#113: So Much Doom-and-Gloom in the Stock Market

Hey all, it’s MMV.

Looking at my portfolio this week has been brutal. If you haven’t looked at your brokerage account, don’t.

Today, my portfolio got rocked 5.94%.. pretty nuts to think about. In the past week, I lost $45,000 in my main brokerage account.

It’s not crazy when my two biggest positions are 2 of the Magnificent 7.

So this post is to provide a quick summary of why the stock market isn’t doing so hot and what I think about it. Maybe it’ll help you NOT freak out.

If you want to read the full MMV Pro posts and to support me and my work, you can upgrade below.

₿ Bitcoin falls below $64,000 as losses accelerate, hits lowest levels since October 2024
Yikes..

📦 Amazon stock falls 10% on $200 billion spending forecast, earnings miss
Amazon said “hold my beer” and said their 2026 spending forecast is going to be $200 billion.

🚀 The sale of xAI comes with tax, financial and legal benefits for xAI and SpaceX investors
Twitter → X → xAI → SpaceX

That’s 3 sales this quarter. 26 sales total. 

And the performance?

14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8% → The three most representative annualized net returns.
(See all 26 at Masterworks.com)

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_{*Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance not indicative of future returns. Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd}

To sum it up, it’s a lot of doom-and-gloom adding up.

Let’s start with the job market.

The biggest bad news is that job openings sink to a post-pandemic low. Job openings sink to a post-pandemic low and job cuts are relatively high.

US employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, up a staggering 118% from a year earlier and the highest January total since the depths of the financial crisis in 2009, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Also, applications for unemployment claims for the week ending January 31st rose by 22,000 to 231,000 from the previous week.

This is another sign that the American labor market remains sluggish.

Job openings fell across all business sizes, but the professional and business services sector accounted for two-thirds of the drop. Some economists attributed the third straight monthly drop in unfilled positions in professional and business services to AI.

"This is potentially suggesting that AI is persuading a rising proportion of businesses to pause on new hiring," said Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

This leads me to the next part: AI.

Anthropic debuted its Opus 4.6 model, calling it the company’s “most capable model for all enterprise and knowledge work.”

And just a few days ago, Anthropic revealed a series of enterprise-focused plugins for the company’s Claude Cowork.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies have been hit hard as there is growing concerns about AI upending traditional SaaS businesses. Think Salesforce, HubSpot, ServiceNow, and Docusign.

Why? Because there’s a sentiment that SaaS customers can develop in-house software solutions using AI and that AI will lower the barrier of entry for startups to enter the enterprise software space.

The second reason AI has been spooking investor is how much tech companies are spending on AI. The major tech companies are spending a lot of money on AI infrastructure like data centers and GPUs in 2026.

It’s A LOT of money so investors are worried how these companies will make a return on that money. It’s a valid take. Are we in an AI bubble?

The selloff of stocks almost feels like investors are waking up from the constant AI push of how AI will translate to profits, but how can it if all the tech companies are spending so much? Maybe not for a few years.

My brain hurts looking at my brokerage account because of how suddenly my portfolio dropped. I understood the stock market selloff when Trump announced tariffs, but this is like a lot of fear that’s been building up and other people getting scared by people getting scared, which causes a bigger selloff.

How it looks:

AI → jobs lost and not being created → tech companies using layoffs to fund AI spending like Amazon → SaaS companies at risk by AI → sell off → tech companies announcing bigger spending on AI → sell off of tech stocks

I shared this clip of Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO on Instagram. I recommend you watch it.

My thoughts:

I don’t think Salesforce is going away. I’m surprised Docusign is still a thing though.

I do think the capex of tech companies is concerning because they’re all in the AI race and it’s a lot of money. Thankfully, capex can be pulled back (just don’t spend..) but the question is whether this will really pay off for all these companies.

Is this the AI bubble popping? I don’t think so. If we don’t reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in 2-3 years, then maybe. That’s the point of this AI race, right?

Overall, I’m not too concerned with this market selloff.

I view this as a buying opportunity to buy more tech stocks and to buy in sector that were impacted by this selloff but maybe shouldn’t have been like fintech.

This is the banking tool I use for my entire real estate portfolio. It has built-in bookkeeping, tax form generation, and cash flow analytics.

If you sign up using my link, I’ll help you get set up.