The AI-chip trade will flatten out at some point, says Leah Bennett, chief investment strategist at Concurrent Asset Management, the investment arm of a $34 billion-asset wealth manager based in Tampa, Fla., but equities should continue to chug along, with industrials, healthcare and biotech names among the sectors reaching for the baton. "Earnings growth is going to continue to propel us forward," she says.

Speaking with Barron's Advisor, Bennett explains why she left a leadership role at asset manager Westwood Holdings to join Concurrent -- while simultaneously starting a separate multifamily office. She shares her view on what has powered the market through geopolitical and other headwinds, and argues that a deteriorating credit cycle may be the biggest risk out there right now. Finally, she indulges us by swinging for the fences with a hypothetical $100,000. Her targets? Cybersecurity, emerging pharma, and real estate.

Where are you from, and how did you wind up in wealth management? I grew up in Dallas, and I had a wonderful father who liked to teach real-world lessons. My parents paid for my college. The agreement was that my freshman year I just focused on grades. My sophomore year, I had to create a budget and present it to dad. I couldn't fib too much because he knew how much things cost. And I got a check for the year. That's how I started learning about investing. I opened my first money-market account and learned I could make some interest.

I always had a couple of hundred dollars left over at the end of the year. So I started researching and buying mutual funds, and I really liked the analytical side of figuring out where I wanted to invest. When I graduated, I went to interviews on campus and Capital Research and Management, American Funds Group was interviewing for a training program. I think they liked the fact that I had actually bought mutual funds. I just was really drawn to the industry. I ended up in their fixed-income department, and it wasn't for probably another decade that I really started working with clients and started realizing I liked that.

You are Concurrent Asset Management's chief investment strategist, but you also run a multifamily office, Elevate Family Partners. You essentially have two full-time jobs, correct? Yes, but coming from what I was doing before, it feels like it's a lot less than that. I was the president for almost 10 years of the wealth division of Westwood Holdings Group, a publicly traded asset-management firm in Dallas. Being a senior person at a publicly traded firm is great and awful at the same time. It's so administrative. I really wanted to get back to focusing on investing and building the team and focusing on clients. So I left and started my own practice, and it's been really fun. All last year, every day felt like Christmas. We have seven people on the team. I've got an estate planner slash family governance person, I've got two planners, a couple of client service folks. Our minimum is $10 million, and we serve 24 families.

What are your duties on the investment strategist side? There are synergies between the two roles, because I'm investing for our families. I basically am looking at what's going on in the markets and trying to decide what makes the most sense for clients in general. And with Concurrent, we've got a couple of asset allocation models. One is a strategic asset allocation model, which is based on a 10-year capital market assumption, and then we have a dynamic asset allocation model, which is based on what we think is going to happen over the next 18 months. And then you have to balance tax management in there as well.

The market has done surprisingly well throughout tariffs, war, the energy shock, all the Trump II-era things. It just keeps rolling forward. Are you surprised? I am surprised. I think what's going on is the macro headwinds and potential policy missteps are a headwind, and then the tailwind, which I think is remarkably strong, is the adoption of technology that is transformational to companies' efficiency and earnings. And that tailwind is winning. And even when you get these concerns, whether it's Meta saying they have excess capacity, or if Samsung's memory chip price increases a little bit less than people expected, you get these surprises with the leaders with these AI stocks that have done really well. But you still are getting nice earnings growth with the rest of the market. And I think that earnings growth is going to continue to propel us forward. So that is what's made us so much more resilient than what I would have thought.

AI is one big pillar holding up the market. Do you think it's as solid as people believe? There's basically the capex around AI and the leaders that we think of, the Nvidias and the ARMs, the direct beneficiaries. I think those companies will start flattening out and maybe trading down when you start seeing chinks in the armor, which we're starting to see. We know growth investors aren't valuation sensitive and they're willing to pay up as long as they're seeing margins, earnings, and revenues accelerating, and as you start seeing blips in there, which I think you're going to see more of, I think you'll see some of those stocks really gap down, and you'll see margins compress.

I think it's the rest of the market where you're going to see the strength of why money isn't leaving equities in general, it's just rotating. I think these rotations will continue to be violent because you're seeing a lot of, for example, industrial companies that have thin margins that all of a sudden are expanding those margins and getting nice valuation expansions. You're really seeing it in healthcare. I think it's around 90% of healthcare companies that recently were trading above their 50-day moving average. And I think the next area of quote unquote AI is really seeing the efficiency with the biotechs and with the healthcare companies, and seeing earnings accelerate meaningfully.

Because of the market's resilience a lot of people are feeling happy and just sailing along. What are the icebergs to look out for? Credit is the one that worries me the most. It seems like the credit cycle kind of reset during Covid. And you've seen a lot of strength in the consumer. I worry now with higher oil prices for a prolonged period, that's obviously going to impact a segment of the market. That's something I'm watching closely, and then on the corporate side, we have been consumers of debt. I think the average rating of U.S. corporations now is triple-B, and it might be triple-B-minus.

We're barely hanging on to investment grade, so I do think when the economy goes through a down cycle, that worries me about what's going to happen with corporations and delinquencies. In private credit we've obviously seen a lot of flags; we may not have seen the red flag, but a lot of maybe orange flags, that there are issues there. There's too much leverage, especially with the large players. I think credit is ultimately going to be what gets us.

Can you point to one or two growth asset areas that you think are especially promising? I think healthcare is very attractive, for multiple reasons. Earnings have the potential to accelerate significantly. And many of the large pharma companies have just been minting cash. Half of Lilly's revenues now come from GLP-1 drugs. That's astounding, because Lilly's an enormous company. But being publicly traded, when you generate that much cash you're under quite a bit of pressure to put the money to work and find the next area of growth.

Becton, Dickinson and Abbott Laboratories were ones that generated tons of cash from Covid test kits, and they still have a lot of cash on their balance sheets. So I think this big wave of consolidation with both biotech and what I'm going to call emerging pharma, I think is a big wave that's going to happen over the next few years. So I think healthcare is just uniquely attractive. The other area I think is attractive is real estate. It has underperformed for quite a while. You had too much money come into multifamily, especially in the Sunbelt in 2020. In so many projects people used adjustable-rate mortgages and then they got hit in 2022 when interest rates moved up. Multifamily is just now coming out of a period where supply and demand is looking more attractive. I think the same for commercial real estate. It went through its shock period, and you have better supply and demand now.

If you had $100,000 to put into a purely speculative bucket, what might you buy with it? Biotechs/emerging pharma is probably the No. 1 thing that I would buy. And if this is totally speculative, I'd do like 50% in that area. I think cybersecurity stocks will continue to perform well. I always think about where cash flow is going, and I think corporations will continue to spend in that area. I'd do a bucket of more-depressed real estate investments. I'd probably do an investment in a secondary fund. There's been so much money in the private-equity side, you still get people who are selling projects for different reasons at depressed multiples. Secondaries are always interesting to me.

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July 27, 2026 11:44 ET (15:44 GMT)

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