It’s a less than merry start to December on Wall Street, with all red and no green. Yet there is still plenty of optimism about 2026 for stocks as a whole and the recently rocky tech trade.
After a stellar Thanksgiving week for stocks, investors are feeling cautious again at the start of the last month of the year. The worries about the artificial-intelligence trade that dogged the market for much of November—concern over the vast capital spending involved, plus increased competition—are back, if they ever really went away.
Monday’s announcement of an expanded partnership between Nvidia and Synopsys, for example, helped those stocks at the expense of Broadcom, the design partner for Alphabet’s Tensor Processing Units.
While investors may be used to a rising tide lifting all boats, this kind of divergence is natural, writes 22V Research President Dennis DeBusschere. He sees two groups of AI stocks, describing what he calls the “GOOG Complex”—the search company, plus Broadcom, TTM Technologies, Celestica, and Lumentum—as the winners for now. He pegs the OpenAI complex, including Nvidia, SoftBank, Oracle, Advanced Micro Devices, CoreWeave, and Microsoft, as the losers, at least for the moment.
That is down to leverage. The OpenAI complex has more debt, and “that does introduce some economic risk, i.e. capex plans eventually collapse for the levered players,” DeBusschere says. In fact, skittishness is growing about how much even well funded tech companies are turning to debt to finance AI development.
Still, that performance gap is “ likely is NOT a significant macro problem though,” DeBusschere writes. “Winners and losers in AI, as opposed to all AI disappointing on return on investment, is not a bad thing. Margins and profitability for the AI Usage name likely don’t change much in this scenario.”
Moreover, DeBusschere says, investors should expect some bumpiness in terms of R&D, particularly because AI remains in its relative infancy. Historically, capital expenditures do boost productivity thanks to efficiency gains, but for S&P 500 companies, the investment growth drags on productivity for the first year and a half.
Overall, that suggests “the current heavy AI investments are likely to 1) have positive impact for future earnings growth, while 2) bringing headwinds to nearer-term earnings growth,” he writes.
It also leaves less cash available for other uses and increases earnings volatility. Nonetheless, investors may be willing to accept these negatives given the potential for long-term gains.
The potential for the economy to expand rapidly without triggering inflation that would force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates is another positive. “Thanks to strong productivity growth, it looks like the economy can run at a +2% growth without inflation being a problem,” he writes. “Just a few months ago, most economists thought 1%-1.5% was the speed limit.”
That creates a supportive environment for stocks, as long as the labor market and inflation remain within normal ranges.
Despite the market’s wobbles, DeBusschere is just one of the positive voices to emerge in recent weeks. Multiple strategists expect a strong economy will bring another year of double-digit gains for the S&P 500 in 2026.
In a 2026 preview published Monday, HSBC strategist Alastair Pinder cited the potential for gains linked to AI. If “AI adoption across the S&P 500 delivers even a 1% cost saving, which we view as reasonable, it could generate nearly $130 billion for the index and raise earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margins by 50 basis points to 18.5%,” he writes. “We see sectors such as pharma, banks, and software & services positioned to benefit most from this shift.”