Dear Reader,
This is Dylan Jovine with Behind the Markets.
Happy Thursday.
Today is Thursday, July 30th.
Tomorrow is the last day of the month.
And I want to ask a question that's being debated on trading desks all over Wall Street right now.
Friends of mine on the street have been asking me what I think.
And I always love when somebody asks me a question like that.
It usually means the stocks I like are getting pretty cheap.
Here's my answer.
As a short-term trade — yes, the Mag Seven is dead.
As a long-term trade — I think you're looking at some of the best bargains you're going to see in a long time.
Markets Run on Stories
The longer I'm in this business, the clearer one thing becomes to me.
Markets run on narratives.
They run on stories.
And you really can't understand what's happening right now without putting it in that context.
John Authers of Bloomberg runs a newsletter called Point of Return, and he pointed out something I found fascinating.
Since the global financial crisis, there have been two long momentum waves in the stock market.
The first ran from roughly 2017 to the pandemic.
Jim Cramer coined the name: FAANGs.
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google.
The narrative was simple.
These companies dominated their corners of the internet and had licenses to print money.
That trade worked beautifully — right up until the pandemic hit.
Then came the second wave.
The 2022 launch of ChatGPT set off the Mag Seven trade.
Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla.
And here's what's remarkable.
If you equalize both trades to a starting index of 100, the patterns are almost identical.
Both started around 92, rose to about 115, pulled back, then shot higher again.
Up 35%, down 40%, up 40%, down 40%.
Over and over.
Proof that markets run on narratives — not just fundamentals.
The Narrative Is Fading
Bloomberg tracks how often these companies are mentioned in news sources.
At the peak of the Mag Seven trade in 2024, they were being mentioned about 4,000 times a month.
By early 2026, that dropped to around 2,000 times a month.
Now we're at about 1,500.
The narrative is fading.
That doesn't mean these companies are going out of business.
That's silly.
Microsoft, Google, Meta — these are extraordinary franchises.
But it probably does mean there's going to be a protracted period of regrouping before a new narrative takes hold and pushes things to new heights.
What Comes Next
The Mag Seven needed a ChatGPT moment to get going.
My suspicion is that the next big moment is the EI moment.
Embodied intelligence.
Robots.
You can already see it starting to cook.
We saw this coming early and put together an exclusive report all about the E.I. Era and the best stocks you need to own to play it.
The Trump administration just blocked China from importing robots into the US — because that's where the competition is heading.
And Musk is betting the entire future of Tesla and SpaceX on it.
Think about it.
What's a robotaxi?
A robot car.
What's a rocket that launches, comes back, and lands exactly where it's supposed to?
A robot rocket.
And of course, Tesla Optimus.
The next ChatGPT moment — the moment that sets off the next big narrative — is going to come from robotics.
I'm starting to hear very positive things about what's cooking behind the scenes.
And I look forward to watching it unfold with you as we navigate this exciting, scary, and genuinely historic phase of human history.
Have a wonderful day.
I'll see you tomorrow.
“The Buck Stops Here,”
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Written by Dylan Jovine