November 2026 | Aspira Wealth, Victoria, BC Special Market Dispatch – Monday Morning Pre Market Open
Chris Raper, CIM, CFP®
As our partner Alex Vozian, CFA, noted in the October 2026 edition of the Quarterly Compass, the market recently “tested investors with higher rates, another oil shock, and the first real cracks in the AI financing boom.” Those worries grew in the final week of October. To wit, CNN’s Fear & Greed Index fell to 16 on October 23 – firmly in “extreme fear” territory – and markets kept sliding through month-end. AI-related stocks took the brunt of it, and by Friday many investors seemed ready to sell just about anything.
We have watched the AI story with interest, and with growing caution. In a very short time, Meta, Alphabet (Google) and Amazon have gone from earning more cash than they could spend to spending every dollar they make – and borrowing heavily on top of that – betting their AI investments will pay off handsomely. We are less convinced. Every building boom creates shortages, so projects tend to run late and over budget. Add eager investors to the mix, and it’s easy to see why latecomers to a boom often end up with significant losses.
To be clear, I don’t know whether this is the beginning of the end. But as the big AI companies reported their third-quarter results last week, they clearly fell short of what investors were hoping for. I believe the biggest limit on AI growth will be electricity. Local opposition to new data centers is real, and there are long waits for everything needed to build one – from on-site gas-fired generators to the buildings and chips themselves.
Our exposure to AI is small compared with the major market indexes, where a handful of large AI-related companies carry an outsized share of the weight.
The above said, we did not get through October unscathed. Our gold and copper companies were hit hard last week, while our energy holdings actually rose. What do they have in common? They are generating more spare cash than they have in decades and carry little debt – many have none at all. Nearly all of them are sharing that cash with shareholders through dividends or by buying back their own shares. We think of these as our “rent cheques.” The AI giants are doing the opposite. So we take comfort in what we own and see this selloff as an opportunity rather than something to run from.
Yes, I believe it’s time to check behind the couch cushions. If you have cash you won’t need for the next three years or longer, now is a good time to move it into your account. We won’t invest it all at once – we’ll buy gradually as good opportunities appear. But we can only put money to work once it’s in your account, and if we wait until things feel better, prices will likely have already moved higher.
No one can say how long this selloff will last, but history shows that periods of extreme fear have often been good times to buy. This week brings the US mid-term elections, and we’d gently suggest not letting politics steer your investment decisions – markets have done well under both Democrats and Republicans. Markets often dip ahead of the mid-terms and recover afterward, and we are approaching what has historically been the strongest stretch of the year: November through April.
We are here to help - please reach out accordingly,
Chris Raper, CIM, CFP®
Co-Founder | Wealth Advisor | Cross Border Specialist
Aspira Wealth of Raymond James Ltd.
