Last year's impressive stock market rally, which began on April 9 (when POTUS postponed his Liberation Day tariffs), was fueled by AI Optimism. It turned into AI Fatigue late last year and, in recent weeks, into AI Fear. Now it's AI Derangement Syndrome. For a while, AI was widely thought of as a productivity-enhancing tool. Now the worry is that it has turned into a Terminator of numerous businesses and the jobs they provide.
Software stocks have plunged since the beginning of the year because Anthropic has been using its LLM (large language models) tools to code better versions of them (chart). If code can write code, who needs coders? Who needs software companies?
Today, we signed up for Claude Pro at $20 per month. We prompted it to create a Fed Policy Stance Meter to rate the relative dovishness and hawkishness of the past two FOMC meetings. It took Claude less than five minutes to write the HTML code and produce the impressive result below. We don't need to fire anyone. We need our entire YRI Team to use this new tool to enhance our productivity. Our tech team has already started integrating Claude Code into their daily workflows.
Fears that AI will put companies out of business pummeled the stocks not only of traditional enterprise SaaS (software as a service) providers but also many other industries, including cybersecurity, IT services & outsourcing, payments & financial services, wealth management, and real estate (chart).
