4 ingredients for a tech bubble. Are we in an AI bubble? Who is really driving the AI hype?

Peter Heinrich puts Christoph Gum, CEO and fund manager of Private Alpha, through what he calls the "AI stress test": is the market already deep in an AI bubble, or still at base camp? Gum breaks the concept of a bubble down into four ingredients: technological foundations and breakthroughs, time (Gum notes that major bubbles typically take six to eight years to form — and we're only in year four), cheap money from falling interest rates, and finally a trigger, a loss of confidence that tips the house of cards.

His verdict: the technological foundation is in place, but cheap money and a triggering event are still missing — and margin debt looks moderate compared with 1929.

In his "Big Ten" check of AI winners, Gum names Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Meta, Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, TSMC, Palantir and Tesla, with his own focus on Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. The conversation also touches on CES in Las Vegas, Siemens and Nvidia as more of a reheated industrial story, and Mercedes and Nvidia as, in his view, the more interesting reasoning-driven opportunity.