In case you haven’t noticed, the bulls are very much in control on Wall Street. The mature stock-driven Dow Jones Industrial Average, benchmark S&P 500, and growth-propelled Nasdaq Composite, have all soared to multiple record-closing highs in 2024.
Although broader themes, such as the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, stock-split euphoria, and better-than-expected corporate earnings, have fueled this rally, the foundation of this two-year (and counting) bull market was laid by the “Magnificent Seven.”
The Magnificent Seven represent some of Wall Street’s largest and most-influential publicly traded companies, including:
These are businesses that, for the most part, possess impenetrable moats. For instance, Alphabet’s Google has accounted for at least a 90% monthly share of global search dating back more than nine years. Meanwhile, Apple’s iPhone is the leader in domestic smartphone market share, Amazon Web Services is the world’s top cloud infrastructure service platform, and Meta Platforms lures more daily active users to its sites than any other social media company.
Despite these competitive edges, Wall Street has mixed views on where some of the Magnificent Seven members are headed next. Based on price target from two Wall Street pundits, the following Magnificent Seven stocks can plunge by up to 98%!
The first Magnificent Seven constituent that at least one respected Wall Street pundit sees losing a majority of its value is AI kingpin Nvidia.
In an interview with Fox News Digital in May, economist and financial author Harry Dent pointed to Wall Street being in the “bubble of all bubbles,” which he expected would result in the market bottoming out in 2025. “I think we’re going to see the S&P go down 86% from the top, and the Nasdaq 92%. A hero stock like Nvidia, as good as it is, and it is a great company, [goes] down 98%. Boy this is over,” per Dent.
While Dent’s forecast of a 98% decline completely overlooks Nvidia’s cash flow and the successful operating segments it had in place long before AI became a driving force on Wall Street — e.g., graphics processing units (GPUs) for gaming and cryptocurrency mining, along with virtualization software — I do believe he recognizes the potential bubble Nvidia’s stock may be in.
As a perfect example, we haven’t witnessed a next-big-thing technology, innovation, or trend, avoid a bubble-bursting event early in its expansion in at least 30 years. Including the advent of the internet, investors have consistently overestimated the uptake and mainstream adoption of purportedly game-changing innovations for decades. Thus far, nothing suggests artificial intelligence is going to be the exception to this unwritten rule.
