A Navidia market, Shades of Cisco and Nortel, Circa 1999.

Hey, Peter Var here with this week's market wrap for the week ending February 24th, 2024.

This was indeed an historic week on Wall Street as it marked the single largest gain in

market capitalization of a stock in history.

Target of course about Navidia, which provides the lion's share of the computer chips necessary,

to run the massive computers that in turn run all of the artificial intelligence engines

around the world.

During the week, the S&P 500 gain 1.7%

its sixth winning week in the last seven.

Much of that gain was indeed driven by Navidia directly

and the exuberance over the AI boom indirectly.

On Friday, following its earnings report, the company's stock price gained 17% and its market cap touched the $2 trillion mark.

Frankly, the dominance of Navidia and more broadly the relatively small

handful of stocks at the Vanguard of the artificial intelligence

insurrection, Microsoft and Meta at the top of that list, is both Iria and a little frightening. In fact, Navidia is one of the biggest

bets in financial market history and the essence of the bet is this. AI will lead to massive increases in productivity that will in turn fuel higher

profits and drive stock prices up more broadly across other companies as the benefits of AI diffused across the corporate world.

Of course, if this happens, a disproportionate share of the gains will go to capital rather

than labor.

Here, by definition, even as AI improves worker productivity,

fewer workers will be needed.

At the same time, entire companies may well be wiped out

...