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You Are Not Bullish Enough

Portfolio Armor's Photo
by Portfolio Armor
Wednesday, May 13, 2026 - 15:53

An anthropomorphic bull and bear survey the AI buildout.

You Are Not Bullish Enough

A few years ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner asked a useful question:

Aschenbrenner is a former OpenAI researcher, author of the widely read Situational Awareness AI essay, and now a successful fund manager, who has been ahead of the curve on AI. He was one of the sharper people thinking about how fast AI could move from software story to civilization-scale industrial buildout.

That still seems like the right frame. The market has spent the last few years gradually repricing AI from “cool software story” to “data-center capex cycle” to “national industrial buildout.” But even now, investors may still be underestimating the scale of what’s coming.

Think humanoid robots that can do chores in your home and eventually cost less than a car. Fully automated factories. AI agents discovering new treatments for diseases. Self-flying cars. Autonomous defense systems. Software agents doing work that once required teams of people. And ew power demand, new data centers, new chips, new memory, new optical networks, new cooling systems, new factories, and new supply chains to build all of it.

This Isn’t The Dot-Com Bubble

Industrial buildouts like this usually end in bubbles.

Railroads, electrification, the internet, housing, China infrastructure, shale, crypto—eventually, capital floods in, marginal projects get funded, valuations detach from cash flows, and the bust follows.

We’re not there yet.

Many of the companies tied to the AI buildout are selling real products for real money, into demand that is already here. GPUs, memory, optics, power equipment, cooling, grid components, semiconductor tools, and the physical infrastructure for data centers aren’t imaginary revenue streams.

Consider Micron (MU). The stock has gone parabolic, but this isn't Cisco Systems (CSCO) in 2000, trading at ~150x forward earnings. Micron's forward P/E is closer to 8. 

Even Cisco is crushing it now though. 

That’s the contrast with the dot-com era: real earnings, real bottlenecks, and real customers, not just clicks, eyeballs, and investor decks.

Trump’s China Trip

The next catalyst may be geopolitical.

President Trump is in China this week with a delegation of America’s top CEOs. Trump himself posted that Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was on Air Force One, and reports have also listed Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwarzman, David Solomon, Jane Fraser, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, GE Aerospace’s Larry Culp, and others among the business leaders tied to the trip. 

Trump's not bringing that kind of executive firepower representing trillions of dollars worth of market capitalization just to return without good news. 

The most obvious near-term prize is massive Chinese orders for Boeing, Nvidia, and other American manufacturers. 

But the upside from a successful trip wouldn’t necessarily stop with the companies in the room. Deals or regulatory breakthroughs in AI chips, autos, aviation, industrial technology, energy, payments, or China market access can flow through to supplier ecosystems: semiconductor equipment, photonics, sensing chips, power systems, manufacturing technology, and the industrial names that make the physical buildout possible.

The Iran Angle

There’s another reason China matters this week.

China hosted Iran’s foreign minister last week, and Beijing has an obvious interest in ending a conflict that has disrupted oil flows and threatened its energy security. If Chinese diplomacy helps move the Iran war toward a settlement, that would be another tailwind for risk assets.

A de-escalation in the Gulf would take pressure off oil, inflation expectations, and shipping risk. A successful China trip could help AI, autos, industrials, and suppliers. Put those two together, and the market may have more upside than the skeptics want to admit.

How We’re Playing It

We have four trades teed up for later today.

One is in silicon photonics, with an after-close catalyst. In this market, if you’re in the right stock and the right trend, earnings and business updates can lead to real movement after hours. We saw that yesterday, when one of our Market Watchers names from the alert, Velo3D (VELO 23.55%↑), reported after the close and traded more than 20% higher after hours.

VELO is currently up 47% intraday today. 

The second is in the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain—the physical layer behind AI capex.

The third is in energy infrastructure, where the power buildout and AI data-center load growth remain part of the same story.

The fourth is in automotive sensing and photonic chips, a higher-torque corner of the market tied to next-generation vehicles, LiDAR, and optical components.

We’re using defined-risk options structures to give us a shot at uncapped upside here. 

If you’d like a heads-up when we place those trades, you can subscribe to our trading Substack/occasional email list below.

 

This Was Wednesday's Trade Alert

A Chance To Lock In Current Prices

One more note: subscription prices for the Portfolio Armor Substack are going up on Thursday, from $40 per month / $400 per year to $50 per month / $500 per year.

Current paid subscribers will be grandfathered into their current rates. So if you were considering becoming a paid subscriber, this is a good time to do so. It’s a chance to lock in the lower price before the increase.

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