I woke up this morning and couldn't speak.
As in, nothing above a whisper works right now…
And in 36 years this has never happened to me.
I've had colds, the flu, the works... but my voice has always shown up for work.
Except today it didn't.
My first thought was naturally if I’ve now lost my voice forever… and if people will still show up to our live calls if they consist of me typing like a maniac in the Zoom chat
My second thought, about four minutes later… was this…
What a beautiful parallel this is… to how most investors act every time the market pulls back a few percentage points…
I'm assuming the worst version of a temporary event is now the permanent version of events.
A sore throat that got worse overnight doesn't mean I've lost my voice forever…
It almost certainly means I'll be back to normal in a few days, maybe a week if I'm unlucky.
But lying there in the dark, my brain wasn't interested in the more likely scenario… it went straight to worst case.
And it's the same brain wiring that makes a 25% pullback in a stock feel like the beginning of the end… even when the stock is still up 197% for the year… and over 800% in 18 months.
Yes, I’m talking about Micron.
If you'd bought at the top and only looked at the chart from that point, you'd think the AI trade was falling apart.
But zoom out and Micron is still up 197% year to date. The stock hasn't round-tripped. It hasn't even given back a third of what it made this year.
In fact it's done exactly what stocks that have run hard tend to do at some point... it's paused, and pulled back, and scared some people out.
Is the AI trade over? I doubt it.
But I'll be honest, I don't know for certain, and neither does anyone else selling you certainty on it either way.
What I do know is that the instinct to treat a pullback as proof the thesis was wrong all along is almost never about the data.
It's about how a 25% red number feels sitting in your portfolio versus how "up 197% this year" feels on a spreadsheet.
Same stock… same set of facts… but wildly different gut reaction depending on which number you're staring at.
I'll probably get my voice back by Thursday.
The AI capex cycle, the DRAM and NAND pricing that's driving a lot of this, the actual demand numbers... those take longer to resolve than a sore throat.
But the pattern of overreacting to the scary version of a temporary event, and needing a few days to remember that pullbacks are just part of how these things move... that part is identical.
Oliver