At last year's Investormania, I put ASML in front of a room full of investors and told them it was one of 3 no-brainer plays for the AI revolution.
The stock has gone up 98% since, 5x the broad market during the same period.
Now, I didn't pick ASML because I got lucky with a hot tip… I picked it because if you understand how chips are actually made, there's really only one company that makes the machines that make them possible.
ASML holds the only technology in the world capable of printing the most intricate layers onto a semiconductor.
Without their equipment, there are no Nvidia chips… no AI data centers… no ChatGPT.
The whole industry runs through one nondescript Dutch town called Veldhoven.
And this morning, ASML confirmed what I suspected a year ago is still very much in motion…
Their CEO went on record saying demand for chips is outpacing supply, and customers are accelerating expansion plans into 2026 and beyond.
They raised their sales forecast for the year to between €36 billion and €40 billion… with Q1 profits coming in ahead of what analysts expected.
So even though the stock has doubled in the past year… it's still very much going.
Ya'know... that's the thing about a monopoly. When the whole world decides it needs something, and you're the only one who makes it, the math gets pretty simple.
Which brings me to Investormania II…
This year I'm not just picking chip companies.
The next wave of AI investment goes beyond semiconductors and into the real-world bottlenecks that most retail investors aren't thinking about yet.
The places where AI demand runs headfirst into physical constraints that can't be solved with a software update.
I'll be walking through 3 stocks that sit squarely in that path… companies with the kind of structural position that ASML had before everyone noticed.
Ones that hold up even if the geopolitical noise gets louder.
Oliver