Liontrust Global Innovation team: Trading the AI gold rush beyond the Magnificent Seven

Focus on ‘picks and shovels’

Investors are overly fixated on the Magnificent Seven tech giants and overlooking the niche ‘picks and shovels’ critical to the AI infrastructure buildout, a duo of managers from Liontrust’s £840m Global Innovation team have said.

Magnificent Seven stocks, the leading tech companies riding the wave of AI excitement, have dominated this year's market rally, but also bore the biggest brunt during the global sell-off in early August. According to Deutsche Bank, these seven stocks were down by 18.1% from peak-to-trough, while the equal-weighted S&P 500 was only down 5.2%. Following an all-time high in July, several earnings reports led to increasing caution about the Magnificent Seven's dominance, with growing nervousness over the pace at which companies such as Meta or Microsoft would be able to translate huge AI ...