The current investor focus on AI-related companies is creating bargains in the neglected corner of the market for small cap stocks, said John Rogers, the founder and chief investment officer of Ariel Investments.
Small caps routinely get less attention from investors and less coverage from Wall Street analysts than blue chip companies. Stock market fads tend to exacerbate this trend, Rogers said Tuesday at Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC.
The result: Investor demand ratchets up the valuations for the stocks that are in favor and depresses the multiples for those that are out of favor, such as small caps. The current gap between the valuations investors place on small caps and large cap growth stocks is among the widest in history, Rogers said. When that gap revers to more normal levels, he said, small caps could deliver outsized profits.
“You’ll see these smaller companies outperform the blue chips massively the same way they did at the end of the century,” he said, referring to the dot-com bubble that peaked in March 2000 and then collapsed over the next two years.
Indeed, Rogers said that the current demand for AI stocks bears something in common with the internet bubble. Back then, his pizza delivery man bragged about how much money he was making on internet stocks. Now he’s hearing the same thing in regard to AI.
“People are talking about how much money they’ve made in their AI stocks,” Rogers said. “It’s just very similar to the internet, you know, at the top.”