Mike McLaren

MY 2026 PREDICTIONS 1. Amazon goes from Mag-7 laggard to leader as AWS reaccelerates. Compute bottlenecks fade, Trainium gains real adoption & AWS growth moves back toward the mid-twenties, while Ads continues its steady climb & becomes a second profit engine that structurally lifts $AMZN margins. 2. Space industry becomes a mainstream investment theme. A $1.5T SpaceX IPO forces public markets to rethink what the space economy is actually worth. That shift accelerates as Sam Altman explores a direct SpaceX competitor & as Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk openly discuss orbital compute which creates a rare moment where politics, capital & technology align. $RKLB & $ASTS are my highest-conviction ways to express that re-rating. 3. Emerging markets outperform the S&P 500. A weaker dollar, lower rates and an explosion of digital products built from AI tools give EM a structural tailwind, with Latin America positioned to benefit the most. $MELI remains my highest-conviction expression of this theme. 4. Model costs collapse again & push value to whoever controls distribution. As inference becomes cheaper & model performance converges then the models themselves stop being the profit center & the power shifts to platforms that own consumer engagement. $META, $GOOGL & $AAPL outperform because distribution becomes the moat since they control the surfaces where billions interact with AI every day. 5. Productivity boom finally shows up in the data. The Fed’s GDP upgrades for 2026–2027 become visible as AI replaces manual workflows, raises output per worker & compresses cost structures across the economy. The gap between companies that embraced AI early & those that delayed adoption widens meaningfully in earnings.