Personal Wealth Management / Expert Commentary
Fisher Investments Reviews Its Semiconductor Outlook for 2024
Fisher Investments’ founder, Executive Chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer Ken Fisher shares his latest outlook on the semiconductor industry. Ken says semiconductor stocks have outperformed—in part due to the essential role they play in the development of artificial intelligence (AI). Ken also believes semiconductor stocks have benefited from an investor preference for growth-oriented industries.
Ken believes market leadership could rotate later in 2024 to favor more value-oriented stocks. While this rotation may mean other categories outperform, Ken believes semiconductor stocks can still be strong parallel market performers.
Transcript
Ken Fisher:
So in 2023 and rolling into 2024, a lot of the top of the Tech leading the market was semiconductors and things related to semiconductors associated with artificial intelligence, AI, with all of the hopes of big transformation ahead associated with AI. Is that going to keep rolling? Do I think, or something else happened or what?
Now first, before answering the question directly, it's important to understand that these features, the semiconductor part, is really the building blocks of what's necessary to accomplish success in the long term in AI.
One of the points about AI that isn't really fully appreciated by people, is that to do AI correctly, you really have to rebuild down into the chip level the entirety of what computing really is. Which up to now, today, most computing, except for those parts that do use some AI, is really about information retrieval and arrangement.
But now with AI it becomes retrieval, arrangement and output. And that requires a different architecture. And there you have on the one hand, the companies that create the stuff to make the semiconductors. The companies that design the semiconductors like Nvidia. The machine companies like ASML, and then the actual manufacturing companies like Taiwan Semi.
That world's all been good. That world is about building the infrastructure for AI. Not the actual AI itself, which is about programing algorithms to create the ability to have successful predictive outcomes from inputs.
The fact of the matter is, that's not going to stop going as a business, but the hype about is pretty strong. In this year, 2024, my expectation is that it'll keep doing fine, but by the time we get to the end of the year, we'll see a transition where, unlike 2023, where growth and big was dominating the market regardless of Tech or no, which you could see by a lot of the non-Tech big growth firms around the world doing well, like a lot of the consumer luxury firms.
Shifting to a world where value would be leading and that value leading orientation, making the semiconductor stocks be not so much the market leaders, just strong parallel market performers.
Thank you very much for listening to me. I hope you found this educating, useful and not too annoying.
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