Four years after the last market crest, the same mirage is back. Tech valuations are stretching to record highs, venture capital is accelerating, and the Nasdaq hovers just below 23,000. The five biggest tech names now hold $16 trillion in market cap, half the value of U.S. GDP.

In private markets, AI has replaced fintech as the speculative engine. Over $300 billion has already been deployed this year, led by OpenAI’s $40 billion mega-round. Unicorns are sprinting through capital stages like checkpoints, their valuations doubling in months. 

Beneath it all, a quiet liquidity engine hums: private credit. Direct lenders and hybrid funds are keeping the cycle inflated, financing what equity can’t justify.

Cracks are forming again. Figma, Chime, and Circle trade well below their post IPO peaks, mirroring the SPAC-era slide of 2021. It’s not a crash yet, it’s the pause before gravity reasserts itself.

AI is fueling the Fourth Industrial Revolution – and these 10 stocks are front and center.

One of them makes $40K accelerator chips with a full-stack platform that all but guarantees wide adoption. 

Another leads warehouse automation, with a $23B backlog – including all 47 distribution centers of a top U.S. retailer – plus a JV to lease robots to mid-market operators. 

From core infrastructure to automation leaders, these companies and other leaders are all in The 10 Best AI Stocks to Own in 2025.

Free today, grab it before the paywall locks.

The new market high feels engineered. Equity markets are euphoric, but credit is doing the heavy lifting. In 2021, zero rates made equity infinite. In 2025, expensive debt is filling the same role, disguised as flexibility. 

Private credit funds, flush with $2 trillion in dry powder, are providing structured lifelines to AI startups, late-stage unicorns, and even venture funds themselves.

It’s an invisible scaffolding. When founders reject down-rounds, private lenders offer convertible facilities. When IPO windows close, credit steps in with bridge loans. When valuations look too steep, debt fills the gap and keeps the optics clean. 

The illusion of growth continues, but the leverage is migrating.

That migration is where the system bends. Private credit is now underwriting energy buildouts for data centers, battery storage, and semiconductor expansion, the hardware backbone of the AI boom. 

These are long-duration assets financed with short-duration optimism. Every dollar recycled into a new facility or warehouse-sized GPU farm is another turn of leverage on the same theme: belief in infinite compute, infinite power, infinite demand.

It’s a déjà vu with higher stakes. The funding totals are smaller than 2021, but the concentration is sharper. A handful of AI winners command the bulk of capital, and their ecosystems are being funded through layers of synthetic liquidity, venture debt, continuation vehicles, fund-of-funds, and credit tranches that blur where risk truly sits.

The cracks are subtle but widening. Late-stage deal flow has slowed, secondary trades are discounting positions, and lenders are starting to write covenants that look like early-warning flares. The last bubble deflated through valuation resets. This one could deflate through refinancing risk.

Every market cycle ends the same way: not from a lack of belief, but from an excess of it. The difference this time is the form of faith. Less equity, more leverage, same story.

Investor Signal

Private credit is the quiet center of this boom. It’s where capital hides when rates rise and exits stall. The lenders structuring today’s hybrid deals will end up owning tomorrow’s equity when valuations buckle under debt.

The next frontier isn’t in chasing AI’s winners, it’s in financing the aftermath.

Wall Street’s confidence is being bought on credit. FINRA data shows margin debt climbed for a fifth straight month in September, reaching an all-time high of $1.13 trillion, up nearly 40% over the past year, more than double the S&P 500’s gain.

Leverage is the market’s most dangerous form of optimism. When investors borrow to buy, they amplify every move, and history shows that acceleration this sharp has preceded peaks before, from the dot-com bubble to the pre-2008 credit surge. 

Today, the mechanics are more sophisticated: algorithmic margin calls, derivatives exposure, and private credit lines quietly underwriting risk.

The indicator itself doesn’t predict direction, it mirrors emotion. But when margin debt rises faster than market returns, it signals confidence outpacing cash flow. 

This is where bull markets turn reflexive: leverage feeds price, price feeds sentiment, and sentiment feeds leverage again, until volatility breaks the loop.

Investor Signal

Rising leverage means liquidity looks abundant, but much of it is borrowed. As private credit deepens its reach into retail margin structures and institutional trading desks, the line between liquidity and leverage blurs. 

Investors should treat excess credit expansion as a signal to rebalance toward real cash flow, companies with pricing power, tangible earnings, and low reliance on financial engineering.

The lesson from 2000 and 2008 still applies: when debt, not demand, is driving price discovery, the market isn’t climbing a wall of worry, it’s scaling a tower of margin.

If you think there's something strange about the "feud" between Trump and Musk…

You need to see THIS jaw-dropping video…

Because it explains what could REALLY be going on behind the scenes…

And how it could hand investors a stake in a $12 trillion revolution.

Click here now to see the full story.

The clock is running out on market hours. Exchanges from New York to London are preparing for continuous trading, a move that would erase the closing bell and rewire the rhythm of global finance. 

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. says it’s ready to go live as early as Q2 2026, while brokers like Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and Schwab already offer 24-hour access five days a week.

Supporters call it inevitable. Critics call it chaos. Overnight liquidity remains paper-thin, just 0.2% of total daily volume, and price gaps could widen as spreads balloon in the dark. 

The shift could push smaller firms to the sidelines while algorithmic funds and global players with round-the-clock desks seize the advantage.

Beneath the technical overhaul lies a deeper question: what happens to risk when the market never sleeps? During the 2008 crisis, regulators had weekends to coordinate rescues. In a 24-hour market, collapse would unfold in real time.

Investor Signal

Round-the-clock trading is the final step in the financialization of time. As equities join crypto and commodities in a perpetual cycle, volatility will stretch across hours instead of days. Expect new revenue lines for brokers, fatigue for traders, and a premium for automation. 

The next edge won’t be faster information, it will be endurance, liquidity provisioning, and algorithmic discipline in a market with no off switch.

Brookfield Asset Management is in exclusive talks to acquire two dormant nuclear reactors in South Carolina, signaling a return to one of America’s most ambitious and expensive energy projects. 

The deal, reportedly valued in the billions, would see Brookfield partner with Santee Cooper to restart construction at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, an unfinished relic of a bygone energy era now being resurrected by the AI gold rush.

The reactors, abandoned in 2017 after contractor Westinghouse Electric filed for bankruptcy, had already consumed $9 billion before work stopped. Ironically, Brookfield later bought Westinghouse out of bankruptcy, giving it the expertise and leverage to revive the project. 

Now, the Canadian asset manager’s clean-energy arm is positioning nuclear power not as legacy infrastructure, but as next-generation fuel for data centers hungry for round-the-clock, carbon-free power.

For Brookfield, it’s a convergence of strategy and circumstance. The firm has already struck a deal to supply Google with up to three gigawatts of hydroelectric power and recently raised $20 billion for its global transition fund. 

Nuclear energy, long sidelined by cheap gas and regulatory scars, has reemerged as a centerpiece in powering AI workloads for Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet.

At a time when global energy systems are straining under digital demand, reviving nuclear capacity offers something renewables can’t yet match: baseload stability. 

South Carolina’s deal, if finalized, could mark the first large-scale nuclear restart in decades and cement Brookfield’s role as the institutional bridge between financial capital, climate mandates, and the compute revolution.

Investor Signal

The nuclear comeback has shifted from environmental rhetoric to economic logic. As AI data centers drive exponential energy demand, the market’s premium is moving toward clean, controllable baseload generation. 

Brookfield’s move reframes nuclear power as a private-capital play, long-duration, asset-heavy, but tied to digital infrastructure and energy security. Expect more private equity and sovereign capital to chase the same equation: old reactors, new profits, infinite demand.

The market’s pulse this week beats with an unmistakable rhythm: old power reborn, new liquidity redefined, and time itself turned into a trade.

Leverage is back at record highs, with $1.13 trillion in margin debt signaling that confidence, or complacency, is running ahead of cash flow. 

Wall Street’s timetables are also changing shape as 24-hour trading edges closer to reality, promising global continuity at the cost of human rest. And in South Carolina, Brookfield’s bid to revive two mothballed nuclear reactors underscores how energy, infrastructure, and AI are converging into one financial current.

This is the new market cycle: infinite screens, perpetual markets, and power grids doubling as data pipelines. 

Private credit fills the cracks in liquidity. Private equity fuels the next energy frontier. Regulation lags behind velocity. The line between night and day, human and machine, has blurred across trading floors and reactor cores alike.

The playbook now is simple but severe: stay funded, stay hedged, stay awake. Capital doesn’t sleep anymore, and neither does the market it built.