Tom Lee: “My Target Is Still 8,250—And The Next Major Move Starts This Summer!”

Ajouté : 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]You know, if I look at the next 3 months, so not 3 years, I do think three tests are emerging for the stock market.

[00:00:06]You know, one is of course how is the Fed going to react to both uh the underlying inflation risks? Um the second is the market doesn't really like when inflation is a concern and yields are rising and I do think you we are seeing it now in PPI. I think there is in the pipeline a lot of inflation, not structural, but just inflation shock, but also energy shortage. And the third of course is you know, I I think we're we have a lot of IPO and that's a lot of supply. So I [music] I think we're going to face some tests later this summer. So I think the risk reward is still great for tech, but I'm not sure about the broader market.

[00:00:43]>> According to market strategist Tom Lee, the market may already be trying to tell us something massive. Artificial intelligence isn't just another tech trend. It could be reshaping the global economy from the ground up. At the same time, Bitcoin may be evolving into the ultimate long-term certainty asset in a world filled with chaos, inflation fears, debt and non-stop money printing.

[00:01:07]But here's where things get interesting.

[00:01:09]Tom Lee also warns that despite the bullish long-term outlook, the market could face serious short-term tests from inflation, rising yields, energy shortages and speculative excess. So are we in the middle of a historic technological boom or are investors dangerously ignoring warning signs right in front of them?

[00:01:30]Please take a little time to like this video, subscribe to the channel and turn on post notifications for more videos like this. You can also check out our other videos on cryptocurrencies and the overall digital asset space and drop your comments and observations in the comment section below. Everything you do helps with the YouTube algorithm and immensely contributes to the channel's growth. [music] Thanks and enjoy the video. You heard what the professor said about the idea that investors are making this bet that this earnings ramp is going to go from here to infinity. I mean you you've been you've been thinking about this. Didn't you call this like the Buzz Lightyear market or something like that the other day?

[00:02:11]>> Buzz Lightyear theory of infinite to infinity and beyond.

[00:02:14]>> making a mistake thinking what has traditionally as he said been a cyclical part of the economy is somehow secular now and and we're just going to project this out from here to you know 20 years from now?

[00:02:26]>> the AI AI may be a bigger deal than people understand and I think the stock market's kind of hinting at it. I think you know economists usually view the economies having three main resources, land, capital and labor. I think data has become a fourth factor of production and we we've all been collecting data, it's been stored away and we really haven't squeezed it for all it's worth and that's what AI is doing. It's it's the digital revolution that started in the 1960s and we've accomplished an amazing ability to process a huge amount of data really quickly, really cheaply and as we continue to do that, guess what? We create more data. There'll be never a shortage of data. Tom, how how do you assess this?

[00:03:13]Um well, I agree that uh the US is benefiting the next 3 years, maybe even 10, 20 years from its leadership in AI.

[00:03:24]But I I kind of agree with Professor Siegel that you know, if I look at the next 3 months, so not 3 years, I do think three tests are emerging for the stock market. You know, one is of course, how is the Fed going to react to both uh the underlying inflation risks.

[00:03:41]Um the second is the market doesn't really like when inflation is a concern and yields are rising and I do think you we are seeing it now in PPI. I think there is in the pipeline a lot of inflation, not structural but just inflation shock, but also energy shortage. And the third of course is, you know, I think we're we have a lot of IPO and that's a lot of supply. So I I think we're going to face some tests later this summer. So I think the risk reward is still great for tech, but I'm not sure about the broader market. How How would you respond to that? I mean, the market, some have suggested has been whistling past the graveyard of this tremendous move that we've seen in oil and not you have yields joining it and you've had some of the inflation data this week get a little alarming. Have we been doing just that, ignoring what's right in front of our face and and there's going to be a comeuppance as a result?

[00:04:31]>> Tom's view is is very plausible that we we may have a stretch of a few weeks, maybe a a a few months where the where the market consolidates. We we just had a pretty significant pullback in the market from the beginning of the year basically, really from October of 20 of 2024, sorry, 2025 when the uh the the the the the the the the big cap stocks, the had a really quite a significant sell-off. And so, you know, we we've had we have we've already had the pullback.

[00:05:07]I guess people would like to have a another opportunities to to buy here.

[00:05:12]But yeah, I mean, there's there's still a issue of the bond yield, but I think the bond yield's reflecting a normalization of the economy. I know, but the the parabolic nature of this move, SMH up six straight weeks, we could end that this week, but nonetheless up six straight. The DRAM ETF began this week, this week with six and a quarter billion in assets under management, finished yesterday with nine and a half billion. It only had 77 billion a month ago. Nvidia up seven straight days, the Qs have been up so much they need to fall 12 and a half percent just to get back to the 50-day.

[00:05:47]And and all of that was triggered by the first quarter earning season, which was phenomenal. Uh as the Professor Siegel said, we I don't think any of us recall a situation where earnings have been surging in such a way other than coming out of a recession.

[00:06:04]So, the fundamentals are good. Look, I think the bond market's reacting to a better than expected economic growth. It does look as though the economy is going to be showing something like 3 to 4% growth in the second quarter. It was weaker than that in the fourth and the first quarter, and some of that had to do with a government shutdown, then some really cold weather. Uh so, I I think we're going to be very pleasantly surprised by the strength of the economy, and that's what will keep the market going. I feel like Tom, you painted a bit of a conundrum for you, perhaps and and maybe other investors, when you said, "Yes, I I still am bullish on on the AI trade, but I don't really like other parts of the market in the environment that we could be in with with inflation in the pipeline, as you said, and shocks in inflation, nothing structural, but nonetheless concerning, the rise in oil, the backup in yields, but then if I sit back and I say, "Well, how can I lean in now to parabolic moves that have already taken place, and at the same time, I don't like any of these other areas of the market, cuz I agree with Tom, then what in the world do I do?"

[00:07:07]All right. So, Scott, I'm I'm going to say something that might make the audience think I'm uh puzzling, but the move in DRAM, in my opinion, is actually somewhat defensive, because we know that if you're worried about inflation and petroleum shortage, uh there's even bigger shortages in memory.

[00:07:27]So, like people are buying what's going to work, even if the macro environment gets tough, and I think that's why it makes sense for semis and DRAM to still do really well.

[00:07:36]Um and so, I think that this pullback is going to be viable there. But to me, if someone's trying to make a bigger bet on tech, I think they're really attractive risk reward is still mag seven and software. And Bill [music] Ackman's buy of Microsoft really reinforces it.

[00:07:51]That's why software is actually still among our top picks right now. Well, Ed, last and quick, you're sticking with 8250, your your S&P target for calendar 26?

[00:08:01]>> I am. And that's what I mean by the end of the decade. Then the conversation shifts into one of the most powerful parts of the discussion, Bitcoin.

[00:08:10]And this is where the broader macro thesis really comes together. The argument isn't simply that Bitcoin goes up because people speculate on it. The thesis is deeper than that.

[00:08:20]Bitcoin represents certainty in an increasingly uncertain world.

[00:08:25]Think about all the questions investors are struggling with right now. Will inflation return? Will the Fed cut or hike? Is AI sustainable? Is the economy booming or weakening? Are markets overvalued? Will debt and money printing continue? Nobody knows the answers. But, according to this thesis, Bitcoin offers something rare, a fixed supply, no central authority, no government control, transparent issuance, digitally scarce, globally accessible.

[00:08:52]How does Bitcoin fit into this whole picture here?

[00:08:56]Bitcoin is an asset that gives you certainty in times of uncertainty. And I think that that is a lost value proposition of Bitcoin. What do I mean by that? Right now, what's the cost of capital going to be just in 23? Forget 2 years from now.

[00:09:09]Nobody has any clue.

[00:09:11]At the Fed, there is so much dissent that some people think we should hike rates, some people think we should lower rates, some people think that we should keep them equal. So, nobody knows. Okay, that's uncertainty. Is the AI boom sustainable or not? I think so. There's a lot of people who think not so, right?

[00:09:28]Okay, that's uncertainty. Is the stock market going higher or is a big crash ahead because the PE ratio is, you know, at some level, blah, blah, whatever. I don't know.

[00:09:38]That's uncertainty.

[00:09:40]Are American citizens stronger than they've ever been?

[00:09:45]Or are they actually in pain? Are we in a rolling recession? Or are we just living life on credit?

[00:09:52]You can twist this data to tell all kinds of stories. Uncertainty. And so, what do I want in my portfolio? I want to buy an asset and I want to hold it for the next 20 years.

[00:10:01]If you tell me right now I got to buy one asset and hold it for 20 years, the asset that has the most certainty to me is a digitally scarce, a finite-based asset that I can audit at any time, that is resilient, that is non-sovereign, and has got the hearts and minds of an entire generation that is going to continue to make money and going to inherit the boomer generation's capital.

[00:10:32]So, I like Bitcoin.

[00:10:33]Because it is simple, it is resilient, and it is certain.

[00:10:40]When you put those three things together, there's not a lot of things that fit that. Now, go look at how did people make money before? They did pretty much the same thing. They bought indexes, they bought real estate, right?

[00:10:50]Like that's how families made money. And so, I just think that Bitcoin has now stepped into this bucket of assets that you can buy and hold for a really long period of time. It's just that at certain times, you know, it draws down, "Oh, that Bitcoin's over." Like, sure.

[00:11:05]They said that how many times before?

[00:11:07]Let's see. I mean, the fact that it's even at what, 82,000 right now or 81,000, it's pretty unbelievable. Um, so, my question now, do you uh do you think the thesis changes at all with the acceleration of technology and maybe all the spend going into AI from the hyperscalers here? Well, I think that there's a couple things going on. One, I'm a big believer that the AI boom is going to be much bigger and much more prolonged than most people think. So, that's first of all. The second of all is, if you went to your economics 101 class for the first day, you didn't have to go after that, but if you went for the first day, they talked all about supply and demand. And in the supply and demand conversation, there is a ton of demand, insatiable demand. Dario Amodei over at uh um Anthropic talked about they planned in their business to like 3x, and then the outlandish example was, "Okay, let's be prepared for 10x growth."

[00:12:00]And they 80x'd.

[00:12:03]>> [laughter] >> Right? So, like that is incredible demand. So, where is supply lacking?

[00:12:09]Well, you can start going through.

[00:12:10]There's power generation, there's data centers, there's chips, there's chemicals, there's commodities, there's you know, all of these things that end up being huge problem. Well, all of those problems or shortages are likely to lead to higher prices over the long run. So, if you are an investor, Bitcoin, scarcity.

[00:12:30]Go through every single thing I just talked about the AI trade, scarcity, right? [music] That is what people ultimately want. That's why you see the memory stocks doing so well, it's like scarcity. And so, to me, that is a very simple way to invest. Is find things where demand outstrips supply, and it is going to be a structural shortage in the coming years, and therefore, if you buy the asset now and the shortage persists, then prices will be higher cuz price is the market clearing kind of mechanism to actually get these things to trade hands. Now, with that said, how does Bitcoin fit in?

[00:13:00]In a world of abundance, scarcity becomes really valuable.

[00:13:03]And so, [music] if I can now create music with a couple of clicks, nobody wants to hear me sing.

[00:13:11]But if I can create an AI song that goes to number one on the Billboard, well, what becomes valuable in music?

[00:13:19]It's probably things that are super rare. Like, I don't know, maybe in-person concerts.

[00:13:24]It's hard to replicate for AI. It's unique. It's very small number of them.

[00:13:29]It's infrequent. It takes effort from a human. Like all these components. Okay.

[00:13:33]Well, go now to stores of value.

[00:13:37]Bitcoin is scarce.

[00:13:39]It also requires effort in terms of the mining process and the expenditure of energy and all these things. So, I just think that all of these technologies are colliding and there's one big trade.

[00:13:50]They're never going to stop printing money and technology is going to be bigger and much, much, much more in demand than everyone realizes. And if you believe those two things, which I do, get long and chill. Just chill.

[00:14:03]Like they are going to make your investment portfolio explode in value over the next decade. So, just chill.

[00:14:10]All that in mind, uh specifically with the AI trade and if we put Bitcoin aside for a moment, what do you say to the bears who are pounding the table that AI is a bubble, we're way overextended, the market's overbought? What do you say to that?

[00:14:25]Their heads a bubble. That that's what I think. Their heads a bubble. Right? Why?

[00:14:29]Because they got stupid ideas in their head. They literally they've packed so many dumb ideas in their head. And you ask them, "Okay, explain to me why it's a bubble." And they literally will tell you things like, "In 1942 when horses were riding around like shut up." Right?

[00:14:44]And then you go and they'll say, "Oh, the PE ratio is this and a decade out it's the lost decade." Blah, blah, blah.

[00:14:50]Do you understand what the United States is doing right now? The United States is going from an antiquated industrial revolution. Then we went into what I call kind of the electronic age, which was Facebook and all this stuff.

[00:15:05]>> [music] >> And we realized we do not have the infrastructure to support how much demand is coming. And the reason why I say that the bears' heads are a bubble is because they cannot comprehend the fact that the AI agents are going to drive more demand than the humans.

[00:15:23]They do not understand exponential demand. They do not understand exponential growth. They literally sit with their spreadsheets. And if you said to them, AI can now do your spreadsheet, they would be like, "No, I want to use my little feather and I want to dip it in ink and I want to do it myself." That is how crazy these people are. And so you look at it and you say, "Okay, if AI agents are going to increase demand both in terms of they're creating more content than humans." So already shows AI agents create more content than humans create in a given year.

[00:15:56]What do you think is going to happen?

[00:15:57]You think it's going to get reversed?

[00:15:58]All of a sudden humans we're going to get like instead of 10 fingers we're going to get 20 and we're going to type on our computers more often? No.

[00:16:04]So, that is just starting.

[00:16:07]What do you think it's going to look like in 5 or 10 years?

[00:16:09]This is an explosion of demand.

[00:16:13]So, you go back to, "Okay, what do they point [music] to?" They point to historical valuations.

[00:16:19]Guess what? We never had a trillion-dollar company before. Now we got a lot of them. Okay, does that mean that it is Apple overvalued?

[00:16:25]Right? Is Berkshire overvalued? Let's just go through all the trillion-dollar companies. So, okay, put that aside.

[00:16:31]Valuation stuff is literally dumb.

[00:16:34]Second, is if you go and you look at it and you ask them and you say, "Okay, explain to me specifically where, if demand is outstripping supply, the only way you get the market to roll over is supply has to now be in oversupply compared to demand." Show me any single one of these shortages where the supply is growing at a faster rate. I'm not even asking you to show me a place where there's oversupply yet. I'm just showing Show me a trend line where the supply is growing faster than the demand.

[00:17:03]Commodities, chemicals, data generation, data power, energy generation, all this There is nowhere.

[00:17:10]And so you go back and you say, "You're heading to bubble." Because you have packed it with so much academic information. And you are sitting staring at charts like you are an astrologist.

[00:17:22]Instead, think from a first principle standpoint. There's not one person that I know that thinks from a first principle standpoint that is even remotely considering that there is some big bubble that is ready to pop.

[00:17:35]Now, in a year or two years, if all of a sudden we look at the data and supply has exploded, demand has slowed, and now there's some different story, 100%.

[00:17:47]But right now, look at the growth of Anthropic. If Anthropic all of a sudden came out and said, "Oh, we were growing $10 billion of revenue per month. Now it's one."

[00:17:58]People would not Do you change your mind, right? You say, "Oh, wait a second, demand may not be as exponential as we thought."

[00:18:03]But that's not what's happening. They're accelerating.

[00:18:06]So, as of right now, given the data, there is no way that there's a bubble.

[00:18:11]And so then you go and you talk to the actual operators. Go talk to the people building the data centers. Go talk to the people at at the large language labs. Go talk to the people building the software. Go talk to the people running AI agents, all this stuff.

[00:18:21]They're like, "Yo, I'm being throttled.

[00:18:25]I cannot use this enough. They're not letting me. I'll pay them more money.

[00:18:28]They still won't let me use it enough."

[00:18:31]And so every single data point is suggesting there is no bubble. And you go back to and you say, "Why do these people think that?"

[00:18:38]Because what I have found in my career is that they usually are the people who didn't make a lot of money.

[00:18:43]They just kept predicting doom and gloom, the next big bubble, and they kept promising that there was financial destruction. So, what I think should have happened is every time you say that financial destruction is on the horizon and it doesn't happen, every single other time that you make a prediction, it should come with like a little scarlet letter on it, right? It should just sit there and it should say, "Hey, this person has predicted zero of the last seven bull markets, and they have predicted four market crashes that never materialized.

[00:19:15]Caution.

[00:19:17]Caution when you're listening to them.

[00:19:18]So, they have said a bubble.

[00:19:20]Fair enough. Um, you know, there's that saying that a bubble is any rally you're not participating in. A 1,000%.

[00:19:27]And I can't tell you if you just look at Micron right now, it's up about 750% in the last year.

[00:19:34]>> [laughter] >> If you tweet a chart of Micron right now, you will get so many people calling it a bubble. It is unbelievable. Even though, uh, talk about valuations, trading at like an eight eight X forward PE right now, which makes it one of the cheapest stocks in the entire stock market, even though it's probably $800 billion market cap. None of it makes any sense, but because there are so many people that have missed the Micron rally, and I still think it's going to run up much higher, but so many people missed that first leg, they can't help but say this stock's full of air and the company's built on a house of cards. So, [music] here's the real question investors need to ask themselves. What if this isn't just another hype cycle? What if AI truly becomes as transformational as electricity, the internet, or the industrial revolution? And what if scarce assets, whether semiconductors, energy infrastructure, or Bitcoin, become the biggest winners in that environment? Tom Lee's message is clear.

[00:20:29]Yes, markets may face volatility. Yes, inflation and rising yields matter. Yes, corrections will happen, but the long-term trend may still be overwhelmingly bullish for technology, AI infrastructure, and digitally scarce assets. Because in a world driven by exploding demand, scarcity wins. And according to this thesis, we are only at the beginning.