Michael Lewis and Tom Lee hold court on the $1 trillion software-stock carnage: ‘I think fear is not a bad thing to be long right now’

Michael Lewis and Tom Lee held court in a podcast taping in New York City on Tuesday, talking to SoFi’s head of investment research Liz Thomas for her show The Important Part. In a wide-ranging conversation that covered, among other things, Lee’s thoughts on flash-frozen technology and Michael Lewis’ dinner with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the subject of Sam Bankman-Fried, the two towering figures in finance debated whether the current sell-off in software stocks was turning into something more serious. They were grim, yet humorous.

The duo dissected a market defined by extreme volatility, in which software stocks are “down a ton” and artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to wipe out entire industries. But the most arresting moment came when Lewis, author of The Big Short, shared a morbid statistic about who actually makes money in these environments.

“Did you know Fidelity published a report about the best-performing retail accounts of Fidelity?” Lewis asked the audience. “And it was all customers who died.” (Lewis was referring to a famous 2014 study that found, in fact, the best-returning portfolios were left alone, whether due to death or absent-mindedness.)

A few moments later, Lee cited research about how 40,000 stocks have either gone public or been spun off since 1974, of which 90% fell by more than 50%, the vast majority going to zero. “So in other words, the majority of stocks basically went to zero.”

FOMO or death?

The anecdote underscored a central theme of the evening: in a market whipped into a frenzy by the feat of missing out (FOMO) and algorithmic trading, doing nothing is often the superior strategy.

“The message is not die,” Lewis clarified dryly. “Don’t over trade.”

Tom Lee, the head of research at Fundstrat, supported this view with data from his own firm. He noted that while institutional investors have shrunk their time horizons to mere days—or in some cases, holding stocks for “like 40 seconds”—retail investors are actually “getting it right” because they are working with “permanent capital.” Being literally dead, they are unable to withdraw their capital from the market. Unlike hedge funds that churn positions based on daily P&L, retail investors sit on their assets.

“As you know,” Lee told the crowd, appearing to refer to high-frequency trading patterns, as covered by Lewis’ book Flash Boys, “the average stock is held for like 40 seconds. So most [of] these large hedge funds … one second or five seconds is considered a long holding period. So a lot of funds are literally just churning through stocks.” (Asset management executive Barry Ritholtz has taken issue with estimates of this nature, arguing they apply only to high-frequency traders and are not representative of most stock-market activity.)

Lee noted Thomas made a good point in her prompt, however.

“There is something that’s different this year. All of a sudden, a lot of stocks and industries are starting to have shrinkage,” Lee said. “So the software industry, for instance, is seeing shrinking demand and a repricing of their service, and there’s now many research reports pointing out that agentic AI products or AI products are starting to replace traditional software.”

It’s a lot of shrinkage, too. Bloomberg calculated an iShares ETF tracking software stocks has bled roughly $1 trillion over the last seven trading days.

Lee said he viewed this as proof of AI’s productivity and a long-term positive, reasoning that less is being spent on software because AI is performing it instead, and there are fewer tech employees now than 2022, when ChatGPT was released—and college graduate unemployment trailing non for the first time in living memory, if ever.

Lewis, though, said he saw echoes of the dot-com bubble. He warned investors are once again “conflating the technology with corporate profits,” assuming that just because AI is transformative, it will inevitably lead to stock market windfalls.

“It may, in fact, be a machine for reducing corporate profits,” Lewis argued, suggesting many of current high-flyers could eventually come “crashing down.”

The conversation veered into existential risks for other asset classes as well, painting a picture in which even “safe” assets could theoretically go to zero. Lee theorized Bitcoin could be rendered obsolete by quantum computing or even by AI itself—if AI decides to run its own “language of validation” and bypass human crypto chains entirely. Even gold, a $35 trillion asset class by Lee’s calculation, isn’t safe from devaluation.

“There’s a million times more gold underground than above ground today,” Lee said, reasoning that if it gets too expensive, the Magnificent 7 will just get into the gold mining business, “because you might as well just dig for gold.”

Despite the talk of bubbles and potential asset collapses, Lewis revealed he has moved into a defensive crouch—specifically, the “Armageddon trade.”

“When I own [gold], I think I’m long fear,” Lewis admitted, revealing he has a position in the metal, which he didn’t advise any listeners to follow him in acquiring. “I don’t see any reason not to be scared. And I think fear is not a bad thing to be long right now.”

For the living investors in the room, the takeaway was a paradox: The market is dangerous, the technology is cannibalizing profits, and the best way to survive might be to emulate the dead—the only reliable capital is permanent capital.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com