Rob Arnott Says Amazon and Microsoft Aren't Actually 'Growth' Stocks — and the Data Backs Him Up
From Gundlach's private credit warnings to Paul Tudor Jones going full YOLO on AI, here's what YouTube's sharpest finance minds can't stop talking about this week
Ticker Ratings
| Ticker | Rating | Entry Price | Current | $ Gain | % Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMZN AMAZON COM INC | hold | $270.88 | — | — | — |
| MSFT MICROSOFT CORP | hold | $420.93 | — | — | — |
| NVDA NVIDIA CORP | buy | $211.43 | — | — | — |
| AAPL Apple Inc. | buy | $287.94 | — | — | — |
| DDOG Datadog, Inc. | buy | $186.10 | — | — | — |
| OWL BLUE OWL CAPITAL INC. | hold | $10.35 | — | — | — |
| GLW CORNING INC /NY | buy | $184.43 | — | — | — |
| ELAN Elanco Animal Health Inc | buy | $23.99 | — | — | — |
| WHR WHIRLPOOL CORP /DE/ | sell | $47.90 | — | — | — |
| SHAK Shake Shack Inc. | sell | $68.98 | — | — | — |
| PZZA PAPA JOHNS INTERNATIONAL INC | sell | $32.70 | — | — | — |
| PLNT Planet Fitness, Inc. | sell | $44.01 | — | — | — |
Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates is making waves across multiple Bloomberg podcast appearances this week, and his core argument is genuinely disorienting: $AMZN and $MSFT don't qualify as growth stocks. Not by actual growth metrics, anyway. His RAFI Growth Index selects on real fundamentals — sales, profits, R&D — and has outperformed the Russell Growth benchmark by 4.5% per year over 28 years in backtesting, then outperformed by 13 percentage points since its March 2024 launch. Meanwhile, $NVDA and $AAPL sit at roughly 10% each as the top two holdings. The industry, Arnott argues, has been conflating 'expensive' with 'growth' for decades. Oops.
On the macro side, Jeffrey Gundlach is calling private credit's '2007 moment' with characteristic cheerfulness, citing funds marking down from 100 to 81 overnight and expecting a wave of redemption requests in June interval funds. Meanwhile, $DDOG posted its best day since 2019 — up 31% after Q1 revenue cracked $1 billion — proving that actual AI-integrated businesses are still printing. Cameron Dawson of New Edge Wealth throws cold water on the 'broadening out' narrative, noting equal-weight S&P just hit a new YTD relative low versus cap-weighted. Narrow leadership, wide delusion.
Paul Tudor Jones attended a private AI conference and came out bullish enough to buy more — comparing the moment to late 1999 with 40% upside remaining. One data point from that conference should keep you up at night though: perceived probability of AI wiping out half of humanity jumped from 10% to 60% year-over-year. Totally normal, totally fine, buy the dip.