Fahad Saleem
11 min read
The AI bubble seems to be popping sooner than expected. Investors are running out of patience, and they want to know where the returns are on the huge AI investments. Tech stocks, including Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, and Intel, dropped hard after their latest earnings reports. Intel fell 29%, its biggest one-day drop in more than four decades, after a weak sales forecast dragged down chipmakers like Nvidia and Broadcom. Before the drop, Intel had gained about 143% over the past year, and we looked at whether its turnaround could keep going. Read our Intel analysis here. Amazon and Alphabet also fell after they stuck with aggressive AI spending plans while their core businesses cooled. Alphabet and Meta both reported negative cash flows.
Investors moved into safer assets. Utilities and consumer staples each rose more than 10% in October, and Treasuries and investment-grade bonds posted their best monthly return since late 2020, Bloomberg reported.
Billionaire Howard Marks, co-chair of Oaktree Capital Management, said in his latest interview on Bloomberg TV that the recent AI stumbles have burst the bubble of infallibility around the sector. He called the new skepticism healthy and said nobody knows whether AI will produce enough profit to pay for all the spending, Bloomberg reported. Marks has warned about this risk before, and we covered his earlier AI warning and 10 non-AI stock picks.
Amid all this chaos, retail value investors are naming the stocks they’d buy for the next 10 years. Click to see the expanded list of 10 best stocks to buy for the next 10 years.
Methodology
We looked through a Reddit discussion on r/ValueInvesting where users were asked which single stock they would buy and hold for 10 years. We picked the 5 stocks Redditors named most often, counting repeat mentions and skipping jokes and memes. For each stock, we explain why Redditors like it. We then ranked the 10 in ascending order by the number of hedge fund investors, based on Insider Monkey’s database of 1,006 hedge funds at the end of the second quarter of 2026.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Insider Monkey’s quarterly newsletter strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 612% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 375 percentage points (see more details here).You can also see the full list of the 10 best stocks to buy for the next 10 years on our YouTube channel by clicking the image below.
