What Changed In 24 Hours?

By Alex Martinez on November 11, 2026

Greetings and thank you for reading Cory’s Perspective.

Last week…what a week! The midterm elections delivered a sweeping victory for Democrats on Tuesday, the stock market staged a big rally Wednesday, and then Thursday arrived and the enthusiasm disappeared in a violent selloff. If you were following the markets and the financial news, you’ve had a front-row seat to how quickly the narrative can change.

Before the election, I read predictions that a Democratic sweep of Congress could send stocks sharply lower. Election night arrived, Democrats won, and futures initially pointed lower. Then Wednesday morning came and stocks took off. The explanation was that election uncertainty had been removed, and investors could move forward. Fair enough. Then Thursday, stocks got hammered and the explanations changed. Suddenly, concerns about AI spending, valuations and political opposition to data centers were front and center.

The truth is I found the whole sequence amusing. When everybody thinks the market is going right, it seems determined to go left. When everybody expects it to go left, it goes right. It’s almost like the market exists to take money from impatient investors and hand it to patient ones. Warren Buffett said something about that.

What changed in 24 hours?

That’s what I want to explore because last week’s market action illustrates something important about investing that gets lost in the daily financial commentary.

The stock market is constantly putting a price on a future nobody knows. When you buy a stock, you’re paying for what investors believe that business will earn in the years ahead. Current earnings of course matter to determine a company’s valuation but so do expectations about growth, interest rates, competition, government policy and risk. Then there’s sentiment which is a fancy word for “vibes.” Those factors all influence what investors are willing to pay.

Super simple example to illustrate my point: Imagine a company earns $10 per share and investors are willing to pay 30 times those earnings. The stock trades at $300. Now suppose the company is still earning $10 per share, but investors decide they’re only willing to pay 20 times earnings (the vibes changed). The stock falls to $200.

That’s a 33% decline with zero change in a company’s current earnings.

That’s what valuation multiples can do. A price-to-earnings ratio, or P/E, tells us how much investors are paying for each dollar of earnings. Higher multiples might reflect expectations for faster growth, greater confidence in future profits or lower perceived risk….or excessive optimism. The point is that expectations can change without the business changing.

Let’s consider what happens when so much of the stock market is concentrated in a handful of companies. The world’s largest publicly traded company (that makes chips for AI) represents a greater share of the S&P 500 than several entire sectors of the economy. One company carries more weight in the index than hundreds of other businesses combined within some sectors. Millions of people own exposure to it through index funds, whether they realize it or not.

When investors change what they’re willing to pay for that company’s future earnings, the consequences ripple beyond shareholders. When several of the largest companies are tied to the same investment theme (AI), the risks become more connected which brings us back to AI and the election.

I’ve written about the contradiction of Americans using AI and technology every day while opposing the data centers needed to support it. My immediate takeaway watching the election results roll in Tuesday night was that those concerns were clearly in focus. I have written right here in this newsletter that electricity costs, water usage, tax incentives and the construction of data centers have become political issues. Changes in government, and perhaps gov’t policy, could make those projects more expensive or less attractive financially.

Does that mean the AI investment boom is over? I don’t know! The fact of the matter is businesses are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building infrastructure, and investors are paying prices based on expectations about what those investments will eventually produce. Political decisions can change those expectations, too.

I don’t know how much of Thursday’s selloff reflected the election, AI concerns, investors reducing risk or something else. Anybody telling you they know exactly why the market moved the way it did last week is guessing.

Jake and I talk about this all the time in meetings, on social media, and on Upticks. Know what you own and WHY you own it. That sounds obvious, but I always wonder how many people buying the S&P 500 understand what they’re invested in. Often when you buy “the market,” you’re buying an index where the largest companies receive the greatest weight. You may own hundreds of companies, but a substantial portion of your money can depend on the fortunes of a handful of businesses.

This is why we take the approach we do at Falcon Wealth Advisors. We want to understand the businesses we own for clients, why we’re buying them, what we’re paying and what could go wrong. We won’t always be right, nobody is. Ultimately, we believe those decisions deserve more thought than just “buying the market.”

It’s important to understand that your financial plan shouldn’t require you to match or beat the S&P 500 to work. For clients at Falcon Wealth Advisors we aim to start with the financial plan that ultimately requires your investments to support your spending, your goals and your life. We establish a portfolio allocation and an individual target rate of return based on what each client’s financial plan requires. That target is a planning baseline derived from historical risk/return. It’s not a prediction and ultimately achieving what your plan requires matters more than “beating the market.”

The election happened. Markets rallied, then sold off. The experts changed their explanations, and this week we’ll have another set of predictions about what comes next.

The goal is to make your money work for YOUR life, not to win a competition against an index.

That’s my perspective.