The S&P 500 reached another record. The Nasdaq gained more than 5%. Small caps rallied. Earnings remained strong. But underneath those numbers, the market's narrative changed. For much of this year, investors worried that the economy was too strong and inflation would force the Fed to keep raising rates. Friday's jobs report introduced the opposite concern. What happens if the economy is actually becoming too weak?

Right now, investors are celebrating because weaker hiring reduces interest-rate pressure. That trade can continue as long as corporate earnings remain strong and the slowdown stays contained. But there is a line. If weak hiring becomes layoffs, falling income and weaker consumer spending, lower interest rates will stop being interpreted as good news. That makes next week's CPI and retail-sales reports particularly important.

We've all made this mistake: Thinking we have to pick the new, unknown company that pops up with some new technology or within a new industry that’s going to skyrocket and take our portfolio from cents to millions. I'm going to tell you why that's wrong, and why sometimes the companies we already know of are the ones that are the real winners.

I'm sure you're familiar with the AI race and everything going on in the market as far as valuations and why they're so high. If not, here’s the scoop: people believed the stories that AI businesses were telling and directed a lot of cash in their direction. Those valuations continued to grow off the backs of a few successful companies like Nvidia, and now we're all looking for the next big company to skyrocket and make our money big in the market.

At this point, a many of their stocks are stalling because we have too many questions. You're spending billions of dollars. You have all these circular deals going on in the market. What's real and what's not? Where is the return on the investment? When can we expect it, and how much is it going to be? How much debt is really circulating in the market? These are questions that these businesses who invest billions in AI infrastructure can't answer.

But the lesson we all need to learn is that sometimes we already know who the winners are. We know of them. They exist. We've invested in them before. They're popular businesses but we don't associate them with the new technology because our default is to look for the new company we've never heard of. We're just kind of asking, "Who's the new guy? Who's the one that's going to skyrocket and take our money to the moon?"

And we overlook some of the established businesses that are going to benefit the most from the new technology.

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A few years ago there was a 3D printing craze. It became a big deal because it became cheaper to produce and marketed to consumers. It wasn't new technology, but it was technology being pushed to the public. And of course, the market is always looking for something to craze about. There were companies going public off of this hype. Unfortunately, a lot of them ended up filing for bankruptcy.

Three companies I want to name: Desktop Metal, Shapeways, and Fast Radius. These went public around 2020 to 2022, and they're all bankrupt right now.

Now, I'm not saying all the 3D printing businesses that went public are bankrupt. What I'm saying is you have to be careful when it comes to new technologies or new industries. Sometimes technologies aren't industries within themselves — they're tools that enhance existing industries. And I believe AI is the same way.

With 3D printing, the companies that benefited the most were Eaton Corporation and 3M, manufacturing businesses that already existed, that were global, that had the supply chain, the distribution, the factories all over the world, and the infrastructure in place to take this new technology, inserting it into their existing operations.

3M and Eaton may not be 3D printing products to sell, but here's what happens: when a machine breaks down in their factory, instead of ordering a part and waiting for it to ship, they 3D printed the replacement parts on the premises and installed it within a day. That makes the operation more efficient. That means the existing operation costs less. They're making more money at the end of the day because they can get products to the customer faster with less downtime on their machines.

These are the things savvy investors and analysts wouuld have thought about, to say these existing companies are going to benefit the most from the new technology because of all these factors.

Now if we switch over to AI, we have two companies we've all known about: Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 0.03% ) and Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 0.82% ) .

These companies are finally giving investors what we've been looking for when it comes to all this data infrastructure and AI infrastructure spending: where's the return? Who's going to grow their revenues from the billions being spent?

Microsoft reported earnings recently for their fiscal 2026 year end. Microsoft Cloud revenue increased 27%. Their commercial remaining performance obligations — meaning their backlog, increased 84% to $678 billion. That made investors happy, because we're finally seeing somebody benefit and show real revenue growth from all the spending.

Now let's go to Amazon's earnings release. Amazon Web Services grew 36.7% year-over-year. Great growth from an established business!

These are very established businesses finding ways to use new technology to grow their current operations. That's the secret to the companies that are going to benefit the most.

I'm not saying some of these smaller companies won't be successful. I'm not saying CoreWeave is a bad investment. The point I’m making: when you're trying to guess which small, unproven company is going to be the one you should invest in out of the many that pop up with new technologies, you’re taking on a tasks that many of the most famous hedge fund mangers won’t take on. It’s an extremely difficult tasks with small odds of you winning.

But we have an opportunity to make a lot of money with little risks because we have companies like Amazon and Microsoft. They're established. Cloud services were already a part of their business model. They were already offering Amazon Web Services and Azure. They have the infrastructure built, inserting AI will enhance their current dominant products, creating a large competitive advantage.

Those are the businesses that are going to be the true winners. They've already been winning, and the real winners continue to win because they already have the infrastructure in place to put these new technologies to work.

We have to be careful when we're constantly looking for the next best thing, and realize the next best thing is often something we already know about — because that's how great businesses are built.