Fortune Executive Editorial Director Diane Brady joined us at AlphaMarket 2026 on October 21, opening our sixth annual growth investor summit in conversation with Alpha Partners Managing Partner Steve Brotman and Chris Daniels, BlackRock’s head of equity capital markets.
She spent the rest of the day with the investors in the room, and the following morning her CEO Daily newsletter in Fortune led with what she heard.
Her conclusion is that after years in which AI has been the market’s answer to almost every question, the consensus “may be starting to crack.”
The numbers give that observation its weight. By Brady’s count, about two-thirds of S&P 500 returns since 2024 have come from 42 AI stocks, and nearly all of this year’s venture dollars are flowing into AI as a handful of private companies close in on trillion-dollar valuations. The investors she spoke with remain committed to the theme. At the same time, they are pressing harder on how the buildout is being financed, given how much of it runs on borrowed money and circular financing, and on how long the infrastructure spending will take to pay off.
Her column pays particular attention to private markets, where the wait for exits keeps lengthening. She cites PitchBook’s count of 33,575 unsold PE-backed companies as of June 30, more than double the figure from a decade ago, alongside venture rounds that now stretch to Series G. She also observes that the best deals concentrate in a small set of firms while everyone else pays up for modest allocations or waits for an IPO. That is the K-shaped market we have been describing in our own work this year, with access and the strongest outcomes narrowing to a few names while pricing and returns compress for the rest.
Brady closes on the Anthropic IPO as a barometer for sentiment across public and private markets, and its reception will shape this debate well into next year. We plan to pick the conversation back up at AlphaMarket 2027 on October 27 in New York.
Read the full article here.
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