--- title: Q3 2026 Market Commentary — Quarry Hill Advisors description: AI could change the world and still be a bad investment at the wrong price. Our Q3 letter looks at the AI boom, past bubbles & how we invest for either outcome. image: https://quarryhilladvisors.com/hubfs/pexels-ertabbt-150087708-11167906.jpg --- [Skip to content](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog/q3-2026-market-commentary-quarry-hill-advisors#main-content) [![Quarry Hill Advisors](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/hubfs/theme/quarry_hill_logo_main_hor.svg "Quarry Hill Advisors")](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/) - Who We Help Show submenu for Who We Help - [Corporate Executives](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/corporate-executives) - [Retirees](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/retirement-planning) - [Business Owners](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/business-owners) - [What We Do](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/what-we-do) - [Our Team](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/our-team) - Resources Show submenu for Resources - [Blog](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog) - [Resource Center](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/resource-center) - [Client Hub](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/client-resources) - [Getting Started](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/getting-started) - Who We Help Show submenu for Who We Help - [Corporate Executives](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/corporate-executives) - [Retirees](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/retirement-planning) - [Business Owners](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/business-owners) - [What We Do](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/what-we-do) - [Our Team](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/our-team) - Resources Show submenu for Resources - [Blog](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog) - [Resource Center](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/resource-center) - [Client Hub](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/client-resources) - [Getting Started](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/getting-started) ![](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/hubfs/pexels-ertabbt-150087708-11167906.jpg) # Q3 2026 Market Commentary 10.22.2026 | 4 min read [Bjorn Amundson CFP®](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog/author/bjorn-amundson) ## Stagnation or Singularity In 2011, the economist Tyler Cowen made a persuasive case that the good times were behind us. In *The Great Stagnation*, he argued that America had already picked the low-hanging fruit of innovation. His grandmother, born in 1905, lived to see electricity, the flush toilet, the automobile, radio and television. [“The whole world changed,” he said](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-great-stagnation-why-hasn-t-recent-technology-created-more-jobs). His own life had brought the internet and computers, “but not that much has changed.” For a long time, that felt true. The iPhone camera got a little better each year. The internet got a bit better, but it seemed that the world’s brightest minds spent their careers getting us to click on more ads. Hardly a path to utopia. Another book I read around that time painted a very different future: Ray Kurzweil’s *The Singularity Is Near*. The title comes from physics: a singularity sits at the center of a black hole, past the point of no return, where the normal rules stop working. Kurzweil had a habit of being early and right. In 1990, he predicted a computer would beat the world’s best chess players by 2000. IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. Many of the predictions in the book had already come true by the time I read it, but others, like self-driving cars and laptops smarter than humans, seemed far-fetched. Kurzweil predicted that machines would one day outthink us and change life beyond recognition. It sounded like science fiction. It doesn’t [anymore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p5LxFdc-Qg). The future happens slowly and then suddenly. For years, chatbots were annoying. Then suddenly they were useful. Even the people building this technology were caught off guard. Before ChatGPT launched, OpenAI employees ran a betting pool on how many people would use it in the first week. The highest guess was 100,000. It passed a million in five days. This summer, it passed a billion users a week. Part of the reason we keep getting surprised is that we think in straight lines. As Tim Urban wrote in [his well-known essay on artificial intelligence](https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html), “It’s most intuitive for us to think linearly, when we should be thinking exponentially.” Kurzweil expected computers to hold their own with humans by 2029. That date no longer sounds fanciful. Forecasters on Metaculus, a prediction site, now put the median arrival of general AI at the end of 2030. Things aren’t slowing down. They are accelerating. [Three years ago, AI models struggled with arithmetic](https://www.understandingai.org/p/mathematicians-are-grappling-with). This month, OpenAI released hundreds of papers on long-unsolved problems in mathematics. Hugo Duminil-Copin, a Fields Medal winner, wrote that [“the shock is immense,”](https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100-solutions/) and that not one of the major problems he had mentioned in his career was left untouched. The commentator Andrew Curran asked people not to mock the mathematicians: “Whatever your field, your expertise, your passion, you too shall one day experience what they are going through.”  The possibilities are thrilling. In 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind [won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold](https://www.maginative.com/article/google-deepminds-demis-hassabis-and-john-jumper-awarded-nobel-prize-in-chemistry-for-alphafold/), an AI system that has predicted the shapes of nearly all of the roughly 200 million proteins scientists have identified. Work that once took years in a lab can now take minutes. That may be just the beginning. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, argues that AI could [“compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.”](https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace) In that world, he imagines the “elimination of most cancer,” “reliable prevention and treatment of nearly all natural infectious disease,” and even a “doubling of the human lifespan.” Hassabis has said that ending disease may be “within reach. Maybe within the next decade or so.” The benefits won’t stop at medicine. [In a Harvard study](https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-tutor-harvard-physics/), students using an AI tutor learned more than twice as much, in less time, as they did in their regular active-learning physics class. Imagine a patient, expert tutor for every child on earth. Amodei even hopes AI could help lift “billions of people out of poverty.” The risks are just as real. This month, [OpenAI disclosed](https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/suppressing-misalignment-monitoring-alerts-and-disabling-misalignment-monitoring) that two of its own AI agents had switched off systems meant to monitor them. When a user asked one of them about it, it falsely said it hadn’t. Anthropic, one of the leading AI labs, warns in its own IPO filing that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” (who puts that in their IPO filing!?!). So what does it mean for your money? The sums involved are staggering. The four largest tech companies are on track to spend [roughly $730 billion this year](https://valueaddvc.com/ai-spending), much of it on data centers. [Anthropic’s revenue grew about fifteenfold in a year](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/anthropic-revenue-hits-16-3-201707100.html), yet it reported an $80.7 billion loss for the first half of 2026, most of it from non-cash accounting charges. The ten biggest companies now make up [about 37% of the S&P 500](https://ecmsource.com/sp500-top-10-concentration-37-percent-ai-eight-june-2026/), more than at the peak of the dot-com bubble. Forecasts for AI’s effect on economic growth run from an extra half a percentage point a year to Elon Musk’s claim that triple-digit growth is possible. The honest answer is that no one knows how this ends. If AI delivers on its promise, today’s prices may look reasonable in hindsight, and paying a little too much for the leaders won’t matter much. If it stalls, history offers two warnings. In 2000, investors were right that the internet would change the world. [The Nasdaq still fell more than 78% from its peak](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/economics/nasdaq-dive-prompts-dot-com-crash) by October 2002, and darlings like Pets.com went bankrupt. In the 1840s, British investors poured their savings into railways. The railways got built. Share prices collapsed, and many families lost their savings. **A technology can change the world and still be a bad investment at the wrong price.** That is why we don’t stake your future on any single forecast. We own thousands of companies around the world, lean toward smaller, cheaper and more profitable ones, and keep costs low. That approach doesn’t require us to guess right about AI. If the boom is real, you own it. If it isn’t, you aren’t betting everything on it. Stagnation or singularity, a sound plan should work in either world. As always, thank you for your trust. ***-A note from Bjorn Amundson, CFP® and Kyle Moore, CFP®*** *This material is intended for educational purposes only. You should always consult a financial, tax, or legal professional familiar with your unique circumstances before making any financial decisions. Nothing contained in the material constitutes a recommendation for purchase or sale of any security, investment advisory services or tax advice. The information and opinions expressed in the linked articles are from third parties, and while they are deemed reliable, we cannot guarantee their accuracy.* Share: [![](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/hubfs/theme/icon_facebook.svg)](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog/q3-2026-market-commentary-quarry-hill-advisors) [![](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/hubfs/theme/icon_x.svg)](https://twitter.com/share?url=https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog/q3-2026-market-commentary-quarry-hill-advisors) [![](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/hubfs/theme/icon_linkedin.svg)](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog/q3-2026-market-commentary-quarry-hill-advisors) ![Bjorn Amundson CFP®](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/hubfs/theme/team__0004_bjorn_amundson.jpeg) [Bjorn Amundson CFP®](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog/author/bjorn-amundson) [![](https://44727353.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/44727353/theme/small_previous_arrow.svg)Previous Article](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog/retirement-income-gap-planning) [![](https://44727353.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/44727353/theme/all_posts.svg)](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog) ![logo\_footer](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/hubfs/theme/logo_footer.svg "logo_footer") #### Address 550 Vandalia St., Suite 311, Saint Paul, MN 55114 #### Phone 612.440.0318 #### Email [info@quarryhilladvisors.com](mailto:info@quarryhilladvisors.com) - [What We Do](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/what-we-do) - [Our Team](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/our-team) - [Blog](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog) - [Resource Center](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/resource-center) - [Client Hub](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/client-resources) - [Contact Us](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/contact-us) - [What We Do](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/what-we-do) - [Our Team](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/our-team) - [Blog](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/blog) - [Resource Center](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/resource-center) - [Client Hub](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/client-resources) - [Contact Us](https://quarryhilladvisors.com/contact-us) Quarry Hill Advisors is a Minnesota-based Investment Advisory Firm registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 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