Creatix / January 18, 2026
The Year Is Just Getting Started and 2026 Already Feels Familiar for AI Investors
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Learning about investing is a clear way to take action towards improving your financial life. Our survival on Earth has been monetized. Money is practically unlimited but restricted for practical reasons. Absent scarcity, real or forced, natural or artificial, a resource loses value. If everyone is granted access to limited amounts of money, it would not be money (it would not be a valuable resource). Restricting its supply is critical to keeping its assigned value. Having said that, those who demonstrate the ability to multiple money for others, get practical unlimited access to credit and investments. Think about Elon Musk, for example. He has demonstrated an unparalleled capacity to create value by leading extraordinary enterprises. Therefore, he is the richest primate on Earth.
With a new year just rolling in, this is a good time as any to learn more investing. In this article we explore what the market is telling investors so far in 2026. The calendar may have just flipped to 2026, but the market mood feels anything but new. The opening weeks of the year are already extending a pattern set in 2025: narrow leadership, extreme dispersion, and eye catching returns concentrated in a handful of stocks tied to AI infrastructure and data growth, while more traditional sectors struggle to keep pace.
In other words, 2026 did not reset the board. It doubled down on 2025’s AI driven run.
Nowhere is that contrast clearer than inside the S&P 500 itself, where one stock has exploded higher out of the gate while another sits near the bottom of the leaderboard. Together, they tell a clear story about what investors are rewarding and what they are punishing. They show what the market considers new and what it already considers old.
The Best S&P 500 Stock of 2026 So Far: Sandisk (SNDK)
Sandisk has picked up right where it left off in 2025, firmly at the top of the performance table.
In just the first weeks of 2026, Sandisk has delivered outsized double digit returns, making it the best performing stock in the entire S&P 500 year to date. That performance is not a fluke or a one week anomaly. It is a continuation of the same forces that powered the stock last year.
Why Sandisk Keeps Winning
Several overlapping tailwinds are reinforcing each other.
AI infrastructure demand
Large language models, cloud platforms, and enterprise AI workloads are massively storage intensive. Flash memory is no longer a commodity side note. It has become core infrastructure.
Memory pricing leverage
After years of oversupply, the memory market has tightened. Even modest price increases can have an outsized impact on margins, and investors are forward pricing that operating leverage.
Pure play clarity
Since separating from Western Digital, Sandisk is now a clean and focused bet on memory. That simplicity matters in an environment where capital is chasing clear narratives and lower complexity.
Index mechanics
Inclusion in major indices forces passive funds to buy, adding a mechanical layer of demand on top of fundamental enthusiasm.
The Bigger Message
Sandisk’s early 2026 surge reinforces a broader lesson from 2025. In markets dominated by transformative technology cycles, winners tend to take most of the gains.
This is not a slow or evenly distributed bull market. It is a power law market where a small number of stocks drive a large share of total returns. Sandisk is currently sitting on the steep part of that winners curve. If the example of 2025 and NVIDIA is any guide, Sandisk could continue to show strong upside through 2026.
A power law market is one where returns are not evenly spread. Instead:
A few extreme winners dominate gains
The average stock significantly underperforms the index
Missing just one or two leaders can mean missing most of the market’s upside
This happens because capital, attention, and narrative concentrate around businesses with scalable advantages such as network effects, platform dominance, or transformative technologies like AI.
In contrast to older and more balanced markets, modern markets increasingly reward the top one to five percent of companies. This makes stock selection more critical and makes broad diversification less effective at capturing the upside.
The phrase power law market emerged more recently as investors, especially in technology and venture capital, began applying power law mathematics to stock returns and recognizing that a very small number of companies drive most long term gains.
The Worst S&P 500 Stock of 2026 So Far: American International Group (AIG)
At the other end of the spectrum sits American International Group, one of the worst performing S&P 500 stocks so far in 2026, with shares down sharply in the opening weeks of the year.
While Sandisk benefits from enthusiasm, scarcity, and growth narratives, AIG is facing the opposite forces.
Unloved sector dynamics
Insurance and financial stocks entered 2026 with weak momentum and little excitement relative to technology and AI adjacent names.
Macro uncertainty
Interest rate expectations, regulatory concerns, and underwriting risk have kept investors cautious toward older segments like insurance.
Opportunity cost
In a market where capital is selective, money flowing into AI infrastructure often comes at the expense of slower, more complex, or lower growth businesses.
An Important Caveat
Being the worst performer early in the year does not mean AIG is broken or irrelevant. It does, however, highlight a defining feature of today’s market. Stocks do not simply rise or fall. They are embraced or ignored. So far in 2026, AIG has clearly been ignored. Chances are that many AIG-like stocks will be mostly ignored in 2026 and the market pays attention to potentially more rewarding investment opportunities in AI, especially in the infrastructure and "backbone" bottleneck.
What This Early 2026 Split Tells Us
The Sandisk versus AIG contrast is not about good companies versus bad companies. It is about future versus past. It reflects where the market believes the future is being built.
In 2025, investors began shifting toward AI infrastructure rather than AI software alone.
In 2026, that lesson is being reinforced with even sharper concentration.
The S&P 500 may contain 500 companies, but under a power law dynamic, returns are coming from very few names. It started with the Magnificent Seven. It is now expanding into the AI backbone.
Beyond Sandisk: The AI Backbone Leaders
Besides Sandisk, early 2026 leadership has come primarily from AI infrastructure and memory and storage companies.
Micron Technology designs and manufactures DRAM and NAND memory chips used in servers, data centers, AI accelerators, PCs, and smartphones. AI workloads require massive and fast access memory, making Micron a direct beneficiary of the memory upcycle.
Western Digital produces hard disk drives and flash storage solutions used in data centers, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise systems. As AI models generate and store enormous datasets, demand for large scale storage continues to rise.
Seagate Technology is a leading maker of high capacity hard drives for hyperscale cloud providers. AI training, inference logs, and long term data storage all support demand for its largest drives.
Lam Research builds semiconductor manufacturing equipment, especially tools used for etching and deposition. Every expansion in memory or logic chip production requires Lam’s tools.
KLA specializes in inspection, metrology, and process control systems. As chips become more complex and more expensive, KLA’s tools become increasingly mission critical.
Applied Materials is the largest supplier of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, covering deposition, patterning, and materials engineering. AI driven capital spending by chipmakers directly boosts demand for its equipment.
Together, these companies form the physical backbone of AI:
Micron provides the memory inside AI systems
Western Digital and Seagate provide the storage around AI systems
Lam Research, KLA, and Applied Materials provide the equipment that builds the chips
This is why capital has been rotating beyond the Magnificent Seven and into AI infrastructure winners. They monetize the true bottleneck of AI, which is infrastructure. Anyone can now create code with AI, but not everyone owns the systems that make AI run at scale.
Build it and They'll Come
History shows a repeatable sequence when a general purpose technology emerges. Capital flows first to infrastructure and bottlenecks. Applications follow later once capacity becomes abundant.
Nineteenth century railroads and canals
Investment surged into tracks, canals, and transport networks before consumer benefits were obvious. Only later did national supply chains, mass retail, and distribution flourish.
Early twentieth century electricity
Early winners were power generation, grids, transformers, motors, and wiring. Productivity gains came later as factories and households reorganized around electricity.
Late twentieth century internet
Capital first flowed into routers, fiber optics, servers, and data centers. Many early applications failed, but the infrastructure endured. Once bandwidth and compute became cheap, search, ecommerce, and social platforms exploded.
Two thousands mobile computing
Early profits accrued to networks, spectrum, towers, and chip ecosystems. Once smartphones were ubiquitous, applications dominated.
The twenty twenties and artificial intelligence
We are again in the infrastructure phase. Value is concentrating in compute, memory, storage, networking, power, and semiconductor equipment. Code is abundant. Infrastructure is scarce. Capital flows toward scarcity.
Best ETFs to Capitalize on This AI Phase
Semiconductor focused ETFs have been clear beneficiaries.
- The iShares Semiconductor ETF has risen roughly 12% year to date by mid January 2026, reflecting strong gains across memory makers and chip equipment suppliers.
- The VanEck Semiconductor ETF has gained around 11% year to date, with heavier exposure to dominant chip leaders.
- The SPDR S and P Semiconductor ETF has gained about 10% year to date, benefiting from broader and more equal weighted exposure.
- The Global X AI Semiconductor and Quantum ETF has gained roughly 8.5% year to date, offering more targeted exposure to next generation technologies.
Broader AI thematic ETFs show more mixed performance.
- The Global X Artificial Intelligence and Technology ETF is up about 3% year to date.
- The iShares Future AI and Tech ETF is up roughly 6% year to date.
- The iShares AI Innovation and Tech Active ETF is up about 2% year to date.
- The Roundhill Generative AI and Technology ETF has shown stronger momentum but with higher volatility.
Together, these results reinforce the same message seen at the stock level. Capital is flowing first to AI’s bottlenecks.
Bottom Line
2026 is still young, but the message is already clear.
Sandisk represents the continuation of AI driven capital concentration.
AIG reflects the growing gap between future aligned growth and legacy sectors.
The market is not starting fresh. It is building momentum on last year’s winners.
AI today looks less like the late stage internet app boom and more like early electrification. The market is rewarding those who build the foundation because history suggests the world changing applications come later. The infrastructure always comes first.
Now you know it.
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