Josh Hawley

The Great Software Panic of 2026 Last week, the equity markets witnessed a visceral reaction to the accelerating evolution of artificial intelligence. Software stocks experienced a precipitous decline, with the IGV software ETF dropping 20% in a single month. This wasn't a standard market correction; it was a fundamental questioning of the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. Investors are grappling with a singular, terrifying thesis: if generative AI allows a 10-person team to spin up a platform that replicates 80% of an incumbent's functionality for 10% of the cost, the moats protecting giants like Salesforce and Adobe have effectively evaporated. The catalyst for this panic was a flurry of product releases from the leading AI labs. Anthropic rolled out industry-specific agents for legal and finance, while OpenAI introduced a multi-agent coding tool that threatens to automate the very labor required to build and maintain traditional software. The market’s reaction—driving forward price-to-earnings ratios to their lowest levels since 2014—suggests a belief that software is a dead asset class. However, history tells us that such extreme selling pressure often signals a "dislocated high-quality" (DHQ) opportunity rather than a permanent industry collapse. Moats, Inertia, and the Illusion of Obsolescence The "software is dead" narrative ignores the fundamental reality of enterprise operations: inertia is a powerful economic force. Switching costs for large organizations are astronomical. Terminating a major contract with Salesforce or Cloudflare involves more than just a pricing comparison; it requires months of committee approvals, executive sign-offs, and the potential for significant termination fees. Most importantly, it requires retraining thousands of employees on a new interface. We saw this movie before during the emergence of ChatGPT. When Google stock cratered 40% on fears that search was obsolete, the market ignored Google's capacity to integrate AI into its own massive ecosystem. Today, Google's search revenue is up 50% since that launch. The same logic applies to the current software cohort. Adobe is not standing still while Figma or AI startups gain ground; it is aggressively integrating AI into Premiere and Photoshop. The incumbent doesn't just have the customer relationship; they have the enterprise security credentials and the integration history that a startup simply cannot replicate overnight. While margin pressure is inevitable as procurement departments use AI alternatives as a negotiating bludgeon, the total displacement of these platforms is an overblown fear. The Entertainment Round-Up: Disney’s Succession and the Woke Theater While the software markets bled, the entertainment sector faced its own existential crossroads. Disney finally announced that Josh D'Amaro, head of the high-performing Parks and Experiences division, will take the helm from Bob Iger next month. This move acknowledges where the real value lies in the Disney conglomerate. The parks are an incredible cash machine with a moat that streaming services can only dream of. However, Disney remains weighted down by its "bad bank" assets: the decaying linear networks like ABC and Nat Geo. Simultaneously, Washington D.C. hosted a performance of political theater disguised as an antitrust hearing. Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery executives were grilled not on market concentration or pricing power, but on the perceived "wokeness" of their content. Senators like Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt focused on cultural grievances, ignoring the hard structural work of antitrust enforcement. This highlights a critical failure in our current regulatory environment: instead of focusing on how a Netflix-HBO merger might harm consumer pricing or worker wages, politicians are chasing viral clips to please an audience of one—either their base or their donors, such as the Ellison family. The AI Wars: Anthropic’s 1984 Moment In the marketing arena, Anthropic executed a strategic masterpiece with its Super Bowl advertisement. Taking a direct shot at OpenAI's plan to introduce ads into ChatGPT, the ad portrayed AI-driven advertising as a dystopian intrusion into personal therapy and intimate moments. This is "lading" at its finest—establishing a point of differentiation (no ads) that is both relevant and sustainable. Sam Altman's defensive response on X (formerly Twitter) only served to validate Anthropic’s offensive. When the market leader references the number two player, they signal fear. Anthropic has successfully positioned itself as the "adult in the room," focusing on enterprise safety and a clean, non-monetized user experience. This marketing win, combined with a sharp focus on the enterprise market rather than the fickle consumer segment, suggests that the valuation gap between OpenAI and Anthropic may close significantly within the next twelve months. We are witnessing the beginning of the rise of a new heavyweight champion in the AI wars. The Path Forward: Buying Fear and Selling Theater For investors, the current environment is a call to action. The panic selling in software has created valuation anomalies in high-quality companies like ServiceNow and Adobe. These are "Dislocated High Quality" (DHQ) assets—companies with double-digit growth and massive moats that are being priced as if they are in terminal decline. In the entertainment space, the path to value for Disney is clear: shed the linear assets. If the new CEO executes a "good bank, bad bank" split, the market will finally reward the strength of the parks and streaming businesses. In the meantime, the macro outlook remains clouded by geopolitical posturing and a lack of serious conversation regarding free trade and antitrust. To bring prices down and oxygenate the economy, we need more than political theater; we need structural reform. Until then, the smart money will be found in the sectors where fear has outpaced reality.