AI chip bubble rivals French stocks in 1700s, surpasses Nasdaq during dot-com frenzy by one measure

The artificial intelligence rally has already reached historic proportions and is now passing some famous – or rather, infamous – milestones. The SOX semiconductor index has a peak price that's 62% higher than its 200-day moving average – more than double the spread of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the run-up to Black Monday in 1987, as well as the lead-in to Black Tuesday in 1929, according to a Thursday note from Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett. The spread is closer to the Nasdaq 's margin of 55% ahead of the dot-com crash in 2000 when the commercial Internet was first taking off and companies with no clear path to profitability got valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It's even in the range of the 73% spread in the French CAC All Tradable index prior to the bursting of the Mississippi Bubble in 1720. In that episode, shares of the troubled French colonial Mississippi Company were permitted to be used as legal tender, leading to a doubling of the French money supply. "Exponential price action, market concentration, collapsing vol, stocks bossing bond yields higher, why melt-up everyone's new base case … Here we go," Hartnett mused on Thursday. AI stocks started going parabolic at the end of March – a highly unusual contour in price charts for securities. Share of chipmakers Micron , Advanced Micro Devices , SK Hynix, Marvell , and Intel , among others, all exhibit this trend. …