Joseph Carlson — My Investing Plan For The Next 5 Years

ASML is the Dutch firm with a near-total monopoly on the EUV machines that print the world's most advanced computer chips. In Carlson's AI roadmap this is "phase 1" — the scarcity phase, where whoever sells the scarce, must-have ingredient has huge pricing power. ASML is his chosen way to play it: a $140,000 position already up $78,000, and he holds every share.

The reason he picked ASML over other hot sellers is durability. Memory chips are a one-time sale; ASML sells building-sized machines that customers use for decades and pay it to service the whole time, so its earnings are far less likely to collapse when the boom cools. He thinks you should own a little phase-1 exposure (otherwise you miss the whole rally), but only through a durable seller like this one rather than the cyclical names.

Alphabet (Google's parent) is unusual because it sits in two of Carlson's phases at once. It's partly "phase 1" — its in-house TPU chips are a scarce AI ingredient and a big reason the stock is up now — and partly "phase 3," the buyer/owner-of-the-customer phase where Google monetizes AI across Search, YouTube, Gemini, Cloud and ads for decades.

That dual role makes it one of his core bets: $130,000 in his passive-income portfolio and another $90,000 in his Story Fund, both well in the green, and he holds every share. His thesis is that once the AI sellers lose their pricing power, money rotates back to platforms like Google that "own the lifetime relationship" with billions of users.

Amazon is one of Carlson's two favorite picks of the year (the other is Meta). In his framework it's a "phase 3" buyer — a hyperscaler that spends heavily on AI now but will monetize it for 10–20 years across AWS cloud, its Trainium chips, retail automation, advertising, logistics and shopping assistants. It's a $188,000 position in his Story Fund.

The key idea: today Amazon's spending depresses its reported profits, which makes the scarcity-phase sellers look better by comparison. But it "owns the customer," so when AI compute gets cheap and plentiful, Amazon turns all that spending into durable, long-lived profit. "I think Amazon is in a great position."

Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads) is Carlson's other top pick this year — and notably a brand-new position he's already built to $180,000, now his third-largest holding. Like Amazon and Google, it's a "phase 3" buyer: it spends on AI now and monetizes it through better ad targeting, recommendations, business messaging and wearables for many years.

His bet is on the same power shift — away from the companies selling AI hardware and toward the giants that put AI to work inside products billions of people use daily. He expects it to take a year or two to pay off, but sees Meta as one of the most predictable long-term winners.

Microsoft is a classic "phase 3" buyer in Carlson's roadmap — a hyperscaler with, in his words, ten minutes' worth of ways to monetize AI: Azure cloud, Copilot, GitHub, Office, security and enterprise software. He owns $70,000 in his passive-income portfolio and $21,000 more in the Story Fund.

The logic is the same as for Google, Amazon and Meta: it's spending big on AI today (which holds the stock back relative to the hot sellers), but it owns deep customer relationships and will convert that spend into long-lived profit once the scarcity phase ends.

S&P Global runs the credit-ratings agency and the data/index business behind the S&P 500. In Carlson's "phase 4" software split, it's firmly on the winners' side: it has distribution, longevity, customer lock-in and unique data sets that AI can't easily copy — so AI makes it more useful, not obsolete.

The stock has been under pressure and investors are nervous, but he stays "very bullish" and owns over $100,000 of it. To him it's a predictable, hard-to-disrupt compounder being unfairly lumped in with vulnerable software.

Moody's is the other big credit-ratings-and-data company — effectively S&P Global's twin — and Carlson owns about $47,000 of it. It belongs in the same "won't be commoditized" group: proprietary data, deep customer relationships and a trusted, regulated franchise that AI can't readily replace.

Like S&P Global it has been pressured and doubted, but he still expects it to be a "big winner" over the long run.

Micron makes memory chips, and it's the centerpiece of Carlson's warning about cyclical "scarcity sellers." Memory suddenly became scarce in the AI boom, so Micron's stock is up about 10× and just crossed a $1 trillion market value. The trap, he says, is that whenever a deeply cyclical stock soars, investors convince themselves it's no longer cyclical and that the fat profits will last.

He doesn't buy that. Memory is enjoying a one-time demand surge; when new supply comes online and contracts roll over, prices and profits can fall hard. So he calls it "highly risky" and is explicit: "I'm not buying Micron" (or SanDisk). It's a great business today, but he won't pay up for peak-cycle earnings.

DocuSign's main product is electronic signatures. Carlson puts it in the "at significant risk" bucket of his software split because e-signing is no longer technically hard — Adobe, Microsoft and many startups can offer it and simply bundle it into bigger products customers already pay for.

When a feature can be copied and given away inside someone else's suite, the standalone version tends to get a permanently lower valuation. That "massive bundling risk" is why he avoids it, even though the stock has already fallen a lot.

Zoom is video conferencing, and Carlson sees it "in a very difficult spot" for the same reason as DocuSign: bundling. Microsoft Teams and similar tools come included with software companies already buy, so Zoom's core feature is increasingly something rivals give away as part of a larger package.

That commoditization risk is why it's in his "avoid" column — the product may survive, but investors may keep assigning it a low multiple.