Editor’s note: Today, Porter turns the Journal over to a friend of the firm from Ireland – Emmet Savage of MyWallSt. Last week, Emmet and Porter were paired on the back nine at the K Club in Straffen, in County Kildaire, and the conversation that followed is why Porter asked him to write today’s essay.

Here is Emmet now…

The K Club sits on 550 acres of Kildare parkland, about 25 minutes outside Dublin. The Ryder Cup was played there in 2006. It is, by any measure, one of the great golf courses in Europe, and it is not, generally, where you expect to have your view of the market rearranged.

But that’s what happened last Monday.

MyWallSt co-founder John Tyrrell and I were paired with Porter for a round that started as golf and ended as one of the more clarifying conversations I’ve had about markets in years. Somewhere around the 14th hole, the talk turned, as it tends to with Porter, to what the crowd is missing. And what the crowd is missing, we all agreed, is the same thing in two different guises.

The first: the market still hasn’t priced in what artificial intelligence (“AI”) is about to do to corporate profitability.

Everyone has an opinion on the stocks: the chipmakers, the hyperscalers, the trillion-dollar capex numbers.

Far fewer people are pricing in what happens on the other side of that spending, a wave of ordinary businesses (logistics companies, insurers, manufacturers, service firms) becoming dramatically more productive, with margins nobody has modeled yet.

The buildout gets the headlines but the productivity dividend is still sitting there, unpriced, for the businesses that will bank it.

That mismatch, hype concentrated in a handful of names while real advantage spreads far wider than the market has bothered to look, is exactly the kind of gap that makes fortunes for the investors who see it early.

Productivity is a simple idea at its core: getting more output from the same input. A logistics firm routes more shipments with the same fleet. An insurer processes claims in a fraction of the time. A manufacturer catches defects before they become recalls. A small accounting practice serves triple the clients without hiring triple the staff.

None of those businesses will ever be called an “AI stock.” But when a company’s output starts growing faster than its costs, that’s operating leverage, and operating leverage is one of the most reliable ways an ordinary business turns into an extraordinary one.

The first wave of the AI story was always going to be physical: chips, data centers, power, cooling, cabling. Goldman Sachs puts the AI infrastructure investment at somewhere between $5.5 trillion and $7.6 trillion between 2026 and 2030.

That kind of spending doesn’t happen out of sight… It shows up as higher input costs today, which is part of why the buildout has looked inflationary in the short run.

But that’s the cost of laying the foundation.