By: Russ Kamp, CEO, Ryan ALM, Inc.

Yogi Berra, the great Yankee catcher, but also a NY Mets player/coach in 1965, is credited with the saying it’s “Deja Vu all over again”, which he supposedly uttered back in 1961. Are we potentially witnessing in 2026, with AI investments soaring and equity valuations that may be stretched, a replay to what transpired in March 2000? Now, I’ve heard many arguments that today’s technology companies aren’t your fathers’ or even your grandfathers’ but anytime I hear the phrase “this time is different”, I want to run and hide.

Let’s explore. At the peak of the dot-com bubble in March 2000, Information Technology represented approximately 35% of the capitalization-weighted S&P 500. That level of concentration within the S&P 500 was deemed extraordinary at that time. Remember when Cisco Systems was the largest stock in the S&P 500 index? What transpired from March 2000 to October 2002, proved incredibly painful to those investors that believed that “this time was different”. Unfortunately, it wasn’t! The result was a significant reduction in the weight of the technology sector within the S&P 500 from 2000-2002 by an incredible 21.7%. The technology bubble burst took down Tech’s exposure from roughly one-third of the index to about 13% by the 2002 bear-market bottom.

Period	Technology weight in S&P 500
1995	~10%
March 2000	~34.5%
Oct. 2002	~12.8%

That leads to today’s discussion comparing March 2000’s Technology exposure versus August 2026’s broader “technology-related” weight when you include Meta, both classes of Alphabet, Amazon, and Tesla. As you can see by the information displayed below, Roughly 50% of the S&P 500’s weight is now in technology-related entities.

Component	S&P 500 weight
Official Information Technology	37.15%
Amazon	3.84%
Alphabet Class A	3.06%
Alphabet Class C	2.45%
Meta Platforms	1.83%
Tesla	1.55%
Broader technology exposure	49.88%

In other words, today’s exposure is about 15.4 percentage points higher in technology than at the peak of the dot-com bubble.

However, the exposure to Technology and AI is not limited to the S&P 500 (equities), as massive investment in data centers (real estate) done through significant debt financing (fixed income) might be subjecting a pension plan’s entire asset allocation to significant risks.

Is your portfolio prepared for the next significant market correction?