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Market Data Table

Breakfast News: 10 Predictions for the Next Decade

September 30, 2026

Tuesday's Markets
S&P 500 7,671 (-0.17%)
Nasdaq 26,798 (-0.09%)
Dow 51,350 (-0.26%)
Bitcoin $83,544 (+0.04%)

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1. 10 Predictions for the Next 10 Years

Chart comparing the market caps of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta over the past decade, with Alphabet at $4.3 trillion, Apple at $4.2 trillion, Amazon at $2.6 trillion, and Meta at $1.4 trillion.

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Brian Richards, Team Rule Breakers

With the pace of change in artificial intelligence (AI), I sat down and tried to imagine what the world will look like in 2036. The present is changing faster than anyone can track, which makes a 10-year-out prediction harder than usual and, I'd argue, more useful. I'm using this thought experiment to re-examine how I'm positioning my own portfolio. I asked colleagues for their views along the way, and I'm grateful for their ideas, several of which I've borrowed.

The stock market returns about 10% per year from 2026 to 2036, roughly its long-run average, on the back of an AI productivity boom that shows up in earnings well before it shows up in the government's statistics.
The five largest companies in the world are Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), Meta (NASDAQ:META), and Anthropic. There are 19 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) marketed with some version of the word "mat." One of them is 10x leveraged.
Meta trades above $10 trillion. Every image on every social platform is shoppable, its agents know what every human on earth wants before they do, and it takes a cut from the idea to the purchase.
The first AI-caused personal bankruptcy makes national news, the resulting lawsuit settles for an undisclosed sum, and "agent discretion limits" become a standard field in every brokerage onboarding flow.
U.S. stocks trade 24/7/365. The last closing bell is rung in 2031 and sold at an auction. Ken Griffin displays it in his seventh home.
A sports-outcome ETF has more assets than the largest actively managed value fund. Nobody at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is happy about it, but the fund management company sponsors College Gameday, and we collectively shrug it off.
"Director, Agent Workforce" is a standard title on corporate org charts, and the people who hold it are paid more than the CFO.
More than 80% of all webpages are authored by AI. Those that aren't intentionally introduce typos to indicate human authorship.
One of the 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 by market cap has fewer than 5,000 employees. Its Director, Agent Workforce, oversees 40 million direct reports. The employee all-hands meeting fits in a hotel ballroom.
Passwords are extinct. Quantum computing, generally, and Q-Day, specifically, permanently changed the way we access our accounts and information. Future generations will not know what a password is, and you'll explain it patiently, along with landlines and the blue links you'd click when you "Googled" things.

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2. OpenAI Moves From Talk to Tasks

OpenAI's DevDay was less about one flashy product than a signal that the AI race is moving into its next phase: AI agents that actually do work. The biggest announcements were Dots, always-on agents that can operate across apps; GPT-6.1 Sol, a cheaper model aimed at bringing advanced AI to more workloads; and ChatGPT Space, a shared workspace where people and AI agents can work together. Separately, Axios and Reuters reported that OpenAI's annualized recurring revenue is nearing $70 billion, up over 70% since July.

As opportunities grow, so do risks: OpenAI is pushing AI from answering prompts and questions to executing multistep jobs in the background. That's likely a far bigger market than chatbots but also a riskier one. OpenAI itself is holding back GPT-6.1 Astra over safety concerns.
Where the money could flow: This could widen the AI opportunity while upending the software stack. More capable agents that run all day could drive more AI compute and networking demand. That's good news for companies supplying computing power and AI infrastructure. Traditional software businesses, however, could feel the pinch, as agents doing more of the work could mean fewer paid user logins.

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3. Defense Stocks Get Long-Range Visibility

A flurry of defense deals landed this week, and the biggest ones run for years. On Tuesday, L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX) bagged a Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) contract worth more than $6 billion over seven years to expand propulsion production for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. It builds on an earlier agreement to quadruple THAAD propulsion output and a separate PAC-3 propulsion deal. A day earlier, RTX (NYSE: RTX) announced a Raytheon AMRAAM contract worth up to $20.7 billion. Tuesday also brought multiple counter-drone contracts.

Digging for multiyear orders: The Pentagon is signing off longer-term contracts rather than single orders. These orders cascade down the supply chain. THAAD's success, for example, spreads revenue beyond its prime contractor, lifting two order books with one missile system.
More orders, longer runway: Multiyear deals give defense companies the confidence to invest in capacity and raise funds to support the growth. Allies are chipping in, and foreign budgets are becoming a steadier growth lever for American contractors. For defense investors, the key question revolves around execution. Companies that can ramp production while investing in next-generation defense systems should reap the rewards.

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4. Apple's Duo Debut Meets a Bigger India Test

Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) first foldable, the $1,999 iPhone Duo, is set to sell about 6 million units this year, per Counterpoint Research. That's modest by Apple's usual standards, but IDC expects Apple's entry into foldables to lift shipments by 13% this year. Without it, the market was headed for a decline.

iPhone skipped the China slump: Apple launched the new iPhone 18 Pro lineup without a base-model upgrade. It still sold well in China and pushed Apple's market share to 33%. Chinese smartphone brands, meanwhile, are fighting a tough battle. Since July, China's weekly smartphone sales have trailed last year's by double digits.
The India pricing power test: The case for Apple rests on charging more per iPhone and taking a cut of what users do on it. China just showed that the first half still works. India will test the second. Apple Pay launched in India this week with one of the nation's largest private-sector banks, Axis Bank. The card-based service enters a market long dominated by the state-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment system. The key is to sign up those banks with a nice cut. Otherwise, India will add users for Apple, but little in services profit.

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5. High Voltage, Low Debt

Team Hidden Gems

Team Hidden Gems has a 5-year price prediction of $1,523.33 for EMCOR Group (NYSE: EME). That's roughly double today's $762, or a return of about 15% a year. We think EMCOR can get there because every extra dollar of sales brings in more profit than the last. Over the past three years, its earnings per share grew about 52% a year, more than triple its sales growth.

Let's start with what EMCOR does. It installs electrical, cooling, and plumbing systems inside data centers, hospitals, and factories, and the artificial intelligence build-out has been a boon for its data center work. We first recommended EMCOR in November 2024, back when Wall Street priced it as a sleepy builder, and shares are up nearly 70% since.

Smart with cash: Over the past 12 months, EMCOR earned about $0.26 on every dollar it invested in its business while carrying almost no debt. It put that cash toward acquiring five smaller companies in the summer of 2026, and together they bring in about $625 million a year.
Booked and busy: EMCOR ended Q2 2026 with a record $17.1 billion backlog of signed work, up 44% from a year earlier on a wave of data center contracts. A big backlog pays off only when a contractor prices jobs smartly and finishes on budget. EMCOR proved it can do both in Q2, when nearly $0.11 of every dollar customers paid turned into profit from its core work.

With data center demand still climbing and a finance team this sharp, we're happy to own EMCOR for the next five years and beyond.

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6. Today's Question

Which of the 10 predictions do you think is most likely to come true, and why?

Discuss with friends and family, or become a member to hear what your fellow Fools are saying!