AI market rout – I’m doing my part (nothing!)

DeepSeek has scared the bejesus out of markets this week. Mouthy Money editor Edmund Greaves explains why he’s doing nothing about it.

The stock market (and other stuff such as bitcoin) got the heck scared out of it this week thanks to the launch of a new Chinese AI competitor called DeepSeek.

To cut a slightly complicated story short:

AI is one of the biggest investment themes of the past few years, and has driven major US tech stocks such as Nvidia, Meta, Apple and others to very high valuations.

But the party has very much been disrupted by DeepSeek which launched with a supposedly extremely competitive tech offering compared to these giants.

And here’s the rub: the reason the market got such a fright is because DeepSeek claimed it had built this model on a tiny fraction of the cost and energy consumption of the AI big boys such as OpenAI.

Cue large amounts of panic, and one of the biggest wipeouts in market valuation in history (although remember these numbers are always ‘record’ because of the effect of inflation on what money is actually worth).

With all these events in mind, what is a private investor (like me!) to do about it?

My answer to that is this: nothing.

Decisions decisions

I am invested (and you will be too) in a number of different ways. I have my pension, I have an ISA, and I have a Junior ISA (JISA) for my son.

On the whole I have selected very broad, cheap global index trackers to do this over the long term.

When the market panicked about DeepSeek, my response was to do nothing. I didn’t (and still haven’t) looked at any of my accounts to see how much they’ve lost.

And this is the core of my personal plan. I am investing for the day I retire. That is still the best part of 25 years away. What happened one week in the market is basically a blip when you consider that massive time horizon.

Indeed, the bump back up in stocks such as Nvidia after the initial panic suggests quite a lot of investors (be they institutional or private) took advantage of some price discounts.

The truth here is that any who isn’t a professional investor, and is only investing for their long-term future, should be ignoring mad market moves.

The caveat to this is one should ensure their investments are well diversified in order to prevent too big a kicking, and to avoid the temptation to sell an asset that has fallen in order not to crystallise losses.

Everything else is just noise at this point. Tune. It. Out.

LISTEN: check out this week’s Mouthy Money Podcast with Edmund Greaves and Chris Tuite. They dive into more detail on the DeepSeek issue and how investors have responded. Plus Ed and Chris look at Rachel Reeves’s plan for growth and if it stacks up.

All investing carries risk. Past performance is no indication of future success. You can lose money. Do as much research as you can and if in doubt, seek professional financial advice.

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