Charlie Morris spent 17 years running a multi-asset portfolio at HSBC that peaked around $3 billion. Then he walked away to become one of the earliest serious researchers of Bitcoin, co-founding ByteTree in 2013 – years before most of Wall Street would say the word out loud.

These days, Morris’s attention is on a different kind of speculation…

He’s been calling the AI trade a bubble for a while now – concentrated, overleveraged, and running on momentum that’s stretched further than he’s comfortable with. A few weeks ago, Bank of America’s Global Fund Manager Survey caught up to him: 48% of the fund managers surveyed now say massive AI-related capital expenditures are the most likely trigger of the next systemic credit event.

Morris draws a direct line back to the dot-com crash, when the NASDAQ fell roughly 78% peak to trough. But he’s also careful about where the comparison breaks down. In 2000, most of that CapEx was funded by shareholders losing money on paper. This time, hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure spending is being funded by debt – bonds that are ending up on the books of pension funds, insurers, and private credit funds far removed from where the risk actually started.

His approach isn’t to short the trade or call the top. It’s to sit it out.

Morris has been steering his own portfolios toward what he calls the “anti-bubble” – staples, healthcare, insurance – sectors he says have been quietly starved of capital while money poured into chips and hyperscalers. He borrows a line from Warren Buffett to explain the idea: the stock market is a church with a casino attached, and Morris would rather spend his time in the church.

The conversation also covers Morris’s “Money Map” – a four-quadrant framework built around inflation and growth that he uses to figure out where capital wants to go next – and what it’s currently telling him about gold, Bitcoin, and where real interest rates need to go before the next leg of the gold bull market can begin.

Plus:

• Why Morris says the debt behind this bubble is riskier than the debt behind the dot-com bubble
• What his “Money Map” is telling him about the current market regime
• Why real interest rates, not inflation alone, are the key number to watch for gold right now

Charlie Morris is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of ByteTree Research. Before ByteTree, he spent 17 years at HSBC Global Asset Management, where he ran a multi-asset absolute return strategy that grew to roughly $3 billion.