What happened
Gabriela Santos, chief market strategist for the Americas at JPMorgan Asset Management, said finding real diversification from the AI trade has become one of the hardest jobs in multi-asset allocation, per BeInCrypto's write-up published Wednesday. Santos named three pockets that still qualify in her view: US Treasuries, gold, and European equities outside the tech complex. Everything else, in her framing, is either explicitly long AI or quietly tracking it through index weightings, capex chains and power demand.
The remarks were not tied to a specific note or product launch. They read as a positioning call, delivered at a moment when the S&P 500 concentration in a handful of AI-linked names is at levels not seen since the late 1990s. Santos did not offer specific allocation targets or price levels in the excerpt BeInCrypto surfaced.
Why it matters
The argument matters because it recasts the AI rally as a concentration risk rather than a sector story. When a strategist at the largest US bank tells clients that even their supposedly defensive sleeves are running AI beta, the implication is that a drawdown in Nvidia or the hyperscalers doesn't get absorbed by the rest of the book. It gets amplified.
For crypto, the read-across is direct. Bitcoin has spent most of 2025 and 2026 correlated to the Nasdaq more than to gold, which puts it on the wrong side of Santos's diversification map. If allocators act on this framing and rotate into Treasuries, bullion and European cyclicals, BTC will need a fresh narrative to avoid being lumped in with the AI trade it has been shadowing.