Jim Bianco
Jim Bianco|Feb 05, 2026 02:03
Totally agree that the pricing-power-erosion angle is the real gut punch here, even if demand doesn't evaporate overnight. I've been thinking about this sell-off, and it reminds me a lot of what happened with Disney/ESPN back in August 2015. Bob Iger basically admitted on the earnings call that ESPN was seeing "some modest subscriber losses" due to cord-cutting trends. It wasn't apocalyptic—he called ESPN a "must-have" and said they were bullish on the bundle—but the market had this sudden epiphany: cable TV's subscriber base was in terminal decline, and it wasn't reversing. Stocks tanked hard (Disney dropped ~9% the next day), and yeah, the concern proved very real. Fast-forward 10+ years: look at the chart you know well—DIS is basically back to where it was in mid-2015, hovering around $100–110 lately (closed ~$107 this week). The big run-up to ~$200 in 2021 was legit streaming/Disney+ growth + post-COVID recovery, but it didn't stick once the cable pressures kept grinding away. ESPN has been in this slow bleed ever since. I feel like something similar is playing out now with SaaS/software. Markets are having an "aha" moment that agentic AI is real, it's here, and it's going to force a total rethink of how these businesses work—pricing, moats, everything. Not tomorrow or next quarter, but the business models are going to have to evolve or get disrupted hard. The sell-off wiped out hundreds of billions (reports peg ~$300B from key software indices alone in this "SaaSpocalypse"), and while some stocks look oversold short-term, the underlying fear isn't just noise. Don't think it's nothing—it's probably a real shift in how the market views these companies' long-term futures. Curious what you think—am I over-indexing on the parallel?(Jim Bianco)
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