AI Trade — the handoff from building AI to using it, in one race

What you are watching

Each bar is one of our functional indices, equal-weight, so every company counts the same. Together they follow the money through the AI trade, from the companies that build the machines to the companies that put the machines to work:

• Rubin Build-Out — the capital spending: chips, memory, packaging, power and the data-centre build. Rubin 100 →
• Agentic Ecosystem — the operating spending: the companies paid each time an AI agent runs, from data and identity to security and compute. Agentic Ecosystem →
• Agentic Winners 40 — the software applications built around AI agents. AW40 →
• AI Users — companies outside tech putting AI to work in their own business. AI Users →

The bar in front always paints brand red. Apart from one day in late October, when the Ecosystem passed Rubin, the order has held since February; the story is in the gaps.

Three phases of 2026

The build-out first. From January to 22 June, Rubin rose from 100 to 241. Chips, memory and power led the AI trade, while the software applications fell: Agentic Winners were 29.2% down on the year by 25 June, and the AI Users touched 83 on 27 March.

Then the operating spending. The Agentic Ecosystem bottomed early, at 91 on 5 February, and kept rising after Rubin had peaked, to 181 on 9 October. Once the machines are in place, the money moves to the companies paid each time they run. The Winners made a first low in the spring, 72 on 10 April, and their lowest on 25 June, as Rubin turned down.

Since the summer, the users. From the first trading day of July to 13 November: Rubin −29.7%, the Agentic Ecosystem −1.6%, Agentic Winners +21.6%, AI Users +11.5%. AI Users closed at 102, near its high for the year.

Why this matters

Rubin still leads the year, at 156 against 102 for the users. The race is not about who is in front but about the order in which the stages rise and fall. Their highs came in sequence: the build-out on 22 June, the operating spending on 9 October, the users on 4 November. So far only the first two have fallen hard from their highs: Rubin −35.1%, the Agentic Ecosystem −19.6%. The Winners are −9.1% from their January high, and the users sit near theirs. That sequence is the handoff this diary has followed since the summer, and the books lean with it: a little lighter in the build-out, more in the companies that put AI to work. The Weekly Signal of 15 November sets out how this diary positions for it.

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Methodology

• Source: the equal-weight series from the Rubin, Agentic Ecosystem, Agentic Winners 40 and AI Users index workers, the same numbers behind each index page.
• Value: each index rebased to 100 at its close on 2026-01-02, the first trading day of the year and the base of every Closelook index’s year-to-date figure, so the last frame matches the YTD on each index page.
• Time window: 2026-01-02 → 2026-11-13, 225 snapshots, one per trading day.
• Refresh: nightly, Tuesday to Saturday, after the index workers have run.
• Cross-read: the index-leadership race runs from the 31 March low; the 2022 bull-markets race shows where crypto and gold lost their trends.

Closelooknet indices are research constructs published as an investment diary, not advice or a recommendation. Rebased index levels show relative performance only.