Following the smart money isn’t always a move that pays dividends. After all, even seasoned billionaire investors can miss the mark from time to time. Add the uncertainty regarding their cost bases (the price a specific firm bought shares of a company at) as well as what they’re thinking about doing moving forward (are there gains to ring the register on at the time you’re considering buying shares?), and I’d not view a billionaire buying as any sort of buy signal.
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Following the smart money
That said, if the smart money is buying what you’re buying and you’ve got a thesis, perhaps being in the company of a legend could signify you’re on the right track.
While I’m no fan of following a particular individual into or out of a stock (who knows if it’s a trade or a true long-term investment), I do find it to be worth the while to check out the cards of some of the more seasoned investors out there. If anything, it’s more food for thought that may just help you consider your investment blindspots as you look to consider the bear and bull cases as you seek to get into the shoes of a big-league investor.
In this piece, we’ll focus on recent hedge fund buying in Brookfield Corp. (TSX:BN), which was scooped up by quite a few big-name firms in the last quarter (that’d be Q4 2025). Some of the same firms also took quite a few profits off the table on shares of e-commerce sensation Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), which recently stumbled after a decent quarterly earnings result that also included some shockingly high capital expenditure (CapEx) numbers. Undoubtedly, Amazon is behind in the AI race, but it’s spending big money to catch up.
Time to swap shares of Amazon for Brookfield Corp?
Whether it’s Alexa, agentic AI, robots, or something else that helps shares get back on track, it feels like investors are in show-me mode. The company is spending heavily on AI, so when is the big money from such projects going to start flowing in? That’s the mystery, and, for now, the stock is back in a correction, off close to 17% from its highs. And if you do hold the stock, you might feel like hitting that sell button. Either way, there’s a lot on the line as Amazon looks to accelerate in this AI race.
While I’m a huge fan of betting big on the AI revolution, Brookfield Corp. stands out as a stealthier way to do it. The company is going big on its AI investment plan, where it’ll help fuel the need for data centre real estate and power. Indeed, it seems like a great way to score a solid return from the massive insurance (from annuities) float, as well as fee-bearing client capital, in which Brookfield Asset Management collects solid fees.
While the Brookfield Corp. structure might be a bit tough to understand, I do think that things are looking up as the firm grows its real cash-generative assets in the AI scene.
Either way, smart money seems to think that playing the AI data centre boom from the real estate and energy side could be the better move. Brookfield has deep enough pockets (that $100 billion plan is impressive) to finance such an ambitious buildout, and the rewards could have the potential to be outsized.
