Wall Street has a new pet name for the stocks it wants you to covet. The buzzword making the rounds among traders and analysts is MANGOS, standing for six companies pitched as the leaders of the artificial intelligence era:
- Meta
- Anthropic
- Nvidia
- Google (Alphabet)
- OpenAI
- SpaceX
The label reportedly caught on with a developer’s post on the social platform X in early June and spread within days into mainstream financial coverage. It is the latest in a long line of cute Wall Street labels, following FAANG in the 2010s and the Magnificent Seven more recently. The idea is to capture investor attention.
There is just one problem with this particular fruit basket. Two of the six are not ripe. You cannot buy them.
Why fill the basket now?
The trigger was SpaceX. Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite, and AI company went public on June 12 in what CNBC called the largest IPO on record, raising $75 billion at a valuation near $1.8 trillion. That made it the seventh most valuable U.S. company, ahead of Tesla.
A company of that size with a different focus made the old Magnificent Seven look dated. In a typical Wall Street move, the AI players got bundled into a new label. MANGOS drops the old tech and retail giants, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, and Amazon, for the companies building AI models, chips, and platforms.
Meta, Nvidia, Alphabet, and now SpaceX trade on public exchanges. If you own a broad stock index fund or an S&P 500 fund, the backbone of many 401(k) and IRA accounts, you very likely own pieces of the first three already.
Forbidden fruit
Two of the stocks, Anthropic and OpenAI, are still private, meaning their shares do not trade on any public exchange and cannot be accessed through a regular brokerage account. These two are the pure-play AI companies at the center of the excitement, the makers of the chatbots Claude and ChatGPT.
That may change before the year is out. Anthropic confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, according to CNBC, and OpenAI is reported to be readying a filing of its own. A confidential filing is an early step, not a guarantee, and the timing depends on the SEC’s review and market conditions, so there is no firm date for either.
The valuations are staggering. CNN reported that Anthropic’s most recent private funding round valued it near $965 billion, with both companies floated as potential trillion-dollar listings. Whether those numbers hold up once the public sees the financials remains to be seen.
To bite or not to bite?
Even if all six companies were public tomorrow, you could not buy MANGOS. You could only invest in individual companies. MANGOS is a clever piece of marketing that captures something real: The market’s center of gravity has shifted toward artificial intelligence.
A catchall name can tempt you to treat the members as interchangeable, but they are not. SpaceX is a case in point.
A hyped listing is rarely the windfall it appears to be for the ordinary investor. The biggest profits go to those who buy at the official offering price before trading opens: institutions and insiders. With SpaceX, the share set aside for individual buyers was trimmed to the low-20% range from a planned 30%, so big money soaked up most of the demand. By the time the stock hit the open market, it was already well above its $135 offering price.
The same pattern will likely repeat when Anthropic and OpenAI go public. A company valued near a trillion dollars before the public has seen a full set of audited financials is a bet on the story, and that is a riskier bet than the headline excitement suggests. None of that makes any of these bad investments. It makes each a separate question worth asking before you buy.
For investors curious about AI and where it fits in a portfolio, getting professional help is a good idea. If you have over $100,000 in savings, SmartAsset offers a free service that matches you to a vetted, fiduciary advisor in less than five minutes.
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