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The Last Time Stocks Were This Expensive Was December 1999.

"Right now, it's good. But it was in '72, '86, 2000, and 2007." - Jamie Dimon, May 2026.

The Shiller CAPE ratio just hit 42.3. The only time in 140 years it's been higher? December 1999.

Stocks can stay expensive for a long time...

It’s one metric to consider, but when your portfolio is built around the most expensive equities in modern history, what else you diversify with could really matter.

Blue-chip contemporary and post war art has shown near-zero correlation with the S&P since 1995.* Prices are largely driven by private collectors competing for a fixed supply of artwork by artists like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso.

Masterworks lets you invest in shares of that market.

  • $1.3B deployed across 500+ artworks

  • 29 exits to date

  • Net annualized returns like 16.5%, 17.6%, and 17.8%, not including those unsold

*According to Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.

GM to the Top 1% ☕

A seller I coach got a question on a discovery call last week that he could not answer. The buyer asked, "Does your product support Agent2Agent, or are we going to have to build the integration ourselves?"

He froze. He had never heard of A2A. The buyer had, because the buyer's whole IT org was mid-decision on which agent platform the company would standardize on. In that silence, the seller stopped being an advisor and became just another vendor who did not understand the room.

💡 THE PLATFORM DECISION HAPPENING ABOVE YOUR DEAL

Something big shifted this month and most sellers slept through it. At Google Cloud Next 2026, Google rebranded Vertex AI into the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, launched a no-code agent builder, shipped managed MCP servers, and put the Agent2Agent protocol into production. Anthropic moved too, adding MCP tunnels for private-network access and self-hosted execution sandboxes to its managed agents.

The keynote line was sharp. Other vendors are "handing you the pieces, not the platform." That is the war being fought right now, and your buyers are the prize.

Here is why it matters to you even if you do not sell AI. Every enterprise you are selling into is making a platform decision this year. Which agent ecosystem, which models, how they interoperate. That decision is happening above your deal, and it changes the questions buyers ask every vendor including you.

The seller who can speak to agent infrastructure, even at a literate level, gets treated as a peer in that conversation. The one who cannot gets treated as a feature. AI fluency has quietly become the new executive presence. It is the thing that earns you the room where the real decisions get made.

🔧 THE AGENT-LITERATE SELLER FRAMEWORK

You do not need to be an engineer. You need to be conversant. Four moves.

1. Learn the three terms that matter: A2A is how agents talk to each other across platforms. MCP is how agents connect to tools and data. Standardization is whether the buyer picks one ecosystem or stitches several. Know these three and you can hold the conversation.

2. Add one infrastructure discovery question: Ask "Have you standardized on one agent platform or are you running several?" The answer tells you how mature they are and who really holds budget.

3. Position your product in their stack, not beside it: Frame how you fit into the agent ecosystem they are building, not as a standalone tool. Standalone is what loses in a consolidation year.

4. Bring a point of view: Have an opinion on where this goes. A seller with a perspective on AI infrastructure is functioning as a trusted advisor. A seller with a feature list is functioning as a quote.

🎯 THIS WEEK'S HOMEWORK

Spend 30 minutes this weekend learning what A2A and MCP actually do at a plain-language level. Then write one discovery question about agent infrastructure you can ask on your next enterprise call. The goal is not expertise. It is the ability to stay in the conversation when your competitor cannot.

❓ QUESTION OF THE DAY

Could you answer if a buyer asked which agent platform your product fits into?

Reply honestly. I read every one.

See you tomorrow.

Edward

Founder, Morning Sales

P.S. A lot of the prompts in my 500 AI Sales Prompts pack are built exactly for this, helping you sound literate and credible on AI infrastructure in front of technical buyers without faking it. $27 and it earns its keep on the next call you would otherwise have frozen in: https://www.edwardgorbis.com/products/500-ai-powered-prompts-for-elite-sales-professionals

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