Before we jump in today, a reminder about tomorrow morning’s Breakthrough 2026 event at 10 a.m. ET with legendary investor 抖阴最新版 and TradeSmith CEO, Keith Kaplan.

They’ll be walking through TradeSmith’s Seasonality tool. It scans more than 5,000 stocks across decades of price history, hunting for one thing…

Windows of time when a stock has historically gone up – or down – with remarkable consistency.

Run through an 18-year backtest, trading only inside these windows produced 857% in total growth – more than double the S&P 500 over the same stretch, and the strategy still came out ahead even in 2007, the worst year in the test.

When you sign up to join Louis and Keith, you’ll get free access to the Seasonality Tool. Give it a spin in your own portfolio.

Then, tomorrow morning, Keith will lay out why he believes the period beginning around July 23 could mark an important shift in market leadership – and how to use the tool to capitalize. That ties into how Louis is using these timing signals with his own stock-grading system.

There will be plenty more, including some free stock recommendations. Just click here, and we’ll see you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. ET.

Everyone wants to debate whether AI is a bubble

That’s the wrong question.

The question that determines who wins and loses – and what happens in your portfolio – is far more mundane…

What does it cost to buy an AI token?

To make sure we’re on the same page, a token is the basic unit AI models get billed by – roughly a few characters of text. It’s the meter running every time a chatbot answers a question, an AI agent completes a task, or a piece of software calls a model behind the scenes.

Think of token prices the way airlines think about jet fuel or manufacturers think about steel. They’re the core input cost of the AI economy.

Today, those costs are falling for a simple reason…

AI models are becoming dramatically more efficient, while competition among providers – including a wave of open-source alternatives – is driving prices down. Every major AI lab is racing to deliver more intelligence for fewer dollars.

Whatever you think about valuations, this is the number that ultimately decides who wins and who loses inside the trade.

And right now, it’s collapsing.

The number that’s already crashed

In March 2023, running OpenAI’s best available model cost roughly $30 to process a million tokens – roughly the amount consumed by a lengthy AI conversation or thousands of simple prompts.

Today, comparable-quality performance runs a few cents to a couple of dollars – a decline of 90% or more in a little over three years and still falling.

Now, despite that collapse, total enterprise AI spending hasn’t fallen. By most accounts, it’s tripled. Companies are using it dramatically more because it’s finally affordable enough to deploy across the business.

Chatbots have given way to autonomous agents that loop, recheck their own work, and call external tools dozens of times to finish a single task. Every loop consumes tokens. So, even as the unit price craters, total usage is growing faster than the price is falling.

This is exactly why AI infrastructure – mostly chip and compute demand – hasn’t cracked yet.

Prices down, but overall spending up. That contradiction is the whole ballgame.

But however much prices have crashed so far, two powerful AI CEOs think it needs to fall dramatically further.

AI is still too expensive

Last week, Palo Alto Networks (PANW) CEO Nikesh Arora went on CNBC to say, in effect, that the current price of an AI token is holding back enterprise adoption.

Here’s Arora to explain:

I think 54% is a good start… I think we probably need another turn at it.

That 54% was a reference to OpenAI’s claim that its newest model is 54% more token-efficient than its last one.

Arora’s point: a nice start, nowhere close to enough. Later in the same interview, he said it more plainly:

We need to see the pricing for AI come down.

Palantir (PLTR) CEO Alex Karp went further the week before, calling the token-pricing model broken outright:

I’m not throwing shade at them, but something has gone completely wrong.

The basic view among enterprises in this country is I’m going to chillax and waste my time with tokens.

In other words, customers don’t want to think about tokens. They just want AI that’s cheap enough to use everywhere.

Two CEOs, running two companies supposedly winning during the AI boom, are publicly complaining that AI costs too much to use at scale. That’s not noise.

These are two massive AI customers telling you where the ceiling is today – and where things are going tomorrow.

What our own 抖阴最新版 is watching

Our global macro expert, 抖阴最新版, editor of Fry’s Investment Report, has been tracking a specific driver behind that price pressure: competition from open-source models, including Chinese labs like Z.ai, deliberately tuned to run on older, cheaper chips rather than the newest ones.

They’ve been getting results nearly indistinguishable from Western models several months more advanced.

Here’s Eric to explain:

Token costs have come down around 20% since the start of June, reducing what data centers can charge for computing power.

Reflecting that trend, shares of data center company CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV) have fallen roughly 40% in the past two months.

I’ll note that CoreWeave’s slide has more than one storyline behind it – reports of Meta (META) building its own compute-for-rent business have gotten most of the mainstream press attention.

But Eric believes falling token prices are the underlying force behind that story – an alternative explanation.

Running against the escalator

Now, what’s the implication for investors?

Well, let’s understand the landscape first with an analogy – trying to run up a descending escalator.

Usage growth is like you climbing up that escalator. Falling token prices are the escalator moving down beneath your feet.

Right now, you’re climbing faster than the escalator descends, so you’re still making progress toward the top – total AI spending keeps rising. This is a win for AI infrastructure companies, and somewhat of a win for companies that want cheap AI.

But if the escalator speeds up (prices fall faster) or your legs tire (usage growth matures), the escalator wins, and you get carried down instead of up. Not a win for AI infrastructure companies, but a big win for companies that want cheap AI.

Right now, usage is dominating – it’s growing faster than prices are falling, which is why infrastructure demand stays strong even as the per-unit economics erode underneath it.

Our growth investing expert 抖阴最新版, editor of Growth Investor, provided evidence of how real that “usage is winning” phase still is…

Yesterday, IBM (IBM) issued an unexpected preliminary Q2 earnings report and a profit warning, triggering the company’s worst single-day stock decline in its history.

But this wasn’t a problem for Louis. Here he is explaining why:

Earnings season is off to a very good start. I know International Business Machines missed, but they missed because they’re losing out market share to data centers.

So, that’s good for us because guess what we own?

Lots of data center-related stocks.

This is Louis – one of the best analysts in our industry – who knows exactly where the money is flowing today and is successfully running up the escalator.

But as Louis knows, and will eventually factor into his recommendations, this same escalator will ultimately win out.

In other words, at some point in the future, token prices will fall far enough, or usage growth will mature enough, that the balance will flip – and when it does, the AI trade will reach a key inflection point.

To join Louis in Growth Investor so you can navigate that transition with him, click here to learn more.

Here’s the big-picture version of who’s on each side when that happens

Exposed: the companies that built expensive, specialized infrastructure to rent out compute by the unit. We’re talking chipmakers, neocloud data-center operators, and any hyperscaler selling raw processing power, because their pricing power depends on scarcity.

When compute stops being scarce, that pricing power goes with it.

Helped: What Eric calls “AI Appliers” – companies that adopt AI as a tool inside their existing business rather than sell compute as the product, expanding their own margins every time their AI bill shrinks.

And the biggest pool of value sits one layer further out: ordinary enterprises across finance, healthcare, retail, and industry, whose AI costs turn from a budget headache into a rounding error, unlocking productivity growth that shows up as real earnings growth rather than a bigger tech bill.

Eric has already recommended specific AI Appliers in Fry’s Investment Report– companies positioned to catch that margin expansion before the rest of the market catches on. To discover what they are, click here to learn about joining him.

One category that I won’t even pretend to have a clean answer on: traditional software-as-a-service companies. These are the companies that suffered the “SaaSmageddon” earlier this year.

Cheap AI should, in theory, let legacy software platforms bolt on powerful features without blowing up their margins. But cheap AI also lowers the barrier for customers – or nimble competitors – to build capabilities that software vendors used to charge dearly for.

Whether SaaS incumbents end up net winners or casualties of this same price collapse is genuinely unresolved, and it likely depends on the specific company, not the sector.

We’re watching this one as closely and will keep you up to speed.

How to monitor all this

Nobody knows exactly when this escalator drama will hit its inflection point, and we’re not going to claim that we do.

Instead, watch whether the major AI labs start reporting expanding margins even as prices keep falling – like, for example, OpenAI reporting that its cost to serve a query dropped faster than the price it charges for one. That would mean efficiency gains are outrunning price cuts, a bad sign for hardware-heavy names like Nvidia (NVDA).

Also, watch whether the software companies riding on top of all this start actually showing cheaper AI in their own reported margins, not just their marketing.

The bottom line

The token collapse isn’t a one-time event, and it isn’t finished.

It’s already happened, it’s still happening, and by Arora’s own math, it needs to happen substantially more before AI adoption really breaks wide open.

What’s unresolved isn’t the direction – it’s how long usage will outrun the price collapse, and when it ultimately reverses, what will happen if the infrastructure trade is still priced for the demand side to win forever.

This is the issue that decides who wins and loses here. It’s not whether “AI is a bubble.” It’s not some abstract multiple on some chip stock everyone already argues about on TV.

This issue requires more analysis and work, which is exactly why it’s the one most people watching from the sidelines won’t wrestle with…

But it’s the one you must wrestle with if you have money in AI.

We’ll keep you updated.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

The post Forget the AI Bubble Talk. Watch This Number Instead appeared first on InvestorPlace.

“We decided yesterday not to take this to the next level.”

“While this sounds interesting, it is not something we would do here.”

“We’ve had the chance to discuss internally, and unfortunately don’t think that it’s the right opportunity from an investment perspective.”

Those are just a few of the rejection emails Airbnb Inc. (ABNB) CEO Brian Chesky received in 2008 when seeking initial funding for the travel services company.

Funding is critical for companies because it provides the cash they need to grow. And after years of hearing “no,” Airbnb eventually raised $1.5 billion in 2015. The company was able to accelerate its global expansion, marketing, and new travel offerings before its IPO in 2020.

Nearly two decades later, securing funding is still one of the hardest parts of building a business. That’s because no two fundraising processes look exactly alike.

But if it’s an AI company looking for funding, investors are willing to throw money at it.

For example, Lyzr Inc., a New York-based AI startup, recently raised $100 million. But it’s not the amount that makes Lyzr interesting; it’s how it raised the money.  

It used one of its own AI agents to do it.

In today’s Smart Money, let’s explore why this seemingly small story could have big implications for investors… and what it means for the “Agentic Reckoning” to come.

The AI That Pitched Itself

First, let’s take a look at Lyzr Inc.

The company builds AI agents – autonomous software systems that can complete complex tasks with minimal human supervision. More importantly, Lyzr enables other companies, including consulting firm Accenture plc (ACN), to build and test AI agents within their own organizations.

When it came time to raise capital, Lyzr turned one of its agents “on” to streamline the process.

Its AI agent, SivaClaw, helped manage the company’s $100 million Series B fundraising process by taking over many of the repetitive, time-consuming tasks. It drafted investment memos, communicated with more than 130 prospective investors, and automatically answered many of their initial questions.

SivaClaw also tracked how investors interacted with Lyzr’s pitch deck – monitoring which slides they spent the most time viewing – to help the founders identify what topics generated the most interest, or confusion.

And because the round attracted about $400 million of interest for a $100 million target, the company used the agent to help determine which investors were the best strategic fit.

“It just sped up our fundraising process,” said Siva Surendira, Lyzr’s co-founder and namesake of the AI agent.

That speed matters because fundraising is one of the least structured workflows in business. Every investor asks different questions, wants different information, and requires repeated follow-up. By automating much of that administrative work, SivaClaw allowed the founders to focus on what humans still do best: tell their story, build relationships, and negotiate terms.

It’s important to note that Lyzr’s AI only assisted with fundraising. Investors still evaluated the company and made the investment decisions.

When Raising Billions Gets Easier

Now, the $100 million Lyzr raised is just pennies compared to Anthropic and OpenAI.

Anthropic – the creator of the “Claude” AI assistant – recently closed a funding round valuing the company at nearly $1 trillion, having risen more than fifteenfold in just over a year. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is sporting a similar valuation. That company recently raised capital at 72 times annual sales.

Let’s also consider Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s (SPCX), Elon Musk’s data-center-in-space enterprise, $1.8 trillion valuation after it went public.

Within its first week of trading, the stock rocketed 67% to a breathtaking market cap of nearly $3 trillion – or 160 times revenues. That’s not a valuation; that’s a theological statement. These three companies are collectively worth something in the neighborhood of $4 trillion.

If Agentic AI makes it dramatically easier to funnel money into an industry that’s already spending at unprecedented levels, investors should ask an uncomfortable question: Has AI just made the next AI bubble even easier to inflate?

Investing in Agentic AI’s Impact

I’m not suggesting this outcome is inevitable. But it is a fascinating development that deserves attention: AI is now helping finance the next wave of AI.

And fundraising is just one of the many areas Agentic AI is beginning to reshape.

We saw an early glimpse of this during the “SaaSpocalypse” selloff earlier this year, when investors began reassessing how vulnerable certain software businesses could be to Agentic AI.

Agentic AI’s reckoning has severe implications from the labor market to the broader economy. Companies disrupted by Agentic AI could see their stocks fall sharply, with the panic spreading well beyond the tech sector.

Widespread adoption of Agentic AI could trigger a market-wide selloff similar to past technology-driven crashes.

I explore these risks – and the investment opportunities they may create – in my Agentic Reckoning broadcast.

History rewards investors who recognize transformative shifts before everyone else. But the biggest risk isn’t always investing in a disruptive technology; it’s failing to recognize just how disruptive it can become.

Click here to learn more.

Regards,

抖阴最新版

The post AI Is No Longer Just Building Companies – It’s Funding Them appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Last week, pop star Lorde stood on stage in Madrid and told the stadium full of fans to reject a piece of technology that some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Kylie Jenner and BLACKPINK’s Jennie, had just spent months getting paid to promote.

That tech belongs to Meta Platforms, Inc. (META), its video-recording AI glasses that celebrities are lining up to sell. Normal people, however, are lining up right behind Lorde to call Meta’s glasses “creepy,” “invasive,” and something you actively do not want strapped to your face. Whereas the billionaires and brand partners see the future, the crowd just sees a surveillance device with a massive marketing budget.

That gap, between what insiders build conviction around and what the public feels comfortable owning, is worth remembering, because it speaks to the five cheap AI stocks I want to talk to you about this week.

Every name on this list has dropped double-digits from its highs over the past month, because retail sentiment turned sour on AI infrastructure the same way it turned sour on face computers.

But Wall Street’s actual conviction did not move an inch.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. just reported a preliminary operating profit of roughly 89.4 trillion won, or nearly $60 billion, up 19 times year over year, driven almost entirely by AI memory demand. On the same morning, International Business Machines (IBM) pre-announced a second-quarter revenue miss and watched its shares crater more than 20% (the stock’s worst session since the 1987 crash) after CEO Arvind Krishna revealed that clients spent the final weeks of June pulling capex out of software and consulting deals to panic-buy supply-constrained servers, storage, and memory ahead of expected price hikes.

The selloff spread fast, dragging down Workday (WDAY), ServiceNow (NOW), Salesforce (CRM), and Accenture (ACN) in sympathy. The same shortage minting record profits in Suwon is cannibalizing enterprise tech budgets everywhere else. If Samsung is collecting the ransom, IBM just showed Wall Street who is paying it.

The crowd does not have to love the trade. They just have to eventually notice the earnings.

So, let’s get into five cheap AI stocks to buy this week:

SpaceX Technologies Inc. (SPCX) is, without question, the most argued-about stock in the market. Half of Wall Street treats it as a cult of personality around Elon Musk, and both the bulls and the bears fall into that trap. What actually matters is that SpaceX is the only vertically integrated company on Earth that can combine rocket launch capability, frontier AI models through xAI, and a live, constant data feed from X. Oppenheimer carries a “buy” rating. Goldman Sachs has a “buy” rating with a $205 price target. Morgan Stanley has a “buy” rating with a $300 price target. Revenue estimates jump from $18.6 billion to $38.7 billion this year, then to $74.2 billion in 2027 and $135 billion in 2028. Twenty-one Wall Street firms have already penciled in 2030 estimates, and they cluster around $330 billion in revenue. Put a 10-times revenue multiple on that, which is not unreasonable for a company growing this fast, and you get a $2 trillion to $3 trillion company. At $150 a share, the math works. I recommend the stock here.

TeraWulf Inc. (WULF) used to mine Bitcoin. Now it leases power. The company just signed a 20-year, $19 billion deal with Anthropic for a 401-megawatt AI campus in Kentucky, and that deal validates the entire pivot from crypto miner to AI infrastructure landlord. TeraWulf is not the best-positioned name in that trade, but it is a legitimate one, and the recent selloff across the AI infrastructure complex hands you an attractive entry. Revenue growth estimates run 89% this year, 210% in 2027, then 72% and 56% after that, taking the company from $168 million in trailing revenue toward $3.3 billion within five years. Gross margins expand from 50% to 70% over that stretch. The stock trades at 33.6 times EBITDA, which is remarkably cheap for triple-digit growth with expanding margins. The chart backs the story up, too: every major pullback since the AI infrastructure rally began has bottomed around the 100-day moving average, roughly a 30% drawdown each time. The stock sits at that exact level right now.

Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) just tapped the debt market for $25 billion to fund AI infrastructure, and the same week, it launched 29 more low Earth orbit satellites, bringing its total to 396 and putting the company on track to begin broadband service later this year. That confirms the satellite broadband race has moved from concept to commercial deployment, and it confirms SpaceX is no longer racing itself. Amazon trades at 22.6 times forward earnings and 11 times forward EBITDA, both essentially five-year lows, while revenue growth holds steady in the low double digits and margins expand from the mid-20s toward the mid-30s because of Amazon Web Services. A company this large, this dominant, and this cheap, growing profits faster than sales, deserves a buyer on this dip.

Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) got caught in the software selloff investors are calling “SaaSpocalypse,” and shares sit down roughly 26% to 27% from their highs. The stock remains trapped below a declining 200-day moving average, the worst technical setup a growth stock can carry, and I want to see it reclaim 150, and ideally 160, before I turn constructive. But the growth profile underneath that chart is extraordinary: 73% revenue growth expected this year, then 46%, 44%, 52%, and 49% in the years after, alongside 86% to 87% gross margins. The old argument against Palantir was valuation. That argument no longer holds, because the stock trades at 75.5 times forward earnings and 56.5 times forward EBITDA for what could become a 70% to 80% compounder. Once it reclaims that 200-day line, I recommend putting money to work.

Micron Technology Inc. (MU) sits 22% below its highs, and the bears say memory chips have peaked. Samsung’s blowout quarter says otherwise. The real fear is not today’s demand, which everyone agrees is scorching, but demand 6 to 12 months out, once new memory supply comes online. That question gets answered in about three weeks when hyperscalers report earnings and either reaffirm or hike 2026 capital expenditure plans. Micron’s past pullbacks during this cycle have all bottomed in the 20% to 30% drawdown range, and the stock sits at a 22.6% drawdown right now, with support between $800 and $900. This remains my favorite name in the group.

The dip feels the same every time: a beeping satellite, a scary headline, a chart that looks broken. Then the earnings roll in, and the fear turns out to be the entry point.

We break all five of these names down in far greater depth, charts and all, on this episode of Being Exponential.

The post Why These Cheap Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks Are Still a Buy Despite the Selloff appeared first on InvestorPlace.

This morning, we got the June Consumer Price Index report, and it was genuinely good.

Headline CPI fell 0.4% for the month – the biggest monthly drop since April 2020 – pulling the annual rate down to 3.5% from May’s 4.2%. Economists had expected a much smaller decline.

Meanwhile, core CPI, which strips out food and energy, was flat on the month, and its annual rate fell to 2.6%, well below the 2.9% consensus. Forecasters had actually expected core to rise slightly – this was an unusually large miss in the other direction, the kind we haven’t seen since a data quirk during last fall’s government shutdown.

And this wasn’t a one-category fluke…

Shelter, the largest piece of CPI, rose just 0.1% against a typical 0.3% pace. Services overall were flat. Goods prices slipped. Overall, it was a broad, genuine cooldown.

As I write in the early afternoon, the S&P and Nasdaq are higher but not soaring, and the Dow is down. It’s certainly not the blowout reaction you might expect after these cool numbers. But once you look at what futures traders are pricing for the Fed’s next several meetings, you’ll understand why.

What’s driving the good news – and why it might not fully repeat

A meaningful slice of today’s relief may not fully repeat.

Gasoline fell nearly 10% in June as the U.S.-Iran ceasefire held and Gulf shipping eased. That ceasefire has since collapsed.

With the two sides exchanging strikes over the Strait of Hormuz, West Texas Intermediate is up to $79 and Brent is at nearly $85 as I write. The longer that drags on, the more likely energy costs will start climbing again.

So, one very good month – driven mostly by a ceasefire that’s already broken – isn’t the kind of evidence that resolves anything at the Fed.

Least of all for Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh…

What Warsh will actually focus on

Regular Digest readers know Warsh doesn’t look at inflation reports the way the headlines do.

In our June 25 issue, we highlighted how he’s called the headline Personal Consumption Expenditures number little more than a “rough swag,” and that he watches the Dallas Fed’s trimmed mean instead – a measure built specifically to filter out exactly the kind of one-off swings driving today’s number.

In our July 2 issue, we quoted him at the European Central Bank’s Sintra forum:

We’ve all looked around, and we’ve seen that prices are too high.

And from his very first press conference, we’ve highlighted his skepticism of any single inflation print before revisions settle it – what he called an “echo of history.”

Today, we got to see how Warsh thinks about inflation in real time. He delivered testimony this morning to the House Financial Services Committee, after the CPI data dropped, and he didn’t move an inch:

While monthly price fluctuations are inevitable — especially in an unsettled world — underlying inflation over longer time horizons is determined largely by monetary policy.

The members of our Committee have no tolerance for persistently elevated inflation. And we share a resolute commitment to restoring price stability.

He called this a “hinge point in history,” and described the Fed’s objective almost poetically:

The Fed’s number one objective is to get monetary policy right — or as near to it as we possibly can. That is our clear and constant aim, the star we steer by.

And if we get policy right – and we will – the inflation surge of the last five years will be a thing of the past.

That’s not a Fed chair reacting to this morning’s cooler readings. That’s a Fed Chair repeating, almost word for word, the framework we’ve been describing since June.

He isn’t the only one at the Fed still sounding cautious. This week, Fed Governor Christopher Waller said that the Fed’s own preferred core measure had climbed from 3% last December to 3.4% in May. He warned that another hot core reading would force the committee to consider tightening further.

On the other hand, New York Fed President John Williams said that if core inflation holds near a 0.2% monthly pace for the rest of the year, a hike might be avoidable.

Today’s flat core print is exactly the kind of reading Williams wants to see – but it’s one month, and Waller’s warning was about a pattern, not a single data point.

That’s the real state of play inside the Fed right now: genuinely divided, not newly aligned.

So, one good print doesn’t erase Waller’s concern any more than it validates Williams’s – it just gives both men a data point to argue about at the next meeting.

What the futures market actually believes

How are traders viewing Fed policy in light of this morning’s data?

The next Fed meeting, July 29, just got meaningfully de-risked – hike odds collapsed from a near-coin-flip 42% yesterday to just 12% today.

But look further out and the picture barely budges…

September hike odds fell from about 75% to 60% – still more likely than not to bring a hike, not a hold.

And when we look farther out to December, the cumulative odds of at least one hike didn’t change much. They fell from about 89% yesterday to just 80% as I write.

So, what’s the takeaway for investors?

Today’s data is encouraging, but if it has you tempted to chase rate-sensitive names on hopes of a broader dovish pivot from the Fed, the futures market itself says that’s still early.

Of course, if there’s one thing the futures market has been wrong about many times over the last several years, it’s Fed policy.

A second unresolved debate

Inflation isn’t the only thing on Warsh’s plate, and this deserves a mention before we move on.

In his testimony, Warsh spent real time on AI – not as a jobs story, but as an inflation one.

He called the pace of AI-driven business investment “the most striking feature” of the current economy and predicted “what is now called ‘AI investment’ will soon be called just ‘investment.’”

He’s previously said he expects the coming AI productivity boom to prove disinflationary over time – lowering costs economy-wide.

Not everyone at the Fed agrees…

Multiple officials have flagged the AI data-center buildout itself as a source of upward price pressure – on memory chips, semiconductors, and electricity.

For example, here’s John Williams:

If [AI] creates a sustained impulse to demand relative to supply in inflation, I do think that’s the kind of situation where you don’t look through this.

This isn’t abstract. As we’ve covered here in the Digest, Apple (AAPL) recently announced price increases for its Mac and iPad lineup – directly citing the AI-driven memory chip shortage.

So, AI now sits on both sides of the ledger Warsh must balance – a disinflationary force by his own long-term thesis, but an inflationary one by his own colleagues’ near-term read.

Legendary investor 抖阴最新版 threw in his two cents on the debate this morning. He believes AI will be a disinflationary tool like Warsh – and that the rate hikes the market is pricing in today won’t materialize.  

From this morning’s Flash Alert in Accelerated Profits:

The Fed’s not increasing rates. So, whatever the talking heads on TV have been telling you, that’s not happening.

Also remember, AI is not inflationary. It’s temporarily inflationary in memory. That’s a freak thing because of a bottleneck.

But other than that, no. AI is going to be creating incredible productivity gains, lots of GDP growth, and that’s that.

So, what’s the bottom line on the CPI report then?

It’s good news – genuinely.

But good news and a resolved story aren’t the same thing.

While the Fed’s next meeting just got a lot easier, September and beyond still lean toward a hike, even though Louis has taken them off the table.

One last thing…

We don’t know exactly when Warsh & Co. will move on interest rates – if at all. But our friends at TradeSmith think they’ve found one corner of the market where timing isn’t a guessing game.

CEO Keith Kaplan and his team have built software that scans thousands of stocks for historically favorable buying windows – calendar stretches where a stock has risen with unusual consistency, year after year.

Run through an 18-year backtest, trading only inside those windows produced 857% in total growth – more than double the S&P 500 over the same stretch – and the strategy still came out ahead even in 2007, the worst year in the test.

Keith is walking through the full research this Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET, alongside 抖阴最新版, who’s pairing these timing signals with his own stock-grading system. You don’t have to wait until then to see it in action – you can test drive the software for free right now by signing up here.

I’ll note that attendees at Thursday’s event will also get three free stock picks, plus one Keith says to avoid. Just click here to register and we’ll see you there.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

(Disclosure: I own AAPL)

The post Inflation Cooled to 3.5%. But Does the Fed Care? appeared first on InvestorPlace.

That’s the question TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan tackles in today’s guest essay.

Keith believes the answer has less to do with headlines and more to do with timing. His team’s research became the foundation for TradeSmith’s Seasonality tool, which helps identify historically favorable buying windows for thousands of stocks.

Keith’s research caught my attention, which is why I wanted to feature it here today. If you’d like to learn more, I encourage you to reserve your spot here for Keith’s free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. Eastern. When you register, you’ll also get to try the Seasonality tool ahead of the event.

In the essay below, he explains how he uses it to compare two AI memory stocks tied to the same trend – but with very different seasonal outlooks. Take a look…

***

OpenAI is reportedly in talks to buy up to five exabytes of data storage. Which sounds meaningless, until you translate it into everyday terms.

The top iPhone from Apple Inc. (AAPL) holds a terabyte. That’s enough for about 250 high-definition movies. Multiply that 5 million times over, and you’re getting near what OpenAI is buying. In one order.

And it isn’t the only AI company scooping up storage. An estimated seven out of every 10 memory chips are going to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), and the other hyperscalers building AI data centers.

That’s because AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are memory hogs.

Training an AI model like that starts with feeding it a meaningful slice of everything humanity has ever written, photographed, and filmed. All of it has to sit on a hard drive, inside one of those buildings, before the model can start learning.

And the amount of data these models are training on is growing exponentially.

Training GPT-2, one of OpenAI’s earliest language models, took about as much text as you’d find on 2,800 shelves of library books. Two years later, GPT-3 needed the equivalent of 30,000 shelves. By 2024, Llama 3 from Meta Platforms Inc. (META) trained on the equivalent of 1 million shelves of books.

This surge in demand sent shares of memory and storage companies like Western Digital Corp. (WDC) and Micron Technology Inc. (MU) soaring. Western Digital is up 800% over the past year. Micron has done nearly as well — up more than 700% — after revealing it had sold out its most important product, high-bandwidth memory for AI chips, all the way through 2026.

But this month, investors started taking profits. Micron has fallen roughly 20% from the record high it hit in June. And Western Digital is down 26%.

This has triggered a lot of questions. Is the AI bull market still intact? Was that the top? Or is this a healthy pause and nothing more?

But guessing without some kind of edge — a plan, a pattern, something more solid than a hunch — is how most people lose money chasing a good story.

One way to find that edge is to stop trying to answer those questions at all, and to look at something else entirely — seasonality.

Every Stock Has Its Green Days

Seasonality is the study of how stocks trade across different calendar windows, year after year — through bull and bear markets, manias and panics, wars, pandemics, and more.

I didn’t come to TradeSmith from Wall Street. I’m a software engineer by training. So when my team went looking for an edge for investors, we didn’t start by asking what should move a stock. We started by asking what the data already showed.

By crunching through years of stock market history, we’ve found seasonally bullish days for thousands of stocks.

We call these “green days.” Once you know them, you don’t need to know whether the AI story holds up, or whether this correction has further to run. You just need to know the dates when those windows occur.

Take Parker-Hannifin Corp. (PH), the aerospace and industrial company. For the past 15 years, the stock has gone up starting on October 27 — not most years, every year. A 100% historical accuracy rate, through bull markets and bear markets both:

That same time of year is also bullish for KLA Corp. (KLAC), which makes equipment for semiconductor manufacturers. Its stock has risen beginning October 21 in 93.3% of the last 15 years:

Parker-Hannifin and KLA have nothing in common. They’re different businesses in different industries with different customers. What they share are windows of time during the calendar year that tend to be bullish for their stock prices.

TradeSmith’s research team has now found seasonality patterns across roughly 5,000 stocks.

So what does that analysis say about the two companies at the center of the memory story?

A Better AI Memory Trade Than Micron in July

Micron is the company most directly in the crosshairs of the AI chip shortage. It makes the high-bandwidth memory that sits right next to the chip in an AI system, feeding it data in real time.

If you’re looking for a stock that’s emblematic of the AI memory trade, Micron is it.

But right now, Micron isn’t in one of its green windows. Its next one doesn’t open until August 20. Through September 9, it’s been up on average 4.1% during this window 80% of the time:

For a memory stock with a window open right now, look at Western Digital instead. It’s one of the oldest names in computer storage, making the hard drives that data centers — including the ones being built for AI right now — depend on to hold everything we’ve been talking about.

And its green days run from July 1 to July 22. Over the past 15 years, the stock has gone up during that stretch 86.7% of the time.

You don’t have to just take my word for it. I’ve asked my team to make a free trial of our Seasonality tool available so you can try it out for yourself.

Test Drive Our Seasonality Software Today

You can try out our software on the stocks you own with this free, limited-time trial version.

We’re making it available ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event. It’s all about the seasonal patterns you need to be aware of in this critical year.

We’ve unlocked access so you can see the seasonal “green days” for thousands of stocks ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event.

It kicks off Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET. The event is free to attend, but you need to reserve your spot ahead of time.

I’ll walk you through how we uncovered these patterns, why they persist even in chaotic markets, and how you can use them to guide real-world trading decisions.

More important, I’ll be getting into detail about the fast-approaching seasonality patterns you need to be aware of.

Knowing when these windows are opening and closing is crucial to your wealth.

The first date you’ll want to circle on your calendar is July 16. If seasonality patterns hold this year, it could open up a lucrative trading opportunity in one of the market’s hottest AI stocks.

I hope you’ll join us.

All the best,

Keith Kaplan

CEO, TradeSmith

P.S. Thanks to Keith for sharing his perspective on the AI memory trade. If you’d like to see how his seasonality research applies to thousands of stocks – not just the names discussed here – I encourage you to reserve your free seat for Keith’s free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET. He’ll explain how the Trade Cycles system works, discuss why he’s watching the weeks ahead so closely, and reveal three free stock recommendations he believes could be well positioned for what’s next. Click here to take advantage of his Seasonality tool’s free trial and reserve your free seat.

The post Looking For the Next Micron? Try This Tool Instead… appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Editor’s note: “The Physical AI Proof Points Are Suddenly Everywhere” was previously published in June 2026 with the title “AI Is Leaving the Cloud. Here’s Who Gets Paid When It Does.” It has since been updated to include the most relevant information available.

For the first phase of the AI boom, intelligence lived mostly behind a screen.

You typed a prompt. A model answered. Maybe it wrote code, summarized a document, generated an image, or helped draft an email.

Useful? Absolutely.

Transformational? No doubt.

But it was still trapped behind glass. 

Because intelligence that only lives in software can advise the physical world. It can’t act in it.

That is starting to change.

AI is moving into the devices that see, hear, move, navigate, and manipulate the world around us — robots, wearables, smart glasses, autonomous vehicles, factory systems, and edge devices.

In other words, AI is getting a body.

And once that happens, the investment opportunity changes completely.

The Proof Points Are Piling Up

Consider what has happened since this thesis first started coming together:

• Microsoft’s (MSFT) new AI laptops — powered by Snapdragon X2 — are now shipping.
• Nvidia (NVDA) and Hugging Face are bringing Isaac GR00T 1.7, Isaac Teleop, datasets, and robotics workflows into LeRobot, giving developers an open path into Physical AI.
• 1X just unveiled a new hand for its NEO humanoid robot that can move with far more human-like precision — gripping, adjusting, and manipulating objects in ways earlier robots struggled to do. 
• Applied Materials (AMAT) and EssilorLuxottica announced a long-term partnership to develop intelligent optical systems for AR and AI-powered smart eyewear.
• Mobileye (MBLY) is moving from supplier to vertically integrated robotaxi operator, targeting a U.S. launch in 2027 and roughly 17,000 vehicles over five years.
• Apple’s (AAPL) camera-equipped AirPods timeline remains fluid, but the direction is clear: the next generation of wearables will sense the physical world, not just connect to your phone.

Different companies. Different products. Same message.

Physical AI is moving from scattered experiments into a real hardware ecosystem.

What Physical AI Actually Means — and Why the Architecture Is Completely Different From Cloud AI 

What makes this cycle different from the AI wave we’ve been riding isn’t the ambition. It’s the architecture. 

Cloud-based AI is about scale — throw compute at a model, let it learn, serve answers via API. Physical AI is about efficiency — get the answer right, in milliseconds, on a device with a 40-watt thermal budget, without a network connection. 

It’s the AI inside your headphones that filters background noise before you even notice it… 

The vision system on a warehouse robot that decides which box to pick next… 

The autonomous vehicle perception stack that identifies a pedestrian at 60 miles per hour.

The requirements are completely different — and that difference runs all the way down the supply chain. 

The Six Pillars of the Physical AI Supply Chain

Think of Physical AI not as a single industry but as six distinct hardware categories that all need to scale simultaneously. 

1. Edge AI Silicon

This is the foundation. Every physical AI device needs a chip that can run inference locally — fast, cool, and cheap. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2, which just launched inside Microsoft’s new Surface lineup, is the clearest proof point that on-device AI silicon has crossed the viability threshold. 

Arm‘s (ARM) architecture underpins virtually every mobile AI chip on the planet. Nvidia (NVDA) is pushing into embedded inference with its Jetson platform. 抖阴最新版 (抖阴最新版) and Intel (INTC) are fighting for their share of the AI PC market. The edge silicon war is just beginning, and the winners here get paid on every device that ships. 

Key names: QCOM, ARM, NVDA, 抖阴最新版, INTC

2. Sensors & Machine Vision

Image sensors, depth cameras, radar, lidar, microphones — these are the eyes and ears of every robot, wearable, and autonomous vehicle. 

The AMAT-EssilorLuxottica partnership to develop intelligent optical systems for AR eyewear tells you everything: the optics industry is being recruited into the AI supply chain at the component level. Apple’s forthcoming AI AirPods with embedded cameras will drive a new demand cycle for miniaturized sensor modules. 

Key names: Ambarella (AMBA), ON Semiconductor (ON), STMicroelectronics (STM), Sony (SONY), Cognex (CGNX)

3. Advanced Optics

AR glasses and AI eyewear aren’t a consumer curiosity anymore — they’re a hardware category. And the bottleneck? Optics. 

Waveguides, photonic displays, specialty glass, and laser projection systems are what separate a pair of glasses from a heads-up display. Corning (GLW) and Coherent (COHR) are two of the most underappreciated Physical AI plays in the market for precisely this reason. Applied Materials’ pivot into intelligent optics manufacturing signals how seriously the semiconductor equipment industry is taking this category. 

Key names: AMAT, GLW, Lumentum (LITE), COHR

4. Robotics & Industrial Automation

Genesis AI’s Eno robot isn’t interesting because it’s humanoid — it’s interesting because it reasons. That’s the leap from industrial automation 1.0 (programmed motion) to Physical AI 1.0 (adaptive intelligence). 

Companies like Symbotic (SYM), Teradyne (TER), Rockwell Automation (ROK), and Honeywell (HON) are already deploying AI-driven automation in factories and warehouses at scale. Tesla‘s (TSLA) Optimus is the flashy version; the boring but lucrative version is already running in distribution centers across America. 

Key names: SYM, TER, ROK, HON, TSLA

5. Memory, Storage & Power

On-device AI needs more local memory than anyone planned for. That means Low Power Double Data Rate 6 (LPDDR6) RAM, expanded NAND storage, power management integrated circuits (PMICs) that can handle burst inference workloads, and analog semiconductors for signal processing. 

Micron (MU) is already winning here with its LPCAMM modules for AI PCs. The storage plays — Seagate (STX), Western Digital (WDC), SanDisk (SNDK) — get a demand tailwind as every edge device needs local model storage. 

Key names: MU, STX, WDC, SNDK, Monolithic Power (MPWR), Analog Devices (ADI), Texas Instruments (TXN).

6. Connectivity & Infrastructure

Even edge AI needs the cloud. Local inference handles the latency-sensitive tasks; cloud AI handles the heavy lifting — model updates, data sync, fleet coordination for robotaxis, telemetry from billions of wearables. 

That means the optical networking and connectivity layer is a direct beneficiary of Physical AI scaling. Robotaxis syncing to the cloud. AR glasses streaming map data. Industrial robots phoning home with diagnostic telemetry. Broadcom (AVGO), Marvell (MRVL), Arista (ANET), Ciena (CIEN), Credo (CRDO), and Corning are all toll roads on that data highway. 

Key names: AVGO, MRVL, ANET, CRDO, CIEN, GLW

The Investor’s Guide: Own the Picks and Shovels for the Biggest Hardware Cycle Since the Smartphone

Nobody made more money in the California Gold Rush by panning for gold. The real fortunes went to the people selling the equipment.

Physical AI follows the same logic — with one important difference. 

In the Gold Rush, you could only sell one pan at a time. In Physical AI, every device that ships — every robot, wearable, AI PC, and autonomous vehicle — needs chips, sensors, optics, memory, power management, and connectivity. The suppliers don’t need to pick the winning application. They get paid on every unit, across every category, regardless of which company’s robot ends up in your warehouse or which AR glasses end up on your face.

The transition from cloud AI to Physical AI is the single biggest hardware cycle since the smartphone. And like the smartphone, the companies that win aren’t just the device makers — they’re the entire supply chain underneath them.

The hype was right. It just took the hardware a few years to catch up. 

The names in this piece — the edge silicon suppliers, the sensor makers, the optics companies, the memory and connectivity plays — are the public-market expression of that thesis. But the smartest money isn’t just moving into the obvious trades. 

Take Peter Thiel’s most recent 13F, for example: zero shares of Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, or Tesla. Not trimmed — liquidated entirely. His private fund, meanwhile, has been quietly building positions in energy infrastructure, nuclear power, chip fabrication, and natural resources — the physical backbone of everything described in this piece.

He can’t buy most of those positions publicly. 

Seven of them, however, have a backdoor…

And we think they’re among the most compelling AI plays hiding in plain sight.

The post The Physical AI Proof Points Are Suddenly Everywhere appeared first on InvestorPlace.

It was another violent weekend in the Middle East, with the U.S. and Iran trading a wave of strikes rather than settling into the calm both sides promised weeks ago.

The flashpoint remains the Strait of Hormuz…

The Trump administration had expected Iran to publicly declare the waterway open and toll-free. Instead, Tehran did the opposite, closing it and blaming the U.S. for the violence that disrupted traffic in the first place.

Iran’s strikes hit U.S. allies across the Gulf, targeting positions in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and Oman.

On Truth Social, President Trump posted that he has reimposed the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, and said the U.S. would effectively take over management of the strait:

We are reinstating the IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving.

The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’ but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World.

Crude prices rose on the news, with both Brent and West Texas Intermediate up almost 5% as I write.

However, stocks are taking it in stride. Here at midday, the Dow is barely lower, and the S&P 500 is modestly down. Only the Nasdaq is showing real stress, off about 1%.

Why the muted reaction given the headlines?

Because Wall Street still believes the conflict will stay contained.

At this point, we’ve seen enough of these strikes followed by de-escalations to bank on the coming ceasefire. Until that assumption breaks, investors seem willing to look through the noise.

Meanwhile, there’s more behind the Nasdaq’s underperformance this morning than Middle East headlines

Semiconductor stocks are getting hit hard – again – and it’s all linked to one name: South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix (SKHY).

It’s down 6% as I write after making its U.S. trading debut last Friday. That’s a sharp reversal from its 13% pop last week – and it’s dragging down U.S. memory and chipmakers.

Bloomberg points toward fears that SK Hynix won’t deliver on earnings after investors flooded into the IPO:

[The pullback underscores] growing investor concerns that the boom is overextended…

Traders pointed to fears of lower-than-expected earnings…

Even amid recent concerns over stretched AI valuations and high spending levels, the deal was more than seven times oversubscribed, according to people familiar with the matter.

Now, while some on Wall Street are looking for cover today, legendary investor 抖阴最新版 sees this collateral damage on U.S. chipmakers as a buying opportunity.

From his Accelerated Profits Flash Alert this morning:

SK Hynix Inc. (SKHY), the big memory company that went public last week, gapped up on Friday and is consolidating today. The Korean stocks are pretty manic.

So up, down, up, down, up, down. That will make Micron Technology, Inc. (MU) do the same thing, but Micron is a good buy on any pullback, and today would be another good example of that.

A more systematic way to play that “up, down” chip volatility

Louis is trading the fundamentals here – buying Micron on the dip because he trusts the long-term memory story regardless of the day-to-day noise.

But our friends at TradeSmith are looking at that same “up, down, up, down” pattern through a totally different lens…

CEO Keith Kaplan isn’t looking at earnings, Fed policy, or the AI narrative to decide where the trade goes next. He’s looking at the calendar.

Keith’s team has built software that scans more than 5,000 stocks across decades of price history, hunting for one thing: windows of time when a stock has historically gone up – or down – with remarkable consistency.

He calls the bullish stretches “green days,” and in backtesting, the approach has flagged these windows with an 83% historical accuracy rate.

Run through an 18-year backtest, trading only inside these windows produced 857% in total growth – more than double the S&P 500 over the same stretch, and the strategy still came out ahead even in 2007, the worst year in the test.

It’s the same logic commodity traders have used for planting and harvest cycles, or gold traders have used around Indian and Chinese jewelry-buying seasons — just applied with more precision, stock by stock, day by day.

By that measure, Western Digital (WDC) – one of the oldest names in computer storage, and now a critical supplier to AI data centers – is sitting in one of its green windows right now.

This green window opened on July 1 and runs through July 22. Over the past 15 years, the stock has risen 86.7% of the time during that stretch.

Want to know when your stocks will be in their own green days?

A free trial of TradeSmith’s Seasonality tool is available so you can find out.

It’s available in the run-up to Keith’s Breakthrough 2026 event that’s happening this Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET.

Here’s Keith:

You can try out our software on the stocks you own with this free, limited-time trial version.

We’ve unlocked access so you can see the seasonal “green days” for thousands of stocks ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event.

At the event, Keith will lay out why he believes the period beginning around July 23 could mark an important shift in market leadership – the kind of turn that rewards investors who know exactly when to be positioned, not just what to own.

I’ll note that Louis will join him, explaining how he’s pairing Keith’s timing signals with his own stock-grading system to identify both what to buy and when to buy it.

Attendees walk away with three free stock recommendations Keith believes are positioned for what’s ahead – plus one he says to avoid entirely.

To sign up to join them just click here.

Another IPO story – and another prediction

SK Hynix’s swings over the last two sessions are a reminder that a hot IPO can move a stock for reasons that have little to do with what’s happening at the company.

Nowhere is that truer than with the biggest IPO of the year, which we’ve been tracking in recent weeks: SpaceX (SPCX)

Here’s a new prediction: it’s going higher from here.

But here’s a twist: it’ll have very little to do with SpaceX being a good investment.

Before SpaceX’s historic IPO last month, we urged readers to stay away. Behind the warning was 45 years of U.S. IPO history – compiled and analyzed by University of Florida professor Jay Ritter, who is the world’s foremost academic authority on IPOs.

In short, the average investor wasn’t going to be able to buy SPCX at its initial IPO price. And the data suggested that after an early surge (during which the average buyer would eventually get in), the stock would experience a meaningful pullback, leaving many investors underwater.

That’s exactly how it played out…

In the days following its IPO, SPCX jumped to an all-time intraday high of $225.64. But then heavy selling pressure and a major $20 billion public bond offering dragged shares down.

Last Wednesday, SPCX fell below that $150 opening price. And as I write on Monday, it’s trading below $140 – meaning nearly every buyer since the open is now underwater.

So, what happens now?

Well, it’s our strangest forecast yet…

SPCX is probably going up – but once again, you’ll want to be careful about buying in.

What’s coming, why, and why smart investors will remain cautious

On July 7, SPCX joined the Nasdaq-100, forcing every fund tracking the index to buy shares. But that wave was the small one. SpaceX floated only about 5% of its shares in the IPO, so despite a market cap rivaling Amazon’s (AMZN), its index weight sits at roughly 1.3% today.

That will change…

Lockups begin unwinding this summer in tiers – with large freed-up tranches coming through the fall. As the float grows, so does SpaceX’s index weight. Some analysts expect it could approach a 4% weighting – a top 10 spot in the Nasdaq-100 – by mid-August.

Every step up in weight forces another round of buying from funds that have no say in the matter.

Even permabear Jeremy Grantham – who called this “the craziest IPO in the history of man” – admits the math means the price could climb “a lot” from here, valuation be damned.

What that rising share price will not reflect – profitable earnings

Watch for the coming rally to get sold to everyday investors as vindication – proof that the market “believes” in SpaceX.

But that story is misleading. It’ll be index funds fulfilling a legal obligation.

Here’s what you can believe…

SpaceX posted a $4.3 billion net loss in the first three months of 2026 alone, on top of an accumulated deficit – the running total of losses since the company’s founding – of $41.3 billion. Meanwhile, it’s carrying $29.1 billion in long-term debt, including a $20 billion bridge loan.

Its AI segment (xAI/Grok) lost $6.4 billion last year while burning through billions more in capex.

Now, the SpaceX bull will say, “Whoa, slow down there, Jeff – SPCX is a groundbreaking company and loads of profits are coming in time.”

Perhaps. But S&P Global doesn’t expect the company to generate positive free cash flow until 2029. And yet the stock, even after its slide, still trades at a range of 70 to 90 times sales.

For comparison, Nvidia (NVDA) – the poster child of this entire AI boom that’s generating gobs of actual profits – trades at roughly 13 times sales.

Now, none of that is a reason SpaceX can’t – or won’t – go up. It just means that if it does, it won’t be because of fundamentals.

Bottom line: know the difference between a stock rising on conviction and one rising on plumbing.

We’ll keep you updated on all these stories here in the Digest.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

(Disclosure: I own MU, AMZN)

The post $41 Billion in Losses… and Still Going Up? appeared first on InvestorPlace.

First, there were concerns about memory stocks. Next came renewed concerns about inflation heating back up. (I’ll be reviewing this week’s inflation data in another Market 360 later this week, so stay tuned for that.)

Then, there’s Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s rumored folding iPhone. And now, oil prices are coming back up after President Trump announced this morning that the U.S. would reinstate a blockade against Iran on the Strait of Hormuz.

Every day, there’s a new story driving the market. But the stories change much faster than the fundamentals do.

That’s why I don’t spend my time chasing headlines. I stay focused on the trends that ultimately drive stock prices: earnings, institutional demand and economic growth.

Headlines can move stocks for a day or two. Strong fundamentals can drive them for months – or even years.

So, in this week’s Navellier Market Buzz, I share my outlook for the second half of 2026, including why I believe accelerating earnings, improving inflation and continued AI investment should keep this bull market on track.

Click below to watch the latest episode of Navellier Market Buzz.

To see more of my videos, click here to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Plus, the grades in Stock Grader (subscription required) have been updated this week! Click here to plug in your own stocks and see how they’re rated.

Finding Opportunity Before the Crowd

If my outlook for the second half of 2026 proves correct, investors could see plenty of opportunities in the months ahead.

The next step is identifying which companies are most likely to lead the way.

Institutional investors often begin building positions long before a company becomes Wall Street’s newest favorite. By the time everyone else catches on, much of the biggest upside may already be behind it.

That’s exactly why I developed my proprietary Precursor Intelligence (P.I.) system.

It’s designed to help identify where institutional investors may be positioning themselves while most other investors are still looking elsewhere.

In a recent presentation, I pulled back the curtain on how P.I. works and explained how it helps me identify companies that could be attracting institutional buying before they become Wall Street’s next favorites.

You’ll also learn how to access my special report, Four P.I. Trades for 400% Gains, featuring four companies my P.I. system believes could have significant upside potential.

Click here to watch now.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

Editor, Market 360

The post My Predictions for the Rest of 2026 appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Sometimes, the best way to play an investment boom is to walk away from it.

The success story of “Wheelbarrow Johnny” makes that case.

John Studebaker arrived in California during the gold rush – with $65 sewn into a belt, three changes of clothes, and the same dream as everyone else: find the precious yellow metal. But he looked around and changed his mind almost immediately. Lots of prospectors were searching for gold; few of them were finding any.

So, he abandoned that dream and pursued a different one.

As a kid from a family of Indiana wagon-builders, he knew a little something about attaching wheels to wood. So, he set up a small shop to construct and sell wheelbarrows to miners for $10 each.

When the gold rush wound down five years later, Studebaker went home to Indiana with $8,000 in savings – a small fortune at the time.

Back in South Bend, his brothers Henry and Clement had been quietly expanding their family wagon business. John wanted in. So, he invested his $8,000 into what would become the largest producer of horse-drawn vehicles in the world.

At the height of westward migration, half of the wagons crossing the continent were Studebakers. The company also built carriages for Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, and Harrison.

When the automobile age arrived, the Studebaker company made the transition to “horseless carriages” without breaking stride – becoming the third largest producer of automobiles in America. John died a wealthy man in 1917.

“Wheelbarrow Johnny” didn’t strike it rich mining gold. Instead, he amassed his riches by first saying “no” to the most over-hyped, get-rich-quick opportunity of their day. His story contains timeless insights about investing in the age of artificial intelligence.

I’ll share these insights below. But first, let’s take a look back at what we covered here at Smart Money last week, where we also explore how the biggest fortunes often come from refusing to chase whatever everyone else is chasing.

Including…

• Buying when the crowd overreacts.
• Choosing value over hype.
• Avoiding overpriced expectations.
• Owning the companies behind the boom.

Smart Money Roundup

These Seasonal Trends Take the Guesswork Out of Buying and Selling

July 12, 2026

Timing is important for us as investors. It’s tempting to leave buying and selling decisions to gut instinct. Now, the research team at TradeSmith has developed a way to track seasonal patterns, giving investors an edge in today’s chaotic markets. TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan explains how this system works and shows you how to access it in Sunday’s issue.

What My 200,000-Mile Mazda Taught Me 抖阴最新版 Value Investing

July 11, 2026

Value alone hasn’t been enough to satisfy portfolios… especially not since the mid-2000s. Over the past decade and a half, growth stocks have dominated headlines and delivered some incredible returns, leading many investors to believe growth has permanently beaten value. But Tom Yeung explains how that’s not the case.

Click here to read more about the illusion of growth – and where overlooked opportunities are hiding today.

Where to Invest When Great News Isn’t Enough

July 9, 2026

As we saw with Samsung Electronics Co.’s recent earnings, stocks don’t move solely on results – they move on the gap between results and expectations. This dynamic is especially clear in today’s AI-focused market. Discover why expectations can be detrimental and how investing in less popular companies might protect your portfolio.

The 3 Stocks Quietly Benefiting From the SpaceX Shakeup

July 8, 2026

When nothing but excitement surrounded the SpaceX IPO, my colleague and veteran trader Jonathan Rose insisted that investors not give in. He explains why the IPO isn’t the main story and how it may instead reshape the communications business, creating significant investment opportunities. Click here to find the names of the companies that could benefit.

The Real Fortune in the AI Gold Rush

The AI gold rush is underway… and almost no one wants to say “no” to the opportunity. The financial markets are teaming with “prospectors” of all types – from individual investors to trillion-dollar tech companies.

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Meta Platforms Inc. (META), and Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) will collectively spend about $725 billion this year to build AI data centers — up more than 75% from last year’s already-staggering total.

For now, however, investors care little about the soaring cost of building AI dreams; nor about their uncertain profit potential.  They care only about the dreams themselves… and will pay almost any price to be part of them.

That’s why investors are lavishing many AI companies with valuations that would have made Pets.com blush during the peak of the dot-com bubble.

Meanwhile, lurking on the fringes of the market, we find the overlooked “AI Survivor” companies that have as little to do with AI as a vegan with steak tartare. These companies are the providers of “future-proof” goods and services that can survive the onslaught of AI, or even thrive because of it.

They make sandals or sneakers. They sell coffee. They bottle water. They thrift clothing. They discover drugs and dispense medications.

However, because of their expressly non-AI pedigree, the market has been ignoring them, punishing them, and in some cases repricing them as if they were broken businesses rather than durable ones.

That collective myopia is creating some compelling investment opportunities.

Click here to learn how to access my favorite AI Survivor companies.

Regards,

抖阴最新版

The post The Man Who Got Rich by Walking Away appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Keith Kaplan doesn’t start with earnings estimates. He doesn’t start with headlines either. He starts with seasonality — the recurring patterns that tell you when to buy and when to sell, regardless of the story everyone’s telling about a stock. That’s the TradeSmith CEO’s whole approach. And in today’s essay, he applies it to two AI memory names you already know. His conclusion? Timing the trade might matter as much as picking it.

Keith’s going deeper on all of this at his free Breakthrough 2026 event — Thursday, July 16, 10 a.m. ET. Save your seat here.

Take it away, Keith…

OpenAI is reportedly in talks to buy up to five exabytes of data storage. Which sounds meaningless, until you translate it into everyday terms.

The top iPhone from Apple Inc. (AAPL) holds a terabyte. That’s enough for about 250 high-definition movies. Multiply that 5 million times over, and you’re getting near what OpenAI is buying. In one order.

And it isn’t the only AI company scooping up storage. An estimated seven out of every 10 memory chips are going to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), and the other hyperscalers building AI data centers.

That’s because AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are memory hogs.

Training an AI model like that starts with feeding it a meaningful slice of everything humanity has ever written, photographed, and filmed. All of it has to sit on a hard drive, inside one of those buildings, before the model can start learning.

And the amount of data these models are training on is growing exponentially.

Training GPT-2, one of OpenAI’s earliest language models, took about as much text as you’d find on 2,800 shelves of library books. Two years later, GPT-3 needed the equivalent of 30,000 shelves. By 2024, Llama 3 from Meta Platforms Inc. (META) trained on the equivalent of 1 million shelves of books.

This surge in demand sent shares of memory and storage companies like Western Digital Corp. (WDC) and Micron Technology Inc. (MU) soaring. Western Digital is up 800% over the past year. Micron has done nearly as well — up more than 700% — after revealing it had sold out its most important product, high-bandwidth memory for AI chips, all the way through 2026.

But this month, investors started taking profits. Micron has fallen roughly 20% from the record high it hit in June. And Western Digital is down 26%.

This has triggered a lot of questions. Is the AI bull market still intact? Was that the top? Or is this a healthy pause and nothing more?

But guessing without some kind of edge — a plan, a pattern, something more solid than a hunch — is how most people lose money chasing a good story.

One way to find that edge is to stop trying to answer those questions at all, and to look at something else entirely — seasonality.

Every Stock Has Its Green Days

Seasonality is the study of how stocks trade across different calendar windows, year after year — through bull and bear markets, manias and panics, wars, pandemics, and more.

I didn’t come to TradeSmith from Wall Street. I’m a software engineer by training. So when my team went looking for an edge for investors, we didn’t start by asking what should move a stock. We started by asking what the data already showed.

By crunching through years of stock market history, we’ve found seasonally bullish days for thousands of stocks.

We call these “green days.” Once you know them, you don’t need to know whether the AI story holds up, or whether this correction has further to run. You just need to know the dates when those windows occur.

Take Parker-Hannifin Corp. (PH), the aerospace and industrial company. For the past 15 years, the stock has gone up starting on October 27 — not most years, every year. A 100% historical accuracy rate, through bull markets and bear markets both:

That same time of year is also bullish for KLA Corp. (KLAC), which makes equipment for semiconductor manufacturers. Its stock has risen beginning October 21 in 93.3% of the last 15 years:

Parker-Hannifin and KLA have nothing in common. They’re different businesses in different industries with different customers. What they share are windows of time during the calendar year that tend to be bullish for their stock prices.

TradeSmith’s research team has now found seasonality patterns across roughly 5,000 stocks.

So what does that analysis say about the two companies at the center of the memory story?

A Better AI Memory Trade Than Micron in July

Micron is the company most directly in the crosshairs of the AI chip shortage. It makes the high-bandwidth memory that sits right next to the chip in an AI system, feeding it data in real time.

If you’re looking for a stock that’s emblematic of the AI memory trade, Micron is it.

But right now, Micron isn’t in one of its green windows. Its next one doesn’t open until August 20. Through September 9, it’s been up on average 4.1% during this window 80% of the time:

For a memory stock with a window open right now, look at Western Digital instead. It’s one of the oldest names in computer storage, making the hard drives that data centers — including the ones being built for AI right now — depend on to hold everything we’ve been talking about.

And its green days run from July 1 to July 22. Over the past 15 years, the stock has gone up during that stretch 86.7% of the time.

You don’t have to just take my word for it. I’ve asked my team to make a free trial of our Seasonality tool available so you can try it out for yourself.

Test Drive Our Seasonality Software Today

You can try out our software on the stocks you own with this free, limited-time trial version.

We’re making it available ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event. It’s all about the seasonal patterns you need to be aware of in this critical year.

We’ve unlocked access so you can see the seasonal “green days” for thousands of stocks ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event.

It kicks off Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET. The event is free to attend, but you need to reserve your spot ahead of time.

I’ll walk you through how we uncovered these patterns, why they persist even in chaotic markets, and how you can use them to guide real-world trading decisions.

More important, I’ll be getting into detail about the fast-approaching seasonality patterns you need to be aware of.

Knowing when these windows are opening and closing is crucial to your wealth.

The first date you’ll want to circle on your calendar is July 16. If seasonality patterns hold this year, it could open up a lucrative trading opportunity in one of the market’s hottest AI stocks.

I hope you’ll join us.

All the best,

Keith Kaplan

CEO, TradeSmith

P.S. Thanks to Keith for sharing his perspective on the AI memory trade. If you’d like to see how his seasonality research applies to thousands of stocks – not just the names discussed here – I encourage you to reserve your free seat for Keith’s free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET. He’ll explain how the Trade Cycles system works, discuss why he’s watching the weeks ahead so closely, and reveal three free stock recommendations he believes could be well positioned for what’s next. Click here to take advantage of his Seasonality tool’s free trial and reserve your free seat.

The post If You Missed Micron, Try This Instead appeared first on InvestorPlace.

In today’s essay, he explains how this research led to TradeSmith’s seasonality strategy, shares a few examples, and offers readers a chance to explore the tool themselves ahead of his free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET. During the presentation, Keith will explain the research behind the strategy, discuss the market outlook he’s watching closely, and share three free stock recommendations. Try the tool and learn more about Breakthrough 2026 here.

Take it away, Keith…

In June 1944, as the Allies prepared to invade Normandy, their plans hinged on one man, Group Captain James Stagg.

And he was telling General Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Don’t do it!”

Turns out, he was right.

Everyone knows the Allies stormed the beaches on June 6, 1944. What you may not know is that D-Day was supposed to happen a day earlier – on June 5.

And if Eisenhower had ignored Stagg’s warning… and went ahead with the invasion a day earlier… the Allies could have failed.

Could one day have made that much difference?

Absolutely. Because Stagg’s warning came down to the most fundamental element of planning a seaborne invasion: the weather.

You see, Stagg’s path to the Allied Command was different than that of the more conventional officers in the war-room.

He was a meteorologist best known for leading an Arctic expedition in 1932. And when the war began, he was the superintendent of Kew Observatory — the United Kingdom’s weather-forecasting headquarters.

Now, Eisenhower was asking Stagg for the most crucial observations of his career: conditions in the English Channel ahead of the largest amphibious assault in history. And Stagg’s network of Royal Air Force weathermen had told him that a massive storm was rolling in.

Luckily for the U.K., the U.S., Canada, France, and the world, Eisenhower listened to Stagg. The landings took place on June 6, 1944, after the storm had passed. Eleven months later, the Allies were celebrating victory in Europe.

Timing is important for us as investors, too. It’s tempting to leave buying and selling decisions to gut feel. But at TradeSmith, we believe — like Stagg did — in following the data.

One of those signals is what we call “seasonality” — recurring patterns that repeat year in, year out with remarkable consistency.

I’ll show you how it works today… plus how seasonal trades generated 857% total growth in an 18-year backtest.

Buy on These “Green Days”

I didn’t come to TradeSmith from Wall Street. I’m a software engineer by training.

So, when my team and I went looking for an edge for investors, we didn’t start by asking what should move a stock. We started by asking what the data already shows.

We built software that scans more than 5,000 stocks — decades of price history — and asks a simple question. Does this stock behave differently at certain times of the year than others?

The answer, again and again, was yes.

We’ve found historically reliable windows across thousands of stocks – specific times of the year when they tend to rise or fall.

We call the bullish windows “green days.” And we built a trading system around them that spots these seasonal patterns with an 83% historical accuracy rate.

In other words, they’ve shown up in about eight years out of every 10. That’s not a guarantee they’ll show up again. But it’s a statistical edge you can use to stacks the odds of success in your favor.

Seasonality isn’t new:

• Commodity traders have always tracked planting and harvesting cycles.
• Energy markets move with heating and cooling demand.
• Gold has long shown seasonal strength tied to jewelry demand and annual buying patterns in India and China.
• And stock investors track seasonal patterns like the January Effect and the Santa Claus Rally.

What’s new is that we can now measure it precisely – across thousands of stocks, over decades of data, and down to specific days.

Target Corp. (TGT), for example, has climbed during the same 29-day window — late June into late July — in 15 straight years, gaining an average of 5.2%:

Home Depot Inc. (HD) has done the same between mid-June and late July, rising 93.3% of the time over 15 years, with an average gain of 4.7%:

But rival home improvement store Lowe’s Cos. Inc. (LOW) optimal window comes nearly two months later.

LOW has gone up 86.7% of the time from August 10 to September 11 during the past 15 years, with an average return of 6.1%:

Over an 18-year backtest, these seasonal trades produced 857% in total growth — more than double the S&P 500 over the same stretch. Even in 2007, the worst year in the test, the strategy still came out ahead.

You don’t have to just take my word for it. I’ve asked my team to make a free trial of our Seasonality tool available so you can try it out for yourself.

Test Drive Our Seasonality Software Today

You can try out our software on the stocks you own with this free, limited-time trial version.

We’re making it available ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event. It’s all about the seasonal patterns you need to be aware of in this critical year.

That’s why we’ve made a version of our Seasonality software available for you to explore now.

We’ve unlocked access so you can see the seasonal “green days” for thousands of stocks ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event.

It kicks off Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET.

I’ll walk you through how we uncovered these patterns, why they persist even in chaotic markets, and how you can use them to guide real-world trading decisions.

More important, I’ll be going into detail about the fast-approaching seasonality patterns you need to be aware of.

Knowing when the windows are opening and closing likely matters more to your wealth than any single decision you’ve made.

The first date you’ll want to circle on your calendar is July 16. If seasonality patterns hold this year, it could open up a lucrative trading opportunity in one of the market’s hottest AI stocks.

I hope you’ll join us.

All the best,

Keith Kaplan

CEO, TradeSmith

P.S. Keith has only scratched the surface here. During his free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET, he’ll explain the research behind Trade Cycles, show how his team identifies recurring seasonal opportunities across thousands of stocks, discuss why he believes the market is approaching an important turning point, and share three free stock recommendations. It’s free to attend, but you do need to reserve your seat in advance. Click here to sign up.

The post These Seasonal Trends Take the Guesswork Out of Buying and Selling appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Summer months are usually a boring stretch for active stock traders. Trading volumes dry up, options get more expensive, and everyone is waiting for a second-quarter earnings season that often disappoints. Q2 lacks a major shopping season, which might explain why August and September (when financials are reported) are historically weak for many U.S. stocks – especially consumer-facing ones.

Nevertheless, there’s always a bull market somewhere. And that’s because not every country follows the same calendar that we Americans do.

Much of East Asia treats its Lunar New Year like Christmas. People splash out on fancy vacations and gifts. For them, February is their month to spend big. The Middle East celebrates Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr on an every-changing date.

That’s why I think it’s highly worthwhile for active traders to tune in to an upcoming presentation by TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan, happening on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. Eastern.

In this free Breakthrough 2026 event, Keith explains how he and his team have developed a trading system designed to precisely identify these seasonal signals and help investors pinpoint the exact right time to enter a stock. It’s not just about identifying what the right stocks to buy are… it’s also about when to get in. Reserve your spot for that broadcast here.

The system works. Last year, I suggested four stocks using this approach. Shares of the four rose 10% on average in the following month – a nice bonus for stocks I already had my eye on. And if you would like to try the tool for yourself, you can do so by clicking here.

In the meantime, Keith’s system has identified two companies that I expect to do extremely well in the coming months. And I’d like to share them with you today.

Stock to Buy No. 1: Open Sesame

It’s been a tough stretch for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (BABA), China’s largest e-commerce company by revenue. After peaking at almost $200 last year, shares of the retail giant have collapsed… reaching as low as $92 last week before seeing a minor rebound last week.

Keith’s system suggests now is the time to get back in. Over the past 12 years, Alibaba’s stock has performed best in the first three weeks of July – an unusual period for Western consumer stocks to perform well.

There’s a good chance this boost stems from China’s 618 shopping festival, a multiweek “digital Black Friday” that runs from mid-May until mid-June. This oddly timed sale comes just three months after Lunar New Year and adds rocket fuel to second-quarter earnings. (In the U.S., it would be like having a second Christmas in March.)

The 618 festival is overshadowed by its better-known cousin, the Singles’ Day sale in November, when people buy presents for themselves. I believe this often causes investors to underestimate that day’s less-famous peer.

Nevertheless, 618 has become a bonanza for online sellers. Analysts estimate that last year’s festival brought in $125 billion in sales. That’s almost as much as what the entire U.S. online holiday shopping season brought in, once you adjust for the size difference of the two countries. This year’s “slow” 618 festival is still expected to see a 4% increase in spending.

Alibaba stands to gain handsomely. The company is responsible for almost 50% of Chinese e-commerce sales by value, and its Taobao and Tmall marketplaces are profitable cash cows.

In addition, I have my eye on Alibaba because it is rapidly expanding into AI cloud computing using a playbook from Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL). Alibaba is now designing its own chips, constructing its own data centers, and developing a whole set of advanced AI models. Its Qwen 3.7 Max AI model is the best of any Chinese firm, as ranked by Artificial Analysis, and is only several months behind OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s leading models.

In other words, Alibaba is becoming a diversified tech giant.

That matters because Alibaba’s e-commerce business now generates too much cash to reinvest in the business. And all this money (over $20 billion per year) can now be used in creating a high-growth, vertically integrated AI business.

This vertical integration is important for Alibaba’s success. Custom-designed chips are more energy efficient and run faster, because they can be hardwired to run specific models (i.e., Alibaba’s). And that means Alibaba can often undercut rivals by simply running things more efficiently.

Think of it like a chef who’s trained to make certain dishes. A diner cook might be able to put together dozens of cuisines and switch between cooking, baking, and sauce-making. These chefs are akin to the generalist data centers like CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV) or Nebius Group NV (NBIS) that take any customer willing to spend money for AI compute.

But if you want a perfect plate of sushi or the crispiest croissant, it’s usually better to go to a restaurant specializing in these dishes, rather than a Las Vegas steakhouse that somehow does it all. This is the strategy Google and Alibaba are both pursuing, and I expect both to succeed.

Best of all, expectations are low for Alibaba. The company now trades at just 17X forward earnings after its recent selloff – a fraction of what e-commerce and AI companies typically trade for. And if Keith’s system is correct, now is the right time to get back into this promising stock.

Stock to Buy No. 2: Wowing Shoppers

South Korean consumers also have their oddities. They do roughly half of all shopping online now, using their phones to buy everything from fresh groceries to major appliances.

That means South Korean e-commerce platforms have an enormous pull with their digital sales events. And the market leader of this is Coupang Inc. (CPNG).

Coupang is South Korea’s largest retailer by sales, outclassing every other e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar firm. The company has a nationwide logistics network that provides same-day or next-day delivery to over 90% of the country and is aiming to cover 99% within the next several years. Its Rocket Delivery system is so quick that most people ordering fresh food in the evening can expect to receive it before they leave for work the next morning.

Keith’s system suggests that August will be the best time to enter this stock. Over the past five years, shares have risen 9% on average from the start of August through mid-September.

One likely reason is Coupang’s Wow Members Day, a one-week sale that happens in July. The event is so large that I believe it adds somewhere between 10% to 15% of revenue to a normal month of sales.

Another is that South Korea has a second Lunar New Year holiday in September called Chuseok. This is one of the most important festivals of the year, and the sales boost is comparable to both China’s 618 event and America’s online holiday shopping season once you adjust for South Korea’s smaller size. Coupang’s third-quarter revenues are always larger than the first two, and even eclipsed Q4 sales last year.

The company is also quickly emerging from a cybersecurity scandal last year that rocked investor confidence. In mid-June, South Korea finalized a $409 million fine for Coupang over a 2025 data breach that exposed user information. That fine was far smaller than investors expected and caused the stock to jump. For those seeking to line up an investment abroad, Keith’s system finds that Coupang in August is an ideal pick.

Finding the Right Time to Buy

Of course, Coupang and Alibaba come with significant regulatory risks. Both operate in countries with heavy-handed governments, and both have landed on the wrong side of those hands at some point.

• Alibaba founder Jack Ma vanished from the public eye in late 2020 after criticizing Beijing’s financial regulators and state-owned banks. He no longer runs the firm.
• Coupang’s 2025 data breach triggered the government to assemble a massive interagency task force that was later called “disproportionate” and “discriminatory” by an American-led Congressional committee. (Coupang shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and so they enjoy some American protections.)

However, that left the two firms at incredible discounts. And cheap prices for high-growth firms often translate into double-digit gains when a recovery arrives.

Now, timing these recoveries used to be a guessing game. Many people turn to “smart money” indicators, technical analysis, or black-box algorithms to figure out when to get in. With Keith Kaplan’s system, this guessing is replaced by careful analysis of data.

I highly recommend you tune in. The system has already helped me find several excellent entry points, and I believe it can help you, too, find the best time to buy the stocks you’ve had your eye on.

Click here to sign up for Keith’s free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. Eastern.

Until next week,

Thomas Yeung, CFA

Market Analyst, InvestorPlace

Thomas Yeung is a market analyst and portfolio manager of the Omnia Portfolio, the highest-tier subscription at InvestorPlace. He is the former editor of Tom Yeung’s Profit & Protection, a free e-letter about investing to profit in good times and protecting gains during the bad.

The post 2 Stocks to Escape the Summer Crush appeared first on InvestorPlace.

More than 240 companies were building cars that year, and dealers could not tell one from the next. Money poured in, then vanished in a season. Buicks and Oldsmobiles piled up in showrooms nobody could afford to rent. The panic of 1907 had just rattled every bank in the country, and the newspapers were calling the automobile a fad for rich men that regular families would never buy in bulk. Investors who had ridden the boom for two or three good years watched their shares get cut in half and started asking whether the whole thing was a mirage.

Within two decades, the automobile industry built the middle class, paved the country, and created some of the largest fortunes in American history. The demand never stopped growing. What stopped, again and again, was the market’s patience for waiting to see it confirmed.

I am telling you this because I think you are experiencing the same thing right now in AI infrastructure stocks, and I think most investors are about to make the same mistake those 1908 skeptics made.

Here is my promise to you: This sell-off in AI infrastructure stocks is a gift, and I believe the stocks that dropped 20% to 30% over the past few weeks could roar back 50% to 60% within a matter of weeks. 

But the problem keeping you from buying is the fear that AI chip demand is about to flatten out just as a wave of new supply hits the market, which is the exact setup that has ended semiconductor booms before. 

That fear, however, is overblown: Samsung Electronics Co. reported preliminary second-quarter operating income of nearly 90 trillion won, up 19 times year over year and well above expectations, describing memory demand as white-hot, and the market sold the stock anyway. 

Everyone is watching the wrong data. And I will walk you through exactly what to watch next, and which smaller, high-torque semiconductor names I recommend buying into this dip, because the real answer arrives in three weeks, not today. See more in our latest episode of Being Exponential With Luke Lango:

Why the Market Is Ignoring Great News

Samsung’s blowout quarter should have sent AI infrastructure stocks higher. Instead, the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) dropped 4% to 5% that same day, and the Nasdaq fell more than 1%. Micron Technology Inc. (MU) and Western Digital’s (WDC) SanDisk (SNDK) spin-off both fell 10% the following day, right on the heels of Samsung confirming that memory demand is roaring in the present tense.

The market does not care what is happening right now. It cares what happens over the next six to 12 months, because a wave of new chip supply is finally arriving, and the entire bull case for this trade rests on demand staying ahead of it. 

That tension, supply catching up to demand, is what is dragging these stocks lower. It has nothing to do with whether the AI Boom is real.

The Buy Zone, By the Numbers

The SMH ETF sits about 14% below its highs, and history says that is exactly where AI semiconductor stocks tend to bottom. Every routine pullback in this group since the AI Boom began in late 2022 has bottomed in the 10% to 15% range, with two exceptions: a 24% drop in late summer 2024, and a 35% drop during the Liberation Day tariff scare. Outside those two, this marks the thirteenth double-digit correction in AI infrastructure stocks since the boom started, and semiconductor stocks are up more than 565% since 2023 despite living through all thirteen.

Zoom out further, and the pattern holds for the entire history of technology bull markets. Semiconductor stocks endured multiple 10% corrections and two nearly 40% bear markets between 1995 and 2000, then still climbed more than 1,100% from the start of that stretch to the March 2000 peak. Sharp pullbacks are the price of admission for triple-digit rallies. You do not get one without the other.

The Fundamental Case Has Not Moved

Here is what actually matters, and it is not the war in Iran, not the Federal Reserve, and not oil prices, unless those things get extreme enough to threaten one specific decision: how much Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Meta Platforms Inc. (META), Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), Oracle Corp. (ORCL), and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) plan to spend on AI infrastructure.

Those five companies are spending roughly $800 billion this year on AI infrastructure, a figure that could top $1 trillion annually by 2027. Amazon just moved to raise another $25 billion in bonds specifically to fund AI infrastructure, pushing total AI-related debt issuance toward $335 billion this year, more than double last year’s pace. Cash-rich companies are tapping debt markets because they have already emptied their own coffers, and that behavior signals acceleration, not retreat.

Meanwhile, OpenAI recently raised $122 billion, Anthropic raised roughly $60 billion, and SpaceX Inc. (SPCX) raised $85 billion and is emerging as a serious compute player in its own right. None of that points toward these companies pulling back on capital expenditures when they report earnings in roughly three weeks. I expect they reaffirm, and likely raise, their 2026 capex guidance, with bullish directional commentary on 2027 and 2028 spending plans.

Where I Am Putting Money to Work

I recommend running a screener for stocks up sharply over the past six to 12 months, down more than 10% from their 52-week highs, yet still trading above their 200-day moving averages, meaning the long-term uptrend stays intact even during the pullback.

Four names fit that profile in the semiconductor equipment and materials space right now. I recommend Aehr Test Systems (AEHR), a core part of the AI supply chain currently pulling back within its longer uptrend. I recommend Ultra Clean Holdings Inc. (UCT), whose cleaning and inspection equipment is mission-critical to chip manufacturing and whose chart still looks constructive. I recommend Axcelis Technologies Inc. (ACLS) and ACM Research Inc. (ACMR) as two more names positioned to move higher once technical support confirms.

The Verdict

Volatility is a feature of every hypergrowth bull market I have ever traded. The 1900s automobile shakeout felt like proof the industry was collapsing to the people living through it. It was proof the industry was working exactly as growth industries do: in violent, uneven bursts that reward patience and punish panic. I see the same pattern in AI infrastructure stocks today, and I believe late July, when the hyperscalers report earnings and confirm their capex plans, is the moment this trade reawakens.

Want the full breakdown, charts and all? Watch this week’s episode of Being Exponential, and drop your questions in the comments for a future show, or send them here.

The post The AI Selloff Is Not the End. It Is the Setup. appeared first on InvestorPlace.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by the car they drive. 

Some people like to flaunt their wealth and drive six-figure sports cars or SUVs so large that you need a stepladder to get in. I would bet their investment portfolios are made up of flashy growth stocks. 

Others adopt a practical approach, like owners of an electric Model 3 Tesla or a dark red minivan heading to their kids’ soccer practice. You usually see them wear sensible shoes, and they probably invest their 401(k) in target-date index funds. 

Meanwhile, my dinged-up ten-year-old Mazda tells a rather different story. 

In my case, I came across my white sedan after it already had 70,000 miles on it. It didn’t have cruise control or digital displays. And for a low price of $7,500, including taxes and fees, I bought it.

“Tyler,” as I nicknamed the car, and I are now at 203,000 miles. And we’re still going strong. 

Now, you might guess that my natural investment style is value. And you would be mostly right. My first investments were in airline stocks, and I still get excited whenever I see companies trading at 5X forward earnings. 

But, of course, value alone hasn’t been enough to satisfy portfolios… especially not since the mid-2000s. Over the past decade and a half, growth stocks – like those that make up the Magnificent Seven –  have dominated headlines and delivered some incredible returns.

That has led many investors to believe growth has permanently beaten value. But that conclusion overlooks an important detail: much of growth’s success has come from only a small group of extraordinary companies.

In today’s Smart Money, I’ll share why value investing isn’t dead – and where overlooked opportunities are hiding today.

The Illusion of Growth

Two forces made it look like growth stocks had permanently beaten value stocks after 2008.

First, low interest rates. After the financial crisis, central banks pushed rates lower, making future profits from fast-growing companies more valuable. According to Vanguard analysts, this explained much of growth’s outperformance from 2010 to 2020.

Second, the rise of mega-cap tech companies. Companies like Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) dominated markets. These businesses grew rapidly while avoiding many of the costs that traditionally held back large companies. Then came the AI boom, which pushed even more money into a small group of perceived winners.

Together, these forces created an environment that was almost perfectly designed for growth stocks.

But there’s a catch: Growth’s success was driven by far fewer companies than most investors realize.

While those in the Mag 7 may have soared, many other growth stocks struggled. For example, high-growth stocks like Zoom Communications Inc. (ZM), Peloton Interactive Inc. (PTON), and Roku Inc. (ROKU) soared during the pandemic boom but plunged when higher interest rates revealed their challenges.

Meanwhile, value investing didn’t disappear. It was simply hidden behind the success of a few giants of the 2010s tech revolution. Cheaper, asset-rich firms like Texas Pacific Land Corp (TPL) and Axon Enterprise (AXON) notched 100X returns with barely anyone noticing.

Today, with investors once again captivated by AI’s biggest winners, it can be easy to forget that a handful of companies don’t represent all growth stocks. The better opportunities may be found instead in the overlooked areas of the market.

There are areas where expectations are lower and potential returns are higher.

Here’s where to look…

How to Invest in Value 

Just like my 200,000-mile Mazda, value investing isn’t flashy. It doesn’t make headlines. But it quietly keeps delivering long after the glamorous alternatives have broken down.

The key is finding companies that the market has overlooked – businesses with solid fundamentals, reasonable valuations, and the potential to surprise investors.

That is why Eric recommends a particular hospital automation firm, a fertilizer company, and an oil and gas company expected to grow earnings at around 25% this quarter.

You can learn more about these companies by clicking here.

These companies may not have the excitement of AI’s biggest winners, but history shows that value stocks have rewarded patient investors over the long run.

Value’s long-term track record is only one reason I believe it deserves attention today.

In the latest Fry’s Investment Report monthly issue, released just yesterday, I join Eric to explore another reason:

Why value stocks could be positioned for a comeback sooner than many investors expect.

Understanding where value stands today could help investors avoid chasing yesterday’s winners and uncover tomorrow’s opportunities.

Click here to learn how to read all about it.

Until next time,

Thomas Yeung, CFA

Market Analyst, InvestorPlace

The post What My 200,000-Mile Mazda Taught Me 抖阴最新版 Value Investing appeared first on InvestorPlace.

According to legendary investor 抖阴最新版, that instinct – what psychologists call “recency bias” – causes investors to chase stocks long after much of the easy money has already been made.

In today’s essay, Louis explains why he believes the better approach is to look beyond recent price action and instead focus on where institutional money is quietly moving next. As part of this, he shares a real-world example of his Precursor Intelligence system spotting trouble in one popular AI stock while identifying opportunity in another that most investors were overlooking.

Louis also expands on these ideas in a new presentation, where he explains why July 23 could be an important date for the market, and reveals several stocks his system is tracking today. You can watch it right here.

If Louis is right, the market’s next big winners are already taking shape – they just aren’t the stocks everyone is talking about yet.

I’ll let him take it from here.

Have a good weekend,

Jeff Remsburg

Imagine watching an NBA basketball game, and LeBron James is just lighting it up. He’s made six shots in a row. The game is close. And James is clearly lining up to take another jump shot.

What are the odds he makes it?

In basketball, players and coaches often talk about the “hot hand.” The idea is simple: If someone has made several shots in a row, folks believe he has a greater chance of making the next one.

Sometimes, that instinct may be right.

But often, our brains take what just happened and assume it will keep happening.

That is a simple example of Recency Bias.

And even if you don’t know the technical term, you have almost certainly experienced it.

Take your annual performance review at work. Odds are your supervisor remembers a lot of the work you’ve done over the past month. But they may not remember as many of your accomplishments from nine months ago.

As a result, you’re more likely to be judged by the last month than the last year.

This same bias can influence your decisions as an investor. And it can have a big impact on your portfolio.

The human brain is a marvelous tool for creating art, music, language, and engineering feats.

But it can be a terrible tool for investing.

The more you know about the workings of your own mind, the “bugs” inside it, and how they work against investment performance, the more you can develop strategies to reduce their negative effects.

Let me help you with that.

In today’s issue, I’ll show you how Recency Bias can blind investors to the next big market move. Then, I’ll explain how my Precursor Intelligence system helps me look past what a stock has done lately and focus on the signals that could point to where institutional money is headed next.

The Danger of Rearview-Mirror Investing

In investing, Recency Bias occurs when a stock has momentum, either up or down.

If a stock has been going up for the past six months, folks naturally believe it is likely to keep going up.

The inverse also happens. If a stock hasn’t gone up in six months, it seems unlikely to turn around any time soon.

On a wider level, if it has been years since the last bear market, investors are more likely to believe one isn’t coming soon.

You can see this everywhere in today’s market.

A stock runs for a few months, and investors assume it will keep running. A stock pulls back, and they assume the story is broken. A sector falls out of the headlines, and they assume the opportunity is gone.

That is rearview-mirror investing.

And it can be costly.

When AI Chases the Rearview Mirror

Take Oracle Corp. (ORCL), for example.

Earlier this year, Money.com reported on Danelfin, an AI stock-picking platform that says it identifies stocks likely to outperform over the next 90 days. At the time, Danelfin’s top 10 stocks included Oracle, along with other well-known names like Meta Platforms Inc. (META) and Roblox Corp. (RBLX).

On the surface, that made sense.

Oracle had become one of Wall Street’s favorite AI infrastructure plays. Investors had watched the stock rise, and many assumed the recent momentum would continue.

That is Recency Bias at work.

But my P.I. system was telling me something different.

It was flashing warning signs that the ownership structure was shifting. In other words, the big institutional investors were starting to move out while the crowd was moving in.

Ninety days later, Oracle was down 32%.

Not only that, but Meta was down 12%, and Roblox was down 25%.

That is why recent performance is not enough.

A stock can look strong on the surface while the deeper signals are already starting to weaken.

The reverse can also happen.

Last December, most investors were not putting GE Vernova Inc. (GEV), a company that builds the power infrastructure AI data centers need, on their list of hot AI stocks. They were focused on the obvious names – software companies, chipmakers, and the usual Big Tech leaders.

But P.I. was reading a different signal. My system showed that institutional investors were quietly accumulating GE Vernova. Since then, GE Vernova has climbed roughly 70%.

That’s the power of looking beyond what just happened. Recency Bias keeps investors focused on yesterday’s winners. My P.I. system is designed to help me spot where the big money may be moving next.

A stock can look boring, overlooked, or temporarily out of favor right before institutional money starts moving in.

That is why I developed my stock-grading system in the first place.

Instead of eyeballing a stock chart and guessing what comes next, my system runs the numbers. It analyzes thousands and thousands of data points, including fundamentals and quantitative signals.

And now, with Precursor Intelligence, I’m able to go even deeper.

P.I. is designed to help me identify the early signs that often show up before a major move. It helps me look beyond what has already happened and focus on what could happen next.

That’s the key. Because if you wait until everyone else sees the same opportunity, you may already be too late. By the time the crowd piles in, the easy money may already be gone. And in some cases, the big money may already be heading for the exits.

But you don’t have to let your future be governed by Recency Bias.

All you need is the right tools. And that’s why I built P.I.

Put My System to Work for You

My system isn’t emotional. It doesn’t get impatient. It doesn’t get greedy. And it doesn’t assume a stock will keep rising just because it has been rising lately.

It simply looks for the same kinds of precursor signals that have appeared before many of the great stock moves of my career.

And with second-quarter earnings season about to kick into high gear, I believe this kind of insight could become even more important.

In my new presentation, I explain why July 23 could become a pivotal day for the market and why I’m watching it so closely.

I also show you how P.I. works and reveal several stocks my system says could be next in line as institutional money makes its next move.

Click here to watch now.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

The Editor hereby discloses that as of the date of this email, the Editor, directly or indirectly, owns the following securities that are the subject of the commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, or recommendations in, or which are otherwise mentioned in, the essay set forth below:

GE Vernova Inc. (GEV)

Jeff Remsburg also owns GEV

The post How to Stop Chasing the Wrong Stocks at the Wrong Time appeared first on InvestorPlace.

And every retail investor in America is asking the same question: is it too late to buy oil stocks?

Here’s my answer, after 28 years trading options — including years as a market maker on the CBOE floor: stop asking pundits. The options market already voted, with real money. And I’m going to show you exactly how to read the ballot.

Why Are Oil Prices Surging Today?

Quick recap of the news, because it matters:

President Trump declared the ceasefire with Iran over after three tankers were attacked near the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. struck Iran overnight, with threats of more strikes and a renewed naval blockade to come. The Treasury Department revoked the waiver that had allowed Iran to sell its crude. And the Strait — the chokepoint that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil — is once again effectively closed to most shipping.

That’s the headline story. Now here’s the part the headlines can’t tell you: what the smart money expects to happen next.

The Free CVOL Chart That Answers ’What Comes Next’ for Oil

The CME Group publishes a free tool called CVOL — think of it as the VIX, but for oil (and gold, and silver, and everything else that trades as a future). It’s a speedometer built from real option prices: one number that tells you how BIG a move traders are paying for.

You don’t trade futures? Doesn’t matter. Crude oil options are where the world’s biggest energy traders — producers, refiners, hedge funds — place their real bets. When oil moves, XLE, USO, Exxon and Chevron move with it. This is the X-ray of the market that drives your oil stocks.

Here’s what that X-ray showed today:

Crude oil’s skew ripped higher today. Skew tells you which direction the money leans. When upside calls cost more than downside puts at equal distances from the price, traders are paying for higher prices — not protecting against lower ones. And today, as crude gapped 7%, the skew didn’t just stay positive — it JUMPED, one of its sharpest one-day moves of the year. Traders piled into upside calls.

The expected-movement gauge is elevated too — crude’s CVOL sits around 60, roughly double its calm-market levels — but today’s tell was the skew. That’s the difference between “the market expects movement” and “the market is paying for a SPIKE.” Crude’s upside-skew regime started when the Hormuz crisis first erupted this spring, and today it re-accelerated.

Translation, in plain English: the options market is priced for a market that SPIKES, not one that fades quietly back to $60.

One honest caveat, because I trade this stuff and you should know it: extreme readings cut both ways. When skew gets WAY out of line, you’re often near the top or bottom of a big systematic move. Today’s reading is elevated — not yet at the panic extreme we saw this spring, when it briefly went off the charts before crude pulled back. Watch that.

The Quiet Winners: Refinery Stocks and the Crack Spread

Here’s the part of this story almost nobody is writing about — and it’s where the strongest bid in the energy tape is showing up: refiners.

Quick definition. The crack spread is a refiner’s profit margin. A refinery buys crude oil, “cracks” it into gasoline and diesel, and sells the products. The crack spread is simply the price of what they sell minus the price of what they buy. When product prices rise faster than crude, the spread widens — and refiner profits explode.

Right now, it’s not widening. It’s ripping.

The gasoline crack spread is running above $53 a barrel — near its highest level since June 2022. The standard 3-2-1 refining margin is more than DOUBLE where it sat before the Iran conflict broke out. And that’s with U.S. refineries already running near maximum capacity, in the 92–95% utilization range.

Why? Follow the barrels. With Hormuz restricted, the world isn’t just short crude — it’s short refined products: diesel, jet fuel, gasoline. U.S. Gulf Coast refiners sit in the sweet spot. They buy WTI-based crude — which trades several dollars cheaper than Brent — and sell finished products into a global market paying panic prices. Cheaper input, premium output, maximum volume. That’s the whole business, and right now the math has rarely been better.

The names with that exact profile: Valero (VLO), Marathon Petroleum (MPC), and Phillips 66 (PSX) — the big Gulf Coast independents with WTI-advantaged crude access. Shell has already told the market to expect significantly higher trading results from this volatility; the pure-play refiners are the more direct expression.

Two honest caveats. First, headline crack spreads include renewable fuel credit costs, so true margins are somewhat lower than the sticker number. Second — and this is the real risk — refining margins are cyclical and mean-reverting, and $50+ cracks have already drawn political fire: the White House is publicly demanding lower pump prices. Fat margins attract attention. Trade the spread while it’s wide; don’t marry it.

Oil Stocks and ETFs: What Today’s Spike Means

I’m not going to hand you a buy list — that’s not what this piece is. But here’s the map for the tickers everyone is searching today:

XLE (Energy Select Sector SPDR). The one-click basket of big energy. In a spike regime, the majors inside it — Exxon Mobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX) — benefit from higher realized prices, and Shell has already signaled sharply higher second-quarter trading results on exactly this volatility. But XLE has already moved. The options data says expect violence in both directions, not a smooth ride.

USO (United States Oil Fund). The retail favorite for “just give me oil exposure.” Understand what you own: USO holds crude futures, and in a supply-shock market, futures curves get weird. It tracks the panic on the way up and bleeds in the chop. It’s a trade, not an investment.

Producers with barrels outside the blast radius. When a fifth of the world’s oil is bottlenecked in the Gulf, barrels that DON’T transit Hormuz get more valuable. That’s the lens for U.S. shale names like Occidental (OXY) and the Permian producers. The EIA reported U.S. crude and product exports already hit record levels as the world scrambles for non-Gulf supply.

The trap to avoid: chasing a 7% gap with your whole position. When volatility doubles, position sizes should shrink, not grow. Risk gets decided before entry — that’s not a slogan, it’s how floor traders survive decades.

How to Watch CVOL Yourself (Free, 5 Minutes a Day)

You don’t need my newsletter to track this. Bookmark cmegroup.com/cvol — no account, no cost.

That’s how you stop guessing what traders think and start reading what they’re paying for.

Want to learn to read the market this way every single day?

To learn more, check out the Masters in Trading Challenge — where we teach real, usable information for traders and investors: the same tools, the same process, the same follow-the-money doctrine you just read.

Join the Challenge: InvestorPlace.com/Challenge2026

The post Is It Too Late to Buy Oil Stocks? Here’s What the Options Market Says Happens Next appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Keith has spent years studying recurring seasonal patterns across thousands of stocks. That research became the foundation for TradeSmith’s Seasonality tool, which helps identify historically favorable buying and selling windows. In an 18-year backtest, the strategy produced 857% total growth, more than double the S&P 500 over the same period.

Results like that are hard to ignore. That’s one reason I recently joined Keith for his upcoming Breakthrough 2026 event. In today’s guest essay, he explains how it all works and why timing can matter just as much as stock selection.

If you’d like to learn more, click here to reserve your spot for the free Breakthrough 2026event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. Eastern. When you register, you’ll also get a chance to try the Seasonality tool before the event.

But before you do, here’s Keith to explain more…

****

In June 1944, as the Allies prepared to invade Normandy, their plans hinged on one man, Group Captain James Stagg.

And he was telling General Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Don’t do it!”

Turns out, he was right.

Everyone knows the Allies stormed the beaches on June 6, 1944. What you may notknow is that D-Day was supposed to happen a day earlier – on June 5.

And if Eisenhower had ignored Stagg’s warning… and went ahead with the invasion a day earlier… the Allies could have failed.

Could one day have made that much difference?

Absolutely. Because Stagg’s warning came down to the most fundamental element of planning a seaborne invasion: the weather.

You see, Stagg’s path to the Allied Command was different than that of the more conventional officers in the war-room.

He was a meteorologist best known for leading an Arctic expedition in 1932. And when the war began, he was the superintendent of Kew Observatory — the United Kingdom’s weather-forecasting headquarters.

Now, Eisenhower was asking Stagg for the most crucial observations of his career: conditions in the English Channel ahead of the largest amphibious assault in history. And Stagg’s network of Royal Air Force weathermen had told him that a massive storm was rolling in.

Luckily for the U.K., the U.S., Canada, France, and the world, Eisenhower listened to Stagg. The landings took place on June 6, 1944, after the storm had passed. Eleven months later, the Allies were celebrating victory in Europe.

Timing is important for us as investors, too. It’s tempting to leave buying and selling decisions to gut feel. But at TradeSmith, we believe — like Stagg did — in following the data.

One of those signals is what we call “seasonality” — recurring patterns that repeat year in, year out with remarkable consistency.

I’ll show you how it works today… plus how seasonal trades generated 857% total growth in an 18-year backtest.

Buy on These “Green Days”

I didn’t come to TradeSmith from Wall Street. I’m a software engineer by training.

So, when my team and I went looking for an edge for investors, we didn’t start by asking what should move a stock. We started by asking what the data already shows.

We built software that scans more than 5,000 stocks — decades of price history — and asks a simple question. Does this stock behave differently at certain times of the year than others?

The answer, again and again, was yes.

We’ve found historically reliable windows across thousands of stocks – specific times of the year when they tend to rise or fall.

We call the bullish windows “green days.” And we built a trading system around them that spots these seasonal patterns with an 83% historical accuracy rate.

In other words, they’ve shown up in about eight years out of every 10. That’s not a guarantee they’ll show up again. But it’s a statistical edge you can use to stacks the odds of success in your favor.

Seasonality isn’t new:

• Commodity traders have always tracked planting and harvesting cycles.
• Energy markets move with heating and cooling demand.
• Gold has long shown seasonal strength tied to jewelry demand and annual buying patterns in India and China.
• And stock investors track seasonal patterns like the January Effect and the Santa Claus Rally.

What’s new is that we can now measure it precisely – across thousands of stocks, over decades of data, and down to specific days.

Target Corp. (TGT), for example, has climbed during the same 29-day window — late June into late July — in 15 straight years, gaining an average of 5.2%:

Home Depot Inc. (HD) has done the same between mid-June and late July, rising 93.3% of the time over 15 years, with an average gain of 4.7%:

But rival home improvement store Lowe’s Cos. Inc. (LOW) optimal window comes nearly two months later.

LOW has gone up 86.7% of the time from August 10 to September 11 during the past 15 years, with an average return of 6.1%:

Over an 18-year backtest, these seasonal trades produced 857% in total growth — more than double the S&P 500 over the same stretch. Even in 2007, the worst year in the test, the strategy still came out ahead.

You don’t have to just take my word for it. I’ve asked my team to make a free trial of our Seasonality tool available so you can try it out for yourself.

Test Drive Our Seasonality Software Today

You can try out our software on the stocks you own with this free, limited-time trial version.

We’re making it available ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event. It’s all about the seasonal patterns you need to be aware of in this critical year.

That’s why we’ve made a version of our Seasonality software available for you to explore now.

We’ve unlocked access so you can see the seasonal “green days” for thousands of stocks ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event.

It kicks off Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET.

I’ll walk you through how we uncovered these patterns, why they persist even in chaotic markets, and how you can use them to guide real-world trading decisions.

More important, I’ll be going into detail about the fast-approaching seasonality patterns you need to be aware of.

Knowing when the windows are opening and closing likely matters more to your wealth than any single decision you’ve made.

The first date you’ll want to circle on your calendar is July 16. If seasonality patterns hold this year, it could open up a lucrative trading opportunity in one of the market’s hottest AI stocks.

I hope you’ll join us.

All the best,

Keith Kaplan

CEO, TradeSmith

P.S. Keith has only scratched the surface here. During his free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET, he’ll explain the research behind Trade Cycles, show how his team identifies recurring seasonal opportunities across thousands of stocks, discuss why he believes the market is approaching an important turning point, and share three free stock recommendations. It’s free to attend, but you do need to reserve your seat in advance. Click here to sign up.

The post These Seasonal Trends Take the Guesswork Out of Buying and Selling appeared first on InvestorPlace.

There is a short list of technologies that governments have decided are too important to lose.

They are: Nuclear, semiconductors, satellites, GPS, and the internet itself.

But now AI just made the list.

Recently, Anthropic abruptly disabled its newest frontier models — Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — after the U.S. government ordered it to suspend foreign-national access on national-security grounds. 

As the headlines ran, investors debated whether it was bearish for AI.

But in our view, it’s the single most bullish macro signal for AI infrastructure we’ve seen all year. 

Here’s why.

From Consumer Tool to Strategic Asset: The Regime Change Many Are Misreading 

For the past several years, Washington has treated frontier AI the same way it treated cloud computing, smartphones, or social media: as transformative technology that deserves attention, maybe some guardrails, but nothing approaching this level of control.

The federal government’s ‘cease and desist’ to Anthropic signals a shift of epic proportions. 

By shutting down access on explicit grounds of national security, Washington is saying that AI models are no longer consumer productivity tools. They’re now strategic assets whose access, deployment, and security matter to national power.

That is a regime change. And regime changes of that magnitude almost always have large, durable consequences for capital flows.

The Manhattan Project of Sovereign AI

In 1942, when the U.S. government decided that atomic weapons were a national-security imperative, it built an industrial pipeline to ensure it succeeded — from uranium mining to enrichment to delivery systems — at a scale and speed that had never been attempted in peacetime.

We are watching the early stages of something structurally analogous.

The difference is that the ‘Manhattan Project’ of sovereign AI requires not one centralized government program but an entire ecosystem: domestic semiconductor fabs, secure data center campuses, high-bandwidth networking, stable power grids, and model development labs operating under strict security protocols.

The U.S. has signaled it is serious about building that ecosystem — through CHIPS Act funding, export controls on advanced semiconductors, and now direct national-security intervention in frontier model access. 

Japan became the first international partner in the U.S.’ Genesis Mission, committing $500 million alongside a matching $500 million from the U.S. Department of Energy — a combined $1 billion over five years to advance AI science, next-generation computing, and autonomous laboratory systems through joint teams spanning 12 DOE National Laboratories and 12 leading Japanese research institutions. 

Saudi Arabia’s Project Transcendence is deploying $100 billion toward AI infrastructure, model development, and data centers. 

The UAE has launched G42 as its sovereign AI vehicle, with Abu Dhabi committing billions to domestic compute capacity. 

And China has been quietly building sovereign AI infrastructure for years — ChangXin Memory Technologies scaling domestic HBM production, Huawei developing its own GPU stack, and state-directed capital flowing into data center construction at a pace that rivals the hyperscalers. 

Every one of those commitments reinforces the others. Sovereign AI is now a race — and races don’t have off switches. 

How National Security Classification Sets a Permanent Floor Under AI Infrastructure Spending

Once a technology is classified as critical to national security, the political cost of underfunding it becomes unacceptably high. That means capital will flow regardless of economic cycles, earnings misses, or Fed policy. 

The most sophisticated private capital in the world started repositioning around this thesis before Washington made it official. Where it went will make more sense once you see what’s underneath it.

Because the entire AI infrastructure stack sits directly in the path of that spending.

• Secure compute: Foreign-access restrictions mean domestic, sovereign, security-hardened data centers become a requirement, not a preference. Hyperscaler buildout just got a policy tailwind.
• Chips and memory: If frontier models are strategic assets, the chips that run them are, too. Domestic semiconductor production, Nvidia (NVDA) allocations, high-bandwidth memory supply — all become matters of national priority. That’s structurally bullish for firms like NVDA, Broadcom (AVGO), Micron (MU), and Sandisk (SNDK).
• Networking and optics: AI infrastructure communicates, constantly, at scales that dwarf anything the internet was originally designed to handle. All of it runs across physical fiber, switches, and optical transceivers. Arista Networks (ANET), Ciena (CIEN), and Corning (GLW) are direct beneficiaries.
• Power and cooling: Sovereign AI clusters run continuously, consume extraordinary amounts of power, and generate heat that requires industrial-scale cooling systems. That demand grows with every new model generation — bullish for GE Vernova (GEV), Vertiv (VRT), and Eaton (ETN).
• Cybersecurity: If AI models are now in the same category as military hardware, then the security perimeter around them will be built to military-grade standards. Companies like CrowdStrike (CRWD), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), and Fortinet (FTNT) should thrive as a result.

Together, these trades form a single investment thesis: own the infrastructure layer of a technology that governments have decided they cannot afford to lose. 

The Sovereign AI Race Is Self-Reinforcing: What That Means for the Infrastructure Stack

National-security-motivated government intervention in AI is what transforms this trade from a growth theme into a permanent spending priority. 

It’s the thing that puts a floor under capex cycles that would otherwise be subject to earnings pressure, credit tightening, or executive hesitation.

Once this dynamic is established, it becomes self-reinforcing: each country’s build accelerates the others’, which requires more chips, power, networking, and security.

That’s a flywheel.

Core AI infrastructure names — like NVDA, AVGO, ANET, and VRT — are precisely the companies that benefit most when AI infrastructure becomes a sovereign imperative rather than an enterprise discretionary.

We are watching closely for:

• New government AI infrastructure contracts and sovereign AI fund announcements
• Allied-nation buildout cadence
• Accelerated domestic fab investment, particularly anything related to secure, export-controlled advanced packaging and HBM production
• Security hardware specs for AI data centers — when DoD and allied governments start publishing requirements for secure AI infrastructure, those spec sheets will be a roadmap for which companies win.

There’s one more thing worth watching: the private capital already spinning this flywheel from the inside… 

We’ve analyzed Peter Thiel’s last 13F — zero Nvidia, zero Apple, zero Microsoft, zero Tesla. 

Not trimmed. Out entirely. 

His private fund went into the physical layer of the AI economy — energy infrastructure, nuclear power, and the hard assets that make sovereign AI possible. Most of those positions aren’t accessible to retail investors. But there are seven publicly traded stocks that mirror those same bets almost exactly. That’s the Billionaire’s Backdoor — and sovereign AI just made it more relevant than ever. 

The Anthropic suspension was a declaration that AI matters too much to leave unguarded. And it’s the kind of macro shift that, if you’re positioned correctly, makes careers.

The post The Bearish AI Headline That’s Actually the Most Bullish Signal of the Year appeared first on InvestorPlace.

But according to Keith Kaplan, just as important– if not more – is when you buy.

In today’s Friday Digest takeover, Keith, the CEO of our corporate partner, TradeSmith, explains how his team uncovered recurring seasonal patterns across thousands of stocks – specific windows when certain names have historically outperformed with remarkable consistency.

The goal isn’t to predict the future. It’s to stack the odds in your favor using decades of market data.

Keith also shares why these patterns have become the foundation of TradeSmith’s Seasonality tool, and why he believes several important opportunities are approaching.

If you’d like to see how the system works, Keith will walk through it during his free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET.

To register – and try the tool today for free – click here.

Whether you use this approach or not, I think you’ll come away looking at market timing in a very different way.

I’ll let Keith take it from here.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

In June 1944, as the Allies prepared to invade Normandy, their plans hinged on one man, Group Captain James Stagg.

And he was telling General Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Don’t do it!”

Turns out, he was right.

Everyone knows the Allies stormed the beaches on June 6, 1944. What you may not know is that D-Day was supposed to happen a day earlier – on June 5.

And if Eisenhower had ignored Stagg’s warning… and went ahead with the invasion a day earlier… the Allies could have failed.

Could one day have made that much difference?

Absolutely. Because Stagg’s warning came down to the most fundamental element of planning a seaborne invasion: the weather.

You see, Stagg’s path to the Allied Command was different than that of the more conventional officers in the war-room.

He was a meteorologist best known for leading an Arctic expedition in 1932. And when the war began, he was the superintendent of Kew Observatory — the United Kingdom’s weather-forecasting headquarters.

Now, Eisenhower was asking Stagg for the most crucial observations of his career: conditions in the English Channel ahead of the largest amphibious assault in history. And Stagg’s network of Royal Air Force weathermen had told him that a massive storm was rolling in.

Luckily for the U.K., the U.S., Canada, France, and the world, Eisenhower listened to Stagg. The landings took place on June 6, 1944, after the storm had passed. Eleven months later, the Allies were celebrating victory in Europe.

Timing is important for us as investors, too. It’s tempting to leave buying and selling decisions to gut feel. But at TradeSmith, we believe — like Stagg did — in following the data.

One of those signals is what we call “seasonality” — recurring patterns that repeat year in, year out with remarkable consistency.

I’ll show you how it works today… plus how seasonal trades generated 857% total growth in an 18-year backtest.

Buy on These “Green Days”

I didn’t come to TradeSmith from Wall Street. I’m a software engineer by training.

So, when my team and I went looking for an edge for investors, we didn’t start by asking what should move a stock. We started by asking what the data already shows.

We built software that scans more than 5,000 stocks — decades of price history — and asks a simple question. Does this stock behave differently at certain times of the year than others?

The answer, again and again, was yes.

We’ve found historically reliable windows across thousands of stocks – specific times of the year when they tend to rise or fall.

We call the bullish windows “green days.” And we built a trading system around them that spots these seasonal patterns with an 83% historical accuracy rate.

In other words, they’ve shown up in about eight years out of every 10. That’s not a guarantee they’ll show up again. But it’s a statistical edge you can use to stacks the odds of success in your favor.

Seasonality isn’t new:

• Commodity traders have always tracked planting and harvesting cycles.
• Energy markets move with heating and cooling demand.
• Gold has long shown seasonal strength tied to jewelry demand and annual buying patterns in India and China.
• And stock investors track seasonal patterns like the January Effect and the Santa Claus Rally.

What’s new is that we can now measure it precisely – across thousands of stocks, over decades of data, and down to specific days.

Target Corp. (TGT), for example, has climbed during the same 29-day window — late June into late July — in 15 straight years, gaining an average of 5.2%:

Home Depot Inc. (HD) has done the same between mid-June and late July, rising 93.3% of the time over 15 years, with an average gain of 4.7%:

But rival home improvement store Lowe’s Cos. Inc. (LOW) optimal window comes nearly two months later.

LOW has gone up 86.7% of the time from August 10 to September 11 during the past 15 years, with an average return of 6.1%:

Over an 18-year backtest, these seasonal trades produced 857% in total growth — more than double the S&P 500 over the same stretch. Even in 2007, the worst year in the test, the strategy still came out ahead.

You don’t have to just take my word for it. I’ve asked my team to make a free trial of our Seasonality tool available so you can try it out for yourself.

Test Drive Our Seasonality Software Today

You can try out our software on the stocks you own with this free, limited-time trial version.

We’re making it available ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event. It’s all about the seasonal patterns you need to be aware of in this critical year.

That’s why we’ve made a version of our Seasonality software available for you to explore now.

We’ve unlocked access so you can see the seasonal “green days” for thousands of stocks ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event.

It kicks off Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET.

I’ll walk you through how we uncovered these patterns, why they persist even in chaotic markets, and how you can use them to guide real-world trading decisions.

More important, I’ll be going into detail about the fast-approaching seasonality patterns you need to be aware of.

Knowing when the windows are opening and closing likely matters more to your wealth than any single decision you’ve made.

The first date you’ll want to circle on your calendar is July 16. If seasonality patterns hold this year, it could open up a lucrative trading opportunity in one of the market’s hottest AI stocks.

Reserve your spot here. I hope you’ll join us.

All the best,

Keith Kaplan

CEO, TradeSmith

P.S. Keith has only scratched the surface here. During his free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET, he’ll explain the research behind Trade Cycles, show how his team identifies recurring seasonal opportunities across thousands of stocks, discuss why he believes the market is approaching an important turning point, and share three free stock recommendations. It’s free to attend, but you do need to reserve your seat in advance. Click here to sign up.

The post The Calendar Could Be Hiding Your Next Winning Trade appeared first on InvestorPlace.

And that makes this a perfect time to reassess what’s working in your portfolio… and what isn’t.

You see, a lot has changed since the year began.

Conflict in the Middle East rattled investors and sent crude oil prices soaring. While tensions remain elevated, oil prices have come off their highs, and the market has largely been able to look past that uncertainty.

At the same time, artificial intelligence, data center and memory stocks have continued to dominate Wall Street’s attention. These are still some of the strongest areas of the market, but we’ve also seen how quickly investors can take profits in these names when headlines shift.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve remains a key focus. Wall Street is closely watching every comment from new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh to determine when the next round of rate cuts – or hikes – may arrive.

And, of course, Washington continues to play a major role in the market. New policy shifts tied to artificial intelligence, energy infrastructure and U.S. manufacturing are creating fresh opportunities for investors.

That makes this time of year the perfect time to do a little portfolio cleanup.

Every investor is different… and so I strongly encourage you to evaluate your own situation before making any major decision. But generally speaking, you should ask yourself three key questions before making any major buy or sell in your portfolio:

• What is your risk tolerance…
• What are your financial goals…
• And how long do you have to achieve them?

If you’ve addressed these questions, you’re off to a great start.

And in the rest of today’s Market 360, I want to share 10 stocks my system says you should consider parting ways with now. These aren’t the kind of names you want to hold onto in a changing market environment. Weak fundamentals, deteriorating momentum and poor institutional support… It’s all there in the data.

Let’s take a look…

The Data Says It’s Time to Let These Go

My Stock Grader system (subscription required) runs the numbers on thousands of companies scanning for earnings growth, cash flow, analyst earnings revisions, institutional buying pressure and more. And while it’s currently flagging some very compelling buy opportunities, it’s also flagging plenty of sells.

Some of these may look familiar to you. They may have even been solid performers in the past. But based on the data I’m seeing now, the risk of holding these stocks outweighs the potential reward – especially as we head into the back half of the year.

I encourage you to give this list of stocks a skim. Each one currently has a D or F rating, which means my system considers it either a “Sell” or a “Strong Sell.” So, feel free to adjust your portfolio accordingly…

A New Way to Find the Market’s Next Winners

Now, if you are looking for stocks to replace these sells, I encourage you to focus on fundamentally superior stocks with growing sales and earnings.

That is always the foundation of a strong portfolio.

But right now, I’m also watching for something more specific: the early signals that show where institutional money may be moving next.

Because the biggest gains often do not come from chasing the stocks everyone is already talking about. They come from spotting the stocks that are quietly strengthening before Wall Street fully catches on.

That’s why I’ve been working on a brand-new research project built around something I call Precursor Intelligence.

The idea is simple: Before a major market move hits the headlines, there are often early signals hidden in the data.

Sales growth starts to accelerate… earnings estimates start to rise… institutional buying pressure starts to build…

And certain stocks begin to strengthen long before the crowd fully understands why.

My job is to find those signals early.

And right now, my system is pointing me toward a very specific group of stocks that could benefit as the next stage of the artificial intelligence boom unfolds.

These are not the obvious AI names everyone already knows. But I believe they could become increasingly important as billions of dollars continue flowing into the AI boom.

So, while we’re using today’s Market 360 to clear out weak stocks, I also want to show you where I believe the next wave of opportunity is taking shape.

That’s why I recently recorded a special presentation explaining what Precursor Intelligence is, why I believe this opportunity is still in its early stages and how you can prepare before more investors catch on.

You can check it out right here.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

Editor, Market 360

The post 10 Stocks to Sell as the Second Half Begins appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Editor’s Note: Most investors spend their time deciding what to buy. TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan believes they’re overlooking an equally important question: when to buy it. Drawing on decades of historical market data, Keith and his team have identified recurring seasonal patterns they believe can help investors recognize historically favorable buying and selling windows across thousands of stocks.

In today’s essay, he explains how this research led to TradeSmith’s seasonality strategy, shares a few examples, and offers readers a chance to explore the tool themselves ahead of his free Breakthrough 2026 event on Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET. During the presentation, Keith will explain the research behind the strategy, discuss the market outlook he’s watching closely, and share three free stock recommendations. Try the tool and learn more about Breakthrough 2026 here.

Take it away, Keith…

In June 1944, as the Allies prepared to invade Normandy, their plans hinged on one man, Group Captain James Stagg.

And he was telling General Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Don’t do it!”

Turns out, he was right.

Everyone knows the Allies stormed the beaches on June 6, 1944. What you may not know is that D-Day was supposed to happen a day earlier – on June 5.

And if Eisenhower had ignored Stagg’s warning… and went ahead with the invasion a day earlier… the Allies could have failed.

Could one day have made that much difference? 

Absolutely. Because Stagg’s warning came down to the most fundamental element of planning a seaborne invasion: the weather.

You see, Stagg’s path to the Allied Command was different than that of the more conventional officers in the war-room. 

He was a meteorologist best known for leading an Arctic expedition in 1932. And when the war began, he was the superintendent of Kew Observatory — the United Kingdom’s weather-forecasting headquarters.

Now, Eisenhower was asking Stagg for the most crucial observations of his career: conditions in the English Channel ahead of the largest amphibious assault in history. And Stagg’s network of Royal Air Force weathermen had told him that a massive storm was rolling in.

Luckily for the U.K., the U.S., Canada, France, and the world, Eisenhower listened to Stagg. The landings took place on June 6, 1944, after the storm had passed. Eleven months later, the Allies were celebrating victory in Europe.

Timing is important for us as investors, too. It’s tempting to leave buying and selling decisions to gut feel. But at TradeSmith, we believe — like Stagg did — in following the data.

One of those signals is what we call “seasonality” — recurring patterns that repeat year in, year out with remarkable consistency.

I’ll show you how it works today… plus how seasonal trades generated 857% total growth in an 18-year backtest.

How Stock Seasonality Finds ‘Green Days’

I didn’t come to TradeSmith from Wall Street. I’m a software engineer by training. 

So, when my team and I went looking for an edge for investors, we didn’t start by asking what should move a stock. We started by asking what the data already shows.

We built software that scans more than 5,000 stocks — decades of price history — and asks a simple question. Does this stock behave differently at certain times of the year than others?

The answer, again and again, was yes.

We’ve found historically reliable windows across thousands of stocks – specific times of the year when they tend to rise or fall.

We call the bullish windows “green days.” And we built a trading system around them that spots these seasonal patterns with an 83% historical accuracy rate.

In other words, they’ve shown up in about eight years out of every 10. That’s not a guarantee they’ll show up again. But it’s a statistical edge you can use to stacks the odds of success in your favor. 

Seasonality isn’t new:

• Commodity traders have always tracked planting and harvesting cycles. 
• Energy markets move with heating and cooling demand. 
• Gold has long shown seasonal strength tied to jewelry demand and annual buying patterns in India and China. 
• And stock investors track seasonal patterns like the January Effect and the Santa Claus Rally.

What’s new is that we can now measure it precisely – across thousands of stocks, over decades of data, and down to specific days.

Target Corp. (TGT), for example, has climbed during the same 29-day window — late June into late July — in 15 straight years, gaining an average of 5.2%:

Home Depot Inc. (HD) has done the same between mid-June and late July, rising 93.3% of the time over 15 years, with an average gain of 4.7%:

But rival home improvement store Lowe’s Cos. Inc. (LOW) optimal window comes nearly two months later. 

LOW has gone up 86.7% of the time from August 10 to September 11 during the past 15 years, with an average return of 6.1%:

Over an 18-year backtest, these seasonal trades produced 857% in total growth — more than double the S&P 500 over the same stretch. Even in 2007, the worst year in the test, the strategy still came out ahead.

You don’t have to just take my word for it. I’ve asked my team to make a free trial of our Seasonality tool available so you can try it out for yourself.

Test Drive TradeSmith’s Stock Seasonality Tool

You can try out our software on the stocks you own with this free, limited-time trial version. 

We’re making it available ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event. It’s all about the seasonal patterns you need to be aware of in this critical year.

That’s why we’ve made a version of our Seasonality software available for you to explore now.

We’ve unlocked access so you can see the seasonal “green days” for thousands of stocks ahead of our Breakthrough 2026 event.

It kicks off Thursday, July 16, at 10 a.m. ET. 

I’ll walk you through how we uncovered these patterns, why they persist even in chaotic markets, and how you can use them to guide real-world trading decisions.

More important, I’ll be going into detail about the fast-approaching seasonality patterns you need to be aware of.

Knowing when the windows are opening and closing likely matters more to your wealth than any single decision you’ve made.

The first date you’ll want to circle on your calendar is July 16. If seasonality patterns hold this year, it could open up a lucrative trading opportunity in one of the market’s hottest AI stocks.

I hope you’ll join us.

The post The Best Days to Buy Stocks May Already Be on the Calendar appeared first on InvestorPlace.

As I write on Thursday morning, the biggest headline is that President Trump says Iran called “a little while ago” wanting to make a deal “so badly” – just hours after a second night of U.S. strikes.

But there are plenty of other stories…

South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix – one of the world’s most recently minted trillion-dollar companies – is preparing for its $28 billion American IPO tomorrow. Demand is running roughly seven times the available shares, a loud signal for the AI memory trade.

Meanwhile, on the economic front, this morning’s initial jobless claims came in at a seasonally adjusted 215,000, beating forecasts and down from the prior week. It’s another sign the labor market is holding steady – and a data point that Fed Chair Kevin Warsh will factor in.

We could spend this Digest chasing any one of those threads. Instead, we’re letting them take a backseat for a different purpose…

Putting some money in your pocket.

Today, let’s look at three investment ideas – straight from three of our sharpest analysts.

The first is a straightforward AI play from Luke Lango – built for when the AI trade’s current multiweek drawdown eventually gives way to its next leg higher.

The second is a more conservative way to ride that same AI wave, courtesy of Brian Hunt – and it comes from a corner of the market most investors aren’t watching.

And the third is for AI-weary investors who just need a break from all-things-tech and its recent volatility. It’s a trade from legendary investor 抖阴最新版, built around one of the more overlooked side effects of the conflict in the Middle East.

Let’s get into it.

Luke Lango: “AI just joined the payroll”

Luke, our tech and innovation expert and editor of Innovation Investor, is flagging a shift he thinks most investors are underestimating. AI is turning from a tool people use into labor companies deploy.

This is the shift to “agentic” AI that we’ve been tracking here in the Digest for months.

To illustrate, Luke highlights Kalshi, the prediction-market platform. It has an internal AI agent named “Harrison” doing work that looks like analyst labor – tracking news, monitoring competitors, drafting contract language, and helping resolve markets.

Tying into the investment opportunities, here’s Luke to explain why that matters for the compute build-out:

An AI agent is different.

Give it an objective, and it goes to work — planning, executing, checking its own output, calling tools, querying databases, revising, and iterating until the task is complete.

That continuous loop consumes inference compute on a vastly larger scale.

This reference to “inference compute” is where we find opportunity.

Luke points to estimates from Gartner that agentic AI workflows consume 5X to 30X more tokens per task than single-shot generative AI queries. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs projects that monthly token counts for agentic AI could reach roughly 120 quadrillion by 2030.

Luke’s takeaway for investors:

Follow the compute, and you’ll find the trade. 

It doesn’t matter which app wins, which enterprise deploys the most agents, or which model — GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama — powers them.

What matters is that every agent is sending traffic through the same physical infrastructure stack. And that stack is finite, expensive to build, and currently being stretched to its limits.

Each layer collects a different kind of toll.

Luke breaks the “toll roads” into several categories – accelerators like Nvidia (NVDA), networking and custom silicon such as Credo (CRDO), memory like SanDisk (SNDK), servers and power such as Dell (DELL), optical connectivity like Coherent (COHR), and storage.

For our purpose today, I’ll highlight one of Luke’s “storage” stocks: Everpure (P).

AI agents need fast retrieval from massive datasets, and Luke says storage is where that need shows up first. Here he is with more:

Everpure in particular has been gaining strength beneath the surface.

In Q1 of FY2027, product revenue surged 55%, while subscription services accounted for 45% of total revenue.

Operating profit jumped over 90% year-over-year to $159 million.

His broader point is that as agentic workloads scale, storage isn’t a side character in the AI story; it’s a structural beneficiary. It quietly compounds while the market’s attention stays fixed on chips.

Luke’s closing thought is interesting. While we’ve written many Digests about the economic incentive for companies to shift from a human workforce to an agentic workforce to benefit from lower labor costs, Luke spots a parallel:

Once AI joins the payroll, compute becomes the new labor cost.

The companies supplying the accelerators, networking, memory, servers, storage, power, cooling, and connectivity behind that shift are not side bets on AI. They are the trade.

It’ll be interesting to watch how pricy this new compute “labor cost” becomes – and how that shapes the agentic AI trade.

In the meantime, for the specific AI stocks that Luke officially recommends in Innovation Investor, click here to learn more.

Brian Hunt: Brazil is the AI trade nobody’s talking about

Following Luke’s look at the infrastructure layer behind AI agents, our next opportunity comes from Brian, editor of the free daily newsletter Money & Megatrends – and it takes the AI infrastructure story somewhere unexpected…

Brazil.

In Tuesday’s issue of Money & Megatrends, Brian argues the iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ) is set up to keep climbing, and that AI’s global infrastructure boom is part of the reason why.

Brazil, he notes, is a commodity superpower – and commodities are the backbone of the AI buildout that most investors overlook.

Here he is to explain:

Brazil is a beneficiary of the historic AI infrastructure spending boom…

Brazil’s huge network of rivers also makes it a giant producer of hydroelectric power. This makes it an attractive destination for power-hungry AI data centers.

Brazil also has large reserves of rare earth elements. Demand for these raw materials is soaring thanks to growing demand in AI infrastructure, robotics, and defense tech.

Brian’s been tracking the price action for months. He first flagged Brazilian stocks back in September, and here’s how that call played out:

Soon after my September note, Brazilian stocks – in the form of the iShares Brazil ETF (EWZ) – surged 38% in less than seven months.

It then experienced a natural, healthy bull market correction from mid-April to mid-June.

Now, he says, that correction is over as EWZ looks poised to continue its uptrend.

It’s a reminder that the AI trade isn’t confined to chips and data centers. Somewhere down the supply chain, it runs through rare earths, hydropower, and the raw materials that make the whole buildout physically possible – and Brian thinks Brazil sits right in the middle of that chain.

If you like EWZ, Brian writes Money & Megatrends every day the market is open, highlighting these kinds of opportunities before they become front-page news – and it’s 100% free.

His issues are loaded with trend analysis, actionable advice, and loads of specific tickers. You can sign up right here. 

抖阴最新版: A trade that has nothing to do with AI

To round out today’s lineup, let’s turn to Louis, editor of Growth Investor. Two weeks ago, he recommended a trade that’s aging quite well – U.S. oil refiners.

Louis made this call while the ceasefire was still holding. Now that it’s collapsing, the shortages and refining-margin tailwind he flagged look even more likely to persist.

Backing up, volatile crude prices usually squeeze energy companies from both directions…

Rising crude hits refiners’ feedstock costs – the price they pay for the crude oil they’re about to turn into diesel and jet fuel – before they can pass the increase along. Falling crude does the opposite damage – it marks down the value of the crude oil they’re already holding in storage and pipelines.

But right now, refiners are catching a powerful offset: some of the strongest refining margins in years.

Here’s Louis to explain why:

The conflict in the Middle East has created shortages and increased demand for U.S. energy products.

That has pushed refiners to ramp up production of diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products – and helped drive some of the strongest refining margins in years.

The numbers back him up. In the first quarter, the industry benchmark 3-2-1 crack spread – essentially a snapshot of refiner profitability – jumped 73% on average.

One of the companies riding that tailwind – Louis’ pick – is Phillips 66 (PSX), a diversified energy giant that touches nearly every part of the fuel supply chain. It boasts 12 U.S. refineries, more than 70,000 miles of pipeline, thousands of branded and joint-venture fuel outlets, and a growing renewable fuels business.

That diversification showed up directly in the company’s first-quarter results. Louis highlights how Phillips 66 posted adjusted earnings of $200 million, or $0.49 per share – crushing Wall Street’s estimate for a loss of $0.39 per share.

Analysts have since revised their consensus estimate 60% higher over the past three months, and they now expect second-quarter earnings to soar 179% year-over-year, to $6.64 per share, compared with $2.38 per share in the same quarter a year ago.

Now, Louis made this recommendation on June 26, and his Growth Investor subscribers are already up 11%. That’s pushed PSX above his buy-up-to price of $180 – the stock trades around $189 as I write.

But keep watching here. Any genuine de-escalation in the Middle East would likely ease the shortages driving refining margins higher, which could pull PSX back down – potentially back into Louis’ buy range.

Either way, PSX is a reminder that AI isn’t the only game in town right now. Sometimes the more interesting opportunity is old-fashioned energy infrastructure, catching a tailwind from an entirely different story.

If you want more from Louis, he’s got his eyes on July 23 – exactly two weeks from today – when Q2 earnings kick in.

In his latest presentation, he dives into what his Precursor Intelligence system – or P.I. for short – is digging up right now. Louis designed it to help him identify where institutional money moves next, before the rest of Wall Street catches on. That’s the lens through which he’ll be positioning himself for Q2 earnings.

You can get more details right here – as well as several stocks his system says could be next in line as institutional money makes its next move.

Wrapping up

No big headline analysis today – just three ideas to consider from some of our sharpest analysts…

• An AI infrastructure trade built for the rebound,
• A conservative AI angle running through Brazil,
• And an energy play riding a tailwind that has nothing to do with AI at all.

Given our analysts’ respective track records, each is worth a good look if you’re thinking about putting money to work today.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

(Disclaimer: I own COHR)

The post 3 Investment Ideas With Room to Run appeared first on InvestorPlace.

What are the odds he makes it?

In basketball, players and coaches often talk about the “hot hand.” The idea is simple: If someone has made several shots in a row, folks believe he has a greater chance of making the next one.

Sometimes, that instinct may be right.

But often, our brains take what just happened and assume it will keep happening.

That is a simple example of Recency Bias.

And even if you don’t know the technical term, you have almost certainly experienced it.

Take your annual performance review at work. Odds are your supervisor remembers a lot of the work you’ve done over the past month. But they may not remember as many of your accomplishments from nine months ago.

As a result, you’re more likely to be judged by the last month than the last year.

This same bias can influence your decisions as an investor. And it can have a big impact on your portfolio.

The human brain is a marvelous tool for creating art, music, language and engineering feats.

But it can be a terrible tool for investing.

The more you know about the workings of your own mind, the “bugs” inside it and how they work against investment performance, the more you can develop strategies to reduce their negative effects.

Let me help you with that.

In today’s Market 360, I’ll show you how Recency Bias can blind investors to the next big market move. Then, I’ll explain how my Precursor Intelligence system helps me look past what a stock has done lately and focus on the signals that could point to where institutional money is headed next.

The Danger of Rearview-Mirror Investing

In investing, Recency Bias occurs when a stock has momentum, either up or down.

If a stock has been going up for the past six months, folks naturally believe it is likely to keep going up.

The inverse also happens. If a stock hasn’t gone up in six months, it seems unlikely to turn around any time soon.

On a wider level, if it has been years since the last bear market, investors are more likely to believe one is not coming soon.

You can see this everywhere in today’s market.

A stock runs for a few months, and investors assume it will keep running. A stock pulls back, and they assume the story is broken. A sector falls out of the headlines, and they assume the opportunity is gone.

That is rearview-mirror investing.

And it can be costly.

When AI Chases the Rearview Mirror

Take Oracle Corporation (ORCL), for example.

Earlier this year, Money.com reported on Danelfin, an AI stock-picking platform that says it identifies stocks likely to outperform over the next 90 days. At the time, Danelfin’s top 10 stocks included Oracle, along with other well-known names like Meta Platforms, Inc. (META) and Roblox Corporation (RBLX).

On the surface, that made sense.

Oracle had become one of Wall Street’s favorite AI infrastructure plays. Investors had watched the stock rise, and many assumed the recent momentum would continue.

That is Recency Bias at work.

But my P.I. system was telling me something different.

It was flashing warning signs that the ownership structure was shifting. In other words, the big institutional investors were starting to move out while the crowd was moving in.

Ninety days later, Oracle was down 32%.

Not only that, but Meta was down 12%. Roblox was down 25%.

That is why recent performance is not enough.

A stock can look strong on the surface while the deeper signals are already starting to weaken.

The reverse can also happen.

Last December, most investors were not putting GE Vernova Inc. (GEV), a company that builds the power infrastructure AI data centers need, on their list of hot AI stocks. They were focused on the obvious names – software companies, chipmakers and the usual Big Tech leaders.

But P.I. was reading a different signal.

My system showed that institutional investors were quietly accumulating GE Vernova.

Since then, GE Vernova has climbed roughly 70%.

That’s the power of looking beyond what just happened. Recency Bias keeps investors focused on yesterday’s winners. My P.I. system is designed to help me spot where the big money may be moving next.

A stock can look boring, overlooked or temporarily out of favor right before institutional money starts moving in.

That is why I developed my stock-grading system in the first place.

Instead of eyeballing a stock chart and guessing what comes next, my system runs the numbers. It analyzes thousands and thousands of data points, including fundamentals and quantitative signals.

And now, with Precursor Intelligence, I’m able to go even deeper.

P.I. is designed to help me identify the early signs that often show up before a major move. It helps me look beyond what has already happened and focus on what could happen next.

That’s the key. Because if you wait until everyone else sees the same opportunity, you may already be too late. By the time the crowd piles in, the easy money may already be gone. And in some cases, the big money may already be heading for the exits.

But you don’t have to let your future be governed by Recency Bias or any of the other biases we’ve covered.

All you need is the right tools. And that’s why I built P.I.

Put My System to Work for You

My system isn’t emotional. It doesn’t get impatient. It doesn’t get greedy. And it doesn’t assume a stock will keep rising just because it has been rising lately.

It simply looks for the same kinds of precursor signals that have appeared before many of the great stock moves of my career.

And with second-quarter earnings season about to kick into high gear, I believe this kind of insight could become even more important.

In my new presentation, I explain why July 23 could become a pivotal day for the market and why I’m watching it so closely.

I’ll also show you how P.I. works and reveal several stocks my system says could be next in line as institutional money makes its next move.

Click here to watch now.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

Editor, Market 360

The Editor hereby discloses that as of the date of this email, the Editor, directly or indirectly, owns the following securities that are the subject of the commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, or recommendations in, or which are otherwise mentioned in, the essay set forth below:

GE Vernova Inc. (GEV)

The post The Wrong Way to Predict the Next Big Stock Move appeared first on InvestorPlace.

John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Samsung Electronics Co.?

At first glance, the Beatles and the South Korean tech giant have little in common. Yet both offer an important lesson about expectations.

When the Beatles released Magical Mystery Tour in late 1967, the songs were well-received. It is actually my favorite of the band’s albums.

The accompanying made-for-TV film, on the other hand, was widely criticized.

Audiences expected another polished Beatles triumph, but got something experimental, surreal, and unconventional instead.

Commercially, the project was far from a failure – but it remains a fascinating case study in expectations.

The backlash to the Magical Mystery Tour TV film highlights the “expectation gap,” or the difference between what is presumed to happen and what actually happens.

In the words of the walrus-costume-wearing John Lennon, “Whatever image they have for themselves, they’re disappointed if we don’t fulfill it.”

The same dynamic plays out in financial markets. Stocks don’t move only on results – they move on the gap between results and expectations.

And that means, especially in a market driven by excitement around AI, more isn’t always better.

The AI boom is far from over, but investors may have already priced in an extraordinary future. That means even extraordinary results can disappoint if expectations have become extra-extraordinary.

This brings me to Samsung.

This week, the South Korean tech giant became a modern example of the same phenomenon: It delivered exceptional earnings results… but saw its stock fall because investors expected even more.

In today’s Smart Money, I’ll explain how the same expectation gap that humbled the Beatles is now appearing in the AI market… and why Samsung’s record results still disappointed Wall Street.

Then, I’ll share where to look for opportunity in a market where expectations may matter more than reality.

Let’s dive in…

When Expectations Become the Enemy

For the past few years, the biggest AI winners have been companies selling chips and processors. But that infrastructure is useless without huge amounts of high-performance memory.

As one of the world’s largest memory manufacturers, Samsung is a key supplier in the AI buildout, providing the high-performance memory chips needed to support the rapid expansion of AI computing.

On Tuesday, the company released preliminary second-quarter results showing operating profits jumped a massive 1,800% from a year earlier. This surge was fueled by ongoing global demand for AI memory chips.

Normally, that kind of profit surge would send a stock higher. But Samsung shares dropped sharply after the announcement.

The problem?

While the earnings guidance confirmed the AI boom was real, it didn’t provide a major upside surprise about future growth. Like the Beatles, Samsung became a victim of its own success. The company reported record revenue and profits, but investors still wanted more. Mainly, for Samsung to increase its share of the AI memory market and give shareholders a bigger payoff.

With expectations unmet, a selloff ensued.

But the selloff wasn’t limited to Samsung. The decline rippled across the broader AI supply chain, including other memory-chip makers. Micron Technology Inc. (MU) and SanDisk Corp. (SNDK) dropped 7% and 5%, respectively.

The bottom line is that Samsung delivered what should have been a dream report. Instead, investors sold chip stocks.

What resulted was a Magical Mystery Tour moment of the AI trade: Investors were not celebrating strong AI-related earnings – they were questioning whether expectations had become too high.

Memory stocks have experienced a partial rebound since the Samsung-led selloff, as some investors stepped in to “buy the dip.”

But here’s what I recommend doing instead…

The Importance of Being Early

Panic!

No, don’t really panic. Here’s what I mean…

The best investors don’t wait for obvious risks to become obvious to everyone else. They identify them early and position themselves before expectations begin to reset.

So, although it sounds as unconventional as John Lennon dressed as a walrus, I recommend a healthy dose of preemptive panicking.

I explain this strategy in much greater detail in the July issue of Fry’s Investment Report, which will be available tomorrow. You can learn how to receive it as soon as it’s released by clicking here.

In a market priced for perfection, the smartest move is to avoid the obvious risks first – like owning companies with expectations that have become almost impossible to meet.

Once you’ve done that, you can focus on opportunities where reality still has a chance to surprise on the upside.

When so much of the market’s attention, enthusiasm, and capital is concentrated in just a handful of AI favorites, opportunity often emerges in the places few investors are looking. Some of the most compelling prospects today aren’t the glamorous market leaders. Instead, they’re the overlooked companies quietly building value while everyone else chases the same high-profile names.

In fact, many of my Fry’s Investment Report recommendations are decidedly not market darlings, which means that expectations remain relatively modest. And most trade at discounted valuations despite solid business performance.

I will “tour” several of these companies in my upcoming monthly issue. So, be sure to join me at Fry’s Investment Report today, and then keep an eye on your inbox tomorrow.

If market leadership begins to broaden – as it often does after expectations become stretched – these forgotten stocks could attract fresh capital and deliver outsized returns while yesterday’s favorites struggle under the weight of impossible expectations.

Then, as the Beatles sang on Magical Mystery Tour, “Baby, you’re a rich man.”

Regards,

抖阴最新版

The post Where to Invest When Great News Isn’t Enough appeared first on InvestorPlace.

The AI infrastructure story that has dominated markets for the past two years has had one assumed ending: eventually, every enterprise will migrate its AI workloads to the hyperscaler cloud. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle (ORCL) — pick your platform, pay per token, and let someone else worry about the hardware.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) just added an important asterisk.

This week, SambaNova Systems — an AI chip company that Intel (INTC) reportedly tried to acquire for about $1.6 billion less than a year ago — raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation. 

The customer that made the announcement so interesting was JPMorgan Chase, which selected SambaNova as its inference-infrastructure partner, deploying its systems to power secure, on-premises AI inference at the bank.

The speed of the startup’s re-rating — and who signed on as the anchor customer — isn’t an accident. 

JPMorgan Just Put an Asterisk on the Cloud-Only AI Thesis

The mainstream AI infrastructure thesis assumes that inference demand — the workload created every time an AI model answers a query, writes code, or completes a task — primarily flows through hyperscaler cloud platforms. 

That’s been true so far, and it will remain true for most of the market.

But JPMorgan’s decision points to a segment that the cloud-first narrative underweights: enterprises and institutions that simply cannot send their most sensitive data to a third-party server.

Banks hold client data and proprietary trading strategies they can’t expose. Hospitals manage patient records that federal law requires them to protect. Defense contractors and government agencies often face outright restrictions on running sensitive workloads on commercial cloud infrastructure.

For these organizations, cloud economics are appealing on paper. But that architecture comes with a data exposure risk they can’t accept. 

SambaNova’s CEO framed the JPMorgan win as a signal to the whole banking industry: banks want control over their most sensitive inference, and they’re starting to build for it.  And the vendors that give them that control are about to have a very interesting few years. 

Why Enterprise AI Inference Looks Different From Chatbots

We’ve written at length about the inference supercycle — the shift from AI as a training-era story to AI as a persistent, always-on workload running inside enterprise operations. Agentic AI is accelerating that shift, with agent-based workflows consuming more compute than single-shot queries ever did.

What SambaNova’s round shows is that the inference supercycle has a niche the market hasn’t fully accounted for. 

A meaningful slice of enterprise inference demand won’t flow through hyperscaler APIs. It will run on-premises, inside the firewall, on hardware owned and operated by the enterprise itself.

Liang noted that enterprises and governments are just starting their AI journey, with most growth so far concentrated among tech’s model makers and frontier labs — leaving substantial revenue still on the table. In regulated industries specifically, that revenue goes to whoever sells the hardware, the networking, the storage, and the software stack that makes on-premises inference work.

But the next phase of the AI trade has more moving parts than most investors realize. If you want to hear where I think the smartest money in AI is moving next — my highest-conviction ideas, live and in-person — I’ll be at the Stansberry Conference & Alliance Meeting in Las Vegas later this year. Interested? Reserve your discounted seat before they sell out.

The AI Infrastructure Trade Is Splitting Between Cloud and On-Prem

The picks-and-shovels thesis for AI infrastructure remains intact. The global AI inference market is valued at roughly $120 billion in 2026 and projected to reach $300-plus billion by 2034. That demand has to live somewhere.

Now that “somewhere” is looking a bit more bifurcated. 

Hyperscaler cloud captures the majority of it. Within regulated industries, on-premises inference is forming as its own distinct market. Banks, hospital systems, and government agencies can build a compelling economic case for owning their own hardware. The cost per token math favors on-premises at sufficient utilization. And when the regulatory constraints are real, the economics almost don’t matter. Cloud simply isn’t a viable option for their most sensitive workloads. 

The names positioned for this are the same ones we’ve been writing about. Dell‘s (DELL) AI Factory already has more than 4,000 enterprise customers. Everpure (P) — formerly Pure Storage — has rebuilt its platform specifically to make enterprise data accessible to AI workloads without the overhead of replication. 

JPMorgan’s decision just made their pitch to the next bank a lot easier.

The Bottom Line

SambaNova going from a rumored $1.6 billion acquisition target to raising at $11 billion in under a year reflects something real: private capital has decided that secure, on-premises enterprise AI inference is a durable market, and the price of getting in has changed accordingly. 

The frontier labs and hyperscalers drove the first phase of this trade. The enterprise and sovereign deployment wave is the second phase — and within regulated industries, it plays by different rules. Banks, hospital systems, and government agencies don’t move fast. But when they do, they move at scale, under long-term contracts, with infrastructure budgets that tend to be sticky.

Other banks are likely watching JPMorgan’s move. So are certain corners of healthcare and government. For data-sensitive organizations, this could be the new blueprint. 

The inference supercycle is real, and the hyperscaler cloud will capture most of it. But within sensitive sectors, a structurally distinct market is forming for secure, on-premises inference infrastructure. For the companies best positioned to serve it, it’s a durable one.

And durable infrastructure spend is exactly what the most sophisticated private capital has been positioning around… not at the application layer or the model layer, but underneath all of it.

The energy systems, nuclear capacity, and physical fabrication that make persistent AI compute possible — whether it runs in a hyperscaler’s data center or inside JPMorgan’s firewall — are being secured through private funds and bilateral agreements that most investors never see.

And though most of those positions aren’t accessible publicly, there are seven publicly traded stocks that mirror those same bets almost exactly — the hard-asset backbone of an infrastructure build that isn’t slowing down regardless of where enterprises decide to run their workloads.

Here’s how to get in through the ‘back door.’

The post JPMorgan Just Challenged the Cloud-Only AI Thesis appeared first on InvestorPlace.

As I write on Wednesday, the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is over. At least, that’s how President Trump described it.

Overnight, three commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz came under Iranian attack. The U.S. responded with what Central Command called a “series of powerful strikes,” hitting more than 80 targets across the country. The targets included air defense systems, command-and-control networks, and coastal radar sites.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury withdrew the waiver that had allowed Iran to sell its oil on the global market. And Trump said he may reimpose the naval blockade on Iranian ports.

Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, the president sounded fed up:

I don’t want to deal with them anymore…

As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.

He added that the U.S. would “very probably” strike Iran again by nightfall.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry called the strikes a “gross violation” of the memorandum of understanding both sides signed in June, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claimed to have hit military bases in Kuwait and Bahrain in response.

This leaves investors with a question…

Is this a genuine return to war and, along with it, a sustained spike in energy costs? Or is it just another round of brinkmanship? Trump has hedged before, and he hedged again earlier today, saying he’d let negotiators keep talking “if they want.”

For the moment, the investment markets are unsettled but not panicked – so, they’re treating this as brinksmanship. Stocks are lower, but it’s an orderly retreat, not a stampede for the exits. In fact, as I write, they’re rebounding and well off their lows.

Crude oil is the more interesting story – up about 7% – and that’s the number to watch. Pricier oil means stickier inflation, which means even less room for the Federal Reserve to cut.

There’s plenty riding on how this story evolves. We’ll keep tracking it.

Checking in on the AI trade’s ongoing correction

Semiconductor and AI-related stocks have been under pressure for weeks, and today’s Middle East headlines aren’t helping. But our tech investing expert, Luke Lango, editor of Innovation Investor, has been telling subscribers to zoom out.

In yesterday’s Innovation Investor Daily Notes, he provided helpful context for this AI drawdown, as well as how to handle it in your portfolio.

In short, the semiconductor sector is currently down about 14% from its highs – the 13th correction of 10% or more since the AI boom kicked off in late 2022. None of the previous 12 ended the boom. In fact, semis are still up roughly 565% from the start of 2023, corrections and all.

Luke sees parallels to the Dot Com era: Two separate ~40% semiconductor drawdowns hit between 1995 and 1999, and each one felt like the end of the tech bull market at the time. Neither was. Semis still rallied more than 1,100% into the March 2000 peak.

Here’s his takeaway:

The 13th correction is painful. It is not the end.

Now, a naysayer might respond, “Well, there must be an end at some point. So, why not now?”

Luke has an answer – how the hyperscalers are fueling their AI capex spend, and what that signals about confidence.

Yesterday, news broke that Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is reportedly raising another $25 billion in bonds to fund AI infrastructure. That pushes global AI-related debt issuance to roughly $335 billion this year – more than double 2025 levels.

To Luke, that’s a massive signal – investment-grade bonds don’t get issued in $25 billion tranches, oversubscribed multiple times over, at 30-year maturities, unless the people signing off on them expect decades of cash flow to back it up.

Here’s Luke with the significance for investors:

These are the financing decisions of companies that see an arms race and are raising every dollar they can to stay in it.

Returning to our naysayer from a moment ago, yes, the AI boom will end at some point. But Luke says that will be when the underlying fundamental dynamics powering it suddenly and dramatically reverse course, which is not happening today.

So, what’s the actual game plan for AI investors staring at red screens today?

Luke points toward the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) – a proxy for the AI trade. He says it’s fallen to the exact level where garden-variety corrections have historically bottomed. Buying here in anticipation of a bounce is reasonable as part of a planned accumulation program.

But if SMH doesn’t find support here, there’s a deeper pullback coming. Luke recommends holding some cash in that scenario, where SMH drops toward $560.

Either way, remain focused on the other side of this flush. On that note, here’s Luke’s bottom line:

The late July earnings are the real recovery catalyst, and being positioned before those reports — even if the entry timing is imperfect — is the right posture for investors with a multi-month time horizon.

So, there’s the perspective for tech investors. But if you’re still feeling rattled, let’s give you a trade idea courtesy of veteran trader Jonathan Rose that has nothing to do with AI.

Inside the mind of a “creative trader” – Jonathan’s contrarian Bitcoin play

Most traders see a stock sitting at a fresh record low and do the same thing – walk away.

But for trading veterans like Jonathan, editor of Advanced Notice, ignored setups can create opportunities – and I want to show you one.

First, if you’re new to Jonathan, he spent 28 years on some of the most important trading floors in America – the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, bond futures desks, and four years as a market maker at the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

Over that period, he’s made millions in his own trading account, and it’s rarely because he chased what everyone else was running after. It’s because he searches for value in exactly the spots other traders have written off.

He recently flagged one of those spots to his premier subscribers, and it’s worth walking through – both because it could be a genuinely lucrative setup, and because it’s a perfect window into how Jonathan thinks. As he ends his alerts to subscribers: “Remember, the creative trader wins.”

Here’s what he found…

There’s a corner of the market most people never look

Preferred shares.

It’s a strange hybrid security that trades like stocks but pays fixed income like bonds.

It’s here we find an issuance from Strategy Inc. (MSTR), the Bitcoin-holding company formerly known as MicroStrategy.

That issuance – STRC – has a “home base” price of $100. Think of this as the value the security is designed to trade at, similar to how a bond is meant to trade near its face value.

Recently, this preferred share issuance nosedived to around $75, a fresh record low. It has since bounced back, but still trades in the mid-$80s, well below that $100 home-base price. However, during this time, STRC has been paying a cash dividend equivalent to roughly 14% a year.

Now, the headline reads that STRC is a security in trouble. But Jonathan noticed something buried in Strategy’s own filings…

The company has explicitly stated its intention to defend STRC’s price and pull it back toward that $100 home base, using dividend hikes and buybacks as its levers.

In other words, Strategy has a built-in incentive to fight for this investment’s recovery.

And this points us to the difference between how Jonathan and the average investor view this setup…

While most investors would consider this a trade on Bitcoin, to Jonathan, it’s a bet on Strategy’s own machinery doing exactly what the company says it’s built to do. If it works, investors will collect a 14% cash yield while they wait for a price recovery that could add another 15%-plus on top.

It’s already working for some of Jonathan’s subscribers. Here’s a screenshot of a subscriber writing in to Jonathan, commenting on their trade results so far.

If you can’t see it, he’s up 25% on the preferred share of STRC and that doesn’t even include the first dividend payment.

As always, be aware of the risks

Now, Jonathan is upfront about the obvious risk – it’s something we need to take seriously.

STRC is backed by Strategy’s crypto holdings, and Bitcoin has recently fallen to around $59,500 – roughly 21% below what the company paid for it. That’s squeezed Strategy’s cash position, and the company has started selling some of its Bitcoin to help cover the dividend.

Meanwhile, the preferred share payout itself isn’t guaranteed; it’s discretionary, and the board could cut or suspend it if conditions worsen. That risk is exactly why the yield is this fat – the market is pricing in real doubt.

This is the tension that Jonathan and trading veterans navigate every day: opportunity and risk, tangled together.

Want more trades from Jonathan?

STRC was a call Jonathan made for InvestorPlace’s premier Omnia subscribers after doing a great deal of research into filings and footnotes everyone else skips. But not every opportunity announces itself in a company’s fine print…

Some show up first in the money itself – where large trading positions are building before the rest of the market notices.

That’s what Jonathan built his “Convergence Trigger” tool to spot. Working with market veteran Marc Chaikin, he paired his own Unusual Trading Activity tool with Chaikin’s Money Flow system to flag the moment institutional capital starts piling into a stock – before the move that follows.

To see how it works, click here for a deeper dive.

Wrapping up

Three stories today, yet one common thread: Volatility and uncertainty are the price of admission.

The U.S.-Iran ceasefire is fraying, the AI trade is grinding through its 13th gut-check, and Jonathan’s STRC play only pays off if you’ve priced in the downside, not just the yield.

None of it is risk-free. But it never is.

Our challenge is figuring out which risks are worth taking, not avoiding risk altogether. That’s what we’ll keep helping you do here in the Digest.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

(Disclaimer: I own AMZN and SMH)

The post The Iranian Ceasefire Collapses: What Happens Now? appeared first on InvestorPlace.

I asked Jonathan to clarify in today’s Smart Money that the IPO isn’t the main story — instead, it’s what SpaceX plans to do with the money.

He also shares three stocks he believes stand to benefit as the communications industry adapts to a new reality and explains why this is exactly the kind of second-order market shift he and Wall Street veteran Marc Chaikin built their Convergence system to identify.

If you missed their recent presentation, you can still catch the replay here.

Now, here’s Jonathan…

A few weeks ago, AT&T Inc. (T) dropped more than 4% in a single day.

The headlines blamed a Wall Street analyst.

Oppenheimer’s Timothy Horan had just downgraded the stock after warning that the Starlink satellite constellation business at the newly public Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX) could permanently reshape the communications industry.

Most investors treated that downgrade as the news. I didn’t.

One of the first lessons I learned during nearly three decades trading on the floors in Chicago is that analyst upgrades and downgrades rarely start major trends. More often, they describe those trends after institutional investors – the “smart money” – have already begun repositioning.

Indeed, by the time Horan published his report, AT&T had been sliding for months. His downgrade was reacting to a move that had already begun.

So instead of asking why one analyst had suddenly turned bearish on AT&T, I started asking a different question: How much damage can SpaceX actually do to AT&T and the telecom industry now that it’s sitting on roughly $75 billion in fresh capital?

That question sent me down a rabbit hole. I spent the weekend reading telecom company filings, earnings calls, analyst reports, insider transactions… and SpaceX’s S-1 IPO filing.

I want to share some of my findings with you today.

I’ll explain why I think the SpaceX IPO may permanently reshape the communications business…

Show you how my newest system helps identify opportunities behind these kinds of shifts in the market…

And introduce you to three companies I believe could benefit from that shift.

Starlink Is the Opportunity, Not the IPO

When SpaceX went public, most of the financial media focused on the obvious questions.

Is the valuation too high? Will the share price pop or drop? Who gets rich?

That’s all great water-cooler chatter. But as a trader, I want to know what SpaceX plans to do with the $75 billion it raised.

The answer isn’t more rockets. It’s more Starlink.

For years, Starlink was viewed as an interesting side business, a satellite internet service serving rural customers and places traditional broadband couldn’t easily reach. Today, it’s something much bigger.

It’s the only consistently profitable part of SpaceX’s business. And with fresh capital from the IPO, it suddenly has the resources to expand much more aggressively.

That’s bad news if you’ve spent the last 20 years building expensive fiber networks.

Starlink can connect customers for a fraction of what traditional providers spend on extending broadband into new markets. While cable and telecom companies continue investing billions in wires, trenches, and infrastructure, Starlink is adding subscribers from orbit.

The economics simply aren’t the same.

Here’s what I think happens next.

Every Winner Creates a Loser

One thing markets have taught me is that every technological breakthrough creates two groups of stocks: the obvious winners and the companies quietly losing relevance.

When automobiles replaced horses, investors shouldn’t have focused only on Ford Motor Co. (F). They also should have asked what happened to buggy-whip manufacturers.

Today, we’re seeing a similar transition in telecommunications. Companies like AT&T, Comcast Corp. (CMCSA), and Lumen Technologies Inc. (LUMN) spent decades building infrastructure designed for a different era.

Meanwhile, SpaceX just raised enough capital to dramatically accelerate a competing network built on entirely different economics.

The tape – these stocks’ share prices – recognized that before many analysts did.

That’s why I try to ignore the headlines and pay more attention to second-order effects.

The biggest opportunity is often in understanding which businesses are quietly becoming more valuable – and which ones aren’t.

Three Stocks I’m Watching

So, instead of chasing SpaceX, I’ve been looking at the businesses helping build the next phase of this ecosystem.

One name that continues to interest me is Sunrun Inc. (RUN).

Shortly after the SpaceX IPO, Tesla Inc. (TSLA) and Sunrun announced a framework to aggregate more than 16 gigawatts of home energy capacity for utilities and hyperscale AI customers. The market noticed immediately. Sunrun surged, and my Unusual Trading Activity confirmed the smart money was paying attention as well.

I’m also watching NextNav Inc. (NN).

This has been one of my favorite infrastructure stories for a while. The company controls valuable spectrum assets that become increasingly important as satellite internet expands. It’s exactly the kind of overlooked business Wall Street often reprices after a major industry shift.

And then there’s BlackSky Technology Inc. (BKSY).

As SpaceX launches more satellites and the cost of accessing space continues falling, companies that provide satellite imagery and AI-powered geospatial intelligence stand to benefit alongside it. That’s another second-order effect most investors miss while focusing on the IPO itself.

Now, let me be clear.

I’m not suggesting every company connected to SpaceX becomes a great investment. Far from it.

The opportunity isn’t simply identifying the story. It’s identifying where institutional investors and their billions of dollars are quietly building positions before everyone else recognizes the implications.

That’s an entirely different exercise.

That’s Why We Built Convergence

One phrase I use often on my livestream is this: The tape can’t hide.

Big institutional money leaves footprints. And those footprints are there long before analysts publish upgrades and long before the headlines explain what’s happening.

I’ve spent most of my career learning to recognize those footprints through unusual trading activity and volatility.

Marc Chaikin approaches the same challenge from a different direction. For decades, he’s been developing institutional money-flow tools designed to show where the big money is actually going.

When we started comparing notes, we realized we were often identifying the same opportunities from completely different angles.

I identify unusual market behavior. Marc confirms whether institutional money is moving in the same direction.

And we’ve discovered that when those signals line up – we call it a “Convergence Trigger” – our confidence changes dramatically. That’s why we combined our systems to create Convergence.

And we’re using that new system to examine the ripple effects from the SpaceX IPO and several other major AI themes we’re tracking right now.

Marc and I recently sat down to explain how we’re using the Convergence Trigger to identify these second-order opportunities before they become obvious. If you missed that free presentation, we’ve made it available again for a limited time.

I think you’ll come away with valuable stock ideas and a different way of looking at the market.

While everyone else was debating whether to buy the SpaceX IPO, I was asking what Starlink’s next move would mean for everyone else.

Bottom line: Don’t chase the headline. Trade the ripple effect.

Remember, the creative trader wins,

Jonathan Rose

Founder, Masters in Trading

P.S. One of the reasons I enjoy reading Jonathan’s work is that he never stops at the headline. He asks what happens next. That’s exactly what he did here, and it’s also the thinking behind his work with Marc Chaikin. If you haven’t seen their free presentation yet, I’d encourage you to carve out a little time for it. I think you’ll come away with a few new ways to look at the market and maybe a few opportunities you hadn’t considered.

The post The 3 Stocks Quietly Benefiting From the SpaceX Shakeup appeared first on InvestorPlace.

The honest answer is, I don’t.

Nobody knows ahead of time that a stock is about to double. If someone tells you they do, I’d be skeptical. What you can do is learn to recognize when something deserves a closer look. That’s really what I’ve spent most of my career doing.

A few weeks ago, one of the companies we’d been following at my Masters in Trading LIVE show – uniQure NV (QURE) – nearly doubled after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it was changing its position on one of the company’s drug candidates. Overnight, everybody wanted to talk about it.

What interested me wasn’t the move itself. It was what happened before the move.

For about a week leading up to that announcement, I kept seeing unusually large amounts of trading in the stock. Not random trades here and there, but the same kind of institutional big-money activity showing up over and over again.

That didn’t mean somebody knew what the FDA was going to do. Markets are rarely that simple. But it did tell me it was something worth investigating.

After almost 30 years trading futures and options on the floors in Chicago, I’ve learned that large institutional investors don’t spend millions of dollars casually. When they continue building positions in the same company, I want to understand what they’re seeing that the rest of the market isn’t seeing yet.

Sometimes you do all that homework and discover there’s nothing there.

Sometimes you find a stock that’s about to become the biggest story of the week.

That got me thinking this would be a good opportunity to pull back the curtain a little and show you how I look at biotech.

It’s one of my favorite areas of the market because it plays by a completely different set of rules than most companies people follow every day.

Today I’d like to explain what I mean by that, introduce you to three biotech companies currently on my watchlist, and show you why I think paying attention to institutional behavior can often tell you more than reading the headlines.

Biotech Lives on Its Own Calendar

One of the reasons I enjoy biotech so much is that it really doesn’t care about the same things the rest of the market worries about.

Let’s say during a week, the Federal Reserve surprises everybody, inflation comes in hot, and payroll numbers miss expectations. The stock market as a whole may drop, but biotech stocks will barely move.

Then an FDA decision comes out on a Tuesday morning and one biotech stock is suddenly up 60% before you’ve finished your second cup of coffee. That’s just the nature of the business.

These companies trade on catalysts like clinical-trial results, FDA decisions, and advisory committee meetings. Those are the dates that matter.

That’s why I spend so much time studying regulatory calendars and upcoming events. They tell me when I should start paying closer attention.

The company I mentioned earlier, uniQure, is a perfect example. For months, investors believed its Huntington’s disease treatment faced a difficult road after regulators questioned whether existing data would be enough.

Then the FDA changed its thinking after markets closed on Tuesday, June 16. Suddenly the company everyone had ignored became one of the biggest winners in the market.

UniQure closed that Tuesday at $26.99. Then it opened on Wednesday, June 17, at $43, touched $48.88 intraday, and closed at nearly $48. That’s an 81% gain, overnight. 

Most investors focused on the FDA announcement.

I found myself thinking much more about everything that happened before it.

The Clues Usually Show Up First

When I went back through the trade, what stood out was how many clues had been sitting there beforehand.

Institutional investors had been building upside exposure through the trading market. Everything I was seeing in the trading told me sophisticated investors were leaning toward the upside, not preparing for the downside. That didn’t guarantee anything, but it definitely caught my attention.

That’s really the difference between investing and simply guessing.

I’m not trying to predict what the FDA is going to do. I’m trying to understand where sophisticated investors are placing meaningful bets before the broader market catches on.

Sometimes these smart money players are wrong. That’s part of the business.

But when an important catalyst is approaching, unusual institutional activity begins to appear, and the trading market starts telling the same story, I’ve learned it’s usually worth digging deeper.

The goal here is to build the habits that help you recognize tomorrow’s opportunity before everybody else starts talking about it.

Three Biotech Companies I’m Watching

Whenever a trade like that works, the next question is always the same: “So what’s on your radar now?”

The truth is, I’m never looking for “another” anything. Every company, every trade, has its own story.

But there are three biotech names I’ve been spending a lot of time researching because I think they deserve a closer look.

The first is Ionis Pharmaceuticals Inc. (IONS).What I like here is the calendar. Ionis has multiple potential catalysts over the coming months, which means investors aren’t depending on one make-or-break event. Just as important, I don’t think any trades out there have become overly expensive yet, which gives us more flexibility in how we approach the stock.

I’m also watching Celcuity Inc. (CELC). This one caught my attention because the stock sold off despite encouraging clinical results. Whenever I see a disconnect like that, I start asking why. Even more interesting, several well-respected healthcare funds didn’t head for the exits. They stayed with the company. When experienced institutional investors remain patient after disappointing price action, I think it’s worth paying attention.

The third name is Replimune Group (REPL). This is easily the highest-risk company of the three, and I’d treat it that way. But biotech has never been about certainty. It’s about probabilities. Replimune has meaningful catalysts ahead, and it’s another company where I’m seeing enough pieces come together to justify keeping it on my whiteboard.

Now, let me be clear about something. I’m not telling you these three companies are guaranteed winners. That’s not how biotech works, and it’s not how I trade.

I’m looking for situations where the science, the calendar, and institutional behavior all begin pointing in the same direction. When that starts happening, I think it’s worth leaning in and doing the work.

That’s Why We Built Convergence

One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed working with Marc Chaikin over the past year is that we approach the market from two very different directions.

For most of my career, I’ve focused on unusual trading activity. I want to know where something unusual is happening before everybody else notices. Marc has spent decades studying institutional money flow — where the big money is actually going.

As we started comparing notes, we realized something interesting. We were often identifying the same stocks, but for completely different reasons. That eventually became the foundation for our new Convergence system.

Before we ever introduced it publicly, we tested the approach across nearly 200 historical trades. The combined signal produced an 81% win rate, an average gain of roughly 147%, and helped us avoid nearly two out of every three losing trades.

Backtests are one thing, though. What really matters is how a system performs in the real world.

Over the past month, readers have already reported gains of 243%, 505%, 745%, 920%, and even more than 2,000% using the same approach on a Butterfly Network Inc. (BFLY) trade at one of my premium trading services. Of course, not every trade works out that way, and no strategy wins every time. But early results have only reinforced my confidence that Marc and I are onto something worthwhile.

That’s also why I wanted to write this letter… to show you how I think.

The biggest opportunities rarely come with television cameras and front-page headlines. More often, they start quietly, with institutional money beginning to move before the headlines and TV cameras catch up.

That’s the habit I’ve tried to build over the past three decades. It’s also the habit Marc and I are trying to help our readers develop through Convergence.

If you’d like to see exactly how we’re putting that process to work today — not just in biotech, but across AI infrastructure, space, energy, and several other themes we’re watching — I think you’ll enjoy the free presentation Marc and I recently recorded together.

Click here to check it out.

I believe you’ll come away looking at the market a little differently.

Remember, the creative trader wins,

Jonathan Rose

Founder, Masters in Trading

P.S. One of the things I appreciate most about Jonathan’s work is that he almost never starts with, “Here’s the stock to buy.” He starts with, “Here’s what I’m seeing, and here’s why I think it matters.” That’s a much more useful way to learn. If you’d like to see how Jonathan and Wall Street veteran Marc Chaikin are applying that same approach across biotech, AI, SpaceX, and several other market themes, I’d encourage you to take a little time to watch their free presentation.

The post 3 Biotech Stocks to Watch Before Wall Street Catches On appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Along the border between Myanmar and China, wealthy collectors play a game with rocks.

The rocks are jadeite boulders. They are gray, dull, and roughly the size of a bowling ball. Pretty ugly things, honestly. While some contain a green jade worth millions, most contain nothing at all. But that is not the cruel part… for that, you cannot know which is worth millions and which is worthless until you pay full price and cut the stone open.

Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich tell that story in The Innovation Tournament Handbook, and they add a twist. Imagine, they say, that for a small fee you could drill a tiny test hole first and sample the stone dust before committing your fortune. You’d no longer be gambling but investing… You invest a little to learn a lot. What’s more, your odds of finding the gem increase exponentially.

Think of the AI trade the same way.

After the selloff we have endured through the first half of 2026, the market is a pile of gray boulders. The fundamentals tell me some of these stocks are hiding serious jade. Triple-digit revenue growth. Expanding margins. Multibillion-dollar government contracts. But the tape is broken, and buying a stock in freefall is paying full price for an uncut stone. 

Do not do it! 

Drill the test hole first. Let the technicals confirm a bounce, and then buy.

On this week’s episode of Being Exponential, we ran five subscriber-submitted stocks through exactly that filter. Some passed. Some did not. And one gave us the clearest picture of how to play this entire correction. Let’s dig in.

The Gem With a Cracked Chart

Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) has been hit hard. Very hard. We are down roughly 47% from the highs, matching the stock’s biggest pullback since this uptrend got going in the summer of 2025. We have lost the 50-day moving average. We have lost the 100-day. We broke the March high around $127 emphatically. Only the 200-day is still holding.

That is a cracked chart. No sugarcoating it.

But crack open the fundamentals, and the jade is glowing. We are talking about a company on track to grow revenues about 125% this year to more than $1 billion, then roughly 160% next year to nearly $2.7 billion, then more than 50% again the year after that. Gross margins march from about 30% toward 40% by 2028. EBITDA flips from a loss last year to a projected $500 million-plus by 2027. And you get all of that for about 34 times forward earnings.

There is nothing not to like in that setup. Fundamentally, I mean, it is gorgeous. But I do not catch falling knives. I buy bounces. So my two cents: Wait for AAOI to prove support, and buy the bounce off that support. That is the test hole. Drill it before you pay full price.

Trapped Under the 200

Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is the opposite lesson. A subscriber asked for the buy zone. Right now, there is not one.

Palantir is trapped under a downward-sloping 200-day moving average. It has hit its head on that ceiling once, twice, three times. Rejected all three times. And as the old saying goes, nothing good happens below the 200-day moving average.

The buy zone activates when PLTR retakes that line, currently around $158, and holds above it. Call it a commanding reclaim of the $155 to $160 zone. Until then, I am not constructive. You do not chase stocks that are crashing below the 200. Period.

The King of Outer Space Solar

A subscriber asked which company Elon Musk would tap as the solar infrastructure play for the SpaceX vertical: Redwire (RDW) or Ascent Solar Technologies (ASTI)?

Easy. Redwire has the proof. Redwire powers the International Space Station. Redwire has the contracts, the track record, the incumbency. In an innovation tournament, the later rounds reward the candidates who survive scrutiny, and Redwire has been surviving scrutiny in orbit for years.

Now, the chart demands honesty. I previously identified $15 as the buy zone, and we lost it. Not great. But the stock is holding the $10 to $11 area, where the 100-day and 200-day moving averages converge, and I believe that level holds. If you accumulated at $15, fine. If you missed it, this $10 to $11 zone is the next opportunity. And if we lose that level? Then you start questioning the bull thesis just a little bit. But I do not think we get there. Redwire over ASTI.

The Dual-Optionality Nuclear Play

Last week we covered BWX Technologies (BWXT), and a subscriber countered: Is Cameco (CCJ) the cheaper nuclear alternative?

I recommend Cameco, and here is the numbered logic. One: Cameco is a major uranium producer, and uranium demand rises as the nuclear buildout accelerates. Two: Cameco owns a large stake in Westinghouse, which recently won a massive U.S. government contract to build a fleet of new reactors on American soil. That is dual optionality. Commodity producer on one side, government-backed reactor buildout on the other.

The technicals? Challenged. We lost the 200-day, tried to regain it, lost it again. I do not love that action. But there is heavy support between $90 and $100, and I believe that floor holds and this trend reverses course. If we slice through $90 toward $80, the price action starts challenging the thesis. Until then, the fundamentals win the argument. Wait for the technicals to confirm the fundamental strength, and then act.

One quick word on Datavault AI (DVLT), because a subscriber asked: I do not mess around with 40-cent stocks, and you should not have to either. There are far better AI infrastructure plays out there that do not require digging through the penny bin.

Do Not Fight the Market

Zoom out. The semiconductor complex roughly doubled over a stretch of months, and now we are down about 10%. Painful? Sure. But historically, 10% to 15% pullbacks in the big AI infrastructure ETFs, like the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), are the buy zone. We are in that zone right now. History says this is a buying opportunity.

But history also says you wait for the drill sample. Do not buy until the tape confirms a rebound. Listen to the charts. The best way to lose money in the market is to fight the market. So don’t fight it. Get ready, watch for the bounce, and when the market confirms, get in the game.

Want the full breakdown, charts and all? Watch this week’s episode of Being Exponential, and drop your questions in the comments for a future show, or send them here.

Join Luke Lango in Vegas to Hear His Top Ideas LIVE!

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The featured speaker lineup this year also includes famed actor Henry Winkler (aka “The Fonz” from Happy Days). And attendees will hear from bestselling authors and experts in economics, technology (including AI), and more.

You can expect two days packed with intriguing presentations and fun social events – all in the luxurious city of Las Vegas. It really pays to be in the room where it all happens!

Reserve your discounted ticket today before they sell out!

The post How to Buy This AI Selloff Without Catching a Falling Knife appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Another day, another wobble in the AI trade…

As I write on Tuesday, South Korea’s Kospi just closed down nearly 5%, its sixth circuit-breaker halt of the year. Leading the crash was Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (SSNLF), falling as much as 8% in early trading after delivering its latest earnings report.

But here’s the thing: Samsung’s results were good.

The company guided second-quarter operating profit to about 89.4 trillion won ($58 billion). That’s a roughly 19-fold jump from a year ago. Meanwhile, revenue guidance came in around 171 trillion won, more than double last year’s total.

So, why did the stock get hammered?

Well, investors aren’t punishing the earnings. They’re punishing the overall setup.

Samsung shares had already roughly doubled in 2026 heading into earnings. So, it’s a classic “sell the news” situation, coupled with fears of “can the growth continue apace?”

Meanwhile, this morning also brought news that Chinese AI company DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip. This adds another layer of unease about how much room is left in the memory supercycle.

Put it all together, and “take profits on AI” is the knee-jerk reaction.

For AI investors, some broader perspective can help during moments like this

Here in the Digest, we often dig into the weeds – a Fed decision here, a tariff headline there, an earnings miss that sends a stock reeling for a day or two…

That’s our job – to help you understand what’s happening in real time.

But when we do this, we run the risk of focusing too much on short-term issues that can feel like they have lasting significance – but often don’t.

Many of the “crises” that dominate a week of headlines turn out, in hindsight, to have had real short-term consequences but little lasting impact on the market’s broader trajectory. In other words, while those headlines can be quite significant for short-term traders, they’re mostly noise for long-term investors.

Of course, this can be a problem for investors who forget this distinction. Allowing short-term pressures to affect our long-term positioning is a danger to reaching our investment goals.

Remembering where we are in the big picture is a helpful way to push back against this risk.

How history can help calm rattled nerves

Take a look at the chart below…

It’s the S&P 500 going back to 2017, with a dashed trendline running underneath – a rough approximation for the “spine” of this multiyear climb.

Every major drawdown on this chart – the 2018 selloff, the 2020 COVID crash, the 2022 bear market, last year’s tariff-driven dip – eventually found its way back down to that line before the rally resumed.

But similarly, every exaggerated spike of bullish enthusiasm eventually “came back to Earth,” so to speak. This is just the natural ebb and flow of the market.

Now look again at the chart, zeroing in on where we are today. With the S&P recently touching a fresh all-time high, we’re sitting well above that spine.

That’s not a reason to panic – or even predict an imminent pullback. But it is a reason to remember the “two steps forward, one step back” nature of investing.

A reversion to the spine for both the S&P and the AI trade would be normal

History says these gaps close eventually – sometimes gently, sometimes more violently.

Market analyst Charlie Bilello at Creative Planning ran the numbers on this last year. He studied the market since the March 2009 low, concluding that while the S&P 500 has gained over 1,000% since then (about 16% annually), the return has been anything but smooth.

From Bilello:

There have been 30 corrections since the March 2009 low of more than 5%.

Of these, 10 were larger than 10%, 4 exceeded 20%, and 1 was more than 30%…

In hindsight, it’s tempting to believe you could’ve sidestepped the losses in 2011, 2018, 2020, and 2022, receiving all of the upside since March 2009 with none of the downside. But no one has shown an ability to do so in a repeatable fashion.

Which means that large declines and the fear-inducing narratives associated with them are the price of admission for long-term investors.

And these dips aren’t rare one-off events.

Bilello has also found that in the median year since 1928, an investor in the S&P 500 has experienced a 13% drawdown at some point during the year.

Think about that. Even in “up” years, you might need to sit through a double-digit crash.

For perspective, the pullback we saw between late January and late March this year clocked in at just 9% – smaller than a typical year’s dip.

To be clear, this framework applies to technical pullbacks – prices catching up with themselves. But if earnings growth in the AI trade stalls, or an upstart like DeepSeek creates a technology that changes the economics of AI in a material way, that’s a different conversation, and a legitimate reason to reassess.

But for today, that’s not our situation. Which leaves AI investors with a question…

Which will you believe?

When that pullback comes – and per Bilello, something in that range comes with real regularity – the headlines will not be measured…

You can be sure we’ll see “bubble bursting,” “meltdown,” “the AI trade unwinds,” and so on. That’s not a guess. That’s what the financial media did during every single one of the 30 corrections Bilello just cited.

At that moment, you’ll have a choice…

You can let those headlines set your portfolio decisions for you. Or you can remember that a 10%, or even 20%+, drawdown is the toll every long-term investor has always paid.

Bottom line: Some sort of pullback is coming, and probably one that hurts. How you interpret and respond to it is what actually matters.

Now, when we shift from a long-term investing mindset to a short-term trading one, the situation changes completely.

After all, for traders, volatility creates opportunity…

How Jonathan Rose’s “Convergence Trigger” can help you profit from these selloffs

Our trading expert Jonathan Rose, editor of Advanced Notice, has created a trading system built to capitalize on moments like this.

Jonathan and market veteran Marc Chaikin call it the “Convergence Trigger” – a signal that combines Jonathan’s Unusual Trading Activity tool with Chaikin’s Money Flow to spot exactly when institutional money is piling into a stock before the move happens. Back-tested across nearly 200 trades, it produced an 81% win rate and a 147% average gain.

As we noted yesterday, Jonathan and Marc first introduced this Convergence Trigger at the end of May. Since then, traders have been using it in their own trading portfolios – and many have written in highlighting their results.

Jonathan says these traders have reported gains of 505%, 745%, and even 920% – all just in the weeks since their event.

If you want to see how it works – especially during volatile markets like today – Jonathan and Marc are making their encore presentation available free, for a limited time. Click here to watch.

Coming full circle

Let’s return to Samsung and this morning’s Kospi plunge.

Nothing about a 19-fold profit jump getting punished by an 8% share-price drop breaks the pattern we just walked through. It’s exactly the kind of headline that will dominate the financial press for a day or two, get filed under “AI bubble bursting,” and then fade from memory within a month – while the underlying growth in AI memory demand keeps compounding underneath it.

That doesn’t mean Samsung’s stock is cheap here, or that every AI dip is automatically buyable, or even that there isn’t more pain ahead. It means the instinct to treat one rough session in Seoul as a verdict on the entire AI trade is precisely the instinct Bilello’s numbers warn us against.

If you’re a long-term investor, today’s wobble is the toll you agreed to pay when you bought into AI. And if you’re a trader, today’s wobble is opportunity – which is exactly what Jonathan and Marc built the Convergence Trigger to capture.

Either way, letting fear – or the headlines engineered to produce it – drive your portfolio decisions is always the wrong call.

After all, the market doesn’t punish volatility. It punishes impulsive, knee-jerk reactions to volatility.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

The post Why This AI Drawdown Shouldn’t Rattle You appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Right now, one of the biggest forces changing the market is AI. My friend Jonathan Rose wanted to know whether investors could have spotted the early warning signs before AI disrupted companies like Chegg and Fiverr.

He found four warning signs that appeared before those companies began to lose momentum. Then, he applied that same research to today’s market and identified 14 stocks where he believes those signals are starting to show up again.

To build on that research, Jonathan teamed up with Marc Chaikin, the creator of the Money Flow indicator. Together, they combined Jonathan’s research with Marc’s decades of experience tracking where big investors are putting their money, with the goal of spotting opportunities early before they become obvious.

If you missed their recent presentation, the replay is still available. You can watch it here. 

In today’s guest essay, Jonathan walks through those four warning signs, what they could mean for investors today and where he believes new opportunities may be emerging. Check it out below…

****

I did some research recently that I can’t stop thinking about.

I went back and studied the companies that AI has already destroyed:

• Chegg Inc. (CHGG)
• Fiverr International Ltd. (FVRR)
• Teleperformance SE (TLPFY)

I looked at what they all had in common – not after the AI trend has destroyed them, but before. When the stock was still holding up and nobody was really worried yet.

I found four specific tells. Four characteristics that showed up, in some combination, in every single company before the fall.

Once I had the framework, I started running it forward and applied it to companies that by most measures look fine today. I found 14 names with multiple tells stacking up right now.

Some of them will upset you. You might own a few of them. Someone you respect probably recommended them.

But here’s the important point.

The same four signals that show me where smart money is quietly leaving also show me where it’s quietly arriving.

Institutional capital doesn’t sit in cash. When it rotates out of one place, it shows up somewhere else. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance.

And right now, the somewhere else that smart money is flowing is getting very interesting.

In today’s piece, let’s take a walk through these three things:

The four tells – the warning signs I found in every AI casualty before the market caught on – and the 14 stocks those signals are flashing on right now.

Where the big money rotation is going right now, with some proof from our own track record to back it up.

A stock that sits directly in the path of that rotation. It’s one of the names where both a big trend and the smart money activity are pointing in the same direction at the same time.

Let’s get into it.

The Four Tells – and the 14 Names

I want to be clear: I didn’t start this research by looking for specific companies. I started by asking what the pattern was. Then I let the pattern find the names.

Here’s what I found.

Tell #1: Coordinated insider selling. Not one executive trimming a position for tax reasons. Multiple senior people selling at the same time, across different titles, in size. When the people who know the business best are quietly getting out together, that’s not a coincidence.

Tell #2: Senior talent leaving for AI companies. Top engineers. Product leads. Salespeople who know where the customers are going. When they start moving to OpenAI, Anthropic, or the hyperscalers, they’re not leaving for the money alone. They’re leaving because they can see the trajectory from the inside.

Tell #3: Pricing model changes. When a software company suddenly pivots from per-seat to consumption-based pricing, they’ll call it “innovation.” It isn’t. It’s a response to AI undercutting their business model. Companies that are genuinely winning don’t restructure their pricing under pressure.

Tell #4: CEO denial. This one is almost a perfect inverse signal. The earnings call where the CEO says, “AI cannot disrupt our business – our moat is too wide.” Real moats don’t require that kind of reassurance. When you hear it, pay attention to what’s happening underneath the surface.

The 14 names where I’m seeing multiple tells stack up:

• Salesforce Inc. (CRM)
• Adobe Inc. (ADBE)
• Workday Inc. (WDAY)
• Gartner Inc. (IT)
• Atlassian Corp. (TEAM)
• HubSpot Inc. (HUBS)
• EPAM Systems Inc. (EPAM)
• DXC Technology Co. (DXC)
• Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR)
• ServiceNow Inc. (NOW)
• Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. (CTSH)
• CoStar Group Inc. (CSGP)
• Expedia Group Inc. (EXPE)
• Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP)

I’m not saying they all collapse tomorrow. I’m saying the smart money is repositioning out of them – and historically, price follows positioning. These are names I’m watching carefully, not holding.

The Other Side of the Rotation

The flip side is more interesting.

Everything AI is dismantling in software is simultaneously creating opportunity somewhere else.

One of the biggest beneficiaries may not be another software company at all. It may be biotechnology.

AI is dramatically accelerating how researchers identify drug candidates, analyze massive datasets, and shorten the path from discovery to development. Some industry leaders have even described the next decade as the beginning of a biotech renaissance.

The challenge, of course, is figuring out which companies actually benefit.

Rather than trying to predict which experimental drug will eventually succeed, I prefer to follow the money. Institutional investors have a habit of identifying the most promising opportunities long before the headlines catch up.

One company that’s climbed to the top of my watchlist is Artiva Biotherapeutics (ARTV). Artiva is still a speculative small-cap biotech, and I’ll say that plainly. Success in oncology development is never guaranteed. But that’s precisely why I find it interesting.

What’s catching my attention isn’t simply the science. It’s the combination of institutional buying, improving technical action, and the kind of asymmetric risk profile that has historically produced some of our best opportunities. AI may dramatically accelerate the pace of innovation across biotech, but I still want confirmation that sophisticated investors are putting real money to work.

Which brings me to why Marc Chaikin and I have joined forces.

Marc has spent 60 years in markets. He created the Money Flow indicator that’s now in Bloomberg terminals and virtually every major trading platform on the planet. For decades he built research tools for the world’s biggest hedge funds, and then walked away to give regular investors access to the same analysis.

Marc can tell you where institutional money is flowing. I can tell you where the highest-conviction positioning is building. We both thought those two things were built to work together.

And so, we’ve spent that last few months putting them together to see what happens.

We backtested the combination against nearly 200 of my real trade recommendations. The results surprised even me. Confirmed setups produced 45% higher average gains than unconfirmed ones. Win rate jumped 17 percentage points. And the filter would have kept us out of two-thirds of losing trades.

We’re calling it the Convergence Trigger – and it’s become one of our favorite ways to uncover some of the market’s highest-conviction opportunities. You can see what happens when the signals align right here.

Every stock we highlight has met a strict set of technical, momentum, and money flow criteria. We don’t share these ideas often – only when the signals line up.

When they do, we want our readers to know about them.

Click here to see what we’re watching now.

The creative trader always wins,

Jonathan Rose

Founder, Masters in Trading

P.S. One thing I appreciate about Jonathan’s approach is that he spends less time trying to predict the future and more time tracking where institutional money is actually moving right now. In markets this volatile, that distinction matters. He and Marc Chaikin are breaking down that process during their “Convergence Trigger” presentation. Get your inside look at the process Jonathan uses to identify high-conviction opportunities here.

The post 4 Signs a Company Is 抖阴最新版 to Be Destroyed by AI appeared first on InvestorPlace.

On one side was Bitcoin. Down nearly 30% this year, and below $60,000 for the first time since 2024.

On the other side were Bitcoin miners. Their stocks were up around 56% so far in 2026.

At first glance, it doesn’t make any sense.

For years, those two charts might as well have been one. Bitcoin went up… miners went up. Bitcoin went down… miners went down. That’s just how the market worked.

Except, not anymore.

After nearly three decades trading on the floors in Chicago, I’ve learned that when two things that usually move together suddenly stop moving together, it’s usually because the market has figured something out before everyone else has.

Most investors see a contradiction. Professional traders see a clue.

I want to show you more about that today.

I’m going to explain why Bitcoin miners have quietly become one of the most interesting AI infrastructure stories in the market…

Introduce you to a few companies I think are leading that transition…

And show you why this is exactly the kind of market shift Marc Chaikin and I built our Convergence Trigger system to identify before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

Same Substation. Different Tenant.

Sometimes, companies don’t change, but the market changes the business they’re in. Bitcoin miners are a perfect example.

For years, investors valued them almost entirely on one thing: Bitcoin’s price. That made sense.

Crypto mining companies filled giant warehouses with specialized computers, consumed enormous amounts of electricity, and turned all that power into digital coins. If Bitcoin went up, their economics improved. If Bitcoin fell, investors headed for the exits.

Simple.

Then something unexpected happened: AI kept running into walls. First power, then transformers, and eventually substations, cooling systems, memory, and electrical equipment.

While everyone wants to build AI data centers, utilities can’t magically create new substations, transmission lines, transformers, cooling systems, and grid connections overnight. Those things take years to permit and build.

That’s when the AI hyperscalers started asking a different question —  who already owns massive, energized industrial sites connected directly to the electrical grid?

The answer is Bitcoin miners.

Nothing about their land, electrical infrastructure, or transmission connections changed. The only change was where the demand was coming from.

The companies remain essentially the same, but I don’t think of this business as Bitcoin mining anymore. They’re now AI infrastructure companies that have discovered their most valuable asset isn’t Bitcoin.

It’s electricity.

That’s why those charts suddenly diverged. The market went looking for power, found it in Bitcoin miners, and started repricing them.

And once I saw that, the entire sector started making sense.

Follow the Power, Not the Headlines

This isn’t the first time Wall Street has misunderstood what it was looking at.

During every major technology boom, investors spend the early years obsessing over the obvious winners. Then they slowly realize the real money often sits one layer underneath.

The internet needed fiber, cloud computing needed data centers, and the shale revolution needed pipelines and pressure-pumping equipment.

AI needs electricity – and lots of it.

That’s why I think this transition is still in its early innings.

Wall Street research firm Bernstein estimates publicly traded Bitcoin miners control more than 27 gigawatts of planned power capacity. Many are signing 15- to 25-year agreements with AI customers instead of dedicating those facilities to Bitcoin mining.

That’s an entirely different business model, one with long-term contracts, predictable cash flows, and investment-grade counterparties.

Instead of hoping Bitcoin rallies next month, they’re signing long-term infrastructure contracts.

That’s a very different investment thesis.

Three “Miner” Names I’m Watching

If you’ve been watching at Masters in Trading Live, you’ve probably heard me mention these crypto miners-turned-AI infrastructure names before.

IREN Ltd. (IREN) remains my favorite. The company has partnered directly with Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), continues expanding its power footprint, and — something I really like — has deliberately avoided turning itself into another leveraged Bitcoin proxy. It’s focused on building an AI infrastructure business.

Cipher Digital Inc. (CIFR) has also been making this transition aggressively. We’ve traded it successfully before, and I continue to like what management is doing as it shifts toward long-term AI hosting contracts.

And then there’s TeraWulf Inc. (WULF). I’ve joked on the livestream about it being “Google’s landlord.” That’s obviously an oversimplification, but it captures what’s happening. Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) has invested heavily in the company as TeraWulf transforms some of its Bitcoin-mining sites into AI data center infrastructure. Instead of earning money primarily from mining coins, it’s increasingly getting paid to provide the power, land, and facilities AI companies (including Google) desperately need.

The market used to value these companies based on how many coins they mined. Today it’s beginning to value them based on who leases their AI infrastructure.

Now, I want to be clear.

I’m not telling you to run out and buy every Bitcoin miner you can find. Some will execute this transition well, but plenty won’t.

The opportunity is in knowing which companies big institutional investors – the “smart money” – are quietly accumulating before everyone else starts telling the same story.

That’s Why Marc and I Built Convergence

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that Wall Street almost never announces these transitions.

They don’t ring a bell.

The smart money moves first. A few months later, analysts upgrade the stocks. Then the rest of us see the headlines.

That’s frustrating if you’re trying to stay ahead of the market.

It’s also exactly why Marc Chaikin and I started working together.

I’ve always been comfortable spotting unusual market behavior—moments when the tape starts telling a different story than the headlines. That’s what I did on the trading floor for nearly three decades.

Bitcoin down, miners up. That’s exactly the kind of divergence that gets my attention.

But direction has always been harder.

Marc built his career studying institutional money flow… direction.

When we combined those two approaches, we found something neither of us had on our own. We call it the Convergence Trigger.

Instead of asking, “Is this an interesting story?” we ask, “Are institutions already positioning for it?”

Because by the time everyone agrees Bitcoin miners have become AI infrastructure companies, the biggest gains may already be behind us.

Marc and I recently sat down to explain exactly how we’re using this approach — not just with Bitcoin miners, but across AI infrastructure, SpaceX-related opportunities, and several other market themes we’re watching right now.

If you missed that free presentation, we’ve made it available again for a limited time.

I think you’ll come away with something even more valuable than three stock ideas. You’ll come away with a different way of looking at the market.

You’ll understand that the biggest winners often aren’t hiding at all. They’re simply being misunderstood.

Remember, the creative trader wins.

Jonathan Rose,

Founder, Masters in Trading

P.S. One of the things I appreciate most about Jonathan’s work is that he doesn’t stop at the headline. He asks the next question. In this case, it wasn’t “What is Bitcoin doing?” It was “Why are the miners behaving differently?” That’s the kind of thinking he and Marc Chaikin unpack in their Convergence presentation. If you haven’t watched it yet, I’d encourage you to set aside a little time. I think you’ll see the market a bit differently afterward.

The post Bitcoin Miners Are Now in the AI Business. Here Are Three Worth Watching. appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Editor’s Note: One of the things I appreciate most about Jonathan Rose is that he doesn’t stop at the headline. He asks the next question.

In this case, it wasn’t “what is Bitcoin doing?” but “why are the miners behaving differently?” That’s the kind of thinking he and Marc Chaikin unpack in their Convergence presentation. If you haven’t watched it yet, I’d encourage you to set aside a little time. I think you’ll see the market a bit differently afterward.

In today’s guest essay, Jonathan explains why many of these miners are quietly becoming AI infrastructure plays — and why that shift is still in its early stages, with plenty of runway left. Plus, he identifies three companies that stand to benefit.

Read on for all the details.

The other morning on my daily livestream, I put up a chart that made everyone watching think I’d made a mistake.

On one side was Bitcoin. Down nearly 30% this year and below $60,000 for the first time since 2024.

On the other side were Bitcoin miners. Their stocks were up around 56% so far in 2026.

At first glance, it doesn’t make any sense.

For years, those two charts might as well have been one. Bitcoin went up… miners went up. Bitcoin went down… miners went down. That’s just how the market worked.

Except, not anymore.

After nearly three decades trading on the floors in Chicago, I’ve learned that when two things that usually move together suddenly stop moving together, it’s usually because the market has figured something out before everyone else has.

Most investors see a contradiction. Professional traders see a clue.

I want to show you more about that today.

I’m going to explain why Bitcoin miners have quietly become one of the most interesting AI infrastructure stories in the market… 

Introduce you to a few companies I think are leading that transition… 

And show you why this is exactly the kind of market shift Marc Chaikin and I built our Convergence system to identify before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

Same Substation, Different Tenant: Why Bitcoin Miners Are Becoming AI Infrastructure Stocks

Sometimes, companies don’t change, but the market changes the business they’re in. Bitcoin miners are a perfect example.

For years, investors valued them almost entirely on one thing: Bitcoin’s price. That made sense.

Crypto mining companies filled giant warehouses with specialized computers, consumed enormous amounts of electricity, and turned all that power into digital coins. If Bitcoin went up, their economics improved. If Bitcoin fell, investors headed for the exits.

Simple.

Then something unexpected happened: AI kept running into walls. First power, then transformers, and eventually substations, cooling systems, memory, and electrical equipment.

While everyone wants to build AI data centers, utilities can’t magically create new substations, transmission lines, transformers, cooling systems, and grid connections overnight. Those things take years to permit and build.

That’s when the AI hyperscalers started asking a different question —  who already owns massive, energized industrial sites connected directly to the electrical grid?

The answer is Bitcoin miners.

Nothing about their land, electrical infrastructure, or transmission connections changed. The only change was where the demand was coming from.

The companies remain essentially the same, but I don’t think of this business as Bitcoin mining anymore. They’re now AI infrastructure companies that have discovered their most valuable asset isn’t Bitcoin.

It’s electricity.

That’s why those charts suddenly diverged. The market went looking for power, found it in Bitcoin miners, and started repricing them.

And once I saw that, the entire sector started making sense.

Follow the Power: The AI Trade Hidden Inside Bitcoin Mining Stocks

This isn’t the first time Wall Street has misunderstood what it was looking at.

During every major technology boom, investors spend the early years obsessing over the obvious winners. Then they slowly realize the real money often sits one layer underneath.

The internet needed fiber, cloud computing needed data centers, and the shale revolution needed pipelines and pressure-pumping equipment.

AI needs electricity – and lots of it.

That’s why I think this transition is still in its early innings.

Wall Street research firm Bernstein estimates publicly traded Bitcoin miners control more than 27 gigawatts of planned power capacity. Many are signing 15- to 25-year agreements with AI customers instead of dedicating those facilities to Bitcoin mining.

That’s an entirely different business model, one with long-term contracts, predictable cash flows, and investment-grade counterparties.

Instead of hoping Bitcoin rallies next month, they’re signing long-term infrastructure contracts.

That’s a very different investment thesis.

Three Bitcoin Miners Pivoting Into AI Data Centers

If you’ve been watching at Masters in Trading Live, you’ve probably heard me mention these crypto miners-turned-AI infrastructure names before.

IREN Ltd. (IREN) remains my favorite. The company has partnered directly with Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), continues expanding its power footprint, and — something I really like — has deliberately avoided turning itself into another leveraged Bitcoin proxy. It’s focused on building an AI infrastructure business.

Cipher Digital Inc. (CIFR) has also been making this transition aggressively. We’ve traded it successfully before, and I continue to like what management is doing as it shifts toward long-term AI hosting contracts.

And then there’s TeraWulf Inc. (WULF). I’ve joked on the livestream about it being “Google’s landlord.” That’s obviously an oversimplification, but it captures what’s happening. Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) has invested heavily in the company as TeraWulf transforms some of its Bitcoin-mining sites into AI data center infrastructure. Instead of earning money primarily from mining coins, it’s increasingly getting paid to provide the power, land, and facilities AI companies (including Google) desperately need. 

The market used to value these companies based on how many coins they mined. Today it’s beginning to value them based on who leases their AI infrastructure.

Now, I want to be clear.

I’m not telling you to run out and buy every Bitcoin miner you can find. Some will execute this transition well, but plenty won’t.

The opportunity is in knowing which companies big institutional investors – the “smart money” – are quietly accumulating before everyone else starts telling the same story.

How to Spot the Bitcoin Miners Institutions Are Buying

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that Wall Street almost never announces these transitions.

They don’t ring a bell.

The smart money moves first. A few months later, analysts upgrade the stocks. Then the rest of us see the headlines.

That’s frustrating if you’re trying to stay ahead of the market.

It’s also exactly why Marc Chaikin and I started working together.

I’ve always been comfortable spotting unusual market behavior—moments when the tape starts telling a different story than the headlines. That’s what I did on the trading floor for nearly three decades.

Bitcoin down, miners up. That’s exactly the kind of divergence that gets my attention.

But direction has always been harder.

Marc built his career studying institutional money flow… direction.

When we combined those two approaches, we found something neither of us had on our own. We call it the Convergence Trigger.

Instead of asking, “Is this an interesting story?” we ask, “Are institutions already positioning for it?”

Because by the time everyone agrees Bitcoin miners have become AI infrastructure companies, the biggest gains may already be behind us.

Marc and I recently sat down to explain exactly how we’re using this approach — not just with Bitcoin miners, but across AI infrastructure, SpaceX-related opportunities, and several other market themes we’re watching right now.

If you missed that free presentation, we’ve made it available again for a limited time.

I think you’ll come away with something even more valuable than three stock ideas. You’ll come away with a different way of looking at the market.

You’ll understand that the biggest winners often aren’t hiding at all. They’re simply being misunderstood.

The post Bitcoin Is Down. Miners Are Up. That’s the Signal. appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Micron Technology, Inc. (MU) fell about 14% in just five trading days. Seagate Technology Holdings plc (STX) dropped nearly 18%. And Sandisk Corporation (SNDK) tumbled almost 20%.

At first glance, it looked like investors were dumping AI memory stocks.

But that’s not what happened.

The truth is, last week’s selloff had far more to do with how Wall Street trades than with the companies themselves.

This morning’s rebound is a good reminder of that. Investors are warming back up to AI, helping lift the S&P 500 and NASDAQ higher. But there’s a reason last week’s sell-off happened, and it’s important for you to know.

It’s a pattern I’ve seen before.

Once you understand what caused it, you’ll start looking at sharp pullbacks very differently.

That’s why, in this week’s Navellier Market Buzz, I explain why last week’s AI pullback was more of a Wall Street shakeout than a warning sign. I also share which AI infrastructure stocks are next in line to buy and why I still consider Micron, Seagate and SanDisk “screaming buys” after the selloff.

Plus, I’ll also talk about what the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s recent downgrade in GDP really means, why gold is resurging and my top natural gas pick for this summer.

Click the image below to watch now.

To see more of my videos, click here to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Plus, the grades in Stock Grader (subscription required) have been updated this week! Click here to plug in your own stocks and see how they’re rated.

The Next Turning Point Could Be Days Away

If last week’s pullback taught us anything, it’s that understanding how Wall Street moves can make all the difference.

Stocks don’t just move because of headlines. They move because money moves.

And the key is knowing whether the big money is moving in or out before the crowd figures it out.

But on July 23, that lesson could be put to the test when the second-quarter earnings season kicks into high gear.

I believe what happens that day could reveal where Wall Street is headed next.

But the real challenge is figuring out where it’s headed before everyone else does.

That’s exactly why I built my Precursor Intelligence – or P.I. for short. It’s designed to help me identify where institutional money could move next, before the rest of Wall Street catches on.

With July 23 quickly approaching, that kind of insight could become more important than ever.

In my new presentation, I’ll explain why July 23 could become a pivotal day for the market and why I’m watching it so closely. I’ll also show you how P.I. works and reveal several stocks my system says could be next in line as institutional money makes its next move.

Click here to watch now.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

Editor, Market 360

The Editor hereby discloses that as of the date of this email, the Editor, directly or indirectly, owns the following securities that are the subject of the commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, or recommendations in, or which are otherwise mentioned in, the essay set forth below:

Micron Technology, Inc. (MU), Sandisk Corporation (SNDK) and Seagate Technology Holdings plc (STX)

The post These 3 AI Stocks Just Got Hit, But I Think They’re Screaming Buys… appeared first on InvestorPlace.

As I write on Monday morning, AI stocks are jumping, a welcome change from last week’s selling pressure.

Still, AI has felt different recently. At last Thursday’s close, the AI-heavy Nasdaq 100 had fallen more than 4% since mid-June, and many AI darlings were (and some remain) down double digits.

Over this stretch, the bears have grown louder. For instance, even this morning as tech stocks move higher, CNBC features an article titled “Semiconductor stocks are flashing warning signs of a possible top. What to watch.”

So, let’s revisit the question we must ask periodically: Is this the start of the crash?

According to our hypergrowth expert, Luke Lango, editor of Innovation Investor, no.

Here he is to explain:

The mechanics of today’s price action are classic end-of-half, beginning-of-half repositioning.

Portfolio managers are rebalancing — trimming positions that have run dramatically in H1 to harvest gains and redeploy into underperforming names that look cheap on relative valuation metrics.

This is not driven by fundamental analysis of AI infrastructure demand…

The rotation changes none of that. It only changes the price at which you can buy in to it.

Legendary investor 抖阴最新版 made the same point about portfolio managers rebalancing.

Here’s Louis from a Growth Investor Special Market Podcast last week:

The market is rotating…

We’re now on holiday trading. So, traders have largely cleaned out their inventories and are in the Hamptons or somewhere else for the weekend.

It’s unfortunate they take the winners and have to punish them from time to time, but they’ll bounce right back.

Louis sent out another Special Market Podcast this morning. As tech pushes higher, he tells his readers:

All last week was, was just normal profit-taking headed into the holiday weekend. And now it’s time to focus on earnings.

***Still, such pullbacks can be hard to stomach, so an analogy might help investors worried about the bubble popping

Imagine two balloons: one fully inflated to the point of bursting, the other only half-full. Which one’s easier to pop?

Obviously, the fully inflated one.

Periodic flushes in the AI trade like the one we’ve seen in recent weeks work the same way – air releasing, letting pressure escape before it builds to a popping point.

And when AI stock prices fall while AI earnings keep rising (which they are, as we’ve highlighted in recent Digests), it takes pressure off forward valuations.

While that’s the technical benefit of these selloffs, there’s also a sentiment-related benefit…

Recall last Wednesday’s Digest where I made the point that market tops are almost always marked by rabid greed, FOMO, and a widely held belief that the party will never end. Do these recent headlines sound like that to you?

• “S&P 500 to 5,600? Gareth Soloway says the AI trade is cracking” –The Street
• “‘Yet another way in which 2026 is looking like 1999’: Top analyst fears bubble popping with investors and Wall Street out over their skis” –Fortune
• “A VC Says the ‘All Your Eggs in the AI Basket’ Trade Is Finally Cracking — Here’s Where the Money Goes Next” –24/7 Wall Street

Paradoxically, the late-cycle selloffs that spook investors are part of what keeps a bull market running longer than the bears expect.

So, is the AI trade cracking?

While nobody knows for sure, it’s highly unlikely.

Here’s Luke’s bottom line – and what to do now:

Rotation days are not warnings. They are invitations…

The last time we had price action this extreme — AI stocks down hard, beaten-down software names ripping — SMH was 8% higher within days.

The rotation resolved, the fundamentals reasserted themselves, and the investors who used the flush to add were rewarded.

Today’s rotation is the same pattern…

The second half of 2026 is just getting started. Use the dip.

This brings us to veteran trader Jonathan Rose, who’s been making great use of dips in recent weeks.

Jonathan’s “Convergence Trigger”: the results, and where it’s flashing now

Could I interest you in roughly 900% returns in about a month?

At the end of May, Jonathan and market veteran Marc Chaikin went public with something they’d spent months building together: a system called the Convergence Trigger.

Both Jonathan and Marc’s systems follow institutional money, but from different angles…

Jonathan’s Unusual Trading Activity tool reveals what big players are doing before the move happens. Chaikin’s Money Flow measures the actual flow of capital in or out of a stock in real time.

Together, they create a more complete picture of where institutional money is really going.

And when both signals align on the same trade – resulting in this “Convergence Trigger” – the results from nearly 200 back-tested trades are striking: an 81%-win rate and a 147% average gain. And critically, the combined signal helped avoid two out of every three losing trades.

We’re now roughly one month after Jonathan and Marc debuted the Convergence Trigger. So, how’s it actually performing in real portfolios?

Here are some results shared by Jonathan’s readers:

• “243% gain! With next week being a shortened trading week, now seemed to be a good time to print some money for me!” –Jeff R. (not this Jeff R.)
• “In for $0.20, out for $4.32 — up 2,060%! Thank you!” –Ernie H.
• “JR, I am new but jumped into BFLY. It is flying today and my return has gone parabolic… my return on a relatively large position for me is at least 5X.” – David H

Here’s more from Jonathan:

Readers have reported gains of 505%… 745%… and even 920% – all just in the weeks since our event. You could have seen the same gains yourself if you’d been paying attention.

Better still, we now have a state-of-the-art, AI-powered tool scanning the market for these opportunities for readers 24/7… which is why I expect many more similar gains going forward.

So, where are the latest opportunities?

The Convergence Trigger just flagged a new setup, and it’s an odd one

Bitcoin (BTC) is down nearly 30% this year. But Bitcoin miners, historically glued to Bitcoin’s price, are up around 56%.

Jonathan just dove into this seeming inconsistency, explaining that AI’s endless hunger for power ran into a wall of substations, transformers, and grid connections that take years to build.

So, hyperscalers went looking for companies that already own energized, grid-connected industrial sites. That’s Bitcoin miners.

What are the specific stocks that are benefiting?

Jonathan flags Cipher Digital Inc. (CIFR) and TeraWulf Inc. (WULF). I’ll note that WULF is soaring nearly 14% as I write on news that Anthropic has signed a 20-year lease on a TeraWulf data center in Kentucky.

But even with this news, there’s a third play that Jonthan likes even more:

IREN Ltd. (IREN) remains my favorite.

The company has partnered directly with Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), continues expanding its power footprint, and — something I really like — has deliberately avoided turning itself into another leveraged Bitcoin proxy.

It’s focused on building an AI infrastructure business.

I’ll note that it’s also up about 15% today as I write.

If you want the full walkthrough of how the Convergence Trigger works, click here to watch Jonathan and Marc’s encore presentation. We’re making it available for free again for only a limited time.

Circling back to Bitcoin miners, here’s Jonathan’s bottom line:

I’m not telling you to run out and buy every Bitcoin miner you can find. Some will execute this transition well, but plenty won’t.

The opportunity is in knowing which companies big institutional investors – the “smart money” – are quietly accumulating before everyone else starts telling the same story.

Finally, 抖阴最新版’s copper call – checking the scorecard at the halfway mark

Every January, our global macro expert 抖阴最新版, editor of Fry’s Investment Report, publishes a “Forecast Issue” laying out his boldest calls for the year ahead.

Now that we’re through the first half of 2026, he’s circling back to grade his own homework – and one call in particular stands out.

Back in January, Eric told his readers:

Copper prices will reach at least $7.50 per pound sometime in 2026 – driven by structural supply constraints and accelerating demand for electrification, AI infrastructure, renewables, grid expansion, and industrial modernization.

So, how’s that playing out?

Copper started the year at $5.70 a pound. It’s since climbed to about $6.20 – still a good stretch from Eric’s $7.50 target. But the metal has notched record highs along the way, and half the year still remains.

Meanwhile, the thesis behind the number hasn’t budged. As Eric put it in April:

Copper has always been the wiring of the world. But now, the world is demanding more wiring than it has at any point in history.

AI infrastructure, electrification, decarbonization, data centers, and EVs are all, at bottom, copper stories – a single hyperscale AI data center alone can consume up to 50,000 tons of the metal.

But the supply side isn’t keeping pace…

The International Copper Study Group expects the refined-copper market to swing into a deficit of roughly 150,000 tonnes this year. Eric says it will take more than $200 billion in new mining investment to close the long-term gap – compare that with the roughly $76 billion the industry actually invested over the past six years.

That combination – surging demand, a widening structural deficit – is exactly why Eric says this remains one of the better ways to play the AI boom without paying up for a household-name AI stock.

Bottom line: Copper hasn’t hit Eric’s $7.50 target – yet.

But with six months left on the clock and the structural case intact, he’s not backing off of it.

So, what’s Eric’s favorite way to play it?

Freeport-McMoRan Inc. (FCX), up over 20% year-to-date, and up about 255% in Eric’s Investment Report portfolio.

FCX is just one name on Eric’s buy list today. He also has a “drop immediately” list that flags many broadly owned stocks he believes are at risk today – some of them AI darlings. You can find his full breakdown in his free Sell This, Buy That presentation here.

Coming full circle

Three stories today, one common thread…

Don’t confuse noise for signal.

AI stocks dipping doesn’t mean the bull market’s over. It means portfolio managers have been doing what portfolio managers will do at the end of a quarter.

Meanwhile, a trading system flashing on Bitcoin miners doesn’t mean you chase every crypto-adjacent ticker. It means smart money is quietly repricing the leaders before the headlines catch up.

And copper sitting at $6.20 instead of Eric’s $7.50 target doesn’t mean the forecast was wrong. It means the thesis is well on its way to playing out with six months left.

In every case, the initial noise/headline grabs your attention. But it’s the ensuing signal that’s more likely to make you money.

We’ll keep tracking all of it here in the Digest.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

The post Is AI Cracking – or 抖阴最新版 to Break Out? appeared first on InvestorPlace.

This Week’s Ratings Changes:

Upgraded: Strong to Very Strong

Downgraded: Very Strong to Strong

Upgraded: Neutral to Strong

Downgraded: Strong to Neutral

Upgraded: Weak to Neutral

Downgraded: Neutral to Weak

Upgraded: Very Weak to Weak

Downgraded: Weak to Very Weak

To stay on top of my latest stock ratings, plug your holdings into Stock Grader, my proprietary stock screening tool. But, you must be a subscriber to one of my premium services.

To learn more about my premium service, Growth Investor, and get my latest picks, go here. Or, if you are a member of one of my premium services, you can go here to get started.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

Editor, Market 360

The post Planet Labs Upgraded, Royal Caribbean Downgraded: Updated Rankings on Top Blue-Chip Stocks appeared first on InvestorPlace.

In today’s guest essay, he explains why many of these companies are quietly becoming AI infrastructure plays — and why that shift is still in its early stages. Plus, he identifies three companies that stand to benefit.

It’s also a perfect example of the kind of market transition Jonathan and Wall Street veteran Marc Chaikin built their new Convergence system to identify before the broader market catches on. You can watch their free presentation here.

The other morning on my daily livestream, I put up a chart that made everyone watching think I’d made a mistake.

On one side was Bitcoin. Down nearly 30% this year, and below $60,000 for the first time since 2024.

On the other side were Bitcoin miners. Their stocks were up around 56% so far in 2026.

At first glance, it doesn’t make any sense.

For years, those two charts might as well have been one. Bitcoin went up… miners went up. Bitcoin went down… miners went down. That’s just how the market worked.

Except, not anymore.

After nearly three decades trading on the floors in Chicago, I’ve learned that when two things that usually move together suddenly stop moving together, it’s usually because the market has figured something out before everyone else has.

Most investors see a contradiction. Professional traders see a clue.

I want to show you more about that today.

I’m going to explain why Bitcoin miners have quietly become one of the most interesting AI infrastructure stories in the market…

Introduce you to a few companies I think are leading that transition…

And show you why this is exactly the kind of market shift Marc Chaikin and I built our Convergence system to identify before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

Same Substation. Different Tenant.

Sometimes, companies don’t change, but the market changes the business they’re in. Bitcoin miners are a perfect example.

For years, investors valued them almost entirely on one thing: Bitcoin’s price. That made sense.

Crypto mining companies filled giant warehouses with specialized computers, consumed enormous amounts of electricity, and turned all that power into digital coins. If Bitcoin went up, their economics improved. If Bitcoin fell, investors headed for the exits.

Simple.

Then something unexpected happened: AI kept running into walls. First power, then transformers, and eventually substations, cooling systems, memory, and electrical equipment.

While everyone wants to build AI data centers, utilities can’t magically create new substations, transmission lines, transformers, cooling systems, and grid connections overnight. Those things take years to permit and build.

That’s when the AI hyperscalers started asking a different question —  who already owns massive, energized industrial sites connected directly to the electrical grid?

The answer is Bitcoin miners.

Nothing about their land, electrical infrastructure, or transmission connections changed. The only change was where the demand was coming from.

The companies remain essentially the same, but I don’t think of this business as Bitcoin mining anymore. They’re now AI infrastructure companies that have discovered their most valuable asset isn’t Bitcoin.

It’s electricity.

That’s why those charts suddenly diverged. The market went looking for power, found it in Bitcoin miners, and started repricing them.

And once I saw that, the entire sector started making sense.

Follow the Power, Not the Headlines

This isn’t the first time Wall Street has misunderstood what it was looking at.

During every major technology boom, investors spend the early years obsessing over the obvious winners. Then they slowly realize the real money often sits one layer underneath.

The internet needed fiber, cloud computing needed data centers, and the shale revolution needed pipelines and pressure-pumping equipment.

AI needs electricity – and lots of it.

That’s why I think this transition is still in its early innings.

Wall Street research firm Bernstein estimates publicly traded Bitcoin miners control more than 27 gigawatts of planned power capacity. Many are signing 15- to 25-year agreements with AI customers instead of dedicating those facilities to Bitcoin mining.

That’s an entirely different business model, one with long-term contracts, predictable cash flows, and investment-grade counterparties.

Instead of hoping Bitcoin rallies next month, they’re signing long-term infrastructure contracts.

That’s a very different investment thesis.

Three “Miner” Names I’m Watching

If you’ve been watching at Masters in Trading Live, you’ve probably heard me mention these crypto miners-turned-AI infrastructure names before.

IREN Ltd. (IREN) remains my favorite. The company has partnered directly with Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), continues expanding its power footprint, and — something I really like — has deliberately avoided turning itself into another leveraged Bitcoin proxy. It’s focused on building an AI infrastructure business.

Cipher Digital Inc. (CIFR) has also been making this transition aggressively. We’ve traded it successfully before, and I continue to like what management is doing as it shifts toward long-term AI hosting contracts.

And then there’s TeraWulf Inc. (WULF). I’ve joked on the livestream about it being “Google’s landlord.” That’s obviously an oversimplification, but it captures what’s happening. Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) has invested heavily in the company as TeraWulf transforms some of its Bitcoin-mining sites into AI data center infrastructure. Instead of earning money primarily from mining coins, it’s increasingly getting paid to provide the power, land, and facilities AI companies (including Google) desperately need.

The market used to value these companies based on how many coins they mined. Today it’s beginning to value them based on who leases their AI infrastructure.

Now, I want to be clear.

I’m not telling you to run out and buy every Bitcoin miner you can find. Some will execute this transition well, but plenty won’t.

The opportunity is in knowing which companies big institutional investors – the “smart money” – are quietly accumulating before everyone else starts telling the same story.

That’s Why Marc and I Built Convergence

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that Wall Street almost never announces these transitions.

They don’t ring a bell.

The smart money moves first. A few months later, analysts upgrade the stocks. Then the rest of us see the headlines.

That’s frustrating if you’re trying to stay ahead of the market.

It’s also exactly why Marc Chaikin and I started working together.

I’ve always been comfortable spotting unusual market behavior—moments when the tape starts telling a different story than the headlines. That’s what I did on the trading floor for nearly three decades.

Bitcoin down, miners up. That’s exactly the kind of divergence that gets my attention.

But direction has always been harder.

Marc built his career studying institutional money flow… direction.

When we combined those two approaches, we found something neither of us had on our own. We call it the Convergence Trigger.

Instead of asking, “Is this an interesting story?” we ask, “Are institutions already positioning for it?”

Because by the time everyone agrees Bitcoin miners have become AI infrastructure companies, the biggest gains may already be behind us.

Marc and I recently sat down to explain exactly how we’re using this approach — not just with Bitcoin miners, but across AI infrastructure, SpaceX-related opportunities, and several other market themes we’re watching right now.

If you missed that free presentation, we’ve made it available again for a limited time.

I think you’ll come away with something even more valuable than three stock ideas. You’ll come away with a different way of looking at the market.

You’ll understand that the biggest winners often aren’t hiding at all. They’re simply being misunderstood.

Remember, the creative trader wins.

Jonathan Rose

Founder, Masters in Trading

P.S. One of the things I appreciate most about Jonathan’s work is that he doesn’t stop at the headline. He asks the next question. In this case, it wasn’t “What is Bitcoin doing?” It was “Why are the miners behaving differently?” That’s the kind of thinking he and Marc Chaikin unpack in their Convergence presentation. If you haven’t watched it yet, I’d encourage you to set aside a little time. I think you’ll see the market a bit differently afterward.

The post Don’t Chase Bitcoin – Own the Companies Powering AI appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Prices rose. Producers added capacity. Supply caught up. Prices crashed. Investors learned the rhythm: buy the shortage, sell the expansion, and never forget that the next bust was waiting somewhere down the road. 

Micron’s (MU) latest quarter suggests that rhythm may be changing.

The headline numbers were excellent. Revenue surged, margins hit records, and guidance jumped again.  But the real story was not just the earnings report.

It was the contracts.

Micron disclosed 16 strategic customer agreements designed to give customers long-term access to memory supply through the end of the decade. Many of those agreements include minimum-price terms or pricing bands — basically, protections that give Micron more certainty around what customers will pay. 

In other words, customers are not just buying memory. They are reserving it.

The most valuable memory supply is getting locked up before it ever reaches the open market.

That is not how a normal commodity cycle behaves.

And it’s the part of Micron’s quarter investors should be studying most closely. 

Micron’s Real Story Was 16 Long-Term AI Memory Contracts

Micron’s fiscal Q3 revenue came in at $41.46 billion, up from $23.86 billion the prior quarter and $9.30 billion a year ago. Non-GAAP EPS hit $25.11, while non-GAAP gross margin reached 84.9%. Then came the guidance: roughly $50 billion in fiscal Q4 revenue, about $31 in non-GAAP EPS, and gross margin around 86%.

As impressive as they are, even those numbers were not the most important part of the quarter.

The bigger reveal was that Micron has entered into 16 strategic customer agreements across data center, consumer, and automotive markets. Most run from calendar 2026 through the end of calendar 2030. Several include fixed prices, price bands, floors, or ceilings — terms designed to keep pricing from swinging as violently as it has in past cycles. And according to Micron, even the floor prices in those agreements should support gross margins well above prior cycle peaks. 

That changes the conversation.

Memory has always been cyclical because supply and demand reset through spot pricing. When demand cooled, pricing collapsed. When pricing collapsed, earnings followed. That was the model.

These agreements do not eliminate cyclicality. They do not make Micron immune to downturns. And they do not mean every corner of the memory market will stay tight forever. But they do change the shape of the cycle. 

Instead of relying entirely on customers showing up in the open market, Micron now has customers committing years in advance to secure access to advanced memory. That gives the company more visibility, more pricing protection, and a much stronger hand than memory suppliers typically enjoy at this stage of a boom.

The old memory market was built around inventory swings. The new one is starting to look like a race for guaranteed supply.

Why HBM Is Becoming Strategic AI Supply

A modern AI chip can process enormous amounts of data. But it needs that data delivered fast enough. If the memory cannot keep up, the chip sits there waiting — and performance stalls. 

That is why high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has become one of the most important components in the AI stack.

HBM4 is the next step forward. It can hold more data, move that data faster, and do it more efficiently — exactly what large AI systems need. 

But the bigger tell is what customers are doing around it: locking up supply years before they need it. 

Hyperscalers cannot afford to build billion-dollar AI clusters only to realize they cannot get enough memory to run them efficiently. They cannot build their AI plans around the hope that enough memory will be available later. 

So they are doing what companies do when a resource becomes mission-critical: reserving it ahead of time.

That is a major behavioral shift. Memory is becoming a bottleneck customers feel they have to secure before the shortage gets worse. 

The AI Memory Bear Case Needs More Precision 

Samsung and SK Hynix are sending the same broad signal from the other side of the market .

South Korea recently unveiled a massive semiconductor push involving Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, with plans for the companies and suppliers to invest roughly 800 trillion won — about $518 billion — in new chipmaking capacity, including new memory fabs.

The bear response: this is how memory busts start.

Demand booms. Producers expand capacity. Supply catches up. Prices crack. Stocks fall.

That argument deserves respect because memory history is full of exactly that pattern. But for the AI memory market taking shape now, it is too blunt. 

AI data centers use a very different kind of memory than phones, laptops, and consumer electronics. They need premium, high-performance parts built for massive chips, huge datasets, and dense server clusters.

If the industry produces too much ordinary memory for PCs, phones, and consumer devices, pricing pressure could still return in those markets. But the memory going into AI data centers is not interchangeable with ordinary consumer-device memory. A fab making commodity NAND does not become an HBM4 engine overnight.

So the bear case is not wrong. It just needs to be more precise.

The risk is not ‘more memory supply.’ The risk is the wrong kind of supply.

For investors, that means the old memory-bust playbook is too simple. The winners will likely be the companies selling the right kinds of memory, to the right customers, under the right agreements.

That is where the easy memory trade ends — and the stock-picking begins. 

How to Evaluate AI Memory Stocks Now

None of this means memory stocks have suddenly become risk-free. Memory will still have supply cycles, pricing swings, and inventory corrections. But it may change the shape of the cycle. 

The old memory market was built around spot pricing. The AI memory market is starting to revolve around long-term commitments and guaranteed supply. 

That gives investors a better question to ask. 

Which companies can turn AI memory demand into revenue and profits investors can actually count on?

Three things matter most.

The AI memory trade is now about finding the companies that can turn this demand into profits that last. 

Micron just gave investors a template for what that can look like.

The Bottom Line: AI Memory Is Becoming Strategic Supply

Bears are not wrong to remember history.

Memory has always been cyclical. Supply has always caught up. Pricing has always mattered. Every memory investor who ignores that history eventually pays for it.

But the AI memory market is beginning to behave differently.

Micron’s latest quarter showed explosive demand and something more important: customers willing to lock in supply years in advance because advanced memory has become mission-critical. 

For investors, that means the question has changed. Do not simply ask whether memory demand is strong. Ask which companies have the contracts, the product mix, and the customer commitments to turn that demand into visible earnings power.

The same logic also applies one layer deeper in the AI stack.

The energy, nuclear capacity, and physical fabrication infrastructure that makes persistent AI compute possible is already being locked up — not through public markets, but through private funds, government contracts, and bilateral agreements that most investors never see. By the time those positions surface in headlines, the early window has already closed.

Seven of them still have a publicly traded backdoor. That’s what I’ve spent months mapping.

Take a look at that research.

The post Micron’s 16 Contracts Reveal the Next AI Bottleneck appeared first on InvestorPlace.

In today’s essay, Louis explains why the current moment — the AI boom, the earnings surge, the abundance that still shocks foreign visitors — makes him as bullish as he’s ever been. He also points to a group of AI-related stocks he believes could surge 100% or more in the next six to 12 months.

From all of us at InvestorPlace, we hope you had a wonderful Fourth. Now, take it away, Louis…

In September 1989, Boris Yeltsin came to America.

At the time, he was a rising political figure inside the Soviet Union – a reformer who had begun to question the system he had spent his life serving. He would later become the first president of Russia.

The trip was part diplomacy, part public relations, part fact-finding mission. Yeltsin toured the country, met with officials, and saw the polished version of American power.

But the moment that stayed with him did not happen in Washington, D.C.

It happened in a grocery store in suburban Houston.

After visiting NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Yeltsin and his entourage made an unscheduled stop at a Randalls supermarket. The visit lasted only about 20 minutes, but it left a deep impression.

He saw the meat counter. The produce. The frozen foods. The endless shelves. The choices. The sheer abundance of ordinary American life.

This was no Potemkin village. It wasn’t a special store for party officials or a privileged elite. It wasn’t a dog-and-pony show for foreign visitors.

It was a supermarket where regular Americans bought their milk, bread, beef, and cereal.

One of Yeltsin’s aides later said that the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside him after that visit.

And in hindsight, that grocery-store visit looks like one small scene in a much larger collapse.

Two months later, the Berlin Wall finally came down.

Not long after that, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

The World Gets Another Look at America

For decades, some of the smartest people in the world believed the Soviet Union might catch America. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson even projected that the USSR could reach economic parity with the United States by the late 1980s or 1990s.

The experts had their models. All Yeltsin needed was the grocery store.

Fast forward to today, and something similar is happening.

With the World Cup bringing fans from all over the world to the United States, social media is filling up with videos of foreign visitors having their own “Yeltsin moments.”

Only this time, it’s European soccer fans walking into a Buc-ees and trying to wrap their heads around a gas station with 100 pumps, spotless bathrooms, barbecue sandwiches, and acres of snacks.

It is visitors wandering through Bass Pro Shops and realizing that what Americans call a “store” can include boats, aquariums, waterfalls, hunting gear, and enough outdoor equipment to outfit a small army.

It is people posting videos about Chick-fil-A sandwiches served by polite young workers. It is American suburbs filled with houses that look enormous compared to what many people are used to overseas.

Some of this is funny. Some of it is culture shock. But there is a serious point underneath it.

A lot of these visitors were sold a very different story about America. They were told this country is broken, angry, poor, dangerous, and falling apart. Then they get here, visit our restaurants, walk through our stores, drive through our suburbs, and see the truth with their own eyes.

America is not perfect. Far from it. We have plenty of things to fix.

But the story many people have been told about America is a lie. Sadly, a lot of Americans have bought it, too. They are told every day that their neighbors hate them, that the country is hopelessly divided, and that the American Dream is dead.

I don’t believe that for one second.

We are not as divided as the media makes us seem. And we are not as weak as our critics want us to believe.

The American Investor’s Advantage

America’s everyday abundance still shocks people who did not grow up with it because that abundance is not an accident. It is the result of a system that has spent 250 years rewarding risk-taking, competition, innovation, capital formation, and entrepreneurship.

That’s why I love this country. And it’s why I love being an American investor.

We do not just get to live inside this system. We get to own pieces of it.

The United States is home to roughly 4% of the world’s population, yet we account for more than 26% of global GDP. Even more impressive, America represents about 43% of the world’s total stock market value.

We have the deepest, most dynamic, and most valuable stock market on Earth.

Our companies are building the next generation of microchips, data centers, power systems, software, medical breakthroughs, defense technology, robotics, logistics networks, and financial platforms.

You don’t just get to watch the American growth machine from the sidelines, folks. You can own a stake in it.

And over the long span of U.S. history, that has been one of the smartest things you could do.

Yes, there have been scary periods: wars, recessions, inflation, bear markets, banking crises, terror attacks, and pandemics. Every generation gets its own reason to think the American growth story is finished.

But again and again, America adapts, recovers, and moves higher.

That is why, over the long run, you buy the dips in America. Period.

When the United States’ best companies get knocked down by fear, headlines, or temporary profit-taking, history says those moments can create some of the best buying opportunities you will ever see.

Don’t Let the Bears Fool You

Take the recent volatility in AI-related stocks, for example.

The usual bears were back on television. People like famed British investor Jeremy Grantham were claiming that this is “the most expensive market in history,” warning of a 70% collapse.

Which is just nonsense.

A lot of this negative commentary is emanating from Europe before our American media parrots it. And I don’t think that is a coincidence… especially when it comes to AI.

The reality is Europe has fallen behind in the AI race. The United States has not.

Some of the loudest critics sound less like objective analysts and more like people who are envious of America’s lead. So, instead of celebrating the boom, they complain about it.

But the numbers tell the real story.

The AI boom is not just hype. S&P 500 earnings for the first quarter of 2026 were up nearly 28% year-over-year. FactSet now estimates earnings will grow 23% in the second quarter – and 24% for the full year.

Analysts routinely underestimate earnings, so the real number will likely be even higher. That is stunning, folks.

And the AI buildout behind much of this boom is enormous. The four largest hyperscalers alone are expected to spend about $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year.

That is showing up in real orders, real backlogs and real revenue.

Vertiv Holding Co. (VRT), which provides power and cooling systems for data centers, reportedly has a backlog north of $15 billion. GE Vernova Inc.’s (GEV) gas turbine backlog reached 100 gigawatts in the first quarter. Oracle Corp. (ORCL) has remaining performance obligations of around $638 billion on its books.

By the time it’s all said and done,Goldman Sachs thinks total spending on AI will reach $7.6 trillion between 2026 and 2031.

That is why I continue to believe the best AI and data center infrastructure stocks are screaming buys on meaningful dips.

The center of this boom is not Europe. It is not China. It is not some command-and-control economy where everyday people aren’t allowed to participate.

It is America.

So, as we head into this Fourth of July weekend, I want you to enjoy America’s 250^th birthday celebration. Enjoy the fireworks. Enjoy the cookouts. Enjoy the fact that people from all over the world are coming here and seeing what too many Americans have forgotten.

The U.S. is an economic oasis. And the best way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday isn’t just to watch the fireworks. It’s to own a piece of what makes this country worth celebrating

Find the Next Wave of AI Winners

Right now, the AI boom is creating one of the biggest opportunities we are likely to see in our lifetimes. That is why I want to help you find the right AI stocks now.

I am not talking about the obvious names everyone already hears about on CNBC or sees in every AI-generated list. I am talking about the next wave of AI winners – the companies quietly supplying the chips, memory, cooling, power, storage, software, and infrastructure that make artificial intelligence possible.

That is exactly what my stock-selection system is designed to do.

For 47 years, I have studied the numbers that matter most: sales growth, earnings growth, analyst revisions, and institutional buying pressure. My system helps me track where the real money is moving before most investors have even heard the names.

In my latest special briefing, I reveal a group of AI-related stocks that I believe could be positioned to surge 100% or more over the next six to 12 months. I will also give you the ticker symbol of my No. 1 stock to buy now – free.

Go here to learn more now.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

Senior Analyst,

InvestorPlaceThe Editor hereby discloses that as of the date of this email, the Editor, directly or indirectly, owns the following securities that are the subject of the commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, or recommendations in, or which are otherwise mentioned in, the essay set forth below:

GE Vernova Inc. (GEV) and Vertiv Holding Co. (VRT)

The post Why You Should Be Proud to Be an American Investor appeared first on InvestorPlace.

In the days following its IPO, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX) surged 25%, rewarding early investors and turning its owner, Elon Musk, into a trillionaire. The following week the stock sank below $160, sending most investors into the red and forcing Musk back into the “lowly” hundreds-billionaire class.

SpaceX isn’t alone in its volatility. That same week, shares of Micron Technology Inc. (MU) gapped down 15% on a broader tech selloff before shooting straight back up on blowout earnings.

As InvestorPlace Senior Analyst 抖阴最新版 noted in a recent Market 360 issue, the AI market has been all over the place lately.

Now, this sometimes happens during late-stage rallies. Traders know that certain stocks are overbought, so they sell out at the first sign of trouble. A tiny dip can trigger a panic.

But as I mentioned in last Sunday’s Digest, this volatility is also a byproduct of artificial intelligence. Millions of trading algorithms, advisors, and investors are increasingly relying on the same AI-powered tools. And it’s creating a new kind of “trading convergence” that causes people to jump in and out of stocks at the same time.

It can lead to massive losses of wealth when trades go wrong.

That’s why Louis rarely chases the crowd. Instead, he’s looking for signs that typically happen before AI systems catch wind, with the help of his system called Precursor Intelligence (P.I.). It helps him find companies with improving fundamentals and accelerating money flow before every AI tool jumps on board. You can click here to hear him talk more about it.

Last week, I showcased three of these top picks: Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN), Monolithic Power Systems Inc. (MPWR), and Oncology Institute Inc. (TOI).

This week, I’d like to add two more.

Stock to Buy #1: The AI Dark Horse

Over the past two months, shares of Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) have lagged the broader AI market. Its top-rated Gemini model is now the fifth best, as graded by Artificial Analysis, an AI benchmarking firm. It will soon fall to sixth place when OpenAI’s latest GPT-5.6 version finishes its testing. Alphabet’s shares have slipped 10% since their mid-May peak.

Gemini (dark green) is starting to look rather average

Yet, Louis’ system believes this bearishness is overdone. The company earns an “A” grade for its “follow the money” score and has the receipts to back it up. The company is one of the fastest-growing companies in our universe of stocks, and it’s the only hyperscale AI data center firm expected to remain cashflow positive in every quarter this year.

I believe this assessment is right on several counts, which I outlined last month. Alphabet has a dominant search business, efficient data center chips, and momentum against OpenAI. Together, this suggests its fair stock value is somewhere in the mid-$400 range; it’s now trading around $355.

And a recent AI model launch by Chinese startup Z.ai only reinforces that conviction.

On June 13, Z.ai launched a large language model (LLM) called GLM-5.2, which Artificial Analysis determined is better than Alphabet’s two flagship models. And after test-riding the new LLM, I believe this is a surprisingly good development for Alphabet because the system is entirely open-source. Users can download GLM-5.2 for free, read through its source code, and take anything they like for their own use.

In other words, Alphabet can take the model for itself.

That should prove a windfall for the search giant, which was previously fighting two separate battles:

GLM-5.2 helps fight that first, since it’s good enough for daily use and surprisingly cheap to run. You don’t need a cutting-edge model to give directions to the nearest golf course… and you certainly don’t need one to set a 7 a.m. phone alarm. You only need something that’s dependable enough not to wake you up at 3 a.m. or send you to the wrong place.

That means Google can focus on that second arena, where it is already doing quite well. The company doubled the number of $100 million to $1 billion deals in its most recent quarter. And now that it can focus its efforts on high-end AI models, it will likely continue to pull ahead of rivals in the coming quarters.

And so, I continue to see further upside in Alphabet. Shares are already up 27% since I flagged them last November (even with the recent drawdown), and they still have more room to climb.

Stock to Buy #2: The Return of U.S. Drug Development

Last week, I wrote about the U.S. government suddenly becoming pro-pharma again.

In April, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted to Congress that “China is now eating our lunch” in drug development and promised to make changes.

Since then, agencies overseen by RFK Jr. have made an almost 180-degree turn. In June, one group unanimously recommended its first vaccine of the current administration, and a separate one launched a project called Operation TrialBlazer to fast-track clinical research.

I recommended Oncology Institute Inc. (TOI) as a stock to buy.

This week, I’d like to add one more healthcare firm to this list:

Moderna Inc. (MRNA).

You will likely know Moderna for its development of the Covid-19 vaccine, a therapy that only took 10 weeks to develop and another 10 months to reach approval. You will also probably know that Moderna’s stock price fell over 94% between 2021 and 2025 after vaccine demand fell off and mRNA vaccines became a culture war lightning rod.

It hasn’t been easy for the drugmaker. In President Trump’s first year back in office, the HHS terminated Moderna’s pandemic bird-flu contract, stopped recommending Covid-19 shots for healthy children, cut $500 million in mRNA vaccine funding, and removed all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory committee. Moderna was forced to cut projects and funnel its remaining cash into fewer, higher-priority clinical trials.

But the drugmaker seems to be back. On June 18, Food and Drug Administration advisors backed Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine, capping a 20% rally in the stock. At roughly the same time, MRNA moved from a “C” grade in Louis’ system to a “B” on unusually high smart money buying.

The fundamental story has only since improved. On June 25, the company gave exciting details at its annual Science Day that suggest far faster growth for its oncology drugs, known as “cancer vaccines.” These are programmable therapies that can be tailored to individuals or targeted more broadly at common cancer markers for off-the-shelf use.

The most promising of Moderna’s tailored drugs, known as intismeran autogene, is currently undergoing Phase 3 trials for treating skin cancer. Results will be published by the end of this year, and analysts expect over $3.5 billion in annual revenues by 2035. The same therapy is also being tested on kidney cancers, lung cancers, and more.

The company is also working on several off-the-shelf therapies that are showing early promise. At least one of these should become a blockbuster, according to analysts at Morningstar, and could lay the groundwork for “multiplex” therapies. This is where one drug seeks out multiple targets at once, increasing the likelihood of success.

Most importantly, Washington’s mood around drug development is changing. RFK Jr. himself has said that China “went from running 3% of clinical trials to running 30%” and that “we are losing scientists, we’re losing our IPs… and we’re going to lose our biosecurity.”

And if the federal government wants to flood the zone with money to develop more drugs, then Moderna is the most obvious candidate for it. Programmable mRNA vaccines are incredibly fast to develop, and this drugmaker has plenty in partial development that are ready to resume.

Walking Apart from the Crowd

You’ll notice that Alphabet and Moderna are not exactly the most popular names among retail investors. Google is often seen as too large to grow further, while the politicization of vaccines has turned a generation of investors off Moderna entirely.

Here’s why that matters: AI systems are exceptional at pricing what’s already in the numbers. They can “see” everything that’s happened in the past five-plus decades and often know precisely what investors are doing today. They’re also relatively good at extrapolating if the future looks anything like the past.

What AI does not do so well is predict changes. And the reality is that Alphabet and Moderna both run platforms that can adapt quickly. Alphabet can absorb a free, open-source model like GLM-5.2 and turn it into a dozen cheap consumer products overnight. Moderna’s programmable mRNA lets it point the same underlying technology at everything from the flu to skin cancer.

That’s the real opportunity in a market ruled by trading convergence. The more investors lean on the same tools that only see today’s data, the more they underprice the companies whose best chapters haven’t been written yet.

That’s exactly what Louis built Precursor Intelligence to do. He’s looking to pinpoint companies with strong fundamentals and accelerating money flow.

Louis just recorded a presentation walking investors through that system, and how it’s predicting a major rally in stocks beyond AI. So, if you’d like to get ahead of the next wave instead of getting swept up in it, I urge you to watch Louis’ free broadcast here.

All of us here at InvestorPlace wish you a happy Fourth of July.

Until next week,

Thomas Yeung, CFA

Market Analyst, InvestorPlace

Thomas Yeung is a market analyst and portfolio manager of the Omnia Portfolio, the highest-tier subscription at InvestorPlace. He is the former editor of Tom Yeung’s Profit & Protection, a free e-letter about investing to profit in good times and protecting gains during the bad.

The post 2 More Stocks to Buy for the AI Convergence appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Both decks opened with a cream-colored slide, gussied up with orange accents and oversized italic serifs, bullet points, rectangular grids, and, most damning, a third slide with a centered line pointing to “Our Move.” You could swap the logos and the founders themselves might not have known which deck belonged to whom.

The New Yorker just chronicled this phenomenon, which is powered by Claude Design, Anthropic’s AI design tool. The more the tool spreads, the more design clichés spread with it. Clichés such as beige backgrounds and warm serifs, both blanketing the internet so thoroughly that designers now flinch at color palettes they used to love.

Here’s why I’m telling you this in an investing newsletter: Wall Street just did the exact same thing to AI stocks.

Over the past few weeks, the market grabbed every company with an AI story – from memory makers and chip designers to quantum pioneers and search giants – and sold them as one undifferentiated blob. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) and iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) each gave back double-digits from recent highs as money fled the whole complex at once, no questions asked.

Yet, underneath those cream-colored charts, these are wildly different businesses with wildly different fundamentals. While the market was busy selling AI stocks, the individual companies were busy reporting some of the strongest numbers of the entire AI Boom.

For example, Micron (MU) delivered an earnings blowout for the ages. And Qualcomm (QCOM) extended its growth runway to the end of the decade.

The gap between a market treating AI as a monolith and businesses diverging underneath it is where fortunes are made. We walked through five stocks in Being Exponential, each with its own distinct story, and why I’d be a buyer of this weakness in every one of them.

Let’s dig in.

Micron Just Smashed the Bear Case

Start with Micron stock, because MU’s earnings report puts to rest just about every fear the bears have been peddling.

Quarterly revenues of $41.46 billion, up 74% sequentially and 346% year-over-year. Adjusted earnings of $25.11 per share, beating consensus by $4.62. A record-high gross margin of 84.9%. And then guidance above expectations – roughly $50 billion in revenue next quarter, about $31 in earnings per share, and gross margins expanding again toward 86%.

At this stage of the game, everyone expects a beat-and-raise. Micron smashed-and-raised. Even the crowd that came in expecting fireworks walked away impressed. MU stock ripped about 15% in after-hours trading toward record highs.

Now, why does this matter beyond one stock? Because Micron is the high-beta tip of the spear on the entire AI trade. Memory is where the “peak capex” and “peak spending” fears were supposed to show up first. Instead, we got confirmation that demand is booming and margins are expanding. The wobble in AI stocks was fundamentally incongruent with reality.

Bottom line on Micron stock: I’d buy this breakout. Take a look at the full episode below for more:

Qualcomm’s Story Just Changed

Next up: Qualcomm, which delivered a guidance boost built on major new business wins.

The company now says its AI data center silicon revenue will exceed $15 billion by fiscal 2029, with $5 billion arriving by fiscal 2027, and total non-handset revenue reaching $40 billion by 2029. Those targets are way above Wall Street consensus, and they’re bullish for two reasons:

Cerebras: Read the Demand, Ignore the Noise

Then there’s Cerebras (CBRS), the recent IPO that reported earnings into the teeth of the selloff and got punished for it.

But separate the noise from the signal. Quarterly revenue came in around $192 million, up 93% year-over-year. Hardware revenue grew 60%. Cloud services revenue surged more than 160%. Management maintained its full-year revenue guide of roughly $860 million, or about 70% annual growth.

Those aren’t slowdown numbers, man. Yes, the IPO was richly valued. Yes, there are margin questions as the company invests aggressively. But think about the sequence here. Micron just confirmed the boom is raging. Qualcomm just confirmed visibility to 2029. If we’re that early in the cycle, aggressive investment is exactly what I want a young infrastructure company doing right now.

I’m less bullish here than on Micron or Qualcomm, but the post-earnings dip looks like opportunity, and I’m constructive on CBRS stock at current levels.

Washington Just Went All-In on Quantum

Meanwhile, the quantum computing breakout we flagged a few weeks back just got a booster rocket from Washington.

The White House signed executive orders to accelerate and broaden the U.S. government’s involvement in quantum computing – layered on top of a $2 billion investment spread across seven companies in the space. The signal is unmistakable: the federal government is throwing its full weight behind quantum development.

That’s rocket fuel for the whole sector – D-Wave Quantum (QBTS), Rigetti Computing (RGTI), the newly public names, all of them. But IonQ (IONQ) remains my favorite horse in this race. It’s the most commercially advanced player, it has the best leadership team in the industry, and its trapped-ion technology looks like the superior architecture for real-world commercial use.

AI selloff be damned… The micro fundamentals in quantum are outstanding.

Google: The Comeback Nobody Sees Coming

Finally, Alphabet (GOOGL), which is under pressure from the selloff, from talent departures to rival labs, and from a Gemini model that’s gone quiet in the frontier race while Claude and ChatGPT grab headlines.

But remember: this race is a marathon, and we’re in roughly the fourth mile of 26. Everyone wrote off OpenAI six months ago; it punched back into a leadership position. Everyone wrote off Google two years ago when chatbots were supposedly going to obsolete search; that never happened. Counting out a company with Google’s talent density and distribution in mile four is a mistake I’ve watched investors make over and over.

When Gemini takes its next big step forward – and it will – the market will rediscover this story fast. With GOOGL stock sitting at a compelling technical and fundamental level, I like the dip-buy here.

The Verdict

Across all five names, we’re seeing shares under pressure and fundamentals strengthening underneath. That gap paves the way for estimates to move higher, and higher estimates set the stage for stocks to surge. Just like 1962, the tape is panicking while the technology curve keeps bending upward.

So I’d be a buyer of weakness in the semiconductor complex, the AI complex, and the broader technology complex. The music is still playing, folks. This is noise. The long-term view remains intact.

Catch more AI stock breakdowns – plus the macro picture behind them – by subscribing to Being Exponential with Luke Lango.

P.S. Join Luke at this year’s Stansberry Conference & Alliance Meeting – where ideas move fast, conviction gets sharper, and the next big opportunities come into focus.

You’ll get live market updates, learn about top ideas and stock picks from Jonathan Rose and Luke Lango, and have the chance to meet some of your favorite editors – like Marc Chaikin, Whitney Tilson, Dr. David Eifrig, and Keith Kaplan.

Attendees will hear from bestselling authors and experts in economics, technology (including AI), and more. This year’s featured speaker lineup also includes famed actor Henry Winkler (aka “The Fonz” from Happy Days).

Expect two days packed with intriguing presentations and fun social events – all in luxurious Las Vegas. It pays to be in the room where it all happens.

Reserve your discounted ticket today before they sell out!

The post 5 AI Stocks Wall Street Is Selling That You Should Be Buying appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Happy Fourth of July!

Few stories capture the American entrepreneurial spirit better than Cornelius Vanderbilt’s in the early 1800s. This was at the very start of his career, before he became the railroad and shipping magnate we all know.

New York State had handed steamboat pioneer Robert Fulton and his heirs a monopoly on all steamboat traffic in state waters. No competition. No alternatives. Just Fulton’s boats, Fulton’s prices, Fulton’s rules.

Vanderbilt, at the time working for someone else, had other ideas.

He didn’t lobby the state or bribe politicians to help him change things. He simply kept running his ferry between New York and New Jersey and hoisted a flag on his ship — “New Jersey Must Be Free.” He undercut Fulton’s prices (charging $1 to Fulton’s $4) and essentially dared the authorities to stop him.

Credit: clu

The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled that New York’s monopoly was an unconstitutional stranglehold on interstate commerce. But by then, the monopoly was already broken as customers had increasingly cast their vote. Vanderbilt hadn’t waited for permission.

That attitude created one of the greatest wealth empires in American history. And, it’s the attitude you should still have while building your wealth and securing your financial freedom today.

And, frankly, there may not have ever been a better time to grow your wealth than right now.

A Quick Win in an AI Infrastructure Play

As you’re undoubtedly aware, the AI trade has dominated the markets since the debut of ChatGPT in November 2022.

Since then, we’ve seen some stocks skyrocket, such as Nvidia (NVDA), up more than 1,000%, and Advanced Micro Devices (抖阴最新版), up 657%, among others.

Many people are looking at their portfolio and simply can’t believe these good times can last. But investing legend 抖阴最新版 is confident we are still early in this bull market.

Earnings explain why.

Here is what he wrote to his Accelerated Profits subscribers earlier this week.

The current earnings environment is phenomenal, and earnings momentum will remain robust throughout 2026. FactSet currently expects the S&P 500 will achieve 27.7% average earnings growth in the first quarter – and then 19.9%, 23.2% and 20.7% average earnings growth in the second, third and fourth quarters, respectively.

For calendar year 2026, estimates call for 21%.

As you know, positive earnings surprises will likely drive these estimates even higher in the upcoming months. At the beginning of the first-quarter earnings season, analysts only expected the S&P 500 to achieve 13.1% average earnings growth. Given positive results and surprises, the S&P 500 has more than doubled this estimate.

So, again, earnings momentum is accelerating – and that means we need to remain invested in companies with stunning forecasted earnings and sales growth, positive analyst revisions and robust institutional buying pressure.

One of those companies is Seagate Technology Holdings (STX). STX develops AI-capable hard drives better than any other company.

The need for computer memory has not slowed. The training and deployment of AI models requires high-speed data, memory, and storage technologies – ideally, technologies that balance cost, performance, and scalability. That means most AI data ultimately ends up stored on hard drives, such as those developed by STX.

STX’s earnings reflect the demand for its product.

Here is how Louis summarized their outlook.

In its third quarter in fiscal year 2026, Seagate Technology reported revenue increased 44.1% year-over-year to $3.11 billion. Earnings soared 129.5% year-over-year to $934 million, or $4.10 per share.

The consensus estimate called for earnings of $3.50 per share on $2.96 billion in revenue, so Seagate Technology posted a 17.1% earnings surprise and a 5% revenue surprise.

Looking forward to the fourth quarter, Seagate Technology expects revenue of about $3.45 billion and earnings of about $5.00 per share. That represents 41.4% year-over-year revenue growth and 93.1% year-over-year earnings growth.

Thanks to the positive outlook, analysts have significantly increased fourth-quarter and full-year earnings estimates over the past month. Fourth-quarter earnings are now forecast to soar 95.4% year-over-year to $5.06 per share, and full-year 2026 earnings are expected to jump 83.7% year-over-year to $14.88 per share.

Since Louis’ recommendation, STX (in blue) has outpaced the S&P (in green) 10-to-1, and is still below Louis’ buy below price.

What Louis Worries 抖阴最新版

Underneath all the earnings gains is a potential pitfall for investors.

Vanderbilt understood something that many investors forget: just because everyone believes something doesn’t make it true.

Everyone accepted Fulton’s monopoly as permanent, but Vanderbilt saw an opening that everyone else missed.

Today, millions of people now rely on the same Wall Street research… the same financial headlines… and increasingly, the same AI tools to tell them what to buy.

While that’s convenient, it also creates a danger.

If everyone is looking at the same information, everyone is likely reaching the same conclusions. Louis believes that’s exactly what’s beginning to happen.

In his view, AI isn’t replacing investors. It’s encouraging millions of investors to chase the same obvious opportunities at roughly the same time.

That’s why he believes the biggest advantage isn’t finding better headlines. It’s finding the signals that appear before the headlines.

That’s exactly what Louis explains in a new presentation he recently recorded.

He discusses why he believes the next phase of the AI boom may look very different from the first and why investors who simply follow AI-generated recommendations could eventually find themselves buying the same crowded stocks as everyone else.

More importantly, he explains the one signal he has relied on for more than four decades to identify opportunities before they turn into their biggest gains.

If you’re investing in AI – or simply wondering where the next great opportunities may come from – you should watch Louis’ presentation today.

You can access the presentation here.

Enjoy your weekend,

Luis Hernandez

Editor in Chief, InvestorPlace

The post The Fourth of July Investing Lesson Most People Miss appeared first on InvestorPlace.

This Fourth of July marks America’s 250th birthday. And for legendary investor 抖阴最新版, it’s also a reminder of something investors sometimes overlook.

For nearly 50 years, Louis has watched America navigate recessions, wars, inflation, financial crises, and bear markets. Through it all, he’s reached the same conclusion: this remains the greatest wealth-creation machine in history.

In this Friday Digest takeover, he explains why that conviction is even stronger today, thanks in large part to America’s leadership in AI. Along the way, he shares a remarkable story from the final years of the Soviet Union – and why it still carries an important lesson for investors.

Louis also highlights the AI-related sectors he’s watching most closely and expands on them in a recent presentation, where he reveals the stocks he believes could become the next wave of AI winners. You can watch it right here.

Whether you’re celebrating America’s birthday with family, friends, or fireworks, Louis’ perspective is a fitting reminder of why owning great American businesses has been one of history’s best long-term investments.

I’ll let Louis take it from here.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

In September 1989, Boris Yeltsin came to America.

At the time, he was a rising political figure inside the Soviet Union – a reformer who had begun to question the system he had spent his life serving. He would later become the first president of Russia.

The trip was part diplomacy, part public relations, part fact-finding mission. Yeltsin toured the country, met with officials, and saw the polished version of American power.

But the moment that stayed with him did not happen in Washington, D.C.

It happened in a grocery store in suburban Houston.

After visiting NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Yeltsin and his entourage made an unscheduled stop at a Randalls supermarket. The visit lasted only about 20 minutes, but it left a deep impression.

He saw the meat counter. The produce. The frozen foods. The endless shelves. The choices. The sheer abundance of ordinary American life.

source

This was no Potemkin village. It wasn’t a special store for party officials or a privileged elite. It wasn’t a dog-and-pony show for foreign visitors.

It was a supermarket where regular Americans bought their milk, bread, beef, and cereal.

One of Yeltsin’s aides later said that the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside him after that visit.

And in hindsight, that grocery-store visit looks like one small scene in a much larger collapse.

Two months later, the Berlin Wall finally came down.

Not long after that, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

The World Gets Another Look at America

For decades, some of the smartest people in the world believed the Soviet Union might catch America. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson even projected that the USSR could reach economic parity with the United States by the late 1980s or 1990s.

The experts had their models. All Yeltsin needed was the grocery store.

Fast forward to today, and something similar is happening.

With the World Cup bringing fans from all over the world to the United States, social media is filling up with videos of foreign visitors having their own “Yeltsin moments.”

Only this time, it’s European soccer fans walking into a Buc-ees and trying to wrap their heads around a gas station with 100 pumps, spotless bathrooms, barbecue sandwiches, and acres of snacks.

It is visitors wandering through Bass Pro Shops and realizing that what Americans call a “store” can include boats, aquariums, waterfalls, hunting gear, and enough outdoor equipment to outfit a small army.

It is people posting videos about Chick-fil-A sandwiches served by polite young workers. It is American suburbs filled with houses that look enormous compared to what many people are used to overseas.

Some of this is funny. Some of it is culture shock. But there is a serious point underneath it.

A lot of these visitors were sold a very different story about America. They were told this country is broken, angry, poor, dangerous, and falling apart. Then they get here, visit our restaurants, walk through our stores, drive through our suburbs, and see the truth with their own eyes.

America is not perfect. Far from it. We have plenty of things to fix.

But the story many people have been told about America is a lie. Sadly, a lot of Americans have bought it, too. They are told every day that their neighbors hate them, that the country is hopelessly divided, and that the American Dream is dead.

I don’t believe that for one second.

We are not as divided as the media makes us seem. And we are not as weak as our critics want us to believe.

The American Investor’s Advantage

America’s everyday abundance still shocks people who did not grow up with it because that abundance is not an accident. It is the result of a system that has spent 250 years rewarding risk-taking, competition, innovation, capital formation, and entrepreneurship.

That’s why I love this country. And it’s why I love being an American investor.

We do not just get to live inside this system. We get to own pieces of it.

The United States is home to roughly 4% of the world’s population, yet we account for more than 26% of global GDP. Even more impressive, America represents about 43% of the world’s total stock market value.

We have the deepest, most dynamic, and most valuable stock market on Earth.

Our companies are building the next generation of microchips, data centers, power systems, software, medical breakthroughs, defense technology, robotics, logistics networks, and financial platforms.

You don’t just get to watch the American growth machine from the sidelines, folks. You can own a stake in it.

And over the long span of U.S. history, that has been one of the smartest things you could do.

Yes, there have been scary periods: wars, recessions, inflation, bear markets, banking crises, terror attacks, and pandemics. Every generation gets its own reason to think the American growth story is finished.

But again and again, America adapts, recovers, and moves higher.

That is why, over the long run, you buy the dips in America. Period.

When the United States’ best companies get knocked down by fear, headlines, or temporary profit-taking, history says those moments can create some of the best buying opportunities you will ever see.

Don’t Let the Bears Fool You

Take the recent volatility in AI-related stocks, for example.

The usual bears were back on television. People like famed British investor Jeremy Grantham were claiming that this is “the most expensive market in history,” warning of a 70% collapse.

Which is just nonsense.

A lot of this negative commentary is emanating from Europe before our American media parrots it. And I don’t think that is a coincidence… especially when it comes to AI.

The reality is Europe has fallen behind in the AI race. The United States has not.

Some of the loudest critics sound less like objective analysts and more like people who are envious of America’s lead. So, instead of celebrating the boom, they complain about it.

But the numbers tell the real story.

The AI boom is not just hype. S&P 500 earnings for the first quarter of 2026 were up nearly 28% year-over-year. FactSet now estimates earnings will grow 23% in the second quarter – and 24% for the full year.

Analysts routinely underestimate earnings, so the real number will likely be even higher. That is stunning, folks.

And the AI buildout behind much of this boom is enormous. The four largest hyperscalers alone are expected to spend about $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year.

That is showing up in real orders, real backlogs and real revenue.

Vertiv Holdings Co. (VRT), which provides power and cooling systems for data centers, reportedly has a backlog north of $15 billion. GE Vernova Inc.’s (GEV) gas turbine backlog reached 100 gigawatts in the first quarter. Oracle Corp. (ORCL) has remaining performance obligations of around $638 billion on its books.

By the time it’s all said and done, Goldman Sachs thinks total spending on AI will reach $7.6 trillion between 2026 and 2031.

That is why I continue to believe the best AI and data center infrastructure stocks are screaming buys on meaningful dips.

The center of this boom is not Europe. It is not China. It is not some command-and-control economy where everyday people aren’t allowed to participate.

It is America.

So, as we head into this Fourth of July weekend, I want you to enjoy America’s 250^th birthday celebration. Enjoy the fireworks. Enjoy the cookouts. Enjoy the fact that people from all over the world are coming here and seeing what too many Americans have forgotten.

The U.S. is an economic oasis. And the best way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday isn’t just to watch the fireworks. It’s to own a piece of what makes this country worth celebrating

Find the Next Wave of AI Winners

Right now, the AI boom is creating one of the biggest opportunities we are likely to see in our lifetimes. That is why I want to help you find the right AI stocks now.

I am not talking about the obvious names everyone already hears about on CNBC or sees in every AI-generated list. I am talking about the next wave of AI winners – the companies quietly supplying the chips, memory, cooling, power, storage, software, and infrastructure that make artificial intelligence possible.

That is exactly what my stock-selection system is designed to do.

For 47 years, I have studied the numbers that matter most: sales growth, earnings growth, analyst revisions, and institutional buying pressure. My system helps me track where the real money is moving before most investors have even heard the names.

In my latest special briefing, I reveal a group of AI-related stocks that I believe could be positioned to surge 100% or more over the next six to 12 months. I will also give you the ticker symbol of my No. 1 stock to buy now – free.

Go here to learn more now.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

Senior Analyst, InvestorPlace

P.S. Louis has been finding market-beating stocks for nearly five decades, through bull markets, bear markets, and everything in between. If his track record tells us anything, it’s that the moments most investors spend worrying are often the moments worth buying. If you’d like to see which AI stocks Louis is most excited about right now — including his No. 1 pick, named free — his latest briefing is available here. Happy Fourth.

The Editor hereby discloses that as of the date of this email, the Editor, directly or indirectly, owns the following securities that are the subject of the commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, or recommendations in, or which are otherwise mentioned in, the essay set forth below:
GE Vernova Inc. (GEV) and Vertiv Holding Co. (VRT)

The post The Grocery Store That Brought Down the Soviet Union appeared first on InvestorPlace.

At the time, he was a rising political figure inside the Soviet Union – a reformer who had begun to question the system he had spent his life serving. He would later become the first president of Russia.

The trip was part diplomacy, part public relations, part fact-finding mission. Yeltsin toured the country, met with officials and saw the polished version of American power.

But the moment that stayed with him did not happen in Washington, D.C.

It happened in a grocery store in suburban Houston.

After visiting NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Yeltsin and his entourage made an unscheduled stop at a Randalls supermarket in the Houston suburb of Webster, Texas. The visit lasted only about 20 minutes, but it left a deep impression.

He saw the meat counter. The produce. The frozen foods. The endless shelves. The choices. The sheer abundance of ordinary American life.

Credit: Houston Chronicle

This was no Potemkin village. It wasn’t a special store for party officials or a privileged elite. It wasn’t a dog-and-pony show for foreign visitors.

It was a supermarket where regular Americans bought their milk, bread, beef, and cereal.

One of Yeltsin’s aides later said that the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside him after that visit.

And in hindsight, that grocery-store visit looks like one small scene in a much larger collapse.

Two months later, the Berlin Wall finally came down.

Not long after that, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

The World Gets Another Look at America

For decades, some of the smartest people in the world believed the Soviet Union might catch America. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson even projected that the USSR could reach economic parity with the United States by the late 1980s or 1990s.

The experts had their models. All Yeltsin needed was the grocery store.

Fast forward to today, and something similar is happening.

With the World Cup bringing fans from all over the world to the United States, social media is filling up with videos of foreign visitors having their own “Yeltsin moments.”

Only this time, it’s European soccer fans walking into a Buc-ees and trying to wrap their heads around a gas station with 100 pumps, spotless bathrooms, barbecue sandwiches, and acres of snacks.

It is visitors wandering through Bass Pro Shops and realizing that what Americans call a “store” can include boats, aquariums, waterfalls, hunting gear, and enough outdoor equipment to outfit a small army.

It is people posting videos about Chick-fil-A sandwiches served by polite young workers. It is American suburbs filled with houses that look enormous compared to what many people are used to overseas.

Some of this is funny. Some of it is culture shock. But there is a serious point underneath it.

A lot of these visitors were sold a very different story about America. They were told this country is broken, angry, poor, dangerous, and falling apart. Then they get here, visit our restaurants, walk through our stores, drive through our suburbs, and see the truth with their own eyes.

America is not perfect. Far from it. We have plenty of things to fix.

But the story many people have been told about America is a lie. Sadly, a lot of Americans have bought it, too. They are told every day that their neighbors hate them, that the country is hopelessly divided, and that the American Dream is dead.

I don’t believe that for one second.

We are not as divided as the media makes us seem. And we are not as weak as our critics want us to believe.

The American Investor’s Advantage

America’s everyday abundance still shocks people who did not grow up with it because that abundance is not an accident. It is the result of a system that has spent 250 years rewarding risk-taking, competition, innovation, capital formation, and entrepreneurship.

That’s why I love this country. And it’s why I love being an American investor.

We do not just get to live inside this system. We get to own pieces of it.

The United States is home to roughly 4% of the world’s population, yet we account for more than 26% of global GDP. Even more impressive, America represents about 43% of the world’s total stock market value.

We have the deepest, most dynamic, and most valuable stock market on Earth.

Our companies are building the next generation of microchips, data centers, power systems, software, medical breakthroughs, defense technology, robotics, logistics networks, and financial platforms.

You don’t just get to watch the American growth machine from the sidelines, folks. You can own a stake in it.

And over the long span of U.S. history, that has been one of the smartest things you could do.

Yes, there have been scary periods: wars, recessions, inflation, bear markets, banking crises, terror attacks, and pandemics. Every generation gets its own reason to think the American growth story is finished.

But again and again, America adapts, recovers, and moves higher.

That is why, over the long run, you buy the dips in America. Period.

When the United States’ best companies get knocked down by fear, headlines, or temporary profit-taking, history says those moments can create some of the best buying opportunities you will ever see.

Don’t Let the Bears Fool You

Take the recent volatility in AI-related stocks, for example.

The usual bears were back on television. People like famed British investor Jeremy Grantham were claiming that this is “the most expensive market in history,” warning of a 70% collapse.

Which is just nonsense.

A lot of this negative commentary is emanating from Europe before our American media parrots it. And I don’t think that is a coincidence… especially when it comes to AI.

The reality is Europe has fallen behind in the AI race. The United States has not.

Some of the loudest critics sound less like objective analysts and more like people who are envious of America’s lead. So, instead of celebrating the boom, they complain about it.

But the numbers tell the real story.

The AI boom is not just hype. S&P 500 earnings for the first quarter of 2026 were up nearly 28% year-over-year. FactSet now estimates earnings will grow 23% in the second quarter – and 24% for the full year.

Analysts routinely underestimate earnings, so the real number will likely be even higher. That is stunning, folks.

And the AI buildout behind much of this boom is enormous. The four largest hyperscalers alone are expected to spend about $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year.

That is showing up in real orders, real backlogs and real revenue.

Vertiv Holding Co. (VRT), which provides power and cooling systems for data centers, reportedly has a backlog north of $15 billion. GE Vernova Inc.’s (GEV) gas turbine backlog reached 100 gigawatts in the first quarter. Oracle Corp. (ORCL) has remaining performance obligations of around $638 billion on its books.

By the time it’s all said and done,Goldman Sachs thinks total spending on AI will reach $7.6 trillion between 2026 and 2031.

That is why I continue to believe the best AI and data center infrastructure stocks are screaming buys on meaningful dips.

The center of this boom is not Europe. It is not China. It is not some command-and-control economy where everyday people aren’t allowed to participate.

It is America.

So, as we head into this Fourth of July weekend, I want you to enjoy America’s 250th birthday celebration. Enjoy the fireworks. Enjoy the cookouts. Enjoy the fact that people from all over the world are coming here and seeing what too many Americans have forgotten.

The U.S. is an economic oasis. And the best way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday isn’t just to watch the fireworks. It’s to own a piece of what makes this country worth celebrating.

Find the Next Wave of AI Winners

Right now, the AI boom is creating one of the biggest opportunities we are likely to see in our lifetimes. That is why I want to help you find the right AI stocks now.

I am not talking about the obvious names everyone already hears about on CNBC or sees in every AI-generated list. I am talking about the next wave of AI winners – the companies quietly supplying the chips, memory, cooling, power, storage, software, and infrastructure that make artificial intelligence possible.

That is exactly what my stock-selection system is designed to do.

For 47 years, I have studied the numbers that matter most: sales growth, earnings growth, analyst revisions, and institutional buying pressure. My system helps me track where the real money is moving before most investors have even heard the names.

In my latest special briefing, I reveal a group of AI-related stocks that I believe could be positioned to surge 100% or more over the next six to 12 months. I will also give you the ticker symbol of my No. 1 stock to buy now – free.

Go here to learn more now.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

Editor, Market 360

The Editor hereby discloses that as of the date of this email, the Editor, directly or indirectly, owns the following securities that are the subject of the commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, or recommendations in, or which are otherwise mentioned in, the essay set forth below:

GE Vernova Inc. (GEV) and Vertiv Holding Co. (VRT)

The post Why You Should Be Proud to Be an American Investor appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Editor’s Note: This Fourth of July marks the 250th anniversary of the United States — and 抖阴最新版 thinks that’s worth celebrating as an investor, not just as an American. Louis has been in the markets for nearly 50 years. He’s watched this country navigate wars, recessions, inflation spikes, and bear markets. And he’s come to the same conclusion every time: America adapts, recovers, and moves higher.

In today’s essay, Louis explains why the current moment — the AI boom, the earnings surge, the abundance that still shocks foreign visitors — makes him as bullish as he’s ever been. He also points to a group of AI-related stocks he believes could surge 100% or more in the next six to 12 months.

From all of us at InvestorPlace, have a wonderful Fourth. Now, take it away, Louis…

In September 1989, Boris Yeltsin came to America.

At the time, he was a rising political figure inside the Soviet Union – a reformer who had begun to question the system he had spent his life serving. He would later become the first president of Russia.

The trip was part diplomacy, part public relations, part fact-finding mission. Yeltsin toured the country, met with officials, and saw the polished version of American power.

But the moment that stayed with him did not happen in Washington, D.C.

It happened in a grocery store in suburban Houston.

After visiting NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Yeltsin and his entourage made an unscheduled stop at a Randalls supermarket. The visit lasted only about 20 minutes, but it left a deep impression.

He saw the meat counter. The produce. The frozen foods. The endless shelves. The choices. The sheer abundance of ordinary American life.

This was no Potemkin village. It wasn’t a special store for a privileged elite or a dog-and-pony show for foreign visitors.

It was a supermarket where regular Americans bought their milk, bread, beef, and cereal.

One of Yeltsin’s aides later said that the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside him after that visit.

And in hindsight, that grocery-store visit looks like one small scene in a much larger collapse.

Two months later, the Berlin Wall finally came down.

Not long after that, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

World Cup Visitors Are Having Their Own Yeltsin Moments

For decades, some of the smartest people in the world believed the Soviet Union might catch America. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson even projected that the USSR could reach economic parity with the United States by the late 1980s or 1990s.

The experts had their models. All Yeltsin needed was the grocery store.

Fast forward to today, and something similar is happening.

With the World Cup bringing fans from all over the world to the United States, social media is filling up with videos of foreign visitors having their own “Yeltsin moments.”

Only this time, it’s European soccer fans walking into a Buc-ees and trying to wrap their heads around a gas station with 100 pumps, spotless bathrooms, barbecue sandwiches, and acres of snacks.

It is visitors wandering through Bass Pro Shops and realizing that what Americans call a “store” can include boats, aquariums, waterfalls, hunting gear, and enough outdoor equipment to outfit a small army.

It is people posting videos about Chick-fil-A sandwiches served by polite young workers and American suburbs filled with houses that look enormous compared to what many people are used to overseas.

Some of this is funny. Some of it is culture shock. But there is a serious point underneath it.

A lot of these visitors were sold a very different story about America. They were told this country is broken, angry, poor, dangerous, and falling apart. Then they get here, visit our restaurants, walk through our stores, drive through our suburbs, and see the truth with their own eyes.

America is not perfect. Far from it. We have plenty of things to fix.

But the story many people have been told about America is a lie. Sadly, a lot of Americans have bought it, too. They are told every day that their neighbors hate them, that the country is hopelessly divided, and that the American Dream is dead.

I don’t believe that for one second.

We are not as divided as the media makes us seem. And we are not as weak as our critics want us to believe.

The American Investor’s Advantage: Owning the Growth Machine

America’s everyday abundance still shocks people who did not grow up with it because that abundance is not an accident. It is the result of a system that has spent 250 years rewarding risk-taking, competition, innovation, capital formation, and entrepreneurship.

That’s why I love this country. And it’s why I love being an American investor.

We do not just get to live inside this system. We get to own pieces of it.

The United States is home to roughly 4% of the world’s population, yet we account for more than 26% of global GDP. Even more impressive, America represents about 43% of the world’s total stock market value.

We have the deepest, most dynamic, and most valuable stock market on Earth. 

Our companies are building the next generation of microchips, data centers, power systems, software, medical breakthroughs, defense technology, robotics, logistics networks, and financial platforms. 

You don’t just get to watch the American growth machine from the sidelines, folks. You can own a stake in it.

And over the long span of U.S. history, that has been one of the smartest things you could do.

Yes, there have been scary periods: wars, recessions, inflation, bear markets, banking crises, terror attacks, and pandemics. Every generation gets its own reason to think the American growth story is finished.

But again and again, America adapts, recovers, and moves higher.

That is why, over the long run, you buy the dips in America. Period.

When the United States’ best companies get knocked down by fear, headlines, or temporary profit-taking, history says those moments can create some of the best buying opportunities you will ever see.

Why the Bears Are Wrong 抖阴最新版 the AI Boom

Take the recent volatility in AI-related stocks, for example. 

The usual bears were back on television. People like famed British investor Jeremy Grantham were claiming that this is “the most expensive market in history,” warning of a 70% collapse.

Which is just nonsense. 

A lot of this negative commentary is emanating from Europe before our American media parrots it. And I don’t think that is a coincidence… especially when it comes to AI.

The reality is Europe has fallen behind in the AI race. The United States has not.

Some of the loudest critics sound less like objective analysts and more like people who are envious of America’s lead. So, instead of celebrating the boom, they complain about it.

AI Earnings Are Backing Up the Rally 

But the numbers tell the real story.

The AI boom is not just hype. S&P 500 earnings for the first quarter of 2026 were up nearly 28% year-over-year. FactSet now estimates earnings will grow 23% in the second quarter – and 24% for the full year.

Analysts routinely underestimate earnings, so the real number will likely be even higher. That is stunning, folks. 

And the AI buildout behind much of this boom is enormous. The four largest hyperscalers alone are expected to spend about $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year. 

That is showing up in real orders, real backlogs and real revenue. 

Vertiv Holding Co. (VRT), which provides power and cooling systems for data centers, reportedly has a backlog north of $15 billion. GE Vernova Inc.’s (GEV) gas turbine backlog reached 100 gigawatts in the first quarter. Oracle Corp. (ORCL) has remaining performance obligations of around $638 billion on its books. 

By the time it’s all said and done, Goldman Sachs thinks total spending on AI will reach $7.6 trillion between 2026 and 2031.

That is why I continue to believe the best AI and data center infrastructure stocks are screaming buys on meaningful dips.

The center of this boom is not Europe or China. It is not some command-and-control economy where everyday people aren’t allowed to participate.

It is America.

So, as we head into this Fourth of July weekend, I want you to enjoy America’s 250^th birthday celebration. Enjoy the fireworks and the cookouts. Enjoy the fact that people from all over the world are coming here and seeing what too many Americans have forgotten.

The U.S. is an economic oasis. And the best way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday isn’t just to watch the fireworks. It’s to own a piece of what makes this country worth celebrating

How to Find the Next Wave of AI Infrastructure Winners

Right now, the AI boom is creating one of the biggest opportunities we are likely to see in our lifetimes. That is why I want to help you find the right AI stocks now.

I am not talking about the obvious names everyone already hears about on CNBC or sees in every AI-generated list. I am talking about the next wave of AI winners – the companies quietly supplying the chips, memory, cooling, power, storage, software, and infrastructure that make artificial intelligence possible.

That is exactly what my stock-selection system is designed to do.

For 47 years, I have studied the numbers that matter most: sales growth, earnings growth, analyst revisions, and institutional buying pressure. My system helps me track where the real money is moving before most investors have even heard the names.

In my latest special briefing, I reveal a group of AI-related stocks that I believe could be positioned to surge 100% or more over the next six to 12 months. I will also give you the ticker symbol of my No. 1 stock to buy now – free. 

Go here to learn more now.

The post As America Turns 250, Here’s Why I’m More Bullish Than Ever appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Before we jump in today, a reminder that our InvestorPlace offices are closed tomorrow in honor of Independence Day.

If you need help from our Customer Service team, they’ll be happy to assist you when we reopen on Monday at 9 a.m. Eastern.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

As I write on Thursday morning, the Labor Department just reported 57,000 jobs added in June – badly missing the 115,000 consensus and a sharp step down from May’s downwardly revised 129,000.

The unemployment rate did tick down to 4.2%. But that’s not really good news…

The drop came almost entirely from a falling labor-force participation rate, which slid to 61.5%, its lowest level since March 2021. So, we can translate this number as “fewer people looking for work” rather than “more people finding it.”

Now, plenty of talking heads are already taking a familiar posture – the soft jobs report takes pressure off the Fed, rate hikes get kicked further down the road, onward and upward for the market.

But there’s a wrinkle…

The man running the Fed has already told you, in his own words, that he’s not grading today’s number the way Wall Street is.

So, how is he grading it?

Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh gave us a preview of how he’s thinking

Speaking Wednesday at the ECB’s forum on central banking in Sintra, Portugal, Warsh once again declined to signal anything about this month’s meeting. But he didn’t stay quiet on inflation.

Here’s Warsh:

We’re all in the price stability business… but if there was a common thing I heard over the last couple of days, it was open-mindedness on these questions of AI, open-mindedness on productivity, but we’ve all looked around, and we’ve seen that prices are too high.

Translation: whatever AI is doing to boost productivity isn’t fixing the inflation problem yet.

That’s the lens Warsh brought into this morning’s number – not “did payrolls beat consensus?” but “does anything here change my inflation math?”

It’s unlikely the answer is “yes.”

One more detail from yesterday is worth noting, given this morning’s data…

In that same Sintra appearance, Warsh described the labor market as “steady.” Twenty-four hours later, payrolls missed by more than half, and a chunk of the workforce simply stopped looking for jobs altogether.

That’s either an inconvenient coincidence or an early sign of the exact disconnect we’re about to walk through…

You see, yesterday, Warsh also gave us a glimpse of where he wants the Fed’s whole approach to data to go – and when:

My hope, my aspiration, is that nine-12 months from now we’re going to be using new technologies to understand what’s happening in the real economy in a contemporaneous real time way.

That’s not a Fed chair who trusts the data he’s handed by default. It’s a Fed chair actively building his own alternative to it.

We flagged this shift three weeks ago

Regular Digest readers will remember our June 16 issue, where we laid out the case that Warsh is dismantling forward guidance itself – the dot plot, the press-conference roadmapping, the whole architecture Bernanke built and Powell expanded.

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Warsh to this plainly:

Unlike many of my colleagues, past and present, I don’t believe in forward guidance.

I don’t believe that I should be previewing for you what a future decision might be.

Our takeaway was that if the Fed stops telling you where it’s going, the incoming data becomes the new dot plot. Every economic report gets bigger. Every release becomes a larger event that can rattle markets.

Today’s jobs report was the first real-world test of that thesis. So, we should still be careful not to rush to interpret it.

Warsh already told us what’s wrong with this morning’s number – just not what should replace it

In our June 25 Digest, we showed you that Warsh doesn’t lean primarily on headline PCE – he’s called the Fed’s conventional inflation gauge little more than a “rough swag.”

Instead, he watches the Dallas Fed’s trimmed mean PCE, a measure that lops off the pricing outliers on either side to focus on what’s happening in the middle.

Warsh hasn’t given us a parallel substitute he prefers to the jobs report. But at his very first FOMC press conference as chair, on June 17, he made clear he has the same discomfort with it.

A reporter pressed him on how much weight he puts on the initial payroll print. Here’s Warsh:

What we’re less interested in is echoes of history.

Some of the data that we receive – that we’re waiting on the first Friday after the month of payroll index or something else – that might be an echo of history that’s quite useful on its third revision.

We need to take those error bounds down because we have to make hard decisions in real time.

Translating that out of Fed-speak, Warsh is saying the number that hits your screen the moment it’s released isn’t the real number. It’s a rough first draft that gets rewritten twice more over the following two months – and Warsh is telling you, directly, that he doesn’t fully trust the first draft.

Today’s data proved his point…

May’s already-strong 172,000 print got cut by another 43,000, down to 129,000. And April came down another 31,000, to 148,000.

That’s two more months of the “echo of history” Warsh is describing, rewriting itself in real time.

So, what’s a better way to read this morning’s data?

Warsh hasn’t told us what replaces the headline print. His task forces on data quality are still being staffed – he said as much yesterday at Sintra, promising more detail “next week.”

So, until the Fed builds something better, investors are left to build their own workaround.

Here’s ours: rather than reacting to any single month’s headline number, watch the three-month average payroll gain, calculated using the most recently revised figures rather than each month’s initial estimate.

To be clear, this isn’t Warsh’s framework. But it’s offered in the spirit of the problem he’s flagged.

So, what does this morning’s number look like after smoothing?

Averaging the three most recently revised prints – April’s 148,000, May’s 129,000, and June’s initial 57,000 – puts the trailing three-month pace at roughly 111,000 jobs a month.

To keep pace with population growth and keep the unemployment rate steady, the U.S. economy historically needs to add roughly 150,000 jobs per month.

So, this average is somewhat weak.

Plus, it represents a real cooling trend – and a confirmed one, since all three months just got revised in the same direction: down.

So, even though our three-month framework doesn’t let us treat today’s softer headline print, on its own, as significant enough to move Fed policy, three consecutive downward revisions point toward a real signal.

Is that enough for Warsh to ease up on his hawkishness?

A critical detail to keep in mind

Every new Fed chair gets the same treatment from the media…

Cameras find one face, and that face’s mood becomes shorthand for the whole institution’s mood.

It happened with Bernanke. It happened with Powell. It’s happening now with Warsh.

But Warsh doesn’t run the Fed the way the coverage sometimes implies. He’s chairman, but on the FOMC, his vote counts the same as everyone else’s.

And right now, that committee is deeply split – even if the vote itself doesn’t show it. At Warsh’s first meeting on June 17, the Fed held rates unanimously. But look past the vote to the dot plot underneath it, and the picture changes…

Nine of his 18 colleagues penciled in higher rates before year-end, six of those wanting two separate hikes, while eight favored holding steady and just one wanted a cut.

Warsh himself declined to submit a projection at all.

A unanimous vote with that kind of split sitting underneath it isn’t a consensus. It’s a committee that agreed to disagree quietly for one more meeting.

So, everything we’ve walked through so far – the “echo of history” comment, the discomfort with headline noise, the instinct to look past a single month’s print – tells you how Warsh is likely reading this jobs report. It doesn’t tell you how the rest of the committee reads it, divided as it is.

What this means for how you trade between now and the fall

We got a confirmation of our June 16 thesis this morning – just not a clean, one-directional one.

The initial reaction to the jobs print was textbook…

Futures ripped higher within minutes, yields fell, and traders recalculated their rate hikes expectations. But that snap judgment didn’t hold…

As I write around lunchtime, the early gains have disappeared – though the Dow is still up, the S&P has gone negative, and the Nasdaq is off almost 1%.

This is a market split on how to read a soft-but-revision-heavy print: does cooling labor demand ease the pressure that’s been keeping the Fed hawkish, or is it an early sign the economy itself is cracking?

And without a Warsh press conference to smooth that disagreement into a tidy consensus, this is what price discovery looks like instead – fast, messy, and uncertain.

But the bigger picture hasn’t changed…

Warsh isn’t going to move on one number – he needs a sustained trend. And even if he gets one, he’ll still need to bring along a committee that doesn’t fully agree with him.

Until both of those things happen, expect exactly what we’ve been suggesting is today’s new normal: bigger reactions to smaller pieces of data – and, apparently, uncertain reactions to those reactions.

It’s the logical consequence of a Fed that’s more divided, and less communicative, than it’s been in years.

We’ll keep tracking this as the story develops.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

The post The Real Story Behind the Disappointing Jobs Report appeared first on InvestorPlace.

It can get very philosophical. But I’ll let you in on a secret: At the end of the day, the culprit is almost always the same…

Emotions are what’s driving our behavior.

That’s true today, and it was true in 100,000 B.C.

Imagine you and your hunter/gatherer tribe are out and about… moving to a place with more fresh water.

On your way, you see three dozen terrified members of your neighboring tribe running for their lives. It’s a human stampede.

Your instincts will tell you to run like the wind. Your instincts will say there’s a good reason three dozen people are running for their lives. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see a saber-toothed tiger or a rival tribe with spears… you just know it’s time to run.

This reason – survival – is the core reason why humans find comfort in crowds. It’s how we survived in the wild and became the dominant species on Earth. To this day, we know having your own crowd – your family, friends, and coworkers – leads to longer, better lives.

However, the desire to be part of a crowd can kill your stock portfolio.

We need look no further than how Wall Street responded in early April 2025, when President Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariff plan.

The crowd panicked.

On Thursday, April 3, the Dow dropped 1,679 points. The S&P 500 sank 4.8%. The NASDAQ fell 6%. It was the worst day for the major indexes since the COVID-19 crash.

However, I repeatedly told investors to stand pat and wait out the storm; the market would bounce back. The reality is Wall Street is a manic crowd and it likes to “react” first and “think” later.

This proved to be the right call.

Just days later, President Trump announced a 90-day pause on most reciprocal tariffs. Stocks exploded higher. The S&P 500 jumped 9.5%, its best day since 2008. The NASDAQ surged 12%, its best day in 24 years. And the Dow jumped nearly 3,000 points.

By late June, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ were back at all-time highs.

Investors who sold in the panic missed one of the fastest rebounds in market history.

Going your own way can save it.

The reality is that the human brain is a marvelous tool for creating art, music, language, and engineering feats, but it’s a terrible tool for investing.

The more you know about the workings of your own mind, the “bugs” inside it, and how they work against our investment performance, the more you can develop strategies to mitigate the negative effects of those bugs.

In today’s Market 360, I’ll explain Crowd-Seeking Bias, how it works and how you can neutralize its negative effects. Then, I’ll show you how my Precursor Intelligence system can help you sidestep costly investing mistakes… and zero in on stocks with the best chance of delivering market-beating gains.

The Problem With Crowd-Seeking

A lot of you are probably fans of momentum investing. The truth is, I am, too. You always want to capitalize on a trend, and trends are made up of people.

But while following the crowd CAN result in great momentum plays… you don’t want to do so blindly.

The crowd-seeking I’m talking about – follow the herd, think later – is responsible for a lot of failed investments. It means you won’t pick up on a shift in the trend. So, you’ll get your timing all wrong. You’ll often end up buying near the highs and selling near the lows.

With Crowd-Seeking Bias, even the best investing ideas can become a losing proposition.

The flip side is to be a contrarian. In other words, to buy the dip and sell the highs.

As I mentioned, though, it goes against our instincts. That’s why everyone isn’t Warren Buffett. But you can get his level of returns (or better) by checking your emotions at the door – and sticking with a pattern that works.

The premise is simple.

Look Off the Beaten Path…

There’s an easy way to resist our tendency for crowd-seeking, and it’s to look for buys where nobody else is looking.

It’s a lot easier to go your own way when nobody else is there to influence your decisions.

In other words, look for a company that gets little to no mainstream attention.

A company that doesn’t get fawning coverage on CNBC or on the internet.

But one that’s still growing like crazy – in terms of sales, operating margins, and especially earnings.

Whenever its stock experiences a sell-off… then that’s a great opportunity. And those fundamental factors are exactly what I’ve designed my P.I. system to detect.

But again, you only want the highest-quality companies.

Then you can shift the engine into reverse, too. When an investment starts to slip on these factors, it’s time to sell. (Especially when the crowd hasn’t caught on yet.)

In total, there’s 8 factors to look for. Apply them to fundamentally superior stocks, and that’s the basis for my Precursor Intelligence system.

Once you have these 8 precursors in mind, the results can be phenomenal. For example…

Take Sezzle Inc. (SEZL), for example.

Most investors had never heard of it.

It’s a small buy-now-pay-later credit company. It wasn’t being covered by CNBC. It wasn’t one of the same crowded AI names everyone was chasing. And it certainly wasn’t the kind of stock most retail investors were talking about.

But in early September 2024, my P.I. system identified a major shift in the stock’s ownership structure.

The “elephants” were moving in.

In other words, large institutional investors were quietly accumulating shares before the crowd caught on.

So, after doing my own vetting, I recommended Sezzle to my members.

In less than a year, they had the chance to capture a 555% gain.

That’s the power of going where the smart money is moving before the crowd gets there.

Precursor Intelligence Presentation Now Available

Operating margins, sales metrics, earnings projections…it all sounds pretty boring, I know. That’s exactly the point.

These factors don’t activate your feelings. They do activate something much more important: the system behind Precursor Intelligence.

Not a lot of people take the time to assess stocks this way – much less all 8 factors. So, it’s a great way to beat the Crowd-Seeking Bias we discussed today…and end up with better gains in half the time.

If you want to learn more, go here for the Precursor Intelligence recording and transcript. Besides the glimpse at my system, I even reveal my No.1 stock pick. Click here for details.

Sincerely,

抖阴最新版

Editor, Market 360

The Editor hereby discloses that as of the date of this email, the Editor, directly or indirectly, owns the following securities that are the subject of the commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, or recommendations in, or which are otherwise mentioned in, the essay set forth below:

Sezzle Inc. (SEZL)

The post How to Beat Wall Street’s Manic Crowd appeared first on InvestorPlace.

We wish you all a Happy Fourth of July here from InvestorPlace.

Tom Yeung here with today’s Smart Money.

I used to look forward to upgrading my smartphone.

Every new model felt revolutionary. The iPhone 3… iPhone 6… iPhone 8… every new generation was miles ahead of the one before.

Then something changed.

By the late 2010s, smartphones had become “good enough.” (I now use a Google Pixel with a version number I don’t know.)

Most people stopped upgrading every two years because the improvements simply weren’t worth it. That shift reshaped the entire industry.

Former smartphone giants like HTC, BlackBerry, and Nokia were soon replaced by low-cost manufacturers. Meanwhile, Apple Inc. (AAPL) kept winning – not because it always had the best hardware, but because it owned the ecosystem.

AI may be reaching a similar turning point.

The biggest winners of the next phase may not be the companies building the fastest chips or the largest AI models. Instead, they may be the companies building products people rely on every day.

And a little-known Chinese startup may have just given us the clearest sign yet.

Let’s take a look…

A Free AI That’s Almost as Good

Last month, Chinese startup Z.ai released GLM 5.2, an open-source AI model that ranks among the world’s best.

Unlike models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, GLM 5.2 is completely free. Anyone can download it, modify it, and even use it commercially.

Even more impressive, it’s good enough to run complicated tasks. I’ve taken the model for a test-drive, and can say it’s almost on par with America’s leading AI systems.

And Z.ai isn’t alone.

It’s one of China’s “Six AI Tigers,” a group of startups just months behind the best U.S. companies. They’re giving away capable models and monetizing cloud computing instead.

In other words, cheap, “good enough” AI is arriving much sooner than many investors expected.

Today’s fourth-best AI model can already perform many real-world business tasks, and it doesn’t require Nvidia’s newest chips to do it. Instead, it runs well on the last generation’s hardware that is available to Chinese firms.

That makes AI a lot like smartphones. When technology becomes good enough, buyers become less willing to pay premium prices for cutting-edge hardware unless you own the whole ecosystem like Apple.

In fact, this has happened with almost every new technology. TVs… digital cameras… PCs… solar panels… When “good enough” versions start showing up, price becomes more important than owning the latest model.

This doesn’t mean AI is slowing down, but it does mean that the companies capturing the biggest profits will change.

Why This Changes the Investment Story

Rather than flowing primarily to hardware makers, more value could shift toward businesses that build indispensable AI-powered products, software, and ecosystems.

That’s why Eric has been cautious about chasing the hottest semiconductor stocks after their enormous gains. No one wants to be caught holding the next Blackberry.

Instead, he continues focusing on what we call AI Appliers: the companies using AI to create products customers can’t easily replace.

Several months ago, Eric and I warned that parts of the AI market were becoming overheated. Just as smartphones evolved from breakthrough hardware into everyday commodities, AI may be entering its own “iPhone Moment.”

If that’s the case, the biggest investment opportunity won’t necessarily be building better AI. It will be owning the companies that put increasingly cheap, increasingly capable AI to work.

You can learn more about Eric’s recommended AI Applier companies at Fry’s Investment Report.

Simply click here to learn more.

Until next time,

Thomas Yeung, CFA

Market Analyst, InvestorPlace

The post Why AI Becoming “Good Enough” Changes Everything for Investors appeared first on InvestorPlace.

When the first American railroads began reporting revenue in the 1840s, the critics who had called the whole enterprise an overbuilt fantasy found themselves with less and less to say.

Something similar is happening in AI right now.

Exponential View just published the most comprehensive accounting of the AI economy we’ve yet seen — its State of the AI Economy 2026 report — with real revenue, utilization, and capex payback math. 

The numbers don’t leave much room for the bear narrative.

The Revenue Bears Have Run Out of Excuses — $175 Billion Says So 

Exponential View’s report estimates the global ex-China Generative AI (GenAI) economy is producing $175 billion in annualized revenue. And before anyone accuses Exponential View of creative accounting — this figure excludes chips, AI ad uplift, legacy software “AI features,” and financing.

In other words, it is only reflecting real customer demand.

Now, $175 billion in run-rate revenue sounds massive — and it is. But let’s contextualize that number. 

One hundred seventy-five billion dollars represents just 0.5% of total U.S. GDP. The broader ‘digital economy’ sector makes up about 10% of GDP. Total U.S. corporate profits — which surged to a record $4.426 trillion in Q1 of 2026 — are 25x larger than the entire GenAI revenue pool. AI revenue is enormous in absolute terms and almost minuscule in relative terms.

Therein lies the opportunity…

Because here’s the thing those relative numbers don’t capture: speed. AI revenue relative to GDP is already up 10x from Q1 2024. GenAI is scaling 3x faster than prior IT waves — faster than the internet and mobile booms. In 2023, the AI economy needed 180 days to add $1 billion of cumulative revenue. Today it needs less than two days. That is a 90x acceleration in the speed of revenue generation. Recent quarter-over-quarter growth is running ~35%, which annualizes to more than 3x.

This is the setup every long-term investor dreams about. Big enough to validate the thesis. Small enough that the runway is virtually unlimited. The penetration curve is in the very earliest innings of a generational platform shift — and the data proves it.

The CapEx Math Is Actually Working

According to the bears, while the hyperscalers are spending a combined ~$2 trillion cumulatively through 2026 on AI infrastructure — the largest technology buildout in history — there’s no possible way the economics ever pencil out. It’s a capex bubble about to burst.

Except… the math is starting to work.

The AI economy is now generating enough revenue to cover depreciation: the ongoing cost of using up the infrastructure built to run it. Not with room to spare, but the gap has closed, and the direction is positive.

For every dollar of AI infrastructure that depreciates, roughly $1.19 in hyperscaler and neocloud revenue is coming in to cover it — and $1.32 when you count the full GenAI economy. A year ago, that ratio was below 1. Now it’s above it.

This is still a race, of course. But the critics who insisted AI would never generate sufficient revenue to justify the buildout are already being proven wrong. And we are still in the early stages of the utilization ramp.

The Jevons Paradox: Why Falling Token Prices Are Bullish for AI

One of the more sophisticated bear arguments has to do with token cost. Some believe that as token prices continue to collapse — with blended pricing falling from ~$17 per million tokens to ~$2 —AI companies are destroying the economics of the industry.

‘Margins are going to zero. The boom is over.’

But that argument confuses price with value — and ignores how technology adoption actually works. 

For technologies with elastic demand, falling prices create value; cheaper tokens = more use cases.

Better models expand what AI can actually do. Reasoning models consume more tokens as they think through complex problems. So the very thing bears are pointing to as a headwind — price compression — is actually the accelerant for the next leg of volume growth.

More apps, more agents, more inference, more memory, more networking, more storage, more power, more cooling, more data centers… 

The Jevons paradox — the observation that efficiency improvements in resource use lead to increased total consumption — is playing out in real time across the AI infrastructure stack.

Bears are worried about price compression. Bulls are focused on volume elasticity. The data says volume wins.

Why AI Feels Slower Than It Is — and Why That’s Exactly What the Data Predicts

Here is one nuance worth understanding, because it explains why AI’s impact can feel underwhelming in GDP statistics even as it is very real inside companies.

Seven in 10 GenAI claims from companies in the S&P 500 focus on cost savings, time savings, throughput, or quality improvement. Explicit revenue gains are only ~6% of claims. The first killer enterprise AI app is not “create a magical new business line.” It’s “do the same work faster, cheaper, better.”

This is actually the normal pattern for platform shifts. The efficiency wave always comes first. Productivity gains show up in margins and labor leverage before they show up in GDP or revenue. The internet’s first decade was dominated by cost reduction and efficiency. Revenue came later — and when it came, it was enormous.

AI is following the same script. Efficiency now. Revenue later. And if the efficiency wave alone is already generating $175 billion in run-rate demand, imagine what happens when the revenue wave hits.

What the Revenue Inflection Means for AI Infrastructure Stocks Right Now

The macro data on AI has never been more bullish. The micro data — real company revenues, utilization trends, and capex payback — is inflecting positively. And yet AI stocks have been choppy, volatile, and in some cases well off their highs.

That combination — improving fundamentals, weak stock prices — is the definition of a buying opportunity.

The names best positioned to benefit from this data are across the full AI Builder stack, detailed most recently here:

• Chips and semiconductors
• Memory
• Networking and optics
• Servers and infrastructure
• Power and cooling

The Bottom Line: The Direction Changed

For the past two years, the race between AI capex and AI revenue has been the central question of this trade. This quarter, for the first time, the revenue side pulled ahead.

That doesn’t mean the race is over. The capex curve will keep rising. But the direction has changed — and in markets, direction matters more than destination.

The AI trade is alive, the fundamentals are inflecting, and the market is handing you a discount on one of the most compelling long-term growth stories in history.

That doesn’t happen often. Act accordingly.

Here’s one way to do that.

The infrastructure data in this piece tells you the AI buildout is real and accelerating. What it doesn’t tell you is where the most sophisticated private capital has already been positioning — months before this quarter’s numbers made the bull case undeniable.

Peter Thiel’s answer? A wholesale exit from public markets and a move into the physical substrate of the AI economy — the hard assets that get paid regardless of which model, which hyperscaler, or which application layer ultimately wins.

Most of those positions aren’t available to retail investors. Seven of them have a publicly traded equivalent.

Here’s what that portfolio looks like — and the thesis behind every position.

The post The AI Capex Bear Case Just Lost Its Best Argument appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Last week, Jeremy Grantham, British investor, billionaire, and GMO co-founder, went full bear:

This is the most expensive market in American history…

My guess is sometime between two weeks ago, two weeks from now, two months, two quarters and conceivably two years – the timing is always terribly uncertain – the market’s going to peak out and drop back to trend.

And getting back to trend from here is closer to a 70% decline than a 50% decline

Do you find this helpful?

At some point… between two weeks ago and two years from now… we’ll have a huge crash.

No disrespect to Grantham – he’s a legendary investor – but, to me, this comment is useless. Worse, it can be financially damaging.

On January 24, 2023, Grantham released his official 2023 outlook letter titled “After a Timeout, Back to the Meat Grinder!” where he warned of a potential 50% crash.

Then in April of 2023, he told the We Study Billionaires podcast that the modern “superbubble” was on the verge of popping.

And in July of 2023, he put a 70% probability on a crash matching the patterns of 1929, 2000, and 2021.

Not only has no such crash occurred since Grantham’s first January 2023 call, but stocks have surged since then. The Nasdaq 100 is up more than 150%.

If you’d sat out of stocks based on Grantham’s call, you’d have missed your account more than doubling. That’s not a rounding error – that’s a potential multi-year retirement delay.

The reality is that we will eventually have a market crash. But I don’t think it’ll be tomorrow, next month, or even this year. And today, I want to highlight one major reason why.

To be clear, I’m not saying the next 6-12 months will be smooth, or even that we won’t suffer a 10%-15% haircut somewhere along the way. But I believe “the crash” remains farther out on the horizon, which means one thing…

It’s still time to be invested and make money before the eventual pain arrives.

A magazine cover, a stock chart, and a lesson about tops

Older investors like me will recall 1991 when the U.S. economy was clawing its way out of a recession.

Auto sales had collapsed to a level that would mark the low point for the next 16 years. Investors were bearish on Detroit, and they had reason to be – TIME even ran a cover story that November asking a blunt question: “Can GM survive in today’s world?”

Thirteen months later, the mood had entirely flipped…

The economy was strengthening, auto sales had bounced back, and TIME ran a new cover featuring the CEOs of the Big Three automakers. But this one wasn’t despairing. It was triumphant: “The Big Three – How Detroit is shifting into high gear.”

Same company, same industry, 13 months apart.

So, which would have been the better time to buy GM stock? At the point of despair or the point of hope?

In November 1992, during the “despair” cover, GM shares traded around $28.

By December 1993, during the “hope” cover, they’d climbed to just above $55, nearly doubling.

And then, just 12 months after that triumphant cover ran, GM shares had fallen by about a third, back to $35.

Despair preceded the gains. Hope preceded the losses.

This teaches us a critical lesson about investment peaks and valleys that we’d be wise to remember today…

Whether on a stock-specific basis or across broad markets, “tops” tend to form when investors are wildly confident, bullish, and greedy, while bottoms are typically carved out when investors are despairing and hopeless.

Alan Greenspan coined the phrase “irrational exuberance” to describe exactly this dynamic during the dot-com run-up. And Newsweek‘s famous 1999 cover capturing that era’s FOMO ran just months before the Nasdaq collapsed.

So, here’s the question…

Does this market feel irrationally exuberant?

The sentiment data tells a different story than the headlines

If euphoria and rabid FOMO are the preconditions for a top, today’s numbers don’t support the “we’re there” thesis nearly as cleanly as Grantham’s bubble framing suggests.

Yes, some pockets of the market are experiencing FOMO, but as we’ll get to, it’s somewhat justified by earnings. More on that shortly…

First, zeroing in on sentiment, let’s start with retail investors…

The latest American Association of Individual Investors Sentiment Survey from last week shows bullish sentiment at 44.9%. That’s above the historical average of 37.5%, so it’s not nothing. But it’s well below the 60% to 70%-plus readings that marked the actual dot-com peak.

Retail investors look more like accumulators than blind speculators right now – surveys on AI-focused investors show the overwhelming majority plan to hold or add to positions, with only a small minority looking to reduce exposure.

Now look at wealthier investors…

A recent Janus Henderson survey of affluent and high-net-worth investors found that 67% are actively worried about an AI bubble bursting within the next 12 months.

That’s not complacency or “YOLO” risk-taking. That’s a market grinding higher while two-thirds of its most sophisticated participants are looking over their shoulder.

Finally, on the institutional side, Bank of America’s Global Fund Manager Survey shows funds remain structurally long tech, but positioning has eased meaningfully. Managers are taking profits on the most extended hardware names and rotating into broader equities rather than doubling down.

Put it together, and you get a market climbing the proverbial “wall of worry” – high conviction paired with persistent, widespread caution.

That combination has historically been a feature of ongoing bull markets, not a signature of imminent tops.

A true top tends to require something close to universal agreement that prices can only go up – recall Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy during the 2020 day-trading craze saying, “Stocks only go up” and “only losers take profits.”

Are you seeing that sentiment today?

I see the opposite: widespread, well-documented anxiety sitting underneath continued buying.

Still, caution remains critical

The lack of rabid FOMO is not an invitation to go all-in.

Grantham’s framing deserves real respect, and there’s at least one place where the data is flashing something worth watching closely.

Here’s our hypergrowth expert Luke Lango, editor of Innovation Investor, on what he’s calling an IPO Spike Warning:

The Bloomberg data showing Q2 2026 IPO value tracking toward $400 billion — roughly double the recent quarterly average — is a pattern worth monitoring precisely because it has occurred near inflection points in prior cycles.

We are not making a market crash call. The specific circumstances of each prior spike were different, and the AI infrastructure fundamentals today are categorically stronger than the earnings realities of the Dot Com era, the leverage realities of the GFC era, or the inflation shock of 2021.

But historical patterns that have repeated across multiple distinct market cycles deserve respect, and the intellectually honest posture is to acknowledge this one while maintaining our constructive stance on AI infrastructure. 

Luke recommends investors be thoughtful about position sizing, maintain dry powder for potential outsized pullbacks, and stay focused on the highest-quality, most defensible names in the AI infrastructure trade rather than speculating.

But with those defensive measures in place, he concludes:

The Summer of AI is intact. We are watching the IPO spike carefully. Both things can be true.

That posture feels right to me.

IPO mania does reflect some exaggerated FOMO, and it has shown up near inflection points before – not as a guaranteed crash signal, but as a pattern that deserves respect. However, this FOMO centers on just a handful of stocks going public.

“But Jeff, you’re missing the FOMO and greed in corners of AI like the memory trade.”

Great point! The memory/semiconductor trade is very crowded today. And I’d be surprised if we don’t see some double-digit profit-taking over the coming weeks. In fact, we’re seeing some today as I write. It could result in a longer stretch of underperformance.

But profit-taking is not the same as crashing. And there’s a big reason there will likely be loads of buyers after a bout of profit-taking…

Earnings.

Does today’s earnings backdrop support the bubble-bursting narrative?

Memory is a hot trade today – but it’s for a reason.

A week ago today, memory giant Micron (MU) told investors to expect roughly $50 billion in revenue next quarter. Analysts had penciled in $43.6 billion. That’s not a beat – that’s a different zip code.

Micron’s blowout outlook is a microcosm of a broader AI supercycle that has the entire chip sector firing on all cylinders. According to research from International Data Corporation (IDC), total global semiconductor revenues are projected to surge 52.8% to hit a historic $1.29 trillion in 2026.

Here’s more from IDC:

The memory segment is at the epicenter of this shift: DRAM revenues alone are projected to nearly triple in 2026 to $418.6 billion, driven by demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and DDR from hyperscalers and AI infrastructure providers. 

But this earnings strength isn’t limited to just memory chips. It’s wider…

In last Thursday’s Digest, I highlighted a chart from Alpine Macro showing how today’s tech boom has something the dot-com era didn’t have…

Real earnings growth, not just multiple expansion.

From last Thursday’s Digest:

In the dot-com boom, P/E ratios went to the moon while profits barely budged. Today, earnings per share are compounding while multiples have stayed relatively flat.

That’s a structurally different – and arguably more durable – setup.

Better still, we can also look one layer up from tech to the wider S&P…

Wells Fargo expects headline S&P 500 earnings growth to surge to 22% growth year-over-year during Q2.

Meanwhile, FactSet’s forward-earnings data shows similarly robust expectations baked into current estimates – meaning today’s elevated valuations are, at least partly, being met by real, growing profits rather than pure multiple expansion.

Don’t misunderstand me – this market is not cheap. But these robust earnings take pressure off the “nosebleed valuation” argument, which – along with the lack of frothing-at-the-mouth FOMO – suggests disaster isn’t directly at our door.

Closing the loop on the memory trade and FOMO, yes, there’s some FOMO in memory today – but it’s chasing a massive number that just printed, not a fantasy number that people hope will print.

Coming full circle

If you had to put a magazine cover on today’s market, would it be the jubilant “shifting into high gear” version? Or the despondent “can it survive?” version?

For me, it’s neither. It’s something far less marketable – perhaps:

“Investors Aren’t Sure, and the Data Backs Them Up.”

Of course, magazines with that cover don’t sell well. But that’s usually a good sign for investors like you and me.

Most likely, we’re somewhere in the messy middle, though skewing toward the top. The evidence still supports parts of both the bullish and bearish cases. And that’s important because true market peaks usually leave very little room for debate.

Bottom line: Watch the IPO data… track the earnings… respect Grantham’s warnings…

But analyze whether you’re really seeing rabid FOMO today – and if you’re not, consider what that means for whether we’ve truly arrived at the peak.

We’ll keep tracking this as the data develops.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

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