The graph below shows that the US oil rig count has been slightly declining despite much higher oil prices. While many investors may assume that no growth in the number of operating oil rigs implies limited oil production growth, that assumption is not necessarily true. To wit, we share Diamondback Energy’s May 2026 stockholder letter. […]
Michael Nicoletos wrote a thoughtful paper titled “The Index Trap,” making a compelling case that active investing, i.e., picking individual stocks versus buying baskets of stocks (ETFs), will outperform in the future. If correct, that would reverse the trend over the last two decades, in which investors increasingly relied on passive investment strategies. The following […]
The Treasury General Account (TGA) is effectively the US Treasury’s checking account held at the Fed. The changing balance of the TGA affects the financial system’s liquidity, thereby influencing broader economic and market activity. For example, when the Treasury raises its TGA balances by issuing more debt and or collecting more tax revenue than it […]
The semiconductor leaderboard has quietly flipped over the past month, and the NVDA to CPU rotation is worth pausing on. NVDA, the name that defined the AI trade for two-plus years, is up just 13.4% over the trailing month. The CPU cohort has run circles around it. AMD has ripped 70.4% higher, MU has added […]
Wednesday’s mega-cap tech earnings produced one of the cleaner real-time experiments we’ve seen this cycle. Four hyperscalers reported. All four beat on revenue and earnings. All four committed to massive AI infrastructure spending. Yet the market reactions were wildly divergent: Alphabet surged 10% higher, while Amazon rose 0.8%, Microsoft fell 3.9%, and Meta fell 8.6%. […]
Presuming Kevin Warsh’s nomination as Fed Chair is approved by the Senate, as is widely expected, yesterday’s FOMC meeting was Jerome Powell’s last as its Chair. However, he will stay on as a voting Governor. As he explains: Things that happened in the last 3 months left me no choice but to see them through […]
The relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI has been a defining partnership in the blooming AI technology. But the partnership terms are changing, and what was once a solid relationship may be fracturing. On Monday morning, Microsoft shares quickly fell 5% as the Bloomberg headline “OpenAI Breaks Free From Exclusive AI Pact With Partner Microsoft” sent concern […]
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) is on an incredible 18-day winning streak. Over this period, starting on March 31st, the SOX index has risen by 44%. This marks the longest winning streak in the index’s 32-year history. Moreover, it is now up 150% year over year, exceeding its 100% year-over-year gain during the dot-com boom. […]
On Thursday, the executives at Service Now (NOW) and IBM learned an important lesson the hard way as their stocks fell by 18% and nearly 10%, respectively. The stark message from Wall Street is that forward sales and earnings guidance now take precedence over recent financial results. IBM beat earnings expectations across the board. However, […]