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Iran stops negotiations… how high could oil go?… Jonathan Rose’s three IPO red flags… Elizabeth Warren pushes AI taxes and higher capital gains taxes… the data that undercuts her jobs argument…
As I write on Monday near lunch, U.S. oil prices have surged 7%, with West Texas Intermediate Crude jumping to nearly $94 a barrel and Brent crude approaching $97 a barrel.
Driving the price action is news that Tehran is halting negotiations with the U.S. and threatening to fully close the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s escalating ground offensive in Lebanon.
The headline arrives at a fragile moment in the Middle East. Despite an uneasy ceasefire that took effect in early April, U.S. warplanes struck Iranian radar and drone facilities on Qeshm Island over the weekend. Meanwhile, Iran launched missiles and drones at Kuwait. Both sides claimed the other fired first.
Despite what appears to be a deteriorating geopolitical situation, yesterday, President Trump posted on Truth Social:
Iran really wants to make a deal…
Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end.
Whether that optimism is warranted is unclear. Axios reported over the weekend that Trump had requested several amendments to the draft agreement his envoys had reached with Iranian officials. Apparently, nuclear commitments and the scope of sanctions relief are two key issues.
As oil jumps higher this morning, the markets are pricing in uncertainty more than reassurance. And the range of outcomes here is wide.
Rystad Energy’s head of geopolitical analysis told CNBC that a full breakdown in talks – with fighting resuming in earnest – could send Brent to $180 a barrel by August. On the other hand, a comprehensive deal could see prices fall back toward $70 by year-end.
It’s a striking thought that this Strait – barely 21 miles wide at its tightest point – largely controls the fate of global energy markets, inflation forecasts, and economic growth across three continents.
We’ll keep you updated.
“They robbed us. That’s the only way I can put it.”
That’s our trading expert Jonathan Rose, referring to what happened with the Figma Inc. (FIG) IPO – which we detailed in Friday’s Digest.
Here’s Jonathan’s quick recap if you missed it:
A performance-based trigger almost no one knew about was in place.
The stock opened 158% above the threshold, and so the trigger fired on Day 1. By 36 days later, the people who understood the structure were selling at $80.
Eight months later, Figma was at $22 – down 81% from the peak and 33% lower than the IPO price itself.
That structure wasn’t an accident. It was the playbook.
This story echoes a saying I heard somewhere along the way…
“IPO” doesn’t stand for “Initial Public Offering,” but rather “Initial Public Offloading” – a time when insiders dump their shares to the unsuspecting public.
An IPO wave is on the way – at a scale we’ve never seen. SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI represent over $3 trillion in combined valuation coming to market, each structured by the same investment banks using the same mechanics.
Given this, Jonathan just flagged five warning signs that a deal is built for insiders, not you. I want to share three with you.
Three IPO red flags to watch for
The first thing to check is the float. If less than 10% of shares are being offered, Jonathan says be careful:
Small floats create artificial scarcity. They amplify the first-day pop. They give insiders more shares to sell into the secondary lockup expirations.
Second, ignore the “oversubscribed” bragging. Back to Jonathan:
A massively oversubscribed deal that prices below where it should clear is a deal that’s been deliberately underpriced to produce a pop.
Third – and this is the one almost nobody does – search the S-1 for “Early Release Condition” or “performance-based release.”
Here’s Jonathan on what to look for:
If the lockup releases additional shares at a price 25% above IPO, and the company prices low enough to guarantee the trigger, you’re looking at the Figma structure.
This is part of your defensive playbook – but what about offense?
Jonathan recommends investors buy the IPO family, not the headline.
Every AI IPO in this pipeline has publicly traded proxies you can own today. The logic of owning the family works two ways…
These companies hold direct equity stakes that rise in value as the IPO prices higher, and when Wall Street starts assigning enormous valuations to a sector, the public peers get repriced too – analysts are forced to update their comparables overnight.
SpaceX has Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), which holds a 6.11% stake – exposure that becomes suddenly visible once SpaceX starts trading publicly. Anthropic has Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) as major investors. OpenAI has Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) as its cloud and equity partner.
No lockup risk. No allocation lottery. No premium built on a deliberately restricted float.
Jonathan has taken this a step further
His unusual trading activity scanner – which identifies concentrated institutional positioning before the crowd arrives – is now paired with veteran trader Marc Chaikin’s institutional Money Flow indicator.
When both indicators confirm the same name, that’s their Convergence Trigger. It’s a powerful way to find the most attractive stock opportunities swirling around massive market events like IPOs before the bell ever rings.
Last week, the two experts went live to walk through exactly how this Convergence Trigger works – and shared specific setups already flashing today.
Click here to watch the free replay.
Bottom line: Three trillion dollars in AI “Initial Public Offloadings” is on the way. Be smart about how you play it.
Now, all the money being made – whether from IPOs or the AI trade broadly – is widening the wealth gap in America. And that’s producing the exact policy response I predicted in January…
At the start of the year, as our analysts were unveiling their 2026 predictions for the market, I made one of my own
This year will bring a wave of new, controversial legislative proposals aimed at investment wealth – proposals that may not pass immediately, but will introduce a new layer of policy risk investors will have to price in.
Behind my prediction was our ever-widening K-shaped economy, where Americans with assets grow wealthier while those without watch inflation erode their purchasing power.
Data from the Federal Reserve shows that in April, the gap between these two groups set a record…
The top 1% of households now own 31.9% of all U.S. wealth. This is the highest share on record since the Fed began tracking it in 1989. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% holds a mere 2.5% of the nation’s wealth.
History shows that large and persistent economic splits don’t stay contained. Over time, they tend to produce policy responses. That was the basis for my prediction.
With that context, let’s jump to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) op-ed published in Time last Wednesday. These are select quotes:
- It’s time to tax AI and invest in people…
- Taxing AI is one way we make sure the winnings from AI benefit all Americans…
- We need to level the playing field by raising taxes on corporations and capital gains…
- There is no denying that AI is already changing the labor market…
Now, we could analyze Warren’s op-ed from all sorts of angles. But let’s zero in on the last point about the labor market…
What’s the truth about AI jobs losses?
If you’re a longtime Digest reader, you know I’ve spent years flagging the risk of an AI-driven jobs apocalypse. The early data and commentary from AI experts pointing in that direction have been hard to ignore – and I’ve never been shy about sharing it.
But one thing I’ve always tried to be is honest, even when new evidence pushes back on old assumptions. And lately, that’s exactly what’s been happening.
So, let’s look at the actual data.
First, we’re three years into the age of AI, and yet the national unemployment rate still sits at 4.3%.
As you can see below, this is one of the lowest rates on record dating back to 1950.
Second, as I covered in last Wednesday’s Digest, Federal Reserve data on college graduate unemployment and underemployment show both metrics are running roughly in line with their 30-year averages.
For example, here’s the underemployment rate for recent graduates and college graduates dating back to 1990 as a reminder.
These statistics don’t support the crisis picture Warren’s framing implies, or recent headlines about “graduation boos” – students booing commencement speakers who mentioned AI – even as the underlying employment data remained sturdy.
Third, let’s look at what the actual job-posting data show – starting with the report from Citadel Securities that I featured in last Friday’s issue of Investing Insider.
The short version: hiring in several AI-exposed industries isn’t collapsing – in some cases, it’s accelerating.
As one example, the chart below shows a dotted vertical line labeled “Inflection in Software Hiring” around May 2025 – right as AI capabilities were accelerating dramatically.
Software-engineer hiring has climbed since then, now up 18% from that inflection point. The most AI-exposed occupation in the economy is seeing some of the fastest hiring growth.
If AI were already displacing knowledge workers on a broad scale, this isn’t the kind of chart we’d expect to see.
Even where layoffs are real, the story is complicated
The tech sector has seen heavier layoffs in recent months. But there’s more to it than the headlines…
Do you remember the Swedish “buy now, pay later” fintech giant Klarna (KLAR)?
It slashed its workforce by 22% and bragged that its AI chatbots could do the work of 700 customer service agents and marketing staff.
Well, after facing a decline in service quality and customer trust, the company backtracked on the aggressive cuts and initiated a recruitment drive to bring human workers back into customer support roles.
Even Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic are walking back their previous doom-and-gloom forecasts for job cuts.
Here’s Fortune from last week:
Altman said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact—a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk.
Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do.
Interesting timing as these companies gear up to go public…
Now, I’m not saying that displacement won’t eventually accelerate – but the current data simply aren’t there, and the experts are drastically changing their tune.
If you’re an Investing Insider subscriber, click here to log in and read the full analysis and piece from Citadel. You’ll come away with a better idea of what’s really happening – and how to position your portfolio.
If you’re not yet an Investing Insider subscriber, this is a service where I interview our analysts, break down research from major Wall Street firms, and translate it all into the risks and portfolio implications that don’t fit in the Digest. Click here to learn more.
Where does all this end up?
The data today show that the job-loss narrative is running well ahead of the actual job-loss numbers.
In other words, though it could change in the future, Elizabeth Warren’s assertion that “there is no denying that AI is already changing the labor market” is wrong – there’s plenty to deny it.
But when it comes to the consequences for your portfolio, she doesn’t need to be right – she just needs to be persuasive.
So, where does this leave us today?
Stay long – but eyes open to public sentiment and political framing.
Have a good evening,
Jeff Remsburg
