Amazon‘s (AMZN) Rufus can now buy things for you. OpenAI‘s ChatGPT has a checkout built in. Walmart‘s (WMT) Sparky is moving from recommendations to transactions.

One by one, the biggest companies in the world are crossing the same line: from AI that advises to AI that acts. 

Now Mastercard (MA) has built the road for all of them to drive on. 

This week, the company unveiled Agent Pay for Machines — AP4M — a payments infrastructure platform built not for humans but for AI agents. 

The announcement didn’t exactly break the internet; just a clean product launch describing infrastructure for “automated microtransactions” and “machine-driven transactions that happen continuously in digital commerce.”

It’s a bigger deal than most people might realize — because in the Age of AI, human purchasing behavior doesn’t scale quite as well as what’s coming…

The Purchase Decision Is Getting a Co-Pilot

Today, a typical mid-size enterprise manages hundreds of software subscriptions and vendor contracts, with dozens of payment methods, all involving an approval process bogged down by compliance checks and budget codes. 

Consumer commerce isn’t much better. Anyone who has been trapped in a time warp comparing airline seats, luggage fees, loyalty point conversions, and layover times across six browser tabs knows that the human brain was never optimized for this kind of decision-making. 

AI agents are increasingly capable of handling much of that process — evaluating price, quality, delivery time, return policy, and budget availability simultaneously — in a fraction of the time a human would need. The technology isn’t perfect yet. But the direction is clear, and the infrastructure being built around it is being designed for a much more capable generation of agents. 

The problem, until now, has been trust. A bad chatbot recommendation is a mere annoyance. A bad payment agent that routes real money to the wrong vendor, fails to settle a transaction, gets compromised by a fraudster, or blows past a spending limit is a catastrophe. That’s why payments, identity, authorization, fraud prevention, and guaranteed settlement aren’t just features in the agentic world. They’re the entire game.

Mastercard’s AP4M is a bet that it can be the trust layer for this new era. High-frequency, low-latency, low-value machine payments across cards, bank accounts, and stablecoins — with credentialing, spending controls, and settlement built in. 

It’s essentially aiming to be the financial nervous system for the robot economy.

What AI Agents Will Actually Buy — and How Much Volume That Creates

The road is built. The question is what drives on it — and how much. 

Consumer agents could shop for groceries, compare insurance plans, book travel, reorder prescriptions, pay utility bills, manage subscriptions, negotiate with service providers, and handle returns — all without requiring anything except a budget and preferences. 

But consumer shopping is just the entry point. The real volume is in business.

We’re talking about industrial AI agents that can:

• Procure cloud compute on spot markets in real time
• Buy data feeds from third-party providers to answer a query
• Pay API calls to specialized models
• Bid for inference capacity, settling micropayments to data brokers
• Manage logistics contracts
• Reorder inventory when stock dips below a threshold

All in the background, at machine speed, without requiring human approval for each individual transaction.

And then there’s agent-to-agent commerce: 

• AI models paying other AI models for specialized capabilities
• An orchestration agent routing a task to a vision model, a code generation model, and a legal review model — and paying each one
• Micropayment settlement between software systems that used to communicate for free but will increasingly charge for specialized inference

The volume of individual transactions in this world is orders of magnitude higher than anything existing payment infrastructure was designed to handle — which is exactly why Mastercard is moving now.

The Agentic Commerce Winners: Who Owns Each Layer of the Stack

So where does this leave investors? The agentic commerce stack has clear winners — and they’re not all obvious. 

The Payment Rails: Mastercard and Visa Play Offense

Mastercard and Visa (V) are the most direct plays. If AI agents become major economic actors, every transaction they make needs a trusted, regulated rail to run on. Both networks are moving intelligently — AP4M is Mastercard’s opening move, and Visa has its own agent payment initiatives underway. The risk is crypto disintermediation; but their fraud infrastructure, regulatory relationships, and merchant networks are moats that don’t disappear overnight. They’re playing offense, not waiting to be disrupted. 

The Crypto Layer: Where Stablecoins Beat Card Economics

For high-frequency, low-value machine payments — an agent paying $0.003 to a data API 60,000 times a day — traditional card economics don’t work. Stablecoins do. Circle‘s USDC is already embedded in developer infrastructure and is dollar-denominated, programmable, and built for exactly this use case. Coinbase (COIN-USD) is the leading regulated on-ramp. Solana (SOL-USD) and XRP (XRP-USD) offer the low-cost, high-speed settlement rails the agentic economy needs. This is a structural advantage. 

The Invisible Infrastructure: Why Cloudflare May Be the Most Important Winner

Cloudflare (NET) may be the least obvious but most important winner in this stack. Every AI agent operating on the web needs traffic routing, identity verification, security, and, increasingly, payment hooks. Cloudflare already handles most of that for the human web — and it’s clearly been thinking about the agent version for a while. Its developer tools are already built to let agents discover, authenticate, and pay for network resources on the fly. 

The Frontier AI Labs: Whoever Controls the Default Agent Controls Commerce

The frontier AI labs — Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Anthropic, Meta (META) — may be the biggest winners of all. Whoever controls the default agent controls what gets bought. If your shopping agent runs on Gemini, Google captures commercial intent before any retailer enters the picture. The agent becomes the new search bar, the new storefront entrance. That’s an enormous amount of economic leverage — and it goes to whoever builds the most trusted, most widely deployed agents. 

Commerce Platforms: Why Being Agent-Friendly Becomes a Competitive Moat

Shopify (SHOP), MercadoLibre (MELI), Uber (UBER), DoorDash (DASH) win if they build agent-friendly infrastructure — clean, machine-readable APIs that expose price, availability, delivery time, and product data in structured form. Platforms that make themselves easy for agents to query become preferred vendors by default. Platforms that don’t become invisible. 

The Losers: The $600 Billion Digital Ad Economy Built for Humans, Not Agents

The flip side of this thesis is just as important — and more uncomfortable for some. 

A significant chunk of digital commerce today runs on what we might call manufactured friction: 

• SEO-content farms that exist to intercept consumer search queries
• Coupon sites and comparison platforms that monetize human indecision
• Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that spend fortunes on Instagram ads and bank on impulse purchases
• Retailers whose entire competitive strategy is “be first in Google results.”

But AI agents won’t get distracted by a banner ad, click on a sponsored result, or respond to influencer marketing. 

They evaluate objective criteria — price, verified quality, delivery reliability, return policy, trust signals — and transact. 

The entire apparatus of attention-based digital marketing, which has been the backbone of the internet economy for two decades, gets significantly disrupted.

Low-moat DTC brands without genuine product differentiation face structural pressure. If an agent can find a functionally equivalent product for 15% less from a vendor with better delivery reliability, that’s what it will buy. Brand loyalty built through social media presence and influencer campaigns is worth considerably less when the purchase decision is made by software.

Legacy retailers with messy, poorly structured data infrastructure are especially vulnerable. The retailers who haven’t built clean, machine-readable APIs won’t get considered at all. 

The Bigger Picture: How Agentic Commerce Rewrites the Rules of the Internet Economy

The internet was built for human navigation. Every layer of it — search algorithms, advertising systems, content marketing, social platforms — was designed to capture human attention, direct it toward specific products and services, and monetize the journey. 

The entire $600 billion digital advertising industry exists because humans browse inefficiently — and can be influenced along the way.

When an AI agent can handle purchase decisions autonomously, the economic value gets redistributed away from attention-based intermediaries and toward the infrastructure layers — trust, identity, settlement, agent distribution, and structured data.

This is why Mastercard’s AP4M announcement, easy to dismiss as a niche fintech product launch, is actually a signal about a profound structural shift. 

AI is rewriting the rules of commerce. Mastercard intends to own a piece of the financial future.

It’s rebuilding the payment rails. And all eyes are on the legacy titan as it lays the track.

But nobody’s watching who’s building the station.

Here’s what I mean.

The post Mastercard’s New AI Payment System Is Great News for These Stocks appeared first on InvestorPlace.

As I write on Wednesday in the wake of new Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh’s press conference, markets are selling off as investors process Warsh and his changes at the Federal Reserve.

The quick read on Wall Street appears straightforward: Warsh wasn’t as dovish as the market wanted.

Meanwhile, what Warsh did say – and what he deliberately didn’t – told you everything about where this chairmanship is headed.

Stepping back, as expected, the FOMC voted unanimously to hold rates at 3.5%–3.75%. But as we noted in yesterday’s Digest, the rate decision itself was never going to be the story today.

The question marks surrounded the official statement language and the easing bias, the press conference, and what Warsh did with the dot plot.

Let’s take them in order.

The statement first. Warsh didn’t just trim it – he gutted it. Today’s official release came in at 132 words. The prior statement under Jerome Powell ran 344.

Warsh acknowledged the change directly at the top of his press conference:

It’s a bit shorter, a bit simpler and it dispenses with some older language. That statement just gives you the facts, as best we can judge it.

More importantly, gone was the easing bias – the language that had signaled the next move in rates was more likely down than up, and one of the three things we told you to watch for yesterday.

But Warsh went further than simply removing it. Gone, too, was all forward guidance. Back to Warsh:

Absent, also, is so-called forward guidance, which we agreed was not well suited to the current policy conjuncture.

The era of explicit Fed guidance appears to be changing dramatically, at least for now.

As for Warsh’s tone at the podium, he was thoughtful, but didn’t overspeak, or give much hope to doves.

He said the committee is ‘unambiguously and unanimously’ committed to delivering 2% – but when reporters pushed him toward forward guidance, he wouldn’t take the bait.

He also declined to commit to holding a press conference after every future meeting, leaving that open as well.

Then there was the dot plot.

In yesterday’s Digest, we flagged this as a potential point of major change – and specifically suggested that Warsh might decline to submit his own dot as a first, deliberate step toward dismantling the framework.

That’s exactly what happened.

Warsh confirmed it himself in the press conference:

I did not submit a dot for me. It’s not helpful in the conduct of policy.

The remaining 18 participants submitted projections, and the results were striking in their own right.

The committee is split nearly down the middle – nine officials see at least one rate hike this year, eight see no change, and one wants a cut.

The median projection now puts the fed funds rate at 3.8% by year-end, up from 3.4% in March.

But with Warsh absent from the grid, and given his publicly stated hawkish lean, the real committee center of gravity may lean further toward a hike than the median projection suggests.

But there was a twist we didn’t see coming…

Warsh announced the formation of five task forces that will formally review Fed operations going forward – covering communications, the balance sheet, data sourcing, the impact of AI and productivity, and the Fed’s inflation framework.

Critically, the dot plot and press conference format are both explicitly on the table. Warsh made it clear he’s interested in updating the Federal Reserve, as well as how it operates and communicates.

One more line from the press conference worth noting…

When asked whether Fed policy is actually restrictive, Warsh said:

Broadly, I would say Fed policy appears to be somewhat restrictive.

I would have a hard time managing to say those words if I were to see what’s happening in financial markets.

That’s a subtle but important signal.

Warsh is watching financial conditions – not just the policy rate – and he doesn’t think markets are behaving like policy is tight. File that one away.

The market wanted dovish…but didn’t get it

Since Sunday’s Iran peace deal, markets have been moving in one direction – bullish.

The narrative taking hold was simple: the Strait of Hormuz is reopening, the oil shock is over, inflation is yesterday’s problem, and the Fed can now pivot toward easier policy.

Warsh didn’t validate that narrative. And today’s selloff is the market’s response.

But here’s what’s worth understanding: the market’s disappointment may say more about its own assumptions than about anything Warsh got wrong.

After all, the inflation problem that Warsh is navigating was never really about Iran – and the Iran peace deal was never really a solution to it.

Here’s what the deal actually fixes: the acute energy price shock. Oil surged to roughly $115 a barrel at the height of the conflict. With the Strait reopening, that spike will unwind. Headline inflation – the number that includes energy – will soften in coming months.

On that specific point, the market’s prior optimism was rational.

But headline inflation softening is not the same as the Fed’s problem being solved.

The Fed targets Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation – and specifically core PCE, which strips out energy prices entirely. Core PCE has been above the Fed’s 2% target for five consecutive years – through rate hikes, through pauses, and through the entire arc of the Iran conflict. The peace deal doesn’t touch any of that.

The drivers of core inflation – a federal government running $2 trillion annual deficits, services costs that have proven remarkably stubborn, wage growth that hasn’t fully normalized – are structurally unchanged.

So, expecting the ceasefire to clear the path for rate cuts was always a headscratcher.

Unconvinced?

Here’s the simplest way to stress test it.

Before the Iran conflict began on February 28, core PCE – the Fed’s preferred inflation measure, which strips out energy entirely – was running at 3.1% and moving in the wrong direction, already well above the Fed’s 2.0% goal.

The Iran conflict itself, according to Dallas Fed modeling, added roughly 0.3 percentage points to core at its peak. So, even if the peace deal unwinds every last bit of conflict-related inflation, you’re still left with core running somewhere around 2.8% to 3% – well above the Fed’s 2% target, and on a trajectory that was already stalling before Iran entered the picture.

The market was celebrating the removal of something that was never the root of our core inflation problem to begin with.

As the inflation picture returns to its baseline, here’s what genuinely has changed

The labor market has been quietly tightening back up in recent months.

Job openings per unemployed worker have risen back above 1.0. And nonfarm payrolls in May jumped 172,000.

This is important. It means that there is less labor market fragility that gave interest-rate doves hopes of cuts.

Before the Iran peace deal, traders were pricing roughly a 66% probability of at least one hike before year-end.

Right after the Iran peace deal, that number fell sharply.

But today, in the wake of this FOMC decision and Warsh’s press conference? It’s spiked to nearly 86%.

The labor market data pushing toward hikes had nothing to do with Iran – and hasn’t changed. The market seems to be waking up to this as they wrestle with Warsh’s hawkishness.

Put it all together and here’s our bottom line…

The Iran deal is genuinely good news for headline inflation, and the market was right to price that. But the broader inflation problem is only partially energy-driven. The part that isn’t energy-driven is still there, still sticky, and still the Fed’s problem.

Meanwhile, the fragile labor market that was holding the Fed’s dual mandate in rough equilibrium is no longer so fragile.

What this means for Warsh

The question he now faces isn’t whether the conflict is over – it’s whether core inflation (which was going the wrong direction before Iran) starts cooperating once the energy distortion clears, and whether the labor market keeps tightening.

Those are genuinely open questions, and the data over the next several months will answer them.

Meanwhile, the market wants what it always wants: easier policy, lower rates, a Fed on its side. That’s not different.

What is different is the new Fed chair, who, on his very first day, gave the doves almost nothing to work with – no forward guidance, no easing bias, no dot of his own, and a press conference that pointedly refused to sketch out a path to cuts.

Today’s selloff is the market processing that reality.

His decisions in the months ahead will tell us more about his chairmanship than anything he said today.

Coming full circle

Yesterday, we asked whether Warsh would signal – directly or through deliberate vagueness – that the era of explicit Fed guidance was ending. We got a direct answer.

He stripped the statement to its bones, declined to submit his own dot, confirmed it publicly on camera, and launched a formal institutional review of every major communications tool the Fed has used for the past 15 years.

That’s not a signal. That’s a regime change, confirmed.

But here’s the thing about regime changes: the first move is the easy part…

The harder test comes when the data don’t play nice – and today’s selloff suggests the market already senses that gap between what it wants and what Warsh is willing to deliver.

Welcome to the Warsh era.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

The post Warsh’s First Move – And the Test That’s Just Getting Started appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Worldwide attitudes toward energy supplies have pivoted sharply from “just in time” to “just in case.” Gone are the days when countries blithely assumed that supertankers full of crude oil would arrive at their ports tomorrow, just as reliably as they did yesterday.

The energy world has changed, and there’s no going back to what was.

Two massive, concurrent forces are colliding to create what could become one of the most durable energy bull markets in modern history.

Together, they are stoking a fire under every corner of the energy complex – oil and gas, solar and wind, battery storage, nuclear, pipelines, and grid infrastructure alike.

In today’s Smart Money, let’s examine these two forces and the market opportunities they’re uniquely creating in the energy sector

Then, I’ll show you how to profit effectively.

Force One: The Great Energy Nationalization

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 fired the first warning flare over the energy markets. It reminded Europe – and much of the rest of the world – that energy dependence is a strategic vulnerability.

Countries that had spent decades optimizing for cheap energy suddenly scrambled for any energy.

Despite it being a rude awakening, it still failed to open the eyes of most energy-importing nations. They simply hit the “snooze” button and carried on as before.

Then came Iran.

The U.S.-Israel attack on Iran fired a second warning flare – one that proved impossible to ignore.

Because the conflict abruptly choked off a critical artery of worldwide oil supplies, the global economy started gasping for breath almost immediately. Countries that rely heavily on fossil fuel imports watched their energy costs surge overnight.

The message was unmistakable: depend on someone else’s energy supply at your peril.

Before the Iran conflict, the macro data suggested that global energy markets were in balance. But that “balance” never resembled the symmetrical Scales of Justice; it was more like a circus elephant atop a stool.

It was precarious, and has become even more so, which is why each of the recent energy shocks has strengthened the case for countries to build their own energy supply from the ground up.

So, an urgent, planet-wide capital expenditure program is now underway. If the past is prologue, even the most aggressive forecasts will fall short of reality.

But that’s only the first force causing investors to rush and adjust their energy investments…

Force Two: AI Sleeps for No One

Now for the second force – the one that arrived without warning, upended every energy forecast on the planet, and shows no sign of slowing.

Artificial intelligence needs power. A lot of it.

As recently as 2022, data centers consumed roughly 300 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity globally – a figure that had barely budged for nearly a decade, because efficiency improvements in computing hardware had kept pace with the growth in workloads. The International Energy Agency (IEA) looked at that flat-line trend and predicted a decade more of the same.

Then ChatGPT launched in November 2022… and everything changed.

By 2024, global data center electricity consumption had reached 415 TWh. By 2025, it jumped to 500 – a 20% surge in a single year. The IEA now projects it will reach 945 TWh by 2030.

The most aggressive forecasters see even more. Goldman Sachs has raised its 2030 forecast three times in the last 14 months, most recently to 1,350 TWh – or more than triple the 2022 consensus.

Looking further down the road, BloombergNEF projects that data centers will consume 1,600 TWh globally by 2035. To put that in perspective: If data centers were a country and consumed that volume of electricity today, they would be the world’s fourth-largest consumer – behind only China, the United States, and India.

In the U.S. specifically, data centers are on track to account for nearly half of all incremental electricity demand growth through 2030. The construction statistics tell the same story. Global data center installations rose 22% in 2025 – the second consecutive record year – with 24.8 GW of new capacity currently under construction.

And U.S. electric utilities seem to have gotten the message.

Mizuho Securities tracks the capital expenditure plans and found that U.S. utilities will ramp their 2026 spending by 70% over the 2025 total, which was itself a record – and more than five times the magnitude of the increases Mizuho tracked in the early 2020s.

The three biggest up-sizers tell the story:

• Duke Energy Corp. (DUK) raised its five-year capital plan by $11.5 billion, bringing its 2026-2030 generation, transmission, and distribution budget to $90 billion.
• The Southern Co. (SO) raised its five-year plan by roughly 50%, from $37 billion to $56 billion.
• American Electric Power Co. Inc. (AEP) bumped its planned spending by 50% as well, to $74 billion.

This is what “energy, everywhere, all at once” looks like in practice.

And as electricity demand ramps up, the opportunity to expand your portfolio also increases…

The Opportunity Lives in the Gap

This isn’t a story about one technology winning. It’s a story about all energy technologies winning – at different times, in different places, for different customers – because the world simultaneously needs more of every kind of power.

Therefore, in a stock market trading at historically elevated valuations – where investors pay dearly for growth that may or may not materialize – the energy sector offers a more compelling opportunity: attractive valuations, combined with multiple, compounding, structural growth drivers.

At Fry’s Investment Report, we’re soaking up that opportunity. Our portfolio’s wide range of energy stocks shows we’re prepared for the serious impact that nationalization of energy, the rise of data centers, and surges in electricity demand will have on the energy sector.

I discussed one way we’re prepared in last Saturday’s issue, where I examine how solar power will expand in the current AI era and how investors can ride the profit wave with our pick that’s currently up almost 80%.

The experts have chronically and consistently underestimated energy investment trends.

They are still underestimating it today.

That gap between what the forecasters expect and what the world actually needs is where the investment opportunity lives.

Click here to learn more about Fry’s Investment Report and how to join our approach to profiting from energy’s surging demand.

And look out for tomorrow’s Smart Money, where I’ll detail one of my favorite opportunities in a specific section of the sector.

Regards,

Eric Fry

The post The Two Forces Creating One Massive Energy Bull Market – and How to Join It appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Then the planet appeared.

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135, opened near $150, and within days punched through $225, more than 50% above its offer price, pulling its valuation toward the neighborhood of $3 trillion.

This is the biggest public debut in market history. And the moment the real thing was tradable, the shadows went dark. The proxies that had run up for years on borrowed light started falling back toward earth.

But that selloff says nothing about the fundamentals of space.

It’s mechanical… a plumbing problem in how money flows, not a verdict on the physics.

So let me walk you through what this IPO actually proved, why orbital compute may be the most valuable real estate of the next decade, and which beaten-down names could lead the comeback tour.

The Bull Thesis on SpaceX

Start with the bull thesis on SpaceX, because it’s simpler than it sounds. SpaceX is building the AWS of space… the cloud layer for AI compute that lives above the atmosphere.

Right now, terrestrial compute runs about a dollar per GPU hour by our team’s estimates. Orbital compute? Call it $142. Sounds like a closed case, right?

Look closer.

Terrestrial compute is resource-bound.

Electricity, land, water, permitting… those follow scarcity curves, and scarcity curves don’t fall. They creep higher.

Orbital compute is technology-bound. Launch costs, chips, networking, space-based solar… those follow technology curves, and technology curves drop exponentially.

Somewhere in the 2030s, maybe as early as 2030, those two lines cross. When they do, compute moves to the stars. And SpaceX owns the only elevator: reusable launch, Starlink, satellite manufacturing, soon Starship-scale payloads.

That’s why a valuation north of 80 times next year’s sales can feel rich and still pencil out.

After all, you’re buying the gatekeeper to humanity’s most valuable infrastructure asset, and gatekeepers command a premium.

Now, the names the market just left for dead…

The Five Space Stocks to Buy Now

AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) is the telecom industry’s counterweight to Starlink — deep alignment with the carriers who would rather not be replaced by Elon. It’s sitting on its 200-day moving average, a line that’s held since 2024.

Rocket Lab (RKLB) is the credible non-SpaceX launch partner — think of the rivals who won’t run their operations on a competitor’s cloud. They need redundancy, and Rocket Lab is the only real alternative.

Planet Labs (PL) owns the always-on Earth-observation data set that AI models are starving for, and it’s the cheapest grower of the bunch around 20 times sales.

BlackSky (BKSY) is the high-torque version of Planet — smaller, defense-tilted, riskier, and potentially the biggest winner if the trade works.

So here’s the playbook…

Fade the SpaceX rally into the August lockups, buy the dip across these space names, ride the comeback tour, then rotate back into SpaceX by year-end for balance. For one-ticket exposure, there’s the Tema Space Innovators ETF (NASA).

We’re in the early innings of space becoming infrastructure, folks, and the music is playing.

We break down all five names, plus the full orbital compute math and the Kessler-syndrome question everyone keeps asking, on this week’s Being Exponential. Tune in here!

The post 5 More Space Stocks to Buy After the SpaceX IPO appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Tomorrow, every financial anchor on every financial network will ask the same three questions…

They’re fair and important questions.

But there’s one thing I’d argue that matters more than the bias language or even Warsh’s live comments about upcoming rate policy…

Whether Warsh says anything – directly or indirectly – that signals he intends to dismantle one of the most powerful tools the Federal Reserve has developed over the past 15 years.

It’s a tool that Wall Street has come to rely on so completely that the entire investment ecosystem has reorganized itself around it…

Forward guidance.

If Warsh follows through on what he’s been saying for years, its days are numbered.

How the Fed taught Wall Street to stop thinking

Let’s rewind to May 2013.

Ben Bernanke was testifying before Congress, fielding routine questions about monetary policy.

The economy was recovering. The Fed had been running its bond-buying program – quantitative easing – at full throttle since the financial crisis. And then Bernanke casually mentioned that the Fed might, at some point in the future, begin to “taper” that program.

Nothing changed. Not rates. Not policy. Not a single dollar of bond purchases. Just a word – “taper” – used loosely in a congressional hearing.

What happened next became known as the Taper Tantrum.

Bond yields spiked… stock markets lurched… capital violently pulled out of emerging markets across the globe…

The damage was real, and it was significant – all because of a hypothetical, future-tense, offhand remark from a central banker.

That moment crystallized something important: the Federal Reserve’s words had become, in many ways, more powerful than its actions.

This wasn’t an accident.

How Bernanke built the machine

When the 2008 financial crisis hit and the Fed slashed rates to zero, Bernanke faced a problem…

You can’t cut rates below zero – at least not in any conventional sense. So, if you want to further stimulate the economy, you need another lever.

Bernanke’s answer was communication itself.

If the Fed couldn’t lower rates further, it could at least tell markets where rates were going to stay – and for how long. By making credible commitments about the future path of policy, the Fed could influence long-term borrowing costs even when short-term rates were pinned at the floor.

This was the birth of modern forward guidance as an active policy tool. The Fed introduced the dot plot: a chart showing exactly where each Fed official expected rates to go over the next several years, published four times a year for the whole world to see.

Jerome Powell took the architecture Bernanke built and doubled down. He moved to hold press conferences after every single FOMC meeting – not just the four “major” ones. Every six weeks, the Fed Chair stood before cameras and fielded questions about the rate path, economic projections, and what might change his mind.

And on many occasions, the commentary in these press conferences moved the market more than the FOMC statement itself.

Over time, a whole industry grew up around decoding all of this…

Fed watchers. Dot plot analysts. “Fedspeak” translators.

Hedge funds with entire teams dedicated to parsing the Chair’s word choices. The skill of reading the Fed became, in many corners of Wall Street, more valuable than reading earnings reports.

Which brings us to Kevin Warsh – and why he wants to tear it all down.

“I don’t believe in forward guidance”

Warsh has been publicly skeptical of forward guidance for years. But at his Senate confirmation hearing in April, he put it 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.

That’s not a philosophical musing. That’s rubber-meets-road policy intent. And he went further, explaining specifically why the dot plot troubles him:

The Fed tells the whole world what their dots are going to be, what their forecasts are going to be.

Well, the Fed’s human then – they hold on to those forecasts longer than they should.

He’s arguing that forward guidance has become a trap – once the Fed publishes its projected rate path, it becomes psychologically and politically difficult to deviate from it, even when the data suggests otherwise.

The dot plot, in other words, doesn’t just tell markets where rates are going. It locks the Fed into going there.

Here’s Warsh’s broader philosophy, as he expressed it to the IMF:

The central bank should find new comfort in working without applause and without the audience on the edge of its seats.

He wants a Fed that acts on data, not one that manages expectations so carefully it becomes captive to them.

According to reporting from the Financial Times and confirmed by several former Fed officials, Warsh may move to curtail or eliminate the dot plot as early as tomorrow’s meeting.

He may simply decline to submit his own dot – or signal in his press conference that the framework is under review.

But why tomorrow?

Logically, tomorrow is the perfect strategic moment to make this change.

The June meeting is one of only four per year that includes an updated Summary of Economic Projections – the formal release that contains the dot plot. Warsh can’t simply sidestep it.

He must either publish it as usual, modify the format, or make an active decision not to participate. That forced hand makes tomorrow a genuine inflection point, not a hypothetical one.

If he’s going to move on this at all, tomorrow is the natural opening.

And that would be a genuine regime change in how the world’s most powerful central bank communicates.

So, what’s the effect on investors?

From “don’t fight the Fed” to “can’t find the Fed”

“Don’t fight the Fed” is one of the oldest rules in investing.

The idea is simple: the Fed controls the price of money, and that price determines the value of almost every asset. Fighting the Fed is like fighting gravity.

But that rule assumes you know where the Fed is going. It assumes the dot plot is there, the forward guidance is there, and the roadmap is legible. You might disagree with the destination, but at least you can see it.

What happens in a world where the Fed deliberately stops telling you where it’s going and when?

The short answer: volatility goes up.

Every data release becomes a larger event. Every press conference becomes less scripted and more consequential. And the market can no longer front-run Fed signals because there are fewer signals to front-run.

Instead of a central bank that telegraphs its moves months in advance, you get one that responds to data in real time – and keeps you guessing until it acts.

For investors, that changes things in three concrete ways…

What changes – and what to do about it

One…

Stop positioning around Fed signals. Start positioning around data.

If the dot plot goes away, the data becomes the new dot plot. The CPI… the jobs report… the PCE… and most notably, corporate earnings.  

The economic data that the Fed is responding to takes center stage in a way it hasn’t in years. So, investors who’ve built portfolios around reading Fed communications will need to rebuild them around reading the economy directly.

That’s not necessarily a worse skill – it’s arguably a healthier one. But it requires a different set of tools.

This is where a fundamentals-first approach becomes more valuable, not less. Our growth investing expert, Louis Navellier, editor of Growth Investor, has spent decades building quantitative models for exactly this – identifying companies with genuine earnings momentum rather than rate sensitivity. And last week, he held an event with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan to detail a new collaboration: Louis’ quantitative system that finds stocks with fundamental excellence and Keith’s quantitative system that adds a timing layer – a data-driven signal for when it’s time to buy or sell.

You can catch a free replay of the event right here. But heads-up, this is the last day it’s available, so if you’ve been meaning to watch, this is last call.

Two…

Expect more volatility around data events – and consider trading it.

A less-transparent Fed doesn’t just add uncertainty – it concentrates it.

Without forward guidance smoothing the path, markets will reprice more sharply each time new data arrives. Every inflation report, every manufacturing number, every GDP release becomes a potential inflection point.

For traders, this is a genuine opportunity. Jonathan Rose, editor of Masters in Trading, tracks institutional capital flows in real time – watching where the big money positions ahead of major events rather than reacting after.

In a higher-volatility environment driven by data surprises rather than Fed signals, that kind of positioning intelligence becomes more valuable.

Three…

Hard assets become a more durable anchor.

Forward guidance gave investors something to rely on: a predictable rate path, a stable anchor for long-term valuations.

If that anchor weakens, the case for hard assets – gold especially – strengthens. Not as a trade, but as a structural portfolio component.

Central banks have been net buyers of gold for four consecutive years. Meanwhile, the dollar’s share of global reserves has declined for two decades. Those aren’t cyclical arguments. They’re structural ones – and a less transparent Fed makes the structural case more compelling, not less.

Our global macro expert Eric Fry, editor of Fry’s Investment Report, has been making exactly this case on gold for years. And as we covered in yesterday’s Digest, the bull case for the yellow metal strengthened considerably on Sunday’s news of the U.S/Iran peace agreement.

What to listen for tomorrow

The rate decision itself will almost certainly be a hold. And that’s true even accounting for Sunday’s Iran peace deal…

Yes, the repricing is real – yields are falling, rate-hike odds are softening, and the longer-term rate path looks different now than it did Friday. But tomorrow’s decision was always going to be a hold.

So, there’s a different angle to watch for tomorrow…

Because the rate decision is essentially pre-settled, the dot plot has become the primary policy instrument at this meeting – the one place where Warsh can actually move the needle.

And here’s what makes it especially shrewd: stripping away the dot plot allows him to pivot the Fed’s stance without the market shock of an unprompted rate hike.

He can tighten expectations without tightening rates. It’s a way to send a hawkish signal in a way that doesn’t automatically roil the market. If he makes that move tomorrow, read it accordingly.

So, watch whether Warsh signals – directly or through deliberate vagueness – that the era of explicit Fed guidance is ending.

If he declines to elaborate on the rate path when pressed, that’s a signal. If he pushes back on a reporter’s question about future moves with something like “the data will tell us,” that’s a signal. If anything surfaces about the dot plot being under review, that’s obviously an enormous signal.

And if he kills the dot plot at his very first meeting?

Well, that tells you how central this is to his vision of the Fed – and how quickly the rules of the game are changing.

We’ll be watching closely. And we’ll have a full analysis here in tomorrow’s Digest after the decision drops.

Bottom line: The old rule was don’t fight the Fed. The new rule – if Warsh gets his way – is that you’ll have to find it first.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

The post “Don’t Fight the Fed.” But What If You Can’t Find It? appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Consumer and wholesale prices surged in May, and Wall Street is already asking the obvious question:

Will higher energy prices force the Federal Reserve to raise rates?

That fear picked up after the latest inflation reports showed that the conflict in the Middle East pushed energy prices sharply higher last month.

Now, there is some good news here.

The U.S. and Iran finally agreed to an interim deal that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and crude oil prices dropped in response. But the two sides still need to negotiate a final deal over the next 60 days.

So, the elevated prices from May will likely persist in the near term.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.5% in May and was up 4.2% over the past 12 months. Energy prices jumped 3.9%, while owner’s equivalent rent – a key measure of shelter costs – rose 0.3%.

Core CPI, which excludes food and energy, increased 0.2% in May and was up 2.9% over the past 12 months.

So, on the consumer side, the report was not as bad as the headline number made it seem.

The wholesale inflation report was a different story.

The Producer Price Index (PPI) soared 1.1% in May and was up 6.5% over the past 12 months. That was the highest level since November 2022. Economists had expected only a 0.7% rise.

Wholesale energy prices surged 10.7% last month.

Ouch.

The good news is that most of the increase in consumer and wholesale inflation is tied to energy prices. In other words, this inflation bubble should prove somewhat transitory.

That matters because central banks cannot control food and energy prices. Higher interest rates do not pump more oil. They do not reopen shipping lanes. And they do not lower gasoline prices overnight.

The European Central Bank apparently did not get that memo, hiking its key interest rate last week despite weakness across Europe. I think that was a mistake.

Hopefully, the Federal Reserve will make a wiser decision.

The consensus is that the Fed will stand pat this week and leave key interest rates unchanged.

One reason the Fed should not overreact is that the U.S. economy continues to grow rapidly.

The Atlanta Fed currently estimates that the U.S. will achieve 3.3% annual GDP growth in the second quarter. I suspect upward revisions to this number in the wake of positive ISM manufacturing and service sector data, as well as robust retail sales.

So, the U.S. economy could grow at a 5% to 6% annual pace in the third quarter.

The bottom line: The U.S. remains an economic oasis, and I still expect the Fed to cut key interest rates later this year. That, coupled with a phenomenal earnings environment, should help set us up for a very prosperous year.

But that does not mean every stock is a buy. It means you have to be selective.

Watch This Before Midnight Tonight

That’s why I recently sat down with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan to reveal what I believe could be the most important upgrade to Stock Grader since I created it.

Keith and I revealed a new AI-powered approach that takes the power of Stock Grader and adds a short-term timing signal – designed to help investors identify which stocks may have the strongest upside potential right now, and which ones may be flashing warning signs.

In a market where global conflict, Fed uncertainty and energy prices can push stocks around fast, this upgrade could be extremely valuable for investors who want to navigate the uncertainty.

Go here to watch the replay before it’s taken down at midnight tonight.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Editor, Market 360

The post Inflation Fears Are Rising. Do You Own the Right Stocks? appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Editor’s Note: Most people who lived through the dot-com boom remember what happened when it ended. Louis Navellier remembers what happened while it was running — and he’s seeing the same patterns emerge in AI right now.

He’s been refining his stock-selection system for decades. And what he’s built with TradeSmith over the past year may be the most significant upgrade to his system in nearly 50 years. He explained exactly how it works — and what he’s doing with it — in a free event last week. You can catch the replay here before midnight tonight.

Read on to see why he believes most investors are already in the right trend — and still at risk of walking away with the wrong result…

“How much would it cost me to buy you?”

That’s how Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) CEO John Chambers greeted the founder of telecom startup Cerent Corp. in 1999.

Not his company. You.

Cerent had only about $10 million in annual sales, but Cisco paid roughly $6.9 billion in stock because Chambers believed the technology and that founder were critical to the internet buildout.

At the time, Chambers had a simple solution whenever he found a bottleneck: 

Buy it.

By the late 1990s, the internet was growing so fast that Cisco couldn’t build products quickly enough to keep up. So it started buying competitors, technologies, and choke points throughout Silicon Valley.

That strategy helped make Cisco the most valuable company in the world for a brief moment in March 2000.

Most people remember what happened next. I remember what came before.

The Last Time Capital Moved This Fast

The internet buildout was real. Networks got built, servers got installed, and infrastructure spending exploded. Investors who understood that trend made fortunes.

I’ve been thinking about Cisco lately because we’re watching the same movie again.

The AI buildout is real. First-quarter S&P 500 earnings grew nearly 29% from a year ago — more than double what analysts expected. Analysts keep revising estimates higher. The spending behind this is staggering and it’s accelerating.

That’s what I want to talk about today. 

In this piece, I’ll show you four stocks prospering from the AI buildout beyond Nvidia and Micron… 

Why I believe this infrastructure boom is still early… 

And why the hardest part of the AI trade isn’t finding the right companies. It’s staying with them.

Everybody Wants the Next Nvidia. That’s Exactly the Wrong Way to Think About This.

I’ve been investing through major technology shifts for nearly five decades. I was using computers to analyze stocks in the 1970s, long before it became common on Wall Street. Over the years, my quantitative systems helped identify winning stocks such as Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Nike Inc. (NKE) — and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) — long before they became household names.

In the late 1990s, everybody wanted the next internet stock. Today, everybody wants the next AI stock.

That’s understandable. Nvidia has become one of the most successful investments in modern market history.

But investors often become so focused on one company that they miss the broader trend unfolding around it.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a Nvidia story. There are a lot more AI-related stocks prospering now. Memory companies, networking companies, power-generation companies (we used to call those “utilities”)… all are benefiting.

Why? Because AI requires an enormous amount of infrastructure.

The average investor sees ChatGPT or Claude on their browser and thinks software. I see hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into an entirely new computing architecture.

What the Earnings Numbers Are Actually Saying About the AI Buildout

To appreciate the scale, one proposed AI data-center project in Utah would cover nearly three times the area of Manhattan. Similar projects are being planned across the country. These facilities will require thousands upon thousands of chips, servers, and networking systems.

That’s why companies like Micron Technology Inc. (MU) have become so important.

Most investors still think of it as a cyclical memory-chip company from the middle of the country. But on May 26, Micron became Boise, Idaho’s first trillion-dollar company. 

Wall Street sees something different. Sales are expected to grow more than 250%. Earnings are expected to rise more than 900%. 

Those aren’t normal numbers. They’re what happens when a major technological shift is underway and demand overwhelms supply. Micron has reportedly sold out much of its high-bandwidth memory production under long-term contracts, and analysts expect supply shortages to persist for years.

It’s also why I want you to pay attention to companies like Dell Technologies Inc. (DELL), Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), Ciena Corp. (CIEN)… and, yes, Cisco. These aren’t the first names investors think about when they hear “AI,” but they’re increasingly prospering from the buildout.

The opportunity is getting bigger. Not smaller. When a major investment theme spreads beyond a handful of stocks and starts lifting entire industries, it usually means the trend is becoming more durable and more profitable — not less.

That’s what we’re seeing right now.

The Real Risk to Your AI Infrastructure Stocks Isn’t What You Think

I focus on a combination of fundamental and quantitative measures — sales growth, earnings growth, analyst revisions, institutional buying pressure. That’s how my Stock Grader system has identified winning stocks for well over 40 years.

And right now, those indicators continue to point in the right direction. I think many of the best AI and data-center stocks still have substantial upside ahead of them before the year is over.

But being bullish doesn’t mean being complacent.

The spending behind this boom is staggering. Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), and Meta Platforms Inc. (META) are expected to spend roughly $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. That’s data centers, networking equipment, chips, power generation, and everything needed to support the next generation of AI applications. 

Those aren’t startup projections. They’re some of the largest and most successful companies in the world committing enormous capital because they believe AI will reshape the global economy.

The biggest risk facing investors right now isn’t that AI suddenly becomes less popular. It’s not that companies stop spending on data centers. And it’s not that earnings suddenly collapse.

The bigger risk is that investors get shaken out of fundamentally superior stocks during perfectly normal periods of volatility.

I’ve seen it happen throughout my career. A stock pulls back. The headlines get scary. Investors become nervous. They sell. Six months later, the stock is substantially higher.

The late 1990s were full of those moments. Even the biggest winners experienced sharp pullbacks from time to time. Investors who stayed focused on the long-term trend were rewarded. Investors who reacted emotionally often weren’t.

I think we’re approaching a similar period now. The market remains healthy, but summer can get bumpy. Trading volume thins out. Volatility increases. Short sellers become more aggressive.

That’s normal.

The Hard Part of the AI Infrastructure Trade Is Staying With It Through Volatility

And it’s one reason I’ve been spending so much time with Keith Kaplan and the team at TradeSmith. Over the past year, Keith and I have been exploring a new AI-enhanced approach that combines my Stock Grader system with TradeSmith’s pattern-recognition technology. What interested me wasn’t the technology itself. It was the results.

More importantly, it showed how investors can stay with opportunities like Dell, HPE, Ciena, and Cisco when volatility inevitably shows up. Because the hard part isn’t finding promising AI stocks anymore. The trend is staring us in the face. The hard part is staying invested when the headlines turn negative and investors start questioning the same companies they loved a month earlier.

That’s exactly what Keith and I discussed at our free event last week. We showed investors how we’re using AI to become more tactical and amplify the gains you can make with the stocks I recommend. 

You can catch the replay of that event right now and get access to a “lite” version of this new system.

Whether it’s Micron, Dell, HPE, Ciena, Cisco — or another company prospering from the AI buildout — the opportunity is still much bigger than most investors realize.

The challenge isn’t finding the trend.

The challenge is staying with it.

The post Four Stocks Prospering From the $700 Billion AI Spending Boom appeared first on InvestorPlace.

A few years ago, it probably sounded more like science fiction than a real investment opportunity.

Today, a handful of quantum-computing stocks have soared roughly 1,800%. And they may just be getting started.

Whether it’s semiconductors, data centers, robotics, biotechnology or cryptocurrencies, the market is full of megatrends.

You just have to know where to look.

But that’s also half the battle. You also have to have the knowledge and fortitude to get in early and ride the tailwinds through the ups and downs.

One person who has made a career out of recognizing these opportunities long before they became a mainstream investing story is Brian Hunt, editor of Money & Megatrends.

This week on Navellier Market Buzz, I sat down with Brian to discuss how he spots megatrends early, what he’s watching today – and how understanding one simple concept can help you profit from some of the market’s biggest growth stories.

Click the image below to watch now.

To see more of my videos, click here to subscribe to my YouTube channel. And if you’d like to check out Brian’s Money & Megatrends newsletter, you can sign up right here.

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.

What If You Could See Major Market Shifts Earlier?

What struck me most about my conversation with Brian wasn’t any single prediction.

It was our discussion about process… The ability to recognize when something important is beginning to change, and to act before the rest of Wall Street catches on.

That’s the key to investing success.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

After all, every day brings a new headline, a new technology or a new “can’t miss” opportunity. The challenge is knowing which signals matter and which ones are just noise.

That’s exactly why Keith Kaplan and I recently hosted a special presentation together.

During the presentation, we unveiled a powerful new AI breakthrough that combines the strength of my Stock Grader system with TradeSmith’s proprietary short-term health signals, creating a new way to identify opportunities that many investors might otherwise miss.

You’ll also learn how to gain access to the Tactical Profits Portfolio, a portfolio built around the five stocks this new system currently views as its best opportunities.

More importantly, you’ll see exactly how Keith and I believe investors can become more tactical in today’s market, and why we think that approach could be critical in the months ahead.

But this presentation is being taken down tomorrow, so I’d highly encourage you to watch it now before it’s gone.

Click here to watch the replay.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Editor, Market 360

The post He Called Quantum Computing Before 1,800% Gains – Here Are His Next Big Trades… appeared first on InvestorPlace.

As I write on Monday, the investment markets are surging on news from yesterday that the U.S. and Iran have announced a preliminary peace agreement intended to end nearly four months of conflict.

A memorandum of understanding has been finalized. Both sides have stood down militarily. And critically, the Strait of Hormuz – which carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG in normal times – is set to reopen Friday, when the deal is formally signed in Geneva.

The markets aren’t waiting for Friday…

As I write, all three major U.S. stock indexes are up more than 1% with the Nasdaq leading the way, up roughly 3%. Meanwhile, West Texas Intermediate Crude (WTIC) has plunged 5% to $80 a barrel, its lowest level in more than three months. Treasury yields are dropping. And the dollar is pulling back.

Today’s read is straightforward: war premium out, risk-on in. And that framing isn’t wrong. A reopened Hormuz means lower energy prices, lower inflation expectations, and a Fed that has more room to breathe.

But a note of caution is warranted. The deal isn’t signed yet, Israel isn’t a party to it, and the underlying issues – Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions, and regional security – are being pushed into a 60-day negotiating window. So, the risk of a return to conflict over the summer remains.

Still, for today, markets are celebrating. And for good reason – this is genuinely significant news.

Now, while most investors are cannonballing back into the AI trade, there’s another setup that looks even more attractive today…

Gold.

It’s up nearly 3.5% as I write, and the reasons behind that move tell a more interesting story than the one everyone is talking about.

Why gold is surging – and why it matters more than you think

For months, the Iran conflict was gold’s near-term kryptonite.

The logic was counterintuitive but real: surging oil prices drove inflation expectations higher, which pushed Treasury yields up and strengthened the dollar – and gold, which pays no yield, loses its relative appeal in that environment.

Higher-for-longer rates were pressing down on the metal even as the underlying disorder that’s gold’s true engine kept building beneath the surface.

Today, that dynamic is reversing all at once as traders eye a reopened Strait of Hormuz.

Oil is falling. Inflation expectations are dropping. Rate hike odds are declining. And the dollar is weakening. Basically, every one of gold’s short-term headwinds is turning into a tailwind in a single session.

At the same time, the structural forces that drove gold’s historic run – fiscal deterioration, dollar debasement, central bank accumulation – haven’t moved an inch. Those forces operate on a decade-long timeline and weren’t affected by the Iran conflict.

So, today’s gold move isn’t just a peace-deal pop. It’s the market beginning to reprice the yellow metal without the artificial weight of rate fears pressing down on it. That’s a different and more lasting story than what most investors are focused on right now.

To understand where gold goes from here, you need to understand what broke its record run in January – and why the damage may be closer to finished than most people think.

The warning signs were there

From its all-time high of roughly $5,600 on January 29, the yellow metal had fallen to around $4,200 before today’s bounce – a drawdown of nearly 25%.

For an asset that was supposed to benefit from inflation, geopolitical turmoil and fiscal disorder, that’s a jarring result.

Why did it fall so badly?

First, gold’s run from mid-2025 through late January 2026 was extraordinary – the metal roughly doubled in about a year, its best annual performance since 1979. By the time it hit $5,600, two technical indicators that traders watch closely were flashing bright red.

The first is the RSI – the Relative Strength Index – which measures whether an asset has been bought too aggressively in a short period. Readings above 70 signal “overbought” territory. As I’ll show you below, at gold’s January peak, the RSI was nearly 90.

The second is the MACD – the Moving Average Convergence/Divergence indicator – which tracks the momentum behind a price move. At the January peak, it reached its highest level in more than a decade, suggesting the move was running out of steam.

Any technical trader looking at gold in late January would have told you a correction was coming. The questions were what would trigger the move, and how deep the ensuing correction would be.

The match that lit the fuse

Two things hit simultaneously on January 30 – and the combination turned a normal pullback into a historic crash.

The first was President Donald Trump’s announcement that Kevin Warsh would become the next Fed Chair, which sent shockwaves through the rates market.

Warsh is widely viewed as an inflation hawk. Markets instantly repriced the rate path: instead of cuts in 2026, suddenly the conversation shifted toward higher-for-longer.

Meanwhile, Treasury yields pushed up. The dollar strengthened. And gold, which pays no yield and competes directly with interest-bearing assets, lost its relative appeal almost overnight.

The second cause is less well known – and frankly, it’s the detail that most financial media missed entirely.

Forced index rebalancing.

Think of a major commodity index like a pie. Each ingredient – oil, copper, gold, silver – is supposed to represent a certain slice. When gold nearly doubled in a year, its slice grew far bigger than the rules allow.

The large index funds that track these benchmarks aren’t permitted to simply let that happen. They’re required to sell gold futures contracts to shrink gold’s slice back to its target size.

This isn’t because they want to, or because they’ve lost faith in gold or its fundamentals. It’s purely because of rules – like a thermostat clicking off when the room gets too warm.

So, when the Warsh nomination landed on the same day, this forced mechanical selling was already underway; the two waves hit at once, which means what looked like a decisive victory from gold bears was, in large part, just a perfect storm of mechanics colliding with a historically overbought asset.

The case that hasn’t moved

Our global macro expert Eric Fry, editor of Fry’s Investment Report, framed the long-term case for gold when he made a gold recommendation to subscribers last year, borrowing a line from financial writer James Grant:

Gold is a bet on monetary disorder – indeed, on other kinds of disorder too, including fiscal, geopolitical and presidential.

Today, despite gold’s drawdown, none of the four disorders Grant identifies have dissipated.

Central banks bought 244 net tonnes of gold in Q1 2026 alone. The U.S. national debt is growing by roughly a trillion dollars every three months. And the dollar’s share of global reserves has declined for two decades.

The market has been pricing the Iran inflation shock. It has not been pricing the decade-long thesis.

Today’s peace deal doesn’t resolve those structural disorders – it simply removes the short-term rate headwind that had been pushing against them. Those are two very different things – and that distinction is exactly why gold’s move today deserves more attention than it’s getting.

Another look at gold’s chart – but updated

A moment ago, I showed you what the technicals looked like at the January peak: the RSI pushing 90, the MACD stretched to an extreme, an asset primed for a fall.

From a technical perspective, we’re in the opposite position today. See for yourself…

Recently, the RSI briefly touched the high 20s – officially oversold – and is now surging, already back up to 45.

Meanwhile, the MACD is deeply negative but has just U-turned to the north and is climbing back toward its signal line – a bullish movement.  

So, the same indicators that screamed “overbought” at $5,600 and were signaling “oversold” just days ago at $4,200 are now signaling a “buying opportunity with room to run” as gold approaches $4,400 today.

To be clear, this is not a guarantee that gold goes straight up from here. And again, the deal isn’t signed yet, and the Iran situation remains highly uncertain. But the technical and fundamental pictures are now pointing in the same direction for the first time since January.

Which raises the most practical question of this entire Digest…

Fundamentals tell you what to own, but timing tells you when to act

The structural case says gold is worth owning at these levels for investors with a longer-term timeframe. And today’s macro shift removes the most powerful near-term headwind the metal has faced all year from a technical perspective.

But “the technicals look better” is not the same as “now is the precise moment.” How does an investor move from analysis to action with data rather than gut feel?

That’s the specific problem that legendary investor Louis Navellier, editor of Growth Investor, and the team at TradeSmith spent the past year solving together.

If you missed our coverage of this last week, Louis has spent 47 years identifying companies with genuine fundamental strength – and his Stock Grader is the quantitative system he built to codify that process.

What the collaboration with our friends at TradeSmith added is a timing layer: a precise, data-driven signal for when the fundamentals are strong enough to act on.

The output is simple – a traffic light. Green means the fundamentals are strong and the technical timing is right. Yellow means hold. Red means stay out or get out.

Here’s Louis:

While my Stock Grader’s main focus is on what stocks to buy, TradeSmith’s Short-Term Health is all about when to buy them.

I’ve been hunting for edges in this market for 47 years. I’ve never seen one like this.

The tie-in to gold is easy…

The fundamental case for owning gold right now is strong – discounted 20% from its high, with structural forces intact and shorter-term technical indicators flashing green.

But knowing the fundamental/technical case and knowing the right moment to pull the trigger are two different skills. Louis and TradeSmith built a system for exactly that second skill.

You can learn more about this collaborative approach by watching a free replay of last week’s event right here.

One final corner of the market worth your attention today…

Bitcoin mining stocks are having a remarkable year, with a tracked basket up more than 50% in 2026 even as Bitcoin itself cratered. And they’re surging today as investors jump back into the market.

How is this happening if Bitcoin has crashed?

Because Bitcoin miners have been pivoting from selling hash to selling power, positioning themselves as landlords for the AI buildout.

As veteran trader Jonathan Rose puts it, it’s the same substation, same transformer – just a different tenant.

The reality is that today, Wall Street values a megawatt of power used to run AI chips at a dramatically higher multiple than the same megawatt used to run bitcoin mining equipment.

So, the companies making that switch are being re-rated from “speculative hash factory” to “critical AI infrastructure” in real time. And this is creating massive momentum in related stocks.

Jonathan will be breaking down six mining stocks at the center of this $90 billion AI pivot in tomorrow’s Masters in Trading Live episode.

In these free MIT Live videos, he profiles market trends, explains entries and exits, and discusses the opportunities he’s watching in real time. He does this every day the market is open at 11 a.m. ET. You can sign up right here.

Bottom line: If the mining-to-AI pivot is new to you, tomorrow’s video is the right place to start – Jonathan will walk through where it goes from here and how much runway these stocks still have.

Coming full circle

The gold bull market didn’t end in January. It got reset by a hawkish Fed surprise, mechanical index selling, and an oil shock that temporarily made inflation the bigger story than disorder.

Today’s peace deal removes the biggest of those headwinds. But the decade-long forces driving the bull case for gold – fiscal deterioration, dollar debasement, central bank accumulation – haven’t moved an inch.

Invest accordingly.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

The post The Trade Everyone’s Missing in the Peace Rally appeared first on InvestorPlace.

If you were to compare human beings to companies, there aren’t many similarities to hang your hat on.

For starters, we are, obviously, alive, and companies are not.

However, companies are living, breathing organisms – they just so happen to subsist on a steady diet of market-share gains and/or expanding profit margins.

And also much like us fragile humans, companies enjoy a lifetime of indeterminate length. But their lifespans do eventually come to an end.

Most investors ignore or overlook this important reality. They tend to think of their core investments as “forever stocks.”

But that sort of perspective can be a dangerous one – especially now that artificial intelligence is running amok in the global economy. AI will conquer and replace established companies that may seem indomitable today, if not immortal.

That’s the process an Austro-Hungarian economist by the name of Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”… and it is an inescapable facet of economic lifecycles.

As investors, therefore, we cannot afford to bemoan new technologies like AI; we must embrace them. Companies will come and go, whether we like it or not.

Take Blockbuster Inc., for example. It was the king of the hill in the movie rental business. But then along came rental channels that provided a measure of efficiency, like when Netflix Inc. (NFLX) began offering DVDs by mail.

So, at my flagship service, Fry’s Investment Report, our mission is to cozy up to the up-and-comers and steer clear of the down-and-outers.

Unfortunately, because the process of creative destruction resembles a chaotic war zone, we cannot always identify the winners or the losers immediately. But there’s an essential two-part test that can help cut through the fog of war to provide clarity and insight, long before the hostilities end.

The test relies on one word: efficiency.

Since the process of creative destruction is a war of efficiency, the creator-victors of this war either develop and market efficiency gains or put them to use. The “destroyee”-victims do not.

It is the secret sauce that converts upstart companies into world dominators.

Recent geopolitical events, such as the ambiguous U.S.-Iran peace deal over the weekend, which have caused confusion about when the Strait of Hormuz will open, highlight the importance of efficiency. Companies that quickly adapt or secure their supply chains using advanced technologies like AI will become victors.

So, when analyzing new investment opportunities or evaluating existing positions in your portfolio, ask yourself these two questions…

If the answer to either question is “Yes,” congratulations – you’ve probably got a creative winner on your hands.

If the answer to both questions is “Yes,” you’ve definitely got one.

The inverse is also true, of course. Companies that elicit a “No” answer to both questions are heading for the “destroyee” side of the creative-destruction spectrum.

Efficiency gains do not always show up immediately in financial statements, but they do appear eventually in various ways: expanding profit margins, a growing market share, rising revenues, or all of them at once.

This wide array of efficiency gains is evident in our Fry’s Investment Report portfolio.

They’re from companies that could profit enormously as they deploy AI technologies across their operations and potentially see gains not unlike those of companies that put internet infrastructure to use in the dot-com era and went on to dominate the global economy.

Click here to learn about my favorite companies that are growing most efficiently in today’s market.

Now, let’s take a quick look back at what we covered here at Smart Money last week.

Smart Money Roundup

Three Reasons Why Louis Isn’t Chasing SpaceX… and What Investors Should Do Instead

June 14, 2026

An early investor in SpaceX, like Ron Baron with his $22 billion pre-IPO investment, is likely to profit from the company’s recent IPO. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that buying SpaceX stock is a good decision for you.

In Sunday’s guest essay, Louis Navellier goes over what history tells us about the risks of IPO bets, why the lack of data should signal you to stay away, and more. Click here to read the full issue.

Nvidia Returned 30% Last Year, but This Stock Could Return 1,000%

June 13, 2026

setting new records and showing potential for at least another 30% upside, I believe investors can find better opportunities. I’ve shifted my focus away from semiconductor and data center stocks and am now exploring third-wave AI companies: “Enablers.” Continue reading to learn about one of my favorite little-known energy companies supporting the AI expansion.

Cisco Did It in 2000, and These Four Stocks Could Do It Next

June 11, 2026

With nearly 50 years of investing experience, InvestorPlace Senior Analyst Louis Navellier has witnessed the market’s evolution from the PC revolution to the internet boom and now to the AI buildup. This long history provides him with a unique perspective on how these changes have shaped AI investment strategies today. On Thursday’s Smart Money, Louis highlights four companies he believes will be winners of the AI infrastructure surge.

Everyone’s Chasing SpaceX, but We’re Going After Something Better

June 10, 2026

SpaceX may be an impressive catch, but it’s not guaranteed to be a smooth or profitable journey. I believe the opportunity for the astute speculator lies elsewhere – in the companies doing the unglamorous, essential work that makes space travel missions possible.

As SpaceX’s IPO headlines capture investors’ attention, let’s dive into why investing in companies downstream of SpaceX is a better choice than buying a stake in the IPO itself.

Looking Ahead

As conflict in the Middle East persists, with peace agreements fluctuating and oil fortunes in flux, one thing remains clear: the rapid progress of AI.

This week, I’ll explore how the current forces of AI and oil are creating unique investment opportunities in the energy sector. Then, I’ll highlight a specific area within the sector poised for significant gains.

Make sure to stay tuned to your inbox.

Regards,

Eric Fry

The post The One Word That Predicts Which Companies Win 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,

Louis Navellier

Editor, Market 360

The post Verizon Upgraded, Oracle Downgraded: Updated Rankings on Top Blue-Chip Stocks appeared first on InvestorPlace.

The dot-com era taught investors a valuable lesson.

Betting on the winning website was hard. Owning the infrastructure every website needed was easier.

Amazon (AMZN) survived. Pets.com disappeared. AOL rose, then faded. Dozens of internet companies burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and left investors with nothing. But Cisco (CSCO) made money through it all because every byte of internet traffic needed its routers and switches to move across the web.

The stock rose about 3,400% in five years.

Cisco didn’t have to pick the winning website because it sold the equipment that made the internet work.

The same dynamic is starting to play out in AI right now — but with one important twist.

The market already understands that AI needs infrastructure. What it still underestimates is how much more infrastructure AI consumes when it stops answering questions and starts completing work.

That is the next phase of the boom. And it creates what we call the Invisible AI Tax.

From Chatbots to Agents: Why the Infrastructure Bill Just Got 20x Bigger

A chatbot answers a prompt. An agent pursues a goal.

Those two consume very different amounts of infrastructure.

A simple chatbot exchange might process a few hundred tokens — the chunks of text a model reads and generates to complete a response. You ask a question, the model answers, and the interaction ends.

But an agentic workflow is different.

Tell a chatbot, “Write me a marketing plan,” and it gives you a response. Tell an agent, “Grow our market share by 15% this quarter,” and it starts working. It researches competitors, pulls internal data, drafts campaigns, tests messages, coordinates with other agents, revises, reports, and keeps going until the task is done.

What begins as a few hundred tokens can become tens of thousands as the system plans, executes, checks its own work, calls tools, communicates with databases, and iterates. That is the part most investors still have not fully processed.

AI agents can consume 20 to 30 times more physical infrastructure per task than a simple chatbot exchange.

Not 20% more — 20 to 30 times more.

More compute, more memory, more networking, more cooling, more power, more data center capacity.

And this is not some distant scenario. More than half of major enterprises already have AI agents running in production, and adoption is projected to rise sharply over the next year.

That means the AI boom is moving from experimentation to persistent infrastructure consumption.

The question is where, exactly, all that additional demand lands. 

The Six Tollbooths Every Agentic AI Workload Must Pay 

Think of the AI economy as a superhighway.

Every model query and agentic task has to travel across physical infrastructure. And along the way, it passes through six tollbooths: compute, memory, networking, thermal management, power, and real estate.

We’ve covered parts of this system before — the custom silicon shift, the data center networking bottleneck, and the physical limits around power and cooling. But this piece is about the next layer of the thesis: agents consume that infrastructure — and then some.

Compute is the most visible. Every AI model needs specialized chips to run — GPUs, custom accelerators, and inference chips built to handle enormous amounts of parallel processing. Nvidia still sits at the center of this layer, but custom silicon designers are increasingly important as hyperscalers build cheaper, optimized chips for their own AI workloads.

Memory is the next toll. Agents need context; to remember what they have done, what they are doing, and what comes next. The longer and more complex the task, the larger the context window — and the more high-performance memory the system needs to keep everything moving.

Networking may be the least appreciated tollbooth. Agents communicate with databases, tools, APIs, external services, and other agents. That traffic has to move between chips, racks, servers, and data centers at extraordinary speed. As agentic AI spreads, switches, interconnects, cables, optics, and networking silicon become even more important.

Then comes thermal management. Dense AI racks generate extreme heat. And because agentic workloads run longer and more persistently than simple chatbot requests, thermal production only rises. Liquid cooling, coolant distribution units, and precision thermal systems are now core infrastructure for keeping AI systems online.

Power is the fifth toll. AI agents do not sleep. They can run constantly, across thousands of enterprises, performing tasks in the background around the clock. That persistence requires grid upgrades, onsite power, long-term electricity contracts, and reliable baseload energy.

Finally, there is real estate. Every server, chip, cooling unit, power system, and networking rack has to live somewhere. That means specialized data center buildings with access to land, electricity, cooling, and fiber.

A chatbot taps all six. An agent pounds them.

That is the Invisible AI Tax. And the bigger the agent economy gets, the more every transaction pays it.

The Numbers Are Already Showing Up In Earnings 

The tollbooths are already collecting.

At Google Cloud Next, CEO Sundar Pichai disclosed that Google’s AI models are processing more than 16 billion tokens per minute. That number was up about 60% from the prior quarter. And hundreds of Google customers each consumed more than one trillion tokens over the past year.

One trillion tokens each.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said the amount of inference compute needed is already 100 times more than initially expected — and that this is just the beginning.

Hyperscaler AI infrastructure spending is exploding. AI-related memory demand is surging. Networking targets are moving higher. Cooling backlogs are expanding. Power companies are signing long-term agreements with cloud giants. Data center landlords are leasing capacity as fast as they can build it.

The tollbooth companies are not hoping this demand shows up. They are reporting it quarter after quarter.

And the agentic multiplier is only starting to hit.

What This Means for Agentic AI Stocks 

The AI model war will produce winners and losers.

OpenAI. Google. Anthropic. Meta. xAI. Chinese competitors. Open-source models. Proprietary models. Some will win. Some will fade. 

Trying to pick the ultimate winner is hard, and even the smartest technology investors can get it wrong.

But whichever model wins, the infrastructure bill stays the same.

Every model needs compute; every agent needs memory; every workflow needs networking; every rack needs cooling; every data center needs power.

That is why the Invisible AI Tax matters so much.

The best-positioned infrastructure companies get paid as AI usage intensifies.

And agents are the multiplier.

The first phase of this boom was about proving AI worked. The next is about paying to run it at scale.

That is where the tollbooth companies sit.

The Real Risks (This Isn’t a Free Lunch)

None of this makes these stocks risk-free.

Many already trade at premium valuations. A pause in hyperscaler capex would hit the group as a whole. Some companies have heavy customer concentration. And some emerging infrastructure plays — especially in next-generation power, cooling, and optical networking — still carry real execution risk.

But those are timing and sizing risks. They do not break the core thesis.

The shift from chatbots to agents increases infrastructure consumption per task. And a narrow set of companies collects revenue as that consumption rises.

The Infrastructure Always Gets Paid

Most investors are watching the AI race and trying to pick the winner. That is the wrong game.

The winner of a race still has to run the road. And the AI road has a toll.

The companies collecting that toll get paid regardless of who crosses the finish line first. 

Unless you’re early enough that the road itself hasn’t even been priced in yet.

The investors who made the most money from the dot-com era didn’t wait for Cisco to become obvious. The same opportunity exists right now — hiding in plain sight, underneath two IPOs that will dominate every financial headline the moment they arrive.

Here’s where I’d look before that happens.

The post The Agentic AI Tax: Who Pays and Who Profits appeared first on InvestorPlace.

To share his perspective, I’ve invited Louis to today’s Smart Money to explain why he considers SpaceX a risky bet. He’ll go through the history behind popular IPOs, the data problem, and more. Then he shares what investors should do instead in today’s market.

And if you’re concerned about navigating what could be a more volatile summer, I also encourage you to watch Louis’ recent presentation with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan. Louis explains why investors may need a more tactical approach in the months ahead and how a new AI-powered tool could help us evaluate opportunities and manage risk. You can watch the replay here.

Take it away, Louis…

In 2017, legendary investor Ron Baron made the bet of a lifetime.

His firm invested in SpaceX when the company was valued at less than $22 billion.

Now that SpaceX has recently gone public, that bet could go down as one of the great investments in history. So, let’s give credit where credit is due.

But folks, before you think about buying SpaceX now that it’s public, you need to think about your risk tolerance and ask yourself this:

How much risk can you actually stomach?

A billionaire like Baron can make a huge, concentrated bet on Elon Musk. He can wait years for it to pay off. He can ride the ups and downs. He can afford to be early and patient.

Most investors cannot afford to do any of those things.

And that is the real lesson I want you to think about as SpaceX begins trading.

Today, let’s talk about how investors should handle SpaceX now that it is public and the three reasons why I do not recommend buying SpaceX stock right now… and a new tool that can help you time the market better and make bigger gains – so you don’t have to ride the emotional roller coaster on the way to profits.

Reason No. 1: IPOs Are Risky

Now, let me first say that I think SpaceX is a wonderful company. Starlink makes money. SpaceX makes money. But a great company can still be a risky stock if you buy it at the wrong price, at the wrong time.

Case in point: Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms, Inc. (META).

Facebook went public on May 18, 2012. At the time, it was one of the most anticipated IPOs Wall Street had seen in years. Investors were clamoring to get in. The stock was priced at $38.

The FOMO was real. Then reality set in. By August 2012, Facebook had fallen to about $17.50. That was a loss of more than 50% from the IPO price.

Now, Facebook eventually became a tremendous long-term winner – up more than 1,300% since it first went public. But investors who chased the IPO still got taken to the woodshed.

That wasn’t some one-off case, either. Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) became one of the greatest stocks of all time – but it first fell more than 90% from its dot-com peak. Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), then Google, became a monster winner – but only after testing investors’ patience with steep pullbacks.

Bottom line: Great stocks do not move in a straight line.

That is why I have a simple rule when it comes to IPOs. I usually wait at least a year before I buy.

That may sound boring when everyone is talking about a stock that could soar on its first day of trading. But I have been doing this for nearly five decades, and I have learned that the best time to buy a great company is not always the first time Wall Street lets you buy it.

When a company goes public, there is usually a lockup period for insiders. They cannot immediately sell their shares. But once that lockup expires, a lot of stock can come onto the market, creating selling pressure.

We saw something similar recently with another space-related stock, Rocket Lab Corporation (RKLB). As excitement around SpaceX picked up, a lot of Rocket Lab insiders were cashing out. So do not be surprised if some SpaceX insiders eventually sell after their lockup period expires.

Reason No. 2: No Fundamental Data

That is one reason I wait. The other reason is data.

After a company has been public for a year, I can calculate reward-to-risk. I can look at alpha. I can study standard deviation. And I can get four quarters of fundamentals to see whether the stock fits my eight-factor fundamental model.

In other words, I can stop guessing. My Stock Grader tool can give it a simple ranking of A to F – giving my followers and I a clear understanding of whether to buy it.

That matters with SpaceX because it’s a complex business. You have the launch business. You have Starlink. And you have other long-term projects that could eventually become very valuable – or not.

But as an investor, I want to know which part of the business is driving the growth. That is one of the main reasons I am willing to wait. Right now, SpaceX’s future as a public company is still speculative. A year from now, we should have a much clearer picture.

Reason No. 3: The Elon Musk Factor

I should also add that there is the Elon Musk factor.

I am not here to dispute the man’s genius. Elon Musk helped reinvent the auto industry. He helped restart America’s space ambitions. He built the world’s largest satellite internet network. He turned Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) into one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

That is an extraordinary record. But investors need to ask a very practical question:

Can you afford the volatility that comes with Elon Musk?

When you invest in a Musk-led company, you are not just investing in the business. You are also accepting the market’s reaction to Elon Musk himself.

We have seen that with Tesla. A single Musk headline can move billions of dollars in market value. His political comments, public battles and unpredictable behavior have all created added volatility around the stock at different times.

That does not erase what Musk has accomplished. But it does add another layer of risk.

The Smart Move This Summer

The reality is there is still a tremendous amount of money sloshing around. When I was on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show recently, she pointed out that there is about $7 trillion in cash on the sidelines.

Some of that money will naturally gravitate toward the market.

High-profile IPOs like SpaceX, Anthropic and eventually OpenAI could help pull more of that money into stocks. That is bullish for growth stocks, and it tells me investors still have a strong appetite for innovation.

But bullish does not mean blind, folks.

June is a seasonally strong month, helped by the annual Russell realignment. We should also have another great earnings announcement season kick off in July. But as we get into August and the first half of September, we’ve entered the seasonally weakest period for the market.

So, if we see drawdowns or stair-steps lower this summer, I will not be surprised.

Bottom line: This is still not a market where you can afford to guess or ignore your risk tolerance. You need to know what you own. You need to know what you are missing. And you need to know when to be aggressive – and when to be cautious.

That is exactly why I sat down with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan earlier this week.

During our special event, we discussed why today’s market reminds me of the late 1990s, why I believe the AI boom still has much further to run and how a new AI-powered tool could help investors become more tactical as volatility picks up this summer.

It works by taking my financial analysis, based on trillions of data points, and combining it with a new system with my friends over at TradeSmith. And then it adds a revolutionary new form of AI, to give investors the best possible shot at massive, rapid-fire gains.

We also share two stock picks – absolutely free.

If you missed it, you can watch the replay right here.

I strongly encourage you to watch it as soon as you can.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace

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:

Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) and Rocket Lab Corporation (RKLB)

The post Three Reasons Why Louis Isn’t Chasing SpaceX… and What Investors Should Do Instead appeared first on InvestorPlace.

In today’s Sunday Digest, Louis explores how AI is already transforming fields as complex as medicine and scientific research – and why he believes the same technology is poised to reshape investing.

Along the way, he revisits the “eureka moment” that launched his investment career, explains how his data-driven approach has identified hundreds of major stock winners over the years, and shares why a new collaboration with TradeSmith has him more excited about the future of investing than anything he’s seen in decades.

Louis dove deeper into this collaboration during last week’s presentation with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan. They demonstrated how AI can help investors become more tactical in volatile markets. You can watch the free replay right here.

Bottom line: If Louis is right, AI won’t just change the companies we invest in – it’ll fundamentally change how we invest.

I’ll let him take it from here.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

If you’re under 50 and you stay healthy, you could live to 150.

To you and me, that may sound like science fiction. But to Demis Hassabis, it sounds conservative.

Hassabis is the computer programmer and neuroscientist who founded DeepMind — the pioneer deep learning lab that Google bought in 2014.

Deep Learning is the method of training software to recognize patterns by feeding it enormous amounts of data and letting it learn from its own mistakes. And it’s the core technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and most of what people mean when they say “AI” today.

In 2024, Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for building an AI model — called AlphaFold2 — that mapped virtually all 200 million known proteins. This touched off a revolution in drug discovery.

Most drugs work by binding to a specific protein in your body — much like a key fits into a lock. For 50 years, figuring out the shape of those locks was so slow and expensive that it bottlenecked the entire drug discovery process.

Thanks to AlphaFold2’s mapping, what used to take researchers years in the lab now happens in hours on a computer.

The progress is so fast that Hassabis estimates we’ll cure ALL disease within 10 years.

I’m 67 — well past the 50-year-old cutoff he’s talking about. But when I look at what’s come out of medical research in just the last two months, he might be right:

• A drug just doubled survival in pancreatic cancer — the deadliest cancer there is.
• A one-time gene-editing infusion permanently cut bad cholesterol by 62% from a single dose.
• A lung cancer pill held back a spreading tumor for five full years — longer than any drug has ever managed.
• The Mayo Clinic built an AI that detects pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans up to three years before a doctor can spot it.
• Eli Lilly’s new anti-obesity drug achieved 30% body weight loss in its Phase 3 trial — and, along the way, cut knee arthritis pain by 76%.

These aren’t random breakthroughs. They were all either discovered, accelerated, or made possible by the kind of deep-learning AI models Hassabis pioneered.

And, folks, these models are only accelerating as AI learns to write code to create more powerful models… which write code for even more powerful models… and so on.

Which brings me to the question that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

If AI is rewriting what’s possible in a field as complex as human biology — what is it about to do to financial markets?

I’ve spent 47 years building computer systems to find growth stocks before the crowd catches on. So, I know what it looks like when a new technology changes the game for investors.

In the 1970s, I was one of the few people using a computer to pick stocks. Most of my peers thought it was eccentric at best… and a fool’s errand at worst. Today, computers are responsible for about 80% of daily stock trading volume.

And I believe what’s coming with AI is a change of a far greater magnitude.

I’ll show you what I mean in a minute — including how adding AI to my own quantitative models could turn a 615% gain on a stock like DXP Enterprises Inc. (DXPE) into a 3,626% winner, or a 292% gain on Broadcom Inc. (AVG) into 6,284%.

First, though, let me take you back to the early 1970s when I had my first “eureka moment” about how machines could crack the secrets of the stock market.

My Eureka Moment

It was my junior year at Cal State Hayward (now Cal State East Bay), where I was studying finance.

One of my professors was working for Wells Fargo — using its mainframe computer to build the stock market indexes that were just emerging. He asked me if I could help.

The flashiest technology I’d touched up to that point was a slide rule. Getting access to that mainframe was like an 1800s gold prospector being shown a diesel-powered excavator.

My job was to build a model portfolio that mimicked the S&P 500 using just 320 stocks. But something unexpected happened. Instead of just tracking the market — my version beat it.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. The prevailing theory at the time — which every finance textbook repeated as gospel — was that you couldn’t consistently beat the market. It was impossible.

My data said otherwise.

So, I dug deeper. I ran the statistical tests. And I found a pattern that would define the next five decades of my career. Some stocks move independently of the broader market and have their own signal. Find them early enough, and the gains can be extraordinary.

Folks on Wall Street call it “alpha.” From that moment on, I was obsessed with building systems to find it.

Nearly 700 Gains of 100% or More

That discovery launched a career I could never have predicted.

Over the next five decades, I built quant models that powered some of the most successful investment newsletters in America.

My system has identified 676 stocks that went on to double — including recommendations like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 1987, Nike Inc. (NKE) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) in 1988, and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) a full 17 years before most people had ever heard of ChatGPT.

That last one alone would have turned $1,000 into more than $1 million.

None of those wins came from hunches or gut feelings. They came from what I discovered with the help of that Wells Fargo mainframe in the 1970s — a systematic, data-driven process for finding fundamentally superior stocks backed by powerful institutional buying pressure.

The process got more refined over the decades. The data got richer. The models got more powerful.

In other words, I’ve spent my career looking for the crème de la crème of the stock market. But I never had access to a technology as powerful as what I’m about to show you.

The Difference Is Extraordinary

As I like to say, good stocks bounce like fresh tennis balls, while bad stocks fall like rocks. The key is knowing the difference before the market starts shaking.

That’s why, for the past year, I’ve been working with the team at TradeSmith on something I’ve never attempted before.

If you don’t know them already, it’s the financial technology company behind some of the most sophisticated portfolio tools available to individual investors today.

Together, we’ve built a new form of AI that takes my Stock Grader system and adds a layer it didn’t have before: a precise, data-driven signal for when to get in and when to get out of the stocks I recommend.

It includes a layer of the same kind of pattern-recognition AI technology that’s diagnosing cancer three years earlier and designing drugs in hours instead of years.

The difference it makes is extraordinary.

Take AppFolio Inc. (APPF), a stock I recommended in 2017.

Anyone who acted on that recommendation has enjoyed an annualized gain of 20%. Compounded over time, that’s excellent. But according to our backtesting, this new AI-enhanced system would have delivered a 74% annualized gain.

Or take Nexstar Media Group (NXST), which I recommended in 2013. A 23% average yearly gain becomes 173%.

Same stock over the same stretch of time. Just smarter timing.

Across the board, backtesting suggests that pairing this new AI with my Stock Grader ratings could generate up to 20 times more money than following Stock Grader alone.

That’s why I say this is the biggest edge I’ve seen in my 47 years as a professional investor. It’s not a new stock picking system — it’s a new layer of intelligence on top of what I’ve already built.

And if we get more stock market gyrations this summer, I believe that kind of intelligence could be more valuable than ever.

The Biggest Edge I’ve Seen

Back in the 1970s, the idea of using a computer to pick stocks seemed absurd to most people on Wall Street. I did it anyway. The results spoke for themselves.

Today, the idea that AI can reliably improve on a 47-year track record might seem equally hard to believe. I get that skepticism. I felt it myself. But then I looked at the testing and had to admit that AI plus my system works like gangbusters.

I’ve been hunting for edges in this market for 47 years. I’ve never seen one like this.

To see exactly how it works — and get the full list of stocks it’s flagging as urgent buys and sells — click here to watch the replay of my event with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan.

During the presentation, you’ll get to see TradeSmith’s Short-Term Health indicator.

While Stock Grader’s main focus is on what stocks to buy, Short-Term Health is all about when to buy them.

It allows you to type in any ticker to see if a stock is a short-term buy or sell based on a simple traffic light system. Green means buy. Yellow means hold. And Red means sell.

Here’s that link to learn all about the Short-Term Health indicator – and how Stock Grader enhances it.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace

The post How AI Turned a 615% Gain Into 3,626% appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Editor’s Note: SpaceX is finally public. And the FOMO is already building. But before you buy, Louis Navellier — who has been investing through major technology cycles for nearly five decades — wants you to ask one question: can you afford the volatility?

In today’s piece, Louis walks through three reasons he’s not buying SpaceX right now, despite believing it’s a wonderful company. It’s a masterclass in the difference between a great business and a great entry point — and a timely reminder that the best investors don’t just know what to buy. They know when.

He and TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan recently sat down to talk through all of it — including two free stock picks for the summer ahead. Watch the replay here.

Now here’s Louis.

In 2017, legendary billionaire investor Ron Baron made a big bet.

His firm invested in SpaceX (SPCX) when the company was valued at less than $22 billion.

Now, with SpaceX public, that bet could go down as one of the great investments in history. So, let’s give credit where credit is due.

But folks, before you think about buying SpaceX stock, you need to think about your risk tolerance and ask yourself:

How much risk can you stomach?

A billionaire like Baron can make a huge, concentrated bet on Elon Musk. He can wait years for it to pay off. He can ride the ups and downs. He can afford to be early and patient.

Most investors cannot afford to do any of those things.

And that is the real lesson I want you to think about as SpaceX begins trading.

So, let’s talk about how investors should handle SpaceX now that it is public and the three reasons why I do not recommend buying SpaceX stock right now… and a new tool that can help you time the market better and make bigger gains – so you don’t have to ride the emotional roller coaster on the way to profits. 

Reason No. 1: Great Companies Make Terrible IPO Buys — Just Ask Facebook

Now, let me first say that I think SpaceX is a wonderful company. Starlink makes money. SpaceX makes money. But a great company can still be a risky stock if you buy it at the wrong price, at the wrong time.

Case in point: Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms, Inc. (META).

Facebook went public on May 18, 2012. At the time, it was one of the most anticipated IPOs Wall Street had seen in years. Investors were clamoring to get in. The stock was priced at $38. 

The FOMO was real. Then reality set in. By August 2012, Facebook had fallen to about $17.50. That was a loss of more than 50% from the IPO price.

Now, Facebook eventually became a tremendous long-term winner, up more than 1,300% since it first went public. But investors who chased the IPO still got taken to the woodshed.

That wasn’t some one-off case, either. Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) became one of the greatest stocks of all time – but it first fell more than 90% from its dot-com peak. Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), then Google, became a monster winner – but only after testing investors’ patience with steep pullbacks.

Bottom line: Great stocks do not move in a straight line.

That is why I have a simple rule when it comes to IPOs. I usually wait at least a year before I buy.

That may sound boring when everyone is talking about a stock that could soar on its first day of trading. But I have been doing this for nearly five decades, and I have learned that the best time to buy a great company is not always the first time Wall Street lets you buy it.

When a company goes public, there is usually a lockup period for insiders. They cannot immediately sell their shares. But once that lockup expires, a lot of stock can come onto the market, creating selling pressure.

We saw something similar recently with another space-related stock, Rocket Lab Corporation (RKLB). As excitement around SpaceX picked up, a lot of Rocket Lab insiders were cashing out. So do not be surprised if some SpaceX insiders eventually sell after their lockup period expires.

Reason No. 2: You Can’t Grade What You Can’t See Yet

The second reason I wait is to see the data.

After a company has been public for a year, I can calculate reward-to-risk. I can look at alpha. I can study standard deviation. And I can get four quarters of fundamentals to see whether the stock fits my eight-factor fundamental model.

In other words, I can stop guessing. My Stock Grader tool can give it a simple ranking of A to F, giving my followers and me a clear understanding of whether to buy it.

That matters with SpaceX because it’s a complex business. You have the launch business. You have Starlink. And you have other long-term projects that could eventually become very valuable – or not. 

But as an investor, I want to know which part of the business is driving the growth. That is one of the main reasons I am willing to wait. Right now, SpaceX’s future as a public company is still speculative. A year from now, we should have a much clearer picture.

Reason No. 3: When You Buy SpaceX Stock, You’re Also Buying Elon Musk’s Headlines

I should also add the Elon Musk factor.

I am not here to dispute the man’s genius. Elon Musk helped reinvent the auto industry. He helped restart America’s space ambitions. He built the world’s largest satellite internet network. He turned Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) into one of the most valuable companies on the planet. 

That is an extraordinary record. But investors need to ask a very practical question: 

Can you afford the volatility that comes with Elon Musk?

When you invest in a Musk-led company, you are not just investing in the business. You are also accepting the market’s reaction to Elon Musk himself. 

We have seen that with Tesla. A single Musk headline can move billions of dollars in market value. His political comments, public battles and unpredictable behavior have all created added volatility around the stock at different times.

That does not erase what Musk has accomplished. But it does add another layer of risk.

The Smarter Trade This Summer: Here’s What to Do Instead

The reality is there is still a tremendous amount of money sloshing around. When I was on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show recently, she pointed out that there is about $7 trillion in cash on the sidelines. 

Some of that money will naturally gravitate toward the market.

High-profile IPOs like SpaceX, Anthropic and eventually OpenAI could help pull more of that money into stocks. That is bullish for growth stocks and suggests investors still have a strong appetite for innovation.

But bullish does not mean blind, folks.

June is a seasonally strong month, helped by the annual Russell realignment. We should also have another great earnings announcement season kick off in July. But as we get into August and the first half of September, we’ve entered the seasonally weakest period for the market.

So, if we see drawdowns or stair-steps lower this summer, I will not be surprised.

Bottom line: This is still not a market where you can afford to guess or ignore your risk tolerance. You need to know what you own. You need to know what you are missing. And you need to know when to be aggressive – and when to be cautious.

That is exactly why I sat down with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan earlier this week.

During our special event, we discussed why today’s market reminds me of the late 1990s, why I believe the AI boom still has much further to run and how a new AI-powered tool could help investors become more tactical as volatility picks up this summer.

It works by taking my financial analysis, and combining it with a new system developed by my friends over at TradeSmith. And then it adds a revolutionary new form of AI to give investors the best possible shot at massive, rapid-fire gains.

We also share two stock picks – absolutely free.

If you missed it, you can watch the replay right here.

I strongly encourage you to watch it as soon as you can.

The post Three Reasons Why I’m Not Chasing SpaceX… and What to Do Instead appeared first on InvestorPlace.

There’s one simple problem with investing in a company like Nvidia Corp. (NVDA): 

There’s only so much upside left to a $5 trillion stock. 

• If shares were to double again, it would make Nvidia worth more than the Dutch East India Co. (VOC), the most valuable company in history in inflation-adjusted dollars ($8 billion). 
• If it were to triple, Nvidia would be worth more than every stock on the Japanese and U.K. stock markets combined ($12 billion). 
• And if it were to rise 10X, that would make Nvidia worth almost as much as the total U.S. stock market. 

Like a goldfish in a bowl, every corporation is limited by the economies they swim in. And no matter how successful Nvidia becomes, it’s still constrained by having only 8.3 billion potential customers… at least until they figure out how to sell AI chips to rabbits and mice. 

Now, I fully believe that Nvidia is an amazing company. In fact, I recently compared the world’s most valuable company to Babe Ruth, the most famous baseball player in American history. The chipmaker will keep hitting home runs, and there could be at least another 30% upside in shares, especially after last week’s brutal selloff. 

But I think you can do better than that.  

Thirty percent returns are table stakes on Wall Street… something you can earn with a high-dividend stock in three to four years, or by buying a house in the right ZIP code. In fact, my old Lexus rose 30% in value while sitting in my driveway in 2021. 

That’s why I’ve built my career around finding 1,000% winners instead – the extraordinary stocks that can rise 10X or more. Most people only need to buy two or three of these over their entire careers to make a life-changing amount of money. I’ve found over 40. 

Last year, my focus was on chipmakers like Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and data center companies like Oracle Corp. (ORCL). These “second wave” AI winners were still growing fast, even as Nvidia’s growth was plateauing. 

Now that those stories have played out, I’ve turned my attention to a third wave of AI companies: “Enablers.”  

These far smaller firms are providing the “picks and shovels” to the AI buildout and are the new set of stocks that can rise 10X. 

These are the companies I’m now recommending. 

In fact, I recently added one to my flagship service, Fry’s Investment Report.  

So, in today’s Smart Money, I’d like to tell you about this little-known energy company with incredible potential.  

Then, I’ll share how you can find even more Enabler companies with bigger upsides than Nvidia.  

Let’s dive in… 

AI’s Energy Problem 

We all know that electricity has gotten expensive in America. The average household now pays roughly $2,000 per year in utility bills, or 2.5 times more than in 2000.  

That figure is even higher in fully deregulated states like Massachusetts and Maryland, where private companies are free to set their own rates. 

Now, we can’t blame energy costs. Henry Hub natural gas prices have only risen from $2.42 per unit in 2000 to $2.94 today… a 21% increase in 26 years. (Again, my car did that and more in 12 months).  

“Greedy” energy utilities aren’t responsible for the spike, either… at least not entirely. For instance, Massachusetts’ largest private utility has been cash-flow negative for nine of the past 10 years and struggles to meet its dividend payments. 

Instead, the real culprit is that America doesn’t make enough electricity.  

Most of America’s coal-fired power plants were built 40 to 60 years ago, and they’re reaching their end-of-life all at once. Natural gas power has filled around two-thirds of that gap, but it is hitting a limit from shortages of gas turbines and pipeline capacity. Offshore wind power has proved phenomenally expensive. The Massachusetts utility I talked about earlier has already lost $2.5 billion on its wind projects… and still counting. 

In fact, America’s growth in electrcity generation looks like a rounding error compared to growth in countries like China. The chart below tells the tale. 

And now, the tightness is getting worse because of artificial intelligence. Data centers are already using around 5% of electricity in the U.S., and they’re only getting started. 

For instance, the “Stratos” AI data center planned for Box Elder County, Utah, will need 9 gigawatts of electricity – more than double what the entire state currently uses. If estimates are correct, we’ll need anywhere from 12 to 20 of these “Stratos”-sized projects by 2032 just to keep up with AI demand. 

That’s a lot of electricity. 

To play this trend, longtime readers will know that I’ve selected several natural gas plays, which are outperforming many of the “obvious” AI plays like Nvidia.  

But American data centers and utilities alike are now turning to another power source to get ahead… 

The Sun Also Shines 

Solar power. 

This intermittent source of electricity has become a surprisingly popular way to add generation capacity. Solar panels are cheap, battery storage is viable, and the technology is supported by both sides of the political spectrum.  

My home state of California still leads the nation in installed solar capacity, but Texas, at No. 2, has almost caught up. Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina round out the next three spots.  

In fact, 51% of American power-grid additions in 2026 is expected to come from solar, and another 28% from battery storage, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Most will happen in the South and Southeast. 

Solar and battery storage will dominate new electricity additions this year.

Source: EIA

That’s creating a bonanza for solar stocks, which have risen 84% in the past year alone.  

Solar power is also surprisingly useful for AI data centers. Solar output matches the 9-to-5 workloads of corporate AI use (not to mention peak cooling demands of AI data centers), and many state utilities now allow new data centers to “cut the line” for grid connections if they add solar-and-battery capacity. BloombergNEF estimates that battery storage can cut a data center’s connection timeline by five years – an eternity in the AI arms race. 

Now, there are many terrible solar companies out there. The industry is cut-throat competitive from years of international price-dumping, and Chinese-related companies now control 80% to 90% share of solar components.  

Western firms like Canadian Solar Inc. (CSIQ) must pay whatever their Chinese suppliers demand. We’ve already seen two major solar bankruptcies this year: SOLON Corp. and Freedom Forever. The latter ironically named firm is now being investigated by the state of Texas for fraud. 

But I believe I’ve found an innovative energy firm that should do far better.  

This company has developed a battery storage technology that absorbs and smooths the violent swings between AI data center demands and solar power generation. It’s solving a multiyear problem that has plagued the data center industry. 

For instance, in July 2024, a small electrical disturbance in Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” that lasted just a few milliseconds triggered emergency shutoffs that cut 1.5 gigawatts of load from the grid all at once – the equivalent of turning off an entire midsized city. Power plants across Virginia and Maryland were ordered to throttle output to prevent a cascade of damage, and engineers were then forced to manually reconnect each data center to the network. 

This company helps prevent such wild swings, making data centers easier to connect to the grid. And growth is expected to surge.  

Nvidia is a remarkable company. I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. But remarkable companies and remarkable returns are different things — especially when the company is already worth $5 trillion. 

This goldfish has nearly outgrown its bowl. 

The energy company I’ve described today is still swimming in open water.  

Revenue growth is expected to flip from negative 16% last year to positive 48% this year, and then remain in the 20% range after that. And it looks set to break even this year before profits start rolling in during the fiscal 2027 year. 

Its technology is solving a problem that’s costing data centers billions. And its stock hasn’t been discovered yet by investors still staring at Nvidia. 

That’s where the 1,000% winners come from. Not from the most famous fish in the tank — but from the ones nobody’s watching yet.

You can click here to learn how to access the name of this AI energy company.

Regards, 

Eric Fry 

Editor, Smart Money

The post Nvidia Returned 30% Last Year, but This Stock Could Return 1,000%  appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Can you identify the item below?

This is – believe it or not – the world’s first digital camera … invented by Kodak.

Well, invented by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson. As you probably remember, Kodak was the leader in photography. They sold cameras, film, and every other accessory dealing with analog photography.

But you also probably remember that Kodak’s business was eventually buried by digital photography. If they were the first ones to develop digital photography, why were they eventually killed by it?

The simple truth is that management preferred protecting its existing business rather than investing in future technology.

They saw the future but immediately underestimated how quickly it would change everything.

When remembering this story, I’m reminded of a quote from motivational speaker Tony Robbins:

The future cannot be navigated by looking in the rearview mirror…

Investors often make the same mistake.

They spend so much time studying today’s winners that they fail to notice the next technological shift taking shape right before their eyes.

Major innovations are dominating the news right now. The SpaceX IPO was on Friday, but news of upcoming IPOs from AI leaders OpenAI and Anthropic have people excited to try to get in on the ground floor.

Instead of looking at what has already happened, or things we know will happen soon, what can we find earlier that no one else is on to yet?

That’s where the biggest gains are hiding.

Where to Find the Next Big Gains

The challenge, of course, is distinguishing between a genuine technological shift and just another overhyped trend.

Kodak’s executives weren’t blind. They saw digital photography before anyone else.

Their mistake wasn’t failing to recognize the technology. It was failing to recognize its consequences. Plus, they had such a strong business in analog photography that they didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize it.

Digital photography seemed like a niche product. Instead, it completely transformed the way the world captured and shared memories.

According to tech analyst Luke Lango, investors may be facing a similar moment today.

If you’re new to the Digest, Luke has built his reputation by identifying major technology shifts before Wall Street fully appreciates them. That means he finds them before they go on for double and triple-digit gains.

Today, companies and investors are creating wealth at the fastest rate ever. In fact, Luke often says that it’s never been easier to make 10X your money in the stock market than it is now.

Those are the opportunities Luke finds for his Innovation Investor subscribers.

As the name would imply, Innovation Investor is all about investing in innovation, which is the best investment strategy in the market.

It was more than a year ago when Luke recommended Marvell Technology (MRVL). Back in March of 2025, the market endured a downturn, not too different from the ones we’ve seen this week. Luke saw this as an opportunity to get into innovative technology at a lower price.

Here is what he wrote in his recommendation:

Marvell is a semiconductor firm that specializes in designing network and storage solutions for use in data centers. This positions MRVL at the epicenter of the AI infrastructure boom, and the company has seen huge demand for its products over the past few years as companies build more AI data centers.

We don’t see this demand slowing anytime soon. The company should sustain more than 20% revenue growth and more than 30% profit growth for the next few years.

Because of the recent market crash, though, MRVL stock now trades at a two-year low valuation multiple of 23.5 times forward earnings, which feels like a steal for a potential more than 30% profit grower. Meanwhile, the stock has also crashed into oversold territory and is finally showing signs of life. We think shares could rebound significantly here.

Initially, the stock delivered the quick 30% gain Luke mentioned, but as the AI megatrend has accelerated, so has the stock.

Since that recommendation, the stock has risen by more than 200%.

These are the kind of gains Luke seeks out in Innovation Investor.

Most people are understandably focused on artificial intelligence, SpaceX, and the latest wave of high-profile IPOs. That’s where everyone is looking.

Luke is looking somewhere else. He believes an even larger story may be developing quietly in the background.

One that could ultimately affect every paycheck, every investment account, every tax payment, and every dollar moving through the financial system.

And at the center of that story is the leading innovation leader of our time, Elon Musk.

Only this time, Musk isn’t just disrupting cars or rockets. Instead, he has now set his sights on the single largest industry on the planet: banking.

And, as usual, he isn’t interested in taking his time or being polite about his ambitions.

According to recent statements, the world’s richest man wants his new bank to become “the biggest financial institution in the world” and “the place where all the money is.”

Kodak saw the future before almost anyone else. But they underestimated how much it would matter.

Luke believes Wall Street may be making a similar mistake today.

To learn why he believes Elon Musk’s newest venture could reshape the financial system – and which stocks he believes could benefit most – watch his new presentation here.

Enjoy your weekend,

Luis Hernandez

Editor in Chief, InvestorPlace

The post Are You Making the Kodak Mistake? appeared first on InvestorPlace.

The idea behind it is simple, even if the technology under the hood isn’t.  

Most model portfolios hand you a list of stocks and tell you to sit tight for a year or more. This one is built for a different kind of market – the choppy, headline-driven summer I see coming, where leadership rotates fast, and yesterday’s winner can become next week’s laggard. 

We’re already seeing this kind of rotation at play today, with chipmakers and space stocks cooling off. 

So instead of updating once a quarter, this portfolio refreshes every single week.  

Each week, it narrows the entire market down to a short list of the five stocks that look strongest based on Stock Grader and TradeSmith’s Short-Term Health momentum indicator.  

With it, you’re never married to a single trade. As the data shifts, the portfolio shifts with it. 

And the results from testing the strategy are what really caught my eye. Run on the past five years, the approach returned more than 5 times your money since 2021 – using just five stocks at a time.  

In our brand-new broadcast, Keith and I walked through exactly how it works, and how to get access before the doors close on June 16. Click here to watch the replay now.

But before the event, I sat down with Michael Salvatore, Editor of TradeSmith Daily, for a wide-ranging conversation about AI, the new collaboration I’ve built with TradeSmith, and why 2026 reminds me of 1999 – for better and worse.  

You’ll find an edited version of our conversation below. I hope you enjoy it.

***************

Michael Salvatore: Louis, thank you for spending your time with me and my readers today.  

Louis Navellier: My pleasure. 

MS: You’ve been running quantitative models since the 1970s. Most people who use the word “quant” today mean an algorithm that’s been live for five years. You were doing this on mainframe computers before it even had a name. Where did it start? 

LN: It started with a project at Wells Fargo. They’d just passed ERISA — the pension law — and the way lawyers were interpreting it, fund managers needed to match their benchmarks to limit liability.  

My job was to figure out how to track the S&P 500 without buying all 500 stocks. 

I isolated a 320-stock portfolio that I thought had the highest quality in the index. It also had a perfect correlation with all the industry groups, and a beta of one – meaning it was about as volatile as the index itself.  

The problem was, I kept beating the market. And the job was to match it. 

That exercise taught me that the market was rife with inefficiencies — stocks that had returns uncorrelated to the broader market.  

Over time I layered in an eight-factor fundamental model — earnings growth, sales growth, margins, revisions.  

So while I “failed” in my attempt to match the market with a smaller number of stocks, it wound up turning into my Stock Grader system, which I’ve been building and refining for close to 50 years.  

MS: AI looks like one of the most crowded trades in a generation. How do you separate the companies building real businesses from the ones just riding the wave? 

LN: Well, the key separating factor is earnings. And you can have all the doubts about AI that you want, but the fact is that these companies are posting record earnings right now. 

We’re almost through earnings season, and the average S&P 500 company is up 29.3% year over year on earnings.  

That’s the strongest earnings season in seven years. So forget every narrative-driven warning you’re hearing about AI. These companies have the numbers to back up the boom.   

That said, I’m not buying everything. Stock Grader is tight right now. The top 10% is where you want to be. The top 20% isn’t bad. But below that, you’re taking on risk without the fundamentals to back it up.  

The money in this market is very focused — like a garden hose on a strong spray, not a soft mist over everything. 

MS: You’ve been saying this year reminds you of 1999. Now, 1999 was a great year for stocks. The Nasdaq 100 doubled that year alone. But not without a few bumps along the way. So what’s the connection you’re seeing? 

LN: 1999 was actually one of my best years. We had some portfolios up over 100%. I have fond memories of it. 

But what I’m watching is the pattern leading into the summer of 1999 — and what followed.  

The market had a big run-up, then saw a correction in the summer. Many of the most popular stocks fell 25%, 30%, 50%. Then the market recovered and finished strong. 

And then came 2000, of course. That’s when the Nasdaq topped out and didn’t see a new high for more than 14 years. 

Now, to be clear, I’m long-term bullish. And the market we’re in today is very fundamentally different from 1999. Personally, I think we’re heading into 30% to 40% more gains this year because the fundamentals are in place.  

But the summer pattern is something I think investors need to be prepared for — especially in the most crowded, most popular stocks. Those tend to feel the volatility most. 

That’s actually one reason why this collaboration with TradeSmith matters so much to me right now. The tools Keith has built are specifically designed for exactly this kind of environment. 

MS: You’ve been particular about what you put your name on over the years. What was it about what TradeSmith was doing that made you want to collaborate? 

LN: What impresses me so much about TradeSmith’ssoftware is how it automatically does what I’ve always done manually in my own research.  

Essentially, it figures out a stock’s individual price behavior.  

It understands that if a stock typically goes up, say, 12% on a big rally, it usually has to give back at least a third of those gains before the next leg higher. Sometimes two-thirds, depending on how strong the stock is. 

What TradeSmith does is crack the code on those moves. It tells you when you’re buying on a pullback versus chasing a peak.  

For the stocks I’m recommending — strong fundamentals, strong earnings growth — that timing layer can make an enormous difference. 

I actually use TradeSmith software myself to track my own personal stocks. When Keith showed me what the combined system could do, especially in an environment like this one, it felt like a natural fit. 

MS: The backtesting on the combined system showed something that surprised me — it wasn’t just that winners got bigger. There were cases where a trade that was going against you actually turned into a meaningful gain. A 4% win on Dover Corp. became 1,341%. A 9% loss on Fastenal (FAST) turned into a 463% gain. Does that match your intuition about where investors leave the most money on the table? 

LN: Absolutely. And that’s one of the things I respect most about what TradeSmith built. My system tells you what to own. The timing layer tells you when — and when to get out before the damage happens. 

A lot of investors hold a losing position too long because the fundamentals still look fine. The fundamentals can be fine, and the stock can still go the wrong way for months. Having a timing signal that tells you “the flow of funds has shifted, get out now” — that’s the piece that turns a loss into something you can recover from, or better, into a gain. 

The stocks I find tend to be strong stocks. When the timing is right, they can move fast and far. The combination is what makes the numbers look like they do. 

MS: Last question: Setting aside the summer volatility concern for a moment — what’s the single most important thing someone reading this should do differently with their portfolio over the next 30 days? 

LN: Know what you own and why you own it. 

In a market like this one, there are a lot of stocks going up. Some of them deserve to be going up — strong earnings, strong revisions, strong institutional accumulation. Others are just going up because everything is going up. Those are the ones that will feel the worst when volatility comes. 

Run your portfolio through a grading system. Know whether the fundamentals are actually there. And have a plan for your exits — not a vague “I’ll sell if it drops too much” plan, but a specific, data-driven signal that tells you when the trade is over. 

That’s what I do. That’s what TradeSmith does. And when you combine both, you’re not guessing anymore. 

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Editor, Market 360

The post A Warning from the “King of Quants” – and a New AI-Powered Trading Tool appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Editor’s note: “Why X Money Could Be Bigger Than PayPal Ever Was” was previously published in May 2026. It has since been updated to include the most relevant information available.

When you think about Elon Musk’s defining business achievements, what comes to mind?

Tesla (TSLA) — the company that pulled off a 20,000% stock run and turned skeptical engineers into reluctant millionaires? SpaceX — the rocket company that went from a laughingstock to a $2-trillion juggernaut and is now the most anticipated IPO in history?

As impressive as those growth stories are, they may not be the endgame… 

Almost entirely outside the focus of mainstream financial media, Elon Musk is executing the most audacious move of his entire career — one he has been plotting for 27 years. It’s a move that targets not a single industry, but the foundation of how money itself flows through the global economy.

He calls it X Money.

Elon Musk’s 27-Year Battle to Reinvent Banking 

Back in 1999, Elon Musk — then 28 years old, flush with $22 million from selling his first company — poured nearly everything he had into a single idea: that the entire global financial system could live at a single web address.

Banking. Payments. Investments. Insurance. Loans. All of it. One platform. Instant transactions. No waiting for payments to clear. No middlemen skimming fees at every step.

He called it X.com, and within two months of launch, it had 200,000 users. 

Around the same time, another startup — Peter Thiel’s Confinity — was growing rapidly with its own digital payments product. The two companies were locked in a costly battle for users, burning cash to dominate the emerging online-payments market. In 2000, they merged under the X.com umbrella in an attempt to survive the dot-com crash and consolidate market share. But the merger quickly devolved into an internal civil war over leadership, strategy, and Musk’s vision for the company. 

Then came the coup.

Peter Thiel and his allies called an emergency board meeting while Elon and his new wife were mid-air on a honeymoon flight to Sydney. By the time the plane landed, Musk had been forced out of his own company. His partners hated the name X and changed it to PayPal (PYPL). The dream of a unified financial OS — dead on arrival.

Why Buying Twitter Was Never Really About Social Media 

That was 27 years ago.

Elon Musk never forgot — and never stopped wanting to finish what he started.

In 2022, he saw his chance. He bought Twitter for $44 billion. The mainstream media mocked him relentlessly. ‘Classic Musk, overpaying for a failing social media company.’ 

But Musk didn’t buy Twitter because he wanted to own a social media company. He bought Twitter as a distribution layer, with a user base of hundreds of millions of people already using the platform daily.

He renamed it X, partnered with Visa (V) — the financial network that processes more electronic payments than any company in the world — and secured money-transmitter licenses in all 50 states. And he brought X into his broader empire, merging it with the AI firepower of xAI.

Suddenly, everything makes sense. The rebrand. The financial licenses. The Visa deal. The White House executive order directing the Treasury, State Department, HHS, Veterans Affairs, Education, and Homeland Security to modernize electronic payment rails. 

Musk didn’t just build a product. He built the regulatory infrastructure to go with it. In fact, as he’s said: “If done right, X would be half of the global financial system.”

Well, that system is worth $480 trillion. If Musk is right about X Money, it’s more than a startup chasing a billion-dollar market. 

It’s an attempt to transform one of the most deeply embedded systems in the global economy. 

Every Financial Infrastructure Shift Creates New Winners 

Every time technology fundamentally changes how money moves, entirely new financial giants emerge alongside it. 

Telegraphs Created Western Union 

By the 1850s, telegraph lines were rapidly connecting American cities, allowing information — and eventually money — to move across the country almost instantly. Western Union (WU) quickly realized that the same network transmitting information could also move money — and turned wire transfers into a national business. Western Union was one of the original 11 companies listed on the Dow Transportation Index in 1884. Technology met money. Fortunes were made.

Credit Cards Built Financial Giants 

In 1950, Frank McNamara launched the Diners Club card — the world’s first multipurpose charge card. It was designed to allow business travelers to pay at multiple restaurants without carrying cash. The card’s success gave birth to the ‘plastic money’ revolution. American Express (AXP) rode the wave to nearly 10,000% gains. Mastercard (MA) ultimately rose 14,000%. 

The Internet Birthed PayPal 

In 1998, PayPal set out to make sending money as easy as sending an email. Within four years, it had 20 million users and went public on Nasdaq. Early investors who got in at the IPO price of $13 saw the stock eventually reach $310 at its peak — a 2,300% gain. Those who bought in the months after the dot-com crash, when the stock briefly traded under $5, did even better.

Now the next chapter is being written. And if history is any guide, the investors who recognize it earliest will be the ones who benefit most.

What X Money Actually Is

Most people might hear “X Money” and think it’s just another glorified peer-to-peer payment app, like Venmo or CashApp.

But here’s why that take is fundamentally wrong.

X Money is being built to consolidate payments, banking, investing, and financial identity inside a single platform.  

The physical manifestation of this is a debit card — embedded with a sophisticated microchip — that Musk has already begun mailing to thousands of Americans. That chip contains technology capable of processing encrypted payments, identity verification, and account authentication almost instantaneously. 

But the card is just the consumer-facing layer of this OS. Beneath it sits an integrated financial platform that brings together:

• A digital wallet built into an app already used by over 1 billion people worldwide
• Instant peer-to-peer payments
• Direct bank account integration
• Brokerage and investment functionality, allowing users to buy stocks directly inside the app
• Portfolio management across all financial assets
• Social Security income, tax payments, paychecks — all managed in one place
• Yields between 4% and 6% APY — roughly 10x what most Americans earn at traditional banks

Musk has been explicit about his ambition here: “If it involves money, it’ll be on our platform. I’m talking about someone’s entire financial life.” 

And lest you think this is science fiction, just look to China. WeChat — which is also called “The Everything App” — launched its banking features in 2013. Within a few years, nearly 1 billion people were using that app to pay for groceries, invest in the market, split restaurant bills, and send money to family. Mobile payments now account for over 80% of all transactions in China. Tencent, WeChat’s parent company, rewarded investors with a 20x return when mobile banking took off.

X Money is the American version of that story. Except Elon Musk has significantly more users, significantly more political tailwind, and significantly more audacity.

The Investment Pattern Investors Keep Missing 

This is the pattern investors should be paying closest attention to. 

Elon Musk has a well-documented history of turning early partners and adjacent companies into massive multi-baggers. 

• Nvidia (NVDA) was trading at $15 when Jensen Huang personally delivered the first DGX-1 — an “AI supercomputer in a box” — to OpenAI, the then-small startup co-founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. That early relationship helped train the models that eventually became ChatGPT — and Nvidia never looked back. It’s now worth nearly $5 trillion and trades at more than $200/share. Early investors made 5,000%-plus.
• Modine Manufacturing (MOD) partnered with Tesla on battery cooling systems in 2012, when the stock was trading at $5. MOD recently hit an all-time high of $280 — a 5,500% gain.
• Carpenter Technology (CRS), a 135-year-old metals company, supplied SpaceX with superalloys for Starship. The stock surged 2,000%.

In each case, the gains were tied to companies supplying critical infrastructure to a rapidly scaling platform. 

And right now, X Money is creating a new set of partners, suppliers, infrastructure providers, and financial rails that could follow that exact same pattern.

The Bottom Line: X Money Is a Bet on Financial Consolidation 

Every major upgrade in the infrastructure of money has created a new class of winners. 

Telegraphs built Western Union. Credit cards built American Express and Mastercard. The internet built PayPal. 

X Money is the next great systematic upgrade. And it is underway right now, as you’re reading these words.

There is a set of stocks that I believe will be the direct beneficiaries of this rollout — companies positioned to provide the financial infrastructure, payment rails, technology integrations, and adjacent services that an endeavor of this scale requires. 

The same way Nvidia rode the AI build-out and Modine rode the Tesla production ramp, there are companies today that will ride the X Money megatrend.

I’ve spent months identifying them, running the same research process I used when I spotted AMD (AMD) before it exploded 13,500%, Palantir (PLTR) before it rose 1,200%, and Shopify (SHOP) before it jumped 1,700%.

I’ve detailed them all in a brand-new special report called How to Make 1,000% From the Bank of Elon.

Here’s everything I know — my complete research, model portfolio, and daily market intelligence — on this very topic.

The post Why X Money Could Be Bigger Than PayPal Ever Was appeared first on InvestorPlace.

In today’s Friday Digest takeover, Louis explains why today’s AI boom reminds him of the internet buildout of the late 1990s. Not because he sees a bubble, but because he sees the same mix of massive infrastructure spending, rapid growth, and investors getting shaken out by volatility.

He highlights several companies benefiting from the AI buildout beyond the usual headline names and argues that the opportunity remains much broader than most investors realize.

Most importantly, Louis says the biggest challenge isn’t identifying the trend – it’s staying invested when the market gets choppy.

If you missed it, he expanded on these ideas in a presentation with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan this past Wednesday, where the two discussed a new AI-powered approach to navigating volatility. You can watch the replay right here.

Bottom line: If Louis is right, the investors who benefit most from the AI boom won’t be the ones who find the trend first – but the ones who stick with it.

I’ll let Louis take it from here.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

“How much would it cost me to buy you?”

That’s how Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) CEO John Chambers greeted the founder of telecom startup Cerent Corp. in 1999.

Not his company. You.

Cerent had only about $10 million in annual sales, but Cisco paid roughly $6.9 billion in stock because Chambers believed the technology and that founder were critical to the internet buildout.

At the time, Chambers had a simple solution whenever he found a bottleneck:

Buy it.

By the late 1990s, the internet was growing so fast that Cisco couldn’t build products quickly enough to keep up. So it started buying competitors, technologies, and choke points throughout Silicon Valley.

That strategy helped make Cisco the most valuable company in the world for a brief moment in March 2000.

Most people remember what happened next. I remember what came before.

The internet buildout was real. Networks got built, servers got installed, and infrastructure spending exploded. Investors who understood that trend made fortunes.

I’ve been thinking about Cisco lately because we’re watching the same movie again.

The AI buildout is real. First-quarter S&P 500 earnings grew nearly 29% from a year ago — more than double what analysts expected. Analysts keep revising estimates higher. The spending behind this is staggering and it’s accelerating.

That’s what I want to talk about today.

In this piece, I’ll show you four stocks prospering from the AI buildout beyond Nvidia and Micron…

Why I believe this infrastructure boom is still early…

And why the hardest part of the AI trade isn’t finding the right companies. It’s staying with them.

Everybody Wants the Next Nvidia

I’ve been investing through major technology shifts for nearly five decades. I was using computers to analyze stocks in the 1970s, long before it became common on Wall Street. Over the years, my quantitative systems helped identify winning stocks such as Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Nike Inc. (NKE) — and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) — long before they became household names.

In the late 1990s, everybody wanted the next internet stock. Today, everybody wants the next AI stock.

That’s understandable. Nvidia has become one of the most successful investments in modern market history.

But investors often become so focused on one company that they miss the broader trend unfolding around it.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a Nvidia story. There are a lot more AI-related stocks prospering now. Memory companies, networking companies, power-generation companies (we used to call those “utilities”)… all are benefiting.

Why? Because AI requires an enormous amount of infrastructure.

The average investor sees ChatGPT or Claude on their browser and thinks software. I see hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into an entirely new computing architecture.

To appreciate the scale, one proposed AI data-center project in Utah would cover nearly three times the area of Manhattan. Similar projects are being planned across the country. These facilities will require thousands upon thousands of chips, servers, and networking systems.

That’s why companies like Micron Technology Inc. (MU) have become so important.

Most investors still think of it as a cyclical memory-chip company from the middle of the country. But on May 26, Micron became Boise, Idaho’s first trillion-dollar company.

Wall Street sees something different. Sales are expected to grow more than 250%. Earnings are expected to rise more than 900%.

Those aren’t normal numbers. They’re what happens when a major technological shift is underway and demand overwhelms supply. Micron has reportedly sold out much of its high-bandwidth memory production under long-term contracts, and analysts expect supply shortages to persist for years.

It’s also why I want you to pay attention to companies like Dell Technologies Inc. (DELL), Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), Ciena Corp. (CIEN)… and, yes, Cisco. These aren’t the first names investors think about when they hear “AI,” but they’re increasingly prospering from the buildout.

The opportunity is getting bigger. Not smaller. When a major investment theme spreads beyond a handful of stocks and starts lifting entire industries, it usually means the trend is becoming more durable and more profitable — not less.

That’s what we’re seeing right now.

The Real Risk Isn’t What Most Investors Think

I focus on a combination of fundamental and quantitative measures — sales growth, earnings growth, analyst revisions, institutional buying pressure. That’s how my Stock Grader system has identified winning stocks for well over 40 years.

And right now, those indicators continue to point in the right direction. I think many of the best AI and data-center stocks still have substantial upside ahead of them before the year is over.

But being bullish doesn’t mean being complacent.

The spending behind this boom is staggering. Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), and Meta Platforms Inc. (META) are expected to spend roughly $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. That’s data centers, networking equipment, chips, power generation, and everything needed to support the next generation of AI applications.

Those aren’t startup projections. They’re some of the largest and most successful companies in the world committing enormous capital because they believe AI will reshape the global economy.

The biggest risk facing investors right now isn’t that AI suddenly becomes less popular. It’s not that companies stop spending on data centers. And it’s not that earnings suddenly collapse.

The bigger risk is that investors get shaken out of fundamentally superior stocks during perfectly normal periods of volatility.

I’ve seen it happen throughout my career. A stock pulls back. The headlines get scary. Investors become nervous. They sell. Six months later, the stock is substantially higher.

The late 1990s were full of those moments. Even the biggest winners experienced sharp pullbacks from time to time. Investors who stayed focused on the long-term trend were rewarded. Investors who reacted emotionally often weren’t.

I think we’re approaching a similar period now. The market remains healthy, but summer can get bumpy. Trading volume thins out. Volatility increases. Short sellers become more aggressive.

That’s normal.

And it’s one reason I’ve been spending so much time with Keith Kaplan and the team at TradeSmith. Over the past year, Keith and I have been exploring a new AI-enhanced approach that combines my Stock Grader system with TradeSmith’s pattern-recognition technology. What interested me wasn’t the technology itself. It was the results.

More importantly, it showed how investors can stay with opportunities like Dell, HPE, Ciena, and Cisco when volatility inevitably shows up. Because the hard part isn’t finding promising AI stocks anymore. The trend is staring us in the face. The hard part is staying invested when the headlines turn negative and investors start questioning the same companies they loved a month earlier.

That’s exactly what Keith and I discussed earlier this week.

In our free, special presentation, we show investors how we’re using AI to become more tactical and amplify the gains you can make with the stocks I recommend.

You can watch a replay of the event right here.

Whether it’s Micron, Dell, HPE, Ciena, Cisco — or another company prospering from the AI buildout — the opportunity is still much bigger than most investors realize.

The challenge isn’t finding the trend.

The challenge is staying with it.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace

The post How to Hold the Next Nvidia Through the Noise appeared first on InvestorPlace.

His firm invested in SpaceX when the company was valued at less than $22 billion.

Now, with SpaceX going public today, that bet could go down as one of the great investments in history. So, let’s give credit where credit is due.

But folks, before you think about buying SpaceX now that it’s public, you need to think about your risk tolerance and ask yourself:

How much risk can you stomach?

A billionaire like Baron can make a huge, concentrated bet on Elon Musk. He can wait years for it to pay off. He can ride the ups and downs. He can afford to be early and patient.

Most investors cannot afford to do any of those things.

And that is the real lesson I want you to think about as SpaceX begins trading.

So, in today’s Market 360, let’s talk about how investors should handle SpaceX now that it is public and the three reasons why I do not recommend buying SpaceX stock right now… and a new tool that can help you time the market better and make bigger gains – so you don’t have to ride the emotional roller coaster on the way to profits.

Reason No. 1: IPOs Are Risky

Now, let me first say that I think SpaceX is a wonderful company. Starlink makes money. SpaceX makes money. But a great company can still be a risky stock if you buy it at the wrong price, at the wrong time.

Case in point: Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms, Inc. (META).

Facebook went public on May 18, 2012. At the time, it was one of the most anticipated IPOs Wall Street had seen in years. Investors were clamoring to get in. The stock was priced at $38.

The FOMO was real. Then reality set in. By August 2012, Facebook had fallen to about $17.50. That was a loss of more than 50% from the IPO price.

Now, Facebook eventually became a tremendous long-term winner, up more than 1,300% since it first went public. But investors who chased the IPO still got taken to the woodshed.

That wasn’t some one-off case, either. Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) became one of the greatest stocks of all time – but it first fell more than 90% from its dot-com peak. Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), then Google, became a monster winner – but only after testing investors’ patience with steep pullbacks.

Bottom line: Great stocks do not move in a straight line.

That is why I have a simple rule when it comes to IPOs. I usually wait at least a year before I buy.

That may sound boring when everyone is talking about a stock that could soar on its first day of trading. But I have been doing this for nearly five decades, and I have learned that the best time to buy a great company is not always the first time Wall Street lets you buy it.

When a company goes public, there is usually a lockup period for insiders. They cannot immediately sell their shares. But once that lockup expires, a lot of stock can come onto the market, creating selling pressure.

We saw something similar recently with another space-related stock, Rocket Lab Corporation (RKLB). As excitement around SpaceX picked up, a lot of Rocket Lab insiders were cashing out. So do not be surprised if some SpaceX insiders eventually sell after their lockup period expires.

Reason No. 2: No Fundamental Data

The second reason is I want to see the data.

After a company has been public for a year, I can calculate reward-to-risk. I can look at alpha. I can study standard deviation. And I can get four quarters of fundamentals to see whether the stock fits my eight-factor fundamental model.

In other words, I can stop guessing. My Stock Grader tool can give it a simple ranking of A to F, giving my followers and me a clear understanding of whether to buy it.

That matters with SpaceX because it’s a complex business. You have the launch business. You have Starlink. And you have other long-term projects that could eventually become very valuable – or not.

But as an investor, I want to know which part of the business is driving the growth. That is one of the main reasons I am willing to wait. Right now, SpaceX’s future as a public company is still speculative. A year from now, we should have a much clearer picture.

Reason No. 3: The Elon Musk Factor

I should also add the Elon Musk factor.

I am not here to dispute the man’s genius. Elon Musk helped reinvent the auto industry. He helped restart America’s space ambitions. He built the world’s largest satellite internet network. He turned Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) into one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

That is an extraordinary record. But investors need to ask a very practical question:

Can you afford the volatility that comes with Elon Musk?

When you invest in a Musk-led company, you are not just investing in the business. You are also accepting the market’s reaction to Elon Musk himself.

We have seen that with Tesla. A single Musk headline can move billions of dollars in market value. His political comments, public battles and unpredictable behavior have all created added volatility around the stock at different times.

That does not erase what Musk has accomplished. But it does add another layer of risk.

The Smart Move This Summer

The reality is there is still a tremendous amount of money sloshing around. When I was on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show recently, she pointed out that there is about $7 trillion in cash on the sidelines.

Some of that money will naturally gravitate toward the market.

High-profile IPOs like SpaceX, Anthropic and eventually OpenAI could help pull more of that money into stocks. That is bullish for growth stocks and suggests investors still have a strong appetite for innovation.

But bullish does not mean blind, folks.

June is a seasonally strong month, helped by the annual Russell realignment. We should also have another great earnings announcement season kick off in July. But as we get into August and the first half of September, we’ve entered the seasonally weakest period for the market.

So, if we see drawdowns or stair-steps lower this summer, I will not be surprised.

Bottom line: This is still not a market where you can afford to guess or ignore your risk tolerance. You need to know what you own. You need to know what you are missing. And you need to know when to be aggressive – and when to be cautious.

That is exactly why I sat down with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan earlier this week.

During our special event, we discussed why today’s market reminds me of the late 1990s, why I believe the AI boom still has much further to run and how a new AI-powered tool could help investors become more tactical as volatility picks up this summer.

It works by taking my financial analysis, and combining it with a new system developed by my friends over at TradeSmith. And then it adds a revolutionary new form of AI to give investors the best possible shot at massive, rapid-fire gains.

We also share two stock picks – absolutely free.

If you missed it, you can watch the replay right here.

I strongly encourage you to watch it as soon as you can.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

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:

Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) and Rocket Lab Corporation (RKLB)

The post Three Reasons Why I’m Not Chasing SpaceX… and What Investors Should Do Instead appeared first on InvestorPlace.

A presenter guided the group’s attention out of the window, past the gothic spires of campus, and traced which neighborhoods could vanish from differently sized nuclear blasts. The exercise, recently chronicled in Popular Mechanics, is part of the process behind one of the most recognizable symbols on Earth: the Doomsday Clock.

When artist Martyl Langsdorf drew it for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ first magazine cover in 1947, she set the hand at seven minutes to midnight for no scientific reason at all… the placement simply “suited my eye.” The hand has always been a judgment call.

This past January, the Bulletin’s board moved it to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest in its history, citing nuclear arsenals, climate, and the unchecked rise of unregulated artificial intelligence.

Wall Street, it turns out, keeps a clock of its own for AI. And every selloff like the one we just lived through is the crowd grabbing the hand and winding it backward… a collective verdict that the technology’s world-changing promise sits further out than feared, that the disruption is overstated, that midnight is receding.

The stakes of the two clocks differ by orders of magnitude, of course. The mechanism, though, is the same. On the latest episode of Being Exponential with Luke Lango, we read the machinery, and find it running faster than ever.

Watch the full episode here. Also, be sure to subscribe to Being Exponential on X (formerly Twitter) for more exclusive content:

What the Selloff Got Wrong

Some blamed Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) for kicking it off. However, we are not buying that story. Broadcom delivered nearly 50% revenue growth, nearly 80% semiconductor revenue growth, more than 140% AI semiconductor revenue growth, and a $30 billion backlog… records across the board. As we say in the episode, there is no fundamental weakness in that report.

And the spending headlines keep stacking up. China is reportedly committing nearly $300 billion over five years to a national network of AI data centers. Nebius Group N.V. (NBIS) is investing 1.7 billion euros to build capacity in the U.K. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) just announced plans to invest up to 2 billion pounds there over the same stretch. SK Telecom is planning a gigawatt-scale AI cloud in South Korea. OpenAI just raised $122 billion and filed for its IPO. SpaceX is set to raise roughly $75 billion in its own offering.

So what actually spooked the market? We look at three real risks: escalation with Iran sending oil above $110 to $120 and reigniting inflation, political shifts that shouldn’t matter until 2028, and the creeping sense that the market has gotten too euphoric. In the full episode, we walk through why each one, examined closely, looks far more manageable than the tape suggests.

The Toy Every Corporation Wants

Then there’s the viral story that Uber (UBER) blew through its Anthropic token budget… held up in some corners as proof AI isn’t paying off. Our read flips that on its head: buy a kid a new toy, and of course he plays with it every waking hour until you set some limits. The limits don’t mean the toy was a mistake.

Companies are moving from token-maxing to token-budgeting – and a budget line item is precisely what institutionalization looks like. Read the conference calls, and company after company reports AI improving operations across software, hardware, and consumer businesses alike.

The $5 Trillion Floodgate

The episode’s centerpiece is the wave of “kilicorn” IPOs – SpaceX near $1.75 trillion, OpenAI and Anthropic each tracking toward roughly $1.5 trillion. Call it $5 trillion in new market cap hitting public markets in a single year. Many investors read that as a top signal.

History reads it differently…

The giant IPOs of the dot-com era came in 1998 and 1999, and the smaller companies trickled through the gates afterward. The big bulls open the gates first. There’s also one development in particular that could supercharge one corner of this trade: reports that the White House is weighing direct stakes in frontier AI labs, which we interpret as an OpenAI story… and a bullish one for pre-IPO vehicles like SuRo Capital Corp. (SSSS).

Where does all that fresh IPO capital go? Straight back into compute… which means more networking, more memory, more chips, more cooling, more power.

The Jobs Report Mirage

One last contrarian call. Last week’s strong jobs report – more than 170,000 added – revived claims that the AI labor apocalypse was overhyped. We walk through the Challenger, Gray & Christmas data telling a different story: nearly 100,000 job cuts in May, the largest May figure since 2020, with AI cited in roughly 40% of them. AI-driven cuts have already passed 88,000 this year – about 60% more than all of 2025, just five months in.

In the full episode, we lay out the specific accumulation zone we’re watching on the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), why we believe the Summer of AI resumes once the SpaceX IPO clears, and the one scenario that would actually change our minds.

Watch the latest episode of Being Exponential With Luke Lango here. And be sure to subscribe to Being Exponential on X (formerly Twitter) for more exclusive content.

The post Is the AI Selloff a Buying Opportunity? The Data Says Yes appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Don’t you do it – don’t you buy the SpaceX (SPCX) IPO tomorrow.

Or, if you insist, at least do so with your eyes open.

The hype machine surrounding this IPO is unlike anything Wall Street has produced in years. Financial media is wall-to-wall with breathless coverage. And investor demand has reportedly topped $250 billion – more than three times the size of the offering itself.

Analysts are projecting valuations that would make SpaceX worth more than every company on earth except a handful.

It’s a simple and seductive narrative: this is a once-in-a-generation company, and if you don’t get in at the open, you’ll regret it forever.

Maybe.

But before you place that order tomorrow morning, meet Jay Ritter.

He’s a professor at the University of Florida and, without exaggeration, the world’s foremost academic authority on IPOs. His database covers 45 years of U.S. IPO history – more than 9,300 offerings.

Ritter produces the source material on which virtually every serious IPO analysis on Wall Street is built. Goldman cites it. JPMorgan cites it. The SEC cites it.

Tomorrow, I’ll publish a deep-dive on the upcoming spate of IPOs in my latest issue of Investing Insider – my separate weekly investment letter – going through Ritter’s data in greater detail. What follows in today’s Digest is an abbreviated version of what I found.

And I’ll be direct: it should give any retail investor serious pause before chasing tomorrow’s open, or any of the slew of high-profile IPOs on the way.

The first-day pop is not for you

When SpaceX starts trading tomorrow, financial media will lead with one number: the first-day return. And that number will almost certainly be large.

A first-day pop is a durable feature of IPO markets – Ritter’s data shows the average IPO from 1980 through 2025 closed its first trading day 19% above the offer price.

The problem is that you – Mr. or Ms. Average Investor – are highly unlikely to get the offer price.

That price goes to institutional investors – the mutual funds, hedge funds, and pension managers that the underwriting banks cultivate as clients. By the time the typical retail investor can buy SpaceX shares, the stock will already be trading at that inflated first-day price.

Now, SpaceX is reportedly trying a workaround here. It has reserved 30% of its total IPO shares specifically for retail investors. However, the deadline to request the $135 shares passed yesterday. If you didn’t place an order, you’ll have to wait until the stock begins trading on the Nasdaq.

Plus, the IPO is currently “oversubscribed,” meaning investors have requested up to fourtimes more shares than SpaceX has available. Because of this, brokerages cannot guarantee full orders.

So, once again, odds are that if you’re the average investor, you’re not buying at the offer price. You’re buying after the pop has already happened.

Which means that 19% Day-1 gain?

It was never yours.

So, who gets that?

Tomorrow brings a massive wealth transfer – from retail buyers to the insiders and institutions who were there first.

Ritter quantifies just one piece of this: since 1980, $250 billion has been left on the table through first-day underpricing alone – money that flowed to institutional allocatees who got shares at the offer price while retail buyers could only buy in after the pop.

There’s a phrase that circulates in certain financial circles: instead of “Initial Public Offering,” IPO stands for “It’s Probably Overpriced.”

But there’s a darker version I’ve referenced before in the Digest: “Introductory Public Offloading.”

In other words, IPO day is when insiders and early backers use the public markets to hand off risk to new buyers at peak valuations.

After 45 years of Ritter’s data, I’m not sure either label is wrong.

What happens after the pop

While most IPO coverage is obsessed with day one, Ritter spent decades measuring what happens over the three to five years that follow. The findings should be required reading for any retail investor thinking about buying into the coming IPO wave.

The bottom line: IPO buyers – purchasing at the day-one closing price, not the offer price – underperform the market by an average of 20.5% over the following three years.

That works out to roughly 5.5% per year of underperformance versus simply owning an index fund.

Think about that for a moment…

After all the excitement, all the media coverage, all the analyst upgrades – the average person who buys an IPO on or shortly after its debut would have been better off, by a meaningful margin, just buying the S&P 500.

But see for yourself…

The chart below dates to 2013. The red line is the S&P 500. The blue line is a basket of IPOs.

The performance differential – 428% for the S&P versus 155% for the IPO basket – is the cost of chasing new issues instead of owning the index.

Source: Max Martone / Morningstar 

The numbers get even worse when you break the data down by profitability.

Profitable companies going public already underperform the market by 13% over three years – a poor outcome on its own.

But what happens when an unprofitable company goes public?

SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all going public without established profitability, while burning capital at a scale that would draw serious scrutiny in any other context (to be clear, SpaceX’s Starlink division is highly profitable, but SpaceX as a whole is losing billions of dollars).

Ritter’s data shows that unprofitable companies return -30.7% on a market-adjusted basis over the same time frame. That’s nearly two-and-a-half times worse.

Goldman’s own track record says: be careful

Ritter’s data tracks long-run IPO performance by lead underwriter – the bank whose name goes on the top left of the prospectus, whose job is to price the deal and generate investor enthusiasm.

Goldman Sachs is the lead underwriter on the SpaceX IPO. JPMorgan is involved as well.

So, how have Goldman-led IPOs performed for the investors who bought them?

From 2012 through 2021, Goldman led 272 IPOs. Those deals produced an average first-day return of 27.6% – a great day for institutional allocatees.

But for investors who bought at that first-day closing price and held for three years, the market-adjusted return was negative 25.6%.

To be clear, that’s not an absolute return. The investor didn’t lose 25.6%. This is the degree of underperformance relative to the market.

After all the excitement, all the media coverage, and the risk of buying a single unproven company, investors would still have been better off, by a wide margin, just owning the index.

JPMorgan’s track record over the same window: negative 10.5% on a market-adjusted basis.

The Hall of Fame of first-day doubles

Ritter tracks every IPO that doubled on its first day of trading. It’s a fascinating list – and it’s littered with companies that ended up in the graveyard.

• VA Linux: up 697%
• Globe.com: up 606%
• Webmethods: up 507%
• Free Markets: up 483%.

The companies that generated the most spectacular first-day pops are almost without exception either bankrupt, acquired for pennies, or trading far below their first-day close.

The latest example? NewsMax (NMAX).

It surged 735% on its first trading day in March 2025 – the single largest first-day pop for any IPO raising at least $40 million in recorded history.

But as I write on Thursday, NMAX trades at less than $9 a share. And as to that day-one pop, well, imagine buying at the top of the peak below…

The very feature that made those IPOs feel like the opportunity of a lifetime was the signal that something had gone wrong in the pricing process.

Bottom line: The more a stock pops on day one, on average, the more it underperforms in the years that follow.

So, if SpaceX surges 50% tomorrow, treat it as a yellow flag – not a green light.

The action step: focus on the foundations, not the castle

None of this means the AI and space revolution isn’t real. It is.

And none of it means there’s no money to be made in this moment. There is.

What the data shows – clearly, consistently, across 45 years – is that the money is rarely made by retail investors buying IPOs. It is made by the investors who owned the ecosystem around these companies before Wall Street showed up to reprice it.

I’m talking about the semiconductor supply chain. The power infrastructure. The networking equipment. The data centers. The picks-and-shovels plays that benefit from the AI buildout regardless of which company ultimately wins.

The economist Burton Malkiel once sorted all of investing into two camps: stocks that rest on firm foundations of profits and cash flow, and stocks built as castles in the air, held aloft by belief.

SpaceX may eventually become a massively profitable winner – but right now, it looks more like the grandest castle ever floated. But while everyone stares up at the castle, the foundations go on sale.

Our technology expert, Luke Lango, editor of Innovation Investor, has been building this framework for his subscribers.

Here he is explaining:

SpaceX is offering 555,555,555 shares at $135 apiece, valuing Elon Musk’s rocket company near $1.75 trillion — more than 90 times last year’s revenue. Morningstar ran its own numbers and landed nearly a trillion dollars short of that figure.

The biggest gains from landmark technology IPOs have almost never gone to the investors who bought on day one. They’ve gone to the investors who owned the ecosystem around those companies before Wall Street showed up to reprice it.

The window to get in ahead of that repricing is open right now. I don’t know how much longer it stays that way.

Luke calls this the Pre-IPO Backdoor – identifying the publicly traded companies that supply, power, and benefit from the AI giants, and owning them before the IPO roadshow begins.

For the specific stocks he thinks you need to own as SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI reprice their sectors, click here to see Luke’s full research.

Tomorrow’s Investing Insider issue goes even deeper on Ritter’s data and what it means for the coming IPO wave. Click here to join me and access the full issue.

Wrapping up…

The SpaceX IPO will dominate the financial conversation tomorrow. Maybe it pops 30%. Maybe it doubles. Maybe it becomes one of the decade’s greatest investments.

But the data shows that, historically, the odds have not favored the average retail investor who buys on day one – and the more spectacular the pop, the worse those odds have tended to be.

So, if you still want to go in tomorrow, eyes open.

Own the foundations, not the castle.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

The post What Wall Street Isn’t Telling You About SpaceX appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Before she came along, French cooking seemed intimidating to a lot of Americans. It felt fancy. It felt complicated. It felt like something best left to trained chefs.

Julia changed that.

On her cooking shows, she showed people that good cooking was not about fear. It was about understanding the ingredients, following the process and knowing when to adjust.

And folks, that is a pretty good way to think about this market.

The ingredients are strong. Artificial intelligence is still one of the biggest growth stories I have seen in my career. Corporate earnings remain healthy. Fundamentally superior stocks continue to lead.

But there are some tricky ingredients in the mix, too.

Inflation remains sticky in certain areas. Energy prices are moving around. Treasury yields can change the market’s mood in a hurry. And the Federal Reserve is still looking for enough evidence to cut interest rates without reigniting inflation.

That is why this week’s inflation reports mattered so much.

On Wednesday, we got the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and then the Producer Price Index (PPI) was released this morning. Together, these two reports gave us a better look at what is really happening beneath the surface of the economy.

So, in today’s Market 360, we’ll break down what these reports tell us and what they mean for the Federal Reserve. I’ll also share why this is exactly the kind of market where investors need to understand the ingredients, follow the data and have a more tactical way to know when to be aggressive – and when to be cautious.

The Consumer Inflation Picture

The CPI gave Wall Street plenty to chew on.

The Consumer Price Index showed that prices rose 0.5% in May and 4.2% over the past 12 months. That was the hottest annual reading since 2023.

But it is important to understand where the heat came from: energy.

Energy prices rose 3.9% in May, and that pushed the headline number higher.

When you strip out food and energy, the report looked much better. Core CPI rose just 0.2% in May, which was lower than expected. It’s now running at a 2.9% annual pace, which was right in line with estimates.

That is important, folks.

Core CPI tells us whether inflation pressures are spreading through the broader economy. And based on this report, they are not running away.

The other encouraging detail was shelter. Owners’ equivalent rent, which measures what homeowners would pay if they rented their own homes, rose 0.3% in May. That is down from 0.6% the month before.

In other words, rental costs are starting to dissipate. That is a big deal because shelter has been one of the stickiest parts of inflation for a long time.

Bottom line: The headline CPI number looked hot because of energy. But core inflation was better than expected, shelter cooled and Treasury yields moved lower after the report.

As long as the Treasury market likes the report, we should, too.

The Wholesale Inflation Picture

Then came the Producer Price Index – and energy was the story here, too.

The PPI rose 1.1% in May and is now up 6.5% over the past 12 months. That was hotter than economists expected – and the fastest annual pace since November 2022.

Looking deeper, final demand goods prices jumped 2.8% in May. Final demand services rose a much more modest 0.3%.

Energy explains a lot of that gap.

Final demand energy prices jumped 10.7% in May. Gasoline prices surged 23.4%. Diesel fuel, jet fuel, industrial chemicals, plastic resins and natural gas liquids also moved higher.

So, why does this matter?

Well, the PPI tells us what producers are paying. And when producers pay more for fuel, transportation and raw materials, those costs can ripple through the economy.

That is why the PPI is considered a leading indicator of consumer inflation.

Now, I do not want to overreact to one energy-driven report. Energy prices can move around a lot from month to month.

But this report does tell us something important: Higher energy costs are still working their way through the wholesale pipeline.

That does not erase the good news we saw in core CPI. But it does mean the Fed still has another tricky ingredient to consider.

The Rate-Cut Question

The CPI report was better than expected where it mattered most. Under the hood, the report showed inflation pressures are easing in some of the areas the Fed watches most closely, particularly shelter costs.

That tells me inflation pressures are not spreading through the broader consumer economy.

But wholesale inflation remains an important part of the picture. And if energy costs keep rising, companies may eventually try to pass them along to consumers.

That is what the Fed has to watch.

So, I still believe rate cuts can happen later this year. But after this week’s reports, the Fed will likely want to see more evidence that energy-driven inflation is cooling before it moves.

That may create some short-term volatility. But it does not change the bigger picture.

The earnings environment remains very strong. FactSet now expects S&P 500 earnings to grow 21.7% in the second quarter, up from 18.7% at the start of the quarter. That tells me analysts are still revising estimates higher, and fundamentally superior stocks should continue to lead.

But this is still a market where one inflation report or one move in Treasury yields can change the mood in a hurry.

That’s why having the right ingredients is only part of the recipe.

The Right Recipe for This Market

The other part is knowing when to adjust.

That was Julia Child’s real lesson. Good cooking was not about pretending nothing could go wrong. It was about understanding the process well enough to make the right adjustment at the right time.

That same lesson applies to investors right now.

The ingredients are there. But this is not a market where investors should simply close their eyes and hope everything comes together.

Inflation reports can surprise. Treasury yields can move. Fed expectations can shift.

And when markets are this sensitive to new information, investors need to stay flexible. You need to know when to press – and when to pull back.

That’s why I sat down with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan yesterday morning.

During our special event, we discussed why today’s market reminds me of the late 1990s, why I believe the AI boom still has much further to run and how a new AI-powered approach could help investors become more tactical as volatility picks up this summer.

If you missed it, you can watch the replay right here.

I strongly encourage you to watch it as soon as you can.

Because in a market like this, you do not want to guess. You want to follow the data.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Editor, Market 360

The post Don’t Let This Week’s Inflation Data Scare You Out of Stocks appeared first on InvestorPlace.

In today’s guest piece, Louis will share a lesson from the late 1990s that’s shaping how he’s thinking about artificial intelligence today.

Along the way, he highlights four companies prospering from the AI infrastructure boom and explains why he believes the biggest challenge for investors isn’t finding the trend — it’s staying with it.

Louis also held a special presentation yesterday with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan, where they expand on these ideas. You can watch the replay here.

I think you’ll enjoy this one. Read on…

“How much would it cost me to buy you?”

That’s how Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) CEO John Chambers greeted the founder of telecom startup Cerent Corp. in 1999.

Not his company. You.

Cerent had only about $10 million in annual sales, but Cisco paid roughly $6.9 billion in stock because Chambers believed the technology and that founder were critical to the internet buildout.

At the time, Chambers had a simple solution whenever he found a bottleneck:

Buy it.

By the late 1990s, the internet was growing so fast that Cisco couldn’t build products quickly enough to keep up. So it started buying competitors, technologies, and choke points throughout Silicon Valley.

That strategy helped make Cisco the most valuable company in the world for a brief moment in March 2000.

Most people remember what happened next. I remember what came before.

The internet buildout was real. Networks got built, servers got installed, and infrastructure spending exploded. Investors who understood that trend made fortunes.

I’ve been thinking about Cisco lately because we’re watching the same movie again.

The AI buildout is real. First-quarter S&P 500 earnings grew nearly 29% from a year ago — more than double what analysts expected. Analysts keep revising estimates higher. The spending behind this is staggering and it’s accelerating.

That’s what I want to talk about today.

In this piece, I’ll show you four stocks prospering from the AI buildout beyond Nvidia and Micron…

Why I believe this infrastructure boom is still early…

And why the hardest part of the AI trade isn’t finding the right companies. It’s staying with them.

Everybody Wants the Next Nvidia

I’ve been investing through major technology shifts for nearly five decades. I was using computers to analyze stocks in the 1970s, long before it became common on Wall Street. Over the years, my quantitative systems helped identify winning stocks such as Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Nike Inc. (NKE) — and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) — long before they became household names.

In the late 1990s, everybody wanted the next internet stock. Today, everybody wants the next AI stock.

That’s understandable. Nvidia has become one of the most successful investments in modern market history.

But investors often become so focused on one company that they miss the broader trend unfolding around it.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a Nvidia story. There are a lot more AI-related stocks prospering now. Memory companies, networking companies, power-generation companies (we used to call those “utilities”)… all are benefiting.

Why? Because AI requires an enormous amount of infrastructure.

The average investor sees ChatGPT or Claude on their browser and thinks software. I see hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into an entirely new computing architecture.

To appreciate the scale, one proposed AI data-center project in Utah would cover nearly three times the area of Manhattan. Similar projects are being planned across the country. These facilities will require thousands upon thousands of chips, servers, and networking systems.

That’s why companies like Micron Technology Inc. (MU) have become so important.

Most investors still think of it as a cyclical memory-chip company from the middle of the country. But on May 26, Micron became Boise, Idaho’s first trillion-dollar company.

Wall Street sees something different. Sales are expected to grow more than 250%. Earnings are expected to rise more than 900%.

Those aren’t normal numbers. They’re what happens when a major technological shift is underway and demand overwhelms supply. Micron has reportedly sold out much of its high-bandwidth memory production under long-term contracts, and analysts expect supply shortages to persist for years.

It’s also why I want you to pay attention to companies like Dell Technologies Inc. (DELL), Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), Ciena Corp. (CIEN)… and, yes, Cisco. These aren’t the first names investors think about when they hear “AI,” but they’re increasingly prospering from the buildout.

The opportunity is getting bigger. Not smaller. When a major investment theme spreads beyond a handful of stocks and starts lifting entire industries, it usually means the trend is becoming more durable and more profitable — not less.

That’s what we’re seeing right now.

The Real Risk Isn’t What Most Investors Think

I focus on a combination of fundamental and quantitative measures — sales growth, earnings growth, analyst revisions, institutional buying pressure. That’s how my Stock Grader system has identified winning stocks for well over 40 years.

And right now, those indicators continue to point in the right direction. I think many of the best AI and data-center stocks still have substantial upside ahead of them before the year is over.

But being bullish doesn’t mean being complacent.

The spending behind this boom is staggering. Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), and Meta Platforms Inc. (META) are expected to spend roughly $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. That’s data centers, networking equipment, chips, power generation, and everything needed to support the next generation of AI applications.

Those aren’t startup projections. They’re some of the largest and most successful companies in the world committing enormous capital because they believe AI will reshape the global economy.

The biggest risk facing investors right now isn’t that AI suddenly becomes less popular. It’s not that companies stop spending on data centers. And it’s not that earnings suddenly collapse.

The bigger risk is that investors get shaken out of fundamentally superior stocks during perfectly normal periods of volatility.

I’ve seen it happen throughout my career. A stock pulls back. The headlines get scary. Investors become nervous. They sell. Six months later, the stock is substantially higher.

The late 1990s were full of those moments. Even the biggest winners experienced sharp pullbacks from time to time. Investors who stayed focused on the long-term trend were rewarded. Investors who reacted emotionally often weren’t.

I think we’re approaching a similar period now. The market remains healthy, but summer can get bumpy. Trading volume thins out. Volatility increases. Short sellers become more aggressive.

That’s normal.

And it’s one reason I’ve been spending so much time with Keith Kaplan and the team at TradeSmith. Over the past year, Keith and I have been exploring a new AI-enhanced approach that combines my Stock Grader system with TradeSmith’s pattern-recognition technology. What interested me wasn’t the technology itself. It was the results.

More importantly, it showed how investors can stay with opportunities like Dell, HPE, Ciena, and Cisco when volatility inevitably shows up. Because the hard part isn’t finding promising AI stocks anymore. The trend is staring us in the face. The hard part is staying invested when the headlines turn negative and investors start questioning the same companies they loved a month earlier.

That’s exactly what Keith and I discussed earlier this week.

In our free, special presentation, we show investors how we’re using AI to become more tactical and amplify the gains you can make with the stocks I recommend.

You can watch a replay of the event right here.

Whether it’s Micron, Dell, HPE, Ciena, Cisco — or another company prospering from the AI buildout — the opportunity is still much bigger than most investors realize.

The challenge isn’t finding the trend.

The challenge is staying with it.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace

P.S. Louis has been right about these infrastructure waves before. The internet buildout created enormous opportunities, but many investors got shaken out before they could fully benefit. Louis doesn’t want that to happen during this AI buildout. That’s one reason I urge investors to look more into the work he’s been doing with Keith. If you haven’t already, watch yesterday’s event here.

The post Cisco Did It in 2000, and These Four Stocks Could Do It Next appeared first on InvestorPlace.

The best non-AI trade of the decade might be hiding in your gym’s lobby.

Gen Z — the largest consumer cohort in history — is making a quiet but seismic spending decision. They are not going to bars or spending Friday nights out at restaurants. They are paying hundreds of dollars a month for premium gym memberships, boutique fitness classes, and recovery studios. And it has become the center of their social life.

Most investors are completely ignoring this shift — because it doesn’t involve a GPU. That’s exactly why it’s worth paying attention to. 

The Death of the Bar Tab: Gen Z’s Spending Shift Is Showing Up In the Data

According to a February 2026 Bank of America report, gym-related spending among Gen Z and millennials is rising sharply as alcohol consumption continues to decline. 

A separate survey from Mintel found that 77% of U.S. Gen Z consumers say they are more focused on wellness than they were a year ago, with 30% spending more on gym memberships and classes in that time.

With over 3.4 million posts under #Pilates on Instagram alone and TikTok overflowing with gym routines, “what I eat in a day” videos, and run club recaps, fitness isn’t something Gen Z does. It’s something Gen Z is. 

This is a structural identity shift. And it matters enormously for investors.

Why This Is a Structural Identity Shift, Not a Fad

This isn’t just about health. These premium gyms and boutique studios are functioning as social infrastructure — filling the community void once occupied by bars, restaurants, and even offices.

The data bears this out. According to Bank of America, Gen Z households spend 2.8 times more than baby boomers on fitness. Fitness club foot traffic has surpassed bars and pubs by 22 percentage points since 2021. Non-alcoholic beverage spending has outpaced alcoholic alternatives by 28 points over the same period. 

This is a generational reallocation of the “going out” budget — and it is accelerating. 

Spending on premium fitness carries a social ROI that a traditional gym membership never had. You don’t build your professional network at a $30/month big-box gym. But at a $300/month Equinox or a $40-per-class boutique studio? 

The switching costs and community lock-in are real. And the willingness to pay is, evidently, recession-resistant — these Gen Z consumers are spending $500-plus per month on fitness despite record rent burdens, student debt, and a brutal job market.

The Long Side: Three Wellness Stocks Built for This Generational Shift

Against this backdrop, three names stand out as the highest-conviction expressions of this trend in public markets.

The Short Side: Three Stocks Bleeding Out as Gen Z Abandons the Bar Tab

The wellness shift isn’t just a spending increase — it’s a substitution trade. Gen Z is explicitly reallocating their “going out” budget away from specific industries. That creates high-conviction short opportunities that mirror the longs.

The Pair Trades: Three Self-Hedging Expressions of the Same Thesis

If you want clean expression of this thesis:

• Long LTH/Short SAM — premium fitness social hub directly cannibalizing craft beer’s Friday night occasion
• Long XPOF/Short PLAY — boutique studio franchisor vs. bar entertainment venue, competing for the same Gen Z “where do I go tonight” budget
• Long BROS/Short Molson Coors (TAP) — morning fitness culture functional beverage vs. traditional beer whose core demographic is literally aging into retirement

Why This Is the Best Non-AI Trade In the Market Right Now

Almost every macro conversation in 2025 and ’26 has circled back to AI infrastructure. And rightly so — the ‘Pax Silica’ buildout remains the dominant investment theme of this era. But AI infrastructure investing is crowded, expensive, and requires navigating geopolitical risk, tariff exposure, and supply chain complexity.

The wellness trade is different. It’s a consumer behavioral shift playing out in plain sight, being documented in real time by Bloomberg, Bank of America, and Mintel. It requires no technology adoption curve, regulatory approval, or transformer architecture expertise. The tailwinds — Gen Z’s identity-level commitment to wellness, structural alcohol decline, and the social collapse that made boutique gyms the new “third place” — are durable across multiple years.

That same cultural force that is minting new revenue at Life Time and Xponential is quietly bleeding out Boston Beer and Dave & Buster’s. Long/short, the thesis is self-hedging and structurally clean.

Gen Z replaced the entire nightlife scene with something better — and built a $300-a-month subscription around it. 

For investors willing to follow the smoothie instead of the beer, the setup has rarely been cleaner.

That instinct — looking where the crowd isn’t — tends to be where the most interesting opportunities live.

The companies I’m most focused on right now aren’t household names, don’t dominate financial media, and won’t show up on most investors’ radar until it’s too late to get in at the right price. That’s exactly why I think the opportunity is as clean as anything I’ve seen in years.

Here’s what I’m watching — and why I think the window is narrowing fast.

The post The Best Trade Nobody’s Making Because It Doesn’t Involve a GPU appeared first on InvestorPlace.

The May Consumer Price Index (CPI) report came out this morning, and the initial read is about as good as investors could have hoped for given the circumstances.

Headline inflation came in at 4.2% year-over-year, matching expectations. Yes, that’s the highest print since April 2023, and yes, it crossed the 4% threshold for the first time in three years. But the monthly pace actually slowed – 0.5% in May versus 0.6% in April.

Meanwhile, the number that matters most to the Fed – core CPI, which strips out volatile food and energy – came in at just 0.2% month-over-month, cooler than both the 0.3% forecast and April’s 0.4% reading.

Gasoline accounted for the bulk of the headline monthly move, while shelter costs, food, and core goods were all well-behaved. Economists are increasingly calling May the peak – assuming Iran hostilities don’t reignite and push oil higher again.

The takeaway: so far, this is an energy-driven inflation surge, not a broad-based one – which makes it a moment of relatively good news in what has been a difficult inflation stretch. Had core inflation come in hot, it would have rattled a market that’s already looking fragile. So, bullet dodged.

That said, the CPI print tells us where we’ve been. What’s changed underneath the surface tells us where we’re going – and what’s changed is already significant enough that even a well-behaved core reading doesn’t alter the trajectory.

In other words, the inflation risk hasn’t gone away. And the fragile balance that’s been keeping the Fed from responding to it is starting to crack.

The handbrake is being released

For the better part of six months, the Federal Reserve has been frozen between two competing fires.

On one side: inflation running well above the 2% target…

The Iran conflict has added an energy shock, pushing headline CPI to 4.2% – a three-year high, as of this morning’s print. Cutting rates into that environment would mean pouring fuel on the fire.

On the other side: a labor market showing real signs of weakness…

It spent most of 2025 softening – slow hirings, job openings down, unemployment drifting toward 4.5% at its peak last November. Not in freefall, but fragile enough that hiking into it carried real risk.

But that two-handed weakness created a delicate balance. Inflation made it too hot to cut rates, yet the labor market was too fragile for hikes.

The result was paralysis: rates locked at 3.50% to 3.75% through three straight meetings, which was fine for Wall Street.

But that calculus may now be changing – and the evidence comes from an unlikely place.

One of the loudest arguments for labor market fragility has been the fear that AI was quietly hollowing out hiring. If that were true, it would give the Fed even more reason to stay put. But the data are telling a different story.

As regular Digest readers know, I’ve been questioning the “AI will take all jobs” narrative. I haven’t abandoned it, but a growing body of data is making me hold it with less conviction.

Yesterday, Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, flagged the latest relevant data point.

Instead of snowballing job losses related to AI, Slok reports that the number of job openings per unemployed worker has started rising again and is now back above 1.0 – meaning there are more jobs available than workers to fill them. The May jobs report from last Friday reinforced this, with nonfarm payrolls jumping 172,000.

Here’s Slok:

If AI were triggering a jobs crisis, we would expect job openings to collapse and unemployment to climb, yet the opposite is happening.

Source: Torsten Slok / Apollo

This is big.

The labor market weakness that gave the Fed its excuse to stay put is fading. Which means one of the two constraints supporting the Fed’s delicate equilibrium is being removed.

What it means for Warsh’s first meeting

Kevin Warsh was sworn in as the 17th Fed chair on May 22, inheriting a central bank holding rates at 3.50% to 3.75%, a deeply divided FOMC – four dissents at the most recent meeting – and inflation that’s been above the 2% target for five straight years.

Three of those four dissenters weren’t opposed to pausing. They were opposed to the Fed’s easing bias – the language signaling that cuts, not hikes, remain the next move.

Why lean toward easing when inflation has been running hot this long?

At the June FOMC meeting – one week from today – it’s widely expected that Warsh will drop that easing bias entirely.

Now, that alone would be a meaningful hawkish signal. But the deeper question, with the labor market handbrake releasing, is whether a bias shift is enough – or whether the data are supportive of an overt head-nod toward a hike.

Markets are starting to price that possibility.

Below, we look at the CME Group’s FedWatch Tool, which shows the probability traders assign to different interest rate ranges in the future.

As you can see, the odds of at least one quarter-point hike by the December 2026 FOMC meeting now clock in at roughly 66%.

In other words, the question is now not so much “when do we cut?” but rather “when do we hike – and by how much?”

Two markets inside one – and where the AI trade fits

Let’s say that sometime in the coming months, Warsh hikes.

What happens then?

First, there’s a broad selloff. That’s a near-certainty based on how markets behave.

High-multiple growth stocks get nailed because higher rates mean higher discount rates, which compress valuations on companies whose earnings are weighted toward the future.

So, AI darlings like Nvidia (NVDA), ARM (ARM), and Marvell (MRVL) all suffer in the immediate aftermath of a hike announcement.

But as wise investors, we need to look beyond this. After all, the first move and the lasting move are entirely different issues.

While the knee-jerk selloff would treat all rate-sensitive assets roughly the same, the recovery wouldn’t.

To understand the difference, we must ask one key question…

What’s fueling today’s AI bull?

The answer: the hyperscalers. Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), and Meta (META).

But while these companies are using some debt in their AI capex buildout, the majority of that funding comes from operating cash flows and new equity issuance, totaling tens of billions of dollars per quarter.

A 25- or 50-basis-point rate hike doesn’t change that math. These companies don’t need cheap debt to build data centers. Their AI infrastructure spending is, in a meaningful sense, insulated from the Fed in a way that most of the market simply isn’t.

Compare that to what a genuine tightening cycle does to the rest of the market: leveraged real estate, small-cap companies running on thin credit lines, consumer discretionary names dependent on households that borrowed cheaply…

That pain is structural, not temporary – and it doesn’t bounce back the same way.

This will accelerate the “tale of two markets”

Regular Digest readers will recognize this dynamic. It’s the Technochasm we’ve written about for years at this point – the widening gap between the companies and investors positioned on the right side of transformative technology, and everyone else.

What’s worth understanding now is that a rising-rate environment doesn’t pause the Technochasm – rather, it likely accelerates it.

If monetary tightening hits rate-sensitive sectors hard while leaving hyperscaler AI capex largely intact, the performance gap between AI infrastructure and the rest of the market widens.

That’s a harder story to tell than “rates go up, growth stocks go down.” But it’s the more accurate one – and it’s the distinction that matters for how you think about positioning.

Which is exactly where legendary investor Louis Navellier comes in

Louis has spent 47 years identifying the fundamentally strongest stocks in the market. But in a bifurcating market – where the right names recover and the wrong ones don’t – finding quality is only half the equation.

The other half is timing: knowing when a stock’s short-term momentum supports taking action on a long-term thesis, and when it doesn’t.

This morning, Louis and TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan held a live event unveiling a new system that combines Louis’ fundamental stock-selection framework with TradeSmith’s market-timing technology. The goal is precisely the kind of edge this environment demands – not just what to own through a volatile, rate-sensitive stretch, but when to pull the trigger or step aside.

If you missed this morning’s event, you can catch a free replay right here.

Coming full circle

Today’s CPI print was relatively good news. But the real news is how the handbrake is now releasing.

One week from today, Warsh chairs his first FOMC meeting with inflation at a three-year high, a labor market that’s no longer fragile enough to justify inaction, and markets pricing a 66% chance of a hike before year-end.

The regime is shifting, and the Technochasm will be widening.

The investors who come out ahead will be the ones who recognize what this means, where it takes us, and how to position for it.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

(Disclaimer: I own MSFT, GOOGL, and AMZN)

The post The Fed’s Excuse Just Disappeared appeared first on InvestorPlace.

In Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novel, The Old Man and the Sea, a fisherman named Santiago sails out into the Gulf Stream’s deep waters, where he discovers a giant marlin.

After many sleepless nights, he finally catches the marlin and lashes it to the side of his boat… only to see sharks devour it on the journey home.

Santiago is left with nothing but its skeleton.

The market is going after its own giant marlin this week: SpaceX.

Elon Musk’s space exploration company is targeting a June 12 Nasdaq debut at a $1.75 trillion valuation, which would make it the largest IPO in history. Talk about a big fish.

Come Friday, thousands of investors – maybe millions – will drop a line in the water to snag this prize catch. But landing that fish profitably will be no easy task. From the moment SpaceX goes public, competitors will circle the company to take a bite out of its ambitions. In the early days, SpaceX’s share price will likely lose some flesh off the bones.

Admittedly, SpaceX is a marvel in many ways. But not even a cosmic explorer deserves such a stratospheric valuation. The company is still producing multibillion-dollar losses quarter after quarter. At some point, investors might decide that a $1.75 trillion company should turn a profit.

In the meantime, thanks to the SpaceX IPO, hundreds of billions of dollars in fresh investor attention will pour into the commercial space sector, searching for the companies that build, supply, and enable the new space economy.

Most of that attention will flow toward names investors already know. But the opportunity for the astute speculator lies elsewhere – in the companies doing the unglamorous, essential work that makes missions possible.

Indeed, history suggests the biggest gains often come from the companies operating one step downstream.

In major technological shifts, the companies that capture investors’ attention are rarely the only winners. Their success often helps fuel growth across related businesses.

So, in today’s Smart Money, let’s dig into why investing in the companies downstream of SpaceX is a better choice than buying a stake in the IPO itself.

The Beneficiary Trade Has Worked Before

Ignoring the biggest fish might feel counterintuitive. The advice can even feel downright “fishy.” But history shows that the most visible opportunities are rarely the only, or best, ways to invest in a major trend.

We saw this phenomenon play out with the rise of the internet.

Like SpaceX, Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOG) IPO was highly anticipated. The company went public on August 19, 2004, at $85 per share and generated roughly $1.67 billion. Since then – accounting for two large stock splits – GOOG shares are up by more than 17,000%.

But that remarkable return was only part of the opportunity.

Google’s success helped validate the internet economy as a whole. Investors gained confidence that web-based business models could scale globally and generate enormous profits.

That confidence didn’t benefit Google alone. As businesses increasingly moved online, software delivered through the internet – what we now call software-as-a-service (SaaS) – experienced explosive growth.

Salesforce Inc. (CRM), which went public in June 2004, was one of the biggest beneficiaries. The company priced its shares at $11 and raised about $110 million. Since then, Salesforce shares have climbed 6,355%, adjusted for its 2013 stock split.

Investors who recognized Salesforce as a downstream beneficiary of the internet economy were able to make a similar investment thesis play with far less competition.

Veeva Systems Inc. (VEEV), a cloud-based software company serving the life sciences industry that initially built its customer relationship management (CRM) product on Salesforce’s platform, went public in 2013 at $20 per share. Since then, it has delivered 734% returns, outperforming the S&P 500 and the broader software sector.

In short, Google validated the internet model, Salesforce rode the wave, and then Veeva rode Salesforce’s wave.

Each link in the chain represented a less obvious way to invest in the same underlying trend. And at a more favorable entry point.

SpaceX will likely create the same type of chain.

And when it does, the most attractive investments may not be found in SpaceX itself, but in companies positioned to benefit from the wave that follows.

The Space Economy Is Real – but the Best Stocks Aren’t Obvious

Here is the speculative heart of the thesis: A successful SpaceX IPO at its trillion-dollar-plus valuation would legitimize commercial spaceflight as an investable sector at scale, likely accelerating capital flows to competitors and suppliers alike.

Just as Google’s IPO accelerated investor interest in internet businesses, a landmark SpaceX debut will introduce millions of investors to the idea that space is not just a government program. It is an entire economy.

Many of those investors will want skin in the game. Most will buy SpaceX directly, especially considering how revenue soared by 33% year over year to $18.7 billion last year, driven mainly by a 32% increase in Starlink satellite internet sales.

But growth and investment returns are not always the same thing.

SpaceX also reported a significant GAAP net loss of $4.94 billion for full-year 2025 and a steep $4.28 billion loss in the first quarter of this year – mainly because of Musk’s push into AI infrastructure. (SpaceX invested about $12.7 billion last year in AI capital expenditures.)

Despite its impressive growth, SpaceX is still spending heavily, making near-term profitability unlikely.

That’s why I advise looking for SpaceX-related companies with real revenues, real contracts, and real hardware already in orbit.

I’ve identified a company in aerospace manufacturing that can credibly claim all three, and it’s already up double digits in less than a month since we added it to our portfolio in The Speculator.

I’ve also recently recommended another space-focused company, at The Speculator, on the opposite end of the spectrum. You can think of it as “space investing for chickens.”

Buried inside this very large, very profitable, very boring company is a robotics business with a direct connection to SpaceX. And as the SpaceX IPO approaches, that connection may prove more important than most investors realize.

Hemingway’s Santiago came home with a skeleton. He caught the biggest fish in the Gulf Stream, but had nothing to show for it.

The investors who buy SpaceX on Friday may tell a similar tale. The valuation is stratospheric, the losses are real, and the sharks are already circling.

The smarter play isn’t to chase the marlin. It’s to fish in the waters around it – the smaller, faster-moving fish that the whole ecosystem depends on.

That’s where these two companies live. And in our experience, those are the waters where the real money gets made.

To get the full details of these companies before SpaceX joins them on the stock market, click here to learn how to become a member of The Speculator.

Regards,

Eric Fry

Editor, Smart Money

The post Everyone’s Chasing SpaceX, but We’re Going After Something Better appeared first on InvestorPlace.

SpaceX is offering 555,555,555 shares at $135 apiece, valuing Elon Musk’s rocket company near $1.75 trillion… more than 90 times last year’s revenue. Morningstar ran its own numbers and landed nearly a trillion dollars short of that figure.

Steve Eisman, the money manager who famously shorted subprime, called the offering “a sci-fi story tailor-made for a sci-fi cult.” And Goldman Sachs, the lead underwriter, reportedly expects SpaceX’s AI revenue to grow a hundredfold within five years…

Even Musk hasn’t promised that.

The economist Burton Malkiel once sorted all of investing into two camps: stocks that rest on firm foundations of profits and cash flow, and stocks built as castles in the air, held aloft by belief. SpaceX may be the grandest castle ever floated. And the argument over whether it can stay aloft knocked the entire tech tape lower last week.

But while everyone stares up at the castle, the foundations went on sale.

Watch the full episode here. Also, be sure to subscribe to Being Exponential on X (formerly Twitter) for more exclusive content:

The SpaceX AI Buildout

The AI buildout that SpaceX is selling – the data centers, the fiber, the orbital compute – runs through companies posting record revenue with bookings stacked to the ceiling. On this week’s episode of Being Exponential, we argue the selling pressure is castle anxiety, while the foundations underneath keep getting stronger.

The numbers keep going up and to the right. That gap between fear and fundamentals is where we see a tactical buying opportunity in four stocks: Corning Inc. (GLW), Ciena Corp. (CIEN), Broadcom Inc. (AVGO), and Redwire Corp. (RDW). A fifth name, Strategy Inc. (MSTR), gets a very different verdict.

Corning (GLW)

Start with Corning itself. Every Blackwell GPU cluster needs fiber… a lot of it. Nvidia’s (NVDA) 72-GPU Blackwell nodes require 16 times more fiber than traditional cloud switch racks, and Corning dominates that supply.

The deals keep stacking up: $6 billion with Meta (META), a new multibillion-dollar partnership with Amazon (AMZN), a spot in Nvidia’s orbit. We peg Corning as a roughly 20% compounded top-line grower for the next four to five years, with EBITDA compounding 30% to 40% as margins expand. At 26 times forward EBITDA, we call the $150 to $170 range an accumulation zone.

Ciena (CIEN)

Ciena runs on the same logic, supercharged. Decades of operator underinvestment in global networks are colliding with explosive AI demand… the same supply-demand imbalance that broke the housing market after 2008, now playing out in optics.

We see a potential 40% to 50% compounded EBITDA grower trading at 34 times, with the stock sitting right on its 100-day moving average near $420 and RSI approaching oversold territory. Bounce time, in our view.

Broadcom (AVGO)

Then there’s Broadcom, the stock that arguably kicked off the whole selloff. The market nitpicked a slightly soft AI revenue guide and ignored everything else: total revenue up 48% to a record $22.2 billion, semiconductor revenue up 79%, AI semiconductor revenue up 143% to $10.8 billion, and more than $30 billion in AI bookings – nearly triple what the company shipped in the quarter. Luke calls that a demand tsunami and views the $340 to $370 zone, hugging the 200-day moving average, as accumulation territory.

Redwire (RDW)

Redwire is the smaller, higher-torque story. The company is the big dog in outer-space solar panels (it powers the International Space Station), which makes it a pure play on orbital compute, where energy costs approach zero.

That thesis just got a boost from the SpaceX filings themselves, with Anthropic signaling interest in gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity. We told viewers not to chase the stock when it went vertical. The pullback we wanted has finally arrived at $15, a level that has acted as the stock’s flip line for nearly two years.

Strategy (MSTR)

And Strategy? The world’s largest Bitcoin (BTC/USD) treasury company is, by design, a leveraged bet on Bitcoin – and we believe Bitcoin keeps falling through this inter-halving dead zone, with MSTR potentially breaking below $100 before bottoming.

Our timeline for the crypto reawakening: late 2026 into early 2027, once the IPO wave passes and the next halving cycle approaches. Until then, our guidance is blunt. Own AI. Wait on crypto.

We’re in the later innings of this bull market, and the music is still playing. The full episode walks through every chart, every support level, and the complete bull case on all five names.

Be sure to watch and subscribe to Luke’s X feed for more of his insights!

The post The Grandest Castle Ever Floated (and the Stocks to Profit From It) appeared first on InvestorPlace.

As I worked through my inbox over coffee this past Saturday morning, one subject line caught my attention…

I won’t repeat it verbatim – no need to call anyone out. But it oozed with schadenfreude.

Based on last Thursday’s and Friday’s tech pullback, the author gleefully trumpeted that the long-awaited “market meltdown” he had assured his readers was coming had finally arrived.

He could not have sounded happier or more self-congratulatory.

Below is a visual of this alleged collapse. We’re looking at the S&P 500 over the last two years.

Now, let me quickly clarify…

I don’t know.

As I write on Tuesday, the AI trade is deep in the red again. So, perhaps last week was the start of a market collapse, and this author is right. Eventually, some bear always is.

But declaring a market implosion after a 3% pullback in the S&P and 5% drawdown in the Nasdaq requires a pessimism I don’t share, even with today’s selloff – and apparently, neither does legendary investor Louis Navellier.

In fact, Louis is looking at this market and seeing evidence of strength. Let’s jump to his Growth Investor Special Market podcast from yesterday:

I think if you just look at the fundamentals like we do, you’ll find that the market is quite healthy.

We just updated our back testing of Stock Grader. Basically, we went from the top 10% of Stock Grader stocks being the best place to invest to the top 20%.

So, it means the breadth and power of this market is expanding. And fundamentally, the breadth and power on our eight-factor model went from the top 30% to the top 65%.

If you’re new to the Digest, Louis’ Stock Grader is a quantitative stock-rating system that scores companies across eight fundamental factors – things like earnings growth and analyst revisions – and assigns letter grades (A through F) to help investors identify the strongest stocks to buy and the weakest to avoid.

So, that 30% to 65% expansion Louis referenced suggests the overall market is growing stronger, not weaker.

Given this, Louis’ advice to his readers was quite the opposite of that bearish victory lap:

Every dip is a buying opportunity.

Hang on, enjoy the ride.

But the story goes deeper

While Louis is bullish, he’s also been telling readers to prepare for summer bumpiness – and today’s market action is a great example of it.

From his update last week:

It’s no secret that volatility tends to rise during the summer months…

There will be a few distractions for investors this June – the CPI, PPI, and FOMC announcement – that could cause some volatility.

All these events have the potential to create some waves in the stock market.

In a calmer market environment, those waves would be easier to shrug off. But today’s backdrop makes them more challenging…

Valuations in parts of this market are at or near historic highs. Inflation is running close to double the Fed’s baseline rate. Investors are worried about rate hikes. The conflict in the Middle East isn’t going away – which means elevated oil prices aren’t either.

And into this environment, a growing chorus of voices is calling for the reckoning they’ve long predicted – like the author I read over coffee on Saturday.

This leaves investors with a challenging question that’s critical to answer correctly

When a drawdown hits our portfolios, how will we know whether it’s a normal pullback within an ongoing bull market – the kind you hold through, or even buy into, like Louis recommends?

Or whether it’s the early warning sign of something more serious – the kind of decline that creates real portfolio damage as investors wrongly wait on a bounce?

Getting it wrong in either direction will be costly…

Sell during a healthy reset, and you miss the recovery. Hold through the early stages of a real bear market and watch positions that took months to build give back years of gains.

But this is where we can move from Louis’ generalized bullishness to localized confidence for your specific portfolio holdings.

Here’s Louis:

For the past year, I’ve been working with the team at TradeSmith on something I’ve never attempted before.

Together, we’ve built a new form of AI that takes my Stock Grader system and adds a layer it didn’t have before: a precise, data-driven signal for when to get in and when to get out of the stocks I recommend.

The results from backtesting are striking.

AppFolio Inc. (APPF), which Louis recommended in 2017, delivered a 20% annualized gain for those who followed his original call – but pairing that recommendation with this new AI-enhanced timing layer would have pushed the annualized return to 74%.

Nexstar Media Group (NXST), recommended in 2013, went from a 23% average yearly gain to 173%.

Same stocks, same time frames – just smarter signals on when to act.

You can try this tool right now – 100% free – in your own portfolio

Louis and TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan will be presenting the full details of their collaboration tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern. But you don’t have to wait to take their system for a test drive.

When you register to join tomorrow’s event, you’ll get access to this indicator – just enter the ticker symbols of stocks you already own (or stocks you’re considering) and see how the system evaluates their short-term health.

Here’s Louis with more:

It allows you to type in any ticker to see if a stock is a short-term buy or sell based on a simple traffic light system. Green means buy. Yellow means hold. And Red means sell.

While my Stock Grader’s main focus is on what stocks to buy, Short-Term Health is all about when to buy them.

I’ve been hunting for edges in this market for 47 years. I’ve never seen one like this.

Whether Louis’ bullish case plays out smoothly or the summer gets rocky first, more confidence regardless is the real payoff – fewer gut-wrenching moments of “do I hold or do I sell?” thanks to a simple green, yellow, red system.

I think of it as a tool that tells you what’s fundamentally strong enough to buy, and when it’s technically attractive enough to pull the trigger – or not.

Click here to join Louis and Keith tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern, and access the free Short-Term Health Indicator now.

One bullish AI name that might surprise you – and what it points to next

To help round out today’s Digest, I want to share a bullish AI recommendation courtesy of the combined Louis/TradeSmith market timing system we just described.

To do that, let’s turn to Tom Yeung – our Sunday Digest writer and Eric Fry’s lead analyst in Fry’s Investment Report.

Tom got his hands on the system and ran some of today’s leading AI stocks through it for Sunday’s issue. One of his findings might surprise you – and in case you missed his Digest, I wanted to highlight it again…

It’s Nvidia (NVDA).

Now, you might think: Nvidia? After a multi-thousand-percent run? (Louis’ Growth Investor subscribers are up more than 4,750% in Nvidia as I write.) Surely that ship has sailed.

Here’s Tom with why the data says otherwise:

Nvidia continues to surprise even its greatest fans.

Last month, the company announced its 14th consecutive earnings beat. Earnings per share grew 95% to $1.87, surpassing consensus by 6%. The company has expanded its supply chain faster than Wall Street expected and kept its lead in AI chips.

By my calculations, that means Nvidia’s fair value is closer to $300 per share today, up 40% from its current share price.

The firm is dominating its industry, and its solid “B” rating in Louis’ Stock Grader suggests it’s an excellent company to buy, even after its multiyear run.

A 40% upside-case for one of the most widely owned stocks on the planet?

It’s an extraordinary reflection of how fast earnings have grown – even relative to Nvidia’s breakneck stock price surge of recent years.

But Tom’s Nvidia analysis raises a natural next question

It’s one that Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang himself answered at Computex 2026 last week.

Huang sat down with Marvell Technology Inc. (MRVL) CEO Matthew Murphy and made the same point we’ve covered here in the Digest for months now…

The AI industry is beginning to hit the physical limits of traditional copper wiring. The infrastructure that’s powered this buildout so far simply can’t keep up with where AI demand is headed.

The solution, Huang said, is a shift toward optical systems.

The market heard him.

Marvell surged 24%. And Corning Inc. (GLW) – a leading fiber-optic company whose glass cables can carry data at the speed of light over distances that would overwhelm copper – jumped nearly 13% in a single session.

In a matter of hours, billions of dollars flowed into the companies positioned for what Huang described.

Now, this wasn’t a surprise to Tom or Eric. They’d recommended GLW to Fry’s Investment Report subscribers years ago, long before the recent spotlight.

Here’s Eric writing in the wake of the Huang/Marvell/Corning news:

I’ve been trying to equip my readers for moments exactly like this, which is why I recommended Corning shares well before the recent fanfare arrived.

That recommendation has gained nearly 400% and is still advancing because of the long-term demand trends Huang mentioned.

If you’re curious what else Eric is seeing that the crowd hasn’t priced in yet, he’s put together a free presentation – his “Sell This, Buy That” broadcast – that walks through the specific AI plays he believes will generate maximum profits during the next phase of the boom.

It includes lesser-known picks-and-shovels plays, the sectors he expects to see the biggest AI-driven surges, and seven trades he’s giving away – completely free.

Coming full circle

From a bear declaring a meltdown to Louis calling every dip a buying opportunity to Jensen Huang pointing toward the next frontier of AI infrastructure – we’ve covered a lot today. But there’s still a logical throughline…

The investors who will come out ahead this summer aren’t the ones who panic at a 3% pullback or chase yesterday’s headlines…

They’re the ones who know what they own, why they own it, and when they’ll sell it.

If you’d like help with that, a reminder to tune in tomorrow for Louis’ and Keith’s new green, yellow, red system.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

(Disclaimer: I own GLW.)

The post Nvidia Still Has 40% Upside – Here’s the Math appeared first on InvestorPlace.

On Monday, it looked like the pain might be over. But that selling pressure continued today.

As I write this, the S&P 500 is down 0.8%, the NASDAQ dropped 1.7% – after briefly paring losses of as much as 3.5% – and the Dow is currently flat.

As I explained in a Special Market Podcast to my followers, the weakness has been mostly tied to profit-taking in AI-related stocks. The reality is the market was overbought after the big run we’ve seen in chip, memory and AI infrastructure names.

What’s more, concerns are rising that persistent inflation could keep the Federal Reserve on hold – or worse, force a rate hike.

If that weren’t enough to put investors on edge, U.S.-Iran tensions flared again today. Hours after President Trump suggested peace talks were on track, he announced the U.S. would respond to an Iranian attack on a U.S. military helicopter.

That’s the kind of headline that can turn a relief rally into a selloff fast.

That said, I want you to understand that the situation is more contained than the headlines suggest. Ships are getting through the Strait of Hormuz with U.S. escorts, domestic oil production has increased significantly, and inventories are being filled. This bottleneck is not going to be a long-term problem, folks.

And let’s not forget, buried in the headlines today was a bright spot. Existing home sales rose 3.2% – the strongest reading this year. Housing has been one of the weakest parts of our economy, so that’s an encouraging sign.

The Next Big Test for This Market

Looking ahead, there’s plenty to get excited about this week.

Meanwhile, the IPO market is heating up in a big way: SpaceX is set to go public Friday, aiming to raise $80 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation – the largest IPO in market history. And after Monday’s close, the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, confidentially filed IPO paperwork. That follows rival Anthropic, the company behind Claude, which took the same step just a week earlier.

Both companies could be trading on Wall Street as soon as this fall.

But as exciting as all of that is, this week’s inflation reports matter more for the market’s direction.

On Wednesday, we’ll get the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Economists expect headline CPI to rise 0.5% in May and 4.2% over the past 12 months. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy, is expected to rise to 2.9% year-over-year, compared to 2.8% the prior month.

Then on Thursday, we’ll get the Producer Price Index (PPI). Expectations call for headline PPI to rise 0.6% in May compared to 1.4% in April, while core PPI is expected to increase 0.4%.

Bottom line, while the market is worried about the tech trade, cooler-than-expected inflation readings could help calm the investors – while hotter numbers could put more pressure on stocks and Treasury yields.

But what I want you to understand is that these oscillations are normal. The market gets hit, bounces, retracts, then bounces again. Sometimes it retests the lows two or three times before the next leg higher.

That’s why I don’t chase headlines. I follow the data.

And right now, the data tells me the bears are getting this market wrong.

Why the Bears Are Getting This Wrong

Now, not everyone is on the same page as me. A Bank of America strategist made headlines this week, warning that the market could fall 6% – arguing that the tech-heavy top half of the market will get dragged down by the weaker bottom half.

I respectfully disagree. In fact, my latest backtest of Stock Grader data shows that the breadth & power of the market are improving.

This strategist is making a mean reversion argument that completely ignores the fundamentals. Earnings grew 29.3% last quarter. Analysts are forecasting 21.5% growth for the full year – and those estimates are still being revised higher.

You don’t get a sustained 6% correction when earnings are accelerating like that.

Notably, even some of Wall Street’s most persistent bears are coming around. One strategist who spent years telling investors to get out of stocks has turned more positive. When the bears start capitulating, that tells you something.

The bottom line: I think we’re looking at 5% to 6% GDP growth next quarter, housing is picking up, and earnings momentum is intact. The oscillations we’re seeing now are a normal part of any bull market – not a reason to abandon fundamentally superior stocks.

That’s why I stay focused on the data. And right now, the data is telling me this market has more room to run.

But folks, this is a market where you have to be selective.

Good stocks can bounce like fresh tennis balls. Bad stocks can fall like rocks.

So, before you make any moves in this market, I want you to check the short-term health of the stocks you already own. And I’ve been working on a brand new tool with my friends over at TradeSmith that can help you do it…

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern, I’m hosting a special event where I’ll show you a groundbreaking new form of AI that takes the power of Stock Grader and uses it to generate investing signals with some of the highest upside potential that I’ve seen in my entire 47-year career.

You don’t have to be a sophisticated Wall Street “quant” or math whiz to understand it or use it.

And before the event, you can test-drive part of that system for free.

Just type in any ticker symbol, and you’ll see whether the system currently views that stock as healthy, neutral, or at risk in the short term.

Go here to register for tomorrow’s event and check your stocks now.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Editor, Market 360

The post Don’t Let This Pullback Shake You Out of Great Stocks appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Two months ago, software stocks were in freefall. Today, they’re within striking distance of all-time highs. 

Same companies. Same AI threat. Completely different prices.

Something changed. The question worth asking — before you chase this rally — is what, exactly, that something was.

The SaaS Comeback Nobody Saw Coming — and What It Actually Means

The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV)— the benchmark index for software stocks — just made an unexpected comeback.

Back in April, IGV was sitting nearly 40% below its all-time highs, in bear market territory. People began questioning if the entire sector had a future. And some of those questions were legitimate — more on that in a moment.

But then the rally began. IGV ripped 45% off its lows in a matter of weeks. It blew through its 50-, 100-, and 200-day moving averages like they weren’t even there. Today, it sits less than 10% off its all-time highs.

This type of reversal off the 200-week moving average has only happened a handful of times in the past 15 years. Each time — in late 2011, early 2016, and early 2023 — turned out to be generational buying opportunities.

Technically speaking, this rally looks like the real deal. Institutional money came back hard and fast. Positioning is no longer washed out. The macro backdrop — no recession, tariff de-escalation, the AI capital expenditure cycle running full steam — is supportive. 

For traders, fighting this tape in the near term is likely a losing game.

What the Rally Did Not Fix: The Three AI Waves Still Threatening SaaS

Now, here’s the uncomfortable truth: the stock prices recovered. The fundamental risks did not.

For years, Wall Street loved the Software-as-a-Service business model. Businesses would pay per employee per month to access a software platform that managed some part of its operations — sales pipeline, expense reports, project timelines, creative assets. 

Recurring, predictable, high-margin revenue. 

AI is now dismantling that very business model that made these companies worth hundreds of billions in the first place.

The disruption is playing out in three distinct waves, each more threatening than the last:

Wave 1: The Point Solution Wipeout

AI agents can now perform tasks without a SaaS subscription attached. Why pay $15 per employee per month when AI can now manage tasks for far less? The lowest-value software offerings are being hollowed out first, and the pace is accelerating.

Wave 2: The Pricing Compression Squeeze

For mid-market horizontal platforms — i.e. project management, customer relationship management, collaboration tools — the threat is subtler but equally dangerous. AI is reducing the switching cost of leaving these platforms. 

If an AI agent can replicate much of what a software platform does at a fraction of the price, customers don’t necessarily churn immediately. But they start to negotiate. Renewal rates slip. Pricing power evaporates. 

These are low-multiple businesses masquerading in high-multiple clothing.

Wave 3: The Business Model Disruption

Even the biggest, most entrenched platform companies — the ones with large enterprise relationships and genuine data moats — will survive. Though, to do so, they will have to transform from seat-based subscription businesses into consumption-based AI platforms. 

Usage-based pricing sounds modern and exciting. It is also inherently lower-margin and lower-multiple than the model Wall Street has been paying 30x revenue for. This is not a crisis. But it is a permanent structural reset.

Beta vs. Conviction: How to Tell Which Software Stocks Deserve the Rally

IGV went up as a block. It will not come down that way. 

When macro sentiment flips — fear turns to greed, institutional money re-risks — it buys everything in a sector first and asks questions later. That is what happened with IGV. 

However, inside that ETF, there are companies with genuinely AI-native business models that will compound through this transition, and there are companies bouncing on pure beta that will re-test their lows the next time AI demonstrates its abilities.

The Compounders: SaaS Stocks That Benefit as AI Proliferates

The names worth holding are those that make up the nervous system of the AI economy — the infrastructure, security, observability, and physical-world data. 

Palantir (PLTR), CrowdStrike (CRWD), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), Datadog (DDOG), Axon (AXON), Samsara (IOT): these businesses benefit directly from a world where more AI agents are running, more data is being processed, and more attack vectors need strong defense.

The Faders: SaaS Stocks Bouncing on Macro, Not Fundamentals

Then there are the names worth fading on this bounce. And this is where the SaaSmageddon thesis bites hardest.

Broader SaaS incumbents — legacy CRM platforms, creative tool suites, HR and payroll software, project management tools — face a more complicated road. Some are investing aggressively in AI and may survive the transition. But many are bouncing on macro tailwinds rather than fundamental improvement, and their pricing power story is getting harder to tell with each AI capability improvement.

Workday (WDAY), HubSpot (HUBS), and Adobe (ADBE) each face acute pressure from the second and third waves — bouncing hard on macro tailwinds while their pricing power stories quietly erode.

One of the most ironic shorts in the market right now is UiPath (PATH) — a company whose entire business is automating workflows, now being disrupted by better automation. UiPath built its model on robotic process automation: software bots that mimic human clicks, keystrokes, and navigation across legacy enterprise systems. It charged enterprise customers handsomely to deploy and manage those bots. Now, AI agents can do the same work — and increasingly more — without the rigid rule-based scripting UiPath requires, at a fraction of the cost, and without a dedicated implementation team. The product that was the future of automation is being made obsolete by the next version of it. The robots are eating the robot-makers.

The Bottom Line: Own the Nervous System, Fade the Workflow

In the near term, there is no reason to be aggressively bearish on software stocks. The technical setup is as good as it has been in years, institutional positioning supports continuation, and the macro backdrop is not fighting the tape. 

But looking out 12 to 24 months? The fundamental reckoning that the market postponed is still coming. Enterprise AI adoption data — renewal rates, churn patterns, pricing concessions — will start to surface in earnings calls over the next several quarters. And as that happens, the distinction between AI-native compounders and beta-driven bounces will become impossible to ignore.

Own the nervous system. Fade the workflow.

Software that becomes more valuable as AI proliferates — security, observability, data infrastructure, physical-world intelligence — deserves a permanent place in your portfolio. The rest deserves skepticism, regardless of how good the chart looks today.

One thing this rally made clear? The market doesn’t wait for permission.

When institutional money decided software was worth owning again, it came back all at once, in a matter of weeks, before most retail investors had time to react. 

The same thing will happen when OpenAI and Anthropic file their S-1s — except the repricing won’t be contained to one sector. It’ll ripple across the entire AI ecosystem simultaneously.

I’ve already mapped where I think that money lands first. Not the IPOs themselves — the companies underneath them that Wall Street will be forced to reprice the moment the filings go public.

Here’s the full picture — including the specific names I think move first.

The post SaaSmageddon Isn’t Over. It’s Just on Pause. appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Semiconductor giant Broadcom, Inc. (AVGO) reported earnings after the bell last Wednesday.  

The company posted 48% year-over-year revenue growth and 54% year-over-year earnings growth. Both were a slight surprise.  

But investors weren’t satisfied after the company maintained its previous forecast for semiconductor revenue of $100 billion. And that sent Broadcom shares plummeting more than 25% on Thursday and Friday.

Since Broadcom is one of the leaders of the AI Revolution, it dragged the entire NASDAQ down with it. As a result, the tech-heavy index finished down by nearly 5% on the week.

At first glance, this may seem like alarm bells are going off for the AI boom. After all, chipmakers have been among the biggest drivers of the market’s rally over the past year.

So, the question is: What is Wall Street actually rewarding right now?

In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with the market. It’s just that after a long period of gains, the market has to take a breather from time to time.

So, money isn’t leaving the market. It’s just being reshuffled into areas that may offer greater upside from here. It’s now rewarding smaller AI companies.

And in this week’s Navellier Market Buzz, I explained why investors are rotating away from some of the biggest AI winners and into a new group of AI infrastructure stocks benefiting from the massive data center buildout.

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.

What If You Could See the Shift Before Everyone Else?

Personally, I think the pullback was a gross overreaction to Broadcom’s outlook and view the dip as a good buying opportunity.

So, a pullback in a stock like Broadcom doesn’t change my long-term outlook on AI.

In fact, I believe some of the biggest opportunities in AI are still ahead of us.

But as we’ve seen over the past week, investor sentiment can shift quickly. The stocks that drove yesterday’s gains aren’t always the ones that drive tomorrow’s.

When shifts like this happen, it always helps to have a signal – a way to cut through the noise and identify where money may be flowing next.

Before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

That’s exactly why I’m stepping forward this Wednesday, June 10, at 10 a.m. Eastern, with my colleague and friend, Keith Kaplan, to reveal what I believe could be the most important upgrade to my Stock Grader system in decades.

Based on our extensive backtesting, this upgrade could have dramatically improved results on many of my past recommendations.

For example…

• It could’ve already turned a 26% gain on Generac Holdings Inc. (GNRC) into a 1,178% gain…
• A 130% gain on Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (REGN) into a 241% gain…
• And boosted a mere 7% gain on Carpenter Technology Corporation (CRS) into an incredible 416% winner.

During this special event, I’ll show you exactly how it works and explain why I believe it could become an essential tool for navigating today’s fast-moving market.

Plus, if you join us, I’ll give away two stocks that this system is flagging – one to buy and one to sell.

Click here to reserve your spot now.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

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:

Broadcom, Inc. (AVGO) and Carpenter Technology Corporation (CRS)

The post Broadcom Fell, But Here Are 5 AI Stocks Winning Now appeared first on InvestorPlace.

As I write on Monday morning, the markets are trying to claw back from last Friday’s tech rout triggered by the blowout jobs report – it was the last thing an inflation-rattled market wanted to see.

The May employment report landed well above expectations. The U.S. added a seasonally adjusted 172,000 jobs in May, more than doubling expectations of 80,000. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%.

Stepping back, payroll gains have averaged 188,000 over the past three months – a pace not seen since March 2024.

Now, this would appear to be great news – so, why the Friday tech-wreck?

Because the report landed on top of the latest Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation reading of 3.8% – the highest since May 2023 – and two consecutive inflation prints trending in the wrong direction. A robust labor market, in this environment, doesn’t give the Fed any room to cut interest rates. If anything, the conversation now shifts to rate hikes.

White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told Bloomberg Television that investors are “terribly wrong” to interpret the strong report as evidence that the Fed will hike rates – his argument: oil-price shocks historically produce temporary, not lasting, inflation.

We’ll find out soon enough. Fed officials meet next week under the leadership of new Chairman Kevin Warsh – and Friday morning’s data just made that meeting considerably more interesting.

But Fed policy aside, is this report really a glowing reflection of Main Street health?

Let’s break it down.

The headline vs. what’s underneath

Friday’s jobs number looks strong on the surface. Underneath, there’s a different picture.

Beyond the 172,000 new jobs, the same report showed that year-over-year average hourly earnings rose just 3.4% in May – down from 3.6% in April. With PCE inflation running at 3.8%, that means real wages are deeply negative. Translation: workers are getting raises that don’t keep up with what they’re paying at the pump and the grocery store.

Meanwhile, the long-term unemployment rate – people out of work for 27 weeks or longer – jumped to 27.5% in May. That’s up from 25.3% in April, and the highest level since December 2021.

So, under the glossy “172,000 jobs” headline, there are widening cracks.

And it gets more complicated…

Even as long-term unemployment ticks up and real wages decline, our technology expert Luke Lango, editor of Innovation Investor, has been tracking a strange paradox.

Here’s Luke:

Nominal personal spending growth rose in April from 5.7% to 5.9% — the strongest reading since January 2025. 

Consumers haven’t pulled back at all. If anything, they’re spending more. But the fundamental support for that spending has completely collapsed underneath them.

So, if wages aren’t funding this spending binge, what is?

Savings.

Luke reports that the U.S. personal savings rate crashed to 2.6% in April 2026 – one of its lowest levels in modern history.

But savings aren’t the only source of this spending – it’s also coming from debt. And some cracks are forming.

Here’s CBS News:

Credit card delinquencies across the U.S. have reached their highest level since 2011…

Nationwide, about 13% of all credit card accounts were in arrears in the first quarter.

CBS went on to report on data from Fidelity that more Americans are taking out loans and making hardship withdrawals from their 401(k)s.

So, while Friday’s headline unemployment rate suggests the labor market is strengthening, the picture for the American consumer is considerably more troubling.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s summary from Friday:

American consumers report feeling miserable about the economy, gasoline prices, inflation and the labor market.

A key measure of consumer sentiment has hit new all-time lows in recent months amid anxiety about future inflation. 

Where does all this take us?

Here’s Luke’s latest prediction:

Over the next 12 months, the consumer situation goes from bad to worse.

Sometime in 2027, they hit the wall. Spending collapses. Consumer confidence craters.

And since consumer spending still drives roughly 70% of U.S. GDP, the broader economy starts to crack. 

And here’s where the AI jobs-displacement narrative that we’ve been tracking kicks in.

Luke predicts that when the economy starts to crack, corporate revenues will be hit. So, how will management respond?

By accelerating the transition from human workers to AI.

That dynamic feeds directly into Luke’s “2028 election” forecast – a populist, bipartisan anti-AI movement pushes through legislation. That could look like different things – perhaps a tax on AI profits, a forced limit on hyperscaler capex, or maybe mandatory review processes for new AI models – but whatever the form, it derails the AI trade.

Back to Luke:

By late 2028 or early 2029, those politicians follow through…

That’s the March 2000 moment for the AI bull market.

We’ll keep tracking this.

And on that note, last Thursday, the data gave us something new to track…

The AI jobs debate just got more data

Over the last several months, I’ve been in what I’d call a “convince me” posture about AI-driven job displacement.

Long-time Digest readers know I’ve spent years flagging the risk. But over the last 12 months, I’ve encountered increasing data and analysis that counter that narrative. At a minimum, on its timing.

Most recently, I came across research from Citadel Securities reporting that job postings in AI-exposed sectors are now rising, not falling. Meanwhile, executives are framing AI as a complement to their workforce, not a substitute for it.

Today, while still concerned about the job displacement thesis, I’m holding it with less conviction than before as I track the data, which brings us to last Thursday’s Challenger, Gray & Christmas report.

The headline:

AI drives May cuts to 97,006, the highest May total since 2020.

For the third straight month, firms cited artificial intelligence as the leading reason for layoffs – accounting for 40% of all May cuts.

AI-driven job cuts have now reached 87,714 so far this year, already up roughly 60% versus all of 2025, with seven months still to go.

Luke saw the report and offered a pointed response:

Jevons’ Paradox… meet Engels’ Pause. 

To make sure we’re all on the same page, Jevons’ Paradox holds that when a resource becomes more efficient, total consumption of that resource tends to rise rather than fall.

Applied to AI: cheaper, more capable AI might expand demand for workers who use it, not shrink it.

Meanwhile, Engels’ Pause refers to a period during Britain’s Industrial Revolution – roughly 1790 to 1840 – when GDP growth exploded, and corporate profits surged, while average workers’ real wages remained flat or fell for 50 years.

The wealth eventually trickled down. The jobs eventually multiplied. But it took half a century.

Luke argues that AI is compressing that same dynamic into a single decade. The steam engine took a century to deploy. ChatGPT hit 100 million users in two months.

So, while the Jevons argument has its believers, Luke isn’t one of them – at least not right now:

While I understand those arguments in the long-term, I’m not sure I believe them in the short-term, because the numbers and announcements tell a pretty clear story.

That story added a new chapter last Thursday.

We’ll keep following this evolution here in the Digest.

What’s driving volatility this week

If Friday’s 4.2% pullback in the Nasdaq had you feeling rattled, you’re not out of the woods yet. This week is stacked with catalysts that could move markets.

Wednesday brings the May Consumer Price Index report – the latest data on the Iran War’s impact on consumer costs.

Thursday follows with the Producer Price Index, showing how that same inflation is hitting businesses.

Friday brings the latest Consumer Sentiment report.

All of it feeds directly into the Fed’s calculus ahead of next week’s FOMC meeting, now the most consequential Fed gathering in years.

New Chairman Warsh will have to weigh Friday’s strong labor market reading against inflation running nearly double the Fed’s target – with rate-hike pressure building from multiple directions.

Now, amidst that packed calendar, there’s one more wildcard.

This Friday, SpaceX is expected to price its IPO at a $75 billion valuation – already oversubscribed, according to Bloomberg. It could be the largest IPO in history, arriving in the middle of one of the most consequential macro weeks in recent memory.

Luke has been preparing his subscribers for this moment – and his view may surprise you. Buying a landmark IPO on day one is usually the wrong trade.

Here’s Luke:

The biggest gains from landmark technology IPOs have almost never gone to the investors who bought on day one. They’ve gone to the investors who owned the ecosystem around those companies before Wall Street showed up to reprice it.

That’s exactly the opportunity I’ve been preparing for. I call it the Pre-IPO Backdoor — a small group of publicly traded companies that supply, power, and benefit from both OpenAI and Anthropic, and that I believe will get significantly repriced the moment those S-1 filings land.

The window to get in ahead of that repricing is open right now. I don’t know how much longer it stays that way.

For everything Luke has found – including the specific stocks he thinks you need to own before the IPOs arrive – click here.

Bottom line: Between inflation data, Fed policy, AI disruption, and a historic IPO pipeline, investors have plenty to digest. Buckle up!

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

P.S. Louis Navellier is doing something I’ve never really seen him do before

The legendary investor is partnering with TradeSmith to unveil a new AI-powered investing approach designed to help investors become more tactical in a fast-moving market.

What’s especially interesting is that you don’t have to wait for the event to get a taste of it. You can use the free ticker tool to check the short-term health of stocks you already own, then join Louis on June 10 for the full presentation.

I’ll bring you more on this tomorrow. But to learn more now, just click here.

The post What to Look For Before the SpaceX IPO appeared first on InvestorPlace.

What happens when AI starts finding security flaws that humans missed for 27 years?

Governments don’t ignore it. They want access.

Anthropic recently agreed to give the European Union (EU) access to Mythos – its highly advanced cybersecurity-focused AI model – after months of discussions between the company and EU officials.

Anthropic initially released a limited version of Claude Mythos in April. It reportedly uncovered zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system, including one security flaw that had remained hidden for 27 years. (Zero-days are hidden software flaws that hackers can exploit to steal data, take over systems, or launch cyberattacks.)

Because of its capabilities, Anthropic immediately restricted access to the model to a small group of organizations involved in critical infrastructure, finance, and cybersecurity under its “Project Glasswing” initiative.

So, the EU gaining access to Mythos signals a broader shift in the AI race and where capital may start to flow. Here’s why…

Mythos features powerful autonomous and agentic capabilities. Many of you have heard the term “agentic AI” for months, but the model is a concrete example of why it matters.

To briefly review, agentic systems are the “next generation” of AI technologies that can make decisions by themselves and adapt to changes. They are essentially like the brain behind a smart assistant or AI robot, able to perceive their environment and act accordingly.

You can learn more about the agentic AI – and the opportunities it presents – here.

Mythos is agentic AI applied to cybersecurity.

Traditionally, cybersecurity has relied on highly skilled analysts spending weeks or months searching for vulnerabilities. But if AI can discover software vulnerabilities that humans missed, the opportunity changes from “AI helping workers” to “AI performing work that previously required highly specialized experts.”

That shift points to cybersecurity AI as an emerging market in its own right.

In other words, the next phase of the AI boom may not be about helping workers write emails faster… but about helping governments and corporations protect digital infrastructure, like data centers and software systems, from increasingly sophisticated threats.

And governments getting access to models like Mythos suggests that advanced AI is being viewed less like normal software and more like critical infrastructure, similar to cloud systems, or even energy systems.

This could drive more spending on AI security and defense tools that will most likely be run by agentic AI themselves.

And if Mythos is any indication, the real opportunity in agentic AI extends even beyond cybersecurity. The same autonomous capabilities that can identify software vulnerabilities could eventually be applied to scientific research, engineering, healthcare, manufacturing, and countless other fields that rely on specialized expertise.

That means agentic AI has the potential to become a new kind of digital worker that helps organizations solve complex problems faster, cheaper, and at a much larger scale than before.

I discuss everything you need to know about agentic AI in my special broadcast, which you can check out here.

Now, let’s take a look back at what we covered here at Smart Money this week.

Smart Money Roundup

AI Could Help You Live Longer – and Invest Smarter

June 6, 2026

Many investors think of AI as a story about chips, software, and the companies building the technology. But its biggest impact may be far broader than that.

My colleague Louis Navellier has been exploring how the same deep-learning systems that are accelerating breakthroughs in medicine, scientific research, and drug discovery could also transform the way investors identify opportunities in the stock market.

This Market Looks Like 1999, and That Should Make You Pay Attention

June 4, 2026

Louis has been investing through major market cycles for nearly 50 years, including the internet boom of the late 1990s. Recently, he told me that the AI boom reminds him of that period in surprising ways.

Not because he thinks the market is about to crash, but because he believes investors need to be prepared for both opportunity and volatility. Here’s what he has to say.

SoftBank Calls AI 50X Bigger Than Dot-Com — Here’s Who Actually Profits

June 3, 2026

“I think this is like more than 10X, probably 50X bigger than dot-com,” SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son told CNBC. The “this,” of course, is the AI Revolution.

And if AI delivers even a fraction of the impact Son predicts, the greatest opportunities will not be in the technology itself, but the infrastructure required to power it.

Looking Ahead

Anthropic isn’t just making moves across the pond.

It kicked off its initial public offering process after confidentially filing paperwork with U.S. regulators last week.

The confidential filing is the early, private step where regulators review the company’s financials. That means the details, like share price, IPO date, and final valuation, are not yet public. However, the company was recently valued at about $965 billion after a massive funding round – surpassing OpenAI’s valuation for the first time.

Anthropic is joining the AI IPO race alongside OpenAI and SpaceX – the latter of which is set to go public on Friday.

The three companies’ huge valuations show strong demand for AI tools and suggests investors believe the AI boom – from software to chips and data centers – is still far from over.

We’ll further discuss SpaceX’s IPO later this week. So, be sure to keep an eye out on your inbox.

Regards,

Eric Fry

The post The Next AI Boom Could Be Driven by Cybersecurity 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

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,

Louis Navellier

Editor, Market 360

The post Bristol-Myers Upgraded, Broadcom Downgraded: Updated Rankings on Top Blue-Chip Stocks appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Editor’s Note: There are people on Wall Street who say they’ve been using data and quantitative systems to pick stocks their whole career. And then there’s Louis Navellier — who was actually doing it in the 1970s, on a mainframe computer, before most of his peers thought it was even worth trying.

I share that because what Louis is about to tell you isn’t a story about jumping on the AI trend. It’s a story about someone who has spent nearly five decades refining a system — and just found the most powerful upgrade of his career.

Read what he has to say below, and I think you’ll understand why I took notice.

Louis is hosting a free event on June 10 at 10 a.m. Eastern with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan to demonstrate the full system. When you register, you’ll get immediate access to a free tool that lets you check whether any stock you own is currently a short-term buy, hold, or sell — before the event even starts.

Sign up right here.

If you’re under 50 and you stay healthy, you could live to 150.

To you and me, that may sound like science fiction. But to Demis Hassabis, it sounds conservative.

Hassabis is the computer programmer and neuroscientist who founded DeepMind — the pioneer deep learning lab that Google bought in 2014.

Deep Learning is the method of training software to recognize patterns by feeding it enormous amounts of data and letting it learn from its own mistakes. And it’s the core technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and most of what people mean when they say “AI” today.

In 2024, Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for building an AI model — called AlphaFold2 — that mapped virtually all 200 million known proteins. This touched off a revolution in drug discovery. 

Most drugs work by binding to a specific protein in your body — much like a key fits into a lock. For 50 years, figuring out the shape of those locks was so slow and expensive that it bottlenecked the entire drug discovery process. 

Thanks to AlphaFold2’s mapping, what used to take researchers years in the lab now happens in hours on a computer.

The progress is so fast that Hassabis estimates we’ll cure ALL disease within 10 years.

I’m 67 — well past the 50-year-old cutoff he’s talking about. But when I look at what’s come out of medical research in just the last two months, he might be right:

• A drug just doubled survival in pancreatic cancer — the deadliest cancer there is.
• A one-time gene-editing infusion permanently cut bad cholesterol by 62% from a single dose.
• A lung cancer pill held back a spreading tumor for five full years — longer than any drug has ever managed.
• The Mayo Clinic built an AI that detects pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans up to three years before a doctor can spot it.
• Eli Lilly’s new anti-obesity drug achieved 30% body weight loss in its Phase 3 trial — and, along the way, cut knee arthritis pain by 76%.

These aren’t random breakthroughs. They were all either discovered, accelerated, or made possible by the kind of deep-learning AI models Hassabis pioneered.

And, folks, these models are only accelerating as AI learns to write code to create more powerful models… which write code for even more powerful models… and so on.

Which brings me to the question that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

If AI is rewriting what’s possible in a field as complex as human biology — what is it about to do to financial markets?

I’ve spent 47 years building computer systems to find growth stocks before the crowd catches on. So, I know what it looks like when a new technology changes the game for investors.

In the 1970s, I was one of the few people using a computer to pick stocks. Most of my peers thought it was eccentric at best… and a fool’s errand at worst. Today, computers are responsible for about 80% of daily stock trading volume.

And I believe what’s coming with AI is a change of a far greater magnitude. 

I’ll show you what I mean in a minute — including how adding AI to my own quantitative models could turn a 615% gain on a stock like DXP Enterprises Inc. (DXPE) into a 3,626% winner, or a 292% gain on Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) into 6,284%.

First, though, let me take you back to the early 1970s when I had my first “eureka moment” about how machines could crack the secrets of the stock market. 

The 1970s Eureka Moment That Launched 47 Years of Market-Beating Quant Investing

It was my junior year at Cal State Hayward (now Cal State East Bay), where I was studying finance. 

One of my professors was working for Wells Fargo — using its mainframe computer to build the stock market indexes that were just emerging. He asked me if I could help.

The flashiest technology I’d touched up to that point was a slide rule. Getting access to that mainframe was like an 1800s gold prospector being shown a diesel-powered excavator.

My job was to build a model portfolio that mimicked the S&P 500 using just 320 stocks. But something unexpected happened. Instead of just tracking the market — my version beat it.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. The prevailing theory at the time — which every finance textbook repeated as gospel — was that you couldn’t consistently beat the market. It was impossible. 

My data said otherwise.

So, I dug deeper. I ran the statistical tests. And I found a pattern that would define the next five decades of my career. Some stocks move independently of the broader market and have their own signal. Find them early enough, and the gains can be extraordinary.

Folks on Wall Street call it “alpha.” From that moment on, I was obsessed with building systems to find it.

676 Stocks That Doubled: The 47-Year Track Record Behind the System

That discovery launched a career I could never have predicted.

Over the next five decades, I built quant models that powered some of the most successful investment newsletters in America. 

My system has identified 676 stocks that went on to double — including recommendations like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 1987, Nike Inc. (NKE) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) in 1988, and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) a full 17 years before most people had ever heard of ChatGPT.

That last one alone would have turned $1,000 into more than $1 million.

None of those wins came from hunches or gut feelings. They came from what I discovered with the help of that Wells Fargo mainframe in the 1970s — a systematic, data-driven process for finding fundamentally superior stocks backed by powerful institutional buying pressure. 

The process got more refined over the decades. The data got richer. The models got more powerful. 

In other words, I’ve spent my career looking for the crème de la crème of the stock market. But I never had access to a technology as powerful as what I’m about to show you.

What Happens When AI Meets a Time-Tested Quant System: The Results Are Extraordinary 

As I like to say, good stocks bounce like fresh tennis balls, while bad stocks fall like rocks. The key is knowing the difference before the market starts shaking.

That’s why, for the past year, I’ve been working with the team at TradeSmith on something I’ve never attempted before.

If you don’t know them already, it’s the financial technology company behind some of the most sophisticated portfolio tools available to individual investors today.

Together, we’ve built a new form of AI that takes my Stock Grader system and adds a layer it didn’t have before: a precise, data-driven signal for when to get in and when to get out of the stocks I recommend. 

It includes a layer of the same kind of pattern-recognition AI technology that’s diagnosing cancer three years earlier and designing drugs in hours instead of years.

The difference it makes is extraordinary.

Take AppFolio Inc. (APPF), a stock I recommended in 2017. 

Anyone who acted on that recommendation has enjoyed an annualized gain of 20%. Compounded over time, that’s excellent. But according to our backtesting, this new AI-enhanced system would have delivered a 74% annualized gain.

Or take Nexstar Media Group (NXST), which I recommended in 2013. A 23% average yearly gain becomes 173%.

Same stock over the same stretch of time. Just smarter timing.

Across the board, backtesting suggests that pairing this new AI with my Stock Grader ratings could generate up to 20 times more money than following Stock Grader alone.

That’s why I say this is the biggest edge I’ve seen in my 47 years as a professional investor. It’s not a new stock picking system — it’s a new layer of intelligence on top of what I’ve already built.

And if we get more stock market gyrations this summer, I believe that kind of intelligence could be more valuable than ever.

Why AI Stock Picking Changes Everything 

Back in the 1970s, the idea of using a computer to pick stocks seemed absurd to most people on Wall Street. I did it anyway. The results spoke for themselves.

Today, the idea that AI can reliably improve on a 47-year track record might seem equally hard to believe. I get that skepticism. I felt it myself. But then I looked at the testing and had to admit that AI plus my system works like gangbusters.

I’ve been hunting for edges in this market for 47 years. I’ve never seen one like this.

To see exactly how it works — and get the full list of stocks it’s flagging as urgent buys and sells — join me for my online event with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan next Wednesday, June 10, at 10 a.m. Eastern. 

When you register your interest, you’ll get access to TradeSmith’s Short-Term Health indicator. 

While Stock Grader’s main focus is on what stocks to buy, Short-Term Health is all about when to buy them.

It allows you to type in any ticker to see if a stock is a short-term buy or sell based on a simple traffic light system. Green means buy. Yellow means hold. And Red means sell.

Here’s that link again to access the unlocked version.

The post The Nobel Prize-Winning AI That’s Coming for the Stock Market appeared first on InvestorPlace.

When people talk about the year “1999,” most investors will immediately tense up. That year was the start of a terrible stretch for the value-focused buy-and-hold crowd. The dot-com bubble burst meant that anyone who bought the Nasdaq Composite in January that year would have been in the red until 2006… just in time for the global financial crisis two years later. 

Experienced growth investors will also shudder at the thought of 1999. Many internet companies saw their share prices peak early that year, including Lycos (March), Priceline (April), and TheStreet.com (May). In fact, many smaller dot-coms were already on their way out by the time 1999 began. 

That means when Louis Navellier says he thinks today’s market looks a lot like 1999, he’s really saying two things: 

• Bullish. Much like the internet, AI is justifying more gains to come. Consumers and companies are paying handsomely for the best AI models, and industry leaders are generating record profits as a result. Anthropic, an AI startup that lost roughly $5.2 billion last year, expects to swing to an operating profit this quarter. 
• Bearish. However, high valuations today make for an extremely fragile bull market. Smaller AI laggards are already fading away, and indebted ones like Oracle Corp. (ORCL) are showing cracks in their balance sheets. Louis forecasts a highly volatile summer and the possibility of a meaningful pullback. 

After all, if so many AI stocks are starting to look like hockey-stick charts like the one from Intel Corp. (INTC) below, it’s easy to see how ugly a selloff can get. 

INTC stock price 

Source: LSEG 

To navigate this increasingly brittle rally, Louis has become far more selective in the stocks he’s recommending. And to do that, he’s partnered with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan to build a new AI-driven investing system that combines his Stock Grader research with TradeSmith’s market-timing technology. 

The result is a new Tactical Profits Portfolio that selects the best AI-focused companies with strong fundamentals that can withstand drawdowns. It also helps flag weaker players at risk of losing ground. 

On Thursday, June 10, Louis will sit down with Keith and explain the work they’ve done with their system and how their stock-selection tools have helped investors navigate past volatility. 

You can sign up for their presentation here.

Today, I’d like to give a sample of five stocks that pass this threshold, and another three that fail it. And if you’re worried about the stocks in your own portfolio, you can register for their event and use their free ticker tool for a limited time to check their short-term health.

Five High-Quality Names for a Volatile Summer 

Readers will immediately notice that the five companies in this list are wide-moat firms trading at surprisingly reasonable prices. All run like quasi-monopolies, giving them the strength to outlast a market selloff. And all were recently ranked well by both Louis’ Stock Grader and TradeSmith’s market-timing system. 

1. Nvidia Corp. (NVDA). The “king of AI” continues to expand its domain. Last week, at Computex 2026, CEO Jensen Huang revealed that the chipmaker plans to move into personal computers (PCs) with a new chip called the RTX Spark that combines AI and traditional computing power. 

His rationale is straightforward: PCs are looking much like the “dumb phones” from the 1990s. Their purpose has not changed in decades, even though technology has marched ahead. Today, smartphones are used for everything except making calls. Why can’t the same happen for a reinvented laptop? 

In addition, Nvidia continues to surprise even its greatest fans. Last month, the company announced its 14th consecutive earnings beat. Earnings per share grew 95% to $1.87, surpassing consensus by 6%. The company has expanded its supply chain faster than Wall Street expected and kept its lead in AI chips. At Computex 2026, the company additionally announced that its next-gen Vera Rubin AI supercomputer is already ramping into full production – delivering on a promise Nvidia made in 2024. 

By my calculations, that means Nvidia’s fair value is closer to $300 per share today, up 40% from its current  share price. The firm is dominating its industry, and its solid “B” rating in Louis’ Stock Grader suggests it’s an excellent company to buy, even after its multiyear run. 

2. Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL). Meanwhile, Google’s parent company is the only major hyperscale AI data center firm expected to remain cashflow positive in every quarter this year. Analysts expect net cash inflows of $18 billion in 2026 (despite $185 billion in data center spending). That’s thanks to a combination of: 

That suggests Alphabet’s fair value is somewhere in the mid-$400s range, according to my math. The company’s vertical integration is proving to be a durable competitive advantage, and the advantage looks set to expand over time. Louis’ and TradeSmith’s system both agree. 

3. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). Over the past several years, AMD has capitalized on Intel’s stumbles to establish itself in the CPU market. It has gone from less than 10% market share to about a third overall – and provides nearly half of all server CPUs. Its evolution from near-bankrupt company to world-beater got CEO Lisa Su named Time magazine’s CEO of the Year 2024. 

Markets might still be underestimating AMD’s potential. 

In a recent earnings call, Su noted that the CPU-to-GPU ratio should move from a 1-4 or 1-8 ratio today to 1-1 in the coming years. She joins the bosses of Intel and Arm Holdings PLC (ARM) in predicting the return of the CPU. 

I believe they’re right (even though they’re all CEOs of CPU companies). 

That’s because AI is shifting from mostly training and simple inference to agentic inference. This new type of AI requires far more “thinking,” where AI models will plan, call tools, run code, inspect results, and sometimes run in circles before asking for help. GPUs are still needed to run AI models, but CPUs are then used to orchestrate and analyze results. 

That should put AMD on a far faster growth track than people expect. Analysts are currently expecting growth to taper off by the end of 2027, but I expect demand could last through 2030. Louis’ and Keith’s systems both agree, awarding AMD their top bullish scores. 

4. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSM). Taiwan Semi (also known as TSMC) is the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer. The firm controls roughly 70% of the market and is the only chipmaker capable of manufacturing the advanced 2-nanometer process at profitable scale. It is now working on the A16 and A13 nodes. 

Expectations for the company are surprisingly modest. TSMC trades at just 28X forward earnings and 21X forward cash flows – well below less established firms like Intel and China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC). Investors have become conditioned by years of boom-bust cycles in the chip “fab” business and typically view incumbents with skepticism. (Upstarts typically get a free pass during boom times.) 

Yet, skeptics will ignore the Taiwanese firm at their own risk. Like Nvidia, TSMC has been able to raise prices thanks to insatiable AI demand. The company expects capacity to rise just 7% in 2026, meaning that over two-thirds of its 31% revenue growth is coming from price increases. Its monopolistic position means further price increases are likely. 

Consolidation among semiconductor companies has also created demand for more complex chips. Larger firms like Nvidia and AMD are combining GPUs, CPUs, and memory components into integrated products, and these complicated chips require the type of leading-edge nodes that TSMC produces. Though Taiwan Semi is more of a “grind higher” company because of its capital investment needs, it’s still a solid enough company that should weather a selloff. The company earns top marks in Louis’ and Keith’s system. 

5. Analog Devices Inc. (ADI). Finally, we have Analog Devices, one of the world’s largest analog and mixed-signals chipmakers. The company has a particularly wide lead in high-performance signal processing chips – the devices that convert real-world information (light, sound, temperature, voltages) into the usable “0s” and “1s” that digital chips need. 

Profits are high thanks to years of investments and high customer switching costs. Operating margins have hovered around 40% since 2020. Growth is also quite reasonable, thanks to the rise of electric vehicles, robotics, and “internet of things” devices. Analysts expect revenues to increase 34% this year. 

The AI boom now offers three new paths for growth. 

Together, that makes Analog one of my top long-term companies to buy. The company has a durable moat in analog chips, and its strong quantitative scores from Louis and Keith suggest there’s still time to get in on this high-quality firm. 

Knowing When to Sell 

Louis’ and Keith’s systems also make it clear that some AI stocks are off the table. These include: 

• Accenture Plc (ACN) 
• Adobe Inc. (ADBE) 
• Intuit Inc. (INTU) 

Not only are the fundamentals at these firms deteriorating – often from AI competition – but short-term momentum is also turning decidedly negative. That’s a highly bearish sign in this returns-chasing market. No retail investor wants to hold a sinking stock. 

These are not the only companies at risk. 

In their upcoming presentation, Louis and Keith caution why the months ahead could be much more volatile than many investors expect… and why comparisons to 1999 are both an encouragement and a warning for investors today. 

You can register for their presentation here.

I’ll be out of town next week, so I’ll see you back here in two weeks 

Regards, 

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 Party Like It’s 1999: 5 Stocks to Buy Without Getting Bubble-Burned  appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Oura is going public at the perfect cultural moment. And that is exactly what makes the IPO dangerous.

The smart-ring maker has confidentially filed its draft IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to CNBC. The company says it is on track to pass 5 million paid members this quarter. Revenue has reportedly grown fourfold over the past two fiscal years. Oura was valued at $11 billion last October after a $900 million Series E round, and it has raised more than $1.5 billion in total.

Those are monster numbers. They also explain why this IPO may already have too much good news baked in.

Wall Street has discovered wearable health. Wellness has become dinner-table conversation. People who used to brag about 80-hour weeks now brag about zone 2 cardio, magnesium glycinate, eight hours of sleep, and a morning readiness score.

That shift is real. It may last for decades.

But buying the hottest private company after the market has already found the theme is still a dangerous way to make money.

Just ask Peloton.

The Peloton Warning: Seeing the Future Doesn’t Make the IPO Safe

Peloton understood the future early.

Fitness was moving into the home. Hardware could become a social product. A bike could become a media platform. A workout could become a subscription habit. 

Peloton was right about the culture. Investors paid pandemic multiples for that story. Then demand normalized, competitors caught up, and the world reopened.

That is the Oura risk in miniature.

Oura may be a great product. It may keep growing. It may even become one of the defining consumer health brands of this decade. The IPO can still be a poor entry point.

At an $11 billion private valuation, Oura is being valued less like a hardware company and more like a platform. CEO Tom Hale told CNBC the company was on track for about $1 billion in 2025 sales and could approach $2 billion in 2026. Even if it hits the high end of that 2026 target, the last private valuation still implies roughly 5.5x those future sales.

That can work if Oura proves it has high-retention software economics. Though the math gets much tougher if the S-1 shows a premium hardware business with a subscription wrapper.

Hardware gets copied. Sensors get cheaper. Wellness fads cool. The winner turns health obsession into durable habits, services, locations, devices, records, and treatment loops.

Oura owns a strong measurement point. The public-market winners could own the rest of the system.

The Health Boom Is Much Bigger Than the Oura Ring

Oura’s pitch is simple: a small device watches your body all day and all night, then turns that stream of signals into advice.

That sounds like a ring story. The trail of money is bigger.

People are changing what they spend on. More dollars are going into health, energy, fitness, sleep, appearance, longevity, and self-command. A premium gym membership can signal more than a nicer briefcase. A shoe rotation can matter more than another suit. A lab panel, a running watch, GLP-1 care, a recovery score, or a training plan can become part of how someone sees themselves.

Oura is following the money. It has:

• Pushed into AI coaching through Oura Advisor
• Moved into metabolic health through Veri and a Dexcom partnership
• Launched Health Panels with Quest Diagnostics, offering about 50 biomarkers for $99 with in-app interpretation. 
• Bought medical-record technology through Galen AI
• Invested in women’s health, cardiovascular risk, and enterprise wellness.

That is the correct map.

The issue is ownership. How much of the economics can Oura keep when the same trend feeds gyms, shoes, watches, phones, labs, treatment platforms, and clinical data companies?

10 Wellness Stocks to Buy Instead of the Oura Ring IPO

As it turns out, a lot of those better-positioned stocks are already public. 

Life Time: the Cleanest Lifestyle Play

Life Time Group (LTH) may be the most culturally relevant stock in this whole basket. Oura tracks the body. Life Time gives the body somewhere to go.

The company operates premium athletic country clubs built around fitness, recovery, pools, classes, childcare, coworking, cafes, spas, and social life. 

For a certain kind of buyer, the new status symbol is a body that works, a sleep score that is decent enough to share, a trainer, a sauna, a pickleball court, and a place to spend Saturday morning without feeling like garbage. That is Life Time’s lane.

• Sales: $3.1 billion | Quarterly growth: 11.7% | Operating margin: 16.9% | Forward P/E: ~19x
• Risks: real estate, debt, consumer spending, premium-gym execution
• The trend fit is unusually clean. This is the higher-upside lifestyle pick.

Garmin: the Better Wearable Business

Garmin (GRMN) is the cleaner public wearable stock. It wins through trust instead of fashion — runners, cyclists, hikers, divers, pilots, golfers, and endurance athletes buy Garmin because the products work.

Its fitness segment revenue rose 42% year over year in Q1 2026.

• Sales: $7.5 billion | Quarterly growth: 14% | Operating margin: 26% | Profit margin: 23%
• Garmin is mature, profitable, and built for committed users — not wellness tourists.

Hims & Hers Owns the Action Layer

Hims & Hers (HIMS) is a very different kind of Oura-adjacent stock. Oura measures and nudges. Hims sells action.

The company has built a direct consumer health funnel across sexual health, dermatology, mental health, weight loss, and GLP-1-related care. It also has a natural path into biomarkers, diagnostics, and AI coaching — giving it a broader monetization surface than a wearable brand.

• Sales: $2.4 billion | Gross margin: 57% | Price-to-sales: 2.5x | Short interest: ~31% of float
• The short interest tells you the market sees both sides. Hims has more upside than the mature names — and more ways to get hurt.

Quest: the Boring Biomarker Engine

Quest Diagnostics (DGX) is dull in a useful way.

Oura’s Health Panels run through Quest — but Quest already does this job at much larger scale. It runs bloodwork and biomarker testing for physicians, hospitals, employers, and direct consumers. Oura is one front door into that lab system. It is not the whole building. Consumer-direct revenue at questhealth.com grew in the high-20% range in Q1, with partnership-driven testing growing even faster.

• Sales: $11.3 billion | Quarterly growth: 9.2% | Operating margin: 14.6% | Forward P/E: ~16.7x
• Bloodwork is harder to hand-wave than a readiness score. DGX is the boring toll road behind the shiny wearable.

Dexcom: the Better Oura-Linked Sensor Play

Dexcom (DXCM) invested in and partnered with Oura — combining glucose data with sleep, activity, and recovery signals. It is already profitable, already scaled, and already central to the continuous-glucose-monitoring market.

• Sales: $4.8 billion | Quarterly growth: 15% | Operating margin: 21.5% | Forward P/E: ~23x
• Risks: reimbursement, competition, pricing, and the pace at which CGM expands beyond diabetes into mainstream metabolic health.
• If metabolic tracking becomes a normal consumer habit, Dexcom is one of the cleaner public ways to play it.

Google Just Made the Oura Trade More Dangerous

Earlier this month, Google announced Fitbit Air — a screenless fitness tracker starting at $99.99, designed for 24/7 health monitoring, paired with Google Health Coach, a Gemini-powered fitness, sleep, and wellness advisor.

Alphabet (GOOGL) is a mature mega-cap with health optionality. Fitbit Air will barely move its revenue by itself. The bigger point: Google has Android, Fitbit, Gemini, cloud infrastructure, and consumer reach. If wearable health becomes an AI coaching market, Google competes at the software layer while Oura fights hardware margin pressure.

Oura may sell a better object. Google may own the decision layer.

Apple: Best Device Footprint, Hardest AI Question

Apple (AAPL) belongs in this conversation whether Oura bulls like it or not. The Apple Watch is already on millions of wrists. The Health app already sits on the iPhone. Apple has the hardware, the trust, the privacy pitch, the payments relationship, and the developer ecosystem.

The caveat: Apple’s health-coaching ambitions have lagged its hardware. The AI layer isn’t ready yet. Apple can still win — the win may just arrive later and with less force than investors expect.

AAPL is a core trend participant. It is a slower, safer way to own the theme.

Tempus and Illumina: the Health-Data Brain and Plumbing

Tempus AI (TEM) and Illumina (ILMN) are the data stack under the ring-stock story.

Tempus sits closer to oncology, clinical AI, and diagnostics than to consumer wellness. 

• Sales: $1.4 billion | Quarterly growth: 36% | Gross margin: 62% | Operating margin: negative | Short interest: ~25%
• Speculative growth — higher upside, higher drawdown risk
• If AI health-data platforms work, Tempus could matter. If investors tire of unprofitable AI-health stories, it can get punished fast.

Illumina is the sequencing infrastructure name — less sexy after years of overhangs, but still near the base of biology-as-data. 

• Sales: $4.4 billion | Operating margin: 20.6% | Profit margin: 19.4% | Forward P/E: ~25x
• If longevity, prevention, and cancer screening keep expanding, sequencing remains part of the machinery.

Deckers: the Lifestyle Dividend

Deckers (DECK), through Hoka, captures the easiest version of the trend to understand. Hoka sits directly in the behavior shift toward walking, running, and low-impact endurance training.

• Sales: $5.5 billion | Quarterly growth: 8.7% | Operating margin: 22.8% | Forward P/E: ~13.7x
• Profitable, real trend exposure; fashion-cycle risk.

This is the “touch grass and buy better shoes” part of the health trade.

Two Cautionary Tales: What Not to Buy In the Wellness Boom

Peloton (PTON) and Lululemon (LULU) are cautionary tales worth studying — and leaving off the buy list.

Peloton proves that trend accuracy cannot save a stock when the valuation, hardware cycle, and demand assumptions break.

Lululemon proves that wellness identity alone is thin protection. The brand can still be valuable. The stock can still be cheap. The growth story has lost its clean shape, and Mirror already showed how hard it is to bolt connected fitness onto an apparel brand.

They are worth knowing. Neither belongs on the buy list. 

The Bottom Line: Let Someone Else Buy the Oura Ring IPO

Oura is part of an undeniable boom. Yet that alone only gets investors so far.

This company is going public after the market already understands the story: sleep tracking, recovery, metabolic health, AI coaching, preventive care, and longevity. The product is cool. The brand is strong. The growth is impressive.

The stock may still be a trap if investors pay platform prices before the S-1 proves platform economics.

I want to see the revenue split and hardware gross margin versus subscription gross margin. I want to see churn, paid-member attach rate, cohort retention, customer acquisition cost, replacement cycles, and the economics of labs, CGMs, employer programs, and AI coaching.

Until then, I would let someone else buy in at IPO-hype prices.

The better trade is to buy the companies that can survive after the fad burns off.

Oura may become a great company. It may even become a staple of health wearables someday, the kind of product people put on at night as automatically as they charge their phone.

That still says very little about whether the stock will be a good deal on IPO day. A great product can come public at a bad price. In this market, the better way to play the health boom may be to skip the IPO and buy the companies already holding the pieces that last.

Oura won’t be the last IPO to test your discipline this year.

The window is already closing on what I believe are the two most important pre-IPO trades in a generation. Most investors will find out about them on IPO day — which is precisely when the best opportunity has already passed.

I’ve spent months mapping the ecosystem. I know which stocks I want to own before the headlines arrive.

Here’s what’s on that list — and why the clock is running.

The post Skip the Oura Ring IPO. Buy These 10 Stocks Instead. appeared first on InvestorPlace.

My colleague Louis Navellier has been exploring how the same deep-learning systems that are accelerating breakthroughs in medicine, scientific research, and drug discovery could also transform the way investors identify opportunities in the stock market.

After nearly five decades of building quantitative investment models, Louis believes AI may represent the most powerful advancement he’s seen yet – not as an investment theme, but as a tool for making better investment decisions.

Next week, he’ll be joining TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan for a free event to demonstrate exactly what he means. You can reserve your spot for that here.

Before that event, I asked Louis to share some of his thinking here. Take it away…

If you’re under 50 and you stay healthy, you could live to 150.

To you and me, that may sound like science fiction. But to Demis Hassabis, it sounds conservative.

Hassabis is the computer programmer and neuroscientist who founded DeepMind — the pioneer deep learning lab that Google bought in 2014.

Deep Learning is the method of training software to recognize patterns by feeding it enormous amounts of data and letting it learn from its own mistakes. And it’s the core technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and most of what people mean when they say “AI” today.

In 2024, Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for building an AI model — called AlphaFold2 — that mapped virtually all 200 million known proteins. This touched off a revolution in drug discovery.

Most drugs work by binding to a specific protein in your body — much like a key fits into a lock. For 50 years, figuring out the shape of those locks was so slow and expensive that it bottlenecked the entire drug discovery process.

Thanks to AlphaFold2’s mapping, what used to take researchers years in the lab now happens in hours on a computer.

The progress is so fast that Hassabis estimates we’ll cure ALL disease within 10 years.

I’m 67 — well past the 50-year-old cutoff he’s talking about. But when I look at what’s come out of medical research in just the last two months, he might be right:

• A drug just doubled survival in pancreatic cancer — the deadliest cancer there is.
• A one-time gene-editing infusion permanently cut bad cholesterol by 62% from a single dose.
• A lung cancer pill held back a spreading tumor for five full years — longer than any drug has ever managed.
• The Mayo Clinic built an AI that detects pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans up to three years before a doctor can spot it.
• Eli Lilly’s new anti-obesity drug achieved 30% body weight loss in its Phase 3 trial — and, along the way, cut knee arthritis pain by 76%.

These aren’t random breakthroughs. They were all either discovered, accelerated, or made possible by the kind of deep-learning AI models Hassabis pioneered.

And, folks, these models are only accelerating as AI learns to write code to create more powerful models… which write code for even more powerful models… and so on.

Which brings me to the question that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

If AI is rewriting what’s possible in a field as complex as human biology — what is it about to do to financial markets?

I’ve spent 47 years building computer systems to find growth stocks before the crowd catches on. So, I know what it looks like when a new technology changes the game for investors.

In the 1970s, I was one of the few people using a computer to pick stocks. Most of my peers thought it was eccentric at best… and a fool’s errand at worst. Today, computers are responsible for about 80% of daily stock trading volume.

And I believe what’s coming with AI is a change of a far greater magnitude.

I’ll show you what I mean in a minute — including how adding AI to my own quantitative models could turn a 615% gain on a stock like DXP Enterprises Inc. (DXPE) into a 3,626% winner, or a 292% gain on Broadcom Inc. (AVG) into 6,284%.

First, though, let me take you back to the early 1970s when I had my first “eureka moment” about how machines could crack the secrets of the stock market.

My Eureka Moment

It was my junior year at Cal State Hayward (now Cal State East Bay), where I was studying finance.

One of my professors was working for Wells Fargo — using its mainframe computer to build the stock market indexes that were just emerging. He asked me if I could help.

The flashiest technology I’d touched up to that point was a slide rule. Getting access to that mainframe was like an 1800s gold prospector being shown a diesel-powered excavator.

My job was to build a model portfolio that mimicked the S&P 500 using just 320 stocks. But something unexpected happened. Instead of just tracking the market — my version beat it.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. The prevailing theory at the time — which every finance textbook repeated as gospel — was that you couldn’t consistently beat the market. It was impossible.

My data said otherwise.

So, I dug deeper. I ran the statistical tests. And I found a pattern that would define the next five decades of my career. Some stocks move independently of the broader market and have their own signal. Find them early enough, and the gains can be extraordinary.

Folks on Wall Street call it “alpha.” From that moment on, I was obsessed with building systems to find it.

Nearly 700 Gains of 100% or More

That discovery launched a career I could never have predicted.

Over the next five decades, I built quant models that powered some of the most successful investment newsletters in America.

My system has identified 676 stocks that went on to double — including recommendations like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 1987, Nike Inc. (NKE) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) in 1988, and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) a full 17 years before most people had ever heard of ChatGPT.

That last one alone would have turned $1,000 into more than $1 million.

None of those wins came from hunches or gut feelings. They came from what I discovered with the help of that Wells Fargo mainframe in the 1970s — a systematic, data-driven process for finding fundamentally superior stocks backed by powerful institutional buying pressure.

The process got more refined over the decades. The data got richer. The models got more powerful.

In other words, I’ve spent my career looking for the crème de la crème of the stock market. But I never had access to a technology as powerful as what I’m about to show you.

The Difference Is Extraordinary

As I like to say, good stocks bounce like fresh tennis balls, while bad stocks fall like rocks. The key is knowing the difference before the market starts shaking.

That’s why, for the past year, I’ve been working with the team at TradeSmith on something I’ve never attempted before.

If you don’t know them already, it’s the financial technology company behind some of the most sophisticated portfolio tools available to individual investors today.

Together, we’ve built a new form of AI that takes my Stock Grader system and adds a layer it didn’t have before: a precise, data-driven signal for when to get in and when to get out of the stocks I recommend.

It includes a layer of the same kind of pattern-recognition AI technology that’s diagnosing cancer three years earlier and designing drugs in hours instead of years.

The difference it makes is extraordinary.

Take AppFolio Inc. (APPF), a stock I recommended in 2017.

Anyone who acted on that recommendation has enjoyed an annualized gain of 20%. Compounded over time, that’s excellent. But according to our backtesting, this new AI-enhanced system would have delivered a 74% annualized gain.

Or take Nexstar Media Group (NXST), which I recommended in 2013. A 23% average yearly gain becomes 173%.

Same stock over the same stretch of time. Just smarter timing.

Across the board, backtesting suggests that pairing this new AI with my Stock Grader ratings could generate up to 20 times more money than following Stock Grader alone.

That’s why I say this is the biggest edge I’ve seen in my 47 years as a professional investor. It’s not a new stock picking system — it’s a new layer of intelligence on top of what I’ve already built.

And if we get more stock market gyrations this summer, I believe that kind of intelligence could be more valuable than ever.

The Biggest Edge I’ve Seen

Back in the 1970s, the idea of using a computer to pick stocks seemed absurd to most people on Wall Street. I did it anyway. The results spoke for themselves.

Today, the idea that AI can reliably improve on a 47-year track record might seem equally hard to believe. I get that skepticism. I felt it myself. But then I looked at the testing and had to admit that AI plus my system works like gangbusters.

I’ve been hunting for edges in this market for 47 years. I’ve never seen one like this.

To see exactly how it works — and get the full list of stocks it’s flagging as urgent buys and sells — join me for my online event with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan next Wednesday, June 10, at 10 a.m. Eastern.

When you register your interest, you’ll get access to TradeSmith’s Short-Term Health indicator.

While Stock Grader’s main focus is on what stocks to buy, Short-Term Health is all about when to buy them.

It allows you to type in any ticker to see if a stock is a short-term buy or sell based on a simple traffic light system. Green means buy. Yellow means hold. And Red means sell.

Here’s that link again to access the unlocked version.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace

P.S. What caught my attention here is that Louis isn’t talking about AI as an investment theme. He’s talking about AI as a tool for becoming a better investor. That’s a very different idea, and one he’ll explore in much greater detail during his free event with TradeSmith. Be sure to reserve your spot if you haven’t already.

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:
Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) and NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)

The post AI Could Help You Live Longer – and Invest Smarter appeared first on InvestorPlace.

We’re in rare air.

According to Dow Jones Market Data, the S&P 500 entered Friday on a nine-week streak of weekly gains. That has happened only four times in the last 40 years (1989, 2004, 2023, and this year).

When I sat down to write Friday morning, the market looked poised to finish the week higher once again, which would have marked 10 consecutive weeks of gains – a streak not achieved in 40 years! But the market turned south, and as I write this on Friday, it looks like we won’t get there. By the time you read this, the market’s final verdict for the week will be in.

Either way, that statistic is striking. The last time the S&P 500 achieved a streak of 10 or more consecutive positive weeks was a 12-week run that ended in December 1985.

I was skeptical of this market stat at first. Surely this must have happened another time within the last 40 years…

During the dot-com boom? During the post-COVID bounce?

Nope.

Despite dozens of bull markets, corrections, and rallies, there have apparently been no 10-week streaks since 1985.

To put that in perspective, here’s what was happening the last time investors witnessed a streak like that:

The Number One song then was “Say You, Say Me” by Lionel Richie.

NFL quarterback legends Dan Marino (Miami Dolphins) and John Elway (Denver Broncos) faced each other for the first time, with Miami winning 30-26.

“Rocky IV,” starring Sylvester Stallone, was the top movie of the holiday season, but “Back to the Future” was the highest-grossing movie of the year.

Even the nine-week streak, given how rare it is, could lead some investors to declare it’s time to sell – that the market must be in store for a hard correction.

But the bigger story isn’t whether the market finishes this week up or down.

It’s how quickly things can change.

One day, investors are celebrating new highs. The next day, they’re worrying about President Donald Trump’s new tariffs, rising Treasury yields, geopolitics, or the latest economic report.

The market seems capable of shifting from optimism to pessimism – and back again – in just a few hours.

I’d like to call this environment unusual – after all, there’s always volatility. But according to DataTrek, the S&P has become noticeably more volatile in recent years. Historical baselines have nearly doubled due to unprecedented macroeconomic shocks, intense concentration in Big Tech in the indices, and the rapid rise of algorithmic trading.  

There’s every reason to believe that the ride is only getting bumpier.

But volatility isn’t always bad.

When Volatility is Your Friend

For decades, investors have been taught the same basic lesson: Find great stocks and hold them for the long run.

There’s certainly wisdom in that approach. Louis Navellier’s near-5,000%-gain in Nvidia (NVDA) attests to the value of holding a top-tier position for a long time. Meanwhile, Amazon (AMZN), and Microsoft (MSFT) ultimately rewarded patient investors with life-changing gains.

But given today’s increasing volatility, market moves are coming faster than ever.

Information travels at the speed of a click. Algorithms dominate trading. Retail investors can respond to market news in seconds and make trades on their phones. Entire sectors can surge – or collapse – in just a few days. What once took months now happens in hours.

And in many of these cases, volatility works to our advantage.

A great example is Tower Semiconductor (TSEM), which Louis recommended in his Accelerated Profits not three months ago. Since his recommendation, the stock has almost doubled.

Doubling your money in less than three months, in a mid-cap stock valued at more than $26 billion, can make any investor feel dizzy.

Even with that acceleration, the stock is still below Louis’ buy below price. He believes it has the potential to run higher.

But finding great stocks is only half the battle.

The Challenge of Trade Management

The other half is knowing how to manage your positions when the other kind of volatility inevitably strikes – the kind that sends our portfolios into the red.

Most people will simply hold and hope for the best. Is that the best we can do?

While Louis remains highly optimistic about the long-term outlook for stocks, he also believes the months ahead could bring selloffs that catch many investors off guard.

And that’s what makes an upcoming event so interesting.

Louis already knows how to find winning stocks. His track record speaks for itself.

From Nvidia to countless other market leaders, Louis has spent decades refining a system designed to identify companies with the earnings growth, sales growth, and institutional demand necessary to generate outsized gains.

The harder question is often what comes next. If a stock drops on any particular day, how should you react?

And perhaps most importantly, how do you know whether to hold your position for the long haul versus step aside to protect your profits?

That’s where TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan comes in.

For years, Keith and his team have been developing tools designed to help investors make better decisions about timing, risk, and portfolio management.

Louis’ focus is on what to buy, and Keith’s focus is on helping investors determine when to act. Together, they believe they may have created a powerful combination for today’s market environment.

One side of the equation is designed to uncover potentially exceptional stocks.

The other is designed to help investors navigate the increasingly volatile path those stocks often travel.

At a special event next week, Louis and Keith will explain how their approaches complement one another, why they believe this partnership arrives at exactly the right moment for investors, and how they are using this combined framework to identify opportunities in today’s AI-driven market.

On June 10^th at 10 a.m. Eastern, they’re releasing what they believe could be the most important – and lucrative – upgrade to the TradeSmith platform since its founding.

You can sign up for this event by clicking here.

The market’s weeks-long winning streak may have ended, but you can make sure you stay on the right side of the volatility.

Enjoy your weekend,

Luis Hernandez

Editor in Chief, InvestorPlace

The post How to Profit From Stock Market Volatility in the AI Era appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Not Walmart Inc. (WMT). Not General Electric Co. (GE). Not Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM).

At the time, a lot of people thought that was absurd. After all, Cisco wasn’t a consumer brand. It didn’t make cars. It didn’t drill for oil. Most people couldn’t have told you exactly what the company did.

But Wall Street understood something important.

The internet was changing everything.

Businesses were wiring offices. Telecom companies were laying fiber. Data traffic was exploding. Every company wanted to connect employees, customers, suppliers and partners to this new digital world.

Cisco wasn’t selling the internet itself.

It was selling the infrastructure that made the internet possible.

Today, when people look back on that period, they usually focus on the crash. They remember Pets.com. They remember the speculation. They remember all the companies that disappeared.

What they forget is that the infrastructure buildout was real. Fiber got laid, networks got built and servers got installed.

And investors who understood that trend made a tremendous amount of money.

I’ve been thinking about Cisco lately because we’re living through another tech infrastructure boom.

Not identical. History never repeats exactly. But in my nearly five decades of investing, I have learned that major technological shifts tend to rhyme.

In fact, one company in particular keeps coming to mind.

Most investors still think of Micron Technology Inc. (MU) as a cyclical memory-chip company from Boise, Idaho. Yet today, Wall Street is searching for the next great AI leader after NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) – and Micron is at the center of the conversation.

Sales are expected to grow more than 250%. Earnings are expected to rise more than 900%.

Those aren’t normal numbers. That’s what happens when a major technological shift is underway and demand overwhelms supply. And it’s where the fundamentally superior companies start to separate themselves from the pack.

In fact, Micron joined the trillion-dollar market-cap club last Tuesday, May 26, because demand for advanced AI memory has become one of the biggest bottlenecks in the entire AI ecosystem. The company has reportedly sold out much of its high-bandwidth memory production under long-term contracts, and analysts expect supply shortages to persist for years.

That’s why I want you to ignore all the doom-and-gloom forecasts you hear every day.

The stock market has a very good foundation under it. First-quarter S&P 500 earnings grew nearly 29% from a year ago – more than double what analysts expected coming into the quarter. Analysts continue revising estimates higher, and many AI-related companies have seen earnings forecasts jump dramatically over the past year.

The AI buildout is real.

And the spending behind it is staggering.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) and Meta Platforms Inc. (META) are expected to spend roughly $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. That’s data centers, networking equipment, chips, power generation and everything needed to support the next generation of AI applications.

Those aren’t startup projections.

Those are some of the largest and most successful companies in the world committing enormous amounts of capital because they believe AI will reshape the global economy.

That’s what I want to talk about today.

More importantly, I want to explain why I think many investors are focusing on the wrong thing.

I’ll show you four stocks that are prospering from the AI buildout beyond NVIDIA and Micron… why I believe the AI boom is broadening into one of the biggest infrastructure spending waves I’ve ever seen…

And why I’m teaming up with one of the best AI developers in this business to discuss a new way investors can stay bullish without getting blindsided by volatility.

Everybody Wants the Next NVIDIA

I’ve been investing through major technology shifts for nearly five decades.

I was using computers to analyze stocks in the 1970s, long before it became common on Wall Street. Over the years, my quantitative systems helped identify winning stocks such as Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Nike Inc. (NKE) – and NVIDIA and Microsoft – long before they became household names.

One thing I’ve learned is that investors are always looking for the next leader.

In the late 1990s, everybody wanted the next internet stock.

Today, everybody wants the next AI stock.

That’s understandable. NVIDIA has become one of the most successful investments in modern market history.

But investors often become so focused on one company that they miss the broader trend unfolding around it.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a NVIDIA story.

There are a lot more AI-related stocks prospering now.

Memory companies are benefiting. Networking companies are benefiting. Construction companies are benefiting. Data-center companies are benefiting. Even power-generation companies are benefiting (we used to call those “utilities”).

Why?

Because AI requires an enormous amount of infrastructure.

The average investor sees ChatGPT or Claude on their browser and thinks software.

I see hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into an entirely new computing architecture.

To appreciate the scale, one proposed AI data-center project in Utah would cover nearly three times the area of Manhattan. Meta is building a massive AI campus in Louisiana, and similar projects are being planned across the country.

These facilities will require thousands upon thousands of chips, servers and networking systems.

That’s why companies like Micron have become so important.

It’s also why I want you to pay attention to companies like Dell Technologies Inc. (DELL), Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), Ciena Corp. (CIEN)… and, yes, Cisco. These aren’t the first names investors think about when they hear “AI,” but they’re increasingly prospering from the buildout.

The opportunity is getting bigger. Not smaller.

When a major investment theme spreads beyond a handful of stocks and starts lifting entire industries, it usually means the trend is becoming more durable and more profitable – not less.

That’s what we’re seeing right now.

The Real Risk Isn’t What Most Investors Think

I focus on a combination of fundamental and quantitative measures– sales growth, earnings growth, analyst revisions, institutional buying pressure. That’s how my Stock Grader system has identified winning stocks for well over 40 years.

And right now, those indicators continue to point in the right direction. I think many of the best AI and data-center stocks still have substantial upside ahead of them before the year is over.

But being bullish doesn’t mean being complacent.

The biggest risk facing investors right now isn’t that AI suddenly becomes less popular. It’s not that companies stop spending on data centers. And it’s not that earnings suddenly collapse.

The bigger risk is that investors get shaken out of fundamentally superior stocks during perfectly normal periods of volatility.

I’ve seen it happen throughout my career. A stock pulls back. The headlines get scary. Investors become nervous. They sell.

Six months later, the stock is substantially higher.

The late 1990s were full of those moments.

Even the biggest winners experienced sharp pullbacks from time to time. Investors who stayed focused on the long-term trend were rewarded. Investors who reacted emotionally often weren’t.

I think we’re approaching a similar period now.

The market remains healthy, but summer can get bumpy. Trading volume thins out. Volatility increases. Short sellers become more aggressive.

That’s normal.

And it’s one reason I’ve been spending so much time with Keith Kaplan and the team at TradeSmith.

Over the past year, Keith and I have been exploring a new AI-enhanced approach that combines my stock-selection system with TradeSmith’s pattern-recognition technology.

What interested me wasn’t the technology itself. It was the results.

More importantly, it showed how investors can stay with opportunities like Dell, HPE, Ciena and Cisco when volatility inevitably shows up.

Because the hard part isn’t finding promising AI stocks anymore. The trend is staring us in the face.

The hard part is staying invested when the headlines turn negative and investors start questioning the same companies they loved a month earlier.

That’s exactly what Keith and I will be discussing on June 10 at a free event. We’ll show investors how we’re using AI to become more tactical without losing sight of the bigger opportunity, and you can register for that event right now.

Twenty-six years ago, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world because of the internet buildout. Last week, Micron became Boise’s first trillion-dollar company because of the AI buildout.

Whether it’s Micron, Dell, HPE, Ciena, Cisco – or another company prospering from the AI buildout – the opportunity is still much bigger than most investors realize.

The challenge isn’t finding the trend. The challenge is staying with it.

Save your seat for our free event here.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

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:

Ciena Corp. (CIEN), Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), Micron Technology Inc. (MU), NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) and Walmart Inc. (WMT)

The post These Four Stocks Could Do What Cisco Did in 2000 appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Editor’s Note: Louis Navellier has been managing money through major market cycles for nearly five decades. He was in the room in 1999 — and when someone who lived through that moment tells me today’s AI market is starting to rhyme with it, I pay attention.

Louis is still bullish. So am I. But what he’s written below makes a compelling case — that the difference between investors who build real wealth through this boom and those who lose it in a pullback comes down to one thing: getting tactical before the volatility arrives, not after.

He’s hosting a free event on June 10 at 10 a.m. Eastern with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan to show investors exactly how he’s approaching that — and there’s a free tool available right now that lets you check the short-term health of stocks you already own before the event even starts.

Register for that event here — and read what Louis has to say below.

In 1999, Jeff Bezos was doing something that drove Wall Street absolutely crazy.

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) was already a public company. And it was already capable of producing profits — if Bezos had wanted to. But instead, he kept aggressively reinvesting. Instead of worrying about profits, he was building warehouses, distribution infrastructure, and technology systems. 

Every quarter, the margins that should have been there weren’t, because every dollar was going right back into the Amazon machine.

Analysts were furious. Where are the profits? What exactly are we owning here?

Meanwhile, all around Amazon, the dot-com boom was producing companies with no revenue, no product, sometimes no coherent business model at all — and their stocks were tripling. The whole market was chasing a story. 

Who looks most like the future? Who has the best narrative? Wall Street was funding them fast and asking questions later.

Bezos wasn’t playing that game.

What he understood — and almost nobody else did back then — is that 1999 capital was a once-in-a-generation resource. Every dollar of market enthusiasm could be converted into permanent infrastructure: fulfillment capacity, distribution reach, systems that got cheaper the more volume they handled. He wasn’t optimizing for this quarter. He was building something that would be almost impossible to replicate once the window closed.

When the Music Stopped, the Infrastructure Survived

When the music stopped in 2000, it stopped for everybody. The story companies – do I need to mention Pets.com? – vanished almost overnight. 

Amazon went through its own brutal drawdown, but the infrastructure Bezos built was still there. The customer relationships were still there. The cost curves were still bending in the right direction.

By 2005, Bezos looked like a genius. In 1999, he just looked tactical.

I was managing money through all of it. And I’ll tell you — 1999 was one of the best years of my career. It was also one of the strangest markets I’ve ever seen in nearly 50 years in this business. Capital was flowing faster than fundamentals could justify. 

My Stock Grader system kept me focused on what actually mattered: real earnings, real institutional conviction. A lot of the dot-com darlings never showed up in my system at all — and a lot of them went to zero.

But the companies with genuine fundamentals underneath the noise survived. And the ones — like Amazon — that used the window tactically didn’t just survive. They won the whole decade.

Right now, the AI boom is rhyming with that moment in ways that I find both exciting and instructive. But at the same time,  this is not the dot-com boom — the fundamentals are far stronger. 

So, in this piece, I want to show you why this AI boom reminds me so much of the late 1990s… why I believe some AI stocks could be much higher by year-end… and why the smartest move today is not to run for the exits when things get choppy, but to get more tactical.

And finally, I’ll tell you about a new tool that can help you do just that…

The ChatGPT Moment: What Lit the Fuse This Time

I recently got my hands on a chart from our friends at Bespoke Investment Group comparing the Nasdaq Composite’s performance during the internet boom of the late 1990s with its current path during the AI boom.

The comparison is striking.

ChatGPT appears to have done for AI what Netscape did for the internet.

When Netscape came along, investors realized the internet wasn’t just a neat new technology. It was a business revolution. Money poured into the companies building that new world, and the Nasdaq soared.

We’re seeing that same basic story today.

ChatGPT woke people up to what AI can actually do. And Wall Street quickly figured out how much infrastructure that was going to require.

The fact is that the boom is backed by real sales, real earnings, and real order backlogs. 

Look at Bloom Energy Corp. (BE), for example. The company helps make fuel cell generators, which data centers need to produce power on-site so they don’t have to rely on the electrical grid. 

Bloom Energy’s current product backlog is about $6 billion, while its total backlog exceeds $20 billion.

At this rate, it will take years to deliver what is already in the pipeline. And Bloom Energy isn’t an outlier. This story is playing out across the AI and data center space.

Companies are receiving more orders than sales. That makes this a real capital spending cycle.

That is why I remain bullish. Personally, I think the AI and data center stocks across my premium services could be another 30% to 40% higher between now and the end of the year.

But that does not mean investors should get complacent.

Summer Volatility Is Coming — Don’t Let It Shake You Out

August and early September tend to be volatile. Seemingly everyone on Wall Street and in Europe are on vacation, trading volume thins out, and unscrupulous short sellers come out of the woodwork.

So, I would not be surprised if the market gets bumpy.

In fact, Bespoke also shows that the Nasdaq took a significant dip between late May and October 1998 — right in the middle of what turned out to be a historic bull run. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar this summer.

But here’s the key insight: If the AI Revolution continues to follow the internet boom’s path, a summer pullback would not mark the end of this bull market. It could simply set the stage for much higher levels later in 2026 and beyond.

That is why I do not want you to follow the “sell in May and go away” crowd to the exits.

We remain in one of the best earnings environments of our lifetime. Analysts continue to revise estimates higher. Companies keep beating expectations. Fundamentally superior stocks with accelerating earnings and sales growth should continue to lead.

But there is a big difference between staying invested and just closing your eyes.

The late 1990s created tremendous wealth. But that market did not move in a straight line. Even great stocks got hit hard from time to time. The investors who panicked during those pullbacks often missed the biggest gains that came next.

That is the real risk this summer.

Not that a great stock has a bad week. The real risk is that you let a bad week scare you out of a great stock right before the next leg higher.

And that’s why I’ve been working with my friends over at TradeSmith on something special – something that’s specifically designed for times like this.

The Strategy for What Comes Next: Stay Bullish, Get Tactical

In my view, the answer is simple: Stay bullish, but get tactical.

That means focusing on fundamentally superior companies. It means paying attention to earnings momentum, sales growth, and analyst revisions. It means having a better way to track whether the stocks you own are still healthy in the short term.

And it’s why I’ve been paying close attention to what my friends at TradeSmith have been building.

On Wednesday, June 10, at 10 a.m. Eastern, I’m teaming up with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan for a special event.

Keith and his team have spent years building technology designed to help investors make more tactical decisions. And during this event, we’re going to show you a new AI-powered approach to navigating today’s faster-moving market. 

I don’t want to give away the full story today. That is what the event is for. But here’s the basic idea…

If this market really is rhyming with the late 1990s, investors need to be prepared for two things at once:

Before the event, you can even test-drive part of the technology for yourself. You can enter the ticker symbols of stocks you already own – or stocks you are thinking about buying – and see how the system evaluates their short-term health.

That is exactly the kind of tool I believe investors should have at their fingertips in a market like this.

When volatility picks up, you don’t want to guess. You don’t want to rely on fear. And you do not want to get shaken out of a great long-term opportunity because the market has a bad week.

That’s why I encourage you to sign up for our free event. And to try out the free ticker tool before the event.

Jeff Bezos didn’t close his eyes in 1999 and hope for the best. He got tactical. 

That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do right now.

The post What Bezos Knew In 1999 That AI Investors Are Missing Today appeared first on InvestorPlace.

In today’s Friday Digest takeover, legendary investor Louis Navellier draws a fascinating comparison between today’s AI-driven market and the internet boom of the late 1990s. Not because he believes a crash is imminent, but because he sees many of the same forces at work: massive capital spending, powerful technological change, and investors trying to separate lasting winners from temporary hype.

The difference, Louis argues, is that today’s boom is backed by something many dot-com companies lacked: real earnings, real sales, and massive order backlogs.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the ride will be smooth. Below, Louis explains why he believes AI stocks have substantial upside ahead, but also why those gains will test investors’ nerves.

He’ll share more on all this during a special event next Wednesday, June 10, with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan. The two will discuss a new AI-powered approach to navigating market volatility. You can register right here.

If Louis is right, the biggest risk this summer isn’t volatility itself. It’s letting that volatility shake you out of a great stock at exactly the wrong time

I’ll let him take it from here.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

In 1999, Jeff Bezos was doing something that drove Wall Street absolutely crazy.

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) was already a public company. And it was already capable of producing profits — if Bezos had wanted to. But instead, he kept aggressively reinvesting. Instead of worrying about profits, he was building warehouses, distribution infrastructure, and technology systems.

Every quarter, the margins that should have been there weren’t, because every dollar was going right back into the Amazon machine.

Analysts were furious. Where are the profits? What exactly are we owning here?

Meanwhile, all around Amazon, the dot-com boom was producing companies with no revenue, no product, sometimes no coherent business model at all — and their stocks were tripling. The whole market was chasing a story.

Who looks most like the future? Who has the best narrative? Wall Street was funding them fast and asking questions later.

Bezos wasn’t playing that game.

What he understood — and almost nobody else did back then — is that 1999 capital was a once-in-a-generation resource. Every dollar of market enthusiasm could be converted into permanent infrastructure: fulfillment capacity, distribution reach, systems that got cheaper the more volume they handled. He wasn’t optimizing for this quarter. He was building something that would be almost impossible to replicate once the window closed.

When the music stopped in 2000, it stopped for everybody. The story companies – do I need to mention Pets.com? – vanished almost overnight.

Amazon went through its own brutal drawdown, but the infrastructure Bezos built was still there. The customer relationships were still there. The cost curves were still bending in the right direction.

By 2005, Bezos looked like a genius. In 1999, he just looked tactical.

I was managing money through all of it. And I’ll tell you — 1999 was one of the best years of my career. It was also one of the strangest markets I’ve ever seen in nearly 50 years in this business. Capital was flowing faster than fundamentals could justify.

My Stock Grader system kept me focused on what actually mattered: real earnings, real institutional conviction. A lot of the dot-com darlings never showed up in my system at all — and a lot of them went to zero.

But the companies with genuine fundamentals underneath the noise survived. And the ones — like Amazon — that used the window tactically didn’t just survive. They won the whole decade.

Right now, the AI boom is rhyming with that moment in ways that I find both exciting and instructive. But at the same time,  this is not the dot-com boom — the fundamentals are far stronger.

So, in this piece, I want to show you why this AI boom reminds me so much of the late 1990s… why I believe some AI stocks could be much higher by year-end… and why the smartest move today is not to run for the exits when things get choppy, but to get more tactical.

And finally, I’ll tell you about a new tool that can help you do just that…

The ChatGPT Moment

I recently got my hands on a chart from our friends at Bespoke Investment Group comparing the Nasdaq Composite’s performance during the internet boom of the late 1990s with its current path during the AI boom.

The comparison is striking.

ChatGPT appears to have done for AI what Netscape did for the internet.

When Netscape came along, investors realized the internet wasn’t just a neat new technology. It was a business revolution. Money poured into the companies building that new world, and the Nasdaq soared.

We’re seeing that same basic story today.

ChatGPT woke people up to what AI can actually do. And Wall Street quickly figured out how much infrastructure that was going to require.

The fact is that the boom is backed by real sales, real earnings, and real order backlogs.

Look at Bloom Energy Corp. (BE), for example. The company helps make fuel cell generators, which data centers need to produce power on-site so they don’t have to rely on the electrical grid.

Bloom Energy’s current product backlog is about $6 billion, while its total backlog exceeds $20 billion.

At this rate, it will take years to deliver what is already in the pipeline. And Bloom Energy isn’t an outlier. This story is playing out across the AI and data center space.

Companies are receiving more orders than sales. That makes this a real capital spending cycle.

That is why I remain bullish. Personally, I think the AI and data center stocks across my premium services could be another 30% to 40% higher between now and the end of the year.

But that does not mean investors should get complacent.

Summer Could Get Bumpy

August and early September tend to be volatile. Seemingly everyone on Wall Street and in Europe are on vacation, trading volume thins out, and unscrupulous short sellers come out of the woodwork.

So, I would not be surprised if the market gets bumpy.

In fact, Bespoke also shows that the Nasdaq took a significant dip between late May and October 1998 — right in the middle of what turned out to be a historic bull run. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar this summer.

But here’s the key insight: If the AI Revolution continues to follow the internet boom’s path, a summer pullback would not mark the end of this bull market. It could simply set the stage for much higher levels later in 2026 and beyond.

That is why I do not want you to follow the “sell in May and go away” crowd to the exits.

We remain in one of the best earnings environments of our lifetime. Analysts continue to revise estimates higher. Companies keep beating expectations. Fundamentally superior stocks with accelerating earnings and sales growth should continue to lead.

But there is a big difference between staying invested and just closing your eyes.

The late 1990s created tremendous wealth. But that market did not move in a straight line. Even great stocks got hit hard from time to time. The investors who panicked during those pullbacks often missed the biggest gains that came next.

That is the real risk this summer.

Not that a great stock has a bad week. The real risk is that you let a bad week scare you out of a great stock right before the next leg higher.

And that’s why I’ve been working with my friends over at TradeSmith on something special – something that’s specifically designed for times like this.

Stay Bullish, but Get Tactical

In my view, the answer is simple: Stay bullish, but get tactical.

That means focusing on fundamentally superior companies. It means paying attention to earnings momentum, sales growth, and analyst revisions. It means having a better way to track whether the stocks you own are still healthy in the short term.

And it’s why I’ve been paying close attention to what my friends at TradeSmith have been building.

On Wednesday, June 10, at 10 a.m. Eastern, I’m teaming up with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan for a special event.

Keith and his team have spent years building technology designed to help investors make more tactical decisions. And during this event, we’re going to show you a new AI-powered approach to navigating today’s faster-moving market.

I don’t want to give away the full story today. That is what the event is for. But here’s the basic idea…

If this market really is rhyming with the late 1990s, investors need to be prepared for two things at once:

Before the event, you can even test-drive part of the technology for yourself. You can enter the ticker symbols of stocks you already own – or stocks you are thinking about buying – and see how the system evaluates their short-term health.

That is exactly the kind of tool I believe investors should have at their fingertips in a market like this.

When volatility picks up, you don’t want to guess. You don’t want to rely on fear. And you do not want to get shaken out of a great long-term opportunity because the market has a bad week.

That’s why I encourage you to sign up for our free event. And to try out the free ticker tool before the event.

Jeff Bezos didn’t close his eyes in 1999 and hope for the best. He got tactical.

That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do right now.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace

P.S. I think Louis makes an important point here. The question isn’t whether the AI boom is over. The question is how investors navigate the inevitable volatility along the way. That’s exactly what he’ll be discussing during his upcoming event with TradeSmith. If you haven’t registered for Louis’ free event yet, I’d encourage you to do so now.

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:

Bloom Energy Corporation (BE)

The post The AI Boom Is Still Going Strong, but Don’t Expect a Smooth Summer appeared first on InvestorPlace.

To you and me, that may sound like science fiction. But to Demis Hassabis, it sounds conservative.

Hassabis is the computer programmer and neuroscientist who founded DeepMind – the pioneer deep learning lab that Google bought in 2014.

Deep Learning is the method of training software to recognize patterns by feeding it enormous amounts of data and letting it learn from its own mistakes. And it’s the core technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and most of what people mean when they say “AI” today.

In 2024, Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for building an AI model – called AlphaFold2 – that mapped virtually all 200 million known proteins. This touched off a revolution in drug discovery.

Most drugs work by binding to a specific protein in your body – much like a key fits into a lock. For 50 years, figuring out the shape of those locks was so slow and expensive that it bottlenecked the entire drug discovery process.

Thanks to AlphaFold2’s mapping, what used to take researchers years in the lab now happens in hours on a computer.

The progress is so fast that Hassabis estimates we’ll cure ALL diseases within 10 years.

I’m 67 – well past the 50-year-old cutoff he’s talking about. But when I look at what’s come out of medical research in just the last two months, he might be right:

• A drug just doubled survival in pancreatic cancer – the deadliest cancer there is.
• A one-time gene-editing infusion permanently cut bad cholesterol by 62% from a single dose.
• A lung cancer pill held back a spreading tumor for five full years – longer than any drug has ever managed.
• The Mayo Clinic built an AI that detects pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans up to three years before a doctor can spot it.
• Eli Lilly’s new anti-obesity drug achieved 30% body weight loss in its Phase 3 trial – and, along the way, cut knee arthritis pain by 76%.

These aren’t random breakthroughs. They were all either discovered, accelerated, or made possible by the kind of deep-learning AI models Hassabis pioneered.

And, folks, these models are only accelerating as AI learns to write code to create more powerful models… which write code for even more powerful models… and so on.

Which brings me to the question that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

If AI is rewriting what’s possible in a field as complex as human biology – what is it about to do to financial markets?

I’ve spent 47 years building computer systems to find growth stocks before the crowd catches on. So, I know what it looks like when a new technology changes the game for investors.

In the 1970s, I was one of the few people using a computer to pick stocks. Most of my peers thought it was eccentric at best… and a fool’s errand at worst. Today, computers are responsible for about 80% of daily stock trading volume.

And I believe what’s coming with AI is a change of a far greater magnitude.

I’ll show you what I mean in a minute – including how adding AI to my own quantitative models could turn a 615% gain on a stock like DXP Enterprises Inc. (DXPE) into a 3,626% winner, or a 292% gain on Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) into 6,284%.

First, though, let me take you back to the early 1970s when I had my first “eureka moment” about how machines could crack the secrets of the stock market.

My Eureka Moment

It was my junior year at Cal State Hayward (now Cal State East Bay), where I was studying finance.

One of my professors was working for Wells Fargo – using its mainframe computer to build the stock market indexes that were just emerging. He asked me if I could help.

The flashiest technology I’d touched up to that point was a slide rule. Getting access to that mainframe was like an 1800s gold prospector being shown a diesel-powered excavator.

My job was to build a model portfolio that mimicked the S&P 500 using just 320 stocks. But something unexpected happened. Instead of just tracking the market – my version beat it.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. The prevailing theory at the time – which every finance textbook repeated as gospel – was that you couldn’t consistently beat the market. It was impossible.

My data said otherwise.

So, I dug deeper. I ran the statistical tests. And I found a pattern that would define the next five decades of my career. Some stocks move independently of the broader market and have their own signal. Find them early enough, and the gains can be extraordinary.

Folks on Wall Street call it “alpha.” From that moment on, I was obsessed with building systems to find it.

Nearly 700 Gains of 100% or More

That discovery launched a career I could never have predicted.

Over the next five decades, I built quant models that powered some of the most successful investment newsletters in America.

My system has identified 676 stocks that went on to double – including recommendations like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 1987, Nike Inc. (NKE) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) in 1988, and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) a full 17 years before most people had ever heard of ChatGPT.

That last one alone would have turned $1,000 into more than $1 million.

None of those wins came from hunches or gut feelings. They came from what I discovered with the help of that Wells Fargo mainframe in the 1970s — a systematic, data-driven process for finding fundamentally superior stocks backed by powerful institutional buying pressure.

The process got more refined over the decades. The data got richer. The models got more powerful.

In other words, I’ve spent my career looking for the crème de la crème of the stock market. But I never had access to a technology as powerful as what I’m about to show you.

The Difference Is Extraordinary

As I like to say, good stocks bounce like fresh tennis balls, while bad stocks fall like rocks. The key is knowing the difference before the market starts shaking.

That’s why, for the past year, I’ve been working with the team at TradeSmith on something I’ve never attempted before.

If you don’t know them already, it’s the financial technology company behind some of the most sophisticated portfolio tools available to individual investors today.

Together, we’ve built a new form of AI that takes my Stock Grader system and adds a layer it didn’t have before: a precise, data-driven signal for when to get in and when to get out of the stocks I recommend.

It includes a layer of the same kind of pattern-recognition AI technology that’s diagnosing cancer three years earlier and designing drugs in hours instead of years.

The difference it makes is extraordinary.

Take AppFolio Inc. (APPF), a stock I recommended in 2017.

Anyone who acted on that recommendation has enjoyed an annualized gain of 20%. Compounded over time, that’s excellent. But according to our backtesting, this new AI-enhanced system would have delivered a 74% annualized gain.

Or take Nexstar Media Group (NXST), which I recommended in 2013. A 23% average yearly gain becomes 173%.

Same stock over the same stretch of time. Just smarter timing.

Across the board, backtesting suggests that pairing this new AI with my Stock Grader ratings could generate up to 20 times more money than following Stock Grader alone.

That’s why I say this is the biggest edge I’ve seen in my 47 years as a professional investor. It’s not a new stock picking system – it’s a new layer of intelligence on top of what I’ve already built.

And if we get more stock market gyrations this summer, I believe that kind of intelligence could be more valuable than ever.

The Biggest Edge I’ve Seen

Back in the 1970s, the idea of using a computer to pick stocks seemed absurd to most people on Wall Street. I did it anyway. The results spoke for themselves.

Today, the idea that AI can reliably improve on a 47-year track record might seem equally hard to believe. I get that skepticism. I felt it myself. But then I looked at the testing and had to admit that AI plus my system works like gangbusters.

I’ve been hunting for edges in this market for 47 years. I’ve never seen one like this.

To see exactly how it works – and get the full list of stocks it’s flagging as urgent buys and sells – join me for my online event with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan next Wednesday, June 10, at 10 a.m. Eastern.

When you register your interest, you’ll get access to TradeSmith’s Short-Term Health indicator.

While Stock Grader’s main focus is on what stocks to buy, Short-Term Health is all about when to buy them.

It allows you to type in any ticker to see if a stock is a short-term buy or sell based on a simple traffic light system. Green means buy. Yellow means hold. And Red means sell.

Here’s that link again to access the unlocked version.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

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:

Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) and NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)

The post The Biggest Edge I’ve Found in My 47-Year Career appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Recently, he told me the AI boom reminds him of that period in some surprising ways. Not because he thinks the market is about to crash, but because he believes investors need to be prepared for both opportunity and volatility.

I asked Louis to explain what he’s seeing—and why he’s teaming up with TradeSmith for a free special event on June 10 to help investors navigate what’s next. You can register for that free broadcast here.

And here’s Louis…

In 1999, Jeff Bezos was doing something that drove Wall Street absolutely crazy.

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) was already a public company. And it was already capable of producing profits — if Bezos had wanted to. But instead, he kept aggressively reinvesting. Instead of worrying about profits, he was building warehouses, distribution infrastructure, and technology systems.

Every quarter, the margins that should have been there weren’t, because every dollar was going right back into the Amazon machine.

Analysts were furious. Where are the profits? What exactly are we owning here?

Meanwhile, all around Amazon, the dot-com boom was producing companies with no revenue, no product, sometimes no coherent business model at all — and their stocks were tripling. The whole market was chasing a story.

Who looks most like the future? Who has the best narrative? Wall Street was funding them fast and asking questions later.

Bezos wasn’t playing that game.

What he understood — and almost nobody else did back then — is that 1999 capital was a once-in-a-generation resource. Every dollar of market enthusiasm could be converted into permanent infrastructure: fulfillment capacity, distribution reach, systems that got cheaper the more volume they handled. He wasn’t optimizing for this quarter. He was building something that would be almost impossible to replicate once the window closed.

When the music stopped in 2000, it stopped for everybody. The story companies – do I need to mention Pets.com? – vanished almost overnight.

Amazon went through its own brutal drawdown, but the infrastructure Bezos built was still there. The customer relationships were still there. The cost curves were still bending in the right direction.

By 2005, Bezos looked like a genius. In 1999, he just looked tactical.

I was managing money through all of it. And I’ll tell you — 1999 was one of the best years of my career. It was also one of the strangest markets I’ve ever seen in nearly 50 years in this business. Capital was flowing faster than fundamentals could justify.

My Stock Grader system kept me focused on what actually mattered: real earnings, real institutional conviction. A lot of the dot-com darlings never showed up in my system at all — and a lot of them went to zero.

But the companies with genuine fundamentals underneath the noise survived. And the ones — like Amazon — that used the window tactically didn’t just survive. They won the whole decade.

Right now, the AI boom is rhyming with that moment in ways that I find both exciting and instructive. But at the same time,  this is not the dot-com boom — the fundamentals are far stronger.

So, in this piece, I want to show you why this AI boom reminds me so much of the late 1990s… why I believe some AI stocks could be much higher by year-end… and why the smartest move today is not to run for the exits when things get choppy, but to get more tactical.

And finally, I’ll tell you about a new tool that can help you do just that…

The ChatGPT Moment

I recently got my hands on a chart from our friends at Bespoke Investment Group comparing the Nasdaq Composite’s performance during the internet boom of the late 1990s with its current path during the AI boom.

The comparison is striking.

ChatGPT appears to have done for AI what Netscape did for the internet.

When Netscape came along, investors realized the internet wasn’t just a neat new technology. It was a business revolution. Money poured into the companies building that new world, and the Nasdaq soared.

We’re seeing that same basic story today.

ChatGPT woke people up to what AI can actually do. And Wall Street quickly figured out how much infrastructure that was going to require.

The fact is that the boom is backed by real sales, real earnings, and real order backlogs.

Look at Bloom Energy Corp. (BE), for example. The company helps make fuel cell generators, which data centers need to produce power on-site so they don’t have to rely on the electrical grid.

Bloom Energy’s current product backlog is about $6 billion, while its total backlog exceeds $20 billion.

At this rate, it will take years to deliver what is already in the pipeline. And Bloom Energy isn’t an outlier. This story is playing out across the AI and data center space.

Companies are receiving more orders than sales. That makes this a real capital spending cycle.

That is why I remain bullish. Personally, I think the AI and data center stocks across my premium services could be another 30% to 40% higher between now and the end of the year.

But that does not mean investors should get complacent.

Summer Could Get Bumpy

August and early September tend to be volatile. Seemingly everyone on Wall Street and in Europe are on vacation, trading volume thins out, and unscrupulous short sellers come out of the woodwork.

So, I would not be surprised if the market gets bumpy.

In fact, Bespoke also shows that the Nasdaq took a significant dip between late May and October 1998 — right in the middle of what turned out to be a historic bull run. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar this summer.

But here’s the key insight: If the AI Revolution continues to follow the internet boom’s path, a summer pullback would not mark the end of this bull market. It could simply set the stage for much higher levels later in 2026 and beyond.

That is why I do not want you to follow the “sell in May and go away” crowd to the exits.

We remain in one of the best earnings environments of our lifetime. Analysts continue to revise estimates higher. Companies keep beating expectations. Fundamentally superior stocks with accelerating earnings and sales growth should continue to lead.

But there is a big difference between staying invested and just closing your eyes.

The late 1990s created tremendous wealth. But that market did not move in a straight line. Even great stocks got hit hard from time to time. The investors who panicked during those pullbacks often missed the biggest gains that came next.

That is the real risk this summer.

Not that a great stock has a bad week. The real risk is that you let a bad week scare you out of a great stock right before the next leg higher.

And that’s why I’ve been working with my friends over at TradeSmith on something special – something that’s specifically designed for times like this.

Stay Bullish, but Get Tactical

In my view, the answer is simple: Stay bullish, but get tactical.

That means focusing on fundamentally superior companies. It means paying attention to earnings momentum, sales growth, and analyst revisions. It means having a better way to track whether the stocks you own are still healthy in the short term.

And it’s why I’ve been paying close attention to what my friends at TradeSmith have been building.

On Wednesday, June 10, at 10 a.m. Eastern, I’m teaming up with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan for a special event.

Keith and his team have spent years building technology designed to help investors make more tactical decisions. And during this event, we’re going to show you a new AI-powered approach to navigating today’s faster-moving market.

I don’t want to give away the full story today. That is what the event is for. But here’s the basic idea…

If this market really is rhyming with the late 1990s, investors need to be prepared for two things at once:

Before the event, you can even test-drive part of the technology for yourself. You can enter the ticker symbols of stocks you already own – or stocks you are thinking about buying – and see how the system evaluates their short-term health.

That is exactly the kind of tool I believe investors should have at their fingertips in a market like this.

When volatility picks up, you don’t want to guess. You don’t want to rely on fear. And you do not want to get shaken out of a great long-term opportunity because the market has a bad week.

That’s why I encourage you to sign up for our free event. And to try out the free ticker tool before the event.

Jeff Bezos didn’t close his eyes in 1999 and hope for the best. He got tactical.

That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do right now.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace

P.S. I think Louis makes an important point here. The question isn’t whether the AI boom is over. The question is how investors navigate the inevitable volatility along the way. That’s exactly what he’ll be discussing during his upcoming event with TradeSmith. If you haven’t registered for Louis’ free event yet, I’d encourage you to do so now.

The post The Biggest Mistake AI Investors Could Make This Summer appeared first on InvestorPlace.

The backlash was brutal. The same newspapers that had cheered him began trading in ideas that Field’s entire operation had been a swindle from the start… a scheme to pump a worthless stock and dump it on a gullible public.

A few even insisted the messages had been faked. So, what am I getting at here? It’s simple: Field had run headlong into what I call “the reality wall.”

SpaceX’s Reality Wall

The Reality Wall is the moment the hype runs out of road and the hard, unforgiving truth of the engineering catches up.

Most ventures die at that wall. But Field’s did not.

He spent eight more years chasing it (going broke in the process); and in 1866, he finally laid a cable that worked. Once it held, it went from being an experiment and borderline scam, to becoming the nervous system of global finance, commerce, and news for the next hundred years.

I’ve been thinking about Cyrus Field all week, because the SpaceX IPO just hit its reality wall. The $2 trillion hype trade that had been carrying every space stock higher slammed into its first real valuation and governance gut-check. The financial commentators came out swinging – “the number is absurd,” they said, “the index fast-tracking is a grift on retail,” “this is a dump on your 401k.” The whispers have started. So, is the parade is over?

Here’s the question that actually matters, the one that separates the initial public offerings that mint fortunes from the ones that vaporize them: does this trade burst through the reality wall, or die at it?

“Everyone else is 10, 15, 20 years behind.”

Every IPO has hype. Every IPO eventually meets the wall. GoPro (GPRO) met it and never recovered. Fitbit (FIT) met it and faded. Facebook (META) met it too… a brutal drawdown in its first couple of years… and then bulldozed straight through and became one of the most valuable companies on earth. The difference is never the hype. It’s what’s standing behind the hype.

What’s Behind the SpaceX IPO

Behind SpaceX is the hardest business on the planet. They literally call it rocket science.

Just how hard it is became apparent this past week, when Blue Origin’s rocket exploded before it even cleared the ground. This is Jeff Bezos we’re talking about – one of the great business minds of our era, with effectively unlimited capital – and his rocket blew up on the pad.

Only two companies on earth have turned rocket science into a reliable, repeatable commercial machine: SpaceX and Rocket Lab (RKLB). That technical moat is enormous, and in an age where most moats are eroding, this one is getting wider.

Everyone else is 10, 15, 20 years behind.

Now layer on what that moat unlocks – orbital computing, satellite intelligence, geospatial observation, national defense, eventually point-to-point travel that gets you from Los Angeles to Beijing in about an hour. Does that last one sound like science fiction? Of course it does. So did a mainstream $30,000 electric car when Tesla (TSLA) went public in 2010, and people laughed at that, too.

Sixteen years later, Tesla is the most valuable automaker in the world. This is a founder who has turned science fiction into reality before – more than once, with the most ambitious projects imaginable.

If I’m betting on anyone to break through the wall, it’s the man with the longest track record of doing exactly that, a fresh IPO war chest of roughly $75 billion, and Tesla’s balance sheet behind him.

And that “grift on your 401(k)” accusation? Take the emotion out and it falls apart. You want the indices to own a $2 trillion company.

Picture an index fund that doesn’t hold one of the four or five most valuable businesses on earth – that isn’t protecting you, it’s handing you a broken, inefficient portfolio. The fast-tracking is the market scrambling to build a sensible index for a wave of trillion-dollar IPOs the rules were never written for.

“Knowing which is which is the whole game.”

Here’s where it gets interesting for your portfolio, though, because the reality wall isn’t only a space story. The same pattern is flashing across the entire AI Boom.

The AI Signal Under the Noise

Take Nvidia’s (NVDA) move into the PC chip market for the first time in its history – a market Intel has owned for decades. Read past the headline and it tells you two things.

First, the smartest company in AI is now betting heavily on Physical AI – pushing intelligence out of the cloud and onto the device, which puts names like Dell (DELL) and HP (HPQ) squarely in the path of the next leg of this buildout. Second, that new chip is built on ARM (ARM) architecture.

All roads lead back to the foundry when it comes to printing chips. All roads lead back to ARM when it comes to running them. Every one of those chips sold sends a royalty back to ARM. That’s a quiet toll booth on the entire AI economy.

Then there’s the software bounce, where I’ll do something most analysts won’t: admit I got it wrong. I called this a dead-cat bounce. It wasn’t. A 45% rally off the lows, a clean bounce off the 200-week moving average – that’s real technical strength, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But strength in the tape doesn’t resolve the long-term risk that AI eventually collapses demand for ordinary software. The market is finally getting selective. The names that own proprietary data and live inside a workflow AI can’t easily replace – the nervous-system businesses – deserve their bounce. The pure-function names riding the same tide don’t.

Knowing which is which is the whole game.

And watch the drones. They went red-hot before the Iran War, then ice-cold the moment the thesis got validated and everyone sold the news. Now an unexpected jolt of good news out of the White House looks like it could reawaken the trade.

We’ve seen this exact movie with quantum stocks a few weeks ago: red-hot, ice-cold, a policy catalyst, then liftoff. The drone names – AeroVironment (AVAV), Kratos (KTOS), Red Cat (RCAT) – look to be a few weeks behind that same blueprint.

Pull it all together and the signal underneath the noise is the one we’ve been pounding the table on for months. Seven, eight, nine of the 11 sectors can close red while tech rips 2% to 3% higher.

That isn’t random.

That’s the cleanest expression yet of an economy being weighed down by stagflation while the AI train refuses to slow.

We are in the later innings here. Not the ninth but not the fourth, either. The music is still playing, and you stay on the floor as long as it does. The trade is simple, and it hasn’t changed: own AI, and forget almost everything else.

In this week’s episode of Being Exponential With Luke Lango, we walk through exactly where these reality-wall setups sit on the charts… the technical support levels worth watching across space, chips, and drones, and the specific names we think burst through rather than break against the wall.

Watch the full episode here. Also, be sure to subscribe to Being Exponential on X (formerly Twitter) for more exclusive content.

The post The SpaceX IPO Just Hit the Reality Wall (Plus, the Trades Behind It) appeared first on InvestorPlace.

As I write Thursday morning, chip stocks are selling off, pulling the AI complex down alongside it.

The culprit: Broadcom (AVGO) reported earnings last night that were, by any objective measure, extraordinary. AI semiconductor revenues climbed 143% year over year, and Q3 guidance calls for $29.4 billion in revenue.

And yet Wall Street is hammering the stock, down 13% as I write.

Why?

Mostly because Broadcom didn’t raise its full-year AI chip guidance. CEO Hock Tan reiterated the existing forecast rather than upgrading it.

Beyond that, the software segment results were light. And Tan said Broadcom would offer “chips only,” rather than the complete integrated AI systems the company had previously said it would provide to customers.

On a stock that had run more than 60% since its late-March low, this was enough to trigger profit-taking – and the ripple has spread to the broader AI trade this morning.

Now, let’s be clear…

The selloff isn’t about Broadcom’s AI business. That business didn’t disappoint – it more than doubled, and AI revenue is expected to triple to $16 billion next quarter. That makes this selloff a valuation story: what happens when a stock priced for perfection only delivers excellence instead.

But that doesn’t mean we can write it off. It prompts a genuine question that all AI investors must answer…

Is this the beginning of growth rates failing to match lofty expectations? Or is the underlying AI buildout powerful enough to keep delivering at the scale the market needs?

To help answer that, let’s rewind to Monday’s news that Alphabet (GOOG) is raising $80 billion – not to survive a downturn, but because the demand for its AI products is outrunning its ability to build the infrastructure to deliver them.

This has massive implications for tomorrow’s AI growth story.

In yesterday’s Digest, I wrote: “If you’re nervous today, listen to your fears – but frame them in facts.”

So, as the AI complex sells off this morning, let’s take our own advice.

A breather or a bust?

As we try to read where we are in this AI bull run – and how much growth remains in front of us – Alphabet’s $80 billion raise is one of the clearest signals we’ve seen. Let’s talk about why.

Every time you ask Gemini a question or run an AI-powered search, that query flows through a data center packed with specialized chips, networking equipment and cooling systems.

Billions of people do this daily. But that’s just consumer-side demand…

On top of that, corporations are paying Google directly to run their AI workloads – customer service systems, coding tools, data pipelines – all of it pulling on the same infrastructure.

Now, is Google making money on all this?

Yes, handsomely.

Google Cloud’s operating margin expanded to nearly 33% last quarter. Search revenue grew 19% as AI features drove queries to all-time highs.

On the consumer side, advertising revenue subsidizes the free users. On the enterprise side, companies are paying directly and profitably. Net income jumped 81% year over year to $62.58 billion.

So, with cash flooding in Google’s front door, why raise $80 billion?

Because it’s winning so fast that even one of the most profitable companies on earth can’t build AI infrastructure quickly enough to keep up with its own demand.

It’s no wonder why, when asked earlier this year what keeps him up at night, CEO Sundar Pichai’s answer was two words: compute capacity.

The only way to solve that is to spend at a scale that even Alphabet’s cash machine can’t fully self-fund.

If you’re worried about an AI bubble, trillion-dollar valuations with nothing underneath, or hype outrunning reality – this is one of the most ringing endorsements of the real thing you’re going to see.

A Wall Street elephant just put $10 billion behind that same conclusion

Our technology investing expert, Luke Lango, editor of Innovation Investor, reported that Berkshire Hathaway just sunk a boatload of money into Google, and their piece of this deal carries significance well beyond Google’s compute capacity problem:

Either Berkshire finally started understanding technology — or they stopped seeing Alphabet’s AI infrastructure buildout as a technology investment and started seeing it as a utility.

Regulated demand. Contracted revenue. Infrastructure moat. Predictable cash flows at scale. The framework Berkshire has used for railroads, energy pipelines, and insurance for decades.

When Berkshire sees utility economics, they write enormous checks.

That $10 billion tells us more about the AI infrastructure thesis than any earnings report could.

But the implications run well beyond Google. Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META) and the rest are locked in the same arms race.

If Alphabet is pulling in $80 billion to accelerate, the pressure on everyone else to keep the gas pedal down only intensifies.

Here’s Luke on what that means for investors:

The winners are the chipmakers, memory suppliers, networking vendors, server builders, power providers, cooling companies, and high-beta compute clouds supplying the rails of the AI economy.

Luke has been positioning Innovation Investor subscribers in precisely those names…

And he believes the biggest catalyst for repricing them is still ahead.

OpenAI and Anthropic are on track for what could be the two largest IPOs in American history – reportedly targeting valuations of roughly $1 trillion and $900 billion, respectively.

When those S-1 filings hit, every Wall Street analyst and institutional investor will scramble to identify the AI infrastructure companies supplying, powering and enabling those businesses – many of them will be the same ones benefitting from Google’s AI ramp-up.

Luke calls getting there first the “Pre-IPO Backdoor.”

The historical pattern supports this. When Facebook went public in 2012, the IPO buyers had a rough ride. But a chipmaker supplying the memory behind the data-center buildout that powered the social media boom quietly returned hundreds of percent over the same window. Luke believes that pattern is about to repeat – at a far larger scale.

The window to position ahead of the repricing is now, before the filings arrive.

Luke lays out the full Pre-IPO Backdoor strategy here — including a free ticker that gives ordinary investors exposure to both OpenAI and Anthropic while they’re still private.

Now, as we assess the overall AI trade and future growth rates, the buildout is one thing. But what about the applications?

Get ready for what’s coming…

The age of agentic AI just arrived in your brokerage account

Last week, Robinhood (HOOD) announced two new products: Agentic Trading and an Agentic Credit Card.

The first lets you connect a third-party AI assistant to your brokerage account to execute investing strategies on your behalf – rebalancing your portfolio, monitoring themes, executing trades – with minimal human involvement.

The second lets a separate AI agent hunt for deals and complete purchases using a designated virtual credit card.

In other words, you set the goals, the AI handles the execution.

Robinhood isn’t alone. Google has already launched agentic checkout across Search and Gemini – a live “Buy for me” button that executes purchases directly on merchant websites.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant Rufus now serves 300 million users. Etsy (ETSY) and over a million Shopify (SHOP) merchants are live with agentic commerce capabilities.

And that’s just retail…

Gartner projects agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention by 2029, cutting operational costs by 30%.

The pace of all this is striking. According to research from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 96% of global technologists predict that agentic AI development and integration will accelerate through 2026, with many experts expecting near-mass consumer adoption this year.

Here’s TechRadar with the impact:

For consumers, this shift is profound, as autonomous agents begin managing the complexities of personal finance, travel, and household logistics, turning once-manual digital tasks into hands-off, automated experiences.

We’re not talking about a chatbot that answers questions. We’re talking about AI that acts on your behalf, in the real world, right now.

For investors still on the fence about whether AI is real or just hype, this is your answer.

But still, for nervous AI investors watching their portfolio sink into the red today, is there another proof point to calm nerves?

“We’re just rewiring the world”

If Alphabet’s $80 billion raise and Robinhood’s agentic trading accounts didn’t convince you about AI, consider what Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) is doing.

Brookfield built one of the world’s great fortunes on bridges, toll roads, freight railways, and utilities – the unglamorous, load-bearing infrastructure that quietly powers civilization.

It doesn’t chase trends. It doesn’t do hype. It writes enormous checks into assets it expects to collect cash from for decades.

It is now going all-in on AI infrastructure.

The firm is raising $50 billion across a new suite of AI-focused infrastructure funds. Its first major deployment: a $5 billion commitment to install Bloom Energy (BE) fuel cells at AI data centers – with the first project tied to an Oracle (ORCL) data center campus spanning 1,400 acres of New Mexico desert, built to support OpenAI’s compute needs.

Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt recently summed up the firm’s view at the Milken Institute Global Conference:

We’re just rewiring the world.

This framing should sound familiar…

Earlier in this Digest, Luke noted that Berkshire sees Alphabet’s AI buildout through the lens of utility economics – railroads, pipelines, contracted cash flows.

Brookfield is saying the same thing, just more explicitly.

Its CEO, Connor Teskey, described the strategy as “focused on investing in long-life, critical assets,” betting that well-structured contracts will deliver reliable cash flows for years – regardless of which AI model or platform ultimately wins the race.

And here’s Bloomberg, noting the scope of the growth in the area:

These asset managers are plowing ever-more cash into AI, stepping in to finance deals when banks can’t supply the sheer magnitude of cash needed to construct massive data facilities.

The ever-larger deals are turning infrastructure, once a staid and sleepy corner of finance, into a buzzy space that’s sparking both ebullience and trepidation.

That last point is critical for investors to recognize.

Brookfield and these asset managers at large aren’t betting on OpenAI versus Anthropic, or Nvidia versus the next chipmaker. They’re betting on the physical layer beneath it all – the power, the land, the cooling, the connectivity. That’s a bet that pays off no matter who wins the AI arms race above it.

The scale of the opportunity, in Brookfield’s own assessment: $7 trillion.

Bridges. Toll roads. Freight railways. Now AI data centers…

Brookfield doesn’t do bubbles – it does decades.

The bottom line

Step back from this morning’s selloff for a moment and look at what today’s Digest actually contains.

Three stories. Three different vantage points – a tech giant, a retail brokerage, and a global infrastructure empire. All pointing in the same direction.

Yes, AVGO is down 13% as I write. But Broadcom’s AI revenue more than doubled, and next quarter it’s expected to triple. The stock is being punished for not beating elevated expectations by enough. That’s a very different problem from a broken thesis.

Meanwhile, Alphabet is raising $80 billion because it can’t build AI infrastructure fast enough to meet demand. Berkshire is writing $10 billion checks because it sees utility economics. Brookfield is committing $50 billion because it sees a $7 trillion opportunity. And AI agents are already executing trades and buying groceries on behalf of ordinary consumers.

A stock getting punished for tripling its AI revenue doesn’t change any of that.

As always, factor in valuations, your personal timeline and your own risk tolerance before acting. Smart investing is never one-size-fits-all. But on the foundational questions – is this AI boom real? And can massive growth continue?

The evidence speaks clearly.

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

(Disclaimer: I own AVGO, GOOGL, AMZN, and MSFT.)

The post Is Broadcom the First Crack in the AI Bull Market? appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) was already a public company. And it was already capable of producing profits – if Bezos had wanted to. But instead, he kept aggressively reinvesting. Instead of worrying about profits, he was building warehouses, distribution infrastructure, and technology systems.

Every quarter, the margins that should have been there weren’t, because every dollar was going right back into the Amazon machine.

Analysts were furious. Where are the profits? What exactly are we owning here?

Meanwhile, all around Amazon, the dot-com boom was producing companies with no revenue, no product, sometimes no coherent business model at all – and their stocks were tripling. The whole market was chasing a story.

Who looks most like the future? Who has the best narrative? Wall Street was funding them fast and asking questions later.

Bezos wasn’t playing that game.

What he understood – and almost nobody else did back then – is that 1999 capital was a once-in-a-generation resource. Every dollar of market enthusiasm could be converted into permanent infrastructure: fulfillment capacity, distribution reach, systems that got cheaper the more volume they handled. He wasn’t optimizing for this quarter. He was building something that would be almost impossible to replicate once the window closed.

When the music stopped in 2000, it stopped for everybody. The story companies – do I need to mention Pets.com? – vanished almost overnight.

Amazon went through its own brutal drawdown, but the infrastructure Bezos built was still there. The customer relationships were still there. The cost curves were still bending in the right direction.

By 2005, Bezos looked like a genius. In 1999, he just looked tactical.

I was managing money through all of it. And I’ll tell you – 1999 was one of the best years of my career. It was also one of the strangest markets I’ve ever seen in nearly 50 years in this business. Capital was flowing faster than fundamentals could justify.

My Stock Grader system kept me focused on what actually mattered: real earnings, real institutional conviction. A lot of the dot-com darlings never showed up in my system at all – and a lot of them went to zero.

But the companies with genuine fundamentals underneath the noise survived. And the ones – like Amazon – that used the window tactically didn’t just survive. They won the whole decade.

Right now, the AI boom is rhyming with that moment in ways that I find both exciting and instructive. But at the same time, this is not the dot-com boom – the fundamentals are far stronger.

So, in this piece, I want to show you why this AI boom reminds me so much of the late 1990s… why I believe some AI stocks could be much higher by year-end… and why the smartest move today is not to run for the exits when things get choppy, but to get more tactical.

And finally, I’ll tell you about a new tool that can help you do just that…

The ChatGPT Moment

I recently got my hands on a chart from our friends at Bespoke Investment Group comparing the Nasdaq Composite’s performance during the internet boom of the late 1990s with its current path during the AI boom.

The comparison is striking.

ChatGPT appears to have done for AI what Netscape did for the internet.

When Netscape came along, investors realized the internet wasn’t just a neat new technology. It was a business revolution. Money poured into the companies building that new world, and the Nasdaq soared.

We’re seeing that same basic story today.

ChatGPT woke people up to what AI can actually do. And Wall Street quickly figured out how much infrastructure that was going to require.

The fact is that the boom is backed by real sales, real earnings, and real order backlogs.

Look at Bloom Energy Corp. (BE), for example. The company helps make fuel cell generators, which data centers need to produce power on-site so they don’t have to rely on the electrical grid.

Bloom Energy’s current product backlog is about $6 billion, while its total backlog exceeds $20 billion.

At this rate, it will take years to deliver what is already in the pipeline. And Bloom Energy isn’t an outlier. This story is playing out across the AI and data center space.

Companies are receiving more orders than sales. That makes this a real capital spending cycle.

That is why I remain bullish. Personally, I think the AI and data center stocks across my premium services could be another 30% to 40% higher between now and the end of the year.

But that does not mean investors should get complacent.

Summer Could Get Bumpy

August and early September tend to be volatile. Seemingly everyone on Wall Street and in Europe is on vacation, trading volume thins out and unscrupulous short sellers come out of the woodwork.

So, I would not be surprised if the market gets bumpy.

In fact, Bespoke also shows that the Nasdaq took a significant dip between late May and October 1998 – right in the middle of what turned out to be a historic bull run. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar this summer.

But here’s the key insight: If the AI Revolution continues to follow the internet boom’s path, a summer pullback would not mark the end of this bull market. It could simply set the stage for much higher levels later in 2026 and beyond.

That is why I do not want you to follow the “sell in May and go away” crowd to the exits.

We remain in one of the best earnings environments of our lifetime. Analysts continue to revise estimates higher. Companies keep beating expectations. Fundamentally superior stocks with accelerating earnings and sales growth should continue to lead.

But there is a big difference between staying invested and just closing your eyes.

The late 1990s created tremendous wealth. But that market did not move in a straight line. Even great stocks got hit hard from time to time. The investors who panicked during those pullbacks often missed the biggest gains that came next.

That is the real risk this summer.

Not that a great stock has a bad week. The real risk is that you let a bad week scare you out of a great stock right before the next leg higher.

And that’s why I’ve been working with my friends over at TradeSmith on something special – something that’s specifically designed for times like this.

Stay Bullish, but Get Tactical

In my view, the answer is simple: Stay bullish, but get tactical.

That means focusing on fundamentally superior companies. It means paying attention to earnings momentum, sales growth, and analyst revisions. It means having a better way to track whether the stocks you own are still healthy in the short term.

And it’s why I’ve been paying close attention to what my friends at TradeSmith have been building.

On Wednesday, June 10, at 10 a.m. Eastern, I’m teaming up with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan for a special event.

Keith and his team have spent years building technology designed to help investors make more tactical decisions. And during this event, we’re going to show you a new AI-powered approach to navigating today’s faster-moving market.

I don’t want to give away the full story today. That is what the event is for. But here’s the basic idea…

If this market really is rhyming with the late 1990s, investors need to be prepared for two things at once:

Before the event, you can even test-drive part of the technology for yourself. You can enter the ticker symbols of stocks you already own – or stocks you are thinking about buying – and see how the system evaluates their short-term health.

That is exactly the kind of tool I believe investors should have at their fingertips in a market like this.

When volatility picks up, you don’t want to guess. You don’t want to rely on fear. And you do not want to get shaken out of a great long-term opportunity because the market has a bad week.

That’s why I encourage you to sign up for our free event. And to try out the free ticker tool before the event.

Jeff Bezos didn’t close his eyes in 1999 and hope for the best. He got tactical.

That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do right now.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Editor, Market 360

The post The Biggest Mistake AI Investors Could Make This Summer appeared first on InvestorPlace.

Not because he thinks the market is about to crash, but because he believes investors need to be prepared for both opportunity and volatility.

I invited Louis here today to explain what he’s seeing – and why he’s teaming up with TradeSmith for a free special event on June 10 to help investors navigate what’s next. You can register for that free broadcast here.

And here’s Louis…

In 1999, Jeff Bezos was doing something that drove Wall Street absolutely crazy.

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) was already a public company. And it was already capable of producing profits — if Bezos had wanted to. But instead, he kept aggressively reinvesting. Instead of worrying about profits, he was building warehouses, distribution infrastructure, and technology systems.

Every quarter, the margins that should have been there weren’t, because every dollar was going right back into the Amazon machine.

Analysts were furious. Where are the profits? What exactly are we owning here?

Meanwhile, all around Amazon, the dot-com boom was producing companies with no revenue, no product, sometimes no coherent business model at all — and their stocks were tripling. The whole market was chasing a story.

Who looks most like the future? Who has the best narrative? Wall Street was funding them fast and asking questions later.

Bezos wasn’t playing that game.

What he understood — and almost nobody else did back then — is that 1999 capital was a once-in-a-generation resource. Every dollar of market enthusiasm could be converted into permanent infrastructure: fulfillment capacity, distribution reach, systems that got cheaper the more volume they handled. He wasn’t optimizing for this quarter. He was building something that would be almost impossible to replicate once the window closed.

When the music stopped in 2000, it stopped for everybody. The story companies – do I need to mention Pets.com? – vanished almost overnight.

Amazon went through its own brutal drawdown, but the infrastructure Bezos built was still there. The customer relationships were still there. The cost curves were still bending in the right direction.

By 2005, Bezos looked like a genius. In 1999, he just looked tactical.

I was managing money through all of it. And I’ll tell you — 1999 was one of the best years of my career. It was also one of the strangest markets I’ve ever seen in nearly 50 years in this business. Capital was flowing faster than fundamentals could justify.

My Stock Grader system kept me focused on what actually mattered: real earnings, real institutional conviction. A lot of the dot-com darlings never showed up in my system at all — and a lot of them went to zero.

But the companies with genuine fundamentals underneath the noise survived. And the ones — like Amazon — that used the window tactically didn’t just survive. They won the whole decade.

Right now, the AI boom is rhyming with that moment in ways that I find both exciting and instructive. But at the same time,  this is not the dot-com boom — the fundamentals are far stronger.

So, in this piece, I want to show you why this AI boom reminds me so much of the late 1990s… why I believe some AI stocks could be much higher by year-end… and why the smartest move today is not to run for the exits when things get choppy, but to get more tactical.

And finally, I’ll tell you about a new tool that can help you do just that…

The ChatGPT Moment

I recently got my hands on a chart from our friends at Bespoke Investment Group comparing the Nasdaq Composite’s performance during the internet boom of the late 1990s with its current path during the AI boom.

The comparison is striking.

ChatGPT appears to have done for AI what Netscape did for the internet.

When Netscape came along, investors realized the internet wasn’t just a neat new technology. It was a business revolution. Money poured into the companies building that new world, and the Nasdaq soared.

We’re seeing that same basic story today.

ChatGPT woke people up to what AI can actually do. And Wall Street quickly figured out how much infrastructure that was going to require.

The fact is that the boom is backed by real sales, real earnings, and real order backlogs.

Look at Bloom Energy Corp. (BE), for example. The company helps make fuel cell generators, which data centers need to produce power on-site so they don’t have to rely on the electrical grid.

Bloom Energy’s current product backlog is about $6 billion, while its total backlog exceeds $20 billion.

At this rate, it will take years to deliver what is already in the pipeline. And Bloom Energy isn’t an outlier. This story is playing out across the AI and data center space.

Companies are receiving more orders than sales. That makes this a real capital spending cycle.

That is why I remain bullish. Personally, I think the AI and data center stocks across my premium services could be another 30% to 40% higher between now and the end of the year.

But that does not mean investors should get complacent.

Summer Could Get Bumpy

August and early September tend to be volatile. Seemingly everyone on Wall Street and in Europe are on vacation, trading volume thins out, and unscrupulous short sellers come out of the woodwork.

So, I would not be surprised if the market gets bumpy.

In fact, Bespoke also shows that the Nasdaq took a significant dip between late May and October 1998 — right in the middle of what turned out to be a historic bull run. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar this summer.

But here’s the key insight: If the AI Revolution continues to follow the internet boom’s path, a summer pullback would not mark the end of this bull market. It could simply set the stage for much higher levels later in 2026 and beyond.

That is why I do not want you to follow the “sell in May and go away” crowd to the exits.

We remain in one of the best earnings environments of our lifetime. Analysts continue to revise estimates higher. Companies keep beating expectations. Fundamentally superior stocks with accelerating earnings and sales growth should continue to lead.

But there is a big difference between staying invested and just closing your eyes.

The late 1990s created tremendous wealth. But that market did not move in a straight line. Even great stocks got hit hard from time to time. The investors who panicked during those pullbacks often missed the biggest gains that came next.

That is the real risk this summer.

Not that a great stock has a bad week. The real risk is that you let a bad week scare you out of a great stock right before the next leg higher.

And that’s why I’ve been working with my friends over at TradeSmith on something special – something that’s specifically designed for times like this.

Stay Bullish, but Get Tactical

In my view, the answer is simple: Stay bullish, but get tactical.

That means focusing on fundamentally superior companies. It means paying attention to earnings momentum, sales growth, and analyst revisions. It means having a better way to track whether the stocks you own are still healthy in the short term.

And it’s why I’ve been paying close attention to what my friends at TradeSmith have been building.

On Wednesday, June 10, at 10 a.m. Eastern, I’m teaming up with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan for a special event.

Keith and his team have spent years building technology designed to help investors make more tactical decisions. And during this event, we’re going to show you a new AI-powered approach to navigating today’s faster-moving market.

I don’t want to give away the full story today. That is what the event is for. But here’s the basic idea…

If this market really is rhyming with the late 1990s, investors need to be prepared for two things at once:

Before the event, you can even test-drive part of the technology for yourself. You can enter the ticker symbols of stocks you already own – or stocks you are thinking about buying – and see how the system evaluates their short-term health.

That is exactly the kind of tool I believe investors should have at their fingertips in a market like this.

When volatility picks up, you don’t want to guess. You don’t want to rely on fear. And you do not want to get shaken out of a great long-term opportunity because the market has a bad week.

That’s why I encourage you to sign up for our free event. And to try out the free ticker tool before the event.

Jeff Bezos didn’t close his eyes in 1999 and hope for the best. He got tactical.

That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do right now.

Sincerely,

Louis Navellier

Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace

P.S. I think Louis makes an important point here. The question isn’t whether the AI boom is over. The question is how investors navigate the inevitable volatility along the way. That’s exactly what he’ll be discussing during his upcoming event with TradeSmith. If you haven’t registered for Louis’ free event yet, I’d encourage you to do so now.

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:

Bloom Energy Corporation (BE)

The post This Market Looks Like 1999, and That Should Make You Pay Attention appeared first on InvestorPlace.