Nine Up Days In A Row. The Market's Longest Winning Streak In Over A Year Is The Calmest One We've Seen.

When we wrote the weekend edition, the story was "cheap oil and three records." Three trading days later, two of those threads have already evolved — and that is exactly the lesson we keep repeating to clients: a great headline is not a thesis. Oil didn't stay cheap. West Texas crude (WTI) climbed for three straight sessions, jumping 5.5% on Monday alone, and finished Tuesday at $93.76. The "peace dividend" that knocked oil down 19% in May turned out to be a dip to buy, not a trend to chase. That's why we never sold our energy overweight — ExxonMobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), and Cheniere Energy (LNG) stayed right where they were.

The engine under the streak is the same one we've been describing all spring: the artificial-intelligence build-out is showing up in real revenue, not just press releases. Monday's Journal led with a front-page piece arguing the AI-driven rally could keep running despite its height — memory-chip maker Micron (MU) is up roughly tenfold in a year and now worth more than a trillion dollars, Intel (INTC) has tripled in 2026, and the chip index just had its best 100-day start ever. Goldman Sachs (GS) raised its year-end S&P target again. None of that is a reason to abandon discipline — but it is a reason to stay invested and tilted toward the picks-and-shovels of the cycle rather than the flashy application names.

We made four additions and several reinforcements this week. The headline buy is Marvell Technology (MRVL); we also added Dollar General (DG), Motorola Solutions (MSI), and MP Materials (MP). The full reasoning is below, and the cascaded positions are on the Portfolios page.

Nvidia's CEO Says Marvell "Could Be The Next Trillion-Dollar Company." We Bought It.

When the most important person in the chip business points at his neighbor and says "that one's going to be huge," it's worth listening. On Tuesday, Nvidia (NVDA) chief executive Jensen Huang said Marvell Technology (MRVL) — a company most people outside the industry have never heard of — "could become the next trillion-dollar company." Marvell shares jumped about 7% on the comment. So what does Marvell actually do? In plain English: it designs the custom chips and the optical "plumbing" that move data around inside an AI data center. Nvidia builds the brains; Marvell builds a lot of the nervous system that connects them.

This is the part of the AI story we like best — the cycle widening out beyond a single stock. For most of the last two years, "the AI trade" basically meant Nvidia. Now the same demand is pulling up the companies that supply custom silicon, networking, optics, power, and cooling. A broadening rally is a healthier rally; it means the spending is real enough to lift an entire supply chain, not just one logo. Marvell sits squarely in that widening, alongside Broadcom (AVGO), which we already own.

We added Marvell Technology (MRVL) to the Aggressive Growth tactical tiers this week at a starter ~2% weight, and reinforced Nvidia (NVDA) and Broadcom (AVGO). To be clear-eyed about it: these stocks are not cheap, and a single disappointing data-center order could knock 10% off any of them on a Tuesday. That's why it's a starter position, not a swing. Full Marvell write-up here.

Washington Puts AI On A Leash. Why That's Not The Bad News The Headlines Suggest.

President Trump signed an executive order this week asking the major AI companies to give the administration access to their most powerful models a full 30 days before public release. The order, shaped in part by White House AI adviser David Sacks, is the clearest sign yet that AI oversight is coming — and it lands on top of the cultural pushback we've been tracking for weeks (the Pope's encyclical, the campus protests, Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI and Anthropic). Same week, the new Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, named two outside advisers, one of whom co-wrote a blueprint to restructure the Federal Reserve.

Here's the counter-intuitive part. A pre-release review window is a headache for the labs, but it's not an existential threat — and for the public, large, regulated technology companies, a clear rulebook can actually be a moat. Regulation is expensive to comply with, which favors the giants (Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Nvidia (NVDA)) over the long tail of unfunded startups. The risk we're watching is narrower: if oversight slows the release cadence of new models, the most expensive "AI application" stocks — the ones priced for flawless quarterly acceleration — have the most to lose. The infrastructure names we favor have demand booked years out regardless of which model ships in which month.

No position changes on the policy news alone. We're keeping our gold (IAU) and dividend sleeves as the hedge against a regulatory-driven multiple compression, and staying tilted to infrastructure over applications. Full policy read-through here.

Oil Climbed Three Straight Days. The Weekend's "Cheap Oil Forever" Story Was Already Wrong.

Three trading days is all it took. West Texas crude (WTI) rose 5.5% on Monday and kept climbing Tuesday to $93.76 a barrel, as the war-peace optimism that crushed oil in May ran into the reality of a still-tight market. We told you in the weekend edition that we were not selling our energy overweight on the peace headline — that the structural price of oil is higher, not lower, once the war premium clears, because a decade of under-investment in drilling, aging refineries, and a power grid straining under data-center demand all add up to tight supply. This week the tape agreed with us.

There was a quirky confirmation buried in Wednesday's paper, too: a feature on truckers literally driving slower to save fuel, because diesel is now up 44%. When the people who move America's freight are easing off the accelerator, that's a real-economy signal that energy costs are biting again — and it's bullish for the integrated majors and the refiners, not bearish.

We reinforced ExxonMobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), and Cheniere Energy (LNG) this week. The energy overweight stays. The truckers story — and what it means for the energy book — here.

Dollar General Beat And Raised — And Jumped 8%. The Discounter Is Telling Us Something.

Dollar General (DG) reported strong results this week and raised its outlook for the year, sending the stock up 8.2%. The driver, in the company's own words, was "value-seeking consumers" — shoppers trading down to stretch a dollar. That's a double-edged signal: it's great for Dollar General and it's a quiet caution flag on the health of the everyday American budget. Both things can be true, and a well-built portfolio should hold something that does well in each case.

We think of Dollar General as a barbell against the AI trade. If the melt-up keeps going, our chip and power names carry the book. If the consumer wobbles and the froth comes out of the expensive end of the market, a defensive discounter with pricing power and a raised forecast is exactly the kind of ballast you want. It also pays a dividend and trades at a far more forgiving valuation than anything with "AI" in the pitch.

We added Dollar General (DG) to the tactical tiers this week at ~1.5%. Full Dollar General note here.

The Counter-Drone Arms Race Goes Mainstream. Motorola Just Bought Its Way In.

Three stories landed on top of each other this week. Russia intensified its drone-and-missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, killing at least 22 people in a single Kyiv barrage. The U.S. Army said it is "jailbreaking" its own weapon systems — opening them up so they can plug in new software fast — specifically to counter the drone threat. And Motorola Solutions (MSI), best known for police radios, agreed to buy a counter-drone technology firm (D-Fend) for roughly $1.5 billion. Read together, they describe a market that's moving from "battlefield novelty" to "permanent line item."

Cheap drones have rewritten modern conflict, and the money is now flowing to whoever can detect and stop them. Motorola is an interesting way to own that without making a pure-play bet on a single defense prime — it has a steady public-safety communications business (the radios in nearly every U.S. squad car) plus this new, fast-growing counter-drone arm. We also reinforced the core defense sleeve: Lockheed Martin (LMT), RTX Corp (RTX), General Dynamics (GD), and Northrop Grumman (NOC).

We added Motorola Solutions (MSI) this week at ~1.5% and reinforced the defense primes. Full counter-drone brief here.

America Is Trying To Build Magnets Without China. It Matters More Than It Sounds.

Here's a sentence that runs the modern world and almost nobody thinks about: the powerful magnets inside electric-car motors, wind turbines, missiles, and factory robots are mostly made from rare-earth elements, and China controls roughly 90% of that supply chain. Wednesday's Journal ran a terrific feature on three companies trying to change that — led by a Minnesota startup called Niron Magnetics, which makes a powerful magnet out of iron and nitrogen with no rare earths in it at all. The Department of Energy is funding the effort. If it works at scale, it quietly removes one of the biggest single points of leverage China has over the West.

Niron itself is private, so you can't buy it directly. But the theme — "magnets and rare-earth materials that don't run through Beijing" — has a public expression we like: MP Materials (MP), which runs the only operating rare-earth mine in the United States and is building domestic magnet-making capacity. It's part defense story, part energy-transition story, and part geopolitics story, which is exactly the kind of multi-engine thesis that tends to age well. It's also volatile and tied to commodity prices, so we're sizing it as a thematic starter, not a core holding.

We added MP Materials (MP) at a ~1.5% thematic weight this week. The full rare-earth-without-China write-up — with the supply-chain map and the names to watch — is here. This is the piece to send any client who keeps asking "what's our China hedge?"

While Everyone Watched AI, Buffett Bought A Homebuilder And An Airline. And Saylor Sold Bitcoin.

Two small stories this week told a bigger one about discipline. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) agreed to buy homebuilder Taylor Morrison (TMHC) for $6.8 billion and disclosed a new $2.6 billion stake in Delta Air Lines (DAL) — classic Buffett, buying boring, cash-generating businesses while the crowd chases chips. On the other end of the spectrum, Michael Saylor's Strategy (MSTR, the old MicroStrategy) sold bitcoin for the first time since 2022 — a small sale, just to cover a preferred-stock dividend, but a meaningful tell about the limits of the "borrow money and buy crypto" corporate model when the bills come due.

We don't own MSTR or bitcoin-treasury proxies in the models, and this week is a good illustration of why: a business whose only engine is a volatile asset has to sell that asset at the worst possible moments. We do own Berkshire (BRK.B) across the tiers as our quality-and-cash anchor, and weeks like this are why. The contrast — Buffett buying durable cash flows, Saylor selling the family silver to pay a dividend — is the whole philosophy of the book in one screen.

No changes; reinforcing the message. We're holding Berkshire (BRK.B) and steering clear of crypto-treasury equities. Full note on the Buffett / Saylor split here.