The Supreme Court struck down the tariffs. The checks are in the mail.
A one-time legal windfall is not an earnings trend — know which of your companies got a check and which got a business. Action: nothing bought on refunds; where refunds flatter a quarter, we mark the underlying number and move on.
Heard on the Street: nine columns, one verdict on our themes.
The Journal’s skeptics filed nine columns this week. We put the model themes on trial against all of them — five validations, two warnings, and one column that confirmed our only buy of the week forty-eight hours after we made it.
When the skeptics’ desk agrees with you twice in three days, you write down what would make you wrong. We did.
The Journal made our case for us: inflation protection is on sale.
Heard on the Street ran the numbers on Thursday: 30-year TIPS pay about 3% above inflation, the highest in years, with a break-even near 2.2% against headline CPI of 3.4%. Five-year TIPS clear 2.1% real. We added the position on Wednesday. It is nice when the homework gets graded the same week.
This is the week’s one genuine action, now double-sourced: LTPZ joins the income sleeve, tax-deferred accounts only. Ladder shorter maturities alongside it if you want the flexibility — and remember TIPS track headline CPI, groceries and gasoline included.
The data centers gave up on the grid and started building their own.
A single gigawatt data center eats what a thousand Walmarts do, and in many places the grid can’t connect one until the 2030s. So Musk parked 69 temporary turbines in Memphis, Chevron signed a 20-year deal to power Microsoft in West Texas, and Williams is building off-grid gas generation for Meta in Ohio. A McKinsey survey found 65% of power executives now plan on-site generation — and 64% of those will burn natural gas.
Bring-Your-Own-Power is the thesis the energy sleeve was waiting for: CVX and WMB are no longer just oil-and-toll holdings, they’re AI infrastructure with a dividend. REINFORCE both; this is the strongest confirmation the sleeve has had.
America defended the yen by selling euros. Read that twice.
Heard’s Spencer Jakab caught the tell: when Washington moved to prop up a yen sliding toward 166, it sold euros rather than dollars — keeping pressure off the dollar and off Treasury yields already near multidecade highs. With federal borrowing about to cross $40 trillion, the mechanics of who props up whom are becoming the story.
Currency plumbing is not a trade for us; it’s a warning label on duration. Yields near multidecade highs plus $40 trillion of borrowing is exactly why the ladder stays short and TIPS do the long-horizon work.
The richest sports sale in history happened because the seller needed cash.
Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner agreed to buy control of the Lakers at a $12.5 billion valuation — struck in 72 hours — because Mark Walter needed liquidity to steady insurance companies now under federal investigation over billions in loans routed to his own entities. He had bought the team a year earlier at a then-record $10 billion.
Two weeks running, the fine print says the same thing: private, illiquid, self-referential credit is where this cycle’s stress lives. Even a trophy asset can be a margin call wearing a jersey. The BDC avoid stands.
Two lessons in expectations: a World Cup that broke StubHub, and Ackman rebuilding.
StubHub’s revenue jumped 33% on the World Cup and its costs jumped 37%, wiping out the quarter; the stock is down about 70% from its IPO price inside a year. Meanwhile Bill Ackman — whose funds sat out the chip rally — is rebuilding around Visa, Mastercard and Netflix while his newest fund trades at a 22% discount to its own assets.
The event everyone can see is priced before you get there; the toll booths keep collecting whether or not the tournament goes well. Ackman rotating toward payment networks is, awkwardly for him, the same conclusion this book reached two years ago.
Chips fell 29%, then rose 19% in nineteen days. Nothing changed but the mood.
The semiconductor index went from record to bear market to nearly out again in about a month — the shortest bear market since 2020 — while Korea’s Kospi ripped 22% off its July low into its own bull market on Samsung and SK Hynix. Regulators there are simultaneously cracking down on leveraged ETFs, which tells you who was doing the buying.
This is what a crowded trade’s heartbeat looks like: violence without news. We hold the AI toll booths through it and decline the leverage that turns a round trip into a permanent loss.
The Wine at Mile Twenty.
A marathon with twenty wine stops, men feeding their heartbeats to chatbots, grandparents outliving their peers, and two families racing wheelbarrows for a surname — four stories having the same argument, and it’s the one your plan is secretly about.
Involvement compounds; obligation corrodes. The plan that models best is rarely the plan that survives year eleven.
Greece’s island ferries have earned a nickname: the vomit comets.
American visits to Greece have nearly quadrupled in a decade, and a good number of those visitors are now discovering the Naxos-to-Milos crossing the hard way — water sheeting down the windows, attendants sprinting the aisle, one passenger describing it as holding on for dear life. The fix, per a ferry specialist: bigger boats, direct routes, patches bought before boarding.
File under the same heading as last week’s unstoppable American tourist: the travel line in a retirement plan is real spending that deserves real planning. Including, apparently, dramamine.
Tim Cook’s last tour: a Texas factory, a $600 billion promise, and the door.
Cook walked a new Foxconn plant near Austin that will build Mac Minis, alongside a manufacturing school — part of Apple’s $600 billion domestic pledge and a $30 billion commitment to American-made chips. He is expected to hand the chief executive job to hardware chief John Ternus next month and become chairman.
Succession at the most valuable company in the world is a governance event, not a product event — and it lands as Apple’s memory-chip costs and China exposure are both live questions. AAPL stays a WATCH, not an add.
China is building more cars than the world has boats to carry.
Chinese factories may export up to 10 million vehicles this year — from under 600,000 in 2019 — and charter rates for car-carrier ships are up 65%. Some automakers are so desperate they’re stuffing cars into shipping containers. In Europe, BYD’s registrations more than doubled while Volkswagen managed 2.6%.
Watch the shipping rate, not the press release: the freight market is telling you the export wave is real and the legacy carmakers’ problem is structural. Our international sleeve stays out of the way of that fight.
Cuba threw a hundredth birthday party. The lights kept going out.
A week of ballet, poetry and three hundred academic papers on Castro Thought — staged in a country where electricity and water vanish for days and garbage piles in the street. One analyst called it political necrophilia, which is harsh, accurate, and hard to improve upon.
No portfolio angle whatsoever. It stays in the paper as the week’s reminder that an idea can outlive the economy that was supposed to prove it.
The WNBA has never been bigger, or messier.
Attendance is at an all-time high, viewership is up 15%, the league has a $3.1 billion broadcast deal and is heading to eighteen teams — and the season has been consumed by feuds, flagrant fouls, ejections and death threats. Growth and chaos, arriving together, as they usually do.
Every fast-growing enterprise hits the stage where the product outruns the governance. It is true of leagues, and it is true of the AI names in every portfolio on this page.
Five papers, one week: what we actually learned.
Inflation cooled to 3.4% and bought the Fed a month. Earnings beat by the widest margin since 2008. The Supreme Court’s tariff ruling posted $9.6 billion of refunds. The UAE left OPEC and the strait stayed shut. And the single best idea in five days of newsprint was a government bond paying 3% above inflation.
Two model actions this week and both are defensive: LTPZ into the income sleeve, and Pfizer’s coverage review closed with a trim. In a week of records, the portfolio got more conservative on purpose. That is usually how it should work.