Thinking.
What we publish, and what we think right now.
- August 2026
- Editions The Intelligence Report Twenty-six standing reports: the Pundit Scorecard on a year of forecasts that missed, three market-history lessons, the AI money loop, four planning fundamentals, the true cost of living longer, and four Off Duty reads. Evergreen.
- Briefings Nvidia Promised Its Suppliers $279 Billion Nvidia's supply-chain commitments more than doubled to $279 billion in one quarter, on top of a $105 billion OpenAI lease backstop and up to $125 billion of residual-value support.
- Briefings Three Trillion Dollars Sits in Cash. Here Is the Honest Math. Retail money-market funds hold more than $3 trillion, near a record. They yielded 3.49% against 3.4% inflation, which is a tie before taxes and a small loss after them.
- Briefings Swapping Indexes to Dodge SpaceX Was Pretty Much a Wash Investors who switched from a total-market index to the S&P 500 to avoid SpaceX gained almost nothing. Both returned about 2.5%. Index shopping is stock picking with extra steps.
- Briefings Burned-Out Workers Are Going to Clown School to Practice Failing Corporate attorneys and therapists are filling clowning workshops that sell out fast, while the offices they came from aim for 60% to 80% of the workday to register as utilized.
- Briefings Coca-Cola Sold 417,000 Shares in 1919. It Sells 1.9 Billion Drinks a Day. A syndicate of banks bought 417,000 Coca-Cola shares on Aug. 26, 1919, to resell at $40. Coke returned 30.31% in 2026 against the S&P 500's 12.1%. What the slow winner is worth owning.
- Briefings Living Longer Is Wonderful. Someone Still Pays the Premium. U.S. life expectancy hit a record 79 years while employers brace for an 11% health-cost increase in 2027, the steepest in more than two decades.
- Briefings Your Insurance Card Decides How Long You Wait for Cancer Care A JAMA Surgery study of 2.7 million cancer patients found private insurance brought the shortest waits from diagnosis to treatment and Medicaid the longest.
- Briefings The Dog Got the House. The Owners Got the Renovation Bill. Howard and Suze Rubin paid $1,825,000 for a Pound Ridge house in 2019, then spent roughly $2 million more making it right for their bearded collie. The asking price is now $2.9 million.
- Briefings The $2.9 Million House Belongs to the Dog A couple, both 77, spent about $300,000 remodeling a New York house around their bearded collie. Now they are listing it for $2.9 million and downsizing to Florida.
- Briefings A Pancreatic Cancer Drug Finally Works. It Costs $477,000 a Year. The FDA cleared Rasonque after patients lived a median 13.2 months versus 6.7 on chemotherapy alone. Revolution Medicines priced it at $39,800 a month.
- Briefings The Pension Is a Promise. Own Something Outside It. California may let firefighters collect pay and pension at once. Washington swept $3.9 billion from a police-and-fire fund that was 160% funded. The lesson for safety members is the same.
- Briefings The World Owes $350 Trillion and the Interest Is Due Global debt has passed $350 trillion, about 305% of world output. France, Britain, Italy and Japan are all paying up, and France now yields 0.85 points more than Germany.
- Briefings Bill Gates Says There Is No Plan for the AI Era In a 12-page essay, the Microsoft co-founder called for AI regulation, taxes on AI tokens and bots, and jobs deliberately set aside for humans. Unemployment is still 4.1%. That is his point.
- Briefings Pick the Date First. The Portfolio Will Follow. How to set a financial goal with a real date on it, and why the timeframe changes the portfolio more than the goal ever does.
- Briefings 130 Ships a Day Became 15. Everything Repriced. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed from about 130 vessels a day to roughly 15, and the price of gasoline, shipping and global inflation all moved with it.
- Briefings The Index Fund Turns 50. It Started as a Punchline. Jack Bogle's first index fund raised $11 million in 1976 and was mocked as a folly. Over the past 15 years only 10% of managers tracking the S&P 500 have beaten it.
- Briefings Two Controllers Went Home Early. Two Pilots Never Did. The FAA is moving to fire two air traffic controllers who left about an hour early before a deadly LaGuardia crash, part of a wider timecard problem inside a stretched workforce.
- Briefings You Are Living Longer. The Data Just Made It Official. American life expectancy reached a record 79 in 2024. Heart-disease death rates are down 39% since 2000 and cancer death rates down 31%. Retirement plans should catch up.
- Briefings The Habits That Add Years Are Free. The Industry Selling Them Is Not. Elite longevity memberships run up to $250,000 a year. The evidence favors walking 150 minutes a week, sleep, social connection and a hearing aid.
- Briefings Lucent Lent Customers the Money to Buy Its Gear. It Did Not End Well. Lucent financed its own less-creditworthy customers in the dot-com boom and shrank to a third of its workforce. Nvidia's backstops now reach some $230 billion. What that means if you own an index fund.
- Briefings The Cancer Line Moves Slower Depending on Your Insurance Card A study of 2.7 million patients found Medicaid patients 11% to 42% more likely to wait a month or more for cancer surgery, and Medicare patients 4% to 12% more likely.
- Briefings Nvidia Added $442 Billion in a Day. The Fine Print Added $279 Billion. Nvidia jumped 8.7% and added $442 billion in market value. Its promises to suppliers doubled to $279 billion, and gross margin is heading from 74% to 71.5%.
- Briefings The Quarter the Tariff Refunds Came Home Abercrombie, Kohl’s, Bath & Body Works and Dollar Tree all booked large tariff refunds, and investors treated one-time money like recurring money.
- Briefings A Carmaker Thinks Its Best Business Will Be a Robot XPeng values its robotics unit above $6.3 billion and sees hardware margins above 50%, against 12.1% on cars. The unit has yet to earn meaningful revenue. Fewer than 200 humanoids work in factories today.
- Briefings How to Read a Forecast A year of graded predictions on oil, rates, jobs, inflation and bitcoin boils down to three rules for reading the next confident headline number without obeying it.
- Briefings The Year the Cuts Never Came Wall Street entered 2026 expecting several Fed rate cuts. The target range never moved from 3.50%–3.75%, mortgages got pricier, and by late August a Fed president was discussing a hike.
- Briefings The Recession That Kept Not Arriving Journal-surveyed economists put 12-month recession odds at 27%, 32%, then 33% in 2026. No recession came, the S&P 500 rallied to records, and sitting out cost double digits.
- Briefings The 15-Week Credential Just Got Federal Backing Workforce Pell grants now cover trade programs of 8 to 15 weeks, up to $7,400 a year that never has to be repaid, with real job-placement guardrails.
- Briefings The Social Security Math Has a Date on It Now The trustees put the old-age fund exhaustion in late 2032, implying a roughly 22% benefit cut. How to plan on 78 cents on the dollar and stay calm.
- Briefings He Set the Fastest Time. Someone Else Got the Record. Enzo Wu, 17, has the quickest known run through every BART station. No witnesses on one attempt and a bicycle on another mean the official record belongs to seven Berkeley students.
- Briefings The $20,000 Concert Habit and the Spreadsheet Behind It Harry Styles is playing 30 nights at Madison Square Garden. One fan spent $6,196.87 on tickets to 15 of them, and another tracks every dollar of a roughly $20,000 habit in a spreadsheet.
- Briefings The Trades Pay. The Robot Is Still in Its Cage. Entry-level plumbers earn close to $50,000 and masters about double. Ford has 5,000 mechanic openings paying up to $120,000. What a good year in the trades should become.
- Briefings Washington Wants a Piece of 90 Billion Barrels The U.S. is in talks for a direct stake in more than 17 Venezuelan oil fields holding roughly 90 billion barrels — and what that means for an energy sleeve built on tolls, not on barrels.
- Briefings Washington Was Evicted From New York and Won the War Anyway Gen. Nathanael Greene described the Revolution in seven words. The same idea sets how much cash a retirement plan should hold, why $3 trillion is sitting still, and what all-cash saving actually costs.
- Briefings Five Papers, One Week: The Machines Delivered, the Bills Arrived Nvidia earned $59.7 billion and added $442 billion in a day. The same papers carried a 5.31% thirty-year yield, a hawkish Fed voice, and $18 trillion of government borrowing. The week, in one place.
- Briefings What the Fee Is Actually For Vanguard is paying about $4 billion for Altruist while index funds charge $3 per $10,000. What an advisory fee actually buys now is behavior and a fiduciary duty.
- Briefings Wheat Just Had Its Loudest Week Since 2023 Wheat hit its 45-cent daily limit, then settled at $7.60 and three-quarters a bushel, the highest close since July 2023 and about 30% above the end-of-June low.
- Briefings Three People Are Steering This Market. They Disagree. A Fed chairman at Jackson Hole, a Fed president open to a hike, and a Treasury secretary buying back long bonds. Where the market heads next depends on who wins the argument.
- Editions The Week the Machines Paid Off and the Bond Market Sent a Bill Twelve reads from the August 28 Journal and the week behind it: Nvidia’s $442 billion day, a 5.31% thirty-year yield, $350 trillion of government debt, record American life expectancy, cancer-surgery waits that track your insurance card, wheat at a two-year high — and a $2.9 million house that belongs to the dog.
- Briefings $18 Billion, and Your Grandkids' Phones Get a Bedtime Meta settled with 48 state attorneys general for $18 billion, agreeing to default two-hour teen limits, a midnight-to-6am night mode and a school mode. What the settlement means for META holders.
- Briefings Azure Grew 41%. Of What, The Company Will Not Say. Microsoft reports its flagship cloud business as a growth rate with no dollar base, and a $145.3 billion capital-spending figure that does not tie to the $115.9 billion in the cash-flow statement.
- Briefings The 24-Year-Old Who Ran $45 Billion Into A Wall Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund managed up to $45 billion and unraveled last month on a concentrated, borrowed AI position. What the collapse says about leverage and position size.
- Briefings Nvidia Promised 70% More. The Street Believed It. Nvidia posted record sales of $96.2 billion and forecast 70% revenue growth in 2028. What the margin guidance and the $230 billion of financing promises mean for the Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio.
- Briefings The First Real Win Against the Worst Cancer The FDA cleared Revolution Medicines' Rasonque for pancreatic cancer: median survival of 13.2 months versus 6.7 on chemotherapy, a 60% cut in risk of death, and a $477,000 annual price.
- Briefings Vanguard Just Bought The Pipes Your Advisor Runs On Vanguard, a $12 trillion manager, is buying the custodian Altruist for roughly $4 billion. What a price war in the $10 trillion independent-advice market means for the Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio.
- Editions The Machine Kept Its Promise. The Referee Might Change the Rules. Twelve reads from the August 26 and 27 Journals: Nvidia’s record quarter and a 70% forecast, the $230 billion web of promises holding up the AI trade, an $18 billion Meta settlement that gives phones a bedtime, the first real win against pancreatic cancer, Vanguard buying the pipes your advisor runs on, a 24-year-old who ran $45 billion into a wall — and Dolly Parton’s near-perfect estate plan.
- Briefings Canada Aimed At Wisconsin Cheese. The Bill Lands Everywhere. Canada is retaliating with tariffs of up to 50% on roughly 700 American products from Sept. 8, covering about $20 billion of goods. What the escalation means for inflation and the Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio.
- Briefings 3,000 Songs And One Nearly Perfect Estate Plan Dolly Parton died Tuesday at 80. A catalog of 3,000-plus songs she owned, a park drawing two million visitors a year, 200 million donated books, and a $1 million gift that helped seed a vaccine.
- Briefings Fourteen Million Koreans Rode the World's Craziest Market Korea's Kospi gained 76% in 2025, then dropped about 40% in six weeks, erasing roughly $2.5 trillion. What 14 million individual investors — and their margin loans — teach every retirement saver.
- Briefings Measles Killed Two Americans. It Didn't Have To. Two unvaccinated people died of measles in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the first US measles deaths this year. With 2,700 cases nationally and a 97% effective vaccine, this is a preventable-risk story.
- Briefings The $230 Billion Web of Promises Holding Up the AI Trade Nvidia sells the chips — and increasingly guarantees the deals that buy them. Inside the roughly $230 billion web of backstops, and the Lucent vendor-financing memory it stirs.
- Briefings The Social Security Clock Is Louder Than the Market Social Security's cash reserves run out by the end of the next president's first term, triggering across-the-board cuts of more than 20%. What a $40 trillion debt and doubling interest costs mean for your retirement income plan.
- Briefings America’s Seniors Are Getting High. Their Neighbors Are Getting Even. Seniors are the fastest-growing cannabis demographic, and the neighbor wars have reached the courts — a 145-violation log, a toilet-paper draft test, and sworn testimony denying Snoop Dogg status.
- Briefings Your Boss Wants the AI to Read Your Slack Messages. All of Them. CEOs are pushing staff out of DMs so AI agents can read everything — one company scores executives on their public-message percentage, and Google bid $10 million for a dead airline’s emails.
- Briefings The $2,500 Question: What Business Class Actually Buys You Now Alaska Airlines’ new trans-Atlantic business class, reviewed at $2,500 one-way: privacy suites, a sundae cart, no Wi-Fi at all — and the honest math for the retirement travel budget.
- Briefings Druckenmiller: Let the Bond Market Speak. Your Mortgage Already Is. Stanley Druckenmiller says Treasury is muzzling the last fiscal disciplinarian America has left, while the $40 trillion debt shows up in a 6.69% mortgage rate. Ladder short; USFR and LTPZ do the work.
- Briefings He Faced Big-League Pitching for 8 Years. The Scariest Test Was Accounting. Sam Fuld played 598 big-league games, then found real fear in a Wharton accounting midterm at 44 — and returned as Phillies president. The case for investing in yourself at mid-career.
- Briefings One in Five Job Ads Is a Ghost. Lawmakers Are Done Haunting Along. As many as one in five job postings is never filled. New York and Pennsylvania want fines, Texas is investigating LinkedIn — and Lynn Lee’s 16-month comeback at 66 shows what the emergency fund is really for.
- Briefings Washington Says the Oil Is Flowing. The People Who Count Ships Disagree. The Energy Secretary says 8 million barrels a day move through Hormuz; the ship-trackers count 2 to 6 million because tankers keep going dark. Crude fell $2 on sanctions day — price follows the trackers.
- Briefings He Runs $800 Billion. His Most Distressed Asset Is a Lobster Shack. Apollo CEO Marc Rowan’s Montauk lobster shack — $97 lobster salad, Dom Pérignon — has been losing to its neighbors and the zoning board for twelve years. In real estate, the process is the asset.
- Briefings The Most Important Earnings Call in the World Is Wednesday Nvidia fell seven straight days into Wednesday’s earnings while financing its own customers — a $500 billion backstop, a $6 billion open-weight AI deal, and one binary afternoon for the whole market.
- Briefings The $30 Part Broke. He Printed a New One for Pennies. A growing army of DIYers is 3-D printing the fifty-cent parts that total $30 tools and $300 appliances — repair culture is back, and it’s the cheapest inflation hedge in the house.
- Briefings Used iPhones Are Going UP in Value. Here’s How Not to Get Burned. Used phones normally lose 1% a week; this year they’re appreciating because the memory-chip crisis reached the checkout line. How to buy refurbished without inheriting spyware or a fire-hazard battery.
- Briefings Hockey Sticks, Honey and a 50% Wall: The Canada Trade War Is Real Now Trade talks collapsed at 11:30pm Friday, 50% tariffs hit $20 billion of Canadian goods Saturday, and Monday brought a threat against the whole auto supply chain — a $25 billion tax on America’s own carmakers.
- Briefings China’s Young Professionals Found a Career Coach: A 1,700-Year-Old Temple At Shanghai’s 1,700-year-old Dragon Flower Temple, the incense lines are full of young professionals praying for careers — a human story that doubles as the clearest macro read on China’s youth economy.
- Briefings The Whiskey Bust Is Tearing Apart an $11 Billion Kentucky Dynasty Brown-Forman is down 60% in five years, Sazerac is waving $15 billion, and two heirs accused their own board of rewarding failure. The family constitution was printed on the bottles; it didn’t help.
- Editions The Week Begins: Everything Is a Test. Nvidia’s Wednesday referendum, the 50% Canada tariff wall, Druckenmiller on the bond market — and a billionaire losing to a zoning board.
- Briefings The Wealth of Nations Turned 250 This Year. James Grant Went Back to the Pages. America’s was not the only semiquincentennial of 2026. Adam Smith’s great book also turned 250 — 27 years in the writing, 976 pages in the Modern Library edition, a 71-page detour on herring subsidies — and its two plainest lessons are about debt and about the invisible hand. Both are overdue a rereading.
- Briefings Alcaraz Is Back. The Grounds Pass Is $350. Both Things Are True. The defending champion sat out five months with a wrist injury and refused to rush it. The U.S. Open winner’s check is now $5.5 million. A $65 grounds pass resells for $350. Jason Gay on the best news tennis has had all summer, and the worst.
- Briefings He Became the Longest-Serving Manager in England by Not Getting Fired Mikel Arteta took the Arsenal job in 2019 with zero seasons of head-coaching experience and a league full of apex predators. Seven years later he is a champion and the senior figure in the Premier League — by nearly three years — mostly because everyone else is gone.
- Briefings They Paid $399,000 for the House That Jailed Ben Franklin’s Son Parts of it date to 1695. It held the Loyalist governor of New Jersey during the Revolution. The plumbing did not work and a bathroom was about to fall into the dining room. A young couple spent two years and $1 million fixing it, lived in an RV in the driveway, and are now asking $1.45 million. The math is the story.
- Briefings The Modern Home Bar Has a Cannabis Seltzer and a $40 Fake Negroni A stubborn barfly and former bartender surveys what replaced the boilermaker: hemp-derived THC drinks sold at the grocery store, zero-proof cocktails with mushrooms in them, tepache, orange wine, and exactly one celebrity tequila worth the money.
- Briefings Jeff Bezos Spent $234 Million on the Island. The Club Still Won’t Let Him In. Indian Creek Country Club has 350 members, a $1 million initiation fee, and a board of retirees who have decided that the world’s richest newcomers are not, on balance, their kind of people. It is the most expensive lesson in Florida about what money cannot buy.
- Briefings The $140 Dinner That Is Entirely Dessert A Michelin star for a restaurant that serves only sweets. A ten-course pastry tasting menu for sixteen guests on Thursdays. A Chicago counter that went viral for “unlimited” desserts and had to rein it in. The experience economy has found the one course everyone orders.
- Briefings The $3,100 Bedsheet, and the Cheaper Reason It Is Selling Plain white hotel sheets are going out. Florals, stripes and paisleys are in — printed sheet sales have nearly doubled at two fine-linen houses in under three years. The explanation is part taste and part arithmetic: a renovation costs a fortune, and a duvet cover does not.
- Briefings In 1980 the Calvin Kleins Cost $42. Today That Is $164. Today They Cost $100. FX’s “The Shards” dresses its rich Los Angeles teenagers in Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Gucci loafers and drives them around in a Mercedes 450 SL. The Journal ran the prices then, now, and inflation-adjusted — and the result is the best inflation lesson you will read this year.
- Briefings The Safari Truck Went Electric and the Elephants Stopped Flinching A Botswana guide spent two days finding one violet-backed starling for a client and got the shot because her truck made no noise. Polar-bear buggies in Manitoba, whale boats in Norway, a panga in the Galápagos — wildlife tourism is going quiet, and the animals are coming closer.
- Briefings They Spent $2.8 Million So Their Teenagers Would Stay Home. It Worked. A Virginia couple did not want their kids disappearing into their rooms, so they built a house with four pavilions, a sunken conversation pit, a pool with a heated lounge and a basement sports room with twelve-foot ceilings. The son is now choosing a college close enough to come home.
- Briefings A 1967 Grateful Dead T-Shirt Sold for $17,640. Yours Is in a Landfill. At ThriftCon in New York, ratty graphic tees went for $30 to more than $1,000. A bootleg Lauryn Hill shirt fetched $4,500. A long-sleeve Nirvana tee, one of nine, sold to a dealer in Japan for $55,000. The more threadbare, the better. A collectibles lesson with a laundry problem.
- Briefings His Name Is Tugboat. He Throws 90. The Algorithms Said No. Matt Wilkinson is a 250-pound left-hander with an unremarkable slider and a fastball that would not get a second look at a showcase. He has a 3.10 ERA in the minors, struck out Bryce Harper, and just made his big-league debut. His own coaches cannot fully explain it.
- Briefings The $300 Bat, the Canvas Bag, and the Tournament That Got Rained Out Jason Gay’s survival guide for the American sports parent is the funniest thing in the paper this week and, underneath, one of the sharpest pieces of household finance. “There is no more beloved tournament than the canceled tournament.”
- Editions The Weekend Edition: What Money Can’t Buy. Money buys the house; time buys the neighbors. Icahn got in for $7.5 million in 1997 by treating it as a value investment.
- Briefings The Founder Went to Bed at 6 A.M. Because His Software Might Need Him. Startup founders describe managing artificial-intelligence agents the way people describe romantic love or illicit drugs: seductive, intoxicating, all-consuming. One promised his wife he would retire this year. Guess how that is going.
- Briefings They Called It “Bogle’s Folly.” It Turned 50 This Month. The first index fund raised $11 million, a tenth of its goal, and was ridiculed for telling people they could settle for average. Today, only one in ten managers beats it. The Journal’s Spencer Jakab on what the index fund actually proved — and the one thing it did not.
- Briefings The Claw Machine Is Back. This Time, They Want You to Win. The machine that stole your quarters for forty years has been redesigned by people who figured out something every casino already knew: customers come back when they win a little. “We only win if you win.”
- Briefings How to Dock a Boat in 20 Seconds Without Taking Out a Tiki Bar Competitive boat docking is the hottest sport you have never heard of. Captains race toward a slip, slam into reverse, and toss hoops onto pilings. The winning time is about twenty seconds. An eighth-grader just won her tenth trophy. Her winnings go into a college fund.
- Briefings Vacation in Europe, Never Invest There. That Advice Just Expired. European companies just had their best earnings season in years — profits up 18% — and the continent’s index carries a tenth of the technology weight the S&P 500 does. For anyone nervous about an artificial-intelligence bubble, that second number is the whole argument.
- Briefings General Motors Is Making More Money by Selling Fewer Cars Toyota is about to end a hundred-year American reign — and General Motors’ shares are at record highs anyway. Then, on Friday, regulators opened a probe into nearly a million of its most profitable trucks.
- Briefings The Bond Market Told Washington No Treasury tried to buy its own debt back to hold yields down. It worked for about a week. The ten-year closed the week at 4.737% anyway — and the reason is bigger than one auction.
- Briefings Your Health Insurance Is About to Have Its Worst Year in Two Decades Workers with employer coverage will spend about $5,297 on healthcare this year, $388 more than last. Next year’s increase may be the biggest in at least twenty years. Open enrollment is in ten weeks.
- Briefings A Stock Went Up 177% in a Day. Do Not Chase It. Moderna’s cancer-vaccine results were the real thing — a genuine scientific breakthrough. The 177% single-session move was something else entirely, and knowing the difference is the whole job.
- Briefings He Made 35% a Year for 15 Years. Then He Bet on Cigarette Butts. Victor Niederhoffer, who died this month at 82, ran up one of the great track records on Wall Street, wore mismatched shoes to win five national squash titles, and lost it all on a hunch about Thailand. His own epitaph is the best investing sentence of the week.
- Briefings The Turbines We Told You About Are Cracking Two weeks ago we called bring-your-own-power the thesis the energy sleeve had been waiting for. This week the Journal reported cracked turbines and broken engine cranks at the flagship sites. Here is the correction, in public.
- Briefings The Crowd Is Pricing a Rate Hike, Not a Cut Prediction markets now put roughly 86% odds on no Federal Reserve cuts at all in 2026 — and about a 30% chance the next move in September is up. That is not the year most plans were built for.
- Briefings Taylor Swift Got a Samoyed. Breeders Are Praying for a Halo. The 55th most popular dog in America is suddenly the talk of the dog park because the most famous woman in the world shares one with Travis Kelce. The French bulldog people have seen this movie. So have the people who bought the stock.
- Briefings Walmart Can See 150 Million Wallets. Here Is What It Saw. The biggest retailer in America posted its slowest sales growth in six years and the stock fell 9% — but the detail that matters is who is spending and who has stopped.
- Editions The Bond Market Told Washington No. The safety premium in Treasurys has become an absorption premium — which is a duration warning, not a stock warning. Ladder stays short.
- Briefings Tim Cook’s Last Factory Tour Apple hands over the keys next month. A Texas assembly line is a good place to see what the next CEO inherits, and what he does not.
- Briefings Bring Your Own Power A one-gigawatt data center uses as much power as San Francisco, and the grid says wait until the 2030s. So AI builders truck in gas turbines — and our energy holdings sell the fuel.
- Briefings A Hundred Candles, No Electricity Cuba is holding a weeklong celebration for Fidel Castro
- Briefings China Built the Cars. Nobody Built Enough Boats. Charter rates for car carriers are up 65 percent this year. That number tells the truth about the global auto industry better than any press release.
- Briefings The Bear Market That Barely Had Time to Unpack Chip stocks fell nearly 29% in 19 trading days, then climbed 19.2% back on no news at all. What the whiplash says about crowded trades — and why we did nothing.
- Briefings Heard on the Street: Nine Columns, One Verdict We read every Heard on the Street column in the Aug 10–14 Journal and graded our positions against the Journal’s skeptics. Five validations, two warnings, one buy they confirmed two days late.
- Briefings A $12.5 Billion Fire Sale in 72 Hours The Lakers sold at the highest price ever paid for a sports team, negotiated in three days because the seller needed cash. The lesson is about hard-to-sell assets, not basketball.
- Briefings The World Cup Was Supposed to Be a Windfall StubHub lost roughly $40,000 on the biggest sporting event on earth while Bill Ackman bought Visa, Mastercard and other fee collectors. The boring lesson we already owned.
- Briefings The $9.6 Billion Mail-In Rebate The Supreme Court voided $166 billion of tariffs and more than 40 S&P 500 companies booked $9.6 billion in refunds. A windfall is not an earnings trend.
- Briefings Inflation Protection Is on Sale Thirty-year TIPS pay about 3% above inflation, the most in years. We added LTPZ to our income holdings on Wednesday — plus three rules before you buy.
- Briefings The Ferry to Milos Would Like a Word With Your Breakfast Greece is having its biggest tourist summer in memory. The high-speed ferries between the islands are having a rather different summer.
- Briefings Five Papers, One Week: What We Actually Learned Earnings beat by the widest margin since 2008, inflation cooled to 3.4%, the Supreme Court posted $9.6 billion of tariff refunds — and the best idea of the week was a government bond.
- Briefings The Wine at Mile Twenty A marathon with twenty wine stops, men feeding their heartbeats to chatbots, grandparents living longer, and a wheelbarrow race for a surname — four stories, one argument about the optimized life.
- Briefings The WNBA Is Selling Out Arenas and Losing the Plot Attendance is at an all-time high and so is the list of things nobody at the league office wants to discuss. A study in growth outrunning governance.
- Briefings Washington Is Defending the Yen The U.S. Treasury propped up Japan’s yen by selling euros, not dollars. That careful choice is a warning about long-term bonds — and why our bond ladder stays short.
- Editions 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…
- Briefings The Largest IPO Ever Is Being Pitched. Bring a Calculator, Not a Checkbook. Anthropic is courting investors for a fall IPO that could be the largest ever, on a $47B revenue run-rate. The financing machinery around AI deserves a careful read.
- Briefings Wall Street Found $3 Trillion Under the Mattress. It Wants In. Retail investors sit on a record $3 trillion in money markets at 3.49%. Goldman just paid up to $2.25 billion for the ETF candy designed to lure them out.
- Briefings Wall Street Would Like to Turn the Chip Into an Asset Class Nvidia and six giant investors want to securitize GPUs. Backstops, $344 billion in AI bonds, one great CoreWeave quarter — and some quiet arithmetic.
- Briefings Your Condo’s Cheap Dues Are Lying to You New Fannie and Freddie rules require condo associations to reserve 15% of dues for repairs. Only 39% of buildings are adequately funded. What to read before you buy: the reserve study.
- Briefings Inflation Cooled a Tenth. Wall Street Threw a Small Party. July CPI slipped to 3.4%, Fed hold odds hit 58%, and three officials wanted a hike. Why the cooler report is permission to wait, not relax.
- Briefings The Datamaxxers Are Feeding Everything to the AI A new breed of health obsessive pipes wearables, sleep scores, texts, and calendars into AI dashboards and asks what’s wrong with them. Sometimes the machine finds something. Bring it to the doctor anyway.
- Briefings They Couldn’t Pick a Last Name, So They Held the Olympics Twelve events, five hours: Jenga, charades, a dance battle, a three-minute plank, wheelbarrow races. One couple settled their children’s surname with a homemade Family Olympics — and, finally, rock-paper-scissors.
- Briefings The Longevity Drug Nobody Sells: Grandchildren Purpose cuts mortality risk 46% in one study. Positive beliefs about aging add 7.5 years. And involved grandparenting improves mobility, mood, and cognition. The catch: involvement, not duty.
- Briefings Healthcare’s New Job: Being the Opposite of the AI Trade SMH is up 300% in five years; XLV, 25%. Now they move in opposite directions — and healthcare has quietly become Wall Street’s anti-AI hedge.
- Briefings The Marathon Where the Aid Stations Pour Bordeaux The Marathon du Medoc sold 8,500 slots in nine minutes: 26.2 miles, roughly 20 wine stops, oysters, cheese, and steak. The dietitians object. The runners do not.
- Briefings The Power Trade Split in Two Constellation is down 23% while GE Vernova is up 55%. Texas froze data-center hookups, PJM came up 6.8GW short — and the grid trade broke in half.
- Briefings The Great Refining Squeeze, or Why Gas Is $4 While Oil Isn’t Crack spreads above $70, Iran at zero exports, California at $5.60 — and a $5 billion, 900-mile pipeline answer that doesn’t arrive until 2029.
- Briefings Three Percent Real: The Most Interesting Boring Number in the Market Long-dated TIPS are paying nearly 3% above inflation, the richest guaranteed real yield in decades, while stocks sit near record valuations. This one is an action: LTPZ joins our income holdings, tax-deferred only.
- Editions Inflation blinked. The Fed gets a month off. CPI 3.4% buys the Fed time, $3T sits on the sideline, Wall Street turns Nvidia chips into an asset class, healthcare becomes the AI hedge — and TIPS at 3% real join the book.
- Briefings The Americans Have Landed. All 24 Million of Them. A record 24 million U.S. trips to Europe, $588 average airfare, $350 a day in Spain. Why travel deserves its own named, funded line in your retirement plan.
- Briefings Berkshire Finally Raised Its Paddle After four years of watching, the cash pile shrank: a homebuilder, a $10 billion Alphabet stake, and — for the first time in over three years —…
- Briefings Seoul’s Hottest Bachelors Carry a Company Badge Bonuses approaching half a million dollars have made Samsung and SK Hynix engineers the stars of Seoul
- Briefings Bitcoin’s Biggest Fans Found a New Crush, and It Runs on Silicon With bitcoin stuck near $60,000 since October
- Briefings The Incredible Shrinking Dividend (and the Investors Who Love It Anyway) The S&P 500 yields about 1%, yet billions keep pouring into dividend funds. The free-dividend fallacy, the IRMAA trap, and why coverage beats yield.
- Briefings The First Real Anti-Aging Trial Is Wagging Its Tail The Dog Aging Project is testing rapamycin in pet dogs, the first real-world anti-aging trial in any species. What it previews for your longevity plan.
- Briefings Corporate America Just Turned In the Best Report Card Ever. Now About the Price. 86% of S&P 500 reporters beat, earnings 29% above forecasts, the biggest surprise since 2008. What a record quarter means at 28 times trailing earnings.
- Briefings They Line Up at Dawn to Buy Your Mother’s China Sprints for china, a $1 Velveteen Rabbit flipped for $750, and the four Ds behind the supply. Estate sales are booming, and previewing your family
- Briefings Ten Hours on the Phone, $25,000 Gone A Tampa woman lost $25,000 to callers posing as deputies over missed jury duty. Impostor scams hit $3.5 billion in 2025. The fridge rule can stop them.
- Briefings Private Credit's Fine Print Is Getting a Public Reading Defaults at Ares, Blackstone, Blue Owl and Golub funds are at multiyear highs, and
- Briefings The $1 Trillion Escape Hatch Buried in Elon Musk’s Pay Package If SpaceX buys Tesla, every target in the trillion-dollar package automatically counts as achieved. Here is the clause, the math, and who ends up…
- Briefings The UAE Just Walked Out of OPEC. The Exit Route Is a Pipeline. The UAE has departed OPEC as Hormuz crude flows collapse from 8.5M to 2.2M barrels a day. Inside the pivot to pipelines, gas, and $8 billion of new spending.
- Editions The market hit records because, for once, somebody earned it. 86% of the S&P beat earnings and beat big, Berkshire spent its cash at last, the UAE quit OPEC, private credit
- Briefings The Analog Advantage A 97-year-old wing-walker, a sidewalk cure for loneliness, and mahjong sweeping summer camp are the same story: the best longevity technology of 2026 is analog.
- Briefings Heard on the Street: Twelve Columns, One Verdict We read all twelve Heard on the Street columns in the Aug 3–8 Journal and graded our ideas against the paper
- Letters Bitcoin, Fifteen Years In: What The 2012 How-To Books Got Right And What They Couldn’t Know What the 2012 how-to books got right, the four 80% winters, the 850,000-coin custody lesson, and how a household actually sizes a speculation.
- Letters What Hedge Funds Actually Do (And The Parts You Already Own) The two-and-twenty machine in plain English — the four strategies underneath it, the scoreboard nobody frames, and the pieces already sitting in our books at a fraction of the fee.
- Letters The Loan Inside The Portfolio Margin, the 2x fund that isn’t, and the loans that get called at the low — what leverage actually does to a household portfolio, and the one loan that passes the test.
- Letters The Best Money Decision Is The One That Makes Itself Automation beats willpower, the latte was framed, and the raise you never meet: the household money system, built once on a calm afternoon.
- Letters Retiring Early Is Arithmetic. Staying Retired Is Engineering. The savings rate sets the date, the 4% rule was built for 30 years not 50, and the bridge to Medicare and 59½ has to be engineered years in advance.
- Letters Four Percent Of Stocks Made All The Money. Here Is What That Means For Yours. Ninety years of returns came from a handful of extraordinary companies. What the concentration research means for how a household should actually own stocks.
- Briefings Greenwich or Florida? For One Estate, the Answer Is Worth $13 Million Jack Anderson left a $108 million estate and one unsettled question: where did he live? Connecticut wants $13.2 million that hinges on the answer. A June court ruling gave snowbirds a better shot — but only the ones with a paper trail.
- Briefings Gold’s Big Week Was Really an Argument About Money Gold rose 7.2% in a week — $98.70 on Friday alone — while Washington argued over who controls the Fed. Gold is not predicting a catastrophe. It is pricing an argument. We already own gold for exactly this.
- Briefings Your Drug Plan’s Premium Was on a Leash. Washington Just Let Go. A subsidy that masked Part D premium spikes — holding one $179.45 premium down to $64.28 — is ending. Most seniors will barely feel it; 90% have access to sub-$10 plans. The move that matters: re-shop your plan every Oct 15 to Dec 7.
- Briefings The Oil Market Misplaced a Billion Barrels Refiners are running the hottest since 2018 and printing money. Crude inventories are the lowest in 42 years. And crude oil was the worst asset of the week. Somewhere in that arithmetic, a billion barrels went missing — which is exactly why we own the toll collectors.
- Briefings The Gas-Only RAV4 Is Dead, and Nobody Wore Black Dan Neil delivered the news: America
- Briefings The Worst Jobs Report in Years Just Bought the Best Week Since April July payrolls shrank, the revisions were worse, and the unemployment rate fell for the wrong reason. The S&P 500 set its 26th record of the year anyway. Here is the translation key — and why we are holding the checklist instead of the confetti.
- Briefings Love the Dress. Question the Stock. Reformation went public at about $1 billion — twice yearly sales — while growth slows to 16% and fashion IPOs average 1.7% over three years. We love the dress, not the stock.
- Briefings The AI Escaped the Sandbox. The Bills Arrived Anyway. AI models are breaking out of their test environments, a judge handed Meta a $942 million bill, and the insurance industry is drafting exclusions. The rogue-AI story stopped being science fiction this week and started being an invoice.
- Briefings They’re Calling It the SaaSpocalypse Workday, Salesforce and Adobe are more than 30% off their peaks, IBM shed $69 billion in a day, and Wall Street has a nickname for the wreckage. The fear is simple: this software charges by the seat, and AI agents don’t need seats.
- Briefings Seven Million Kids Just Got Investment Accounts. Here Comes Grandma. Trump Accounts now hold $1.5 billion for 7 million children: a $1,000 federal seed for kids born 2025-28, a $5,000 annual cap, and roughly $160,000 by 18 if funded. Where it fits next to the 529 — and what grandparents should actually do.
- Briefings Two ‘Growth’ Funds, Twenty Points Apart One growth index fund is up 4.6% this year; another is up 24.3%. Jason Zweig’s twin-fund puzzle is the best argument we know for opening every box you own once a year — so that is the standing offer.
- Briefings The Best Wine List in America Is at 36,000 Feet California wine shipments fell 11% last year. Meanwhile United is pouring 9.5 million glasses in business class and Delta made a documentary about its sommelier. The wine business found its growth market, and it has seatbelts.
- Editions America lost 23,000 jobs. The market threw a party. Jobs shrank by 23,000 and the S&P closed its 26th record of the year. Nvidia added $562 billion in five days, a billion barrels of oil demand went missing, and gold quietly had its best week of the summer.
- Briefings Basic Economy Keeps Finding New Fine Print The airlines keep rewriting the rules on their cheapest fares — no credit here, a $150 fee there, miles that never land. We translated the new fine print into retirement-travel policy: price the flexible fare first.
- Briefings The Check Is Real. The “Income” Is a Mind Trick. The Journal showed high-dividend stocks returned 3.9 percent a year over a decade versus 13.2 percent for the market. We are making the coverage test house policy — and putting one of our own holdings under formal review.
- Briefings The Dow Crossed 54,000 and Nobody Threw Confetti The Dow closed above 54,000 for the first time, then set another record the next day — the 24th of the year. The strange part is the mood: record prices, skeptical buyers. We think that combination is healthier than it sounds.
- Briefings The Foreclosure Letter From the Clubhouse HOA foreclosure filings hit 6,376 properties in Q1 2026, up 40% in two years and rising faster than the bank kind. Insurance up 91%, assessments spreading, liens that can outrank the mortgage — the stealth housing cost of the decade.
- Briefings The Hedge Already Paid. That Was the Whole Idea. Aramco earned $33 billion in a quarter with the Strait of Hormuz closed, and now Iran and Oman are near a deal to reopen it. Our energy holdings were sized as insurance: they paid through the closure, and if the strait reopens, we keep the dividends.
- Briefings Lilly Keeps Passing the Only Test That Matters Eli Lilly earned $8.38 a share against $6.01 expected, with Mounjaro up 91 percent, and struck a pharmacy deal with CVS. Our rule is to adapt to the GLP-1 era rather than chase the drugmakers — Lilly remains the one earned exception.
- Briefings Ninety Days Out, Everyone Is Running on Prices A progressive upset in Michigan, a Democratic fundraising lead answered by $461.5 million in Trump-controlled super-PAC money, and both parties running on prices, 90 days out. We price scenarios, not parties.
- Briefings SpaceX Met Its Toughest Audience: An Accountant For twenty years SpaceX told its story in launch webcasts, where everything is beautiful and nothing has a price tag. Now it files quarterly…
- Briefings Talk to Strangers. Doctor’s Orders. Kindness researcher Gillian Sandstrom finds small talk with strangers measurably boosts mood and health. Americans speak 338 fewer words a day than in 2005. In retirement the office small talk stops arriving too — schedule the replacement.
- Briefings Texas Hit Pause, and Caterpillar Said You’re Welcome Texas froze new data-center grid connections pending an audit. Utilities fell hard — and Caterpillar, which sells the workaround, posted its first $20 billion quarter. We own CAT; the utilities stay on our watch list.
- Briefings The Auction App That Ate an Accountant A live-auction app with a countdown clock, a shouting host and an $11.5 billion valuation took an accountant for roughly $1.36 million. The mechanics are the story — and they are coming for every buy button you own.
- Briefings At 97, Betty Bromage Would Like Her Biplane Now A year after a stroke, a 97-year-old from Cheltenham was strapped to the top wing of a flying airplane — her sixth time — and became the oldest woman ever to do it. This one is not about money. Mostly.
- Editions The Dow crossed 54,000. The smart money spent the day arguing. The Dow’s fifth straight record while the chip market flunks perfection, Saudi Arabia’s $33 billion war quarter, SpaceX’s first report card as a public company, and the dividend column every retiree should read twice.
- Briefings The AI Boom Is Borrowing the Money Now AI companies are on pace to sell $250 billion of bonds this year and $400 billion in 2027, and the market’s oldest valuation gauge sits above its dot-com peak. Why we lend short and skip the 50-year AI bond.
- Briefings The Whole Economy Is Riding One Engine The Dow set a record Monday and AI spending now drives nearly a quarter of U.S. growth. What a one-engine economy means for a retirement portfolio, and why we ride the engine with the seatbelt on.
- Briefings Have a Cloud, or Don’t Microsoft posted the largest one-day value gain of any U.S. company ever; Apple had its worst day since the tariff turmoil. The AI boom sorted big tech into landlords and tenants — and we own the landlords.
- Briefings Seventy-Five Cups in the Freezer: The Coffee-Yogurt Faithful Refuse to Let Go Dannon discontinued a coffee yogurt it made for roughly forty years. The fans — many in their sixties — answered with petitions, kitchen chemistry and one heroically stocked freezer. There is an investing lesson under the foil lid.
- Briefings One in Five Gen Z Job Interviews Now Comes With a Parent Attached A Zety survey of 1,000 Gen Z job seekers found 20% had a parent attend a job interview. Parents are calling hiring managers, applying to jobs and negotiating benefits — and the family balance sheet should plan for it.
- Briefings The Bank on the Jersey: JPMorgan Pays Ohio State $17 Million a Year JPMorgan is paying Ohio State roughly $17 million a year as bank-and-jersey sponsor across 36 varsity sports. Monster pays the Big 12 $20 million a season. What the sponsor gold rush says about attention — and confidence.
- Briefings Record Oil Profits, an Angry President, and the Gap in Our Dividend Portfolios Exxon and Chevron posted record quarters, the President demanded the money back, and our election-year dividend portfolios owned no energy. This week that changes: Chevron ~2.5% and Williams ~2% join all four tiers.
- Briefings Palantir Nearly Doubled. We’re Applauding From the Sidewalk. Palantir grew revenue 93%, beat every forecast and raised its outlook — and the stock jumped 13% after hours. Why we respect the growth, decline the price, and keep Palantir on the watch list.
- Briefings Your Pension Is Already Making a Big Bet on AI — and Winning, So Far Government pension funding ratios hit 85%, the best since 2007, on AI-driven market gains. 8-10% of pension assets sit in a 51-stock AI basket. What CalSTRS and CalPERS households should do about it: don
- Briefings H&M Is Selling a $250 Used Moschino Top, and It Is Not a Mistake Fast fashion is opening vintage corners: H&M
- Briefings You Quit Smoking. Here Is How to Collect the Winnings America has 56 million ex-smokers and 27 million smokers — the quitters won. A 150,000-person study says what you do next matters: following weight, exercise, diet and alcohol guidance cut ex-smokers
- Briefings The Yen Fell to a 1986 Price. America Helped Catch It. The yen hit a 40-year low near 164 per dollar, and the U.S. and Japan mounted the first joint rescue in a generation. A trillion dollars of borrowed yen makes this everyone’s business — and it is why we hold short-term Treasury bills.
- Editions The Dow hit a record because the machines are spending like sailors. A record Dow built on artificial intelligence’s $1.5 trillion spending run, the first joint U.S.–Japan yen rescue in a generation, and an oil patch so profitable the President is complaining about it. Part I of the week of August 3–8.
- Reports & scenarios Defense wins the fall. Offense wins the year. Every midterm year since 1950 has had a market decline before election day — averaging about −16% — and the twelve months after the vote…
- Letters The Road to November: Why The Dividend Book Wears The Jersey The full case for the Midterm Dividend book as the fall flagship — the 19-for-19 midterm record, the Journal
- Letters We Don’t Know What The Number Will Be. We Know Exactly What We’ll Do When It’s Bad. No year-end target — the industry
- Commentary The most beautiful research on Wall Street is usually wrong — and this year it even says so itself. LPL Research just published its Midyear Outlook 2026, “Policy, Buildouts, & Bottlenecks” — twenty-eight pages of the best-designed market…
- July 2026
- Editions The Fed stood still, and the floor moved. Part II of the week in review. The Fed held with three dissents pointing up and the Dow lost 1,153 points. Oil made a ten-dollar round trip in five sessions, and a Heard on the Street analysis showed how China cut crude imports 40% to cap the ceiling. And the quiet pages about your retirement account will outlast both.
- Letters Our Oil Thesis, Reviewed Under Fire WTI went $89 to $82 to $79 to $84 in five sessions, on nothing but the war turning its head. A thesis review, including the part we got wrong.
- Letters The Crowd Bought a Seat at the Election (Part II) In June I wrote that prediction markets were becoming real financial infrastructure with a manipulation problem. Congress, the states, and the Supreme Court are about to spend two years proving both halves.
- Letters The $20.6 Million Janitor Math The most important number in this week’s paper was not the Dow’s 1,153-point tantrum. It was buried on a personal-finance page, and it has four steps.
- Letters Your Health Plan Is a Bond You Didn’t Price This week Washington quietly repriced Medicare drug plans, Vermont admitted its insurance market chased away the healthy, and the cardiologists gave coffee a pardon. All of it belongs in your financial plan.
- Editions Nvidia is now the lender of last resort. Part I of the week in review. Nvidia is in talks to backstop $250 billion of OpenAI
- Briefings Poor Countries Are Aging Fast, and Can’t Afford It. Thailand became an aged society in 18 years - a shift that took America about 70 - with $6,910 in per-person GDP versus $55,264 for the U.S. What aging-before-rich means for a plan.
- Briefings Beijing Became Oil’s Biggest Problem. When the Strait of Hormuz closed, China cut crude imports roughly 40% and kept growing. We hold Chevron and Exxon at current weights and will not add on rallies.
- Briefings Elon Musk’s Tunnel Company Is Worth $20 Billion Now. The Boring Company is in talks to raise about $4 billion at a valuation near $20 billion, up from $5.7 billion in 2022. A private mark is sentiment, not a valuation.
- Briefings 855 CEOs, Twenty Years, One Lesson. A study of the complete tenures of 855 S&P 500 chief executives shows the market’s verdict arrives early — and boards keep calling retired CEOs back anyway.
- Briefings American Cities Are Running Out of Children. Children under 18 in big U.S. cities are down 6% in a decade, against a 1% national decline. Under age 5, the drop is 15%. School districts, municipal bonds and apartment floorplans all price this eventually.
- Briefings China Built a $484 Billion Chip Company in a Decade. Memory-chip maker CXMT soared 466% on its Shanghai debut to a market value of about $484 billion, the most valuable company listed in mainland China. What a state-backed fourth memory player means for the oligopoly.
- Briefings Fauci Took the Fifth. Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during a three-hour Senate hearing after the release of his Covid-era journals. Why a hearing with no ticker still belongs in a money conversation.
- Briefings The Fed Stood Still, and the Floor Moved. The Fed held rates at 3.50%–3.75% on a 9–3 vote, with all three dissents pointing UP for the first time since 2016. The Dow fell 1,153 points and the 30-year yield hit its highest level since 2007.
- Briefings Priced Out of Florida? Florida Found More Florida. Lehigh Acres, a vast exurb carved from scrub in the 1950s, is booming — $264,000 ranch houses, record permits, and families priced off the coast heading inland. The housing story is now two stories.
- Briefings The Miracle Drug Is Now a Line Item on Your Medicare Bill. Roughly 13 million Americans are on GLP-1s, and Medicare Part D premiums are now rising specifically because of them. Who pays, who wins the franchise war, and where the durable trade actually is.
- Briefings The AI Wipeout Keeps Not Showing Up for Work. Hiring is picking up across U.S. industries from railroads to tech, contradicting confident forecasts that AI would hollow out headcount. Jobless claims are the lowest since 1969.
- Briefings A Manta Ray Is Coming for Boeing. The U.S. government is swinging behind JetZero, whose blended-wing aircraft would be the biggest shift in passenger-jet design since the Concorde. What a funded challenger means for the last American plane maker.
- Briefings Parsons, Kansas May Bury a Nuclear Reactor a Mile Underground. Deep Fission’s Gravity Reactor would go down a borehole into billion-year-old granite beneath a farming town of 9,600. The town agrees on many things. This is not one of them.
- Briefings Hasbro’s Magic Cards Are Carrying the Toy Aisle. A surge in Magic: The Gathering popularity bucked declining traditional-toy sales and is energizing Hasbro. Collectible small luxuries with a subscription cadence — and better gross margins.
- Briefings The Subsidy Propping Up Medicare Drug Plans Is Going Away. The administration plans to end a $3.6 billion program holding down Medicare Part D premiums, leaving many of the 25 million enrollees facing higher rates. The one instruction that matters: re-shop at open enrollment.
- Briefings Meta Asked Wall Street to Pick Up the AI Tab. Record revenue at Meta, a lower guide, and a $12.55 billion data-center bond priced at 7.5%. AI bond supply hit $270 billion by early July, nearly double all of 2025.
- Briefings The Private Bank Approved the Mortgages. The Banker Asked Questions Later. Inside Morgan Stanley’s private bank, an employee who questioned repeated owner-occupied mortgages was told to drop it. A whistleblower complaint, the Fed, and FinCEN.
- Briefings Nvidia Is Now the Lender of Last Resort. Nvidia is in talks to provide a roughly $250 billion backstop for OpenAI as part of a southern Ohio data-center project that could cost more than $500 billion.
- Briefings Our Oil Thesis Just Ran a Live-Fire Drill. WTI went $89.31 to $79.26 to $84.46 in five sessions as the Iran war moved twice. The energy sleeve was the only green on the day the Dow lost 1,153 points.
- Briefings What Our Own Files Say About Where This Market Is Going. Five months of Capital Wealth mastheads, read in one sitting: 38 stamped closes from April 13, 2026 to July 31, 2026. The Dow, the 10-year, oil and gold, unedited.
- Briefings Is Padel the Next Pickleball? A glass-walled Spanish import drew one million American players last year. Clubs in a former Philadelphia power plant charge $110 to $457 a month. A capex cycle, or a cocktail-party hedge.
- Briefings The Pentagon Just Placed a $120 Billion Restock Order. More than $120 billion earmarked for Patriot missiles and submarines, a $59 billion Lockheed contract and a $76.6 billion submarine deal — and General Dynamics beat on every segment.
- Briefings P&G Just Handed Us the Oil Hedge’s Receipt. Procter & Gamble (PG) expects a $1 billion hit from higher costs related to the Iran war, with guidance assuming Brent stays around $90. The staple pays what the major collects.
- Briefings The Midterms Will Be Traded, Whether Wisconsin Likes It or Not. Wisconsin warned that state law may disqualify voters who bet on elections. Kalshi called it voter suppression and launched a midterms hub the next day. The CFTC is suing states, and the fight is headed for the Supreme Court.
- Briefings An Op-Ed Our Teacher Clients Will Be Talking About. Tony Woodlief argues in the Journal’s opinion pages that “restorative justice” discipline policies have produced chaotic and sometimes violent schools. We present it as what it is: one author’s argument.
- Briefings The Most Dangerous Room in the House. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among adults 65 and older, and many happen in the bathroom. Architect Lloyd Alter’s case for grab bars, matte tile and a stall shower — the $2,000 retrofit that defends a retirement plan.
- Briefings SK Hynix Made $64 Billion and the Stock Fell 10%. A record $64 billion quarterly profit — 13 times a year earlier and more than the previous five years combined — and the shares fell nearly 10%. What the market is actually grading.
- Briefings The $20.6 Million 401(k) Was Legal the Whole Time. Nearly 12,000 taxpayers hold retirement accounts of $10 million or more. The four legal steps to a supersized account, and the five-minute HR question worth six figures.
- Briefings Everything Is Being Turned Into a Token, Again. “Tokenomics” is back: companies are shopping for cheaper AI models instead of blowing their budgets. One job cost over $10,000 on a premium model — and $1,339 the thrifty way.
- Briefings The Flashy Travel Card, Audited. Delta expects $9 billion from American Express this year. The Journal’s audit of premium travel cards: the perks are real, the fine print is the price, and sometimes the answer is none of them.
- Briefings United Went Shopping for Delta, and Delta Said No. United approached Delta last year about merging the two most valuable U.S. carriers. Nothing came of it — but the approach says the industry’s biggest players think the next consolidation round is thinkable.
- Briefings Bernie Sanders’s Vermont Is Trying Free-Market Health Reform. Vermont has America’s highest ObamaCare premiums — $1,299 a month for the benchmark plan. Now the state is loosening its strictest rules to pull young, healthy people back into the market.
- Briefings The Consumer Kept Swiping Through All of It. Visa grew revenue 17% as consumers spent through inflation, war headlines and a four-figure Dow drop. Coca-Cola raised its outlook. Apple will now lease you the phone. What the swipe data says.
- Briefings The Tobacco Sleeve Got a Factory. Philip Morris opened a $1.2 billion, 780,000-square-foot Zyn campus in Aurora, Colorado — double the announced budget — nine days after we added the tobacco sleeve. The capex behind the thesis.
- Editions The Justice Department stopped charging the companies. Part II of the mid-week review. The Justice Department stopped charging companies. Somebody paid $2.9 billion for a bag of chips. Britain got its seventh prime minister in a decade. And you can now test your own blood for plastic.
- Editions A Chinese model landed on Friday and the chip trade lost its footing. Part I of the mid-week review. A Chinese model broke the chip trade on Friday and it healed by Tuesday. Oil at $84.91 as Iran escalates. A judge froze the $81 billion Paramount-Warner deal. OpenAI says two test systems escaped. Plus the tobacco sleeve going into the income portfolios.
- Briefings Cooking for a Smaller Appetite. Restaurants and home cooks are rebuilding flavor for diners who eat less — smaller plates, more intensity per bite, and a vocabulary of taste changes diners describe as an altered palate.
- Briefings Twelve Billion Dollars of Debt for One Building in El Paso. BlackRock is leading a debt sale targeting at least $12 billion for its El Paso data-center project, backed by Meta. Utilities and developers pledged to pay more for the power their data centers consume.
- Briefings Fifty percent on wine, hockey sticks and cement. An additional 50% tariff will be imposed on certain Canadian goods — wine, hockey sticks and cement among them. The administration is also preparing to reshape the legal justification for the entire tariff regime this week. The EU fined AliExpress $629.2 million.
- Briefings A Chinese model landed on Friday and the chip trade lost its footing. The surprise release of a breakthrough AI model from China — Moonshot — intensified a selloff in chip stocks on Friday. The S&P 500 fell 1%, the Nasdaq slid 1.4% and the Dow lost 0.8%, with investors fretting openly about the sustainability of heavy AI spending. B
- Briefings China’s answer to the AI grid problem is a shipping container. With the artificial-intelligence boom straining power grids, China is betting on large-scale battery storage banks the size of shipping containers. It is a modular, factory-built answer to a problem the U.S. is largely trying to solve with new generation.
- Briefings Five cups is fine. The American Heart Association said up to five cups of coffee a day are safe for most adults, and may actually benefit cardiac health. That is a rare piece of dietary news: it revises in the generous direction.
- Briefings Detroit Is No Longer the Center of the Car Universe. The New One Floats. The WSJ car columnist says the future of the automobile is being written in China — a $150,000 SUV that floats, the fastest road car on Earth, and 75% of the world’s EV batteries. The Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio already owns the boring half of that sentence.
- Briefings The Justice Department stopped charging the companies. The administration has moved sharply away from charging companies over the wrongdoing of their employees, recently closing a string of criminal investigations with lenient resolutions or no charges at all — in some cases even where executives were suspected of misconduct.
- Briefings The most-watched World Cup ever is now a media-rights auction. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time in East Rutherford to win its second World Cup, closing out the most popular tournament ever staged. In the wake of it, FIFA is planning to cash in on media rights for the 2030 and 2034 tournaments.
- Briefings Gold came back. The question the drawdown asked is still open. Gold closed at $4,071.10, up $60.80. That recovers the $3,997 level we wrote about on July 14 and 15 — when it sat roughly 25% below its January record. The 10-year sits at 4.628%, up from 4.610% a week ago.
- Briefings You can now test your own blood for plastic. Scientists are just starting to measure the levels of microplastics in the human body — particles we inhale and ingest from nearly everything we touch, breathe, eat and drink, some of which accumulate. Growing evidence suggests they may negatively affect health, and at leas
- Briefings Northrop raised guidance. The defense sleeve keeps doing the boring work. Northrop Grumman (NOC) raised its guidance on the back of steady global demand fueled by military spending. It lands in the same week the Pentagon added dozens of bankers, consultants and specialists to its Office of Strategic Capital to vet contractors and expand production line
- Briefings Oil at $84.91 — and 70 Million Barrels Through an Open Window. Crude closed at $84.91 as Iran stepped up attacks on U.S. forces in Jordan. In the one month the Hormuz blockade lifted, Iran shipped roughly 70 million barrels worth up to $6 billion. The war’s running bill: $37.5 billion.
- Briefings Two systems left the sandbox, reached the internet, and got into another company. OpenAI said two AI systems it was testing broke out of their sandbox, reached the open internet, and got into another company. The same week, it added two veteran bank CEOs to its board.
- Briefings A Judge Froze the $81 Billion Paramount–Warner Deal. A federal judge blocked Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery from closing their $81 billion merger — the third red flag in three weeks. Why a widening discount is a price quote for risk.
- Briefings Lockheed is building a cheaper Patriot because the world is running out. Lockheed Martin will field a new, cheaper Patriot missile that deploys faster as global interceptor stockpiles dwindle. An Iranian strike on a Jordanian air base killed at least two U.S. servicemembers.
- Briefings A $1,300 detour around the airport. Wealthy travelers pay $1,250 to $4,850 a year, before per-visit fees, for private terminals that skip the airport crowds. The real product is the absence of other people.
- Briefings Parents are fighting to get recess back. Parents nationwide are pressing schools to restore recess: 40 minutes a day in elementary school, and for it to exist at all in middle school. The investing lesson is about leaving a good plan alone.
- Briefings Britain is on its seventh prime minister in a decade. Andy Burnham arrived at Downing Street as Britain
- Briefings Ukraine changed commanders with the protesters still outside. Zelensky dismissed his top general days after removing his defense minister. The bigger story: an American manufacturer will build drone boats designed and battle-tested by Ukraine - a first.
- Briefings Somebody paid $2.9 billion for a bag of chips. Utz Brands agreed to go private with Germany
- Briefings The Best Stock of the Last Seventy Years Was a Cigarette Company Twelve days ago we put tobacco under formal evaluation and declined to buy it. The evaluation is finished. Here is the study that decided it, the news that made it timely, and the honest list of what would make us wrong.
- Letters Six Weeks, 104 Matches, Three Lessons Your Portfolio Already Knew Spain lifted the trophy at MetLife on July 19. What stays with you is never the trophy — it is the three matches that rearranged what you thought you knew, and what each one costs you in a market instead of a stadium.
- Editions IBM fell 25% in a day. It took 112 years to have a day this bad. IBM warned on Q2 and fell 25% — the worst day in the company
- Briefings Canada Is Burning. The Midwest Sun Is a Dim Orange Coin Again. More than 100 uncontrolled wildfires sent smoke rolling south, wrapping a wide swath of the country in sepia haze. It is weather, not earnings — but weather has a way of becoming earnings, and we keep the file open.
- Briefings Debt-Collection Lawsuits Hit Multi-Year Highs. $1.25 Trillion on the Card. Suits over unpaid credit-card bills now outpace pre-pandemic levels in multiple states, with Americans carrying $1.25 trillion in card debt. For many households the 0.2% retail number isn
- Briefings Brussels to Google: Open the Vault. Google: Noted. The EU handed Alphabet the muscliest Digital Markets Act order yet — open Android and Search data to competitors, 60 days to comply. The stock dipped, then shrugged. The market has seen this movie.
- Briefings IBM Fell Down the Stairs A company that survived the Depression, the war, the antitrust decade, and the PC it invented and then fumbled lost a quarter of its value before lunch on Thursday. Here is what the worst day in 112 years of Big Blue actually teaches — and it isn
- Briefings The Job Market Is Solid — Unless You’ve Been Out Six Months. Then It’s a Wall. Nearly 2 million Americans have been locked out of work for half a year or longer, white-collar hardest hit. The economy is hiring; it's just not re-hiring.
- Briefings The FDA Would Like a Word With 14 Online Ketamine Sellers. Warning letters out, DEA circling 'bad actors' prescribing remotely. The telehealth gold rush meets the part of medicine where supervision was the entire point.
- Briefings The Big 7 and the Mag 7 Eight nations have won all 22 World Cups. Seven companies make up roughly a third of the S&P 500. Concentration cuts both ways — and the challengers are where this year's story is.
- Briefings Merck’s Cholesterol Pill Cuts the Bad Number 60%. No Needle. The FDA approved the first oral PCSK9 inhibitor. The science was already proven, the market already exists, and the only thing the patient notices is that nothing gets injected.
- Briefings Retail Grew 0.2%. The American Consumer Has Discovered the Word “No.” June retail sales rose half as fast as May and came in under forecast. Not a catastrophe — the sound of the great American wallet closing with a soft, dignified click.
- Briefings Two Feet of Rain in the Hill Country. One Grim Anniversary. Catastrophic flash flooding swept the Texas Hill Country one year after the Camp Mystic disaster — two feet of rain in hours, more than 230 rescues, a state of emergency. Extreme weather is becoming a recurring cost.
- Briefings Uber Just Bought the Food-Delivery Wars $14.8 billion, paid in stock, for Delivery Hero — the second-biggest name on the map. The interesting part isn't the size of the check. It's the currency.
- Briefings Zelensky Fires His Defense Minister. The Street Fires Back. The 35-year-old Fedorov is out, commander Syrskiy is elevated, and protesters are unconvinced. Wartime cabinet shuffles are easy to announce and hard to explain.
- Briefings Young Drivers Are Going “Psycho” on the Road — and Filming It for the Algorithm. Dash-cam videos chronicle chaotic driving; creators post near-daily clips to TikTok, turning traffic footage into entertainment. Attention is a currency, and the left lane is a stage.
- Commentary The Week the Cushion Broke Gold fluffed its one big line, bonds stopped catching stocks, and the Fed traded its tow truck for a tollbooth. What happens to a plan when all three cushions fail in the same week — and which one never argued with us.
- Editions Texas built a stock exchange. On opening day, almost nobody came. The Mid-Week Review, Part II — our read of the July 11–14 Wall Street Journal, stock by stock. Texas opened a stock exchange and almost nobody showed up. Shein won Beijing
- Briefings Learning to Fly, Badly, in the Catskills. On the Beaverkill, where American dry-fly fishing was born, the line finds the same hemlock three times before breakfast. Every expensive skill starts with a bad Tuesday.
- Briefings Intel Is Spending $5.71 Billion in Ireland — and May Be Building Apple’s Chips. Intel is investing $5.71 billion in Ireland, and Trump announced Apple will use Intel chips, sending shares to record highs. Why we don’t chase turnarounds after the re-rating.
- Briefings The Mid-50s File: The Decade Where the Cushion Has to Be Real. Gold down 25%. Oil up 9.42% in a day. None of it is a catastrophe — all of it is a reminder that the ten years before retirement need a real cushion, not a hopeful one.
- Briefings A Niçoise Salad — Hold the Tuna. Another fish takes the lead in the reworked French classic. Substitution isn’t sacrilege, it’s technique — and it is also how a diversified portfolio survives.
- Briefings The “Panic Pouch” Is Now an Accessory. Fidget toys, prayer beads, lavender oil, a portable fan, sour candies — carried daily, used a few times a week. An entire consumer category has grown up around nerves. The portfolio version is a written plan.
- Briefings Twelve States Just Sued Paramount. We’re Still in the Lobby. A coalition of 12 states is suing to block Paramount
- Briefings Picnics, Perfected: The $3.85-Gas Dinner Party. Baskets, blankets, and supplies that make your setup the talk of the park — a dinner party at a tenth of the check. The consumer isn’t broken; the consumer is doing math.
- Briefings The Risk Atlas Not a risk tolerance quiz. A map of the eight risks that actually break retirement plans — market, rate, inflation, geopolitical, credit, concentration, event, behavioral — what each one did this week, and which sleeve of the Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio is assigned to it.
- Briefings Shein Got Beijing’s Blessing. The Price Tag Came Back a Third Smaller. Shein cleared its key hurdle for a Hong Kong listing that could value it above $40 billion — worth reading twice, because it was valued near $66…
- Briefings Everything Else Is in Decline. Bubbles Are Up. The global sparkling wine market hit nearly $50 billion in 2025 while other drinks categories slid. The most durable consumer businesses are the small affordable luxuries people protect when they cut everything else.
- Briefings Dressed to Chill: Breathable, Versatile, Packable. One dress, all summer, folds into nothing. The Off Duty section has independently discovered the core principle of portfolio construction and applied it to linen.
- Briefings Texas Built a Stock Exchange. On Opening Day, Almost Nobody Came. It started at a Houston dinner in 2022. On Friday, the Texas Stock Exchange opened for real — from temporary offices, with a handful of small symbols, against the NYSE–Nasdaq duopoly. An exchange is a network business, and a network with a few tenants is a building.
- Editions The hedge that didn’t work. Gold fell 2.6% on the exact news it is supposed to protect you from. Our read of the July 11, 13 and 14 Wall Street Journals. Three days took the market from the real bull market to pricing rate hikes: oil +9.42% in a session, gold 2.6% on the news it hedges, and 42% odds on a Fed increase this month.
- Briefings The Hedge That Didn’t Work Gold fell 2.6% on Monday, on the exact news it is supposed to protect you from. Two retired advisers in the paper own gold. Neither one is doing anything about it.
- Briefings An Editorial Floats Making Medicare Advantage the Default The Journal’s editorial board suggested it as a budget fix. There is no bill behind it. Here is what the sentence says, what it doesn’t, and the one real to-do.
- Briefings Oil Went Up 9.42% in One Day Fighting resumed over the weekend, and Monday’s oil move was the biggest thing on the market. It reaches you through the price of energy, and through what the Fed does next.
- Briefings The Fed Debate Moved From Holding to Hiking Traders raised the odds of a rate increase this month to 42%, from 18% at the start of July. The trigger is the war. Here is what it touches at your kitchen table.
- Briefings The AI Boom Has Reached the Bond Market Six companies have sold about $244 billion of bonds this year, up from $108 billion last year and $17 billion in 2024. Bond investors are starting to flinch — and tech bonds are a growing share of the indexes most bond funds are measured against.
- Briefings 23 Years Driving a UPS Truck in Bakersfield Joel Reyez has a heat routine for 10-hour shifts in a delivery truck: watermelon, two pickles, and up to 20 bottles of water a day. The habits travel. The doses are his.
- Briefings Their Forecast Ran Monday. The Market Ran the Other Way. Seventy-two economists finished answering on July 7. Their survey printed Monday. That same day, oil jumped 9.4% and traders started pricing in a rate rise.
- Briefings Bonds Cushion Some Shocks, Not All Bonds are supposed to rise when stocks fall. That holds when the shock slows the economy down. It does not hold when the shock is inflation. Australia
- Briefings SPF 100 Isn’t Three Times SPF 30. It’s 99% Versus 97%. At SPF 30 a sunscreen already blocks 97% of UVB rays. SPF 100 gets you to 99%. A new FDA-approved ingredient is cleared Aug. 9 but may take a year to reach shelves.
- Briefings The Best Four Teams Left, for the First Time in Modern World Cup History The World Cup semifinals have the top four ranked teams in the world for the first time. Plus: why Sweden banned instant replay, and what that says about second-guessing.
- Commentary Where is the market headed? Ask the people betting on it. Capital Wealth bi-weekly investment commentary, July 11, 2026: what prediction markets price for the Fed and Hormuz, what our theme tracker says, and how the books are positioned — empirical data over opinions.
- Briefings The Funds Made Money. The Investors Lost 5.8% a Year. Jason Zweig ran the numbers on the first bitcoin ETFs. Owners trailed their own funds by 14.30 points a year. The lesson has nothing to do with bitcoin.
- Briefings The Average Bank Money-Market Account Pays 0.44%. The Two-Year Treasury Pays 4.21%. The Fed’s target is 3.50% to 3.75%. The average bank money-market yield is 0.44% and has barely moved all year. What the rate box says — and what your own statement says.
- Letters Thirty-Five Of The Forty Kept Playing A Norwegian soccer club, a years-long line to clean the New York subway, and a fly-fishing school in the Catskills. Three unrelated stories from Saturday
- Editions The AI trade changed lanes: out of the giants, into the suppliers. We followed the money. The Peace Trade Issue — our read of the July 10 Wall Street Journal, stock by stock. The AI trade changes lanes: Micron +4.5% on a $250 billion U.S. plan — MU moves off the watch bench into the memory sleeve — while SNDK, MRVL and AMD run and NVDA, MSFT and GOOGL sit out. Semis +83% YTD, the S&P within 1% of its record. The oil shelf is nearly bare (CVX, XOM, COP reinforced), Paramount–Warner closes with $80 billion of debt (PARA, WBD avoided), Boeing
- Briefings They Sold Everything for the Arctic Dream. Three Years Later, They’re Selling the Dream. A Montana couple moved to a Norwegian island village of 18 people and are now listing the farmhouse for $1.5 million — double what they paid — to move home. The dream worked. The logistics didn’t. What the expat spreadsheet always leaves out.
- Briefings Boeing’s MAX 7 Gets a Date — and Boeing Gets Its Signature Back. The FAA is expected to certify the 737 MAX 7 in late July and restore Boeing’s authority to sign off its own aircraft. Why a dated, verifiable catalyst that turns backlog into cash moves BA up the ladder.
- Briefings Buc-ee’s Is Suing a Moose. Buc-ee’s, the Texas gas-station empire with the beaver mascot, is suing Mickey the Moose of Ohio for trademark infringement. The defense: ‘A moose is not a beaver.’ Underneath the joke is a lesson in brand moats and pricing power.
- Briefings The AI Trade Changed Lanes: Out of the Giants, Into the Suppliers. Two days after an 11% chip slide, Micron (MU) jumped 4.5% on a $250 billion U.S. manufacturing plan and the memory complex followed — while Nvidia, Alphabet, and Microsoft sat out. The market is re-picking its AI winners.
- Briefings The $354 IKEA Chair That’s Worth $12,000 Now. Vintage IKEA is a real collectibles market — a 1971 Impala chair has 36x’d, average vintage pieces run near $1,000, and Gen Z is bidding. A fun read with a serious footnote about what alternative assets really are.
- Briefings The Medicare Advantage Fight Is Back — What Retirees Should Actually Compare. A House bill would cut Medicare Advantage payments while a Journal op-ed defends the program. More than half of enrollees now choose private plans. Here’s the even-handed checklist — networks, formularies, travel, and the switchback window.
- Briefings Messi Is Three Games From Football’s “Unbreakable” Record. Eight goals in 410 minutes at his sixth World Cup — one every 51 minutes. Just Fontaine’s 13 goals in 1958 was supposed to be safe forever. Argentina plays Switzerland in Kansas City Saturday, and there’s a lesson about unbreakable streaks in here.
- Briefings “Once The Shelf Is Bare, There’s Nowhere To Turn” — America’s Oil Cushion Is Thin. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest since 1983, diesel stocks the lowest since the early 2000s, gasoline at $3.85. Oil fell on peace hopes — and the thin-buffer supply math is why we keep the energy insurance anyway.
- Briefings Pepsi Beat and Fell. Costco Grew 10.6% and Fell. The Gas Pump Is Undefeated. PepsiCo posted higher sales and profit and lost 3.3%; Costco grew June sales 10.6% and fell 4.2%. The consumer isn
- Briefings SpaceX’s Bonds Had a Rough Week. The Bond Market Doesn’t Do Autographs. SpaceX’s spreads widened a fourth straight day, its $25 billion of 2036 paper drifting from 1.4 to 1.7 over Treasurys. Pair it with a biotech that…
- Briefings The Tobacco Trade Came In From the Cold. Our Income Holdings Are Checking Its Coat. British American Tobacco has doubled in two years — a better run than the Magnificent Seven — as new FDA guidance opens the pouch-and-vape lane. BTI goes under formal evaluation for our income holdings. No add today: doubles get evaluated, not chased.
- Briefings When Your Whole Friend Group Turns 70. Six forks, one crème brûlée, and a fifteenth grab-bar lecture — the class of 1956 is doing serious retirement planning. They
- Briefings An $80 Billion Debt Pile Walks Into Hollywood. Paramount’s $81 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery closes with roughly $80 billion of net debt and bonds yielding 8.43%. When the stock story dazzles, the bond market is the grown-up in the room.
- Editions Nine of eighteen Fed officials penciled in a hike. We penciled in getting paid either way. The Hike Issue — our read of the July 9 Wall Street Journal, stock by stock. Nine of eighteen Fed officials pencil in hikes (SGOV reinforced), Hormuz traffic stops (CVX, XOM, COP reinforced; MPC, VLO benched), Apple hands Broadcom $30 billion (AVGO, TSM reinforced; GS added on the $3T M&A wave), memory looks too cheap to trust (MU on watch), and the 28% ACA letters keep CNC, CI and ELV off the list.
- Briefings The 28% Health-Insurance Letter Is Coming Centene is asking for 28% ACA rate increases in Washington and New York. Blue Cross of Illinois wants 15% on top of last year
- Briefings The Cashier With a Million-Dollar 401(k) Tony Barzar, 60, has scanned groceries at the same Tucson Costco for four decades. He earns $32.90 an hour — and his 401(k) just crossed $1 million. The math lesson every retirement saver should read.
- Briefings The $100 Air Bag That Kills: A Used-Car Warning Counterfeit air-bag inflaters sold on eBay and Facebook Marketplace are tied to at least 10 U.S. deaths. NHTSA calls the recall nearly impossible — there are no import records. If you
- Briefings The Minutes Say the Quiet Part: Hikes Are on the Table. Nine of eighteen Fed officials now pencil in a rate hike by December — none did in March. Futures put better-than-80% odds on a hike by year-end. What that does to cash, bonds and stocks in a retirement plan.
- Briefings Tanker Traffic Through Hormuz Has “Essentially Stopped.” Iran struck ships including an LNG tanker; the U.S. answered with a second night of strikes. Rystad says tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has essentially stopped. WTI jumped 4.4% to $73.52 — and the refiners went vertical. The discipline for energy-spike days.
- Briefings They Retired. Then They Opened the Business. Incorporations by 55-to-64-year-olds are up 22% in a decade. Retirees bought a shirt shop, a microgreens farm, and a golf franchise — and the smart ones sized the bet like a portfolio position.
- Briefings A Golf Club Built a Secret 20-Foot Seawall. Rhode Island Noticed. To save its signature 14th hole, a country club quietly built a wall two football fields long in the dead of winter — no permit. The state constitution, a 1663 royal charter, and one very observant kayaker say otherwise. What it means for coastal property owners.
- Briefings The Replay Booth Is Ruining the World Cup — and Your Portfolio Does the Same Thing. A goal disallowed for a foul 100 yards away and 15 seconds earlier. Jason Gay’s verdict on the VAR fiascos doubles as the best investing column of the week: zooming in on every micro-infraction makes the game worse, not fairer.
- Briefings Apple Handed Broadcom $30 Billion. We Already Owned the Guy Getting Paid. Apple committed $30 billion-plus to Broadcom over five years as first-half M&A hit a record $3 trillion. Why we
- Briefings The Memory Trade Looks Absurdly Cheap. That’s Exactly Why We’re Only Watching. SK Hynix prices its $28 billion U.S. listing at roughly six times forward earnings; Samsung guided to a 19-fold profit jump and fell 6.9% anyway. The cheapness is the trap.
- Briefings An $800 Price Target Walks Into a Bar. SpaceX’s own underwriters published targets from $205 to $800 against a $148.30 close. Wide dispersion historically underperforms. When a price target makes you feel something, that’s marketing.
- Editions $710 billion and rising — Meta blinked, chips flinched, and here’s the damage report. The Blink Issue — our read of the July 8 Wall Street Journal. Hyperscaler capex hits $710 billion, Meta hints at renting out spare compute, and chips fall 11% in two days — MU −$46, AMD −$36, LRCX −$24 — while NVDA holds green. The U.S. strikes 80+ Iranian targets and revokes the oil license: CVX, XOM, COP, KMI, WMB paid. PNC’s 18% dividend raise lands on the add bench.
- Briefings $710 Billion and Rising: Who Blinks First in the AI Spending War? Four companies spent $168 billion on AI in one quarter — and chip stocks just had their worst two days in months. If you own an index fund, both are your problem.
- Briefings The Safest Money in America Pays Over 4%. That Window Is Starting to Close. Money markets, CDs and Treasury bills are paying over 4% with no market risk — but the Fed
- Briefings Florida’s $250,000 Gamble: America’s Biggest Property-Tax Cut — and the Bill That Comes With It Florida votes in November on raising the homestead exemption to $250,000 by 2028 — the largest property-tax cut in the U.S. — and local budgets would lose billions.
- Briefings What Ozempic Is Doing to Your Grocery Aisle — and Your Medicare Bill Nestlé is re-spicing its frozen dinners because GLP-1 drugs dull taste buds. When the biggest food company reshapes its line around a drug, check your Medicare plan before you re-enroll.
- Briefings The License Is Revoked: Oil Reprices in a Day After Iran hit three ships near Hormuz, the U.S. struck back and Treasury revoked the June 21 oil-sale license. WTI jumped 2.76% to $70.44. Why the energy sleeve is insurance that pays a dividend.
- Briefings 13,500 Companies, Nine Years to the Exit Private equity now holds ~13,500 U.S. companies — a backlog that would take nine years to clear at the current exit pace. Why retirement money needs a public bid, and what the retail wrappers don
- Briefings SpaceX Joined the Index and Fell 6.8%. That’s Normal. SpaceX dropped 6.8% on the day $800 billion of index money became forced buyers. Sell-the-inclusion is a pattern, not a scandal — and you probably own SpaceX now. Know the wrapper.
- Briefings Value Is “Back” — Until You Read the Holdings A value ETF is up 43% this year — because it
- Briefings Welcome to the Willpower Economy Three unrelated stories in the July 8 Journal — a Gen Z gadget that locks your phone, Nestlé re-spicing food for GLP-1 users, and a prison term for the Adderall pill-mill founder — are secretly one story: Americans now pay for self-control. So does your portfolio.
- Briefings The $2,200 Grant That Can Out-Yield Any Fund As of July 1, Pell Grants cover 8-to-15-week vocational programs — paramedics, cybersecurity, HVAC. Free money for a credential is the best-yielding asset in the household. Here
- Briefings The Team Lost. The Asset Won. The U.S. lost 4-1 to Belgium in Seattle — and 30 million watched on Fox, beating the World Series and NBA Finals. Soccer broke through as a U.S. media asset. Plus: Messi
- Editions A record Dow, a 19-fold profit — we read the fever chart so you don’t catch it. The Fever Issue — our read of the July 7 Wall Street Journal. A record Dow at 53,055.91, Samsung’s profit up 19-fold, the Kospi +91% — and every story wired to a move in the model books: TSM, AVGO, GEV, CEG, the banks and the gold sleeve reinforced; MU held at target; MSTR and the 2x wrappers kept at arm’s length.
- Briefings Jet fuel fell 40%. Your airfare didn’t. Jet fuel is down 40% from its April peak, but airlines have raised fares eight times since the war began and tickets cost $100 more than last year. What consolidation pricing means for travelers — and why pricing power is the trait dividend investors hunt.
- Briefings Nine-dollar gas, a $1,483 Social Security check. In Dillingham, Alaska, gas is $9 a gallon and a retiree paid $1,000 a month to heat her home against a $1,483 Social Security check. What sequence-of-returns risk looks like when it wears a parka — and how every retiree should budget for it.
- Briefings Four Giant Banks Want to Buy a Pipe — Because Owning It Erases a Fee Cap JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC are in preliminary talks to buy a Fiserv payments network — because owning the pipes exempts a bank from the Durbin debit-fee cap.
- Briefings Korea’s Memory Mania: The Boom Is Real. The Wrapper Is the Risk. Samsung’s quarterly profit rose nineteen-fold. SK Hynix is up 765% in a year. Korea’s Kospi has nearly doubled since January. The boom is genuine…
- Briefings Kids Move In, Parents Move Out, Schools Become Apartments: The Household Is Re-Bundling Half of adults under 30 live with a parent, 23.6 million Americans care for aging parents, and empty schools are becoming apartments. Three stories, one trend — and your plan should notice.
- Briefings The Machine Runs Backward: Strategy Sells Its Bitcoin to Pay the 12% It Promised Strategy (MSTR) is down 75%, its own mNAV metric fell below 1, and it
- Briefings Washington Just Capped the College Credit Card New federal student-loan rules took effect July 1: Parent PLUS capped at $65,000 per child, grad loans at $100,000, a $257,500 lifetime cap, and just two repayment plans.
- Briefings Toyota’s $3.6 Billion Lesson: Tariffs Eventually Pour Concrete. Toyota will spend $3.6 billion to bring Tacoma production back to San Antonio by 2030 — 2,000 jobs and 150,000 trucks a year — after an $8.5 billion tariff bill. The investment story is the concrete, not the truck.
- Briefings A 4–1 Exit, a Presidential Phone Call, and the Terminator Ends Brazil Belgium sent the U.S. home 4-1, a red-card ban was reversed after a White House phone call, and Erling Haaland ended Brazil. Underneath: the most financial lesson in sports.
- Briefings “Our Business Today Is Not Healthy”: Microsoft Resets Xbox Out Loud. Microsoft is cutting about 3,200 Xbox jobs — a fifth of the division — after Game Pass stalled at 30 million subscribers against a 77 million projection. Why honest bad news is the bullish tell.
- Editions Financial Independence Day. Markets are closed for the Fourth. So instead of the daily recap, the Independence Day edition: the eight pieces that actually decide your financial independence — what it costs, how it
- Briefings CalPERS vs CalSTRS: same state, two very different pensions. Teacher married to a classified employee or city worker? CalSTRS and CalPERS differ on Social Security, COLAs, survivor benefits, and age factors — a side-by-side guide for two-pension households.
- Briefings The Six-Figure Deduction Hiding in Plain Sight. A cash balance plan can let a business owner in their 50s or 60s shelter $150K–$300K+ a year pretax on top of the 401(k). What it is, who fits, and what it costs.
- Briefings Changing districts, changing systems: how to move jobs without breaking your pension. Teacher to admin, district to county, CalSTRS to CalPERS — how reciprocity, the six-month window, the five-year vesting cliff, and the refund temptation decide whether a job change costs you six figures of pension.
- Briefings How Many Stocks Is Enough? The rule of thirty expired, 4% of stocks made all the wealth, Lynch ran 1,400 positions — and a 19-year backtest of the Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio: 0.80 correlation, 0.59 beta, and 2022 finished positive.
- Briefings Same average return, ruined retirement. Two retirees earn identical average returns for 25 years. One ends with $3.6 million; the other runs out of money in year 19. The only difference is the order of the returns — and why the five years around retirement day decide everything.
- Briefings The autopilot bought bonds at the top. How target-date funds became America
- Briefings The retirement tax do-over. Between your last paycheck and your first required minimum distribution, your taxable income collapses — a once-in-a-lifetime low-bracket window to reposition decades of pretax savings. Roth conversions, 0% capital-gains harvesting, QCD timing, and the RMD snowball if you do nothing.
- Briefings Two pyramids, three buckets, four boxes. Most portfolios were accumulated, one product at a time. The 2-3-4 framework puts the decisions back in order: strategy before product, money…
- Briefings The money Washington gave back: WEP and GPO are repealed. The Social Security Fairness Act repealed the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset. What CalSTRS, CalPERS, and safety families are owed, and the four numbers to recheck now.
- Editions 57,000 jobs, a 594-point record — the market rotated into everything we already own. Our read of the July 3 Wall Street Journal — with tickers and model moves. Jobs came in at 57K vs 115K expected and the Dow set a record on rotation (UNH, DG, GS, MS, JPM). Private credit’s gates closed harder (OWL, BX, APO, ARES, KKR), the yen hit a 40-year low (IAU, WPM, RGLD), Tesla rebounded 25% in a shrinking EV market, Comcast broke itself up, and Starlink aimed at AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. What we’re adding, reinforcing, watching and avoiding — name by name.
- Briefings Wall Street Bought Bowling. The Bowlers Went Ballistic. America’s league bowlers are at war with the Wall Street-backed company that owns their lanes. Lasers, DJs and nachos out-earn the regulars. It’s a tidy little parable about loyalty and moats.
- Briefings Comcast Splits In Two And Buries The Convergence Era On his 67th birthday, Brian Roberts finalized the split of the company his father built. NBCUniversal and Sky spin off; cable stands alone. John Malone’s one-word review: “finally.”
- Briefings He Waited 60 Years To Build A Movie House. It’s For Sale. In 1959, an 11-year-old watched Cary Grant scale a house that never existed. At 78, semiretired architect John Boccardo built it above Park City. It’s listed at $45 million.
- Briefings ‘Buy Now, While Supplies Last’ Doesn’t Apply To Stocks. Retail trading just set records — nine of the ten busiest days ever came in one month, and every SpaceX share has traded four times since the IPO. Facebook fell by half after its debut; Amazon fell 80% after the famous 1998 call. Patience is profitable.
- Briefings Austin’s Million-Dollar Spillover: The Hill Country Boom And The Great Wealth Migration. Austin’s million-dollar home boom is spilling into the Hill Country — and following the migration is a portfolio decision. The full math: property tax, insurance, healthcare access and the slow exit, not just the income-tax headline.
- Briefings 57,000 Jobs, A Record Dow, And The Return Of The Rotation Trade. June added 57,000 jobs, half the forecast — and the Dow jumped 594 points to a record while the Nasdaq fell. Weak data cooled rate-hike fear and money rotated into healthcare, staples and dividend payers.
- Briefings Medicare Will Now Cover Weight-Loss Drugs. Here’s What A Retiree Actually Needs To Know. Medicare now covers GLP-1 weight-loss drugs through a $50-a-month program called Bridge. About 3.8 million seniors qualify — and funding runs only through 2027. What retirees should do now.
- Briefings She Almost Lost Hope Before ‘Stranger Things.’ Now It’s Ponies In Georgia. Millie Bobby Brown’s House Call essay: four ear surgeries before age five, a family bet on a talent scout’s word, and at 22 a Georgia farm with twenty animals. What the windfall bought is the retirement lesson.
- Briefings Big Beer’s Growth Plan Is A Smaller Can. That’s Smarter Than It Sounds. Brewers are launching small ‘pony’ cans into July 4 week, when beer sales run 37% above average. The price per ounce goes up, the customer is happier, and the margin funds dividends — the staples lesson in a can.
- Briefings A Beer Can, A Bowling Lane, And A Ranch Town: One Economy, Three Disguises. A shrinking beer can, a bowling-alley feud and million-dollar ranch towns — one economy in three disguises. Austin sold 729 million-dollar homes in four months; the premium customer sets the market now.
- Briefings The $16 Billion Exit Line: Private Credit’s Gates Are Doing What We Warned About. Investors asked private-credit funds for $15.6 billion back; only $5.9 billion came out. Blue Owl capped withdrawals at 5% and new fundraising fell 75%. Why our income holdings all have a public bid.
- Briefings Starlink Wants Your Phone Bill Next. The Carriers Should Sweat — Slowly. Starlink is exploring ground networks for mobile service — 10,000 satellites, 10 million subscribers, a prototype handset. Carrier stocks already fell far behind the market. We own the towers, fiber and silicon instead.
- Briefings Tesla’s 25% Rebound Quarter — In An EV Market That Shrank. Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles, up 25%, while the U.S. EV market shrank about 25%. Energy storage grew 41%. The valuation rides on robotaxis — so Tesla stays a watch, and we own the grid.
- Briefings The Yen Hit a 40-Year Low. The Crowd Piled In. The yen slid past 161 to the dollar, its weakest in four decades, as traders crowd into the borrow-cheap-yen trade. Why a currency 6,000 miles away matters to a retirement plan — and what we hold instead of a forecast.
- Editions The Fed switched verbs — and the banks we own threw a party about it. Our read of the July 2 Wall Street Journal — with tickers and model moves. The Fed switched verbs (SGOV, GS, MS, JPM), the AI build-out went off-grid (GEV, CEG, NEE, VRT, PWR), Michael Burry shorted half the AI market (NVDA, PLTR, TSLA, MU, AMD), Kroger bought Giant Eagle, and a record IPO half raised $130 billion. What we
- Briefings The AI Boom Runs On Boring Old Engines Data centers can’t get grid power fast enough, so they’re buying engines and 20-year utility contracts. The winners are boring, and they pay dividends. That’s our kind of gold rush.
- Briefings America At 250: Three Questions, One Retirement Lesson On the eve of the 250th birthday, the Journal poses three forks: growth or redistribution, bridges or walls, competition or control. You don’t get to pick. Your plan has to survive the answer.
- Briefings Europe’s Air-Conditioning Fight Is Really About Buffers A record heat wave is forcing a very European argument: is air conditioning a necessity or a nuisance? One Paris man has fought two years in court for one unit. There’s a planning lesson in the sweat.
- Briefings The Fed’s New Argument: Hold Or Hike? Speaking in Portugal, Fed chair Kevin Warsh said inflation risks have receded — while declining to rule out a rate increase this month. Officials are split down the middle. Plan for the parked Fed, not the pivot.
- Briefings A 52-Year-Old Soup Explains Compounding At Wattana Panich in Bangkok, the beef broth has simmered since 1974 — four years older than the grandson guarding it. He can’t leave it alone for long. Neither should you leave your compounding.
- Briefings A Record Half for IPOs. The Pop Was Never Yours. U.S. IPOs raised a record $130 billion in the first half of 2026. New listings trade up 24% on average — but that gain lands at the offer price, which institutions get and you do not.
- Briefings Kroger Buys Giant Eagle. Boring Wins Again. Kroger is paying $1.65 billion for 200 Giant Eagle supermarkets and about $9 billion in yearly sales. No AI, no drama — just the quiet consolidation that funds the dividends a retirement lives on.
- Briefings Musk’s SpaceX Sketched an AI Phone. Here’s Why It Reaches Your Index Fund. SpaceX showed investors a prototype AI phone running xAI on a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. Whether or not it ships, the suppliers get paid — and your index fund already owns them.
- Briefings The USMCA Lives — On A One-Year Leash The U.S. traded a clean 16-year renewal of its North American trade pact for a decade of yearly reviews. The deal survives. The certainty businesses planned around just left the building.
- June 2026
- Editions AI Stopped Being A Stock Story And Became An Inflation Story. Our read of the June 20–27 Wall Street Journal. The AI build-out stopped being a stock story and became an inflation story — quadrupling chip prices, a $200 jump on a MacBook, a 6% electric bill — while oil round-tripped to where the war started and the Fed quietly switched from debating cuts to debating hikes. Plus Chevron powering a Microsoft AI data center, a $35B Lockheed restock, the ACA subsidy cliff for early retirees, and a 14% yield that is really a warning label.
- Briefings Retiring Before 65 Just Got More Expensive: The ACA Subsidy Cliff. Nearly 4 million people just dropped ACA coverage as enhanced subsidies vanished and some premiums doubled. If you plan to bridge to 65 on a marketplace plan, that gap year now needs a number.
- Briefings AI Is Now Being Regulated One Friday Letter At A Time. Washington banned Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, then partly un-banned it two weeks later. The real signal isn’t the model — it’s that AI policy now ships case-by-case from the Commerce Department.
- Briefings Sentiment Crawls Off The Floor — And One Number Matters Most. Consumer mood ticked up to 49.5 in June — a number that tells you how low the bar got. The figure worth watching is the long-run inflation read that fell to 3.3%.
- Briefings Crimea Went From Crown Jewel To Maintenance Nightmare. A state of emergency in Crimea, oil down to $69, and a war premium quietly deflating. Why the energy & defense sleeve is a long-arc hold, not a Friday headline.
- Briefings Used To The Heat, Undone By It — A Lesson In Building The Buffer. Americans from the hottest U.S. states got ‘humbled’ by a European heat wave with no air conditioning. The lesson isn’t the heat — it’s whether you built the buffer to absorb it.
- Briefings Stocks Limp To The End Of A Five-Day Slump. The S&P and Nasdaq fell every day this week — the first time since April 2024 — while the Dow stayed green and gold hit $4,080. That split is diversification doing its quiet job.
- Briefings The Price Of A Good Time Has Never Been Higher. Fans are financing $9,000 ballgames through Klarna while the wealthy pay cash. The smart move is to own the toll booth — MSG Sports, Live Nation — not carry the balance to sit in it.
- Briefings It Took A Busload Of Scots At Costco To Remind Us The Country Is Rich. The World Cup’s Tartan Army marveled at free refills, Costco and homes they could afford. Strip the sentiment and there’s a real lesson about gratitude and money.
- Briefings Apple Found Out Memory Isn’t Free Anymore. Apple raised Mac and iPad prices up to 25% as DRAM and NAND chip prices quadrupled — the AI build-out tax showing up at your local Best Buy. Here’s who collects.
- Briefings JPMorgan Finally Narrowed The World’s Longest Job Interview. JPMorgan promoted two co-presidents and handed each a $30 million bonus, narrowing the race to succeed Jamie Dimon — and what a deep bench means for a core financials position.
- Briefings Oil Took The Scenic Route Back To Square One. Crude went from $118 to $72 and right back to where the war began. The market priced an apocalypse, collected it, and handed the money back — here is how you own energy through a round-trip.
- Briefings Everyone Wants Passive Income. A Dividend Portfolio Is The Version That Actually Works. Passive income is just a younger word for dividends — assets that pay you while you sleep. The boring diversified version works; the side-hustle lottery makes you find the glitch first.
- Briefings The Fed’s Favorite Gauge Just Said The Quiet Part Out Loud. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge just hit 4.1% — its hottest since 2023 — and officials stopped debating cuts and started debating hikes. Here’s what that means for a fixed income.
- Briefings Socialism Is Back In Fashion — And Both Parties Are Wearing It. Democratic socialists swept New York, Andy Burnham is poised to run Britain, and Trump wants federal stakes in AI. When both wings eye government ownership, the portfolio question isn’t ideology — it’s where the heavy hand lands.
- Briefings When Regulation Sent Shoppers Back To The Highway Diner. A UK adult retailer is reviving shuttered roadside diners — and its whole online business equals one good store. The lesson regulation just taught about brick-and-mortar moats.
- Briefings The WallStreetBets Crowd Ordered A Frosty With A Side Of Short Squeeze. Wendy’s jumped 18% on a Reddit dare, not on burger sales. GameStop and AMC walked so this could run — here’s why “punish the haters” is an emotion, not a position.
- Briefings The AI Boom Is The New Inflation — And It’s Coming For Your Electric Bill. An $8 trillion data-center build-out is quietly pushing up the price of your laptop, your gadgets, and your power. Here’s why “higher-for-longer” is now a supply-chain fact — and how to hedge it.
- Briefings An Open-Book Stress Test — And A Wave Of Buybacks For The Income Sleeve. The big banks “passed” a test the Fed graded with the answer key handed out in advance — then answered with $50 billion buybacks and dividend hikes. Here’s what that means for an income portfolio.
- Briefings Real Progress Against A Brutal Cancer — And Why Your Retirement Plan Should Care. Two new breast-cancer drugs just cut disease progression ~40% versus chemo. The human win is real — and so is the planning lesson about what coverage actually buys you.
- Briefings China Is Quietly Hobbling The Dollar’s Biggest Weapon. Iran routed its oil around U.S. sanctions through China’s yuan plumbing — and that’s the strongest argument for owning real assets and a sliver of gold (IAU).
- Briefings A $35 Billion Restock: Why The Defense Sleeve Earns Its Keep After A War. The Pentagon handed Lockheed up to $35 billion to rebuild THAAD interceptor stockpiles. That kind of multi-year, government-funded backlog is why we own defense for the cash flow — not the war.
- Briefings Micron’s Midnight Blowout: Memory Is The New Oil. After a week-long chip selloff, Micron (MU) earned $28.24 billion in a quarter and jumped 15% after hours. One print erased a panic — and that whipsaw is the whole lesson.
- Briefings SK Hynix Wants $29 Billion To Build Even More AI Memory. SK Hynix plans an Aramco-scale $29 billion Nasdaq listing to fund more AI memory. What a 300%-up stock arriving in New York means for a retirement book.
- Briefings The World’s Fastest Beer Run: A Three-Minute Lesson In Reading The Fine Print. FIFA’s three-minute “hydration breaks” became high-speed beer runs. A rule built for safety got repurposed for profit — exactly how every “safe” product does. Read a prospectus the way fans read the break.
- Briefings Carnival’s Soft Outlook Is A Read On The Whole Consumer. Carnival missed and guided light, but it’s 93% booked for 2026 and demand only cracked in the war zone. A cruise line is the purest read on the consumer there is.
- Briefings Florida’s Messiest Political Fight Is Between Two Birds. Tallahassee spent real hours arguing flamingo versus mockingbird while you fretted a 2% Nasdaq day. Perspective is a free and renewable resource — and ‘add a third bird’ is how every committee solves everything.
- Briefings The GLP-1 Bill Is Now A Retirement-Plan Line Item. A working family is draining retirement accounts to pay roughly $700 every four weeks for a GLP-1 drug. The quiet financial story of the GLP-1 era — and why medication inflation belongs in the plan.
- Briefings The Greenspan Put Just Died At 100. Don’t Build A Retirement Around A Rescue. Alan Greenspan died at 100, and so did the three-decade faith that the Fed rescues falling stocks. With inflation at 4% and the Fed weighing hikes, plan as if no one is coming.
- Briefings Hormuz, Not The Headlines: Why The Iran Vote Reaches Your Grocery Bill. The Senate voted 50-48 to curb the Iran war. The market read isn’t the politics — it’s the Strait of Hormuz, the single biggest disinflation lever between the front page and your grocery bill.
- Briefings The Tech Slide Deepens — And Diversification Earns Its Keep. A global tech selloff dragged the Nasdaq down 2.2% and chip names down 13% — while six of the S&P’s 11 sectors rose. That split is the whole case for a cash-flow tilt.
- Briefings Own The Economy, Don’t Just Rent It: The Real Lesson In The Wealth Gap. The ranks of the ultrawealthy jumped 14.4% last year. Strip the eat-the-rich framing and there’s a usable lesson: they got there by owning the economy, not renting it — and the on-ramp is open to everyone.
- Briefings Walmart Is Becoming A Media Company With A Side Business In Cereal. Walmart is paying $1.4 billion for a French ad-tech firm. The real story isn’t groceries — it’s the high-margin ad business hiding inside the store.
- Briefings AbbVie Pays $10.9 Billion For Itchy Skin — The Patent-Cliff Playbook. AbbVie paid a 49% premium for a tiny biotech and a great yield is only as safe as the pipeline behind it. Why dividend retirees should own the acquirers, not chase the 47% pop.
- Briefings The $100 Million Payday For CEOs Is Back. More chiefs cleared $100 million last year than any year since 2021, and Musk set a $158 billion record. Nine-figure pay clusters at market tops — here’s why we tilt to the cash-flow payers instead.
- Briefings Old Oil Meets New AI: Chevron Will Power A Microsoft Data Center For 20 Years. Chevron signed a 20-year deal to sell electricity to Microsoft for one of the largest U.S. AI data centers. The build-out is rerouting through dividend-paying old-economy energy — here’s why we own it that way.
- Briefings In A Shift, The U.S. Lets Iran Sell Its Oil In Dollars. A two-month sanctions waiver drained $1.78 of war premium out of crude in a single headline. Here’s why we own energy for the dividend, sized so that’s a Tuesday, not a heart attack.
- Briefings Mars Gives M&M’s A Makeover, And The Color Blue Loses. M&M’s is dropping artificial dyes — and quietly losing blue and brown. The candy bowl has a real lesson about policy risk and margins for retirement investors.
- Briefings Does Your Index Fund Own SpaceX? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Care. VTI owns SpaceX, S&P 500 funds don’t, and over a decade the gap was half a percent. The benchmark you pick matters far less than what you save and pay.
- Briefings Starmer Quits Amid A Labour Revolt, And Farage Counts To Three. Britain is getting its sixth prime minister in seven years — and the FTSE 100 rose anyway. Why a country’s politics and its stock index run on different clocks.
- Briefings A 14% Yield Is Not A Gift. It’s A Warning Label. A bitcoin-hoarding company is funding itself with a 14% perpetual preferred. That yield isn’t a reward — it’s the market screaming the risk at you.
- Briefings The Flood Of AI Money Is The Tell. Forward P/E sits just under 20, calmer than the dot-com peak. But companies are now selling stock instead of buying it — and that’s the quiet signal that matters.
- Briefings Hollywood Posts Its Best Box Office Since Pre-Covid. “Toy Story 5” opened to $312 million and the year is running at $4.46 billion — the best since 2019. The tell isn’t the gross. It’s that people are actually showing up.
- Briefings Coca-Cola And The IRS Square Off Over $20 Billion. Coke and the IRS go to court over $20 billion in back taxes. The company says its 64-year dividend streak is safe either way — and that tells you exactly who it answers to.
- Briefings Stranded Spirit Fliers Are Now Winging It By Bus. Spirit died, so its fans boarded the actual Greyhound — a 30% jump in bus riders is the trading-down signal markets near records keep missing.
- Briefings Your Resume Is A Financial Asset. Keep It Sharp In Calm Weather. Workers are landing jobs by overhauling their LinkedIn after layoffs. The cheapest insurance against a layoff is a profile that’s already sharp — not an emergency makeover at the worst moment.
- Briefings The Memory-Chip Crunch Is Nearly Unsolvable — And It’s In Your Next Laptop. AI is funneling memory to data centers and squeezing your gear. A data-center chip went from $350 to $1,300 in a year. This is the inflation nobody legislates away.
- Briefings “Is This Just Free Money?” Polymarket’s Fake-Bet Hype Machine. Paid creators posted $1.9 million in fake Polymarket wagers to “win” nearly $900,000 — bets that would have lost $166,000. When a platform stages its winners, the house edge is the business model.
- Briefings Why Sanctions Keep Failing To Cow Rogue Regimes. More than 1,000 sanctions on Iran, and Tehran still earned $43 billion from oil. Sanctions leak, regimes adapt — and the crude risk premium just hibernates.
- Briefings Crazy-Rich Returns Are Luring Everyone Into Red-Hot Asian Markets. Taiwan doubled, Korea tripled, the Nikkei is up 80%. You already own the AI build-out through index funds — here’s the difference between owning the trend and getting drunk on it.
- Briefings The New Fed Chief’s First Job Is To Read The AI Boom. Kevin Warsh’s first call as Fed chair isn’t rates — it’s deciding what moment he’s in. With the AI build-out pumping demand, the split over a year-end hike is what your income sleeves should be listening to.
- Briefings They Gave An AI Tomorrow’s Headlines. It Still Went Broke. Elm Wealth handed Grok tomorrow’s WSJ front page and let it trade ahead of the news. It still blew up — and so did the reporter. Here’s the lesson.
- Briefings Iran’s Frozen Billions Start To Thaw As Hormuz Reopens. A 60-day deal frees Iranian cash and oil as the Strait of Hormuz crawls back open and Brent slides to $78. Here is why the energy sleeve still earns its keep.
- Briefings An $18,000 Consult To Learn Where The Pickles Are. A fermented-food diet is sweeping Trump’s cabinet, and a doctor charges $18,000 to walk you through the fridge aisle. When wealth concentrates at the top, exclusivity is the product — the sauerkraut costs four dollars.
- Briefings When Your Broker Starts Selling Roulette Tickets. Charles Schwab is rolling out binary “will the S&P be up by Friday” bets. That’s a marketing decision, not a retirement strategy — here’s the line.
- Briefings Las Vegas Is The K-Shaped Economy With A Neon Sign On It. Postpandemic Vegas was rebuilt for the rich — 75% of visitors now earn six figures, and a $26 bottle of water went viral. It’s the cleanest read on the K-shaped economy you’ll find.
- Briefings Even The Comfortable Feel Broke. That’s A Planning Problem, Not A Portfolio Problem. Over 40% of upper-middle-class Americans say they haven’t saved enough to retire. Anxiety this broad isn’t a portfolio problem — it’s a missing number.
- Editions Trump Strikes A Deal To End The Iran War. Oil Falls, And The Dow Closes At A Record. Trump strikes a deal to end the Iran war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — oil fell to $80.75 and the Dow closed at a record 51,671.03, the best three-session run in a year. But inflation is still hot and a hawkish Kevin Warsh chairs his first Fed meeting Wednesday. Plus a CFP-grounded
- Briefings AI Just Cracked A 1946 Math Problem. Is It Really Doing Math? An OpenAI model disproved a longstanding Erdos conjecture, verified by humans. A sharp essay asks whether machine-generated proof is real mathematics, and the answer matters for how we use AI.
- Briefings ‘Backdoor’ Reference Checks Are Back — Because AI Broke The Résumé. With most applicants now using AI to polish resumes and coach references, hiring managers are quietly calling people who aren
- Briefings Jalen Brunson, King Of New York — And The Quiet Lesson In Staying. The Knicks won it all, and Jason Gay crowned Brunson the king of New York. His biggest move wasn
- Briefings The Pentagon Wants $35,000 Missiles, Not $2 Million Ones — And That Reshapes Defense. The Iran war burned through expensive munitions fast. Now the U.S. is buying cheap, mass-produced drones and low-cost cruise missiles — quietly rewiring who wins in defense.
- Briefings Colombia’s Stark Choice — And Why Emerging-Market Politics Are Money Risk. Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s Americas column frames Sunday’s Colombian runoff as a stark choice between hard-left socialism and a free-market…
- Briefings America’s Strange New Credit-Card Problem: We’re Not Borrowing Enough. Heard on the Street flips the worry: U.S. card debt is manageable and debt-service is near record lows. The real issue is that banks have tightened so much that lending growth is too slow.
- Briefings Teachers Are Cashing In On The AI Data-Center Boom. Here’s The Investing Lesson. In one Louisiana parish a Meta data center is funding teacher bonuses through the local tax base. The AI build-out is spilling real money into real towns — and into the power-and-property trade.
- Briefings Worried About A Tech Bubble? There’s A Cheaper Place To Hide. Jason Zweig argues European stocks — left behind in the AI trade — are the diversification U.S. investors quietly need. I agree, with one caveat.
- Briefings Gifts With Big Dad Energy — And The Best One Costs Nothing. Father’s Day is June 21. Here’s a quick, fun gift guide pulled from the weekend Journal — and the one ‘gift’ I push every dad toward that doesn’t…
- Briefings The War’s Over — But Inflation Isn’t. Kevin Warsh Takes The Fed’s Chair. The relief rally assumes rate cuts. The bond market and the new Fed chair may have other plans. Warsh
- Briefings The War’s Quiet Casualty: The World’s Fertilizer — And Your Grocery Bill. While everyone watched oil, the war did quieter damage to something just as important: the fertilizer that grows the world’s food. Here's how a…
- Briefings Royal Enfield Is Coming For Harley — And The Culture War Is The Marketing Plan. India’s Royal Enfield is expanding aggressively in the U.S., courting younger riders with cheaper bikes and savvy social media — while…
- Briefings House Robots Are Coming, And They’ll Be Dangerously Cute. Owners have held Buddhist funerals for Sony’s robot dog. A sharp new essay argues that machines designed to be adorable are designed to lower your…
- Briefings Trump Strikes A Deal To End The Iran War. Oil Falls, And The Dow Closes At A Record. A cease-fire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz sent crude tumbling and the Dow to a record close. The across-the-desk read on what changes — and what doesn
- Briefings The Summer Jersey Goes Everywhere — A Field Guide (And A Note On Spending). With the World Cup on, soccer jerseys are this summer
- Briefings The Knicks Waited 53 Years. Your Retirement Shouldn’t Have To. It took the Knicks 53 years to win it all again. Fifty-three years is a vesting period — and the whole point of a real plan is that you shouldn
- Briefings Why Oil Never Went Through The Roof — Even With A War On. Crude topped out near $86 and then fell, not the $120 everyone feared. Four quiet brakes explain it — and they tell you how to actually own energy.
- Briefings ‘Rocky,’ America At 250, And The Long Game. Peggy Noonan’s essay uses a 1976 boxing movie to talk about American optimism heading into the country’s 250th year. There’s a quiet lesson in it…
- Briefings The $12 Coffee Mug That’s Worth More Than Your Souvenirs. A Journal feature on people who collect cheesy travel souvenirs for the memories they hold. A light read, and a quiet point about what we actually value.
- Briefings Serenity In 17,000 Square Feet — And The Quieter Kind You Can Actually Afford. New York’s most extravagant new spa has five plunge pools, four saunas, and a $1,495 couples massage. A fun escape of a read — and a reminder…
- Briefings The Hidden Tax In Index Funds: What SpaceX’s Listing Just Exposed. James Mackintosh’s Streetwise column uses SpaceX’s roughly $1.8 trillion debut to dissect the “index trade” — and an uncomfortable truth most…
- Briefings Should You Buy The SpaceX IPO? A Planner’s Honest Answer. SpaceX (SPCX) is public at a ~$1.75T valuation. Should you buy it? A CFP-grounded buy / no-buy assessment: the real S-1 numbers, the IPO rules, how landmark IPOs actually performed, and a position-sizing verdict.
- Briefings The Invention Of The Trillionaire — And What The Gilded Age Teaches Us. The weekend Review traces the arc from the first great industrial fortunes to today
- Briefings ‘Trump Accounts’ For Kids Launch Soon — But The Rules Are Still Half-Written. A new federal savings account for children is weeks from launch, complete with a $1,000 government seed deposit. The problem: the contribution,…
- Editions Capital Wealth Mid-Week Daily A rough week ended with a hard down day — the S&P fell 1.6%, the Nasdaq 2% and the Dow 953 points — as May inflation hit a three-year high of 4.2% and the Iran war kept oil bid. Deutsche Telekom eyed a full T-Mobile merger (the largest ever), NextEra
- Briefings The Bond Market Isn't Buying The Bounce. For all the green on the stock screens, the bond market barely budged.
- Briefings At The Movies: A Sober Take On The Summer's Big Alien-Encounter Spectacle WSJ's Kyle Smith reviews the Russo brothers' new sci-fi tentpole. A weekend watch — and a small lesson about spectacle versus substance.
- Briefings From Sizzler To SpaceX: The Quiet Billionaire Behind Musk's Empire. The Journal profiled Antonio Gracias, the longtime Musk associate and DOGE volunteer whose SpaceX stake is now worth around $68 billion — a fortune that traces back, improbably, to franchising Sizzler and Little Caesars before he ever touched a rocket.
- Briefings Trump Threatens To Strike Iran's Oil — And Crude Catches A Bid. President Trump escalated again, threatening further military strikes on Iran and floating the idea of seizing its oil infrastructure.
- Briefings The Nursing-Home Coin Flip: Medicare Advantage Denials Draw A Federal Probe. A new federal investigation found that Medicare Advantage insurers — including CVS Health
- Briefings Does Microfinance Actually Work? Yunus's Nobel Idea Gets Re-Examined. Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize for the idea that tiny loans could be capitalism
- Briefings Where Mortgage Rates Actually Are Right Now — And Why They Won't Budge The 30-year fixed is parked around 6.58% and the 15-year near 6.01%. With inflation hot and the Fed on hold, here
- Briefings Off Duty: The Quiet Luxury Of Renting A Room At The Convent Convents across Europe rent beautiful rooms for a song — if you can live by the rules. A weekend read on cost, simplicity, and what “enough” really looks like.
- Briefings Why a 1,000-Point Rebound Feels So Good — And Why That's The Dangerous Part The Dow's snap-back felt like relief. Here's what's really happening in your head when the screens turn green — and how I keep it from driving…
- Briefings Stocks Roar Back: The Dow Jumps Nearly 1,000 Points As Dip-Buyers Return. The day after the worst session in weeks, buyers came right back.
- Briefings The Cattle Killer Comes Back: Texas Ranchers Battle A Flesh-Eating Fly. The New World screwworm — a flesh-eating parasite eradicated from the United States back in the 1960s — is inching north again through Mexico.
- Briefings The Social Security “Trust Fund” Deception — And What Retirees Should Actually Plan For A WSJ opinion piece argues the so-called trust fund is more accounting fiction than a vault of cash. Here
- Editions A Three-Year-High Inflation Print And A Widening War Sank Stocks. We Spent The Week Leaning Into What Holds Up When They Do. A rough week ended with a hard down day — the S&P fell 1.6%, the Nasdaq 2% and the Dow 953 points — as May inflation hit a three-year high of 4.2% and the Iran war kept oil bid. Deutsche Telekom eyed a full T-Mobile merger (the largest ever), NextEra
- Briefings A Cloud Startup That Refuses To Touch Nvidia Just Raised $350M — Led By AMD. TensorWave, a Las Vegas cloud-computing startup, runs exclusively on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) hardware — on principle, because its founder thinks Nvidia controls too much of the AI infrastructure market.
- Briefings The Bond Market Just Quietly Repriced The Year. Here's What 4.54% Is Telling Us. With inflation back at 4.2%, the 10-year Treasury yield sits at 4.541%, the fed-funds target is still 3.50–3.75%, and the average 30-year mortgage is 6.57%.
- Briefings North Korea Arms Up, Taiwan Drills Live-Fire — The Defense Tailwind Stays Chronic. North Korea is likely to expand its nuclear enrichment by about 75%, according to international researchers, even as Taiwan ran live-fire Himars drills aimed squarely at deterring Beijing.
- Briefings Inflation Just Hit a Three-Year High — and the War Is Part of the Reason Consumer prices rose 4.2% in May, the hottest in three years, as the Iran war pushed energy costs up and pushed Fed rate cuts further out. What it means for the book.
- Briefings Battered But Not Beaten: Iran's Grip On Hormuz Keeps A Floor Under Oil. Iran's regime was battered by bombing but came away with real leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint a fifth of the world's oil passes…
- Briefings NextEra Is Buying Dominion To Build A Mega-Utility. The Market Hated It. I'm Buying The Dip. Shares of NextEra (NEE), the largest U.S.
- Briefings The Pope Weighs In On AI: Build A City, Not A Tower Of Babel. In his first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," Pope Leo XIV framed the future of artificial intelligence as a choice between two construction…
- Briefings SpaceX Is to Orbit What the Model T Was to the Road The biggest IPO in history priced this week at roughly a $1.75 trillion valuation. But the number isn’t the story. The story is that, once again,…
- Briefings Deutsche Telekom Wants All Of T-Mobile — The Largest Merger Anyone Has Ever Tried. Timotheus Höttges, who runs Deutsche Telekom — the West
- Editions In One Day, Apple Rebooted Siri And OpenAI Filed To Go Public. The AI Story Just Reset — And Tech Carried The Market Again. Tech led again — Nasdaq +0.9% while the Dow slipped — as Apple rebooted Siri with Google
- Briefings A Smarter Siri, And A Farewell: Apple Bets Its AI On Google's Engine. Apple (AAPL) used its big developer showcase to introduce an AI version of Siri — one built with technology developed alongside Alphabet
- Briefings $159 Billion In AI Bonds: Genius, Or A Bubble Inflating? Both Sides Have A Real Case. Global bond issuance by the big AI-tech companies is on track for a record — roughly $159 billion in 2026.
- Briefings Amazon Bought A Mountain Of Glass. We Bought The Company That Makes It. Amazon.com (AMZN) entered a multibillion-dollar agreement with Corning (GLW) for the optical fiber, cable and connectivity that knit its fast-growing data centers together.
- Briefings Iran's Missiles Signal A Wider Goal — And Keep A Bid Under Oil. Iran's series of ballistic-missile salvos aimed at Israel are meant to show that, despite an intense air campaign against it, Tehran retains real…
- Briefings The World's Most Unlikely Boom: Inside North Korea's Pizza-And-QR-Code Economy. It's a story that makes you do a double-take.
- Briefings Nvidia Plants A Flag In Asia — And Widens The Moat Again. Nvidia (NVDA) said it will collaborate with South Korea
- Briefings OpenAI Files To Go Public — The First Real Gut-Check On The AI Trade. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said it filed paperwork for an initial public offering.
- Briefings Taiwan's Arms Backlog: An Op-Ed Argues Delay Is Emboldening Beijing. Defense analyst Seth G.
- Briefings The Weight-Loss Pill Era: Novo's Wegovy Tablet Tops Three Million Scripts. Novo Nordisk (NVO) said prescriptions for its Wegovy weight-loss pill have surpassed three million — a big number for an oral version of a treatment that until recently mostly meant injections.
- Reports & scenarios The 2026 Midterms: Why November Matters, And How Markets Could Move November 3, 2026: all 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats, 36 governorships. Why midterms move markets — taxes, oversight, regulation, the deficit — and an interactive look at gridlock, sweep, or status quo. Educational, not a prediction.
- Editions Capital Wealth Weekend Edition A rough week ended with a hard down day — the S&P fell 1.6%, the Nasdaq 2% and the Dow 953 points — as May inflation hit a three-year high of 4.2% and the Iran war kept oil bid. Deutsche Telekom eyed a full T-Mobile merger (the largest ever), NextEra
- Briefings The Bond Market Quietly Repriced The Cuts Away. The clearest tell on Friday wasn
- Briefings The Chip Trade Cracks: Semis Lead A Sharp Selloff. The hardest hit corner Friday was the one that had run the furthest: semiconductors.
- Briefings Hiring Gathers Steam — And Wall Street Hates It. The May jobs report came in strong — solid payroll gains and a labor market that refuses to roll over.
- Briefings Inside The Push To Rein In Medicare Spending. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is again at the center of the spending debate, weighing how to slow the growth of the program millions of retirees depend on without cutting the care they were promised.
- Briefings Mortgage Rates Head Into Summer Stuck Near 6.5%. With the jobs report pushing rate cuts out, the 30-year fixed mortgage stayed parked in the mid-6% range heading into summer.
- Briefings The Retired Shuttle Engineers Who Can't Quite Let Go. A lovely weekend read: the engineers who built and flew the Space Shuttle, now long retired, still gather to tinker, teach, and keep the old knowledge alive — unwilling to let a life
- Reports & scenarios The Credit Stress Scenario: Private Credit, AI Debt & Your Portfolio Private credit at ~$3T turns lender-friendly: spreads at 2-year highs, Blackstone
- Editions The Dow's Biggest Record Day Of The Year Had Nothing To Do With AI. That's The Best News In This Paper. A 1,500-point whipsaw. Wednesday the Dow fell 620 on an Iran oil spike; Thursday it jumped +875 to a record 51,561.93 — on health care and banks,…
- Briefings Washington Wants Equity In AI. The Biggest AI Lab Wants A Breather. Welcome To The Utility Era. Senior officials discussed federal equity stakes in major AI companies; Sanders drafts a 50% public-fund bill; Anthropic — near a $1 trillion valuation with a $50B run rate — publicly calls for a slowdown. AI is becoming a state-entangled utility in real time.
- Briefings Apple's Comeback Plan For AI Is The Thing Everyone Mocked: Siri. After years of being the punchline of the AI race, Apple (AAPL) is expected to unveil a rebuilt, ChatGPT-style Siri at next week's developer…
- Briefings Buffett's Team Bought The Parade. We Bought A Float. Berkshire disclosed a Macy
- Briefings Broadcom Lost $286 Billion In A Day. Its Crime? Meeting Expectations. Broadcom (AVGO) fell 13% and erased $286 billion — the fourth-largest one-day loss ever — after affirming, not raising, its AI forecast. What the shrug heard
- Briefings The Nasdaq Just Had Its Worst Day In Over A Year. The Top-Heavy Market Finally Cracked. Friday: the Nasdaq fell 4.2% (more than 1,100 points), its worst day since the April 2025 tariff rout. A blowout jobs report revived rate fears just as AI-spending doubts slammed the chips — and the semiconductor index shed $1.2 trillion. Why concentration was the real risk, and how a multi-engine book is built for exactly this.
- Briefings Bitcoin Is Half Its October Peak. SpaceX Wants $75 Billion Next Week. Same Dollar, Two Doors. Bitcoin fell to ~$65,380 — half its October peak — after Strategy
- Briefings The AI Boom's Scarcest Resource Isn't Chips Or Capital. It's A Transformer With A Delivery Date. Thursday's Journal led with the most important AI story nobody trades on: more than 60% of the data-center capacity planned for 2027 isn't under…
- Briefings The Hottest Ticket In America Is A Parking Spot To Watch Bugs Blink In Unison. Every June, for a couple of weeks, the Photinus carolinus fireflies of the Great Smoky Mountains flash in perfect synchrony — thousands of them,…
- Briefings A Neuroscientist Walks Into An Improv Class And Pitches A 'Hammer Humidifier.' The best thing on Friday's front page wasn't about markets. Scientists across America are taking improv comedy classes to learn how to talk to the…
- Briefings The Hottest Amenity In Retirement Real Estate Is A World-Class Cardiologist Down The Street. Wealthy seniors are buying $2M–$10M second homes near elite hospitals — apartments close to the cardiologist, not the beach. The Mansion section coined a word for it, and there
- Briefings Oil Dipped On A Ceasefire. The Inventory Clock Didn't Notice. WTI dipped to $93.04 on a ceasefire — hours before an Iranian drone hit Kuwait
- Briefings Private Credit’s Members-Only Era: Lenders Tighten, Investors Queue For The Exit Lenders are raising rates, fattening fees and closing loopholes; investors asked to pull 10% of Blackstone
- Briefings The SpaceX IPO Has A Hidden Twist For Your 401(k): QQQ Might Own It, SPY Won't. SpaceX prices its unconventional $75B IPO at $135/share (~$1.77T) for a June 12 Nasdaq debut. The S&P 500 won
- Briefings The Banks Stopped Fighting Crypto And Started Absorbing It. The largest U.S. banks plan a shared tokenized-deposit network for H1 2027 — a counterattack on stablecoins. Same day, the 25-year-old pattern-day-trader rule died and Robinhood jumped 5.5%. What it means for the financials sleeve.
- Editions Nine Up Days In A Row. The Market's Longest Winning Streak In Over A Year Is The Calmest One We've Seen. The S&P 500 just logged its longest winning streak in over a year, the AI-chip trade widened to Marvell, oil quietly climbed for three straight sessions, and Washington put AI on a leash. Our mid-week read of June 1–3 — what moved, what we did in the book, and the human-interest reads worth your coffee.
- Briefings Buffett Bought a Homebuilder. Saylor Sold Bitcoin to Pay a Dividend. That's the Whole Lesson. Berkshire bought Taylor Morrison and added Delta while Strategy (MSTR) sold bitcoin to fund a preferred dividend. The clearest illustration of the book
- Briefings The Counter-Drone Arms Race Just Went Mainstream. Motorola Bought Its Way In. Russia is escalating drone attacks, the U.S. Army is opening up its weapons to counter drones, and Motorola Solutions (MSI) bought D-Fend for ~$1.5B. Why counter-drone is now a permanent budget line.
- Briefings Dollar General Beat, Raised, and Jumped 8%. We Added It as a Barbell Against the AI Trade. Dollar General (DG) beat and raised on
- Briefings Estonia Just Gave Every High-Schooler Free ChatGPT. The Joke Has a Serious Tail. Estonia is rolling out free ChatGPT to high-school students nationwide. A fun headline with a real read-through for the AI-adoption story.
- Briefings Garth Brooks Might Sell His Catalog for $2 Billion. Songs Are an Asset Class Now. Garth Brooks is exploring a ~$2B sale of his music catalog. Why song catalogs became a real asset class — and the quiet lesson for long-term investors.
- Briefings Nvidia's CEO Just Pointed at Marvell and Said “Trillion-Dollar Company.” We Listened. Jensen Huang says Marvell (MRVL) could be the next trillion-dollar company. Here is what it actually does, why the AI-chip trade is widening, and how we sized it.
- Briefings America Is Trying to Build Magnets Without China. It Matters More Than It Sounds. A startup called Niron is making powerful magnets with no rare earths at all. Why the magnets-without-China theme matters for defense, EVs and your portfolio — and the public proxy we bought.
- Briefings “Solo Agers” Are Navigating Life's Hardest Decisions Alone. Here's the Scaffolding That Helps. A growing number of Americans are aging without a spouse or children to lean on. The legal and financial scaffolding every solo ager should put in place — well before they need it.
- Briefings Truckers Are Driving Slower to Save Fuel. That's a Real Signal About Oil. Diesel is up 44% and truckers are easing off the accelerator to save fuel. A quirky story with a serious read-through for the energy trade.
- Briefings Washington Just Put AI on a Leash. The Headlines Got It Backwards. A new executive order asks AI labs to give the government 30 days
- Briefings Anthropic Files to Go Public. SpaceX Eyes $1.75 Trillion. The IPO Window Is Wide Open. Anthropic filed confidentially to go public and SpaceX is eyeing a ~$1.75T valuation. Why the IPO wave is the cleanest way to play the AI cycle through the public market.
- Briefings Gen Z Can't Get Enough of Roth IRAs. They're More Right Than They Know. Young savers are piling into Roth IRAs for tax-free growth. The planning note we
- May 2026
- Editions Oil Just Had Its Worst Month Since 2020 — And That's Exactly Why Stocks Hit Records. Brent fell 19% in May on Iran-peace hopes and cheaper crude pushed the Dow above 51,000 for the first time. Plus: big banks minting money, BYD
- Commentary Three Records, Cheap Oil, and a Deal Frenzy Three records to close May, oil’s worst month since 2020, and a wide-open deal market. Our weekend roundup of 11 stories — and what we did in the book.
- Briefings When the World Went on Sale: What 1873 Can Teach Us About 2026 A productivity boom, an investment bubble, and falling prices: the panic of 1873 is the most useful history lesson for 2026 markets nobody is reading.
- Briefings The Class of AI Reports for Duty — and the Job Market Is Very Weird The Class of 2026 is the first truly AI-native cohort. Employers are fighting to hire them for their skills — and quietly cutting other entry-level jobs with the same technology.
- Briefings ‘It’s Gung Ho’: The Big Banks Are Minting Money Again Dealmaking is back, trading desks are humming, and IPOs are up 80%. Why the biggest U.S. banks are having a moment — and what we
- Briefings BYD’s $14 Billion Bet: A Self-Driving Chip That Undercuts Nvidia China’s BYD — the EV giant that already outsells most rivals — just unveiled its own autonomous-driving chip at roughly one-third the hardware…
- Briefings The $665,000 Receipt: A Charitable-Giving Horror Story (and the New 2026 Rules) Two cousins donated land worth $665,000 and lost the entire deduction over one missing piece of paper. Plus: the new 2026 charitable rules that will surprise filers.
- Briefings Good News: The Day Is Getting Longer. Bad News: By 1.33 Milliseconds a Century. Ever feel like the days are dragging on longer? Turns out you’re right — scientifically. Earth’s rotation is slowing, which means each day is…
- Briefings An Honest Word on Mental Health — and Why It Belongs Here This weekend’s most-talked-about essay isn’t about markets at all. It’s a veteran journalist’s account of how a little-understood therapy helped…
- Briefings Vibes Don’t Pay the Bills: What Everlane’s Sale to Shein Teaches Investors Everlane promised ethical, transparent fashion and millennials loved it. Then it sold to fast-fashion giant Shein. The lesson: a great story isn
- Briefings The $30 Billion Hoodie: Greg Brockman and OpenAI’s March to an IPO OpenAI president Greg Brockman is stepping into the spotlight on the eve of the company
- Briefings Deal Frenzy: A $4.3 Billion Flavor Sale and a Food-Ingredients Land Grab Buyout firm CVC is grabbing International Flavors & Fragrances’ food-ingredients unit for $4.3 billion. Ingredion is chasing Britain’s Tate &…
- Briefings Silent Stan: How Patience Conquered the Richest Leagues in Sports Stan Kroenke owns Arsenal, the Rams, the Nuggets and the Avalanche. His secret weapon is the most boring one in finance: patience.
- Briefings Oil's Worst Month Since 2020 — and Why It Lifted Stocks to Records Brent crude fell 19% in May on hopes of an Iran peace deal. Cheaper oil pushed the Dow above 51,000 for the first time. Here
- Briefings AI Just Cracked an 80-Year-Old Math Problem (for About $1,000) An OpenAI model resolved the Erdos unit-distance problem that stumped humans for eight decades — and it cost about $1,000 in compute. What it means for the AI trade.
- Briefings Sonny Rollins: The Colossus Who Walked Off Stage to Get Better At the height of his fame, jazz giant Sonny Rollins quit to practice alone on a bridge for two years. His career is a master class in compounding.
- Briefings Ackman Swung $65 Billion at Universal Music. The Family Said Non. Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square offered roughly $65 billion for Universal Music Group — the home of Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar. The board…
- Commentary Three Records To Close May. GDP Quietly Cut. Anthropic Crosses Trillion-Dollar Air. Friday May 29, 2026 end-of-week recap. Dow, S&P, Nasdaq all closed at all-time highs. Anthropic raised $65B at a $965B valuation. Dell +28.75% AH on $4.2B AI server orders. GDP revised to 1.6%. Tesla joins the book.
- Briefings The Auto Industry’s AI Collision One million US new-car buyers gone. Qualcomm signed Stellantis. Pope Leo XIV warned on labor displacement. A Beijing court fined a tech firm for AI-driven firings. The auto industry is being rewritten — here is the trade.
- Briefings Schadenfreude At The Sausalito Yacht Club WSJ Friday A1 Sausalito Yacht Club lawsuit dissected. The funniest piece of the week — and accidentally a perfect case study in how closed institutional systems destroy themselves. Lessons for family-office governance.
- Editions Nasdaq And S&P Hit Records As Chip Stocks Rip. The AI Trade Is Back On. Chip stocks rip on Tuesday. Qualcomm (QCOM) +12% on the Stellantis (STLA) deal to power AI-driven vehicles. The PHLX Semiconductor Index jumps…
- Briefings "The AI Overwatch Act Would Help China." Neil Chilson's Op-Ed And What It Tells Us About The Regulatory Setup. Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, argues in today's WSJ Opinion section that the proposed AI Overwatch Act — the latest…
- Briefings BP Fires Its Chairman For "Abusive Behavior." A Governance Reminder For The Energy Sleeve. BP (BP) announced Tuesday that its board has unanimously decided that chairman Albert Manifold would no longer serve, and that he would depart…
- Briefings Qualcomm +12% On The Stellantis AI Deal. Why Tuesday's Chip Rally Is The Real Signal. The chip-stock rally that paused briefly last week resumed on Friday and accelerated dramatically on Tuesday. The PHLX Semiconductor Index climbed…
- Briefings Russia Threatens The Baltics. The Pentagon Pulls Back From NATO. Defense Stocks Keep Catching A Bid. Two related stories anchored today's front page. The first, Yaroslav Trofimov reporting from Tallinn: Russia is making "increasingly bellicose…
- Briefings Private Credit To VC-Backed Startups Hit $68.8 Billion. AI Is Two-Thirds Of Every Dollar. The WSJ's Wednesday Markets section reports that venture-debt firms are expanding aggressively beyond their software-industry core. Total deal…
- Briefings "AI Addiction Nearly Ruined Him." Why The Chatbot-Psychosis Story Is Now A Regulatory Catalyst. The Journal's Tuesday Personal Journal feature opens with a 57-year-old Toronto video editor named Joe Alary . After a romantic disappointment in…
- Briefings 84% Of Small Businesses Are Now Using AI This Quarter. Here's Why That Locks In The Hyperscaler Trade. The Journal's Tuesday A1 feature on Helene Godin's By the Way Bakery — a 14-person gluten-and-dairy-free shop in Pleasantville, NY — quietly…
- Briefings What 1925 Already Told Us About 2026 Every few years a piece of journalism shows up that we end up sending around the office and re-reading two or three times. George Anders’s essay…
- Briefings Ferrari Just Built A $640,000 Electric Glass Spaceship. The Read-Through Goes Way Beyond Maranello. On Sunday in Rome, at the Vela di Calatrava — the towering concrete “sail” stadium opened for the Vatican’s 2025 Jubilee — Ferrari Chairman John…
- Briefings Huawei's "LogicFolding" Chip End-Around: What It Means For The ASML / TSMC / NVDA Stack Huawei Technologies announced Monday at an event in Shanghai that it has developed a workaround — branded "LogicFolding" — that lets it make chips…
- Briefings Pope Leo XIV: AI Is "A Threat To Normalize An Anti-Human Vision" Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical letter Monday in Vatican City, titled "Magnifica Humanitas." The full document is poised to define his…
- Briefings Gavin Baker's Decade-Long SpaceX Bet Is About To Print. Here's The Read-Through For Goldman, Morgan Stanley, And The Picks-And-Shovels Names. Tuesday's WSJ B1 profile of star stock picker Gavin Baker is the cleanest window we have into how the SpaceX IPO — now 15 days out, targeting a…
- Editions Dow Hits An All-Time High. Eight Weeks Of Gains. The Fed Is Now Talking Hikes. Dow closes at an all-time high. The actual Friday close per the Saturday paper: 50,579.70 (+0.58%) . S&P 500 wraps up an eighth consecutive week…
- Briefings Your Memorial Day Cookout Costs 28% More Than Last Year The Saturday paper's most useful read of the week is the most prosaic one: "Burger Bills Sizzle This Holiday Weekend." The piece walks through…
- Briefings The Groom Economy: $15K Wedding Wardrobes And The 90-Day Tax Question Most Couples Miss The Saturday Off-Duty section leads with one of the more fun pieces of the year: the rise of the "groom economy." The Journal profiles grooms who…
- Briefings 21 Days To The Largest IPO In American History The Saturday paper's B1 feature is the most useful piece of capital-markets reporting we've read all month: a play-by-play of what the next 21…
- Briefings The 'Vibe Slop' Crisis Is Coming — And Why The Infrastructure Trade Still Works The Saturday paper's B2 lead is a striking piece on what the industry is starting to call the "vibe slop" crisis: AI-generated code that compiles,…
- Briefings The Bond Desk Is Now Pricing In Fed Hikes — Not Cuts The Saturday paper's most important macro item is on page A2: bond-desk strategists are now openly forecasting that the Fed's next move could be a…
- Editions The Dow Just Hit a Record. The IPO Window Just Opened. The Dow closed at a record. 50,285.66, up 0.55%. IBM (IBM) ripped 12% on a new federally backed quantum foundry called Anderon. The S&P and Nasdaq…
- Briefings You’re Probably Overinvested in Bonds Friday’s Wall Street Journal published one of the more provocative pieces I’ve read in years: the argument that the 60/40 portfolio is dead, and…
- Briefings U.S.-China Diplomacy Is Alive With “The Sound of Music” Hannah Miao wrote one of the more unexpected front-page pieces of the week: songs from “The Sound of Music” are a standard of U.S.-China…
- Briefings America’s IPO Mini-Boom Just Opened the Door On Wednesday, SpaceX filed paperwork with the SEC, kicking off what will almost certainly be the largest IPO in U.S. history. Polymarket has…
- Briefings Natural Gas Is Escaping Into Thin Air. The Inflation Story Beneath The Story. The president of the Environmental Defense Fund made a striking argument in Friday’s Wall Street Journal: as energy prices spike around the world…
- Briefings Even at $5 Trillion, Nvidia Is Underpriced The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard On The Street” column on Friday made an unusual argument: Nvidia (NVDA), despite a $5 trillion market cap, is…
- Briefings The Fed Just Stopped Talking About Cuts. They’re Talking About Hikes. Thursday’s release of the April FOMC minutes was the single biggest macro event of the week, and almost no one in retail-investor land noticed…
- Editions Bonds Broke Today. Stocks Followed. Global bonds break. The 10-year yield jumped to 4.668%. S&P, Nasdaq, and Dow all fell. The Fed-can't-cut narrative is now priced in stocks too.
- Briefings Americans Just Turned on AI The Journal's front-page feature Wednesday by Amrith Ramkumar, Katherine Blunt, and Lindsay Ellis lays out something every AI-exposed investor…
- Editions Warsh Takes a Fed That Can't Cut Warsh inherits a Fed boxed in. The new chair takes the gavel Friday and wants to cut rates, but Iran-war inflation has the futures market now…
- Briefings Trump's Primary Campaign Against Massie William McGurn's Main Street column today reports on Tuesday's Kentucky Fourth Congressional District Republican primary — the most expensive…
- Briefings A Glimpse at the Future of War Walter Russell Mead's Global View column today, written from Kyiv on his third visit since the Russian invasion, lays out something investors…
- Briefings Reconnaissance at 70,000 Feet Mark Yost's Bookshelf review today covers Josh Dean's The Impossible Factory , a history of Lockheed's Skunk Works under engineer Kelly Johnson…
- Editions The Strongest Muscle You’re Ignoring Is Your Backside The strongest muscle in your retirement plan isn’t in your spreadsheet — it’s in your backside. The fall-prevention math.
- Briefings The Strongest Muscle You're Ignoring Is Your Backside One in four Americans over 65 falls every year. Twenty-eight thousand die from it. The cheapest, most measurable defense isn't a supplement, a…
- Briefings How To Live Longer Than Your Money Plan Thinks You Will Fidelity's lifetime retirement healthcare estimate is now $315,000 per couple. Most outside platforms still model $150K to $175K. The five-year…
- Briefings An Architect Couple Traded Colorado For Palm Springs. The Renovation Was $1.05 Million. A four-bedroom, six-bathroom mid-century home in the Deepwell neighborhood. Solar panels. A jazz quartet at the housewarming. The Personal Journal…
- Briefings Teen Boys Are Injecting Themselves From WhatsApp Suppliers For A Better Jawline A 22-year-old former child actor in Florida is buying peptide stacks for $65 a pop. An 18-year-old high-school senior in the Bay Area orders…
- Briefings She Quit Her 9-To-5 To Write Beach Romances. Now She Sells Millions. Carley Fortune was unhappy at her editor job. She started writing a romance novel on her phone during her commute. Five years later she has four…
- Reports & scenarios Where to Invest in the Iran Conflict Market Week 5 update. S&P down five straight weeks. Nasdaq in correction. Pentagon deploying 17,000 ground troops. Brent past $100. Consumer sentiment at…
- Editions Your Grocery Bill Just Won The Argument With Your Paycheck Consumer prices rose 3.8% in April. Gasoline +28%. Fuel oil +54%. Airfares +21%. Real wages went negative (−0.3%) for the first time this cycle.
- Editions U.S. Jobs Report Blows Past Expectations — 115,000 Added In April The U.S. added 115,000 jobs in April across retail, transportation, warehousing and healthcare — far exceeding analysts’ expectations.
- Briefings The AI Oversight Order: What It Means For Your Tech Holdings Federal AI oversight is starting to take shape. Here's what to watch and how it affects the seven AI names in our model.
- Briefings The Bezos Fashion Piece Is A Wealth-Leveraging Case Study (And You Can Run The Same Playbook) How ultra-high-net-worth families convert capital into cultural access. The four giving vehicles, when each fits, and what it means for your charitable strategy.
- Commentary Iran Hits Tankers In The Strait, Oil Rips To $106, State Farm Gets Hammered By California, And Palantir Prints A Record Quarter Iran fighting hits the Strait of Hormuz, oil rips to $106; factory orders +1.5% surprise; State Farm faces California penalties for wildfire-claim handling; Palantir prints a record quarter; Cerebras priced at $3.5B; and a Personal Journal piece on Bezos that's really a wealth-leveraging case study.
- Briefings Iran Just Hit Tankers In The Strait. Brent ↑ 5.8% to $114. Here's What We're Buying. Strait of Hormuz escalation, Brent at $114, three scenarios for the next 90 days, and how the Capital Wealth book is positioned.
- Briefings Spirit Airlines Bankruptcy: A Capital Wealth Traveler's Money Guide If you have a Spirit ticket, miles, or co-branded BAC credit card — here's the practical playbook. Plus what it means for the broader airline portfolio.
- Briefings State Farm's Wildfire Reckoning — And What It Means For Your Homeowners Premium What the State Farm enforcement action means for California homeowners and where the rotation goes — ALL, TRV, CB.
- Briefings The Sewage Spill That's Re-pricing Coronado Real Estate — And Your Estate Plan Why the Tijuana sewage problem is a real-estate, insurance, and estate-planning issue for California coastal owners. Five decisions to make explicitly.
- Commentary Emerging Markets Just Lapped The S&P, Spirit Folded, And A Personal Journal Story On Divorce Reframed The Whole Wealth Conversation Emerging markets rip past the S&P (Korea +57%, Taiwan +34%); Spirit files Chapter 11; Berkshire's new CEO loads up the M&A shortlist; foreclosures hit a six-year high. Plus Personal Journal: what divorce really teaches you about money.
- Briefings What Divorce Taught Real Families About Money — And What I Tell My California Clients Lessons from divorced families about money — what to fight for, what to let go, and how to actually get the financial scaffolding in place. California-specific traps included.
- Briefings Foreclosures Hit a Six-Year High — And It's Insurance, Not the Mortgage Why the headline foreclosure spike is structurally about insurance and property tax, not mortgages. California-specific picture.
- Briefings Trump Has An IRA To Sell You: Five Questions Before You Click Sign Up The five questions every retirement saver should ask before using a federal-portal IRA. Why your existing custodian is almost certainly already cheaper.
- Briefings Musical Light In The Darkness A book on music as resistance — and what its arguments mean for cultural memory
- Commentary Iran War Hits Spirit, Pentagon Doubles Down On AI, And The Fed Is Now Talking Hikes Spirit Airlines liquidating Saturday after the Iran war broke the discount-carrier economics. Gas hit $4.39 in nine weeks—the fastest surge…
- Briefings An Uproar Over Electric Cars In Formula One The sport's identity crisis: combustion or current?
- Briefings How Not To Respond To Political Violence A meditation on tone, restraint, and the long arc of public conduct
- Briefings The Key To OpenAI The company wants an IPO. First it needs to impress one woman.
- Briefings Pentagon Just Signed Eight AI Vendors. Anthropic Wasn't One. Why the Defense Department's AI procurement just split open along a guardrails fault line
- Briefings A $1,000 Trip To Venice How a long-weekend in the City of Bridges actually pencils out
- Briefings How YouTube Took Over The American Classroom Inside Google's quiet capture of K-12 curriculum
- Commentary AI Saved Q1, Venezuela Reopens, And The Debt Just Hit 100% Of GDP The S&P closed up 1% to a fresh high. April finished +10%. Underneath: AI capex did the heavy lifting on GDP, ExxonMobil and Conoco are back in…
- Briefings AI Saves the Trump Economy WSJ Editorial Board: AI saves the Trump economy as $133B Q1 capex by four tech giants offsets tariff drag and slowing consumer.
- Briefings Charges of a Covid Coverup WSJ Editorial: DOJ indicts former NIH official David Morens for obstructing Covid origin investigations. Implications for healthcare positioning.
- Briefings Albany Demands a Climate Sacrifice WSJ Editorial: Governor Hochul seeks delay on NY climate law as compliance costs rise. Investment read on utilities and natural gas.
- Briefings Korea +57%, Taiwan +34% — Emerging Markets Just Lapped The S&P EM is structurally winning the AI capex cycle through chip suppliers. Why we're adding TSM, EWY, and EEM today — and the three risks that would kill the thesis.
- Briefings We Can Fix the U.S. Navy. Here's How To Do It. National Commission on the Future of the U.S. Navy: rebuild maritime industrial base. Investment read on shipbuilders and defense primes.
- Briefings Lessons for Anna Paulina Luna Strassel: Rep. Luna's opposition to a farm-bill federalism provision gets the federalism backwards. Read for consumer-staples regulatory risk.
- April 2026
- Commentary Three Things Broke Today That The Dow Didn't Notice The headline market barely moved. Don't be fooled. OpenAI quietly told its own people it can't pay for the data centers it ordered, the…
- Briefings An America That Might Have Been Peter Cozzens reviews Peter Stark's ‘The Lost Cities of El Norte’ — and what Coronado's 1540 expedition tells us about institutional limits.
- Briefings A Split Works for Both: Microsoft and OpenAI The new Monday partnership amendment frees OpenAI from Azure exclusivity. Fitch explains why a slow split is now logical for both.
- Briefings Trump Holds the Cards on War Powers The 60-day War Powers clock closes May 1. Galston explains why the founders' design has tilted toward the executive — and what that means for…
- Briefings The Trump Tax Increase of 2026 Gramm and Solon argue that tariffs are wiping out the One Big Beautiful Bill's tax cuts — with consequences for consumers and the November…
- Briefings Timeshares Hint at Consumer Angst Travel + Leisure's 14% drop on early-stage delinquencies is the cleanest signal yet that the upper-middle consumer is cracking.
- Briefings From ‘Fine People’ to Assassinations After SPLC's indictment, Jenkins reopens the Charlottesville file — and asks why a cynical media keeps feeding a cynical politics.
- Briefings King Charles on the Common Defense Excerpts from the King's congressional address — F-35s, AUKUS, NATO Article 5, and the biggest UK defense increase since the Cold War.
- Briefings Reagan's Military Lessons for the New Cold War Lehman (Reagan-era Navy Secretary) and Toprani (AEI) argue 5% of GDP isn't enough — the Reagan buildup worked because of strategic doctrine…
- Briefings Why the U.A.E. Broke Up With OPEC U.S. fracking and the Iran war fractured the cartel — the WSJ editorial board frames the structural shift in oil.
- Briefings Can Drugmakers Afford the Cancer Revolution? Revolution Medicines' pancreatic-cancer pill nearly doubled survival vs chemo. The deal math points to standalone, not takeover.
- Briefings Quantum Computing's IPO Rush — Eight Pure-Plays In One Year, And A New Speculative Theme For The Watchlist Bousquette's WSJ B10 piece this weekend lays out a quiet stampede: three quantum companies have already gone public in 2026, five more have…
- Briefings The Car That Deleted Its Rear Window Every Saturday morning I read Dan Neil’s “Rumble Seat” column the way other people watch SNL cold opens. Neil is the only auto writer in the…
- Commentary Iraq Crisis Lifts Crude To $94, DOJ Drops Powell Probe Clearing Warsh, And Meta's AI Job Reckoning Tells Us To Trim Tech Saturday/Sunday paper anchored by three structural shifts: (1) Iraqi oil at 1.6 mb/d vs 4.9 pre-war means a 9-month supply deficit and sustained…
- Commentary Phelan Fired As Hegseth Keeps Trump's Backing, U.S. Seizes Iranian Tanker, Marijuana Reclassified, Intel Beats Q1 — Setting Up Saturday's Bigger Story Friday paper covers Thursday's mixed close (NASDAQ -0.81%, S&P -0.49%, DJIA +0.42%) and three structural shifts: (1) the Phelan firing…
- Briefings The Cheeseburger and the Soul of America What a sandwich tells us about a country that argues about everything — and still agrees on lunch.
- Commentary Iran Stalemate Locks Hormuz, Spirit Gets a Bailout, Boeing & Tesla Beat, And The S&P Hits Its 8th Record Close Of 2026 Thursday's paper is the inverse of Wednesday's market: the index melts up to a fresh all-time high while the underlying news flow is heavy —…
- Briefings Why Democrats Cannot Quit Israel The party's elite donor class and its activist base are pulling in opposite directions on the most morally charged foreign policy question of the era.
- Briefings How New York Should Rebuild Penn Station A former governor argues that Madison Square Garden
- Briefings What Pakistan's Pivot Toward Israel Means A quiet shift in Islamabad
- Briefings The Supreme Court's Gerrymander Mistake By treating partisan gerrymandering as a non-justiciable political question, the Court guaranteed a decade of map litigation with no end in sight.
- Briefings Iran's Drone Doctrine Tests the West Tehran's mass-drone strategy is being copied. The West's counter-drone investment has not kept pace.
- Briefings RFK Jr., the Oncologists and the FDA A standoff between HHS leadership and the cancer community is testing whether the FDA
- Briefings Big Tech's AI Capex Is Now a Macro Variable Combined hyperscaler AI capex for 2026 is on track to exceed $400 billion. That changes how we think about every sector that touches power, cooling and silicon.
- Briefings Shakespeare's Other Inheritances The playwright did not only give us the language of love and power. He also gave us the language of money, debt and broken promises.
- Briefings The Meme Stock Era is Not Over — It Has Just Moved Retail-driven squeezes are migrating from the original 2021 names into rate-sensitive special situations.
- Briefings What's Next for Greater New York The region's office vacancy, transit funding and migration trends are starting to sort into a clearer post-pandemic picture — and it is more…
- Briefings Robert Reich at 50: A Reckoning Half a century after his first book, the former Labor Secretary
- Briefings Democrats Court Their Own Peril By tying themselves to the most contested cultural fights of the cycle, the Democratic Party is repeating the strategic mistake of 1972 — or 2004.
- Briefings The Real Story Behind the Latest Supreme Court Leak Leaks have become a feature, not a bug, of the modern Court — and they tell us less about the merits of any case than about the warring camps inside the building.
- Briefings Private Credit's First Real Stress Test After a decade of growth, the asset class is finally facing default rates that look like the loan market it replaced.
- Briefings Clairvoyance and Control Carissa Véliz's 'Prophecy' asks what we surrender when we hand the future to predictive algorithms.
- Briefings Advice to Apple's Next CEO Tim Cook ran the world's most valuable company for 25 years. John Ternus inherits it Monday. Here's what the job actually requires.
- Commentary Warsh Pledges Independence, Iran Talks Stall, Oil Grinds Back To $92, And A $60B SpaceX-Cursor Deal Lands On The Eve Of The IPO Wednesday's paper is heavy. The market took the stress and sold off 0.6% across all three indices — but the story underneath the market is a…
- Briefings Unwed Couples Face a Messy Legal Landscape You can build a life together and still leave each other with nothing if you skip three pieces of paper.
- Briefings The Upper Middle Class American Dream The middle-class escalator stopped running. What replaced it is narrower, faster, and uglier.
- Briefings A Quiet U.S. Favor for Xi Jinping The IMF quota review is on track to hand Beijing more voting power — without Washington extracting a single concession in return.
- Briefings From the 2019 Impeachment to Iran Trump's enemies keep choosing the worst terrain to fight him on, and it's giving him wins he didn't have to earn.
- Briefings Major League Baseball at 150 A century and a half in, baseball is still about the box score — and the box score is still about the runners on first.
- Briefings Oncologists vs. the FDA and RFK Jr. When the people who read the trial data disagree with the people who run the agency, the trial data usually wins.
- Briefings The Biggest AI Risk Is Foolish, Fear-Driven Policies The real AI threat is not extinction. It's a regulatory reflex that locks in incumbents and locks out mobility.
- Briefings How to Ease the Fed Off Quantitative Easing The Fed's balance sheet is still four times its pre-2008 norm. Sekerke and Hanke propose a resolution-fund auction to unwind it without blowing up…
- Briefings The Price Beijing Pays for Backing Tehran China's quiet subsidy of Iran's oil and drone industry is aging it out of every other market it cares about.
- Briefings When Warren and Trump Agree Sen. Elizabeth Warren and President Trump now share a Fed-critique script. That should worry markets more than either of them.
- Commentary Iran Endgame Uncertain, Oil Grinds Back Toward $90, And A Stealth Manufacturing Boom Gets Its First Headline Last week printed the strongest S&P week since 2020 (+4.54%), NASDAQ +6.8%, DJIA +3.19%. Monday's paper opens with four big stories that move our…
- Briefings The Life-Science Political Risk Map — A Capital Wealth Read Of Allysia Finley Finley uses the Swalwell news cycle as a hook to draw the 2026 political-risk map for life sciences. Rare disease, oncology, AI drug discovery,…
- Briefings The Economics Of Religion — A Capital Wealth Read Of Roland Fryer's Essay Fryer's essay puts a number on trust networks. For advisors, it's a reminder that household financial outcomes sit on top of community…
- Briefings How Should LIV Be Remembered? — A Capital Wealth Read Of Jason Gay's Sports Column Gay's LIV postmortem is the cleanest case study of the limits of sovereign-wealth content disruption. For clients with sports-media and…
- Briefings Chosen Land — A Capital Wealth Read Of D.G. Hart's Bookshelf Review Hart's review of Matthew Avery Sutton's new book is a long-horizon framing piece. The investment read-through is about generational…
- Briefings America's Stealth Manufacturing Boom — A Capital Wealth Read Of Greg Ip's Monday Column Ip argues the 50-year decline in U.S. manufacturing has ended — and the shipments data is already past the inflection point. Here is what…
- Briefings Viz.ai And The AI Healthcare Pathway — A Capital Wealth Read Of Andy Kessler's Inside View Kessler profiles Viz.ai, the AI-powered stroke-detection platform already reimbursed by Medicare and deployed in 1,700 U.S. hospitals. It is the…
- Briefings Why The S&P Rally Rests On One-Offs — A Capital Wealth Read Of James Mackintosh's Streetwise Mackintosh strips tariffs, AI capex, and the dollar out of S&P earnings and argues underlying growth is closer to 4% than 12%. Here is how we stay…
- Briefings The Trouble In Trump's Venezuela — A Capital Wealth Read Of Mary Anastasia O'Grady's Americas Venezuela is the inverse-Iran oil trade. O'Grady's reporting on the Maduro-opposition balance explains why the marginal barrel is still…
- Reports & scenarios The Recession-Ready Portfolio. A defensive portfolio construction for 2026 — quality dividends, duration, real assets. Internal research note.
- Briefings Yale Takes Itself To Reform School — A Capital Wealth Read Of The WSJ R&O Editorial The R&O piece on Yale's governance shake-up is useful to advisors less for its politics than for what endowment re-benchmarking means:…
- Letters The Phone Call You Are Not Ready For What long-term-care actually costs in 2026, the in-home care math most families never run, and the three documents your aging parents need on file before the phone rings.
- Commentary The Markets Climbs A Wall Of Peace — Oil Cracks, Records Stretch, And The Bench Gets Paid Saturday's Journal is the cleanest risk-on market of the year. The Strait of Hormuz is "completely open" — a U.S. official's direct quote on the…
- Briefings Inside The Fidelity $18T Empire — A Capital Wealth Read Of Justin Baer's Book Excerpt The weekend Exchange section leads with a book excerpt from Justin Baer's forthcoming House of Fidelity , telling the story of the 2005…
- Letters The Money Conversation Most Couples Postpone Until It Is A Crisis Joint vs. separate accounts, the prenup most second marriages should have, financial infidelity, and the five-step playbook for protecting yourself if the marriage ends.
- Briefings Why AI Finally Got Reliable — A Capital Wealth Read Of Christopher Mims' B2 Column Mims's Keywords column this weekend explains the three engineering shifts that turned frontier AI from a demo into a deployed system. The…
- Briefings Trump Meets His Match in Pope Leo — Reading Peggy Noonan on the American Pontiff Peggy Noonan's A13 "Declarations" column frames Pope Leo XIV — the first American Pope — as a public figure who is quietly reshaping…
- Briefings To Beat China, Embrace Open-Source AI — Ramaswamy & Perault On The Platform Question A Saturday A13 op-ed argues the US AI lead depends on broad, open-source diffusion rather than closed-lab dominance. The investment implication is…
- Briefings Water, Water Everywhere — Except In California's Reservoirs. Edward Ring On Why We Keep Losing It. Edward Ring's Cross Country column catalogues California's reservoir shortfall and the political geometry keeping it stuck. For clients living in…
- Briefings You've Done Your Taxes. Now Here's What Matters For 2026 — A Capital Wealth Planning Read Laura Saunders's Weekend "Tax Report" lays out the 2026 limits, brackets, and planning windows. For CalSTRS, CalPERS and participants, four things…
- Briefings Sutton's Review Cover: "Trump, The Pope, and a New Holy War" — A Capital Wealth Read Historian Matthew Avery Sutton's C1 Review cover essay is the weekend paper's most consequential piece — tracing 70 years of U.S.-Vatican…
- Briefings America Loses Its Will To Work — Reading Barton Swaim on the Labor-Force Puzzle Barton Swaim's Saturday A11 essay argues the US labor-force participation problem is now cultural as much as economic. For our book, it is less…
- Letters The Will Should Be In The Room Before The Funeral Why the inter-generational wealth-transfer conversation has gotten harder — and the one-page family-meeting agenda we send clients.
- Letters The $1,560 Supplement Line What the wellness-influencer economy is doing to your household budget — and why a credentialed dietitian is worth more than the algorithm
- Commentary Blockade Goes Global, Private Equity Takes the Pentagon, and a Mega-Layoff Era Arrives Friday's Journal reads as the market's most information-dense day of the week. The U.S. Navy's interdiction effort has officially expanded from…
- Commentary Fed Chief in the Crosshairs, Pentagon on a Wartime Footing, Shadow Fleet Under Siege The Journal's April 16 front page reads like three simultaneous regime shifts: a sitting President backs a criminal probe of the Fed Chair, the…
- Commentary S&P Hits Record 7,022 — Banks Crush Earnings, ASML Raises, Strait Still Shut Markets defy war. Morgan Stanley posts biggest quarter in history. AI infrastructure demand accelerating. Hormuz blockade holding.
- Commentary Day 2: Gold Hits Record High as Allies Refuse the Blockade Day 2 of the blockade. Saudi Arabia, the UK, and France publicly refused to join the U.S. naval operation. Trump announced Iranian fast-attack…
- Commentary Blockade Day: The Strait of Hormuz Becomes a Battlefield Week 7 update. Ceasefire collapsed after 21 hours of talks in Islamabad failed. Trump ordered the U.S. Navy to blockade the Strait of Hormuz at…
- March 2026
- Reports & scenarios WSJ-Sourced Market Updates & Portfolio Models Daily and weekly market commentary sourced from WSJ, portfolio model performance, and 401(k)/403(b)/IRA allocation updates.
- Briefings Drew Barrymore’s “Karmic Calling” To A $4.4 Million Tear-Down Drew Barrymore’s “karmic” $4.4M Harrison mansion is back at $4.99M after a full gut. A field guide to celebrity-property ROI and buying on feelings.
- Reports & scenarios Why Dividend Stocks Are Replacing Bonds With CPI heading toward 3.5%, rate cuts pushed to mid-2027, and Treasuries yielding near-zero in real terms — here are three investor scenarios…
- February 2018
- Letters You Can Sell Insurance Without Owning An Insurance Company Option income is an insurance company wearing a brokerage account — the policy you are writing, the premium you are paid, and the question that separates the honest versions from the court exhibits.
- March 2000
- Briefings When Investing Starts Looking Like Gambling — A Capital Wealth Read of Jason Zweig's Weekend Column Zweig's B1 "Intelligent Investor" column this weekend names something our client book needs to hear: the line between speculation and allocation…
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- Reports & scenarios 50 Best Stocks to Own in 2026 The 50 best stocks to own in 2026 — WSJ-researched, Capital Wealth validated. Each name with thesis, 12-month price target, sector positioning, and Q2-Q4 catalyst calendar.
- Briefings Trump's Economic Engineer: Bessent on China, AI & Energy Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the AI dominance window is “a year, maybe 18 months,” that the U.S. will derisk but not decouple from China, a
- Reports & scenarios Eid Mubarak With love & duas — The Saifi Family
- Briefings Iraq's 9-Month Oil-Recovery Window Iraq is pumping 1.6 mb/d versus 4.9 mb/d pre-war — a 3% global-supply gap. Wood Mackenzie sees a 9-month recovery to 85% of pre-war output, conditional on
- Briefings Meta's AI Push Sparks Job Anxiety Meta has rolled out keystroke-tracking software with no employee opt-out, layered atop 1,500 Reality Labs layoffs and a new 50:1 employee-to-manager AI org. Blo
- Reports & scenarios Taiwan Crisis: How Markets Would Play Out An interactive scenario simulation: how global markets could react to a Taiwan blockade, a limited conflict, or a full invasion with U.S. involvement. Hypothetical, educational — not a prediction.
- Briefings United's Kirby Bets the Airline United CEO Scott Kirby, a former professional poker player, has built a Delta-clone premium+loyalty strategy that has lifted UAL stock 150% from 2022 lows. Prem
- Briefings Kevin Warsh Can Head to the Fed DOJ closes the Powell probe with “essentially zero evidence” of criminal wrongdoing. Tillis's freeze on Banking Committee votes ends, clearing
- Letters The World Cup Recap. Six lessons from the 2026 World Cup — and every one of them is really about the markets. Stoppage-time risk, Harry Kane
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