The headlines are rife with pheromone-maxxing, manosphere-participating, shower-skipping stay-at-home boyfriends with regressive views on gender.

(Don’t think too hard about the stay-at-home boyfriend’s regressive views on gender; I assume he doesn’t either.)

I have to follow all of this via the mainstream media, because I don’t have any of these specific types of droogs available for firsthand research in my personal life.

All I have, in fact, is an absolute gaggle of well-spoken little Gen Z gentlemen colleagues who I consider my honorary nephews – and in some extreme cases, my adopted sons.

Which is to say, I’m not one of those toxic moms who compares my children to one another in ways that will stoke lingering feelings of emotional inadequacy for decades to come (e.g., “Why can’t you be more like your brother!”).

Instead, I’m one of those insufferable toxic moms who compares my children to niche freelance financial writers they have never heard of, which I imagine leaves them feeling inadequate in ways both emotional and intellectual (e.g., “Why can’t you be more like Ebube Jones!”).

I kid, of course. And soon, I might even forget that Ebube was the first of my sons to wish me a happy birthday this year.

So in honor of both the Labor Day weekend and our all-too-often maligned younger brothers, today’s column spotlights one of our unsung Gen Z men behind the scenes here at Barchart.

Are the Young Men Really Alright?

I consider myself an old-school feminist, which mostly means I’m still annoyed about the ex-boyfriend from college who borrowed my copy of “Backlash” by Susan Faludi and never returned it.

But it also means I feel a bit wary about media coverage that makes the kind of sweeping generalizations we’ve been seeing about Gen Z men.

Fortunately, the nonpartisan Center for American Progress reports 10 relatively reassuring data points about young men’s employment trends in historical context – none of which involve the suffix “-maxxing”.

Their takeaways suggest that the broader workplace shifts going on right now are not nearly as dire as the clickbait would have you believe, possibly because their sources go well beyond a small handful of antisocial TikTok creators.

CAP authors Sara Estep and Christian E. Weller also drew on their data to suggest potential policy solutions that could support our Gen Z nephews in this changing work environment.

Notably, one idea is vocational training focused on “jobs in the healthcare industry that have historically been dominated by women and are projected to grow rapidly over the next decade,” which seems satisfyingly proactive and also fairly noncontroversial.

However, one young Gen Z man who is not allowed to participate in any healthcare industry growth without my express written permission is my good buddy and sidekick Ethan.

Ethan from Marketing

I’ve been writing our daily Barchart Brief newsletter for something like two and a half years, including Saturdays and a number of major holidays, plus some Sundays when I’m feeling ambitious – which is quite a lot of work on my part, so anyone who wants to pause and admire myself briefly here can do so.

Not even my own mother reads my newsletter, by the way. She would probably tell me to my very own face that it’s too boring, and then she would make me watch a 12-minute YouTube explainer about the intricate seasonal chemistry of pie crusts based on specific USDA planting zones.

But one person who does read the Brief – and probably holds the world record for the second-highest number of Briefs read, right after me – is Ethan Chase, my Work Nephew No. 1.

For quite a long time, Ethan reviewed every one of my daily newsletter drafts – mostly to make sure the ad placement was correct, because he’s our Advertising Operations Associate. But because he’s also a very conscientious person, he checked all of my editorial content and links, too.

If I needed to fix a typo, or correct a dead link, or adjust an intraday stock move, Ethan made sure to let me know before I sent out the daily email.

And sometimes, if he just really liked that day’s write-up, he would drop me a line to let me know that, too.

Even though he has since passed the torch on daily Brief setup and review to young Miss Natalie – a new colleague so tiny and precious she seems to me almost like the cartoon concept art for a coworker – Ethan and I still message back and forth about what I’m writing, or what’s happening in the market, or which stocks we’re losing money on, because he is my nephew.

The Jalen Brunson of Stocks

Like all of our finest modern Wall Street icons – the Nasdaq trading machines; the CNBC recording studio; TV’s beloved Lupertazzi crime family underboss Johnny Sack – Ethan Chase is technically a New Jersey icon.

A Morristown original, Ethan was just 11 years old when the stock market bottomed out on March 9, 2009, which places him firmly in the 1997-2012 bracket for Gen Z Man status.

But if you’re looking for regressive gender views, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Addressing his pick of Janet Yellen as best Fed chair, Ethan told me: “When I run for president, they need to know I support HER-story.”

Here’s more from one of the hardest-working Gen Z bros behind the Barchart machine.

Elizabeth Volk: What’s your favorite part about working in & around the stock market?

Ethan Chase: Staying up to date with the latest market news and cornering people at parties to mansplain why futures markets exist.

EV: If you had to work for a multi-billionaire, would you pick Musk, Bezos, or Zuckerberg?

EC: Zuckerberg. The guy’s got a movie about him and another one coming out soon with Kendall Roy from “Succession” playing him. Somewhere between the Senate hearings and the MMA phase he pulled off one of the more improbable rebrands in recent memory.

EV: What’s the best stock you’re holding right now?

EC: Apple (AAPL). I, like most, have intense brand loyalty to Apple and especially my iPhone 13 Mini. Also like most, this phone’s battery is rapidly worsening and I can sense the obligatory pilgrimage to the Verizon store for an upgrade coming soon.

In all seriousness, all this stock has done is outperform since the pandemic. New CEO, with an adaptable strategy around AI rather than pouring money into a never-ending capex hole. Apple is the Jalen Brunson – the captain – of any 20-something’s portfolio.

EV: What’s the worst stock you’re holding right now?

EC: Flutter (FLUT). I really believed in FanDuel before the government decided prediction markets should be viewed as commodities transactions. The brand association with top leagues, the endorsement deals with top talent. They were viewed as the best of the best in the corporate gaming world. I was spot on with the trend, but totally whiffed on who would be in position to grab the market share.

EV: Are you a prediction markets guy?

EC: I am perpetually fascinated by the prediction markets as well as the paid spend assault the leaders in the space have done to get people, specifically young folks, on their platform. I can see the appeal in wanting to trade the swings of an event. However, the outsized fees brokers collect from “investors” making these commodities transactions (AKA “bets”), and the professional trading operations active on these sites give me pause.

EV: Are you betting yes or no on a September rate hike?

EC: The data seems to point to yes. But what do I know? The real question is if they do, does Kevin Warsh get a nickname? They should put Kalshi odds on that.

EV: Who’s the best Fed chair of your little lifetime?

EC: As much as I want to say J-Pow for the money printer memes or Bernanke for the cool beard and crisis response, I’m going to have to go with Janet Yellen. She presided over a period of low inflation and steady employment, including the summer of 2016, which we can all agree was the cultural high point of modern society.

EV: Any big Labor Day plans?

EC: I will be down in Charleston, South Carolina, taking in the sights, hitting the beach and the links, and setting sail on a boat to celebrate my birthday. Hoping to see my fellow Barcharter Justin Estes while I am down there.

EV: What’s your forecast for the Barchart fantasy football league this year?

EC: I’ll take anything except an Elizabeth Volk repeat championship. I heard she’s taking Travis Kelce in the first round in this week’s draft “for Taylor.”

EV: How’s your dog?

EC: Alfredo is doing great and has enjoyed his first Chicago summer. He loves the park and lounging in the sun.

Speaking of fantasy, my girlfriend almost got me to name him Ja’Marr after Cincinnati Bengals star wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase (who shares my last name), but in the end Alfie won out.

EV: Growth, income, or both?

EC: Gotta go growth until you own a house in my opinion. Who doesn’t love a value stock with a good story, though?

I do shill New Jersey’s own Campbell’s Soup (CPB) at 30-year lows. I really love Goldfish and Snyder’s Pretzels and I see that as a strong investment thesis.

– This interview has been edited for clarity. You can support Ethan Chase and Alfie by clicking on all of the sponsored links in our official Barchart emails.

It was a solid, entertaining, educational piece that seamlessly connected some of the more obvious parallels between our two favorite forms of speculation.

Andrea’s explainer became such a classic that her original copy continues to be resurrected each year by the editorial team as a seasonal tradition, with only minor updates.

The two of us also hosted a live webinar on the subject, and I included a topical mention of the “Kardashian curse” for pro athletes. Kim was dating Reggie Bush at the time, and I really can’t remember if it affected my roster personally, but I have always enjoyed an organic Kim Kardashian mention whenever time and subject matter permit. (See: the paragraph you are reading right now.)

It seems quaint anymore, but outside of our little fantasy league with the trading guys, puts and calls felt about as close as you could get to legal “gambling” on Wall Street.

Keep in mind that this was before payment for order flow had gone mainstream via platforms like Robinhood – before widespread weeklies, and well ahead of the moral panic over 0DTEs.

So at the time, the casino of options trading was still effectively velvet-roped to a class of investors who were willing and able to pay for the privilege.

Those extra fees and commissions – along with the relative lack of what we now consider “cheap” dailies and weeklies, from a time premium standpoint – somewhat diminished the grimy gambling aspect of options, and instead gave them more of an exotic, upper-shelf mystique. (Not to be confused, mind you, with “exotic options.”)

But then, of course, there were binary options.

Nadex Dreamed a Dream

Did you know that we’re living through the Summer of Anne Hathaway?

But… remember when we all hated Anne Hathaway?

If not, please don’t speak to me until after the fall equinox.

I say this not to single out Fantine, whose tragic death from tuberculosis requires no further pile-on, but more so to highlight our general lack of memory, consistency, and ability to learn from our own history, as a people.

Because in addition to living through the Summer of Anne Hathaway, we are simultaneously living through the Summer of Binary Options.

In case you have not heard, event contracts like the ones offered by Polymarket and Kalshi are the hottest NEW things ever, and a revolutionary NEW way to trade, and a disturbing NEW signal about our attention spans and money habits and finances and national slide into degeneracy.

But… do you guys not remember the revolutionary NEW market called “hedgelets” that was troubling Wall Street in 2004?

As the Wall Street Journal reported nearly 22 years ago:

Users of HedgeStreet register at Hedgestreet.com and place a bet -- either a “yes” or “no” position -- on short-term changes in a variety of economic indicators, from mortgage rates to gasoline and real-estate prices. To do so, they have to open a market by buying both the “yes” and “no” sides of a futures contract called a hedgelet for $10. They then sell the portion of the hedgelet they don’t want to another trader who wants that position. Similarly, a trader holding one position can buy the other and sell the pair back to the exchange before the settlement date for $10.

Was this welcomed at the time as a sophisticated and novel innovation for investors?, you might wonder.

Well, stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

While it may prove helpful for average investors to manage personal risk, Mr. Henningsen, the financial advisor, predicts individuals who visit the site and study the nuances of futures trading may see HedgeStreet as an online casino rather than a tool to reduce risk. “This could be used as a hedge,” he says, “but I would almost guarantee that it will be used just for gambling.”

By the time I was a fledgling young options analyst a few years later, HedgeStreet had become Nadex, which had become, yes, the black sheep of the options industry – binary contracts, filthy yes/no bets for gamblers.

Today, Chicago-based Nadex is a prediction markets platform owned by Crypto.com.

Roughly a decade after the product’s first-gen iteration died out due to lack of interest, Cboe and CME are relaunching binary options to compete with Kalshi and Polymarket.

And we all looooove Annie Hathaway!

(What is your favorite eyeroll gif? Please think about it here.)

Understanding the Hathahate

“Cboe has tried binary options before,” wrote Bloomberg’s Bernard Goyder in June, clearly a student of history:

In 2008, it first listed these type of options on the S&P 500 and the Cboe Volatility Index, but they failed to attract investor interest and were pulled off the exchange.The last SPX binary option expired in January 2015 and last VIX binary option ended in August 2017, according to a spokesperson.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see why binary options didn’t garner an instant fanbase among investors back in 2008.

It’s also easy to explain, with just a little help from this classic “Back to the Future” scene:

Earlier, I mentioned a couple of the dominoes that fell into place over the last 15-ish years to help “trading as gambling” reach critical mass:

• Commission-free options trading, right from your phone.

• Options that expire every week on the most popular symbols – and hey, you know what? Every day.

• A 24-hour news cycle fueled by social media that’s constantly available and always updating.

There are other factors at play, too – a complete and decades-long miscarriage of federal regulatory oversight and an utter lack of meaningful fiscal policy from Congress that has resulted in our economy balancing almost entirely on a one-legged stool of money printing, for example.

For the average retail trader, though, it’s (1) the availability of the tools and (2) the mainstream acceptance of that gambling mindset that matter the most.

And back in 2008, when binary options first limped out onto the Cboe trading floor (or CBOE, as we called it back then) – well, I guess we weren’t ready for them yet.

There was a time not so long ago, too, where we were “not ready” to embrace the fullness of Anne Hathaway’s humanity.

But times – as I imagine Hathaway’s character in “The End of Oak Street” saying, a gulp lodged in her throat as she takes in her suddenly prehistoric surroundings – have changed.

(I haven’t seen the movie, but if she doesn’t say this even once? Wasted opportunity.)

How to Stop Caring and Love Anne Hathaway Nihilism

Did you know that Kalshi is partnering with the Weather Channel’s parent company to help settle its climate-based event contracts?

That’s according to an exclusive today from the Journal’s Clara Hudson:

The companies said they want to explore new weather markets for sporting events, for example, citing local ski conditions and marathon race days. Consumers use Kalshi to trade on predictions ranging from what the highest temperature will be in Los Angeles on a given day to whether 2026 will be the hottest year ever. The platform said it chose the Weather Co. because it is one of the most trusted meteorological brands.

The market size for Kalshi’s weather vertical, reports Hudson, is projected at $1.1 billion in trading volume this year.

To bet on stuff like, “Will it be hotter this year?” or “Will it be smoggy in LA again today?”

Your gut reaction to this news might range anywhere from vague interest to mild disbelief to possible nausea.

To an extent, the era when you got into the market will dictate how you contextualize the ongoing shift toward “everything is a trade, and every trade is a bet.” Are you pre- or post-COVID? Pre- or post-Great Financial Crisis? And so on.

As we all know, I like to make a little fun, and I think it’s important to stay aware of the “wisdom of crowds,” in whatever form that takes.

If I can be serious for just the length of this sentence, though, I’m also old enough by now to know some families that will never be the same again because of gambling.

So whatever shade of Hathaway you feel about the Age of Prediction Markets – believe me, I get it.

Nevertheless, we live in a society, and this is the one.

Fortunately, I realize now that everything I really need to know about the current market environment, I learned during my earliest days of options trading… including a shared WSJ log-in that has been passed around more times than Michael Burry’s deleted tweets (please don’t shut me off, Todd).

So if the stock market today ever seems off-putting, or nonsensical, or illogical, and you just don’t know how to approach it – maybe these 3 lifelong lessons from my junior days will provide you with the requisite sense of calm, empty nothingness.

#1. I don’t care if the price is high, as long as it gets even higher.

Our traders used to get a lot of confused emails when they recommended buying calls on stocks that were hitting new 52-week highs.

“I don’t care if the price is high,” I remember one of them saying, deeply exasperated, “as long as it gets even higher before the option expires.”

It’s an important lesson about not stepping in front of a moving train.

#2. I never bothered to learn what a price/earnings ratio was until they were becoming irrelevant, anyway.

You know what doesn’t matter when you’re buying a front-month call that’s 10% out-of-the-money?

How much investors are willing to pay for every projected $1 of profit over the next 12 months.

And as Ben Levisohn reports for the WSJ:

…thanks to the recent shift toward rapid-fire stock trading, the P/E ratio may be losing its relevance. The emergence of exchange-traded funds in the past 10 years has allowed investors to make broad bets on entire baskets of stocks. And the ascendance of computer-driven trading is making macroeconomic data and trading patterns more important drivers of market action than fundamental analysis of individual companies, even during periods of relative calm.

Someone should check up on this prediction 16 years later and see if he’s right.

#3. Earnings reports are just a catalyst.

You think a couple of lowbrow put buyers are getting into the weeds on buyback progress, margin compression, and how confident the CFO sounds regarding fiscal Q3 projections?

Nah.

Quarterly earnings reports were relevant only to the extent that they could (a) move the share price and (b) affect the risk/reward of our favorite options strategies by affecting implied volatility.

Then once we got the price move, we were on to the next one.

The Grisette with a Heart of Gold

To clarify, this wasn’t some completely conscience-free “Clockwork Orange” situation.

There was always context involved, and we talked about the VIX, and the Fed, and economic data, and investor sentiment, and I worked through the entirety of 2008 and 2009 with this team. So, you know, we saw some things.

I still remember, too, taking a call from the Senior VP of Research in my old apartment one Friday night in August 2011, because S&P issued a historic U.S. debt downgrade as I was in the middle of editing his weekend column.

With that said, it’s important not to take any of this too seriously. (Unless, of course, you need to.)

Bear in mind that 15 years from now, I could be reminiscing about this column while I write about how the second-gen iteration of binary options is being pulled from the market and replaced with NFTs of rare “RuPaul’s Drag Race” trading cards.

By then, we might be in a full-court press media cycle leading up to the film debut of the entity that we know today only as Anne Hathaway’s unborn child.

In any case, when I share these lessons, please know that I do so in the spirit of 2013 Annie – hoping that someday in the not too distant future the misfortunes of Fantine will only be found in stories and nevermore in real life.

Thank you.

I didn’t really know anything about the company, other than they were some kind of CIA black box something-or-other.

Well, that’s never going to go belly up, I remember thinking.

PLTR has gained over 500% since then, but my shares have not.

That’s because I don’t own them anymore. After about two years, I got tired of watching a stock and a company I didn’t particularly care about do absolutely nothing in my portfolio.

This stock is a psyop, I remember thinking.

I sold my Palantir shares in November 2022 for a loss, at $7.60 each.

On the other hand, my friend Josh (pictured below), exercised remarkable patience over the years as Palantir wavered, backed, filled, and then ripped to record highs.

The ongoing CIA investigation into my heavy Palantir bags is a textbook example of Warren Buffett’s most famous quote about me, which goes something like:

“The stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient.”

It’s also the best evidence I can offer from my own trading history that you don’t need any leverage at all to make poor decisions and bad transactions.

Josh, who occasionally can be kind of gentlemanly, declined to select a headline from the four variously self-deprecating options I sent over for his consideration along with the introduction to this article. However:

“If it was a memoir, it’d be ‘But My Shares Have Not,’” he offered.

The Question I Never Let Rob Answer About Leverage

Astute readers will notice that I posed a question to ETF expert Rob Isbitts early on in our conversation on leverage (“If you can’t avoid leverage, do you want to lean into it and use it as a defensive tool?”), and then I never shared his answer.

That’s partly because the answer was very heavily implied by the rest of our conversation.

But to be frank, it’s also partly because Rob did not follow my script.

I wanted him to say something very broad and affirmative, like “Yes, of course, and there are so many ways you can do that,” while gesturing widely with both arms in the style of a “Price is Right” spokesmodel.

And then I would pick up my line of questioning with options strategies, see, before easing him into leveraged ETFs organically.

That’s not how Rob wanted things to go.

In fact, he actually wanted to “go big or go home,” to quote the man himself.

Fortunately, as a member of the agenda-driven media, I edited our conversation into the exact picture-perfect orchestration I had dreamed of, even as I allowed Rob to gently persuade me that there are some situations where leveraged ETFs can be a smart way to trade.

Much, much smarter than selling Palantir stock at a loss in 2022, certainly.

Anyway, Rob has ZERO future as a spokesmodel – but below, he explains one smart way to use leverage that most of us dummies have never even thought of.

How Rob Uses a 2-ETF Strategy to Hedge with Leverage

Rob Isbitts: It’s funny, they were talking for two days about — what was the thing called, the Questionable Decisions, or whatever the guy’s name was?

Elizabeth Volk: Situational Awareness.

RI: Situational Awareness. “Why is everybody using the phrase situational awareness?” It took me about a day and a half to figure out that they were talking about this guy.

EV: It’s funny; that’s always a phrase I use in relation to, “Be aware of your surroundings in case there’s a creepy guy following you, so you don’t get attacked.”

RI: Right, right. Well, by the way, you can call this whole thing situational awareness.

EV: It’s just – anyway. The irony is thick.

RI: But they’re all forms of taking on more risk than you’re capable of, and it always comes down to one thing – because remember, I think like a hedge fund manager, and everything I do has some hedge to it, even if it’s SPY-BIL. To me, it’s all about: Are you going to try to make money so badly that you’re OK with the opposite outcome?

And maybe in the backs of the minds of people like Leopold, they’re saying, “Yeah, of course, because I get paid a ton,” or “Whatever, I’ll go and reinvent myself. I’m not going to be destitute.”

I have a little pet strategy nobody looks at called “Go Big or Go Home.” It has two securities in it: ProShares UltraPro QQQ (TQQ) and Direxion Small Cap Bear 3X ETF (TZA). That’s triple long Qs and triple short the small-cap Russell 2000, because I think that that will be the root of all evil eventually.

RI: But those two in combination, that’s using leverage, but using it to hedge at the same time.

If you’re ok with risking it all to the point where you blow up – this is for you.

For even more ideas on built-in hedges, 2-ETF portfolios, and how to approach a leverage-happy market without becoming a Leopold yourself, check out my full conversation with Rob at Barchart.

Leverage: Not Bad, Not Great

– This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Check out more from Rob Isbitts at Roar.PiTrade.com and ETFYourself.

Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: “The cocaine isn’t the point. The cocaine is a metaphor,” he explained wearily over the pile of cocaine. She folded her arms. She didn’t understand his cocaine. “Didn’t you read my manifesto?” The prostitute had read his manifesto. Why couldn’t she?

As a playwriting student who suffered through a unit on “Edmond” back when the broader US entertainment culture was undergoing a minor David Mamet renaissance, this joke has been lodged in my brain for well over a decade.

So whenever I see a headline like Bloomberg’s “Five Takeaways From Zuckerberg’s 6,500-Word Manifesto on AI,” I think to myself with mock indignation: Didn’t you read my manifesto?

But in deference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s continued insistence on launching personal tech products with use cases primarily geared toward violating the privacy boundaries of strangers, I have decided to give his manifesto at least as much attention as the imaginary sex worker from one of my favorite punchlines.

Here are my takeaways.

5 Takeaways from Someone Who Struggled to Engage, as a Reader, with Mark Zuckerberg’s AI Manifesto

#1. This manifesto is almost excruciatingly anodyne and not a very compelling read, especially for someone who can ostensibly afford the finest copywriters in the world.

#2. You should not write a 6,500-word manifesto unless you’re an exceptionally strong writer, or willing to hire one. (Alternately: unless you’re an aspiring cult leader, or a sociopathic personality type.)

#3. Even Zuckerberg’s bold hypothetical thought experiment about an egalitarian AI-powered future is ultimately a pallid, colorless nightmare populated entirely by theoretical attorneys and litigants.

#4. I’m like 99% sure that I now know the specific identity of the Silicon Valley milquetoast that Palantir CEO Alex Karp is always loudly subtweeting in his shareholder letters (it’s Zuck).

#5. Making brownies with your dad sounds like fun, unless your dad is the kind of guy who insists it’s NOT a distraction when he wears his AI glasses – only to stand there slack-jawed in front of the marble kitchen island, his attention wordlessly focused on the AI agent purring in his ear about the merits of measuring by volume vs. weight, and what an easy way that would be to optimize this fun family hobby time with your daughter… wait, where did she go?

Why No One Should Actually Read Mark’s AI Manifesto

Just because a piece of writing is a manifesto written by a billionaire does not mean it’s worth reading.

This is true no matter what kind of soothing self-talk rituals the New York Times has to perform after their paper served as an early public workshop for large passages of Mark’s manifesto.

What do I mean by “worth reading”?

As someone whose LinkedIn feed is dominated by professional writers who apparently have an intimate daily relationship with Claude and other various AI agents, this feels worth discussing.

The Unabomber was turned into the FBI by his own family because his brother David and sister-in-law Linda recognized certain linguistic hallmarks after reading Ted’s manifesto.

If you stripped Zuckerberg’s byline from his own AI manifesto, and then ran a copy of it in the Washington Post under legal duress, there would be no possible hallmarks to recognize the author by – no linguistic quirks; no irrepressibly specific glint of humanity shining through.

Almost certainly, though, you would recognize Mark’s hand at work here by the baldly craven agenda in his manifesto, which is primarily to serve his own financial interests by seeking to shape federal government policy on AI.

Even as a reader who gave up and started scanning, and then skimming, about 40% of the way through – all of this is startlingly obvious.

How can we not platform the political agenda of billionaire tech CEOs? asks the paper of record.

5 Market Memos You Might Have Missed That Are Actually Worth Reading

Whether or not you have already chosen to subject your eyeballs to Mark’s AI diary entry, here are 5 better things to spend your time reading.

I don’t know if I would call any of them a “manifesto,” per se, but I’m open to your feedback.

In any case, you could strip the bylines off of every one of these columns and hand them to me in a dark room, and I could tell you who wrote each one of them – no problem.

#1. What Do Cost of Carry Tables Tell Us Heading Into Fall Harvest?

Senior Market Analyst Darin Newsom explains what his go-to cost of carry tables are telling us about critical corn and soybean markets, and how US producers can use the data to inform their hedging decisions.

As Darin Newsom’s biggest fan, I was remotely following his appearances at our recent Barchart Road Shows (or whatever these farm things are called that I’m not invited to).

Our colleague Zach, aware of my keen interest, sent over a picture of Darin’s presentation in action.

“Has he mentioned me,” I messaged back urgently (like a normal coworker would).

“Yeah,” said Zach. “El Niño.”

#2. How Leveraged ETFs Turned South Korea’s Stock Market Into a Casino and Why the U.S. Might Be Next

Columnist Rob Isbitts describes the role of leverage in South Korea’s recent market volatility, and why US investors shouldn’t get complacent about the odds of a similar explosion here at home.

Before I spoke with him earlier today about the risk of a South Korea-style collapse in the US, I reviewed about a fiscal quarter’s worth of Rob’s writing on leveraged ETFs, market concentration risk, and how to trade a semiconductor meltdown.

Of the wild tech volatility we’ve seen recently, “The whole summer has been spring training,” Rob said. “We’ll come back to this again in the fall, because we always do.”

And then, perhaps unnecessarily, he added: “I heard there’s an election.”

Our deep dive on leverage is coming soon.

#3. Micron vs. SK hynix: One Stock Rules AI Memory. The Other Has More Room to Run.

Analyst Rick Orford dives into the hottest niche of the tech sector with this explainer on SK hynix’s rise to dominance, what Micron is doing to close the gap, where Samsung fits into the picture, and everything else investors need to know before plowing their money into memory.

Rick is always trying to spot the edits I make on his articles so that I never, ever have to make that specific edit on one of his articles again.

“I don’t mind editing, I promise,” I tell him. “I’m doing this on the clock.”

“I noticed you changed my captions!” he’ll chirp in response. “I’ll be sure to do that moving forward.”

Please know that he brings the same tireless, detail-oriented energy to this week’s analysis of the ballooning market for random access memories – which pairs well with the Daft Punk classic of the same name, if you prefer background music with your research.

#4. Nvidia’s Best Customers Have a Reason to Stop Buying So Many Nvidia Chips

Contributor Jim Osman addresses a major existential threat to Nvidia’s future, as the company’s customers include some of the biggest and best-capitalized tech companies on Earth – and they’re spending billions to build their own custom silicon. In this column, Osman explains the metrics investors should be watching to see whether that threat is turning to reality for Nvidia.

Jim is kind of like a serious, all-business guy from across the pond, right?

He once posted a picture of his dogs on social media and I have never, ever stopped thinking about it.

#5. Here’s 1 Way to Trade This Classic Supply & Demand Story for US Refiners

Senior Market Strategist John Rowland, CMT, describes the market dynamics that are driving fat margins for US refiners right now, and explains how opportunistic traders can try to capitalize on a fundamental setup that’s not going away anytime soon.

As the host of our Market on Close livestream, sometimes John will casually show up surrounded by an entire multimedia production experience – in much the same way that I imagine Bono might emerge, glittering and camera-ready, from within the Sphere in Las Vegas.

“Not sure if you want to tackle this,” John told me, referring to the series of carefully curated and linked charts he had provided, along with his accompanying analysis, all of which I would only need to lightly edit before publishing.

There was also an accompanying video.

As we follow the news cycle of US-Iran negotiations like tennis fans at center court, the energy supply chain remains in a chokehold, and John’s entire laser light show is worth checking out:

Always Be Closing

To very loosely paraphrase Mamet’s Edmond —

Just because Mark Zuckerberg can publish a blog on his company’s website doesn’t make him a real writer. He’s Tom from MySpace at the end of the day, and he needs to be honest with himself about that.

If you’re still interested in further longform content about our future tech dystopia, I would suggest the George Saunders short stories “The Semplica Girl Diaries” and “Liberation Day,” in that order.

And oh man, have you guys ever seen “Venom” with Tom Hardy?

Remember that scene where he’s listening to Eckhart Tolle?

That gets me every time.

I was a recent graduate of a highly regarded private university in Manhattan; disarmingly intelligent; easy on the eyes in a turtleneck; completely inexperienced in portfolio management; and capable of winning over with incredible ease, when I was in the right mood, a target demographic of men aged 35 and older.

Could I manage a highly leveraged hedge fund, Focker?

We’ll never know, because no one ever gave me the seed money.

But if I had tried, it’s fair to assume that the story arc probably would have looked a lot like Leopold’s.

I had heard of the guy by name only.

When I finally saw his face – only after Situational Awareness needed a lifeline from Ken Griffin – I was struck by how young he was.

He could be my son.

My first response was schadenfreude.

Of course he’s a Columbia guy, I scoffed.

I don’t consider myself a particularly tribalist individual, except for the weird Bengals thing, but I will engage in NYU vs. Columbia pettiness with my final wheezing death rattle.

Did you know those uptown Ivy hooligans barely even took a day off after 9/11?!

Relieved to find that Aschenbrenner was not the Gallatin School of Individualized Study halfling that he appeared to be at first glance, I promptly changed my profile picture in Slack to Leopold, his arms outstretched like AI Jesus against a green field, and updated my job description to “wunderkind.”

I truly do enjoy a good bit.

What’s the Trade?!

But this is not my hot take on Leopold Aschenbrenner. You don’t need to hear one of those from me.

The best postmortem you can read on Situational Awareness has already been written by my friend and former colleague Garrett Baldwin, right here on Substack.

I’d suggest that you subscribe and read the entire thing, but I want to specifically highlight the second part of the series, because it drills down on the fundamental flaw with so much of today’s media.

It’s an issue I’ve discussed over email with our Senior Market Analyst Darin Newsom, and with our dedicated ETF columnist Rob Isbitts, and more so than anyone, with our Editorial Director Sarah Holzmann.

It’s the question of access.

Access is why you never hear a CEO answer a tough question on CNBC.

It’s presumably why I’m the only idiot to write about Taylor Swift’s CEF battle with BlackRock, given that a source close to the pop star responded to my multiple specific, detailed questions – some of which were yes/no – with a single dismissive handwave about inaccuracy that seemed designed to discourage me from covering the story altogether.

It’s why you see Jamie Dimon held up by financial media as a legendary banking genius, even though – as my vendetta-carrying dad messaged me via two separate formats last night – JPMorgan Chase was reportedly probed by the feds earlier this year for improperly withholding $100 million in reimbursements from its own customers.

As Garrett writes from a theoretical reporter’s POV:

You could ask why a fund financed by some of the world’s largest banks could obtain that much leverage.

But the truth is that this question is an unwelcome guest…

After all, your editor wants the exclusive interview that you might deliver.

The publication wants the traffic to the article that carries your byline.

The publicist wants a dedicated outlet that can validate and elevate the fund manager (or other client’s) profile, and the expectation is that you’ll deliver… and accommodate…

So… you don’t ask the question about leverage.

Read G's Article Here

I still remember the first phone call I ever had with Garrett.

This was a few jobs ago for both of us, and he had taken over ghostwriting for one trader’s public-facing “family portfolio.”

Unfortunately, the trader in question had grown quite enamored with the strategy of selling naked options premium without quite understanding the risk involved. As a result, the portfolio had just been assigned a metric truckload of shares at expiration.

As Garrett and I held an emergency weekend call to discuss how to address this with subscribers from a fulfillment perspective, he tossed out a potential subject line for the email: “You’ll never guess what I did with my family’s money!”

He was kidding, but also kind of not.

As editors, our agenda – so to speak – was to explain away the absurdity of the situation in a way that would mollify subscribers, preserve the reputation of the trader, and not completely kneecap the future efforts of the marketing team to sell this specific portfolio product.

That’s not the kind of content needle you can thread with a ChatGPT prompt just yet, or even Claude.

Later, Garrett would bring this uncanny ability to bullet-point the agenda to our live trading network for another company.

Russia invaded Ukraine?

“What’s the trade?” Garrett would demand.

A Norfolk-Southern train derailment?

“What is the trade?” he would bark.

Roe v. Wade is overturned?

“WHAT is the TRADE?”

He was still kidding, again, but kind of not.

At some point, more or less all of the live video we were producing was meant to be framed for the audience of our marketing team, so they could turn it into winning trade ideas to sell to our subscribers. It was a proto-AI circular economy of making content for ourselves to ingest and repurpose.

Literally just the Leopold narrative, but instead of chip stocks, we triple-leveraged Garrett’s investment ideas and our dumb comedy bits.

What is the trade? was our only agenda. It became exhausting.

And we still ask each other, years later, with the market and the media around us at least 3x dumber by now:

“What is the trade???”

Agenda vs. Access

I’m in a ~*~ season of life ~*~ where I will occasionally write a strongly worded letter when the topic or occasion moves me.

That’s how I came to exchange words with a fellow writer this week about our respective agendas.

I felt his article was clearly driven by a particular agenda, even as the author claimed, without evidence, that other, unnamed media outlets were driven by another, unspecified agenda. I wondered if he saw the irony.

The author responded to me a little too quickly, and in a way that I would classify as “negging” – a highly cultivated strain of faux dismissal that begs for more engagement.

First, in response to my initial email, which was sent from my personal Gmail and did not identify my employer:

Never heard of Barchart. Maybe I’ll check it out. Let’s be friends?

Since he also asked about my professional experience, I replied only to suggest that it’s often best to reconsider responding in haste to critical reader emails. He fired back:

“Say nothing” wasn’t the response I expected. You’re a professional writer. I expected something a little more intrepid.

He continued on; he double-replied. They were the overlong, oddly defensive responses I would occasionally get from stray readers in my early days as a young woman writing about stocks online.

Back then, I would file each email away in an Outlook folder titled something like, “I’d take the dumb bitch out for drinks,” in tribute to my most memorable anonymous feedback from the now-defunct Yahoo Finance message boards.

The point being, I am extremely flattered (as I should be) to exist as the only one of reportedly “40 to 60 emails” this writer responded to on that day, and yet I still don’t have an answer to the simple question I sent him about the agenda behind his piece.

As a writer, I think it’s important to know your agenda.

When I started mentally composing a recent entry here – before I ever set down a word – I thought replenishing beaches was the dumbest thing I had ever heard of, and I was ready to publish a fairly specific write-up about it based on an angle driven by that agenda.

But after I did a little more reading, that is not the story I came up with.

I will now replenish the beaches myself out of spite with a plastic sand castle bucket, if I have to.

When I sat down for a lighthearted, half-joking Q&A with my own father, I did so with a thoroughly flagged copy of “The Jakarta Method” in my purse.

The existence of an agenda itself is not a bad thing. In fact, I find it’s usually what inspires the work.

But a hidden agenda… well. That’s something else, isn’t it?

“Agenda” is not the same thing as “access,” of course, but there are times in the modern media landscape where they share the same armrest.

And the amount of space each one occupies, along with whether or not you notice the territorial creep, can genuinely affect the quality of the content you’re consuming.

Starting out in my career, I was lucky to work for a company that was early to the niche of online financial content, and for a CEO who was serious about maintaining a strong firewall between editorial and marketing.

So strong, in fact, that for the longest time, I assumed that our marketing efforts consisted pretty much solely of selling our own products.

I was vaguely aware of the practice but didn’t think too hard about the practicalities of renting out our email lists to third parties – neither the risk, nor the reward, and definitely not which one of them would prevail in a sudden death match.

I was oblivious for nearly a decade, actually, until one fateful day during the bitterly fought 2016 presidential election, when my good friend and employee Josh messaged me urgently.

Our brand account was getting dragged on Twitter by one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers, he said, and it was bad.

That was how I discovered the seamy side of the business called finpub, and also how I learned about the one very specific figure who sent the marketing email under our name that got us in trouble with Team Hillary. (It was about incontinence, remarkably, and we were right to be dragged for it.)

I would later learn that the personality behind the email was the head of a larger finpub empire, and he had made his name in the industry with a magnum opus based primarily on racist conspiracy theories about former President Obama.

“Why are we working with this guy?” I asked my boss at the time, after an initial Google search quickly turned up his checkered history with federal regulators.

Because of the revenue, came the obvious answer.

Just a few years after that Twitter ugliness, I was in Baltimore, sitting in a room with one of the marketing masterminds behind that same infamous “Obama is scary” promo – although not the man himself.

This marketing guy (arguably a wunderkind in his own right, by some regional measures) was telling us how he had met some of the biggest Fox News personalities of the early 2010s as part of this anti-Obama effort. But he assured us that none of them actually bought into the conspiracy Kool-Aid they were selling.

“They’re all just in it for the money,” he said, like that was some kind of absolution.

I think I’ve been doing this long enough to identify my own personal agenda.

I’m here to give Darin Newsom a format to boldly insult USDA data; to encourage Rob Isbitts to make dad jokes of increasingly questionable taste; and to ask the questions about beach replenishment and Taylor Swift investments that only a fine arts graduate would (or could?).

My knee-jerk reaction to “Does Barchart have an agenda?” would be “Corn,” which I’ve discussed at length here.

I don’t have a distant corporate overlord at this job, unless you count He Who Walks Behind the Rows. My boss, the COO, and the CEO of the company all contact me directly with feedback.

We don’t have publicly traded stock and shareholders to think about, like Jimmy Dimon.

But of course, like all businesses, we have advertisers, and initiatives, and internal stakeholders.

There’s always an agenda somewhere.

Speaking Freely About 3X Leverage

When I said I don’t have a hot take about Leopold, I meant it.

But Rob “Bobby Stock” Isbitts and I have been trading notes back and forth – between the various breaking headlines and our own summer vacations – for a substantial, slow-cooked Q&A coming up on the dangers of unchecked leverage, why risk management is everything, where South Korea comes into play, and what you really need to know about leveraged ETFs so you don’t get blown up.

Obviously, you’ll hear more about that when we get our schedules aligned and get our conversation posted to the site, which is pretty much entirely on me at this point.

What I really want to underscore with Rob, and why I’ve been bothering him about this periodically for weeks now, are two things – risk management, and the realities of 3x ETFs.

Rob, as you may already know, is a consummate professional in all aspects of the business, from portfolio management to content production, which is why we’ve previously discussed the media-adjacent topic of access.

And he’s conscious, when we plan these types of content pieces, that advertisers might take notice, particularly since he knows we have quite a few ETF issuers in our stable.

In some of my previous jobs, there was already a firewall in place between editorial and marketing. And at some other jobs, there was a federally significant lack of firewalls, in general.

But when I started at Barchart, the in-house editorial department was still pretty new, and the content marketing division was even newer.

That means some of the agenda is being set in real time, and we’re deciding right now what kind of trade-offs we’re willing to make for access, because we’re building as we go.

Working with Sarah Holzmann – who could no doubt crack her knuckles and tell you her own stories about the industry-leading propagandist who once ruined my workday with a single unsubstantiated claim about former Sec. Clinton’s health – makes this extremely easy.

We tend to agree completely on things like AI disclosure, which our editorial policy is 100% transparent on, even when I’m only using a little AI content – as a treat.

And while we love and support our colleagues who sell the ad placements that appear alongside our content and inside our newsletters, Sarah and I also agree completely on keeping the concerns of advertising out of our editorial.

Broadly, of course, it is our agenda to get more pageviews for more advertising dollars, in the classic “soap opera” model; this is not a new, innovative, or complicated scheme that we’re running here.

But as I alluded to a couple of paragraphs earlier, we’re all navigating through the age of AI-generated content, bot farms, and deepfakes.

Even with our content that is not disclosed as AI, readers have occasionally accused us of publishing AI content, even though our policy is to disclose AI content as such, as is evident from our clearly disclosed AI content.

In other words, audience trust levels seem almost historically low, in general.

And while Sarah and I personally know and trust our AI content team over in London, we also recognize that most of you do not. So we try to be sparing and intentional about how we use those tools, as brilliant and advanced as they may be relative to what’s widely available.

Given this context, imagine if we were to publish an article that had been influenced somehow by an advertiser, and that influence had not been disclosed?

It would be the absolute end.

Why would anyone trust us?

So the best audience-building agenda for our team, I think, is to keep developing into a publication that readers actually feel like they can trust – by continuing to write about what we know, and what we believe, and what we feel passionately about, and what is true.

That means my upcoming conversation with investing expert Rob Isbitts about leveraged ETFs – 3x, long, short, and otherwise – will be expansive, and unvarnished, and delivered in the interest of our readers rather than our shareholders, which is exactly why no one will ever remember me as a great banking CEO.

My personal agenda, as usual, will be to deliver the kind of scathing and incisive educational insight that elicits sputtering, indignant email feedback wherein I am both insulted and solicited by the sender, ideally within the same sentence.

Our advertisers – who are presumably targeting the most highly engaged, active traders in the market, even if that group includes people who would triple-leverage their houses, marriages, and entire lives to prove me wrong – are going to love it.

We float in the pool and waste money in the arcade and find shells on the beach, and when it storms, we stay inside to watch whatever major global sporting event is on broadcast TV.

Depending on the year and the specific week in July that we make it out there, sometimes it’s Wimbledon, or maybe even the Summer Olympics.

At night, when we’re all exhausted from the sun and the swimming, the adults do very adult things that my kids will probably never grow up to do – like watch blockbuster 1990s movies on cable, complete with regular commercial breaks.

This year, it was the World Cup final and some kind of “Forrest Gump” marathon, and I tried not to sit too long with the profound melancholy that settled in when I realized the Abbie Hoffman character would not register with my children, not even as a flicker.

Fortunately or not, there was another and more pressing melancholy distraction at the beach for me this year, courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Out on the horizon, every morning and every night, we tracked the steady progress of the ships dredging sand from the bottom of the continental shelf, as a team of federal government contractors dutifully chipped away at the impossible, farcical, quixotic, infuriating task of fighting beach erosion.

The ships suction up heaps of wet sand from the shallowest ledge of the ocean – along with chunks of fossilized limestone; ancient and living coral; stray shark teeth; and any tiny saltwater dwellers that happen to get in the way – and then the whole mess is power-hosed back out onto the beach proper to dry and reshape itself into dunes.

And there it settles, waiting for the wind and the tide and the time to sweep it all right back out into the waves.

Maybe Stop Building Things on Piles of Slowly Shifting Grains, Though

South Carolina’s coastline empire was initially built on grains of rice, not grains of sand.

The tropical cash crop that put Charleston on the map was cultivated by people with generational agricultural expertise who were purchased and transported directly from West Africa for that specific purpose, even though it’s the European colonizers and plantation owners whose names are emblazoned today across islands and street signs and memorials throughout coastal beach towns.

The legal realities of emancipation drastically changed the economics of large-scale agricultural production for coastal Carolina rice barons, who were previously rolling around in margins up to 26% under their heritage-based “unpaid labor” model.

With prospects in the indigo market looking equally lackluster following the Great Migration, business interests in the swampy, marshy region were due for a rebranding.

So, for the better part of the last century, much of the South Carolina coastline – starting from Myrtle Beach and its Grand Strand radius, and stretching all the way down south to Hilton Head in the Lowcountry – has been built squarely on the broad, sunburned shoulders of beach tourism.

That includes surfing, fishing, boat rides, swimming, mini golf, full-size golf, seafood, ethically questionable marine life encounters, and everything else the light touches.

Fewer grains of sand, in this kind of economy, translates pretty directly to fewer dollars.

And there are a lot of Beach Dollars at stake:

“Approximately 17.6 million people visit the Grand Strand area annually with an economic impact of $12.5 billion,” according to the USACE press release announcing the current beach renourishment project.

USACE notes that since the last time they re-sanded these beaches, Hurricanes Ian and Debby have both inflicted major erosion on the coastline (with the oceans hard at work, perhaps, on their own competing floor renourishment projects).

“Renourishment” is a word I did not and would not have chosen, for what it’s worth, because it utterly fails at capturing the unique futility of this endeavor.

Picture Sisyphus playing out his eternal, interminable punishment in the underworld. Except the boulder he’s pushing in this scenario is a tiny grain of sand, and if anybody in Hades so much as sneezes or coughs – or even seeds a pomegranate with a little too much dramatic flourish – Sisyphus is right back at the bottom of the hill.

The cost is not exactly trivial, either.

If we compare the $72 million in federal funding for this project to, say, the amount that Secretary Hegseth needs to do whatever it is they’re doing in Iran – then yes, sanding a beach is relatively cheap.

Then again, there’s the environmental cost, which is difficult to measure, since we largely don’t even try.

However, we do know that “Scraping coastal ecosystems churns up vegetation, soil and seabeds and disrupts marine life,” according to David A. Taylor, writing for Scientific American in May 2024 about the massive global sand market – black, gray, and otherwise.

So why do we keep pouring money into beach renourishment?

It seems on the surface, to paraphrase a starkly relevant “Barry” episode, like it would take a psycho to keep spending money to dredge up old piles of seashells and sand from the horizon.

It Takes a Psycho

“I kind of wish we were at the Pacific,” said my 10-year-old, who strongly believed he would have been measurably cooler in a different ocean.

I thought about his Aunt Athena, who we haven’t seen in too long. She took me to see the Pacific Ocean for the first time when I was barely an adult, closer to my son’s age now than my own.

Out in Los Angeles, just about a 20-minute drive from where Athena grew up, a public health disaster is unfolding after a warehouse fire in the Boyle Heights neighborhood.

On June 22, Bloomberg’s John Gittelsohn and Laura Curtis reported:

Firefighters have faced an unusually difficult challenge at the 500,000-square-foot (46,500 square meter) facility, a giant refrigerated warehouse packed with thick insulated walls and topped with solar panels. Concerns that ammonia used in the cooling system could be released into surrounding neighborhoods have further complicated the response.

The fire started at a Lineage (LINE) warehouse, which means it was packed full of refrigerated food when it caught fire.

As a result, the days-long blaze that was exacerbated by the building’s chemical insulation and heavy metal outfittings left behind a mess of rotten food, rodents, flies, pests, and a stench that the company and its recently hired crisis management firm have barely even started to address.

That’s because Lineage and its founders (a) do not live in Boyle Heights and (b) they will be fine.

In an excellent article that everyone should read, Robin Urevich and Aaron Cantú at Capital & Main report:

In 2024, a Lineage cold storage warehouse in Benton County, Washington, burned for 60 days before it was demolished. The following year, the company reported in its annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that the fire produced a net gain of $107 million in 2024 and 2025 from insurance reimbursements, even after accounting for costs, including $29 million in clean-up costs.

However, earlier this year in the rural communities surrounding the Benton County warehouse, more than 100 people filed lawsuits alleging their health and the environment was damaged as result of negligent actions by Lineage and others in responding to the fire. In one of the lawsuits, residents said runoff from the firefighting effort contained contaminants that seeped into the water supply and the soil. Residents also alleged that they suffered “acute physical symptoms” including “burning eyes, throat irritation, coughing, difficulty breathing, headaches, nausea, dizziness and cognitive defects.”

They’re actually making money on these warehouse fires. And maybe even enough to cover their legal fees, if the math shakes out right.

It’s a truly soulless marvel of Wall Street engineering that rivals a sand dredge off a continental shelf.

Boyle Heights, incidentally, is nowhere near the beach or the beach economy. It’s a working-class Latino neighborhood right off the East LA Interchange, and the residents do not appear to have any federal Sisyphus funds en route to shore up their livelihoods, economy, or property.

The only recent mention of “fire” I could find on the EPA website was a stern admonishment to the Canadians “to do everything in their power to extinguish these fires as fast as possible,” and the only mentions of Lineage were their semi-relevant Clean Air Act violations in Seattle and Altoona, Iowa.

I had been reading about Boyle Heights and the Lineage disaster while I drank my coffee each morning at the beach, with the far-off ships silently, forcibly pulling up sand along the horizon for imminent relocation.

“Maybe we’ll go to the Pacific next year,” I told my son. “Your Aunt Athena would love to see you.”

When the Levee Breaks

It would be easy to talk about beach renourishment as a tale of two economies. And truly, no one would enjoy that narrative more than me.

I did feel like a very salt-washed version of Marie Antoinette each day, reading about the children and families in Boyle Heights breathing in toxic fumes (a private market concern!) as I watched for my fresh batch of beach to be hand-delivered by the administration (a national problem for everyone’s tax dollars!).

But if you dig down deep into the sand, the story gets bigger, and it starts to swallow all of us.

Just a fun family road trip up the Atlantic coast from South Carolina is the State of New Jersey, which poured over $1 billion into restoring its beaches after the historic devastation of Hurricane Sandy earlier this century.

The NJ Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Science and Research, acknowledges that what it calls “beach replenishment” may not be a sustainable long-term option due to “the questions about future financial feasibility and availability of sufficient material,” but adds that alternate mitigation measures will be critical as climate-related hazards increase:

Beaches are one of our nation’s most valuable resources. In addition to economic value, robust beaches play a significant role in maintaining a healthy coastal environment. As beaches erode, property, structures, and infrastructure are put at greater risk of damages from hurricanes and coastal storms. The importance and value of beach maintenance and replenishment projects will continue to grow in the face of rising sea levels…

According to the best available science, rising sea levels coupled with the increased intensity of storms predicted by climate change models will result in worsening flooding and beach erosion over time.

It’s not just the hippies in New Jersey’s DEP saying this, either.

“The climate is still changing, the world is still overheating, agricultural productivity is declining and there is an impact on companies,” said MSCI CEO Henry Fernandez during a London interview on July 28, amid an outbreak of wildfires in France and Spain that prompted mass evacuations.

Bloomberg’s coverage adds that “major companies mentioned extreme heat a record number of times in their latest quarterly filings, indicating that they increasingly recognize the operational and financial risks posed by rising temperatures.”

So if even Wall Street is starting to agree that we should invest in climate change mitigation, and if beach replenishment is an imperfect but achievable way to shore up our defenses… then what’s the problem?

Well, it’s about that “availability of sufficient material” that New Jersey mentioned.

Sand, writes David A. Taylor, “is a mundane resource”:

Yet sand mining is the world’s largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature’s ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050.

There’s an absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel hourglass joke in here somewhere, I’m sure.

Not so long ago, this was a paradise earth. There was enough for all.

And now we’re running out of beach, because we turned way too many grains of sand into toxic warehouse fires.

They Took All the Beaches, Put ‘Em in a Beach Museum

Of course, people being what and who they are, you will still find a few “pro-business” die-hards who remain planted firmly on the side of erosion, concrete buildings, and furiously collecting whatever nickels they can until our oceans dry up completely.

That story is reported out in great detail for us here by Sammy Fretwell at The State, who describes how the big-game hunting lawyer Stephen Goldfinch ascended to the South Carolina legislature for what seems like the sole purpose of defending high-value real estate built in high-risk coastal areas:

…no other South Carolina lawmaker has been more outspoken than Goldfinch about what he says are undue burdens on property owners and developers facing oceanfront building restrictions.

His stances have drawn criticism from people who say the senator’s views are limited mostly to the interests of those owning land on the oceanfront — instead of protecting the beach for the public at a time of rising sea levels. Even Gov. Henry McMaster has questioned Goldfinch’s efforts, vetoing two coastal measures the senator pushed that would have short-circuited part of a 1988 beach protection law…

He “has a history of trying to undermine what would be good for the public in the beachfront management act,’’ outgoing Republican Sen. Sandy Senn, a sometimes critic of the Georgetown County lawmaker, said in an interview with The State.

Goldfinch, the great defender of property, is now running for South Carolina Attorney General.

His campaign website prominently features a photo of him shopped artlessly atop the inlet waters that he scorns so deeply as an impediment to real estate development.

Perhaps he’s simply advertising the vacant lot to interested buyers, though.

We sailed through this same inlet last Monday night, right as the sun was setting.

As you get closer to the man-made jetties that open out into the Atlantic, the beach houses get conspicuously more expensive, and the boats all sit on lifts to keep them out of the salt water.

Our boat captain, who told us he hailed from up the shore in New Jersey, took the opportunity to remind us that the entire beach was public.

“You can kayak right up to the shore here and enjoy the beach anywhere you like! It’s a public resource, folks!”

My sister and I laughed.

At the very last sandy edge of the beach, right before we slipped out of the inlet and into the wider ocean, two people were stepping out slowly into the tide.

They held hands and negotiated their way as far out as the sand shelf would let them. From our view on deck, it looked like they were walking on the waves.

I took a picture, steadying myself as the boat rocked under us, and they raised a hand in greeting as we passed by.

“Take it all in, boys,” I said, my voice breaking over the waves. “One day this will all be yours.”

“I decided to go into accounting after I got out of the service,” said my dad. “I figured I would be able to get a job in accounting, and I was pretty good with numbers. So that’s how I got started in business.”

“Did your work in the service contribute to your decision?”

“No, not at all. In the service I wanted to get into accounting, but they kind of snookered me a little bit, and I got into linguistics instead.”

“How so? How did they snooker you?”

“They had a program in the Air Force at the time where if you volunteered and got a guaranteed job, they would put you into that job once you got in. But what I didn’t know – and they didn’t tell me – was that you actually have to ask for that at the time of your enlistment. So when I got down to basic training, they gave me a series of ability tests, and I tested out in linguistics pretty well. They put me into linguistics after threatening to put me into Morse code if I didn’t want to go into linguistics.” He shrugged. “That’s how they work.”

“How did you end up going to Greece specifically?”

“Greece? Oh, that was through the Air Force. My permanent duty station was in Greece. After I finished my linguistics courses, they sent me to Greece, and I was there for about a little short of two years.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I was a voice processor translator.”

“And what kind of stuff were you translating?”

“I was a voice processor translator, and I worked out of the Athens Air Force. Athens Airport.”

“But what kind of stuff?”

“I was a voice processor translator. The actual work that I did was classified.”

“Is it because you were working for the CIA?”

“No, no, no, no. I was in the Air Force. You can’t work for the Air Force and the CIA at the same time.”

“Is that something a CIA agent would say?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“How long have you been a double agent for Mossad?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “For who?”

“Is that something a Mossad agent would say?”

The Mild-Mannered Accountant

The first business mentor I ever had was my dad, who existed in my early childhood mornings mostly as the general impression of the things he left behind on his way to work.

There was the vague scent of Safeguard and Speed Stick; an apple core in the kitchen trash; a lightly handled copy of that day’s Wall Street Journal; and on Valentine’s Day, a heart-shaped box of chocolates for both me and my older sister.

I don’t remember asking him too much about work when I was growing up, but I remember him telling me a few things.

Like, “Never keep more personal effects at your desk than you can clear out in five minutes.”

“That sounds like the movie ‘Heat’,” my boss told me when I repeated it to him recently.

That resonates with me as an adult, but as an 8th grader, I understood it in the context of my dad watching this happen at work (via UPI):

MILFORD, Ohio, May 3 -- [A] systems engineering manager at suburban Cincinnati’s Structural Dynamics Research Corp. proudly took his 8-year-old child to work last Thursday for national Bring Your Daughter to Work Day -- only to be fired and escorted from the building [as] she watched.

This was 1995, and decades later, with the AI boom in the forefront of our minds, we tend to generalize the 1990s as the era of the dot-com bubble and tech riches and Silicon Valley overexuberance.

But if you lived through it, you know the 1990s was also an era of corporate downsizing and outsourcing on a massive scale.

We knew him as a mild-mannered accountant, my sister and I, with an emphasis on the mild.

He went to work every day, and he was sick so rarely that I could count the days on one hand (we stayed home together with our chicken pox, watching The Beatles on VHS), and he raised his voice even less often. He ran and played tennis for leisure, and in the summer he took us to the pool after work, and he dragged us both to the earliest possible Mass every Sunday at 8:30 AM.

Meanwhile, my sister and I were being radicalized by our Protestant mother, who was a constant thorn in the side of our elementary school’s PTO. When reactionary parents and teachers decided to ban Sweet Valley High #40, “On the Edge,” from a school book fair for drug-related content, it was my mom who dutifully sold copies out of a box, under the literal table, to all interested students.

So when we went to confession, and it took our father any longer than 30 seconds – our father, who never so much as dressed inappropriately for the weather – we inevitably joked about what he could possibly be saying in there.

Maybe he thought a curse word in his head, I suggested.

Probably hit the snooze button one morning, replied my sister.

They both sounded like equally outlandish possibilities.

But as you get older, the interactions you have with your parents change.

Like the weekend that I drove my dad home from lunch and stopped to fill up my car with gas.

I was halfway to reentering my car mid-fillup when he barked at me about creating static electricity at the pump.

His fuel parts company had recently settled a case where a cleric nearly self-immolated, he told me, and it was most likely because the priest had not been observing the posted static electricity warnings at the pump.

I silently tightened my gas cap as I imagined my dad in confession the next Saturday, repeating this same story to his own pastor.

And then there was the phone call I overheard at his kitchen table one day in 2014, during the extended period of unrest in Tripoli after Gaddafi fell:

“Yeah, we can sell to Libya – there’s no embargo. We just have to know who we’re dealing with.”

Who was I dealing with, I wondered.

Then, as I entered my 40s and began my obligatory midlife journey into post-WW2 world history, I began to wonder what, exactly, my dad – then a fresh-faced young college grad – was doing in Athens during the Vietnam War.

My newly married parents landed in Greece during the fall of Prime Minister Georgios Papadopoulos, who the BBC described in 1968 by his “gory surgical metaphors, his flinty eyes, his flood of garbled messianic language.”

The rebellion by post-war communists in Greece was long doomed by then, having been abandoned by Stalin himself as “foolishness,” but the CIA wasn’t willing to take any chances. Ambassador John Peurifoy, on his way to the nickname “The Butcher of Athens,” was instrumental in installing a right-wing government that better aligned with the aims of both the Greek monarchy and Washington, D.C.

The November 1973 student-led Athens Polytechnic uprising was a turning point for ousting the Papadopoulos regime, and my dad remembers a military curfew being in place when he landed.

But classic American anti-communism wasn’t the only reason Greece mattered to the US, as President Nixon said the same year: “Without aid to Greece, we would have no viable policy to save Israel.”

When I was growing up, I had remarkably few questions about why my Catholic father knew so much Hebrew.

But as an adult who has closely studied the genre of “mild-mannered white guy who’s actually a human weapon” films – including “The Accountant,” the entire “Taken” franchise, and “Nobody” – I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask my dad about his secret identity.

While I was at it, we also talked about the intricacies of trading with unstable foreign governments; why all the best accountants have been fired a few times; the simple reason that AI can’t replace a good accountant; and why he absolutely can’t stand his doppelganger, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

Teflon Jamie, Ben’s Best Movie, and What AI Can’t Do

Elizbeth Volk: Do you remember telling me about the priest who caught on fire at the gas station?

The Accountant: Oh. Yeah. Yeah, that can happen. The thing about even modern-day fueling, if you’re not careful, it can happen to you too.

EV: Ever since you told me that story, I’ve always been very careful about discharging my static electricity.

TA: You definitely have to do that. The best solution really is once you get out of your car to refuel, don’t get back in.

EV: And I feel like people consider it a low risk. Like, “Oh, that’s probably not going to happen to me.”

TA: That’s not necessarily the case. We have cases almost every year where somebody hurts themselves fueling the car. And some of it’s just pure idiocy. You know, like you have a parent that lets a 12 or 13 year old do it. That’s a no-no.

EV: Who were you dealing with in Libya?

TA: Well, you have to be careful who you sell to. I had discussions with people about who we’re allowed to sell to. And I think back then, North Korea, Cuba, Iran were on the no-sell list, so we had to be careful.

Libya might have been on that list at one time too, depending upon the time frame. Venezuela was another problem area. You could get into trouble because there are sanctions.

So you’ve got to be careful who you sell to. You also have to be careful who you do business with, because if you do business with an agent who sells into one of those countries, you’re just as liable for punishment, and the fines can be huge.

EV: So your role was basically compliance.

TA: Yeah, I was in compliance, export compliance. It all fell under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. When I left the company they had 16 locations, so I mean we were worldwide – basically every continent.

EV: Have you seen “The Accountant” with Ben Affleck?

TA: I have seen it more than once.

EV: See, so you know where I’m coming from, right? He’s like a mild-mannered guy who’s an accountant. Wow! But then he’s a killer.

TA: Wait a second – he was autistic, right? And he was also way better with weapons than your average accountant, right?

EV: But no one knew that about him!

TA: And he also worked with underworld characters, right? And had kind of –

EV: He’s someone who knew an unusual amount about corrupt practices…

TA: Yes, he was doing corrupt practices. Gotcha. But he also had a bit of a conscience because he also tipped the cops off to crimes.

EV: That’s true. He’s like a hooker with a heart of gold.

TA: Yeah, exactly.

EV: So, what’s your favorite Ben Affleck movie? Do you have one?

TA: Well, “The Town” wasn’t bad. It was, I thought, kind of a good movie because it kind of shows you a culture, a crime culture. Between the two of them, I guess I would go with “The Town.” I liked the ending a little bit better. “The Accountant,” I wasn’t too crazy about the ending.

EV: [taking notes furiously] Mm-hmm.

TA: But they were still both, I think, fairly decent movies.

EV: How do you feel about Matt Damon?

TA: Well, you know, I can’t really remember seeing that many Matt Damon movies. Hmm. So I– I’m hard pressed to have an opinion on that.

EV: Do you think you look like Jamie Dimon?

TA: No.

EV: Have you ever been in the same room as Jamie Dimon?

TA: No.

EV: Do you remember telling me that you created a WSJ digital account for the first time ever purely to post something critical of Jamie Dimon?

TA: I think what set me off there was an article about Jamie Dimon, and it was – the Wall Street Journal always defers to Jamie Dimon for some reason. He must be paying them or something. I don’t know.

But the thing that got me was they looked to him for counsel, advice, you know, predictions, and JPMorgan has probably been responsible for more fraudulent activities than any other major bank by double or triple in the last 15 or 20 years under Jamie Dimon, and this guy, he’s got Teflon because all of this stuff happens under him. Nothing happens to him.

So I do remember that, and he still pisses me off. I just don’t get that guy. And being an auditor, of course, yeah – you know, when you let your underlings, your subsidiaries, commit those kinds of fraud? I mean, it’s like, how can you come off so scot-free? I want to be a CEO.

Yeah, screw that. I remember one really bad one. It was Alabama, Alabama municipal bonds. Oh my God, it was just so bad. What was it? I think they actually, I can’t remember the details, but it was just, it was awful.

EV: Let me see if I can find it. [I did; it’s bad.]

TA: I mean, it was just egregious. And Dimon gets off scot-free every time. I mean, of all the CEOs on Wall Street, that guy is Teflon. If you or I did the same stuff, we’d be in jail forever.

TA: Jamie Dimon. That just sets me off. I guess what I’m saying is, when it comes to business, it doesn’t pay to be honest.

EV: Right, no, that’s true. So, on that note, what do you think I could have accomplished by now if I had been born a man?

TA: Well, I think you’ve had a good career, and in your field, I don’t feel that there’s any – to me, I don’t give more credibility to a male writer than to a female writer, because I think I can recognize a well put-together piece that’s well-researched, and I think I can also figure out who’s trying to snow me.

So I’ve read your articles, and they’re well-researched. They’re logical. I think what helps you is your – call it skepticism, cynicism – because that’s what you have to have in this business. I don’t think you’d be more successful as a man. You might even be less.

EV: Yeah, maybe so. I would be cockier. Would you tell your grandsons to become accountants?

TA: I would say only if they enjoy that type of work. I don’t think accountants will be replaced by AI because there’s too much judgment involved.

I think some of the tasks definitely can be taken over, no doubt about it. But I think where companies benefit from and where they also get in trouble is following the judgment of accountants.

Because if you get bad advice from an accountant, you could end up in tax court and in trouble with the regulatory agencies. If you get good advice, you can deploy your assets effectively, and be a better company.

EV: Can you think of examples where companies get in trouble following the bad judgment of accountants?

TA: Well, I think the problem is the senior management and CEOs, for example, lean on the CFOs and convince them to take actions that they shouldn’t take or not take actions that they should take.

And generally, where most of the problems come in is with revenue recognition. To me, revenue recognition is pretty straightforward, but some people think it isn’t. So they give bad advice on recognizing revenue, and as a result, they overstate the results.

Notice they never, almost never, understate the results, right? Because there’s a lot of pressure if you’re a public company to meet your quarterly numbers. So I think that’s one area, with revenue recognition, where a lot of accountants buckle under pressure.

Really, if you’re a good accountant, you’ve probably been fired a couple of times because you won’t go along with what the CEO wants you to do.

EV: Do you think my college degree was a good investment?

TA: Hard question. That’s not for me. That’s for you to answer.

EV: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it worked out fine. People are really impressed by it on my resume for some reason.

TA: Well, you know, it wouldn’t have done you any good if you weren’t a good writer. Once you get the degree, after that, it’s all your work product. It doesn’t matter about the degree. That just gets you in the door.

[At this point my mom enters, so it’s about time to wrap up the interview.]

EV: I have one final, formal question. This is actually from Sarah Holzmann, my coworker: Do you think it’s too late for me to become a tradwife?

TA: Yes.

Mom: It’s not too late. You’re just the wrong person.

TA: Yes, I don’t think you’re the right person to be a tradwife.

EV: O-kay.

TA: So that was a formal question, but maybe not a serious question. [to my mother] Her questions were all over the place, by the way.

Mom: I know. I saw a few of them.

EV: I was really trying to catch him off guard so that he would tell me he was CIA.

Mom: Oh, he can’t really talk about that.

– This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Otherwise, I am almost completely room-temperature on the subject.

But I feel an extremely specific way about comedy bits, and it’s very similar to the way I imagine Swifties must feel about Taylor.

As in, my commitment to the bit is unrivaled. I would go to great and embarrassing lengths just for the sake of the bit.

I would lay down my life for the bit.

And one thing I will always celebrate about Taylor, other than “Mirrorball,” is the rich source of material she provides for bits.

The monk-like shroud of PR silence she maintains is not only good business for Taylor Swift Inc., it’s also the ideal blank canvas for any genre of comedy you want to project onto her persona.

…although she did call herself an English teacher, to be fair.

I wouldn’t be writing about her in this space, though, if my interest in Taylor weren’t primarily financial.

…and, yes, still kind of a bit.

So I initially intended to write a light-yet-substantive piece about “how to invest so you can afford a wedding like Taylor,” and instead I kept chewing like a rescue terrier with a new bone until I came up with… this.

Which, I think, is an accidental deep dive into how Taylor Swift’s complete COVID-era financial emasculation of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink sparked a legal battle that didn’t end until about a month ago, and as a result it is actually illegal to invest like Taylor in some ways.

But we’ll need a flowing, folklorean cape of context around us before we get to that Supreme Court ruling.

Not a Lot Going On at the Moment

Note that what you are about to read is based on publicly available SEC filings, social media posts, and regular old reporting.

Any direct or indirect Swift family involvement has not been officially confirmed or denied (unless and until that fateful day when Ms. Tree Paine opens up her inbox and decides to risk it all for this Barchart blogger), and the specifics of Taylor’s own investment seem to hinge entirely on the hearsay accounting of a notorious closed-end fund activist.

So, grain of salt, and all that.

The Easter egg for this story was first planted nearly a year ago, with another bit about Taylor Swift taken to its logical extreme.

This, as you surely have recorded in your Tumblrs, was not long after our English teacher and our gym teacher had gotten engaged.

Between the spiking interest in Taylor’s Ralph Lauren engagement wear, rising shares of jewelry stocks, and every other brand on the planet trying to capitalize on the news, it was an unusually fruitful time across financial media for Swiftie-themed content.

Given the usual onslaught of headlines about tariffs, war, inflation, and robot armies, we here at Barchart Editorial HQ were somewhat tickled by this brief and unexpected side plot.

Brainstorming for ways to extend our mental vacation, I vaguely remembered having read that Taylor was invested in some closed-end funds.

Our Editorial Director – the beautiful, intelligent, and demure Sarah Holzmann – leaned into the bit with an email to Taylor’s notoriously tight-lipped publicist Tree Paine about closed-end funds.

Somewhat predictably, Tree never responded.

Of course, we now know that Ms. Paine was most likely already knee-deep in the process of coordinating with the NYPD and other necessary authorities to throttle public access to major transportation arteries into the area around Madison Square Garden so Taylor could execute her Bane-style revenge plot dream fantasy wedding.

So it’s understandable that this message never made it to the top of her “URGENT TAY-TAY BUSINESS” inbox.

Although, if I were Taylor Swift, I would tell my publicist to let everyone know about the time I beat Larry Fink and BlackRock in a proxy fight.

(We come from such different worlds!)

Anyway, I might have forgotten about it entirely myself, except for the wedding.

The Taylor ETF: Deep Cuts Only

There are two kinds of people in this world:

1. People who love billionaires and think they can teach us many things about investing, business, wealth-building, and the ways of the economy; and

2. People who hate billionaires and are just waiting, wild-eyed, for a revolution to mount them all on jagged makeshift pikes of rebar.

Whether or not you are filing a piece of rebar to a jagged point across your lap as you read this, we can perhaps all tentatively agree that billionaires, generally, tend to know a few things about investing.

And perhaps they even know a few things the rest of us don’t.

This might go double for Taylor Swift, I thought, because her father, Scott Swift, semi-famously worked for Merrill Lynch before he glommed on, remora-like, to the career of his much more talented and charismatic daughter.

Of course, I knew she was into closed-end funds, and of course, I knew Tree wouldn’t tell us which ones.

But I thought if I were to build a hypothetical portfolio or exchange-traded fund (ETF) based purely on companies that Taylor Swift has partnered with, I might be onto something.

It was a fine enough idea, and surprisingly easy to execute, thanks to the lovingly assembled resources at the Taylor Swift Wiki.

Note that some of these partnerships, ambassadorships, and sponsorships are no longer active, or have at least gone dormant, which you can explore in more detail at the wiki.

• Apple (AAPL)

• Coca-Cola (KO)

• Capital One (COF)

• Sony (SNE)

• Target (TGT)

There’s an almost uncanny Warren Buffett quality to the list, from the outright twinning of Apple and Coke to the dividend history of Target to the Japanese exposure via Sony.

Taylor was also allegedly one of the few celebrities to outright reject shilling us on the crypto exchange FTX, in classic Charlie Munger fashion, although the New York Times later disabused us of the notion that she was some kind of regulatory savant:

Mr. Moskowitz said on a podcast in April that Ms. Swift had conducted due diligence on FTX, asking the exchange to prove that its cryptocurrencies were not unregistered securities. His comments led to a flurry of headlines about Ms. Swift’s business acumen. But in an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Moskowitz said he had no inside information about the talks.

In reality, Ms. Swift’s side signed the sponsorship agreement with FTX after more than six months of discussions, three people with knowledge of the deal said, and it was Mr. Bankman-Fried who pulled out. The last-minute reversal left Ms. Swift’s team frustrated and disappointed, two of the people said.

At least, that’s the reporting.

But given everything we’ve been through with the NYT, not to mention everything we’ve been through with Taylor, I still find it hard to swallow that SBF broke up with her.

And of course:

A spokeswoman for Ms. Swift declined to comment.

Anyway.

So we have those 5 core stocks, and then I was also going to throw gold on the list, via the exchange-traded fund (ETF) GLD.

I figured it would be a fun nod to the fact that (1) Taylor is an institution and that’s what they buy; plus (2) the whole Karlie Kloss “Gold Rush” Gaylor thing, which you are free to research at your very own risk if you’re not familiar.

That gave me the substantive stocks to talk about, and I had my little GLD bit, and that’s really quite enough for me to flesh out into a whole Substack post, if I’m being entirely honest.

But I still knew, in my poorest most impoverished member-of-the-99% heart, that she was a fan of closed-end funds.

And Tree Paine – that absolute brick wall of a redhead standing in between me and the voice of a generation somewhat near to mine – was refusing to tell me which ones.

I searched one last time.

That was 11 hours ago.

Welcome to New York

For the sake of brevity, I used in the headline a phrase about “Taylor Swift beat BlackRock” in a proxy fight.

But if you wanted to be loquacious, you could just as easily say that Taylor Swift personally humiliated Larry Fink – absolutely rinsed him out – so badly that he spent the next six years of his life escalating a legal fight to the highest court in the land to make sure that no one could ever hurt him that badly again.

(Sorry; I’m laughing.)

Here is the rough Taylor-Larry relationship timeline that I have gathered, in the fashion of some horrifically monstrous “half-Us Weekly/half-Bloomberg” creature featurette:

• Scott Swift, who presumably stays licensed & registered for this very reason, invests some unknown portion of Taylor’s wealth across closed-end funds

• Around 2019, at least 3 of these funds are targeted for activist campaigns by Saba Capital Management, which is led by founder and Chief Investment Officer Boaz Weinstein

• Via the Non-Objecting Beneficial Owner (NOBO) list, Taylor Swift is discovered by Saba Capital to be the single largest individual investor in those 3 CEFs

• Scott Swift and Boaz Weinstein then realize that they share a mutual interest in extracting the greatest possible value on their respective investments

• The Swiftie Bloc, if you will, aligns in favor of Weinstein and Saba Capital’s activist campaigns

• By about mid-2020, their combined voting power results in proxy battle wins on all 3 of Taylor’s majority-held funds

Based on the timing and public record, those 3 funds could very well be as follows (ready for it?):

1. BlackRock Muni New York Intermediate Duration Fund (open-end conversion)

2. BlackRock New York Municipal Bond Trust (open-end conversion)

3. Voya Prime Rate Trust (full board slate + tender offer)

Now, a few questions:

Do you know how many people in the world are likely to win a proxy fight against Larry Fink?

Do you know the odds of discovering the NOBO in the proxy fight against you is Taylor Swift??

Do you know how funny it is to write “The Man” after robbing Larry Fink???

Get My Daily Market Letter

It’s all so absurd that it sounds like a Matt Levine column, and it actually was – but not until years later.

During the same stretch that Swift was on her Eras tour in 2023 and 2024, “Saba’s closed-end fund activism strategy also earned it recognition as the Activist Hedge Fund Manager of the Year by Institutional Investor,” according to the firm’s website.

This would have been around the time, no doubt, that you started hearing about Taylor Swift and her uncanny knack for investing in closed-end funds.

And you heard about it, rest assured, from superstar closed-end fund activist Boaz Weinstein – via a tweet that seems to have since been deleted, for reasons that we will assume are innocuous.

But Zinya Salfiti at Business Insider reported of Taylor on May 15, 2023:

The pop superstar puts her money in a niche type of mutual fund, an elite investor has revealed.

Hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein attended a Swift concert with his daughters in Philadelphia last weekend, and joked the singer’s investment smarts are one reason for her immense appeal.

“Having a blast watching our daughters sing every lyric tonight in Philly,” he tweeted on Saturday. “Did you know that @taylorswift13 invests in discounted closed end funds? You think I’m kidding, but her father Scott told me so!”

“For many reasons, it’s hard not to be a Swifty,” the founder of Saba Capital Management added.

Actually, we’ll assume that the tweet was deleted because he spelled “Swiftie” weird.

(But Tree… you know how to reach us.)

The angle on “Taylor loves this ONE obscure asset class!” got a little pickup, thanks to the canny timing.

Here’s Brett Owens for Forbes on May 24, 2023 (emphasis is the author’s):

CEFs are a pretty obscure corner of the market, even for a savvy investor, with only 500 or so out there. But Swift apparently knows the score: as Weinstein says, she not only buys CEFs, but focuses on CEFs trading at a discount to net asset value (NAV).

And this write-up from David Snowball at Mutual Fund Investor in June 2023, which cites the same Forbes article, is a generally excellent explainer on closed-end funds, NAV discounts, and everything else we’ve discussed that’s left you feeling cold and alienated up until now.

Of course, this whole narrative was just outlandish enough to catch the attention of Matt Levine at Bloomberg, who absolutely hit it out of the park with his May 16, 2023 newsletter:

This, of course, being a description of the exact scenario that had already played out years earlier, during COVID.

Her mind.

Boaz Weinstein clocked the opportunity to tweet again on May 17, 2023:

Apparently, neither Tree nor Scott has told him to delete this one yet. Not that they would, to my knowledge.

Then, with absolutely no mention of the Eras tour, this story appeared from Jack Pitcher at the Wall Street Journal a couple of months later:

And yes, if you follow this proxy fight through, it all appears to be connected.

I Knew You Were Trouble

Before we go any further:

No, prominent New York businessman Boaz Weinstein is not currently on the list of known attendees at the Swift-Kelce wedding.

Almost exactly a year after his big hit tweet, when even us niche weirdos had mostly stopped caring about Taylor and her discounted CEF kink, Weinstein’s latest BlackRock proxy battle was heating up.

I presume at this point that he did not have the benefit of Taylor Swift Inc. on his side, but I say that mostly because he was losing, and losing badly. (And because Tree may or may not have made him delete the tweet, depending upon which plane of the multiverse we currently occupy.)

Again, it’s pure speculation, because Tree is too busy to write us back either then or now – but a lack of actual Taylor financial backing may have prompted Weinstein’s increasing interest in desperately, strenuously leveraging the Taylor Swift name, image, and brand to drum up outside investor interest in closed-end funds.

On May 20, 2024, Saba Capital hosted a live webinar detailing their plan to deliver enhanced shareholder value at 10 BlackRock closed-end funds.

Here’s the very first slide, which is almost unforgivably absent from CNBC’s coverage of the presentation:

There was a speech to go with this slide, too, which it’s truly difficult to imagine Tree Paine approving in any multiverse.

I’ve cleaned up the transcript for readability, but here’s the SEC filing:

Taylor Swift actually is somebody that I got to speak to her father on a closed-end fund campaign because they were the largest owner. She was the largest owner when I got that NOBO list of three closed-end funds.

And Scott Swift eventually sided with us, voted in our favor, and that was three of the more than 60 battles where we have fought for investors and got investors all the way from mom and pop to Taylor Swift to get a full NAV exit on a big chunk or all of their investment.

So how do we contextualize a billion dollars? People talk about, and I’ve been to two of her concerts, how amazing it is and how she’s made $1.04 billion from the Eras tour North America and all the work she put in, three and a half hour concerts all around the country, over and over again. It’s hard, it’s hard work. It’s admirable what she does.

Larry Fink could deliver $1.4 billion to his shareholders, which include his employees, which would improve the value of their portfolios, which they could then invest and earn interest on compounding if they allowed shareholders an exit at NAV.

And all that’s required, as I wrote above, is a push of the button…

Really notice that by his own testimony here, Weinstein has now attended two Eras shows, and yet very deliberately states, emphasis my own: “Taylor Swift actually is somebody that I got to speak to her father on a closed-end fund campaign because they were the largest owner.”

Read that slowly. So, he met them at work once? (Masterful lede, though, sir!)

And if Weinstein thought his name-drop would get the same kind of reception as Swift after a 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” he was badly mistaken.

Again, what follows is a lightly edited overview of what’s available here:

Moderator: Thanks Boaz. So we will now transition to the Q&A portion of today’s event… First question from the audience. Why are these funds losing so much money?

Boaz Weinstein: Alright, there’s a – let’s see, let’s go. Losing so much money. Well, some of them have not lost so much money. Let’s just pull up the slide. Why are they not positive? Why are they losing so much money? Okay, so the discount is a chunk of it…

Moderator: Why did Saba purchase such a substantial interest in these funds? If they’re so poorly run, don’t you have an obligation to your own investors to make sound investments?

Boaz Weinstein: Wow. Well, we do have an obligation to make sound investments. Part of the activist job is to try to fix something that’s broken. And we knew that there’s a solution we had won three times before with BlackRock. I said, we made a mistake…

It’s important to know that historically – in their pre-Taylor era – Saba Capital’s go-to strategy for exiting “mom and pop” at full NAV would not be a proxy fight or a vote.

Instead, they would simply do something very boring but extremely annoying on paper – contract arbitrage; prospectus loopholes; waiting out expiration dates – until the asset manager is surrendering while muttering “bloody Yanks” under their breath.

But maybe once you win a fight against Larry Fink, you get a taste for billionaire blood. I really can’t say.

In any case, Saba’s subsequent battle against the largest asset manager in the universe fared substantially worse than Taylor’s Version.

Here’s BlackRock circa 2023, trying to paint the other guy as the real bloodthirsty Wall Street monster:

“The truth is this is a hedge-fund manager who is using its sheer size and assets to take control of closed-end funds for its own benefit at the expense of the retail investor,” said Stephen Minar, managing director of closed-end fund products at BlackRock.

But then again, from the same Wall Street Journal reporting (still Jack Pitcher), here’s a wide-eyed Boaz Weinstein pretending he’s never heard of BlackRock before:

“We’ve been in dozens of campaigns where it hasn’t come to this,” said Weinstein. “If I made a miscalculation, it is that I estimated BlackRock would actually give a damn about their investors and not just about greed.”

It’s easy to roll your eyes and be Team Nobody here, until you realize that once again, it’s the retail investor who loses.

How Did It End?

If you think Larry Fink likes being one-upped at his own asset management game, let the record show that he does not.

And especially not by a younger woman who, at the time of the perceived offense, was still pretty fresh off dropping “ME!” as a lead single (ft. Brendon Urie, mind you).

She was not even a Taybillionaire yet!

So after being absolutely bent over the sink by Taylor Swift and her voting shares on those fateful closed-end funds, allegedly, the CEO of BlackRock set about making sure that no one else – not Scott Swift, not Sabrina Carpenter, not Olivia Rodrigo, and certainly not Rita Ora – could ever do it again.

As quickly as October 2020, a slate of BlackRock closed-funds opted into Maryland legislation that effectively strips voting rights from any investor with a stake over 10%.

The press release describes it as an effort “to limit the ability of any single stockholder to exert undue influence in pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term value for Fund stockholders and the Fund’s ability to achieve its investment objective.”

Correctly perceiving the threat to their activist business model, Saba Capital sued BlackRock through a provision of the 1940 Investment Company Act (ICA), and they won in the Southern District of NY.

But then we arrive at the present day, when the case worked its way up to the Supreme Court.

In a 6-3 ruling in favor of the asset managers (i.e., BlackRock and their closed-end funds), Justice Barrett “concluded that Section 47(b) is directed at courts and remedies, not private litigants and causes of action,” per Alexandra Sadinsky and Sean Foley at Elsberg Law.

While that ruling seems like it hinges on something similar to a technicality (to me, who is not a lawyer), it also doesn’t seem like the matter is being punted to a regulator that particularly cares about retail investors. Via Greg Stohr at Bloomberg:

“These are protections Congress wrote into law more than 80 years ago — they are not optional,” said Weinstein, the founder and chief investment officer of Saba. “The evidence of shareholder harm is overwhelming. The SEC has no excuse not to act.”

The Trump administration and the SEC backed FS and BlackRock, arguing that the 1940 law doesn’t authorize investors to sue. “We are grateful the court agreed with the commission’s position on the scope of private rights of action under the Investment Company Act,” SEC General Counsel Russell McGranahan said in an emailed statement.

And just in case you still wanted to be stubbornly Team Nobody, here’s another point to consider from Inside the Mind of Mojo right here on Substack:

If CEF activism gets neutered by the Supreme Court ruling, those assets don’t disappear. They flow into BlackRock’s ETF ecosystem where investors get worse disclosure, more overlap, and less control. Shareholders who had mathematical recourse through CEF activism get stuffed into ETFs with identical underlying holdings but no ability to force discounts to close.

BlackRock wins regardless. Fewer activist threats in the CEF space means higher fees and less pressure. If activism kills the CEF structure entirely, those assets migrate to ETFs where BlackRock dominates market share. The ultimate asset gathering machine benefits from either outcome while retail investors lose leverage.

So, what have we learned here, other than “Matt Levine knows ball”?

If Taylor Swift did initially prevail in a proxy fight against Larry Fink and BlackRock, it was largely because she was already quite rich and in a strong position of power, and because the infinitely richer and more powerful asset managers had not yet thought of closing that particular legal loophole.

Saba Capital is much better at proxy fights when they have surprise Taylor Swift money in their back pocket.

Your dad’s weird friend from work will inevitably embarrass you at some point by plugging his business idea at the most awkward time.

The ongoing consolidation of power and lack of oversight in the US financial industry continues to disempower the retail investor, even as our Treasury Secretary winks at us to “get a piece of the action.”

Nobody, nobody, commits harder to the bit than Larry M.F. Fink.

And this is Becky.

I’m so excited for you to read the full report, and I’m endlessly grateful to my brilliant and tolerant colleagues for putting up with my hard-hitting questions about, “What is corn?” and “Who is soy?” and “How many kinds of wheat?!”

Read the Farm Report

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed the research, although I deeply apologize in advance if our CARL artificial intelligence assistant starts to hallucinate about frozen bananas – that’s on me, guys.

My pre-holiday rush was partly due to weekend newsletter prep on that particular Thursday, but I was also looking forward to getting out of town for a few days with my kids.

So, despite feeling extremely proud of the work I accomplished in collaboration with my colleagues Darin Newsom and Will Osnato on this feature, I ultimately did little more than hit “Publish” and then flee the scene as though I had just pulled a bank job.

If I thought I was taking a vacation from cows, though, I was wrong.

The Liquidity of the Crowd

It’s nearly impossible to drive to the mountains – any mountains – from southwestern Ohio without running into a few roving gangs of cows along the way.

And it’s not that I want to be “on” all the time, but I cannot just seamlessly transition from writing about the implications of cattle future spreads to mindlessly shouting, “Look, guys! Cows!” as we speed past.

So while I’m shrieking excitedly about the cows, I’m also thinking about whether they’re livestock or dairy, and noticing the soybeans across the two-lane highway, and then asking my 13-year-old to write down the name of the farm in his notes app so I can look them up later, once we’re done driving for the day.

I believe it was Shawn Carter who told us, “No matter where you go, you are what you are, player.”

And so I was also thinking – while I filled up my tank in Paris, Kentucky – about the conversation I had with Barchart’s Director of Commodity Data Research & Analysis, William Osnato, about the “wisdom of crowds” on oil prices.

We were diving into the growing dominance of prediction markets on Wall Street, and he detailed a concept for commodity-based contracts that has not quite made it to the live product stage yet.

But as for what’s out there already, it was the last line of our exchange here that really stuck with me.

Elizabeth Volk: There are prediction markets coming out on some commodities, like natural gas. Do you think there’s any value in looking at data like that, in terms of how the masses are betting on futures, or is that more like noise to you?

William Osnato: I feel like everything that’s not sports on the prediction markets, you could have an edge on – because sports is obviously efficient. It was already efficient before they started doing that.

There’s somebody who has to have an information edge there, which is why institutional asset management firms are taking significant interest in prediction markets. Because it’s rare to have a whole new marketplace and a whole bunch of new contracts that you can trade that actually have liquidity.

On the commodity side, I’d like to see those other contracts, but they’re so small potatoes compared to even just the price-based ones.

And even then, I would actually not really care what the wisdom of the crowd is on whether or not they think oil prices are going up, because that’s what everybody has to bet on all the time.

It’s funny, because it’s true. How good are any of us, after all these years of practice, at predicting gas prices?

But that concept and that phrase – the “wisdom of crowds” – keeps coming up lately, as with this excellent essay from our Barchart columnist Jim Osman:

Prediction markets are often sold as the cleanest version of crowd wisdom. People trade contracts tied to real-world outcomes. The price becomes a live probability estimate. In theory, the crowd processes information faster and better than any single forecaster.

The reality appears more compelling. The [Yale] research found that a small minority of accounts looked genuinely skilled, while most participants were much closer to chance. The market could still produce useful prices, but not because everyone was equally wise. It was because a small number of skilled traders were making much of the real price discovery, while the majority supplied liquidity, volume, and, in many cases, the losses.

That is not really the wisdom of crowds. It is the wisdom of the few, funded by the many.

Read Jim's Column

Not Every Cow Has the Stomach For It

Candidly, the idea that anyone thinks crowds have any wisdom at all is entirely foreign to me, particularly after having so recently stood in line at various mountain theme park attractions.

Even more candidly, “the wisdom of the crowd” sounds like something that a member of the crowd would come up with to make themselves feel better.

It’s probably worth acknowledging that I got my start in this industry back in 2007 under the tutelage of an analyst who prided himself on being a contrarian.

So, while other people were reading “The Intelligent Investor” or “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator,” my two foundational investing texts were “The Art of Contrary Thinking” by Humphrey B. Neill and “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay.

As the titles imply, neither author believes very much in any particular wisdom of the masses, though Neill allows that crowds are often right during the middle of a trend – albeit wrong at both ends.

That’s not what we call an “edge” in this industry.

Given this professional background, as well as the nearly 20 years of borderline farcical world history that have ensued since, my body at this point rejects the very notion of “the wisdom of crowds.”

I haven’t officially confirmed with him, but I believe this is something that Senior Market Analyst Darin Newsom and I have in common.

EV: So, as someone who has a professional grounding in these markets in terms of what we would describe as “real” analysis, to use shorthand – do you think there are any useful takeaways to be gleaned from what you are seeing in these prediction markets?

Darin Newsom: There’s a book my friend told me about, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” and I don’t remember who wrote it.

But I would lean the other way. If I were to write a book, I would talk about the stupidity of crowds.

What we used to be able to take away from the fund market or the non-commercial side, you know, back when there were pit traders – way back when, before the day of algorithms and computers – is that you could fade them and you would win.

They were easy to figure out. You knew where their stops were. You knew what they were going to do. And you knew that they had no background. They had no depth of knowledge as to what was actually going to happen to them. And so you could fade them.

I think you can do the same thing with most of these new traders. They’re not in it for the long haul. You know, it kind of takes us back to the old Wild West days in commodities where a long-term trade was two days.

I think you’re going to see more of that because a lot of people just don’t have the stomach for it. And they’re gamblers at heart and they want the excitement. They want to get in, get out, make money, and go on. So they’re going to be pretty easy to figure out.

On the first day of our mini-vacation to the mountains, I stopped in a Walmart parking lot to connect my work laptop to a mobile hotspot and write up a quick intro for Barchart’s daily newsletter:

You may want to sit down for this one: A new Wall Street Journal review of 1,105 videos posted across Polymarket’s viral marketing network reveals that none of those kids are actually that good at betting.

A solid 70% of the clips appeared to show a Polymarket trade in action, totaling $1.9 million at stake across the sample. The WSJ team found that the creators actually would have lost more than $166K, as opposed to the $900K in winnings they falsely portrayed using “outdated footage or faked headlines.”

As Darin told me toward the end of our conversation, “It’d be interesting to know what Charlie Munger would have to say.”

Probably something very rude or wildly controversial, if I had to guess.

For whatever reason, Charlie was never particularly concerned about being a crowd-pleaser.

It had become clear to me that the courts were willing to make Elon Musk follow through on any expensive bad idea he might tweet out, which I thought could escalate quickly.

If you had told me back then that just a few years later, Elon would repackage Twitter as a white supremacist AI nudify app, duct-tape it to a federally funded rocket, and try to sell it back to Wall Street for $2 trillion, I would not have been surprised.

But I might have been taken aback by the sheer number of willing and ravenous buyers.

Beware of Smiling Bankers

There are analysts more qualified than me to talk about SpaceX’s engineering feats – such as the use of reusable rockets, and the deposit of an incredibly high volume of physical debris into the low atmosphere to complicate the ongoing research of working astrophysicists.

But the most impressive engineering feat behind the SpaceX (SPCX) IPO, to my mind, is financial.

To mark the occasion on Friday, Morgan Stanley’s official account X-dot-commed:

Today, @SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) makes its public market debut with a $75Bn offering (pre-greenshoe) at $135 per share, marking the largest IPO in history.

Congratulations to the SpaceX team. We are honored to serve as joint lead bookrunner and sole stabilization agent.

In response, CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of the ungodly green shoes he made all of his bankers wear – an insider nod to the fact that he virtually stiffed them on fees.

As Bloomberg explains it:

SpaceX, which had already negotiated to pay razor-thin fees on its record initial public offering, somehow managed to get an even better deal out of its investment bankers.

Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI firm won’t pay any fee if underwriters on the offering agree to exercise their ability to sell another 15% of shares, an option known as a greenshoe in Wall Street parlance. The unusual deal means Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and the other banks on the offering are missing out on an extra $75 million of fees in the deal.

So why would these bankers be smiling in their hideous footwear?

Is it because they’re so excited that this generational wealth-building opportunity is now available to the broader retail investing population?

Haha – no. Allow Bloomberg to continue:

Musk’s conglomerate has agreed to pay dealmakers a $500 million fee for the offering, or about 0.67% of the $75 billion IPO haul. Even at that paltry rate, it’s still one of the biggest fee-paying events on Wall Street of all time.

As the lead banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley took home the biggest share of that fee pool, notching roughly $100 million each.

Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. all had smaller roles in the offering, taking in $75 million each. For more than a dozen banks that only managed to land the role of a co-manager, the fee dropped precipitously to just about $2 million each.

It’s worth recalling at this point that Morgan Stanley, not so long ago, also played the lead role in a group of banks that funded Elon’s infamous Twitter acquisition.

I was hardly alone in failing to see the strategy behind Tesla buying a social media platform, so the initial funding from big banks to support Musk’s unreasonably overpriced Twitter bid was almost purely an act of faith in the man’s ability to achieve some kind of business alchemy.

The part that wasn’t faith was a naked attempt to curry favor with Elon, in hopes that the banks he remembered fondly might one day be chosen to underwrite a fat IPO for one of his other side projects. (In addition to the more widely known MechaHitler-meets-Mars magic that is SpaceX, his portfolio also includes a business that is specifically dedicated to creating Tesla-sized tunnels and ankle-deep caustic sludge puddles).

As it should, that lofty degree of blind faith and shameless favor-currying carries with it some considerable risk.

The collective debt load from Elon’s Twitter buyout was so big and so balance sheet-crippling that The Wall Street Journal reported as of August 2024 that it was hobbling deal activity, denting bank profits, and even reorganizing the hierarchy of M&A bank leaders:

The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis…

Paper losses on the debt have dented bank profits, and holding high-risk loans directly on the balance sheet attracts more scrutiny from regulators. Because of Twitter and other hung deals, some of the banks also scaled back how much they lent in providing capital for merger-finance deals, according to some of the people.

The Twitter loans, along with other hung deals, helped knock some banks’ standing in the investment banking league tables, a closely watched ranking of their market share. The rankings are a major part of how banks market themselves to customers and can impact compensation.

Bank of America and Morgan Stanley commanded the top two spots in the U.S. leveraged-finance investment banking league tables in 2021 and 2022 during some quarters before Musk bought Twitter, according to data from Dealogic. In 2023 and 2024, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs—which didn’t finance the Twitter deal—have held the top spots.

So why take on the risk?

These bankers all believed that gambling on Elon Musk was a bet that would pay off big, and in the not-so-distant future.

That he would prove to be the type of guy who could successfully negotiate the terms of his own merger between a satellite company and an AI that’s helping to write new laws around nonconsensual sexual images, and somehow come out smelling like a trillionaire.

Morgan Stanley unloaded the final $1.23 billion tranche of its Twitter buyout debt in late April 2025, in a sale that Bloomberg said “generated huge demand” at a rate of 98 cents on the dollar.

Finally unloading the albatross of that Twitter/X debt ostensibly freed up Wall Street’s M&A giants to pursue a few years’ worth of lost opportunities.

And now, just over a year later, here we are celebrating the biggest IPO in history.

But what is it we’re celebrating, exactly?

Someone’s reward for believing in Elon, but certainly not ours.

Please remember, and trust me when I say this: beware of smiling Wall Street bankers.

They only smile when they think about their bonuses.

1 Billion Boxes of Ziti, Please

All of this is, perhaps, the greatest example to date of “the house always wins” on Wall Street, and it’s currently playing out in real time.

As luck would have it, SpaceX Day 1 coincided with my edit of Rob Isbitts’ latest thinkpiece, which takes a sobering look at the casino down at Wall & Broad.

Read Rob's Latest

FYI, I added that Tony Soprano reference in there myself, which is the kind of wild liberty I sometimes take as the Eccentric Dowager Emeritus of Barchart Editorial.

Back when we were a real society with a proper monoculture, my first year at NYU happened to overlap, in more ways than the chronological, with the second season of “The Sopranos.”

The actress who played Meadow briefly lived in my freshman dorm, and I spent one Monday night in my weekly scriptwriting seminar listening intently as two of the show’s buttoned-down lead writers explained to us how they captured the voice of the New Jersey underworld.

Years later, during the pandemic, I binged the entire series and was struck by how much I had come to relate to Tony.

My sole non-destructive mode of self-expression had been reduced to which robe I might choose to wear each morning, and I was gripped by the overwhelming sense that, just like the Cap said:

I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.

For Tony, it was the dot-com bubble and the ducks leaving his pool.

For me, it’s the artificial intelligence frenzy and how ominously quiet it’s gotten in the dense green woods outside my window.

We can debate the details of how much I really have in common with this particular balding paisan, if you want – and I’d love to; please email me – but “The Sopranos” has nevertheless become a foundational text to my understanding of many things in life: ethics; business; business ethics; gambling; deli meats; and the social strata of New Jersey, just for starters.

And we can argue about which episode is the best (again, please email me). There’s Pine Barrens with its interior decorating assassin; there’s Tracee the thoroughbred and Ralphie the gladiator; the brutal George-and-Martha marital bloodletting of Whitecaps; the unbearable lightness of Kevin Finnerty; and I can still barely use Long-Term Parking at the airport without tearing up for poor, sexy, stupid Adriana La Cerva.

But since I’ve been really, fully ensconced in these post-pandemic markets, there’s one arc in the series that holds more truth for me than any other, and that’s Dave Scatino.

You know – Eric’s dad, the guy who owns the sporting goods store?

Dave’s an otherwise very respectable businessman with a little gambling problem, and he thinks he can join Tony’s “executive” poker game for that one life-changing come-up that’s going to turn things around… only to find himself 45 boxes of ziti deep into the Soprano family, bleeding his business and his son’s college fund dry, and even inadvertently ruining Carmela’s chances at a romantic lunch date with her contractor.

Just like that ghoulishly grinning gaggle of Morgan Stanley bankers wearing green shoes, Tony knows before the first hand is ever dealt exactly how it’s going to end up for this little guy at his big poker table.

One minor difference is that Tony tries to warn him:

Tony Soprano: Forget it. This game’s not for you.

David Scatino: No, it’s just, you know, I was thinking it would be a kick.

Tony Soprano: Davey, you’re a nice guy. I like you, OK? But trust me, this game’s not for you. I don’t want to see you get hurt. These guys, they play deep.

David Scatino: You know how many jockstraps I sold last week?

Tony Soprano: Not enough for this game, OK? Forget it.

By the time we revisit Davey’s lifestyle a few episodes later in “Bust Out,” he’s reduced to sleeping in a tent at his own trashed store.

Maybe that’s why he feels vulnerable enough to tell Tony that his warning about the so-called “executive game” wasn’t quite strong enough.

“You told me not to get in the game,” says Dave. “Why’d you let me do it?”

“Well, I knew you had this business here, Davey,” Tony tells him. “It’s my nature. The frog and the scorpion, you know?”

This Isn’t a Game for You

But as Dr. Melfi once said, “Let’s get back to smashing my face.”

We’ve known for a while now that the casinos are rigged against us.

Meanwhile, the absolutely-not-a-casino prediction markets are rigging their own version of reality.

Like when Kalshi abruptly decided in mid-April that Maduro had been the “official” leader of Venezuela from a US prison all year long. And as someone at the CFTC will no doubt assure you, federally incarcerated foreign leaders have always been considered a commodity, so this is all perfectly above-board.

It’s harder for some of us to accept, though – still, after 2008; after everything – that the stock market is rigged just like the rest of it.

And I get it.

Because if investing is just another shell game, and our 401(k)s might explode on reentry, then what’s the point of any of it?

Why not just stuff a duffel bag full of unmarked bills in the bird feeder?

The bird feeder? Listen to yourself; you sound demented.

“Fear knocked on the door. Faith answered. There was no one there.”

– Christopher Moltisanti

A couple few things:

First, to protect our wild migratory friends, please be mindful of proper bird feeder ethics.

Second, there’s no need to be so reactionary with your duffel bag full of cash.

Instead, take a look at Rob’s essay on our gambling investment culture, which wraps up with 2 of his go-to strategies to help lock down your capital and protect it from what he describes as “the modern financial grift.”

And I would add, generally, that there’s a lot to be said for cooling your jets and playing the long game.

This requires some executive-level ice in your veins, particularly now that the inevitable heat death of the universe appears ever more imminent (cc: Super El Niño), so you’ll want to log some miles on Rob’s investor learning curve.

But take as a valuable example Goldman Sachs, which famously did not gamble on Elon’s big expensive Twitter buyout.

Let me repeat that WSJ quote about banking league tables from above, with my own emphasis added:

Bank of America and Morgan Stanley commanded the top two spots in the U.S. leveraged-finance investment banking league tables in 2021 and 2022 during some quarters before Musk bought Twitter, according to data from Dealogic. In 2023 and 2024, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs—which didn’t finance the Twitter deal—have held the top spots.

In other words, Goldman is such a legendary, iconic player at the executive game that they completely opted out of taking a risk on Elon Musk in the name of currying favor.

As a result, Goldman gained dealmaking ground on their debt-saddled peers at a critical time, and ultimately won the lead-left role in that coveted SpaceX IPO.

Then, in vintage Vampire Squid fashion, they also quarterbacked a massive $85 billion financing deal for Alphabet (GOOGL), and they’re now expected to be a key player in the upcoming OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, as well.

So sure, Morgan Stanley turned out fine in the end, even if they do look like clowns on Twitter.

But Goldman? They’re doing maybe even a little better.

Because it turns out that trying to curry favor doesn’t get you very far in a landscape where there are no friends.

In that kind of crowd, as Silvio would tell you: “You’re only as good as your last envelope.”

So trust me – you don’t want in on whatever game they’re playing. Those guys play deep, and they make you wear ugly shoes while they’re doing it.

That means you can go ahead and feel free to skip that hot new IPO, however historic it is, with absolutely no FOMO. You’re not missing out on anything, except another chance for the house to take your money.

But you can still play and win at your own game – the one that takes place at your own table, where you set the rules. (May I suggest Monopoly at the lake house?)

And guys like Rob can help you find your own edge. So can Rick, and John, and Kenny.

They’ve all witnessed the clown shoe-wearing men behind the curtain in action, and they know the playbook.

And I’m always here to help out the frogs of the world, too, but only as long as you promise not to defend the CGI Livia incident.

I can’t have that conversation again.

Specifically, you can saunter into the ag industry with futures jargon like “contango” and “backwardation” rolling fluently off your tongue, and accomplish nothing more than immediately labeling yourself as an outsider.

Or, as I vividly remember reading in more than one column from our Senior Market Analyst Darin Newsom, those are “New York terms.”

Perhaps coincidentally, Barchart’s Director of Commodity Data Research & Analysis, William Osnato, is a little bit of a local celebrity here at the office, because he holds the distinction of being our very first hire from New York City.

So when Will showed me a chart of the corn futures spread, I had to ask.

William Osnato: …and you have cheaper prices at the front, and you get more and more expensive as you get through the rest of this crop, because there’s plenty of corn around.

Elizabeth Volk: Do you talk about this in terms of contango and backwardation, or is there a different – are those the non-grain ways of saying it?

WO: Those are sort of the textbook definitions. Grain traders will say inverse or carry.

EV: OK, so inverse would be backwardation, and then contango would be carry.

WO: Correct.

EV: OK.

WO: Even Andrew Ward pointed that out. He said, “I think we made a LinkedIn post saying contango or backwardation. Grain traders don’t –”

I was like, “Yeah, but I learned academically. You say contango and backwardation.” Those are the textbook definitions of it.

As context, our brilliant colleague Andrew Ward is Barchart’s Head of Commodity Sales, as well as a graduate of Melbourne’s Swinburne University.

Will didn’t specify, so I prefer to imagine his phrasing was clocked in person – or at least over the phone or through a video call – so that Andrew’s lyrical Aussie twang was audible throughout as he stressed the importance of authenticity when communicating with US farmers in the heartland.

I kid, but the importance of authentic communication with farmers was more or less the exact topic of my conversation with Will this past week, as well as Darin.

Sensational headlines about the New World screwworm fly, meatpacking monopolies, a Super El Niño, and a US farm crisis are filtering down to mainstream media sources – but how does the real story on the ground compare to the clickbait?

While they both approach the market from different angles and philosophies, I found some key data points where Darin and Will overlap in their analysis.

I’ll be working over the next week or so to pull together all of their insights into a full-blown deep dive on what’s happening in commodities now and what the market is telling us about the rest of the year, where I hope to anchor some of these high-anxiety headlines in quantifiable stats.

So even though New York and Kansas City might have different ways of describing the same futures curve, it’s like Jesse said at Wattstax:

Stay tuned for more from our exclusive 2H 2026 farm report (ft. NYC), coming soon to Barchart.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Because the Qs include smaller, more speculative, lottery-ticket stocks.

Since then, S&P Dow Jones Indices has underscored Rick’s point by announcing that – while other index committees may have folded faster than a pair of flat-front fuchsia slacks in Dan Ives’ Balenciaga garment bag – it most certainly will not change its rules to fast-track upcoming mega-IPOs from the likes of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

So what else can we learn from the killer instincts of Rick Orford, the options expert behind some of our most popular YouTube explainers?

Quite a bit more than I was able to include in Part 1 of our interview without totally blowing my deadline, if I’m being real with you.

Read Our Q&A

Here, find out how long Rick expects the AI investment cycle to last; whether he’s rushing into SpaceX on launch day; and which Magnificent 7 stock he’s “super bullish” on right now.

AI is the New iPhone

Rick Orford: I think right now, with AI being the front-and-center trade – along with semiconductors and power and related trades – this is a cycle that’s going to continue. This is probably a 20-year cycle, and we are maybe in year three or four of it.

I mean, AI to me is the new iPhone. It’s an iPhone cycle. We’ve been looking for it, and it’s here. It’s staring us right in the face.

But the difference between the iPhone cycle and the AI cycle is that if the iPhone cycle was all about Apple (AAPL), then the AI cycle is about all of the companies that are supporting the AI trade, starting with NVIDIA (NVDA).

Elizabeth Volk: You said you’ve been in the Magnificent 7. Do you hold them all individually?

RO: I do. Actually, the only trade that I made in the last year was I trimmed a little bit. But the funny thing is, I trimmed a little over a year ago. One of those moments where I said, “It’s just getting too expensive.”

So, I took about 10% right off the top. I didn’t even look at the fundamentals. I cared nothing about what the prospects were of each individual company. I just looked at the number of shares that I own for every company and dropped it by 10%.

I generated some liquidity and I bought something else with it. And it had nothing to do with stocks. So, I just bought a new house.

EV: I mean, you can’t live in your stocks.

RO: No, no, definitely not.

On SpaceX Now & SpaceX Future

EV: What is your take on the fast track changes for companies like SpaceX and OpenAI getting into the indexes after they IPO?

RO: Right, the accelerated inclusion into the index. I would want to wait and see on SpaceX.

Because SpaceX, from everything that I understand, their entire business model is being funded from Starlink, from internet service, and everything else is just costing them oodles of money. They’re just losing money like crazy. So this is not the type of company that I would automatically invest in for the long term. I wouldn’t open a position right away because of that.

We can speculate that SpaceX will be the most important company on the planet in the future, but they still have to earn money. So, for a beginner investor, for someone who’s starting a new position, I’d probably hold off.

In terms of OpenAI, I need to look at the numbers. That one hasn’t been on my radar, because I don’t participate in a lot of IPOs. I can only think of one where I bought out of the gate.

EV: And with the SpaceX IPO, Elon is retaining so much control of the company. It’s like, why are you even going public? You just want to raise some money, right?

RO: He’s the only one in control. He’s the only one who will be able to make a strategic decision for the company. So he’s the only one who can fire himself.

I can’t think of too many other examples of that. I mean, good for him. He’ll become a trillionaire. Wonderful.

But that doesn’t help the Main Street investor who’s trying to just make ends meet. And it kind of makes me worry a little bit, because a lot of folks are very interested in it just for the name, not for the fundamentals.

And it could very well become the most important company of our lifetime!

EV: But does the average investor have your patience to hold for 10, 15 years and kind of watch that narrative play out?

RO: One similar company that this reminds me of in a lot of ways is Meta, back when they were trading under Facebook.

I did not own the stock at that time. And I’ve gone in and out of it – maybe I’ll hold it for a year or so.

But it’s one of those situations where we really need to see the company making money before beginner investors should be even looking at these names.

The Best ETF to Start Building a Portfolio

EV: When it comes to investing, do you like something like the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) for investors who are starting out? Or do you think that’s too – I don’t want to use the word sloppy; imprecise, maybe, in terms of whether people should be considering ETFs or individual stocks when they’re starting to build a portfolio?

RO: I think the simplest and easiest way is actually the most boring, which is owning a low cost S&P 500 ETF. Vanguard has got one with VOO; I’m a holder of one. It’s the most efficient way to own the collection of 500 of the most important U.S. companies.

Now, why would I hold that one as a beginner over the Qs? Because the Qs include smaller, more speculative, lottery-ticket stocks. And if we recall, in the dot-com bubble, it was the NASDAQ that suffered much more significantly.

The companies that were mature, that were growing their cash flow, that have a wide moat – they didn’t fare nearly as bad. And those are typically the companies you’ll find in the S&P 500.

There’s so much tech right now in the S&P 500, too. You’ve got NVIDIA sitting at the top, about 7%, followed by Microsoft (MSFT), Apple, Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL).

And of course folks want lottery-ticket stocks, but you know, how much is Google up in a year? 100-and-something percent.

EV: Yeah, and for such a giant stock to return that much…

RO: It happens even with the bigger companies.

We think that big companies are boring, but actually they’re not. Even Caterpillar (CAT) was up like 50% or something this year.

EV: Yeah, that’s been crazy.

RO: Well, you know, it’s an AI stock.

EV: Aren’t we all?

RO: Go figure.

Why Alphabet is a Good Bet

RO: I’m super bullish on Alphabet. They’ve got stuff that’s coming out all the time. You know, even a year ago, there was lots of talk that ChatGPT was going to overtake Google because people are doing their searches on ChatGPT. But what did they do? They answered the question.

I mean, it’s not their first day in business. They saw what the customer is looking for, which is quick, real human answers to questions. They don’t want to read through 3,000-word listicles to get a one-sentence answer.

So Google monetized this, and guess what? They did a great job.

EV: That’s one that I know John Rowland really likes, too.

RO: There’s a lot to love about Google. Their competitive advantages just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And now, with their TPUs, they’re getting away from needing NVIDIA’s products. So this is just going to help the bottom line.

And it’s going to carve kind of a niche in the sense that their own customers will go to Google Cloud because Gemini is using these TPUs and it’s being optimized on that particular platform, and customers with specific use cases will actually want to continue using it. And that’s something that is a boon for Google.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Follow Rick Orford at Barchart to receive his latest columns as they go live, and catch his latest YouTube lessons by subscribing to @BarchartOfficial & @rickorford.

He was gone every morning before I woke up for school, leaving behind only a gently rustled Wall Street Journal on the kitchen table as proof of life. Then he arrived home just in time for dinner, set down his briefcase full of secrets and loosened his necktie, and we never once spoke about how his day went.

My own children – who grew up napping on my shoulder, staring at my inbox, and wandering blithely into my Zoom calls as I worked remotely through COVID and beyond – also find my career to be a complete mystery.

“So your job is just sending emails?” asked my son.

I had to sit with that one for a moment.

I thought about my years of hard-won niche subject matter expertise; the long nights spent hunting down user metrics that didn’t make sense; the increasingly complex task of developing a viable enterprise-level editorial strategy in a landscape dominated by LLMs; the nonstop scramble of managing a far-flung network of freelancers and creatives to produce timely, useful content that resonates with traders and investors in an algo-driven market.

“Yeah,” I told him. “Pretty much.”

The Bezos of the Email

When I first started working here at Barchart, I was almost exclusively editing other people’s writing all day.

Years later, I do a little bit of editing but a lot of writing, and it’s mostly for our daily Barchart Brief newsletter.

Now, when I say that I do “a lot of writing,” that’s a particularly wobbly-kneed phrasing, but it’s very intentionally so. It’s a lot of writing compared to what I used to do as part of my daily routine, sure.

But compared to the average output of our diligent ETF columnist, Rob Isbitts? I’m barely hunting-and-pecking along over here.

I would sleep roughly as much as the average housecat on a daily basis if my circumstances permitted, so on a personal level, I can’t pretend to understand or relate to Rob’s boundless energy.

On a professional level, of course, Rob is our editorial champion.

So when our regular Chart of the Day newsletter columnist, Jim Van Meerten, had a couple of weeks off on the calendar, Editorial Director Sarah Holzmann reached out to Rob for coverage.

Read Rob's Story

From my perspective, the relationship between a daily newsletter author and their audience is a lot like a desperate comedian delivering a hastily workshopped tight five – but to an audience in another theater, via carrier pigeon.

Most of the time, your only feedback arrives the next day in the form of metrics. Or maybe one of your coworkers or colleagues will say, “Hey, that was good.”

On your best days, a reader will be engaged and entertained enough to write in and say, “Your Morrissey reference was great! I love Barchart.”

On your worst days, a reader will be bothered enough to write in and say, “Your Meg Thee Stallion reference was unnecessarily political! I don’t need that agenda-pushing from Barchart!”

On at least a few occasions, you will find yourself several emails deep into a thread where you have succeeded in personally convincing one specific reader not to unsubscribe over some perceived offense in the prior day’s copy, and you’ll wonder why it matters to you so much.

And my little newsletter is a very certain kind of ether. We haven’t built a permanent home for our Brief issues on the site just yet, so a couple years’ worth of my daily output exists only in the form of email blasts and nowhere else.

Sometimes I think about this on days when I’m writing and want to link to a prior issue, and the only available URL is my memories.

So, yes, my job is “sending emails,” but there’s also a modicum of emotional labor.

You Ain’t Malice

What we were asking of Rob in this Chart of the Day coverage assignment was even a little more fraught.

He would be stepping in for Jim Van Meerten, who is – to quote Pusha T – beloved like the BeeGees.

If the Chart of the Day newsletter goes out with even a minor change to the usual format, our support team is likely to hear about it from a faithful reader, asking why their daily issue looks different and politely asking if we can please put it back the way it was.

And as if to apply a proverbial thumb to any guest editor’s neck, Jim Van Meerten is quite literally hard-coded into our content management system as our Chart of the Day author.

No kidding. One of the below columns was written by the real Jim, and one was written by Rob. It’s what we call an “uncredited cameo” in the industry.

So in asking Rob to write this daily column for two weeks, we were both opening him up to some well-meaning but very real complaints from the Chart of the Day fanbase, and asking him to do so with almost zero credit for his labor – except for whatever small percentage of readers actually scroll all the way down to the italicized text at the bottom of the newsletter version, where we’re able to note his authorship.

Very fortunately for us, Rob is the kind of guy who’s willing to analyze charts all day long just for the love of the game. (See also: night charting.)

Let Rob Sort ‘Em Out

So not only did our resident ETF savant sail through his Chart of the Day tour of duty, he also built a new stock screening process for the occasion.

Naturally – because we didn’t hire him to do impressions – Rob’s daily routine for finding Chart of the Day candidates is not identical to Jim’s. Instead, it’s inspired by Jim’s process with a distinctly Isbitts twist.

I understand the switch-up might be jarring for regular readers – but one thing I’ve discovered over my lengthy career of sending emails working with a broad, deep bench of market experts is that the most valuable lessons tend to emerge where the Venn diagram of different analysts overlaps.

And sometimes the two different analysts are both Rob, as he explains in our latest longread breaking down his behind-the-scenes Chart of the Day experience.

Check out Rob’s latest deep dive to discover how our macro-minded ETF expert rediscovered his passion for stock-picking – plus, get an inside look at his custom Chart of the Day screener.

Get the Story

If you missed Rob’s stint as our Honorary Jim Van Meerten in May, don’t worry – you can catch him again when JVM hits the road for another summer break starting this week.

To get the best of all possible worlds with daily stock features from Jim ft. Rob, subscribe free to Chart of the Day.

And if you’re interested in exploring a very emotionally complicated relationship with me, check out Barchart Brief, too. Your inbox is quite literally the only place to find it.

Thanks for reading, and extra special thanks to all of you who take the time to email me about my cultural references.

If it weren’t for my kids, you would be the only reason I do this.

“I know it was transcribed, but you nailed his voice,” said Andrea, which was the opinion I really cared about.

Believe it or not, I actually was in the room during this exclusive interview with Kenny Glick, even though my presence lifts out of the transcript pretty seamlessly.

And while we’re suspending our disbelief, go ahead and wrap your mind around the fact that I have even more of Kenny’s trading-themed monologue to share with you here today.

It’s true; there was simply too much high-quality VWAP content to cram it all into the original article.

Read Part 1

But first, about that voice.

Martin, It’s All Psychological

Andrea is one of my closest friends, because that’s what happens sometimes when people work with me. After 15 years of close collaboration side-by-side in our utterly broken economy, she found only my lifelong companionship as her pension (an increasingly common tale in our industry, it seems).

She has an extremely similar resume to mine, and back when we launched our scrappy little live trading network, Andrea was the editor in charge of writing for Kenny. Every day for weeks and months, she was mainlining hours of live video and working with him one-on-one to create the foundational documents for a living Kenny Glick style guide.

So in many ways, I consider her to be the ultimate judge of capturing his voice – probably much more so than the man who hears it rattling around in his own head all day. (Incidentally, he will absolutely answer to “The Man Who” if you see him out in public.)

And if it seems like Kenny has an easy voice to capture, then you’ve never seen it done badly by an overconfident copywriter. It’s an easy voice to caricaturize, I think, if you’re not paying attention.

Because sometimes there’s maybe a wig, or a sequined trading smock, or a prank call to the Investor Relations line, or even a pair of action figures performing a stock market puppet show.

And sometimes it’s James Tiberius Kirk referencing Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction to tell you that anomalies are starting to stack up in the market, which is a level of meta that not every trader feels comfortable dropping into.

So yes, sometimes hearing this guy talk about the market can feel like a very elaborate bit, or a goof, or something not worth your time as a trader — if you don’t actually listen.

But if you’re tuned in, the voice is very valuable.

The Kenny Monologues

“I don’t even trade what he’s trading most of the time. I just like to listen to what he’s talking about.”

We were at the NYSE earlier this month at a Stocktwits event, and Kenny had a modestly sized entourage in tow.

These were guys who paid thousands of dollars to join his subscription-only room – mostly, they told me, just to hear what he was saying that day. For the Kenny experience, if you will.

To be totally transparent, at least one of them paid his dues in some combination of silver coins and homegrown weed, as opposed to the usual legal tender.

Either way, it made sense to me.

I don’t even use VWAP to trade, which I realize technically makes me a loser. And I’m probably some kind of double loser, since I actually had Kenny’s own custom VWAP code installed on my thinkorswim platform at one point.

But if I think about it – most of what I know about today’s remarkably stupid market? I probably learned from listening to The Man Who.

Like how there’s really no point in trading around that low-volume stretch of the session during lunchtime, and you might as well watch “The Price Is Right” instead.

Or sometimes when one of the big-name investment banks comes out with a bold “Buy” call on a stock, it’s because they have a lot of those shares to unload, and they would love to sell them to you.

And why during a high-momentum bull market, this handsome and demure dog can probably find and place a winning trade just as easily as the rest of us can.

But most of all – above anything else – he taught me how the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) is designed to be the best investing vehicle of all time, because it overweights the outperformers and regularly culls the underperformers, and you never even have to think about it.

If you’re familiar with Kenny and you were surprised by the lack of QQQ in Part 1 of our discussion, don’t worry; it’s all below.

QQQ-Free Version

For the completists, this part of the conversation picks up very near the end of Part 1, right after:

“So that’s why day trading right now is probably the least risky way to trade, other than buying the S&P and holding it for 10 years.”

Go ahead and listen in.

Broadway Bitcoin and the Lunatics Who Love It

Elizabeth Volk: Well, they’re changing the rules of the S&P so that you don’t have to be profitable anymore, so that they can let in companies like SpaceX and OpenAI. So is that really the least risky anymore?

Kenny Glick: You’re still diversified amongst 500 stocks, right?

EV: But how diversified is it? That’s really like the top 10 and then, you know, pocket change.

KG: Well, that’s what I was thinking. You know, the QQQ – everyone has been complaining about how heavily weighted it is towards 10 stocks. Guess what? Everybody owns those 10 stocks. It’s very difficult for the market to go down.

Every fund. What are they buying? Nobody’s outsmarting the market anymore. So if you launch a fund and you don’t own Apple, you’re a loser, right?

And that’s why everyone’s – when they try to find the next best thing, nobody’s actually finding the next best thing. They just end up buying the actual best thing. That’s why everybody owns the same 25 stocks. And that’s why it’s working. That’s why we don’t go down.

Because they’re not going to change something that’s working, right? If you pick 10 random stocks right now, chances are, eight are gonna suck. One or two might be great, and one will probably do nothing.

But you buy the QQQs? You’ve got a pretty good chance of making money, because everyone else is buying.

That’s why this dip is just – I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, we just rallied 120 points on the QQQs in 22 trading days. Unprecedented. But it’s because once the squeeze starts, everybody wants back in. Everybody starts chasing, and the shorts get crushed. And here we are.

Even Bitcoin, you know, that’s why VWAP rocks, man. Bitcoin, when it started trading more actively? Now you can VWAP Bitcoin.

And when it was crashing in February, there was that one night where it crossed over a monthly VWAP. Next thing you know – selloff’s over.

And I hate Bitcoin, so I was like, “Listen, I don’t like it, but buy it right now.” And next thing you know, it’s tacked on $15,000.

Again, to me, it’s completely worthless bulls***, but it’s legitimate now because enough people own it. Just like anything else – if enough people believe in anything, it suddenly has value.

Why is Joe Namath’s autograph worth so much money? Because there’s a bunch of lunatics like me who want one.

– This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can find Kenny Glick on our official Barchart YouTube channel and at Hit the Bid.

But if that’s true, why am I always the only person at the grocery store wearing a Ki-Jana Carter jersey?

Because, as any other Cincinnati Bengals fan could tell you, people don’t actually like underdogs. They mostly like underdog movies that are over in about 2 hours or less.

In other words, The Karate Kid is not a loser long enough for you to start resenting him, and then resenting yourself for ever caring about him in the first place. He’s simply an underdog in theory; a hero temporarily delayed from one-upping his soulless oppressors.

So like I was saying, I was only unemployed for a few months back in 2023 before I started working at Barchart.

Tag Yourself, I’m Orange Cat

Before long, I was in the newly created role of Managing Editor, and we had a modest-sized team of freelancers who were sending me articles to edit and publish every day.

One of our newer writers – as in, even newer to Barchart than me – was Sushree Mohanty, who I came to recognize by her deep dives into company financials, her penchant for finding under-covered growth stocks, and her talent for writing buzzy headlines.

As we got to know each other better, I would share stories about my kids, and she would send through pictures of her travels.

Sushree is also an extremely talented artist, and when I’m lucky, she’ll send pics of her latest paintings to me – like the one below, which she kindly agreed to let me share here.

Our content team keeps growing, and I’m no longer the editor in charge of reviewing Sushree’s daily submissions, which means we don’t have quite as many excuses to catch up anymore.

But I was thinking of her this week after reviewing the latest longread from Rob Isbitts, which I have alternately titled, “There’s Always Money in the Microcaps.”

Rob Goes Micro

Penny Stocks as Hidden Gems

Let’s see if you can follow my thread here. Here’s Rob Isbitts on microcaps, May 2026:

This market is lousy with AI heroes and low P/E zeroes – meaning the stocks have a decent valuation, but the share price doesn’t go up; see about 30% of the S&P 500 Index (SPX) the past few years.

That suggests to me that the hidden gems in this market might just be the most overlooked, well-hidden equities….

Because riding the wave works for a while. But at some point, you have to look for the proverbial coins between the couch cushions.

That said, many of today’s megacap giants were once very small stocks at one point.

And then here’s Sushree Mohanty on penny stocks, back in November 2023:

While the mega-cap tech stocks have gotten most of the attention this year due to the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, many smaller tech players have the potential to get much bigger as the AI era progresses.

Penny stocks might not appear to be the most appealing investment. However, it’s worth pointing out that many of today’s most successful mega-cap stocks began as penny stocks. In this sense, penny stocks are mostly growth stocks that have a lot of room to run.

The general idea here, and it’s a good one, is that there can be a lot of reasons to invest in giant tech stocks like the Magnificent 7, with their well-established moats and massive market caps and institutional backing and, in some cases, de facto monopolies.

But the biggest opportunity to catch a generational multibagger often lies in the very smallest corner of the market. (Right next to the increased risk, of course.)

To borrow a phrase, the best microcaps are less like “underdogs,” and more like “temporarily embarrassed megacaps.”

Soundhound AI: Not an Underdog!

The specific penny stock Sushree was writing about in the passage above, incidentally, was Soundhound AI (SOUN). Her column was published just a few months before the stock spiked 66.7% in a single day on Feb. 15, 2024, driven by Nvidia (NVDA) disclosing a stake in the company.

SOUN is up about 322% since that November 2023 write-up, while the broad QQQ has gained 88%.

I added the stock to my own portfolio in June 2024, because I was too busy gossiping with Sushree about our travel plans to pay very much attention to her super-timely and razor-sharp analysis.

SOUN is just one example, but it shows how a well-researched investment in a very, very small company can outperform the broader market – even a runaway Big Tech bull like the one we’ve experienced.

Where to Find the Next MVP

Of course, even if a stock is relatively cheap to buy, you don’t want to waste years of your investing life rooting for a company that’s a brutally disappointing underdog.

That goes double if you’re already a fan of the Bengals or the Clippers or the Mariners or something else terrible.

So, to help kick off your due diligence, check out Rob’s workflow for separating the microcap MVPs from the likely Ki-Janas.

Read Rob's Latest

You can also follow Sushree at her Barchart author page for more growth stock coverage.

And you can catch up with Ki-Jana Carter on LinkedIn, where he’s the founder and CEO of marketing company ByoGlobe.

But I prefer to remember him how he was – as a temporarily embarrassed MVP.

This recent deep dive on bond ladders by Rob Isbitts was an exception. I was able to roll up my sleeves and really get my editorial fingerprints all over it – adjusting his word choices; sharpening a few sentences that wandered; even relocating entire passages to try and pull in equity-brained readers like me.

Read My Rob Edit

One part I was very careful not to touch – even though I don’t usually like being attacked by the content on our site – was this line:

“...investors are undereducated about the bond side of the ledger – and in some ways miseducated, as well, to the extent that many consider TLT ‘bond investing.’”

Listen, we don’t need to make this an essay about my personal investing failures. That would have to feature Palantir much more heavily, which is something we can absolutely talk about another time if you want.

But to the extent that this borderline-throwaway Rob line describes my personal knowledge level and experience with bond investing* to a tee, I had to laugh as I was editing. And other than a quick punctuation clean-up, there was no excuse not to leave his razor-sharp analysis here completely intact.

Sometimes the best edit is knowing when to leave good content alone.

*If you prefer, “knowledge level” and “bond investing,” applying scare quotes where appropriate.

I Also Like Craft Cocktails (Meandering with a Purpose)

Other than my bond investing illiteracy, my most millennial tendency is a habit of forming meaningful long-term friendships with people who have previously been my direct reports in a workplace environment.

That’s probably a good enough explanation for how I found myself at an industry event in Manhattan last week, leading my BFF and former colleague Ryan ~ only a few ~ extra city blocks out of our way en route to the Brooklyn Bridge.

This was an old smoke spot of mine in college, which means I hadn’t independently navigated my way there in a little over 20 years. But Ryan, who still recalls with mild terror in his voice the time I led him a few extra city blocks out of our way one drizzly night in Baltimore, followed my lead nevertheless.

Afterward, I repaid his trust by using Google Maps to find our way back across the Financial District to Tribeca, where we ate well-deserved pizza.

To get metaphorical, which is essential if we’re ever going to return to our point here: This wasn’t the first time Ryan has followed me slightly off-track, but it’s fair to say that we worked together side by side every day for years before he trusted me enough to get him lost take him on a little adventure.

The experience of collaborating with Rob on this bond ladder column was not entirely dissimilar, in terms of the trust level involved.

“Write something much longer than usual,” I told him, “and slightly evergreen, but also kind of timely, and make sure it’s highly relevant to our audience, while also weaving in your personal life experience, narrative-style, throughout this actionable investing piece.”

I’m paraphrasing here, but I think Rob said something like, “You betcha,” and then he submitted a draft that very gamely accomplished everything I asked.

While the final product is, of course, solely a testament to Rob’s efforts, I really do appreciate the trust that inspired him to humor such an outlandish, slightly wandering assignment in the first place.

Leadership You Can Trust vs. Leadership You Can’t

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, and not just because Ryan Cohen’s CE-Bro antics inspired me to start rewatching Succession.

Market leadership is already skewed very heavily toward a small handful of tech names, as Rob pointed out in his analysis. Nvidia alone now accounts for over 8.5% of QQQ, and more than 8% of the supposedly even-handed SPY, too.

And soon, SpaceX will be rammed at warp speed into the major equity benchmarks, to the benefit of virtually no one but Elon Musk. That’s also a whole separate essay, and this analysis from my good friend (...and yes, former colleague) Garrett Baldwin is essential reading on the biggest IPO of the year.

So as markets get more lopsided, top-heavy, and tech-driven than ever, consider who you want to trust with your money – and where you want to stash it, and how much you really know about TLT.

I don’t personally believe in fear-mongering, and I’m not dumping my best-performing stocks here.

But I trust Rob Isbitts to keep it practical, and I love the idea of addressing the bond knowledge gap to help readers diversify realistically in one of the weirdest markets ever.

Anyway, there’s another Isbitts draft on my desk right now. Stay tuned to see if I get called out mid-edit again.

It was sudden, but not entirely surprising. We had created a new, modern way to market our trading content more directly to audiences, and it completely cut out the old industry model – the one that centered highly compensated copywriters who wouldn’t even show up to a Zoom meeting without the lure of a fat commission.

In any other business, this kind of budget-saving innovation – one that served audiences and saved money – would be viewed as a huge win. However, due to how long this particular copywriter-focused model had been in place, every single executive we dealt with was also a former copywriter.

Maybe, they suggested, we could actually tweak this efficient new business model into a lumbering Frankenstein where we still center the copywriters so they can milk out every possible drop of revenue, while you get very few resources to make your idea look unsuccessful so we can cut your team for budget reasons, and then a few months later the whole company can just collapse in on itself like a grain silo exploding – first spectacularly and dramatically, and then slowly, sadly, haltingly, in a way that makes you want to look elsewhere?

Sure, I said, sounds great.

So anyway, I was unemployed, but in a way that felt relatively fortunate. I had a little bit of money saved up, I was getting unemployment checks, my car was paid off, and I had some connections that could help me find good freelance work if I wanted it.

But freelance work is not what I did – or at least, not right away.

The Female Lion, Not in Her Natural Habitat

The first thing I did was chaperone a first grade field trip to the zoo.

When you’re the mother of two children, and you’re accustomed deep in your bones to working long days every day because you are their primary source of financial support, there’s something strangely freeing and deeply alarming about sudden unemployment.

On the one hand, there’s so much more time to spend with your beautiful brilliant funny children, and it’s that specific kind of time you’ll never get back – the time that you were missing while you sat in video calls talking about how to pervert your new business model back into the old business model so the copywriters would stop crying – which is a great swap for you.

There’s a certain luxuriousness in getting that time back, wide open and yawning, just in time for summer vacation.

It would be my “summer of George,” my sister and I joked, and she sent me this picture from her graduation in Chicago that June.

On the other hand, when you are the only one old enough and skilled enough to provide the family with food and shelter, it charges the entire situation with a kind of narrative electricity.

So the second thing I did was call my broker and ask them to take the Level 3 options clearance off my trading account. That meant I was no longer trading on margin, which meant my trades would be cash-settled.

At some point during my illustrious gender-bending career as a stock market guru, I had opened this small account with a few thousand dollars. Up until that point, I had mostly used it to test out new indicators, for proofs of concept, and for screenshots on a few charts and paper trades.

When you’re writing on deadline consistently throughout the day, it’s just not practical to be trading at the same time, too. But I wasn’t writing anymore.

I was ready to day trade.

Establishing a New Routine

When I scroll back through my trade history from June 2023, it’s all Apple (AAPL), QQQ, and sometimes SQQQ, because I would always rather trade to the upside than to the downside. I’m a little bit like Zoolander that way.

Although, now that I’ve said this, here’s a QQQ put trade that didn’t go too badly. Trust me when I say this is an aberration, though.

Anyway, you can see how AAPL and QQQ both fit into my criteria for top day trading candidates. They’re extremely liquid, you get super-fast fills, there are narrow strike prices for maximum flexibility, and I’ve even gotten filled at prices better than my limit when I’m trading AAPL. It’s not too often the market gives you a gift like that, so when it happens, you should pay attention.

SQQQ is less ideal, in terms of options liquidity, but it’s always nice to have a vehicle that lets you participate in the downside if you’re not a big fan of puts or shorting stock.

At the same time I was establishing my go-to trades in my daily routine, the boys and I were establishing our own regular rotation in the outside world – the zoo, the aquarium, the children’s museum, the creek in the woods.

And wherever we went, I had my brokerage app open.

The more I incorporated trading into my daily routine, the more I found myself allergic to inactivity. The drive to stay productive had very little to do with my actual results; on June 23 alone, I placed 7 trades, none of them particularly good.

Nevertheless, I multi-tasked.

The aquarium, which snaked underground at a few points, was terrible for it, even with the free guest wifi. But the zoo was wide open and not far from the university, and the museum had solid coverage throughout almost the entire building. While my kids browsed the gift shop for stuffed planets, I made my last-minute adjustments before the closing bell.

Then, when the trading day was over, we would head down to the creek to look for weird rocks and creepy bugs, and let the cool gray clay of the creek bed get stuck in our sneakers.

I wouldn’t say I was trading compulsively, per se. But if you’ve seen Uncut Gems, I can understand the urge that drives a man to send Julia Fox on a high-stakes casino caper with almost zero regard for her personal safety.

Interesting story here in the WSJ today, by the way.

Trading Tips & Book Picks

Looking back through my transaction history, there are a few takeaways that seem obvious to me now, though I really don’t think they were so glaring to me at the time.

1. As a day trader, if you can eliminate the work of, “Which stock am I going to trade?”, you’re way ahead of the curve. There are plenty of liquid assets out there making moves you can capture every day, and you don’t necessarily need to find the biggest move or the wildest news story. For most traders, it’s more sustainable to stick with a few very liquid stocks you can get to know like a good friend.

2. Don’t force trades and don’t overtrade. If you ever find yourself, as I once did, placing a second AAPL call order immediately after your first because #1 is already “not going quite right,” that’s your sign to call it a day. When you don’t have a relatively high-conviction trade, just don’t trade.

3. The lunch hour is not your friend. Usually, most of the action happens during that first 60-90 minutes of trading, and then things flatten out for a while around mid-session before picking back up again for the final 60-90 minutes. If you’re going to day trade, it makes sense to focus your efforts around the opening and closing hours of the session, when volume and liquidity are at their peak. You’ve got the best chance of capturing the biggest move then, with the least time in the market.

OK, and one more from the scrapbook before we wrap this up.

If you’ve read my related article over at Barchart and you’re wondering why I described the archetypal investor as “the idealized version of my dad,” just take a look at this picture I snapped of his bookshelf during my Summer of George.

Intermediate Accounting and The Oldest Living Things in the World?! Name a more iconic duo, I’ll wait.

And we can talk, if you want, about benchmark lending rates and the core PCE index and Treasury yield curves and fed funds futures, and any number of other indicators that involve various levels of arcane financial math.

But the most critical job of the Fed, arguably, is one of those frustrating intangibles that can’t be measured by math.

Feelings Are Facts

Like just about everything else in the stock market, inflation expectations are anchored, at the end of the day, to our collective feelings. If Wall Street generally believes there’s a steady, reasonable hand guiding and overseeing monetary policy, inflation expectations are likely to remain well-anchored.

On the other hand, if Wall Street believes there’s a cocky sycophant with unreasonably gelled hair guiding monetary policy… well, we don’t know yet what might happen. But that could potentially be a negative factor for investor confidence in the Fed, and an untethering factor for inflation expectations.

That’s why we saw so many analysts, economists, and pundits explode with pushback in January when President Trump showed signs of attempting to strongarm Fed Chair Jerome Powell – not just with loud criticism, for once, but with full-blown criminal charges. Without its perceived integrity and independence, the Fed stands to lose quite a bit of the collective confidence it requires to carry out its work with regard to managing inflation.

Or, as Powell once said, “At the end of the day, your integrity is all you have. Guard it carefully.”

I Was Right About You, Jay

Back in November 2018, we were going through a rough stretch of equity volatility. (You can clock the fourth-quarter performance for QQQ by month here; November itself netted out close to flat, but October and December? Woof.)

Around this time, the US was still in its post-#MeToo era, and CNBC in particular was looking to broaden its roster of non-male on-air contributors. After I had competently covered a live hit for one of my non-female colleagues in a pinch, they decided I was just the broad for the job.

It may startle you, in retrospect, to realize that less than a year after his swearing-in ceremony, Powell was already catching heat from the guy who hired him. When Squawk Box co-host Joe Kernen asked whether there was any risk of undue influence on Fed policy based on the president’s jawing, I told him:

“I think there’s very little upside in Trump criticizing Fed policy, but I don’t think there’s any risk, for people who have been following Powell or this committee, that they’re actually going to base their policy around Trump’s criticism.”

At the time, my comment wasn’t based on any particular reverence for Powell’s backbone or bravery or even my knowledge of him as a person, because I wouldn’t get to learn more about our Fed chair until after this spot: his unabashed Rocky Horror Picture Show superfandom; his time spent working in a warehouse after graduating Princeton; and even the engrossing suburban drama over his wife’s Chevy Chase dog park project.

Instead, I was thinking about the logical complications of trying to strongarm an entire committee – an unruly, wonkish group of economists obsessed with data, and aligned along tribal hawk/dove alliances. Even if Trump could make Powell fall in line, I reasoned, that’s one vote out of 12.

But I have since come to develop a greater respect for Powell’s backbone.

From any perspective, I’m happy to have been right about Jay then, and happy to be right about him now.

It’s Really Not About Jay

And now we head into what will be our final Fed week with Jay at the helm, and prepare to reluctantly accept Fed Stepdad Kevin Warsh into our lives.

But for all the nonstop media focus on Fed chairs – on Greenspan, on Bernanke, on Yellen, on Powell, on Warsh, and even monetary policy superhero Paul Volcker – the central bank has never operated as a one-man show.

And if you were listening during Jay’s ceremonial swearing-in remarks back in February 2018, he told us from the beginning that it was never going to be “his” Fed.

After thanking Bernanke and Yellen, Powell said:

I am grateful for their leadership and for their example and advice as colleagues. But there is more to the story than successful leadership. The success of our institution is really the result of the way all of us carry out our responsibilities. We approach every issue through a rigorous evaluation of the facts, theory, empirical analysis and relevant research. We consider a range of external and internal views; our unique institutional structure, with a Board of Governors in Washington and 12 Reserve Banks around the country, ensures that we will have a diversity of perspectives at all times. We explain our actions to the public. We listen to feedback and give serious consideration to the possibility that we might be getting something wrong. There is great value in having thoughtful, well-informed critics.

The closing line feels a bit droll, coming from a guy who must have known he was headed into a years-long gauntlet of thoughtless, ill-informed criticism from just about every corner of Wall Street and K Street alike.

But to Jay’s point, the Fed is much more than the man or woman carrying the big title. And in a country where fiscal policy is really just something that Congress pulls out reluctantly for disaster response purposes, there’s still a lot of value to be found in an institution where experts with diverse viewpoints come together regularly to debate, share their findings transparently, and then act on the results.

So rest easy, Powell. We have the watch, and we’ll see you in Chevy Chase.

It may disillusion you greatly to learn that a staggering majority of these self-styled finpub gurus are not necessarily people whom I would trust with my children’s financial future. For that matter, I’m not quite sure I would trust too many of them to keep my children away from a hot stove if I had to answer an unexpected knock at the door while I was prepping dinner.

But Rob Isbitts, our resident ETF columnist over at Barchart, is someone that even the nuns at my Catholic school would have described as a mensch.

When I showed up for our video call with a scorching case of seasonal allergies, he recommended an over-the-counter eye drop that has since changed my life substantially for the better.

Then, during a brief tech lull as he obliged my request for a live demo of the PPO indicator, he asked, “Is this going the way you would like it to go? I want to make sure I’m not being too loquacious.”

Later, when I sent him the link to our interview, he emailed me back before he even had a chance to finish reading: “I know you work very hard and diligently to make this new aspect of editorial work. Way to go!”

And Rob — not unlike my dad, incidentally — has a near-pathological urge to acronym all of his favorite concepts. The ROAR indicator is just the beginning; he also christened me with the nickname “ETF” during our call, for “Elizabeth Translates Finance,” and then there’s this very on-brand interaction from our respective accounts on here:

That said, Rob is also impish in the extreme.

When I ask about the connections he’s found between stock market analysis and his latest obsession in horse claiming, he teed me up: “We probably shouldn’t say there’s a lot of horse’s asses in the money business . . .”

“But we will,” I assured him.

With that taken care of, I’d love for you to discover the origin of Rob’s ROAR score in our latest Barchart longread. He also reveals what’s inside his desert island ETF; how his dad influenced his work in charting and his relationship to risk; and what he wishes investors knew about the exchange-traded cottage industry.

Read the Interview

Right here, though, you can find all of the Rob Isbitts insights we simply didn’t have room for over at Barchart, including:

• His “anti-picks” philosophy

• Why ABL is the most important acronym of all

• How ROAR works like a prediction market

• The one ETF he would recommend to his kids

• . . . and the one that’s good enough for mine

• How horses are just like traders

P Stands for Everything but Risk Management

I have to think of all the P words, okay? There’s process, there’s portfolio, there’s — I’m not sure; risk management doesn’t begin with a P — but anyway, there’s all these different things about investing. What is the number one thing that people think sells?

It’s another P — picks — and I am so anti-picks. You don’t have to look any further than some of the stuff I write for you guys.

I’ve done the picks thing, and I figured out that for every good one, there’s a bad one. That’s the nature of the market; you just have to look at the data, right?

So, I think the big education gap that exists is with people who are not necessarily Investing 101, not 201, but who already know enough to be dangerous. What path do you want to be on from there? Do you want to stay in Picksville? Because then good luck in a bear market — and you’ll never really understand how to use ETFs as the tools they are.

My point is, you don’t educate people with picks. You educate them with process and a portfolio concept, which they can then adapt for themselves. You’re just giving them the building blocks.

Always Be Avoiding Big Losses

It’s all ABL, avoid big loss, okay?

With ROAR, we say: You’ve got a chance to make a 10% to 20% gain on anything in the market. So do you wanna gravitate toward the stocks and ETFs where for every 10% it could go up, the flip side is that it could fall by 30% before it hits 10%? Or do I want the one where I probably have 4% or 5% on the downside before it hits 10%?

And so that’s what ROAR tries to measure as best we can: How much risk is attached. If you want to think of it as, for every 100% you can make, is your expected worst-case scenario minus 20%, minus 50%, minus 100%, minus 900%?

And this is no different than, I guess, sports betting, but it’s the same thing as the prediction market. Just put it in that framework: Next 10% move, what’s it going to be? Because for most investors and for people in prediction markets, you’re either speculating or you’re looking for — let’s call it an edge.

1 ETF He’d Recommend to His Kids . . . and Mine

It’s a tough one. I can’t help but hedge. But I guess the one would be DIA. Why? Because I want them to understand the stock market, but I also want them to know these 30 companies. This is a basket of America — it still is, for the most part. And even with the quirky weighting system —

In fact, you know what? Let’s get a little bit wacky, OK? Let’s make it EDOW, not DIA — the equal-weighted Dow.

So here are 30 great blue-chip stocks across many industries. You’ll never learn what real estate investment trusts (REITs) are, because there are no REITs. But it’s OK, because this is a desert island ETF pick, so you’ll own all the real estate on the desert island. So, you got that.

And I would want them to know these 30 companies, because it’s like the iceberg on top of the market, and then you start to discover everything underneath it. From there, you can decide if you are interested in, you know, “I think I’d like to do a little more of this, a little more of that, a little less of that. I want to add a hedge to it. I want to add cash.” It’s a great building block. And that is why I love the Dow.

So if your kids like that lesson, it would be the same — EDOW. Actually, I wrote down in my little notes here . . . which one for your kids? SPYU, the only approved 4x ETF. It’s SPY times 4. [laughs]

Great trading tool, right? SPYU and some out-of-the-money put options; that’s a nice little pairing.

Why Horse Claiming is a Natural Side Hustle

I like how you phrased this: “What’s the connection between printing money and large, nervous animals?” In the notes I wrote for myself, Who are you calling nervous?

The obvious connection, to me, is the analytics part of it, the odds. I know how to read the racing form up to a point. But I know enough to know that this is just like a lot of the work that I’m doing here. And I’m even trying to figure out if I can find a spot in the business of racing analytics because the Wall Street background dovetails perfectly with it.

And the trainer that I work with, they tell me all the time, horses are as different as people. They all have their own personalities, they all have their own work ethics. And to me, they’re like big dogs. We just claimed one the other day, shipped him over from Tampa just to see him loving his new environment.

Anyway, great. I hope you got everything you wanted from this.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can follow Rob Isbitts at ETF Yourself, at Barchart, and at Horse Claiming. Check out our full conversation about ROAR, ETFs, and his desert island ETF picks.

It’s all about AI data centers and their sprawling ripple effect on the economy and markets as the Big 4 hyperscalers race for land and grid access.

Read the Interview

Sometimes, their mad dash for real estate puts the hyperscalers and their data centers right in your backyard.

They don’t care for that in Missouri; they don’t like it in Massachusetts; they won’t stand for it in Michigan, Virginia, Georgia, New York, or any part of Bernie Sanders Country; and in Maine, they’ll ban you for it outright.

But data centers aren’t trying to start any trouble. As far as I can tell, they really only want to help us create the kind of hilarious memes that used to require a friend or colleague with Photoshop. (Also, something about Claude Cowork? I don’t know, ask my boss.)

Why, then, are data centers so unpopular?

We could get philosophical about the ethics of AI, the environmental impact of industrialization, the rise of the billionaire technocracy…

But it’s mostly just the electricity bills.

Via the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), though the emphasis is my own:

Before 2019, electricity prices had been flat at around 13 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for more than a decade… By the end of 2025, however, average electricity prices in the United States increased to 19 cents per kWh, about 27% more than in 2019. In states with a high concentration of data centers like Virginia, electricity prices have increased by up to 267% over the last five years. Such spikes are due to utilities needing to quickly deploy infrastructure, such as power lines and transformers, and pay extra for market-rate energy.

So it’s a bit like a slick huckster in a wide-brimmed hat sails into town to sell you and all of your neighbors on a monorail, only the monorail in this analogy is a 3x increase to your monthly utility bill.

Of course everyone hates data centers!

EV: We previously wrote about some pushback in Michigan against a Microsoft data center, and now Maine is coming out to ban data centers. Is this a real existential threat for hyperscalers? Because they’re now not only having to bring their own power to the data center race, they’re also bleeding extra money to fight these political battles and maybe PR battles along the way.

JR: Yeah, I think that is a valid point – these extraneous costs, like PR and political contributions, let’s call it, that just adds to the expense of data centers.

But these hyperscalers threw all these darts out there in terms of looking for excess grid capacity – so now they’re taking Maine off the board, and taking Michigan off the board. There are plenty of places in the United States where the state legislature is receptive to data center build outs.

Then in places where they are building out, the debate becomes: will these data center hyperscalers be expected to bring their own power? And is that going to be good for the grid or is that going to be bad for the grid?

There’s also an idea that maybe where we’ll land is with one regulatory commission for retail buyers of utilities like you and me, and then another regulatory commission for commercial buyers like these giant data centers.

But the fact is that, yes, a lot of these hyperscalers who are having to address these NIMBYs are adding to their cost in terms of PR.

It made me wonder, I told John, how much these compounding obstacles of the past year – grid limitations; access delays; bring-your-own-power demands; and now NIMBY attacks – had contributed to the recent Wall Street narrative around data centers in space.

After all, there’s no power grid in space, no energy regulator, and absolutely no zoning code. If you’re hyperscaling, it’s the perfect obstacle-free environment to blow out your 2026 capex budget.

Rowland seemed unmoved by my theory.

“Certainly, I think Elon Musk is a visionary,” he noted. “And I think a lot of times he throws stuff up that he’s trying to stick to the wall and see what happens… especially since he’s trying to bring a rocket ship company to market, and a satellite company, in SpaceX. You want to create as much hype around it as you can.”

EV: There are two takes on this – people like Elon Musk are all on board, but then OpenAI’s Sam Altman has come out to say it’s kind of a farcical idea. So, is this a solid investment idea we should be looking into?

JR: Altman’s point is that it’s just not cost effective with the technology we have. They talk about the payload costs, how much it costs to put something into space – you know, just one of these Nvidia servers – and the cost to put it into space is something like over $5-$6 million just for one of those units.

So what Sam Altman is saying is, “Hey, we just don’t have the technology yet, and the cost effectiveness of something like that doesn’t make sense right now.”

But there is something called the physics of thermodynamics.

And the narrative we’re hearing is, “Oh, let’s put these data centers in space because we won’t have to use as much energy; we’re going to get energy from the sun. We don’t need to get hooked up to a power grid. And also we don’t have to cool units down because we’re in the vacuum of space, where it’s colder” – right?

EV: Right, the best of both worlds.

JR: The reality is that in space, in a vacuum, the cooling aspect doesn’t work. There’s no convection. There’s no conductivity, right? You need some way to move the heat from something that’s hot to evaporate it. In space, the only way you can evaporate heat is through radiation.

And what NASA has known for years is that objects in space that have direct impact to the sun actually tend to overheat. So you have to build this whole new technology to protect some of these satellites from overheating. They’re not going to cool down because they’re in space, because that doesn’t happen in the vacuum. So all that technology needs to be solved before one of these data centers can be built.

OK, fair enough. But would John buy the SpaceX IPO?

“If your timeline is 20-30 years, yeah, you’re probably looking at an opportunity,” he allows. “Starlink is a disruptor – would I like to have a piece of that business? For sure.”

Be sure to check out my full interview with John over at Barchart. And to find out about a couple more space stocks on the radar for our Market on Close crew, watch this quick clip below.

This interview has been edited for clarity. For more from John Rowland, CMT, sign up to be notified when Market on Close goes live.