John O’Connor priced risk for a living.

He ran the alternatives business at JPMorgan, sat on the risk policy committee for the entire corporation, and served on the Defense Business Board reporting to the Secretary of Defense.

He has since rejoined the Department of War as a special government employee.

Military to markets, and he reads the world the way a war planner does, in dependencies and probabilities.

That is exactly the lens he brought to his Real Conversation hosted by Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough, and within minutes it was clear this would not be a normal markets chat.

He warns that the most important number in your portfolio has been set to zero, and that the assumption deserves a hard second look.

The number is the geostrategic risk premium.

“WE’RE BULLISH CHAOS. WE’RE LONG CHAOS.”

Conflict, in all of its forms, at every level of aggregation, is going up.

Crime on the streets. Conflict between and among states.

The free movement of people, goods, ideas, and capital becoming less free by the year.

Rising trade barriers. A generational surge in defense spending.

For thirty years, the West ran on the assumption that globalism was the final state of history and a frictionless world was the natural endpoint.

O’Connor says that world is gone, and he is careful to point out that Trump is not the reason it left.

The phenomenon underneath all of it is China.

O’Connor calls the rise of the PRC the most disruptive macro factor of our lifetimes, and he means it literally, because it permeates everything from the cost of commodities to the cost of capital to the direction of global trade.

We have left the Davos world, where you eat bugs because it is optimal, and have walked into the Putin world, where a nation simply takes what it believes it must and can take.

If your model still assumes economic optimization dictates how nation states behave, you are going to be unhappy for a long time.

THE MOST MISPRICED NUMBER IN MARKETS IS ZERO

Here is where it gets practical.

O’Connor called up old colleagues at JPMorgan and asked a deceptively simple question.

What is the geostrategic risk premium built into your capital asset pricing model?

“Yeah, it’s zero. What’s your point?”

In a world where one policy decision in Beijing can put trillions of dollars of production at risk, the premium the Street assigns to that exposure rounds to nothing.

Maybe it is zero, maybe it is something, but he is fairly sure it is not zero for everybody.

He likens it to the pre-2010 European sovereign curve, when Germany, Greece, Italy, and Portugal all traded flat to one another. Nobody knew the right answer. Everybody knew it wasn’t that.

As the chart above shows, markets are perfectly capable of pricing a risk at zero right up until the moment they can’t.

“CHINA WEAPONIZED THE PERIODIC TABLE”

If you want the cleanest expression of that mispricing, watch the rare earths.

This November, the waivers China issued on its rare earth and permanent magnet export restrictions are set to expire.

The International Energy Agency warned that full implementation of those curbs could jeopardize roughly $6.5 trillion of downstream production outside China each year, with the United States and Europe expected to bear nearly half of the impact.

And this is not a soft target.

November 10, 2026 is a hard legal inflection point at which the suspended measures automatically resume absent a renegotiated framework.

Just before this conversation aired, President Trump signed an executive order pushing the defense industrial base to tighten its grip on materials and supply chains. Late to the need, as O’Connor put it, but here.

Then there is the base of the industrial economy.

The United States produces under one million metric tons of primary aluminum a year.

China produces north of 40 million tons, roughly 60% of global output.

O’Connor just joined the board of the last alumina producer left in the country, the precursor you need to make aluminum at all. Run the requirements.

Military consumption alone is measured in millions of tons. The defense industrial base needs millions more. The open economy needs millions on top of that. We are nowhere close.

The chart above highlights the risk the U.S. is assuming.

The pattern repeats all the way down the table, from tungsten to gallium to the dumb analog legacy chips that control something as unglamorous as a side mirror motor.

CHESS PLAYERS IN A GO GAME

Why did we let this happen? O’Connor’s answer is cultural, and it lands.

In the West, he says, “we play chess,” and “you win by force, by toppling the Queen.”

In Go, “you win by occupying space.”

China has been playing Go for two decades, quietly occupying space, building patience into the position, and shaping the board until the West became asymmetrically dependent on it.

Meanwhile we optimized.

That brittleness is exactly why entanglement matters at the single-stock level, and why O’Connor’s team screens for it.

Tesla’s single largest production facility sits in China, on land owned by the Chinese government, operating on a license from the Chinese government.

Apple runs through seven million workers and a supply chain Beijing could re-sign overnight.

You do not have to be short either name to see it. The index is simply carrying the risk for you at a premium of, you guessed it, zero.

Now layer the calendar on top.

Hedgeye’s models point toward deceleration into the first quarter of 2027, what Keith called the potential mother of all Quad 4s, growth and inflation slowing together.

And Xi, who has been in no rush to visit, is coming to town right before it.

The man who plays Go does not book that trip by accident.

You can learn more about our GIP Model and our Quad framework in our Process Guide.

THE ONLY EDGE LEFT IS RESILIENCE

The good news is that this is knowable.

O’Connor built a ten-factor geostrategic risk rating that scores companies on their entanglement with adversarial nations, the same rules-based logic we apply to the Quads.

It is the engine behind his ETF, Xtrackers US National Critical Technologies (CRTC), and it is the rare tool that looks a hundred years forward instead of asking what the machines did yesterday.

That last part matters, because over ninety percent of daily order flow is now machine driven, and as O’Connor put it, “the noise has become the signal.”

Watch the full Real Conversation between Keith McCullough and John O’Connor here.

Americans are putting record amounts into their retirement accounts and taking record amounts out.

Vanguard’s “How America Saves 2026“ report shows average 401(k) balance climbing to an all-time high of $167,970, up 13% from last year, helped by a 19.3% average return as markets ran hot.

At the same time, a record 6% of savers withdrew funds early for an emergency.

The chart above shows how steep that climb has been.

The share of participants taking a hardship withdrawal has tripled in just four years, from 2% in 2021 to 6% in 2025.

The worrying part is frequency. Nearly half of those who tapped their plan did it more than once, effectively treating their 401(k) as an emergency fund.

And the timing isn’t random.

Real disposable income turned negative this spring, down -1.1% year over year, while the personal savings rate has collapsed from above 5% to just 2.6%.

As the household cushion disappears, the retirement account becomes the natural line of last resort.

The K-Shaped economy becomes most evident when looking at who is pulling the money, and why.

More than a third of every hardship withdrawal last year went to stopping a foreclosure or eviction, the single most common reason.

For workers earning under $50,000, roughly 70% of hardship withdrawals went toward avoiding eviction or covering medical bills, as the chart above makes clear.

Higher earners were far more likely to use the option for a home purchase or tuition.

The split runs straight through the balances, too. The average swelled to $167,970, but the median, the typical saver, sits at just $44,115.

A small number of very large accounts drag the average up and away from reality.

One in four participants has less than $10,000 saved.

So how did savers keep building wealth through a year of real financial strain?

Largely on autopilot.

A record 69% of participants are now in a professionally managed allocation, up from just 9% in 2005.

Automatic enrollment has pushed plan participation to a record 86%, and target-date funds are doing the heavy lifting.

For the half already cashing out to get by, their 401(k) is their last line of defense.

The K-Shaped economy is real.

The biggest caveat to the SpaceX IPO is that you’re going to own it whether you want to or not.

Let’s start with the scale because it’s genuinely hard to comprehend.

SpaceX is targeting roughly $75 billion in proceeds at a ~$1.75 trillion valuation, which makes it the largest IPO ever.

The previous record holder, Saudi Aramco, raised $29.4 billion in 2019. SpaceX is on deck to raise nearly three times that.

As shown above, every other mega-IPO of the last two decades clusters in the $19–25 billion range.

On valuation, it’s the same story. At ~$1.75 trillion, SpaceX would price as a top-15 company in the world on day one, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Saudi Aramco and dwarfing the rest of the largest listings in history.

Normally, a company this unproven doesn’t walk straight into your retirement account.

The S&P 500 has required 12 months of trading and four quarters of GAAP profitability since 2002. Both waived.

Nasdaq cut its inclusion window from 90 trading days to 15, and the FTSE Russell cut its to 5.

All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing.

The rules designed to protect passive investors were quietly dismantled so they could be force-fed the largest, least-disclosed offering on record.

This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401(k) and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations.

Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S&P 500 funds must absorb 19% of the float within six months. Russell 1000 and Nasdaq 100 funds will absorb 24%.

In effect, the passive index machine becomes a backboard, a constant and mechanical flow of buyers who buy the stock whether they like it or not.

WHAT ARE INVESTORS ACTUALLY BUYING?

SpaceX is effectively three businesses sharing a balance sheet:

1. A profitable Starlink (~70% of the business)

2. A capital-hungry launch and Starship operation

3. An AI segment (xAI/Grok) burning cash at frontier-lab scale

And for that bundle, the company is asking ~$1.75 trillion, roughly 94x last year’s $18.67 billion in revenue, against a $4.9 billion net loss.

SpaceX even fixed its price at $135 a share before the show began, asking investors to accept the valuation rather than negotiate it.

This is exactly why rules and policy matter so much in this game.

A mentor of mine asked me years ago:

“If you don’t know the rules, how are you going to win the game?”

The rules set the stage. When they change, so does the way you strategize your game.

The same waiver that changed the rules for SpaceX is now changing it for the whole pipeline of IPOs.

Anthropic filed for its own IPO this week at a reported valuation of ~$900 billion, with OpenAI expected to follow.

The same profitability screen that kept Tesla out of the S&P 500 until late 2020 is now being broken three times in a single year.

So, consider what that does to the premise of indexing.

You spent 40 years doing the boring, responsible thing. You opened the 401(k) at 23. You bought the index because every piece of financial advice has told you it was the safest, most rules-based way to own America.

The security in it was the guardrails. Key word: was.

Our analysts go deeper on SpaceX today.

Industrials Sector Head Jay Van Sciver will cover aerospace, defense, and launch economics at 12:30 PM ET. Communications Sector Head Andrew Freedman will cover Starlink, xAI, and connectivity at 2:00 PM ET.

Both granular, both worth your time.

GET ACCESS TO to Jay/Industrials at 12:30pm ET

GET ACCESS TO FREEDMAN/Communications at 2:00 PM ET

Or, contact sales@hedgeye.com.

Learn more about their call here.

Cheers,

NG

When I wrote the original essay in August 2025 it was still early in the AI paradigm shift, and since then, much has changed. Anthropic’s emergence as the first AI-native disrupter, Google flexing its core advantages, OpenAI’s stumbles, and Apple’s reminder of its relevancy are a few of the notable twists and turns so far.

In this version of Game of Thrones, the leaders have emerged, bringing with them an army of advantages that will be hard to circumvent.

My core assumption remains the same:

“LLMs will become commoditized. Scale is the moat — and scale requires capital. To earn a return, you must monetize the model. Value will accrue to those building compelling applications on top of LLMs and distributing them efficiently. As with the internet, adoption accelerated once real utility (e.g., e-commerce, logistics optimization) became available.”

Now, what has also become clear is how foundational the following three assets have become: hardware, application layer, and distribution – the Three Foundations.

I use the term hardware in broad terms, but it captures infrastructure, compute optionality, and distributed devices.

There is no AI without compute infrastructure, and the infrastructure does not work without power. Compute optionality means in-house silicon expertise to tailor the applications you build as efficiently as possible.

Finally, for AI to become useful, it has to be distributed as widely as possible, pushing more compute to the edge.

These foundations have helped define which winners emerged to dominate in past technology paradigms shifts, and I believe that will also be the case in the future.

This note outlines my revised thinking on each of the Mag 7, and how it has changed from my original views in August 2025.

SURVIVE AND THRIVE

Amazon (AMZN)

Updated View – As an early investor and partner of Anthropic, Amazon chose wisely. As the main infrastructure partner, Amazon is riding the wave of disruption from Claude Code, which is not only enhancing its enterprise application layer but also accelerating AWS’s growth. Also, Amazon’s investment in its own silicon (Trainium/Graviton) and its logistics infrastructure (robotics) give it both margin and growth optionality.

Original View – Rather than building its own LLM, Amazon partnered with Anthropic—suggesting it sees more value in the application layer. By combining Anthropic’s LLMs with its own models, Amazon enhances AWS’s infrastructure and its utility to developers and enterprise users.

Apple (AAPL)

Updated View – Apple has the Three Foundations – hardware (custom silicon); application layer (not only iOS and the App store, but access to Gemini); Distribution.

The DoJ ruling in August 2025 was a gamechanger, allowing Apple the freedom to partner with long time search partner Google to integrate Gemini’s in-cloud LLM with Apple’s on-device personalized inferencing. If Apple can execute, they will likely have the first scaled consumer AI utility – your own personalized AI assistant.

Original View – While some claim Apple has fallen behind in AI, I disagree. Apple has structural advantages: no other company combines such global reach, compute density, and hardware desirability as the iPhone. For AI to become truly useful to consumers, iOS-based apps will need to merge LLM-scale knowledge with on-device inferencing to offer personalized intelligence. Apple has the platform and distribution—it only lacks an LLM partner. A pivotal catalyst could be the DOJ’s ruling in its antitrust case against Google. A favorable verdict would likely open the door for Apple to partner with a leading LLM, potentially vaulting it into AI leadership.

Alphabet (GOOGL)

Updated View – The DoJ ruling was indeed a clearing event for Google. Since then, Gemini has become a top 3 LLM and its AI partnership with Apple cements its place as a vital AI infrastructure partner, underlined further by its recent partnership with Anthropic.

Importantly, Google has the platforms to monetize this massive capex in AI, which will be vital for the market to continue to underwrite the spending. As an industry, we may be approaching peak capex (likely on a 2^nd derivative basis), with future incremental investment going toward the application/agentic layer.

Original View – The risk: AI disrupts Google’s core search business. The response: Gemini and AI Search aim to slow the decline. I’ve been bearish since ChatGPT’s 2022 launch but now believe Google has the right ingredients: Cloud infrastructure, a competitive LLM, deep data assets (e.g., YouTube), and monetization paths via Android, GCP, and iOS. The DOJ’s upcoming antitrust ruling could serve as a clearing event—especially if it separates traditional search from AI search.

Nvidia (NVDA)

Updated View – Since October 2025, Nvidia has traded in range for two reasons, in my view: investor concerns about a deceleration of growth, starting in CY2027 as the 2^nd derivative of capex growth starts to slow; and potential competition in inferencing which is a bigger consumer of compute needs.

At 18x FY2028 earnings, I think most of the deceleration derating has happened, while revenues have the potential to be revised higher as compute demand continues to outstrip supply. Strategically, Nvidia is also ahead of the curve – it is no longer just about the GPU or CPU; it is the whole rack, server, and datacenter. Nvidia is working on smoothing out multiple points of friction, for example, in storage (use of SRAM for speed), and networking (copper to optical). Cost per token is declining, and Nvidia’s datacenter architecture changes will keep driving those costs lower, which is a critical variable as customers project an eventual RoI.

Original View – Model upgrades continue to validate AI scaling laws—ensuring demand for Nvidia’s latest chips. Beyond AI data centers, new buyers are emerging: sovereign nations, large enterprises, and more. Many overlook that GPUs also powers crypto and blockchain, both early in their adoption curves. When combining AI, crypto, and blockchain, the total addressable market for Nvidia may be far larger than most assume.

Survive? Yes. Thrive? It Depends

Microsoft (MSFT)

Updated View – Microsoft’s strategic positioning has been negatively affected by three things, two of their own making, one that was outside of their control: 1) Their early lock-in with OpenAI proved to be a blind spot as they were late to an Anthropic deal, and OpenAI has made multiple missteps due to a lack of strategic focus; 2) Slowing down capex spending in 2025 proved to be a massive mistake as they were unable to participate in the accelerating growth of token consumption; and 3) the launches of Claude Code, Opus, and Cowork were a broadside hit to the software industry and raised questions about the terminal value of a broad range of software companies.

While Microsoft’s enterprise moat will be hard to displace, AI-native applications are forcing the company to re-engineer their own applications, which is coming at a cost.

Regarding AI capex spend, Microsoft has a decision to make: massively accelerate capex and temporarily crush free cash flow in order to accelerate Azure growth in the future; or try to manage capex spend that balances their customers’ demands as well as their own internal product development. In my view, for the stock to work in the future, they must rip the band aid off and follow Google, Amazon, and Meta with a massive acceleration in capex. This will accelerate Azure growth, but longer-term questions on software will remain.

Original View – Like Amazon, Microsoft has doubled down on its partnership with OpenAI. Its capital spending now emphasizes inference over training, with a clear goal: delivering real, user-facing utility. That said, Microsoft’s SMB franchise could face long-term pressure from AI-native operating systems adopted by startups and younger users.

Meta (META)

Updated View – Not much has changed from my original view. Meta’s new model placed them in 4^th place, but the question remains: if used for internal purposes only, where will Meta’s operating margins end up? If Meta Compute is a bolder strategy to provide infrastructure to third parties, then margins are going lower.

Strategically, Meta is chasing the leaders and the cost to compete is too high for the existing business model to sustain. It will have to change. Longer term, this line is probably the biggest problem for Meta – “More troubling is the risk that users shift attention toward personalized AI assistants—undermining Meta’s engagement-driven ad model.”

Original View – Zuckerberg’s hiring of a “super team” of AI engineers raises a question: bold move or desperation? I lean toward the latter. Meta’s open-source LLM strategy has fallen flat. More troubling is the risk that users shift attention toward personalized AI assistants—undermining Meta’s engagement-driven ad model. While Meta owns valuable assets, its AI team must now execute—and fast—against four established LLM players.

Multiple Challenges Ahead

Tesla (TSLA)

Updated View – Musk is as creative a financier as he is an engineer. By merging xAI into SpaceX ahead of this IPO, Musk is using this sought-after strategic asset as a back-door way to fund the billions of dollars he wants to invest in xAI. You, the SpaceX shareholder, will be paying for this capex. Can he monetize this investment in the future, and which enterprise in their right mind would partner with him? But if it is for internal use (to fund his many projects from Optimus, Robotaxi, TerraFab), we may likely never see a return on investment. This is still not a constructive setup.

Original View - Though not directly threatened by AI, Tesla warrants comment. The company is trying to pivot from EVs to robotics/autonomy—a bold move complicated by CEO Elon Musk’s erratic leadership. Musk overpaid for Twitter, abandoned OpenAI (a strategic blunder), and tainted Tesla’s brand through political theatrics. His AI startup xAI has shipped fast, but burns $1B/month—raising doubts about its sustainability and appeal to enterprise buyers. Tesla shareholders must now contend with a distracted CEO leveraging TSLA equity to fund side projects. This is not a constructive setup.

Next time I update this view, there may be two new companies vying for leadership in an AI world.

These views are mine alone and may evolve as the technology landscape shifts.

Sincerely,

Sam Rahman

HGRO Portfolio Manager, Hedgeye Asset Management

ABOUT US

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DISCLOSURE

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Twenty years ago, cities like New York and San Francisco were where young Americans went to launch careers.

In 2005, unemployment rates for 21-to-27-year-olds in both metros ran at or below the national average. That relationship has now completely inverted.

Youth unemployment in New York and San Francisco now exceeds the national rate, with NYC youth unemployment hitting 11.9% in 2025, still above its pre-pandemic level of 9.6%.

The traditional playbook of moving to a big city to start your career is breaking down, but the hiring slowdown is only half the problem.

These same young workers are also the most financially exposed to the inflation that’s arriving alongside the slowdown.

They’re now getting squeezed from both sides. A labor market that’s tightening against them at the exact moment their cost of living is accelerating fastest.

THE MACRO MECHANICS

Hedgeye macro analyst Christian Drake, who covers the team’s day-to-day macro data tracking alongside CEO Keith McCullough, has been profiling exactly what’s behind these dynamics.

Drake’s conclusion maps directly onto a framework that sits at the center of how Hedgeye manages risk: the Quads.

Hedgeye’s proprietary GIP Model divides the macro environment into four regimes based on the rate of change in economic growth and inflation.

Quad 3 is the regime where growth is decelerating while inflation is accelerating, and it’s where the U.S. and global economies are right now.

The year-over-year growth in U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls has been converging on zero, and real disposable income growth is hovering just above 1% with no cushion to absorb inflation.

As the Quad 3 energy shock causes inflation to re-accelerate in our Hedgeye Inflation Nowcast, that thin earnings cushion collapses fast.

And, we know that inflation doesn’t land evenly.

Gas and energy consume 8.2 to 8.4% of total spending for the bottom two income quintiles versus 4.8% for the top quintile.

Young workers disproportionately sit in those lower brackets.

WAR. OIL. STAGFLATION. SEE HOW SMART MONEY IS POSITIONED.

These are just some of the dynamics that are defining markets in 2026.

From April 21-23, Hedgeye Founder and CEO Keith McCullough sits down with 13 independent portfolio managers, economists, and strategists for nine hours of deep-dive discussion on exactly how real money is positioning around war, rising energy costs, and stagflation.

No consensus narratives. No conflicts of interest. Just independent analysis you can act on.

Register free for the Hedgeye Investing Summit.

Since March 2, QatarEnergy has indefinitely halted helium and LNG production at Ras Laffan Industrial City.

Iranian missile strikes caused extensive damage to one of the world’s most strategically important gas hubs.

Even after hostilities cease, QatarEnergy estimates that “annual helium exports will be reduced by 14%” over the next three to five years as facilities are repaired.

The damage bill is estimated at roughly $26 billion in lost annual revenue.

As Hedgeye Asset Management HEFT Portfolio Manager Neil Howe writes, “Helium is one of several resources now under pressure due to the war in the Gulf.”

Qatar accounts for roughly 34% of global helium output, making this the largest single-source disruption in the history of the helium market.

The United States is the top producer at 43.8%, followed by Russia at 9.7% and Algeria at 5.9%, but none of these sources can quickly replace a third of global supply lost overnight.

WHY HELIUM MATTERS

Helium is not a commodity that most investors typically consider.

As Howe explains, “Helium is a critical industrial gas used in semiconductors, MRI machines, and aerospace, where its inert properties and extremely low boiling point are essential.”

What makes helium uniquely vulnerable is its chemistry.

“As a noble gas, helium does not easily form chemical compounds and cannot be refined like other industrial gases,” Howe notes.

“Instead, it is recovered as a trace component of natural gas processing. In most cases, there are no economical substitutes.”

This is what makes the situation particularly challenging. There is no synthetic alternative, and no emergency stockpile to draw upon.

When helium’s supply is disrupted, the downstream industries that depend on it have no fallback.

Analytical, engineering, lab, and specialty gases account for 22% of consumption.

Controlled atmospheres, fiber optics, and semiconductors account for 17%. MRI machines represent 15%. Aerospace accounts for 9%.

In semiconductor fabrication specifically, helium is used in more than 20 process steps, from cooling components to controlling heat transfer rates to serving as a carrier gas in deposition tools.

THE TWO-MONTH CLOCK

The supply shock is compounded by a logistics bottleneck that most analysts are underestimating.

Liquid helium ships in insulated ISO containers that stay viable for 35 to 48 days.

After that, the helium warms, converts to gas, and escapes Earth’s atmosphere.

Roughly 200 of these containers are stranded in the Middle East. Each one costs approximately $1 million, so there is no deep reserve of spare capacity available elsewhere.

The entire distribution chain, from production to container repositioning to delivery, is disrupted.

Even after a ceasefire, the industry faces a minimum of two to three additional months to normalize logistics and bring the system back to a steady state.

While there isn’t a “spot” helium price traded on a centralized exchange, Fitch Ratings says Helium prices have already doubled since the start of the Iran War.

WHO BENEFITS

Howe identifies the primary beneficiaries: “The primary beneficiaries of the shortage are Linde plc (LIN), Air Products and Chemicals (APD), and Air Liquide (AI.PA). These firms generate revenue both from helium production and long-term distribution and supply contracts.”

While all three source meaningful volumes from Qatar, Howe notes they are well diversified geographically.

Linde in particular operates a large storage cavern for helium inventories sufficient to cover roughly half a year of global demand. JPMorgan recently upgraded Linde to Overweight, identifying the tightening helium market as a primary catalyst.

“These firms also control the logistics, storage, and delivery of helium through long-term contracts with industrial customers,” Howe explains.

“That gives them pricing power. As supply tightens, higher helium prices are passed through into contracts, expanding margins.”

When demand is inelastic and there are no substitutes, whoever controls the supply chain controls the economics.

“ExxonMobil (XOM) also stands to benefit. Its LaBarge facility in Wyoming produces roughly 20% of the global helium supply.”

As Howe writes, “The Hedgeye Fourth Turning ETF is long this trend through Linde plc (LIN) and Air Products and Chemicals (APD). It also owns shares in ExxonMobil (XOM).”

BOTTOM LINE

A third of global helium supply is offline with no clear timeline for restoration.

Helium is a finite, non-substitutable resource where a handful of companies control pricing.

Get positioned ahead of Global Macro moves with the Hedgeye Process.

Global energy prices are feeling the heat.

Since the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28th, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked off roughly 20% of the world’s seaborne oil supply, triggering the largest energy disruption since the 1970s oil crisis.

Brent crude oil briefly topped $119 a barrel, up more than +40% from pre-conflict levels near $70.

That price shock isn’t contained to the oil market. It’s already rippling through every way Americans get from Point A to Point B.

Airtime - PLANES

Global Jet Fuel prices have risen +82.8% in a month, the largest spike in four years.

As a result, airlines are feeling the pressure.

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian stated that Delta had added approximately $400 million to the airline’s fuel bill in March alone, and American Airlines reported a similar increase.

Flight prices are set to rise.

Horse & Buggy - CARS

Regular gasoline at the national average has demonstrated the incredible reflexivity of energy prices in a short period of time.

One Month Ago: $2.94

Today’s National Average: $3.82

That’s a +29.9% jump in a single month, an increase of 88 cents for a gallon of gas nationally. California is already above $5.50, and the cheapest state in the country (Kansas) is at $3.04.

The spread between the most and least expensive markets is now over $2.30 per gallon.

For the majority of Americans, the daily cost of getting to and from their jobs just went up materially, and that’s before factoring in errands, school runs, and everything else that keeps a household moving.

Commercial - TRUCKS & TRAINS

Diesel prices have soared in tandem, with the national average surging to $5.07 per gallon as of March 18th, up from $3.65 just one month ago.

That’s a +38.1% spike, and it represents the highest diesel price since 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy markets reeling.

Most Americans have no direct exposure to diesel prices since they fill up with regular unleaded.

But diesel powers the trucks, trains, ships, and farm equipment that move virtually every physical good in the economy.

The indirect effects of higher diesel prices are enormous, flowing through to the cost of bringing nearly all goods to market.

Fuel now represents 30–40% of total operating costs for many trucking fleets, and the pressure is already accelerating carrier failures and squeezing margins industrywide.

Putting a Bow On It

The February CPI print came in at 2.41% year-over-year, just 3bps from the Hedgeye Inflation Nowcast. But that data captured the world before the Iran conflict erupted.

With the dramatic rise in energy costs, inflation is now set to be substantially higher in March, with energy being a main component in the CPI.

Kalshi odds have a 3.2% forecast, with it continuing to trend higher as energy prices continue rising.

Hedgeye Energy Sector Head Fernando Valle, CFA, highlighted that the IEA is targeting a release of 300–400 million barrels from strategic petroleum reserves.

However, he sees a speedy recovery as highly unlikely.

“Where we were prior to this event is no longer tenable in the next year; we won’t get WTI back to the $50s or $60s because the disruptions have been much more significant than any short-term fix could help.”

Get access to Fernando Valle’s research here.

And to see how we are positioning ahead of an inflationary economic regime, join Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough today at 11:00am ET for an institutional-grade, 155-slide presentation breaking down the most important macro exposures for Q2 and beyond.

Our Macro Themes presentation is exclusive to Macro Pro subscribers and gives you everything you need to position ahead of large moves, not react to them.

If you’ve ever felt blindsided by a market move, the real problem isn’t that the market moved against you; it’s that nobody gave you a framework to position ahead of the next one.

That’s why Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough created the Quad system. It’s not a prediction. It’s a map.

Our proprietary GIP Model tracks the rate of change in two key factors that drive market dynamics: Growth and Inflation.

When you cross those two variables, you get four possible economic regimes, what we call the Quads, and each one has a distinct playbook for which asset classes, sectors, and factor exposures tend to win or lose.

The Quads reveal what the economy is doing beneath the surface.

On Wednesday, March 18 at 11:00am ET, Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough will present our 2Q Macro Themes deck fully loaded with the Quads, macro insights, and positioning guidance going into a period of difficult comparatives, fading Big Tech leadership, and a stagflationary economic regime in the US and abroad.

2Q26 MACRO THEMES:

1. USA: #Quad3 Stagflation

Our tryst with Goldilocks proved transitory as we made the Quad1→Quad3 pivot in mid-February, and the implications of that shift have been playing out aggressively across every asset class on the board.

What does that mean for you? It means the market environment that rewarded the passive buy-and-hold approach — the one where your U.S. index fund and your growth-heavy tech sleeve could do no wrong — is over for now.

The regime has changed, and if your portfolio hasn’t changed with it, the last three weeks have been painful.

In the last three weeks alone, Keith sold half of his maximum 30 Core Asset Allocations. Fourteen of the 15 ETFs he sold kept going lower after he exited. That’s not luck. That’s the process in motion, reading the Quad shift in real time and having the discipline to act on it.

On Wednesday, Keith McCullough will disentangle the policy-catalyzed distortions from the underlying trajectory, detail the expected monthly Quad cadence, and explore the key path dependencies — including the Quad 2 to Quad 3 tensions likely to characterize 2Q and how to practically navigate the intensifying cognitive dissonance associated with holding multiple, highly uncertain, and potentially antithetical scenarios simultaneously.

2. USA’s Diverging Profit Cycles

2026 is trending as the year of fading the Magnificent 7 and its earnings growth rate of change halving, which is a significant inflection that most of the financial media haven’t caught up to yet.

While Bullish TRENDs have become somewhat harder to find, the fundamental reality is that the 2026 earnings growth outlook for small caps, midcaps, and the S&P 493 are all much improved from recent years.

The opportunity set is broadening — but only if you know where to look, and only if you have the tools to navigate it.

3. Long Gold & Treasuries?

Gold is the #1 asset allocation in Quad 3. That’s not a opinion. That’s what the model says, and it’s what Keith McCullough is doing with real money.

On Wednesday’s 2Q Macro Themes presentation, Keith will walk through why gold leads, why commodities as an asset class rank right behind it, and why fixed income rounds out the top three. He’ll also explain why the Mag 7 — what he’s calling the “Bag 7” — continue to get body-bagged in this regime while real assets like wheat, corn, and gold do the opposite.

The Strait of Hormuz disruption has delivered a textbook supply-side oil shock, a direct tax on growth, not a symptom of it.

Unlike traditional inflationary episodes, this shock arrives with a Fed already on a disinflationary glide path, a Chair with an explicit mandate to cut, and political pressure from a war with a 20% approval rating making rate hikes effectively off the table. What you get instead is Quad 3: rising costs, slowing growth, and a Fed that holds or eases, pushing long-end yields lower as the stagflationary reality sets in.

Macro Themes is just one reason to upgrade to Macro Pro

Macro Pro also includes:

• Hedgeye’s flagship Macro research tools, plus Investing Ideas and The Call

• Keith’s daily Portfolio Solutions ETF re-rank

• TREND/TAIL signals for 68 ETFs

• Exclusive Macro & Policy events

• Monthly Process Coaching Q&A — ask Keith anything live

Upgrade today with our limited-time Cyber March promotion.

Join us on Wednesday, March 18, at 11:00 AM ET for our Q2 Macro Themes presentation where Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough and the Macro team break down the most important exposures for Q2 and beyond.

Something large and consequential is happening in the $1.8 trillion private credit market.

On Friday morning’s edition of The Call @ Hedgeye, Financials Sector Head Josh Steiner broke down the current private credit environment and how it compares to 2008.

Last week, JPMorgan Chase marked down the value of certain private credit loans and restricted lending to funds that hold them.

U.S. private credit defaults reached a record 9.2% according to Fitch Ratings, more than double the 4.5% default rate in the broadly syndicated loan market.

What makes those numbers especially dangerous is where they sit within the broader macro cycle.

On Thursday’s edition of The Macro Show, Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough described how growth is slowing in Quad 3.

He pointed to Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan both addressing client redemptions in private credit as evidence that the credit stress is no longer hypothetical.

And with our GIP Model signaling Quad 3 quarters in Q2 and Q3, followed by a Quad 4 beginning in November, the pressure on these floating-rate borrowers only deepens from here.

Steiner placed that cycle in sharper focus. Quad 3 stagflation had already been the central tendency for March before the start of the war in Iran.

“Then we got a war and an oil shock. In that condition set, the first thing you get is the inflation impulse. Then later on, you get the consumption labor market slowdown.”

Against that macro backdrop, private credit occupies an especially precarious position.

Steiner described what he called a “percolating underbelly of private credit concern” that has been “slowly rising” and is now impossible to dismiss.

Cliffwater has become the latest major private credit fund to face withdrawal requests exceeding 7% of assets.

BlackRock, Blackstone, and Morgan Stanley have all limited or gated redemptions in recent weeks as investors, spooked by deteriorating underwriting standards and AI-driven fears, rush for the exits.

“People want their money,” Steiner said on The Call. “They don’t want the illiquidity.”

Steiner estimated that regional banks carry between $100 billion and $150 billion of aggregate exposure to private credit, much of it through lending to the very funds now gating withdrawals and watching their collateral get marked down. That loan growth, he said, is “increasingly in doubt.”

The natural question, and the one that Hedgeye Asset Management Portfolio Manager Sam Rahman posed on The Call, is whether this turns into 2008.

Steiner does not think so; banks today are far better capitalized.

“I think with the private credit, there is a big problem,” Steiner said, “but they have more tools available to deal with it.”

The more apt analog, he suggested, is the ‘01–’02 credit cycle, which was built slowly around a crowded investment thesis in telecom, eventually rolling over across two to three years.

Private credit’s version of that crowding today is in software, not telecom.

The unwinding will be “fairly slow motion” and will “play out sort of gradually over the next couple years,” Steiner says.

“It’s going to be a car crash or a train crash, whatever pick your metaphor, but it’s going to be fairly slow motion. And that’s going to be real painful.”

McCullough took the frame wider by invoking the Fourth Turning—the generational cycle framework developed by Neil Howe, whose best estimate places the next climax somewhere between 2028 and 2032.

He pointed to the 1873 railroad panic, a bubble built on growth expectations that bled into a credit crisis and reshaped the economy for a generation, and noted that the consensus will default to recency bias—reaching for 2008 because it’s the crisis they lived through—when the more useful framework spans centuries.

However, what Steiner and McCullough see is not an imminent collapse.

“I want to dispel these concerns that this is going to blow up overnight,” Steiner said, “but at the same time, make it clear that we’re going into something much bigger here, much more nonlinear, over a three to five-year type time scale.”

For now, the private credit market sits in an uncomfortable middle ground: defaults at records, redemptions surging, the largest bank in America pulling back collateral values, and a macro environment that is about to get worse before it gets better.

McCullough opened Friday’s Call with a story about watching lightning strike on a golf course, comparing the situation to someone getting hit by lightning while holding a metal club.

“You either act on it, or you don’t.”

Subscribe to The Call @ Hedgeye for analysis from our team of 40+ analysts hosted by Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough.

ABOUT JOSH STEINER, CFA

Josh Steiner, CFA, is a veteran investment professional with more than two decades of experience across the Sell Side and Buy Side. Josh began his financial career at C.E. Unterberg, Towbin, covering the Satellite Communications sector, where he developed a strong foundation in fundamental equity research.

He later joined Lehman Brothers, where he became a core member of the #1 ranked Institutional Investor and Greenwich Survey Mortgage and Specialty Finance Team. During his tenure, Josh built deep expertise across Financials, Housing, and Specialty Finance, contributing to the team’s industry-leading research.

Following Lehman Brothers, Josh transitioned to the Buy Side, managing Long/Short Financials strategies at Millennium Partners and Amaranth Group. Across both firms, he refined a macro-aware, risk-managed investment approach spanning financial institutions, credit, and housing-related assets.

Josh joined Hedgeye Risk Management in 2009, where he covers Macro, Financials, Housing, and Digital Assets, bringing a cross-asset perspective to identifying opportunities and risks across market cycles.

Josh holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Rochester and is a CFA Charterholder.

X/Twitter: @HedgeyeFIG

LinkedIn: Josh Steiner, CFA

Research: Josh Steiner, CFA

There’s a reason gambling keeps making headlines. It’s everywhere.

Eli Thompson, a college freshman at North Greenville University, describes his teammates spiraling into debt, lying to their families, and selling their gaming consoles to cover $500 bets in his recently published essay “Gen Z Sports Betting Is Wrecking My Friends’ Lives.”

Today, 16% of 18-to-22-year-olds are classified as problematic bettors.

The trend is so prevalent that 43% of U.S. adults now say sports betting is bad for society, up from 34% in 2022.

Behind this rise in speculative gambling may be a widely accepted reality: the traditional paths to building a financially successful life are fading from what previous generations of Americans once knew.

Over one third (35.2%) of men aged between 18 and 34 years still live with their parent(s), the number of entry-level job postings continues to shrink, and the gargantuan investment a college degree demands is no longer paying the dividends it once did.

When opportunities for growth begin looking more grim, gambling starts to feel like a rational response.

WHO IS THE TARGET AUDIENCE?

I hopped on a call with Hedgeye GLL analyst Puneet Saini, who covers large gaming platforms like DraftKings (DKNG) and Flutter Entertainment (FLUT), to get a better understanding of sports betting.

The best customers, he told me, are the ones who have a steady stream of disposable income and don’t get wiped out in the first go.

The younger generation is developing the gambler mindset early, but they’re more likely to chase high-payout formats, especially parlays.

“When a $10 parlay is set to pay out hundreds of dollars, the last leg of the parlay has your heart racing like nothing you’ve ever experienced in the stock market,” Saini noted.

Bet builder bets, the industry term for customized parlays, accounted for 49% of all pre-match bets during the Super Bowl, up from just 4% in 2020.

These products have been engineered in a way that keeps you engaged, betting more, and betting more often.

GAMBLING IN TRADITIONAL MARKETS

Over time, products evolve to meet the demand of the people.

They’re a direct reflection of the “vibe” of the society, exposing what people’s needs and wants are.

In established markets, the soaring use of leveraged ETFs is the greatest representation of the growing desire for thrills on Wall Street.

Bloomberg Intelligence data shows that Leveraged ETF volume hit an all-time high of $7.9 trillion in 2025. Read that again.

The same dopamine loop that hooks an 21-year-old on DraftKings is now prevalent through the most actively traded names in the stock market.

On March 9, 2026, (HIMZ), the 2x leveraged single-stock ETF on Hims & Hers Health (HIMS), traded over 178 million shares.

The ETF was up +80% on the day. The day before, the 3x inverse Russell 2000 ETF (TZA) was the most actively traded name on the tape at over 184 million shares.

As Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough noted on The Macro Show:

"The top three most actively traded names in the market were two 'pump stocks' and an index at three times leverage. That is certified gambling."

Margin debt is pushing new all-time highs, Robinhood and Coinbase are launching sports betting into their investing apps, and FanDuel is bringing stock trading into theirs.

The casino and the stock market are merging to satisfy the needs and wants of The People, a dangerous yet fascinating trend.

Generational wealth is rarely built on binary bets or gut-wrenching leverage. It usually comes from years of hard work, discipline, focus, and having a repeatable process that allows you to identify the highest-probability bets when real money is on the line.

PROCESS > PREDICTION

Hedgeye is a risk management service focused on protecting and preserving capital in order to compound wealth over time. The less you lose, the faster you compound.

In a world fascinated with gambling on moonshots, our process reveals the best opportunities in the market without assuming extraordinary risk.

We’ve worked too damn hard for our capital to throw it around, and you have too.

We start with the fundamentals of the top 50+ global economies through Keith McCullough‘s GIP Model. It tracks the rate of change of Growth and Inflation to identify the next economic regime.

Then, we align it with the Risk Range™ Signals, which use price, volume, and volatility to generate probable buy-low, sell-high levels across any asset that ticks.

Armed with both, we align ideas with the fundamental research done by our team of 40+ analysts.

Right now, through Cyber March, we’re offering our best prices of the year.

1. If you’re already a subscriber: This is your opportunity to upgrade your access at massive savings.

2. If you’re new to Hedgeye: Our introductory offers will get you started with our most popular research.

Through Macro Pro, you get Daily Portfolio Solutions: Keith’s actual long-only retirement account, updated every trading day with positions ranked by size.

With Premium Pass, you get Weekly updates to that same account and much more.

And if you’d rather have us manage it directly, Hedgeye Asset Management offers actively managed portfolios built on the Hedgeye process.

Learn more about how we approach portfolio construction by visiting our Process Guide.

Join us in a #BetterWay.

Hedgeye Communications analyst Andrew Freedman and and Health Policy Sector Head Emily Evans broke down AnthropicAI's battle with the federal government.

Beneath the surface a debate - or maybe it is all out war - rages over the future of A.I. It has a future, there seems to be agreement on that. However, the fault lines have formed between AnthropicAI’s vision for pre-emptive regulation for “safety” versus a more wide open approach like we saw in the early days of the internet.

Which vision prevails matters. Anthropic argues in favor of state level regulation, an adversarial approach to the U.S. military but very powerful and appealing products. Everyone else, OpenAI, Google etc, are less combative but also more supportive of open source and open weight models that may triumph in the end.

There is more.

Please watch Andrew Freedman and Emily Evans discuss it.

WATCH THE REPLAY HERE

ABOUT EMILY EVANS

Emily serves as Sector Head for Health Policy at Hedgeye Risk Management, where she acts as a translator and guide for investors navigating the health care industry. Her work focuses on areas where politics, policy, and regulation exert outsized influence, including managed care, biopharma, supply chain management, and health care services.

Emily’s research is data-centric, leveraging macro trends in employment, insurance coverage, and inflation to inform investment insights, even when policymaking itself is not data-driven. She is also an active supporter of the health care start-up community in Nashville, helping emerging companies incorporate macro awareness into their strategic planning.

Prior to joining Hedgeye, Emily served as an Investment Limited Partner responsible for municipal bond underwriting at J.C. Bradford & Co. in Nashville, Tennessee. She also spent nine years serving on the Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County Council, as well as the Mayor’s Homelessness Commission, bringing a public policy perspective that continues to inform her work today.

Twitter/X: @HedgeyeEEvans

LinkedIn: Emily Evans

ABOUT ANDREW FREEDMAN

Andrew Freedman leads Communications Sector research at Hedgeye, covering Internet, Media, Cable, and Telecom, and also co-heads the firm’s Software Sector. His work has driven several high-profile long and short calls across major platform companies, including Netflix, Meta, and Google. Andrew was early in identifying the end of Netflix’s growth runway, as well as the peak of the digital advertising cycle in October 2021 and its subsequent bottom in January 2023.

Andrew joined Hedgeye in 2014. Prior to assuming his current leadership roles, he served as a Senior Equity Research Analyst covering U.S. Health Care equities, with a specialization in Health Care IT. In that role, he developed deep expertise across electronic medical records, population health, value-based care, telehealth, and related segments.

Before joining Hedgeye, Andrew played a key role at Clearbrook Global Advisors, where he focused on asset allocation, risk analysis, and investment manager research.

Andrew’s research approach combines proprietary high-frequency data trackers with detailed industry modeling and fundamental analysis, forming the foundation of his differentiated, process-driven investment insights.

Twitter/X: @HedgeyeComm

Research: Andrew Freedman, CFA

If you’re new to Hedgeye’s process, there’s one asset you need to understand before anything else: the U.S. Dollar.

The Dollar is the single most important variable in global macro investing, and as the world’s dominant reserve currency, every major asset class from stocks and bonds to gold, oil, Bitcoin, and emerging market equities orbits around it.

WHY THE DOLLAR MATTERS

Think of the U.S. Dollar as the beating heart of global finance—when it strengthens, liquidity tightens around the world, borrowing costs rise for countries and corporations that owe debts denominated in dollars, risk appetite diminishes, and volatility tends to increase.

When the Dollar weakens, the opposite happens: financial conditions loosen, capital flows into riskier assets like commodities, emerging markets, and global equities, and volatility typically subsides.

This is how the plumbing of global finance actually works. The Dollar is how countries settle debts, price commodities, and move capital, so when it moves, everything else has to adjust.

Hedgeye CEO Keith R. McCullough has built a process around this reality, treating the Dollar not as the anchor for the entire global asset allocation—get the Dollar right, and a lot of other positions fall into place.

THE RISK RANGE™ SIGNAL: YOUR EDGE IN A NOISY MARKET

Before we can talk about what the Dollar is doing right now, you need to understand the primary tool we use to read it: The Risk Range™ Signal.

Built on the fractal mathematics pioneered by Benoit Mandelbrot, the Risk Range™ is a multi-factor, multi-duration model that uses price, volume, and volatility to generate a dynamic probable range for any asset that trades.

“Financial markets are fractal in nature, meaning that the market prices follow patterns that exhibit similar characteristics over time.” — Benoit Mandelbrot

Here’s how we read our fractal Risk Range™ Signal:

1. The Low end of the Risk Range™ (LRR) = where you want to be buying. The asset has probable upside from here (#oversold).

2. The Top end of the Risk Range™ (TRR) = where you want to be selling or reducing exposure. The probable upside is limited (#overbought).

Beyond the range itself, the Risk Range™ Signal operates across three time durations that help you distinguish between short-term noise and meaningful market moves:

1. TRADE — immediate-term duration (3 weeks or less)

2. TREND — intermediate-term duration (3 months or more)

3. TAIL — long-term secular duration (3 years or less)

When an asset is Bullish on both TRADE and TREND with higher highs and higher lows in the Risk Range™, that’s the cleanest signal to own it.

And when it starts flashing lower highs and breaks TRADE or TREND support, that’s when you reduce, sell, and watch correlation moves.

Every morning, our subscribers receive a TRADE range with TREND direction.

WHAT THE DOLLAR IS SIGNALING RIGHT NOW

The U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) is currently Bullish TRADE and TREND as of the morning of March 4, 2026, a significant phase transition from where it’s been.

Over the past several months, the Dollar experienced a substantial decline from its November–December 2025 highs above 100 to below 96, before staging a counter-trend bounce in February that has now matured into a full Bullish TREND breakout.

Just one week ago, the Dollar was signaling Neutral TREND, and before that, it had been Bearish on both TRADE and TREND durations for weeks.

The sequence of events was textbook Hedgeye process:

1. The Dollar made a series of higher lows in the Risk Range™, signaling that selling pressure was exhausting.

2. It broke above immediate-term TRADE resistance, flipping from Bearish to Neutral.

3. Confirmed a Bullish TREND breakout as of early March, with the DXY now sitting near the top-end of the Risk Range™.

McCullough’s signaling process nailed this transition.

We covered our USD short (via UUP) and sold key FX longs against it before the weekend headlines about Middle East escalation hit the wires.

As Keith put it on The Macro Show: “The AI Signals usually know more than humans do.”

THE QUAD CONNECTION: WHY USD + OIL = #QUAD3

To understand why this Dollar move matters, you also need to understand Hedgeye’s Growth, Inflation, Policy (GIP) model—the economic framework that drives every asset allocation decision.

The GIP model tracks two things on a year-over-year rate-of-change basis based on economic growth and inflation. From there, you get four economic environments, or “Quads”:

Right now, the U.S. economy is in a Monthly Quad 3 for March, meaning growth is slowing while inflation is accelerating.

The #1 causal factor driving McCullough’s USD and Bond Yield Signals is the rate of change in Hedgeye’s proprietary CPI Nowcast.

This matters for the Dollar because Quad 3 is the stagflationary environment where the Dollar can stop going down and commodities can go up at the same time—which is exactly what’s happening: Oil Up, Dollar Up.

The USD’s immediate-term TRADE correlation with Brent Oil has spiked to +0.92, while its correlation with Gold is running at +0.64.

These are tight positive correlations that confirm the Quad 3 stagflation dynamic playing out in real time, and a departure from the typical Dollar-up-Gold-down relationship that most investors expect.

In Quad 3, both can rise together because the Dollar is strengthening as a flight-to-safety trade while commodities are rising on supply disruption and inflation expectations.

McCullough’s process identified this shift before it became consensus. If it even is consensus...the pool of uninformed volume chasing last quarter’s playbook is probably bigger than most people want to admit.

FOLLOW THE SIGNAL, NOT THE NARRATIVE

The beauty of the Hedgeye process is that you don’t need to predict geopolitics or listen to CNBC pundits.

You need a multi-factor, multi-duration signaling process that tells you what’s actually happening in price, volume, and volatility—and the process to act on it.

As McCullough wrote in his book Master The Market: “The only way to combat uncertainty is to have a rules-based, repeatable process.”

The Dollar’s Risk Range™ Signal is the first domino. When you get that right, the rest of your macro portfolio falls into place.

This week only, we’re opening up our daily macro insights, top stock & ETF ideas, and actionable Buy/Sell signals so you can experience exactly how our subscribers stay ahead of the market.

Take full advantage of FREE ALL ACCESS WEEK (March 2–6).

On September 3, 2025, Hedgeye Communications analyst Andrew Freedman told our subscribers on The Call @ Hedgeye that Google (GOOGL) was about to move higher than $210, significantly higher.

“I’m looking at out-year numbers,” Freedman said on air. “I think it represents a pretty big turning point for the company...it’s trading in a mid to high teens P/E multiple, which is far below what the DCF valuation implies.”

Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough pushed him: “Beyond $230, do you see it materially higher than $230? Give us some rope on that.”

Freedman’s response: “It could be over $300...the path is a lot higher here for this stock.”

Fifty-three trading days later, the stock was well above $300, up over +25%.

That’s the Hedgeye process in action. It all happened live on The Call before the market opened.

What Is The Call @ Hedgeye?

Before 2020, The Call @ Hedgeye was our internal research meeting. Now, it’s streamed live, every weekday at 7:45 AM ET, directly to subscribers.

What you get, every single morning:

• Fundamental stock analysis from 40+ sector analysts covering every corner of the market — Retail, Tech, Healthcare, Industrials, Energy, Gaming, D.C. Policy, and more.

• Keith McCullough’s Top 5 most actionable ideas — filtered through his proprietary Risk Range™ Signals and Hedgeye’s macro model.

• Long AND short ideas — something you’ll almost never get from traditional Wall Street research, where less than 10% of stocks carry a “sell” rating in any given year.

• Replays and summaries are available after every show.

No other firm is livestreaming their research team meeting with this caliber of analysts, every trading day. Not CNBC. Not Bloomberg. And certainly no other hedge funds.

As Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough writes in Master the Market:

“The timeless, dirty little secret about Wall Street is this: It’s all about the money. Media is no different. Any financial ‘news’ outlet that suggests it provides actionable insights for the average investor is lying. It’s all about collecting advertising dollars.”

The Call @ Hedgeye was built to be the antidote. No advertising revenue to protect. No corporate sponsors to appease.

Hedgeye gets paid when subscribers protect, preserve, and compound their hard-earned capital. Full stop.

Big Calls, Real Results

American Healthcare REIT (AHR): +146% after Featured on The Call

On May 28, 2024, Brian McGough — then Hedgeye’s REITs Sector Head, now leading the firm’s Retail coverage — spotlighted American Healthcare REIT (AHR) on The Call. At the time, the stock was trading near $14.

One year later, AHR had surged +146%, making it one of the biggest wins ever flagged on the show.

McGough’s thesis was an accelerating rate of change in cash flow, expanding senior housing margins, improving occupancy, and a balance sheet that had been dramatically de-levered from 9x pre-IPO to roughly 4.5x.

As McGough put it: “There are few companies with such a clear path to upside to consensus and an absolute acceleration in rate of change in cash flow as we have with AHR.”

You can read the full recap here.

Paul Glenchur Calls the IEEPA Tariff Ruling — Months in Advance

On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs — invalidating the sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Senior TMT Policy and Legal Analyst Paul Glenchur had been laying out the entire case play-by-play on The Call since April 2025.

While others scrambled to react, Hedgeye subscribers had been prepared for months.

You can read the full recap here.

The Person Behind the Process

There’s a reason The Call works. It starts with the person running it.

Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough is up at 4:30 AM every day. By 5:00, he’s running data through his Risk Range™ Signals.

By 7:45, he’s live on The Call with his full team. By 9:00, he’s hosting The Macro Show. Then intraday signals. Then coaching notes. Every single trading day.

In his own words:

“For me, investing has never been about being the smartest guy in the room. It’s always been about getting up at 5 a.m., putting two feet on the floor and doing the hard work most people are unwilling to do. If a hockey player named Mucker from Thunder Bay can do this, anyone can.”

Just as David Goggins’ discipline has become a light for those seeking purpose, McCullough’s relentless commitment to process and truth has become a beacon for investors across #HedgeyeNation.

He is, as he says, for The People. Right there in the ring with you. Every morning.

The Call @ Hedgeye. Live. Every weekday at 7:45 AM ET.

Watch The Call @ Hedgeye LIVE & FREE this week, March 2-6 by clicking here.

Fartcoin is down more than -95% from its January 2025 peak, collapsing from $2.70 to under $0.15 in just over a year.

Like many of the high-flying memecoins that surged during the late 24’ speculative frenzy, Fartcoin was being driven more by chart-astrologers and hype than utility or fundamentals.

If you’re new to Hedgeye, we covered Fartcoin’s illustrious rise on X.

In December 2024, we joked that:

At its peak, Fartcoin’s market cap reached $2.4 billion, making it greater than 70% of all American publicly-traded companies at the time.

Yes, a memecoin named after bodily functions briefly was larger than the majority of Corporate America.

That was the joke.

“FOR DUST YOU ARE, AND TO DUST YOU WILL RETURN.” — Genesis 3:19

Fast forward to today: Fartcoin trades below fifteen cents with a market cap near $145 million.

Fartcoin’s plunge is not happening in isolation.

The broader Memecoin Index is down over -85% from its December ‘24 highs.

WHY THIS IS HAPPENING

Memecoins aren’t priced on cash flows, adoption curves, or “real-world utility.”

They’re priced on:

• attention

• liquidity

• reflexivity

When attention peaks, the price peaks. When attention leaves, momentum fades and holders become sellers.

What’s left is a sad, desolate market struggling for life, with the vast majority of coins suffering the same fate as Fartcoin.

While crypto analysts love to say that “Bitcoin isn’t crypto, and crypto isn’t Bitcoin,” in practice… it kind of is.

The memecoin index has a 30-day intermediate-term positive correlation of +0.92.

AS CRYPTO CRASHES, WE’VE BEEN SHORT.

We don’t track Fartcoin in our risk management product, but we do track Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and more.

As a Gen-Z user of our Crypto Trend Tracker, I can genuinely attest that this is the best value product for anyone trying to make money in crypto without liquidating their account.

No reddit narratives, just pure math.

Here’s proof it works.

The truth is, Risk Management and Maximalism are functionally aligned.

The maxi objective is to own as much BTC as possible.

That means:

1. Sell Bearish TREND breakdowns

2. Avoid 50% drawdowns (like from $126k --> $60k)

3. Buy back the BTC after it flips back to Bullish TREND

If you’d like to see a full edition of what subscribers receive in their inbox daily, click here.

Start your free trial — first 30 days on us.

“Few Americans understand just how great the Great Lakes really are.” — John Bacon

That line hits harder when you grew up around them, because they don’t care what you meant to do, or what you thought the forecast implied.

Once you’re out there and the wind changes, the only thing that matters is whether you have a process for what the water can actually do to you.

It’s a clean parable for global investing, because most investors don’t actually “invest” in a global sense at all — they hug the shoreline of the familiar, they stay inside the same domestic exposures they’ve been trained to call “diversified,” and they tell themselves that staying put is prudence, when it’s often just passive obedience.

In other words, they don’t lack intelligence; they lack navigation and process.

They have access to the entire world of investing across currencies, commodities, global equities, credit, rates, sector styles, factor exposures, and the 50+ largest economies that drive the world’s real demand function — but they keep running the same small loop between a U.S. index fund, a growth-heavy equity sleeve, and whatever narrative the Old Wall is pushing as “safe” this quarter, which is exactly how you end up getting surprised by waves you were told weren’t there, right up until they are.

Hedgeye was built to be the opposite of that.

Not as another “opinion” shop, not as another narrative factory, and definitely not as a faith-based, buy-and-hold comfort machine that collects whether you make money or not, but as a risk management service built around a repeatable process that respects the rate of change, timing, and reality that “the long-term moving averages aren’t signal.”

The Real Reason Most People Don’t Invest Globally

It’s not because they’re too conservative.

It’s because they don’t have a process to do it, and without a process, global investing becomes overwhelming.

Too many markets, too many headlines, too many moving parts...so the default becomes what Wall Street wants: stay local, stay concentrated, stay passive, stay in the same exposures, and call it “discipline.” The kids call it HODL, Wall St. calls it dollar-cost averaging.

At Hedgeye, we do the hard work necessary to professionally invest across the globe.

We measure and map the world’s largest economies with a systematic lens that tracks the cycle through the rate of change in Growth and Inflation, then forces that macro regime work through real-time market behavior.

Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough‘s portfolio is an expression of: Where is the math improving, and where is it breaking down?

This is what we define as “Signal to Quad,” or our proprietary Full-Cycle Investing Process.

The Signal is built on Keith’s Risk Range™ Signals, which use price, volume and volatility to determine probable ranges and turn market timing into something repeatable instead of emotional.

The Quad is the economic regime model — measuring Growth, Inflation, Policy — that maps the Cycle through time.

Put simply, the Signal captures what markets are doing right now, the Quad captures what the economy is doing underneath it, and when those two layers align you start positioning for the next high-probability move instead of defending yesterday’s bag.

That’s why our outperformance isn’t an accident.

We put numbers to that in our recently published material: country-level allocations like Turkey, Mexico, and Israel have been beating consensus exposures, and the point wasn’t the countries; the point was the process that finds them, sizes them, and — crucially — knows when to get out.

Timing Is The Edge — And We Built The Process Around It

Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough has written the origin story a thousand different ways, but the lesson never changes: being right on direction but wrong on timing is the fastest way to get hurt.

The market doesn’t care what you think it should do, and the only antidote is a rules-based process that pivots when the data changes.

This is where our work looks nothing like the Old Wall, because Old Wall wants to be right in public, while Hedgeye wants to win in P&L terms. That requires humility, flexibility, and the willingness to change when the Signal changes.

The compounding game never ends provided that you can rotate your hard-earned capital across Asset Classes, Sector Styles, and Factor Exposures.

Rotation is the whole point.

It’s not about “timing every market move perfectly,” it’s about stepping aside when risk is rising, re-entering when conditions improve, and refusing to let a drawdown become a multi-year prison sentence for your capital.

Process At Hedgeye Is Not Just Macro — It’s Quant + Fundamental + Policy, Across Duration

Our team is comprised of 40+ analysts, and that’s not a headcount flex — it’s the structural reason the Hedgeye process works the way it does.

We’re not trying to win an argument on TV, we’re trying to compound capital through full-cycle volatility with a repeatable framework that can actually be executed in real time.

Hedge-Eye. If you could look inside a world-class hedge fund, what would you see?

Our process is a combination of quant, macro, and fundamental, all at once. The Signal gives you the real-time market behavior, the Quads give you the regime, and our analysts give you the bottom-up truth that keeps you from confusing a factor move with a fundamental shift.

Keith Built It For The People — Not Just For The Street

Keith founded Hedgeye “to build something different: A firm that puts everyday investors first—using a data driven, hedge fund-level process,” and the same process trusted by top money managers is “built to work for your portfolio.”

That’s the mission statement in practice.

This isn’t just research you read. It’s research you execute, with tools designed to get you in and out — because “who gets you out?” is the question Old Wall never answers, and the question Hedgeye was built to answer every single day with #timestamped moves.

Macro Pro Is Where That Experience Becomes Whole.

Macro Pro bundles The Macro Show, Early Look, The Call, Real-Time Alerts, Risk Range Signals, and daily Portfolio Solutions that shows how Keith is positioned in his long-only account — not as theory, but in practice.

Your Chance To Get In

On February 24 at 11AM ET, Keith is reviewing what’s happening across the globe and taking questions live, which is the closest thing you can get — as an self-directed investor — to sitting inside a institutional-grade process, with the captain walking you through the map, the weather, and the positioning in real time.

If you’re tired of being confined to the same domestic block, the same consensus exposures, and the same “stay the course” language that was designed to keep you docile while someone else gets paid, then Macro Pro is the boat ramp to a Better Way.

The waters don’t care what you think or how fancy your boat is. Markets don’t either.

But if you have a process — a repeatable one — you can navigate anywhere.

Join us.

Most U.S. investors are still heavily concentrated in the same exposures: the classic 60/40 portfolio, U.S. large-cap growth, and The Hoodie’s latest crypto disaster.

But while those portfolios have been getting hit, our country-level allocations have been smoking the consensus exposures that a majority of 60/40 portfolios and Old Wall Investors have been long of.

To put numbers on it, since Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough added them to ETF Pro Plus:

• Turkey: +22.1%

• Mexico: +17.4%

• Israel: +19.2%

That outperformance isn’t an accident.

It’s what happens when you start managing capital through a repeatable, globally diversified full-cycle process.

THE SIGNAL TO QUAD

At Hedgeye, we combine quantitative, bottom-up, and macro analysis with an emphasis on timing.

The way we do this is with our Signal to Quad framework.

The Signal is based on our Risk Range™ product, built on a proprietary model using the price, volume, and volatility of underlying assets.

This tool was developed by our CEO Keith McCullough during his years as a hedge fund manager to augment his team’s fundamental research views.

The Quads are derived from our GIP Model — short for Growth, Inflation, Policy — which maps the rate of change in GDP and CPI across time.

The Signal captures market behavior in real time.

The Quad captures the economic regime driving it.

When you combine the two, you stop reacting to noise and start positioning for what’s coming.

Let’s walk through an example.

AN EXAMPLE: MEXICO VS. THE U.S.

With a Quad Count of 2-1-2 for the next 3 quarters, Mexico (EWW) is better than the USA’s at 1-4-3.

That alone sufficiently explains Mexico’s 1-month return of +6.4% versus QQQ’s -1.7%.

Mexico was added when its Signal was Bullish TRADE and TREND, backed by one of the strongest forward Quad Counts on the board.

Macro analyst Ryan Ricci and Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough explained on The Macro Show that when The Signal and Quad align, you rotate out of the “outright disasters” the retail crowd is bag-holding — and into assets with better math, better Quad counts, and better performance.

That rotation is the difference between reacting to losses and managing risk.

Wall Street will happily sell you the next MicroStrategy or BitMiner.

What they won’t provide is a disciplined exit when the math turns.

And that leads to the only question that actually matters:

WHO GETS YOU OUT?

Here’s an excerpt from Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough’s Early Look on February 18th, 2026:

The most important thing to understand is what’s NOT in the portfolio anymore. What I sold. What I got out of entirely.

This is where most people lose the game before it starts. In a traditional Retirement Account, you’re told to stay put. Especially for “passive indexing” (not Active Managers).

Passive’s marketing machine is designed that way, not for your returns, but for their fees.

“Tax efficiency” is the polite way of saying: we collect whether you make money or not. And when a #Quad4 30-foot Rogue Wave is building on the horizon, they’ll still be collecting while your capital takes the hit.

Here’s what they cannot explain to you. I want you to sit with each one of these:

1. There is no risk management plan for your hard-earned capital. Not a static one. Not a modern one. Certainly not a dynamic one that updates in real-time as the Quad Shifts. They don’t have the process. So they don’t have the plan.

2. You are being asked to voluntarily absorb 10-50% drawdowns. Crashes. Bear markets. “Temporary” losses on capital it took you years to build. And the explanation you get is: stay the course. That’s not a strategy. That’s a posture.

3. There are safe ports. You just need a process to find them. Gold. Energy. International Equity. Short Duration Bonds. The #GoAnywhere framework exists because the alternatives to risk always exist.

Getting out is a process. It’s not panic. It’s not “market timing” in the way they’ve trained you to fear it. And like any skill, the more you practice it with real positions in real-time, the faster and cleaner the execution gets.

While QQQ has dropped over -5% from all-time highs, our Go-Anywhere process has been making money elsewhere.

STAY WITH THE PROCESS

There’s a better way to front-run modern Market Structure and the Flows of The Machine.

If you have a #GoAnywhere Strategy, there’s been less risk to manage.

Join us in a better way to invest.

To learn more about our Full-Cycle investing process, visit our Process Guide.

And for our top Macro ideas, Long and Short, subscribe to ETF Pro Plus for globally diversified exposure using the Signal to Quad framework.

“Diversified” isn’t diversified if you never invest outside of the U.S.

One of the most important reviews in our Macro Themes Decks is WHEN to allocate capital to countries other than the USA.

We’ve nailed some big ones in recent years – we’ve also gotten you OUT of some big winners before they imploded (India, China, etc.).

Our current #GoAnywhere EM Alpha Dogs look like:

1. Long Mexico (EWW) has a TRENDING 3-month Full Investing Cycle Return of +19.0%

2. Long Turkey (TUR) has a TRENDING 3-month Full Investing Cycle Return of +22.9%

3. Long Israel (EIS) has a TRENDING 3-month Full Investing Cycle Return of +17.3%

If these #GoAnywhere Asset Allocations have been in YOUR accounts, you’d know that. They’re in The Fam’s.

So why do consensus money managers miss these major Global Macro moves?

The answer is simple: They don’t have a process to do what we do.

At Hedgeye, our process starts with our Growth, Inflation, Policy Model (GIP).

It measures and maps 50+ countries covering ~90% of global GDP and classifies them into one of four economic “Quads,” based on the Rate of Change (RoC) of growth and inflation.

From there, we align those economic conditions with Keith McCullough’s quantitative Risk Range™ Signal, built on:

• Price

• Volume

• Volatility

The strategy is simple: Signal → Quad.

The result is a truly 1-of-1, full-cycle “Quantamental” investing process.

A Current Case Study: Japan

Japan is a great recent example of how this framework works in real time.

Just 12 trading days ago, Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough added Japan (JPXN) to ETF Pro Plus as his quantitative Signal screened Bullish TREND within a Quad 1 economic environment.

Since then, it’s been an all-star.

As of writing, Japanese equities have ripped +7.8% week-over-week following a major political win for Takaichi.

And despite Macro Tourists freaking out about Japan’s 2-Year Yield hitting its highest level in 30 years, Keith called the move exactly what it was: a #Quad1 signal.

Japan remains firmly in Quad 1 on our G20 Quad Map, and the Takaichi catalyst likely reinforces the conditions keeping it there.

We’ve been long Japan (JPXN) since January 23, now up +10.2% in less than two weeks for Hedgeye Nation.

JOIN US: Q126 Macro Themes Mid-Quarter Update

As we move deeper into Q1, the setup is shifting, and we’re here to help you front-run the moves that matter.

Wednesday, Feb 11 @ 11:00am ET, Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough and the Macro team will host our 1Q26 Macro Themes Mid-Quarter Update—reserved exclusively for institutional clients, Macro Pro, and Pro Risk Manager members.

Keith and our Macro team will cover:

1. USA: #Quad1 Goldilocks

2. Rate Cuts: America’s Decelerating Inflation

3. Short USD, Long Gold, Metals & EM

Ready to position ahead of these trends? Unlock full access to Hedgeye’s Q1 Macro Themes Mid-Quarter Update call (and more) with Macro Pro.

Subscribe before midnight Friday for just $6,499/year, $3,501 off standard pricing.

Or, email support@hedgeye.com to upgrade now and get in before Wednesday’s call.

For newcomers to Bitcoin, the recent price plunge may feel like a shock.

Bitcoin slid under the $67,000 level in U.S. morning hours Thursday, extending a month-long selloff that has tracked weakness across global risk assets.

Over the past 24 hours alone, crypto liquidations crossed $1 billion, wiping out roughly $980 million in bullish leveraged bets as the slide forced traders to close positions they could not keep funded.

“As a reminder to Bitcoin “fans”, things that are crashing can and will crash from what they hoped were “oversold” levels…” – Keith McCullough, Top 3 Things, 2/5/2026

Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough has been warning since November 2025 that Bitcoin’s selloffs are not random. They’re the natural consequence of an industry built on leverage.

Crypto influencers like Tom Lee and Michael Saylor have built brands around the idea that “you can’t time markets” — a convenient mantra when your business model depends on others buying what you’re selling.

The so-called institutionalization of crypto through corporate treasuries and levered ETFs has made things worse, not better.

WE DON’T “HODL”. WE RISK MANAGE.

We risk manage Bitcoin the same way we risk manage every other commodity:

• Quantitative signals

• Fractal math

• Multi-duration trend analysis

• A rules-based process

So when we say Bitcoin is signaling Bearish TRADE and TREND, we’re not making a vague statement.

We’re describing a mathematical setup across multiple durations.

• TRADE = immediate-term signal (weeks or less)

• TREND = intermediate-term signal (3+ months)

Proof in the Process

The chart below shows exactly why Hedgeye’s Bitcoin Signaling process has been the most accurate on the Street.

Our Bitcoin Signal continues to preserve & protect our community from Bitcoin drawdowns amounting to -30.2% since last month, and -48.1% since OCT.

And we weren’t alone internally.

Hedgeye Asset Management Portfolio Manager David Salem, a veteran institutional allocator who previously oversaw $8B+ for 800+ endowed foundations as founding President and CIO of TIFF, also captured the longer-term Bitcoin cycle correctly in Capital Allocation Pro.

CAPITAL ALLOCATION PRO: LONGER-TERM PORTFOLIOS, LESS TURNOVER

Capital Allocation Pro was long Bitcoin from 4/28/25 through 10/14/25, capturing a +19.1% gain over that window.

Since then, the strategy has not re-entered, by design.

Capital Allocation Pro is built for lower turnover and cycle-aware capital deployment, not trading every bounce that flips the Signal to Bullish TREND.

As the Capital Allocation team noted in their January commentary:

BUILT FOR LONGER-TERM INVESTORS

Led by David Salem, Portfolio Manager at Hedgeye Asset Management, Capital Allocation Pro applies Hedgeye’s Macro research and signals to four risk-tiered model portfolios designed for advisors, CIOs, and self-directed investors who want systematic risk management without daily trading.

Markets don’t move in straight lines. Capital Allocation Pro helps you navigate the full cycle with structure, clarity, and risk management. Try it commitment-free with our 90-day money-back guarantee.

Get started with Capital Allocation Pro.

Disclaimer:

Capital Allocation Pro is produced by Hedgeye Asset Management, LLC (“HAM”) for Hedgeye Risk Management, LLC (“Hedgeye”). Access to and use of its content is subject to Hedgeye’s Terms of Service which you agree to by subscribing to or accessing Capital Allocation Pro.

Capital Allocation Pro is a newsletter publication and does not constitute investment advice or an advisory service. Subscribing to or accessing Capital Allocation Pro does not create an investment advisory relationship between you and HAM, and you will not be considered a client of HAM by subscribing to Capital Allocation Pro.

Hedgeye is the controlling parent of HAM and receives compensation from HAM for providing operational, administrative, research, and other shared services.

If you’ve been paying attention this week, you can feel it—the uncertainty, the volatility, the emotional fragility across markets.

The sharp rally in precious metals has now clearly corrected. But how investors experience that move depends entirely on their positioning.

If you had FOMO and chased silver above $100, the drawdown feels catastrophic.

But if you’ve been fully allocated to precious metals since early 2025, it looks more like disciplined risk management at work.

To put the recent move in perspective, including last week’s correction: Gold is still up +74% from where Full Cycle investors built positions in February of last year. On a week-over-week basis, Gold was down just -2.4%.

Week over week, silver got smoked -22.5%. Even after that drawdown, it remains +61.5% over the past three months and +138.8% since we added it last June.

In volatility terms, Gold’s 30-day volatility is now greater than Bitcoin’s, with Gold volatility (GVZ) surging above 44 as shown in today’s Chart of the Day.

Importantly, as Gold volatility (GVZ) went vertical, our process had already trimmed Gold down to a MIN position size.

HOW WE PREPARED INVESTORS

Before this correction happened, Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough saw the signs written on the wall: upside volatility was building.

Here’s an excerpt of what Keith wrote in his January 23rd Early Look note to subscribers:

“What doesn’t suck?

1. Something that’s going up when it should in #Quad1 (Precious & Base Metals)

2. Something that you’re really long of that’s going straight up

3. Something that’s signaling Bullish TRADE and TREND @Hedgeye

WHEN do you have to start to risk manage something that doesn’t suck that’s going vertical?

1. When the upside in price starts to perpetuate Upside Volatility

2. Upside Volatility is still Volatility, so you need to know WHEN that’s having a Volatility Regime Shift.

3. Gold Volatility (GVZ), for example, has shot up to 28. That’s not a buy and panic-chase Signal!

The last time Gold Vol (GVZ) broke out above 25, that wasn’t an immediate-term good thing. Gold Vol ultimately peaked around 33 in Mid-October. That’s WHEN we were able to re-load on our Core Asset Allocation < $4000/oz.

“Oh, but KM, that was only a -10% correction.”

LOL.

If Gold corrects -10% in the next 2 weeks, that’ll be the ONLY thing Crypto Bros talk about for 6 months. “See! Told you gold was a boomer relic!”“

Then, on January 27th, Keith #timestamped the Gold volatility setup on X/Twitter:

And just to make sure, in our Macro Week Summary Notes — our Friday wrap-up to all subscribers — we added:

“Our fully loaded Asset Allocations in Metals continued to absolutely rip this week with Gold, Silver, Lithium, Platinum & Palladium all hitting fresh all-time highs. As the process dictates, we sell-SOME at the TRR and look to replant near the LRR (low-end of the Risk Range™).”

That’s not some yoyo on Twitter with a narrative.

That’s a rules-based process in action.

IN TURN, OUR SUBSCRIBERS WERE PREPARED.

One subscriber kindly wrote us after last week’s correction:

“I am 74 years old and since my 30s my investments have been almost exclusively in Precious Metals. Physical, Mining Shares, etc. I have been a Hedgeye subscriber for a while and recently went to Macro Pro. I have made a big return over the past 40 years doing that and especially in the past year in my portfolio. However, after listening to what you said about being older and the need to diversify to reduce risk that may lead to a loss from which you do not have time to recover, I did exactly that using the Hedgeye guidance.

This wisdom saved my ass on 1/30/26. For this every cent I spent on Hedgeye was returned to me ten times over.

Thank you for that.”

That’s why we do this.

Real people. Real capital. Real outcomes.

GOING FORWARD

There’s a risk management reason for everything we do. Position sizing is about math, signals, and managing risk before inevitable corrections happen.

As Keith said on The Macro Show this morning, “There’s been constant coaching about not chasing.”

If you want to see our Full-Cycle Investing Process in action, join us this Wednesday at 9:00AM ET for a FREE edition of The Macro Show.

Live on The Macro Show (Free Edition), Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough will walk through the signals that matter most right now across metals, equities, and the broader macro environment.

See you Wednesday.

It’s been a Heavy Metal banger of a Bull Market, and not just in gold and silver.

If you’ve only been long the precious metals, you’ve missed the broader Asset Allocation opportunity.

We’ve owned a diversified basket of nine metals, including Steel (SLX), which has gained +30.9% since Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough added it to the long side in ETF Pro Plus.

The Fundamental Case for Steel

Steel is a foundational necessity for infrastructure, industrial production, and national defense.

On January 7, President Trump announced that he would ask Congress for a $1.5 trillion 2027 military budget, a figure that would imply roughly +50% year-over-year growth versus FY2026, marking the largest defense spending increase since the Korean War.

In addition, the recently passed $900 billion National Defense Authorization Act reinforces a strong commitment to expanding military capacity amid intensifying great-power competition.

In early November, Industrials analyst Jay Van Sciver emphasized that steel remains structurally cyclical and globally competitive, with domestic producers fundamentally tethered to growth and capacity utilization.

As a result, select industrials Signal Strength Stocks like Huntington Ingalls, HII have been on an absolute tear alongside Steel, SLX.

Macro: The Quad Countdown

The broader setup began with what we call a Quad Countdown.

Our Quad framework classifies the economy based on the Rate of Change in two variables: growth and inflation.

From a macro perspective, the setup was defined by a Quad 3 → Quad 2 → Quad 1 sequence.

Growth first troughed in Quad 3, stabilized through Quad 2, and is now re-accelerating as inflation pressures ease.

Quad 1 is historically the most favorable environment for highly cyclical exposures, as demand improves while cost pressures ease.

Steel fits squarely into that playbook as an Early Cyclical in a #Quad1 Broadening Bull Market:

The Signal: Quantitative Confirmation

Macro and fundamentals set the backdrop. The Signal determines the timing.

As the Quad Countdown played out, Hedgeye CEO Keith McCullough’s quantitative Signals turned constructive across Early Cyclicals, with steel, copper, and lithium confirming Bullish TRENDs.

That confirmation is what matters. Signals don’t care about narratives or headlines; they care about what capital is actually doing.

Since being added to ETF Pro Plus on September 10, steel has emerged as a non-consensus winner, gaining +30.9% while steadily printing fresh all-time highs for Hedgeye Nation.

The Bottom Line

Our process is designed to catch big Macro themes like Steel and Huntington Ingalls before they take off.

You don’t need to own what everyone else owns to compound capital.

You need to own what’s working, even if it’s non-consensus or ignored by Old Wall narratives.

As Keith put it on The David Lin Report, “I want to buy the thing that’s correcting and signaling higher highs — preferably higher all-time highs.”

For a deeper dive into how we’re positioning across our nine metal allocations, global equities, currencies, and more, watch Keith’s recent conversation on The David Lin Report.

And to see the full list of our best macro-driven ETF ideas, subscribe to ETF Pro Plus.

Try 30 days free, no credit card required.