Guild’s Basic Needs Index
Welcome to October
The midterms will fill the void between now and the start of earnings season, but they are not among the three things that at the moment, perhaps, are most influential in strengthening or hurting the attractiveness of stocks. We’d say those three things are the bond market, earnings, and oil
You Can Give Up Modelling War Outcomes, But Not Energy Prices
On one point, the competing analysts of Wall Street agree: this is a banner year for corporate profits, with S&P 500 earnings on track to rise by roughly a third. On what comes next, they part ways. (Strategists tend to be moderate in their targets, so we wouldn’t expect anyone
A World Growing in Unison Needs Cheaper Oil
Nearly every economy on earth is growing, and American companies are earning far more than anyone expected in January. Analysts now see S&P 500 earnings per share rising 29% this year over last, up from about 13% when the year began. Stocks have not kept pace; the S&P 500 sits
China’s Eternally Postponed “Rebalancing”
Xi Jinping arrives in Washington later this month; when the two presidents met in Beijing in May, Xi reached rhetorically for the “Thucydides Trap” — national security scholar Graham Allison’s framing of a rising power and an established one stumbling toward an unnecessary and accidental conflict. He may reach for
Trading, Trending, and Treading Water
As we wrote last week, the Treasury said on August 19 that it would at least double its buyback operations in the ten-to-thirty-year sector, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion apiece. Long yields fell on the news… and climbed straight back. Secretary Bessent called it a “Treasury Twist.”
Bessent Blinks
We were planning to write about rates already after watching them climb for months. On Tuesday, as we were wrapping up this piece, yields on thirty-year Treasuries touched 5.339 percent, their highest since 2007. Then on Wednesday morning, the Treasury Department for all intents and purposes said “Enough!” and announced
Very Different Heavy Metals, Very Different Drivers, Both Have A Way of Glowing
First: Uranium The tightest areas in the uranium supply chain are downstream of the mine. Uranium itself (that is, processed ore) as we write, is at $86.90 per pound, roughly where it’s been since April. The two stages that come next — converting it into a gas, then “enriching” that
Freeing and Moving Electrons Remains a Big Theme
In last week’s commentary, we briefly discussed the destruction and fire sale of a large, highly leveraged hedge fund portfolio called Situational Awareness that was run by a smart 20-something year old. The fund was eyeball-deep in the AI trade; long all the important inputs AI requires (mainly semiconductors), and
The Auditors Arrive
Very little has happened in markets these past few weeks that will alter the trajectory of artificial intelligence; a lot has happened regarding the financial market frenzy surrounding it. Here are three items: What is that list? It is just a sample of how when markets are very extended and
Fifty-Six Years of Prohibition, Two Hours of Treatment: Psychedelic Therapy Is Attracting Billions From Big Pharma
Last week, Eli Lilly (LLY) announced that it would buy a development-stage psychedelics biopharma, AtaiBeckley, for roughly $2.8 billion in cash now, and a potential $1 billion more if Atai meets development and regulatory milestones. It may sound like a big number, but it is a drop in the bucket
Earnings Season: Five Things That Matter More Than the Beats, and One Wildcard
We were surprised to read that Wall Street has never carried higher expectations into an earnings season than it is carrying into this one — recession rebounds aside. The bottom-up consensus (that is, analysts’ company-by-company estimates, added up) calls for S&P 500 earnings to grow 26.2% from a year ago,
AI Is Revitalizing the Industrial Sector, Not Killing It
If you strip the AI rally down to what the money is actually buying, you finally find transformers, high-voltage switchgear, copper, industrial-scale cooling, gas turbines, and data centers whose power draw rivals that of a midsize country — a build-out that Goldman Sachs estimates at roughly $7.6 trillion between 2026
America at 250: If Given a Choice, Continue to Bet on the Country
Happy Fourth of July to all our readers! Here’s our patriotic but unsentimental analysis of where we stand midway through 2026, why we think it makes sense to keep betting on America, and how you should be thinking about market risks and dynamics. You can watch the video here and
Priming the Pump Before November: Three Washington Tailwinds
Next week we’ll give you a video presentation of our first-half 2026 wrap-up and offer some thoughts as we enter the second half of the year. Beyond the MOU signed with Iran — which markets and the G7 have basically treated as a likely success — Washington has spent June
Talking About Tokens, Not “Tokens”
For most of the past decade, “tokenization,” in the minds of most investors, was in the same category as 2017’s meme coins and 2021’s million-dollar cartoon JPEGs of apes — a silly distraction in a then-madly exuberant fringe market, easy to wave away. If that’s still your view, it needs
Gravity Is Relentless… Even In Elon Musk’s Orbit
This Friday, June 12, SpaceX — now enlarged by the recent merger with Elon Musk’s xAI and the X platform — begins trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. At the indicated initial pricing of $135 per share, the offering raises roughly $75 billion and implies a market value
