First, congratulations on a strong first half, because this one was earned. The story of 2026 so far has been a leadership change, and the people who saw it early got paid. A new class of leaders carried this market, names out of the semiconductor ecosystem that spent years as afterthoughts and came roaring back. INTC tripled off its lows and printed its first all-time high in a generation. DELL more than doubled. MRVL doubled and tagged fresh records. ARM kept compounding. The whole silicon complex re-rated in front of our eyes. And while the new guard did the heavy lifting, the prior leaders did not break, they built. The megacaps that led the last leg held near their highs and consolidated, digesting the run instead of giving it back. That is what a healthy market looks like, old leadership basing while new leadership runs.

That backdrop is the whole reason we keep our screens pointed where we point them. The semi ecosystem is still where the money is moving, and the flow this week says it has not stopped. Now we protect what we built and we press where the edge is.

This is a heavier read than usual because the week earns it. Fed Wednesday, a fresh AI policy curveball over the weekend, and a tape that wants higher but needs permission. Let’s get into it.

Weekend Headlines

• Anthropic pulled offline. The US Commerce Department issued an emergency export-control directive Friday evening barring foreign-national access to Anthropic’s two most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Unable to verify nationality in real time, Anthropic disabled both globally. First time Washington has effectively recalled a commercial frontier model. Full breakdown below, it is the headline that matters most for our book.

• Iran peace deal looks close. Trump confirmed planned strikes were called off and a final document could be signed in Europe as soon as this weekend, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting oil sanctions. Crude fell more than 3 percent Friday to an eight-week low in the mid-80s.

• SpaceX debuts and rips. SPCX priced at 135, opened at 150, closed its first session around 161, up roughly 19 percent. Largest IPO in history at a 1.77 trillion valuation. Options listing is the next catalyst and the flow will be loud when it lands.

• Consumer sentiment ticked up. June Michigan came in at 48.9 from 44.8, with year-ahead inflation expectations falling to 4.6 from 4.8. Still near record lows, but the direction is right into a Fed week.

• Oracle got punished. ORCL fell 8.5 percent Thursday after guiding fiscal 2027 capex above estimates. The market is rewarding AI spend discipline and punishing the names that show it spiraling. Remember that everywhere this week.

The Anthropic Story & What Regulations Means

This is the one everybody will be talking about Monday, so this is where we keep our heads while the timeline loses theirs.

Here is what happened. Friday evening, Commerce invoked national security authorities and ordered Anthropic to cut off all foreign-national access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, including foreign nationals inside the US and even Anthropic’s own non-citizen employees. The trigger was a report that the model could be used to find software vulnerabilities, reportedly surfaced to the administration by Amazon. Anthropic says the capability is relatively basic, exists in other public models, and that the whole thing is a misunderstanding they expect to resolve. White House AI adviser David Sacks said the restriction was issued reluctantly and that he hopes it gets fixed so the models return to general release. Their other models including Opus 4.8 were untouched.

Now the bear case making the rounds, and credit where it is due, it is a smart argument that deserves a real answer. The thesis: this bull market is built on AI, the trade prices in continued rapid model advancement plus fast commercialization, and export controls on models plus restrictions on foreign nationals working on them introduce friction to exactly the layer the market assumes moves fastest. A large share of frontier researchers are foreign nationals. Gate the talent and you slow iteration, and if AI progress becomes policy-bound instead of engineering-bound, the multiple expansion behind this whole market gets harder to justify.

Here is my answer, and it is the same thing I said on X this weekend. Regulation is a familiarity in nearly every legal business aspect of the world. It is not a foreign object that breaks the machine, it is a constant the machine has always run inside of. What separates winners from losers is how companies adapt to and benefit from the rules, and that adaptation is exactly how you gauge who carries the next leg. There is always a bull market somewhere. But to the bear’s point, plenty of names that fail to adapt are going to get run over, and that part is true.

The reason I am not flipping defensive on this specific headline comes down to one word: scope. This is a one-company, one-model enforcement action, contested by the company, called reluctant by the White House, framed by everyone involved as something to be resolved rather than a permanent regime. It is not a broad export ban on all frontier AI and it is not a blanket restriction on foreign researchers across the industry. The layer we actually trade, compute and infrastructure, is not where this bites. If anything, a world where access to centralized frontier models becomes a policy football strengthens the case for the picks and shovels underneath, the chips, the memory, the power, the grid, because demand for the buildout does not care which lab is cleared to serve which user this week.

So the read is this. Watch for a Monday open that wants to fade the headline. If the AI complex gaps down and the infrastructure names get dragged with it, that is the dislocation we want, not the breakdown we fear. The risk to respect is real: if this expands from one company into a framework, or the resolution drags, the friction argument starts earning its multiple compression. We watch the scope. Scope is everything here.

The Setup

This is a Fed week, and not a routine one. The FOMC decision lands Wednesday at 2pm and the market is pricing essentially no chance of a move, rates hold at 3.50 to 3.75. That part is settled. Everything around the decision is not. This is Kevin Warsh’s first meeting in the chair, and the reporting going in is that he may start dismantling the forward guidance machinery we have all traded around for years, possibly dropping the dot plot’s rate forecast and stripping the bias language out of the statement. That is the real event Wednesday. Not the rate. The framework.

The backdrop sharpens it. CPI is running near 4.2 percent and the repricing this year has gone one direction: fed funds futures now lean toward a hike as the more likely next move, not a cut. We came into 2026 expecting cuts. That conversation has mostly closed. The risk Wednesday is a hawkish surprise dressed up as a process change. The offset is energy. Oil in the mid-80s and falling on the Iran de-escalation takes pressure off the exact inflation prints keeping the Fed boxed in, and Friday’s Michigan data leaned the right way. So we walk in with a real tailwind and a real two-sided risk sitting on top of it.

The Indices

The whole board tells one story right now and it is a constructive one. We took the hit on June 5, we found the low, and the tape has spent the last week putting in supportive closes right where it needed to. What we want from here is the only thing that matters: hold these closes, carve a higher low, then take out a higher high. That is how a flush becomes a launchpad. One index is already doing it.

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It has been rough sledding through June so far. The nine week win streak that carried us out of spring is likely over, the chip complex gave back over a trillion dollars in market value in two sessions, and the rate cut narrative that powered the whole first half got taken out back by a single jobs print. That is the bad news. The good news is what we are seeing, is pretty typical. We will get to all of it.

Quick framing before we dive in: nothing about the last week changes the structural story. AI infrastructure demand did not get weaker necessarily. Power demand did not shrink because the 10 year backed up. What changed is the price of admission. Multiples compress when yields rise, and positioning that got stretched over nine green weeks needed to reset. That reset is happening now. Our job is to act today in service of where we want to be standing six months from now, and that means respecting the reset without panicking out of theses that remain intact.

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Le Charts

Start with SPY. We printed 760 two weeks ago and we are now trading 725, down 1.6% on the week so far. Here is what matters: price is sitting directly on the 10 week moving average at 726.61, and the rising channel that has defined this entire move from the 2025 lows is fully intact. The 749.53 breakout level is now overhead resistance. Below us sits 699 and the 689.70 shelf, with the 50 week all the way down at 676 and change. A pullback to the 10 week after a nine week run is not a breakdown. It is the most normal thing a bull market does. Lose 689 on a weekly close and we have a different conversation. Until then this is a reset inside an uptrend.

QQQ is the same picture with sharper edges, because tech took the brunt of the selling. We are at 693 after tagging 740, and price is sitting just below the 695.93 shelf with the 10 week at 687 and change just beneath. That 687 to 696 zone is the line. Hold it and the bounce comes from a logical spot. Lose it and 629 is the next real shelf, which would be a much deeper flush than anyone positioned for. Given how fast the selling came and how stretched the RSI was at the highs, a tag of the 10 week here is constructive, not scary.

Now the chart that tells you this is rotation and not liquidation: IWM. Small caps are battling to close green this week, up 0.14% while every large cap index bled. We are at 282 with the highs at 290.87, holding above the 10 week at 279.40. When money flees a market, it does not flee into small caps. When money rotates out of crowded mega cap tech and into the rest of the tape, this is exactly what it looks like. Breadth expanding while the indices pull back is one of the most reliable tells that the underlying bid is alive.

The Dow rounds it out at 49.9k, off the 51,282 record from last week, down 1.9%. The 10 week sits at 49,765 right below price, then 48,756 and 47,752 beneath that. Same structure as SPY: extended, pulling back to the short term mean, channel intact.

Headlines and Headwinds!

The sequence that broke the streak started Thursday June 4. Broadcom reported a beat but left its full year AI chip targets unchanged, with the Q3 AI revenue guide coming in light of what the street wanted. After nine weeks of AI is invincible, that was enough. Chips rolled Thursday and then Friday turned into a rout: the Nasdaq lost over 4% for its worst session since the tariff chaos of April 2025, NVDA briefly gave back the $5 trillion mark, and AMD and INTC both shed double digits.

Friday’s accelerant was the May jobs report. 172,000 payrolls against expectations near 80,000, with unemployment steady at 4.3%. The 10 year spiked toward 4.5% and the market did the math instantly: no June cut, and hike odds for later this year started creeping into the futures. A blowout jobs number used to be good news. In this regime it is a yield shock, and yield shocks hit the longest duration assets hardest, which is exactly why the QQQ wore it.

Then this morning we got May CPI, and the internals matter more than the headline. Headline came in hot at 0.5% on the month and 4.2% year over year, driven by the energy passthrough with Brent still holding above $100 while the US and Iran ceasefire does its uneasy thing. But core printed 0.2% on the month and 2.9% annual, which is cooler than feared. That split is the whole game right now: the oil shock is in the headline numbers, the underlying trend is not accelerating. My fabled ‘Delayed Detonation’ thesis that was never officially released, but discussed in length in discord, spoke of how we flagged the energy passthrough as the slow moving second order effect of the Hormuz disruption. It is now showing up in the official prints, right on schedule. Maybe I’ll release the files.

Next week is the main event. The FOMC meets June 16 and 17, a hold is near certain per the futures, and the real catalyst is how Chair Warsh frames the path with oil above $100 and core behaving. Add the WWDC reception that landed flat for Apple on Monday and you have a market with no shortage of reasons to chop until Wednesday afternoon.

The Environment

So what is the regime? Rates are the tape again. Today’s ‘hot’ / in-line headline CPI is exactly the kind of print that reminds you of that. We hold the thesis and we respect the sensitivity. Both things are true.

The setup into the rest of the week & next week: indices sitting on their 10 week averages, small caps marginally green, breadth improving, core inflation behaving, and a Fed that is almost certainly on hold. That is not a bearish cocktail. It is a market that needed to flush some excess and is doing it in an orderly rotation rather than a liquidation. The caution is real because the FOMC presser is a live grenade and oil above $100 keeps the headline inflation risk alive. The optimism is real because everything that matters dare I say, needed this. This is where futurity earns its keep. If the future you are positioning for requires the AI buildout to continue, the power demand curve to steepen, and rates to eventually normalize, then nothing this week broke your map. Raise cash where conviction is thin, press duration where conviction is fat, and let the headlines belong to people trading the next four hours instead of the next four quarters. Rough sledding so far in June, better weeks ahead if next Wednesday cooperates.

Today’s Flow

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Let’s discuss May.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about May. You could have traded this market blindfolded and still made money. Throw a dart at the board / buy whatever it lands on / hold it a week / sell it green. That is not a shot at anyone. It is just what a melt-up does to a tape. Everything goes up, so everyone wins, and a whole timeline full of people are walking around convinced they are gifted because they bought stocks in the single easiest market in years. Which makes a month as good as the one we just had a little harder to brag about than the screenshots suggest.

May did not slow down. April was the best month of the year and then May walked in and matched it punch for punch, except we did it with nearly double the trade count. Twenty-seven closed positions in April became forty-nine in May, and the win rate did not blink. We closed the month at 81.6 percent, dead even with April’s 81.5, and a full sixteen points clear of where March left us at 65.4. That is the headline. We are not just hitting / we are hitting at volume / and the hit rate is holding while the book gets bigger. We are proud of it. We are also not going to pretend the blindfold had nothing to do with it.

Zoom out and the year tells a clean story. Q1 closed with 82 trades on the board and a strategy that was still finding its footing in a choppy March tape. April flipped the switch. May confirmed it was not a fluke. Two straight months printing better than eight out of ten, on rising size, in the same direction. The trade has been simple all year: read the flow / take the entry / let the winners run / cut the losers small.

The Tape into June

The market did not just hold up in May, it broke out across the board. All four majors closed June 1 pressing record highs. SPY at 758, QQQ at 742, the Dow north of 51,000, and the Russell finally joining the party at 289.

QQQ is leading with the steepest angle off the spring lows, no surprise with the AI names doing the heavy lifting. But the signal that matters is the Russell. Small caps broke out to fresh highs, and that is the breadth confirmation we have been waiting on all year. When the IWM joins the mega caps instead of lagging them, the rally has a wider base under it rather than resting on seven names.

All four are now riding the upper rail of multi-year ascending channels / stretched well above every moving average. That is textbook melt-up structure / beautiful and dangerous in the same breath. The only hesitation worth logging is the Dow printing a tired candle at the highs / the Russell closing slightly red on the day. Minor on their own, but the kind of detail you note when the tape is this extended. More on what that means for our positioning below.

May by the Numbers

• 49 closed positions

• 40 winners / 9 losers

• 81.6% win rate

• Average winner: +127.7%

• Average loser: -27.0%

• Worst single loss: AAOI at -38%

That last line matters more than the win rate. Our worst realized loss of the entire month was 38 percent. The winners ran to 200, 300, 400 percent and the losers all capped under 40. That is the asymmetry we build the whole approach around. You do not need to be right on everything when the math is shaped like that.

The Names that Ran

ARM was the headliner and it was not close. The 250 calls went out at +430 percent, a clean continuation of the same ARM thesis that paid us in March and April. When a name keeps printing, you keep showing up for it. FCEL turned a 15-call into a +365% winner on the fuel cell move, and we caught it twice, the second lot doing the heavy lifting. MSTR 175C ran +332 percent off the bitcoin-treasury tape. GLW was the quiet monster, two lots on the 180 calls closing at +156% and +311% as the optical / AI fiber story finally got priced.

The data center power and AI infrastructure book carried real weight again: MU printed +199% and put up the single biggest dollar move of the month, a 1000 call going from 32.80 to 98.00. NVDA 230C ran +118%, NOW closed two lots at +78% and +144%, AMD 500C did +110%, SMCI +207%, OUST +209% on the lidar pop. NOK surprised everyone with the 13 calls going +308%. ORCL was a machine, three separate lots, three green tickets at +52%, +124%, and +46%. CRWV, NBIS, AMSC, CCJ, MRNA, NET, NVTS, FLNC, TE, AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL puts, TSLA on three of four lots. The breadth was the point. Almost everything we touched worked.

Keeping It Honest

Nine losers, and they tell a real story. AAOI is the one to own. We took the optical name twice and it went red both times, -18 and -38 percent. When a thesis fails twice inside the same month, that is not noise, that is the market telling you the entry was wrong, and we are logging it. INTC 130C gave back -37 on a name that has been a battleground all year. RDDT, MS, USAR on the second lot, AMD on the lone put, all small cuts taken without ego.

And then there is DELL… SIGH

DELL is the biggest fumble of the month and very likely the biggest fumble of the entire year. We were in the 300 calls for June around 9.00. We got stopped out at 7.30 for a 23 percent loss on what I will call exactly what it was… a poor judgment on my end. Not a thesis miss. Not a flow miss. A discipline miss. The flow was right. The entry was right. The exit was the mistake. Those calls are now trading north of 160.00. From where we got shaken out, that is a move of more than 1,500 percent. A seventeen-bagger that we watched walk straight out the door. I am not going to dress it up. That one stings, and it is going in the book as the trade I want back more than any other this year. Note to self, trading on a boat drinking tequila - not always the best decisions are made, that’s the scene of the crime!

The Blindfold Comes Off

Here is the part nobody in the timeline wants to say out loud. We are good at this. We are also in a full-blown melt-up bull market, which means right now, so is everyone else. An 81 percent win rate two months running is not purely skill. A lot of it is the blindfold. When everything is bid and breadth is this wide, the hard part is not picking winners / the hard part is staying disciplined while trading with your eyes closed still pays.

Because the blindfold always comes off. It comes off the week the tape rolls over, and the people who never actually learned to see, the ones who confused a melt-up for a gift they earned, are the ones who get carried out. That is when the bill arrives. It gets collected on the names you sized too big because the last ten worked, on the stops you widened because cutting felt dumb in a market that only goes up. We are not going to relitigate a great month by pretending the macro did not do half the lifting. We are going to bank it / stay humble / keep the losers small / keep our eyes open even when blind buying would have paid the same. That is the whole point. Our edge is not that we made money in May. Everyone made money in May. Our edge is that we read the actual flow instead of guessing, so that when the blindfold finally comes off the rest of the market, ours was never on. This is exactly how we nailed the market bottom on March 30th-31st.

Where Today’s Money Went

Before we get into the live book, look at where the premium is actually flowing. The board below is today's top net premium inflows, every name on it cleared over a million dollars in flow.

Net Premium Flow board courtesy of our guy Charles, on X. He is a good friend of ours here at Unusual Flow and a phenomenal follow. If you are not on his feed, fix that.

Read the board and the whole month makes sense. NET sits right on top, and that is the same NET we closed at +125 percent in May, so the institutions are still piling into the exact name we were already riding. Under it the picture is software and AI semis stacked end to end: DDOG, CRM, COHR, STM, NOW, AMD, MCHP, CSCO. Every one of those is a node in the same data center / AI buildout we have been pressing all year. INTC shows up again, which is fitting for a name that has chopped us up and keeps drawing flow anyway. Defense pokes in with RTX, and PLTR lands on the board too, a name we are still holding in the open book (removed EOD for re-eval tomorrow against resistance).

This is the bridge into the paid section. Charles gives us the where. Below, I show you the how: how my own flow reads stacked up against this board, which of these inflows I was already in front of, and where the next entries are setting up. That is the part worth paying for.

Before the book, a quick word for everyone behind the wall. We run a highly active Discord for paid subscribers, and it is where the real-time conversation lives. Closer-quartered banter, faster back-and-forth, and a much cleaner organizational structure for alerts than any feed or inbox can give you. If you want to be in the room while these setups develop instead of reading about them after the close, this is where you do it. Paying subscribers only.

Discord Here.

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Coming Soon - Volux

Here is the thing about everything in this letter. The net premium reads / the divergences flashing in the options before they ever hit price / the repeat flow that tips a move days early / I pulled all of it by hand, across five tabs and a stack of screenshots. That is the work. It is also exactly the work we are about to put in your hands.

Volux is the flow intelligence platform we have been building all year / and the full launch is close. Options flow / breadth / AI-driven research / and real screeners in one place / built for how a trader actually reads a tape instead of how a data vendor wants to sell you one. The same conviction framework behind two straight months north of 81 percent / systematized / so the edge is not locked inside one guy’s daily routine anymore.

The waitlist is open now. Get on it early / be first through the door the day we go live.

Join the Volux waitlist here

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If you have been MIA for an extended period of time, you may have missed that we do have a discord for better organizational structure of our daily discussions and trade tracking versus the former of filtering through various substack chats as they can become quite convoluted quickly. If you’d like to join, please follow the link posted below. (Note: this is for paying subscribers only, where we chat all day long & even the weekends about current events, positioning, market sentiment, and various other discussions to provide as much value as possible.)

Discord Here

SPX closed Friday at 7,165, a record high. Nasdaq parked at 24,837, also a record. Russell finally showed up at 2,787, and the Dow lagged at 49,231 weighed down by Merck, IBM, and Verizon. VIX bled to 18.71, four-handle compression on the week. Fourth consecutive weekly gain for the S&P, and the tape is squarely in melt-up posture.

On March 31st, we noticed a major shift in the tape of options flow, which ultimately lead us to believe things were changing in a big way, and that we could have major opportunities immediately. This was the turning point & went over looked by many before surging nearly 12% in 3 weeks time.

The driver Friday was Intel. INTC ripped 24% to a record close, the best single day since 1987, on a Q1 print that destroyed estimates ($13.6B revenue, $0.29 non-GAAP EPS vs. $0.01 expected) and a Q2 guide ($13.8B to $14.8B) that came in nearly $1.4B above consensus. Data Center & AI revenue grew 22%, foundry posted 16%, and Lip-Bu Tan said the quiet part loud on the call: the CPU is reinserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era.

On the macro layer: Iran ‘reopened’ (lol) the Strait of Hormuz, peace talks moved to Islamabad with Pakistan mediating, and Trump ‘extended’ the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire by three weeks. Crude is back to $94 and sliding. The fear premium that defined Q1 has fully rotated into AI infra and CPU bid.

The under-the-radar print this week was the DOE issuing its first $1.6B loan to AEP for a five-state grid upgrade, dropped the same week as the Defense Production Act memo on grid infrastructure. That is the project-level catalyst we said to watch for. The framework is operational. This is the trade we want to be early on across multiple legs.

Sentiment & Breadth

NAAIM Exposure Index printed 94.15 for the week ending April 22, jumping from 79.49 the week prior. One of the largest weekly moves of the cycle, pushing active managers into aggressive bullish positioning. Anything above 90 historically flags chase behavior. Not a sell signal on its own, but it tells you who is doing the buying up here: it is professionals who were underexposed and are now playing catchup.

FactSet has 28% of the S&P reported. Q2 to Q4 2026 EPS growth estimates running 20.6%, 22.7%, and 20.4%. Full-year 2026 at 18.6%. Forward P/E at 20.9 (above the 5-year average of 19.9). The earnings tape is doing the heavy lifting. Valuation is full but defensible while EPS keeps printing.

Translation for our positioning: stop adding fresh longs into strength on the names that have already paid, and start letting setups come to you on names that have not. Tighten stops on runners, take size off the closed-out winners, and rotate dry powder into the new themes that are still undervalued by the tape. We do not chase 94 NAAIM readings. We let them mean-revert into us.

April: The Best Month YTD

April is the standout. We caught the CPU renaissance before it was a consensus call. The thesis was simple: the AI buildout was overpriced into GPUs and underpriced into the silicon that runs inference, the orchestration layer, and the agent workloads. INTC and ARM were the two cleanest expressions. The other layer was AI infrastructure pull-through (CRWV, NBIS, DELL), where unusual flow had been screaming for weeks before price followed.

Closed positions for the month, 27 trades, 22 winners, 5 losers, an 81.5% win rate. Multiple INTC 60C 6/18 lots scaled out at 195%, 286%, and 596% as the position ran into earnings. ARM was the bigger fireworks, with 180C 6/18 lots closing at 219%, 434%, and a 903% top tick on the runners. Below is the breakdown:

Five losses, all sized small relative to the winner book. AMD and META were quick cuts taken without ego. NEE was a utility chase on the wrong leg of the curve, lesson booked. TSEM had one win and one loss inside the same name, which is exactly how foundry exposure trades when the Street is split.

VST is the one that deserves a closer look, because it is the difference between an expression failure and a thesis failure. The May 175C got stopped out for -22% on a timing window that closed too tight. That is the trade. The equity position stayed on the book and the underlying thesis stayed alive. We are not relitigating the loss. We are sizing up the thesis. More on that in the next section.

The structural takeaway: high win rate is nice, but the math that wins the year is winners running 200% to 900% while losers cap at 5% to 45%. We do not need to be right more than 60% of the time when the asymmetry is this stark. That ratio is the entire game. Although, we did, and we were right over 80% of the time.

Let’s dive into some new / fresh ideas presenting similar risk reward ratios going forward.

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The dominant headline driver remains the U.S.-Iran conflict, now entering its sixth week. Trump held a press conference this afternoon detailing the rescue of two airmen whose F-15E was shot down over Iran, calling it “one of the largest, most complex, most harrowing combat search and rescue missions ever attempted by the military.” He also reiterated his Tuesday 8 PM deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, warning that “the entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” He acknowledged that elevated fuel costs could persist into the summer but drew a hard line: “We’re never going to let them have a nuclear weapon. And if we have to pay a little extra for fuel for a couple of months, we’ll do that.”

A 45-day ceasefire proposal is floating between mediators, and Trump called it “a significant step,” though he has not signed off. Iran rejected any temporary ceasefire, demanding permanent guarantees. Crude oil jumped from $112 to roughly $114 per barrel during the presser alone, and gas prices are sitting near $4/gallon nationally. The CPI print on Friday looms large as the next macro catalyst, along with Fed minutes on Wednesday and PCE data on Thursday. Raymond James noted that strong early-2026 economic momentum and a backwardated oil curve have prevented a sharper selloff, but the Tuesday deadline is the next major test.

Anyhow, let’s dig into the flow.

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The tape walked in hot this morning and the reason was sitting right there in the headline. Iran’s president came out and said what the market wanted to hear: we’re ready to end the war, but want guarantees. That one sentence flipped the switch on risk appetite across the board and the flow sheet confirmed it before the opening bell even rang. But if you’ve been reading this letter, you know one headline doesn’t close a chapter. It opens a negotiation. And negotiations, especially ones involving the Strait of Hormuz, have a way of dragging out longer than the market’s attention span.

Before we dive into the flow, let’s frame what today actually means in the broader context. This is the last trading day of Q1 2026. Everything that happened this quarter, the tariff whipsaws, the AI capex debate, the energy thesis, the VIX staying elevated for weeks on end, all of it culminates in how institutions are positioned heading into the next three months. End-of-quarter flow is always interesting because it captures both the window dressing and the real conviction bets that are being carried forward. Today’s sheet is worth reading closely because it tells you what the smart money believes is coming, not what already happened. Before moving forward, it is important to note that at the time of writing, the JPM Collar has yet to be announced.

If you have been MIA for an extended period of time, you may have missed that we do have a discord for better organizational structure of our daily discussions and trade tracking versus the former of filtering through various substack chats as they can become quite convoluted quickly. If you’d like to join, please follow the link posted below. (Note: this is for paying subscribers only, where we chat all day long & even the weekends about current events, positioning, market sentiment, and various other discussions to provide as much value as possible.)

Discord Here.

March Performance Recap

Now let’s talk about how we actually performed this month, because the scoreboard is the only thing that doesn’t lie.

March was a battlefield. The macro environment was hostile to overnight holds for most of the month. Tariff headlines whipsawed indices on a daily basis. The VIX stayed elevated. Economic data was mixed at best. And yet, looking at the closed positions for March, we came out the other side in strong shape because we adapted. This was not a month for holding through earnings or riding multi-week swings. This was a month for quick, conviction-based entries and disciplined exits, and the results reflect that approach.

The headliner was ARM, and it wasn’t close. We scaled out of the 145 calls across three separate exits at gains of 178%, 311%, and 770%. That last exit was nearly a nine-bagger on the original cost basis. When a position works that well, you don’t need to hit on everything else. NOW 115C returned 196% in a clean trade that caught the software rally before it stalled. LITE 700P delivered 152% on the downside, proving that the put side can be just as profitable when you read the flow correctly. META 540C doubled. RKLB 75C ran 88%. PLTR 145C closed at 86%. UAL 105C gave us 80% on a name that was tricky to time but rewarded patience. VRT, SPY puts, USO, INTC May calls, RGTI puts, MSFT, VELO, and NFLX puts all contributed winning trades to the ledger.

Were there losers? Of course. INTC April 50C gave back 56% and that one stung because the thesis was right but the timing was early. UUUU dropped 50% as the uranium narrative cooled. SEI lost 49%. BE and COIN both closed red. NVDA had two losing entries, one at negative 24% and another at negative 5%, which is a reminder that even the most liquid name in the market can chop you up when volatility compresses at the wrong time. VG technically closed red as well, but that one deserves a footnote. The trade worked exactly as intended. The entry was clean, the flow confirmed the thesis, and the move came. But broader market volatility created noise that led to a mismanaged exit on my end. That’s not a flow miss, that’s a discipline lesson, and those are the ones that stick with you going into the next quarter.

The final count for March: 17 winners, 8 losers.That’s a win rate above 65% in a market that was actively trying to shake out both sides of the tape every single session. The average winner significantly outpaced the average loser, which is what matters more than the win rate itself. When your best trade returns 770% and your worst loss is 56%, the math works in your favor even if you’re wrong more often than you’d like.

The Flow / Calls Bought

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Today’s first half session was one of the more active flow days we have seen in recent weeks, and the message underneath the surface was loud. The overwhelming majority of activity clustered into near-term expirations, April 2nd through April 24th, with very few positions reaching out beyond May. That is not a coincidence. When uncertainty is this elevated and headlines can move the tape five percent in either direction overnight, traders compress their exposure into the front of the curve. They are ‘renting positions, not buying homes’. Premium at the front end becomes the vehicle of choice because it gives you leverage on a catalyst without forcing you to hold through weeks of headline risk that could render a longer-dated position worthless before the thesis even has time to play out. The fact that this pattern has persisted for weeks now tells you that whales do not see resolution coming soon. They are playing the range, hedging the tails, and keeping their powder accessible.

If you have been MIA for an extended period of time, you may have missed that we do have a discord for better organizational structure of our daily discussions and trade tracking versus the former of filtering through various substack chats as they can become quite convoluted quickly. If you’d like to join, please follow the link posted below. (Note: this is for paying subscribers only, where we chat all day long & even the weekends about current events, positioning, market sentiment, and various other discussions to provide as much value as possible.)

Discord here.

Here is the full breakdown of today’s first half flow for the subscribers:

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After a few weeks of selling, a market flirting with correction territory across every major index, and a weekend where most of the financial world was bracing for U.S. strikes on Iranian power plants, President Trump posted on Truth Social this morning announcing “very good and productive conversations” with Iran and a five day pause on all military strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure. Dow futures ripped over 1,000 points before the open. The S&P, Nasdaq, and Russell 2000 are all up north of two percent as I write this. Oil collapsed from above $112 on Friday to the low $100s on Brent and sub-$92 on WTI. Gold was getting hammered, down over three percent after its worst week since 1983. Silver was off even more. Commodities have already reversed that move and are now trading in the green. The VIX is pulling back. This could be the start of the ‘relief rally’.

And yet…

Iran’s FARS news agency immediately denied any direct or indirect contact with the Trump administration. That little detail didn’t stop the tape from running, but it matters. Because this is the exact kind of headline driven, whiplash inducing environment we’ve been living in for the last month, and today’s flow confirms that institutional money is treating it that way. Nobody is making clean directional bets right now. They’re hedging, they’re spreading, and they’re playing both sides of the same names. We saw this type of action last year during this same time frame during the tariffs, tacos, and liberation day.

Let me walk through where we stand.

The Indexes

The S&P 500 closed Friday at 6,506 after shedding 1.5% on the day, its lowest close in over four months, sitting below its 200d moving average. Today it’s ripping back above 6,600 & the 200d. The Dow went out at 45,577 on Friday and is up over a thousand points on the session. The Nasdaq closed at 21,647 and is rallying north of 2%. The Russell 2000 officially entered correction territory on Friday, down over 10% from its 52-week high, but is bouncing nearly 2% today with over 1,700 of its components advancing against fewer than 200 declining. These are massive moves in both directions. The 10-year is hovering near 4.37%, pulling back slightly as the immediate stagflation panic fades.

But make no mistake. This is a headline market. One Truth Social post reversed four weeks of selling. The next post could erase it. The underlying picture has not changed. The Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed. The IEA called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Goldman raised its Brent forecast to $110 for March and April and warned that if Hormuz flows stay at 5% for ten weeks, daily Brent prices could exceed their 2008 record. Iraq declared force majeure on all foreign operated oilfields on Friday. The Fed is still higher for longer.

So what does the flow look like in this environment? Exactly what you’d expect. Messy, two-sided, and loud.

The Flow

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The War & The Strait

The Strait of Hormuz crisis kicked off on February 28 when the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran, including the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. By March 2, an IRGC official confirmed the strait was closed, threatening to set ablaze any ship attempting to pass through. We’re now on day 17 of this conflict, and the disruption to global energy flows is unlike anything the modern market has dealt with.

The numbers are staggering. Roughly 27% of the world’s maritime trade in crude oil and petroleum products normally goes through the Strait. Daily transit has collapsed from a historical average of 138 ships per day to no more than five since the war began. The IEA has called it the worst oil disruption in history, estimating the war will cut global supply by about 8 million barrels a day in March. Iran’s IRGC has been defiant, declaring that any vessel linked to the U.S., Israel, or their allies will be considered a legitimate target, and warning the world to expect oil at $200 per barrel.

Saudi Arabia has been diverting oil to its Red Sea port of Yanbu via the East-West pipeline, while the UAE is routing through Fujairah, but combined bypass capacity is only 3.5 to 5.5 million barrels per day versus the 20 million that normally transits the strait. That math doesn’t work no matter how you slice it.

Oil Prices

Crude has been on a rollercoaster. Prices have surged roughly 40% since the war began, with Brent closing above $100 for the first time in four years last week. Brent topped $106 on Sunday before pulling back Monday when the IEA reserve release news hit. WTI settled at $93.50 on Monday after the 32-country IEA coalition agreed to release 400 million barrels from strategic reserves, the largest coordinated release in IEA history. But today (Tuesday), oil advanced again with Brent back above $100 as traders cast doubt on a U.S.-backed plan to escort tankers through the strait.

Here’s the thing. 400 million barrels sounds massive, but at 105 million barrels per day of global consumption, that covers roughly four days. Compared to the 20 million barrels per day that normally flows through Hormuz, it’s about 20 days of typical strait traffic. It’s a Band-Aid. Wood Mackenzie has warned that with 15 million barrels per day of Gulf supply gone, oil would need to hit $150 for demand destruction to rebalance the market. That $200 Iran threat isn’t as unthinkable as it sounds if this drags on.

U.S. gasoline prices are now up nearly 80 cents from a month ago, and diesel has shot up $1.34 to just under $5 a gallon. This hits the consumer directly and immediately.

The Macro Picture

Here’s where the narrative gets tricky. A lot of people are screaming “stagflation” right now, and the headline data supports that framing on the surface. Q4 2025 GDP was revised sharply down to just 0.7% annualized, a massive step down from the previous estimate of 1.4% and the 4.4% pace in Q3. Core PCE inflation rose to 3.1% year-over-year in January, still a full point above the Fed’s target.

But context matters. That GDP print was significantly distorted by a record-breaking 43-day government shutdown that disrupted data collection and economic activity. It does not reflect the actual trajectory of the economy heading into this crisis.

The reality is the economy was re-accelerating before February 28. February CPI came in at 2.4% headline with core at 2.5%, the lowest core reading since March 2021. Consumer sentiment had risen to its highest level in six months. The Dow broke above 50,000 for the first time. Industrial production rose 0.2% in February with manufacturing and mining both contributing. The AI capex cycle was firing on all cylinders. International markets were outperforming the U.S. for the first time in years. Credit spreads were tight. Goldman had full-year GDP growth penciled at 2.8%. The vibe heading into late February was closer to “soft landing achieved, now re-accelerating” than anything resembling stagflation.

The University of Michigan consumer sentiment reading tells the story perfectly. The March headline came in at 55.5, but interviews completed before the Iran strikes showed improvement from February. All of those gains were completely erased in the nine days after the military action began. The economy didn’t break on its own. It got hit.

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What a week. We came in off the Supreme Court tariff ruling, rode a two-day rally into NVIDIA earnings, and watched it all unravel by Friday as hot PPI data and AI skepticism sent mark…

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What a week. I mean that. If you stepped away from the screens for even a few hours this week, you probably came back to a completely different market narrative than the one you left behind. That’s the kind of environment we’ve been living in, and honestly, it’s the kind of environment where flow analysis becomes the most valuable tool in the toolkit. Price action tells you what happened. Flow tells you what people were thinking when it happened, and more importantly, what they’re positioning for next.

We came into this shortened holiday week relatively concerned but as noted in last wek’s letter, rather optimistic after last week’s broad selloff, which saw the S&P post its worst week since November while the Nasdaq notched its fifth consecutive weekly decline. AI disruption fears had been spreading like wildfire across sectors that most people hadn’t even considered vulnerable. Insurance brokers, wealth managers, real estate services, logistics companies. The Magnificent Seven were under siege with Amazon alone shedding over $450 billion in market cap across a historic 9-day losing streak. Defensive sectors were catching all the love. Utilities, materials, and real estate were the only places to hide, while tech, financials, and communication services were getting absolutely hammered. Individual investor bullish sentiment had cratered to 12-week lows, and the fear was palpable.

The question heading into this week was simple: is this a dip worth buying (we thought so), or the start of something uglier?

Four sessions later, I think the answer the market gave us is... both. And the flow proved it in real time. Let me walk you through it.

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The Big Picture

Last week was ugly. The S&P 500 closed Friday at ~6,836 after flirting with its 100-day moving average, a level it hasn’t settled below in nearly a year. The Nasdaq posted back-to-back weekly losses. But here’s what matters: the selling wasn’t about fundamentals. It was about fear.

AI disruption anxiety spread like wildfire last week. What started as a software selloff turned into a full-blown rotation out of anything Wall Street decided could be “disrupted” / trucking stocks (C.H. Robinson and RXO each dropped 20%+), real estate (CBRE -16%), wealth management (Schwab -10%), even media names like Netflix. JPMorgan’s trading desk summed it up perfectly:

“The market is struggling to understand the full scope of what AI can do.”

Meanwhile, underneath the noise, the macro picture actually improved. January CPI came in at +2.4% year-over-year, the lowest since May 2021. Core CPI was in line. Treasury yields dropped across the curve, with the 10-year falling to 4.05%. This should have been bullish. It wasn’t. That disconnect tells you something about the current market psychology: fear is driving the tape, not data.

The Fed rate cut timeline shifted after a strong jobs report / March probability dropped to just 10%, June is now the base case at ~85%. Kevin Warsh, nominated to replace Powell in May, has adopted a more pragmatic tone, suggesting the Fed should “look through” tariff-driven price spikes. That’s a dovish tilt from a known hawk.

Earnings season is 74% complete. 76% of S&P 500 companies have beaten on the bottom line, with blended EPS growth tracking at +13.2% - a fifth straight quarter of double-digit gains. The fundamentals are fine. The question is whether sentiment catches up.

This Week’s Earnings Calendar / The Names That Matter

This is one of the most consequential earnings weeks of the season. Here’s your day-by-day breakdown of the reports that could move markets:

Tuesday

PANW: Cybersecurity bellwether reporting after close. Stock is down 10%+ from 50-day MA. Watch ARR growth, billings guidance, and commentary on the Chronosphere + potential CyberArk acquisition closings. DA Davidson cut PT to $210 but kept Buy. A guidance raise could spark a mean-reversion rally.

CEG: Power generation trade still alive. Nuclear/AI data center narrative is the story here. Watch for updated guidance on power purchase agreements and capacity expansion.

MDT: Healthcare bellwether. Steady but watch for any medical device AI integration commentary.

CDNS: EDA/chip design software. In the AI disruption crosshairs / could bounce or get hit further depending on guidance.

ET: MLP/energy infrastructure play. Dividend and distribution guidance is the focus.

Wednesday

CVNA: THE event of the week. See deep dive below. Binary outcome - short squeeze or breakdown. Options pricing a ~15.5% move. Reporting after close.

BKNG: Travel demand bellwether. After Airbnb's upbeat outlook, expectations are elevated. Watch international booking trends and AI-powered travel tool commentary.

DASH: Delivery/gig economy. After DraftKings' guidance disaster (-17%), the consumer discretionary/platform space is under scrutiny.

EBAY: E-commerce turnaround story. AI-powered listing tools driving engagement.

ADI: Semis. Industrial and automotive end-market demand signals matter here.

OXY: Energy. Watch production guidance and Permian Basin commentary.

Thursday

WMT: Consumer spending bellwether #1. Last quarter was strong (+5.9% YoY revenue, e-commerce +27%). Guidance for FY27 is the focus / any tariff impact commentary will move the tape broadly. This is the single most important macro read of the week.

BABA: China + AI narrative. DeepSeek reverberations continue. Watch cloud revenue growth and AI infrastructure spend.

DE: Agriculture/industrial cycle read. Tariff impact on farming equipment demand.

NEM: Gold miner. Gold at $5,035/oz / watch production costs and reserve updates.

SO: Utility/power. AI data center power demand narrative.

Good bit of Economic Data this week to focus on as well…

Key Points:

The FOMC minutes on Wednesday and PCE data on Friday are the two macro landmines this week. If PCE comes in hot at 3.1%+ on the core, it pushes the June cut narrative into question and could trigger another leg down in growth stocks. If it’s softer, we get relief.

I want to talk about Carvana as the asset has been under heavy selling pressure as of late with a ton of negative press including short reports, and growing narrative of delinquencies etc. so let’s dive in shall we?

The Binary Bet of the Week…

The Setup: CVNA hit an all-time high of $486.89 on January 22. Since then, it’s crashed ~29% to ~$367 after Gotham City Research published a devastating short report alleging $1B+ in overstated earnings through undisclosed related-party transactions with DriveTime/Bridgecrest (both controlled by CEO’s father). Multiple law firms (Block & Leviton, Pomerantz, Bragar Eagel) have opened securities fraud investigations. Insider selling has been massive, the CEO has dumped over $1.4 billion in shares since April 2024.

What the Bulls Need: A clean 10-K filing on time. Beat-and-raise on Q4 numbers (consensus: $1.10 EPS, ~$5.2B revenue). Explicit management commentary addressing the Gotham allegations with data. If all three happen, shorts (11.4% SI) get squeezed and the stock could rip 15-20%+ in a single session.

What the Bears Need: Any delay in the 10-K filing. Auditor (Grant Thornton) issues or qualifications. Weak Q4 numbers or soft guidance. If the 10-K doesn’t file or the auditor flags anything, this stock could revisit sub-$200.

The Flow: Bearish options flow has been building for two weeks. Options are pricing a ~15.5% move. This is a pure event-driven, binary trade. Not for the faint of heart.

Carvana operates in the online used vehicle retail industry, running a vertically integrated e-commerce platform for buying, selling, financing, and delivering used cars across the U.S. In Q3 2025, the company sold a record 155,941 retail units (up 44% YoY) and posted record revenue of $5.65B (up 55% YoY). Yahoo Finance

The company also operates wholesale auction sites through its ADESA acquisition. Primary competitors include KMX (CarMax), LAD (Lithia Motors), AN (AutoNation), CARG (CarGurus), and ACVA (ACV Auctions). Analysts project EPS to climb ~428% YoY to $5.39 in FY2025 and grow another 37% to $7.39 in FY2026. Yahoo Finance

Carvana's competitive moat lies in its technology-driven, asset-light digital platform, proprietary logistics/reconditioning network, and data advantages that traditional dealerships cannot replicate at scale. The company was added to the S&P 500 in December 2025, a massive validation event. What makes CVNA unique is the dramatic turnaround, it rose over 12,000% from 2022 lows near $3.56 to highs of ~$486. However, a short-seller report from Gotham City Research in January 2026 alleging $1B+ in overstated earnings has created significant near-term uncertainty ahead of the February 18 earnings release.

The used auto retail sector has been weak overall, pressured by higher interest rates impacting consumer affordability. However, CVNA has been the worst performer in the group over the last month due to idiosyncratic risk (Gotham report). Over 12 months, CVNA still dramatically outperforms all peers (+93% vs KMX -52%).

Analyst Price Targets for the most part still reside higher, ranging from $460 - $530 with some even calling the sell-off as a buying opportunity (where I sit as well).

TLDR Bull / Bear:

BULL CASE:

• If Q4 earnings beat and 10-K files clean on Feb 18, shorts get squeezed hard (11.4% short interest)

• JPMorgan expects “solid beat and raise” / consensus Q4 EPS of $1.10 (+96% YoY)

• Used car demand tailwind as new car prices stay elevated (~$50K avg)

• S&P 500 inclusion ensures ongoing passive fund demand

• Consensus PT of ~$462-498 implies 25-35% upside from current levels

BEAR CASE:

• If 10-K is delayed or auditor raises concerns, the stock could revisit sub-$200

• Massive insider selling is a red flag that’s hard to ignore

• Gotham City allegations on related-party transactions are serious and not yet fully addressed

• Valuation still rich at ~78x PE despite pullback

• Multiple securities fraud investigations now open

• Operating cash flow declining (slipped to $606M from $858M YoY through Q3)

In summary, this week we have earnings, macro data, and Fed signals all converging. The markets are nervous but not quite broken. With the S&P stuck in a range this week’s data could determine which side breaks first. Our watchlist this week is considerably lengthy between Friday’s piece and today’s piece discussing the upcoming earnings & econ data. While I don’t anticipate trading everything we have discussed, it’s still important to watch them for reactions as a gauge on future bets / money flows from a sector stance.

Thanks for tuning in & supporting the Unusual Flow substack. As always, likes and comments are greatly appreciated as well as shares / restacks. See you guys tomorrow for the flows and I hope you guys enjoyed the long weekend.

Cheers,

Jersace

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If you felt like the market was pulling you in two directions at once, that’s because it literally was. The Dow ripped through 50,000 for the first time ever last Friday. Up 1,207 points in a single session. A 2.5% move on the week fueled by a hard rotation into cyclicals and value. Caterpillar, GE Aerospace, Boeing, the airlines, all caught serious bids. Then this week, that momentum hit a wall. Thursday brought a 669-point reversal in the Dow as AI disruption fears spread beyond software into networking (Cisco down 12% [Thursday] on weak guidance), wealth management, and legal services. This week, the S&P closed at 6,836, down 1.4%. Nasdaq got hit hard as well, losing 1.27%. Dow Jones also negative on the week losing 1.23%.

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- SPY Daily

I see a lot of folks mentioning hedges and flipping short etc. but what remains curious to me is why they would position in such a way today, versus three days ago at range highs? Why short support, range lows, and below the channel? I understand the reasoning of it closing below moving average’s and such but when you frame it the way I have above, it feels more panicky than tactical. I have highlighted the last 3 instances in which we closed/wicked below this channel and in each instance we have snapped back into the range within the following two sessions. While there is no guarantee of the similar reaction, it is likely. Just something to note and always check multiple time frames before making rash decisions. If you check the weekly, we remain above the 20wk which has been acting as our floor lately. Times have been whippy as we will touch into more in depth below.

- QQQ Daily/Weekly

More of the same here yet slightly uglier.

Going to display the weekly for this one as well as you can see that we are still compressed in the middle of this channel although below the weekly averages. Of course we have the longer weekend where being in positions carries more risk especially with ongoing Middle East conflicts - though nothing has materialized the past few instances. Personally still in the camp of “nothing ever happens” & that we ultimately resolve higher once the continued unwind of AI complex fears / capex / collateral collapse settle. I do not have a crystal ball and cannot firmly say with the utmost confidence of when that would happen, although I will remain course and buy dips where I see value.

- IWM Daily

Still the YTD leader and showing similar signs as of late in regards to market chop, but holding up well. Not too much else to comment on here other than the looming rotation back into quality (Mag-7 / undervalued key assets).

- DJI Daily

The story of the week, really the story of 2026 so far, is what traders at Jefferies are calling the “SaaSpocalypse.” Bloomberg reported that Anthropic’s product releases triggered a nearly $1 trillion selloff in enterprise software stocks. The iShares Tech-Software ETF (IGV) is now 30% below its recent high. Officially deep in bear market territory. Atlassian cratered 35% in a single week back in early February. Salesforce is down 40%+ over the past 12 months. Workday, same story. Even Palantir, one of 2025’s biggest winners, has given back 27% year-to-date.

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The fear is straightforward. If an AI agent can do the work of 10 humans, why would a company pay for 10 software seats? The per-seat SaaS model that minted millionaires for two decades is getting repriced in real time.

But here’s where it gets interesting for us.

The market is painting with a broad brush right now. Selling everything that touches software, buying anything that touches AI infrastructure. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF is up 10% year-to-date while the software ETF is down 18%. That divergence is the widest it’s been in years, and divergences like this don’t last forever. Some of these software names are getting unfairly lumped in with commodity SaaS that honestly deserves to get disrupted. The companies actually building the orchestration layer for AI agents, the platforms that make agentic AI work in production with real governance and security, those are getting thrown out with the bathwater. And that’s where the opportunity is.

On the macro side, the delayed January jobs report finally dropped Wednesday showing 130K jobs added, well above the 53K consensus. Unemployment ticked down to 4.3% from 4.4%. Consumer sentiment ticked up. CPI dropped this morning at 2.4% year over year, coming in below the 2.5% consensus. Good news on the surface, but core CPI still ticked up to 0.3% month over month so it’s not all clear skies. The Fed is still on hold and markets are pricing roughly a coin-flip on a June cut. The government shutdown that ended February 3rd delayed a lot of this economic data so we’re just now getting caught up on the full picture.

The rotation is real though. Value and cyclicals are leading. Small caps (Russell 2000 up 7% YTD) are outperforming large-cap tech for the first time in a while. The Dow hitting 50K while the Nasdaq struggles tells you exactly where institutional money is flowing.

So how do we play this?

The SaaSpocalypse isn’t the end of software. It’s the market sorting winners from losers in real time. And when the market sorts this aggressively, it creates dislocations. Dislocations are where alpha lives.

That’s exactly what this week’s deep dive is about. The same AI agent technology that’s destroying commodity SaaS stocks is creating an entirely new investable theme. One that spans agentic orchestration platforms, humanoid robotics, edge AI components, and the infrastructure that powers all of it. The companies building the tools that make AI agents actually work in the real world, not just demo well on X, those are setting up to be the next cycle’s biggest winners.

We’re breaking down the full AI Agents & Robotics theme. The layers of the stack, the key players, the timelines, and a tiered watchlist from high-conviction infrastructure plays down to speculative robotics bets. This is the kind of theme that starts with institutional flow, builds into retail narrative, and eventually becomes consensus. We want to be positioned before that happens.

Let’s get into it.

The Big Picture

If 2025 was the year AI proved it could think, 2026 is the year AI starts doing. The narrative is shifting hard from model capabilities to agentic execution, autonomous systems that can plan, act, and complete multi-step workflows with minimal human oversight. Simultaneously, humanoid robotics is crossing the chasm from science-fair demos to factory-floor deployments. These two themes are converging into what could be the defining investment cycle of the next decade.

This is not theoretical anymore. Goldman Sachs expects hyperscalers to pour over $500 billion in capex this year. KPMG found that 67% of business leaders say they will maintain AI spending even in a recession. And at CES 2026, Boston Dynamics put its Atlas robot to work sorting car parts in a Hyundai factory, not doing backflips for cameras. The money is real, the deployments are starting, and the investable surface area is expanding fast.

Part 1: The Agentic AI Revolution

What Changed

The shift from chatbots and copilots to autonomous agents represents a fundamental change in how enterprises consume AI. Instead of answering questions, AI agents are now executing tasks: processing invoices, resolving IT tickets, orchestrating supply chains, and managing complex workflows across departments. Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise applications will integrate task-specific AI agents by 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025.

The agentic AI market is projected to expand from roughly $7.3 billion in 2025 to $88 billion by 2032, a 42.8% CAGR. But the more telling stat comes from Bessemer Venture Partners: the real competitive advantage in 2026 will not be in building the best model, but in data governance, agent orchestration, and observability platforms, the middleware that makes agents work reliably in production.

Why It Matters for Markets

Wall Street is repricing the entire software stack. Again, the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF is down 19% year-to-date while the VanEck Semiconductor ETF is up 12%. The fear is that frontier AI models can now replicate what traditional SaaS companies charge subscription fees for. But this creates a massive dislocation, and dislocations create opportunities.

The companies that survive and thrive are those embedding AI agents into mission-critical workflows where switching costs are high and governance matters. The companies getting killed are commodity SaaS plays with thin moats. This is a stock-picker’s market, not a rising-tide market.

The Investable Layers

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Busy day on the flow desk with some real conviction trades showing up. Let’s break it down.

The Headline Stuff

The monster of the day was that AMZN sweep. Over 10,600 contracts on the 250 calls dated all the way out to August, filled at $10.76. That’s north of $11M parked into a single name with a six-month runway. That’s not a hedge, that’s a thesis. When you see that kind of size on a mega cap reaching out that far, someone has serious conviction AMZN hasn’t topped out.

On the other side, IWM saw nearly 19,000 puts bought at the 254 strike for March. This is worth paying attention to because small caps have been on a tear. The Russell 2000 is up over 8% on the year, hitting all-time highs, while the S&P is only up about 2%. Someone is saying this small cap run is overextended and hedging accordingly. Pair that with the ARKK 70 puts (10,850 contracts) and you’re getting a pretty clear read: protection is being bought against the more speculative end of the market heading into March. The flow is there.

INTC continues to show up. Over 15,600 calls on the 55 strike out to April. That name just keeps attracting interest, and if you’ve been following us, you know how we feel about that one already.

ORCL was active with 13,000+ contracts on the 170 calls expiring this week. ORCL ripped nearly 10% yesterday on a sell-side upgrade and the broader software bounce, so this is someone chasing that momentum with a short-dated, aggressive bet.

Now the PLTR puts caught my eye. 3,500 contracts on the 130 strike expiring 2/27. PLTR just crushed Q4 earnings last week, beat top and bottom line, guided FY26 revenue to $7.19B (61% growth, absolutely lapped consensus), and Alex Karp called it the best results in tech in the last decade. Stock popped hard on the print. But it’s still down about 20% on the year, and someone is positioning for a post-earnings fade or hedging a long. That’s a name to watch closely over the next couple weeks as the dust settles.

For the puts sold column, which is where a lot of the smart money likes to hide: RIG had over 20,000 puts sold at the 5 strike out to May. That’s someone saying “I will happily own this at $5 or collect premium trying.” UBER saw nearly 15,000 puts sold at 65, and SCHW had over 10,000 puts sold at the 90 strike. That cluster of institutional put selling tells you where the floor bids are.

Broader context matters here too. Dow just crossed 50,000 for the first time last week. Retail sales came in flat today, missing expectations, which pushed bonds higher and is now getting the market to price in the possibility of a third Fed cut this year. Jobs data hits Wednesday (delayed from the funding lapse), CPI tomorrow as well. It's a loaded week, and the flow is reflecting that.

What the flow is really telling us, how we’re positioned, and what we’re watching next... as well as a deep dive on one of our newest equity positions.

🔒 The full breakdown, including the highlighted names, and the setups we’re tracking into this week’s data, is for paid subscribers only.

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If you’ve been sitting on the fence, today’s a good day to hop off it.

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You got the full week ahead last night. Today’s about what actually happened and where the money went. Just a quick read and recap of what I am seeing in regards to the flow pull from todays session.

The Tape

Strong reversal day. Opened red, closed green across the board.

S&P 500: 6,979.41 (+0.58%) Dow: 49,420.53 (+1.08%) Nasdaq: 25,744.51 (+0.75%) Russell 2000: +1.01% (small cap rotation continues, for now) VIX: 16.43 (-5.79%)

The metals liquidation from Friday appears to be exhausting itself. Risk-on sentiment returned. Dollar held gains (DXY 97.65, +0.53%).

Disney beat this morning. $1.63 EPS vs $1.57 expected, $26B revenue. Experiences crossed $10B for the first time. Stock still sold off 6%.

Oracle popped on plans to raise $50B for cloud infrastructure. Nvidia fell 2% after WSJ reported the OpenAI investment has stalled.

Palantir reports tonight. AMD tomorrow.

The Flow

Let me walk you through what stood out to me, & what we’re currently positioned in below. As always, yellow indicates that the trade interests me personally, purple indicates earnings, orange is a repeat hit.

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Hope you all had a solid weekend, because last week was a ride and this week isn’t going to slow down. Let’s dive in.

LAST WEEK IN REVIEW

January closed out on a positive note overall, but Friday reminded us that things can get ugly fast. For the month:

• S&P 500 finished around 6,939, up 1.4% for January

• Dow closed near 48,892, up 1.7% for the month

• Nasdaq ended at 25,552, gaining about 1.27% for January

• Russell 2000 was the quiet winner, jumping over 5% on the month as small caps caught a bid

But let’s be clear, Friday was brutal. The S&P dropped 0.43%, Dow fell 0.36%, and the Nasdaq got hit for nearly 1%. Tech led the selling, and risk assets across the board got whacked. VIX crept back up near 17.5.

Sector rotation was the story of January, and it wasn’t subtle.

Energy absolutely dominated, up over 13% for the period. Materials followed at nearly 11%. Industrials, Consumer Staples, and Comm Services all posted solid gains in the 6% range. Meanwhile, the laggards tell you everything about the rotation: Info Tech down 0.36%, Healthcare down 0.75%, and Financials bringing up the rear at negative 2.33%.

This is a clear “risk-on but not in mega cap tech” setup. Money rotated hard into cyclicals and commodity-sensitive names while the Mag 7 trade took a breather. Healthcare got wrecked by that Medicare Advantage news, and Financials never recovered from the early-month weakness.

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Indices

- SPY Daily

Touched 7,000 briefly on Tuesday, which was a new intraday high, before pulling back. The index is sitting right above the 10/20d MA after Friday's action. Breadth has since faded from the January highs when many names were above their 50-day.

- QQQ Daily

Tech weakness dragged it down, especially on Friday. The Nasdaq underperformed all week as rate sensitivity weighed on growth names. Earlier in the week it appeared as though money had been rotating back into tech, yet we are left wondering if that was a head fake after the first half of earnings came around.

- DJI Daily

Held up relatively better thanks to some of the value and industrial names. Caterpillar gained over 3% on earnings. Verizon ripped 12% on guidance. But Visa and American Express weighed on the index.

- IWM Daily

Small caps had been quietly outperforming all month. The 5%+ January gain was notable, though Friday gave some of that back. Still worth watching if the ‘rotation’ trade continues.

Here's something worth keeping in mind. The Dow just posted its 9th consecutive positive month. That's rare.

Going back to 1927, there have only been 12 instances of this happening. The forward returns are overwhelmingly positive. Average 1-month gain of 4.57%, 3-month gain of 8.50%, and 12-month gain of 27.54%. Over 91% of the time, the market was higher one month later.

Now, past performance isn’t a guarantee, and we’re dealing with a different macro backdrop than most of these historical periods. But the takeaway is clear, momentum tends to beget momentum. Extended winning streaks historically don’t just suddenly reverse. Something has to break the trend, and right now, the data isn’t showing that.

Positioning Data: Where the Smart Money is Leaning

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Before we dive in, I have to take a moment.

Last week, Unusual Flows officially hit bestseller status. That doesn’t happen without you. Every share, every referral, every conversation you’ve had telling a friend or colleague about what we’re building here. This community has grown into something real, and I don’t take that lightly.

We’re just getting started. More tools, more data, more alpha coming your way. Thank you for believing in what we’re doing.

Now let’s get to work.

The Tape

What a session. Let’s take a peak at the charts first.

- SPY Daily

- QQQ Daily

- IWM Daily

- DXY Weekly

Price says calm. Rotation says chaos.

S&P 500 pushed to fresh all time highs, settling at 6,978.59, up 0.41%. We’re 22 points from the psychological 7,000 level. Nasdaq finished at 25,939.75, up 0.88%, as mega cap tech continued positioning into this week’s reports. Microsoft gained 2.19%, Apple added 1.12%.

But if you’re only watching the indices, you’re missing the real story.

The Dow got absolutely torched. Down 0.83% to 49,003.41, dragged into the red by a healthcare sector that can only be described as a bloodbath.

$80 billion in market cap evaporated from managed care in a single session.

UnitedHealth cratered 19.61% to $282.70 after dropping 2026 guidance and confirming what everyone feared: the first annual revenue decline in three decades. They’re calling it “right sizing across the enterprise.” The market called it something else.

But UNH wasn’t alone. CMS dropped a bomb, proposing a 0.09% increase to Medicare Advantage payments for 2027. Wall Street was expecting 4 to 6%. Dr. Oz and the Trump administration clearly have different plans for managed care.

Humana fell 21.13% to $207.93. CVS shed 14.15% to $72. Elevance dropped 10.2% to $338.51. That’s not a selloff. That’s a policy induced reset.

On the other side of the tape, CoreWeave ripped 10.73% to $108.86 after Nvidia announced a fresh $2 billion investment to build out five gigawatts of AI data center capacity by 2030. Jensen went on camera to reaffirm the partnership. The flow reflected the enthusiasm.

Silver saw one of the wildest sessions in recent memory. SLV closed at $101.59, up 3.3% after experiencing massive intraday volatility. Over 100 million shares traded on the session. First time an ETF other than SPY has topped that list since we started tracking in 2012. Wild.

VIX at 16.32. Remarkable complacency given the headline risk this week.

The Headlines

CMS Medicare Advantage Bomb

This is the story. CMS proposed 0.09% payment increases for 2027 when the Street expected 4 to 6%. That delta is enormous for companies where margins are already thin. UNH, HUM, CVS, ELV all got taken to the woodshed. The April final notice will be the next catalyst. Either they soften the blow or managed care has a serious problem.

Nvidia Doubles Down on CoreWeave

$2 billion fresh investment. Five gigawatts of AI data center capacity by 2030. Jensen Huang went on camera personally. When Nvidia writes checks like this, pay attention. CRWV ripped 10%+ and the flow was aggressive all session.

Fed Wednesday

FOMC decision at 2pm ET. No change expected. Powell presser at 2:30. Given the ongoing political drama, the tone will matter more than the decision itself.

Earnings Avalanche

Wednesday after close: Microsoft, Meta, Tesla. Thursday after close: Apple. This is the week that determines whether mega cap tech leads or lags in Q1.

In case you missed it, we recently opened up a discord server for the paid subscribers to make it easily accessible to find any missed information, trade ideas, charts, and filter through discussions with ease given their advanced search feature vs the classic “ctrl + F” function on substack chat. While this is reserved for paid only members, I realize discord is not for everyone, and I will continue to post trades on substack as we always have. This is just an added feature for those who enjoy it.

We are also still working on developing a new website client for your use that will be granted upon a new tiered subscription in the future once finalized. I have dropped a few teasers here and there within chats. Features include:

• Historical options database

• Portfolio / basket tracking

• Market AI Chatbot

• Market News updated throughout the day & filtered ticker search

• Stock allocation & performance tracking

Among many other features to come.

What’s Buzzing

CoreWeave (CRWV)

The AI infrastructure name of the moment. Nvidia’s $2 billion investment validates the thesis. $56 billion backlog is real. Debt load is real too. But in this tape, growth gets funded. Stock closed at $108.86, up 10.73% on massive volume. The flow was relentless all day.

Managed Care Wreckage

UNH down 20%, HUM down 21%, CVS down 14% in a single session. This is what policy risk looks like. The question now is whether April’s final CMS notice softens the blow or confirms the damage. Some contrarian flow showed up in HUM calls late in the session. Someone’s betting on a bounce.

Silver (SLV)

Most traded security of the day. Over 100 million shares. Massive intraday swings. Safe haven flows, inflation hedging, short squeezes, take your pick. The metals trade is alive and well.

Options Flow Breakdown

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Happy Monday. Markets are closed for MLK Day, so we get a quick breather before jumping back into what’s shaping up to be a pivotal week. Let’s break it all down.

The S&P 500 closed Friday at 6,940 - essentially flat on the day but down slightly for the week. The Dow settled at 49,359 and Nasdaq at 23,515. But here’s the thing: if you’re only watching the big indices, you’re missing the real story.

The Great Rotation Is Here (well, it’s been occurring)

The Russell 2000 is absolutely ripping. We’re talking +8% YTD while the S&P sits at just +1.5%. Small caps have now outperformed the S&P 500 for 11 consecutive sessions - the longest streak since 2008. This isn’t noise. This is the rotation we’ve been waiting for.

Why? A few things converging:

• The valuation gap between small and large caps hit a 25-year extreme at year-end

• Russell 2000 trades at ~18x P/E vs. S&P at ~26x

• Lower rates are finally flowing through to small-cap balance sheets

• GDP is running hot, Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow pegs Q4 at 5.3%

If you’ve been sitting in mega-cap tech waiting for breadth to improve - congratulations, it’s happening.

Current Levels

Index Close (Jan 16) YTD: S&P 500 6,940 +1.5% Nasdaq 23,515 +2.0% Dow 49,359 +1.2% Russell 2000 2,678 +8.0% VIX 19.23

Gold: $4,600+ (record high)
Silver: $90+ (record high, +26% YTD)
10Y Treasury: 4.20% (breaking out of multi-month base)

- SPY Weekly

- QQQ Weekly

- IWM Weekly

- DJI Weekly

Overall, things are pretty constructive in the grand scheme of things with a longer time frame horizon outlook. While we do sit at/near overbought levels, the channel remains pretty mid-line controlled if you will. When looking at futures at the time of writing, we are still trading above the 10wk SMA on Spooz yet people are running around like chickens with their heads cut off on X. We’ve seen this exact song and dance before just under a year ago. The famously coined TACO trade is back? Per chance, per maybe. Certainly will see a good bit of blood in the week ahead especially with the higher beta names & growth stories likely taking a big hit. This provides necessary downside to consolidation & entry for traders who were ‘locked out’ of the trade.

The Headlines

Powell vs. DOJ

Fed Chair Jerome Powell dropped a bombshell last Sunday: the DOJ served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas threatening criminal indictment over his testimony about the Fed’s building renovation project.

Trump denied involvement but continues hammering Powell on rates, posting “Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should cut interest rates, MEANINGFULLY!!!”

The market implication? JPMorgan now expects the Fed to hold rates steady all of 2026. That’s a big shift from the 1-2 cuts everyone was pricing in. Fed independence concerns are real, and the bond market is paying attention.

Personally still believe we remain on track for 1-2 cuts this year.

Credit Card Cap Drama

Trump floated a 10% cap on credit card interest rates for one year. Bank stocks got hammered - Citi down 7% for the week, Bank of America off 6%, Wells Fargo down 7%. Even JPMorgan sold off despite beating on earnings. Goldman Sachs remained resilient in the grand scheme of things and continues to surge at highs.

Geopolitics Getting Spicy

Iran, Greenland, Venezuela - choose your fighter (lol). Trump announced tariffs on any country doing business with Iran, “effective immediately.” The Greenland situation is escalating. Meanwhile, safe haven flows are going straight into gold and silver.

Macro Setup

The macro picture is honestly pretty constructive despite all the noise:

The Good:

• GDP running hot

• Initial jobless claims came in at 198k, second lowest in two years

• Consumer spending holding steady

• Taiwan Semi’s guidance was strong (more on this below)

• Earnings season starting solid (Goldman/Morgan Stanley crushed it)

The Concerns:

• Fed independence under direct attack

• Valuations stretched (CAPE ratio at 40, only hit this during dot-com bubble)

  

• Inflation could re-accelerate if rates stay higher for longer

• Geopolitical uncertainty at multi-year highs

This Week’s Earnings

Earnings season heats up. Here’s what matters:

Tuesday (Jan 20)

• Netflix (NFLX): All eyes here. The WBD acquisition bid is the wildcard. Stock down -6% YTD after four straight monthly losses. Look for subscriber numbers and any updates on that $83B deal.

• 3M, US Bancorp, United Airlines, D.R. Horton, Interactive Brokers

Wednesday (Jan 21)

• Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): Watch immunology segment and any talc litigation updates

• Kinder Morgan, Halliburton (watch this one), Charles Schwab, Truist

Thursday (Jan 22)

• Intel (INTC): The turnaround story of 2026. Stock is up 129% over the past year and 30%+ just this month. Panther Lake (18A process) now in high-volume production. This is the key AI infrastructure name everyone’s been sleeping on. We classified this name as a Trump Trade back in late ‘24 and we see it coming to full fruition now.

• GE Aerospace (GE): Should be a blowout given the plane backlog

• Procter & Gamble (PG), Freeport-McMoRan (FCX), Capital One, Intuitive Surgical

  • FCX is going to be interesting given the recent run-up from mid December & the widely discussed “Copper Supercycle” from our year-ahead.

Friday (Jan 23)

• SLB (Schlumberger)

Also: Fed meeting is Jan 27-28, expect no change, but the Powell situation will dominate the presser.

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What’s Buzzing

Intel (INTC)

I can’t emphasize this enough. The stock ripped 30% in the first two weeks of January alone. Taiwan Semi’s strong capex guidance ($52-56B for 2026) validates the AI infrastructure buildout. Intel is sold out on server CPUs and reportedly considering 10-15% price hikes. Jefferies has a $45 target (current levels). Earnings Thursday after close.

Gold Miners

Newmont (NEM) hitting all-time highs. Gold at $4,670+, silver above $90. If you believe the Fed independence narrative plays out, precious metals have room to run. Target prices of $5,000 gold / $100 silver are being thrown around by serious analysts.

Small Caps / IWM

The breakout is legit. MarketBeat has targets of 3,250-3,650 on the Russell. That’s 20-35% upside from here. Focus on quality. Industrials, financials, domestic cyclicals benefiting from “America First” policies.

Under the Radar

Freeport-McMoRan (FCX)

Copper and gold exposure. Stock up 40% since the start of December. Metals are on fire. Earnings Thursday before market open.

Dave & Buster’s (PLAY)

Just got upgraded to Buy with a $30 target (55% upside). First positive same-store sales in 13 quarters could be coming. Worth watching.

Dollar Tree (DLTR)

Up 96% in the past year. Evercore just added a tactical outperform rating with $165 target (+17%). Multi-price point strategy is working.

Defense names

Budget increases being proposed. Lockheed (LMT) near all-time highs. Smaller contractors like Kratos Defense (KTOS) benefiting from “America First” industrial policy.

Netflix (NFLX)

Earnings Tuesday, but the Warner Bros acquisition drama overshadows everything. “The earnings will be overshadowed,” as one analyst put it. Options pricing in an 8%+ move. Netflix has now recorded SEVEN straight weeks of downside. Not a huge proponent of ‘knife-catching’ but this one is hard to ignore given the sheer dominance & upside potential here.

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Options Flow Breakdown

Let’s take a look at Friday’s flow grab for the time being while we discuss the current market as many of these highlighted trades will open in the red.

I’ve highlighted only a few trades that really piqued my interest on Friday as we weren’t entirely focused on adding new positions during the session. However, Tuesday should provide us some intriguing opportunities depending on a potential continued unwind vs an intraday reversal.

A standout theme with flow as of late, and one in which we did relatively good with, has been homebuilders. We first positioned into Lennar back in December after their earnings report with the assumption there would be a news trade here with parabolic upside. We were nuts on. Absolutely crushed the thesis as it came to fruition the exact week of expiration for our contracts. Although, there is so much more behind this trade & feels like a potential year-long theme.

Ideas from Friday:

• RKT 25C / 35C 13,670x total size across both strikes for 01/23 & 06/18

  • Weekly idea a bit aggressive but will monitor the chain action upon open to see if they are taking the loss or adding at a lower cost for the aforementioned reversal possibility.

• LEN 117C 2,100x 01/23

  • Again, another weekly to watch for with earnings on Tuesday.

• DHI 180C 1,000x 02/20

  • Earnings also Tuesday. Bit more time behind the idea.

• BLDR 160C 5,800x 03/20

  • Supplier play on housing, more under the radar.

Given futures downside over the weekend, the idea is that these contracts are going to open in the red, some even deep in the red. Money had obviously been flowing into these names especially RKT with some serious size / conviction. Few direct earnings bets including LEN weeklies and DHI quarterlies. Assuming that the whales remain in the trades come Tuesday close, the opportunity for discounted flow trades are present into the report.

• COHR 240C 1,000x 13.64 avg

  • This is the AI optical networking play. Premium paid is substantial (~$1.36M notional). Someone's betting on continued data center buildout. With TSM's strong capex guidance last week, this makes sense thematically. Chart looks great as well, see below.

• CIFR 10,960 contracts at 35C for June

  • Bitcoin miner. Highlighted for a reason. That's a BIG bet. If BTC holds and miners catch a bid, this has room. Not to mention the surplus of news headlines that consistently surround these names / sector boosting them higher. Incredibly volatile name and this will certainly provide discounted entry.

• CRWV 14,010 contracts at 125C for FebruaryLargest single position (OI wise) in the flow. Worth digging into what’s driving this.

• DKNG 11,070 contracts at 37.5C for Feb

  • NFL playoffs in full swing. Sports betting volumes are elevated. Solid seasonal catalyst. This is a bet we notice yearly. Typically has worked although the growing presence of Kalshi, Polymarket, and other prediction markets presents new competition & uncertainty.

Obviously some of those bearish ideas will pay nicely given the weekend we’ve seen. ORCL weeklies are interesting given the cloud competition heating up + Gemini deals going to Google. Reddit weeklies as well coming in at the 20D from below & resistance level of 237 and change. MU had a bit of a split, with puts bought & puts sold. Clearly the puts sold is a bullish position with the whale willing to be assigned shares at $350. The memory trade is far from over IMO, but intermediate weakness on a name that has gone relatively parabolic is always necessary.

Actionable Setups for a Down Open

If futures stay red, here’s how I’d play it:

1. RKT on the dip. The call flow is too big to ignore. Near-term catalyst could be rate expectations or housing data. Watch for support levels to hold. Would lean towards the June chain vs the weeklies for obvious reasons given the short week and Geopolitical uncertainty.

2. LEN / DHI into earnings Tuesday. Both have call flow. The LEN 117C expiring Friday is a lotto but the flow is there. I expect more homebuilder flow in the coming days with more time behind them.

3. COHR for AI infrastructure. If it pulls back with broader tech weakness, the 240C March calls suggest someone sees a move. This is a beneficiary of the same theme driving TSM.

4. Fade ORCL. 10k+ puts expiring this week. If/when it gaps down, could have momentum. Watch 180 as the level to hold as it has previously (bullish gap back from June ‘25).

5. BLDR as a builder play (neat). Less volatile than the homebuilders themselves, benefits from the same tailwind. March expiration gives time.

Bottom line: The homebuilder/housing theme is screaming from this flow. RKT, LEN, DHI, BLDR all have significant call buying. With rates potentially staying higher for longer (per the Powell/Fed situation), this might be a “bad news is priced in” bet.

If we get a gap down Tuesday, those are the names I’d be stalking for entries. The COHR and CIFR calls are more thematic AI/crypto bets with longer timeframes.

The Playbook

Look, the market wants to go higher. We just capped off three consecutive years of double-digit gains. GDP is strong, earnings are coming in solid, and now we’re getting the breadth expansion everyone’s been waiting for.

But there are real risks here. The CAPE ratio at 40 is screaming caution. The Fed situation is unprecedented. Geopolitics are a wildcard. Overbought territory + Greed.

My take for the week:

• Let earnings dictate the action, especially Netflix Tuesday and Intel Thursday

• Small caps remain the play if you believe in the rotation

  • Individual names amid broader market chop

• Precious metals as a hedge against the chaos

• Stay nimble, we have Fed next week and PCE data Thursday

The best opportunities often come when things feel uncomfortable. Right now, it’s uncomfortable, and that’s when you stay sharp.

See you tomorrow & cheers,

Jersace

Unusual Flow is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. Always do your own research.

Key Dates This Week

Date Event Mon 1/19 Markets Closed (MLK Day) Tue 1/20 Netflix earnings (AMC) Wed 1/21 J&J, Schwab, Halliburton earnings Thu 1/22 Intel, P&G, GE Aerospace, FCX earnings / PCE Data Fri 1/23 Michigan Sentiment (final), S&P Global PMI Jan 27-28 FOMC Meeting

Sources:
CNBC, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, MarketBeat, Seeking Alpha, FRED (St. Louis Fed), Reuters, Wall Street Journal

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Hello,

What a year it has been.

Welcome back to the Juice List! To those who have followed me for quite some time or chat with me regularly, you know this list has become something of a tradition. Vol. 1 helped set the stage back in January 2024, and Vol. 2 published at the tail end of 2024 absolutely delivered. Now, as we close out another incredible year, it’s time for Vol. 3.

The 2025 Juice List wasn’t just about picking stocks that would go up. It was about identifying a structural shift so profound that it would revalue entire sectors. 2025 was a phenomenal year for markets.

The big themes of 2025 were clear: AI infrastructure remained king, nuclear energy emerged as a legitimate growth story, memory and storage stocks exploded, and the “picks and shovels” trade expanded beyond semiconductors into power generation and grid infrastructure. Gold hit all-time highs above $4,500, silver broke $70, and commodities broadly rallied as inflation concerns persisted into the first half before easing.

The remarkable thing isn’t that these stocks from Vol. 2 went up as much as they did. The remarkable thing is how few people understood why they went up. Most investors saw “AI stocks” and chased semiconductor names. The real trade was understanding that silicon without electricity is worthless, and that we’d created an energy constraint that would take a decade to solve.

As we position for 2026, I want to be crystal clear about what we’re doing and why. This isn’t a momentum portfolio. This isn’t a collection of “AI plays” because AI is trendy. This is a calculated bet on the largest coordinated infrastructure build-out since the interstate highway system of the 1950s (in other words, the best thing since sliced bread), and we’re positioning ourselves in front of every bottleneck, every capacity constraint, and every material shortage that build-out will create.

Now let's see how the Vol. 2 basket performed and get into what I'm watching for 2026.

Vol. 2 Performance Recap

The Vol. 2 list published in late December 2024 absolutely crushed it. Let me break down how each name performed throughout 2025:

The Big Winners

GOOGL (+66% YTD): The undisputed champion of the basket. The Willow quantum chip announcement we highlighted delivered, Google Cloud continued to dominate, and Waymo expanded its robotaxi footprint. Alphabet emerged as one of the Magnificent Seven’s top performers alongside NVIDIA.

JOBY (+75% YTD): The eVTOL thesis played out beautifully. Joby entered TIA testing (the final stage of FAA certification), acquired Blade’s passenger business, and secured major international deals in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. The company is positioned to potentially launch commercial operations in 2026.

UBER (+51% YTD): Our risk/reward play from Vol. 2 nailed it. Goldman Sachs’s $97 target was hit and exceeded as UBER reached all-time highs above $100 in September 2025. The autonomous vehicle concerns we noted ultimately didn’t derail the stock - Uber partnered with multiple robotaxi companies instead of being disrupted by them.

GEV/VST/CEG (Energy Trifecta): These names crushed it. GEV nearly tripled since its April 2024 IPO. CEG gained roughly 45-60% as Meta, Amazon, and Google signed massive nuclear power deals. The AI power demand thesis we outlined became THE story of 2025.

TLN (Talen Energy): Another nuclear winner. The Amazon partnership we highlighted expanded to 1,920 megawatts through 2042. Earnings projections soared, with 2026 EPS expected to jump over 300%.

HIMS (+36% YTD, hit $73 ATH): The GLP-1 weight loss play delivered early in the year, with shares surging to all-time highs near $73 in February before pulling back. Volatile but profitable for those who caught the move.

TSLA (+18% YTD): Solid gains, though not the explosive move some hoped for. The robotaxi narrative continued building, and the Musk-Trump relationship remained a tailwind.

IONQ: Hit all-time highs above $84 in October 2025 during the quantum computing frenzy, though it’s pulled back since. Those who caught the momentum play banked serious gains.

The Misses

LCID (-65% YTD): The speculative turnaround play didn’t work out. Production scalability issues persisted, and the EV market remained brutally competitive. Risk/reward cuts both ways.

GTLB (-15% YTD): Underperformed despite the DevOps theme. Microsoft’s GitHub integration and broader software compression hurt.

ACHR: More volatile than JOBY, with execution concerns emerging late in the year. Still up significantly from 2023 lows but lagging its peer.

AUR (-38% YTD): This one was interesting because while it didn’t perform well throughout the year, we actually booked a gain on this for over 70% within the first two months of the year.

Each of these names had their moment of green and if executed the trade perfectly, you wouldn’t own any of these at the moment unless you’re still interested in the previous thesis at a lower entry.

The Verdict

Overall, the Vol. 2 basket significantly outperformed the S&P 500’s ~17% return. The energy and autonomous mobility themes we identified were spot-on. Even accounting for the LCID and GTLB misses, a diversified allocation across these names would have generated strong alpha. The juice was absolutely worth the squeeze.

The Broader Market

The S&P 500 returned approximately 17-19%, marking its third consecutive year of double-digit gains. The Nasdaq Composite climbed over 21%, and the Dow added around 14%. We came within striking distance of the historic 7,000 milestone on the S&P 500, hitting an all-time intraday high of 6,945 during the Christmas rally. The market proved resilient, muscling past the April tariff chaos, rate cut speculation, and concerns about an AI bubble bursting.

The Copper Supercycle

I want to spend time on copper because I believe this is the single most underappreciated macro trade for the next three to five years.

Copper demand from AI data centers alone will grow 6x by 2050 according to BHP’s research division, from around half a million tonnes annually today to approximately three million tonnes by mid-century. But here’s the key insight: that growth won’t be linear. It will be front-loaded into the next five years as the massive data center construction boom happens now, not in 2045.

Here’s what makes copper different from other commodities. When you’re building a data center, copper represents less than half of 1% of total project costs. Developers are completely price insensitive. If copper goes from $4 to $6 per pound, it doesn’t change anyone’s decision to build. This inelastic demand in a supply-constrained market is the recipe for explosive price appreciation.

On the supply side, the picture is bleak. The US averages 29 years to permit and build a copper mine. Chile’s state miner Codelco faces stagnation. First Quantum’s Cobre Panama mine closure removed substantial supply. BHP and Freeport-McMoRan both face rising capital requirements for new production. The industry has been underinvesting for fifteen years, and you can’t fix a decade of underinvestment overnight.

The investment playbook here is straightforward. We want to own copper producers with low all-in sustaining costs, mines in politically stable jurisdictions, and near-term production growth. We want to avoid development-stage stories with 5+ year timelines because we’re trying to capture the 2026-2028 price spike, not the 2030s. And we want to complement direct mining exposure with copper-intensive infrastructure plays like utilities and cable manufacturers that will benefit from higher throughput volumes even if margins compress slightly. Moving on…

The 2026 Juice List

Before we dive into the list, I’d like to point out that in the past two weeks, I have nearly re-done the entire letter. A few ideas you will find missing as I have already mentioned them in chat and others on hold for the time being with the intention of writing them up in another letter in its entirety focusing on the memory/data storage angle paired with batteries. I was taking the angle of a full blown weighted portfolio structured letter here, however switched gears back into flat-out idea generation built for investing & trading alike.

Now let’s dive into what I’m watching for 2026. The themes have evolved - AI infrastructure is entering its “maturity phase,” healthcare is setting up for a rebound, and the power generation trade has legs left to run. Here are my picks across various sectors and themes:

Theme 1: AI Power Infrastructure: The Trade That Keeps Giving

CEG (Constellation Energy)

The undisputed heavyweight champion of nuclear power. CEG is the largest nuclear operator in the U.S. with 20-year power purchase agreements now signed with Meta, Microsoft, and others. The Calpine acquisition for $26.6 billion adds natural gas and geothermal assets, making this a diversified clean energy powerhouse.

The Technical Setup: Trading about 8% off all-time highs after retaking the 50-day moving average. Expected earnings growth of 22-26% in 2026. Trades at 29.6X forward earnings - a 20% discount to its highs.

The Catalyst: Trump administration’s four executive orders aimed at expanding domestic nuclear capacity. The regulatory tailwind is real.

GEV (GE Vernova)

Still my favorite energy play. GEV customers generate roughly 25% of all electricity in the world via its installed base. The company provides exposure to nuclear, natural gas, small modular reactors (SMRs), grid solutions, and electrification software. Revenue expected to reach $45 billion by 2028 with $14 billion in cumulative free cash flow. This screams $1000/share.

Stock has increased over 500% since April 2024 IPO. Recently announced $6 billion buyback program and its first dividend. Projected 237% earnings growth in 2025, setting up for continued momentum.

The Catalyst: Electrification backlog expected to double in the next 3 years. Every AI hyperscaler is a potential customer.

TLN (Talen Energy)

Another big winner from 2025. The Amazon-backed nuclear play. TLN has a deal to provide AWS with 1,920 megawatts of carbon-free nuclear power through 2042. Recently expanded by acquiring natural gas plants, boosting generation capacity by 50%.

The Technical Setup: 12 of 13 analysts have Strong Buy ratings. EPS projected to jump 300%+ in 2026 on 75% revenue growth.

The Catalyst: Potential for additional hyperscaler deals. The data center demand pipeline is massive.

NEE (NextEra Energy)

The renewable and nuclear utility giant. NEE has crushed the S&P over the past 25 years (810% vs 460%) yet has traded essentially ‘flat’ for the last 4 years. Recently partnered with Google to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear facility in Iowa, plus signed multiple GW-scale solar and storage deals with Meta.

The Technical Setup: Trading 15% below all-time highs after being rejected at resistance multiple times since 2021. Rate cuts make the dividend yield more attractive. This could be the year it finally breaks out.

Theme 2: AI Infrastructure: Builders

NVDA (Nvidia)

The undisputed king. NVDA is up 42% YTD and remains the second-best performing Mag 7 stock behind only Alphabet. But here’s the thing, after two years of triple-digit returns, the “slowdown” narrative created a buying opportunity that Wall Street is now reversing hard on.

The numbers are staggering: Nvidia has a $500 billion AI chip order book for 2025 and 2026 combined, and Q4 fiscal 2026 revenue is expected to hit $65.6 billion with EPS growth of 69% YoY. Data center is 90% of revenue now and accelerating. Q3 showed 62.5% revenue growth, up from 56% in Q2. When was the last time you saw growth accelerate at this scale?

The 2026 catalyst is clear: the Vera Rubin platform launches, and if it delivers the promised performance uplift, it destroys any remaining doubt about Nvidia’s supremacy. Jensen stays several steps ahead. Cantor Fitzgerald calls NVDA their “top pick” with Tigress raising their target to $350. Mean analyst target sits at $261 with a Street-high of $433.

The Juice: This is still the AI trade. 92% GPU market share. CUDA lock-in. The Groq acquisition adds inference capabilities, and China H200 exports resume in 2026. Premium valuation, but premium asset. You’re not buying a chip company, you’re buying the backbone of the AI revolution essentially BUILDING the ecosystem we all invest in daily.

Risk: Valuation remains elevated. Any demand stumble or hyperscaler pivot to in-house chips (Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium) creates headline risk. China regulatory overhang persists.

AMZN (Amazon)

The Mag 7 laggard becomes the 2026 value play. AMZN is up a mere 3.6% YTD - the worst-performing Magnificent 7 constituent - while the S&P ripped 18%. That’s a 15-point gap that has Wall Street salivating.

Why the underperformance? Rising competition from Walmart, Temu, and Shein on retail. AWS market share losses to Azure and Google Cloud. Fair concerns. But here’s what the market is missing: AWS reaccelerated to 20% revenue growth in Q3, its fastest clip since 2022.

The setup for 2026 is compelling. Data center deal activity hit a record $61 billion in 2025, and Amazon is spending aggressively to capture it. The company plans to invest $125 billion in capex in 2025, growing further in 2026, with plans to double data center capacity by 2027. Oppenheimer estimates each incremental gigawatt of capacity generates $3 billion in annual revenue.

Six major brokerages - BMO, TD Cowen, Wedbush, Truist, J.P. Morgan, and Evercore ISI - have named Amazon a “top idea” for 2026. Mean price target is $296, representing 30% upside from current levels.

The Juice: At 32x forward P/E versus its 5-year average of 44x, AMZN is statistically cheap for the first time in years. AWS is the profit engine, advertising is a $50B+ business growing 20%+, and Prime continues compounding. The “boring” Mag 7 stock might be the best risk/reward of the bunch.

Risk: Capex-heavy model pressures free cash flow near-term. AI shopping agents could disrupt ad revenue. Retail margins remain razor-thin.

CLS (Celestica)

The networking infrastructure play. Celestica provides rack-scale computing solutions for AI data centers, including parts for Google’s custom ASIC chips (TPUs). Revenue grew 28% in Q3 2025 with expectations of 33-34% growth through 2027.

The Catalyst: Leading provider of Google TPU rack-level solutions. Mass production of liquid-cooled AI rack components begins in 2026.

LITE (Lumentum Holdings)

The optical connectivity play. AI servers require massive optical connections - every GPU needs to connect to every other GPU. Lumentum makes the switches, transceivers, and laser-based optical parts that enable this. Stock surged 372% in 2025.

The Catalyst: As AI systems scale out, optical connections from rack-to-rack and eventually data center-to-data center will be essential. This is infrastructure spending that hasn’t peaked.

Thing about this setup is that it’s basically at highs / gone parabolic recently. So we’re not buying this just yet, but rather keeping it high on the focus list for an opportunity to get into the trade versus adding at highs, which can be favorable at times.

ETN (Eaton Corporation)

The electrical systems play. Eaton supplies the power management and electrical systems that deliver and manage the intensive power needs of data centers. As AI power consumption explodes, Eaton’s solutions become mission-critical.

Theme 3: Healthcare

Healthcare has underperformed for years, but the setup for 2026 is compelling. The sector trades at roughly a 20% discount to the broader market. Q4 2025 saw healthcare deliver notable outperformance - a signal that rotation is beginning. The XLV ETF offers diversified exposure, but I’m highlighting specific names with asymmetric upside.

LLY (Eli Lilly)

The GLP-1 king. Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro/Zepbound franchise continues to dominate the weight loss drug market. The global obesity epidemic isn’t going away, and LLY has the best-in-class drugs.

The Catalyst: Continued production ramp and international expansion. New indications (sleep apnea, cardiovascular) could expand the addressable market significantly.

Tough to buy names / charts like these at highs, so they remain on focus list and nibble significant dips as we did a few weeks back to get our year-ahead position locked in with a nice cushion now and plenty of room for adds.

ISRG (Intuitive Surgical)

The robotic surgery monopoly. Intuitive’s da Vinci systems are the gold standard in surgical robotics. The new Da Vinci 5 platform is driving upgrade cycles, and procedure volumes continue to grow.

The Catalyst: Healthcare is ripe for AI integration. Intuitive is positioned to be the picks-and-shovels play for AI-assisted surgery.

We got long this name back in October prior to their massive earnings beat / reaction off that 430 level marked on the chart. Majority of the position to this point has already been trimmed as we did a good bit of maneuvering in Q4 (for the worse in full transparency) yet this remains one of our few healthcare longs going forward.

VRTX (Vertex Pharmaceuticals)

The gene editing pioneer. Vertex’s CASGEVY (developed with CRISPR Therapeutics) was the first approved CRISPR gene therapy. Their pain franchise and cystic fibrosis dominance provide stable cash flows while the gene therapy pipeline offers explosive upside.

Theme 4: Autonomous Everything: Robotaxis to Humanoids

TSLA (Tesla)

Still on the list. 2026 is the year the robotaxi thesis either validates or doesn’t. The broader rollout is planned, Optimus humanoid robots are ramping production, and the FSD subscription model continues growing. The Musk-government relationship remains a unique catalyst.

Risk/Reward: Trading at 317X P/E is insane by traditional metrics, but this is a bet on execution of multiple moonshot projects. Position size accordingly.

We’ve discussed this name nearly everyday this year so not too much else to touch on out of the ordinary.

JOBY (Joby Aviation)

The eVTOL leader. Joby is positioned to potentially begin commercial air taxi operations in Dubai in 2026, ahead of full FAA certification. The Blade acquisition adds immediate revenue, and the NVIDIA partnership for autonomous flight technology strengthens the moat.

The Catalyst: First commercial passenger flights expected mid-2026. If execution continues, this could be a multi-bagger from current levels.

This one rewarded us for the patience we showed throughout 2024 finally this year. Although, the thesis and narrative remains in tact going forward with even greater catalysts coming to fruition if they remain on track. Key support here against 13 is an attractive entry and we will be entering into this position at 250bps size as a more speculative play.

PATH (UiPath)

The enterprise automation play. UiPath’s robotic process automation (RPA) platform is being enhanced with AI agents. As AI moves from chatbots to actual business process automation, UiPath is positioned to benefit. Trading well below highs with improving fundamentals.

We’ve traded this a few times throughout the year and my thoughts remain the same albeit the volatility that comes with these higher beta / growth names.

RIVN (Rivian)

The EV comeback kid. RIVN is up nearly 70% YTD, with most gains coming in the past two months as the market finally recognized two things: the AI angle and the R2.

In early 2026, Rivian begins production of the R2 - its first model priced under $50,000. This is the Tesla Model 3 moment. The R1T and R1S are $100K+ trucks for wealthy enthusiasts. The R2 opens the door to tens of millions of mainstream buyers. Analysts project $6.9 billion in 2026 revenue with a potential price target of $39 if R2 executes.

The balance sheet is secure: VW’s $5.8 billion joint venture partnership (with $1 billion already delivered) bolsters Rivian’s $7.2 billion cash position. This isn’t a company about to run out of runway.

Rivian just achieved its third consecutive quarter of positive gross profit. The Autonomy & AI Day in December showcased hands-free highway assist and robotaxi ambitions - suddenly RIVN trades as an “AI stock” alongside TSLA.

The Juice: Ford just exited the electric truck market. That’s one less competitor. If R2 delivers, Rivian becomes a real Tesla challenger with actual differentiation (adventure/outdoor brand, commercial vans for Amazon). The stock is still 80% below IPO highs, massive room to recover if execution continues.

Risk: EV demand softening as tax credits expired. R2 launch is make-or-break, any delays crater the stock. Still burning cash quarterly. Execution in scaling to 200K+ units is unproven. I’ve been pounding the table on this name for a couple years now and we’re finally seeing the rewards.

Theme 5: Defense & Space: The New Space Race

RKLB (Rocket Lab)

The small launch leader. Rocket Lab has successfully executed more launches than any other private company besides SpaceX. The Neutron medium-lift rocket in development opens up a massive new addressable market including constellation deployment for DoD.

The Catalyst: Neutron first flight expected in 2026. Space becomes a trillion-dollar industry this decade, and RKLB is the most accessible pure-play.

(This chart is all over the place and trading like an alt-coin on some pumpfun website so we’re just going to disregard this one.)

PLTR (Palantir)

PLTR has transformed from “that government contractor” into the AI enterprise software story.

The AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform) is the unlock. Palantir cracked the code on enterprise AI deployment. Boot camps that show companies how to integrate AI into operations in days, not months. Government contracts keep stacking (DoD, CIA, NHS), but commercial is where the hockey stick lives. Commercial revenue growth accelerated to 54% YoY in Q3.

S&P 500 inclusion in September 2024 brought index fund flows. The stock ran from $20 to $80+ in 12 months. Absurd? Maybe. But revenue is growing 30%+ with expanding margins, and they’re one of the few software companies that can actually implement AI at scale for enterprises.

The Juice: Palantir is what happens when a company becomes the de facto AI operating system for governments and Fortune 500s simultaneously. Peter Thiel built this for decades. The valuation (200x+ forward earnings) prices in perfection, but if AIP adoption continues its trajectory, the multiple compresses into the growth.

Risk: Valuation is eye-watering by any traditional metric. Government contract timing creates lumpy quarters. Concentration risk with large deals. If AI hype cools, this gets hit first.

ONDS (Ondas Holdings)

The drone wars dark horse. ONDS has surged over 350% in the past year as the market finally woke up to the counter-UAS (unmanned aerial systems) opportunity. This isn’t speculation anymore, it’s execution.

Q3 revenues exploded 500% YoY to $10 million, with a $23 million backlog. Management raised 2025 guidance to at least $36 million and is targeting $110 million for 2026. That’s a 3x growth story if they deliver.

The thesis is straightforward: global demand for counter-drone tech is expected to grow from $2.4 billion in 2024 to over $10.5 billion by 2030, a 27% CAGR. Ondas positioned itself perfectly through acquisitions - American Robotics, Airobotics, Sentrycs, Roboteam - building a “system-of-systems” that detects, tracks, and defeats hostile drones.

The Optimus System achieved world-first FAA Type Certification, and the company holds BVLOS waivers allowing drones to fly over populated areas - something most competitors can’t legally do. NDAA compliance makes them one of the few viable options for U.S. government agencies replacing Chinese drone fleets.

Stifel just initiated with a Buy rating and $13 price target, citing a “generational inflection point in military drone adoption.”

The Juice: Defense budgets are expanding. Drone threats are proliferating (Ukraine proved this). Ondas is building the picks-and-shovels for drone warfare - detection, interception, ground robotics. If they hit the $110M 2026 target, this re-rates violently higher. WAR?!

Risk: Small-cap execution risk is real. Cash burn requires continued financing. Acquisition integration complexity. Stock has already run hard - pullbacks likely.

Theme 6: Banks - AI Efficiency

The thesis is simple but powerful: global banks could cut up to 200,000 jobs by 2030 as AI automates human tasks, with back-office, middle-office, and operations roles most at risk. Annual workforce reductions potentially reaching 3%. Major banks have already reported cost reductions of up to 22% through AI implementation.

This isn’t speculation, it’s happening now. JPMorgan’s Marianne Lake said productivity in areas using AI has risen to around 6%, up from roughly 3% before deployment, with operations roles eventually seeing productivity gains of 40-50%. PwC estimates front-to-back-office AI adoption in banking could drive a 15% improvement in the efficiency ratio.

The big money-center banks are leading this transformation and stand to benefit most from the margin expansion as labor costs compress.

I realize that a few of these names are not exactly “banks” however I am blanketing them in this theme for the sake of consolidation as this letter is growing increasingly long the more I research and look around the market… Apologies, I have let it get away from me at this point but man there are some great setups for the year ahead.

JPM (JPMorgan Chase)

he fortress bank that’s also the AI leader. JPM hit fresh all-time highs at $327.78 and is up approximately 37% in 2025, yet the AI efficiency story is just getting started.

JPMorgan is investing $18 billion in technology for 2025, up from $17 billion in 2024, with a strong emphasis on AI and operational efficiency. The ROI is already materializing: CEO Jamie Dimon stated the bank’s $2 billion annual AI investment is now delivering roughly $2 billion in benefits, a 1:1 payback that will only compound. Around 150,000 of the bank’s employees use internal AI models weekly to summarize reports, conduct research, and analyze contracts.

AI agents are now being used for complex trade settlements and fraud detection, which management estimates could eventually reduce operational headcount by 10% while increasing accuracy. The bank’s efficiency ratio sits in the low 50% range already industry-leading, with room to compress further.

Beyond efficiency, JPM is building the future: Kinexys (formerly Onyx) processes $10 billion in daily wholesale payments on blockchain. The bank launched 24/7 on-chain FX settlement in late 2025.

The Juice: JPM is what happens when the biggest bank also becomes the most technologically advanced. CET1 ratio at 15.2% provides massive capital buffer. They’re using AI to widen the moat, not just cut costs. At roughly 12x forward earnings for the dominant franchise in global banking, this is quality compounding.

Risk: Dimon succession (he’s signaled ~2 years to retirement). Commercial real estate exposure. Rate sensitivity if cuts accelerate. Premium to peers means less margin of safety.

HOOD (Robinhood)

The retail trading king. HOOD was one of the S&P 500’s best performers in 2025 (up 215%+). The company successfully diversified beyond payment for order flow with the Gold Card, prediction markets, and crypto trading. S&P 500 inclusion brought institutional visibility.

The Catalyst: Retail trading volumes remain elevated. Crypto bull market provides additional revenue. International expansion opens new markets.

Honorable Mentions:

COIN

The crypto infrastructure play. If you believe Bitcoin and crypto have another leg up in 2026 (as many macro analysts suggest for monetary hedge purposes), Coinbase is the regulated U.S. on-ramp. Revenue leverage to crypto prices is significant.

GS

If you’re going to invest in something, you should own the leader at the least. Keep it simple. We could dive into this deeper but I’ll save you the trouble, this bank is resilient and continues to resolve higher.

BAC

Bank of America has been incorporating AI into their day to day for years now and is considered an AI adoption leader in the financial sector.

Erica, their AI virtual assistant, has now surpassed 3 billion client interactions, serving nearly 50 million users and averaging 58 million interactions per month. But the real story is internal adoption: 90% of Bank of America's 213,000 employees are actively using Erica for Employees, reducing IT service desk queries by over 50%.

Theme 7: Commodities: Gold, Copper, and the Inflation Hedge

NEM (Newmont Mining)

The gold miner with leverage. Gold hit all-time highs above $4,500 in 2025, and central banks continue accumulating. NEM was a top-5 S&P 500 performer in 2025 (up 184%). If gold continues its bull run, miners provide leveraged exposure.

The Catalyst: Geopolitical uncertainty, inflation concerns, and central bank buying all support gold. Morgan Stanley expects gold to remain strong in 2026.

FCX (Freeport-McMoRan)

The copper play. Copper is essential for electrification, EVs, and data center construction. Supply constraints are real, and demand is accelerating. Morgan Stanley has copper as a top commodity pick for 2026. Aligned with MS, this is my favorite commodity for the year ahead as we have seen Gold/Silver go bonkers as of late and much of 2025.

Speculative Ideas: Higher Risk, Higher Reward

These are lottery tickets. Position size accordingly and be prepared to lose the entire investment.

IONQ / RGTI (Quantum Computing)

The quantum theme caught fire in 2025. IONQ hit $84 at peak hype before pulling back significantly. The technology is still years from practical commercial applications, but the Defense Department sees quantum as a “new Manhattan Project.” These are high-volatility momentum plays — trade the swings, don’t marry the positions.

ACHR (Archer Aviation)

The JOBY alternative. If you missed JOBY’s run, ACHR trades at half the market cap with similar certification timelines. United Airlines partnership for 200 aircraft, Stellantis manufacturing deal, and first revenue expected Q1 2026. Higher risk than JOBY but more upside if execution improves.

OKLO (Oklo Inc)

The small modular reactor pure-play. If nuclear energy is the future of AI power (and the thesis is strong), OKLO is building the next-generation microreactors. Sam Altman is an investor. Extremely speculative but interesting as an asymmetric bet on nuclear’s role in AI infrastructure.

UUUU (Energy Fuels)

We have traded / been long this name for many months now and remain long this name currently. Using the daily chart right now for the emphasis on what it looks like today breaking out above 18. Confirmation here would be outstanding as we look to capture a good bit of upside to kickstart the year. While nuclear / uranium still seems to be a good bit of ways away, the opportunity to catch news tailwinds from gov’t spending seems imminent.

The “What-If?”

Let me address the bear cases directly because understanding what could invalidate our thesis is as important as understanding the bull case.

The AI Bubble Pops

The most obvious risk is that AI proves to be a bubble similar to the dot-com boom, where infrastructure gets built far ahead of actual demand and returns on invested capital disappoint dramatically. If enterprises discover that AI applications don’t deliver sufficient ROI to justify continued spending, the entire theme collapses.

I consider this the highest-probability risk we face. The capital expenditure numbers from hyperscalers are staggering, and there’s legitimate question whether AI monetization can justify the infrastructure investment. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet collectively plan to spend over two hundred billion dollars in 2026. That capital must generate returns or boards will force retrenchment.

However, several factors provide comfort. First, early AI deployments are showing measurable productivity gains in software development, customer service, and content creation. These aren’t speculative use cases. They’re demonstrating positive returns today. Second, the hyperscalers are not stupid. If demand wasn’t materializing, they’d slow spending. Instead, they’re accelerating. Third, we’re positioned in infrastructure that has value regardless of AI. Power generation, memory, and storage have utility beyond AI workloads.

Geopolitical Shocks

Taiwan remains the most obvious geopolitical flashpoint. A Chinese military action against Taiwan would be catastrophic for semiconductor supply chains.

There’s no perfect hedge available. We could reduce position size, but that means giving up returns in the base case scenario where tensions remain manageable. We could buy put options, but hedging geopolitical tail risks is expensive.

Beyond Taiwan, risks include Middle East conflicts disrupting energy markets, trade wars impacting technology supply chains, and domestic political instability. Any of these could create volatility spikes that test our conviction. The key is maintaining sufficient liquidity to weather temporary dislocations without being forced to liquidate positions at precisely the wrong moment.

Technology Disruption

The technology landscape evolves rapidly. New chip architectures could displace Nvidia. Alternative memory technologies could disrupt DRAM and NAND markets. Breakthrough battery chemistry could obsolete current lithium-ion technology. Software platforms can lose relevance quickly if competitors deliver superior products.

Conclusion

2025 was an incredible year, and Vol. 2’s performance validated the thesis: stay positioned in major themes, don’t chase every meme, and let the compounding work. The energy trade we identified is only getting stronger. The eVTOL play is transitioning from speculation to commercialization. The AI infrastructure buildout has years left to run.

The market is entering 2026 near all-time highs with valuations that aren’t cheap. This isn’t the environment for reckless leverage. But within the market, there are pockets of reasonable value and secular growth that should compound regardless of broader multiple compression. Emphasis on something I have kind of worked around on many of these ideas, save some powder for dips. Many of these names are relatively near highs.

As always, do your own due diligence, position size appropriately, and remember that investing involves risk. Not every pick will work… LCID and GTLB reminded us of that in Vol. 2. The goal is for the basket to outperform, not for every individual name to “moon”.

Thank you all for the incredible support over the years. Here’s to making 2026 even more memorable than the last. The juice is always worth the squeeze when you’re positioned correctly.

Cheers,

Jersace

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This investment letter represents my personal views and is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, and you should not rely on it as the basis for any investment decision. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments carry risk, including the potential loss of principal. The positions and strategies described may not be suitable for all investors and should be evaluated in the context of your individual financial circumstances, risk tolerance, and investment objectives. Consult with a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.