By Eric Parnell “Trouble, Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, Trouble been doggin’ my soul Since the day I was born Worry, Worry, worry, worry, worry, Worry just will not seem to leave, My mind alone” –Trouble, Ray LaMontagne, 2003 Trouble is building on the horizon for capital markets.  Now I should preface everything that comes after with the following caveats.  The …

By Evan Coffey It’s worth asking what a good quarter is actually worth right now when assessing the AI trade. Nvidia reported earnings that handily beat expectations, results strong enough to make technology the only S&P 500 sector to close higher that day, up 3.16%. By that measure, a good quarter still moves markets. But that strength hasn’t been showing …

By Evan Coffey & Kate Templeton When financial markets misbehave, policymakers tend to take action. That reflex has played out twice over the last month, once in currencies and once in fixed income. Both times the response looked decisive. Both times, too, markets rallied briefly on the news before giving much of it back within days, or in the bond market’s …

By Eric Parnell “Your friend is heavy, But he was ready And never stopped for a while, And while you were sleeping, He went on keeping the final line in his mind. It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right” –Tortoise and the Hare, The Moody Blues, 1970 The hare attracts all of the attention.  Swift, fast, nimble, agile, and …

By Eric Hough In my best Steve Harvey voice: “We surveyed two hundred advisors on the optimal 2026 portfolio allocation for high-net-worth clients, and the top answer is on the board” Survey Says: There is no number one answer! There is no consensus and no single model dominates! Ok, I confess, I didn’t poll any advisors.  However, there has been …

“I know times are changing, It’s time we reach out for something new, That means you, too, You say you want to be a leader, But you say you can’t seem to make up your mind, I think you better close it, And let me guide you to the purple rain” – Purple Rain, Prince and the Revolution, 1984 The U.S. stock market remains on fire.  After what …

By Evan Coffey & Kate Templeton A rocket company became one of the most valuable businesses on Earth in a single afternoon in June. Five weeks later, its stock traded below where it started. The technology underneath it, the part that took a decade to build, hadn’t changed at all in that stretch. Only the price had.  That gap, between how …

Why Digital CAPEX Is Colliding with Physical Infrastructure Reality What happens when the tortoise and the hare must finish the race at the same time? The market narrative today is dominated by the scale of capital being deployed into AI, data centers, and next-generation compute. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being committed, sometimes circularly, with the expectation that infrastructure …

“Every time we fall to pieces, we build something new out of the hurt” – Back to Earth, Steve Aoki, 2014 That didn’t take long.  Despite all of the fanfare that accompanied the SpaceX IPO that included many investors working strenuously to get pre-IPO allocations, the rocket ship that soared as high as $225 per share in the days immediately post IPO …

The AI boom’s biggest supply constraint right now isn’t GPUs. It’s memory. Every AI server in every data center powering tools like ChatGPT and Claude is only as fast as the memory chip sitting next to its processor. That memory is now in short supply. Prices for the two main types, DRAM and NAND flash, jumped 58 to 63% and …