While the rest of the market is getting hammered by the Iran conflict, one corner of Wall Street is throwing a party. Defense stocks are surging — and the numbers suggest this trade has a lot more room to run. Palantir (PLTR) spiked roughly 4% at Monday's open, hitting $143 a share as traders piled into what's become the quintessential "war trade." But Palantir isn't alone. Northrop Grumman (NOC) and RTX both jumped about 4%, while Lockheed Martin (LMT) climbed 3%. The iShares US Aerospace & Defense ETF (ITA) is now up 14% in 2026 — and the year is barely two months old. The reason is si...

Picture this: You wake up Monday morning, check your portfolio, and see Las Vegas Sands (NYSE:LVS) jumping 2.5% in premarket trading. Goldman Sachs just slapped a "buy" rating on it with an $80 price target – that's 20% upside from current levels. You're feeling pretty good about life. Then reality hits like a poorly-timed slot machine. By afternoon, the stock is down 1%, sitting around $66.50. What happened? Well, turns out CEO Robert Goldstein decided this was the perfect time to cash out $50 million worth of company stock. Talk about timing. Now, before you start panic-selling and questio...

So everyone's freaking out about AI stealing their jobs, right? Your LinkedIn feed is probably full of people either declaring themselves "AI-powered professionals" or updating their resumes in panic. But here's the thing: Andrew Slimmon from Morgan Stanley Investment Management is basically shrugging at all the hysteria. While the rest of us are doom-scrolling through articles about robot overlords, this guy is out here saying "been there, done that" – except he's talking about the dot-com era. Remember when everyone thought the internet would destroy civilization as we know it? Spoiler aler...

So NVIDIA just dropped their earnings report, and it was basically the corporate equivalent of LeBron dunking on someone in the playoffs. Revenue up 73%. Beat expectations on literally everything. Guided higher for next quarter. And yet... the stock fell 4%. If you're scratching your head wondering how a company can absolutely demolish Wall Street's expectations and still get punished by the market, welcome to 2026, where even excellence isn't good enough anymore. The Numbers Were Ridiculous (In a Good Way) Let's start with the facts, because they're pretty wild. NVIDIA pulled in $68.1 bil...

So, the Middle East is having another one of those weekends, and Wall Street is doing what it does best: panicking first, asking questions later. The US and Israel decided to give Iran some unwanted attention over the weekend, and now everyone's scrambling to figure out who wins and who loses when the world gets a little more chaotic. Here's the thing about geopolitical drama: it's like a really expensive game of musical chairs, except the music is explosions and the chairs are your investment portfolio. The Winners (AKA The "I Told You So" Crowd) Energy stocks are having their moment in th...

Well, this escalated quickly. While you were probably enjoying your weekend, Iran decided to remind everyone why geopolitics and oil prices go together like peanut butter and market volatility. Here's the deal: The US and Israel launched attacks on Iran over the weekend, and now Iran is reportedly moving to close the Strait of Hormuz. If you're thinking "What's the big deal with some random strait?" – buckle up, because this little waterway is basically the world's energy highway. The Strait of Hormuz handles about 13 million barrels of crude oil per day – that's roughly 20-30% of the world'...

Something unusual is happening in tech. The very companies that were supposed to ride the AI wave to infinity — the software-as-a-service names that minted millionaires over the past decade — are getting absolutely hammered. And the weapon doing the damage? AI itself. Salesforce is down 32.7% in 2026 alone, and 42.1% over the past twelve months. The fear is straightforward: if businesses can throw a few prompts into an AI chatbot and build their own CRM alternative at minimal cost, why pay Salesforce's premium? The same logic is crushing the entire SaaS sector. Investors who spent years payin...

This week is the final exam for the American consumer — and the retail stocks that live or die by their wallets. Target, Best Buy, and Costco all report earnings over the next five days, and the results will tell us whether the "consumer resilience" narrative has any legs left or whether tariff headwinds and cumulative inflation have finally broken the shopper. Target kicks things off Tuesday morning, and it's a big one. This is the first full earnings report under new CEO Michael Fiddelke, who takes over a company that's been Wall Street's favorite punching bag. Target missed comp expectatio...

Barclays just issued the kind of note that makes energy traders spill their coffee: Brent crude could test $100 per barrel when markets open Monday. That would be a 37% spike from Friday's close of $72.48. The trigger? The U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran over the weekend — and Iran's response of attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz. If you don't follow oil markets, here's why this matters to every investor on the planet. The Strait of Hormuz handles more than 14 million barrels of crude per day — roughly a third of all seaborne crude exports globally. China alone gets half its oil imports thr...

Here’s a stat that should stop every value investor in their tracks: the Global X FinTech ETF (FINX) has dropped 48% over the past five years. In the same period, the S&P 500 has risen 80% and the financial sector has climbed 59%. Fintech went from being the most overhyped corner of the market to one of the most overlooked. And that’s exactly when the smart money starts sniffing around. Two names sit at the center of this setup: PayPal and Block (formerly Square, now trading as XYZ after a ticker change). Both are trading at price-to-earnings ratios well below their three-year averages. B...