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...

For the first time in 60 years, the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder letter didn’t come from Warren Buffett. Greg Abel, the 63-year-old Canadian who officially took over as CEO at the start of 2026, published his inaugural letter Saturday — and it was as revealing for what it didn’t say as for what it did. The headline number: Berkshire’s cash pile sits at $373.3 billion, down slightly from the $382 billion reported in Q3. Abel called it "dry powder" and "a strategic asset to be deployed at the right time." He was emphatic that the cash is not a retreat from dealmaking. "It allows us to ...

The U.S. and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran Saturday morning, and investors are scrambling to figure out what Monday’s open will look like. The S&P 500 fell 0.43% on Friday in anticipation, the Dow dropped 521 points, the Nasdaq shed nearly 1%, and Dow futures sank another 622 points after the news broke. Oil jumped above $72 a barrel. Gold surged 11% in February alone. Classic risk-off chaos. But here’s what most traders are missing: the real story isn’t the initial spike in defense stocks. It’s that companies like Lockheed Martin and RTX have spent years transforming their ...

Well, well, well. Just when you thought 2026 couldn't get any more interesting, here comes some good old-fashioned geopolitical drama to shake up your portfolio. The weekend attacks on Iran have oil traders reaching for their stress balls and energy stocks doing a little happy dance. Here's the deal: Iran is reportedly moving to close the Strait of Hormuz, which is basically the world's most important oil highway. We're talking about 13 million barrels of crude flowing through there daily – that's roughly 20-30% of global supply. It's like someone threatening to block the Holland Tunnel durin...

So here's a fun Thursday story: while the rest of the stock market was basically having an existential crisis, Dollar General decided to be the main character and jumped 5%. Because apparently, someone didn't get the memo about having a terrible day. Here's what happened: Dollar General dropped their Q4 earnings, and it was... well, let's call it "complicated." Like that friend who says they're "fine" but clearly has some stuff going on. The Good News (Revenue Was Actually Decent) Revenue hit $10.3 billion, up 4.5% from last year and slightly better than what the Wall Street crystal ball ga...

So here's the deal: Big Tech is about to drop $700 billion this year on AI infrastructure. That's roughly $2 billion per day flowing into data centers, GPUs, and enough cooling systems to make Antarctica jealous. Wall Street is having a collective panic attack, wondering if this is the biggest money bonfire since pets.com. But here's the thing – when you actually crunch the numbers (and I mean really crunch them, not just panic-tweet), this spending spree might be the smartest move in corporate history. The Three Ways AI Makes Money Consumer subscriptions: Think ChatGPT Plus at $20/month. W...

Remember when AI was going to make us all rich? Yeah, well, Wall Street got the memo that maybe robots taking everyone's jobs isn't actually bullish for the economy. Who could have seen that coming? The tech sector is currently having what can only be described as an existential crisis. Software stocks are getting absolutely demolished after some fancy AI updates from Anthropic made everyone realize that, hey, maybe this whole "AI will replace knowledge workers" thing is actually happening. Even Nvidia's stellar earnings couldn't calm the nerves – when the golden child of AI can't rally the t...

In a move one government contracts attorney called "the contractual equivalent of nuclear war," President Trump on Friday ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic's AI technology — and the Pentagon declared the company a supply-chain risk to national security. It's the kind of designation previously reserved for Chinese tech giant Huawei. The backstory: Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI system and arguably the most technically advanced AI lab in America, signed a $200 million Pentagon contract last July. The company had just one condition — don't use our models for fully autonomou...