Power Lunch - Stocks Pop as Investors Wait for Nvidia Earnings 2/25/26

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

The market turns to Nvidia earnings after the bell. Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot joins the show to discuss the energy demand from Big Tech. And mortgage rates fall to their lowest level in nearly four years.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Happy Nvidia earnings day may be the most important day of the year so far for your tech investments. Welcome to Power Lunch, everybody alongside Kelly. I am Brian. More on the trade ahead of those numbers. Plus, tech CEOs heading to the White House with President Trump saying Big Tech will pay more for power. But isn't that already happening? We'll ask the CEO of a Red Hot Data Center stock, what's really going on. Look forward to that.

Plus, the call that is powering Oracle higher today. The shares are up almost 3% after they've been cut in half. One Wall Street analyst says it's too cheap to ignore. He's upgrading it to buy ahead of earnings. The analyst behind that move is coming up. All right, we are going to start with the big earnings report that is on deck tonight. That is Nvidia. You may be asking, why do they talk so much about Nvidia on CNBC?

Here's why. It is not only the most valuable company in the world, it's also about 8% of the entire S&P 500. It's about 9% of the widely traded QQQETF, and it's a top hold of, in hundreds of major ETFs outside of that. The bottom line, NVIDIA can move the entire market. It can certainly move your money, but here's the rub,

and don't tell anybody else this. But NVIDIA has not really been a big earnings mover lately. In fact, the last few quarters, it's kind of been on hold. All as its sales growth slows down. But does that mean it is time for you to sell your NVIDIA? Your first guest today says,

no way. It is one of her biggest positions. Joining us out of talk about it, and more. Joanne Feeney, partner and portfolio manager and advisors' capital management. Joanne, good to see you. Is it time to sell Nvidia? Not in our opinion, Brian. You know, we continue to see Nvidia at the center of this very strong demand for AI compute.

They obviously have the most powerful, most efficient chips. And, you know, making the efficiency greater and greater is going to be pretty important, particularly because of the cost of powering these systems. And we expect to hear some, you know, solid information tonight about how they're ramping Blackwell, how Rubin is around the corner. The question really is how much of those memory price increases impacting their margins because they do build systems that include memory. I'm glad you brought that up, Joanne, because we were just talking to Chris Murphy

about this a few moments ago as well. And in many ways, the trades that hang on Nvidia's results are probably a lot of these memory names where if Nvidia says it's not. that bad or it's getting better, those whole names might sell off. But if they say, no, it's impacting margins. And yeah, it's still tough out there. Well, then NVIDIA suffers. Well, you're right. Both things may very well happen. But do remember that we understand on the memory side that the demand is going to be very strong. And we know that they can't ramp up supply very quickly. So it's likely to be the case, as we've been hearing, that memory price pressure will continue.

even so, we do see continued strength in demand to add compute capacity and build new data centers and fill them with Nvidia chips and AMDE chips and Avago or sorry, Broadcom derived chips as well. So a lot of demand out there and it just looks like we have years of this ahead of us. So 70% growth for Nvidia is what we're expecting for this quarter year over year and next. And we just see that demand supply imbalance continuing for a while. I love how you drop the Avago. The old reference to the broadcom ticker. That's why, by the way, it's AVGO. We know, you know, all that stuff you said is accurate, obviously, Joanne, with all the buildout, the data centers, and the spending. But does that mean the stocks are still a good value for advisors, capital management and your clients? Because both things can be true. All that growth can be happening. But at the same time, those stocks can can be viewed as overvalued by some. Yeah, Brian, it's a really good point you bring up.

Always positions inside portfolios depend on the nature of the clients. We have several strategies at advisors' capital from higher yield income-oriented strategies and in balance and all the way to growth and smid. So our position size for invidia is going to differ across the strategies, right? Growth is going to be the highest exposure to invidia. But in a balanced strategy, such as the ones that I run, you know, we're looking to add. diversification in a really important way, whether it's industrials, whether it's higher dividend yielding financial companies or energy companies. It's really important for the client to be in the right kind of portfolio. We do see NVIDIA as an important driver of the growth aspects of various

portfolios going forward, but that's not the only one. In fact, we're overweight broadcom in many of our strategies because we see it as not only being able to feed into this data center opportunity, but because they're diversified. They do a lot of other things. things. And they've shown themselves to be very smart acquirers of companies and managers of capital for investors. What's the biggest risk then? Is it that something goes wrong? There's an open AI and anthropic. We get some, I don't want to say bad news, but not as bullish news as it should be. There has to be with everything, there is a risk. What is that risk right now? Absolutely, Brian. I mean, I think the biggest risk is any slowdown in the adoption rate.

InVIDIA, 70% growth this quarter and next quarter is what's anticipated in their top line. You know, is there a time at which investors fail to anticipate that that growth is going to slow down? Right now, it is in the forecast. People recognize that growth is going to slow. And that should be true for a lot of other companies in the space. So really, I think the risk is on the fundamental side in terms of the past. of growth. There may very well be times when, you know, power generation constrains the growth of the buildout of these data centers, right? We know that's an issue. So far, it hasn't been much of a gate to the buildout because chips have been the gating supply problem. But I think it's

that growth eventually does slow down and investors need to be positioned for that. Again, that's why you don't want to be over-exposed to these names. You want to recognize that's where most of the growth in the U.S. economy has been coming from for the last year or so. So it's good to have exposure there. But, you know, consumer stocks also give investors a role opportunity. T.J. Max, for example, is something we've helped for clients for many years. They reported this morning. Right. They do well, even if there's a, you know, bad economy because they get more inventory, they get more for traffic, et cetera. So diversification is really critical, especially at a time when there is that kind of growth risk on the AI trade. Yeah, just quickly on I.

IBM, you know, UBS upgraded the stock from sell to neutral today, more balanced risk-reward proposition after sell-off this week. So would you generally view these AI-induced sell-offs as buying opportunities then, IBM being a case in point? Yeah, you know, certainly could be. Obviously, look, there's a lot of concern out there about how much AI-generated coding can undermine the pricing power or even the business models of some software companies. is IBM, the latest one to get hit. Obviously, there are cobal languages, which I learned back in college, is something that is old and hard to work with.

And so anything that AI can do to improve that is going to be a good thing. But why don't people recognize that IBM is likely to adopt these tools and be able to reduce their labor cost by making it easier to do these upgrades? And the same thing holds, I think, for other software companies. They're likely best position to adopt AI vibe coding. to make their own business models more efficient. But that doesn't mean that investors are going to recognize this anytime soon. They're going to be show me stories. People are going to have to wait and see.

Their retention rates remain high. They're going to wait and see how much bookings they actually do. So I'm not here to call the bottom on software stocks, but I do think that the patient investor, and we're long-term holders for clients, can be looking around and making sure that they're not running away from names after they've gone down. Quickly, Joanne, because you do, I believe, own Blackstone. Do you have a thought on what's going on in the less transparent software areas, you know, private credit, private equity? Yeah, so we do own Blackstone for clients and some of our strategies. We recognize the headwinds that it is faced. Obviously, the auto-related companies that had difficulties last year gave some folks concerned that accounting irregularities could be occurring in private equity holdings.

But when you look at Blackstone, they had no exposure to those companies, but it nevertheless caused the stock to go down. They have 7% exposure to software yet concerns about software evaluations. I think, again, cause that stock to go down. So it seems to us that given the amount of cash they have on hand, the fundraising they've done recently, that they have a lot of dry powder to take advantage of any disruptions in the market. So we continue to like Blackstone and view them also as one where the market is under,

valuing them relative to their intrinsic value. All right. Sticking with it, Joanne, thanks for joining us today, run through a lot of this. We appreciate it. Joanne Feeney with Advisors Capital. Meantime, let's turn our attention to the bond markets for the 10 years around 404, around its lowest levels of the year, even though that five-year auction last hour, Rick Santelli. What grade did you give it?

And that wasn't a very good one. Welcome. No, yesterday's two-year was a C-plus. Today's five-year, $70 billion was a C-minus, a bit below average. and it really does underscore that we're seeing kind of middling demand, and these are short maturities. They should find a wider, more interested audience, and the reason they're not, of course,

is probably because there's so much going on with respect to what the Fed may or may not do and how that will affect two-year note yields, closest maturity that really reflects Fed activity down the road. As you see on the six-hour chart, right at one Eastern, when the results came out, we did see an uptick in yields on the far right of that chart. Now, if you look at twos and tens together, Kelly's exactly right. You know, we're doing most of the work in twos kind of above yesterday's range, not all of it. In tens, we're doing all the work above yesterday's range.

Today's low, well, it's basically around 4.02. Yesterday's low was 4.02. We've had several intraday lows of 4.01. But one thing we do not have, we do not have any closes below 4% for this year. And as you look at a year-to-date chart, the last time we did have those, and I say this almost every session, was the 25th and 26th of November. It seems like 4% just repels 10-year note yields. And finally, the dollar yen, okay? It is making progress.

It's moving up. The dollar gaining on the yen. That's a year-to-day chart. We're almost back to unchanged. Now, do remember, the dollar index is only 13.6% of the yen. So even though the dollar index is down a bit, the dollar is improving, again, the yen. Kelly, back to you. Thank you, Rick, very much, Rick Santelli. Coming up, reading Oracle's future, we had the analysts behind the upgrade of the day. The shares are on

the move after a tough stretch, and we're back with more after this. Oracle, getting some love on the street today after erasing half its value since that record closed back in September. Oppenheimer upgrading the stock to outperform. They say the pullback has created a compelling risk-reward opportunity for investors willing to step in. The shares are up 2.5% today. Joining us now is Oppenheimer's Brian Schwartz. He's the analyst behind that call puts a 185 price target on Oracle, and they're around 140 today. Good to see you. So talk a little bit about, Brian, why you think not just market perform, but outperform. Yeah, thank you, Kelly, for having me on your show. You know, among this AI panic that's happening in the software industry, we're really looking for

three traits to try to find winners in the future. You know, one, does the business have a defensible mode? Is there a place for them in the agentic AI future? Number two, can they drive strong organic growth? And number three, the valuation, the pricing. With Oracle, we see all three of those characteristics. And if I can build upon my answer, you know, there's an opportunity here with Oracle to invest in a generational EPS compounder, who is an AI winner. So we have tried to de-risk our model. We have cut management's guidance by 25% in our base case, and we still have Oracle's EPS doubling over the next four years. Our investor conversations, they seem to be discounting around 10% the guidance. When you do that, you have Oracle's earnings power tripling over the next four years.

So opportunity to own a generational EPS compounder. And then along with that, three other quick criteria. The risk profile seems to be starting to mitigate a little bit with Oracle, specifically their counterparty risk with OpenAI, who's a large contributor of their backlog. We're seeing very strong momentum from Open AI's disclosures. We're learning about their capital financing plans to fund their operations. Oracle itself is planning to raise nearly $50 billion in capital. That should fund its operations over the next 12, 18 months.

Well, Brian, how much of Oracle investors' recent pain has been because of OpenAI? It is a private company. It is a bit of a black box. We only know what they choose to tell us. So the market is kind of a self-first, ask questions later type move right now. How much would you like to see, if at all, Open AI open up a little bit more? Myself, Brian, as well as every software investor in the world, would love to see Open AI open up their disclosures.

Because not only could it give credence to the backlog of these large software companies that Open AI can deliver on, but it would open up the strategy from OpenAI. It would tell us which applications, which workflows are they targeting to automate. That could provide clarity to the entire software industry on which modes, which businesses are going to be defensive. So, you know, an open AI IPO would be very welcome news among the investment community. Well, don't get me started. I would like the IPO of everything. This is my, Brian, this is my thing lately. This is your thing?

This is my new thing. This is their thing. I'm frustrated that we keep seeing all these IPOs being pulled. The recent ones haven't done well, so that makes no one else want to do them. Then you've got Stripe at 165 billion private. You've got Databricks. It's private. And Brian, to your point, there is a lot of value, public value in these companies going public.

And I know it's a pain for them. I sympathize. I understand. I wouldn't want us talking about them all day long and tearing apart their financial. I get why you'd want to stay private. But I would just love to see more of them going public earlier on. Give us better competition, better information, better transparency, higher quality of companies to pick from, especially when all of our retirements depend on the performance, basically, of the S&P 500.

It's a great point, Calle. And I think what you're defining is really the growth of the alternative assets, the private market. We've seen that expand greatly over the last decade, decade, half. So there are funding sources for these private companies to stay private longer. The case I would make for a company going public is, number one, it makes you a better company. Because the spotlight is on you, you've got to report your financials, everyone is analyzing you. It's number one. Number two, it gives you currency.

You suddenly have stock to be able to engage in M&A activities. And number three, it's a method also of rewarding your employees when you're giving them stock options that they can actually cash in for liquidity. Well, from your lips to their ears, okay? The two Brian's and me, we'll start this campaign together. How about that? I'm all for it, Callie. Brian, thanks very much. Brian Schwartz. Yeah, listen, I mean, not saying something will go wrong, but if something were to go wrong at an anthropic, at an Open AI, one of these huge private companies that is controlling hundreds of billions in spending. You're absolutely right, that they are the data points that will have more to do with how the public markets trade than almost anything else.

right now. Bingo. All right. Coming up, some good news, maybe as mortgage rates do something, they have not done in about four years. Mortgage rates are down at their lowest level in four years, and normally that would mean a little bit of an uptick in home buying, but it hasn't. In fact, Google trend searches for the phrase can't sell house are at their highest levels ever going back to 2004. CNBC senior real estate correspondent Diana Oleg is here to help make sense of what's going on, Diana, as the stocks are really frustrated today. Yeah, and it's a lot to unpack, Kelly. Look, mortgage rates, you know, it's all relative. Yes, yesterday they hit 5.99%, which matches the lowest level since 2022. They did bump up one basis

point today. We're at an even 6%. But rates have really been hovering between 6 and 6 and a quarter percent. And for home buyers out there, it's just not an incentive to get into a market where they are concerned about the economy, where home prices are still high, and where there's not a a lot of great supply on the market to see either. So we did see mortgage applications to buy a home last week actually dropped 8 percent, sorry, dropped 5 percent even while mortgage rates were coming down. Refis great demand for that, but that's because mortgage rates were a lot higher a year ago, almost a full percentage point. So you would think that buyers would want to get in more on that. But it's just, you know, it's a troubled market right now. And the home builder stocks, if you want

the answers on that, that has more to do with what the president did not say. last night. Builders were expecting him to have a very clear plan to say much more about housing affordability and how to get homebuyers back in the market. And the only thing he really hit on was getting investors out of the single family rental market. So there was some disappointment around that. Well, we're looking at the home building stocks, Diana, mortgage rates at four-year lows. But these stocks are all down across the board. What's going on? Yeah. Well, as I said, it's really about what the president did not say yesterday in the state of the union. Builders have been meeting with the Trump administration for many months now, trying to get, you know,

something on either easing land regulations or maybe some tax incentives. And they were expecting to hear something in the state of the union. They were also hearing, expecting to hear something at Davos and didn't hear anything from that either. We also did get earnings from some smaller builders, K. Hovnanian and TriPoint. And they were a bit disappointing. And then we had that Home Depot earnings talking about a weaker consumer. So that's all weighing on the stocks. And, you know, yes, mortgage rates are lower, but as I said, they've still been in this very narrow range for several months. Diana, yeah, it's interesting. Mortgage rates going down, yay.

Stocks are going down. Not a yay. But we'll see how sales actually go up. Diana, look. Thank you very much. Sure. All right. On deck.

From providing your own juice for data centers to Anthropic and Google's latest twists and turns, what does? One of the heads of one of the hottest power companies' thoughts. Think about it all. We're going to ask him, and you'll hear it next. Pushback on data centers continues. The fear is that the demand for power will add even more to your already rising home electric bill.

And as you've probably seen at home, your electric rates have been going up for years. Data centers lately have been increasing the load in many areas. It is a big topic. It's such a big topic that the president hit it in last night's state of the union. Here's what he said about making sure tech. companies don't just jack up your electric rates.

We're telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs. They can build their own power plants as part of their factory so that no one's prices will go up and in many cases prices of electricity will go down for the community and very substantially down. But as we have reported for months, this is really not a new development. companies have been pressed for or are pressing for having their own power and not competing with residential rates. Let's talk more about it with energy infrastructure company. Hutt 8 stock soared on Tuesday, head of posting its results last night. The numbers came in as a bit of a surprise to some.

HUD 8 posted a net loss of just over $300 million, that against net income of $152 million in the same quarter of last year. But one big reason for that change is that Hutt 8 continues to build out more of. electricity capacity, and, as you know, that is expensive. So what to make at the quarter of the president's comments and the latest with customers like Anthropic and Google. Let's ask the CEO Asher Gnude is back with us for an exclusive interview. It's the perfect time, Asher. Welcome back. Before we get into sort of your company-specific details, on March 4th, a bunch of companies. We're going to show them here on the wall or going to the White House to sign what they call a rate-payer protection pledge, basically an agreement to not raise race.

residential electricity rates? Want to know, are you going to that meeting? And if so or if not, does this announcement, this pledge impact your business at all? I'm not going, but the pledge is for the right reasons. Data centers should bring pricing of electricity down, not up. They should increase economic development and the taxes that people receive to invest in school districts and to create more jobs. And so when we think about building data centers, it's a net positive.

impact that you bring to communities. And we've already been doing this for the last one to two years as we discuss energy rates, as we discuss who's paying for the generation, the transmission upgrades. And so we should have all developers focus on creating a net positive impact to the communities that they build so the U.S. can stay at the head of the race of AI development. If we don't build data centers to support AI advancement, we will be falling behind on other countries, and that's key. And we talked about this. You and I talked about it. I spoke about it with other CEOs at the Edison Electrical Institute Utilities Conference in Florida, in early January. And you look at like Loudoun County, Virginia. Loudoun County is the capital of data centers.

And yet, Loudoun County's electricity rates have actually gone down the last few years because these companies are paying so much into the system. Is that, is this pledge, as you know it, I'm kind of putting you on the spot here, Asher, I know it's okay to say you don't know, because I don't know, it's just a pledge or like a commitment. You know what I mean? I can pledge I'm going to go running every day, but what if I don't? Most of the utilities we're working across the country are already focusing on how do we make sure that we are funding the energy needs that we have.

And so this is ongoing, and I think being able to solidify this across every single development of data centers in the U.S. will take away the friction in developing these assets that are critical to the national security of our country and will be able to make sure that communities are able to have a positive impact on their energy and receive the revenues and the job creations that data centers bring to them. And so I think this is part of I've heard from a lot of energy utilities that bringing on data center infrastructure as data centers are paying for those upgrades is net positive to the overall energy bill for retailers.

I think the big impact is recently energy prices going up. A lot of that is because of heating resources. I mean, you have massive winter storms going across the country. country, people are using more heating and air conditioning within their homes. And that tries pricing up as much as the data center large-scale demand does because we're paying for the transmission upgrades. Like our River Bend campus, we announce. We're paying for the transmission upgrades there. We're looking at building a gigawatt of net new generation. And we'll be putting up the collateral and making sure that the commitments, we are backstopping. So customers never have to take the

impacts of that and we're able to support everything. We got a humdinger of a bill last month. can tell you for sure. And it's, you know, we had the energy transition, which then led to a scramble for, you know, more energy because it was like, well, wait a minute. Who knows about the transition, but we definitely need the energy now. And we have the AI boom on top of that, Asher. I was struck by our conversation with Dan Clifton last hour who said, I think it was him, who said, AI is not, the reason the president didn't talk about AI last night, because AI is not popular. People might use it. They might like their chat, GPT, whatever, but talk AI, and look at the piece that was making the rounds all weekend long. It's all about Occupy Silicon

Valley, right? this idea that there's going to be so much backlash. So what do you like seriously do about that? How do you actually make sure the companies are paying their own way? AI is the new evolution of what the internet is. Everybody works on the internet today. Everyone relies on in terms of the day-to-day life. We're very, very early on in AI. It's like the dial-up generation when we're just using a chatbot right now. And so as we think about AI and its impacts into the day-to-day life that will only increase in combat at a rap rate over time. And when people are starting to see the impacts of these data centers, the jobs that they create, how they're driving

energy bills down, how they're creating net new generation, I think you'll see those stories playing out. And in the areas that we're building, like our riverbent side in Louisiana, we're making a massive positive impact to West Felicia on Parrish in terms of taxable revenues we can drive to the county, in terms of everything we're building. We have gigawatts of sites that we're developing across the U.S. now that take that same development model to be able to scale, make sure we have a net positive impact on the communities that we build, and we're able to support this industry and the technologies that it can create with it. Yeah, and the connections queue, basically the line to get permitting and just the line to get lines, power lines, for lack of a better term, Azure. Some places was one year, then it was two years. Now it can be up to four or five years.

Depends on the area, of course, depends on the state and all that other stuff. But how is that that bottleneck that we've talked about so much, that bottleneck in getting this part done, still impacting your business, and how much Asher does come down to just things like being able to get the electricians or the concrete to build out the physical structure? HUDAID is positioned to scale and to execute and take advantage of this opportunity. We are really great at power, and we understand the complexities of power. we're able to navigate through these environments where many other developers aren't.

In terms of the actual talent and labor, Jacobs is a large partner of ours, and they have over 40,000 people worldwide, and they've committed to being a partner of ours and actually being able to have the electricians and the mechanics and being able to bring that talent to develop these data centers. The deal that we announced with Anthropic and Google and Fluid Stack, that's $7 billion deal, we think is just the first domino to fall on our multi-gigilop pipeline that we're excited to scale, and this complexity is an opportunity for us to show our differentiated mode. Is it getting better? Are you noticing, but so much talk about it, speeding up the permitting process,

getting this stuff done, but have you noticed as the CEO of a company that does this for a living? Have you noticed anything getting better? It depends on where you are. There are some states and some communities that they're very supportive, and you're able to scale and grow quickly to meet the demands. In other areas, people are nervous. They want to know what this impact really means, and they want to understand what these large investments actually do to their lives. And so I think the more protection there is, because it's already happening.

When we develop assets, we are making sure we're paying for the power generation, the transmission upgrades that are needed. We're paying for the labor that's going into the environment, the taxes that we pay in different jurisdictions. And so you're going to see more clarity that's wanted. And I think that clarity is good because it allows the development of these projects, move much faster. All right, Asher, appreciate you joining us today. And again, a hugely strong performance by the stock. We heard about it yesterday from James Chuck Muck as well, a fan of it. Asher Janute, the CEO of HUD-8. We checked on the solar stock run up last week. Different story today for one of the biggest names in the space, one of the U.S. ones, first solar shares down 15%

after a lackl lesser earnings report. They missed on the bottom line and their full year guidance was well below what the street was looking for. A few downgrades this morning, you can see the stock reacting accordingly, Brian. This would be its worst day since June. Yeah, still has been a red hot stock. Stock's done very, very well. So maybe they would say price to perfection, but either way, yeah, not a great day to day. Yep. But it's been a pretty good run for first sold. We still need all hands on deck, I think, when it comes to energy provision. And let's get to Kate Rogers now for the CNBC News Update. Hi, Kate. Hi, Kelly. Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell is urging the House to take on a new vote on aviation safety bill, which fell short yesterday by one vote after the Pentagon

withdrew support. The measure passed in the Senate unanimously. It would require aircraft operators to equip their fleets with a safety system designed to prevent mid-air collisions. It was introduced after the January 2025 crash between an Army helicopter and American Airlines plane that killed 67 people. A top official in the Treasury Department will reportedly step down after challenging the Trump administration's plans to crack down on alleged fraud in Minnesota. According to the Washington Post, John Hurley conveyed concerns to Secretary Scott Besson about a plan to enhance federal monitoring of international payments. In a statement to the post, Hurley denied the reporting. And FBI agents raided the headquarters of the Los Angeles School District and the home of its

superintendent today. The agency confirmed it was executing search warrants, but did not comment on the investigation. The district is the nation's second largest. Kelly, back over to you. All right. Kate, thank you. There's always a lot of uncertainty in the oil markets, but even more so right now with the heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Our next guest says he has a safer way to play the space. Stay with us for Market Navigator. Welcome back to Power Lunch. I'm Dominic Chu with your Market Navigator. With the state of the Union now in the books, what can investors take away from the current state of the markets? Our next guest believes, with geopolitical concerns, global tensions percolating, energy is a good

place to focus your portfolio. So joining us now for the cases. is Matt Powers, the managing partner over at Powers Advisory Group. Now, Matt, you heard a lot of stuff coming out of the president from the state of the union. Did anything catch your attention as to driving why you think that energy trade is going to be key in the coming weeks and months? Yeah, Dom, good to see you. Thanks for having me. I mean, there's always geopolitical and global risks in the market, but right now, they're certainly elevated. You know, at the moment, there's a lot layered into this market. We've got trade, tariff, You've got the Middle East tension with Iran like we just mentioned.

There's plenty more. And hovering over all this is AI valuation concerns. So it's not just one thing. It's everything happening at once. And when you've got so much in the air, boring works. We already started to see that at the beginning of this year as we kick off 2026 with energy and staples leading. But our view is simple.

In this geopolitical climate, stay invested, reduce volatility, take a defensive posture and get paid to wait through here just a little bit. And, you know, this is not the time to play offense. But we're focused on energy, defense contractors, and staples. And I do think energy is key right now. Where exactly do you think the trade is within that energy complex overall? Is it in the ETFs that track the fuels and oil and gas themselves? Or is it around the companies and stocks that go along in that ecosystem?

Yeah, I mean, energy has quietly become the best trade in the market. It's up around 23% this year. And I don't think that was on anyone's bingo card to start the year. The Middle East is back in focus. again with Iran and we just had Venezuela. So geopolitical volatility's here and any time that happens, oil carries a risk premium and energy has one of the lowest correlations to the broader market. So yeah, the two that I'll talk about are touching all-time highs. Valuations on them both have moved up quite a bit, but I think we're starting to reprice the idea that oil might

be around and profitable longer than most thought. And we still see a runway here. So that's why we like the two majors. So Exxon and Chevron, there are obvious names in this space for a reason. Great balance sheets, global scale. you know, reliable dividends. They're basically cash machines. So they do well when oil holds in at healthy levels. They don't need a massive spike to outperform, but a sharp move higher would certainly add to the upside. So just a quick line on each.

Exxon's fully integrated. Upstream, refining chemicals, it gives them the ability to consistently generate enormous free cash flow. And even in a flat pricing environment, you know, I don't want to say this is a place to hide, but it's your core holding. Chevron, similar in quality, maybe even more conservative, but arguably. the cleanest balance sheet in the space. So with both, you've got a nice mix of domestic and global assets and with a solid dividend while you hold. All right. Perfect. Matt Powers, thank you very much for the trade there on both Exxon and Chevron. We'll see again soon. Right to you. Brian. Thanks.

Actually, Dom, come on over here if you can because we're getting a lot of questions from everyone who's trying to access in some cases metals pricing, natural gas pricing. And for the last couple of hours now, there have been these, it's unclear exactly what's happening. technical issues, for sure. Technical issues? What can you tell us? So what we can tell you right now is that both NatGAS and Globex metals futures have now resumed trading, I think, as of just a couple minutes ago right now, NatGas earlier on this past last

hour, and then now for metals, they are still trying to figure out what exactly were those kind of technical issues that led to the halts in trading. But the big deal right now is things are, things are start, yes. Yeah, and they're actually flat. It just didn't trade. just didn't trade. The important thing if you're a trader in NatGas and in these metals using CME platform products is that all of the orders that you had in there that were either good for the day, right, good for the day, right, or good till a date, which is some specified expiration

date down the line, those orders are now canceled. So if you want to trade in them with orders in place, you have to go in there and reenter those orders. It does not affect those orders that traders place that are GTC or Good Till Canceled. If they have been acknowledged as Good Till Canceled, those orders, CME says, are still in effect. So let's go back. It's a big story. And in about a lot of people have been pinging us and we appreciate everybody staying focused. Metals, gas contracts at the CME.

I know the NYMEX has some of these contracts, we're talking about Chicago. We don't know if it's a CME issue or maybe it's a Chicago issue. We don't know what happens. They're still trying to do a post-mortem away. what's happening right now. They have not updated us yet on what exactly was the cause or outcome of it. We do know, remember, it was not that long ago where there was a data center issue with the CME that caused a little bit of the issue that they had with regard to technical operations with the CME, data center related. We do not know what that is right now.

I'm sure that the folks at CME, we are in touch with them, not yet telling us exactly what's going on, but we will, of course, bring you those details as the CME knows those details and then makes them clear to us. So if you had an order that was very short term, good for the day, those are canceled. If you put those in, those are gone. So if you think folks that you've made a contract or a trade for a very short term amount for today, you probably did not. It's on their website right now. Correct. But if it's good till canceled, like I'm going to put in a longer term order and I'm going to ride it out unless it hits or I cancel it. Those are still in force. Correct. Right. Those orders, GTC Good Till Cancel, have been acknowledged, then they are still in play.

But if you had a good for the day only or good till a certain date down the line, those orders, CME says, are now canceled. Any truth to the rumor that these contracts are going to move to Northwest Indiana to look for a new stadium? Oh, sorry, no, that's a wrong issue. That's a sports thing. Sorry, I... You cross the bears and everything else. I got hit in the head the other day. Easily confused. There you go. So am I. But look, at a moment when there's been so much interest in these very contracts,

you know, this is a year in which this is where all the activity is. And all the attention, for sure. Absolutely. Well, is there another data? I mean, is there another data center issue? We were just talking about. Did someone unleash Claude on their systems? And it went, if you see the reports making their outs, they say, Claude destroyed my whole infrastructure. So is Claude the new Mothra? Is it Gamera? Is it Godzilla? Hedra. Are we now looking at Claude? Hedra. I don't know. Don't make you. It's my favorite. Not Mecha Godzilla, though. Don't you? Shin Godzilla.

Coming up a power check on health care on a stock that's down double digits in the past year, but our portfolio manager says now is the time to go discount shopping for it. We will reveal that name next. Welcome back. It's time for today's power check. And doing so, let's first reveal our mystery stock from before the break. It's intuitive surgical. And despite the 11% year-to-date decline, it's one of our next guest's highest conviction positions. And there's an AI reason for that.

Tom Heulik is the CEO of Strategy Asset Miners, Tom. Tom, and you think this is going to be a company that starts telling us how AI is helping it grow profits. Is that right? Oh, it is. And nice to be here rather than be in New York. But, you know, we're right now in a real-time adaptation cycle where automation and AI are disruptive. Yes, but things are really accelerating so much for productivity margins in this long-term economic growth. So we'd love to share more about that. Yeah, you're hating on New York, too. I mean, it's like it's fine. You know, New Jersey. You can come to New Jersey. next time. We live there for many years. There we go. We don't have time to get into Lockheed,

which you like, but I do want to ask you about Palantir, which has also been hit hard amid the software slump this year. But you think this is one that again is going to turn around and get its mojo again. Why is that? I do. You know, so Palantir sits at the intersection of AI, also defense, and enterprise automation. And it's important to know that it's moving fast beyond experimentation to deployment. Palantir isn't just building models in the software, and it's integrating these into AI operational workflows. So for government and defense, demand for AI driven decision systems, accelerating, we're going to see Palantir participate in that in the long run. We really like this company. All right. I know you've got a lot of tech, too, in your top holdings,

Broadcom, Microsoft Alphabet. So we'll see what happens with NVIDIA after the bell. Tom. Come back. We'll talk about that, about your power themes here. A lot to discuss around the table. Appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. Tom Hewlich with strategy asset managers. All right. Well, from Tom to Tahini, fast Mediterranean chain Kava also popping today. That stock having its best day ever. It's up 25%.

Same store sales rising. Even with menu price hikes, Kelly, it's had a good year. It's down 15% over the past year. But that's actually pretty good. Consider the last 12 months, Chipotle's down almost 30% and sweet green saying, Hold My Salad. It's wiped out three-fourths of investor value, so down 15 is the new good. That is even better for Kava, given its peer group.

All right, up next, why one of the richest men in the world just went hard after your washer and dryer. Sort of. All right, here's where we remember that tease before the break hedge fund legend. David Tepper blasting the bosses of one of his largest holdings. Whirlpool, an escathing letter. The billionaire and owner of the Carolina Panthers, is accusing, world pole of destroying, quote, hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value and now Tepper is calling for a strategic reset of the company. He may have a point, Kelly, the stock's down

60% in the past five years. Yeah, he was really upset. I think that they are issuing equity as well. So again, this is the fun of being public. You know, you have to be held to a higher so you can have people like Tepper coming after you and saying these decisions make no sense for shareholders. See how they respond to that. Meantime, moving the other direction today, quick look on the crypto space because Bitcoin is back above 69,000 after what we heard. The other old coins are bouncing back as well. The crypto exchanges are flying. All this really goes back to circles earnings.

Brian, you probably saw the stock. It was up at last check, 29%. There you can see some of those names. Well, I'm glad the crypto winter is thawing. If only the winter winter would thaw, I know in New England and Boston, they're like, you know, don't talk to us. They got 40 inches of snow. Yeah.

This needs to end. This cold weather. I'm done. I'm sick of it. I can't do with it. I like how Tom said. I'm glad I'm not in New York. Anyway, thanks for watching.

Power Lunch, everybody. Closing Bells right now.