John Durkin

In December 2024 we published Part I and led with a single chart: investors' allocation to midcap stocks had collapsed to a level last seen at the peak of the dot.com bubble. In February 2025 we followed with Part II, which argued that the prices attached to America's largest companies had turned the case for midcaps into one of the fattest pitches we had seen.

One of the largest oilfield service providers in the world, Halliburton Company (HAL) is widely regarded as the largest hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and pressure pumping provider in North America.

In November 2012, with investors still nursing the wounds of 2008, we published Understanding the Value of Low Volatility and argued that the crowd piling into "low vol" and high-dividend products was paying up for safety at exactly the wrong moment.

Below we have linked our 16-slide video presentation regarding the past, present, and future of nuclear power. The condensed version of the argument is that after fifty years of stagnation, the industry now has a chance of revival with small modular reactor (“SMR”) technology.

What does a mainframe company’s crash have to do with the AI boom? On July 14th, IBM — a company older than the Federal Reserve — had the worst day in its trading history. The stock fell 25%, erasing roughly $67 billion of market value in a single session and taking out a record that had stood since Black Monday, October 19, 1987.i,ii,iii The S&P 500 barely noticed. Apparently there is nothing to see here — just the largest one-day repricing of a blue chip in nearly four decades.

Earlier this month, in The High Price of Promises in SpaceX, we did two things: 1. Walked through the impossible math behind SpaceX’s valuation 2. Documented an almost unbelievable number of broken promises and misleading statements from SpaceX’s CEO on just the most recent Tesla earnings call The most succinct comment in the paper was buried on page two:

In 2023, KCR noticed that Chamath Palihapitiya was invoking the "Man in the Arena" concept from Theodore Roosevelt's spectacular Citizenship in a Republic speech given at the Sorbonne in 1910. We quickly unleashed our first-ever critique of any one individual in our 15-year history.

Spun off from American Express in 2005, Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (AMP) is a diversified financial services company. It has three operating divisions: Advice and Wealth Management, by far AMP’s fastest growing unit, makes up about two-thirds of its adjusted operating earnings; while Asset Management and Retirement & Protection Solutions represent 16% and 19%, respectively, of this key financial metric.

Consumers haven’t been this glum since COVID pandemic supply chain snarls met up with stimulus payments to push inflation up to levels not seen in decades. The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, which often correlates more tightly with grocery and gas prices than the stock market, is lower than it was during the global financial crisis of 2008.

U.S. GDP grew 2% annualized in Q1 2026 after inflation, including gas prices hit their highest since 2022. Private non-residential fixed investment drove 70% of that growth, with "information-processing equipment" alone accounting for one-third of private demand growth over the past 12 months.

Like many conglomerates, Enviri Corporation (NVRI) has traded for many years at a discount to its sum-of-the-parts net worth. However, management has recently taken steps to close this discount with the announced sale of their largest division and a distribution of remaining assets to shareholders.

The S&P 500 is up roughly 9% so far in April – less than one month! This despite the fact that the ongoing blockades in the Strait of Hormuz could turn into another “endless war” and is preventing many countries from getting the oil, natural gas, jet fuel, fertilizer, and petrochemicals they need to keep their economies functioning.