Matthew Malgari

On August 7, 2025, the Trump administration signed an executive order titled “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors,” directing the Department of Labor and the Securities and Exchange Commission to dismantle the regulatory friction that has historically kept private equity, private credit, real estate funds, and similar illiquid alternatives out of the country’s workplace retirement plans.

At the end of March, we published a piece on why the war in Iran could continue longer than expected and another piece on how the consequences of the conflict may be seriously underestimated. Before we dive into the bull-case on energy, the KCR team would like to clarify that the human suffering that may be coming from the war – successful peace deal or not - is front-and-center in our minds.

Water Risk from a Prolonged War with Iran Markets have rightly fixated on what the Iran war means for oil and gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz—but in doing so, they have largely ignored a vulnerability that may prove even more destabilizing: the Middle East's near-total dependence on desalinated water.

Certain of the views expressed in the material below are sourced from center to hard-left-leaning sources. Regardless of what our staff's highly diverse personal views on the war are, we believe that just because some suggesting the conflict may be protracted are left-leaning, does not nullify their thinking from the probability distribution of possible outcomes

Leveraged ETFs look like a shortcut: twice (or three times) the action of a stock, in a tidy wrapper you can buy in a brokerage account. The problem—explained plainly in this paper—is that the shortcut is built on a misunderstanding.

Today’s topic: a large-cap company trading at 11 times earnings, with a ~12% free cash flow yield, and will pay owners a 10% yield in the very near future. Staring at your savings account, stuffed with index funds bloated by supersized tech stocks trading at 30x earnings, one can scarcely believe such discounts exist.

Markets don’t usually give investors clean signals—but 2025 did, and they weren’t subtle. This year’s “Best Charts” update shows a market increasingly dominated by a handful of mega-caps characterized by extreme valuations. Several measures have climbed into the unfortunate “we’ve never been here before” territory.

We are in the Moneyball Business, NOT the crystal ball business.TM -KCR Philosophy It is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. -Benjamin Graham We have long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good. -Warren Buffett Few things are more rewarding for our investment team than when a stock our sister company (L2 Asset Management) is short collapses.

HubSpot, Inc. (HUBS) is an AI-powered software platform that helps businesses simplify and centralize their sales, marketing, and relationship management efforts. HUBS’ business clients, which are typically mid-market businesses (up to 2,000 employees), use feature-rich and intuitive software to automate sales and marketing processes, serve customers more effectively, and allow their teams to work together more efficiently.

In our prior piece analyzing the entire cohort of companies that are net repurchasers of their own company’s stock, we highlighted how the group’s aggregate valuations had hit record highs. We also highlighted that the funding required to facilitate buying back stock at the highest multiples on record, were being funded by debt.

We have presented to a large number of Financial Advisors and institutions of many stripes. The questions around AI are many. They range from “what inning are we in?” to “how can you think this is a bubble when the big tech stocks today are so much healthier than in the dot.com bubble?”

As early as 2014, the financial news media became obsessed with the idea that stock buybacks were being funded by debt and that a reprise of the Great Financial Crisis was looming. By 2016, politicians got involved with many in our political class claiming that stock buybacks were hurting the US economy by reducing capital expenditures and R&D.