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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.

“Late Capitalism” [has] two paradigms [that] combine to swamp the efficient, free-market allocation of capital: 1. Crony capitalism and corruption…choke[s] out the rule of law and reduce the extent to which markets are “free.” 2. The transformation of markets from capital-allocation machines to casinos in which finance becomes just another form of gambling. Reasonable people can argue how far down the path we are… but I do not believe anyone would claim that we weren’t on the road.

Through its core hardware and software technologies of switching, routing, and wireless, Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) is the clear leader in global computer networking. CSCO’s capabilities have made -- and continue to make -- the company a central player in shaping the operations of the modern internet, including the growing internet of things (IoT) landscape.