The AI Trade Has Another Side

Everyone's hunting the companies AI will make rich. Almost nobody's looking at the ones it can't touch.

Government systems. Physical commodities. Financial infrastructure. Businesses that don't depend on AI and can't be replaced by it either — built on real-world demand, regulatory barriers, and assets no algorithm can replicate.

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☕️ GM Munchers! My wife handed me a list of yard work for Saturday and Sunday. I finished about half of it. She says that tracks with my win rate on trades too.

On today’s menu:

• 📅 Monday Reset: What Actually Matters

• 📊 Berkshire Just Made Google Its Third Biggest Bet

• 🎮️ Nintendo Pops Over 6%

• 👀 Harvard Just Bought $2.2 Billion of This Stock

• ❌ This Is A Big Market Warning

Friday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

📅 Monday Reset: What Actually Matters

It's Monday, so let's get you caught up before the market opens and starts throwing numbers at you. Stocks are not just near record highs, they keep making new ones. The S&P 500 hit a fresh record last week, and the Russell 2000 small-cap index touched all-time highs three separate times, meaning this rally is finally spreading beyond the usual mega-cap names. Even the market's fear gauge is barely awake, with the $VIX sitting near its lowest levels of the year around 14.5.

Three things matter most for the week ahead.

1. 🏦 Fed Meeting Minutes, Wednesday. These are the Fed's own notes from its late-July meeting, where three officials reportedly pushed hard for a rate hike instead of a cut. Traders will read every line for clues on how close that vote actually was.

2. 🛒 Walmart earnings, Thursday. This is the clearest read on how the average American is spending money right now, alongside reports from Home Depot, Target, and Lowe's earlier in the week.

3. ⛰️ The countdown to Jackson Hole. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh gives his first keynote at the Fed's big Wyoming conference on August 27. Everything this week is basically a warmup act for that speech.

The Munch Take: A calm VIX next to constant record highs is either a genuinely healthy market or everyone getting too comfortable at once, and there is no way to know which until something actually tests it. My wife stays completely calm right up until she is not, and it has never once been a small correction when it hits. Watch Wednesday's minutes and Thursday's Walmart numbers closely. Jackson Hole is the real main event, but this week decides what mood traders walk in with.

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STOCK OF THE DAY

📊 Berkshire Just Made Google Its Third Biggest Bet

$GOOGL Alphabet just became one of Warren Buffett's favorite stocks. Berkshire Hathaway added 48.1 million shares last quarter, its single largest purchase of the period. That move pushed the total Alphabet stake to about 106 million shares worth $37.8 billion, making it Berkshire's third-largest position. The only two holdings bigger than it are $AAPL Apple at $66 billion and $AXP American Express at $51 billion.

This wasn't a slow accumulation either. The stake grew 83% in a single quarter, partly from a $10 billion private placement Alphabet used to help fund its AI data center buildout, and partly from Berkshire simply buying more shares on the open market. New CEO Greg Abel is the one steering these calls now, and this is his clearest bet yet.

📈 The Bull Case:

• Room to run: Alphabet hit an all-time high of $402.38 back in May and now trades around $345.90. That gap gives the stock real room to climb back if the AI story keeps delivering.

• A five-year monster: Alphabet is up roughly 150% over the past five years, doubling the S&P 500's 74% gain over the same stretch.

• Berkshire's stamp of approval: When Berkshire makes a stock its third-largest position in one quarter, that alone tends to get other investors paying attention.

📉 The Bear Case:

• The AI bill is enormous: Alphabet guided 2026 capital spending to $175 billion to $185 billion, and its long-term debt has climbed sharply to fund all of it.

• Cash flow turned negative: Free cash flow went negative recently as spending outran incoming revenue, and buybacks got paused as a result.

• The stock is already up big: After a 150% five-year run, some of the good news may already be reflected in the price.

The Munch Take: When Berkshire makes something its third-biggest holding in a single quarter, that is not a toe in the water, that is a cannonball. My wife made our biggest purchase of the year without a spreadsheet or a single Google search, and it worked out fine, so maybe conviction beats overthinking sometimes. Alphabet's growth story is real but so is its spending bill. Whether the stock climbs back toward that old high or spends a while digesting these AI costs first is not something we get to know in advance.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

👀 Bonus Report: This has been positive through every crash since 2020 (Ad)

🎮 $NTDOY Nintendo popped 6.08% after Pokémon Pokopia sold more than 5 million copies on the Switch 2. Turns out people still want to catch them all, just now on new hardware.

🛩️ $UMAC Unusual Machines rocketed 25.04% on new U.S. tariffs aimed at imported drones and drone parts. Nothing moves a domestic drone stock like making the foreign competition more expensive.

🛋️ $W Wayfair edged up 0.57% after Bernstein upgraded the stock, pointing to market share gains even while the furniture industry stays slow. Winning while everyone else is stuck in the mud still counts as winning.

💾 $SNDK Sandisk jumped 7.39% on a JPMorgan upgrade that flagged improving margins and clear revenue ahead. Analysts finally noticed the storage business has its act together.

📉 $AVGO Broadcom slid 5.94% after an analyst warned its AI infrastructure financing arm could pile up $370 billion in debt by 2029. That is a lot of borrowed money betting the AI boom keeps paying rent.

TRADING SUCCESS

🤑 Monday Motivation

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 💰️ Here’s the stock symbol I’ve promised (Ad)

2. 👀 Harvard just bought $2.2 billion of this stock.

3. ❌ This is a big market warning.

4. 📈 Copper closed at a weekly all-time high.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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