This Week in Barrons: 02.15.2026

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Rotation, Rotation - Rotation…

• “Compro Oro y Plata” (“I buy Gold ‘n Silver”) made it into a Super Bowl halftime show – a continuing point of global distrust in fiat currency.

• Entrepreneurial filter… per M.J. Pochan: Early startup hardships aren’t bugs; they ‘experientially’ train founders and screen out the unprepared.  If you remove them – you’ll remove the learning.

• It always comes down to sales: Two more xAI co-founders exited, leaving only half the founding team – amid Grok progress concerns.  At Tesla, a longtime IT exec tasked with reviving EV sales left a few months after taking the role.  That was unsurprising given 2 years of declining sales, a mandate outside his expertise, and a boss who’s concentrating on robots and rockets.

• Delinquencies & Debt: U.S. consumer delinquencies hit a ~10-year high as household debt reached a record $18.6T.

• Jobs report skepticism: January showed that we created +130,000 jobs and produced a drop in unemployment.  In a show of disbelief, over 50% of Americans (a 15-year high) expected unemployment to rise.  [FYI: Healthcare was the only sector adding jobs.]

• A Major Revision: The BLS reduced 2025 job totals by 800,000+, erasing jobs previously on our monthly reports.

• Global growth signals: In 6 months, copper +36% and Korean stocks +68% - taken together these show strong global expansion that may outpace the U.S.

• Japan surge: The Nikkei sits at all-time highs after Takaichi’s landslide win; it often moves in tandem with gold and silver.

• Soft retail: December retail sales were flat vs. +0.4% expected.  Annual sales showed a growth of 2.4% - lagging inflation and signaling a cautious consumer.

• China trimming Treasuries: Chinese regulators are urging institutions (not the state) to cut U.S. Treasury exposure and shift toward metals.

• Data center pause: New York lawmakers proposed a 3-year moratorium on new datacenter permits over energy and environmental concerns.

• Asset-light robotaxis: Uber plans robotaxis in 10+ cities by year-end – including Madrid, Houston, Zurich, and Hong Kong.  That allows Uber to leverage partners like Baidu, Momenta, and WeRide for their tech, and the partners get entry into Western and Middle Eastern markets under the Uber brand.

• AI prototyping speed: Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 built a Pokémon-style game in 90 minutes and a global flight simulator that explores anywhere in the world – in 2 days.

• Valuation question: Walmart and Nvidia both trade near 45X earnings.  I wonder which multiple will hold through 2026.

•  It’s an AI Ad land-grab: At Super Bowl LX, AI ads surged as Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Meta battled to become the consumers’ default AI.

• AI.com bet: Crypto.com bought AI.com for $70m, pitching it as a personal-agent hub for messaging, trading, and task automation.

• AI Capex boom: Alphabet is raising $15B in bonds (including a 100-year tranche) to fund up to $185B in AI capex.

• Ads in AI: OpenAI is trying sponsored ads following responses as a monetization path.  Currently, OpenAI needs to be a monetization path for free access to AI.

• China’s Opensource push: Zhipu AI released GLM-5, a low-cost opensource model with agentic document generation that pressures the usual suspects J.

• More Free stuff: Claude’s free users now get Excel and document creation, along with connectors to tools like Slack, Notion, Canva, and PayPal.

• AI video breakout: ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0, from the maker of TikTok, is driving hyper-realistic viral videos.  Here’s a fight scene between Brad Pitt & Tom Cruise that took only 2 lines of code to produce.

• DeepSeek buzz: Hype is building around DeepSeek’s next open-source model, with speculation that it could further pressure U.S. tech valuations.

•  Q: Will AI tools reduce my workload?

• A: Not yet. A Harvard Business Review study of U.S. tech firms found AI often increases workload.

  o AI expanded a worker’s tasks well beyond core roles as AI makes new work feel accessible.

  o AI blurred the work-life boundaries, and workers often fired-off prompts after hours, on weekends, and during vacations.

  o AI engineers spent more time reviewing AI-assisted code, and fielding “vibe-coding” requests.

  - Bottom line: AI delivers productivity gains but also broader roles, longer hours, and faster-changing expectations that many teams struggle to manage.

•  Capital is Rotating: AI capex is rising as markets reprice for real returns.  Software is under pressure, and crypto is volatile while aiming to become the monetary payment rails for all AI agents.  [FYI: Due to market rotation, ~$1T in market cap recently vanished in days.]

• Defensive Lean: Leadership is thinning.  Healthcare and Industrials are leading.  Staples are holding firm while financials lag.  These are all signs of a cautious, defensive market.

• Gemini surge: Google’s Gemini 3 Deep Think posted top-tier math, coding, and science results and added a math agent.  Despite the headlines shifting to OpenAI and Anthropic, Google’s scale and performance keep it a central AI contender.

• Metals & Miners setup for earnings season: Precious metals and miners remain in uptrends with rising 200-day moving averages.  The miners look oversold within that trend, suggesting a potential rebound as earnings approach.  Any pullbacks appear to be short-term catalyst driven, and NOT thesis breaking.

  o Tip #1: Miners such as: AG, Silver Wheaton, COPX & DNN

  o Tip #2: Google

  o Tip #3: Smaller miners: FMANF, ATXRF, VZLA, NFGC & TRX

• Factually: (a) U.S. Tech stocks (particularly software) remain under pressure.  (b) Investor exposure to tech is at historically elevated levels.  (c) Surging tech capex is coming at the cost of buybacks.  (d) Private equity stocks are also coming under pressure.  And (e) Defensive stocks and commodities are movin’ up. Overall, per Callum Thomas… We are at a challenging juncture in markets.  Tech stocks have peaked from a point of major overvaluation and historically high allocations.  So, keep a close eye on tech and financials for purposes of risk management and additional rotation into defensives – while remaining with the bullish outlook in cyclicals, global equities, and commodities.

   

• Trading TIPS:

   

  HODLs: (Hold-On for Dear Life)

  - Holding / Reducing:

  o  (-) Ethereum (ETH = 2,056 / in at $310)

  o (-) Bitcoin (BTC = $68,980 / in at $4,310)

   

  - Increasing:

  o (+) Physical Commodities = Gold @ $5,063/oz. & Silver @ $77.2/oz.

  o (+) SLV (silver ETF) == ($69.7 / in at $27)

  o (+) GLD – Gold ETF ($462 / in at $212)

  o (+) GDX (gold miners ETF) == ($103.9 / in at $52)

  o (+) SIL (silver miners ETF) == ($101.6 / in at $86.05)

  o (+) COPX (copper mine ETF) == ($87.9 / in at $55.3)

  o (+) ATXRF (small copper & gold miner) == ($3.06 / in at $2.47)

  o (+) FMANF (small gold miner) == ($0.28 / in at $0.17)

  o (+) CCJ (uranium) == ($112.9 / in at $84)

  o (+) ILF (S. American ETF) == ($36.26 / in at $27.8)

  o (NEW) EWJ (Japanese ETF) == ($93.85 / in at $91.77)

  o (NEW) EWY (S. Korea ETF) == ($133.97 / in at $120.81)

  o (NEW) UTG (Reaves Utility ETF) == ($40.43 / in at $36.51)

  o (+) QQQI (13% covered-call, QQQ’s divi. producer == pay mo.)

  o (+) ICSH (short term bonds = 4.65% yield == pay mo.)

   

  Please be safe out there!

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