This Week in Barrons: 05.10.2026

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R.F. Culbertson
May 10, 2026

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We really LOST jobs in April...

Nial Ferguson: "Wars start sooner, and last longer – than you’d expect."
The New Entrepreneurship: Cofounder 2 empowers solopreneurs by orchestrating AI agents across engineering, sales, and marketing. It provides a full-team experience complete with an automated org chart and a roadmap to track your progress.
The Profitability Mandate: The "Private Equity Safety Net" is a myth. If top-tier companies like Figma can see massive valuation drops (down 86% from its IPO), average startups have no guaranteed exit. As Peter Walker notes, “PEs won't save you if your customers won't. Profitability is your only real parachute – it buys you the time needed to pivot before the money runs out.” The companies that figure this out, are learning how to sell and gaining paying customers. The others are going out of business – they just don’t know it yet.

The Markets:

Markets & Industry Trends
o Foreclosures hit a 6-year high ... jumping +26% in Q1 – as homeowners struggle with shrinking disposable income, soaring property taxes, and insurance premiums.
o Spirit’s survival blocked: While inflation squeezed margins, Spirit Airlines’ downfall was cemented by the DOJ blocking its JetBlue merger – a failure of the Biden anti-corporate - antitrust policy.
o The new cloud powerhouse: Elon Musk has leased a part of SpaceX’s 220,000-GPU "Colossus 1" supercomputer to Anthropic. This $3 to $4B annual deal positions SpaceX as a major cloud infrastructure player and gives Musk significant leverage in the AI arms race.
Corporate Strategy & Governance
o GameStop’s $56B eBay gambit: In an ambitious "David vs. Goliath" move, GameStop is bidding for eBay (4x its valuation). The goal is to combine GameStop’s collector base with eBay’s 130M buyers to create a legitimate secondhand competitor to Amazon.
o Drama @ OpenAI: In court testimony, Greg Brockman revealed that Elon Musk once demanded "unequivocal control" of OpenAI before storming out in 2017. For enterprise partners, the trial highlights ongoing concerns regarding OpenAI’s leadership stability and history.

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Info-Bits…

Geopolitics & Defense
o Project Freedom Ignites: Trump has deployed 15,000 troops and 100+ aircraft to the Strait of Hormuz to counter Iranian mines. Iran views this as a ceasefire violation; the mission signals a shift from diplomacy to a high-stakes military push for open shipping.
o Palantir’s war premium: Conflict has supercharged Palantir’s balance sheet, with total revenues surging 85% to $1.63B and U.S. revenue doubling ($+104%$) following the outbreak of war with Iran.
o OPEC+ fracture: Seven OPEC+ nations increased June output by 188k bpd without the UAE. The market’s focus has shifted from official announcements to whether these members will honor their production caps.
Enterprise & Innovation
o AI Outperforms ER Doctors: A Harvard study found OpenAI’s 2024 model (only using raw health records) diagnosed ER cases more accurately than physicians. The results suggest a massive frontier for AI in patient care – if institutional leadership allows its adoption.
o Amazon vs. Logistics Giants: Amazon’s entry into commercial logistics sent UPS and FedEx shares tumbling ~10%, and signals a major disruption to the traditional shipping duopoly.

Crypto & AI-Bytes:

AI Industry & Infrastructure
o The "Deployment Company" Era: Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly partnering with major PE firms (Blackstone, Goldman Sachs) to launch AI-native consulting arms. The new bottleneck isn't the model’s capability, but rather the complex integration of AI into large-scale, "messy" enterprise environments.
o The Mac Mini shortage: Apple confirmed that high demand for local AI agent development has caused a supply crunch for the Mac mini and Mac Studio that is expected to last for months.
o OpenAI’s hardware push: OpenAI has moved the production target for its first AI phone to early 2027 – a year ahead of schedule. While hardware control is vital for "agentic" mobile experiences, the status of Jony Ive’s IO group remains unclear following its acquisition.
o Coinbase shifts to running lean: Coinbase is laying off 14% of its staff as it transitions toward AI-native teams and agent-driven operational workflows.
Markets & Macro
o Yields & inflation risks: The yield on the 30-year note is nearing 5% amid a perfect storm: unresolved "Warsh" policy issues, a $1.5T AI-related debt pipeline, and looming inflation driven by the Strait of Hormuz.
o Interactive website conversion: Interact AI launched a new layer for websites that replaces static pages with live AI guides. The tool proactively walks visitors through products and resolves customer issues in real time.

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Morgan Moment(s): Q & A…

Markets & Economy
o The "Golden Age of Grift": Per Le Shrub: Gamestop is bidding for control of Ebay, Nokia has gone parabolic, Kodak broke out, and Blackberry was up +10% pre-market. If only Yahoo was still listed, we could buy a Call on it and complete the walk down memory lane.
o Crumbling Consumer Confidence: Michigan’s consumer sentiment hit a new record low in May, driven by high gas prices and tariffs. Any recovery is unlikely until supply chains stabilize and energy costs return to pre-war levels.
Mindset & Innovation
o The 5-Second Rule for Failure: Scientifically, the "five-second rule" doesn't stop germs, but psychologically – it’s a vital tool for innovation. Per S. Gobin: By quickly fixing any tiny mistakes, you prevent the mental gridlock that comes from over-fretting. This allows you to move past small failures and arrive at the larger breakthroughs – much quicker.

Next Week... We LOST jobs in April…

PMs Weekly:
o De-Dollarization: Mozambique may convert its USD debt into Chinese Yuan debt.
o ETF Rebound: April saw positive gold ETF flows globally, marking the third-highest month-end holdings on record.
o India Supply Crunch: Heavy government regulation has halted gold imports for five weeks, driving up domestic prices and threatening shortages.
Last Week’s Top 3 Actions (Per PBM)
o Fed & Sentiment Shift: With rising supply chain pressure and record-low consumer sentiment, rate hike talk is replacing rate cut expectations. Watch for Kevin Warsh’s pre-meeting comments; silence or a hawkish tone signals a divided committee.
o Global Oil Deficit: Shell reports a 1-billion-barrel physical oil gap – that equates to ~10 days of global supply. Monitor European airlines for cancellations caused by fuel unavailability rather than just price.
o Private Credit Stress: Five institutions have confirmed stress due to volatile data swings, further solidifying the outlook that interest rate cuts are off the table.
Next Week’s Top 3 Watches
o CPI & PPI (Inflation): Watch for a core CPI above 0.3% MoM alongside an accelerating PPI. This would solidify the "stagflation" narrative with back-to-back data points.
o Retail Sales (Consumer Health): Falling sales paired with increased discount store traffic will confirm the "consumer squeeze" is officially a trend.
o AMAT (AI Deployment): Check the book-to-bill ratio. Above 1.0 confirms real demand; below 1.0 suggests a gap between AI "hype" (capex announcements) and actual deployment.
The Reality Check
o Oil: While paper oil prices sit at $100/bbl, physical oil is trading at $150 to $200/bbl.
o Food: A "Dust Bowl" level drought and soaring fertilizer costs are driving food supply and pricing to unprecedented extremes.
o Jobs: The BLS reported a gain of +115k jobs in April, but the details tell a different story:
§ Manufacturing: Lost 2,500 jobs (offset by low-quality job gains).
§ The "Phantom Jobs" Factor: The Birth/Death model added 391kimplied / fake jobs. Removing the ‘Phantom Job Injection’ reveals an actual net LOSS of 236,000 jobs in April.

TIPS...

Factually: (a) The equal-weighted S&Ps have stalled at resistance, while the market cap-weighted is back to outperforming equal-weighted. (b) We are potentially in the blow-off top phase of the market cycle. (c) Investors are all-in on stocks (and all-out of bonds). And (d) several major shifts in market structure have just begun. Overall, per Callum Thomas, the market continues to press higher (lead largely by big tech/AI) and investors (in aggregate) are all-in on growth and the stock bull market continuing. Yet, there are a few major changes in market structure that investors need to be aware of and some very interesting corners of the market that many are overlooking…
Tips:
o Tip #1: BOT MARA ... Stop = $10.72 / Target = $19 / clean head and shoulders pattern.
o Tip #2: BOT NVDA ... Earnings with a $250 target
o Tip #3: BOT PRLD & OSCR ... Small cap healthcare
o Tip #4: BOT EGO ... Gold miner w/ unique process
o Tip #5: BOT DGXX ... Small cap energy
HODLs: (Hold-On for Dear Life):
Hold / Reduce:
o (o) Ethereum (ETH = 2,314 / in at $310)
o (o) Bitcoin (BTC = $80,390 / in at $4,310)
o (o) ATXRF (copper & gold miner) == ($2.27 / in at $2.47)
o (-) ICSH (short term bonds = 4.65% yield == pay mo.
Hold / Increase:
o (+) Physical Commodities = Gold @ $4,723/oz. & Silver @ $80.83/oz.
o (+) SLV (silver ETF) == ($73 / in at $27)
o (+) GLD – Gold ETF ($433.7 / in at $212)
o (+) CCJ (uranium) == ($116.7 / in at $84)
o (+) MTZ (MasTec = grid builder) == ($414.2 / in at $268)
o (+) PWR (Quanta = grid innovator) == ($745 / in at $525)
o (+) HYPE (HyperLiquid) == ($41.7 / in at $32)
o (o) WEAT (Agr. Wheat) == ($23.4 / in at $20.89)
o (o) CORN (Agr. Corn) == ($18.6 / in at $17.19)
o (o) CANE (Agr. Sugarcane) == ($9.86 / in at $9.14)
o (+) QQQI (Divi. producer via Cov. Calls == pay mo.)
Recent Trades:
o (+) MARA (Marathon Hldg.) == ($12.94 / in at $10.02)
o (+) NVDA (Nividia) == ($215 / in at $198.12)
o (+) PRLD (Prelude Therapeutics) == ($4.86 / in at $4.62)
o (+) OSCR (Oscar Healthcare) == ($21.31 / in at $11.92)
o (+) EGO (Eldorado Gold Miner) == ($34.15 / in at $31.13)
o (+) DGXX (Digi Power) == ($6.63 / in at $4.92)
Please be safe out there!

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