The world is grappling with the largest energy supply shock ever as the Iran war heads toward a fourth month. Asian countries are rationing fuel, governments are emptying their crude-oil stockpiles, airlines are canceling thousands of flights, and Middle East alliances are fracturing.
Barron’s convened an all-star panel of energy experts on May 8 to discuss the ramifications for the global economy and investors.
Read an edited version of the conversation, which includes a discussion of the panelists’ favorite stocks, at the link in our bio.
Illustration by Peter Crowther
Picture an excessively mobile middle-class family that does almost nothing but drive, traveling from New York City to Los Angeles and back again each week. Its gasoline bill, instead of taking up a typical 5% of its budget, might come in over 30%. That’s about what it takes to keep an airline fueled under normal circumstances.
Now consider that the price of jet fuel has outpaced gasoline this year, more than doubling. Spirit Airlines recently succumbed. Remaining airlines are scrambling to raise prices.
Domestic airfares are already up 36% this year, according to data from Kayak. That means pricier summer trips for vacationers who haven’t yet booked, with longer-term implications for the airline industry and its investors. The future of the ultralow-cost carrier, a breed of cramped flier that dominates in Europe, is in question in America. At the same time, the strongest airlines—including Delta Air Lines, United Airlines Holdings, and some of the rest now doing their best impressions of these two—could benefit from present turmoil and generate healthy stock returns for years.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Illustration by Barron's
The Fear of 13 is a new play on Broadway starring Adrien Brody about a man wrongly imprisoned for murder. Brody’s character passes his time learning new words, including “triskaidekaphobia,” the fear of the number 13.
A few miles away at Citigroup headquarters in lower Manhattan, employees may be all too familiar with triskaidekaphobia, as the long-beleaguered bank works through its 13th restructuring. The previous 12, the blunt-spoken Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo notes, “failed.”
Not to disabuse a Wall Street truism, but this time might be different. Indeed, Mayo has had an Overweight rating on the stock since 2018, and at $130, Citi shares finally trade above their book value. And don’t look now, but Citi’s stock is up 161% over the past three years, crushing the performance of rivals Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase, as well as the S&P 500 index.
Going back to the 2008-09 financial crisis, however, the stock has been an absolute dog—essentially a two-decade wealth-destruction machine. It is that lingering perception that speaks to Citi CEO Jane Fraser’s charge: She must prove to her employees, customers, and investors that the recent run-up in the stock and rebound in its businesses are sustainable and that Citi is really, truly back.
Fraser doesn’t dwell on the past. “That was decades ago,” she says when asked about Citi’s dark ages in a recent interview at the bank’s offices. “My eyes are on the destination. I see a lot more runway ahead that’s independent of where the world heads. I’m delighted to see the improvement in the performance, but there’s no victory lap.”
Read more at the link in our bio.
Photograph by The Tyler Twins
Kevin Warsh came before the Senate Banking Committee on April 21 with a simple message: The Federal Reserve is broken, and he is the person to fix it.
Warsh, 56, a former Fed governor and successful investor, is President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the 17th chair of the Fed, replacing current Chair Jerome Powell, whose term ends on May 15. Warsh has laid out a vision for America’s central bank that differs notably from Powell’s and that of other recent Fed leaders. He has argued that the Fed should move faster to implement monetary policy, trust markets more, and narrow its footprint in the policy realm. Specifically, he wants to cut interest rates, shrink the Fed’s $6.7 trillion balance sheet, and reform how the institution communicates and conducts policy.
The biggest obstacle to Warsh’s confirmation fell away on Friday, when the Department of Justice closed a criminal investigation into Powell’s handling of the renovation of the Fed’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, handing the matter back to the Fed’s own inspector general. Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) had vowed to withhold his “yea” vote until the probe had ended. The Senate banking committee moved quickly to schedule a confirmation vote for Wednesday, and for the first time in months, a timely leadership transition at the Fed seems all but assured.
Far less certain, however, is Warsh’s ability to realize his ambitious agenda, given persistent inflation, rising oil prices, and the increasingly hawkish tilt of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s policy-setting arm.
Illustration by Mona Eing & Michael Meissner
When a group of financial advisors quit Merrill Lynch to open their own firm, their departure sparked a wave of resignations—and a marathon effort to win over clients and $129 billion in assets.
Read this week's cover story at the link in our bio.
SpaceX’s initial public offering may be the largest IPO ever, but it might just be a prelude to the largest merger ever—a combination of Tesla with Elon Musk’s space venture.
The move could help rescue Tesla—whose shares have fallen almost 30% after hitting a record high in December —from its current stagnation.
For now, investors may be better off focusing on SpaceX and holding off on buying both stocks.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Illustration by @just.metz
Sin City isn’t luring enough sinners.
Visitations have been declining. Real estate prices are falling. The metro area’s 5.2% unemployment rate is nearly a percentage point higher than it is nationally. But you don’t need those statistics to know that all is not right in Las Vegas.
Outside, the pulsing Saturday night crowds on the Strip dwindle fast. By midweek, many pedestrians sport convention badges, showcasing one of the city’s few tourism bright spots.
The reasons for the city’s woes are many—competition, inflation, geopolitics—and many Vegas casino stocks have underperformed the S&P 500 in recent years. At first glance, it seems like Vegas could be headed for a fate worse than death; consider that Atlantic City, N.J., never got its mojo back after gambling faltered.
The travails of Las Vegas come at a time when Americans are gambling more than ever. The problem is that much of the new business is going online to sports betting sites and prediction markets.
Yet the pearl-clutching (or rhinestone-clutching?) about Vegas’ future overlooks the fact that the city is already working on its next act.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Photograph by Bridget Bennett
Artificial intelligence promises to remake economies, supercharge productivity, cure cancer, discover new drugs, and solve climate change. It is also said to be destroying jobs, privacy, profit margins, and the search for truth. One piece of data triggers optimism, followed just days, or hours, later by apocalyptic dread.
The battle is playing out in real-time on Wall Street. Nvidia, once the surefire way to invest in AI, has been dead money for six months. Software, formerly viewed as the perfect business model, is now seen as a relic, outdated by automated agents that can solve business problems on the fly. And once asset-light tech platforms look increasingly like indebted industrials, forced to spend billions of dollars to keep up with AI’s substantial financing demands. Tech investing, put simply, has been turned on its head.
While the volatility is painful, it is also creating big opportunities for investors, and it’s a perfect time to be picking stocks. With that goal in mind, Barron’s recently brought together four tech specialists to make sense of the 2026 tech investing landscape. Read more at the link in our bio.
Illustration by Jeremy Leung
Jamie Dimon is telling us all about his plans.
He wants to start a news outlet that covers public policy—appealing to “nerds like me,” Dimon says. There’s always government service, like Treasury Secretary—“It’s too late for me to run for president.” He could stay on as chairman of JPMorgan Chase after he steps down as CEO. Or maybe he’ll write a book. And he’d like to own a bar.
So many options, though sorting through them will come later. For now, Dimon has his hands full running the nation’s largest bank, which he intends to do for at least three or four more years, “board willing,” he says. Besides, he already has a bar, called Morgan’s (“my idea”) at the company’s new, audacious $4 billion Manhattan headquarters.
The elegant, amenity-filled interior of the Norman Foster-designed 1,388-foot tower belies the real work still to be done; Dimon’s remit has arguably never been more challenging. It isn’t just war in the Middle East, or that the Trump administration poses unprecedented uncertainty, or that the bank faces a raft of new competitors in payments, crypto, private equity and credit, and fintech. And it isn’t just that many of JPMorgan’s competitors, even Citigroup and Wells Fargo, are in good shape, too, or that artificial intelligence could reorder the bank’s business, or that risk from exposure to private-credit loans could worsen.
It isn’t even that, yes, Dimon needs to name a successor at some point.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Photograph by Pari Dukovic
In the midst of the cloud’s emergence in 2011, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously declared that “software is eating the world.” Hardware was becoming commoditized and business software was taking over IT budgets.
Andreessen’s prescient call foreshadowed 15 years of transformation and arguably trillions in value creation. No legacy software company saw a bigger boost than Microsoft, which rode the cloud from stagnation to new heights.
But now it’s software—and Microsoft—getting served up on a platter, as artificial intelligence shifts priorities across the tech sector. While the iShares Semiconductor exchange-traded fund is up 10% this year, the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF is down 20%.
Since peaking in July, Microsoft stock has fallen 28%, shedding $1 trillion in market value. For now, Microsoft and its software peers aren’t companies; they’re narratives of tech’s next generational disruption, all happening at blinding speed.
But there’s a different story to be told: Microsoft is ready for this moment.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Illustration by Jason Allen Lee
The scale of Operation Epic Fury surprised even the military analysts who saw it coming.
Starting midmorning in Tehran on Feb. 28, U.S. and Israeli forces struck nearly 2,000 targets within 100 hours, killing Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of his top lieutenants. It is America’s largest Middle East incursion since Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003—but initially, the stock market back home largely shrugged it off.
Wall Street’s favorite word for describing this is “resilience,” which sounds a bit too heroic for an awkward investing truth: Sometimes world events are both deadly serious and unlikely to dent purchases of iPhones, Oreo cookies, and Nvidia chips.
Investors should contemplate this war’s financial effects just the same.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Photo: Cover Images via AP Images
No AI magic trick is quite as impressive as the one it’s doing in financial markets—giving some utilities an upper hand with tech giants that are 100 times their size. It’s a trick that investors can cash in on.
A handful of utilities are poised to profit from the rush of spending by big tech firms, locking in a decade or more of cash flows to provide power to data centers.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Illustration by Nicolas Ortega
