An American business icon is attempting a comeback. Watch this stock price level for evidence

Today’s issue in preview:

• An American business icon is attempting a comeback. Watch this stock price level for evidence

• How to track and trade OpenAI and Anthropic before they go public

• Small-cap stocks are in a bull market. Are you profiting?

• Learn our Top Themes to buy now

An American business icon is attempting a comeback. Watch this stock price level for evidence

Credit: sanfel

On Monday, August 3, shares of airplane maker Boeing (BA) jumped 8% after the FAA certified its 737 Max 7 after years of delays. The stock also enjoyed an upgrade to “Buy” from BNP Paribas.

This big jump puts Boeing stock close to breaking out of a long, multi-year consolidation pattern… a move we’d see as very bullish not just for Boeing, but for the U.S. economy.

With a market cap of $182 billion and a workforce of over 180,000 people, Boeing is a U.S. manufacturing supergiant.

It is the world’s second-largest airplane manufacturer and a major U.S. military supplier. It is also America’s largest exporter. The world likes to buy Boeing planes.

For many years, Boeing was seen as one of the world’s premier manufacturing firms. However, critics say that starting around 2000, the company began to prioritize bureaucracy and financial engineering rather than the engineering that builds excellent planes.

The stock was a big loser from 2019 to 2025 thanks to serious mechanical problems with several key models in its portfolio. It suffered a decline of more than 66%.

Boeing may have learned its lessons, however. The recent past is a nightmare shareholders do not want to relive. A new engineering-focused CEO was installed in 2024. Importantly, the guy is from Iowa. Since trading for $140 per share in early 2025, Boeing stock has advanced to $232 per share.

Despite its troubles, Boeing is still a U.S. manufacturing icon. It is a major component of the global aerospace industry. What’s good for Boeing is good for America.

Over the past eight months, I’ve written over 20 research notes analyzing the soaring share prices of highly economically sensitive industry groups, including trucking stocks, railroad stocks, regional banks, manufacturing stocks, steelmakers, shopping mall operators, and hotel chains.

At the end of each note, I pointed to their soaring stock prices and told readers that the U.S. economy is doing much better than most people think.

These economically sensitive firms are important “real world” indicators. They almost always do a better job of telling us what is happening in the economy than any media outlet or economist. And their uptrends are moving in a bullish upward direction for the U.S.A.

We’d see a continuation of Boeing’s recent uptrend into the $ 270-per-share area as a great sign for the U.S. economy… and a great addition to this growing list of positives.

How to track and trade OpenAI and Anthropic before they go public

Credit: Kenneth Cheung

Is the future for Anthropic and OpenAI wildly bullish? Or wildly bearish?

This has become one of the financial world’s most important and most interesting debates. The outcome of the situation has huge implications for all kinds of stocks, some of which are probably in your portfolio.

Anthropic and OpenAI are the two largest private “frontier model” AI firms. A frontier model is an AI system at the cutting edge of capability, defined by massive scale, high training costs, and advanced reasoning.

Together, these two firms have raised more than $200 billion in investor capital, revolutionized AI development, and enjoyed explosive growth over the past two years. They’re considered the fastest-growing large businesses of all-time… and now worth more than $1.5 trillion.

They are the wildly successful “poster children” of AI.

But are their giant market values and standing in the AI world at risk?

Some investors believe they are. They point to the proliferation of very cheap “open source” AI models that are free for anyone to download, modify, and operate. These cheap, open-source models could threaten businesses built around expensive “closed source” frontier models. After all, it’s never good for business if a competitor can offer a similar product or service for 90% less than what you’re charging.

Bulls on the frontier model firms say the bear case overlooks major positives working in their favor. No matter what AI model you use, it must have access to “compute,” or AI data center output. This is a scarce, finite resource and will be for years. OpenAI and Anthropic have huge amounts of compute locked up in contracted agreements. Most of their competitors don’t.

The frontier models also have good brand names and the ability to build many kinds of valuable AI agents and software, which can be used to build successful business segments… which could take their valuations into the trillions of dollars.

As you can see, “Will the frontier models soar or sink in value from here?” is a complex issue. The underlying technology is advancing rapidly. The bottlenecks related to making the technology available to billions of consumers are evolving rapidly. And there are dozens of very smart and ruthless competitors working to get a piece of their AI pie.

Although the issue is complex, two simple ways to monitor its progress and outcome are: add shares of Oracle (ORCL) and SK Telecom (SKM) to your watch list.

Oracle is a successful business software firm that has entered into agreements with OpenAI to supply the frontier model firm with large amounts of compute in the future.

To supply this compute, Oracle is spending enormous sums of money to build an AI data center and plans to spend even more in the future (about $90 billion next year alone). This part of Oracle’s business is so large relative to its current business that many investors like to monitor Oracle stock to gauge how well OpenAI is monetizing its technology. If OpenAI is wildly successful, it will be very good for Oracle.

SK Telecom is South Korea’s largest wireless telecommunications provider. The company invested around $100 million into Anthropic in 2023. This stake is believed to be worth more $2 billion now… and could be worth much more. SK Telecom’s current market cap is about $12.5 billion. This makes it so big Anthropic developments can have big impacts on SKM stock.

I recommend adding these two stocks to your watch list if they are not already on it. Anthropic and OpenAI are not publicly traded, but Oracle and SK Telecom are. The variables related to frontier model businesses are complex, but tracking how the situation evolves, whether to the upside or the downside, is not.

Small cap stocks are in a bull market. Are you profiting?

Credit: mixmotive

If all the bad news about war, wealth inequality, and affordability has you down, look at the bright side: Small-cap stocks have just reached a new all-time high. That’s good for America.

On Tuesday morning, the SPDR Portfolio S&P 600 Small Cap ETF (SPSM) advanced 1% to reach a new all-time high. This ETF aims to track the S&P SmallCap 600 index, one of the world’s most widely followed gauges of small-company stock prices. These firms can be less than 1% of the size of a giant like Google.

The S&P SmallCap 600 index differs from its small-cap counterpart, the Russell 2000, in several ways. The biggest one is that S&P requires a company to have achieved a measure of profitability to be considered for inclusion into its small-cap index. Russell has no such requirement.

This means the S&P index “tilts” more towards higher quality, less speculative stocks than the Russell index.

For at least a year, small-cap bulls have said these stocks have underperformed large caps because high interest rates and high inflation hit small companies harder than large ones. This underperformance has left small caps relatively cheap, trading at a forward P/E ratio of 15.5, compared to the S&P’s forward P/E ratio of 19.4.

If Donald Trump gets his wish for lower interest rates later this year, small caps could become much less cheap. Lower rates should benefit small caps more than large caps. The strong U.S. economy I’ve written about dozens of times is also great for small caps.

Regular readers know I believe it’s good to know the fundamentals, but they are much less important than what the market thinks of those fundamentals. Fundamentals ride in the backseat. Price drives the bus. You can be bullish on a theme until you’re blue in the face, but you have a losing idea if the market isn’t moving in your preferred direction.

As you can see in the one-year chart below, the market likes the fundamentals of the small-cap world. SPSM is up 37% over the past year and just broke out a new all-time high. Small caps joining the bull market is a great sign for the American economy.

Market Notes

• Our recommendation to invest in the proliferation of AI agents via Cloudflare (NET) is off to a great start. The stock reached a new all-time high this week.

• Wearable healthcare diagnostics giant DexCom (DXCM) reached a new all-time high this week.

• Our recommendation to invest in the Made in America megatrend via Applied Industrial Technologies (AIT) is off to a great start. The stock reached a new all-time high this week.

• Banking giant Bank of America (BAC) reached a new all-time high this week. This is a bullish economic signal.

• Europe is in a bull market. The SPDR EURO STOXX 50 ETF (FEZ) – a sort of “S&P 500 of Europe” fund – reached a new all-time high this week.

Regards,

Brian Hunt
Editor, Money & Megatrends

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