We're Tracking 21 Portfolio Signals Across 9 of Our Investing Themes
Let's scan through the headlines for the stories of the week that speak to our Pro Portfolio holdings.
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Signals
Older Americans lost nearly $5 billion to scammers in 2024. Italy eyes nuclear energy. Pace quickens for AI infrastructure building. And identify protection company Aura ... hacked.
These are just a handful of the many signals we're spotted this past week that speak to our investment strategies in the Pro Portfolio. If you’ve come across a signal we should know about, be sure to drop a link in the Comment section below.
Aging Population
Scammers will, of course, try to scam anyone, regardless of age. But older adults are prime targets because they often have accumulated wealth and live alone, and are assumed to be vulnerable. More than 147,000 people 60 and older reported scams in 2024, with losses of $4.9 billion—both up more than 40% from the year earlier, according to the FBI. The majority of frauds aren’t reported because of shame and fear, making the actual numbers far higher. Read more here
Position: Labcorp (LH) ; Welltower (WELL)
Artificial Intelligence
Alibaba Group saw growth across both its cloud and eCommerce segments during the quarter ended Dec. 31, according to a Thursday (March 19) earnings release… The company’s Cloud Intelligence Group, which includes what it calls its “AI + Cloud” businesses, saw its revenue increase 36% year over year, according to a presentation released Thursday. This business unit’s revenue growth was driven primarily by its public cloud offering, which in turn was driven by the adoption of AI-related products. Alibaba has seen 10 consecutive quarters of triple-digit year-over-year growth in revenue related to AI products, per the presentation. Read more here
Chief Justice John Roberts said AI will put pressure on everyone, from prospective law students to judges. The legal profession will change as a result, Roberts said. His advice is that future lawyers will need to be "pretty nimble" in response to how AI alters the industry. He said he still hopes that "good people" continue to enter the field. Read more here
Robots are coming to hospitals, but they are not there to replace surgeons. Instead, they observe, coordinate and carry loads, tasks that consume large amounts of clinical staff time and require far less judgment than the work surgeons spend years training to perform. That distinction is central to Nvidia’s latest push into healthcare. The company this week released what it describes as the first open platform built specifically for healthcare robotics, a stack of datasets, simulation tools and vision-language-action models designed to train artificial intelligence systems on surgical environments and deploy them in real clinical workflows. Read more here
Position: Alphabet (GOOGL) , Amazon (AMZN) , Arista Networks (ANET) , Axon (AXON) , Meta (META) , Microsoft (MSFT) , Palantir (PLTR) , ServiceNow (NOW) , SuRo Capital (SSSS)
Cash-Strapped Consumer
At a Costco Wholesale Corp. gas station near San Antonio, wait times have stretched as much as 30 minutes and lines wrap around the block. Elsewhere, drivers are refreshing apps like GasBuddy and going out of their way for cheaper fuel and discounts as prices reach nearly $4 a gallon on average. Others say they are trimming spending on grocery, takeout and travel. How much Americans' spending behavior changes, and what that means for the US economy's main engine of growth, will depend on how high prices at the pump go, and for how long. Read more here
“Diesel is what moves the real economy. It hauls the food, the packages, the building supplies and the inventory sitting on store shelves,” said Paul Dietrich, chief investment strategist at Wedbush Securities. “If the Iran war keeps diesel prices elevated, this becomes a direct hit on consumer prices. Groceries get more expensive, delivery costs rise and household budgets are tightened,” Read more here
Payments and digital banking company Klarna says its Klarna Card now has 5 million customers. In announcing the milestone Thursday (March 19), the Swedish FinTech said this highlights rapid adoption by consumers seeking more control over their money. Read more here
Position: Amazon, Costco (COST) , TJX Companies (TJX)
Cybersecurity, Data Privacy & Digital Identity
Identity protection company Aura has confirmed that an unauthorized party gained access to nearly 900,000 records containing names and email addresses. The company states that the incident was caused by a voice phishing attack targeting an employee, which exposed the sensitive data of 20,000 current and 15,000 former customers. Read more here
The FBI appears to have seized the website of an Iran-linked hacker group that claimed responsibility for the only known significant cyberattack on a U.S. company since war between the countries started in February. Read more here
"Cyber and terrorism are the two levers that I believe Iran will pull now that their navy is decimated," retired US Army Lt. Gen. Ross Coffman told The Register. "What we saw against Stryker - it's just the beginning." Stryker is a medical technology outfit that was last week hit by a cyber crew with ties to Iran's intelligence agency, causing a global network outage at the company. The attack represented the first destructive cyberattack to hit a US-based company during the Iran war. Read more here
Position: Alphabet, First Trust Nasdaq Cybersecurity ETF, Microsoft
Digital Infrastructure
When AI systems move from experimentation to production, data centers cease to be passive hosting environments. They become active execution environments. Models ingest live data, call external APIs, trigger workflows and increasingly feed directly into operational systems. At that point, expectations shift. The question is no longer just whether the lights stay on. It is whether the infrastructure can support autonomous, accountable AI at scale. Read more here
Construction spending for data centers has climbed steadily in recent years, while outlays for general office projects headed downward, US Census data show. The two crossed paths in December, with roughly $3.57 billion spent on data centers that month, compared with $3.49 billion for offices, according to preliminary estimates. The shift is likely to continue and “may perpetuate itself even further as AI is utilized for automating day-to-day jobs,” said Andy Cvengros, co-lead of US data center markets for the brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. “It’s going to directly impact the amount of office space people need.” Read more here
Doug Adams, the CEO of NTT Global Data Centers, has told Bloomberg that the company was working on doubling its capacity to 4GW in as little as two years. The company is currently working on 34 data center projects, and Adams added that the business would be able to offer “well over 5GW” of capacity in five years. Read more here
Japanese electrical equipment vendor Fujikura Ltd has announced it will push ahead with plans to ramp up production of optical fiber and cables to support the rising demand from AI data centers. A lot of this demand is coming from the US, noted the company, which said it will look to increase production capacity up to approximately three times the current level at every one of its manufacturing locations in Japan and the US. In total, Fujikura said it will invest a maximum of 300 billion yen ($1.9bn) to produce the fiber, while "closely monitoring market trends." Read more here
Position: Arista Networks (ANET) , Broadcom (AVGO) , Eaton (ETN) , Marvell (MRVL) , Nvidia (NVDA) , United Rentals (URI)
Energy Pain Point
Giorgia Meloni has long pitched nuclear energy as a cure for Italy’s wilting economy. Now her government is plotting how to actually resurrect the banned technology. Almost 40 years after Italy shuttered its last nuclear reactor — and 15 years after a failed attempt to reverse that decision — the prime minister’s team is consulting experts and holding discussions on how to restart atomic energy production, according to people familiar with the planning. Read more here
Executives at major U.S. AI labs are telling investors to brace for progress that will “shock” them. The gains are already outpacing expectations: OpenAI’s recently released GPT-5.4 “Thinking” model scored 83.0% on the GDPVal benchmark, placing it at or above the level of human experts on economically valuable tasks. And Morgan Stanley says the curve only gets steeper from here. The intelligence explosion comes with a brutal infrastructure constraint. Morgan Stanley’s “Intelligence Factory” model projects a net U.S. power shortfall of 9 to 18 gigawatts through 2028—a 12% to 25% deficit in the power needed to run it all. Read more here
Position: Eaton (ETN)
Homebuilding & Materials
Sales of newly built homes in January dropped 17.6% month over month to a seasonally adjusted, annualized pace of 587,000 units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That is the slowest pace since 2022. Housing analysts had been expecting a much smaller decline. Read more here
U.S. home prices will rise modestly this year and in 2027 as the market remains constrained by high mortgage rates and a shortage of affordable homes that will persist for years, according to housing analysts polled by Reuters. Housing will not provide a boost to the slowing U.S. economy and there will be no near-term progress in the Trump administration's aims to revitalize the market through cheaper mortgages, the February 27-March 17 survey released on Tuesday suggested. Read more here
Related: The Market's Thin Red Line
Luxury Buying Boom
Whatever the label, the effect is the same. China’s long-awaited consumer recovery has gotten stuck — not only in wallets, but in the psychology behind them. Start with the numbers. Chinese households are sitting on an enormous and growing pile of cash. By 2025, household deposits had surged to levels equivalent to roughly 118% of GDP, according to official statistics. Read more here
Safety & Security
The Pentagon is seeking $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war, a sizable amount that is certain to be met with questions from Congress, which would need to approve any new money. Read more here
In 2025, global defence spending reached USD2.63 trillion – up from USD2.48trn in 2024. In real terms, year-on-year spending increased by 2.5%, which, though lower than the 7–8% growth seen in recent years, continued the upward trend from the previous year’s record spend… In contrast, European spending continued to grow at record levels, with the region allocating almost USD563 billion to defence in 2025, almost USD100bn more than the year before. In real terms, this represents a 12.6% year-on-year increase, on a par with the real-term uplift seen in 2024. Crystallised by NATO members’ pledge at The Hague Summit in June to increase defence and security spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, such levels defied expectations that spending growth would slow after an initial spike. As such, European defence spending now accounts for over 21% of the global total, up from 17% in 2022. Read more here
Position: Axon (AXON) , Palantir (PLTR)
The Strategies Behind Our Thematic Models
Aging of the Population - Capturing the demographic wave of the aging population and the changing demands it brings.
Artificial Intelligence – Software, chips, and related companies that facilitate the collection and analysis of large data sets and autonomous generation of solutions given non-machine language prompts.
Cash-Strapped Consumer - Companies poised to benefit as consumers stretch the disposable spending dollars they do have.
Cybersecurity - Companies that focus on protecting against the penetration of digital networks and the theft, ransom, corruption, or destruction of data.
Data Privacy & Digital Identity - Companies providing the tools and services that verify authorized users and safeguard personal data privacy.
Digital Infrastructure & Connectivity -The buildout and upgrading of our Networks, Data Storage Facilities, and Equipment.
Digital Lifestyle - The companies behind our increasingly connected lives.
Digital Payments - This model focuses on companies benefiting from the accelerating structural adoption of digital payments and financial technology (FinTech).
Energy Pain Point - Companies poised to prosper from rising power demand.
EV Transition - Capturing the transition to EVs and related infrastructure from combustion engine vehicles.
Guilty Pleasure – Companies that produce/provide food and drink products that consumers tend to enjoy regardless of the economic environment and potential long-term health hazards associated with excessive consumption.
Homebuilding & Materials – Ranging from homebuilders to key building product companies that serve the housing market, this model looks to capture the rising demand for housing, one that should benefit as the Fed returns monetary policy to more normalized levels.
Luxury Buying Boom - Tapping into aspirational buying and affluent buyers amid rising global wealth.
Rebuilding America - Turning the focused spending on rebuilding US infrastructure into revenue and profits.
Safety & Security – Targeted exposure to companies that provide goods and services primarily to the Defense and security sectors of the economy.
