Panel = CNBC's investment committee; "View" is the panel's net take this episode and the cell names which member(s) held it. This is an audio podcast, so each "At" cell opens the Spotify episode (not a deep-link); the (mm:ss) cues cited in the talking points below are from the Spotify transcript. Order: Positive → Neutral → Negative. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.
| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What the committee said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVDA | Nvidia | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Coming off a monster week (+11%, best since May '25) and reiterated as top sector pick at BofA. Terranova: "I think the stock is in the midst of a breakout" — tracing out the same pattern he identified in Apple several months ago, and the clearest case of new momentum building while Apple's and Alphabet's wanes. It gave back ~2.6–3% intraday on the FT report of a $500B AI-financing partnership with Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock's GIP, Brookfield, Goldman and KKR; Santoli: "good to have NVIDIA waking up." | listen↗ |
| MU | Micron Technology | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Lebenthal's conviction buy: two tranches at the last earnings report and just after, average price ~$1,000 with the stock at 877 — "I got a lot of clients saying, hey, why did you buy it at that price?" His answer: if the cycle is "elongated by years," you're buying six times forward earnings with earnings "growing through the roof" and the company about to anniversary the CHIPS Act, after which it can buy back stock at six times. "It's a great set up." Adam Parker: "Micron's probably going to double from here"; Mizuho target 1375, UBS 1625. He rejects the bubble/bear case outright given hyperscaler reports showing "nothing but growth and growth increasing." | listen↗ |
| MSFT | Microsoft | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Firestone: "I'm a believer that Microsoft can continue to run" — up 39% in this recent run after "people were talking about Microsoft is dead, no one's going to touch Microsoft. It all seemed crazy… how do we live without Outlook?" Bernstein raises its target to 660 from 647 (Outperform). Renick's options color: combined Palantir + Microsoft premium is nearing $1 billion on the day, with calls outnumbering puts almost 3-to-1 in Microsoft. | listen↗ |
| TSM | Taiwan Semiconductor | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Firestone owns it and flags monthly sales up 45%: "it's incredible… there's demand, we hear about it all the time." Her demand proof is everyday AI use ("whatever, Claude, ChatGPT, every single day, building models, making charts… it's my best friend") — "you have to drive all this with chips, and the chips come from" Taiwan Semi. | listen↗ |
| PLTR | Palantir Technologies | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Terranova's flagged name from last week and his exhibit A for the market's alpha hunt: "I told you last week about Palantir" — up more than 30% on the week. Renick: options volume more than double the 30-day average as the stock pushes toward year-to-date highs, calls-to-puts 2-to-1, and the combined Palantir/Microsoft premium near $1B on the day — "fairly aggressive bullish action." | listen↗ |
| CRWD | CrowdStrike | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Up ~6% last week and at a record high today. Terranova, who distrusts the broad software bounce, carves cyber out: "I trust the move in cyber." The exception that proves his rule — he won't own the software index but will own the security names inside it. | listen↗ |
| PANW | Palo Alto Networks | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Up ~5% last week and also at a record high today — the other half of the cyber move Terranova says he trusts, versus the rest of software he does not. | listen↗ |
| ZM | Zoom Communications | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Terranova's second software exception: "I trust the move in Zoom Communications, which has the relationship with Anthropic" — a name whose rally he attributes to a concrete AI partnership rather than a short squeeze. | listen↗ |
| BRK.B | Berkshire Hathaway | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Up 2% on Saturday's report (bought more stock than it sold; the cash pile declined for the first time since early 2022). Michael Burry posted that Greg Abel lacks Buffett's "patience for the fat pitch" and he does "not find Berkshire an attractive investment going forward." Lebenthal, who owns it: "I respectfully disagree" — strip out the stock holdings and the operating companies (BNSF, Berkshire Energy, Precision Castparts) trade at ~13× forward earnings — "you're getting basically 13 times forward earnings for the US economy," plus the portfolio (the $10B Alphabet secondary, buybacks). "I find this compelling here." Terranova no longer owns it (dropped on momentum near 431) but likes Abel "putting his signature on the company" — buybacks, the ~$7B Taylor Morrison purchase — and argues the Buffett premium has "mostly happened" already. UBS raises to 604 from 585; Cowen and CFRA reiterate hold. | listen↗ |
| XOM | Exxon Mobil | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | In Terranova's new 10%-weight energy sleeve, and Lebenthal's worked example of why energy is "analyzable": Exxon explores, produces and refines — "that's where the bottleneck is in the energy industry, it's in the refining sector, which ExxonMobil is a big player in." Asked trade-or-investment: "bellwether for the industry… five years annualized 27% return per annum, the S&P 13%. It's an investment." The point being these are "fundamental forces beyond the price of oil… innate capacity, innate infrastructure." | listen↗ |
| LNG | Cheniere Energy | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | First name Terranova read out of his energy adds. Amoroso: "you mentioned Cheniere — whether it's LNG production, whether it's natural gas, we've bumped that up. So the pipelines, parts of the energy ecosystem can continue to do well" even if the Strait reopens. Lebenthal: "something a little more specialized like Cheniere… it exports through its pipelines liquefied natural gas" — analyzable infrastructure, largely independent of whether oil is $90 or $70. | listen↗ |
| COP | ConocoPhillips | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | One of the names Terranova read out as he took his ETF's energy weight to 10% ("probably 3×" the sector's index weight) at the end of July — "we're across the board getting very aggressive." The setup he likes: nobody trusts energy, "people think energy is going right back to 65," and longs got pushed to the sidelines by repeated "we've got a deal" headlines. | listen↗ |
| EPD | Enterprise Products Partners | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Named in Terranova's across-the-board energy adds — the midstream leg of the 10% weight. Amoroso's supporting frame: with inventories drawn down, US production bumped up and supply increasingly coming from the US, Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela rather than the Middle East, "the pipelines, parts of the energy ecosystem can continue to do well" whatever happens to the Strait. | listen↗ |
| KMI | Kinder Morgan | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | One of the pipeline names in Terranova's new 10% energy weight. He likes the setup precisely because "I don't think people trust the energy" — disbelief built while longs were reduced, and today energy is the best sector by a mile (+3.6%) with the strongest volume of the eleven sector ETFs. | listen↗ |
| OKE | ONEOK | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Read out among Terranova's energy adds — natural-gas gathering/processing infrastructure, the "molecule" side of the trade Amoroso says you need for install power, new generation and mobile power at data centers. | listen↗ |
| TRGP | Targa Resources | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Another of the midstream names in Terranova's 10% energy sleeve, added at the end of July into a positioning vacuum — "a lot of positioning stepped away from it," which is exactly why he sees the near-term alpha opportunity there. | listen↗ |
| TPL | Texas Pacific Land | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | In Terranova's energy adds — the royalty/land name on the list ("Texas Pacific Land — I know Jenny likes that"). Part of the across-the-board 10% weight taken at the end of July, now the day's best-performing sector. | listen↗ |
| WMB | Williams Companies | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The last name Terranova read out of his energy adds — natural-gas pipelines, "we're across the board getting very aggressive." Amoroso frames the whole sleeve as a hold-for-optionality position: even a peace deal leaves drawn inventories and higher US production, "and it gives you that optionality if there's another geopolitical flare up." | listen↗ |
| VLO | Valero Energy | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Lebenthal's one concrete instruction of the show: "I can encourage anyone to do one thing. It's buy a refiner. We're coming into hurricane season. I hope there's no hurricanes — what if in fact there is a hurricane? The disruption." Asked which: "I'll say Valero, but you could have Phillips 66… any of them." Refining is where he sees the industry's real bottleneck, and Terranova "has been a big one on the refiners — it's been the winning trade." | listen↗ |
| PSX | Phillips 66 | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Named alongside Valero and Marathon in Lebenthal's "buy a refiner into hurricane season" call — "you could have Phillips 66… any of them." A capacity/disruption trade on the refining bottleneck rather than a bet on the crude price. | listen↗ |
| MPC | Marathon Petroleum | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The third refiner named in Lebenthal's hurricane-season call ("Marathon, Phillips or Valero… any of them") — same thesis: refining capacity is the bottleneck, and storm-season disruption is the asymmetric catalyst. | listen↗ |
| RIG | Transocean | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Lebenthal's final trade: "my favorite energy stock that Joe doesn't own — but may — is Transocean. Five bucks." (Wapner: "maybe that's why he doesn't own it.") The high-beta, low-priced offshore-drilling expression of the same bullish energy setup. | listen↗ |
| BX | Blackstone | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Amoroso's final trade: "private markets — I think a lot of bad news is priced in… earnings may be high for portfolio companies, but fundraising is strong. It's Blackstone, biggest in private equity." Also named as one of the Wall Street giants (with Apollo, BlackRock's GIP, Brookfield, Goldman and KKR) in the FT's $500B NVIDIA AI-financing partnership — the private-capital plumbing behind the buildout she says "is certainly going to take private markets as well." | listen↗ |
| TWLO | Twilio | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Firestone's final trade — "16.9, on a roll: Twilio." A software/communications-API name riding the same software rebound Amoroso is rotating into and Terranova refuses to trust. | listen↗ |
| KBWB | Invesco KBW Bank ETF | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | ETF Edge guest John Davi (Astoria): the way to play AI from here is to "evolve your portfolio to AI adopters" — "we like banks: heavily invested in AI, a strong IPO calendar, strong M&A calendar, cheaper than the market, strong balance sheets, and a favorable rate environment setup. KBWB is one ETF that we're using to play that." Not a committee position. | listen↗ |
| AAPL | Apple | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The day's debate, and the desk splits four ways. Jefferies downgrades to underperform (target 263 from 285): supply-chain checks say the all-glass iPhone due September '27 is cancelled on low yield, "a major setback to efforts to bring higher-priced iPhones amid soaring memory costs" — one of only ~5 sells among 51 analysts, with a separate report that the 18 Pro's build cost is up ~40%. Lebenthal sold half: "it's more like death by a dozen cuts" (margin pressure, chip input costs, AI upgrades that are "kind of meh… third, fourth year in a row where they promised something") — but the sell call is nearly un-actionable for a taxable holder with a $15 cost basis, so he trimmed the ~190-basis shares only. Firestone holds: at 33× forward "it's easier for people to use all these arguments against it," so overweights cut 7–8% down to 4–5% and then reload near 23× — "this is a normal cycle and I don't have a problem holding the Apple." Terranova has bought it six times and it's up 26% from the June-25 low at 273, but momentum/positioning show holders paring back: "it is losing near-term momentum for sure… vulnerable for a deeper decline into the support of the moving averages. I will take the other side of it when it gets there" — long term "this is the mag seven that is going to stand out." Amoroso: resolving the memory bottleneck (lower average selling prices) is bad for semis but "probably great for somebody like Apple," and its ~3.5% free-cash-flow yield makes it good ballast against high-beta chips. | listen↗ |
| GOOGL | Alphabet | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Terranova: "the momentum is actually waning in Alphabet since the announcement last week about losing the chief science officer" — the AI brain drain. In a huge week for tech and the Nasdaq, "Alphabet is the only one that's down." His process response: recognize you're holding a name losing momentum, ask whether to hedge — "the answer as it relates to Alphabet is no." Firestone: it had "a really big run from March to the recent high and now it's come back… people will get concerned, those sell some shares, then they'll start to buy" again. Also the destination of Berkshire's $10B secondary purchase. | listen↗ |
| IGV | iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF | QT · SA · STK | Neutral | The show's second big argument, and the desk splits. The index was up 8.5% last week; Jonathan Krinsky: "reports of software's death have been greatly exaggerated"; Goldman: "we're at the beginning of a multi-quarter fundamental inflection point." Terranova sees exactly his favourite pattern — "a market that wants to hunt for the alpha in areas where you can identify an equity name as a laggard and you see new momentum, and in technology it's clearly in software" — but won't buy it: coming IPOs (Anthropic, Databricks, OpenAI) mean "significant disintermediation and disruption," short of the "software apocalypse" but enough that he prefers staying in semis/semi-equipment. Amoroso takes the other side: "fundamentals of software are still intact, earnings growth is running about 22% — I would be slowly pivoting to software" as bottlenecks resolve. Renick's options read: traders bought twice as many calls as puts, but the most popular directional trade was selling puts — aggressive bullish positioning. | listen↗ |
| TEAM | Atlassian | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Market color: up more than 40% last week, the biggest individual mover in Wapner's roll-call of the software squeeze (alongside Palantir +30%, ServiceNow +9.5%, Snowflake +7.5%). No individual committee call. | listen↗ |
| NOW | ServiceNow | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Market color in the software-rebound list — up 9.5% last week. No individual committee call; Terranova's blanket "I don't trust it" applies, Amoroso's "slowly pivoting to software" is the counter. | listen↗ |
| SNOW | Snowflake | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Market color: up 7.5% last week and at a 52-week high today in the software squeeze. No individual committee call. | listen↗ |
| ORCL | Oracle | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Market color: up 3.5% last week in the software complex — the laggard of the group Wapner ran through. No individual committee call this episode. | listen↗ |
| JOET | Virtus Terranova US Quality Momentum ETF | QT · SA · STK | Neutral | Terranova's own quality-momentum ETF and the vehicle for the day's call: "the JOET ETF at the end of July with the 10% weighting for energy — well, today we're getting rewarded for that. We're seeing a lot of capital flowing into energy today." Energy's ~3.2% index weight means the sleeve is roughly 3× benchmark. The fund is the mechanism, not a stance. | listen↗ |
| TMHC | Taylor Morrison Home | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | News/context: the homebuilder Berkshire Hathaway bought for close to $7 billion — cited by Terranova as evidence Greg Abel is "putting his signature on the company" rather than living off Buffett's reputation. No committee stance on the name itself. | listen↗ |
| GS | Goldman Sachs | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named (per the FT, via Leslie Picker) as one of the Wall Street giants entering a partnership with NVIDIA to provide ~$500B of AI financing — deal possibly announced as soon as Monday, with all parties declining to comment and CNBC not independently verifying. Separately Goldman's Tony Pascarello supplies the day's bull note on cleaner positioning. No committee stance on the stock. | listen↗ |
| BLK | BlackRock | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named via its Global Infrastructure Partners unit as a member of the reported $500B NVIDIA AI-financing consortium. No committee stance. | listen↗ |
| APO | Apollo Global Management | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named as one of the private-capital firms in the reported $500B NVIDIA financing partnership. Fits Amoroso's broader point that the AI buildout "is going to take debt capital, equity capital — it's certainly going to take private markets as well." No committee stance. | listen↗ |
| KKR | KKR & Co. | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named as one of the six firms in the reported $500B NVIDIA AI-financing partnership (FT, five people briefed on the talks). No committee stance. | listen↗ |
| BN | Brookfield Corporation | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named ("Brookfield") among the Wall Street giants in the reported $500B NVIDIA AI-financing partnership. No committee stance. | listen↗ |
| Anthropic | Anthropic | — | Neutral | (Private.) Cited twice: as the partner behind the Zoom Communications move Terranova says he trusts, and as one of the imminent IPOs — "we are on the cusp of having further IPOs, whether it is from Anthropic, Databricks or OpenAI" — that underpin his refusal to buy the software complex ("significant disintermediation and disruption… short of the software apocalypse"). Firestone separately names Claude as daily-use AI driving chip demand. No committee stance. | listen↗ |
| OpenAI | OpenAI | — | Neutral | (Private.) Named in the same imminent-IPO trio (with Anthropic and Databricks) that Terranova says will disintermediate incumbent software. Firestone cites ChatGPT alongside Claude as the everyday AI use driving Taiwan Semi's 45% sales growth. No committee stance. | listen↗ |
| Databricks | Databricks | — | Neutral | (Private.) The third name in Terranova's coming-IPO list ("whether it is from Anthropic, Databricks or Open AI") — the pipeline of AI-native listings he expects to keep pressuring legacy software multiples. No committee stance. | listen↗ |
"View" = the panel's net stance this episode, with the committee member named in the note. No Negative rows this episode — the only outright sell call was sell-side (Jefferies on Apple), which no committee member fully adopted. Discussed but not tabled: the ETF Edge broad-emerging-markets ETF John Davi says he bought ~2 years ago in place of US hyperscalers ("up 20% year to date," cheap and liquid) — the auto-transcript garbles the ticker beyond confident identification, so no row was created; the AI-insurance company whose CEO is joining the etfedge.cnbc.com follow-up to discuss entering the ETF business (company name garbled in the transcript — no ticker); the sector-ETF volume read (energy strongest of the eleven SPDRs); the Zillow rent series Amoroso uses to compute a real-time core CPI of ~1.6%; and the news update (Ukrainian drone strike on a central-Russian petroleum hub, a Dallas pedestrian death involving an unoccupied Waymo robotaxi, the Zuckerberg superyacht radio-call story) — no securities stance in any. Terranova's read-out of his energy adds also contains one name the auto-transcript garbles ("carry") between Enterprise Products and Exxon; it was left out rather than guessed. People not tabled: Scott Wapner & the committee (Joe Terranova, Karen Firestone, Anastasia Amoroso, Jim Lebenthal), Mike Santoli, Oliver Renick, Leslie Picker, Contessa Brewer, Dom Chu, John Davi, Tony Pascarello, Jonathan Krinsky, Adam Parker, Michael Burry, Warren Buffett, Greg Abel, Kevin Warsh, Mark Zuckerberg.
A jargon-free summary of why each substantively-argued name matters. (These render on each ticker's consolidated page, where this audio episode has no excerpt to pull.)
Apple got a rare "sell" rating. Jefferies cut it to underperform with a $263 target because a fancy all-glass iPhone planned for late 2027 has reportedly been cancelled (too many units came off the line broken), and because memory chips — which Apple must buy — have gotten dramatically more expensive. Without a pricier phone to sell, Apple has fewer ways to protect its profit margin; one report says the next Pro model costs about 40% more to build.
The committee split four ways rather than agreeing. Jim Lebenthal sold half his position: he thinks it's "death by a dozen cuts" and that Apple's AI promises are now in their third or fourth year of "I'll believe it when I see it." But his more useful point is about tax: for a client holding shares bought at $15, selling triggers a tax bill of 25–35%, so the stock would have to fall that much before selling even breaks even — which makes a sell rating almost impossible to act on. So he trimmed only the higher-cost shares he bought near $190.
Karen Firestone holds. Her frame is that at 33 times earnings every old worry (China, chips, competition) suddenly gets a hearing; investors who let Apple grow to 7–8% of a portfolio cut back to 4–5%, the stock falls, and near 23 times earnings the same people pile back in. "This is a normal cycle." Joe Terranova, who has bought Apple six times, says his momentum and positioning work shows holders paring back — so the stock is vulnerable to a deeper slide toward its long-run average price lines, and that is exactly where he plans to buy more, because he still thinks Apple is the "Magnificent 7" name that stands out long term. Anastasia Amoroso adds a twist: when the memory shortage eventually eases, chip stocks suffer but Apple benefits, and Apple's roughly 3.5% free-cash-flow yield (the spare cash it generates versus its price) makes it good ballast against volatile chip holdings.
Nvidia designs the chips that train and run AI. It just had its best week since May 2025 (+11%) and Bank of America reiterated it as its top pick in the sector. Joe Terranova says the chart is "in the midst of a breakout" — and importantly, it's tracing the same pattern he spotted in Apple months ago, before Apple's big run. His whole framework this episode is watching where new momentum is being built versus where it is draining away; right now it is building in Nvidia and draining from Apple and Alphabet.
The stock still gave back about 3% on the day, on a Financial Times report that six of the biggest names in finance — Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock's infrastructure arm, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR — are lining up a partnership to supply Nvidia with roughly $500 billion of financing for AI projects. Investors read a number that large partly as confirmation of demand and partly as a reminder of how much borrowed money the buildout now needs.
Micron makes memory chips, which AI servers consume in enormous quantities. Jim Lebenthal bought it in two chunks — at the last earnings report and just after — at an average price of about $1,000, and the stock is currently $877. Clients have asked why he paid up.
His answer is about the length of the cycle. Memory has historically been boom-and-bust, so investors pay a low price for peak earnings, assuming they will collapse. Lebenthal thinks this boom lasts years, which makes six times next year's earnings a bargain rather than a trap — especially since Micron is about to pass the anniversary of its CHIPS Act funding, after which it becomes free to buy back its own shares at that cheap price. Adam Parker thinks the stock doubles; Mizuho and UBS carry targets of $1,375 and $1,625. Lebenthal dismisses the bear case (that AI is a bubble and data-center construction stops) by pointing at two weeks of hyperscaler results showing "nothing but growth and growth increasing."
Microsoft is up 39% in the current run, after a stretch when, as Karen Firestone puts it, "people were talking about Microsoft is dead, no one's going to touch Microsoft. It all seemed crazy." Her bull case is deliberately unglamorous: businesses cannot function without Outlook and the calendar, so the revenue is about as sticky as software gets. Bernstein nudged its target up to $660 and she is "a believer that Microsoft can continue to run."
The options market agrees loudly: buyers of call options (bets the stock rises) outnumbered put buyers almost three to one, and the combined money spent on Microsoft and Palantir options approached $1 billion in a single day.
TSMC actually manufactures the chips that Nvidia, Apple and everyone else design. Karen Firestone owns it and points to sales up 45%. Her demand check is refreshingly ordinary: she uses Claude and ChatGPT every day to build models and make charts — "it's my best friend" — and every one of those queries runs on hardware. "You have to drive all this with chips, and the chips come from" TSMC.
Palantir sells data-analysis software to governments and large companies. Joe Terranova flagged it on the show the previous week, and it then rose more than 30% in five sessions — his showcase example of the pattern he hunts: a stock that has lagged badly, where fresh buying momentum suddenly appears.
Options traders piled in behind it: volume more than double the normal daily average, twice as many bullish call options as bearish puts, and the stock pushing toward its highs for the year.
CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company, and it hit a record high. It matters because Joe Terranova refuses to buy the broad software rebound — he thinks a wave of AI companies going public (Anthropic, Databricks, OpenAI) will eat into traditional software vendors. Cybersecurity is the exception he carves out: "I trust the move in cyber." The logic is that security spending is defensive and grows with the amount of AI in a company, rather than being replaced by it.
Palo Alto Networks is the other big cybersecurity name, also at a record high after a 5% week. It falls on the trusted side of Terranova's dividing line: he distrusts the software rally in general but believes the cyber move is real, because security budgets grow alongside AI adoption instead of being displaced by it.
Zoom is the video-meeting company. Joe Terranova names it as one of only two parts of the software rally he trusts, specifically because of "the relationship with Anthropic" — a concrete AI partnership rather than a rally driven by traders covering bets against the stock. In other words: he wants a named reason for the move, not just a bounce off oversold levels.
Berkshire reported over the weekend and rose 2%: it bought more stock than it sold, and its famous cash mountain shrank for the first time since early 2022 as new CEO Greg Abel puts money to work. Michael Burry (of "Big Short" fame) publicly argued the opposite side — that his fear about Buffett's successor lacking "patience for the fat pitch" has come true, and Berkshire is no longer attractive.
Jim Lebenthal, who owns it, disagrees with a specific piece of arithmetic. Berkshire is two things bolted together: a portfolio of shares in other companies, and a collection of wholly-owned businesses (the BNSF railroad, Berkshire Energy, Precision Castparts in aerospace). Subtract the market value of the share portfolio from Berkshire's total value, and what's left values those operating businesses at about 13 times next year's profits. Since those businesses are the American economy in miniature, "you're getting basically 13 times forward earnings for the US economy" — plus the share portfolio and buybacks for free. UBS lifted its target to $604; Cowen and CFRA stayed at hold, citing a fading "Buffett premium."
Joe Terranova no longer owns it (he sold near $431 when momentum faded, which he concedes was a poor trade) but likes what Abel is doing: buying back stock, taking a $10 billion Alphabet position, buying homebuilder Taylor Morrison for close to $7 billion. "To make an omelette you have to crack some eggs — I want him to do exactly that, not sit in the chair and live off the reputation." His broader argument is that the Buffett-premium fade has already happened over the fifteen months since the retirement announcement, so today's buyer isn't paying for it either way.
Exxon is in Terranova's newly enlarged energy sleeve, but Jim Lebenthal supplies the argument. Exxon does three things — finds oil, pumps it, and refines it into fuel — and refining is where the industry's genuine shortage sits (America has barely built a new refinery in decades). That means Exxon's profits depend on physical capacity and infrastructure it already owns, "fundamental forces beyond the price of oil," rather than on guessing whether crude is $70 or $90.
Asked whether it's a trade or an investment, he answers with the record: over five years Exxon has returned 27% a year versus 13% for the S&P 500. "It's an investment."
Cheniere chills natural gas until it becomes a liquid, then ships it abroad — the biggest US exporter of liquefied natural gas. It was the first name Terranova read out of his energy additions.
Why it survives even a peace deal: Cheniere makes money on the volume flowing through its terminals and pipelines under long-term contracts, not on the daily price of oil. Both Anastasia Amoroso and Jim Lebenthal make this point — US gas production has been ramped up, so "the pipelines, parts of the energy ecosystem can continue to do well" regardless of whether the Strait of Hormuz reopens and crude falls back.
ConocoPhillips is a large US oil and gas producer, and one of the names Joe Terranova read out as he took his ETF's energy weight to 10% — roughly three times energy's 3.2% share of the S&P 500. The reason he bought is contrarian rather than fundamental: repeated "we're getting a deal" headlines around the Middle East drove investors to sell energy and stand aside, so when no deal arrived there was almost nobody left holding it. Energy was the day's best sector, up 3.6%.
Enterprise Products runs pipelines and processing plants — it charges tolls to move oil, gas and natural-gas liquids rather than betting on their price. It's the midstream leg of Terranova's 10% energy position.
Anastasia Amoroso's supporting point is that supply is shifting away from the Middle East toward the US, Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela, and US production has been increased while inventories were drawn down — all of which means more volume flowing through American pipelines whatever happens to the crude price.
Kinder Morgan is one of the largest natural-gas pipeline operators in North America, added as part of Terranova's 10% energy weight. His reasoning is about crowding rather than valuation: "I like the setup because I don't think people trust the energy — I think people think energy is going right back to 65." When almost everyone has sold and disbelief has set in, there is little selling pressure left and a small piece of good news moves the price a lot.
ONEOK gathers, processes and transports natural gas and natural-gas liquids — infrastructure that earns fees on volume. It's one of the energy names Terranova added. Amoroso's frame explains why the desk likes this end of the sector for the AI era too: "you can't power data centers without energy… install power, new power generation, mobile power. For all of that you need the molecule" — the actual gas, delivered by companies like this one.
Targa is another gathering-and-processing midstream company, moving natural gas and liquids from wellhead to market. It joined Terranova's energy sleeve at the end of July, bought deliberately into a vacuum: "a lot of positioning stepped away from it," so he sees the near-term opportunity for outperformance sitting precisely where other investors have given up.
Texas Pacific Land owns enormous acreage in the Permian Basin and collects royalties and water fees from the companies that drill on it — a landlord rather than a driller, so it has very little of the cost and much of the upside. Terranova read it out among his energy additions ("I know Jenny likes that").
Williams operates major interstate natural-gas pipelines, including the Transco system feeding the eastern US. It was the last name in Terranova's read-out — "we're across the board getting very aggressive."
Amoroso frames the whole basket as a position worth holding for optionality: even if a peace deal reopens the Strait of Hormuz and crude falls, inventories are drawn down and US production is up, "and it gives you that optionality if there's another geopolitical flare-up."
Valero turns crude oil into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Jim Lebenthal's one concrete instruction of the show was "buy a refiner," and asked to pick one he said Valero.
Two reasons. First, refining capacity — not oil production — is the real bottleneck in the US energy system, so refiners capture the spread between cheap crude and expensive fuel. Second, timing: hurricane season is starting, and when a storm knocks Gulf Coast refineries offline the fuel that surviving refineries produce becomes far more valuable. "I hope there's no hurricanes. What if in fact there is a hurricane? The disruption."
Phillips 66 is one of the three refiners Lebenthal named in his "buy a refiner" call — "you could have Phillips 66… any of them." The bet isn't on the oil price; it's on the profit margin between crude and finished fuel, which widens when refining capacity is tight and widens further if hurricane season takes Gulf Coast plants offline.
Marathon Petroleum is the largest US refiner by capacity and the third name in Lebenthal's hurricane-season refiner call ("Marathon, Phillips or Valero — any of them"). Same thesis: own the scarce processing capacity rather than the commodity, and get paid extra if storms disrupt supply.
Transocean owns offshore drilling rigs and leases them to oil companies. It's Jim Lebenthal's final trade — "my favorite energy stock that Joe doesn't own, but may." At around five dollars a share it is the speculative, high-beta way to express the same bullish energy view: rig demand and day-rates rise sharply when oil companies feel confident enough to commit to expensive offshore projects, so the stock moves far more than the oil price in either direction.
Blackstone is the largest private-equity and alternative-asset manager — it raises money from institutions and invests it in companies, property and credit, earning management and performance fees. Anastasia Amoroso made it her final trade: "a lot of bad news is priced in… earnings may be high for portfolio companies, but fundraising is strong."
Translation: the market has already marked down these stocks for the risk that the businesses they own are worth less than claimed, but the fee engine — new money coming in the door — is still running. Blackstone also turns up in the day's other story, as one of the six firms reportedly assembling $500 billion of financing for Nvidia — the same "AI buildout needs private capital" theme she describes.
Twilio provides the plumbing that lets apps send text messages, make calls and run automated customer conversations — increasingly the channel AI agents use to talk to customers. It's Karen Firestone's final trade ("16.9, on a roll"), and it rides the same software rebound Amoroso is rotating into and Terranova refuses to trust.
KBWB is a fund holding the large US banks. ETF Edge guest John Davi (Astoria) uses it to express a specific idea: instead of buying the companies that build AI, buy the industries that adopt it and get more profitable. Banks fit — they are heavy AI spenders internally, they earn fees from a busy IPO and merger calendar, they trade cheaper than the overall market, their balance sheets are strong, and the interest-rate backdrop suits them. This is a guest's view, not a committee position.
Alphabet was the only big technology stock down during a huge week for the Nasdaq, and Joe Terranova pins it on the announcement that Alphabet lost its chief science officer — the "AI brain drain," where rival labs poach the researchers whose names justify a company's AI premium.
What's instructive is his process rather than his conclusion. He notices a holding is losing momentum, asks himself whether he wants to hedge it (buy protection or offset it elsewhere), and answers no — the fundamentals still support holding. Karen Firestone reads it as an ordinary round trip: a big run from March to the recent high, a pullback, some nervous selling, then buyers returning. Berkshire's newly disclosed $10 billion purchase sits on the other side of the ledger.
IGV is the fund that tracks the software sector, and it was up 8.5% last week — the episode's second big argument. The bulls: technician Jonathan Krinsky says "reports of software's death have been greatly exaggerated," Goldman says the industry is at "the beginning of a multi-quarter fundamental inflection point," and Anastasia Amoroso is "slowly pivoting to software," pointing out its earnings are still growing about 22% and arguing software is the ultimate winner when chip shortages ease and prices fall.
Joe Terranova takes the other side, and his reasoning is worth separating from his conclusion. He recognises the pattern — a beaten-down sector where new buying momentum appears is exactly what he hunts. He just won't act on it here, because Anthropic, Databricks and OpenAI are all approaching public listings, and he expects them to take real business away from established software vendors ("significant disintermediation and disruption"), even if it never reaches the "software apocalypse" the market feared earlier this year. He'd rather stay in semiconductors and semiconductor equipment.
The options market is firmly with the bulls: traders bought twice as many calls as puts, and the single most popular trade was selling puts — collecting cash in exchange for agreeing to buy the fund if it falls, which is what you do when you believe the downside is limited.
JOET is Joe Terranova's own exchange-traded fund, which systematically holds high-quality stocks showing price momentum. It matters here as the vehicle for the day's best call: at the end of July he raised its energy weighting to 10% — about three times energy's 3.2% share of the S&P 500 — and energy promptly became the day's strongest sector on the heaviest volume. The fund itself isn't a recommendation; it's the mechanism that shows what he actually did.
Summary derived from the public CNBC Halftime Report audio episode (transcript in transcript.txt) for personal study. Not investment advice. © CNBC for source material.