Larry McDonald — Double-Digit Inflation Risk / 30% Drop by September

Schlumberger is the world's largest oil-services firm — the company hired to find, drill and service oil wells for everyone else. He calls it "the best artificial-intelligence play in the world" because it uses AI heavily in offshore drilling. The bigger driver: with Mideast oil flows disrupted, the U.S. must ramp up offshore drilling to fill the gap, and that means lots of work for Schlumberger. He notes it's "ripping" — strongly outperforming the tech-heavy Nasdaq.

Weatherford is another oil-services company. Same logic as Schlumberger: as the U.S. is pushed to drill more offshore to replace lost Middle East supply, the service firms doing that work benefit. He notes it's "ripping this week."

OIH is a basket of oil-services stocks (Schlumberger, Weatherford and peers) — a one-click way to own the whole group. He points out the basket is "dramatically outperforming the Nasdaq" because the market sees a lot more offshore drilling work coming.

Chevron is a major oil producer. He puts it in his "1968–81 portfolio" — a basket of companies that physically control real assets (oil, metals), modeled on the last high-inflation era. His view: with inflation sticky and the dollar weak, companies that own hard assets should become a much bigger slice of the market over the next five years.

BHP is one of the world's largest mining companies (iron ore, copper, more). It's a core "controls real assets" holding in his commodity-regime basket — exactly the kind of name he argues you want instead of bonds and tech as inflation persists.

FCG is a basket of natural-gas company stocks. He recommended it the prior year and it has "done really well." He still favors it — AI data centers need enormous amounts of power, and cheap U.S. natural gas is a primary way to supply it.

This is a fund that simply holds physical uranium, so you can own the raw material in a brokerage account. He says "the setup is incredible": the world is short of uranium, new reactors are being built in China and Asia, and Europe is reopening to nuclear — while supply can't keep up. He thinks the price could double, maybe triple, over roughly the next 2–5 years.

Caterpillar makes heavy construction and mining machinery. He isn't recommending it — he's using it as a thermometer. Its best year-over-year result ever (about 30% above its old record) reflects all the spending expected on data centers. But that means a lot of good news is already "front-run" (priced in ahead of time), so to him it's a sign of how overheated the AI-spending boom has become.

BlackRock is the world's biggest asset manager. The notable thing is its rare "hard pivot": it abandoned the classic 60% stocks / 40% bonds mix in favor of real assets — gold, copper, uranium, energy. He reads the fact that the mainstream is finally shifting as confirmation his hard-asset move is still early (only the "2nd or 3rd inning").

Anthropic is a private U.S. AI company (maker of the Claude assistant). He raises it as a threat to U.S. AI profits: he alleges Chinese platforms are "distilling" Claude — using roughly 25,000 fake accounts to copy its outputs and rebuild its capabilities cheaply, then pushing them into free open-source models. If U.S. firms spend billions and rivals copy the result for almost nothing, the return on that spending shrinks.

Kimi is a Chinese AI platform. He describes it as the mechanism of the alleged copying — the tool used to "distill" Claude's code and release it into open source. It's the concrete example behind his warning that China's IP theft is quietly eroding the value of America's AI investment.

DeepSeek is the Chinese AI model that shocked markets when it appeared cheaply capable. He warns of "another DeepSeek moment" — if China is shown to have actually pulled ahead of the U.S. in advanced AI, he thinks the big tech leaders ("Mag 7") could drop as much as 50%.

SOXX is a basket of chip stocks. He thinks it "can drop 30% in the next month." His reasoning is that it has gone parabolic — up 36% in just 14 trading days and roughly 106% above its long-run average price line — a blow-off top he compares to the Nasdaq melting up right before the COVID crash. He calls the chasers "crack smokers." (On the page he says "SOXS"; he means the regular long semiconductor ETF.)

Microsoft is the software giant. His blunt take: "the Mag 7 is a joke." Microsoft's stock has gone roughly nowhere for nearly two years. These former cash cows are now spending heavily on AI, and he argues the payoff (return on that capital) is being diluted by China copying the technology — so the profits may not justify the spend.

Meta is Facebook/Instagram's parent. Same critique as Microsoft: the stock has been "unchanged for a year and a half" while it pours money into AI, and the return on that investment is under threat. A symbol of over-investment for uncertain reward.

Oracle is the database/cloud company spending big on AI data centers. He points to its sharp stock drawdown as evidence the data-center buildout is happening more slowly than the market assumes — leaving heavily-invested names exposed.