Larry McDonald — How To Listen When Markets Speak

NUKZ is a basket of "all things nuclear" — reactor builders, uranium miners and the supporting infrastructure. It has climbed from about 50 to north of 70. His logic: if you believe in the AI boom, you must believe in nuclear power, because data centers need vast, steady electricity. He argues the supply shortfall coming in 2028 is so large that even if AI demand were cut by 80%, the trade still works.

Weatherford is an oil-services company (the firms that drill and service wells). It was one of his energy calls from the prior year and has more than doubled — part of his thesis that money is rotating out of crowded tech into energy and other hard assets.

APA Corp (formerly Apache) is an oil-and-gas producer. Another energy name from last year's thesis that has more than doubled — further proof, in his telling, that the hard-asset rotation is underway.

Alcoa makes aluminum, a key building material for the electric grid and data-center buildout. It was part of last year's AI-infrastructure / hard-asset call and is "starting to flourish," though he notes these metals stocks are still only a small fraction of the overall market — i.e. lots of room left.

Agnico Eagle is a large, well-run gold miner — his top new gold-miner buy. He applies investor David Einhorn's checklist: it throws off $6–7 billion in free cash flow (cash left over after running the business), the stock is down about 30% from its high, it's buying back $2 billion of its own shares, and it has "the best management team in all of gold." That combination makes the risk/reward "spectacular."

His broader gold view: gold could dip to around $4,100 first (a buying zone), then run toward $6,500–7,000 over the next year or two as inflation and AI-driven job losses push the economy toward recession.

This fund simply holds physical uranium, letting you own the raw material directly. He prefers owning the commodity over the uranium miners right now because the miners have run up too far ("the spread's gone a little crazy"). The bull case is a "daunting" supply shortfall by 2028, and utilities are finally signing long-term contracts to lock in supply. Because uranium has no normal futures or spot market, he expects the price to move violently to fix the shortage.

Vale is Brazil's giant iron-ore and metals miner. The setup is political: Brazil's October election has left-leaning President Lula gaining, which is spooking the market lower. He thinks the sell-off is about "70% done," and if the media overstates Lula's odds (as he says happens with establishment candidates worldwide), the dip becomes a "screaming buy" — cheap exposure to iron ore and metals.

Newmont is the largest gold miner — and notably the only gold miner in the S&P 500. His point is structural: because it's the lone gold name in the index, the whole sector gets none of the automatic buying that index funds funnel into S&P members. He expects several hard-asset companies to be added to the index over the next 2–3 years, which would change that.

NexGen is developing a major Canadian uranium project the world's future supply is counting on. He's skeptical they'll hit their timelines — the deposit sits about 100 meters underground, it's very expensive, and the start date keeps slipping (2028, then 2029, then 2030). Crucially, he sees those repeated delays as bullish for the uranium price: less new supply means a tighter market.

Alibaba is China's big e-commerce and AI company; its stock is "up a lot." He makes two points at once. Chinese AI is valued at a tiny fraction of U.S. AI ("a thousand Alibabas fit into Nvidia"), so it looks cheap — but he also warns Chinese open-source efforts are "ripping off" U.S. AI spending, a "Pearl Harbor" that erodes the payoff on America's investment.

Tencent is a Chinese internet and gaming giant, "up a lot today." It's part of the same cheap-relative China-AI group he flags as both an opportunity (very low valuations versus the U.S.) and a threat (a source of the IP copying that dilutes U.S. AI returns).

JPMorgan is the largest U.S. bank. He uses it to explain "stealth QE." The government has been quietly forcing banks to buy roughly $1 trillion of Treasury bonds — JPMorgan's cash parked at the Fed fell from about $460 billion to $65–80 billion as it absorbed that debt. That money-printing-by-another-name, he says, is what got gold and silver "going so crazy."

Alphabet is Google's parent. It raised about $80 billion in debt to fund its AI spending, just ahead of the big SpaceX/Anthropic/OpenAI stock listings. To Larry that's a symptom of a top-heavy, "force-fed" market straining to absorb too much new tech supply. (The host, Danny, reads the same raise as bullish — that Google sees opportunity; Larry treats it as a warning.)

McDonald's is the fast-food chain — and his poster child for the squeezed consumer. The stock is down about 30% versus the S&P. His point: the real inflation families feel (a pricier Big Mac and fries) is far worse than the official inflation figures show, so even cheap-eats names are hurting as ordinary households pull back.

Home Depot is the home-improvement retailer, down about 30%, with its suppliers down 10–40%. He cites it as evidence the consumer/retail side of the economy is "in flames" — a sharp contrast with the booming AI/tech side and the high-end spenders.

SpaceX is Elon Musk's private rocket company, expected to go public at a roughly $2 trillion value — about 6% of the entire U.S. economy, and around 20 times the size of Facebook's IPO. He calls it "a disaster": stuffing such richly-valued names into the stock indexes means index funds (and the everyday savers who own them) are force-fed expensive shares. To him it's "the worst setup."

Anthropic is a private U.S. AI company (maker of Claude), part of the wave of roughly $300 billion in AI listings hitting the market "at very expensive levels." His double worry: the prices are stretched, and he says these models are "being really picked off by China" — copied cheaply, which dilutes the return on all that investment.

OpenAI is the private maker of ChatGPT, another name in the overpriced AI-IPO rush. He notes investors are selling other parts of the market "to make room" for these listings — a forced reshuffling he sees as a sign the market is dangerously top-heavy in expensive tech.