Larry McDonald — Crash in Tech Stocks; Uranium & Silver Rip Higher

Rio Tinto is a giant global miner, best known for iron ore (the raw material for steel). It's one of his core holdings.

"Rio Tinto's destroying the Mag 7." His point: while the big tech names have gone nowhere since October, real-asset miners like Rio are up sharply. As money rotates out of expensive tech and into companies that own physical resources, he expects that outperformance to continue.

BHP is one of the largest miners in the world (iron ore, copper and more) — another core hard-asset position.

"BHP is destroying the Mag 7." Same theme as Rio: in a world of sticky inflation and rotation away from tech, owning the physical commodities has been the winning trade, and he sees it persisting.

This is a fund that actually stores physical uranium — so owning it is a bet on the uranium price itself, not on any mining company.

He's deliberately choosing the commodity over the miners. He sees a supply crunch coming in 2027–28: data centers need nuclear power, and the big utilities that buy uranium are finally running short. Just as important, he distrusts the management teams of many uranium miners, so he'd rather own the metal directly and skip the company risk.

Denison is a uranium miner. Among the uranium equities — many of which he calls "suspect" because he doesn't trust their leadership — Denison is one whose management team he actually likes.

So while his main uranium bet is the physical commodity, Denison is his preferred way to own a mining company in the space, on the strength of the people running it.

GDX is a fund of gold-mining companies. He's been buying it because sentiment toward gold miners has swung from euphoric highs in January (when gold was near $5,600) all the way to "historic lows."

He calls it a "screaming buy." The setup: when the U.S. sent forces toward the Persian Gulf, fears flipped from rate cuts to rate hikes, which scared off the casual "tourist" buyers and crushed the miners — even though the underlying gold business is still very profitable. Buying when the weak hands have been flushed out and the fundamentals are intact is his classic contrarian move.

SLV is a fund backed by physical silver. He bought it as silver is "breaking out."

Silver is unusual because it's both a precious metal and an industrial one — used in solar panels and data-center electronics. So it benefits from real-world demand and from the same hard-asset rotation lifting gold. The gold-to-silver ratio (how many ounces of silver equal one ounce of gold) snapped back to about 56, which he reads as silver gaining strength.

JPMorgan is the largest U.S. bank. He mentions it here not as a buy or sell, but as evidence of behind-the-scenes "stealth" money-printing.

JPMorgan reportedly moved about $200 billion out of its reserves parked at the Federal Reserve and into short-term Treasury bonds. He argues the Treasury is quietly pushing banks to buy government debt — which pumps liquidity into markets — and JPM's move is his prime example of that maneuver near the late-March lows.

Meta (Facebook, Instagram) is cited as a cautionary precedent, not a current call. In 2022, after it bet $400 billion on the "metaverse," the stock fell about 70%.

He uses it to make a point: a high-flying tech stock can crash hard even while commodities are booming. It's a reminder of how violently these names can fall when the story turns — supporting his view that today's AI darlings are vulnerable.

Nvidia is the leading AI-chip maker, also used here as a 2022 precedent: it fell about 60% that year — "on the eve of the AI revolution" — back when it wasn't buying back its own stock to support the price.

He lumps it with the overbought "idiotic AI stocks" he expects to deflate. The lesson he's drawing: even the eventual biggest winner can suffer a brutal drop, so the current crowding into chips is dangerous.

NexGen is a uranium developer with, in his words, "great assets" — strong uranium deposits in the ground.

But he's "not crazy about the management team," and that hesitation is exactly why he prefers owning the uranium commodity (SRUUF) over betting on individual miners. Good rocks, but he wants more confidence in the people running the company.

Cameco is the best-known uranium miner. He's "lightening" (reducing) his position — not because he's turned bearish on uranium, but because he's rotating from the mining stocks into the physical uranium itself.

He stays bullish on uranium overall; he just wants the cleaner exposure of the commodity rather than company-specific risk, so he's trimming Cameco to fund that shift.

URNM is a fund holding a basket of uranium-mining companies. He's reducing it for the same reason as Cameco.

He sees big institutional investors rotating out of uranium miners and into the physical commodity, and he's doing the same — still bullish on the theme, just switching how he owns it.

NUKZ is a fund covering nuclear-energy companies broadly. He's trimming it here in favor of physical uranium (SRUUF).

That said, nuclear remains one of his core "food groups" — themes he's most committed to. So the trim is a tactical shift toward the commodity, not a loss of faith in the nuclear-power story.

GDXJ holds smaller, "junior" gold miners — generally more volatile than the big ones in GDX. He cites it (alongside GDX) to show how far gold-miner sentiment has fallen from its January highs.

That extreme washout is the backdrop for his contrarian gold-miner buying. He references GDXJ as evidence of the mood rather than singling it out as his preferred buy (he bought GDX).

Tether issues the largest "stablecoin" — a digital token meant to hold a steady value, backed by reserves. McDonald met its founders and notes it's buying "a jaw-dropping amount of gold" (around 5 tons), plus running a separate gold-backed coin, all held in Switzerland.

He raises it as evidence of a bigger monetary shift: gold has become the top U.S. export (heading to Switzerland and China), and big players like Tether hoarding physical gold are part of that "reordering" of the financial system toward hard assets.

Home Depot is the big home-improvement retailer — a direct read on consumer health. It's down 26% from its highs, and about 40 of its suppliers are down 20–40%.

He uses it to show the "wounded consumer" beneath the record stock indices: with gas at the pump up ~50% and the gas commodity up ~120%, household budgets are squeezed, and consumer-facing stocks are quietly rolling over even as the headline market looks fine.

McDonald's, the fast-food chain, is another consumer bellwether he flags as "rolling over" — its stock chart is breaking down along with the other consumer names.

It's part of the same evidence base: even cheap, everyday-spending companies are weakening, a sign the consumer is strained under the inflation bounce.

Darden is the largest U.S. restaurant company (Olive Garden and others). The energy-driven inflation squeeze is "crushing Darden," which is badly underperforming the S&P.

As the biggest restaurant chain, its weakness is a clear signal of rising recession risk — discretionary dining-out spending is one of the first things consumers cut.

Oracle is a big software and cloud company. He lumps it with the Mag 7 to make a concentration point: together, technology is now roughly 50% of the entire S&P 500.

For comparison, financial stocks were only ~27% of the index right before the 2007 crash. So today's tech weighting is an even more extreme, dangerous concentration — and if you own the index, you're heavily exposed to it whether you realize it or not.

SOXX tracks semiconductor (computer-chip) stocks. McDonald lays out the numbers for why he thinks it's a "hyper-bubble": it's up about 280% in 56 weeks, and it sits roughly 54% above its 200-day average price (a gauge of how stretched it is above its long-run trend).

For context, the Nasdaq rose "only" 130% in the equivalent stretch before the 2000 dot-com crash — so today's chip run is about double the most famous bubble in history. His blunt conclusion: "the semis are starting to crash."

Micron makes memory chips (DRAM). He calls these "the Microns of the world" — the memory names driving the extreme, overstretched move in semiconductors.

They're a big part of why the chip sector looks so dangerously inflated to him, and a prime candidate to fall hard as that bubble deflates.

EWY tracks South Korean stocks — an index loaded with memory-chip makers (Samsung, SK Hynix). He uses it to show just how dislocated the chip trade has become.

It's about 156% above its 200-week average price, versus a previous record of around 54%. In plain terms, it has stretched far above its long-term trend than it ever has — a historic warning sign of a market that's run too far.

SpaceX is Elon Musk's rocket company, expected to go public this summer at a roughly $2 trillion valuation. His concern isn't the business — it's the mechanics of the IPO.

When a huge company joins the index, the index funds everyone owns must buy its shares. He argues that around $250 billion of this expensive new stock will be "force-fed" into passive funds — and that the insiders need to do it before any market decline, because once the window closes they'd be stuck. To make room, he says, today's tech has to crash.

Anthropic is an AI company racing OpenAI to be the first large-language-model firm to go public, at a valuation he pegs above $1 trillion.

Same complaint as SpaceX: he sees billionaires "dumping" richly valued shares into ordinary index-fund investors by getting fast-tracked into the indices — pushing pricey, unproven stock onto passive buyers who don't even choose to own it.

OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) is the other half of that IPO race. He treats it identically to Anthropic.

It's part of what he calls a "shell game": offloading enormous, expensive equity into index funds before any downturn — a setup he views as bearish for the crowded tech market that has to absorb it.