→ PORTFOLIO UPDATE & REFLECTIONS:
The numbers first.
YTD: +40% 1 Year: +157% Max: +129%
The $SPX is 'almost' flat on the year. The Nasdaq just snapped a 13-day winning streak. Markets are at all-time highs while Iran peace talks teeter on collapse and oil still moves on every headline.
I want to talk about what's actually happening.
THE LONG VIEW & WHERE THE US IS REALLY GOING:
This is the part most portfolio updates skip. They focus on the next quarter. I want to talk about the next decade, because that's what this portfolio is actually built on.
We are not in a normal market cycle. We are in the early innings of a genuine industrial transformation, the kind that only happens two or three times in a century.
Morgan Stanley calls it a "fast-moving innovation cycle on a global and historical scale." AI is no longer just a disruption theme. It's a strategic asset, central to economic competitiveness, military capability, and energy demand at a national level.
The parallel being drawn is the mid-1990s, where technological breakthroughs allowed for a prolonged period of growth without a recessionary hangover. For the first time in decades, US productivity growth is trending above 2.5%, largely because companies have successfully integrated AI into the workplace. This has created a buffer against inflation.
LPL Research is blunter about it: only 1% of companies consider themselves mature AI users. Surveys show over 92% plan to increase AI investment, meaning the productivity gains have barely started diffusing into the broader economy.
That's the setup. The market has been pricing the infrastructure phase. The economy is about to enter the productivity phase. And then the application phase after that.
I don't believe there a dot-com bubble. The dot-com companies were burning cash on speculation. The companies driving this cycle have real revenue, real backlog, and real constraints. McKinsey estimates cumulative US data center spending alone will reach $5 trillion by 2030. That capital is already committed. Shovels are in the ground.
And critically, it is not just America funding this.
The UAE has committed $1.4 trillion in US investment and is reaffirming that commitment even amid regional instability, with UAE entities already deploying capital into US-based digital infrastructure at scale. The US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership, formalised in Washington just weeks ago, is designed to secure global AI supply chains with the US at the centre.
Advanced technology and AI have become the newest pillar of the UAE-US relationship, built on a foundation of security and economic cooperation. The UAE describes this as a trillion-dollar relationship that drives real economic impact for everyday Americans.
This is foreign capital, sovereign wealth, and allied governments choosing the United States as the headquarters of the next industrial era. That's a structural thesis.
My thesis, plainly stated: The volatility you're seeing right now, war, politics, tariffs, rate uncertainty, is the turbulence at the beginning of a long flight.
The destination doesn't change because there's turbulence. The AI industrial cycle is a 10-year phase shift in how the global economy operates, and the US is its primary beneficiary. The companies that own the physical constraints of that phase shift; power, compute, infrastructure, defense autonomy are where the value compounds.
That is what this portfolio is built on.
Goldman Sachs has a 7,600 year-end target on the S&P 500. The reasoning is not hype, it's tethered to a 12% EPS growth forecast and an expectation that AI-driven productivity gains are finally hitting corporate bottom lines. They call 2026 the "Execution Phase." I agree. But I'd go further: 2026 is year two of a ten-year execution phase.
There are real risks. Elevated valuations, geopolitical escalation, FED policy uncertainty, none of these are trivial. The "Goldilocks" environment requires multiple variables staying in balance simultaneously. It will not be a straight line. There will be drawdowns. There will be moments that test conviction.
That's fine. That's where the edge is built.
WHERE THE MARKET IS LATE APRIL 2026:
The S&P 500 closed Monday at around $7,109. The Nasdaq ended its 13-day winning streak, its longest positive run since 1992. The Russell 2000 hit a new closing all-time high.
The market has recovered fully from its Iran conflict lows, roughly 11% off the bottom in under three weeks. Investors are signalling a collective belief that tensions resolve, Hormuz normalises, and the structural bull continues.
Analysts at Certuity are right to note that the market wasn't cheap before the conflict. Valuations, earnings potential, and FED policy are going to matter more than geopolitics over the next 6 months. Earnings season is the real test now. Q1 results will reveal which companies are converting AI infrastructure spend into margin expansion and which ones are still in the "spending" column.
My view for late April to September: choppier than the last 3 weeks, more volatile than consensus expects, and full of buying opportunities for anything with hard assets and contracted revenue.
HOW I'M PLAYING IT - LONG-TERM PORTFOLIO:
These are structural positions. Not trades. Each one sits on a specific physical or economic constraint that the AI industrial cycle cannot bypass. I'll hold and DCA.
$IREN: Power is the binding constraint of the entire AI buildout. $MSFT Contract. IREN controls 4.6GW of secured power infrastructure. Next earnings: May 13. I'm long and adding on any meaningful pullback.
$CIFR: Same thesis, adjacent scale. 3GW secured. The hyperscaler arms race didn't stop. This is infrastructure, not a crypto play. Still accumulating.
$NBIS: Nebius is building the AI cloud layer for Europe and emerging markets. Revenue is early. Infrastructure is going in now. This is a multi-year hold. Not touching it.
$AMPX: Battery storage is the invisible bottleneck in the autonomous supply chain. AMPX builds the solution. Patient, early, high conviction.
$PNG.V: Defense autonomy thesis. Undersized, underanalysed, positioned in programs with multi-decade budget commitment.
$RKLB: Rocket Lab is the only orbital launch competitor to SpaceX that has proven execution at scale. Electron is flying. Neutron is coming. Defense contracts are stacking. Still long.
$OUST: The sensor layer that makes autonomous systems possible. Defense, agriculture, logistics. The eyes of the machines being built right now. Still accumulating.
$ONDS: Raised 2026 guidance 25%. $65M backlog up 180% in 60 days. Trading below analyst target. Defense autonomy is not discretionary anymore. It's a locked-in multi-decade budget line. Still long.
$AAOI: Applied Optoelectronics makes the optical components inside every data center rack. Data center capex is crossing $1 trillion this year. The demand curve for $AAOI is not complicated. Adding on weakness.
$HIMS: The telehealth distribution layer. The market keeps treating this as a GLP-1 story. It's actually an access story, the infrastructure for healthcare delivery at scale. Patient.
Overall strategy: DCA into every position on 5-10% pullbacks. The only exit trigger is a broken thesis, not a lower price. Volatility between now and September is the mechanism that creates the next entry points.
SHORT-TERM PORTFOLIO:
$DARE: My conviction is higher in $SIVE, so I sold DARE with 40% profit.
$SIVE: Active swing position. Asymmetric setup with binary catalyst potential. Goal: 1-3x from entry. Taking profit in tranches as it moves. No ego about what it "could" do. Profit is profit. Swing. Take profit. Rotate.
The short-term book is a vehicle for compounding faster capital through high-conviction, catalyst-driven setups. Sizing is appropriate, if it goes to zero, the long-term portfolio doesn't notice. The discipline is in the exit, not the entry.
The process: identify the catalyst, enter the position, set the target, take profits on the way up. Rotate proceeds into the next setup or into the long-term portfolio on dips.
SUMMARY:
Markets are volatile. Geopolitics are messy. The near-term is uncertain.
None of that changes what I believe about the next decade.
AI-related investment increasingly resembles an industrial infrastructure cycle rather than speculative tech spending. Morgan Stanley estimates roughly $2.9 trillion in global data center construction costs through 2028 and expects AI-related investment to account for about 25% of incremental U.S. GDP growth this year.
The US is at the centre of this. Foreign sovereign capital is choosing the US as the host nation for the next industrial era. The physical constraints, power, compute, launch infrastructure, defense sensors are where the compounding happens.
That's not a 2-year trade. That's a 5-10-year thesis.
I'm not managing this portfolio for the next earnings cycle. I'm managing it for the decade.
YTD +40%. One year +157%. And the cycle has barely started.
Adding on dips. Not selling on headlines.
-BP
Note: This is not financial advice. I hold positions in all tickers mentioned.
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