Another week, another surge of investor excitement… and here I sit, watching patiently while semiconductor stocks go nutty again, conjuring up visions of a future collapse, and oil prices continue to bounce around with the on-again, off-again efforts to get the Strait of Hormuz back to what it was in January, a busy highway that feeds and fuels a good chunk of the world. I continue to lack any real wisdom about how the world will unfold from this point — stocks are back to being expensive as a group, but often justifiable in individual cases, and the economy is chugging along with less inflation than feared so far, but consumer sentiment is also at all-time lows in the US, which seems destined to impact consumer spending eventually.

This could turn sharply to create another golden age, particularly if we’re all willing to keep ignoring government debt levels… or we could have a cataclysmic crash as we head into the midterm elections, so all we can do with any real sanity is try to look past the current state of the world and figure out which companies are likely to survive and thrive in whatever environment the world throws at us. And, of course, we’ll be wrong about some of them… so we have to make sure we stay diversified, remain patient with the stocks that overreact to every bit of good or bad news, and avoid betting our retirement on the semiconductor index doubling again in the next six months, on Elon Musk putting a million data centers into space by next week… or on oil either falling back to $50 or doubling to $200.

This week we got some “HALO” (Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence) updates for the first quarter, from companies who are sort of AI-driven, at least given their connection to the need for power and infrastructure to feed and build new data centers… but also not fast growth stories, and not really tech companies — so that includes our building materials leader, Amrize (AMRZ) and our nuclear manufacturing company, BWX Technologies (BWXT), as well as updates from the land of oil and gas, with Viper Energy (VNOM) and Texas Pacific Land (TPL) both reporting… with, no surprise, solid results from the latter two — thanks, in part, to the fact that oil prices surged late in the quarter.

Texas Pacific Land (TPL) has partially ...