Election Tsunami Ahead: How Crotty Holdings Could Sink or Swim as Markets Brace for Impact.

My take on key stocks, some of which are likely in your portfolio: Apple, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, Target, and Tesla. And the key nugget: Blue Horseshoe LOVES Palantir.

I discussed how markets will digest this year’s election results in a recent Crotty Farm Report. I am neither optimistic nor terrified. Markets like certainty; they will adjust to the new reality after volatility and a possible healthy correction over the next seven weeks.

However, not all holdings will do well. Here’s how I regard my core positions in the face of a potential tsunami of disruptive events. After a decline these past few weeks, I still believe that tech darling Nvidia (ticker: NVDA) is behaving rationally; its story is far from over. This historically volatile AI bellwether should resume its recent trading pattern and be up handsomely by year-end. I respect its Taiwanese-American CEO, the hard-working, measured, coders’ coder Jensen Huang, who should be named Time’s Person of the Year. However, should the Dems’ hide-the-football strategy work again in November, the “historic” Kamala Devi Harris will likely get the nod.

Nevertheless, the tag-along nuke and utility gambits worry me as we approach peak AI spending. That starts with Cameco (ticker: CCJ), a Saskatchewan-based uranium miner that exploded in price in 2023, with uranium rising to over $100/pound based on increased demand and global supply constraints. CCJ was expected to increase in price even more after the Biden Administration curtailed Russian uranium imports. However, increased uranium production out of Australia, Kazakhstan, and Namibia cut into uranium’s price and Cameco’s brief strategic advantage. Ditto for nuclear-focused utility plays Constellation Energy (ticker: CEG) out of Baltimore, Maryland, and Vistra (ticker: VST) out of Irving, Texas. Still, the long-term prospects for uranium remain intact as governments hustle to meet their COP28 greenhouse emission targets and data centers furiously seek stable, renewable, and always-on energy to meet the massive uptick in AI compute power demand.

The one global constant on the Biden/Harris watch seems to be war, so data wrangler and spook surveillance tool Palantir (ticker: PLTR) should be fine. Even if Trump puts the world back into relative peace again, his defense spending will not decrease. If Harris wins, PLTR soars. Dems love that "over-the-horizon" stuff (see: "Obama drones"). Anti-NeoCon Trump, who strongly opposes American boots on the ground, will also gravitate to Palantir’s unique ability to find bad-guy needles in complex foreign haystacks, or as CEO Alex Karp put it, “finding hidden things.” Palantir will also benefit from being added to the S&P 500, forcing fund managers to add it to their portfolios. As its CIA-bosomed tools migrate to the private sector, I can’t think of another stock better positioned to capitalize on a volatile global environment.

Apple (ticker: AAPL) keeps cruising on the promise of new AI phones this fall in what could be the mother of all refresh cycles. If Cupertino could get Siri to do something meaningful, it would be a true Christmas miracle. I'd strongly consider selling the news after Apple releases the new Apple 16 AI models today and begins selling them in Apple stores next week. Then again, it’s hard to bet against a product so profoundly addictive that, per several studies, many people would rather spend time on their smartphones than make love. 54% would give up exercise, and 63% would give up chocolate. Studies show that this device addiction is particularly acute in women. Apple isn’t going away without some seismic shift in global consumer culture.

Target (ticker TGT) is possibly on the come, even with Quid Pro Joe’s vote buy-offs (unnecessary COVID relief, student loan forgiveness) running low and credit card debt and unemployment rising. I'd be generally worried about retail and the consumer, especially after the holidays and if civil unrest breaks out post-election. As we saw in Tim Walz’s Minneapolis, those “peaceful protesters” love to riot, loot, and burn Target stores.

TGT has made some concessions on price to compete with Walmart (WMT) and Costco (COST), but this pandemic darling is stuck in the dangerous middle––not cheap enough to attract most price-sensitive consumers and not expensive enough to draw price-impervious ones. But I will likely hang on for a holiday retail boost. If it rises back to $190/share, I am out.

There are better retail plays in Goleta-based Deckers (ticker: DECK)—makers of the new Crotty footwear of choice, the HOKA––and Paris-based luxury powerhouse LVMH (ticker: LVMUY), which seems to power along in good times and bad, despite the draconian tax regime out of France.

Cyber security powerhouse Palo Alto Networks (ticker: PANW) has become indispensable to C-Suite types after the Crowdstrike (CRWD) debacle. If Putin and Iran keep losing their proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza/Lebanon, respectively––Joe, take the gloves off of Bibi and Volodymyr so they can win this for you, bro!––expect stepped-up, even existential, cyber warfare. All of that redounds to PANW and PLTR.

Then there's investor problem child Elon Musk, whose X is getting censored by lefty governments in Brazil, France, and the UK (a stark foreshadowing of what will happen under a Harris/Walz regime in the bamboozled USA). This might distract Musk from the most significant Tesla (ticker: TSLA) event in years: the October 10 Robotaxi rollout at the Warner Brothers Discovery studio in beautiful Burbank. If that event is mind-blowing, TSLA doubles, and UBER plummets. I am hanging on with the mercurial Mr. Musk for a little longer, but I will likely sell some on the Robotaxi news.

The most profitable initial public offering (IPO) for the world’s richest human will be for Space X, which seems able to perform complex outer space missions far better than government-run NASA, let alone government-contractor fat cow Boeing (ticker: BA). But Musk seems most determined to take his free speech darling, X, public. Though still privately held, X is fantastic when it comes to protecting the First Amendment and awful when it comes to platform ease and execution. It’s as if some of that dumb Dorsey code is still floating around. Musk alienates famous and influential Substack authors by not allowing thumbnails of their posts on X, let alone making it easy for them to get traffic. The Trump-deranged Twitter tools that helped throw the 2020 election to Basement Joe are gone, but Elon is defeating the purpose of posting to his platform. Support me anyway by subscribing here.

Speaking of social media, if you want to make easy money this election cycle, a few intrepid Trump-haters are short-trading around Truth Social (ticker: DJT; the initials of one Donald John Trump). Truth Social is horrible at making money but is a fantastic proxy for Trump news flow. If mainstream media (er, propaganda and disinformation) is shockingly pro-Trump––say after the assassination attempt on the former President––DJT goes up, and vice versa when the news flow on Trump is negative (which, in our banana republic media environment, is 89% of the time). Astute political observers track the following somewhat balanced websites to determine where the election is at any moment: PredictIt, Real Clear Politics, and The Silver Bulletin. Forget biased CNN, MSDNC, and Politico, which are foot soldiers for the Democratic Party, whoever is the nominee. Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and Fox are equally useless on the right.

DJT is a prototypical meme stock. Its valuation is untethered to its actual worth. Where DJT goes will tell us much about where the market and election are going. As always, please pay close attention to both on the Crotty Farm Report.