#stocks

A buyback is a company spending cash to buy its own stock, shrinking the share count so profits divide among fewer shares. That's it. Whether it creates value or just flatters EPS comes down to one thing: the price paid. The announcement is noise. The execution is the story.

The price-to-earnings ratio is the most quoted number in investing and the most misunderstood. It looks like a measure of cheapness. It's actually the market's bet about the future, packaged as a single number. Here's what it hides.

xAI priced a $20B round at $230B on January 6, 2026. Twenty-four days later its board declared fair value had doubled and merged the company into SpaceX at a combined $1.25T. Ten weeks after that, SpaceX filed confidentially for a $1.75T IPO. The merger was IPO plumbing, not corporate strategy.

Netflix beat Q1 2026 on revenue and earnings, generated $5.1 billion of free cash flow, and still closed down 9.7% on April 17 on soft Q2 margin guidance. Every prior 'Netflix is finished' moment was a multi-year buying opportunity, and the 2026 setup is the strongest it has been in a decade.

Netflix walked from its $72 billion Warner Bros. Discovery deal in under an hour, kept a $2.8 billion breakup check, and watched its stock rally 18% through the decision. The auction was corporate discipline against Ellison family-office capital, and losing was the right trade.

A practical framework for combining index ETFs and individual stock selection, including when to pick stocks, how to size positions, and when to sell.

Most investors look at the wrong metrics during earnings season. Here's the framework for reading software company results the way institutional analysts actually do it.

GameStop went from $20 to over $400 in three weeks, and most explanations focus on the WallStreetBets meme. The real story is a coordinated short squeeze layered on a gamma squeeze, both inside a stock that hedge funds had over-shorted. Here's the mechanic.