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It all starts with cosmic rays. These aren’t rays in the sun-tanning sense, but incredibly energetic particles flung out by, well, exploding stars – supernovas, to be precise. Think of it as stellar shrapnel, travelling at nearly the speed of light. When these particles collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they create a cascade of other particles, including muons. Now, muons are fleeting – they exist for only a few microseconds – but travelling at such speeds, they can cover vast distances. One muon hits every square centimeter of the Earth every minute, apparently. Which, when you think about it, is a frankly astonishing statistic. They’re also about 200 times heavier than electrons, which is important because when they collide with materials, they lose energy, and that energy loss tells you something about what they hit.

Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple – a combined $12.2 TRILLION. Let that number soak in. It’s obscene. It’s a monument to the relentless march of technology and the sheer, unadulterated greed of the market. This isn’t about building a better mousetrap; it’s about controlling the entire cheese supply. And the Vanguard Growth ETF? It’s a direct line to the heart of that operation. They’ve been quietly accumulating the spoils, and the numbers don’t lie.

Calacanis, you see, is not a product of the polished academies, nor a scion of venture capital dynasties. He began, if memory serves, by scribbling opinions into the ether – a digital pamphleteer, if you will. AOL, in a moment of inexplicable generosity (or perhaps desperation), acquired his digital broadsheets for a sum that briefly startled the financial press. It was a transaction that proved, if nothing else, that even the most fleeting of digital fancies can command a price. Since then, he’s navigated the turbulent waters of innovation, backing ventures with a gambler’s intuition and a peculiar knack for identifying the genuinely disruptive from the merely fashionable. Uber and Robinhood, those emblems of the modern age, bear the imprint of his early confidence.

The Alerian MLP ETF currently exhibits a 30-day SEC yield of 8.1%, with trailing twelve-month distributions averaging slightly below 8%. Critically, this yield is generated without reliance on leveraged strategies, a factor which mitigates certain risks associated with debt-fueled income streams. The fund’s top holdings, including Plains All American Pipeline LP (PAA +0.26%) and Western Midstream Partners LP (WES 0.37%), contribute significantly to this distribution profile, with yields of 8.7% and 8.9% respectively.

The share price, as of late, has been…restless. A decline of thirty-eight percent from its peak, a figure that carries a certain weight, doesn’t it? One imagines the analysts, those diligent observers of the market’s whims, murmuring amongst themselves, charting the descent with the solemnity usually reserved for matters of genuine consequence. But what is it, precisely, that troubles the waters? Is it merely the predictable ebb and flow, or something more…substantial?

Wood’s newsletter, Greed & Fear, is aptly named. He’s swapping out 10% of his portfolio, figuring Bitcoin can’t hold value if some super-powered computer decides to crack its code. He thinks Q-day – the day the encryption falls – is closer than the techies admit. A hunch, maybe. Or maybe he just sees the writing on the wall.

Analysts project a substantial addressable market for quantum computing, ranging from $450 billion to $1 trillion by 2035-2040. This potential, coupled with nascent real-world applications – including molecular simulations for pharmaceutical development, enhanced cybersecurity protocols, accelerated AI learning, and improved weather modeling – has fueled investor optimism. The announcement of JPMorgan Chase’s $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative, with a dedicated focus on quantum computing, further catalyzed this momentum. Early access to IonQ and Rigetti’s hardware through cloud services offered by Amazon and Microsoft represents a further validation of the technology’s potential.

My first prediction? They will continue to rise. Not because of inherent value, mind you, but because inertia is a powerful force, and the herd, as always, will follow the loudest bleating. Investors, bless their naive hearts, are still captivated by the AI narrative. Valuations have, admittedly, retreated somewhat from their stratospheric peaks. A minor correction, really. Like a slight adjustment to a noose. Alphabet, at 29x forward earnings, remains reasonably priced, they say. Reasonable, in this context, is a relative term. It’s akin to declaring a cholera outbreak ‘moderately unpleasant.’