usdaed

J&J (JNJ 0.02%), the company, is a bit like that slightly eccentric neighbor who’s been meticulously tending their garden for decades. You might not understand why they’re so obsessed with petunias, but you have to admire the dedication. They’re approaching a milestone – $100 billion in annual sales. It feels…significant. Not in a world-altering way, but in a “they’ve managed to avoid complete disaster for another year” kind of way. Only one other biopharma company has hit that mark, and that was Pfizer, riding the wave of pandemic panic. J&J’s doing it the old-fashioned way: slowly, steadily, and with a portfolio diverse enough to make a venture capitalist weep.

Choosing between them…it’s not a question of preference, but of recognizing which machine is built to last a little longer. And for me, it’s Apple. Not because it offers salvation, but because its gears, for now, seem marginally less prone to grinding to a halt.

2026 has offered a slight reprieve – a mere 11.8% uptick year-to-date. Charming, but hardly a cause for popping champagne. One wonders if regaining former glories is entirely within the cards. The question, of course, is whether one should venture a purchase at this juncture.

Sandisk’s revenue surged 61% year-over-year to $3 billion in their latest fiscal quarter. Now, one might reasonably ask, what’s driving this sudden demand? The answer, as is so often the case these days, is artificial intelligence. It turns out that all these cloud computing behemoths, the ones busy building these ‘AI factories’ as they’re calling them, need an awful lot of data storage. A truly colossal amount. It’s rather like discovering that building a large Lego castle requires, well, a lot of Lego bricks. And Sandisk, it seems, has a particularly robust supply of those bricks.

They call it DevSecOps. Sounds… complicated. Basically, it’s where people write code and try not to get hacked. Good idea, right? Seems logical. And now they’re adding AI. Of course. Everyone’s adding AI. It’s the new thing to do. It’s like they’re admitting the old way wasn’t good enough. And then they want you to pay extra for it! A hybrid model, they call it. It’s always a “model” these days. Like it’s some sort of high fashion statement. I just want the code to work!

Revenue for the fourth quarter jumped a respectable 24% to $59.9 billion. Spending, as these things often do, went up too, which is always a bit of a balancing act. But investors, being the shrewd bunch they are, had anticipated that. Net income still rose a healthy 9% to $22.8 billion, or $8.88 per share. Not bad. Not bad at all.

By the close of trading, the stock had risen by more than eleven percent—a significant tremor in the usually placid landscape of telecom investments. A quiet signal, perhaps, that something essential is shifting.

Shares of this esteemed company have commenced the year with an unseemly haste, soaring upwards as if propelled by the very vanity they seek to address. A rise of some twenty-six percent, they boast, whilst the broader market merely ambles along at a respectable, if unremarkable, pace. One wonders, of course, if this is genuine enthusiasm, or merely the collective delusion of investors, ever eager to chase the latest glittering object.

McDonald Capital Investors, they’re called. Sounds terribly sensible. They’ve just splashed out around $24.39 million on 86,891 shares of FactSet Research Systems (FDS +0.62%). Which, let’s be honest, is more than I spend on groceries in a year. Probably more than I earn in a year. It’s all terribly unfair.