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Okay, so they want to double fee-earning capital in five years, taking it from $580 billion to $1.2 trillion. Ambitious? Yes. Completely unhinged? Possibly. But here’s the thing: they actually did double it between 2020 and 2025, going from $277 billion to the current $580 billion. That’s roughly 15% a year. Which, let’s be honest, is the kind of growth that makes most fund managers weep with envy. So, they’ve proven they can do it. Doesn’t mean they will, of course. Wall Street is a fickle beast. A bear market could throw a wrench in things. But, you know, bear markets always seem to happen eventually. It’s just a matter of when. And frankly, I’m more concerned about the champagne socialists complaining about their losses.

This cloud, it seems, hath yielded a bounty of some $15.15 billion in the last reported quarter—a sum sufficient to maintain a small kingdom, or at least, to indulge the ambitions of a most enterprising company. And lo, a net income of $3.59 billion! One might almost suspect a touch of alchemy, were it not for the cold, hard logic of the balance sheet.

The comparison to Amazon, specifically to Amazon Web Services, is… curious. It is not the e-commerce facade that is invoked, but the cloud infrastructure—the unseen engine of modern commerce. To equate the two is to suggest a parallel ambition, a desire to become the bedrock upon which others build. Yet, the crucial distinction lies in the nature of the endeavor. AWS offered a genuine solution to a nascent problem – the cost and complexity of maintaining physical server infrastructure. Ripple, however, seeks to solve a problem largely of its own making – the inefficiencies of cross-border payments within a system already dominated by established networks. It is a solution searching for a widespread, unacknowledged affliction.

It’s a curious company, Robinhood. It arrived, rather abruptly, promising to democratize finance, to open the markets to all. A noble ambition, though one often finds that the simplest promises are the most difficult to keep. They’ve certainly captured a segment of the investing public, a restless cohort drawn to the allure of quick gains. But is this a foundation upon which a lasting enterprise can be built?

Do I divest? Occasionally. When the initial premise, the very rationale for investment, dissolves like mist, a reckoning becomes necessary. But these five… these five represent something different. They are not merely assets; they are observations, hypotheses cast in the form of equity. And I do not anticipate their falsification.

You see these corrections, these little dips? They call them “the price of admission.” Admission to what exactly? A system designed to make you feel clever for a few years before inevitably reminding you that you’re just throwing money into the void? I had a similar experience with a gym membership. A complete waste.

The source of this madness? Weight loss. Not some niche market for vanity projects, but a full-blown, societal OBSESSION. Tirzepatide – Mounjaro for the diabetics, Zepbound for the rest of us – is the fuel, and Lilly is sitting on a goddamn rocket. Ten BILLION in revenue last quarter? That’s not incremental, that’s a GODDAMN LANDSLIDE. They’re not just selling medicine; they’re selling… hope. Or maybe just the illusion of control in a world spinning out of control. Whatever it is, people are lining up, wallets open, and Lilly is LAUGHING all the way to the bank.

AbbVie (ABBV 0.31%) has been distributing dividends for 54 consecutive years, a streak that began when it was still part of Abbott Labs (ABT 1.47%). This puts them in the rather exclusive club known as Dividend Kings – a title that sounds suspiciously regal for a bunch of accountants. To qualify, a company must have increased its dividend payout for at least half a century. (It’s a bit like a particularly stubborn weed; it just refuses to stop growing. Though, admittedly, a dividend payout is generally more desirable than a patch of bindweed.)

The bulls, bless their optimistic hearts, insist that Palantir offers indispensable analytics and artificial intelligence tools, assisting both commercial enterprises and governmental bodies in making… decisions. One gathers it’s frightfully clever stuff. The bears, however, maintain that the share price is based more on hype than on, shall we say, robust fundamentals. A perfectly reasonable observation, though lacking a certain… flair. It’s a tiresome dichotomy, really.