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High prices at the pump are a discouragement, a subtle tax on movement. Fewer miles traveled mean fewer accidents, less wear upon the machine. It is a logic that chills the bones of those who trade in parts and repairs. But when the price relents, when the black gold flows a little more freely, the opposite holds true. A loosening of the purse strings, a return to the open road. The stock, predictably, responded. It is a dance as old as the internal combustion engine itself.

The market, you see, is currently afflicted with a peculiar malady: AI anxiety. Stocks related to Artificial Intelligence have been wobbling about like jelly on a particularly bumpy cart track. This isn’t entirely surprising. The promise of thinking machines is all very well, but someone has to pay for the electricity, and the capital expenditure involved is…substantial. Micron, having enjoyed a bit of a run on its High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips, seemed to have sidestepped the initial wobble. The stock price, over the last year, performed a rather impressive vertical ascent. It’s one of only three companies capable of producing this particular flavour of memory, which gives it a certain… leverage. Think of it as owning the only well on the desert road.

This stock… it’s been haunting my periphery. A flicker in the data stream. Down 9% this year? A mere flesh wound. A challenge. They just dumped another $585.2 million in convertible notes onto the market. Dilution, they call it. I call it a calculated risk. A desperate lunge for oxygen in a sea of red ink. The sharks are circling, naturally. But sometimes, you gotta feed the sharks to stay ahead.

Now, however, the bloom has decidedly faded. The company finds itself adrift, a vessel listing in the choppy waters of consumer whim. The departure of Calvin McDonald in January 2026, a figure who, let us be frank, never quite mastered the art of navigating these currents, has left a vacancy at the helm. Adding to the spectacle, the founder, Chip Wilson, has taken to voicing his discontent, a performance that suggests a man more concerned with settling scores than with rescuing the brand. A tiresome spectacle, really.

The SEC filings, those dry chronicles of capital’s movements, reveal the transaction. Sarissa entered the fray in the last quarter, a time when Biohaven was already listing, battered by the FDA’s dismissal of troriluzole and a string of trial results that read like epitaphs. It’s a simple truth: failure is a powerful magnet for those who profit from the misfortunes of others.

The early months of the year offered little to dispel this prevailing gloom. January, in particular, proved a barren landscape, the largest release failing to gather sufficient momentum to truly animate the box office. One might have been forgiven for assuming the slumber would deepen. But then, a stirring. A return, however tentative, to the darkened halls.

The government, naturally, is throwing money at the problem. A “mine-to-magnet” strategy, they call it. Sounds ambitious. And expensive. MP Materials is one of the beneficiaries. The stock price is down almost fifty percent from its peak. A dip, they say. An opportunity. Opportunities are often just disasters delayed.

The concern, naturally, isn’t merely that these companies are expensive – though, dear reader, they are. It’s the specter of disruption, the inevitable arrival of newcomers eager to dismantle the established order. A most unpleasant business, this “creative destruction,” as the economists so blandly term it. It’s like watching a perfectly good samovar being smashed to make room for a… a microwave oven. Utterly barbaric, yet undeniably efficient.

This, apparently, involves light. Specifically, bouncing light around inside data centers. I’m not a physicist, or even particularly handy with a flashlight, but the gist is they’ve teamed up with Coherent (COHR +1.35%) – another company I’d need a flowchart to place – and figured out how to make data transmission faster. Much faster. Instead of electrical signals, they’re using fiber optics. It’s like switching from a bicycle to a rocket, except instead of getting somewhere, they’re just…moving information around. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is probably more important.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – a body dedicated to ensuring that everyone understands exactly how much money is moving around, which, ironically, often leads to more confusion – Quantedge Capital completely divested its DNOW holdings. This resulted in a quarter-end position value decrease of $5.36 million. It’s worth noting that $5.36 million, when divided by the number of stars in the observable universe, yields a figure so small it’s practically meaningless. But it was real money, at one point.