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Chevron’s dividend, a specter draped in percentages, hums with the dissonant harmony of a machine designed to outlast its operators. Its breakeven price of $30 per barrel is a bureaucratic formality, a stamp on a permit for survival. While oil prices oscillate like pendulums in a madhouse, Chevron’s integrated operations-production, refining, chemicals-function as a labyrinthine process that turns volatility into routine. Last year, $15 billion in free cash flow emerged not as a triumph but as a ledger entry, a requirement to be fulfilled. Even as markets convulse, Chevron’s dividend remains a filing to be processed, a form to be completed, its $11.8 billion payout a debt neither owed nor repaid, but simply recorded.

Initially a humble cultivator of renters’ and homeowners’ insurance, Lemonade branched into life, pet, and auto policies-a tree stretching its canopy. The acquisition of Metromile in 2022 was a root-deepening act, while its partnership with Chewy (NYSE: CHWY) nourished the pet health sector. By Q2 2025, it counted 2.69 million customers, a doubling since 2020, yet still dwarfed by Allstate’s 16 million-a titan in a world of saplings.

Intuitive Surgical reported numbers that made their accountants blush. Revenue surged 21%, landing at $2.44 billion. Earnings per share? Up 23%. Amazon’s quarter? A carnival of profit centers. $167.7 billion in sales. AWS, ads, and Prime all dancing in sync. Neither stock’s cheap. But when you own a money-printing press, entry price becomes a footnote. So it goes.

The signs are there, though faint as the whispers of a forgotten god. Netflix continues its inexorable advance. Just recently, it reported a 15.9% increase in year-over-year revenue for the second quarter. Such numbers! One might imagine that the numbers themselves, emboldened by their own largesse, are dancing on the stage of a grand opera. Even more magnificent, free cash flow soared by a dizzying 86.9%. Who could have foreseen such a future, when many naysayers had predicted the end of Netflix’s rise, citing its vast and insatiable hunger for content as the doom of the empire? And yet, the beast continues, unperturbed, content in its existence.

Oh, you thought we were done talking about the late ’90s? Think again. Right now, tech stocks are behaving in ways that feel eerily familiar to anyone who lived through the original internet gold rush. Back then, people were throwing money at anything with “.com” in the name, only to watch it all come crashing down in spectacular fashion. By the time the dust settled, the Nasdaq had dropped nearly 80% from its peak. Oof. It was like the financial equivalent of trying to explain Beanie Babies to your grandkids.

In the grimy back-alley heyday of ’80s investing, Microsoft was a junkyard dog tearing through the silicon scrapheap of mainframes, while Berkshire Hathaway was Warren Buffett’s blackjack table – slow, methodical, and ruthlessly mathematical. But today? Today we’re staring into the maw of something altogether different. This ain’t your grandfather’s growth stock.

Realty Income (O) is a dividend dog with a pedigree. It’s been paying for 55 years, and it does it monthly. That’s more reliable than your local post office. Even when the real estate market is a disaster, it’s beating the market this year. So it goes.

And yet, amidst this pageant of speculation, one cannot ignore the siren song of technology stocks. These companies, with their ceaseless march toward innovation, have become the new aristocracy of commerce. To overlook them would be akin to attending a banquet and refusing the finest wine-an act of self-denial bordering on folly. Without them, we might still be living in a world bereft of personal computers, online banking, or even the dubious convenience of GPS navigation. One shudders to imagine.