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While other sectors stall, AI investment is accelerating — showing up in earnings calls, corporate budgets, and real-world deployment. Capital is quietly concentrating around companies with clear demand and long-term relevance, and selective opportunities are forming right now.
A new research brief identifies 2 AI stocks trading under $15 that may be positioned for the next phase of growth — including key developments that could move these names in the months ahead.
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Have a meaningful Memorial Day, folks.
Market’s closed, but risk never sleeps — and neither does Washington. Here’s what matters before we roll into a thin, headline-driven week.
Image via AP News
MEMORIAL DAY: FROM CIVIL WAR GRAVES TO AMERICA’S UNCOMFORTABLE PAUSE BUTTON
Memorial Day started as Decoration Day — a post–Civil War ritual of laying flowers on graves when the country was still splitting at the seams. Over time it broadened: from Union dead, to all U.S. war dead, and eventually into a national holiday that tries to hold grief, gratitude, and politics in the same hand without dropping any of them.
AP anchors the day where it hits hardest: Section 60 at Arlington, where families sit with the newest headstones. That’s the point of the holiday — not the mattress sales, not the kickoff to summer, but the invoice that keeps getting paid in names and dates.
📈 Fred's Take: Markets love amnesia. Memorial Day is the opposite — it’s forced memory. For investors, it’s also a reminder that geopolitics and defense spending aren’t abstractions: they’re budget lines that don’t go away, and they keep a floor under the “security state” trade even when everything else is cutting.
📎 AP News
Image via Fox News
OMAR VS. MACE: THE “FOREIGN-BORN” AMENDMENT IS RED MEAT — AND A VOLATILITY WAGER
Fox captures Rep. Ilhan Omar getting confronted on camera about Rep. Nancy Mace’s proposed constitutional amendment to bar foreign-born individuals from serving in Congress. Omar’s response is basically: good luck — because amending the Constitution is a high bar, and everyone knows it.
But the trade here isn’t “will it pass.” The trade is “will it spread.” Immigration and identity politics are campaign accelerant. The more this dominates, the more Washington’s bandwidth gets sucked away from boring-but-priceable issues like budgets, debt issuance, and regulatory clarity.
📈 Fred's Take: This isn’t legislation — it’s positioning. Still, it feeds the bigger election-year risk premium: more noise, less policy throughput, wider tails. That usually means defensives outperform cyclicals, and long-duration tech gets jerked around on every headline.
📎 Fox News
ANTHROPIC’S OLAH: “AI MUST BE GUIDED FROM OUTSIDE BIG TECH” — REGULATION IS THE NEXT BIG TRADE
Reuters reports Anthropic’s Dario Amodei’s cofounder Chris Olah arguing AI needs guidance from outside Big Tech. Translation: the lab guys are telegraphing that self-regulation won’t cut it, and they want third-party oversight before the first catastrophic model failure becomes the next financial crisis-style policy event.
This is the fork in the road for AI as an asset class. If governance hardens, the winners won’t just be whoever has the biggest GPU pile — it’ll be whoever can prove auditability, model control, and compliance. That shifts value toward companies with enterprise distribution, regulatory muscle, and clean data pipelines.
📈 Fred's Take: Oversight is bullish for incumbents and bearish for “move fast and ship” AI startups. The market will eventually price AI like biotech: huge upside, but with a real regulatory discount rate. If you’re long the AI complex, you want the picks-and-shovels *and* the compliance layer.
📎 Reuters
RUBIO TO INDIA: “PRO-AMERICAN” MIGRATION POLICY — THAT’S A LABOR SUPPLY SHOCK IN DISGUISE
Breitbart says Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back on Indian criticism of President Trump’s migration posture, framing it as “pro-American.” Strip the rhetoric: this is about restricting inflows — especially high-skill pathways that have quietly been a pressure valve for U.S. labor shortages in tech, engineering, and healthcare-adjacent roles.
If policy tightens materially, you get second-order effects: wage inflation sticks around longer, service inflation cools slower, and the Fed’s “we’re done” narrative gets harder to sustain. Companies that rely on imported talent feel it first — not just Big Tech, but consultancies, IT services, and any firm running lean on specialized labor.
📈 Fred's Take: Immigration is macro now. If Washington chokes the labor pipeline while deficits stay huge, you’re basically choosing higher structural inflation — which means higher-for-longer rates and a tougher backdrop for small caps and unprofitable growth. This is quietly supportive for value, cash-flow, and pricing-power names.
Image via TheStreet
WHO OWNS AMAZON? THE REAL STORY IS WHO MOVES IT
TheStreet runs through Amazon’s ownership: insiders, top executives, and the institutional holders who actually swing the stock on any given day. At a ~$2.9T market cap, AMZN isn’t a “company” in portfolio construction — it’s a factor. It’s index gravity.
When institutions dominate the register, flows matter as much as fundamentals. Passive allocations, mega-cap rebalancing, and risk-parity de-grossing can overpower a quarter of great numbers. And because AMZN sits at the intersection of consumer, cloud, AI, and logistics, it becomes a macro proxy whether it wants to or not.
📈 Fred's Take: If you own the S&P, you own Amazon — congratulations, you’re making a macro bet. The question isn’t “who owns it,” it’s “who’s forced to buy or sell it next.” Watch rates: falling yields juice AMZN’s multiple; rising yields turn it into a funding-cost punching bag despite great execution.
That’s your Memorial Day tape — rest up. Tomorrow the market reopens, and Washington will still be swinging at shadows. Fred Frost, *Morning Bullets*.
— Fred Frost
