💰 The House Buffett Built

THE PULSE
Your Halftime Scorecard 📊

Last week, I asked where your heads are at for the second half of 2026. Here's where you landed.

• 📈 You're winning. More than 70% of you kept pace with or beat the S&P 500 this year. Nice work. If you're in the other 30%, hit reply and tell me what dragged you down. I read every message.

• 🎯 Cautiously bullish. Almost all of you see the S&P finishing the year modestly higher, with tech in the lead. The debate is how: do the AI giants do the heavy lifting, or does the rally broaden out? You're split.

• ⚠️ What's keeping you up: sticky inflation was the top risk, with an AI or tech bubble a clear second.

• 💵 Spare cash? Two answers tied for first: “buy the dip” and “what spare cash?” Which pretty much sums up the mood. Inflation is biting, but your faith in the market isn't.

Thanks to everyone who voted. Now, onto the main event!

THE MAIN EVENT
The House Buffett Built 🏠

Two of the smartest pools of money in America just made opposite bets on housing.

Wall Street's biggest landlords were net sellers of about 3,011 homes last quarter, a 408% jump from a year earlier. In that same stretch, Warren Buffett's Berkshire agreed to buy homebuilder Taylor Morrison for $6.8 billion, becoming roughly the country's fourth-largest homebuilder.

They're not looking at different data. They're looking at different clocks.

Wall Street's Clock Runs In Quarters ⏱️

Right now, the quarters are ugly. At a ~6.5% mortgage, Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) believes 70% of the 100 biggest metros are still overvalued.

Prices are slipping where the building actually happened. Austin, for example, is down over 5% on the year.

To keep sales moving, builders are piling on incentives: last quarter Lennar spent about 13% of each home's price, nearly $50,000 a house, on rate buydowns and discounts, which torches profit margins.

As Moody's Mark Zandi put it, builders are “giving up” because propping up sales has gotten “simply too expensive.”

Landlords are in the same bind, for different reasons.

Their rents have basically flatlined (Invitation Homes' newest leases rose just 0.8%) while taxes, insurance, and upkeep keep climbing. When a house stops paying its way, and your investors want results now, you sell.

Berkshire’s Clock Runs In Decades 🕰️

One of Warren Buffett's most famous lines is that his “favorite holding period is forever.” That changes the math entirely.

Homebuilders trade as low as 10x earnings today, half the broader market's multiple. That’s the kind of value price Berkshire loves. But this isn't buy-it-cheap-and-pray. It comes with a tailwind most value plays don't have.

America is short roughly 4 million homes. That backlog of unmet demand is the cushion under Berkshire's bet.

Buffett said it plainly in 2011: “Every day we are creating more households than housing units.” Lennar's Stuart Miller echoed it just last month: “The fundamental shortage of housing has not been solved. Demand is real, deferred, and building.”

So Berkshire gets a value price, built-in demand support, and free upside. If rates fall or building regulations loosen, that deferred demand floods back into the market and the builders feast. Heads it wins, tails it doesn't lose much.

Should You Follow Buffett? 💡

If you can think in Berkshire's timeframe, this is a rare combination: homebuilders on sale, and a country that still needs millions more homes than it's building.

Just know that “cheap” is usually cheap for a reason, and the payoff may take a few rough quarters. This is not a trade for anyone watching a 90-day scoreboard.

But if you're a buyer rather than an investor, that same softness is your opening.

Those builder incentives, especially the 2-1 rate buydowns in the oversupplied Sun Belt, are the best deal you'll get before the crowds return. Berkshire is betting the window eventually closes. You might as well use it while it's open.

MARKET MOOD
Broadcom Bags Apple, Intel Cedes Its Crown 👑

Winners

Akamai ($AKAM) - Market Cap: $17.0B (Week-to-Date: +14.4%)

Once known as boring internet plumbing, Akamai is suddenly getting priced like an AI-security tollbooth. The company launched tools to verify AI agents, closed a $200 million browser-security deal, and picked up a Microsoft partner badge. The pitch is simple: if AI bots are about to start roaming the internet, someone needs to check their IDs.

Dell ($DELL) - Market Cap: $281.0B (Week-to-Date: +14.2%)

Dell just unveiled a next-gen Nvidia server packing up to 144 GPUs per rack, protecting its first-mover lead in AI “factories.” It didn’t hurt that President Trump used the first-ever White House opening bell to tell Americans to “go out and buy a Dell computer,” after the Dells pledged $6.25 billion to fund kids’ investment accounts. A product win plus a presidential plug is a strong combo.

Broadcom ($AVGO) - Market Cap: $1.82T (Week-to-Date: +11.3%)

Apple turned Broadcom’s biggest worry into a contract. The iPhone maker committed more than $30 billion to U.S.-made Broadcom chips through 2031, covering custom silicon and wireless components. That matters because Apple is a huge Broadcom customer, and investors had worried it might slowly design Broadcom out of its devices. Instead, Broadcom got a five-year vote of confidence.

Losers

Solstice Advanced Materials ($SOLS) – Market Cap: $10.2B (Week-to-Date: -21.7%)

This mega-deal gave investors indigestion. Solstice, the chemicals maker that spun out of Honeywell last fall, agreed to buy Element Solutions in a $14.5 billion cash-and-stock deal. Strategically, it pushes Solstice deeper into electronics, AI infrastructure, and specialty materials. Financially, investors saw a young public company swallowing a very large meal and politely backed away from the table.

Intel ($INTC) – Market Cap: $566.4B (Week-to-Date: -6.5%)

Intel has been on an absolute tear, up 380% over the past year, so this week’s drop was more reality check than meltdown. Reports suggested its next-gen 18A chipmaking process may not reach profitable yields until 2027. Meanwhile, AMD reported $5.8 billion in Q1 data-center revenue, officially surpassing Intel in the category. Not a panic moment, but a reminder that Intel’s comeback still has to prove itself in the factory, not just the stock chart.

Home Depot & Lowe’s ($HD / $LOW) - Market Cap: $346.8B / $123.9B (Week-to-Date: -5.4% / -6.4%)

No earnings let-downs here, just the same ’ol affordability math. U.S.-Iran tensions pushed oil and Treasury yields higher, keeping 30-year mortgage rates stuck around the mid-6% range. That keeps homeowners frozen in place, which means fewer moves, fewer remodels, and less spending on home projects.

CHART OF THE WEEK
Cheap, Open Models Are Eating The Lead 🌏

For years, the AI story was a handful of American labs racing to build the single smartest model. That story is shifting.

Builders are realizing many AI tasks don’t need the most powerful model on Earth. Sometimes they just need something cheap, fast, and reliable.

• Open Chinese models are finding that practical lane. Frontier models still matter for hard problems, but routine work often comes down to cost and speed. That is where DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi are gaining ground.

• Distillation is the shortcut. Smaller models can learn from bigger ones, capturing much of the usefulness without paying the huge upfront cost to create intelligence from scratch.

• Open source also helps with privacy. Companies can run models on their own systems, keeping sensitive data on premises instead of leaking it back to an outside provider.

That is a warning for OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, but a gift for companies and consumers. For investors, it does not kill the AI trade. It changes where value may accrue: apps, chips, power, and whoever can turn cheap intelligence into useful products.

FAST FACTS
Nvidia’s On Sale, Silver's On Fire 🔥

💾 Nvidia Hits The Clearance Rack: Nvidia now trades near 18x forward earnings, its cheapest since 2019, even as quarterly revenue set a record $81.6B. [Read]

🥈 Silver Is Outshining Gold: Silver blew past $60 an ounce, up more than 100% this year, as tight supply and industrial demand leave gold behind. [Read]

💸 Saving Was The Easy Part: Only 19% of near-retirees have thought about how to spend down their nest egg, the "decumulation" blind spot. [Read]

🏥 ACA Premiums Are Set To Spike: Obamacare insurers propose a median 14% premium hike for 2027, on top of 2026's ~20% jump. [Read]

💊 AstraZeneca's Heart Drug Flunks: The pharma giant faced its worst day in six years after its Wainua heart drug missed in late-stage testing. [Read]

📺 Netflix Reinvents The Cable Bundle: Netflix is weighing live TV channels and bundling rivals like Peacock, circling back to the linear model it once killed. [Read] 

🔔 The Year's Biggest Chip IPO: SK Hynix, the memory kingpin, priced a roughly $28 billion U.S. share sale at $149 apiece and debuts on the Nasdaq today. [Read]

🌎 The Average Is Misleading: The typical American holds $124K in median wealth versus a $621K average, the widest rich-skew gap among major economies. [Read]

🏠 Half Of Young Adults Live With Parents: 49% of under-30s still live at home, up 12 points since 2019, as the affordability crunch delays progress. [Read]

WORDS TO REMEMBER
Build Wealth With Broad Exposure 🧠