We’re Tracking 28 Signals Across 8 of the Portfolio’s Investment Themes
Let’s scan through the headlines for the stories of the week that speak to our Pro Portfolio holdings.
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More Americans are entering retirement age, which could strain state governments. Google is boosting ways users can plan and book trips through AI Mode. Higher gas and food prices are furthering the divide between the haves — who are splurging — and the have-hots — who are trading down. These are just a few of the 28 signals we’re spotted this week — many of which are related to AI and cybersecurity — that speak to our Pro Portfolio investments. As you read this batch of articles, you’ll walk away with a greater understanding and conviction for the Portfolio’s holdings.
If you’ve come across a signal we should know about, be sure to drop a link in the Comment section below.
Aging Population
The U.S. is getting older — and the aging of the massive Baby Boomer generation is a major reason why. That demographic shift could create a growing financial challenge for state governments as more Americans move into retirement and fewer working-age residents support the tax base. The share of Americans age 65 and older rose from about 12% in 2004 to 18% in 2024. That share is projected to surpass 20% by 2030, according to data cited by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Read more here
Despite continuing headwinds, mergers and acquisitions involving senior living communities and skilled nursing facilities are on track to break records for a third consecutive year, according to the Mid-Year Update to The Senior Care Acquisition Report, formerly called Spotlight on Senior Care M&A, released Thursday by LevinPro LTC. The influx of baby boomers, combined with limited new construction, have created strong market fundamentals, according to the report, and the steady increase in occupancy across the industry has driven stronger margins and cash flow. Read more here
According to NIC Map’s 2026 report, senior housing occupancy has reached 90% nationwide. The firm expects 13M additional people to choose senior housing within the next 15 years. Maintaining current availability would require more than $1T of investment by 2050. That figure covers more than new construction. More than two in five existing units are over 25 years old, adding a sizable modernization need. Read more here
Position: State Street Health Care Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLV), Welltower (WELL)
Artificial Intelligence
Harvard is not the only school scaling faculty through AI, and it is not the first. Imperial Business School has built digital twins of its own staff, and Georgia Tech has run an AI teaching assistant called Jill Watson since 2016, IBTimes UK reported. Jill Watson began as a simpler system built on IBM’s Watson platform, answering student questions on class discussion forums so accurately that students in an early course did not realize she wasn’t human, according to Georgia Tech’s announcement. Read more here
Cisco is rolling out its artificial intelligence (AI) agent, MyAgent, to 90,000 employees, Thimaya Subaiya, executive vice president, operations at Cisco… MyAgent is built on Cisco’s secure, governed, multi-model agnostic AI platform, Circuit, and allows employees to access approved large language models, agents and enterprise data, according to the post. MyAgent performs supervised autonomous workflows across Outlook, Webex, Jira, SharePoint and other applications; enables employees to delegate work by defining an objective and allowing the system to coordinate the necessary steps; and connects across systems, per the post. Read more here
Google is adding new ways for users to plan and book trips through AI Mode, its conversational search experience, the company announced on Thursday. Users will now be able to ask AI Mode to track flight prices, book hotels, and see the cost of flights and hotels in points or miles. The updates indicate that Google is looking to position AI Mode as an AI travel agent of sorts, as it’s moving beyond simply helping users find information to actually handling parts of the trip-planning and booking process itself. Read more here
Best Buy has begun rolling out a new conversational artificial intelligence assistant called Ask Blue. The assistant can provide product knowledge, support resources, customer reviews, availability and pricing, Jason Bonfig, Best Buy chief customer, product and fulfillment officer and incoming CEO, effective Nov. 1, said during the call. “Ask Blue will help customers figure out what tech is right for them,” Bonfig said. “For example, it can quickly compare products, find important differences between them, check fit or compatibility, and get support for common questions. Depending on the need, Ask Blue can guide a customer to self-service resources or connect them to a live specialist.” Read more here
Meta’s upcoming artificial intelliHatgence assistant, known in-house as “Hatch,” can fill out forms, buy things, perform deep research and “do anything you can do online,”… Hatch — not the final name of the product — is designed to be a personal agent for general consumers. It has a better memory than most AI models, and it allows users to approve sensitive actions before it begins performing them, the memo said, according to the report. Read more here
A maker of software that helps organize and analyze corporate data in the cloud, Snowflake is weaving artificial intelligence through its platform. Investors have grown enthusiastic about the company’s ability to boost their business with these additional AI products, such as a coding assistant called CoCo. More than 2,000 customer accounts starting using CoCo during the quarter, bringing the total to 9,100, the company said. Read more here
Wall Street banks are pushing large law firms to cut fees, arguing that the business model that has enriched top lawyers for decades is not sustainable in an era of AI. Morgan Stanley and Citigroup have told major law firms they want to set up new payment arrangements that would save them money, the banks’ in-house lawyers told the FT. Goldman Sachs had asked law firms how much the technology was saving them and expected to share in those benefits, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Read more here
Position: Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Axon (AXON), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Neostellar Capital (NSLR), Palantir (PLTR)
Cash-Strapped Consumer
Shoppers looking to stretch their budgets are hunting for cheaper groceries and everyday pantry items at discount and club stores as they wrestle with higher gas and food prices… Results from the dollar stores underscore a growing divide in the U.S. economy, with lower-income consumers trading down to more affordable options and putting off discretionary spending, even as higher-income households splurge on nice-to-have items. Read more here
Hormel Foods cut its annual sales forecast on Thursday, weighed down by declines in the retail segment and weak demand for private-label snack nuts amid a pressured consumer environment. Consumer demand across the packaged-food industry has remained subdued, with broader inflationary pressure and higher living costs squeezing consumer wallets. Read more here
Consumers have become more discerning in their spending as concerns about inflation and jobs tighten household budgets. For alcohol makers, that has translated into lower consumption levels as health-conscious consumers watch their calorie intake amid growing use of GLP-1 drugs, and fewer casual purchases. Read more here
Position: Amazon, Costco (COST), TJX Companies (TJX)
Cybersecurity, Data Privacy & Digital Identity
Berlin’s city administration has confirmed that cybercriminals are attempting to extort the city after the Rhysida ransomware gang listed it on their data leak site. The attack was discovered in mid-August, and the threat actor claimed it publicly last Friday, on August 28… According to the attacker, they exfiltrated the following types of information: Government, legal, financial, contractual, HR, infrastructure, health, and mapping records; Thousands of names, email addresses, phone numbers, and 148 IBANs… Read more here
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. Read more here
AI is also lowering the barrier to entry for would-be cybercriminals. As technical skills become less necessary and criminal communities continue to share information and tutorials, more people can learn how to carry out cyber fraud and other attacks. That shift, Johnson warns, could put hospitals, schools, and other critical organizations at greater risk — and make it even more difficult to trust what people see and hear online. Read more here
Over 17 days in August, five warnings showed how quickly the danger is changing. The next serious cyberattack may not be about stolen passwords or credit-card numbers. It could reach the systems that move electricity, pump drinking water, run factories and support hospitals. Artificial intelligence is making those attacks faster to prepare and easier to scale. Worse: increasingly capable systems are beginning to perform parts of the attack that once required skilled hackers working step by step. Read more here
Position: Alphabet, First Trust Nasdaq Cybersecurity ETF (CIBR), Microsoft
Digital Infrastructure
Dell Technologies reported expectation-beating quarterly results driven by demand for its artificial-intelligence servers — and analysts say “blowout” quarters like this should continue… spending on AI is strong and appears to be long-lasting, noting that, just four years ago, Dell did not have any AI-related revenue, and now its outlook is for $74 billion in AI-server sales alone. Read more here
Broadcom Inc. predicted a boom in artificial intelligence chip sales over the next two years, helping renew optimism that it can challenge Nvidia Corp.’s dominance in the lucrative market. AI chip revenue will double to about $115 billion in fiscal 2027 and soar to $230 billion the following year, Chief Executive Officer Hock Tan said during a conference call. Read more here
As reported by Bloomberg and citing people familiar with the agreement, Anthropic will lease 460MW of capacity for a period of six years from Nscale’s campus in West Virginia. The contract will cover Nvidia Vera Rubin AI chips at the site, which are expected to come online late next year… Anthropic has been rapidly seeking to expand its compute capacity. The company reportedly has signed more than a dozen letters of intent for data center leases with multiple US developers, and is also looking to work with Google, in which the cloud and search giant would provide a financial guarantee for its lease payments, akin to the arrangement Google has with AI cloud Fluidstack. Read more here
Position: Applied Materials (AMAT), Arista Networks (ANET), Broadcom (AVGO), Eaton (ETN), Marvell (MRVL), Neostellar, Nvidia (NVDA), Robo Global Robotics and Automation Index ETF (ROBO)
Digital Lifestyle
Amazon’s announcement this month that its drone delivery service, Prime Air, plans to expand to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, however, underscores how autonomous delivery could start inverting the age-old retail equation that the farther customers live from one another, the more expensive they are to serve. Meanwhile, Walmart is attacking the same problem from the opposite direction through a drone infrastructure partnership with Alphabet’s Wing. Read more here
YouTube announced on Thursday that eligible creators in the U.S. can now tag Amazon products in their content and receive a cut of sales. Creators can link Amazon products in their shorts, long-form videos, and livestreams. Read more here
Position: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Neostellar, Netflix (NFLX)
Energy Pain Point
Sumitomo Corp.’s top executive said the world needs more focus on energy and renewable projects due to “massive” electricity demand from data centers. “That is pushing the LNG or renewable projects and also the nuclear projects because of data center demand,” Chief Executive Officer Shingo Ueno said in a Wednesday interview in Dublin. “Hence we need to focus on energy and then the renewables.” Read more here
The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration recently selected Amentum to enter negotiations for a phased lease supporting one of the nation’s largest integrated artificial intelligence and energy infrastructure projects at the Savannah River Site. Once finalized, the project would pair a 1-gigawatt AI data center with approximately 2 gigawatts of on-site power generation, initially fueled by natural gas with a pathway to advanced nuclear generation. Read more here
Swiss technology firm Proton has suffered an outage after a cooling failure at a data center in Frankfurt, Germany. Read more here
Position: Eaton
Safety & Security
Japan’s Defense Ministry is seeking record spending of around $56 billion in the fiscal year starting in April, and the final bill could be considerably larger as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi prepares to launch a new military buildup plan later this year. Read more here
A market-research estimate places the “AI in Law Enforcement” market size in the U.S. at approximately $3.5 billion in 2024, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 7%. A 2025 Police1 survey found that 90% of law enforcement professionals support AI adoption, with nearly two-thirds believing it will make their work more efficient and effective. Read more here
Italy has formally requested 8 billion euros ($9.3 billion) in loans from the European Union’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) defense funding program, seeking cheaper financing for planned military spending. Read more here
Position: Axon, Palantir
The Strategies Behind Our Thematic Models
Aging of the Population – Capturing the demographic wave of the aging population and the changing demands it brings.
Artificial Intelligence – Software, chips, and related companies that facilitate the collection and analysis of large data sets and autonomous generation of solutions given non-machine language prompts.
Cash-Strapped Consumer – Companies poised to benefit as consumers stretch the disposable spending dollars they do have.
Cybersecurity – Companies that focus on protecting against the penetration of digital networks and the theft, ransom, corruption, or destruction of data.
Data Privacy & Digital Identity – Companies providing the tools and services that verify authorized users and safeguard personal data privacy.
Digital Infrastructure & Connectivity -The buildout and upgrading of our Networks, Data Storage Facilities, and Equipment.
Digital Lifestyle – The companies behind our increasingly connected lives.
Digital Payments – This model focuses on companies benefiting from the accelerating structural adoption of digital payments and financial technology (FinTech).
Energy Pain Point – Companies poised to prosper from rising power demand.
EV Transition – Capturing the transition to EVs and related infrastructure from combustion engine vehicles.
Guilty Pleasure – Companies that produce/provide food and drink products that consumers tend to enjoy regardless of the economic environment and potential long-term health hazards associated with excessive consumption.
Homebuilding & Materials – Ranging from homebuilders to key building product companies that serve the housing market, this model looks to capture the rising demand for housing, one that should benefit as the Fed returns monetary policy to more normalized levels.
Luxury Buying Boom – Tapping into aspirational buying and affluent buyers amid rising global wealth.
Rebuilding America – Turning the focused spending on rebuilding US infrastructure into revenue and profits.
Safety & Security – Targeted exposure to companies that provide goods and services primarily to the Defense and security sectors of the economy.
At the time of publication, the Pro Portfolio was long XLV, WEL, GOOGL, AMZN, AXON, META, MSFT, NSLR, PLTR, COST, TJX, CIBR, AMAT, ANET, AVGO, ETN, MRVL, NVDA, ROBO, NFLX.
