The Saturday Sendout From The Simple Side - Market Commentary!

To Simple Side Shareholders — good morning! I am glad to have you join me for another Saturday Sendout. No podcast this week — see you all next week!

If you are new here or unfamiliar with our content, you can see the layout of everything below!

• SATURDAY [free]

  • Market Commentary

    • Weekly Picks Performance

    • An Interesting Trade Idea *NEW*

  • Total Portfolio Performance

• SATURDAY [paid]

  • Our Weekly Picks

    • Mergers & Acquisitions Picks

    • Top Stock Picks

  • Micro Cap Stock Picks

  • Earnings & Options

**** Paying subscribers — I will be sending you an email about the plan forward since Double Finance is closing its doors ****

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The Saturday Sendout (commentary)

I realized that my weekly commentary should make you the most knowledgeable person in the room about everything happening in the markets. I can do that by either diving into one issue or going a mile wide and an inch deep. Today, we are going to be testing the mile-wide and inch-deep update!
Please let me know what you think by using the button below!

Now, into the weekly news…

Markets spent the week dodging tariffs, digesting AI ambition, and trying to figure out if Elon Musk is a car CEO or a political lightning rod. While the S&P 500 and Nasdaq flirted with new highs, the week closed on a down note as profit-taking and rate jitters crept back in.

Market Recap

• S&P 500 ended the week mixed: hitting fresh highs midweek before slipping Friday. Still up 6.8% YTD.

• Rates cooled early but crept back up, with the 10-year yield ending at 4.42%.

• Small-caps and mid-caps outperformed early, helped by strength in energy and discretionary names.

• VIX dropped then popped — traders can’t decide if this rally has legs or needs a breather.

Top Themes

1. AI Still Owns the Spotlight

• TSMC crushed earnings on AI chip demand (+39% YoY).

• Meta shelled out a rumored $200M+ to poach Apple’s top AI talent.

• Amazon is eyeing another multibillion-dollar bet on Anthropic.

• Nvidia passed $4 trillion in market cap, and CEO Jensen Huang cashed in $36M — still sitting on a Buffett-sized pile of shares.

2. EVs Back in the Fast Lane

• Tesla bounced back with a 4.7% gain after news of Robotaxi expansion to SF and Phoenix, plus its India debut.

• XPeng launched a self-chipped SUV to compete with Tesla.

• Stellantis stumbled on a 1.2M Ram recall probe. Ford followed with its own 850K vehicle recall.

• Nissan & Honda might team up on truck production — because tariffs are the new traffic jam.

3. M&A Mania

• Merck dropped $10B to scoop up Verona Pharma for a respiratory boost.

• Capgemini bought WNS for $3.3B to double down on AI-driven outsourcing.

• T-Mobile got DOJ approval for its $4.4B UScellular acquisition.

• MAG Silver shareholders approved a $2.1B buyout from Pan American.

• Performance Food Group popped 8% on merger rumors with US Foods.

• DallasNews soared 200% on a Hearst buyout. Goodbye, local ownership. Hello, conglomerate era.

4. Pharma Gets a Pulse

• Eli Lilly’s Kisunla got a label upgrade to reduce adverse events.

• Pfizer & Astellas’ Xtandi hit survival goals.

• ProKidney jumped 56% on strong trial data.

• Capricor crashed 50% after the FDA sent its lead therapy back to the drawing board.

5. Consumer Strength... with Caffeine

• Delta soared 12% on strong earnings and reinstated guidance(we called this move out last week in our options section of our newsletter).

• McDonald’s got a Goldman upgrade.

• Starbucks is considering selling a chunk of its China biz — bidding war in progress.

• Levi’s raised its outlook as direct-to-consumer sales hit a growth groove.

• WD-40 continued to grease the wheels with record sales.

Other Movers & Shakers

• Oracle got a price target boost on $30B in “mega deals.”

• Palantir’s AI narrative keeps rolling with a target hike to $160.

• Meta bought into EssilorLuxottica to double down on smart glasses.

• MP Materials jumped 39% after a Pentagon-backed rare earth deal, lifting Lynas and Iluka.

• Above Food spiked 178% on a blockchain-fueled merger.

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Weekly Picks Performance

For weeks, maybe months now, I have been saying that short-term trading outperforms when there is instability and volatility in the markets. This is directly in line with what I mentioned before: people are overbuying good news and overselling bad news.

This is why our weekly trades portfolio has been performing so well. If you look at our returns, you’ll notice that our weekly picks portfolio size has begun to separate itself from the SPY over the past few weeks.

Interesting Trade Ideas

We have been following two stocks closely: UNH & AAPL.
We have also been a proponent of “IPO-flipping”

UNH has been experiencing heavy buying from insiders, institutional buyers, and politicians while the stock is down 39% YTD on reports of fraud. UNH stock was basically even this week, though it did run up to $328 before returning to $308.

AAPL was the recipient of personalized Trump tariff attacks and is one of the few stocks that is still down drastically from the beginning of the year: -16.37% YTD. AAPL was up around 6% this past week.

Quick update on these trades since I am on a wedding weekend!

UNH saw bullish option sentiment towards the end of the week taking the price up past $300.

AAPL was flat this week and didn’t have much news drive stock changes.

An upcoming IPO to look at flipping is Firefly (FLY).

Total Portfolio Performance

Now, I know that many of my subscribers are looking for longer-term plays and don’t care too much about the weekly picks. I think that is just fine — our longer-term holdings have also been outperforming (given that you are following the DCA approach that I recommend).

We utilize a dumbbell portfolio approach. With one side offering a long-term “safe” portfolio (our Flagship Fund & TSS 50), and the other going for growth (Contrarian Trades, Weekly Picks).

We do offer copy trading on almost all the portfolios we build, and are in the process of finding a new brokerage to partner with. Paying subscribers will have access to this copy trading platform soon!

This balanced approach has proven effective time and time again. We also offer paying subscribers the ability to look at any and all of our stocks and portfolios with real-time updates here: Check it all out here (for paying subscribers).

My portfolio average return is up to 38.61% YTD.

Our contrarian portfolio is up over 67% YTD, followed closely by our weekly picks at +45% returns year to date (these are the picks found in today’s newsletter).

The lagging portfolio (based on a buy-and-hold basis) is the Flagship Fund. We expect performance to pick up in the later parts of the year when markets stabilize.

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Weekly Picks

Okay, let’s get into the picks that have returned 44% YTD and 68% over the past 51 weeks. As always, what you see below is a summary of our investments for this week!

🟢THE BUYS🟢