The Weekly Insight

Two politicians. Same day. Completely opposite claims about what gas prices are doing to American households.

Rep. Ro Khanna: $5,000 per household.

Treasury Secretary Bessent: "All cylinders are firing. Gas prices are coming down."

Both are wrong.

So, this week we did the actual math.

The real number is approximately $1,400 per year — or $117 a month — for the average household. That's the direct pump cost plus the hidden pass-through costs most people never connect to gas: freight, packaging, petrochemicals, home energy. Costs that show up weeks later as a 3-cent increase on a box of cereal or a slightly higher utility bill. And — critically — costs that don't reverse as quickly as the pump price when gas eventually falls.

But the more important number is what $1,400 means when you put it next to what wages have actually done.

Nominal wages are up 3.5%. Inflation is running at 3.3%. That leaves the median household with roughly a $245 real raise this year. When the energy burden gets added, real purchasing power turns negative for the first time since 2022 — across every income quartile, just at very different magnitudes.

And that's before we get to what falling real wages have historically meant for the economy. Or why the market's current position near all-time highs is worth thinking about carefully.

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-the-math-problem-what-do-rising-gas-prices-really-mean/

John Maynard Keynes may be the most influential economist who ever lived.

He was right about Versailles. Right about the Depression. He redesigned the global financial system at Bretton Woods.

He also lost his entire fortune in the market.

His lesson: it doesn't matter how right you are. If the market stays irrational longer than you can stay solvent, you lose.

LTCM had two Nobel laureates. Lost 90% of investor capital in four months — being right.

Julian Robertson closed his fund on the exact day the Nasdaq peaked — being right.

George Soros — greatest macro trader of the 20th century — bought at the top — after being right for too long.

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-being-right-isnt-enough/

Nine trading days.

That's how long it took the S&P 500 to recover every point it lost since the Iran war began.

The COVID crash — which was considered one of the fastest recoveries in market history — took 104 trading days. Twelve times longer.

The market's message is clear: this conflict is a disruption, not a recession. Recession odds in prediction markets never came close to what we saw during last year's trade war or the government shutdown.

We agree — mostly.

Here's what the market isn't pricing: the Strait of Hormuz can reopen Wednesday and 17% of Qatar's LNG capacity still takes five years to repair. Half of Iraq's oil production could restart within days. Kuwait's refineries could take months. Those are very different timelines — and only one of them is in the price.

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-the-market-moved-on-the-strait-didnt/

A significant amount of Qatar's LNG just went offline for 3-5 years.

Canadian LNG just came online.

The market hasn't connected those dots yet — but it will.

That's one of three opportunities we're building toward in this week's memo. The others: Emerging Markets, where a war-driven selloff has created a 6.6 percentage point gap vs. the S&P 500. And small caps — but not the index everyone uses. 

The war dominates the headlines. The next big things are hiding just underneath them.

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-the-next-big-things/

Five Trump announcements about the Iran war. Five market rallies. Every single one fully reversed within a week.

By Friday, the market didn't even bother with a rally.

That's the story of the last month. The market’s been trading the rhetoric, not the facts on the ground. But Friday, the market has stopped buying it.

But here's what matters more: we've seen this movie before.

Almost exactly six years ago, we were holding an energy MLP fund that was down more than 70% while the S&P was down 34%. Everyone told us we were wrong. We held. We bought more. Our clients stayed the course.

From that COVID low through today, that position has outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 85%.

The Iran war is not COVID. But the behavioral finance lesson is identical. Fear is loudest exactly when patience pays the most.

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-weve-been-here-before/

Part of the problem with drafting these memos is the news can change quickly. 

When we wrote this on Sunday night, we noted: “If the deadline passes without significant escalation, it may end proving Trump’s Friday missive. It may be the biggest offramp yet.”

Monday morning — somebody blinked.

Trump announced "very good and productive conversations" with Iran and postponed all strikes on Iranian power plants for five days.

Iran denied the negotiations. Then their state TV declared victory.

The market read right through it. Equities: up sharply. Oil: down sharply.

Three weeks ago, Goldman said buy the dip. Last week, Goldman said oil above $100 through 2027. This morning, the market is pricing something different.

We don't know how this ends. But we knew what to watch — and one of those signals fired today.

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-nobody-knows-but-somebody-blinked/

The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo removed 7% of the world's oil supply. It gave us gas lines, 11% inflation, and interest rates that eventually hit 20%. It defined a decade.

The Strait of Hormuz closure is removing 20%.

And yet — Wall Street's earnings estimates for 2026 have not moved one inch since the war began. The S&P is down 3.6%.

That gap is about to close. Q1 earnings season starts in three weeks. That's when CFOs stop speculating and start putting real numbers on a world that changed February 28.

Airlines that modeled $88/barrel oil. Trucking companies eating a 36% diesel spike. Retailers watching consumer confidence collapse as gas prices jump 69 cents in two weeks.

The market is betting on a swift resolution. Maybe it's right. But hope isn't a forecast — and earnings season doesn't care about hope.

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-cant-hide-from-earnings-season/

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-the-old-playbook-doesnt-apply/

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide.

20% of the world's oil flows through it every day. As of Saturday, it's effectively closed.

We've been warning about this exact scenario since April 2024. Now it's here.

In this week's memo, we break down:

→ Why the U.S. Navy can control the Strait but can't make shippers transit it 

→ Why pipeline alternatives only solve 13% of the problem 

→ The natural gas crisis no one is talking about (Qatar's LNG has NO alternative route) 

→ What $125/bbl oil means for GDP and inflation 

→ How we've positioned portfolios for exactly this kind of disruption

The situation is developing fast. What comes next matters more than what happened Saturday.

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-the-chokepoint/

Is AI going to end the world? Destroy every software company? Bankrupt the biggest tech companies on earth?

If you've watched the news lately, you'd think the answer to all three is yes.

Here's the problem: the math doesn't work. You can't be right about all of them at once.

This week we go all the way back to the Luddites — 19th century textile workers who literally smashed machines trying to stop the future — to explain why this moment feels scarier than it is, and what history actually tells us about how technological revolutions end.

Spoiler: it's not the way the headlines suggest.

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-from-luddites-to-language-models-why-the-world-isnt-ending/