Good afternoon… as usual, I just wanted to share my Weekend Reading Pile with you… AKA the BofA Research and Specialist Sales commentary that I think requires some attention.
For this Edition, I’m including the work that I’m personally printing out for the Long Weekend.
…AND it’s not just stuff from this week, but from over the last few months, with an emphasis on US content this week.
Oh, and I decided to include my favorite chart from each.
AI Stocks nearing 50% of US Market Cap
This is the latest Flow Show from Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett. Price-action across the globe has been strong, there’s “Retail Mania,” and market concentration in “AI’s Big 10” is now near 50%, close to the bubble levels of the Roaring 20s, Nifty-50 70s, Japan in the 80s, and TMT in the 90s.
Asia Tech is advancing sharply, and this has brought the famed BofA Bull & Bear Indicator above the “8 Sell Level.” Another thing: he likes the idea of contrarian long exposure to a very dislocated Consumer sector, as Trump could pivot post-war narratives more domestically ahead of the Midterms.
Looking beyond AI, this sector is totally dislocated.
The wave of massive NASDAQ inclusions is coming
Back in February, NASDAQ proposed rules to speed up the addition of newly-listed, large stocks into their index: fast-entry after 15 trading days for new listings and a 5x multiplier for low free-float entrants.
This means newly-listed IPOs could command a sizeable weight in the NASDAQ almost immediately and attract material passive tracking flows. It raises the Tech benchmark to be much bigger than before, and could change the volatility profile of the index.
This chart helps visualize some of the changes.
FIFA World Cup 2026 Primer
This primer explores the entire event and its investment implications: 48 teams, 104 matches, 16 host cities across the Americas, a $41bn boost to GDP, and about 1mm jobs created.
The team put together more than 50 charts comparing teams, players, countries, AI unicorns, data-center capacity, and much more.
Japan was the most-cited “potential surprise World Cup outperformer” in a survey of clients.
The Uncomfortable and Forced Dynamic of Pair Trading
The SOX Semiconductor Index has been relentless. Many clients were forced to find shorts to match 50/50 against their longs, and there aren’t that many big, liquid tickers.
Correlations are high. KLA Corp, Applied Materials, and Lam Research have a 90% correlation. Micron is the only US-listed DRAM giant. Sandisk is the only US-listed NAND play. Analog Devices and Texas Instruments also have high correlation, as do Cadence and Synopsys.
A visualization of this dynamic below.
Brian Fenske’s Famous Holiday Reading List
If you’re looking for some reading for the long weekend, look no further. Every year, BofA’s resident TMT specialist Brian Fenske crowdsources a list of more than 100 books, movies, podcasts, and other media from both the external client base and the internal BofA crowd.
The content is collated into sections including Self-Improvement, Business/Investing, History, Culture, Interesting Life Stories, Fiction, Sci-Fi, and more.
Though the full document is much more detailed, here is a list of the superlatives from the last edition.
The Tech Supercycle
That’s what TMT specialists Brian Fenske and Annie Liu have been saying “we’re in,” and it is what’s been driving these massive moves. The SOX Index is up 67% off March lows, punctuated with massive moves like SanDisk up 170% and ARM up 117%.
Constraints continue to prevent overbuilds, capex is starting to see tangible ROI, and agentic traction is brewing in enterprise and consumer use cases. The punch-line: it’s still early innings.
Brian and Annie ran a poll asking investors for their forecasts for “Picks & Shovels.” Check out the revisions.
Trade on Everything
Kalshi, the prediction market, means “Everything” in Arabic. Analysts Shaun Kelley and Julie Hoover published a profile of the company, where users trade event contracts across sports, crypto, politics, and culture.
Founded in 2018, it has more than 90% share of US prediction markets despite an influx of competition. It’s also one of the fastest growing non-AI companies, recently valued at $22bn.
Visualizing the explosive growth at Kalshi and in prediction markets.
Semis: The AI Inference Primer
This is a highly technical yet digestible piece that deconstructs AI inference: when already-trained AI models apply learned knowledge to new, real-world data to make predictions, generate content, or solve tasks.
Analyst Vivek Arya expects inference to represent 75% of the $1.2tn total data-center spend in 2030, up from 50% in 2025.
This is what that looks like.
Amazon’s Agentic Era
The Alexa for Shopping product is key to agentic adoption, leveraging user data across the full product ecosystem. The view: it can translate to $200bn in incremental GMV by 2035.
That’s $20bn in incremental retail profit across commission and advertising opportunities. More importantly, it is key to dispelling agentic competition and traffic concerns from Google and OpenAI.
Framing the opportunity set.
AC/DC
Analysts Andrew Obin and David Ridley-Lane fully nerd out in this AI Power report. The view: data centers are evolving from Alternating Current architecture to Direct Current because rack power density, or watts per server, continues to go higher.
Simply, new infrastructure is needed. A quick list of winners for this 2.0 transition includes Eaton, GE Vernova, Schneider Electric, Siemens, and Vertiv.
Here is what some of the new gear looks like.
Blue Collar > White Collar
This note explores the demand for skilled workers in data-center and grid projects. Firms have seen pay packages balloon well into the six figures for skilled craft labor at data-center sites.
Firms battling for talent at remote sites are even augmenting hefty pay with amenity-packed “man camps” and shuttle logistics to meet increasingly tight deadlines. The note is also an 18-page pitch to buy Quanta Services.
This chart defines the linked title above.
Medicaid is Back on the Menu
After analyst Kevin Fischbeck double-upgraded both pure-plays Molina and Centene, he also upgraded partially exposed Elevance Health.
Why here and now? Utilization finally looks to be under control. Reimbursement rates are inflecting. Risk pools are shifting. Margins are bottoming. Serious upside here.
The equivalent of “Managed Care Comps” are getting easier.
The BofA Bio-Detective
This semi-regular column features fully fleshed-out biotech ideas, complete with rationale, probabilities, catalysts, and explanations around the science and applications of each idea.
A new one launched today, and it’s the biggest one yet, at more than $275bn in market cap. Here’s a hint at what stock it is.
Feedback from Healthcare Founders, CIOs and Allocators
The BofA Capital Strategies Team is out with its latest feedback piece. The median equity healthcare hedge fund returned 40% from 2023 through Q1 2026.
Roughly 80% of allocators have a bullish view on the sector, with 37% of them planning to raise allocations this year. Their emphasis is likely on directional or low-net strategies, with further specificity on early and late-stage biotech.
Healthcare manager performance is widening.
The connective tissue of Data-Center growth
That’s what Jean Ann Salisbury calls the Midstream stocks. More power demand requires more gas turbines, which use natural gas, which is delivered by pipelines.
The growing shadow backlog of projects has scope to drive a multi-year EBITDA uplift to this sector, confirmed again during recent Q1 results.
The construction pipeline is large and growing.
Dividend Cut Risks
Packaged food stocks are trading at post-COVID valuation lows, with most of them red on the year. Nearly all of them finished down in 2025, too.
Are dividends finally at risk? B&G Foods recently cut theirs in half. Flowers Foods did the same thing today. BofA analysts Peter Galbo and Brian Callen observe that Conagra, Campbell, General Mills, and Kraft Heinz all have payout ratios above 70% for the current and next fiscal year.
This shows relative performance upwards of two years after a dividend cut.
You’ll spend 44 years of your life in front of a screen
That’s a quip from the BofA Wellness Primer, an illustrated nexus of how AI, tech, healthcare, and consumer converge across a $7tn economy.
It includes zingers like: more Americans will have tried GLP-1s by 2030 than there are Canadians living today; social disconnection has the same health impact as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; and the top AI use-case in 2025 was companionship.
Oh, the places you’ll go.
More than 150 US Consumer Zingers
Important consumer-centric C-suite commentary was collected throughout the earnings season and organized by sub-theme.
Here’s a small sampling of recent zingers.
Gen-Diya
This must-read column tracks the hottest trends across the Gen Z cohort: Bieberchella, peptides, the age of authenticity, Amazon Storefronts on TikTok, inflation frustration, the influencer Olympics, Sephora Spring Savings Event, clean girl aesthetic, K-Beauty, Zendaya x On, the new Harry Potter TV series, and more.
Here is a look at the most-engaged brands during the recent Coachella event.
That’s it.
This is Sales Commentary Only, Not Research. For Institutional Investor Use Only.