China Owns America's Drones 😬

That’s not by picking the right stock or timing the market. It’s by holding three real asset classes in one strategy.

It’s anchored by an investment typically exclusive to billionaires.

Could be good timing too–

Bloomberg's Marcus Ashworth recently wrote, there’s "no more reliable safe havens."

The S&P, while hovering over 5 year highs, fell over 7% from the February peak. Bonds might carry less risk but they are barely keeping pace with inflation.

The things supposed to protect your portfolio started moving together.

Meanwhile, the world's wealthiest have been setting records in postwar and contemporary art.

After the dot-com bust, it grew roughly 24% annually for a decade. After 2008, roughly 11% annually for 12 years.

It trades globally in multiple currencies, has scarce supply, and has shown near-zero correlation to equities since 1995.*

Masterworks has helped 70,000+ investors allocate $1.3B fractionally across 500+ artworks featuring Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso.

See if you can improve your portfolio performance in one diversified strategy.

Our subscribers skip the waitlist

^{*According to Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd}

The Pentagon has a bold vision: flood the battlefield with cheap, lethal drones made in the USA.

There's just one problem. Most of the guts inside those drones are Chinese.

Batteries. Motors. Cameras. Control electronics. Teardowns of drones used in Ukraine — by both sides — found Chinese-made or Chinese-linked components inside. That's not a supply chain risk. That's a supply chain dependency.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is throwing $1.1 billion at the problem via a new "Drone Dominance" program. The goal: buy 340,000 first-person-view drones across multiple phases, driving unit costs down to around $2,300 each.

Right now, a U.S.-made military quadcopter can run you $15,000+.

A comparable Chinese system? A fraction of that.

The gap isn't about American engineers being worse. It's about scale. China built DJI into a global commercial drone giant — and that mass production machine makes it almost impossible to compete on price.

China also controls the rare-earth magnets and battery supply chains powering those motors. So even if you build the drone here, you're still buying critical inputs from Beijing.

Washington is pushing back with regulation. An FCC ban on foreign drone imports is set to kick in 2027 — but analysts warn it could jack up costs for U.S. producers before domestic alternatives are actually ready.

Replacing a supply chain that's already cheap, efficient and global isn't a sprint. It's a multi-year rebuild.

AI isn’t a tech trend – it’s a full-blown, multi-trillion dollar race, and 10 companies are already pulling ahead.

These are the innovators driving real revenue, attracting institutional attention, and positioning for massive growth.

Get all 10 tickers in The 10 Best AI Stocks to Own in 2026, free today.

Download Now

Index funds might finally stop missing the biggest IPOs of our lifetime.

S&P Dow Jones Indices is proposing to drop its profitability requirement for mega-cap IPOs wanting into the S&P 500. It also wants to shorten the waiting period after a company lists.

Translation: SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic could fast-track straight into your index fund.

Why now? Passive funds tied to indexes control trillions in retirement savings. Missing a $1 trillion company because of a rulebook written in a different era is starting to look embarrassing.

Critics aren't happy though.

The proposal would let giant IPOs skip hurdles that smaller newly public companies still have to clear. So if you're big enough, the velvet rope lifts automatically. Everyone else queues.

It's not a great look.

Here's the thing most people don't realise: the S&P 500 isn't purely mechanical. There's an actual committee. There are eligibility rules. It's not just "500 biggest US companies, done."

That matters more than you'd think.

In 2020, Tesla was added late to the S&P 500. Index investors missed a huge chunk of the run-up. The index lagged rivals that year partly because of that one decision.

At a rumoured valuation of ~$1.75 trillion, it would instantly rank among America's largest stocks. Even with limited shares publicly available, the index treatment alone could move serious money.

Nasdaq has already jumped ahead. It's fast-tracking giant IPOs into the Nasdaq-100 (the index QQQ tracks) and tweaking weighting rules to stop funds being forced into outsized positions on thinly traded new listings.

The direction of travel is clear.

Bottom line: If these changes stick, the next generation of blockbuster IPOs won't sit outside the index waiting room for years. They'll be in your passive fund almost immediately after ringing the bell.

Seven OPEC+ members have provisionally agreed to raise oil output by 188,000 barrels per day in June.

Sounds bullish. There's just one problem.

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed.

That's the chokepoint that handled nearly 20% of global oil and LNG shipments before the Iran war. Right now, those extra barrels have nowhere to go.

The deal mirrors the 206,000 bpd hike OPEC+ agreed to for May, making this the third consecutive monthly increase from the group.

The seven nations locking this in are Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Oman. The UAE, notably, walked out of the group on Friday.

So OPEC+ is essentially printing production targets on paper while a key artery of global energy supply sits blocked. It's like announcing a road expansion on a route that's currently underwater.

The decision gets finalised at a Sunday policy meeting. Don't expect fireworks.

Until Hormuz reopens, this is a headline, not a catalyst.

Exxon $XOM ( ▼ 1.02% ) and ConocoPhillips $COP ( ▼ 2.06% ) have sent teams to Venezuela to meet government officials and scope out potential projects. Nobody's written a cheque yet, but the fact they're even in the room is a massive U-turn.

Three months ago, Exxon's CEO called Venezuela "uninvestable."

Now? Darren Woods is singing a very different tune. On Friday's earnings call he said Venezuela is "a huge resource that has now opened up more freely to the world... I feel positive about what's happening."

That's not a subtle shift. That's a full 180.

Exxon's team even inspected the Cerro Negro heavy oil project — the one the Venezuelan government nationalized back in 2007. So yeah, they're serious about kicking the tyres.

New energy laws are doing the heavy lifting here.

Venezuela has rolled out investor-friendly regulations and contract terms that are making the numbers look a lot more attractive to Western majors. High oil prices aren't hurting either.

Chevron $CVX ( ▼ 1.39% ) is already laughing.

They never left. While Exxon and Conoco were slamming the door, Chevron stayed put and is now pumping ~250K barrels per day — more than any other foreign producer in the country. CEO Mike Wirth put it plainly: "In any scenario, we remain the advantaged incumbent."

Translation: first mover wins. Again.

And Venezuela's output is already surging.

Oil exports hit 1.23M bbl/day in April, the highest monthly volume since 2018. That's a 14% jump from March, with 66 vessels departing Venezuelan waters vs. 61 the month before.

The taps are opening. The question is who gets to turn them.