In April, the S&P 500 energy sector ( XLE ) moved 1.2% in the upward direction this year, supported by a 0.8% rise in crude oil futures ( CL1:COM ). Against this backdrop, short interest trends among mid, large and mega-cap energy stocks show a wide divergence. Centrus Energy ( LEU ) was the most shorted stock in April, while Enterprise Products Partners ( EPD ) was the least shorted stock. Most s...
In April, the S&P 500 energy sector ( XLE ) moved 1.2% in the upward direction this year, supported by a 0.8% rise in crude oil futures ( CL1:COM ). Against this backdrop, short interest trends among mid, large and mega-cap energy stocks show a wide divergence. Centrus Energy ( LEU ) was the most shorted stock in April, while Enterprise Products Partners ( EPD ) was the least shorted stock. Most shorted energy stocks as of April end: Centrus Energy ( LEU ) 22.73% Solaris Energy Infrastructure ( SEI ) 22.36% Sable Offshore ( SOC ) 19.18% Transocean ( RIG ) 17.62% Northern Oil and Gas ( NOG ) 16.72% Least shorted energy stocks as of April end: Enterprise Products Partners ( EPD ) 0.78% MPLX ( MPLX ) 0.80% Energy Transfer ( ET ) 0.84% Chevron ( CVX ) 1.01% Exxon Mobil ( XOM ) 1.03% Energy ETFs: ( XLE ), ( AMLP ), ( VDE ), ( XOP ), ( OIH ), and ( IXC ).More on State Street® Energy Select Sector SPDR® ETF UAE Leaves OPEC: Here's What It Means For Oil Prices Energy Crisis Blows Softer In U.S.: AI Infrastructure Trade Appears Intact XOP: Re-Rating Non-Conflict Oil Stocks Most and least shorted energy stocks with up to $2B market cap as of April A look back at the UAE's OPEC membership and who else left the cartel
chuangxin zhou/iStock via Getty Images Thesis Tail hedges are hard to find, and most often investors just buy put options that get the premium squeezed out. There are very few buy-and-hold hedges out there, and most of them only do well in black swan scenarios. For example, we reviewed The Alpha Architect Tail Risk ETF ( CAOS ) here and determined that this name would only perform during scenarios...
chuangxin zhou/iStock via Getty Images Thesis Tail hedges are hard to find, and most often investors just buy put options that get the premium squeezed out. There are very few buy-and-hold hedges out there, and most of them only do well in black swan scenarios. For example, we reviewed The Alpha Architect Tail Risk ETF ( CAOS ) here and determined that this name would only perform during scenarios such as Covid. We also reviewed the AGF US Market Neutral Anti-Beta Fund ETF ( BTAL ), which in the past has been flat during slightly positive years in the S&P 500 ( SPX ), but this year has done absolutely horribly. In today's article we are going to present an alternative for buying put options and show investors how to use the 2x Long VIX Futures ETF ( UVIX ). First and foremost: UVIX is not a Buy and Hold As a leveraged ETF that goes long VIX futures, UVIX is not a buy and hold. Never forget this. If nothing happens in the market, the fund loses money via the roll and decay features. UVIX is to be used as a short-term trading tool only and as a more powerful alternative to buying puts outright. If we look at the fund chart in the past year, we can clearly see why it is not a buy and hold: Data by YCharts The fund has the following as its stated objective: The 2x Long VIX Futures ETF (Ticker: "UVIX") is a leveraged VIX-linked ETF that seeks to provide daily investment results, before fees and expenses, that correspond generally to twice the performance of the Long VIX Futures Index (Ticker: LONGVOL). The Long VIX Futures Index expresses the daily performance of a theoretical portfolio of first and second month VIX futures contracts that are rolled daily. The Index determines its daily settlement price from the Time Weighted Average Price (TWAP) of its theoretical portfolio over the last 15 minutes of the regular equity trading session. We can see the fund holdings reflective of that objective statement: Holdings (Fund Website) The name contains May 2026 and June 2026 V...
U.S. flags at the Washington Monument, the dome of the U.S. Capitol can be seen in the background. Sebastian Gollnow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images Control of the U.S. Senate in this year's midterms remains a tossup just over six months from election day, according to traders on prediction markets platform Kalshi. Traders give both Republicans and Democrats a 50% chance of winning control of th...
U.S. flags at the Washington Monument, the dome of the U.S. Capitol can be seen in the background. Sebastian Gollnow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images Control of the U.S. Senate in this year's midterms remains a tossup just over six months from election day, according to traders on prediction markets platform Kalshi. Traders give both Republicans and Democrats a 50% chance of winning control of the upper chamber. While traders have Democrats as favorites to flip control of the House of Representatives, odds in the Senate have narrowed in 2026. Republicans saw their odds of maintaining their majority fall from 67% on January 1 throughout that month and February, but the declines intensified in March as traders priced in the political consequences of the U.S.-Iran war. Since the start of the conflict, President Donald Trump 's approval rating has fallen to its lowest levels of his second term in many polls. Democrats have an uphill climb to flip control of the Senate, as the party will have to win multiple states that Trump won in 2024 by double-digits — like Ohio, Iowa, Texas or Alaska — to have a shot at a majority. However, in the middle of April, Democrats were priced with a 54% chance to win the chamber. In a Friday note, Bank of America economist Claudio Irigoyen said these odds are having an impact on policy. "The interesting thing about these moves is that, coupled with falling approval ratings for the US administration, incentives are mounting for the war in Iran to reach a resolution," Irigoyen wrote. "In our view, this is evidenced in the US administration's push to reach a deal." Traders on Polymarket also see the Senate as a tossup, with Democrats holding a 52% chance of winning while Republicans hold 50% odds. Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes a CNBC minority investment. Markets shift and headlines fade, but the core principles of building long-term wealth remain constant. Join us for our third CNBC Pro LIVE, where ...
Earnings Call Insights: Forum Energy Technologies (FET) Q1 2026 Management view "Our first quarter results reinforced our confidence in the path we presented with FET 2030." (President, CEO & Director Neal Lux) "Year-over-year, we increased revenue 8%, EBITDA 14% and net income 300%... Orders were up 10% year-over-year with a book-to-bill of 106%... Compared to the first quarter of last year, our ...
Earnings Call Insights: Forum Energy Technologies (FET) Q1 2026 Management view "Our first quarter results reinforced our confidence in the path we presented with FET 2030." (President, CEO & Director Neal Lux) "Year-over-year, we increased revenue 8%, EBITDA 14% and net income 300%... Orders were up 10% year-over-year with a book-to-bill of 106%... Compared to the first quarter of last year, our backlog is up 44%... These efforts have achieved $15 million of annualized savings." (President, CEO & Director Lux) "We are forecasting second quarter EBITDA of between $24 million and $30 million" and "we are raising the midpoint of our EBITDA guidance to $103 million." (President, CEO & Director Lux) "Importantly, while we are seeing signs of increased activity... our forecast conservatively assumes a flat market." (President, CEO & Director Lux) "First quarter revenue of $209 million came in near the top end of our guidance" and "Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $23 million, in line with our guidance." (Executive VP & CFO David Williams) "Consolidated free cash flow was $1 million, consistent with our guidance." (Executive VP & CFO Williams) "Duracoil-95... is continuing to gain traction and is now active on 3 continents" and "we received a significant order for multiple systems to be deployed in Argentina this year" for DuraLine. (President, CEO & Director Lux) "We have developed patent-pending software for the FR120 iron roughneck... and increases drilling efficiency by 30%." (President, CEO & Director Lux) Outlook "We are forecasting revenue between $200 million and $225 million and EBITDA between $24 million to $30 million" for Q2, with "Adjusted net income expected for the second quarter... between $6 million and $11 million." (Executive VP & CFO Williams) "We are raising the bottom end of our EBITDA guidance range from $90 million to $95 million" while "maintaining our revenue guidance of $800 million to $880 million." (Executive VP & CFO Williams) "For adjuste...
The scaffolding layer that developers once needed to ship LLM applications — indexing layers, query engines, retrieval pipelines, carefully orchestrated agent loops — is collapsing. And according to Jerry Liu, co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, that's not a problem. It's the point. “As a result, there's less of a need for frameworks to actually help users compose these deterministic workflows in a ...
The scaffolding layer that developers once needed to ship LLM applications — indexing layers, query engines, retrieval pipelines, carefully orchestrated agent loops — is collapsing. And according to Jerry Liu, co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, that's not a problem. It's the point. “As a result, there's less of a need for frameworks to actually help users compose these deterministic workflows in a light and shallow manner,” Jerry Liu, co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, explains in a new VentureBeat Beyond the Pilot podcast . Context is becoming the moat Liu’s LlamaIndex is one of the foremost retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks connecting private, custom, and domain-specific data to LLMs. But even he acknowledges that these types of frameworks are becoming less relevant. With every new release, models demonstrate incremental capabilities to reason over “massive amounts” of unstructured data, and they’re getting better at it than humans, he notes. They can be trusted to reason extensively, self-correct, and perform multi-step planning; Modern Context Protocol (MCP) and Claude Agent Skills plug-ins allow models to discover and use tools without requiring integrations for every one independently. Agent patterns have consolidated toward what Liu calls a "managed agent diagram" — a harness layer combined with tools, MCP connectors, and skills plug-ins, rather than custom-built orchestration for every workflow. Further, coding agents excel at writing code, meaning devs don’t need to rely on extensive libraries. In fact, about 95% of LlamaIndex code is generated by AI. “Engineers are not actually writing real code,” Liu said. “They're all typing in natural language.” This means the layers between programmers and non-programmers is collapsing, because “the new programming language is essentially English.” Instead of manual coding or struggling to understand API and document integration, devs can just point Claude Code at it. “This type of stuff was either extremel...
With their last title a decade ago, young players moving on and coach churn, Middlesex are no longer even the most famous team that call Lord’s home Middlesex is unlike every other English county in at least one very important way. It doesn’t actually exist. It was abolished by the London Government Act of 1963, persisted, in dotage, as a postal subdivision, until Royal Mail put it to sleep in 199...
With their last title a decade ago, young players moving on and coach churn, Middlesex are no longer even the most famous team that call Lord’s home Middlesex is unlike every other English county in at least one very important way. It doesn’t actually exist. It was abolished by the London Government Act of 1963, persisted, in dotage, as a postal subdivision, until Royal Mail put it to sleep in 1996. Today, you’ll find it on the tiles of Swiss Cottage Tube station – which are embossed with its badge of three seaxes – the pediment of the Sessions House in Clerkenwell, the mailing addresses of people who just won’t let go, the minutes of Spelthorne council, the titles of three hospitals, a university, assorted sports teams and tournaments, and the cricket club. Those who don’t know any better will tell you English cricket is a country pursuit. It’s not. Sport England’s latest data showed 250,000 Londoners played at least once last year. That’s around 20% of the adult playing population in England and Wales. Walk from Lord’s into the playing fields in Regent’s Park and you will find five, six, seven games going on all at once on the public pitches. Over the road at Fab’s Food & Wine they always have the Indian Premier League on in the afternoons, streaming on a mobile phone. The guy who runs it tells me he is a Royal Challengers Bengaluru fan; I ask if he knows which county plays at the ground around the corner. “No idea.” Continue reading...
Top US General Signals Russia Is Helping Iran In War Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times, The highest-ranking U.S. general on Thursday signaled that the Russian government is assisting the Iranian regime in its war with the United States. In comments before Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Dan Caine, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded in an affirmative manner to a ques...
Top US General Signals Russia Is Helping Iran In War Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times, The highest-ranking U.S. general on Thursday signaled that the Russian government is assisting the Iranian regime in its war with the United States. In comments before Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Dan Caine, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded in an affirmative manner to a question from the panel’s chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Ala.), about whether there is Russian involvement. “General Caine, there’s no question that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is taking serious action to undermine our efforts for success in Iran. Is there any question about that?” Wicker asked the general. Without going into detail, Caine said, “I think there’s actions and activities. [I’m] mindful of the hearing room we’re in, but there’s, there’s, there’s definitely some action there." Meanwhile, Iran’s regime said on Thursday it would respond with attacks on U.S. military positions if Washington renewed attacks on the country in the midst of a ceasefire and a U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports. The country’s leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said in a statement through state-run media that it would assert control over the Strait of Hormuz, which could complicate plans to reopen the key waterway. Any U.S. attack on Iran, even if limited, will usher in “long and painful strikes” on America’s regional positions, a senior Revolutionary Guards official said. “We’ve seen what happened to your regional bases, we will see the same thing happen to your warships,” Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force Commander Majid Mousavi was quoted by Iranian media as saying. Earlier this week, Iran’s foreign minister traveled to Russia to meet with Putin. “As you can see, we have always had close consultations with Russia and have had continuous and bilateral consultations on a wide range of issues, especially regional issues,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a Telegram post o...
According to a recent SEC filing , WIN Advisors, Inc. reduced its holdings in First Trust Large Cap Growth AlphaDEX Fund (NASDAQ:FTC) by 65,497 shares during the first quarter of 2026. The estimated transaction value was $10.6 million, calculated using quarterly average pricing. At quarter-end, the remaining position totaled 25,359 shares valued at $3.9 million. The First Trust Large Cap Growth Al...
According to a recent SEC filing , WIN Advisors, Inc. reduced its holdings in First Trust Large Cap Growth AlphaDEX Fund (NASDAQ:FTC) by 65,497 shares during the first quarter of 2026. The estimated transaction value was $10.6 million, calculated using quarterly average pricing. At quarter-end, the remaining position totaled 25,359 shares valued at $3.9 million. The First Trust Large Cap Growth AlphaDEX Fund (FTC) is a passively managed exchange-traded fund that tracks the Nasdaq AlphaDEX Large Cap Growth Index. WIN Advisors' decision to trim nearly $10.6 million worth of its FTC position is notable -- not because it signals trouble with the fund itself, but because of the size of the reduction. Selling three-quarters of what had been a nearly 7% position for WIN is a meaningful portfolio move. Continue reading
A rare opportunity is opening up in rates derivatives underlying the $31 trillion Treasury market: Division at the Federal Reserve has traders placing bets on interest-rate cuts next year while also hedging for a hike. Wagers cropped up in the wake of this week’s Fed meeting targeting two quarter-point increases in the US by September 2027 and two new positions in protection for rate hikes in the ...
A rare opportunity is opening up in rates derivatives underlying the $31 trillion Treasury market: Division at the Federal Reserve has traders placing bets on interest-rate cuts next year while also hedging for a hike. Wagers cropped up in the wake of this week’s Fed meeting targeting two quarter-point increases in the US by September 2027 and two new positions in protection for rate hikes in the coming months, as well as continuing demand for more than one reduction by March. It reveals that market participants are increasing the variety of bets in their playbooks after some US central bankers made clear this week that they see the potential for the Fed’s next move to be a hike. “People three months ago hadn’t envisioned higher rates and given 2022, don’t want to be caught flat footed so hedge upside risk,” said John Briggs , head of US rates strategist at Natixis North America, referring to the last rate-hiking cycle when investors got hammered. One trade in the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR, which closely tracks pricing around policy expectations, futures market, is already starting to make money with the hawkish scenario shift. In the December 2026-March 2027 SOFR spread, volumes surged to 128,000 on Wednesday, the second biggest day’s trading. Flows included a large steepener position – targeting the March 2027 contract to underperform the December 2026 – which was placed in the lead up to the central bank policy decision. By the end of the day, the position had nearly doubled in value for an in-running profit of almost $2 million. Meanwhile, demand remains for hedges around a couple of rate cuts by March , which was also a popular play on Thursday. Ed Al-Hussainy , portfolio manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, said the labor market is a potential “blind spot” that would benefit from such trades. “If the unemployment rate goes up at any point this year meaningfully, then you’re going to have to bring those future cuts back in,” said Al-Hus...