5 Things We Learned This Week - 5/31/2026

In 1999, a minimum-wage worker needed 18 years of salary to buy 1% of the S&P 500. Today that same stake takes 440 years.

At the top of the market it gets more dizzying still. Buying 1% of Nvidia now takes 2,807 minimum-wage salaries, a twentyfold jump since 2010. Translation: more than two full working lives, lived back to back, with no bathroom breaks.

The door to meaningful stock ownership hasn't just narrowed. It's been welded shut and painted to match the wall.

The federal minimum wage is up 41% since 1999. The stock market is up more than 2,000%. And the top 10 S&P 500 companies now make up nearly 41% of the index. That means every American's 401(k) quietly funnels retirement dollars into the same narrow handful of mega-caps, month after month, no questions asked.

Great deal if you work at Nvidia, where roughly half of employees have a net worth above $25 million. Less great if you don't. The rules of the index fund movement guarantee American workers will park the lion's share of their savings in mega-cap stocks every month, whether they have heard of the companies or not. Most can't even spell the largest one they own. Try saying "Nvidia" three times fast at a cocktail party and watch what happens.

This isn't an accident. It's how the system was built. A market-cap-weighted allocation scheme plus government-sponsored auto-enrollment created a feedback loop that concentrates capital in the same handful of names and rewards them for already being big. Free enterprise, or a polite Ponzi?

Some might even call today's 401(k) system a Trojan Horse.

Passive investment products have been marketed as a gift to help the average American household get ahead. In certain ways, they have been helpful. For example, someone can pay less than 0.1% to own a passive fund whereas many active funds are closer to 1.0%. But what's also going on behind the scenes with this system is the nation's savings are being systematically steered to favor the richest companies. Is it a coincidence that mega firms and their founders also tend to make the biggest political contributions?

Raising the minimum wage won't fix the wealth gap. Doing that just compresses margins for the small businesses least able to absorb the hit.

The real lever is reforming how retirement capital flows. Nudge 401(k) defaults toward equal-weight or small-cap-tilted options and you spread trillions more broadly while weakening a feedback loop that helps the rich get relatively richer every year.

In 2010, the federal government cut a check the size of a small country to save the economy. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, peaked that year at about 2% of GDP. Larry Summers spent the next decade defending it. Conservatives spent the next decade attacking it. Everyone agreed the number was big.

In 2026, five companies are outspending it.

Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle are on track to commit roughly $725 billion of capex this year, mostly for AI infrastructure. That's 2.4% of U.S. GDP, bigger than peak ARRA, twice the Marshall Plan flow, and twice the 2000 telecom capex peak. It is the largest non-COVID, non-wartime investment flow in U.S. history, sitting on five balance sheets.

That's why Powell calls AI capex a "major driver of the economy," why Goldman just lifted its 2026 S&P 500 EPS estimate to $340, and why the recession consensus expected hasn't shown up. Capex is somebody else's revenue. The good news about this capex surge is it means the mega caps aren't just using most of their abundant cash flow to buy back their own shares anymore. In other words, capital is getting more broadly distributed. 

Here's the catch. The right historical analog isn't 2009. It's 1999. When private infrastructure capex of this scale rolls over, recession within 12 to 24 months is the base case.

We recently built a Capex Pulse score to flash early warning signs. This should help us know when it's time to get more defensive in the portfolio. Leading indicators we are watching every week include: hyper-scaler guidance revisions, data-center lease cancellations, new colocation deal flow, and power-queue withdrawals.

Cash money market funds are near an all-time high of $8 trillion. Despite the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates, investors are continuing to park record amounts of capital in these accounts to lock in competitive yields and shelter money from market volatility.

The money market rate is around 4% right now. That sounds like a real return — and it is, barely (in pre-tax nominal terms).

Here is the math most people are not running: PCE inflation came in at 3.8% in April, so even if you earn 4.5% in a money market and your marginal tax rate is 35%, your after-tax yield is 2.9%. That means your real return, which is what you actually kept after taxes and inflation, is negative 0.9%. Few people do this kind of math, which means many investors are losing purchasing power while feeling like they are being prudent.

This does not imply holding cash is always wrong. Cash has a role: it is the oxygen that lets you stay in the game during drawdowns, it funds short-term obligations, and it keeps you from panic-selling equities at the wrong time. But 'I'll just sit in cash until things are clearer' is not a wealth strategy. It is a slow drain that feels like safety. The relevant question is not 'is my cash safe?' The relevant question is 'what is my cash actually doing to my purchasing power over the next 12 to 24 months?' The answer to that question is uncomfortable for anyone who has moved meaningfully to the sidelines waiting for a cleaner entry point that markets rarely provide on schedule.

SLB, the company formerly known as Schlumberger, is the best oilfield services franchise on the planet. The other part of the story is that it's quietly becoming an energy-technology platform.

Three engines are pulling in the same direction. The Delfi data stack and Lumi AI platform sit underneath the workflows of nearly every major operator. The rotary-steerable drilling tools are best in class. And Production Systems, turbocharged by the ChampionX deal, jumped 23.5% in Q1 of 2026. Digital revenue went from $2.0 billion in 2023 to $2.7 billion in 2025, and the mix continues to shift toward asset-light, software-like earnings.

Q1 revenue of $8.7 billion beat the Street despite Iran-related disruption. Management still guides to a structurally stronger 2027 and 2028. Over the last ten years, SLB's P/E has gone from 63 to 20, while the firm's ROE has gone from -4% to 14%. We see that as buying much better fundamental quality for a much cheaper price. 

SLB's backlog has doubled since 2021. Middle East exposure is best in class. Venezuela is first-mover optionality nobody else owns. With global oil inventories tightening into summer, pullbacks in SLB look like gifts, not warnings.

Macro is a key tailwind for SLB. Carlyle's Jeff Currie recently told CNBC that Asian oil inventories are at "minimum operating levels," with Europe close behind and the U.S. potentially short by July. "Every day that goes by, Iran's negotiating leverage compounds," Currie says. "Why? Because inventories of oil continue to drop". This means another oil price spike may be closer than the tape suggests.

The Iran conflict and Strait of Hormuz disruption are forcing Western producers to drill harder, faster, and in tougher geologies, all of which lifts SLB's long-term pricing power. And SLB is the only international services firm currently operating in Venezuela, where rigs are poised to ramp considerably over the next few years.

A friend turned 69 this year and decided it was a good time to start climbing California's tallest peaks. He got back from his first big hike the other day and said something that stuck: "The climb down was harder than the climb up."

He loved the trip, but on the way down his legs ached. The consistent downward pressure gave him cramps he hadn't felt in years, and by the bottom he was wrecked. He'd assumed reaching the summit was going to be the hardest part of the journey. But it was those first few hours after achieving his goal that turned out to be much tougher.

John Lennon wrote "Help!" in 1965, at the peak of Beatlemania, when he was 25 and one of the most famous people alive. He later told Playboy it was "a real cry for help" from what he called his "fat Elvis period," when he was eating heavily, deeply insecure, and going through "deep depressions where I would like to jump out the window." Most listeners heard a catchy pop song; Lennon was drowning inside it.

Olympic athletes describe something similar. Michael Phelps has said that after the medals ended he "straight wanted to die," and Allison Schmitt fell into severe depression after winning gold. Researchers call it the post-Olympic blues, and Team GB built a six-stage decompression protocol to bring athletes back down.

Psychologists call this broader pattern the 'arrival fallacy'. Dopamine drops, the structure of our days disappears, and we ask, "Is this all there is?"

If you've felt that way after retiring, selling a business, receiving an inheritance, or successfully sending kids to college to create an empty nest, you're not broken. You're human.

Three things help:

• Name a new climb before the current one ends. It doesn't have to be grand, but it has to be yours.

• Honor the descent. Rest, reflect, talk to someone. Come down slowly. 

• Trade arrival for engagement. The joy was never at the top. It was in becoming the person who could get there.

My friend is already picking his next peak. Smart man.