BBD Investors

  Stargate's First Scare: What Oracle's Force Majeure Notice Means for the AI Buildout The First Crack in the Foundation Oracle sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl Capital, the lender backing a massive data center in New Mexico. The notice shields Oracle from liability if the project fails to secure certain permits. The project is called Jupiter. It is part of Stargate, the $500 billion AI infrastructure venture announced with great fanfare at the White House. The headline made the rounds. Oracle's stock fell about 3.5%. Financial commentators called it an attempt to wriggle out of upcoming payments. The data center, slated to provide 2.45 gigawatts of compute power for OpenAI, might not be finished by 2028. This is the first real scare for the AI buildout. It will not be the last. But it is worth understanding what happened, why it happened, and what it tells us about the broader project of building the physical infrastructure for artificial intelligence. The AI buildo...

  The BDC That Refused to Blink: Inside Barings' Rating Upgrade The Upgrade That Wasn't Supposed to Happen I wrote the wrong thing. Back in April 2025, I looked at Barings BDC - ticker BBDC, in case you live under a rock or just don't care about business development companies - and I said hold. Not buy. Not run for the hills. Just hold. The stock had sold off. The yield looked tempting. But the math felt fragile. I moved on. Then the thing went and outperformed anyway. Wells Fargo upgraded BBDC from Equal-Weight to Overweight on May 28, 2025, lifting its price target to $9.50 from $8.50. Weiss Ratings followed in November, pushing the stock to a Buy (B-). By the time the dust settled, I was sitting on a rating I no longer believed in. So I did what any stubborn analyst does when the market proves them wrong. I went back and read everything. The Q4 2025 transcript. The dividend coverage sheets. The non-accrual figures. And what I found made the upgrade make sense - not as a ...

  AI Stocks May Be Whistling Past the Graveyard, And the Graveyard Is Getting Crowded The market is up. Not all of it. Just the parts that matter. The parts that people talk about at dinner. The parts that make the numbers on the screen go green. Nvidia is still a five-trillion-dollar company. Broadcom is still a darling. Oracle still has a story. You can hear the whistling from here. It’s a cheerful tune. It’s the tune you whistle when you walk past a graveyard at night. You don’t look at the headstones. You keep your eyes forward. You keep your pace steady. The whistle is not for the dead. It’s for you. The thing about the graveyard is that it’s patient. It doesn’t mind the whistling. It’s been there a long time. It will be there when the tune changes. What the Whistling Sounds Like The Numbers That Don’t Add Up You don’t need to be a quant to see it. You just need to read. Worldwide AI spending is projected to hit $2.7 trillion in 2026. That’s a 49.5% jump from the year before, ...

The Quiet Machine on the OTC: Inside a 5.2% Yield You do not hear much about OTC Markets Group. That is fine. The company does not want you to hear much. It sits in a corner of the financial world that most investors ignore. It runs the market for stocks that do not trade on the big exchanges. Pink sheets. Thin volume. Names you have never heard of. And yet, this quiet operation hands out a dividend yield of around 5.2% to the people who own it. That is not a typo. A company that facilitates trading in the shadows pays its shareholders like a blue-chip utility. There is a story here. It is not a loud story. It is a story about a capital-light business that just keeps working. What Is OTC Markets Group and Why Should You Care OTCM operates a marketplace for over-the-counter securities. Think of it as the landlord of a building nobody photographs. The tenants are thousands of small and foreign companies that want their shares traded in the United States without the cost and scrutiny of a...

  Tesla's Stock Drops 6% as Cybercab Update 'Underwhelms' Wall Street The numbers tell a story. Tesla shares slid 6% on Friday. That's about $100 billion in market cap gone in a single session. The stock closed at roughly $354, down from $376 the day before. What happened? The company held a Cybercab event Thursday in Austin. Invite only. No livestream. No Elon Musk. The company said users could now catch a driverless trip in a Cybercab within a geofenced area around Austin. That was basically it. Wall Street wasn't impressed. Wells Fargo analyst Colin Langan put it bluntly. The Cybercab launch "underwhelms," he wrote. The event offered few surprises and lacked specifics on fleet size or the rollout timeline. The stock dropped more than 6%. Its worst day since July 23, when it plunged 15%. Friday's decline erased Thursday's 5.4% pre-event rally. Buy the rumor, sell the news. The pattern holds. What Actually Happened at the Cybercab Event Tesla firs...

  American Workers Have Slammed the Brakes on Switching Jobs The résumé sits unfinished in a Google Doc. The LinkedIn tab stays open, untouched. For millions of American workers, the search for something better has ground to a halt. Not because the jobs aren't there. They've done the math. The door, it turns out, is barely open. Three years ago, you couldn't keep people in their seats. The Great Resignation was in full swing. Workers quit in droves, 4.5 million a month at the peak. They chased higher pay, better flexibility, a life that didn't make them miserable. And for a while, it worked. Job switchers were pulling down nearly 18% wage growth while the loyal saps who stayed put settled for 7%. That was then. Today, the numbers tell a different story. The quits rate sits at 2.0%, near its lowest level in a decade. Workers across every sector are switching jobs about as infrequently as they were in the years when the job market was still clawing its way back from the 2...

  The U.S. Job Market: Still Standing, For Now You turn on the news and they tell you the economy is fine. Jobs are up. Unemployment is low. The machine keeps chugging along. Then you talk to your neighbor who just got laid off from a tech company. Your cousin with the business degree who's been job hunting for six months. The barista with a master's who can't afford rent. Both things are true. That's the hell of it. The U.S. job market in 2026 is a paradox wrapped in a spreadsheet. The headline numbers scream resilience. The fine print whispers trouble. And somewhere in between, millions of Americans are trying to figure out if they're winning or losing, and whether anyone even knows the difference anymore. Let's look at the mess. The Numbers Don't Lie On September 4, 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped its August jobs report. Employers added 162,000 jobs. Economists had predicted 53,000. They were off by a factor of three. The unemployment rate he...