| Nvidia earnings tend to suck up all the air on Wall Street, and for good reason. With a $4.4 trillion market capitalization, the world’s most valuable company has the power to turbocharge or tank the stock market. That’s a lot of pressure on the leather-clad shoulders of CEO Jensen Huang. But while investors spent the day twiddling their thumbs in anticipation of the megacap darling’s report, Jonathan Levin was worrying about two other stocks: Costco and Walmart: “The most painful selloffs tend to involve things that people erroneously assume to be absolutely secure,” he writes. Costco’s $1 hot dogs and Walmart’s “everyday low prices” both fit that bill, which is why Wall Street calls them “all-weather stocks.” As Jonathan says, “their reputation for good value means they profit in good times and snap up market share when the economy goes south.” But the math behind the two untouchable stocks is even more confounding than a Jochizza (click at your own risk). “While valuation Cassandras tend to focus on the pricy multiples of artificial intelligence stocks, Walmart and Costco actually trade at richer blended forward price-earnings ratios (34.3 times and 47 times, respectively) than Nvidia (34 times), and the situation is getting less tenable with time,” he writes. “It’s highly unusual for a pair of earthly retail stocks to have forward earnings yields — the inverse of the price-earnings multiple — that are now significantly more paltry than the yield on a two-year Treasury note.” “The safety paradox can affect anything in finance and markets … up until 2007, many Baby Boomers — acting out of their lived experience — believed that single family housing never lost its value, pushing home values so high that the crash was an avalanche,” Jonathan explains. In 2025, there’s nothing more sure than a $4.99 Costco rotisserie chicken, but “the fundamentals might not have to change very much at all — nor should we expect them to — for the stocks to suffer a course correction.” Imagine taking your kid to McDonald’s, ordering a Happy Meal and being told they’re sold out because a bunch of adults wanted to resell the toys on eBay. It sounds asinine, but Gearoid Reidy says that’s exactly what happened in Japan: “The promotion seemed innocuous enough, offering two [Pokemon] cards with every meal, one fixed and one random. But stores were inundated with scalpers seeking to flip cards online — and social media flooded with photos of dumped, uneaten meals. Children were left in tears when the restaurants ran out.” There’s no easy solution to the collecting boom, he writes. But viral images of Chicken McNuggets in the trash aren’t a good look, especially at a time when global hunger is a mounting humanitarian concern. At least there’s positive news in that realm: Javier Blas says rice, the world’s most important crop for food security, just reached its lowest price in 18 years. “The key is productivity: more food from fewer farmers,” he writes. “The world will reap a record rice harvest of about 541 million tons in 2025-2026. For perspective, that would be double the crop of 1980-1981, while the amount of land in cultivation has changed little.” Without that uptick in productivity, Javier says “food prices would be significantly higher, and larger swathes of the world would regularly go hungry.” That’s great news. But whether the world will stay caffeinated is up for debate — coffee inventories are dwindling and bean prices are getting squeezed. Supply is just one of many challenges facing the coffee industry, along with intense competition and tepid growth. Chris Hughes says investors are savagely punishing Keurig Dr Pepper for paying $18 billion for its rival JDE Peet’s and taking on truckloads of debt in the process. The deal has wiped nearly 20% off the Snapple maker’s value. Down the road, Keurig Dr Pepper wants to split into two distinct businesses anyway — one for coffee and the other for soft drinks — so it makes little sense to load up on more coffee. | 
