October 8, 2026
Bonus Content: Software Stocks Just Hit 2026 Highs. The AI Threat Was Overblown.
Dear Reader,
Elon Musk can build rockets. Satellites. Factories the size of cities.
But he cannot build minerals he does not control.
I’m Dr. Mark Skousen. My career began inside CIA headquarters, spotting patterns before they became obvious. I warned about Black Monday weeks in advance and called the March 2009 market bottom.
And on January 1, 2027, a U.S. defense restriction expands across the full supply chain for certain covered magnets and strategic materials originating in China and other covered countries.
That is not a headline. It is a countdown.
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Because every launch system, satellite network, military contract and AI buildout ultimately comes back to physical inputs. No minerals… no machines. No machines… no empire.
One small public company is pursuing a direct line to a vast new source of critical minerals – far from the traditional chokepoints that have trapped Western industry for decades.
The company is pursuing rights to recover mineral-rich nodules from the seafloor. Think of them as loose, golf-ball-sized deposits containing metals the 21st-century economy consumes by the ton.
This could give Musk something money alone cannot guarantee: a strategic supply line beyond China’s grip.
And if he chooses to buy rather than wait? The crowd will not receive a polite warning. The ticker could be repriced before most investors finish reading the press release.
My analysis has flagged this mineral play plus two other public companies positioned at the exact pressure points Musk still needs to control: compute and satellite communications.
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A hard deadline is colliding with a strategic bottleneck. Waiting is now a decision of its own.
Yours for peace, prosperity, and liberty, AEIOU,
Dr. Mark Skousen
Macroeconomic Strategist, The Oxford Club
P.S. The January 1, 2027, rule is already on the books. Once the countdown hits zero, the market will not care that you meant to look at this later. This obscure mineral play could become essential to Musk’s empire. Learn more details before the deadline – click here now.
Software Stocks Just Hit 2026 Highs. The AI Threat Was Overblown.
For most of 2026, software stocks were the trade you avoided. The logic seemed airtight: AI would let companies build applications in-house for almost nothing, gutting the subscription revenue that had made the sector rich. Wall Street had a name for it. The “SaaSpocalypse” sent the S&P 500 software and services index down more than 26% from late January to its April low, and erased about $1 trillion in market value over a week at the worst of the fear.
Tuesday’s close told a different story.
The S&P 500 software and services index rose 1.3% to its highest level since November 2025, after posting its biggest quarterly gain from July through September since the second quarter of 2020. That combination, a new 2026 high on the back of the sector’s strongest quarter in six years, is the kind of price action that tells experienced traders a regime is changing, not just bouncing.
The earnings data is what made believers out of skeptics. The sector’s expected annual earnings growth rate for 2026 has climbed to 20.6%, up from 13.8% at the end of March, according to LSEG data. That is not a rounding error. It reflects a genuine revision in what analysts think these companies can earn in an AI-heavy environment, and it came after actual results from companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Accenture showed that AI was landing more as a product tailwind than a business destroyer.
LPL Financial’s chief cross-asset strategist Adam Turnquist put it plainly: “AI has been more of an enabler for a lot of these software companies, more than a disruptor,” adding that “software has recaptured the leadership reins” and that there is “a window here for outperformance in software over semiconductors.”
That rotation is worth pausing on. The software index is up 5% this year. Semiconductors ran on AI infrastructure spending. Software fell on fears that the same AI would make its products redundant. Now the evidence suggests those fears ran well ahead of reality, and capital is beginning to follow the revision.
Analyst calls this week reflect the same reassessment. Melius Research upgraded Microsoft to Buy from Hold with a $665 price target, arguing that Microsoft and cybersecurity companies “are even more needed” as AI leaders speak of risks to humanity, and that leaders like Microsoft will see a boost from AI fears. On the other side, Raymond James downgraded HubSpot to Market Perform from Outperform without a price target, citing the company’s near-term demand dynamics and potential packaging changes that could weigh on its net new growth in 2027. The sector is not moving as one block. Microsoft, with its deep enterprise relationships, sits in a stronger position than smaller CRM-adjacent names still working through pricing and churn questions.
The practical lesson here is one experienced traders learn repeatedly: the market’s consensus story about a sector rarely survives contact with actual earnings. Analysts now believe that fears over the “SaaSpocalypse” were overblown, a term that referred to concerns that companies could use AI to build applications in-house more cheaply, triggering a selloff in software stocks. That story was emotionally compelling and drove a severe dislocation. The traders who stayed disciplined, focused on earnings revisions rather than fear-driven headlines, and waited for confirmation before positioning for a recovery are the ones sitting at new 2026 highs with them.
Watching for continued earnings revision momentum in names like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Oracle heading into their next reporting cycles is the right focus now. New highs on rising earnings estimates is leadership worth respecting, not fading.