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A conversation with Gabe Marshank… How to make money from basic economics… Be ‘right and unlucky’… The AI power boom… The price that needs to go higher… A company well positioned to profit… Learn more here…
Editor’s note: In today’s Digest, we’re taking a break from the daily news on Iran, inflation, and AI to bring you a special Q&A that our Director of Research Matt Weinschenk recently had with Stansberry Research senior analyst and Market Maven editor Gabe Marshank…
Before joining Stansberry Research a few years ago, Gabe spent nearly 30 years at the top of the hedge-fund world.
He worked alongside folks like Leon Cooperman at Omega Advisors, David Einhorn at Greenlight Capital, and Steve Cohen at SAC Capital, helping generate hundreds of millions in gains for some of the most demanding investors alive.
Now, he puts his skills and investing experience to work for Stansberry Research subscribers…
In this conversation – pulled from our weekly Top Stocks show on YouTube and edited for length and clarity – Gabe joined Matt to talk about how he thinks about markets… why an overlooked energy story is bigger than most people realize (it has to do with the longer-term story about AI)… and one of his favorite stocks to play this story.
I (Corey McLaughlin) hope you enjoy… and if you’re interested in learning more about Gabe’s investment thesis about energy in America, he recently laid out all the details in a free presentation. More on that at the end of today’s issue…
Why you can ignore Wall Street’s obsessions…
Matt Weinschenk: Gabe, you’ve had this very specific investing niche throughout your career where you found huge opportunities in the industrial and commodity markets. Why there?
Gabe Marshank: I started from the principle that I could work harder, or I could work smarter. In 1997, when I was at Omega, all these tech guys were running everywhere trying to chase everything. It was kind of the beginning of the dot-com boom. And everyone was trying to tell me how an OC-192 self-healing ring worked [in network connections]. I didn’t want to do that. It seemed too hard. But if I went and looked at industries that nobody else was following, there was nobody else following them. It’s like playing basketball against short people. I’d rather do that than try to go against the toughest guy on the playground.
What I found is that a lot of the best hedge-fund managers have come out of cyclical and industrial industries, because it forces a real grounding in economics, and if you get the economics right in these industries, you can make a lot of money. And the thing I’ve always focused on – always, always, always – is what’s happening on the supply side. Because what you find on Wall Street is economists sitting there looking at a crystal ball saying, “I think GDP is going to grow 3.4% this year, not 3.3%.” Who cares? If you have a situation where the supply of iron ore could go up by 10%, why does it matter whether Japan grows at 3.3% or 3.4%? So I’ve always focused on supply, and that has been the way I’ve gotten into a lot of profitable trades.
Matt: Give us a classic example – a supply story that played out exactly the way you’d expect.
Gabe: Coal is a good one. Utilities were phasing out their old coal plants. Some of it was driven by environmental regulations, but a lot of it was just that these plants were getting to the end of their useful life, getting more expensive to run. Demand started falling, and it fell continuously until last year. And the stock market said, “Nobody’s ever going to use coal again.” The stocks went down a ton. They lost access to capital. Companies had to close mines. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you got this supply crunch.
You could just look at where supply was going versus where demand was. You knew the market was going to be undersupplied. Sure enough, coal prices more than doubled. These stocks went absolutely ballistic. I have a friend who took the money he made on that trade and bought a villa in central Italy we now call Domaine Appalachia.
Matt: So it was a function of there being certain things in the world that you can only make more of with a huge investment in a long time frame… How do you apply that same thinking when you’re looking at any stock, not just a commodity?
Gabe: The first thing I’ve ever told any analyst who has come to work with me is that it doesn’t start with stocks. It starts with companies. And companies start with their actual business model, and it’s something a lot of people forget. Just ask yourself, “How does this company make money?”
Here’s a great example: British Airways. You’d probably say it makes money flying planes around. But if you really look, British Airways makes money by operating premium cabin service – business class and first class from New York to London. That’s it. That’s 100% of its profits. The rest of the network is there to feed [that one route]…
And one of the things I love is when you find an idea and you say to yourself, “If I get this one thing right, I get paid.” Because you always want to look back and ask, “If the stock goes up, was I right, or was I lucky? If the stock goes down, was I unlucky, or was I dumb?” You want to be in the “right and unlucky” camp. You never want to be “lucky and dumb.”
The AI power boom…
Matt: Let’s get into the big story you’ve been focused on. People have seen the headlines about AI power demand… Everyone’s saying their power bill is going up. It’s on the front page. How can this story not already be priced in the market?
Gabe: In most cyclical industries, it takes a couple of years to open a new mine or new factory. Electricity is regulated. It has to be – it’s literally a matter of life and death. If there isn’t enough reserve capacity, bad things happen. You can get a blackout like the Northeast had in 2004. You can get a hospital without power for lifesaving equipment. What complicates it is that our system in the U.S. is incredibly complex.
You’ve got regional grid operators and regional transmission organizations. There are organizations you probably have never heard of, but you might have heard of ERCOT [the Electric Reliability Council of Texas]. These are the guys who oversaw the Texas grid when it went down during Winter Storm Uri. PJM Interconnection is the one out here in [the mid-Atlantic] that operates the largest grid in America… They’ve all got to tie in together… and you have this huge mishmash of regulatory interference at the federal and state levels… It’s a mess.
So unlike most cyclical industries, where some people say, “Hey, I want to flip the switch,” you can’t do that in energy and power… It can take as much as eight years for a new facility to come on.
And on top of that, we had a bad lesson to unlearn. Back in 2000 or 2001, you had the California energy crisis. We had overbuilt. Those were the Enron days. The whole industry went into restructuring. Capital never really came back. Nobody ever said, “I want to invest in utilities.” One guy was investing in utilities – Warren Buffett. And that should tell you how little supply was coming on… So the backdrop going into the AI era was an industry that was wildly underinvested. And I can’t emphasize how critical that is. People thought demand was going to be flat forever.
We were tracking right along the path where electricity intensity – the amount of electricity it takes to produce a dollar of gross domestic product (“GDP”) – was expected to decline. That’s what happened in Japan, and there was every reason to believe we were heading in the same direction.
And then one day ChatGPT came along and turned it all on its head. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is one of the most seminal events in at least modern economic history. And it was so electrically intense that demand went from well below GDP growth to this accelerating spike. At the same time, supply hadn’t caught up.
Matt: This won’t be fixed next year or the following year. You’ve got a view that over the next five or 10 years we are going to be short on power?
Gabe: Well, I don’t have the view. The market has the view… That’s one of the things that’s part of my framework – listen to what the market is giving me… If you look right now, Nvidia (NVDA) is breaking out to new highs. That’s an astonishing thing to say. You have the world’s largest company adding hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap in a day.
The hyperscalers – Amazon (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META), Alphabet (GOOGL), and so forth – are going to spend $600 billion in capital expenditures (“capex”) this year. About nine months ago, that number was $400 billion.
Matt: There was a time when there was a big capex announcement, and the stocks would go up. And then there was a time when there was a big capex announcement, and the reaction started to get muted. But now it has gone back to big capex [meaning] big stock moves like these are being highly approved by the market.
Gabe: That’s right, the market is approving this spending. It’s saying these companies can earn a return. Now, I’m deeply skeptical over whether these companies can earn a return. In fact, I doubt that OpenAI will ever earn a return… Because the fact is that Claude got invented not out of thin air but with just a bunch of money getting poured into the ground, and it was able to take away OpenAI’s business.
But I don’t have to make that bet, right? I don’t have to be the one who’s deciding if the money is going to make sense, because I can own the companies where they’re spending the money.
What has gotten left behind…
Matt: OK, so as you follow this value chain, what’s the answer to keep our power grid going?
Gabe: If you’re listening to what the market is telling you, GE Vernova (GEV) – the biggest U.S.-based turbine manufacturer – went from $100 to $400 in a year… Quanta Services (PWR), which is the company that puts in long-haul transmission lines, went from $300 to $630. These are not small companies. But they’re telling you something is really moving.
The [thing] that has gotten left behind is natural gas. Natural gas is the critical swing fuel in the U.S. energy stack… At the baseload, you have the stuff that runs all the time. That’s nuclear, hydro, a lot of the old coal facilities. Then you have solar and wind, which are fine when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but you can’t predict when they run.
You need something that can act as a swing producer, and that’s natural gas. It’s very efficient, it’s much cleaner than coal, and it’s a lot easier to put up… Liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) is a technology that has been around for a long time but is kind of getting going in real time. I see LNG capacity following the same path that we saw with U.S. onshore drilling. And you’ve now got a second demand driver, which is the LNG export market…
New nuclear is the only real alternative, and that’s basically a generational project…
Matt: But the technology with LNG is settled. We know how to build a natural gas plant. They [can build] them on a scale sometimes that can actually be at the data centers.
Gabe: But despite two enormous demand drivers ‒ new domestic power generation and a booming LNG export market – natural gas prices are still near historic lows. Historically, there’s a 6-to-1 ratio in terms of pricing with oil. If oil is at $90, oil-equivalency math says gas should be trading around $15. It’s at $3.
At some point, that has got to end. You can’t have a free commodity forever. It’s going to be valued at what it’s worth… and that’s going to be an incentive [for companies to get more gas]. The market is going to find a way to get more gas.
A stock worth knowing about…
Matt: If you like this natural gas thesis, why don’t you tell us about your favorite investments to play it?
Gabe: Again, what I find really easy is supply and demand. My old boss at Pequot Capital Management, Art Samberg, rest his soul, used to say the best management is excess demand… I wanted to find the lowest-cost producer of natural gas. That’s Antero Resources (AR). It’s actually headquartered in Denver, with assets in the Marcellus Shale… That’s mostly in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania… right next to “Data-Center Alley” in Virginia. It has very, very big wells, is very focused on keeping operational costs low, and has access to a pipeline system that gets its gas out for a very low cost. These guys are incredibly well positioned.
Matt: They have about an $11 billion market cap on $800 million of free cash, call it 10 times free cash flow. But with natural gas at $2.50 [per million British thermal units (“MMBtu”)], they make about $1 billion more in free cash flow for every dollar that natural gas goes up. So if natural gas goes to $5 or $6 MMBtu, [Antero] is going to have $5 billion or $6 billion of free cash flow and be trading at 5 times, which is remarkable… if you put a forward multiple on that.
Gabe: It’s really as simple as that… Keep it simple, stupid. It shouldn’t take you all the work in the world to arrive at a really simple and obvious answer – and that’s it… If you’re bullish on natural gas, you can be bullish on Antero Resources.
Editor’s note: Before Gabe buys any stock, he asks himself one thing: “What is the single thing I need to get right to make money?”
If you can answer it clearly, you understand the investment. If you can’t, you’re relying on luck. For Antero Resources, the answer is the price of natural gas. For British Airways, it’s one transatlantic route in business class.
The simpler the answer, the better your chances of knowing whether you’re right or wrong about an investment… or are simply leaving things up to chance…
This is the same discipline Gabe used on Wall Street. Now, he’s applying it for you… including with the AI story…
As Gabe says, “The best AI businesses probably haven’t been invented yet. What we want to figure out is the path from here to there – and right now, that path runs through power.”
Stansberry Alliance members and Gabe’s Market Maven subscribers already have the details laid out here.
But if you don’t have access to Gabe’s research yet, he goes much deeper on all of this in a new free presentation – including more stocks up and down the power value chain… and the full case for why he thinks this story has years left to run.
If you’re interested in learning more, watch here.
Recommended Links:
‘Five-Alarm Fire’ Alert: The Man Who Spotted TWO $100 Million Trades Is Back
Gabe Marshank – who made $100 million in profits TWICE by spotting this exact setup before – says the same signal is flashing again. He says the biggest gains could come to those who make one straightforward move before June 1.Instead of briefing billionaire hedge-fund owners, he’s going public (for only the second time ever). Click here now to see his urgent free presentation.
Elon Musk’s New ‘Secret Weapon’ for AI
Did Elon Musk just solve Silicon Valley’s biggest problem? Recently, he quietly deployed something in Memphis, Tennessee that reshaped the next phase of the AI boom – and tech giants like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Alphabet are scrambling to follow his lead. Most people still don’t know about this “secret weapon,” but it could determine the next winners and losers in AI.
New 52-week highs (as of 5/12/26): Altius Minerals (ALS.TO), BHP (BHP), Alpha Architect 1-3 Month Box Fund (BOXX), British American Tobacco (BTI), CBOE Global Markets (CBOE), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Healthpeak Properties (DOC), Fanuc (FANUY), W.W. Grainger (GWW), KraneShares Bosera MSCI China A 50 Connect Index Fund (KBA), Nvidia (NVDA), Pembina Pipeline (PBA), Starbucks (SBUX), USCF SummerHaven Dynamic Commodity Strategy No K-1 Fund (SDCI), Solstice Advanced Materials (SOLS), SSR Mining (SSRM), and UnitedHealth (UNH).
In today’s mailbag, continued discussion on the war in Iran and thoughts on interest rates (we wrote yesterday that Federal Reserve rate hikes are back on the table)… Do you have a comment or question? As always, e-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com.
“Re: Tim L’s comments on the state of the world [in yesterday’s mail]… The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps needs to go. They have fomented violence for nearly five decades… Trump needs to continue pressuring them until they are thrown out.” – Subscriber Mike M.
“Why not reduce rates? Go against the normal expectation… We are in a different economy full of tech and innovation. Rate hikes will stifle the growth while a rate reduction would stimulate the housing and other sectors. In my opinion, a rate reduction would only add to the economic boom. Inflation be damned! Inflation can be overcome by [the] incredible advantages that come with a reduction in rates.” – Subscriber Alan F.
All the best,
Corey McLaughlin with Matt Weinschenk and Gabe Marshank
Baltimore, Maryland
May 13, 2026
Stansberry Research Top 10 Open Recommendations
Top 10 highest-returning open stock positions across all Stansberry Research portfolios. Returns represent the total return from the initial recommendation.InvestmentBuy DateReturnPublicationMSFT
Microsoft11/11/101,361.0%Retirement MillionaireMSFT
Microsoft02/10/121,316.3%Stansberry’s Investment AdvisoryCIEN
Ciena10/20/22900.7%Stansberry Innovations ReportGOOGL
Alphabet12/15/16854.1%Retirement MillionaireADP
Automatic Data Processing10/09/08825.3%Extreme ValueBRK.B
Berkshire Hathaway04/01/09776.5%Retirement MillionaireALS-T
Altius Minerals03/26/09755.7%Extreme ValueSII
Sprott01/11/18682.5%Extreme ValueLITE
Lumentum04/15/21625.1%Stansberry Innovations ReportWRB
W.R. Berkley03/15/12618.5%Stansberry’s Investment Advisory
Please note: Securities appearing in the Top 10 are not necessarily recommended buys at current prices. The list reflects the best-performing positions currently in the model portfolio of any Stansberry Research publication. The buy date reflects when the editor recommended the investment in the listed publication, and the return shows its performance since that date. To learn if a security is still a recommended buy today, you must be a subscriber to that publication and refer to the most recent portfolio.
Top 10 Totals3Extreme ValueFerris3Retirement MillionaireDoc2Stansberry Innovations ReportEngel2Stansberry’s Investment AdvisoryPorter
Top 5 Crypto Capital Open Recommendations
Top 5 highest-returning open positions in the Crypto Capital model portfolioInvestmentBuy DateReturnPublicationBTC/USD
Bitcoin11/27/182,074.5%Crypto CapitalWSTETH/USD
Wrapped Staked Ethereum12/07/181,900.5%Crypto CapitalONE/USD
Harmony12/16/191,012.3%Crypto CapitalPOL/USD
Polygon02/26/21644.2%Crypto CapitalQRL/USD
Quantum Resistant Ledger01/19/21403.6%Crypto Capital
Please note: Securities appearing in the Top 5 are not necessarily recommended buys at current prices. The list reflects the best-performing positions currently in the Crypto Capital model portfolio. The buy date reflects when the recommendation was made, and the return shows its performance since that date. To learn if it’s still a recommended buy today, you must be a subscriber and refer to the most recent portfolio.
Stansberry Research Hall of Fame
Top 10 all-time, highest-returning closed positions across all Stansberry portfoliosInvestmentDurationGainPublicationNvidia (NVDA)^*5.96 years1,466%Venture Tech.Microsoft (MSFT)^12.74 years1,185%Retirement MillionaireInovio Pharma. (INO)^1.01 years1,139%Venture Tech.Rocket Lab (RKLB)^2.35 years1,034%Venture Tech.Seabridge Gold (SA)^4.20 years995%Sjug Conf.Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B)^16.13 years800%Retirement MillionaireIntellia Therapeutics (NTLA)1.95 years775%Amer. MoonshotsRite Aid 8.5% bond4.97 years773%True IncomePNC Warrants (PNC-WS)6.16 years706%True Wealth SystemsMaxar Technologies (MAXR)^1.90 years691%Venture Tech.
^ These gains occurred with a partial position in the respective stocks.
* Editor Dave Lashmet closed the first leg of this Nvidia position in November 2016 for a gain of about 108%. Then, he closed the second leg in July 2020 for a 777% return. And finally, in May 2022, he booked a 1,466% return on the final leg. Subscribers who followed his advice on Nvidia could’ve recorded a total weighted average gain of more than 600%.
Stansberry Research Crypto Hall of Fame
Top 5 highest-returning closed positions in the Crypto Capital model portfolioInvestmentDurationGainAnalystBand Protocol (BAND)0.31 years1,169%Crypto CapitalTerra (LUNA)0.41 years1,166%Crypto CapitalPolymesh (POLYX)3.84 years1,157%Crypto CapitalFrontier (FRONT)0.09 years979%Crypto CapitalBinance Coin (BNB)1.78 years963%Crypto Capital
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RJ Hamster 