Dear Reader,

Wall Street may have already locked up the cheapest AI-energy stock most Americans have never heard of.

Institutions own approximately 88% of its shares.

BlackRock reportedly owns 32 million shares worth roughly $716 million. Vanguard owns another 48 million shares worth nearly $1.1 billion.

One major investor nearly doubled its position to 8.2 million shares. And management authorized the repurchase of 40 million shares.

That is not casual interest.

That is serious money surrounding one virtually unknown American company.

So what do they see?

This company generates approximately $3.2 billion in operating income while carrying a market value of only around $8 billion.

It controls a massive American oil and natural gas operation at a moment when AI data centers desperately need reliable electricity.

It has even signed a multi-year, multimillion-dollar agreement with Palantir to use AI to improve equipment reliability, well performance, raw-material use and distribution.

Wall Street knows the name.

Trump publicly defended the company when a major trading partner targeted its profits by raising their taxes.

But Main Street remains largely outside the room.

I believe that information gap creates the opportunity. Once the broader market connects this company's profits, energy assets and AI relationship, its current valuation could become much harder to justify.

But I refuse to ignore what Wall Street is quietly accumulating.

Click here to learn about the Ultimate Stock Unicorn.

Yours in smart speculation,

Karim Rahemtulla, Head Fundamental Tactician
Monument Traders Alliance

P.S. Institutions control 88% of the shares. BlackRock and Vanguard own tens of millions.

Management authorized a 40-million-share buyback. Main Street may be the last group through the door - click here now to learn about the AI-energy stock Wall Street already knows.

Sociedad Química y Minera’s Lithium Boom Is Back, But Iodine Steals the Show

Written by Chris Markoch. Originally Published: 8/20/2026.

Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (NYSE: SQM) delivered a blowout Q2 2026 earnings report. Revenue of $2.47 billion beat the consensus forecast of $2.24 billion by 10.3%. The company also beat expectations for adjusted earnings per share (EPS), with its reported $2.31 coming in ahead of the $2.04 estimate.

Lithium deserves most of the credit. Segment revenue nearly quadrupled year over year (YOY), and the swing from a weak 2025 to a record 2026 lifted the entire company's results. But buried beneath that headline is another story worth telling: iodine just posted its second straight record quarter without any of the same volatility.

SQM’s Lithium Business Comes Roaring Back

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There's no understating how much lithium drove this quarter. Segment revenue reached $1.78 billion, up 300% YOY, on record sales volume of more than 84,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent. Average realized prices at SQM's Chilean joint venture, Novandino, reached about $21.80 per kilogram. That was up 23% from the prior quarter and roughly 160% higher than a year ago.

That kind of move is exactly what makes lithium such a compelling trade—and such an unpredictable business to own. A year ago, lithium was dragging down the company's results as oversupply crushed prices. Now, demand from battery storage systems has outpaced expectations, and SQM raised its full-year global lithium demand forecast to more than 2.1 million metric tons.

The rise in lithium prices is also showing up on SQM's bottom line. The segment generated 78% of the company's gross margin during the first half of 2026.

That's a dramatic reversal from the period when lithium prices were depressed. It's also the reason SQM has been so volatile over the past year. The stock climbed to nearly $95 in May, fell into the $60s by July and recovered to above $76 as of Aug. 19.

Iodine Adds a Different Kind of Strength

The story of SQM's quarter wouldn't be complete without discussing the role of iodine. It won't get the headlines that lithium does. Some of that is because iodine won't move a stock 20% in a week. But that's precisely the point.

Average realized iodine prices reached an all-time high of about $73.40 per kilogram this quarter, up 2.6% year over year. Volumes grew 8% to 7,900 metric tons during the first half, and segment revenue rose 10% to $578.10 million. Demand continues to be led by X-ray contrast media, iodine's largest application, along with steady demand from industrial, pharmaceutical and polarizing-film markets.

Iodine has now posted record pricing in back-to-back quarters. That's a level of consistency lithium simply doesn't offer investors right now. While lithium swung from a drag on earnings to the company's dominant profit driver, iodine kept setting new highs quarter after quarter without fanfare.

Management isn't blind to what's coming, either. The company forecast that third-party iodine supply will increase later this year, which could moderate sales volumes into year-end. Full-year production guidance remains around 15,500 metric tons, supported by a seawater pipeline project that continues to ramp toward completion and give the company added operational flexibility.

SQM’s Second Growth Engine Deserves More Attention

The bull case isn't that iodine out-earns lithium. Iodine accounted for 16% of SQM's gross margin in the first half of 2026, a fraction of lithium's 78% contribution. But margin share and earnings quality aren't the same thing.

Lithium is a commodity traded within a mining company. Its pricing is tied to global EV adoption curves, battery-storage demand and a notoriously cyclical supply-demand balance that whipsawed from oversupply to shortage within 18 months. Investors buying SQM primarily for lithium exposure are signing up for that volatility, whether they intend to or not.

Iodine behaves differently. Its end markets—medical imaging, pharmaceuticals and industrial applications—are far less cyclical than EV batteries or grid storage. Pricing has moved in one direction for multiple quarters in a row, and SQM's push to expand production flexibility across four operations, aided by the seawater pipeline, points to a business built for steady optimization rather than boom-and-bust swings.

SQM Is Still Investing Heavily in Its Lithium Business

None of this means investors should ignore lithium. It's currently the single biggest driver of SQM's earnings, and the company is putting real capital behind it. For example, roughly 60% of its planned $3 billion in 2026–2028 capital expenditures is earmarked for Novandino alone, including the newly filed Salar Futuro project and the Mt. Holland expansion in Australia with partner Wesfarmers.

But for investors trying to separate a durable long-term thesis from a cyclical trade, iodine offers a useful counterweight. It's the part of SQM's business that doesn't need a favorable commodity cycle to keep setting records—and in a stock this volatile, that kind of consistency is worth a second look, even if it never grabs the headlines.

Can SQM’s Earnings Rebound Keep the Stock Moving?

SQM climbed more than 2% after the earnings report, extending the gains the stock has made since forming a bottom in late July.

At around $76, SQM is trading near its 50-day and 200-day simple moving averages (SMAs). But this has not been a smooth or steady stock. SQM has round-tripped from roughly $46 last September to nearly $95 in May, then back down before this recent bounce.

The encouraging news for investors is that SQM has found support near the $70 level on two separate occasions. Plus, although the stock is trading slightly above its consensus price target of $73.58, recent price targets have reached as high as $100.

This quarter suggests that the lithium recovery narrative now has real numbers behind it, not just sentiment. Whether pricing momentum holds through year-end—especially with iodine facing new supply competition—will likely determine which direction the chart moves next.

Marvell Constructs an AI Moat With Alphabet Warrants

Written by Jeffrey Neal Johnson. Originally Published: 8/21/2026.

The artificial intelligence infrastructure boom extends far beyond off-the-shelf GPUs. Hyperscalers are realizing that renting standard accelerators limits their ability to optimize power, cooling and unit economics at the data-center level. That realization is driving a shift toward custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

Marvell Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL) just cemented its position at the center of this transition.

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By securing a sweeping custom-chip agreement with Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Marvell is evolving from a specialized networking supplier into a foundational architect of the global AI buildout.

The deal features an unusual equity-warrant structure that links Alphabet's capital expenditures to Marvell's financial success, setting a new benchmark for hardware valuation.

Laying the Groundwork: Custom Silicon Takes Over

Data-center economics dictate that as inference volume scales, the cost per token must fall. Merchant chips offer impressive out-of-the-box performance, but they cannot match the custom thermal-design-power optimizations and inter-node routing efficiencies that cloud-sector titans demand.

Custom ASICs address this bottleneck. When a hyperscaler designs its own chip, it can strip away unnecessary general-purpose compute blocks and focus solely on the mathematical workloads that power its proprietary language models.

Marvell brings the engineering expertise needed to turn those blueprints into reality. The company contributes high-speed serializer/deserializer intellectual property and advanced optical packaging, allowing technology giants to manufacture processors tailored specifically to their rack architectures.

This focus on proprietary, hard-to-replicate engineering is partly why Marvell generates a healthy net profit margin of around 29%. By owning the foundational intellectual property that enables high-speed data transfer, Marvell is well positioned to dictate terms in a market desperate for bandwidth.

Pouring the Concrete: The Alphabet Equity Lock-In

What makes the recent Alphabet partnership unique is its underlying financial structure. The agreement includes performance warrants valued at approximately $12.2 billion, granting Alphabet the right to purchase nearly 58.9 million shares at an exercise price of around $206.58.

These warrants do not vest all at once. They unlock in tranches tied to production-volume deliveries and compute-deployment thresholds. The more Alphabet buys, the more shares it earns the right to purchase. With Marvell shares trading around $235, the warrants are already in the money, giving Alphabet an immediate financial incentive to scale its orders.

By structuring the deal this way, Marvell links Alphabet's hardware spending to its own market capitalization. This arrangement functions as an economic moat. If Alphabet pivots to one of Marvell's rivals for future tape-outs, it gives up significant potential upside. The framework creates a barrier to entry, keeps Marvell embedded in the Alphabet ecosystem for years and provides investors with greater visibility into future cash flows. It transforms a standard vendor relationship into something closer to an integrated joint venture.

Demolishing the Monopoly: Broadcom Loses Ground

Historically, the custom AI-chip market has functioned almost like a monopoly, with one dominant player controlling much of Alphabet's Tensor Processing Unit infrastructure: Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO). For years, Broadcom operated as the undisputed incumbent, capturing the lion's share of the custom-compute budget coming out of Mountain View.

Marvell's design wins for Alphabet's latest inference accelerators show that hyperscalers are aggressively diversifying their supply chains. Relying on a single vendor for mission-critical AI infrastructure presents concentration risk for a company the size of Alphabet.

By carving out rack space alongside Broadcom, Marvell establishes itself as a tier-one architect capable of handling some of the world's most demanding workloads. This dual-sourcing strategy not only mitigates supply-chain risks for Alphabet but also validates Marvell as an equal counterpart in the highest echelons of semiconductor design.

Constructing the Total-Rack Revenue Pipeline

The narrative surrounding AI infrastructure often begins and ends with the processor. That view overlooks the broader hardware ecosystem required to train and run modern models. Marvell's true value proposition is its ability to monetize the entire server rack.

Regulatory filings suggest that this partnership extends well beyond inference accelerators. Marvell is integrating its proprietary network interface controllers, storage controllers and optical digital signal-processing technologies directly into the compute cluster.

As AI clusters scale to tens of thousands of nodes, the network connecting those nodes becomes the ultimate bottleneck. Marvell combines custom-compute design with its established networking expertise, increasing its dollar content per rack.

Analysts estimate that this comprehensive architectural integration could unlock a revenue pipeline approaching $120 billion through fiscal 2033 if Alphabet meets its maximum purchasing targets. For a business currently generating approximately $8.19 billion in annual sales, that represents a significant expansion of its total addressable market.

The Final Inspection: Pricing in the AI Expansion

The market is clearly pricing in this growth trajectory. Marvell trades at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio near 84 and a forward multiple of roughly 79. Those premium valuations demand flawless execution, although a price-to-earnings growth ratio of 1.35 suggests that projected earnings expansion justifies part of the premium.

Marvell maintains a solid return on equity of 13.83%, pointing to efficient capital allocation by management. However, foundry-allocation shortages, packaging constraints or tape-out delays could trigger a decline in the stock. Marvell also has a beta of around 2.24, meaning it will likely experience heightened volatility during broader tech-sector rotations.

Recent insider selling by the CEO and COO might give cautious investors pause, but the transactions align with scheduled liquidity programs and do not signal a departure from the core thesis. While the stock is expensive, Marvell's fundamentals tell a compelling story about potential downside protection.

The semiconductor industry is notoriously cyclical, often punishing component suppliers during inventory corrections. The Alphabet warrant structure could shield Marvell from some of those demand shocks by locking in long-term, contractual hyperscaler spending.

Investors looking to gain exposure to the physical buildout of the AI economy might view this custom-silicon partnership as a floor for future earnings. Those with a longer time horizon may find Marvell's transition into a total-rack architect an appealing anchor for a growth-oriented portfolio.