TheChek News Flow

While China is a potential adversary, the bank executive said, America must ‘get our own act together’

JPMorgan JPM -0.14%decrease; red down pointing triangle Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon delivered a dire warning for the markets, predicting a crisis unless the U.S. takes steps to address its spiraling national debt.

“You are going to see a crack in the bond market, OK?” Dimon said during an interview at the Reagan National Economic Forum in California. “It is going to happen.”

Bond markets have been rattled by the prospect that the already wobbly fiscal situation in the U.S. will worsen, should tax legislation backed by President Trump become law. A House-passed measure would increase projected budget deficits by some $2.7 trillion over a decade, adding to a national debt that already stands at more than $36 trillion.

That fiscal package spooked bond traders, leading to a selloff in benchmark 10-year Treasurys that sent yields up nearly a quarter point to 4.418% this month. Moody’s Ratings stripped the U.S. of its triple-A credit rating, citing the government’s towering pile of debt. And tepid demand for Treasurys at a May 21 auction added to concerns.

Dimon noted that Covid had left the debt markets in disarray in early 2020, until the government responded with several actions that normalized trading and stimulated the economy. But “they massively overdid” it in the years that followed, he said.

Regulations imposed on banks after the 2008-09 financial crisis have left them with less flexibility to hold bonds and other securities on their balance sheets. That makes it difficult for financial firms to step in between sellers and buyers when credit markets freeze up, Dimon said.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other banking regulators have pledged to loosen capital requirements to let banks hold more Treasurys.

Without substantial changes, the U.S. is headed for a reckoning, Dimon said. “And I tell this to my regulators…it’s going to happen, and you’re going to panic,” he said. “I just don’t know if it’s going to be a crisis in six months or six years.”

Dimon, one of Wall Street’s longest-serving chiefs, has a long record of delivering sobering prognoses on the health of the economy and the financial markets. Earlier this month, he said stock investors weren’t adequately accounting for the impact of Trump’s tariffs, given the market’s rebound from its lows at the start of the trade war. “It’s an extraordinary amount of complacency,” he said.

A potential debt-market crisis isn’t the only scenario that has Dimon worried. He also believes that if America’s economic and military might erodes, the dollar’s pre-eminent status is at risk.

“If we are not the pre-eminent military and the pre-eminent economy in 40 years, we will not be the reserve currency,” he said. “People tell me we are enormously resilient. I agree with that. I think this time is different. This time we have to get our act together and do it very quickly.”

Dimon acknowledged that China, the primary target of Trump’s trade war, is a “potential adversary.”

“What I really worry about is us,” he said. “Can we get our own act together—our own values, our own capabilities, our own management?”

Four British climbers made it from London to the peak in under five days after preparations that included inhaling xenon gas

KATHMANDU, Nepal—Four men left London’s Heathrow Airport for Nepal on a May afternoon. Within five days, they were atop Mount Everest, the 29,000-foot peak where an ascent typically takes weeks of acclimatization and bursts of climbing punctuated by rest.

Instead, the four British army veterans prepared for the world’s highest peak using a new pre-acclimatization regime involving inhaling xenon gas—once used as an anesthetic but now more commonly found in rocket propellant.

Their ascent is rocking the mountaineering community and Nepali authorities, with their use of a substance banned from competitive sport by the World Anti-Doping Agency provoking the criticism this amounts to cheating.

Nepal’s mountaineering authorities are studying the climb and its implications.

On May 29, when the country marks the first recognized summit of the mountain in 1953 as Everest Day, Nepal’s prime minister lamented the use of xenon.

“Dishonesty even with Mount Everest?” he said. “If it did happen, it should be stopped.”

Alistair Carns, a climber in the group, said critics should take the long view.

“We have just got to accept we’re at the cutting-edge of science,” said Carns, Britain’s veterans minister.

He said using xenon was no different from using supplemental oxygen, an innovation climbers made about a century ago that gained wide use.

Xenon gas was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2014 after Russian athletes acknowledged using it for Winter Olympics contests. Mountain climbing is a largely unregulated endeavor, though climbing Everest requires permission from Nepal if climbing from the south face, and from China if climbing from the north.

Himal Gautam, director at Nepal’s tourism department, said the government hasn’t certified the expedition as a successful ascent or verified it as a record. The government gives certificates for successful ascents based on photos, videos and climber accounts, but doesn’t verify all record claims. The climbers believe they set a record for the fastest round-trip Everest expedition, less than seven days including the return to London.

A Ukrainian man said he made it from his home in New York City to the summit of Everest in four days, reaching the peak on May 19, just ahead of the British group. That claim hasn’t been verified either.

Austrian mountaineer Lukas Furtenbach, who organized the xenon-assisted ascent, said it wasn’t just about speed. He described it as a scientifically planned effort to explore the future of high-altitude mountain-climbing—and make it safer.

“We use xenon to protect the body from altitude sickness, not to hasten the ascent,” said Furtenbach. “I don’t believe that anyone is against increasing safety on Everest, when the whole world is every year reporting about the many deaths on Everest.”

Climbing times for the most experienced mountaineers have steadily lowered since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay achieved the first recognized ascent of the world’s tallest peak. That historic climb began in Kathmandu on March 10, 1953, reaching the summit on May 29.

In 2019, nutrition scientist Roxanne Vogel summited Everest in two weeks, door-to-door, from her home in California. The fastest climb from base camp to Everest, meanwhile, was by Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa in just under 11 hours in 2003.

But for more typical climbers—even when aided by the best gear, experienced Sherpas, climbing ropes and oxygen—Everest is an endeavor that typically spans six to eight weeks. That includes more than a week to trek to base camp, days spent acclimatizing there, and circuits to higher camps often followed by a descent to allow the body to adjust.

Failure to acclimatize properly can mean headaches and dizziness in milder cases, and in the worst instances, fatal mountain sickness.

Carns said his work as a government minister and personal commitments—he has young children—didn’t permit him weeks away from home. Another reason to make news was to raise money for Scotty’s Little Soldiers, a British charity focused on the children of fallen soldiers. His fellow climbers were Kevin Godlington, Anthony Stazicker and Garth Miller.

Furtenbach had the four British climbers prepare for weeks at their homes in the U.K. by sleeping for a total of over 500 hours each in tents that simulate the low-oxygen conditions on Everest. That has long been part of Furtenbach’s expeditions offering a “flash” ascent of Everest in about three weeks. The men also worked out using masks that simulated thin mountain air.

Their regime included a new feature—a roughly 20-minute, one-time hit of a mix of xenon and oxygen some weeks before the men began their climb in Nepal. The formulation was developed and administered to the men in Germany by Dr. Michael Fries, head of anesthesia and intensive-care medicine at St. Vincenz Hospital in the German town of Limburg an der Lahn.

After hearing Furtenbach speak on the radio in 2018 about his efforts to help climbers pre-acclimatize, Fries said he contacted him to propose his idea: breathe in xenon gas before a challenging climb. The gas, said Fries, appears to have neuroprotective properties and prompts the production of a hormone that triggers red blood cell production, improving the blood’s ability to carry oxygen.

Furtenbach and at least a dozen other climbers experimented with the gas in their climbs in the following years, said Fries, and their experiences convinced them it helped prevent altitude-related symptoms.

The International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation said in January that scientific literature didn’t support the idea that breathing in xenon improves performance in the mountains.

Given how swiftly it can work—putting people to sleep in a minute—highly experienced medical supervision is vital, said Fries.

Furtenbach on his Instagram account has warned climbers against trying to copy their example, noting his group used the gas under medical supervision—and not on the mountain itself.

Several mountaineers, while crediting the British climbers achievement and the preparations of Furtenbach’s outfit, expressed concern that less experienced climbers or unethical expedition outfits could try to replicate the experiment with dangerous results.

“I’m happy for the four climbers,” said Alan Arnette, a mountaineer who chronicles Everest climbing. “I just think we have to be very aware of unintended consequences of other people trying to take this and replicate it and not doing it safely and thinking that it’s some kind of magic bullet or shortcut to the top.”

Stephan Keck, head of the Austria-based expedition operator Himalayan Experience, said he worried commercial impulses could encourage xenon’s use to help inexperienced people summit quickly.

“I don’t want to have a circus up there,” he said.

Some mountaineering experts said it is hard to assess the effects of xenon for a climbing group that also prepared extensively with hypoxia tents and had past physical training in the military.

After arriving in Nepal on the morning of May 17, the men took a helicopter to reach base camp after noon. Pasang Tendi Sherpa, who worked with the climbers, said the group prayed at base camp before beginning.

They began climbing around midnight, skipped the first camp and arrived at the second camp the next morning.

The following day they climbed to Camp 3 and on May 20, made it to Camp 4, into the infamous “death zone.”

The pace was relentless, said Godlington: “We barely stopped to rest.”

At Camp 4, three of their Sherpas turned back because of a storm. The rest continued to climb overnight, reaching the summit at 7:15 a.m. on May 21.

“We were the only guys on the mountain,” Godlington said.

Carns said he had given the group a 30% chance of success. Reminders of how wrong climbing Everest can go were all around. When he turned into Camp 4 “there was a dead body just frozen to my left,” said Carns.

He doesn’t foresee a spate of copycat climbs.

“This is one of the hardest things I’ve done,” said Carns. “So I don’t think we’re going to see a whole glut of people trying to get up in a week.”

Palantir Technologies stock has been one of the market’s standout performers over the past year, rising nearly fivefold in price and adding nearly $250 billion in value.

But one group of analysts said the stock’s meteoric rise, tied in part to the broader artificial-intelligence investment theme, could actually work against it over the coming weeks, and suggested it could be one to bet against heading into the summer months.

Palantir was added to the S&P 500 in the fall of last year, with index manager S&P Global unveiling the addition on Sept. 6, when the stock traded with a market value of $68 billion. It officially joined the index on Sept. 23, 2024. The stock has more than tripled since then and looks set to enter the second quarter’s final month with a market value that’s just shy of $300 billion.

Trivariate Research, headed by Adam Parker, said this could be a problem.

Palantir, despite being grouped as a mid-cap stock, is now the 25th largest in the S&P 500. S&P Global will rebalance its benchmark indexes next month, with the changes taking effect on June 30. That could trigger some big moves for the stock, Parker and his team cautioned in a note published Wednesday. Palantir stock rose 0.3% to $123.76 even as the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 0.6%.

“The pending rebalance at the end of June could make for some material changes to universe constituents and cause some substantial rotations out of the stock,” Trivariate said.

Palantir’s current 8% weight in the mid-cap universe, Trivariate argued, poses an “extreme challenge for active managers” who may want to sell the stock but can’t fight against the support from passive managers who track benchmark indexes.

As Palantir moves into the large-cap universe, however, Trivariate said that not only will active managers get a chance to sell, large-cap managers likely will look more closely at Palantir’s valuation.

That could trigger some downward pressure on the stock.

Focusing on the measure of forecast sales to current enterprise value, a figure that includes both equity and debt, Trivariate deemed Palantir’s level of 73 times one of the most expensive stocks it has studied over the past 25 years.

“The implied growth rate from this valuation level is over 40% a year for a decade,” Trivariate wrote. “No company has ever grown from this level of revenue that fast in the last quarter century.”

Palantir’s 2024 revenue increased by 29%, with a bottom-line tally of $2.87 billion. Earlier this month, Palantir lifted its 2025 revenue forecast to around $3.9 billion, a figure that would suggest a growth rate of 35%.

Trivariate argued that only 80 listed companies are forecast to grow faster than Palantir over the next 12 months, but all of them are at least 60% cheaper on a sales-to-EV valuation.

“Palantir might be fundamentally awesome, we don’t know,” Parker and his team wrote, adding that a “rotation is coming out of one universe where everyone will happily sell it, into another universe where managers won’t be forced to hold it.”

“Sell it now and short it near June 30, unless you are confident that it will grow faster and longer than any company has grown ever,” Parker and his team concluded.

That could be a risky bet, however, based on recent attempts to short the stock, which typically involve borrowing shares, selling them in the open market, and buying them back at a cheaper price.

FactSet data showed short interest in the company at just 2.63%, a relatively small amount for a stock with a higher market beta of around 1.76 (anything north of 1 is risky).

Recent data from S3 Partners, a data analytics group, tagged Palantir as one of the least profitable shorts of the year, with those betting against it losing just under $3 billion as of May 21.

The most unprofitable short, interestingly was Bitcoin treasury group MicroStrategy, with investors down just over $3.5 billion. MicroStrategy trades at sales-to-EV multiple of 112.7, making it the most expensive stock on Trivariate’s list.

Bill Ackman Is Killing It. A New ETF Will Track His Investments.

Bill Ackman is off to a strong start in 2025 thanks to a winning investment in Fannie Mae, and now his success has attracted an imitator.

Tidal Trust has filed for an exchange-traded fund keyed off Ackman's investments, the Vista Shares Pershing Square Select ETF. Tidal Trust will also offer ETFs tied to investments by these other notables: Stan Druckenmiller, Michael Burry, and Warren Buffett.

Ackman's chief investment vehicle is the London-listed Pershing Square Holdings. The closed-end fund returned 12.8% through Tuesday based on its net asset value, against a 1% total return for the S&P 500 index. The fund, which also trades in the U.S. under the ticker PSHZF, was off 0.5% to $53.14 a share Friday.

Pershing Square Holdings has gotten a big boost from its investments in Fannie Mae and Federal Home Loan Mortgage, whose shares have surged this year on expectations the Trump administration will free them from federal conservatorship. Fannie Mae stock, at around $10.50, has tripled this year and is up almost tenfold from where it traded about a year ago.

Ackman said on a recent investor call available on the fund's website that his firm owns about 220 million shares of the two mortgage agencies, a stake now worth about $2 billion. Pershing Square is one of the largest holders of the two stocks.

It has been a busy 2025 for Ackman. He got approval for his Pershing Square holding company and Pershing Square Capital Management to buy $900 million of Howard Hughes stock and turn the real estate company into a diversified holding company -- what he has called a mini Berkshire Hathaway. He also has been active on X, where he has 1.7 million followers, with critiques of his alma mater Harvard University.

While Ackman has scored this year, Pershing Square Holdings trades at a steep 35% discount to its net asset value based on Tuesday's stock price, about two percentage points wider than the start of this year. The fund has persistently traded at a 20%-plus discount to net asset value in recent years.

The fund has about 180 million shares outstanding, giving it a market value of $9.5 billion and a net asset value of over $14 billion. Ackman owns more than 20% of Pershing Square Holdings.

Barron's has written that the fund offers an inexpensive way to get access to Ackman and what has been a market-beating record.

Pershing Square Holdings did trail the S&P 500 last year with a return of 10%, against about 25% for the index. But it is way ahead of the S&P 500 over the past five years with a return of 22% annualized (based on the stock price), versus 15% for the index.

Eric Boughton, a portfolio manager at Matisse Capital, whose Matisse Discounted Closed-End Strategy fund (MDCEX) holds Pershing Square Holdings, thinks Fannie Mae and Federal Home Loan Mortgage, known as Freddie Mac, account for most of the fund's outperformance this year relative to the index. He notes Pershing Square Holdings is cheaper than usual based on its discount to net asset value and could benefit from steps by Ackman to narrow the discount.

Other positive fund contributors for Pershing Square Holdings this year are Uber and Hertz Global Holdings, Boughton says.

Pershing Square Holdings holds about a dozen stocks and Ackman's approach is to buy high-quality shares that can compound earnings.

The firm added Amazon and Uber this year while selling Canadian Pacific Kansas City and cutting its stake in Hilton Worldwide Holdings.

Pershing Square Holdings has been handicapped with investors for several reasons -- contributing to the wide discount.

Although Ackman is best known to U.S. investors, the fund trades in Europe -- and some U.S. brokerage firms won't let their U.S. retail clients buy it. The fund generates a PFIC tax form (passive foreign investment company) that is more like a K-1 than a 1099. Many investors don't want to deal with a FPIC form.

Another negative is the fund's fee structure is stiff at 1.5% annually plus 16% of gains subject to a high-water mark. Most U.S. closed end funds have an annual management fee of about one percentage point and no incentive fee.

That is outweighed by access to Pershing Square Holdings and its strong record over the past five years at a huge discount from net asset value.

The new ETF will have a lower fee but won't carry a discount -- and it will have to wait for Ackman to disclose portfolio changes before acting. Ackman has said the delay and other factors give investors in his fund an edge over imitators.

Dominion Energy’s massive project off the coast of Virginia would be a boon for U.S. jobs and energy needs—not to mention the climate. Its future hangs in the balance.

Twenty-seven miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, Va., sit 90 gargantuan steel cylinders arranged in a neat pegboard grid. They are the foundations of one of America’s largest industrial projects, an offshore wind development that’s slated to cover 150 square miles of the ocean, six times the size of Manhattan. The turbines that the company plans to install are skyscraper-like too, reaching their apex at 830 feet.

The project’s power capacity rivals the Hoover Dam’s. And if all goes according to plan, the turbines will start spinning next year—just in the nick of time. Virginia has already seen some of the fastest growth in electricity demand in the country. In addition to a growing population, the state hosts more data centers than anywhere else in the world.

On a recent tour of the site, the foundations and two nearby pilot wind turbines looked like a playground for an enormous amphibious civilization. But what’s notable about the project today isn’t its size and solidity—it’s just how precarious it all is.

The Trump administration has set about dismantling the regulatory system designed to help offshore wind projects proceed. The permitting process is on hold, and even projects that have begun construction are now at risk. The Dominion project is the biggest and most important test case of whether offshore wind can survive under Trump.

A similar project almost died this month, until New York officials took extraordinary measures to save it. In April, the Trump administration ordered Empire Wind, a project that was under construction 15 miles off of Long Island, to halt work, citing deficiencies in the permitting process. Trump officials didn’t detail the deficiencies to the press—or even to Equinor, the company said. The president only relented this week after extensive lobbying by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and the finance minister of Norway, which owns the majority of Equinor’s shares.

There’s a reasonable chance that the Virginia project will face the same kind of scrutiny and delays—and even attempts to revoke its permits. Moody’s recently downgraded its outlook for owner Dominion Energy’s debt in light of that risk. The stock has trailed other utilities this year, and would undoubtedly fall sharply if the project is scuttled. “People are increasingly nervous,” said Paul Zimbardo, an analyst who covers Dominion for Jefferies, last week.

Trump has pulled funding for all sorts of clean-energy projects, but he has reserved his most aggressive comments and actions for offshore wind. He says it’s unpopular, expensive, and too harmful to wildlife. The Republican tax proposal passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday would end wind’s tax credits early.

Offshore wind is particularly vulnerable to a federal crackdown because it’s new and hasn’t built up a domestic supply chain or workforce. The industry was invented in Europe and is growing fast in Asia, but it hardly exists in the U.S. Last year, the first large-scale offshore wind farm was completed off New York. A handful of others are under construction, but none are nearly as big as the Dominion project. Solar power, by comparison, has been widely adopted around the country and has a domestic supply chain. It will keep growing regardless of federal policy.

The Virginia project, known as Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, is dealing with risks that go beyond politics. It’s facing a lawsuit from conservative groups that want to kill it on environmental grounds. The federal government is also a defendant in that case. Under the Biden administration, Dominion could count on federal support. But it isn’t as sure about where Trump stands. The administration has until June 23 to respond in court. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment on its legal strategy.

Even in an ideal world without legal or political threats, the project faced long odds. Dominion signed a lease in 2013 for 113,000 acres of federal seabed off Virginia but didn’t start construction until a decade later, after all the permits and financing came in. To build the turbines, workers must navigate the depths of the ocean, and then scale steel structures that rise as high as an 80-story building. Ladders get them part of the way there, before they cram into a mini-elevator that zips them up the steel tube.

To connect the turbines to deep-sea substations and string them back to the dry-land electric grid, the company will use enough cable to reach from Richmond, Va., to New York City. The supply chain for all those parts stretches around the world, too, to Europe and Asia. Tariffs could add as much as $500 million in new costs to the project.

Advertisement - Scroll to Continue

Throughout the construction process, unexpected obstacles have continually cropped up. As workers prepped the site, they had to remove unexploded munitions from the ocean floor, remnants of past military exercises stretching as far back as the Civil War. The work doesn’t get easier once the power lines hit land. The company eliminated nearly half the potential routes for its transmission lines because they crossed streams that had ties to Native American history.

Progress often slows to a crawl, or halts entirely, to minimize damage to the ecosystem. Construction stops from November until May to accommodate the migration patterns of endangered right whales. When it starts back up again, all of the project’s ships crawl along at a maximum speed of 10 knots, or about 11 miles per hour, as designated observers watch for sea life. The company has used other systems to minimize damage, too. When the monopiles are driven into the seabed, the company installs perforated tubes around the area to pump jacuzzi-like bubbles that dampen the sound.

Despite all the obstacles and delays, however, the Virginia project could well emerge unscathed from all this scrutiny. It has attributes that Empire Wind lacked that give it a clearer path to success. For one, the owner is an American company. And Dominion’s utility bills are paid by American consumers, who would likely be on the hook for some costs should the project fail, according to analyst Zimbardo. Most other major U.S. projects—including Empire—are owned at least in part by European firms, which have deals to sell the power to utilities. Trump has made disdainful comments about “foreign offshore wind companies” impinging on American fishing spots.

The Dominion project has another advantage. While the construction budget sounds hefty at an estimated $10.8 billion, it’s actually one of the less-expensive offshore wind projects being constructed today and it still compares well with other sources of generation. Unlike some other offshore wind developments, it got started before inflation caused equipment prices to rise. Dominion says its levelized cost of energy, a metric meant to assess costs over the lifetime of the project, is $62 per megawatt-hour—competitive with other electricity-generation sources like coal. The Dominion project’s cost benefits may insulate it from Trump’s contention that these projects are too expensive.

The Dominion project is also further along than Empire Wind, which hadn’t yet installed any monopiles. Dominion says it is more than halfway done and will be sending power to the electric grid by next year. It’s expected to have 178 wind turbines providing 2.6 gigawatts of power, or enough for 660,000 homes. On a recent trip to the offshore wind site, there were several signs of progress. The monopiles had been topped with yellow transition pieces that stick more than 50 feet out of the water. They’re designed as a kind of sheath to hold the turbines in place. The project’s first electric substation had been completed, a 4,300-ton electric hub perched on stilts in the middle of the water. It will bundle the power from the turbines, adjust the voltage, and send it to the shore. Nearby are two 600-foot pilot turbines that were installed in 2020 and already produce power for Dominion. Each time their contoured blades make a revolution, it provides enough power for one home for a day, the company says.

Opponents complain that these projects “industrialize the ocean.” Wind turbine construction is undoubtedly disruptive to marine life—metal is being pounded into the seabed. But the fish don’t seem to mind the structures once they’re in the ground. Marine habitats have begun to form around the turbines. Fishermen come to the site to drop lines in the water because species like black sea bass and flounder like to swim around the structures, according to John Larson, director of public policy and economic development at Dominion. Mussels cling to the foundations, and more fearsome creatures stop by, too. Larson showed off a photo of a 14-foot great white shark circling the steel.

There’s no evidence yet that construction is a significant factor hurting animals like the endangered North Atlantic right whale, as opponents contend. The two largest known causes of right whale deaths and serious injuries are entanglements in nets and collisions with vessels, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. Offshore wind isn’t a known cause, the agency says.

And the ocean is already filled with industrial-size ships and other hazards—container ships regularly coast by, belching brown emissions. Perhaps the biggest hazard of all to ocean life is climate change. Among the animals that are most at risk are the whales that offshore wind opponents say they’re trying to save. “Whales are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change because these effects can be magnified toward the top of the food web,” according to NOAA.

Most major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club back offshore wind because it’s a way to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. Failing to shift from coal and gas to cleaner electricity sources will only exacerbate the degradation. Climate change has already had substantial negative impacts on ocean health.

Offshore wind also has strong support from states led by Democrats. This month, 17 state attorneys general and Washington, D.C., sued the Trump administration over the wind permitting pause, saying the president doesn’t have the authority to stop the process. “This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable, and affordable energy,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement.

Northeastern states in particular are depending on offshore wind to help them decarbonize their electric grids, which now rely heavily on natural gas and other fossil fuels. Stopping these projects will make it much harder—perhaps impossible—for them to meet requirements of state climate laws. Trump has created an “existential threat” to wind energy, the lawsuit says.

In response, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said that the attorneys general were “using lawfare to stop the President’s popular energy agenda.”

Advertisement - Scroll to Continue

If Dominion does succeed in completing the project, it could be America’s first wind project of its size—and the last for a while. That’s a shame, says Roger Clayman, a director of a wind employment training center in New York who was on a recent tour of the Dominion project. Clayman was previously the executive director of the Long Island Federation of Labor, part of the AFL-CIO. America’s offshore wind labor force is just starting to get built up, he notes. “We had hoped there would be a series of projects” that could eventually employ thousands of union workers, he says.

The Dominion project was also expected to be the hub of a larger offshore wind supply chain that would generate even more jobs. This month, a Korean company broke ground on a $700 million wind cable factory in nearby Chesapeake, Va., that will be the tallest building in the state. And Dominion spent $715 million to build a specialized turbine-installation vessel at a Texas shipyard. If offshore wind is halted in the U.S., the burgeoning supply chain will quite literally float away.

Dominion’s precarious position points to a larger problem facing utilities. They need to quickly ramp up power production to generate enough electricity for artificial-intelligence data centers, electric vehicles, and other businesses. But funding shortfalls and political uncertainty make it harder than ever. It’s one reason why the U.S. can’t seem to build big projects like nuclear reactors anymore, despite politicians calling for a nuclear renaissance.

“Investors don’t like to see those projects because there are so many points of failure,” says Jefferies’ Zimbardo. “So many things can go wrong in permitting or construction” or because of regulation.

“If your utility is looking to invest a billion dollars, investors don’t want to see a billion-dollar project,” he added. “They want to see, like, 50 small projects.”

Zimbardo still thinks there’s a better-than-average chance this project gets completed. But the uncertainty puts Dominion and its investors in a tough position today. Next year, they’ll either debut a monumental first of its-kind project, or they’ll own an ocean graveyard—a shark-infested Stonehenge.

Successful trial results in the next few years could save thousands of lives and generate billions in new annual revenue for drugmakers.

Forty years after the first statin drug started lowering levels of artery-choking cholesterol, heart attacks and strokes remain the world’s biggest killers. This year will see test results on some drugs that cut cholesterol even more.

Statins are cheap and effective drugs for reducing blood levels of the “bad” cholesterol known as LDL, which gunks up arteries over time. A quarter of Americans have high LDL. But only about half of patients stay on their prescribed statins, and the drugs don’t get LDL low enough in some 10% of patients.

A pack of new cardiovascular drugs are being tried as pills, biweekly or semiannual shots, and even as once-for-a-lifetime infusions. And their benefits all seem additive to those of statins and each other. Successful trial results in the next few years could save thousands of lives and generate billions in new annual revenue for drugmakers.

“Even with everything that we’ve done in the field, there is actually a fair amount of new things in the pipeline,” said researcher Steve Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic who conducts clinical trials on many of the new drugs.

Companies working on new cholesterol-lowering drugs range from pharmaceutical companies—like Eli Lilly, Merck, and AstraZeneca —to biotechs—like Amgen, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and NewAmsterdam Pharma —to gene-editing specialists—like Crispr Therapeutics and Verve Therapeutics. As cash-consuming start-ups, the last three companies would benefit mightily from a successful cardio product.

LDL isn’t the only fatty vandal in circulation. High levels of triglycerides and something called lipoprotein(a) are also associated with cardiovascular disease, and many of the same companies are targeting them.

“My hope is that if we hit all these targets then we can stop this disease before it causes all the trouble that requires stenting and bypasses,” says Nissen.

Regeneron and Sanofi took the first big step beyond statins in 2015 with Praluent, a biweekly injection of antibodies that sop up the enzyme called PCSK9, which strongly affects blood levels of LDL. Amgen followed just weeks later, with the PCSK9 antibody Repatha. In 2021, Novartis launched Leqvio, which blocks the genetic instructions for making PCSK9 and can be injected just twice a year.

The PCSK9 drugs are lifesavers for families with genetically high LDL levels. But they require regular injections and can cost $30,000 a year for the rest of a patient’s life.

The cost and hassle has led to sales that are good, but not as great as expected. Regeneron and Sanofi’s Praluent sales were $585 million in 2024. For the same year, Amgen’s Repatha pulled in $2.2 billion, up 15% year over year. Last year’s sales of Leqvio for Novartis were $260 million, up 80%.

To address these drugs’ cost and convenience issues, Merck is testing a pill treatment that it code-named MK-0616. The company is betting the drug will help replace some of the revenue it will lose after patents expire on its huge-selling cancer drug, Keytruda.

On April 7, Merck finished the once-daily pill’s Phase 3 trial in about 300 people with inherited high-LDL cholesterol. In August, it expects to complete the broader study among some 2,800 patients with serious cardiovascular problems. Both studies measure reductions in LDL—which regulators accept as good-enough proof that cardiovascular problems will also be prevented. Analysts hope the company will report results at the November 2025 meeting of the American Heart Association.

Merck aims for a bigger market than just high-LDL families, so a third Phase 3 for MK-0616 will use the gold-standard test of whether those on the pill actually have fewer heart attacks, strokes, or other cardiovascular calamities. That study, which is enrolling over 14,000 people, won’t finish until 2029.

While Merck’s pill could find its way to a larger population than today’s PCSK9 injections, it still has some convenience issues. Patients have to take MK-0616 on an empty stomach and shouldn’t be on certain other drugs.

That’s why AstraZeneca is pushing ahead with its own PCSK9 pill, dubbed AZD0780, which requires no fasting. In March, the company said the pill achieved 50% reductions in LDL in a Phase 2 study on patients whose statin treatment wasn’t doing the job. AstraZeneca has said the annual market for a PCSK9 pill could exceed $5 billion.

The size of the cardio market and the current PCSK9 drugs’ issues have also caught the eye of the gene-editing industry. These companies’ Crispr technology can zero in on a particular, troublesome stretch in the 3 billion links of our DNA, and then permanently inactivate it, or make a repair.

So far, genetic-medicine firms have struggled to convince investors that there’s real money to be made from the Nobel Prize-winning technology. Companies like Crispr Therapeutics initially focused on dire, but somewhat uncommon diseases like sickle cell disorder. Revenue has been slow to come.

Verve Therapeutics, however, focused on cardiovascular disease from the start. It licensed a second-generation Crispr technology called base-editing, from the company Beam Therapeutics. Base-editing gently changes a single letter at a time in DNA genetic code. By permanently disrupting the code for PCSK9, Verve’s one-time treatment could lower LDL for life.

The stock perked up in April when the company reported initial Phase 1 data that showed no serious side effects among 14 patients—with LDL reductions of around 60% even two years after the one-time treatment. That reduction is comparable to today’s PCSK9 injectables. Eli Lilly has an option to partner on Verve’s cardio programs, and could opt in this year.

“Genetic therapy is frankly a game changer,” said Nissen. Instead of a lifetime of statins and PCSK9 treatments for a young person with inherited high cholesterol, a one-and-done DNA edit could knock out the troublesome gene altogether. To make sure that long-term side effects don’t turn up, the first gene-editing patients will be followed for 15 years.

Other genetic-medicine approaches to PCSK9 are exploring nonpermanent, but long-lasting fixes. The privately held Scribe Therapeutics has reported intriguing results in monkeys from “epigenetic” edits of the molecules that turn genes on and off.

And PCSK9 isn’t the only strong lever on cholesterol levels. Another that our body uses to control blood levels of cholesterol is a protein called CETP. Early in May, NewAmsterdam Pharma reported on a couple of Phase 3 trials of obicetrapib, its antibody that blocks CETP. By itself, the antibody cut LDL levels by a third. Combined with a statin, LDL levels fell by half.

Another lever on LDL is ANGPTL3, a protein controlling blood levels of LDL and harmful triglycerides. Since 2021, Regeneron has marketed Evkeeza, an antibody that inhibits ANGPTL3. Sales of the drug to patients with inherited high cholesterol were $126 million in 2024.

Lilly, Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, and Regeneron are all testing so-called siRNA drugs, which degrade the RNA messages that tell cells to make ANGPTL3. They are injections that work for as long as a year at a time.

Verve began Phase 1 trials in November 2024 on a base-editing treatment that permanently disrupts the genetic instructions for ANGPTL3. It hopes to report some data later this year.

Crispr Therapeutics, meanwhile, is further along in trials of a one-and-done edit that blocks ANGPTL3. In April, it reported that LDL dropped by two-thirds, among the first 10 patients treated. No serious side effects surfaced in the first months after infusion.

For rare but deadly disorders, gene-editing fixes are priced above $1 million. The Crispr crowd thinks it can find a price that is attractive to the healthcare payers that cover the expensive siRNA injections now given to patients with inherited high levels of cholesterol.

“If you’re talking about siRNA, that is $30,000 a year for 50 years,” said Crispr Therapeutics Chief Executive Samarth Kulkarni at an April conference. “We could spend one-tenth of that and charge $150,000 for a single-shot therapy. For the payer, the economic argument is very clear.”

Besides LDL cholesterol, other fatty risk factors for heart attack and stroke are triglycerides and lipo(a).

The triglyceride inhibitor Tryngolza is one of the first wholly owned products for Ionis Pharmaceuticals, whose monthly injections bind to RNA messages that tell liver cells to make the fat. Tryngolza is approved for a rare inherited triglyceride disorder, where it reduced triglycerides 40% to 60%. A recent Phase 3 trial showed 60% reductions in patients with the more common problem of moderately high triglycerides.

Arrowhead’s siRNA drug plozasiran achieved a deeper reduction among patients with the rare inherited disorder, in a Phase 3 trial reported last year. Injected every three months, it cut triglycerides 80%.

There is no approved drug treatment for the roughly 65 million Americans whose genes leave them with high blood levels of lipoprotein(a), and an estimated two-to-three times higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

Next year, Novartis and Ionis will report the first Phase 3 trial that tests whether cutting lipo(a) levels indeed reduces heart attacks and strokes. Their monthly injectable, pelacarsen, cut lipo(a) levels nearly 80% in earlier trials.

Using the longer-acting siRNA technology, a single shot of Lilly’s lepodisiran cut lipo(a) by 94% for six months, in a recently reported Phase 2 trial. Amgen and Arrowhead achieved comparably deep drops with their siRNA olpasiran. These rival siRNA teams are now running Phase 3 studies to see if cardio outcomes benefit.

Drugs for lipo(a)’s inherited risks have been a long time coming, said Nissen. So he thinks the lipo(a) outcome studies under way hold out some of the most exciting prospects in heart medicine.

These devices could pack three times as much energy per pound as today’s best EV batteries, offering a lightweight option for powering trucks, planes, or ships.

Batteries are nearing their limits in terms of how much power they can store for a given weight. That’s a serious obstacle for energy innovation and the search for new ways to power airplanes, trains, and ships. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a solution that could help electrify these transportation systems.

Instead of a battery, the new concept is a kind of fuel cell — which is similar to a battery but can be quickly refueled rather than recharged. In this case, the fuel is liquid sodium metal, an inexpensive and widely available commodity. The other side of the cell is just ordinary air, which serves as a source of oxygen atoms. In between, a layer of solid ceramic material serves as the electrolyte, allowing sodium ions to pass freely through, and a porous air-facing electrode helps the sodium to chemically react with oxygen and produce electricity.

In a series of experiments with a prototype device, the researchers demonstrated that this cell could carry more than three times as much energy per unit of weight as the lithium-ion batteries used in virtually all electric vehicles today. Their findings are being published today in the journal Joule, in a paper by MIT doctoral students Karen Sugano, Sunil Mair, and Saahir Ganti-Agrawal; professor of materials science and engineering Yet-Ming Chiang; and five others.

“We expect people to think that this is a totally crazy idea,” says Chiang, who is the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics. “If they didn’t, I’d be a bit disappointed because if people don’t think something is totally crazy at first, it probably isn’t going to be that revolutionary.”

And this technology does appear to have the potential to be quite revolutionary, he suggests. In particular, for aviation, where weight is especially crucial, such an improvement in energy density could be the breakthrough that finally makes electrically powered flight practical at significant scale.

“The threshold that you really need for realistic electric aviation is about 1,000 watt-hours per kilogram,” Chiang says. Today’s electric vehicle lithium-ion batteries top out at about 300 watt-hours per kilogram — nowhere near what’s needed. Even at 1,000 watt-hours per kilogram, he says, that wouldn’t be enough to enable transcontinental or trans-Atlantic flights.

That’s still beyond reach for any known battery chemistry, but Chiang says that getting to 1,000 watts per kilogram would be an enabling technology for regional electric aviation, which accounts for about 80 percent of domestic flights and 30 percent of the emissions from aviation.

The technology could be an enabler for other sectors as well, including marine and rail transportation. “They all require very high energy density, and they all require low cost,” he says. “And that’s what attracted us to sodium metal.”

A great deal of research has gone into developing lithium-air or sodium-air batteries over the last three decades, but it has been hard to make them fully rechargeable. “People have been aware of the energy density you could get with metal-air batteries for a very long time, and it’s been hugely attractive, but it’s just never been realized in practice,” Chiang says.

By using the same basic electrochemical concept, only making it a fuel cell instead of a battery, the researchers were able to get the advantages of the high energy density in a practical form. Unlike a battery, whose materials are assembled once and sealed in a container, with a fuel cell the energy-carrying materials go in and out.

The team produced two different versions of a lab-scale prototype of the system. In one, called an H cell, two vertical glass tubes are connected by a tube across the middle, which contains a solid ceramic electrolyte material and a porous air electrode. Liquid sodium metal fills the tube on one side, and air flows through the other, providing the oxygen for the electrochemical reaction at the center, which ends up gradually consuming the sodium fuel. The other prototype uses a horizontal design, with a tray of the electrolyte material holding the liquid sodium fuel. The porous air electrode, which facilitates the reaction, is affixed to the bottom of the tray.

Tests using an air stream with a carefully controlled humidity level produced a level of more than 1,500 watt-hours per kilogram at the level of an individual “stack,” which would translate to over 1,000 watt-hours at the full system level, Chiang says.

The researchers envision that to use this system in an aircraft, fuel packs containing stacks of cells, like racks of food trays in a cafeteria, would be inserted into the fuel cells; the sodium metal inside these packs gets chemically transformed as it provides the power. A stream of its chemical byproduct is given off, and in the case of aircraft this would be emitted out the back, not unlike the exhaust from a jet engine.

But there’s a very big difference: There would be no carbon dioxide emissions. Instead the emissions, consisting of sodium oxide, would actually soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This compound would quickly combine with moisture in the air to make sodium hydroxide — a material commonly used as a drain cleaner — which readily combines with carbon dioxide to form a solid material, sodium carbonate, which in turn forms sodium bicarbonate, otherwise known as baking soda.

“There’s this natural cascade of reactions that happens when you start with sodium metal,” Chiang says. “It’s all spontaneous. We don’t have to do anything to make it happen, we just have to fly the airplane.”

As an added benefit, if the final product, the sodium bicarbonate, ends up in the ocean, it could help to de-acidify the water, countering another of the damaging effects of greenhouse gases.

Using sodium hydroxide to capture carbon dioxide has been proposed as a way of mitigating carbon emissions, but on its own, it’s not an economic solution because the compound is too expensive. “But here, it’s a byproduct,” Chiang explains, so it’s essentially free, producing environmental benefits at no cost.

Importantly, the new fuel cell is inherently safer than many other batteries, he says. Sodium metal is extremely reactive and must be well-protected. As with lithium batteries, sodium can spontaneously ignite if exposed to moisture. “Whenever you have a very high energy density battery, safety is always a concern, because if there’s a rupture of the membrane that separates the two reactants, you can have a runaway reaction,” Chiang says. But in this fuel cell, one side is just air, “which is dilute and limited. So you don’t have two concentrated reactants right next to each other. If you’re pushing for really, really high energy density, you’d rather have a fuel cell than a battery for safety reasons.”

While the device so far exists only as a small, single-cell prototype, Chiang says the system should be quite straightforward to scale up to practical sizes for commercialization. Members of the research team have already formed a company, Propel Aero, to develop the technology. The company is currently housed in MIT’s startup incubator, The Engine.

Producing enough sodium metal to enable widespread, full-scale global implementation of this technology should be practical, since the material has been produced at large scale before. When leaded gasoline was the norm, before it was phased out, sodium metal was used to make the tetraethyl lead used as an additive, and it was being produced in the U.S. at a capacity of 200,000 tons a year. “It reminds us that sodium metal was once produced at large scale and safely handled and distributed around the U.S.,” Chiang says.

What’s more, sodium primarily originates from sodium chloride, or salt, so it is abundant, widely distributed around the world, and easily extracted, unlike lithium and other materials used in today’s EV batteries.

The system they envisage would use a refillable cartridge, which would be filled with liquid sodium metal and sealed. When it’s depleted, it would be returned to a refilling station and loaded with fresh sodium. Sodium melts at 98 degrees Celsius, just below the boiling point of water, so it is easy to heat to the melting point to refuel the cartridges.

Initially, the plan is to produce a brick-sized fuel cell that can deliver about 1,000 watt-hours of energy, enough to power a large drone, in order to prove the concept in a practical form that could be used for agriculture, for example. The team hopes to have such a demonstration ready within the next year.

Sugano, who conducted much of the experimental work as part of her doctoral thesis and will now work at the startup, says that a key insight was the importance of moisture in the process. As she tested the device with pure oxygen, and then with air, she found that the amount of humidity in the air was crucial to making the electrochemical reaction efficient. The humid air resulted in the sodium producing its discharge products in liquid rather than solid form, making it much easier for these to be removed by the flow of air through the system. “The key was that we can form this liquid discharge product and remove it easily, as opposed to the solid discharge that would form in dry conditions,” she says.

Ganti-Agrawal notes that the team drew from a variety of different engineering subfields. For example, there has been much research on high-temperature sodium, but none with a system with controlled humidity. “We’re pulling from fuel cell research in terms of designing our electrode, we’re pulling from older high-temperature battery research as well as some nascent sodium-air battery research, and kind of mushing it together,” which led to the “the big bump in performance” the team has achieved, he says.

The research team also included Alden Friesen, an MIT summer intern who attends Desert Mountain High School in Scottsdale, Arizona; Kailash Raman and William Woodford of Form Energy in Somerville, Massachusetts; Shashank Sripad of And Battery Aero in California, and Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan of the University of Michigan. The work was supported by ARPA-E, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and the National Science Foundation, and used facilities at MIT.nano.

This should be a great time to be a mining company. The global transition to electric vehicles and renewable energy will drive copper demand up by half, nickel more than twice, and lithium 11 times from 2020 to 2040, the International Energy Agency predicts.

Markets apparently missed the memo. Shares in the two industry giants, BHP Group and Rio Tinto, are both down by a quarter from peaks in early 2023. Total returns look better thanks to hefty dividends but are still negative. The surprise resignation of Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm, announced May 22, isn’t a bullish sign.

Part of the sector’s problem is cyclical: The stocks went on an irrationally exuberant tear coming out of the pandemic. Part is structural, too.

Most of BHP and Rio Tinto’s cash flow comes from iron ore, says James Whiteside, head of metals and mining corporate research at consultant Wood Mackenzie. Iron ore prices have fallen by 20% in the past 18 months as the biggest buyers, Chinese steel makers, get smacked by their country’s ongoing real estate depression.

“Companies have to find replacements for the iron ore bonanza of the past 20 years,” echoes Jon Mills, mining equities analyst at Morningstar. “It’s a difficult job.”

The Big Two and everyone else are scrambling to switch into copper, whose price has jumped 30% over the same period.

That takes time, lots of it. Mining has devised no equivalent to the shale drilling that allows oil and gas producers to react to markets in months rather than decades.

Production costs for copper have tripled since 2010, Whiteside estimates, as old reliable orebodies like BHP’s Escondida in Chile mature and new prospects are “more remote, harder to develop or water-starved.”

The industry is too Balkanized to meet green transition demand, adds George Cheveley, a portfolio manager at asset manager Ninety One. “BHP and Rio are the only ones big enough to pursue a $10 billion greenfield on their own,” he says. “Everyone else would risk the company on a single project.”

A raft of mergers have been pursued or rumored in recent years: BHP with Anglo American, Rio Tinto with Glencore.

Few have materialized. China’s state-owned Zijin Mining Group is a competitor on offense, targeting a 50% rise in copper output from 2023-28 as it expands recent acquisitions from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Serbia.

Nothing illustrates the perils of bold moves in mining better than Stausholm’s march into lithium at the helm of Rio Tinto. The firm sank nearly $10 billion into the essential metal for EV and energy storage batteries, while the price plunged 90% from a 2022 peak.

Stausholm may be proved right in the long run, investors think. “The time you want to buy into a metal is when everybody hates it,” Morningstar’s Mills says. Rio Tinto is “trading at a relatively large discount to our valuation,” Woodmac’s Whiteside adds. Nevertheless, Stausholm will soon be out of a job.

Mining stocks can turn very hot when they get on the right side of the supply-demand equation. BHP quadrupled in total return terms over five years following a trough in 2016. The world needs them to succeed going forward, dimly as that may be understood by the ESG crowd.

“If nothing happens, copper prices will go nuts,” Cheveley notes, taking prices for greener vehicles and power grids with them.

The ride for investors looks bumpy, though.

The cruise operator’s stock recently took a hit after cautious management earnings commentary and investor jitters, but it’s well positioned to correct course.

“The sea has never been friendly to man,” wrote sailor-cum-author Joseph Conrad. That has often been true of cruise stocks, as well, but Viking Holdings looks like an exception.

Viking has had a choppy couple of weeks. Shares of the Viking Cruise owner—famous for its river voyages—sold off despite a better-than-expected first quarter, as investors fretted that bookings could be slowing in the face of economic uncertainty. The shares took another hit after the company announced a secondary offering—just over a year after its initial public offering. At a time of trade uncertainty, stock market volatility, and recession worries, that has made some investors queasy, particularly given the industry’s reputation for being cyclical.

Yet far from being a good time to jump ship, the selloff seems like a buying opportunity.

“Viking is our favorite of all the cruise companies….It has far and away the best-in-class balance sheet, return on invested capital, and capacity expansion,” says Jodi Love, portfolio manager of the T. Rowe Price Small-Mid Cap exchange-traded fund—factors that she argues will drive industry-best profitability growth over the next three to five years. “Viking is well positioned to win within the cruise industry and the broader travel market” because it caters to a very affluent and extremely loyal customer base that books directly with the company, she notes.

Much of that was on display in its recent upbeat earnings, but due to the unsettled macro backdrop, investors were hoping for more clarity and reassurance. Instead, management’s tone was cautious, implying that the rate of bookings may have slowed.

Nonetheless, there were also encouraging numbers—92% of 2025 and more than 35% of 2026 capacity was already sold after Viking wrapped up a record “wave season” (the cruise industry’s crucial first-quarter booking period). Likewise, pricing remains strong for cruises in general, and particularly for Viking’s more upscale sailings.

“We love companies that are riding the silver tsunami” of baby boomer spending, says Mike Smith, a portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments. “This is a very affluent demographic that makes up 25% of the population but owns half the wealth…and they are still spending.”

Given that the stock is up more than 80% since its IPO, it isn’t surprising that it would pull back on conservative management commentary. Yet consensus estimates still call for best-in-industry growth, with earnings per share climbing more than 30%, to $2.42, this year and nearly 26%, to $3.06, in 2026. That’s a faster clip than its three main peers— Carnival, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, and Royal Caribbean Group—in either year. At 14.5 times next year’s earnings, the stock seems attractively priced.

It’s trading roughly on par with Royal Caribbean but “could grow 50% to 100% faster on a percentage basis,” says Lance Cannon, partner and research analyst at Hood River Capital Management. “If anything, you could argue one of these two is mispriced, and I think that is Viking. It should command a premium.”

That’s because the company’s expertise in providing immersive experiences with an English-speaking crew is second to none—and it’s expanding beyond the European river cruises on which it built its reputation. Viking sailings now include ocean voyages and visit all seven continents.

Cannon says that earnings estimates could wind up being conservative, as pricing remains strong across the cruise industry and Viking boasts a wealthy base of repeat customers. Vacationers who sail with Viking try other cruise companies “but come back every time,” he notes, and that while wealth destruction from stock market gyrations is always a worry, “the vast majority of these people aren’t going from riches to rags,” thanks to diversified investments.

The average analyst price target of more than $51 for the stock implies 15% upside from Thursday’s close of $44.34.

As for the secondary offering announced this week, that doesn’t seem cause for concern, either, in light of the longstanding pattern of more shares coming up for grabs after a stock debuts. “You can almost set your watch to the timing of some of these,” says Allspring’s Smith.

None of the concerns about Viking look like deal breakers, given its high repeat customer rate, solid cash position, and fleet of new ships coming on-line in coming years. T. Rowe’s Love argues that Viking would probably hold up best among the major cruise companies in a downturn because of these factors and its differentiated product.

In fact, the company’s ability to execute well during times of economic feast or famine is what makes Cannon confident about Viking. “The companies that continue to grow in the industry regardless of macro tend to be long-term winners, and Viking has the opportunity to be one,” he says.

It should be smooth sailing ahead for Viking customers and investors alike.