TheChek News Flow

Cybersecurity firms are warning that the prolific hacking group known as Scattered Spider is now targeting airlines and the transportation sector.

Executives from Google’s cybersecurity unit Mandiant and Palo Alto Networks’ security research division Unit 42 say they have observed cyberattacks targeting the aviation industry resembling Scattered Spider.

Scattered Spider is a collective of mostly English-speaking hackers, typically teenagers and young adults, who are financially motivated to steal and extort sensitive data from company networks. The hackers are also known for their deception tactics, which often rely on social engineering, phishing, and sometimes threats of violence toward company help desks and call centers to gain access to their networks.

The warning comes as at least two airlines have reported intrusions this month.

Hawaiian Airlines said late Thursday that it was working to secure its systems following a cyberattack. Canada’s second largest airline, WestJet, reported a cyberattack on June 13 that remains ongoing and unresolved. Media reports have linked the WestJet incident to Scattered Spider.

This fresh wave of Scattered Spider attacks comes soon after the cybercriminal gang targeted the U.K. retail sector and the insurance industry. The hackers have previously broken into hotel chains, casinos, and technology giants.

OpenAI, one of the world’s biggest customers of Nvidia artificial intelligence chips, recently began renting Google’s AI chips to power ChatGPT and other products, the first time it has used non-Nvidia chips in a meaningful way, according to a person who is involved in the arrangement.

The move reflects OpenAI’s broader shift away from relying on Microsoft data centers and could boost Google’s tensor processing units as a cheaper alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, which dominate the AI chip market.

The Takeaway

• OpenAI hopes Google’s TPUs can help lower its costs

• The move is part of OpenAI’s effort to diversify from Microsoft and Nvidia

• The OpenAI-Google cloud pact may be straining Google’s servers

The deal also shows how Google’s longtime strategy of developing technology or businesses in nearly all software and hardware related to AI may be paying off.

OpenAI hopes the TPUs, which it rents through Google Cloud, can help lower the cost of inference computing, a term that refers to running AI on servers after the AI has been fully developed, this person said.

OpenAI’s computing needs are rising fast: ChatGPT likely has more than 25 million paying subscribers, up from 15 million at the start of the year, and hundreds of millions of people use it for free every week.

OpenAI primarily rents Nvidia server chips through Microsoft and Oracle to develop or train its models and to power ChatGPT. OpenAI spent more than $4 billion to use such servers last year, split nearly evenly between training and inference, and has projected that it will spend nearly $14 billion on AI chip servers in 2025.

Google, which competes fiercely with OpenAI in developing AI models, isn’t renting out its most powerful TPUs to its rival, according to a Google Cloud employee. That suggests that for now, Google is reserving the stronger TPUs primarily for its own AI teams to develop Gemini models. It also isn’t clear whether OpenAI wants to use TPUs for training AI.

Other firms that rent TPUs from Google cloud include Apple, Safe Superintelligence and Cohere, in part because some employees of those firms previously worked at Google and are familiar with how TPUs work.

Meta Platforms, which like OpenAI is one of the world’s biggest customers of AI chips, also recently considered using TPUs, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussion. Meta says it isn’t using them.

Google Cloud also rents out Nvidia-powered servers to its customers, and it still generates significantly more from doing so than from renting out TPUs, as Nvidia chips are an industry standard and developers have more experience using the specialized software that controls those chips. Google previously placed more than $10 billion of orders for Nvidia’s state-of-the-art Blackwell server chips and began making them available to select customers in February.

Google began working on its TPUs around 10 years ago and, starting in 2017, made them available to cloud customers interested in training their own AI models.

OpenAI first turned to Google Cloud earlier this year, after its ChatGPT image-generating tool went viral, taxing the inference servers it was using from Microsoft.

But the deal is now straining Google Cloud’s own data center capacity.

In recent weeks, Google approached other cloud providers, which primarily rent out Nvidia GPUs, to ask whether they would also install TPUs in their data centers for the benefit of an unnamed Google Cloud customer, according to several people with direct knowledge. Google recently held discussions with CoreWeave about leasing space for TPUs in its data centers, for instance.

While no company can match the performance of Nvidia chips for training AI, a never-ending list of companies have been developing inference chips to lessen their reliance on Nvidia and, hopefully, lower their costs in the long run.

It’s unclear whether any agreements materialized.

To date, Google has made TPUs available only through its own facilities.

Jacinda Mein, a Google Cloud spokesperson, confirmed that Google was “looking for space and power” outside Google data centers “to meet the short-term needs of a single Google Cloud customer.”

“These discussions in no way change our strategy,” she said, referring to its preference to keep TPUs in its own data centers. An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment.

Challenging Nvidia

While no company can match the performance of Nvidia chips for training AI, a never-ending list of companies have been developing inference chips to lessen their reliance on Nvidia and, hopefully, lower their costs in the long run.

Other major cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft, as well as big AI developers like OpenAI and Meta, have kicked off efforts to develop their own inference chips, with varying degrees of success.

Cloud providers have struggled to score big customers for their Nvidia-chip alternatives without also offering financial incentives. For instance, Anthropic uses Amazon’s and Google’s AI chips, but it has also received several billions of dollars in funding from each firm. It’s not clear whether Google is providing OpenAI with discounts or credits as an incentive to use TPUs.

OpenAI’s Google chip deal could be a setback for Microsoft, OpenAI’s closest partner and early backer. Microsoft has poured a significant amount of money into developing an AI chip it hoped OpenAI would use. Microsoft has run into problems while developing its AI chip and recently delayed the timeline for releasing the next version, meaning it likely will not be competitive with Nvidia’s chips by the time it is done.

Reuters earlier reported on OpenAI signing a deal to rent cloud servers from Google.

Germany just became the latest country to move against DeepSeek over mounting data privacy concerns. Here’s why this keeps happening.

As you probably guessed, it’s a China thing

When DeepSeek took the world by storm earlier this year, it wasn’t long before it found itself in the crosshairs of governments in the West.

First, because users quickly learned that its models were heavily moderated, skirting answering questions that could cast China and its government in a bad light.

Second, and more critically, DeepSeek’s own privacy policy confirms that the app stores user prompts, uploaded files, and other personal data on servers in China, where authorities have sweeping access under the country’s national intelligence laws.

That’s raised red flags globally. Italy was one of the first to remove DeepSeek from local app stores. South Korea did it too. In the Netherlands, it was banned on government devices. Belgium recommended public officials steer clear, and Spain’s leading consumer group has formally called for an investigation.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., lawmakers are reportedly drafting legislation that would basically prohibit federal agencies from using any AI developed in China. One senator floated the idea of jailing those who use it.

Germany joins the list

This week, Germany’s top data protection regulator formally asked Apple and Google to remove Chinese startup DeepSeek from their app stores, citing concerns over the illegal transfer of personal data to China.

In a statement issued Friday (via Reuters), Meike Kamp, Berlin’s federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, said DeepSeek failed to provide sufficient guarantees that user data is protected under standards equivalent to those in the EU:

“DeepSeek has not been able to provide my agency with convincing evidence that German users’ data is protected in China to a level equivalent to that in the European Union.”

Kamp’s office had previously asked DeepSeek to meet EU data transfer requirements or pull the app voluntarily. It didn’t.

While it is worth noting that while DeepSeek’s local, open-source models are relatively easy to fine-tune or detangle from their original China-centric biases, that’s not the case for the app or website, both of which run a hosted version controlled entirely by the company.

As for the takedown request, Google told Reuters it’s currently reviewing it. Apple hasn’t commented, but we’ve reached out and will update this post if we hear back.

The 10 Highest-Yielding Dividend Aristocrats

It’s well known that higher-yielding stocks can be value traps.

While those yields can be alluring, they can also signal an impending dividend cut and underlying weakness in a company’s operations.

Consider the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index. Its 69 members have paid out a higher dividend for at least 25 straight years, a sign of long-term consistency and quality—despite any shorter-term setbacks.

“When you look at the dividend aristocrats, what they are is the best screen for quality,” says Jenny Van Leeuwen Harrington, CEO of Gilman Hill Asset Management.

The index’s yield was recently at around 2.2%, but there are some constituents at much higher levels.

Barron’s compiled a list of 10 of the highest-yielding aristocrats, including Franklin Resources, which recently yielded 5.6%; Amcor, 5.6%; Realty Income, 5.5%; T. Rowe Price Group, 5.4%; and Stanley Black & Decker, 5.1%.

Rounding out the list are Eversource Energy, 4.8%; Target, 4.7%; Chevron, 4.7%; Federal Realty Investment Trust, 4.6%; and J.M. Smucker, 4.4%.

High yields can reflect poor stock performance, and that has been the case for some of these companies. One concern is that a juicy yield could be erased by the share’s price decline.

Case in point: Shares of retailer Target slid nearly 30% this year through June 23. As Barron’s pointed out in March, the chain has been “fighting not just for growth but also for its place in a hotly competitive U.S. retail market dominated by innovative, well-capitalized giants such as Walmart” and others.

A consolation for Target investors is that the company recently announced that it would boost its quarterly payout by nearly 2% to $1.14 a share from $1.12. It said it was on track to increase its annual dividend for the 54th straight year. A yield of nearly 5% provides some downside protection as investors wait for Target’s performance to improve.



One potential source of comfort for investors looking at these particular higher-yielders is that not too many companies get kicked out of the aristocrats index due to dividend cuts.

But companies do get booted sometimes. Examples in recent years include Walgreens Boots Alliance and VF Corp., which both slashed their payouts.

Another laggard this year is money manager T. Rowe Price. Its shares have fallen by about 15%, including dividends. But another asset manager, Franklin Resources, which recently yielded 5.5%, has returned about 15%.

Other solid stock performances this year have come from Realty Income, a real estate investment trust that has returned about 12%; Eversource Energy, up 13%; and Chevron. The global energy giant has returned about 4% in 2025.

Elsewhere, J.M. Smucker is off by about 10%, Federal Realty Investment Trust has slid by 12%, and Stanley Black & Decker has fallen by about 16%. Amcor, which makes packaging products, is down about 1%. The S&P 500 index has returned 3%.

Simeon Hyman, global investment strategist at ProShares, says that focusing on the highest-yielding aristocrats can make sense, though those securities tend to have a value tilt and are more cynical than other members of that index. “You have to walk carefully in the high-dividend-yielding space.” he says.

At the same time, Hyman adds, a long record “of dividend growth is absolutely a marker of quality across all of the constituents of the [dividend aristocrats] index.

The ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats exchange-traded fund (ticker: NOBL) tracks the index. Some investors may prefer to invest in the entire aristocrat index as a way to diversify a portfolio.

Holtec International, a key player in the nuclear industry, plans to go public within several months, CEO Krishna Singh told Barron’s on Monday.

The IPO would almost certainly be the largest nuclear-energy offering in years, giving investors one of the few pure-play ways of buying into the industry. Unlike some other nuclear names, Holtec already produces substantial revenue from activities like decommissioning nuclear plants and handling nuclear waste. The company could be worth more than $10 billion.

Holtec is also on the verge of doing something never before attempted in America—bringing back a decommissioned nuclear plant. The company is restoring a reactor at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, which had been shut down in 2022 for financial reasons. It has received hundreds of millions of dollars of support from the state of Michigan and the Department of Energy for the project.

In addition, Holtec plans to place another two small modular reactors, or SMRs, at the Michigan site, although it has not yet received federal or state approval to do so. Holtec is already building the equipment for those reactors in conjunction with Hyundai Engineering & Construction.

Singh founded Holtec, which is based in Camden, NJ, in 1986. For years, the company has made money by decommissioning existing nuclear plants, which involves carefully disassembling the plants and storing their used nuclear fuel. The company also builds containment units for spent fuel that are sold around the world. Its annual profits are upward of $500 million, according to a source familiar with the company’s results. Singh said he’s hoping to sell about 20% of the company’s equity to investors.

“It will be probably January, although my consultants said it will be April,” he said. “They’re conservative.”

Singh said he is discussing with the consultants if the company’s books are “up to snuff to be a public company.” A company spokesman said afterward that Singh was referring to the company’s software and reporting technology, not its financial controls.

Singh said the company will use proceeds from the equity sale to help it expand construction of small modular reactors. “The real driver for us is we are on our own calendar,” he said. “We’re going to be building, we think, in the next decade 10-20 small modular reactors at the same time.”

Assuming the company perfects the process of building them, each of those reactors could cost about $3 billion to construct. “The capital needed for that is enormous,” he said. Singh said he is open to Holtec operating the units themselves, or selling them to third parties.

Like other nuclear companies, Holtec has been talking to data center operators about buying nuclear power, he said.

Many of these ideas will take years to play out. The company has not yet licensed its design, and there are no SMRs currently operating in the United States.

Holtec’s market value would likely exceed the value of other nuclear developers, which still have relatively minimal amounts of revenue, if any at all. “It’s a more mature company with more revenue than others that have gone public,” said Seth Grae, CEO of nuclear fuel company Lightbridge.

Oklo, another reactor developer, is worth $8 billion, and microreactor company Nano Nuclear is worth $1.5 billion. Nuscale, the most valuable small-scale nuclear developer and the only one with a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is worth a little over $10 billion.

Shares of Oklo and Nuscale have soared more than 200% in the past year, as tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon have expressed interest in buying power from nuclear reactors for their AI data centers. Asked if Holtec ought to be worth more than those existing nuclear developers, Singh said, “In a fair market, I think we should be worth a whole lot more. We actually make things.”

Grae agreed that Holtec will probably be worth over $10 billion, and said that the company should see considerable appetite from investors. “They’re doing it at exactly the right moment,” he said. “There’s so much investor interest in nuclear.”

The timing will be even better if Holtec can successfully reopen Palisades. Singh said the project is likely to be operating in November, a few weeks after the company’s best-case-scenario date of October. A Holtec spokesman said the pushback on the date is because Holtec chose to do additional work on the project, and it keeps the company within its goal of completing the project in the fourth quarter.

President Trump wants an all-American car. U.S. vehicle sales could plunge by as much as 20% if he uses massive levies to get one.

President Donald Trump wants to make U.S. manufacturing great again. He might just hobble the American auto industry in the process.

For all the talk of a manufacturing decline in the U.S., auto making remains a huge industry. Half of all cars sold in America are assembled domestically in factories in Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia, and elsewhere, a far larger investment than industries such as clothing or electronics. The current setup uses low-cost foreign manufacturing to produce lower-value parts, while building higher-end components at home.

The U.S. has attracted foreign car manufacturers as well. Toyota Motor, Honda Motor, and Hyundai Motor directly employ some 67,000 manufacturing workers, supporting an additional nearly half-million jobs, while paying an estimated $7 billion in annual wages and benefits at almost two dozen facilities spread across the U.S.

Trump, however, wants an All-American car—parts included—and is willing to use massive tariffs to get one. He has proposed a 25% penalty on imported cars and parts, along with reciprocal tariffs and Section 232 levies on steel and aluminum.

“Steel production is imperative for our national and economic security,” a White House spokesman said in an email. He didn’t comment on the impact of parts tariffs. In the past, administration officials have cited the desire to boost American manufacturing and protect economic security as reasons for the tariffs.

After intense lobbying, the president modified the parts tariffs, essentially giving the industry two years to move supply chains back home. He also delayed reciprocal tariffs until July 9, allowing countries time to negotiate.

July 9 is now fast approaching—and the industry remains in wait-and-see mode. The automotive industry could handle 25% tariffs if levies were only on completed vehicles. But similar penalties on car parts will cause far more damage. In 2024, General Motors generated almost $160 billion selling cars in North America, making a profit of $14.5 billion in the process. Tariffs, as proposed, could increase its costs by about $25 billion and wipe out its profits, Barron’s estimates, based on potential penalties applied to import costs.

For now, things aren’t that dire. GM estimates current tariff headwinds of roughly $1.5 billion per quarter, net of cost reductions, or about $2,200 per car sold.

Ultimately, the full load would raise car prices by as much as 15%, Barron’s estimates, based on analyst projections and historical evidence. That would cause U.S. competitiveness to fade and create enough chaos that foreign auto makers could ultimately decide it’s easier to pay the levies than build factories in America. The end result? Car-mageddon. U.S. vehicle sales could plunge by as much as 20%—unless the administration chooses other mechanisms to reach its goals.

“You want to get to a certain local manufacturing outcome, and you’re penalizing yourself by putting tariffs on everything,” says Edward Jones analyst Jeff Windau. “You don’t want to drive the car off the cliff.”

Assembling cars in the U.S. makes sense—and global auto makers know it. In March, Hyundai announced a $9 billion investment to expand production at its Savannah, Ga., plant, the newest car factory in the U.S. It is also building a steel factory to supply its steel stamping plants. The plan to increase U.S. production predates Trump 2.0, but Hyundai CEO Jose Muñoz says localization is the best way to address the tariffs. Still, according to reports, Hyundai is considering raising prices across its U.S. lineup by 1% to offset tariffs, the result of the company’s annual pricing review.

U.S. auto makers are also building more in the U.S. GM recently announced plans to spend $4 billion to retool the Orion Assembly Plant in Michigan, the Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas, and Spring Hill Manufacturing in Tennessee, which would add some 300,000 units of production back to America. Stellantis plans to reopen its Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois. Ford Motor already assembles more cars domestically than its Detroit peers. All told, domestic production could approach 75% of demand by the end of the decade, based solely on tariffs placed on completed cars.

“We have excess manufacturing capacity at our existing plants, and auto companies can easily bring good union jobs back to the U.S.,” says UAW President Shawn Fain.

That’s not the case if tariffs on car parts are imposed as currently proposed. The auto supply chain is spread across the world to make it as efficient as possible, with cheaper components made in low-cost countries. Ontario-based Magna International, for instance, has more than 340 manufacturing facilities in 28 countries. It makes hundreds of products, including the e-axle—a high-tech drivetrain component that integrates gears, an electric motor, a power inverter, and an axle for the Ford F-150 hybrid pickup truck.

The e-axle is an international piece of machinery. The gears and motors are made by Magna suppliers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The power inverters come from the U.S. The casings come from Mexico. They all get shipped to Canada for subassembly. Then the finished parts are shipped to Ford’s Dearborn Truck Plant outside of Detroit.

“This kind of cross-border coordination is common in our industry,” says Magna’s vice president of operations, Kathy Worthen. “It also shows why stable trade relations and efficient logistics matter so much—not just for [car makers] but for the entire supply chain that builds the modern car.”

The benefit to consumers of lower-cost manufacturing is improved affordability. That will “simply be out the window,” says David Greene, head of industry and marketplace analytics at Cars.com, adding that there will be precious few new cars costing less than $30,000 when the full effect of tariff policies is felt. Prices are already starting to rise. Cars.com counts an average price increase of about $1,100 for Mexican-built vehicles since the start of 2025. Used-car prices increased by 6.5% year over year in June. Buyers can expect the average car price to creep $1,000 to $2,000 higher over the next 12 months.

Ford CEO Jim Farley puts it more succinctly: “We’ve got to make sure the parts are available, even [foreign] parts.”

The president’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act tries to offset that somewhat. It would eliminate electric-vehicle purchase tax credits worth up to $7,500 and replace them with a deduction for car loan interest for U.S.-assembled vehicles of up to about $1,000. The only problem: To get the full credit requires buying a car that is expensive enough to hit a $10,000 interest cap. Maybe sales of the $160,000 Cadillac Escalade V or a $200,000 Corvette ZR1 will get a boost.

The uncertainty around the final forms of the tariffs is already having an impact. A new factory can take up to five years from breaking ground to producing vehicles. The combination of potential parts tariffs, the on-again/off-again nature of their implementation, and country-by-country trade talks—which industry executives fear could favor one nation over another—have some auto makers opting to retool existing plants or simply manufacture overseas and pay the tariff.

“Many companies are hitting the pause button because they don’t know what the rules are going to be a week, a month, or a year from now,” notes Capital Group economist Darrell Spence.

The longer-term effect on the industry could be devastating. The fact that Trump plans to penalize all imported parts forces new costs on U.S. auto makers that others don’t bear, making U.S.-made cars too expensive for foreign markets, killing GM, Stellantis, and Ford’s ability to export cars. Take steel, which isn’t specific to just autos. The 50% penalty “hurts,” says John Pfeifer, CEO of fire engine maker Oshkosh. “They increase the input costs we all have as [U.S.] manufacturers…. Steel and aluminum are cheaper in Europe and Asia.”

More expensive materials, with a lack of low-cost parts, manufacturing scale, and specialization, could easily raise the cost to make a 100% U.S. vehicle by $10,000, or more, dangerously close to offsetting any penalty from importing whole cars.

A decade from now, the current policy regime, with tariffs on parts and imported vehicles, would make the U.S. car industry landlocked, less profitable, and smaller relative to the global industry. “Tariffs lower long-run productivity by both raising input costs, reducing investment, and distancing U.S. firms from competition,” says Ernie Tedeschi, head of the Budget Lab at Yale University. “By extension, they lower long-run real wages too.”

The tariffs could even accelerate the arrival of Chinese cars in the U.S., argues BofA Securities analyst John Murphy, setting up a dynamic similar to the arrival of cheap Japanese vehicles in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, U.S. auto makers couldn’t make smaller, fuel-efficient cars as cheaply as the Japanese and reacted by abandoning the lower-end segment of the market, focusing on larger vehicles with fatter per-car profit margins.

It seemed like a sensible strategy, but it didn’t result in long-term success. Toyota still makes cheaper cars—the average cost for a Toyota purchased in the U.S. is about $42,000, some $12,000 cheaper than the average new Ford—but Toyota generates $1,900 more profit per car despite the lower selling price. The extra profit earned by Toyota turns into updated factories with better scale, producing improved models with new features.

If U.S. tariffs prompt U.S. auto makers to move even higher up the cost curve and abandon more of the lower-priced market, Chinese auto makers like EV leader BYD or Volvo owner Geely Automotive Holdings, with less need to maintain profit margins, could decide to build their own factories and fill the gap.

“The idea that you would have a Chinese manufacturer in the United States sourcing parts from the U.S., employing Americans, and abiding by all the rules, that would come in at the low end, is something that I don’t think is off the table,” says Murphy. “It is literally a matter of time.”

There are better ways to accomplish Trump’s goals. Industry leaders and analysts say the focus should be on making the U.S. the low-cost place to assemble cars, with tax breaks and credits for investments and exports used as tools to incentivize production. Murphy likes the idea in Sen. Bernie Moreno’s (R., Ohio) Transportation Freedom Act, which provides additional tax breaks for wages because it lowers employment costs.

Others point to export credits as a way to offset some of the costs. The value of imported vehicles and auto parts in 2024 totaled some $474 billion, while U.S. exports amounted to $169 billion. Meanwhile, Ford makes all of the automatic transmissions in Ranger pickup trucks, assembled in five global factories and sold in 180 markets around the world, in the U.S.

“Ford is almost a net exporter,” says CEO Farley. “We have to work with the administration and get some kind of credit. We want to manufacture more in the U.S., but it’s not just keeping it here, it’s actually exporting as well.”

Honda Manufacturing of Indiana in Greensburg, In. (Courtesy Honda)

The situation is enough to make investors write off the sector as uninvestible—and many have. Just 15% of Wall Street analysts covering Ford rate the stock a Buy or equivalent, while 27% have that rating on Stellantis, and 48% have it on GM. The average Buy-rating ratio for a stock in the S&P 500 index is about 55%.

All three, however, remain very cheap. GM, Ford, and Stellantis have recently been trading for about five, six, and four times estimated operating profits, respectively. Investors looking for a margin of safety could look for a discount of one point to those numbers before buying.

At those levels and based on operating profit estimates for 2025 and 2026, GM stock would be attractive at $45 a share, down 8% from a recent $49. GM has been relatively strong thanks to its consistent profit margins and stock buybacks.

Ford would be attractive at $10, down 7% from a recent $10.80. Ford’s performance, however, will depend mostly on its ability to improve production quality and reduce warranty expenses.

Stellantis, at a recent $9.60, has 15% upside to reach its margin-of-safety level of $11. It had a terrible 2024 and now has a new CEO, Antonio Filosa, overseeing a turnaround effort. His job, along with managing tariffs, is to repair dealer and employee relations while getting inventories under control.

Auto parts makers have been hit by concerns that production rates will drop off materially in the second half of the year as tariff impacts start to bite. Citigroup analyst Mike Ward suspects things will turn out better than that, setting up parts companies for earnings beats and increased guidance.

One of his favorites is Southfield, Mich.-based Lear, which makes seats and electrical components. Shares, which yield 3.4%, trade for about 7.3 times estimated earnings over the coming 12 months, a discount to its historic multiple closer to 10 times. GM is Lear’s largest customer, accounting for about 22% of sales, and the auto maker’s decision to build a new full-size sport-utility vehicle and light-duty pickup truck at its Orion, Mich., assembly plant will help Lear. Ward has a Buy rating and $123 price target on the stock, up 33% from a recent $92.42.

Aptiv and BorgWarner also look attractive, says J.P. Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman. Borg, which makes powertrain components and will benefit from more EV and hybrids on the road, trades for just seven times earnings, a discount to its historical multiple of about 8.5 times. Brinkman’s price target for Borg stock is $43, up 29% from a recent $33.46, valuing shares for about 9.5 times his estimated 2026 earnings.

Aptiv, which trades at nine times earnings, also looks cheap relative to its history. The company is splitting into two parts. One unit will supply electrical systems to car makers, while the other will make “sensor-to-cloud tech solutions” for multiple industries. The bet is that a business less tied to cars could fetch a better valuation, since industrial companies in the S&P 500 trade for about 22 times estimated earnings, double the multiples for auto parts companies.

Brinkman has an $85 price target on Aptiv, up 25% from recent levels, valuing the stock at about 10.5 times his estimated 2026 earnings.

Ultimately, investors should be looking for ideas that aren’t completely dependent on tariff policy—and waiting for the right price to pounce when tariff fears beat up the sector.