Jack Pitcher

Earnings reports we got over the first quarter have been really strong, especially for the chip makers.

And people are just piling into chip stocks.

We've seen price action in some of these stocks that people haven't really seen in 25 or 30 years since the dot-com bubble.

So much bullishness in this one area of very large companies is masking the fact that stocks broadly aren't necessarily all up that much.

We actually have more than half of the S&P 500 down on the year.

Stuff that's more sensitive to the price of oil or to consumer spending that is not doing so hot.

Oil has come in from its highs of the year.

It's trading around $100 a barrel right now.

That's an expensive level, but it is not automatically about to trigger a recession.

Some people are worried if the conflict in the Middle East is not resolved soon that oil is going to climb a lot more for here.

So that's definitely something investors are watching closely.

A rule change a few years ago made it easier to launch funds that don't just track indexes, so things like stock picking or bond picking funds.

As we've seen the baby boomers look for income solutions in retirement, some of these actively managed strategies have become really popular with their financial advisors, and a lot of money has been going into them.

We have seen managers able to increase their fee rates, which is helping them out as they report earnings.

For end investors, it's all about what they're looking for specifically.

Some people prefer active strategies or trying to accomplish something specific, and that higher fund fee could be worth it.

But we've also seen numerous studies showing the benefits of being in the cheapest possible passive funds over long periods of time.

As some of these AI companies are building out the infrastructure and the data centers needed to power their models, they're running into a shortage of memory.

There's only a handful of major companies that make the type of memory they need, and the stocks of those have been absolutely soaring this year.

A couple of them are South Korean stocks, including Samsung.