Onwards, Ever Upward

Memorial Day on Monday marks the unofficial start of summer, a poignant reminder of tenacity. It also marks graduation season. Forty plus commencements in Connecticut alone. And if you're anything like us, you don’t remember the commencement speech. Those worth hearing sound wise in the moment, then dissolve quickly into life's greatest and most humbling challenge: survival.

This year's speeches brought boos and tears. Boos for AI, a technology arriving fast and without apology into a job market these graduates are about to enter. Tears for the anxiety of finding a first job in an economy reorganizing itself in real time. Tech layoffs continue to accelerate even as the same companies collectively spend hundreds of billions building AI infrastructure. As of this week, the sector has shed nearly 250,000 jobs since January. Many economists believe the labor disruption is already here, not arriving sometime in the future. The same efficiency gains that made AI indispensable to enterprise are now eliminating the entry-level roles that once built careers.

Markets, meanwhile, told a slightly more optimistic story despite trading in red for most of the week. A midweek rally drove the Dow through 50,000 for the first time while the Russell 2000 showed some real strength, a reminder that small caps remain one of the last places where pricing inefficiency still lives and where disciplined investors can find asymmetric returns before the crowd arrives.

The parallel is not lost upon us. Graduates are entering a choppy, disrupted market. Smallcap companies are navigating a world of big noise. Both require the same thing: “character over resume”, as NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal told the graduating class at LSU last Saturday. And the persistence of Odysseus, a man who spent a decade simply trying to get home.

The journey is rarely straightforward. Onward ho!