Your 5 weekly reads:

Range Takeaway: The market continues to shrug off renewed escalation in Iran. So far, the conflict hasn’t disrupted extraordinary earnings momentum, and energy prices remain well below their spring peaks. But pressure is building: tanker traffic has again ground to a standstill, strategic oil inventories are dwindling, and long-term interest rates have climbed to their highest levels since before the financial crisis. If these strains persist, early analyst forecasts of $150 oil could become a scenario markets (and policymakers) are forced to confront.

Megacap earnings kicked off this week, and Wall Street wasn’t exactly impressed.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, delivered exactly what investors said they wanted. Revenue rose 24%, profits climbed 30%, and Cloud grew an impressive 82%, offering some of the clearest evidence yet that AI investment is translating into growth. The stock still fell 7% the next day, for its worst session in 14 months.

The problem wasn’t the results. It was what they cost. For the second consecutive quarter, Google revised its capex forecast higher. Spending on compute and infrastructure has grown so large that Google’s free cash flow went negative this quarter for the first time as a public company.

Meanwhile, Apple, criticized by many for failing to invest aggressively enough in AI, is currently being rewarded for exactly that. The company has spent a small fraction on AI infrastructure relative to big-tech peers as it outsources much of the model layer. Despite being among the slowest revenue growers in the Mag 7, it’s been the best performer in the group, with shares up nearly 23% year-to-date.

This sets the stage for next week: Apple reports earnings alongside big spenders Microsoft, Amazon and Meta. Boardrooms around the world will see a live test on which approach investors reward. The market’s reaction could dictate the next phase of AI spending.

We’re continuing our series breaking down the strategies we use to manage your portfolio, in plain English. This week: “direct indexing.”

Here’s the idea: An index fund is like a smoothie — 500 companies blended into a single cup. It’s cheap, diversified, and for most people, great. The catch is that once it’s blended, you can’t take any one ingredient out. Direct indexing hands you the fruit instead: you own hundreds of the underlying stocks that make up the fund individually. Same recipe, similar flavor, but now every holding is yours to work with.

Why does owning the pieces matter? Because last week’s move (tax-loss harvesting) can now happen at the level of each stock. Even when the market is up overall, some names inside the index will have dipped, and those dips can still become usable losses. It also means we can leave things out of your personalized recipe: if you already hold a pile of your employer’s stock from RSUs, we can build your index around it so you’re not doubling down on one company.

Direct indexing was long an institutions-only tool, gated behind steep minimums. Range passes it through to our members with no markup.¹

Range partner Michael Kim just did something almost no one in golf ever does: he carded a sub-60 round at the 3M Open, one of the rarest scores in the sport. We are still not over it. Join us in supporting him as he takes on the rest of the tournament this weekend.

On Instagram, we also broke down the week’s wildest money stories:

Follow us on Instagram @rangefinance to catch our videos next week.

Volatile weeks like this one are a good nudge to check whether your asset allocation has shifted from your desired exposure without you realizing it.

Ask Rai: “How can I better align with my investment plan?” and our AI wealth advisor will look over your holdings across every account, flag accounts where you may have become too concentrated in one sector, and suggest moves that could get you back in line with your plan.²

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