Daily roundup of research and analysis from The Globe and Mail\u2019s market strategist Scott Barlow<\/p>\n
The state of large-cap energy<\/p>\n
RBC Capital Markets head of global energy research Greg Pardy addressed the state of domestic integrated and senior oil producer stocks,<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom Venezuela to Iran, volatility has been the pervasive theme this year for both the commodity and equities. With windfall profits on the horizon and uncertainty looming over de-escalation in the Middle East, we would expect the companies in our coverage universe to prioritize their balance sheets and increase shareholder returns \u2026 Quality still matters, especially should the sector pull back sharply amid funds flow rotation catalyzed by an easing of tensions in the Middle East. It is not lost on us that energy producers are being heavily used as a temporary financial hedge against sectors which are being battered and bruised by elevated oil prices. Commitment to Shareholder Returns. The commitment of producers to shareholder returns has remained robust thus far through 2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Pardy did not list favoured stocks in today\u2019s report but recently cited Suncor Energy Inc. (SU-T<\/a>) as his top integrated pick, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNQ-T<\/a>) as top producer and Ovintiv Inc. (OVV-T<\/a>) as a \u201cdark horse pick.\u201d <\/p>\n Impressive lineup at Citi AI summit<\/p>\n Citi held an AI Summit this week that featured more than 125 major companies involved with the theme. The impressive speaker lineup (which explains the length of the following excerpt) included executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Alphabet, Amazon.com, and IBM. <\/p>\n Analyst Heath Terry summarized the major takeaways in a Friday report,<\/p>\n \u201cThe most consistent message across nearly every session was the acceleration of AI technology and enterprise adoption creating a fundamental inversion in how work gets done. Cursor\u2019s Michael Truell noted the acceleration as developers have gone from being 5-10 per cent more productive with early models to running 2-3 agents at a time and accounting for 80 per cent of enterprise customers code development. Ashley Kramer, Vice President of Enterprise at OpenAI, noted the pivotal moment we\u2019re in with \u2018everybody moving from pilot to production\u2019 Vinod Khosla framed it most starkly: we are moving from giving AI to people to people working for AI as the organizing structure of the enterprise. AWS reinforced this with their AI teammate model, where everyone becomes a manager of AI agents \u2026 Compute demand is insatiable through 2028 at minimum, with the infrastructure panel placing supply\/demand rebalancing at 2029 at the earliest or potentially never. The most-discussed binding constraint was power, not silicon. Lightning AI\u2019s William Falcon quantified the demand inflection: a single million-agent business deployment implies 100-times growth in inference demand and a 1,000-times need for compute. CoreWeave has secured 3GW of contracted power to expand from 850MW \u2026 We emerge from the Summit incrementally positive on GOOGL and AMZN given Google Cloud and AWS adoption trends. We highlight investments in compute, infrastructure, and agentic capabilities as broad-based enterprise demand accelerates \u2026 agent proliferation, scale, persistence, and autonomy all stand to magnify architectural complexity and consequently we think points of system-failure (DT, DDOG, tangentially RBRK). (2) Code assistants can equally and proficiently write exploits rapidly, pushing the marginal cost of creating\/launching a cyberattack, which in tandem with prompt injection, data poisoning, and uncontrolled agent behavior risks (as enterprise AI\/agent deployments scale) raises defensive stakes (PANW, CRWD)\u201d<\/p>\n The Space 60<\/p>\n Morgan Stanley head of research Katy Huberty\u2019s weekly emphasis on key analyst reports included marketing of The Space 60: picks and Shovels for the Final Frontier by analyst Adam Jonas. Mr Jonas wrote,<\/p>\n \u201cA combination of scientific advancements, geopolitics and economics have rekindled investor attention on the Space theme to the highest levels we have seen since launching the Morgan Stanley Space Team nearly a decade ago. On April 1st, Artemis II lifted off from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on a 10 day mission to send 4 astronauts on a flyby of the Moon. By 2028, the agency plans to put humans on the Moon, and eventually build a \u2018Moon base\u2019 for sustained lunar operations. The Trump Administration recently released a FY27 budget proposal calling for $1.5-trillion in defense spending (highest nominal request in history), and boosting the US Space Force budget by 77 per cent vs. 2026 ($71-billion vs. $40-billion). All at the same time, Project Hail Mary (a recreation of the 2021 Andy Weir space sci-fi novel) sits as the top grossing film year-to-date in theaters. Zooming out (2020-2025), the cumulative number of objects launched to space is compounding at a 20-per-cent annual rate and successful space launches at a 25-per-cent rate. From our discussions, investors are looking for derivative expressions on the theme at sub-stratospheric valuations\u201d<\/p>\n The stock list includes materials providers like Teck Resources and Alcoa, equipment specialists like Corning, Hexcel Corp, and Materion Corp, components providers like Nvidia Corp., Broadcom, Honeywell and Lumentum, launch system-adjacent stocks like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, York Space Systems and satellite operators Amazon.com, Iridium Connected, Telesat Corp. and Blacksky Technology Inc. <\/p>\n Bluesky post of the day<\/p>\n Institutions are loading up on call options at the fastest pace ever recorded \ud83d\udcc8\ud83e\udd2f\ud83d\udc40<\/p>\n [image or embed]<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Barchart (@barchart.com<\/a>) April 17, 2026 at 4:33 AM<\/a>Diversion<\/p>\n