Q1 2026 was not kind.

The S&P 500 posted its worst quarter since 2022. The Nasdaq entered correction territory. The Iran conflict pushed oil above $100 a barrel. Five straight weeks of losses heading into the quarter end.

And unlike prior selloffs, bonds did not rally when stocks fell, which is the signal of a liquidity problem, not a sentiment problem.

We are not going to pretend that none of that happened. It did. And we are not going to pretend it did not create pain. It did that too.

But here is what we believe with conviction: this tape is creating one of the best entry points of the decade into the megatrend that will define the next 10 years.

This month, the story is robotics and automation. The trend was already accelerating before the selloff. It will keep accelerating regardless of what happens in the Middle East next week.

On March 16, at Nvidia's GTC conference in San Jose, CEO Jensen Huang stood in front of 30,000 people and said this:

That line made headlines. What did not make headlines was what Huang said in the analyst session the following day, which is where the number that matters most came out.

On the GTC show floor that week, there were 110 robots from virtually every major robotics manufacturer in the world. ABB, KUKA, Universal Robots, Foxconn, Caterpillar – all of them building on Nvidia's platform for deployment in factories and logistics networks across the globe.

The analysts who walked out of that conference noted that robotics had been a 2027-2028 planning item for most companies. GTC 2026 suggested that timeline was compressing faster than anyone expected.

That is the context. Bryan is going to show you how to get positioned through a name most people still think of as a car parts company. They are wrong about that. Karim is going to show you what robotics already looks like inside a hospital and a dialysis clinic. And CJ is going to show you how autonomous systems are already reshaping the battlefield. Defense and robotics are no longer two separate stories.

Enjoy the issue,

I never opened them. I never sold them. Because I believed in what they represented.

Here is what I believe now, with that same conviction…

Not the robots of science fiction. The robots that are already here. The ones vacuuming your carpet. The ones delivering food across college campuses.

The ones building cars with a precision no human hand can match. What started with a Roomba is turning into one of the largest industrial shifts in human history.

The global robotics market is around $50 billion today. By 2030 it is projected to reach somewhere between $110 billion and $260 billion, meaning the market is set to double or triple in less than five years.

There are already 4.6 million industrial robots operating worldwide.

By 2030 that number is expected to hit 13 million. Every one of those machines needs sensors to see, computers to think, and actuation systems to move.

Now think about what Jensen Huang said to the room of analysts after his GTC keynote.

Not the headline quote everyone repeated. The number he gave when they pressed him on the size of the opportunity. He said the physical AI market is "something like $50 trillion, $60 trillion, $70 trillion" of the world's industries.

His point was that most of the world's economic activity does not happen in software. It happens in factories and warehouses and shipping yards and fields. All of it needs to be automated. Almost none of it is yet.

Most people still think of Aptiv (APTV) as a car parts company. I understand why. For years that is how it was classified. But here is what Aptiv actually does: its core technology senses the environment in real time, processes that information, and executes an action.

Here's the moment that changed my thinking…

At CES 2026, Aptiv did not show up with a car. It showed up with an AI-powered collaborative robot and a next-generation autonomous material handling system built on the company's own PULSE sensor platform. It announced a partnership with Vecna Robotics to co-develop warehouse automation.

Aptiv's own executive said it plainly on stage. The company is leveraging its leading technologies – proven in millions of vehicles – and extending them into robotics and beyond.

He was not announcing a pivot. He was announcing that the pivot had already happened.

Right now, in early April, Aptiv is in the middle of something that almost nobody in the market is paying attention to. It is spinning off its legacy wiring and connectors business into a separate company called Versigent.

When the spinoff closes, the old car parts identity goes with it. What remains is a pure technology platform focused on sensing, computing, and actuation, free of the legacy business that has been obscuring what this company actually is.

Here is what the market is missing. A company generating $20 billion in revenue and nearly $3 billion in annual earnings is trading at a single-digit earnings multiple.

That is the valuation you assign to a struggling business in decline. Not to a technology platform with capabilities that every warehouse robot, every autonomous vehicle, and every factory floor Jensen Huang described at GTC is going to need.

That gap between what the market thinks Aptiv is and what Aptiv is becoming is the trade.

The stock is currently trading in the upper $60s, well off its 52-week high in the upper $80s. The broader selloff handed us a discount on a company in the middle of a transformation the market has not yet priced.

Seventeen analysts rate APTV a "Buy."

The average price target is in the mid-$90s. Getting back to the pre-selloff level alone is a 25% move. Getting to where the analyst community thinks it belongs is closer to 40%.

My ProfitSight scanner has also recently picked up consecutive short-term Cash Code X setups (aka the perfect timing indicator") on 78-minute and 195-minute intervals… meaning we could be gearing up for a larger reversal.

I held my Star Wars collection for decades waiting for the value to be recognized.

I do not expect to wait that long here.

The company expects worldwide procedure growth of 13% to 15% in 2026.

This is not experimental medicine. It is not a pilot program. It is the standard of care at hospitals around the world, and it is growing every year.

What does a da Vinci robot do that a human hand cannot? It eliminates tremor. It gives the surgeon a magnified three-dimensional view of the surgical field. It translates their movements into smaller, more precise actions inside the patient's body. It does not get tired in hour six of a complex procedure.

The surgeon is still in the room. The surgeon is still making every decision. The robot is the instrument that makes the execution more precise. That precision saves lives. The data shows it. The adoption rate shows it.

DaVita (DVA) is the largest kidney dialysis provider in the United States, serving approximately 293,000 patients across more than 3,200 locations.

For most people, dialysis means going to a clinic two or three times a week for a four-hour treatment. For approximately 80,000 Americans, it means doing it at home.

That is the process of inserting a needle into a blood vessel to begin treatment. It happens two or three times a week for every dialysis patient. It depends on the skill and steadiness of the technician. It can cause pain, infection, and complications when it goes wrong.

X9 is building a robotic system to make cannulation reliable, repeatable, and precise. Not to replace the technician. To give the technician a better instrument.

The same way da Vinci gives the surgeon a better instrument.

That is what robotics looks like in medicine. Not a headline. Not a concept. A needle, placed correctly, every time, for a patient who has been through that process hundreds of times and deserves for it to go well.

The innovation in medical robotics is not coming. It is here. It is being adopted at scale. And the companies driving it are not the ones making headlines about humanoid robots.

They are the ones quietly making life better for millions of patients every single day.

Most people call it a drone company. That label misses the point. AeroVironment's products are not just remotely flown tools. They are machines that gather data, process it, and act on it. That is the definition of a robot.

AeroVironment has been building battlefield robots for years. They just happened to look like drones.

The company's Switchblade system is a good example. It launches, flies on its own, finds a target, and strikes. The human makes the decision to deploy. After that, the machine handles the rest.

That is not a drone in the old sense. That is a robotic weapon.

Each shot costs roughly the price of running a microwave for a few seconds. You can fire it as many times as you need. No reload. No running out.

If that technology scales the way early results suggest, the defender gets a massive cost advantage.

The United States and its allies have the infrastructure to build and deploy these systems at scale. That is a strategic edge that money can buy.

The traditional defense giants like Lockheed Martin and RTX are not going anywhere. But these companies will get less of the next wave of defense spending as spending begins to flow to the companies that move fast, build smart, and operate at the edge of what is technologically possible.

Keep in mind: the large defense companies will likely start buying some of these smaller robotics firms to stay relevant. That acquisition pressure is a second reason to pay attention to this space.

There is also a rebuilding story here. The conflicts happening right now are burning through military inventories faster than anyone planned. Drones, missiles, and defense systems are being used up quickly.

When the time comes to restock, it will not be with the same old tools. It will be with next-generation systems. That is exactly what companies like AeroVironment are already building.

We are in the early stage of a robotics arms race. The side that wins will not be the biggest. It will be the one that can put the most capable, efficient, and scalable systems in the field.

This wasn’t the first time that I had stumbled across this company...

Last year, I caught up with Todd Hoffman, the original star of the hit TV show Gold Rush (and the spinoff Hoffman Family Gold)...

Now, before I explain how BHP gives exposure to Kobold Metals...

Let me first address the most obvious connection to this “robot empire” that I believe the company is quietly building...

The company is the No. 1 producer of copper on the planet. It owns the Escondida mine in Chile, which is currently the world’s largest mine.

In 2025, it produced 2 million metric tons of copper (roughly the same weight as 363,000 adult elephants)...

Which is also the No. 1 metal needed in robotics.

Think about it...

Wiring...

Motors...

Circuit boards....

Power systems...

For robotics to scale, we’re going to need A LOT of copper!

BHP’s research team is expecting copper demand to grow by roughly 2% per year until 2050.

And copper is just ONE of the metals that BHP produces...

The company is also a top-5 producer of nickel and iron ore (needed for steel), which are also important in robotics.

But mining critical metals isn’t the only way the company is building a “robotics empire.”

Perhaps most critically...

One of those companies BHP has invested in is FieldAI, which developed best-in-class “physical AI” software that leading robot companies like Boston Dynamics depend on to serve as the “brain” for their creations.

BHP Group isn’t just spending hundreds of millions of dollars because it wants equity in hot startup robotics companies.

By making these investments, it's getting first access to innovative new technologies it believes will change metal exploration and mining.

That means it can produce more metal to keep up with the growing demand for technologies like robotics, AI, power generation, data centers, infrastructure, and other technologies.

It’s a cycle... and BHP has implanted itself firmly in.

That’s why I believe BHP is a strong “pick and shovel” play in when it comes to robotics.

Let me be clear...

I am not saying it’s the next stock to go from $10 to $1,000-plus per share.

BHP Group (BHP) is a blue-chip company with a market cap of $180 billion, with shares trading for $73 (up 18% YTD)...

But because of its portfolio of over 30 cutting-edge start-up companies, and the growing demand for copper, nickel, and iron...

I'm convinced BHP is a fundamentally sound way to get exposure to the future of robotics and has the potential to reach heights no other mining company has ever achieved.

Oh...

And it pays a 3.59% dividend, which is pretty darn nice in this market environment.

Three corners of the same megatrend.

One surgical robot performing 3.1 million procedures a year and growing.

One defense company whose autonomous systems are deployed in active conflicts right now.

One technology company shedding its old identity to become a pure sensing and automation platform at the exact moment the most watched CEO in tech declared that every industrial company will become a robotics company.

The selloff of Q1 2026 could have created the entry point.

Here is the thing about entry points. They do not stay open forever. The crowd that is currently focused on oil prices, ceasefire timelines, and Fed press conferences will eventually look up and notice what has been building. When they do, the entry closes.

We called the materials and metals rotation at the start of the year. The early winners proved the thesis.

We are making the same call now on robotics and automation, with the same conviction and with the added weight of Jensen Huang telling the entire technology industry in plain language what is coming next.

The machines are already here. In operating rooms. On battlefields. In warehouses.

On the factory floors that Huang described as the next great wave of AI investment.

The question is not whether you believe in robotics. The question is whether you were positioned when it mattered.

To your success,