TABLE OF CONTENTS

Other Stocks May Crack Under Trump’s Tariff Pressures…

But This Glazier Is Far From Fragile

Alexander Green, Chief Investment Strategist, The Oxford Club

The stock market reacted badly to President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Yes, the tariffs will insulate some domestic firms from foreign competition. And they will motivate some international companies to begin manufacturing in the U.S.

But it will take years for those factories to be built. Meanwhile, prices will go up almost immediately.    

There is still a chance that both foreign and domestic tariffs will be negotiated away. That would be a good thing for us and our trading partners.

But, for now, investors are on the defensive.

The key is not to flee the stock market but to get more selective, to focus on companies that are likely to see sales and profits continue to rise despite the challenging new business landscape.   

This month, for instance, we’ll focus on a company that has been churning out profits for over a century and a half.

Sales are rising 18%. Earnings are up 46%. And after just reporting a “terrific quarter,” the chief financial officer said, “We expect our momentum to continue in 2025.”   

The company is the newest addition to our Oxford Trading Portfolio.

Some Things Don’t Change

In 2009, during the trough of the Great Recession, Warren Buffett was driving through downtown Omaha, Nebraska, with a CEO friend who was despondent about economic conditions.

“Warren, how are we ever going to pull out of this?” the friend asked.   

Buffett paused for a moment. Then he asked a question: “Do you know what the bestselling candy bar was in 1962?”   

When his friend said he wasn’t sure, Buffett told him it was Snickers. Then he told him what the current bestselling candy bar was: Snickers. That was the end of their discussion on the subject.

Buffett’s point? However much things change, some things remain the same. That’s worth remembering in the uncertain period we’ve entered lately.   

Stocks rallied on Donald Trump’s election – and his promise to extend the 2017 tax cuts, reduce government regulations, and root out waste, fraud, and abuse in Washington.

But the market tanked in March when Trump first rolled out his tariffs on our leading trading partners.

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Stocks struggled to find a bottom on hopes that the tariffs would be reduced, repealed, or delayed. (After all, economic conditions are mostly positive.) But when the president rolled out his full tariff plans in early April, the market sold off hard.

Make no mistake: Tariffs are taxes paid by Americans. They not only make imports more expensive but also allow domestic manufacturers to raise prices with impunity.

That means inflation is likely to be higher, the economy is likely to be softer, and any near-term interest rate cut is off the table. But here’s something you can count on to remain the same: windows.

Everyone needs them in their homes, their offices, and their cars. And if you can build a better window – after a hundred years with virtually no innovation – the world will beat a path to your door. That’s why I’m bullish on Corning (NYSE: GLW).

A Play on Optical Physics

Based in its namesake city in New York – and with a history spanning 170 years – Corning is a global leader in materials science with unparalleled expertise in ceramics and optical physics.

The firm’s innovations include the first glass bulbs for Thomas Edison’s electric light, the first low-loss optical fiber, the first cellular substrates that enabled catalytic converters, and the first damage-resistant cover glass for mobile devices.

Corning is accelerating and transforming entire industries, including consumer electronics, optical communications, and the automotive industry.

It is also about to revolutionize the construction and remodeling industries as well.   

The company is famous for making glass that is thin, insulated, and damage-resistant. It pioneered the invention of low-loss optical fiber in 1970. And it has since become a cornerstone of the telecommunications industry.

It makes optical fiber and cables, connectivity solutions for hyperscale data centers, 5G networks, and broadband infrastructure.

It manufactures glass substrates for LCDs used in computers, monitors, and TV sets.

It makes windshields, display sensors, and connectors for automobile manufacturers.

It has also become a leader in AI infrastructure. (The company recently launched GlassWorks AI, which positions Corning as a critical enabler of generative AI technologies, offering high-density optical infrastructure for data centers.) As positive as all this high-tech stuff is, the firm’s biggest potential moneymaker in the near term is something far more pedestrian: windows.

Typical double-paned windows have barely changed since their invention a century ago. Filling them with inert gases or adding coating to reflect or let in heat has made them more effective. Yet the energy bill for your home or office will still go up or down based on how many windows you have and how big they are.

That’s because windows typically lose 10 to 20 times more energy per square foot than a well-insulated wall.

The Energy Department estimates that U.S. households waste $200 to $400 a year on energy bills due to leaks, drafts, and inefficiencies. That totals at least $25 billion a year.

However, Corning has created new three- and four-pane windows that can insulate even better than walls – yet they cost only about 20% more than standard energy-efficient windows.    

Installing them will bring huge energy savings to those who retrofit. It will also enable the construction of new homes that are so well-insulated that even when the power goes out in a winter storm, they will stay warm for days.

Those who live in more tropical climes will be delighted to learn that another variant of these windows can meet the most stringent hurricane-related building codes in the country, while being significantly lighter than the conventional stormproof windows.

How is this possible? Corning makes thin, tough Gorilla Glass that is a key component in today’s mobile devices. To win over Steve Jobs as a client when he came up with the iPhone, Corning offered Apple a new kind of LCD display made with chemically strengthened glass.

Traditional glass is made by floating molten glass on top of molten tin. That’s a cheap and effective process. But it leaves microscopic flaws.

With Gorilla Glass, molten glass (with special additives) cascades in a waterfall as thin as half a millimeter, yielding glass that is nearly flawless. It’s also chemically strengthened, making it resistant to scratches and chipping.

Corning’s factories now use the same process to create far larger sheets of similarly tough glass for windows. These sheets are thinner than a credit card, yet they can be bigger than a queen-size mattress.   

When three or four layers of glass are put together, only the interior panes are the super-thin Corning panes, and they add very little weight to the finished product. Yet the insulating ability of the window increases dramatically.

Corning is now ready to mass-manufacture these reinforced windows at two facilities, one in Colorado and the other in Pennsylvania. So the company that brought us smartphone glass is about to start slashing home and office energy bills. 

Some manufacturers are layering Corning’s glass onto windows designed to withstand hurricane-force winds. And while impact-resistant glass doors currently weigh up to 600 pounds, Corning’s thin glass inside cuts the weight by up to 40%. Despite being lighter, these new doors can pass the most stringent hurricane testing in the country.   

Corning is moving rapidly to capitalize on this new market. Its recently announced “Springboard” plan aims to add over $3 billion in annual sales while achieving an operating margin of 20% by the end of next year.

The company is already exceeding expectations – and buying back shares.    

In the most recent quarter, sales increased 18% to a record $3.9 billion. Earnings per share soared 46%. The firm’s operating margin expanded to 19%. For the full year, it generated strong free cash flow, delivering $1.25 billion, up 42%.

And – due in part to its pioneering innovation in windows – I expect earnings per share to rise from $2.36 this year to well over $3 in 2026.

With Trump’s new tariffs, no one knows what the demand for Toyotas or Samsung TVs or Modelo beer will be in six months. But the demand for domestically manufactured glass windows that
are stronger, lighter, and far more energy efficient? Expect that to go way up.

Action to Take: Buy Corning (NYSE: GLW) at market. And use our customary 25% trailingstop to protect your principal and your profits.

Building Wealth

Is It Time to Go on Defense?

Matt Benjamin, Senior Markets Expert, The Oxford Club

It’s been a tough year for investors…

As I write, the S&P 500 is barely up 1% this year, which puts it near correction territory. And because it’s heavily weighted toward the volatile and pricey technology sector, the Nasdaq Composite has fared even worse. It’s down 13% this year.

However, if you delve into those broad index numbers, you’ll quickly find that some sectors are more resilient than others.

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The best-performing sectors of the first quarter were energy (up 9.3%), healthcare (up 6.1%), consumer staples (up 4.6%), consumer staples (up 4.6%), and utilities (up 4.1%).

And while the first week of August brought everything down, it’s no mystery why these sectors weren’t hit as hard: Demand for the goods and services they provide is inelastic. That is, consumers generally don’t buy less of them when their prices go up or the economy slows down.

Investors know this and so have been piling into those four sectors in recent months in case the Trump tariffs slow the economy or reaccelerate inflation.

That’s driven healthcare chain CVS (NYSE: CVS) up 55%, electricity provider Consolidated Edison (NYSE: ED) up 27%, Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK) up 11%, and snack food maker Mondelēz  International (Nasdaq: MDLZ) 8% higher.

Of course, not all stocks in these industries are thriving. But if you look at a heat map of the S&P 500 for 2025, those four sectors were recently islands of green in an otherwise reddish ocean.

There are a couple of other types of companies outside of food, energy, and healthcare that rarely see a dip in demand for their products. They include tobacco companies. Cigarette giants Philip Morris International (NYSE: PM) and Altria Group (NYSE: MO) are up 29% and 10%, respectively, year to date, because price and economic conditions don’t change smokers’ habits.

Perhaps surprisingly, beauty products are similar. Demand for them – especially lower-end brands – tends to remain robust no matter the economic environment, as they’re a small luxury that consumers can indulge in even when times are tough. It’s a phenomenon known as the “lipstick effect.”

We’re not seeing that reflected in stock prices just yet, with many beauty stocks down for the year, but we likely will if the economy contracts this year.

Investing in companies with brands that don’t suffer from downturns or inflation is a great way to add stability and balance to your portfolio. That’s why such stocks are sprinkled throughout our current Oxford Communiqué model portfolios.

If the Trump tariffs send prices broadly higher and further reduce consumers’ purchasing power – or if they push the economy into a recession – these sectors are likely to do even better.

Beyond Wealth

What’s on Your Bucket List?

Alexander Green, Chief Investment Strategist, The Oxford Club

In the 2007 film The Bucket List, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play two men sharing a hospital room who have little in common, except for their terminal illnesses.

With only months to live, they hit the road with a wish list of things to do before they “kick the bucket.” 

In Hollywood, of course, that means race car driving, skydiving, climbing the pyramids, and motorcycling the Great Wall of China.

Some items on their lists, however, are less easily achieved: rekindling a lackluster marriage, reconciling with an estranged daughter, and so on. 

The film was only a mixed success given the star power of the two leading actors. But it did spark a lot of conversation…

Smithsonian magazine featured “28 Places to See Before You Die.” John Izzo wrote The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die. Other books offer the 1,000 foods you must taste, the 1,000 recordings you must hear, and the 1,000 paintings you must see before you die. (Sounds like a lot of pressure.)

The idea of creating and managing a bucket list quickly caught on. Millions of people posted their personal lists on the website 43things.com. (The website is no longer around.)

Some folks have exotic aspirations: wing walking, running with the bulls in Pamplona, experiencing weightlessness, visiting Easter Island, or riding the Trans-Siberian Railway across Asia.

Others are more down-home: Start a garden, enter a marathon, see the aurora borealis, write an autobiography, ride in a hot air balloon, give an anonymous $1,000 to charity.

Still others are a little more “out there”: Search for extraterrestrials. Inhale helium and sing “Yellow Submarine.” Join the 300 Club at the South Pole. (That one entails taking a sauna to 200 degrees and then running naked to the pole in minus 100-degree weather.)

Many people enjoy swapping bucket list recommendations…

For instance, you haven’t really lived, in my opinion, if you haven’t peered over the rim of the Grand Canyon, read The Code of the Woosters, enjoyed a candlelight dinner to the sound of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, or visited the north point of Anna Maria Island, Florida, to watch the sunset.

Of course, the reason for a bucket list is to get away from what someone else wants and finally do what you want.

What’s the process? According to my research – which includes nearly 20 minutes of digging around online – here’s the best way to create and manage your bucket list:

Make your goals realistic and achievable.

Put your list in writing and review it regularly.

Don’t be reluctant to change or modify it.

Planning is not optional. After making your list, decide exactly how and when you intend to get there.

Cross off each item as you achieve it.

If you live long enough, repeat.

Some may feel a list like this is self-indulgent. After all, folks are busy. They have commitments and responsibilities. Where is the time for a cooking class, blue marlin fishing, or a reef dive?

Ironically, these are the people who would benefit the most from this exercise. Are we really too guilt-ridden or tied to the grindstone to live life on our own terms? Will we delude ourselves that we will get around to doing the things we really want “eventually”?

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.” We all have obligations, true. But life can’t just be about pleasing your parents, your boss, your spouse, and your children. It has to be about more than meeting your quota, making the mortgage, picking up the kids, and socking something away for a rainy day.

For too many of us, there is a gap between how we spend our time and what is really important.

If you have a friend or partner who shares your dreams, that’s great. But sometimes it takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you. They want you to go on “their trip.”

Mythologist Joseph Campbell described this as a slave morality, a path to disintegration of both body and spirit. “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned,” he said, “so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

A bucket list requires you to confront your mortality and recognize that you have only so much time to do whatever it is you really want. It makes you stop and enumerate those things. It encourages you to plan for them. And it motivates you.

As management consultant Brian Tracy writes…

When you have clear, exciting goals and ideals, you will feel happier about yourself and your world. You will be more positive and optimistic. You will be more cheerful and enthusiastic. You will feel internally motivated to get up and get going every morning because every step you are taking will be moving you in the direction of something that is important to you.

After all, it’s not how fast you’re moving – it’s where you’re headed. A meaningful life is not about speed and efficiency. It is more a matter of what you do and why you do it.

Some individuals aren’t comfortable branching out, experimenting with their lives. But by avoiding risk, they risk something even greater: an unlived life.

Survey the residents at your local nursing home, for example, and they will tell you their greatest regrets are not the things they did or the mistakes they made, but rather the things they didn’t do, the risks they didn’t take.

A bucket list is a step in the right direction. It may sound frivolous to some. But is it such a bad idea to jot down what you really want to do before you ditch this mortal coil? We take so many freedoms for granted. Freedom from regret, however, is up to you.