Why This Texas Landowner Is a Future AI Powerhouse

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By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily

In This Digest:

As bombs drop in the Middle East, oil and gas prices are rising
Predictive Alpha’s top stock is an oil play and AI play rolled into one
No bounce for Financials as the AI disruption theme continues

The war in Iran is pushing up prices at home…

Israeli and U.S. warplanes launched a fresh wave of strikes across Iran.

Israeli forces have also launched attacks against the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.

And Iran has launched attacks on oil infrastructure and other targets across the region. It’s also threated to set “ablaze” ships passing through the nearby Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that about one-fifth of global crude oil exports passes through.

This has pushed the price of Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, to $83 at writing, a roughly 10% increase since the bombardment of Iran began.

And WTI crude oil, the U.S. benchmark, is trading at $77 a barrel, up from about $62 a barrel a month ago – a roughly 24% jump.

U.S. gas stations are feeling the pinch, with the national average price of gasoline topping $3 per gallon for the first time since November.

This is bad news if you fill your car at the pump. But you can get on the right side of this trend by owning the top energy stocks TradeSmith’s systems have identified. For more on those, make sure to catch up on yesterday’s Daily.

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Stepping back from the Middle East, here’s what our AI model is seeing…

Predictive Alpha is TradeSmith’s AI-powered stock price forecasting tool.

Think of it as a large numbers model – in the same way large language models like ChatGPT predict the next word in a sequence, Predictive Alpha predicts the next price move.

We trained it on more than 100 billion stock market data points. It learns patterns that are hidden in the noise, then projects where stocks are likely to move up to 21 trading days out.

Here are the current top 10 bullish Predictive Alpha forecasts, sorted by expected move:

The top-ranked Predictive Alpha forecast by expected move is Texas Pacific Land (TPL).

It’s a land and royalty company sitting on millions of acres in the shale-oil-rich Permian Basin – it collects a cut of every barrel pumped from its land without ever picking up a drill. That makes it a way to play rising oil prices.

There’s also an AI data center angle driving excitement around this stock right now. In January, TPL committed $50 million to a partnership with Bolt Data & Energy, a firm co-founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, to develop large-scale data centers on its West Texas land.

Predictive Alpha sees it rising 17.1% to $613 by March 19, with a historical target accuracy of 92.2%.

Semiconductor testing equipment maker Teradyne (TER) is right behind it, with a 13.5% projected move to $363 by March 30, also at a 93.8% historical accuracy.

Teradyne is an essential and little-known player in the chip-testing supply chain – precisely the kind of company that fits the “Secret AI Stock” mold colleague Jason Bodner and technologist Jeff Brown discussed here.

Enlight Renewable Energy (ENLT) and Moog (MOG.A) appear in the top five as well, reinforcing the energy-and-defense theme that’s dominated the market in 2026.

Enlight develops and operates wind, solar, and battery storage projects across the U.S., Europe, and Israel. Moog is a precision components maker whose products control the flight surfaces of military jets, missiles, and spacecraft – as pure a defense-infrastructure play as you’ll find on this list.

What this leaderboard tells us is that the stocks seeing the strongest institutional conviction right now are spread across energy, semiconductors, defense, and biotech.

It goes without saying that every one of these stocks should rank near the top of your watchlist.

Zooming out to the sector level, Energy is the clear winner…

Predictive Alpha also makes forecasts for the major S&P 500 sector ETFs… and they’re telling.

The Energy ETF (XLE) leads all sectors with a +5.9% projected move to $59.22 by March 30 – and a historical accuracy of 72.7%.

We talked on Monday about why energy stocks are the top winners of this moment, with XLE up 20% in just the first two months of 2026 and surging nearly 2% on Monday.

Last weekend’s events in Iran – which disrupted oil shipments through key Gulf hubs – add a new dimension to that thesis. Energy isn’t just an AI play. Right now, it’s a geopolitical play with the wind at its back on multiple fronts.

The surprise is the Communication Services ETF (XLC). It holds a basket of the biggest U.S. communication and media companies – think Meta Platforms (META), Google’s parent Alphabet (GOOGL), Netflix (NFLX), and AT&T (T). If you own XLC, you own a slice of the companies controlling how Americans talk, scroll, stream, and advertise online.

The ETF has been roughly flat for 2026, weighed down by the same AI-disruption fears that have hammered software broadly. But Predictive Alpha forecasts a 2.5% move to $121 – the second-highest expected gain of any sector.

Its accuracy rating of 57% is lower than we typically like to see for high-conviction trades. But it’s worth watching.

XLC holds some of the most beaten-down large-cap tech names.

But Predictive Alpha may be picking up early signals of a rotation back into quality communication-services names like these.

At the bottom of the list is the Financials ETF (XLF), the only sector with a negative expected move. That’s consistent with what we’ve seen all year – AI disruption in financial services is ongoing, and Predictive Alpha doesn’t see much of a bounce coming.

The clearest takeaways from the sector view: Stay long on Energy, watch for a turnaround in Communication Services, and stay cautious on Financials until our systems say otherwise.

To building wealth beyond measure,

Michael Salvatore signature