Executive Buying Newsletter September 15, 2026

(Executive Buying Capital LP may hold some or all of these positions.)

The tape is doing what it usually does right before a Fed meeting: it is making people pay for being early. The S&P 500 closed Tuesday at 7,585.73, down 0.4%. The Dow fell 0.6% to 52,093. The Nasdaq dropped 0.8% to 25,981. For the year the S&P is still up about 10.8%. That is a decent year that no longer feels decent, because the last few weeks have been a grind under a 10-year yield at 5%, Brent near $109, and another round of “maybe AI spending is too high” headlines.

The decision tomorrow is not the story. A 25-basis-point hike is already the base case. The story is whether Chair Warsh treats it as a one-off or tells the market that $100-plus oil and 3.4% CPI mean rates stay restrictive for longer. High yields punish duration. They do not automatically punish cash-flow machines. That is the distinction this book is built on.

The eight names below are the model list. It is concentrated on the largest cash compounders, one integrated energy producer that benefits if oil stays tight, one software/infrastructure name that is no longer priced like a growth stock, and a Bitcoin sleeve through IBIT.

AAPL (Apple Inc.)Apple remains the cash-flow engine of the book. Shares have been choppy around the $330 area after the launch of the $1,999 iPhone Duo foldable. The market wanted an AI narrative and got a hardware cycle instead. That is the point. Apple is not trying to win the capex arms race. It is spending on R&D and devices while Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta spend on steel and silicon. The balance sheet, buybacks, and installed base still matter more than whether Siri looks late. We hold it as a quality compounder, not as a frontier-model proxy.

BRK.B (Berkshire Hathaway Inc.)Berkshire is the ballast. Greg Abel is running the operating company and the equity book after Buffett stepped down as CEO at year-end. The disclosed portfolio is still concentrated in a handful of large, understandable businesses — including Apple, Alphabet, and Chevron, which overlap this list on purpose. In a week when 10-year yields are testing 19-year highs, a company that generates enormous operating cash, sits on a fortress balance sheet, and does not need the equity market to fund itself is doing the job we bought it to do.

CVX (Chevron Corporation)Chevron is the inflation and supply-shock sleeve. Brent around $109 is not a rounding error. Q2 production was up 20% after Hess, debt came down hard, and the company signed a 20-year power deal with Microsoft tied to a West Texas data-center project. That is oil cash flow today and a call on AI electricity demand later. Buybacks have been paused while crude is this volatile. The dividend is not. We are not trading the daily oil print. We are holding an integrated major that can fund the payout and still spend on LNG and power if this energy regime lasts.

GOOGL (Alphabet Inc.)Alphabet is the cleanest combination of search cash, cloud growth, and owned silicon in the book. Google Cloud has been running extremely hot, and management has already told the market capex stays elevated into 2027. Berkshire’s large block purchase earlier this year is a useful tell even if the mark has been messy. The stock has been firmer than the chip complex this week as investors rotated from “who sells the GPUs” to “who already owns the distribution and the ads.” That is the side we want.

IBIT (iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF)IBIT is the non-correlated sleeve, not a trading account. Bitcoin is around the mid-$70,000s after a sharp August bounce off the summer lows and a soft tape today as the Senate blocked a crypto market-structure bill. IBIT closed near $43.11, down about 3.6% on the session, still well off the October 2025 highs and well above the June low. This position exists because a 5% 10-year and $100 oil are both arguments for scarce assets that no central bank can print. Size stays limited because the path is violent. The vehicle stays IBIT because it is the cleanest way to hold the exposure in a brokerage account.

IBM (International Business Machines Corporation)IBM is the unloved AI-infrastructure name in the list. Software, especially Red Hat and data, is doing the work. Consulting is flat. Infrastructure was soft. Q2 operating EPS was $2.93 on $17.2 billion of revenue. Full-year constant-currency growth was cut to 4–5%. The stock is in the high $240s with a roughly 2.7% dividend and an October 21 earnings date. The market still treats IBM like a value stock that happens to own hybrid cloud and a serious quantum budget. That discount is why it is here. If enterprise AI spending keeps crowding out other software budgets, this is the name that already lives inside those accounts.

META (Meta Platforms, Inc.)Meta is the advertising compounder with an expensive AI habit. Engagement is still massive. The new agent that can send mail, book travel, and complete purchases is the product the market wanted to see. Capex guidance of $130–$145 billion for 2026 is the cost. Free cash flow got crushed in Q2 because the buildout is running ahead of the cash conversion. This week the stock caught a bid when investors decided software platforms were safer than chip vendors if frontier-model spending slows. We will take the bid. We will not pretend the capex number is small.

MSFT (Microsoft Corporation)Microsoft is still the core enterprise AI holding. Azure, GitHub, Office, and the OpenAI distribution deal remain the franchise. The company has been opening data centers at a pace that is now the competitive variable, not GPU allocation. Capex is enormous. That is the bear case and the bull case in the same sentence. In a market that is starting to question whether every dollar of AI spend earns its keep, Microsoft is the name most likely to show the return in actual seats and cloud contracts rather than in demo videos. We hold it for that reason, not because it is “safe tech.”