Brian Stewart, our director of news at Seeking Alpha, our first Wall Street roundup of 2026. Welcome back.

Yeah, great to be here. It's great to have you. It's great to be talking again. What have you got for us? The world is on stage performing for us all in comedy and drama and horror. What do you got for us? Well, if we're going to talk about the world stage, I think we have to start with Venezuela over the weekend going into this

week. U.S. captured Maduro. The stock market, generally positive response. Several sectors saw

gains. You saw gains in oil sector, oil services. The only exception there, really, a glaring

exception was the Canadian oil stocks. The Canadian oil

sands competes with Venezuela for the heavy crude. So if there's going to be more Venezuelan

oil on the market, that's bad for the oil sands, lower prices there. I mean, at a certain point,

that kind of drilling becomes uneconomical if oil

prices get too low. So there were some concerns in that little pocket. But otherwise,

oil stocks, the prospects of more production in Venezuela, move those higher. Defense stocks higher,

both on the idea of broader sort of geopolitical tensions driving those stocks, but also

the idea that companies like Halliburton are going to get contracts to build out the infrastructure

and Venezuela. Obviously, we'll have to see how that goes. We're sort of still at stage one of that

process, which is going to be a multi-year

process. But I think the interesting impact stock market wise was that the idea of a military

action in Venezuela, kind of a ratcheting up of international tensions, a lot of American allies

pushing back against the idea that we would jump into Venezuela.

The stock market basically shrug those off.

So the idea that we're moving into, say, more dangerous world or that things are going to get,

you know, more troublesome as we kind of move forward, even with the kind of tough talk coming

for the Trump administration about other countries,

Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, even that didn't really phase the stock market that much.

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