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Raul Shah from DocShah Financial talks value investing in stocks like ServiceNow, UnitedHealth and Hims & Hers (2:20) Tax loss harvesting – when to use and when not to (8:15)

Transcript

Rena Sherbill: We are back with none other than Mr. Raul Shah from DocShah Financial. You know him as one of our very own in-house tax experts who has been helping us all as citizens, as investors, helping us navigate the tax world very astutely and very efficiently.

He is the founder, as I mentioned, of DocShah Financial, which is a value investing firm that’s focused on helping everyday investors and retirees maximize their portfolio growth while protecting all of our wealth from heavy taxation through advanced tax planning.

DocShah Financial has been around since 2023 and it’s generated a 43% annualized equity return for its clients. Raul is also an educator at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches a tax planning course for that community. And I’m very excited to have Raul on again for our monthly chat.

Today we’re going to be talking tax loss harvesting, but I wanted to, because Raul has been on in the past talking his very successful investments, most noteworthy Hims & Hers Health (HIMS), but he’s got some other announcements and I think updates for us that I asked him to share with our investing community because I think it’s helpful to know where these stocks are at and what he’s thinking about it.

So, all of that, welcome, Raul, to another month at Investing Experts Podcast.

Raul Shah: Thank you for that warm intro as always. I think this is week four that we’ve been doing the tax planning series. And I still get so many emails from people that listen to the podcast and they love it. I have people that just reach out to say, I didn’t know XYZ before, and now I’m down the rabbit hole.

And that’s really the goal of this segment is just to help people educate themselves and learn for themselves. And and seeking alpha, I think, is the best community to do that.

And so I’m I’m excited to get into the tax planning stuff that we’ll talk about with tax loss harvesting, because there’s actually a lot of nuance with that strategy that I think a lot of investors aren’t necessarily aware of. But also happy to give an update just on the firm. As as you mentioned, you know, we’re a value investing firm. So when I work with clients, I I always try to put quality you know, in front of quantity. So I don’t go out and buy 20 stocks for clients. It

It never made sense to me. Why would you put money in your twentieth best idea? You know, why not your nineteenth? And you could apply that same logic, so on and and and so forth down the the chain effectively.

So we focus on quality, a few of the names that we own I’ve written articles about on Seeking Alpha like Hims and ServiceNow (NOW) and UnitedHealth Group (UNH), just fantastic businesses. And I’m happy to talk about them.

These of course are not recommendations. I don’t know anybody specifically listening in the audience and what your situation is. But I’m a fan of stocks and so I love talking about this stuff.

HIMS is our crown jewel. That’s a stock that I’ve owned personally since 2021. And it’s a stock that’s been in client accounts since inception. Every time I onboard a new client, Hims is usually the leading stock in their portfolio. And that’s just because their growth is tremendous.

I think their total addressable market is tremendous.

There are risks in that business. Anytime you navigate in the healthcare industry, it’s always very regulatory. Aalmost every other week it seems like there’s some some news on him saying, they’re breached from doing XYZ. so it’s it’s a you know, it’s never there’s never a dull day owning that stock.

But I think it’s a tremendous business with great unit economics, and I expect it’s gonna do very well for a long period of time.

ServiceNow is another fantastic company. I’m a huge fan of the CEO, Bill McDermott. I’ve read his book. And I just really admire the integrity that that he has. And of course, I’ve never met him personally, but you can get a good glimpse of people when you read their life story and and and where they come from, especially when it’s from humble beginnings.

I was buying that stock. I’m the only portfolio manager at DocShah Financial, so I oversee all the accounts. I was placing that stock and client accounts at $98, $95 and even further down. And now we’re at almost $150 in six weeks. So, I always tell people price does not determine value, right?

We’ve had conversations about this in the past. And it’s a bit hypocritical for me to come on air and say, because the price is going up, I’m justified or I’m I’m right. I’m looking at the business valuations and I’m looking at the earnings continuing to go up.

I’m looking at the unit economics of all these businesses continuing to improve, especially with UnitedHealth Group. They’ve come a long way in six months. And that’s why the the stock prices have risen and why I expect them to continue to rise.

But that’s the name of the game, value investing. That’s why I always tell people price and value don’t equal each other. If you chase price, you’ll lose that game a hundred percent of the time. If you chase value, you’ll win not a hundred percent of the time, but you’ll get pretty dang close.

Rena Sherbill: Not to get too far off the tax topic, but just to make a point as a value investor, what would you say are the most salient metrics you would encourage investors to look at without doing the deepest dive possible?

Raul Shah: Sure. I always look for 5 things right off the bat. I can analyze pretty much any company if it’s worth looking into more within 60 seconds at this point. revenue.

You have to see revenue going up every year. You know, in economics, revenue is really just a proxy for demand. And so if you’re a company and your revenue is falling, that means less people want your products. That’s not a good investment.

That’s not a good company to own. So that’s number one. You want to see revenue going up because you want to see more people buying services or products. It doesn’t matter how you chop it up, you could be selling more units at a cheaper price or fewer units at a higher price.

But what you want is the total demand or the total revenue to be going up. You also want profits to be going up. You want earnings per share to be go going up. Technically there are great investments that don’t have earnings per share today.

There’s companies like HIMS or Palantir (PLTR) or a lot of these other great companies that are expected to produce ample earnings in the future. So it’s not a hard and set rule, but you either have to have some prospect of realizing earnings relatively quickly, as in within the next five years, or they already have earnings and they’re going up every year. Otherwise, you’re just buying a pipe dream.

If you’re buying a company and their earnings aren’t expected to go up until like 20 years into the future. I mean, you gotta be kidding me there’s a million other stocks out there, you’re just losing an opportunity cost. So you want good solid earnings in your business. And then the balance sheet.

There’s only two things that matter: you look at the cash, you look at the long-term debt. Companies are like people. So if you buy a company that has a lot of cash and no debt, the insolvency risk is, I mean correct me if I’m wrong, but I haven’t seen a lot of companies go bankrupt when they haven’t borrowed any money. That would be a neat party trick for somebody to pull off.

So you want protection, you want margin of safety when you’re buying businesses. And you also want cash flow from operations to be going up. That’s just the cash you make from the stuff that you sell. And if you only bought businesses that had those characteristics, companies that the revenue is going up, the earnings are going up, the cash flows are going up, there’s a ton of cash on the balance sheet, and there’s no debt.

Not only would you buy far fewer businesses in life, but you’d have much better results doing a tenth of the work.

It’s not easy to manage a portfolio of 30 stocks when you have a full-time job. That’s a full-time job in and of itself. And the whole idea always struck me as ludicrous. Why put money in my 30th best idea? The only reason that I would ever do that is if I was just trying to have an insurance policy against my own laziness.

If I’m not doing enough due diligence on my companies that I feel the need to just keep adding more so that if some go down, some go up and it balances out, that’s not really an investment strategy.

So those are the things I would say if you’re a true value investor, and the benefits are tremendous. You’ll likely make far more money than you ever thought was possible, owning fewer businesses, doing less work, and getting better sleep.

Purchase price is very important when you buy stocks. You can’t ever pay more than what something is worth because the the more in excess you pay,

For something relative to what it’s worth, the more risk you take. And believe me, you’re not gonna sleep well at night if you take on a lot of risk in investing.

Rena Sherbill: Speaking of not wanting to take on a lot of risk, how may tax loss harvesting help us kind of navigate those choppy waters of profitability?

Raul Shah: Sure, yeah. So tax loss harvesting, right? I always tell people it’s very simple to understand, it’s a little bit more complicated to know when to use it.

So let’s define it, right? Tax loss harvesting is just recognizing a loss in order to specifically reduce your taxes owed in a particular year. So let’s take a very basic example here.

Let’s say that you have five and by the way, we’re gonna ignore state taxes and all these other we’re just gonna focus on kind of the federal tax, you know, capital gains tax, to just to make the example easy. Okay, let’s say that you have no gains okay in your portfolio, okay. Tough year, and you’ve got 10,000 in a short term capital loss. Okay, so you bought a stock in July, you lost 10K in it, and you know, see we’re at the end of the year. If you sell that, you actually get a tax benefit.

Because you can lock in that loss and ultimately in this example, if you had no gains, you would be able to deduct up to $3,000 from your income, right? From your salary. The benefits are not tremendous.

It’s not like you’re gonna save hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime taxes like you could with Roth conversions, but it’s compounding sort of in reverse. It’s the little bit that you save every year that could add up over a long period of time to really good tax benefits.

Now, like I said, there’s a lot of nuance and we’ll dive into that in just a second. But at the end of the day, tax loss harvesting is purposefully recognizing a loss, clicking the sell button to lock in a loss.

Because until you do that, it’s just an unrealized loss, right? It’s just a paper loss. It’s not a real loss. So you can’t do tax loss harvesting until you actually sell it and you recognize that loss. And, you’re doing it with the intent to save X amount on taxes.

If I take it kind of a step further, what a lot of people will do is, they will buy a stock and they will sell it specifically to harvest losses if it goes down.

And I tell people tax loss harvesting is not the main goal. Okay, the main goal is making money, right?

There’s a saying we have in in wealth management, which is don’t let the tax tail wag the dog. That’s just a kind of cheeky way of saying don’t make saving and taxes the number one priority versus making money.

It’s only if you happen to have made a bad investment or the market goes down that you might want to consider tax loss harvesting. You don’t want to just do it for the tax benefits.

One of the common mistakes people will do with tax loss harvesting is let’s say that the market goes down and they decide that they want to own the S&P 500 and they want to sell that that ETF to recognize losses, but they don’t recognize that there’s an opportunity cost to that because there’s essentially the IRS has what’s what’s called a wash sale rule.

So if you’re going to sell a stock at a loss, you can recognize that gain and reduce your taxable income with it or offset your capital gains tax.

And we’ll use examples in just a second with actual numbers. But there’s a window of 30 days before and 30 days after where you cannot have owned that identical security.

And that’s done to prevent gaming the system. So, for example, if I were to buy a stock and it falls and I have a $10,000 loss in it, and then I just sell it, recognize a loss, and then just buy it right back 10 seconds later. Well, I mean, you could see how that’d be problem, right? Every time, every day the market goes down, you would just do this over and over and over again.

You would remain a hundred percent invested throughout every day of the year, but you would have racked up thousands of dollars in losses that you would be depreciating or that you would be netting versus your capital gain.

So that’s why the wash sale rule exists, is to prevent that from happening. We’ll talk about one really big nuance with that a little bit later. But again, when you do that if you tax loss harvest and you save X amount in tax dollars, you also have to factor in that it keeps you uninvested for up to those 60 days.

And so you’re sitting out of the market during that timeline. And what if the market happens to go up a lot during the time that you have to sit out, like after you sell it? If the market goes up 10% and you don’t save 10% in taxes, well then you actually lost money, right? So it’s not a perfect science.

It takes a lot of planning and it’s really only valuable to do it in scenarios where the benefit to you is obvious. sort of like investing, right? When I’m buying stocks for clients, I’m not trying to buy stocks that I think if everything goes right, the company is gonna the stock price will go up. I’m trying to buy stocks that if everything goes wrong, the stock is still underpriced.

And so you have to try to make it really obvious and that’s where these strategies come into play. So I will stop here and and see if that makes sense and open up the door for any other questions or or comments.

Rena Sherbill: Well, I was gonna ask, it may it may make sense for you to continue on in your explanation, but I was going to ask if there’s a real world example that you can think of of a tax loss harvesting that you’re happy with that feels like a good example, and one where you feel like was maybe too preemptive or something of that nature.

Raul Shah: Sure. That’s a great question. And I’m gonna come out as a little bit hypocritical here.

When I look at my own personal brokerage account, I don’t really buy index funds or ETFs. I mean I buy individual stocks and individual stocks is very difficult to tax loss harvest because the idea, remember, is that if you happen to have a loss, you can lock it in and then you can rebuy maybe a substantial a similar but not substantially identical security as a placeholder. So you aren’t sitting out of the market, you’re still invested, but to get to recognize that loss.

The problem when you own individual stocks is how do you find us an 80% replica of what you own, right? People will say, if I own Coca-Cola and it’s at a loss, I could sell it and then maybe buy Pepsi. But the problem with that is that they are still two different companies, right? Just because they both sell beverages doesn’t make them the same company.

It’s much more valuable when you own like an ETF. Because if you were to own, let’s say, I’m just using this as examples. Like if you were to own Vanguard’s (VOO), which is the S&P 500, and you sold it to lock in a loss because the market’s down, but you have to stay invested. So you buy back maybe the Russell 1000, right? Those indices are different, but you’re staying invested and they’re close enough that if you know the S&P is going up,

The Russell 1000 is probably going up too. So you’re still capturing all the upside, but you’re locking in that downside loss. You just can’t do that as easily with individual stocks.

A lot of times people only tell half the story. They’ll sell you on the tax benefits, but you always have to remember that opportunity cost.

And that’s why doing it with individual stocks is sometimes not the best idea because you can’t really remain invested to something that’s an individual stock, something that’s similar to it but also different, if that makes sense.

And if we kind of use an example here, let’s just say we’re let’s go back to you know ETFs, like you own the S&P or something like that. Let’s say for the year you recognize $10,000 in short-term capital gains. And let’s say that you have 20,000 in short-term capital losses. The IRS uses what’s called a like-for-like matching system. So short-term capital losses offset short-term capital gains.

First. And if there’s excess remaining, then those short-term capital gains will offset us, then the short-term capital losses will offset long-term capital gains. And if there’s still an excess, then you can use up to $3,000 to offset your ordinary income. And if there’s still excess left, then it carries forward to the next year and indefinitely.

So if we run through an example, I have $10,000 in short-term capital gains and I’ve got $20,000 in short-term capital losses. So right off the bat, all my short-term capital gains, the tax is going to be wiped clear because I’ve got $2 in loss for every $1 in gain on a like-for-like basis. So after I net that out, I’ve still got $10,000 in short-term capital losses. So if I have, let’s say, a $5,000 capital gain.

That capital gain gets cleared out and I still have 5,000 in short term capital losses. And then I can take 3,000 of that, deduct that from my income. So if I made a hundred K for the year, now my taxable income’s only ninety seven K. And then I’ve got two thousand left that I can carry for it to the next year, which would offset any capital gains in that year on a like for like basis.

And if something’s left over, then it would apply to your ordinary income. So a lot of a big misconception people will get is that they think that you can only deduct $3,000 a year in tax loss harvesting.

And that’s not true. You can only deduct up to 3,000 on your income, but you also can offset your capital gains and the excess will just carry forward indefinitely. So if you have like a like a horrendous year, and you lose, I don’t know, a hundred, two hundred thousand dollars or something like that, you’re gonna use up all of those losses. You may not use them all up in in when one year. But you will use them up hopefully if you do things right over your lifetime.

But that’s one really big misconception that people have. And I don’t know Rena if you’ve heard that before, the three thousand dollar rule, but a lot of people will get that kind of confused.

Rena Sherbill: I feel like I’ve brought this up before, but when I was starting The Cannabis Investing Podcast, there was a lot of t discussion about tax loss harvesting at the end of those years with people’s portfolios. So yeah, I remember some highlights from that.

Any other caveats you would add to a chock-full caveat conversation?

Raul Shah: Yeah, absolutely.

One of the things that always trips people up is not necessarily the the wash rule, right? That thirty day window before and after where you can’t own the identical or essentially identical security because it will disallow your your wash or d disallow your loss. one thing that trips people up all the time is that applies to also dividends.

So people have DRIP programs set up, right? Dividend reinvestment programs where they’re just automatically reinvesting their dividends into the same security. And so what happens, you probably had this in your portfolio right before where you’ll buy a stock that has a dividend, you’ll sell the stock before the divid the next dividend is paid.

And then the dividend check comes in and you’re like, how do I own that stock again? It’s because it was automatically reinvested. And so that counts, that will trigger the wash sale role. So people will sell something, they locked in the loss, and then like a week later, they’ll have their dividend check deposit, but it’s reinvested in that security

Which counts as you buying back that security again. And then that disallows your loss. So you have to be very careful with that, because that trips people all the time. You gotta turn that that that feature off if you’re specifically trying to tax loss harvest.

The other thing that trips people up too is that tax loss harvesting only applies in brokerage accounts. Right? It doesn’t make sense. It wouldn’t apply in an IRA, Roth IRA, traditional IRA, 401k, because those are all either tax deferred or tax-free accounts. So there’s no such thing as tax loss harvesting in those accounts.

So what people think, they think that they’ll try to trick the system, which which you can’t do that by the way, and you should nor should you ever try, always follow the rules.

But what people will do is they will sell a stock in their brokerage or sell a ETF and they’ll lock in that loss, and then they think they’re slick and they they they go buy it and like in their Roth IRA.

It doesn’t matter what account that you that you ha are selling and buying from, if you rebuy the same security, period, you’re gonna disallow the loss.

So those are kind of the two really big nuances that if you do try to execute that, you really do need to be aware of. and then it’s just really just the mindset, it’s going in knowing that I’m not trying to lose money, right? I’m only going to tax loss harvest if there is some economic benefit to me that exceeds the opportunity cost of just remaining invested. So it’s not just like you do it automatically every year. You have to actually think through and run the numbers on when it’s appropriate, when when it really makes sense.

And then the last little nuance that I will leave everybody with is that when you tax loss harvest, you sell something in a loss, you lock in that loss, and then you rebuy something similar. What’s happened is that you’re likely buying something now at a much lower cost basis.

So again, yes, you recognize that tax saving from tax loss harvesting. But because you’re now taking those cash proceeds and buying something that’s similar but different at a much lower price, whenever the market recovers, your cost basis being lower means that your future tax bill is going to be higher. So you have to calculate that with your overall estimation of if you make out better or not by tax loss harvesting. So it’s not just like a one time cure.

So just to kind of quickly recap, right? So tax loss harvesting, essentially what we’re doing is we are locking in a loss to gain some kind of a tax benefit in our brokerage account while simultaneously trying to remain invested to capture the upside of the recovery of that stock or similar stock or ETF, whatever, while also making sure that we do not trigger the IRS wash sale rule, which can be triggered by dividends, it can be triggered by buying the same security in in your brokerage or a different account. And then ultimately we have to run the numbers to figure out if it’s advantageous.

It’s not a strategy that’s going to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes over your lifetime, like I said before. But it is something that if you do strategically, you can save a meaningful amount. And it’s something that, investors should consider.

Rena Sherbill: A worthy trick in the toolbox. Raul, appreciate this conversation. Another very edifying talk. Anything else to add before I let you go today?

Raul Shah: I think the only natural next episode would have to be tax gain harvesting, which is way better in my opinion than tax loss harvesting. So if you like this episode, you’re going to love that episode.

And it’s great actually for retirees. So a lot of people that listen to the podcast in that phase of life, you guys gotta hear that one.

Rena Sherbill: Perfect. Something to look forward to it in October. If you like loss, you’re gonna love gain. Looking forward to that, Raul, talk to you soon and enjoy September.

Raul Shah: Thank you, you too.

ST. LOUIS — Bunge Global SA is selling two of its Brazilian sugar cane mills to Chinese state-owned food processing holding company COFCO International.

The mills are located in the Junqueirópolis and Guararapes municipalities within the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The mills previously belonged to Canadian grain handling company Viterra Ltd. before Bunge acquired them in July 2025.

“As Bunge focuses on our strategic priorities and positions the business for long-term growth, this transaction is the right step forward,” said Julio Garros, chief operating officer of Bunge. “We are grateful to the sugar mills team for their dedication and contributions to the company.”

Bunge said the sale’s completion is subject to various customary closing conditions, including the receipt of necessary regulatory approvals.

Microsoft Outlook users began reporting a fresh wave of access problems Wednesday morning, with outage-tracking site Downdetector logging a spike in complaints starting around 9:58 a.m. EDT, extending a multi-day stretch of intermittent disruptions tied to a broader Microsoft 365 authentication issue.

The outage tracker’s official account flagged the renewed surge in a social media post shortly after the reports began, asking affected users how the disruption was impacting them and directing people to its live outage map for updates. The hashtag “MicrosoftOutlookDown” quickly began circulating online as users compared notes on the latest round of email trouble.

Wednesday’s reports mark the third consecutive day in which Outlook users have experienced some form of disruption tied to the underlying incident, which Microsoft has been tracking internally under case number MO1465074. The company has said the root cause traces back to a problem within a core authentication configuration shared across multiple Microsoft 365 services, rather than an issue isolated to Outlook alone.

The disruption originally began at 3:08 p.m. UTC on Monday, Aug. 31, according to Microsoft, when users first reported delays and failures sending and receiving email, along with authentication errors and problems searching mailbox content. Reports on Downdetector that day surged past 5,000 within a few hours of the initial onset, with additional complaints flooding social media platforms throughout the day.

Microsoft said its investigation initially pointed to a misconfiguration affecting how authentication components were deployed across a portion of its infrastructure, a problem the company said it was working to isolate through service telemetry and diagnostic review.

“We’ve confirmed that users may experience degraded functionality with various Exchange Online functionalities. We’re reviewing service telemetry and diagnostic data to isolate the source of the issue,” Microsoft said in an update posted to its Microsoft 365 Status account as the outage was unfolding Sunday into Monday.

By Monday evening, Microsoft reported that mail flow was gradually improving for affected users, though search functionality within Outlook remained degraded well into the night. The company said shortly after 3 a.m. ET on Tuesday that it was beginning to see improvements in that search functionality as well, as engineers continued rolling out fixes to the underlying authentication systems.

Even as conditions improved, full resolution proved elusive. On Tuesday, Microsoft acknowledged that its mitigation work was ongoing rather than complete.

“Our mitigation actions are continuing to progress within the remaining affected infrastructure,” Microsoft said in a Tuesday update. “Indications from telemetry remain positive, and we’ve confirmed service availability is improving. We’re entering a period of extended monitoring to ensure a full resolution is in place.”

By early Wednesday, Microsoft had indicated that service availability had stabilized significantly for most customers, reporting availability above 99% and stating that the majority of users should no longer be experiencing impact from the underlying issue. Wednesday morning’s renewed spike in Outlook-specific reports, however, suggests that some users continued to experience residual disruption even as the broader incident showed signs of resolution.

Independent outage-tracking services have separately noted that Outlook has experienced a pattern of intermittent reports throughout the week, distinct from, though related to, the larger authentication incident. One tracking service recorded a stream of Outlook-related reports beginning around 1:53 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, followed by another cluster of reports affecting hundreds of users around 1:35 p.m. that same day, illustrating the uneven, start-and-stop nature of the recovery process across the week.

Beyond Outlook itself, Microsoft has confirmed that the underlying authentication issue affected a range of other Microsoft 365 services this week, including OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender XDR, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Universal Print. The breadth of services affected reflects how deeply many Microsoft 365 products rely on shared authentication infrastructure, meaning a single underlying configuration problem can ripple outward to affect multiple, seemingly unrelated tools used across an organization.

For businesses that rely heavily on Outlook and Exchange Online for daily communication, disruptions of this scale can have significant practical consequences, delaying internal and external correspondence and, in some cases, preventing employees from accessing scheduling, search or mailbox functions entirely. This week’s outage adds to a pattern of significant Microsoft 365 disruptions recorded so far in 2026, including a separate incident in January that stretched for roughly ten hours and affected Outlook, Defender and Purview, with reports on Downdetector during that earlier episode topping 15,000 at the peak of the disruption.

Microsoft has continued directing affected customers to its official Microsoft 365 Status page and social media account for updates as monitoring continues. The company has not yet published a detailed post-incident report explaining the specific technical root cause of the authentication misconfiguration or outlining steps it plans to take to prevent similar multi-day disruptions in the future, though such retrospective reports typically follow major incidents once monitoring periods conclude and engineering teams complete a full review.

As of Wednesday late morning, it remained unclear how long the residual Outlook-specific disruptions reported since 9:58 a.m. would persist, or whether they represented a new, isolated issue separate from the broader authentication problem that has affected Microsoft 365 services since Monday. Users experiencing ongoing trouble were advised to monitor official Microsoft support channels alongside independent outage trackers for the latest updates on service restoration.

Chevron is expanding its footprint in Venezuela under new agreements that call for more than $7 billion in investment over the next five years and aim to more than double production from its joint ventures in the country.

The oil giant said Wednesday that the agreements establish updated fiscal, commercial and legal terms for its Venezuelan joint ventures, creating conditions for additional investment, development and production growth.

Chevron expects the joint ventures to increase production to approximately 600,000 barrels per day, while keeping total costs below $20 per barrel. Production across Chevron’s three Venezuelan joint ventures has already increased 15% so far this year, the company said.

MEET THE MAN BEHIND TRUMP’S JOINT VENEZUELA OIL VENTURE

A sign displays the price of regular gasoline fuel at a Chevron gas station in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. (Kaylee Greenlee/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

As part of the latest agreements, Chevron’s Petroindependencia joint venture was assigned rights to develop the adjacent Carabobo-1 and Carabobo-2-South-A areas in Venezuela’s Orinoco Oil Belt. 

The expansion builds on an April agreement that increased Chevron’s working interest in Petroindependencia to 49%. That deal also gave the Petropiar joint venture, in which Chevron holds a 30% interest, rights to develop the adjacent Ayacucho 8 area.

Oil pumps operate near Lake Maracaibo in Maracaibo, Zulia state, Venezuela, on July 12, 2024. Decades of mismanagement, underinvestment and sanctions have contributed to the decline of Venezuela’s once-dominant oil industry. (Getty Images / Getty Images)

“With improved terms and additional acreage, we are strengthening a portfolio that we believe can deliver attractive low-cost oil growth, support energy supply and create differentiated long-term value,” Chevron Chairman and CEO Mike Wirth said in a statement.

The investment push comes amid a major shift in the U.S.-Venezuela relationship following the January U.S. military operation that captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. Maduro was brought to the U.S. to face federal drug-trafficking charges.

Cerro Negro heavy oil upgrader facility in the Orinoco Oil Belt near Cerro Negro, Venezuela. (Ed Lallo/Getty Images / Getty Images)

Separately, the Trump administration announced an oil agreement last month involving approximately 65 billion barrels of proven Venezuelan reserves. Under the arrangement, Venezuelan interim authorities granted North American Blue Energy Partners 100-year concessions covering 17 oil fields, while the U.S. government secured majority ownership and governance rights in the venture.

Chairman of the Board and CEO of Chevron Corporation, Mike Wirth, speaks during the 29th annual Milken Institute Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California on May 4, 2026. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Against that backdrop, Chevron credited the Trump administration, including the U.S. Department of Energy, with helping facilitate conditions for further investment and growth in Venezuela.

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“Continued engagement between government and industry is essential to advancing projects that support energy security, economic growth and continued investment,” Wirth said.

NEW YORK — Johnson & Johnson shares climbed as much as 2.7% on Wednesday, trading near $278.63 by late morning in New York and extending a yearlong rally that has pushed the healthcare giant into record.

The stock was up $7.44 from Tuesday’s close of $271.19 as of 10:01 a.m. Eastern, according to exchange data cited by market terminals. The move followed a late-August U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for a rare-disease use of the company’s immunology drug Imaavy and a fresh Wall Street price-target increase that valued the shares well above the new high.

Johnson & Johnson, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has gained more than 50% over the past 12 months. The stock’s 52-week low was $173.33, set in September 2025. Intraday prints this week have exceeded the prior peak near $276.47 from Aug. 19, and some data services flagged an all-time high above $276.50 as Wednesday’s session opened.

The advance comes as investors weigh a familiar Johnson & Johnson mix: new product approvals, a raised 2026 sales target above $100 billion, a 64-year dividend-increase streak — and leftover legal costs from talc litigation.

A second approval for Imaavy

On Aug. 24, the FDA approved Imaavy, known generically as nipocalimab-aahu, for warm autoimmune hemolytic anemia in patients 12 and older who are on corticosteroids or have used them before. The agency said it is the first treatment cleared specifically for the condition, a rare autoimmune disease in which antibodies destroy red blood cells.

The FDA based the decision on a 24-week trial in which 24% of patients on the approved 30 mg/kg dose reached a durable hemoglobin response, compared with 8% on placebo. The 15 mg/kg arm did not beat placebo on that measure. The drug is given by infusion every four weeks.

Imaavy was first approved in April 2025 for generalized myasthenia gravis. The new use expands a medicine Johnson & Johnson has positioned as a franchise across autoantibody-driven diseases.

“Today’s announcement marks the second approval for IMAAVY and is an extraordinary milestone for people living with warm autoimmune hemolytic anemia, an underserved community that has waited far too long for an FDA-approved treatment,” David M. Lee, global immunology therapeutic area head at Johnson & Johnson, said in the company’s statement.

Lee told Reuters the trial also showed patients could reduce steroid use while keeping a clinical response. “Those are really important advances for patients,” he said.

Karen Jones, president of the patient group wAIHA Warriors, said in the same company release: “Living with wAIHA often means relentless fatigue and the constant uncertainty of not knowing what tomorrow will bring.”

The commercial market is small. The FDA estimates the disease affects about one to three people per 100,000 each year. Analysts treat the approval less as a blockbuster event than as proof the pipeline can still produce first-in-class labels after the loss of exclusivity on Stelara, the former immunology engine now facing biosimilars.

Why the stock is running now

Wednesday’s jump did not arrive with a new earnings report. Third-quarter results are due in mid-October; market calendars list a call as early as Oct. 13. The nearer catalysts are the Imaavy label, a defensive bid for large healthcare names after a soft tape earlier in the week, and a UBS note that assumed coverage at Buy with a $320 target, up from $280, according to research-distribution records dated Sept. 2.

Other firms were already constructive. Guggenheim maintained a Buy rating on Aug. 6 and raised its target to $287. Wells Fargo and Raymond James have published Buy-rated targets in the $280s. Consensus 12-month targets clustered recently around the mid-$270s, which means the stock has caught up with — and in Wednesday trade, surpassed — the average Wall Street number.

Valuation has stretched with the price. The shares have traded at roughly 31 times trailing earnings and the low-20s on forward estimates, richer than Johnson & Johnson’s long-run multiple. Market capitalization was in the mid-$650 billion range at Tuesday’s close and approached $670 billion on Wednesday’s bounce, with about 2.41 billion shares outstanding.

Beta remains low, near 0.23, which is why the stock often rises when investors rotate toward steadier cash flows.

The $100 billion sales test

The fundamental case still rests on second-quarter results published July 15. Johnson & Johnson reported sales of $25.31 billion, up 6.6% as reported and 5.6% operationally. Adjusted earnings were $2.90 a share, above the prior year’s $2.77 and above estimates near $2.85. GAAP earnings were $2.27 a share. Net earnings were $5.5 billion.

Innovative Medicine, the pharmaceuticals unit, posted $16.4 billion in sales, its first quarter above $16 billion, with 6.8% operational growth. MedTech contributed about $8.9 billion. Management said Tremfya recorded its first $2 billion quarter and grew more than 70%. Darzalex remained a major oncology product. Stelara’s decline was a several-hundred-basis-point drag; excluding Stelara, the company said it grew at a double-digit rate in the quarter.

Chairman and Chief Executive Joaquin Duato tied the print to a round-number goal the company has advertised all year.

“Johnson & Johnson delivered strong second-quarter results, demonstrating the power of our innovation, the depth of our portfolio and the momentum in our pipeline as we advance transformative treatments that address the world’s toughest health challenges,” Duato said in the earnings release. “With raised guidance and quarterly sales surpassing $25 billion, we are on track to meet our 2026 target of more than $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time in our Company’s 140-year history.”

On the conference call he added: “We said 2026 would be a year of accelerated growth and impact for Johnson & Johnson, and with our Q2 beat on the top and bottom line and raised guidance, we are delivering.” He said the company has 28 products and platforms that each generate more than $1 billion in annual sales.

Guidance was lifted. Estimated reported sales were set at $100.8 billion to $101.4 billion, or about $101.1 billion at the midpoint. Adjusted earnings guidance moved to $11.60 to $11.75 a share, $11.68 at the midpoint.

Dividend, legal overhang, leadership

The board raised the quarterly dividend 3.1% in April, to $1.34 a share, the 64th consecutive annual increase. The indicated annual rate is $5.36. The latest installment goes to holders of record as of Aug. 25 and is payable Sept. 8. At Wednesday’s price the forward yield is about 1.9%, lower than in recent years because the share price has outrun the payout.

Cash remains large. At the end of the second quarter the company reported about $20.8 billion in cash and marketable securities and $49.0 billion of debt. The same filing said roughly $3.7 billion remained related to talc matters and about $0.9 billion related to opioid settlements. Those figures are why some investors still treat Johnson & Johnson as a litigation story as well as a growth story.

Deal-making has continued. In June the company agreed to buy Firefly Bio for $1 billion to add oncology technology aimed at KRAS-driven cancers. It also disclosed a $785 million investment in Sail Biomedicines with an option to acquire the firm for $2.58 billion. Bloomberg has reported that Johnson & Johnson has prepared materials around a possible sale of its DePuy Synthes orthopedics business; the company has not announced a transaction.

On the management side, Tom Cavanaugh became executive vice president and worldwide chairman of Innovative Medicine on Sept. 1, succeeding Jennifer Taubert, who retired after more than two decades at the company.

What Wednesday does not settle

A 2.7% pop does not change the checklist for the October call. Investors will look for whether Tremfya, Darzalex and new launches such as Icotyde, Inlexzo and Rybrevant can keep replacing Stelara dollars; whether MedTech growth firms after pressure in heart-recovery devices; and whether Imaavy’s second label starts to show up in prescription trends.

Duato has said the company is “different from other companies — we are not focused on one or two growth drivers.” The stock’s record run is a bet that statement holds through 2026. The FDA paperwork from last week and the UBS target published against Tuesday’s close gave that bet a fresh headline. The next hard numbers are still weeks away.