When markets are volatile, the most revealing thing about an investor is not what they say about the volatility, but what they choose to buy or sell inside it. The second week of March 2026 gave Wall Street's most closely watched investors exactly that kind of test: oil above $100, three major indices in decline, and a geopolitical backdrop with no clear resolution in sight. Bill Ackman, Jim Lebenthal, Kevin Simpson, Gene Munster, and David Zervos each responded differently, and taken together, their moves trace a picture of how experienced capital allocators navigate a market where conventional playbooks are not delivering reliable guidance.
Ackman's Berkshire Ambition: The Float Is the Thing
Bill Ackman, founder of Pershing Square Capital Management and one of the most recognizable activist investors of the past two decades, has long been vocal about his admiration for Warren Buffett's model at Berkshire Hathaway. On March 15, CNBC Pro published analysis from Piper Sandler examining Ackman's reported plans to restructure his investment vehicle, Pershing Square USA (PSUS), along lines that would more closely resemble Berkshire's architecture. The report generated significant attention, not because the ambition itself is new, but because the analysis cut to the heart of why replicating Berkshire is genuinely difficult.
Berkshire Hathaway's long-term competitive advantage rests on a mechanism that is elegant in its simplicity and extraordinarily hard to reproduce. The company's insurance subsidiaries, including GEICO, General Re, and several others, collect billions of dollars in premiums each year. These funds sit on Berkshire's balance sheet from the time they are received until claims are paid out, a gap that can span years or even decades for certain lines of coverage. Buffett calls this "float." Berkshire invests that float in equities and fixed income, effectively earning returns on capital that belongs to policyholders rather than shareholders, at little to no cost. Over 50-plus years, that low-cost leverage has compounded into one of the greatest wealth-creation machines in the history of public markets.
Piper Sandler's point, captured in the phrase "secret sauce," is that Ackman can replicate many surface features of the Berkshire model: long holding periods, concentration in a small number of high-conviction positions, rhetoric about business quality over short-term earnings. What he cannot easily replicate without acquiring or building an insurance company is the float itself. Without float, the structural cost of capital is higher, and the compounding arithmetic changes fundamentally. Some precedent exists for hedge fund managers building insurance vehicles to generate float. David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital Re is the most visible example. But that path requires underwriting expertise, regulatory approval in multiple jurisdictions, and the patience to build a profitable insurance book over years before the float benefits are felt. It is a different business from running a concentrated equity fund.
None of this means Ackman's plan is unworkable. It means the execution challenge is genuinely the hard part, just as Piper Sandler's framing implies. An Ackman-led permanent capital vehicle with insurance float behind it would be a meaningfully different entity from Pershing Square in its current form, with a longer investment horizon, lower fee sensitivity, and better access to illiquid or private opportunities. Markets are watching to see whether he can close the gap between the vision and the structure.
Current strategic direction: working toward a Berkshire Hathaway-style holding structure that incorporates insurance float as a low-cost capital base. Piper Sandler notes that acquiring or building a profitable insurance underwriting operation is the critical missing piece, describing it as the "secret sauce" that differentiates Berkshire from all imitators.
Berkshire After Buffett: Greg Abel's First Moves Under the Spotlight
Discussing Ackman's Berkshire ambitions naturally raises the question of how Berkshire itself is evolving under its new leadership. Warren Buffett's transition to the role of chairman, with Greg Abel stepping into the CEO position, represents the most significant leadership change in the company's modern history. Abel's early investment decisions are being parsed with unusual intensity, because the Berkshire model has always been inseparable from the judgment of the person running it.
CNBC published analysis on March 6 examining Abel's initial moves as CEO and whether he had passed his "first big test." The emerging picture is of a manager who is not in any hurry to distinguish himself from Buffett's legacy, at least not yet. Abel has continued to prioritize the company's wholly-owned operating businesses, maintained the conservative posture on new acquisitions, and not made any dramatic reshuffling of the public equity portfolio. The enormous cash position that Berkshire has accumulated, which produced meaningful returns in the current higher-rate environment, remains largely intact.
Some analysts view this conservatism as exactly the right approach, arguing that markets would punish a new CEO who immediately tried to prove his independence by doing something bold. Others wonder whether the company needs a more active posture to deploy its capital base productively as interest rates eventually fall and the yield on cash declines. That tension will define how Berkshire's story develops over the next several years. For Ackman, the interesting implication is that the institution he most wants to emulate is itself in a period of transition, and the "Berkshire model" that markets have internalized is partly a product of a specific person, Warren Buffett, rather than a purely transferable organizational formula.
Jim Lebenthal Buys Adobe Into the Earnings Dip
Jim Lebenthal, chief equity strategist at Lebenthal and Company and a regular contributor on CNBC's Halftime Report, disclosed this week that he added to his Adobe position following the stock's post-earnings decline of more than 7 percent. Buying a stock that just dropped sharply after a disappointing earnings report requires a specific kind of conviction, and Lebenthal's logic for doing so reveals something about how experienced value-oriented investors think through the difference between a durable business and a quarterly disappointment.
Adobe's core franchise, the Creative Cloud suite encompassing Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and the broader ecosystem of professional creative tools, is built on switching costs that are exceptionally high by enterprise software standards. Working professionals who spend years developing muscle memory around Adobe's interfaces, custom keyboard shortcuts, proprietary file formats, and specialized plugins do not switch software platforms without significant disruption to their workflow and, by extension, their productivity and income. That behavioral stickiness produces subscriber retention rates that hold up well through economic cycles, even when headline growth decelerates.
The market's frustration with Adobe this week centered on the rate at which the Firefly generative AI tools are converting trial users to paid subscribers or prompting existing subscribers to upgrade to higher-tier plans. Lebenthal's implicit bet is that this is a timing issue rather than a structural failure, that the adoption curve for AI-enhanced creative tools within professional workflows is simply slower than analysts modeled, and that the underlying demand will materialize over subsequent quarters rather than evaporate. Buying at a lower cost basis after the dip incorporates an additional margin of safety if that timeline extends further than expected.
The counterargument, which Lebenthal is presumably aware of, is that AI-native design platforms built from scratch around generative tools could attract the next generation of creative professionals in ways that bypass Adobe's switching cost barrier entirely. If the competitive threat materializes at the platform level rather than the feature level, the moat analysis changes. For now, Lebenthal's bet is that the franchise's depth is undervalued relative to a single quarter's conversion numbers.
This week's move: added to Adobe (ADBE) after the stock fell over 7 percent post-earnings. Core thesis: Adobe's switching costs and subscriber retention make the franchise more durable than a single quarter's AI conversion rate implies. Lower entry price after the dip provides additional cushion if the monetization timeline extends.
Kevin Simpson's Three-Stock Playbook: Intuit, Palo Alto, and Caterpillar
Kevin Simpson, founder of Capital Wealth Planning and a regular presence on CNBC's Halftime Report trade tracker segment, disclosed three new or expanded positions this week: Intuit (INTU), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), and Caterpillar (CAT). The three names span very different industries, but the underlying positioning logic connecting them is coherent when examined against the current macro environment.
Intuit sits at the intersection of financial software and tax compliance. Its flagship products, TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma, serve both consumer and small business markets with tools that are embedded in annual regulatory workflows. Financial compliance software occupies a special category in enterprise spending because it is among the last areas most businesses cut when they reduce discretionary technology budgets. A small business that stops paying for design software or marketing automation tools can recover. A business that stops maintaining its tax and accounting infrastructure cannot. This stickiness gives Intuit's revenue a resilience through economic cycles that is more valuable in periods of uncertainty than in periods of broad growth, when almost everything performs well.
Palo Alto Networks represents a separate but complementary rationale. The company is one of the largest cybersecurity platforms in the world, and its competitive position has strengthened as enterprises have consolidated security spending from point solutions to integrated platforms. In a period of elevated geopolitical tension, cybersecurity spending tends to rise or hold steady even when other IT categories are deferred, because the risk calculation for corporate leadership and boards of directors shifts. A manufacturing firm postponing its ERP upgrade is making a financial decision. A manufacturing firm cutting its endpoint security budget in the middle of an active international conflict is arguably making a governance decision with personal liability implications. Simpson's bet on Palo Alto is partly a bet on that dynamic holding through the rest of 2026.
Caterpillar's logic is the most explicitly oil-leveraged of the three. As the world's largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, Caterpillar benefits when capital spending by mining companies increases, which tends to happen when commodity prices are high enough to make new extraction projects economically attractive. Higher oil prices do not only hurt economies. They also improve the margin economics of energy extraction businesses, which in turn encourages operators to invest in new capacity and upgrade aging equipment. Simpson adding to Caterpillar is a way to participate in the commodity price cycle's upside without taking direct exposure to oil futures or leveraged energy structures.
This week's moves: initiated or added to positions in Intuit (INTU), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), and Caterpillar (CAT). The combination targets low-cyclicality subscription software, geopolitical-tailwind cybersecurity spending, and mining-equipment demand driven by high commodity prices.
Gene Munster on NVIDIA: The Inference Cycle Is Just Beginning
Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management and one of the technology sector's most followed long-term analysts, appeared on CNBC's Fast Money segment to preview NVIDIA's GTC 2026 conference. His central argument is that markets continue to underestimate the size and duration of the AI inference hardware cycle, treating it as a downstream continuation of the AI training story when it is more accurately described as the beginning of a new and distinct investment cycle.
Munster's reasoning rests on the observation that inference workloads, the computation required to run a trained model in production and serve responses to real users, are fundamentally different from training workloads in their demand profile. Training happens in concentrated bursts across large GPU clusters. Inference is continuous, distributed, and tied directly to end-user demand, which means it scales with AI product adoption rather than with research budgets. As AI products become embedded in enterprise workflows and consumer applications, the aggregate inference compute demand grows proportionally, and that growth does not plateau when model training is complete. Every new user, every new deployment, every new application builds a persistent and growing base of inference demand.
NVIDIA's position in that environment is further secured by its software ecosystem. The CUDA platform, which provides the development environment that most AI researchers and engineers have built their workflows around, creates a form of lock-in that extends beyond hardware performance. Even if a competing chip matches NVIDIA's raw specifications at a lower price, the cost of migrating an existing codebase, retraining teams, and reworking integrations across the stack is substantial enough that many enterprise AI teams will default to staying with NVIDIA unless the performance or cost differential is large. Munster sees that moat as durable through at least the next product generation cycle.
David Zervos: Read the Credit Market, Not the Headlines
David Zervos, chief market strategist at Jefferies, offered a perspective on CNBC this week that stood out precisely because it was less alarmed than most of the surrounding commentary. His assessment: despite the genuine severity of the geopolitical situation, financial markets are behaving in a "relatively calm" manner when evaluated on the metrics that matter most for identifying systemic risk.
Zervos's preferred lens for this assessment is the credit market, specifically the spread between investment-grade corporate bonds and comparable-maturity Treasuries. In genuinely systemic crises, those spreads widen rapidly as investors demand higher compensation to hold corporate debt, reflecting rising concern about default risk and broader financial system stress. In March 2020, spreads moved dramatically within days. In September 2008, they exploded. Currently, according to Zervos, spreads have widened from where they stood before the conflict began, but the widening has been measured rather than disorderly, suggesting that institutional investors are repricing specific risks without initiating the kind of forced liquidation that characterizes a true financial crisis.
The VIX sitting at 26.12 as of March 13 tells a consistent story from the equity side. The index reflects elevated concern but not panic. A VIX above 40 has historically marked periods of genuine market distress, and the current reading, while above the long-run average, is far from that threshold. Zervos is not arguing that oil prices are benign or that geopolitical risk is overstated. He is arguing that investors should calibrate their responses to what the data actually shows rather than to the emotional intensity of the headlines, and that the data does not yet support treating this as a systemic financial event rather than a significant macroeconomic challenge.
| Guru | Firm | This Week's Position or View |
|---|---|---|
| Bill Ackman | Pershing Square Capital Management | Building toward a Berkshire-style permanent capital structure with insurance float |
| Jim Lebenthal | Lebenthal and Company | Added to Adobe (ADBE) after post-earnings decline; long-term franchise thesis intact |
| Kevin Simpson | Capital Wealth Planning | Bought Intuit, Palo Alto Networks; added to Caterpillar |
| Gene Munster | Deepwater Asset Management | Bullish on NVIDIA GTC; inference cycle is a new and underestimated wave of demand |
| David Zervos | Jefferies | Credit spreads show measured repricing, not systemic stress; VIX not at crisis levels |
What Watching the Gurus Actually Teaches You
Tracking what experienced investors do in a volatile market is useful, but the value is not in the specific ticker symbols. It is in the reasoning behind the positions. Lebenthal's Adobe buy makes sense only because he has a clear view of what Adobe's business is built on and a specific argument for why this week's bad news does not change the long-term picture. Simpson's Caterpillar addition makes sense only because he has thought through the chain from oil prices to mining economics to equipment orders. Without the reasoning, a list of stock names is just noise.
The more instructive observation from this week's guru moves is what they share in common. None of these investors, including the one warning that markets are calm and the one buying into a fresh earnings disappointment, appears to have concluded that the right response to the current environment is to step away from the market entirely. They are all calibrating their portfolios to a specific view of how conditions will develop, and they are all executing within frameworks they had already established before the disruption began.
One additional institutional signal from this week deserves attention. JPMorgan was reported to be scaling back its lending to private credit firms and writing down valuations on certain software-backed loans. When a major bank reduces its participation in a lending category, it tends to improve the competitive position of non-bank lenders in that same category, because the supply of competing capital falls. Firms like Ares Management and Blackstone, whose lending platforms operate without the same regulatory constraints on bank leverage, could see deal flow and pricing power improve as a result. This kind of secondary-order effect, easy to miss when oil prices and VIX readings are dominating the headlines, often matters more for stock performance over a six to twelve month horizon than any single week's market move.
Markets in periods of genuine uncertainty tend to sort investors into two groups: those who respond to the volatility itself, reshuffling portfolios based on what is moving and how fast, and those who respond to the underlying conditions, reassessing their positions based on whether the economic and competitive realities of the businesses they own have actually changed. The guru moves documented this week fall predominantly into the second category. That distinction is worth carrying into your own decision-making regardless of which specific stocks or strategies you find compelling.