Tracking Wealth Through the AI Lens
Tracking Wealth Through the AI Lens
So let me get this straight. A stock chart draws a pretty picture, some rumors about the Oracle of Omaha start flying around, and suddenly everyone loses their goddamn minds. That’s the story with Occidental Petroleum, ticker OXY, this week. It’s the perfect storm of Wall Street nonsense, a masterclass in how narratives, not numbers, seem to drive the market these days.
You’ve got two camps of hype-men working in perfect, nauseating harmony.
First, you have the chart wizards, the technical analysis gurus who stare at squiggly lines all day. They’re all breathless because OXY just formed a “golden cross.” This is when the 50-day moving average crosses above the 200-day moving average. Apparently, this is a historically bullish signal. It’s also, let’s be real, financial astrology. It’s reading tea leaves in a billion-dollar data stream. They say it’s “doubly significant” because it’s happening alongside the big news.
Give me a break. That’s not significance, that’s confirmation bias. It’s finding a four-leaf clover on the same day you get a promotion and deciding the clover has magic powers.
Then you’ve got the fundamentalists, the value guys, who are all hot and bothered because of Warren Buffett. The rumor is that his company, Berkshire Hathaway, is going to buy OXY’s chemical division, OxyChem, for a cool $10 billion.
And because it’s Buffett, everyone just assumes it’s a genius 4D-chess move that we mortals can’t comprehend.
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The Oracle's "Big Bang" Bailout
Let’s look at this deal for what it is. Occidental is sitting on a mountain of debt. We’re talking $24 billion. That’s a massive, soul-crushing number. Selling off OxyChem—with its 23 chemical plants and all—is a quick way to hack that number down. One JPMorgan analyst called it a “big bang” approach to deleveraging.
Here’s my cynical translation of “big bang approach to deleveraging”: a desperate, Hail Mary pass to get the balance sheet under control.
This isn’t some visionary pivot. This is a company selling the family silver to pay the mortgage. Sure, it would be Berkshire’s biggest acquisition in years and would deepen their ties since they already own about 28% of OXY. But selling an asset that was projected to boost your free cash flow by nearly half a billion dollars in 2026, right when chemical margins are in the toilet? That sounds less like a strategic masterstroke and more like something you do when your back is against the wall. And honestly...
They’re monetizing the asset at a cyclical trough. This is a bad idea. No, ‘bad’ doesn’t cover it—this is a fire sale disguised as a strategic partnership. But because the name “Warren Buffett” is attached, the market treats it like gospel.
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Lines on a Screen Don't Mean a Thing
I just can’t get over the golden cross thing. The idea that this pattern, emerging after a “consolidation phase” with “relatively low volatility,” is some kind of reliable predictor of future success is just laughable. It’s an algorithm recognizing a pattern that has, in the past, sometimes preceded a rise in price. Sometimes.
It’s like saying that every time you see a red car and a blue car at the same intersection, the light is about to turn green. It might happen a lot, but one has nothing to do with the other. The market isn’t a sentient being that respects your crayon drawings. It’s a chaotic mess of fear, greed, and high-frequency trading bots.
And the media eats it up. Every financial news site is plastered with this stuff, right between the ads and the pop-ups demanding you accept their cookies. I tried to read more about this on one site and was hit with a wall of text that was longer than the actual article. "Strictly Necessary Cookies," "Personalization Cookies," "Social Media Cookies." It’s a perfect metaphor for the modern internet: a tiny sliver of actual information buried under an avalanche of tracking garbage designed to sell you more garbage. It’s all just noise.
The golden cross is just another form of noise. It’s a simple, easy-to-digest narrative that makes people feel like they have an edge, like they’ve cracked the code. They haven’t.
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Meanwhile, Reality Has Other Plans
So we have the chart-gazers and the Buffett-worshippers all convinced OXY is heading to the moon. But what happens when you ignore the voodoo and the rumors and look at the actual, you know, numbers?
The picture gets a lot uglier.
Wall Street, for all its faults, isn’t particularly bullish on OXY. The analysts who actually have to put their reputations on the line are mostly sitting on the sidelines. Zacks.com, which bases its ratings on earnings estimate revisions, has the stock as a #3 Hold. That’s the financial equivalent of a shrug.
The earnings estimates themselves are just brutal. They’re expected to post earnings of $0.49 per share for the current quarter. That’s a fifty-one percent drop from a year ago. A 51% drop! For the full fiscal year, the consensus estimate indicates a nearly 35% decline. Offcourse, next year’s estimate shows a tiny 1.7% increase, but that’s hardly the stuff of legend.
So, let’s recap. The technical indicator says “buy.” The big rumor says “buy.” But the actual performance of the company says… “maybe don’t?”
This is the disconnect that drives me crazy. A stock is up over 35% from its low earlier this year, fueled by a chart pattern and a potential deal that is fundamentally a debt-dumping exercise, all while its core earnings are getting hammered. It makes no sense.
Then again, who am I to argue with the Oracle of Omaha and a magical cross? Maybe I’m the crazy one for thinking a company’s ability to actually make money matters more than the shapes its stock chart makes.
Look, this whole episode is a perfect snapshot of the market right now. It ain't about value; it's about vibes. It’s about a good story. And “Buffett Buys Into a Golden Cross” is one hell of a story. It’s just too bad it’s fiction. You have a technical pattern that’s basically a superstition, a fundamental catalyst that’s born of financial distress, and a sea of investors ignoring the flashing red lights of declining earnings. They’re buying the sizzle, but the steak is shrinking. And when the hype dies down, all they’ll be left with is an empty plate.
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