The United States economy is full of innovation. It has to be. Manufacturing industries that dominated the economy decades ago - textiles, televisions, even automobiles to a large degree - have moved overseas, where labor and materials costs are lower. Yet the U.S. economy, even during the pandemic and the recent period of high inflation, has expanded to record levels. If U.S. corporations weren't innovating, creating new products (such as AI and vaccines) and services (such as Zoom calls and Netflix), as well as moving into new markets (clean energy, rare drugs), the domestic economy would not be growing, and capital would not be flooding into the country. Consider that U.S. GDP was approximately $1 trillion in 1930 but was almost $31.5 trillion at the end of 2025. That's growth of 30-times. Meanwhile, the U.S. population has grown less than 3-times during that time span, to 340 million from 120 million. The delta between GDP growth and population growth has been driven, in large part, by innovation.

Snowflake is a cloud-native data warehouse company. The company leverages the large public hyperscale cloud services to provide its Data Cloud to customers, enabling them to unify disparate data sources for the purposes of data engineering, and the development of artificial intelligence, applications, collaboration, and cybersecurity. Snowflake went public on September 16, 2020 at $120 per share. The company derives 23% of its revenue outside the U.S.

Insider sentiment, as expressed by the weekly data from Vickers Stock Research, is in a near-term 'best of times, worst of times' mode this week. By that we mean that all of the major one-week sell/buy ratios from Vickers are a bit better this week, but not enough to help the eight-week ratios, which are all a bit worse this week and are either very near to or already in Vickers' bearish-sentiment zone. Of note, the response of insiders to the military developments in the Middle East over the weekend are not reflected in Vickers' current data. But end of day, our ongoing thesis in 2026 has been that insiders are not stepping up to the plate to buy equities, and that position seems defensible based on the 0.5% YTD gain for the S&P 500 and the 2.2% loss for the Nasdaq Composite. Looking at Vickers' eight-week ratios on a sector basis, only three of the 11 S&P sectors are bullish - and they are the same three that were bullish last week: Consumer Staples, Financial, and Real Estate. From a shorter-term sector perspective, four sectors delivered a bullish one-week sell/buy ratio over the past week: Consumer Staples, Financial, Healthcare, and Real Estate. Within the Financial sector, volume was particularly notable, as Vickers recorded 180 transactions that fit the criteria for inclusion in our analysis. Conversely, two sectors had bearish sell/buy ratios over the past week: Communication Services and Utilities. As the ratio was particularly high (bearish) for Communication Services and as this was the second consecutive week for the sector to post bearish results, we will be keeping an eye on performance in this sector. This week, analysts at Vickers highlighted insider transactions of interest at Clean Harbors Inc. (NYSE: CLH) and RTX Corp. (NYSE: RTX).

Argus is hosting a five-part webinar series on Artificial Intelligence (AI), examining how this dynamic force will have an impact across the investing universe. Our team of analysts will identify companies we see as leaders or innovators in this evolving space. The series started on February 4 with a look at how AI is playing out in its dominant sector: Information Technology. Argus Analysts Jim Kelleher, CFA, and Joe Bonner, CFA, broke down the impact of AI on multiple industries within Information Technology. In subsequent webinars, we will examine the impact of AI on the Healthcare (March 4), Consumer (April 1), Financial (May 6), and Industrial/Energy (June 3) sectors. For our list this week, we present stocks that were featured in our initial webinar on IT, all of which are rated BUY at Argus.