Goodbye Nikes, Hello Nukes: Navigating a New Economic Regime with AI

For four decades, the winning formula for investors was deceptively simple: buy steady, predictable growth stocks like McDonald's, Nike, or Procter & Gamble, and ride the tailwind of declining interest rates and disinflation to ever-higher valuations. That playbook is now officially dead. According to Dan Scott Lintott of De Lisle Partners, the tectonic plates of the global economy have shifted permanently. The post-2021 world is defined by a new, volatile trinity: higher-for-longer interest rates, sticky inflation, and a historic, urgent funneling of capital into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The best historical precedent, he argues, is the 1970s—with a Silicon Valley twist. A new world demands a new set of stocks, and investors must pivot from the placid consumer-brand winners of yesteryear to the hard-asset, industrial-economy champions of tomorrow.

In this fresh capital-expenditure-driven cycle, the companies poised to thrive are not the ones with the strongest digital network effects, but those that own scarce, real-world assets, command growing order backlogs, and wield genuine pricing power. The strategy Lintott employs in the VT De Lisle America Fund is a paradoxical "value plus momentum" model, designed to identify these new winners. The fund is finding them in unexpected places—including the break-up of old industrial conglomerates, where overlooked divisions are spun off into attractive, newly listed companies. Here are three such stock picks for this brave new world.

Solstice Advanced Materials (SOLS): The Refrigerant Oligarch with a Nuclear Crown Jewel

In 2025, the industrial giant Honeywell spun off its specialty chemicals division, creating Solstice Advanced Materials. This is not just a corporate restructuring story; it's an unveiling of a strategically critical asset base. Solstice holds a powerful, oligopolistic position in the unglamorous but essential world of refrigerants. This is its cash cow, a business line that is suddenly finding a massive new growth driver as the world builds out energy-hungry data centers that require advanced, efficient cooling solutions.

While the refrigerant business provides the stable foundation, the growth story lies deeper. Solstice is aggressively expanding its capacity in a specialist chemicals business that feeds directly into America's strategically crucial semiconductor supply chain. But the "hidden crown jewel," as Lintott describes it, is the company's stake in the only US uranium conversion facility. It is one of just seven such facilities on the planet, making it a remarkably scarce and geopolitically vital asset at the dawn of a global nuclear renaissance. While the stock may initially screen as expensive on a high-twenties price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, its true earnings power is being underestimated as its chip-making exposure grows and lucrative, higher-priced uranium contracts begin to cycle into its revenue stream. It’s a bet on cooling, computing, and clean energy, all wrapped in a single, recently liberated company.

Forum Energy Technologies (FET): Pick-and-Shovels for an AI-Powered Energy Thirst

The insatiable energy demand from the AI buildout is not just a theme for power producers; it has a profound impact on the complexity and urgency of fossil fuel extraction. This is where Forum Energy Technologies enters the picture. FET manufactures high-tech parts and equipment for oil wells and subsea exploration, positioning itself as the quintessential "picks-and-shovels" play on rising global energy needs. It is not an oil price bet; it is a bet on the increasing technological difficulty and capital intensity of extracting the hydrocarbons the world still needs.

Forum’s strength lies in its high-value, defensible niche. The company is a leading player in all of its product lines and prides itself on patented technical know-how that creates a formidable barrier to competition. This is not a commodity manufacturing business; it's a specialized engineering firm with deeply embedded customer relationships. Furthermore, its low reinvestment requirements translate directly into high levels of cash generation. The result is a stock that, even after a dramatic near-tripling in price over the past year, Lintott still considers a "buy" on a fundamental basis, citing its compelling cheapness relative to its prodigious cash flow. In the new industrial economy, a cash-generating technology provider for the global energy complex is a core portfolio holding.

Pennant Group (PNTG): The Unbeatable Demographic Tailwind

Beyond the noisy macro themes of AI, inflation, and deglobalization lies a quiet, unstoppable force: demography. The Pennant Group provides a direct, pure-play exposure to this trend. The company owns, leases, and operates care facilities for the elderly, positioning it directly in the path of a multi-decade tailwind as America's population ages. This is not a cyclical growth story; it is a structural one. The demand for its services is essentially hard-coded into the nation's demographic profile for years to come.

What makes Pennant a particularly attractive investment proposition is its execution model. It specializes in acquiring and renovating old buildings to add value, a critical advantage in a market where the supply of new facilities is severely constrained by the prohibitive cost of new construction. This ability to expand capacity at a lower cost, combined with an entrepreneurial local management structure that drives operational efficiency, gives it a powerful competitive edge. Financially, the stock trades on a moderate low-twenties P/E, but crucially, it couples this with a high double-digit growth rate. This gives it an enviable price-to-earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio of not much above one, a rarity for a company with such clear, long-duration visibility on its revenue stream. In a world of uncertainty, Pennant offers the quiet confidence of an inevitable demographic wave.

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