Crude prices are volatile, turning sharply negative in Thursday trade, after Brent crude notched a four-year high on a report that the U.S. military would brief President Donald Trump on potential action against Iran. Investors are also digesting results from four of the Mag 7, with hyperscalers announcing plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. Here are three investment strategies we heard out of CNBC's London studios on Thursday to help navigate the noise. Oil and gas hedge Patrick Armstrong, CIO at Plurimi, forecast more trouble from the continued blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, arguing that the levels of jet fuel, diesel and even petroleum levels are "getting close to what you're going to call crisis levels." As a result, he said owning oil and gas companies made a lot of sense, describing energy stocks as a safe-haven, and a ballast in a portfolio. Siemens Energy ENRN-FF 5Y line Siemens Energy over five years Dan Hanbury, global equities co-portfolio manager at Ninety One, holds Siemens Energy in his portfolio, saying it has a 20-year revenue stream. "Their order books are sold out to 2030 in the gas turbine business. If you think about the Rolls Royce model, where you sell a gas turbine and then you service it for 20 years, well this is the same thing," he said. "You've got companies that look historically to be quite low quality, cyclical businesses, where they're building businesses through this phenomenal growth where you've got this scarcity of supply." Commodity bull market Cole Smead, CEO at Smead Capital Management, said we are in a rotational commodity bull market, adding that commodities will beat stocks. He discussed the "paradox" that "the most capital-intensive businesses, like some of the commodity businesses, oil and gas, they're producing the highest cash returns on capital globally." "At the same time, the asset light businesses, the big cap tech and the SaaS businesses, they're producing some of the lowest returns on capital globally," he said.
