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PPL Corp., based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is a gas and electric utility with generation, transmission, distribution, and wholesale operations. The company has 3.5 million customers. PPL has regulated utility operations in Pennsylvania (PPL Electric, 1.4 million customers), Kentucky (KU and Louisville Gas and Electric, 1.3 million), Virginia (less than 0.1 million), and Rhode Island (Rhode Island Energy, 0.8 million). In 2024, revenues were about $8.5 billion with Kentucky Regulated contributing 42% and Pennsylvania Regulated accounting for 34% of the total. PPL has significant coal usage as a generating fuel. Management is targeting net-zero emissions by 2050, which is in line with utilities with coal plants. In addition to adding generation assets to its rate base, management has been reporting an uptick in future data center demand requests, which should drive transmission upgrades. The company's market cap is $27 billion.

Many brokerage firms that serve retail and institutional clients maintain data to measure investment sentiment. This can be very valuable when evaluating how the small investor, or even the corporate giants, are feeling about the stock market - and, more importantly, what are they doing with their funds. Charles Schwab is one of those firms, with its Schwab Trading Activity Index, or STAX. STAX is a proprietary, behavior-based index designed to indicate the sentiment of retail investors and has been incorporating data since January 2019. In April, STAX fell to 41.2, down 15% from 48.4 in March and the lowest headline reading since April 2023. The STAX fell every week of the April period, though the first week saw the heaviest selling as STAX fell 11%, the biggest weekly drop since the first week of April 2023. The third week of the four saw only mild net-selling, but selling accelerated again in the final week (ended April 25). On a monthly basis, April's overall STAX plunge of 14.9% was the deepest drop since March 2020, the first full month of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is just another example of what we have been talking about for weeks, namely the similarity between 2025's correction and the pandemic correction. The current STAX reading is closing in on the low level of 37.2 at the end of 2022, right after that bear market bottomed. During the 2023/2024 market advance, the index never got out of neutral territory, peaking at 55.

The Vickers Top Insider Picks is a daily report that utilizes a proprietary algorithm to identify 25 companies with compelling insider purchase histories based on transactions over the past three months.

FirstEnergy is an investor-owned holding company with 10 regulated distribution utilities across six mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states. FirstEnergy also owns and operates one of the nation's largest electric transmission systems.