Laying the Groundwork for 2 Holdings on Our Shopping List
Following Monday’s moves that added modestly to a handful of Portfolio holdings, we are laying the groundwork for what it would take for two other positions in the Portfolio, heavy- and medium-duty truck company Paccar ($PCAR) and the ROBO Global Robotics and Automation Index ETF ($ROBO).
Paccar
Historically, truck activity has been closely linked to industrial and especially manufacturing activity, and that explains our focus on the monthly Industrial Production report and manufacturing PMI data. Reason being, roughly 73% of tonnage carried by all modes of domestic freight transportation, including manufactured and retail goods, is done by trucking.
As we can see in the below charts, manufacturing activity captured by ISM has been strong this year compared to 2024 and 2025, due in part to accelerated depreciation under the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), reshoring efforts and data center led non-residential construction activity.
The same has been true for new manufacturing order activity.
But with energy and other inflationary pressures lifting borrowing rates, we’ll look to Friday’s Flash October PMI report from S&P Global and what it says about the vector and velocity of manufacturing activity in October as well as what new order activity suggests for the final months of the year. We’ll also keep in mind the OBBB, which covers new heavy and medium-duty truck purchases as well as the greater fuel efficiency for newer trucks compared to current fleet.
Data from NTEA pegs the average age of commercial trucks at 12.8 years in 2025. The typical replacement age for a heavy-duty diesel truck is 12 years of service. And with diesel prices being where they are, new heavy-duty trucks today are generally 15% to 25% more fuel efficient than comparable models from 12 years ago (around 2014)
ROBO Global Robotics and Automation Index ETF
While PCAR is one of the Portfolio’s smaller positions, our ROBO position is even smaller and that has the shares on our shopping list. We’ll leave the deep technical analysis to Bob Lang, but given the 10% fall in the stock, we are tracking the setup closely.
That pullback reflects a combination of higher borrowing costs and its impact on business investment, but here too we should be mindful of the OBBB, accelerated depreciation and the push to drive productivity. We can also add the slump in the Tech sector given that just under half of ROBO’s end-market exposure is to computing & AI, actuation, sensing and integration applications.
Much the way we monitor the holdings for the First Trust Nasdaq Cybersecurity ETF ($CIBR) for new order and backlog data, we’ll be doing the same for ROBO and its key holdings. Those include Intuitive Surgical ($ISRG), Harmonic Drive, Celestica ($CLS), Illumina ($ILMN), Fanuc, Teradyne ($TER), Rockwell Automation ($ROK) and others. We’ll also be interested in comments about robotics during SpaceX’s ($SPCX) earnings call tonight and from Tesla ($TSLA) after tomorrow’s close.
In terms of third-party metrics and data, we’ll be on the lookout for Q3 2026 metrics published by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3). Back in August the group shared Q2 2026 robot unit orders and robot order values, which were up nicely year over year.
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At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long CIBR, PCAR and ROBO.
