1. Hyperscalers Plus NVDA Debt Issuance Equals 70% of New Treasury Long Duration Borrowing
Marketwatch Hyperscalers are issuing so much debt that they may be causing an imbalance at the long end of the yield curve. JPMorgan Asset Management’s Michael Cembalest calculates that the debt issuance by the five hyperscalers, plus Nvidia, equates to 70% of new Treasury long-duration borrowing. He adds that the Treasury twist program of buying back long-dated securities while borrowing more from the short end of the curve pales in comparison to the Fed’s program from 2011 and 2012 — at some 25% of that size — while the outstanding stock of Treasurys with maturities longer than 10 years has risen from $1 trillion to $5.8 trillion.
MarketWatch
2. Chevron Breaking Out to New 5 Year Highs Investing $7B in Venezuela
StockCharts
3. Dell Shares Sideways All Summer After Big Run Up…Needs to Get Above $510 for New Highs.
StockCharts
4. Returns for August
Capital Spectator
5. Leveraged ETFs Have Been a Losing Trade for Retail Investors.
7. Shein IPO Value ¼ of Highest Venture Valuation in 2022
Google
8. 41,000 More Satellites Coming to Low Orbit-WSJ
WSJ
9. Hanwha Shipyard Korea Produces One Ship a Week vs. Philadelphia Hanwha One Ship Per Year
Google
10. The Upper Middle Income Group in Now America’s Largest 31%
Andy Kessler WSJ –
Rahm Emanuel smartly told Politico, “If you’re trying to be a party that recruits people, working class people that go paycheck to paycheck, socialists have been repulsing them.”
Plus, we’re barraged with false analysis that the middle class is hollowing out. The largest income group is now the upper middle class. The upper middle was 10% of families in 1979. It’s now 31%. Really? Is that from exploitation? Heredity? Heck no. More like hard work. And dual incomes. The middle class is getting richer. Why is that bad?
Moreover, the income ranges of the upper middle class are wide enough to drive a truck through, from $109,000 to $326,000 for a family of two and $154,000 to $462,000 for a family of four. Whether any of these folks feel upper middle class is a different matter—it depends on geography. Worse, they have a target on their backs from the politics of envy.
1. NVDA The Cheapest Mega Cap on Forward P/E Basis
Santoli Marketwatch The analyst corps that covers Nvidia is mostly adoring. The consensus price target for the stock implies 50% upside from here and a $7.5 trillion market value. They are merely chasing the remarkable revenue and profit growth, unprecedented at Nvidia’s scale, while staring incredulously at its compressed valuation.
The stock is below 20-times next-12-months forecast earnings and below 15 on next fiscal year’s projection. On free cash flow, it’s easily the cheapest mega-cap on offer.
CNBC
My read here is that the market will simply refuse to pay a premium for what could soon be peak profit growth until the company proves through a longer cycle that it’s not a hit-driven hardware maker.
There is precedent from recent history that might be relevant. Apple in the years following its initial iPhone-release profit bonanza saw its valuation slide down a similar slope (in an early-2010s market that itself was less expensive than today’s).
CNBC
The knock on Apple for years was that tech-device margins always evaporate, smartphones would commodify, etc.
Demonstrating smooth, reliable upgrade cycles, fostering a services-based revenue stream and returning enormous sums of capital through buybacks and dividends slowly got Apple clear of the nagging valuation discount.
To the point where, now, Apple fetches an arguably rich premium, near a 30 P/E, for its defensive properties against the swings of AI sentiment and spending.
2. Why? See Below..Breaking Down the Open AI-NVDA Deal.
WSJ
3. XLV Healthcare ETF Hitting New Highs…But Reversing Off Longest Period of Underperformance Since Internet Bubble.
Trendlabs Let’s review what this chart means. When the line is going up, healthcare is outperforming the rest of the market. When it’s going down, healthcare is underperforming. Earlier this year, healthcare vs the S&P 500 fell to levels we hadn’t seen in roughly 25 years.
You have to go all the way back to around the turn of the century to find healthcare this beaten up compared with everybody else. Then something interesting happened: It stopped going down. Not just anywhere, either. Healthcare stopped falling relative to the market right around the same area where it stopped falling 25 years ago. Either way, after one of the longest periods of relative underperformance we’ve seen from this sector, buyers are showing up again.
TrendLabs
4. AI is Showing Up in Bottom Line Not Just Top Line.
Interestingly, as Goldman’s Chris Hussey points out, while it has been tempting to think that this structural AI-driven EPS growth cycle is peaking for several quarters now, 2Q26 S&P 500 results illustrated how this particular technological development is driving bottom-line results, not just topline.
ZeroHedge
Utilities’ drop-off in the percentage of stocks above their 50-DMAs has been dramatic, but not unprecedented. At 9.7% on Friday, the reading is down 87.1 percentage points from 7/24, and one of several dips below 10% in the last year.
5. Utility Sector Less than 10% Of Stocks Trading Above 50 Day Moving Average.
Bespoke Investment Group
6. The U.S. Never Had a Recession with Profit Growth Positive Year Over Year.
Baird Strategas, BEA, Macrobond as of Q2 2026
7. Mortgage Rates Sit at Historical Average.
X – nickgerli1
8. German Most Common American Ancestry
Visual Capitalist
9. How many students eat free or reduced-price school lunch?
USA FACTS Data from the Agriculture Department shows that, in 2025, about 73.0% of the lunches served at public and nonprofit private schools participating in the National School Lunch Program were free or discounted. Those lunches fed 22.1 million students. Who’s eligible, and how does participation vary by state?
Students from households at or below 130% of the poverty line qualify for free lunches from the National School Lunch Program. Students from households making between 130% and 185% of the poverty line qualify for reduced-price lunches.
The number of students receiving subsidized lunches grew 4.8% from fiscal year 2023 to fiscal year 2025. Program participation grew the most in Colorado (up 29.1%), Michigan (up 16.4%), and Minnesota (up 12.9%).
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows the rates at which state student bodies qualify for the program. In the 2022–2023 school year (the latest NCES data available), Mississippi had the largest percentage of eligible students (99.7%), followed by Nevada (81.5%) and New Mexico (75.2%). Montana (18.7%), New Hampshire (23.4%), and Delaware (25.2%) had the lowest percentages.
USAFacts
10. Flow, In Depth
Psychology Today One way to channel a flow state is to stop trying and just be. Margaret Smith Ph.D.
Key points
A flow state entails alignment of goals, energy, attention, feedback, and so on.
When we learn what we can control in our sport and direct our attention there, we make flow possible.
Flow is a pleasant experience. Athletes crave it. But there’s plenty in sport that’s unpleasant.
Opening what’s unpleasant and beyond our control can offer energy that’s deeper than flow.
Have you ever participated in something awesome? Awesome in the root sense of the word—full of awe—in which you gave of yourself as a participant or as a witness (or both), and in doing so, you allowed the boundaries of your conscious mind to dissolve as you connected with something greater: humanity, history, nature, or the divine?
In sport, this sort of experience is often discussed as flow, but the kind of flow I’m talking about transcends the field of play and/or the performance space, be it athletic, artistic, or otherwise.
Carl Jung called such experiences numinous, from the Latin numen, divine will. In a numinous experience, which might be delightful, terrifying, or both simultaneously, we surrender any efforts at control to something larger than ourselves. We let the divine, however you choose to conceive it, flow in.
Flow in sport performance literature (Csizkszentmihalyi, 1975/1990) has to do with performance and engagement. Flow is conceived of, in the literature, as a psychological state with measurable structural conditions: the balance between challenge and skill (sometimes depicted as an inverted U), clarity of goals and purpose, and action and awareness. Things are maximally ordered, and all is aligned: task, skill, focus, feedback, and so on.
The literature presents flow as something secular and comprehensible. And there’s good reason for this: those of us who support athletes—whether as researchers and scientists, as coaches, counselors, or service-providers—want to help athletes control what they can control, and we want to help athletes highlight what they do have control over so that they can put their focus there. This is what makes flow possible in the first place.
But when you witness an athlete truly in the current of a flow state—when you are an athlete allowing yourself to ride the current of a flow state—you’re a part of something sacred. There is soul. That soul is immeasurable. And it may not always be pretty or pleasant: it might be vast and fearsome.
In his later work, Csikszentmihalyi explored this vastness, writing about autotelic experiences—things done for their own reward rather than for money or status—and autotelic traits—qualities of people who worry less about what others think, allowing themselves instead to be driven by curiosity and awe.
Where flow is a well-operationalized performance concept with indices that seek to describe its contours and complexities, the numinous is more about meaning than performance, and about dissolution that may be unsightly.
There’s a lot of talk in sport and in the sport performance literature about resilience and grit. There’s less talk, at least in the sport performance literature, about terror, dread, and dissolution. And let’s be clear: terror, dread, and dissolution are not an efficient path to a podium (or an efficient path to any place).
But we do athletes a disservice when we point them, relentlessly, toward efficiency and alignment. (We do ourselves, as humans, a disservice when we point relentlessly toward efficiency and alignment!) Social media, mass media, and funding entities overwhelm athletes with massive demands for “narratives” that are readily digestible for a large audience.
Even if such narratives are linked to intrinsic values (“I love my sport, I love my teammates, I want to share this love”), when the demands are externally driven (e.g., express a need for “content” or a “statement”), there is a neurobiological cost that is distinct from that of an action a person chooses for themselves. The demand for narrative coherence on schedule and for external consumption spikes cortisol and can contribute to burnout.
Burnout is a kind of coming apart quite different from Jung’s numinous. Burnout is about depletion, and often depletion over time, whereas Jung’s numinous experience is more like a moment of awe. When we’re burnt out, those moments of awe may be harder to access: we’re looking down at our phones, or we’re accomplishing tasks, and in so doing, we miss the shooting star (or some other unsayable thing that transcends the language of the everyday).
So, if you’re headed back into your fall sport season with your training plan and your to-do lists, wonderful. But also—and write it into the plan, or don’t! — make space to play and space to be afraid. Find people (or other living creatures) who welcome your playfulness and who can witness your fear. You can have your goals and work to align attention and energy toward them, and you can feel the air on your skin, the breath in your body, and the vibration in the atmosphere that might be divine will.
Frontier lab growth. Anthropic and OpenAI’s “growth rates have been both extremely rapid and remarkably robust since 2023: together, they tripled in 2024, and then grew more than fourfold in 2025. And this year they’ve already grown by 3.5x … these labs are growing faster from a higher baseline.”
DAILY CHARTBOOK
2. Since ChapGPT Launch NVDA Hasn’t Missed
In fact, since ChatGPT launched in November of 2022, Nvidia hasn’t missed estimates once.
fiscal
3. AI Data Center Build Out–Private Equity Deal Making in Building Trades
Private equity is following the AI data center boom into the trades that build and equip facilities.
PE activity in construction and engineering hit a record 529 deals in the second quarter, up 56.5% from a year earlier, according to estimates in PitchBook’s Q2 Construction and Engineering report. Deal value slipped slightly from the prior quarter as investors prioritized smaller deals over marquee platforms.
Dealmaking has concentrated in specialty trades needed for site work, electrification and cooling.
PitchBook
4. Earnings Growth vs. Off Balance Sheet Debt
As a result, Morgan Stanley projects free cash flow to turn negative for Amazon and Google in 2026 and for Meta as soon as next quarter, even as reported earnings remain strong. In sum, the massive AI buildout is increasingly being funded through leases, contractual commitments, and debt rather than internally generated cash flow, highlighting the growing financial
Zach Goldberg Jefferies
5. September Seasonality
Dave Lutz Jones Trading Tomorrow brings a new month – Here’s what the average September looks like since 1950 for the S&P 500. Things are ok early, but by Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19th) is when the trouble starts.
USA Facts In 2024, Hawaii had the lowest rate of gun-related deaths nationwide: 3.7 deaths per 100,000 people. Mississippi had the highest rate: 28 per 100,000.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that complex factors, including poverty, racial or ethnic inequities, and other socioeconomic conditions, influence differences in gun-related death rates between states.
9. Biggest American Family Office Investors
Linkedin
10. Top 10 Primary Industries for Ultra High Net Worth
1. Chart: Stocks vs Bonds Long-Term Cycles—Everyone Hates Bonds
Stocks beating Bonds should be no surprise for those paying attention. Stocks are in a raging bull market.Bonds are in brutal a bear market. But you might be surprised by the extent of it (see chart below). The rolling 10-year annualized total return spread (i.e. including interest for bonds, dividends for stocks) of stocks vs bonds just cracked 15% —the highest since 1960 (and eclipsing the 1929 high).
@Callum Thomas (Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm)
2. China Gold vs. U.S. Treasury Holdings
Otavio (Tavi) Costa
3. Gold Miners Pulled Back to 12 Month Levels…Now Making Run at New Highs
StockCharts
4. Target Comeback…TGT +77% vs. WMT -6% 2026
Ycharts
5. Buy Now Pay Later Klarna Group -50% 2026
Google
6. Unicorns $1B+ Value Private Companies Growing in Europe
Europe’s unicorn herd is worth over €600 billion ($701 billion)—almost €100 billion more than their value at the end of last year—as dealmaking among the region’s €1 billion-plus VC-backed companies rebounds, according to our latest European VC Valuations Report.
The addition of 18 new startups to the herd last quarter boosted the total, bringing the number of VC-backed companies worth over €1 billion to 175, the highest count to date.
PitchBook
7. Iraninan Oil Flows to China Plunge
Bloomberg Much of this scarcity is down to the success of a US blockade, which has left loaded Iranian vessels trapped inside the Persian Gulf and a fleet of empty ones stuck outside. The result is that just 40 million barrels of oil are now in waters east of peninsular Malaysia, a popular holding and transhipment area for Chinese and other Asian buyers — and only an estimated 4 million of those remain unsold, according to data intelligence firm Kpler. That’s the equivalent of two supertankers.
Bloomberg
8. American Public AI Opposition Growing…Updated Chart Almost a Double of “Strongly Oppose”
Semafor
9. U.S. Household Leverage is the Lowest in 50 Years
