1. QQQ Never Made New Highs on Chart after Summer Sell Off

StockCharts

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2. Consumer Discretionary Stocks Sideways Chart for 12 Months

StockCharts

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3. Same Store Sales Still Growing 5%

The Irrelevant Investor

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4. Retail Sales Ex-Gas Stations Still Trending Up

Not even sky-high gasoline prices could dent their spending on bars & restaurants, ecommerce, cannabis stores, etc.  By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

Gasoline prices soared in August, and consumers continued to buy gasoline, but paid much higher prices, and so sales at gas stations in dollars (not gallons) also soared and pushed up overall retail sales, which spiked by 1.2% in August from July, to $773 billion, seasonally adjusted, and were up by 6.0% year-over-year, according to data from the Census Bureau today.

But even without gas station sales, retail sales spiked by 1.1% seasonally adjusted in August from July, and rose by 4.9% year-over-year.

It’s not all based on Americans suddenly throwing their entire inheritance at retailers. Part of the month-to-month increase in August was due to the effect of recapturing the drop in July that in turn was due to Amazon Prime Day having shifted into June this year, from July last year, made worse by quirky seasonal adjustments, which we discussed at the time, and today’s jump wasn’t a surprise here. But it shows that spending at retailers continues growing at a solid rate, even without gasoline sales, and despite the gasoline price spike.

Wolf Street

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5. S&P Performance After Rate Hikes

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6. Bitcoin New Correlations to Dollar, S&P and Nasdaq

Marketwatch That’s according to analysis from CoinMarketCap Research, who say in commentary sent Wednesday “the usual macro playbook for how bitcoin reacts to a rate decision is unreliable this afternoon.”  Bitcoin selling on Tuesday reflected a market that had positioned for a yes vote on the crypto regulating Clairity Act and was forced to unwind when it didn’t come, according to CMC.

And while the Clarity Act drove that selling, bitcoin’s correlations with other assets was dwindling.  “Bitcoin’s short-window correlation to the dollar index sits at +0.08, versus -0.54 over the past 30 days. Its correlation to the S&P 500 has fallen to 0.43 from 0.75 yesterday, to the Nasdaq to 0.30 from 0.60 yesterday, and to gold to 0.28 from 0.69 over 30 days,” said CMC. https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-s-p-500-nasdaq-federal-reserve-interest-rate-decision-september-meeting?mod=home_lead

StockCharts

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7. Higher Interest Rates Negative for Small Stocks -6.5% One Month

Google

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8. Russia Cheap New Weapons Full of Chinese Parts-WSJ

WSJ

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9. Japan has 100,000 People Over 100 Years Old….90% Women

OLD NEWS

Japan has a problematic age gap

Unsplash

For the first time in its history, Japan has more than 100,000 people over the age of 100—and nearly 90% of them are women. The surge of centenarians is straining the country’s resources and making the male/female ratio at senior home mixers impossibly unbalanced.

To put the official total of 107,677 into context, that’s enough 100-year-olds to nearly fill AT&T Stadium in Dallas. When paired with Japan’s record-low fertility rates, the number of centenarians—which has risen for 56 straight years—is creating a host of fiscal problems:

Around one-third of the country’s ~120 million residents are drawing from public pensions.
The health ministry asked for $218 billion for pensions and medical care for next year’s fiscal budget, representing about a quarter of the overall requests.
The government estimates that it will need 2.4 million elder care workers in 2026, up from 2.1 million in 2024.
To supplement its withering workforce, Japan is recruiting care workers from abroad. After reaching 66,000 last year under a skilled-worker visa program, the government will now allow nearly three times that many under a new foreign-aid worker plan despite its usually strict immigration policies.—DL

www.morningbrew.com

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10. Close to 50% of Millennials Looking at Prenups

Perplexity

1. Software Revenue Per Employee Hockey Stick

Software revenue per employee. “S&P 1500 Software revenue per employee has gone parabolic. If you are looking for evidence that AI is starting to impact the real economy, this is exhibit A.”

@warrenpies

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2. Monday Biggest Intra-Day Spread  Software +5% vs. Semis -5% In History

Joe Weisenthal

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3. Mag 7 2026 Laggards Close to New Highs

StockCharts

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4. No Money Flowing to Defensive Investments Yet

Where’s Everybody Hiding? 

• ByJC Parets
• September 14, 2026

People can say whatever they want.

But there’s a big difference between saying you’re worried and actually positioning your money like you’re worried.

I’d rather watch the money.

Especially when we’re talking about the biggest financial institutions in the world.

Because when markets really start to deteriorate, money moves.

Investors start protecting themselves. They move away from riskier parts of the market and toward safer ones.

And we can see it happening in real time.

That’s what this chart is about:

TrendLabs

These are three completely different relationships.

But they’re all telling us something similar about the health of the market.

And right now, I don’t see much evidence of deterioration.

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5. Universal Bond Hatred

Lance Roberts

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6. Gasoline in Driving Most of Inflation

Steve Rattner

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7. Core CPI Continues Trend Downward

Bespoke

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8. BRICS Countries Met this Week….5 Year Chart S&P 500 +83% vs. BKF (BRICS ETF) -10%

Ycharts

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9. Are AI Data Centers Raising Your Electric Bill?

AI data centers use a lot of power, and it’s easy to assume that demand drives up electricity bills. A new data center can use as much power in a year as hundreds of thousands of homes. However, electricity markets don’t work like most markets, and the data tells a complicated story. USAFacts gathered data on electricity prices, data center locations, and much, much more for our deepest data dive yet.

USAFacts

• A new data center built with capacity for 100 to 1,000 megawatts of power could consume as much electricity in a year as 80,000 to 800,000 homes. Virginia’s existing data centers currently draw enough for 7.5 million homes — more than double the state’s 3.4 million households.
   ​
• It’s understandable to think that more demand would mean higher prices in general. And new grid infrastructure costs money. But the electricity market works in unique ways: power plants and other infrastructure are expensive to build, yet extra electricity is cheap to produce once those things exist.
   ​
• National electricity prices (adjusted for inflation) have increased somewhat modestly nationally since ChatGPT kicked off the AI boom in 2022. Last year, the average residential electricity price was $0.17 per kilowatt-hour. In 2001, the inflation-adjusted average was $0.16.
   
• Of course, rates have swung quite a bit for some people when you move past national averages. Washington, DC’s rose 45% from $0.16 in December 2022 to $0.24 in December 2025. Yet rates fell in states ranging from Hawaii to New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
   
• And price swings aren’t new. We looked at other three-year stretches since 2000 and found nine other instances in which a state’s prices grew by more than 50%. All of these instances were before the AI boom.
   
• States are working to keep data centers, not households, covering these costs. Some regulators are pushing utilities to charge data centers directly, and more utilities now bill them separately from other customers. Some AI developers have pledged to cover the costs themselves.

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10. U.S. National Multifamily Apartment Starts -53% from 2022 Peak

Thompson Thrift

1. Re-Sending this Chart …Tracking Seasonality

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2. 100-Year Trend Chart from Ned Davis…We Are Out of the Box Above Trend

NDR

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3. Equal Weight S&P Has Outperformed in 2026….Closes Below 50day

Stockcharts

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4. Commodities Ratio to S&P 500

US Funds

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5. NVDA is Financing the Buildout It Supplies

Critics are correct to call out that Nvidia is financing the buildout it supplies.

It issued $25 billion of bonds in June and returned $25.8 billion to shareholders, against $21.4 billion of free cash flow.

Demand is not the question. Nvidia has moved its customers’ financing risk onto its own balance sheet, and receivables now tell you more about the AI trade than revenue does.

ProCap Insights

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6. Brookfield Private/Alts Manager that was Holding Up Well…Broke Trendline Going Back to Mid-2022

Stockcharts

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7. TLT is ETF for 20-Year Treasury Bond

Barchart

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8. Average Hourly Earnings Fall Back to 15-Year Trendline

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9. Mid-Term Election Money…..Crypto PAC $137m and AI PAC $140m

Perplexity

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10. Patterns of Unhappy People-Shane Parish

Patterns of unhappy people:

– Need social approval
– Are reliably unreliable
– Feel sorry for themselves
– Choose comfort over truth
– Refuse to learn from others
– Spend more than they make
– Use chemicals to alter mood
– Make everything about them
– Resent the success of others
– Confuse motion with progress
– Confuse cynicism with intelligence
– Promiscuous with their attention
– Always in love with their first idea
– Are always too smart to look stupid
– Need to learn everything from mistakes
– Build a life that looks better than it feels
– Protect their potential by never testing it
– Stay loyal to decisions that no longer make sense
– Win arguments at the expense of the relationships
– Standards for others and explanations for themselves

Not a good place to be.

https://fs.blog/about/

1. Foreigners Record Allocation to U.S. Stocks

Barchart

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2. Diesel Crack Hits $102

Google

ZeroHedge

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3. U.S. Household Net Worth Near Record Levels

The Kobeissi Letter

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4. Consumer Spending….XRT Retail Shopping ETF -10% Closes Below 200day

Stockcharts

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5. Retail XRT ETF Negative Returns for 12 Months

Google

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6. Fear And Greed Index at Fear Levels

CNN

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7. Draftkings and Flutter Sell Off Right When Kalshi Writes First Sports Contract

Barron’s

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8. What States Most Exposed to Canada? WSJ

WSJ

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9. New York City New Housing Coming From Office Conversions

NYT-So far this year, the city has issued permits for 74 such projects that will create roughly 10,100 new homes, according to an analysis of city data by The New York Times. That amounts to a third of all of the new housing permitted in the city during that period, showing how quickly New York is embracing residential conversions.

NY Times

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10. Your Brain Has a Craving Control Center—Here’s How to Use It

By SUCCESS Staff Published August 25, 20264 min read

Willpower has always felt like a personality trait, something you either have or you don’t. New neuroscience is rewriting that story. Scientists studying GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic have stumbled onto something bigger than a weight-loss mechanism: a specific brain region that may function as your craving’s control panel.

That discovery matters even if you never touch one of these medications. Understanding where craving actually lives in your brain changes how you think about discipline, habits and the moments when your best intentions lose to your impulses.

Meet the Lateral Septum, Your Brain’s Craving Control Point

Researchers have long focused on dopamine-producing regions like the ventral tegmental area when studying reward and craving. But those regions turn out to have relatively few receptors for GLP-1, the hormone these weight-loss drugs mimic.

One region does have that density: the lateral septum. Neuroscientists are building evidence tracing of GLP-1 drugs to this structure, which sits one step upstream from the classic dopamine machinery and appears to help combine memory, place and reward into a single signal.

Think of it as the region that answers the question “What’s rewarding here, right now, based on where I am and what I remember?” That’s a fundamentally different function than simple willpower. It’s closer to a filter that decides which urges get amplified before you’re even consciously aware of them.

What the Newest Research Is Revealing

A Nature study led by researchers at the University of Virginia, funded by the NIH, found that newer oral GLP-1 drugs suppress “hedonic feeding,” essentially eating for pleasure rather than hunger, in mice, by acting on the central amygdala, a region deep in the brain that regulates dopamine release into the brain’s reward circuitry. This pathway appears separate from the appetite-control systems scientists already understood.

That distinction matters. Hunger and craving are not the same experience, and treating them as identical has made discipline feel harder than it needs to be. When you’re fighting a craving that has nothing to do with actual need, you’re not lacking willpower. You’re up against a specific neural circuit doing exactly what it evolved to do.

Willpower vs. ‘Pull’—The Distinction That Changes Everything

Here’s where the science gets genuinely useful for your daily life. Addiction researchers describe what GLP-1 patients report as a decreased pull toward substances, not an increase in willpower. The craving itself gets quieter, rather than requiring more effort to resist.

That reframes the whole conversation around self-control. If craving intensity is something your brain generates based on memory and place, then some of your “willpower failures” were never about weakness. They were about being in an environment engineered to spike your craving circuit.

So what does this mean for you? It means the smartest move isn’t always gritting your teeth harder. Sometimes it’s changing the cue before the craving even fires.

How to Work With Your Craving Center, Not Against It

You don’t need a prescription to use this insight. The lateral septum responds heavily to place and memory, which means your environment may be doing more work on your behavior than your discipline ever could.

• Change the room, not just the resolve. If a specific location triggers a craving, whether it’s a snack drawer, a certain bar or even a particular chair where you scroll your phone, altering that physical cue interrupts the memory-reward link before it starts.
• Notice the “vivid image” moment. Cravings often begin with a mental picture—a food, a purchase, a distraction—appearing vividly in your mind. Naming that image out loud (“I’m picturing the vending machine”) creates a half-second of awareness that weakens its automatic pull.
• Build friction into the pattern, not the decision. Instead of relying on resisting an urge in the moment, make the triggering cue harder to encounter in the first place. Removing an app, changing a route or restocking a kitchen shelf does more than any pep talk.

The High-Achievers Takeaway

For leaders and entrepreneurs, this research offers something more valuable than a weight-loss headline. It offers permission to stop treating every lapse in discipline as a character failure.

Your brain has a genuine mechanism for turning memory and place into desire. Once you understand it operates below conscious awareness, you can start redesigning your surroundings instead of white-knuckling your way through willpower alone. That’s not a lesser strategy. It’s simply a smarter one, backed by where the science is actually pointing.

www.success.com

1. Projected Margin Expansion

The Irrelevant Investor

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2. The Price of AI is Coming Down Based on Tokens

Token prices. “The price of AI is coming down … Our latest index tracking the effective price per million tokens shows that prices have declined 41% to $0.68 as of this week, down from the 2026 peak of $1.15 in March.”

Ara Kharazian – Ramp

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3. AAPL Keeps 27% of Every Revenue Dollar

Opening Bell Daily

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4. Salesforce CRM Forward Price to Earnings Ratio History�..42X to 15X

YCharts

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5. XLE Energy ETF  +48% vs. S&P +12% 2026

YCharts

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6. We Showed WMT and COST Underperforming 2026�.The Consumer Discretionary Sector Broad Weakness-Bespoke

Bespoke

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7. LVMH Owns Louis Vuitton #2 Luxury Brand and Dior #7�..Breaks to New Lows -50% from 2024�-37%  in 2026

StockCharts

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8. San Francisco Centre Hotel $1.2 Billion Valuation 2016�.$133m Sale Just Fell Thru

Perplexity

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9. Housing Inventory Summary

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10. Two schools of thought about school-Seth�s Blog

One kind of school is about culture, compliance and community. We indoctrinate kids, for better or worse, in what it means to be in this world we�ve built, and how to do it together. We teach them how to be kids, how to be citizens and hopefully, how to be adults.

And the other kind of school is about the cent. All the �R�s. The software that goes with the operating system we taught in the other school.

For obvious reasons, these have always been integrated.

Now that Socratic and infinitely patient and customizable AI tutors are everywhere, perhaps it makes sense to consider each separately. Let�s not compromise either on the behalf of the other.

https://seths.blog