Insiders. “What is catching my eye is that while sentiment is leaning bullish among retail investors and Wall Streeters, corporate insiders are selling at the highest level since 2000 … They have all kinds of reasons to sell shares … but given the conversation about valuation and bubbles and loft earnings goals, the current 25:1 sell/buy ratio is something that gives me pause.”
Drills of this kind, which took place in the Kursk region bordering Ukraine and were broadcast on Russian state television, are happening across Russia as the Kremlin reaches into the country’s schools to prepare potential combatants for future wars.
It is part of a dramatic transformation of Russia’s education system that gained pace after the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 but was supercharged by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As the conflict approaches the four-year mark, military-style training and war topics are embedded in Russia’s school curriculum, while the budget for such programs has ballooned as the focus has turned to the youngest grades.
By eighth grade, weapons training—once extracurricular—is now mandatory. Teens are taught army discipline, military history and how to assemble Kalashnikovs and fly drones.
History textbooks portraying the West as Russia’s enemy and Ukraine as its stooge will soon be rolled out for the youngest grades, the government says. Outside of the classroom, the Defense Ministry has its own Youth Army, with a claimed 1.85 million members age 8 to 18 integrated into the school system.
9.Mark Hyman’s Facts on Food
10.Shane Parish Interview Ron Shaich
The Knowledge Project
Top restauranteur Ron Shaich reveals how to scale a business, find the inputs that matter, and create long term success.
Ron is the founder of Panera Bread, chairman of CAVA, and managing partner at Act III Holdings. He created the fast-casual dining category.
Here are 10 of the maxims I took away from this episode and my research:
Complexity kills more companies than competition.
Long-term greedy, not short-term stupid.
Commitment owns you. You don’t own it.
The best seek out the details.
Failing fast works in software, not restaurants.
There is no balance. You make choices.
Obsession isn’t a problem. It’s an advantage.
People want to feel special in a world where they don’t.
The greatest risk is underinvesting in what works.
Build something worthy of those who believed in you.
2. The Counter Argument to My Negative Equity Risk Premium Charts from Yesterday
Equity risk premium. “These negative risk premium charts circulating again. Reminder: stocks are real assets: EPS, Divs demonstrated they [grow] with inflation over time. Earnings Yields vs TIPs are the right comp. Risks premiums roughly 1/2 last 20 yrs but stocks still better than bonds. Rule of 72 says time to double purchasing power: 39 years in TIPS, 17 years in S&P 500.”
Jeremy Schwartz
3. Bitcoin IBIT Below 50day and 200day
StockCharts
4. So I asked Perplexity About Past Historical Example of Bitcoin Below Moving Averages
Perplexity
5. One-Year After Bearish Closes ?
Perplexity
6. Ethereum Holding Above 200-Day
StockCharts
7. Bitcoin Treasury Firms -30-50%
Sherwood
8. Mag 7 vs. Country Market Caps…3 American Companies are Larger than Every Country Ex-Japan
Charlie Bilello
9. Streaming Inflation
Wolf Street Companies have spent billions of dollars buying sports programming, and they have shuffled programming around, and some have stripped some programming from basic streaming services. So prices alone may not reflect the whole picture.
Since 2019, subscriptions have soared, according to the WSJ:
Regularly listening to music is linked to a lower risk of developing dementia, according to a new study.
In the study, published in October, researchers looked at data spanning a decade and involving more than 10,000 relatively healthy people, aged 70 and older, in Australia. People who listened to music most days slashed their risk of developing dementia by 39 percent compared with those who did not regularly listen to music, the study found.
“I have started myself listening to music more than I was,” Ryan said. “I would encourage people to be listening to music, because if it’s something they take pleasure from and it’s also stimulating their brain, why not?”
What happens to the brain when we listen to music
At Princeton University’s Music Cognition Lab, researchers have conducted studies looking at what happens to people’s brains when they listen to music. They’ve found that various parts of the brain are activated, including motor areas, sensory areas, the regions that process emotions and those involved in imagining or daydreaming. This could be the key to what makes music powerful for boosting brain health.
“One of the things that seems to be really important is just getting all those areas to talk to each other in meaningful ways,” said Elizabeth Margulis, director of the lab and a trained pianist who wasn’t involved in this new study. “That’s something music is exceptionally good at doing.”
Margulis pointed out that the study’s finding applies to listening to music as well as playing it. There was slightly less benefit associated with regularly playing music, with a 35 percent reduction in the risk of dementia, though the researchers suspect that’s because it’s a smaller group of people than those who regularly listen to music.
Music also has a transportive quality, Margulis said. If you listen to a song that you first heard during a certain time of life, you may find yourself transported back to that time, especially with the music you listened to in adolescence.
“That tends to be the music that people remember best and have the most memories associated with,” Margulis said. She added that adolescence often is the time when people are defining themselves, which gives that music added meaning.
This can even be seen in people who are experiencing cognitive decline or diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
“They may not even recognize themselves in a mirror, they don’t know where they are or how they got there, but you put on a song from when they were 14, and they reconnect with that self they had lost,” said neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin, who also wasn’t involved in the new research.
Anecdotally, Margulis said, the effect seems to remain for a while even after they listen to the music.
“They’re a little more present, a little more able to interact,” Margulis said.
Music as medicine
Levitin has written a new book, “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine,” bringing together research about how music can be used as therapy for things including depression, pain and neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s.
“Listening to music is neuroprotective,” said Levitin, explaining that it builds resiliency and protects the brain by wiring new neural pathways. “It’s a myth that you don’t grow new neurons, and throughout the lifespan, you’re growing new pathways.”
Levitin added that while listening to music from the past can bring back memories and provide comfort, there is also a benefit to listening to new music and challenging yourself. He also encourages people to play music.
“You can start playing an instrument at any age, and you don’t need to be Herbie Hancock,” Levitin said. He recalled giving his grandmother a keyboard for her 80th birthday and watching her practice almost every day until she died at 97. Levitin said for him, playing music brings an immersive joy.
“If I’m lucky, I disappear, and the music plays me,” he said.
But he emphasized that just being around music — whether that’s listening or playing it — shows benefits. And it’s something pretty much everyone has access to.
“That’s the lovely thing,” Margulis said, on how accessible music is to everyone.
4. Semiconductor Stocks $1.3B Inflows Last Week…Retail Buying
The Kobeissi Letter
5. Gold Trading with High Correlation to S&P
Bloomberg
6. Big Tech CDS Spreads Widening
Big Tech CDS. “The Big Tech CDS has surged this year with Oracle CDS leading the rise. The big Tech CDS is now highest in over 2 years, rising from cycle-lows. While the standalone chart show concerns, when compared with the broader IG market, the spreads are still below the aggregate Investment Grade credit and that the IG CDS is still near cycle lows.”
Manish Kabra – SocGen
7. Historical Returns After 2% Dip-Marketwatch
Joseph Adinolfi
8. AAII Bears History
9. Subprime Auto Loan Delinquencies Break-Out Above 1990’s Record
Ideas open doors, lead to connections and make things better.
But not all good ideas are good businesses.
Crop rotation is a good idea. So is sous vide cooking and the sport of juggling. But these aren’t good businesses.
A business thrives when it can charge a premium–selling something for more than it costs. That means that there has to be a competitive advantage, an asset that produces value. Easy substitutions are a challenge for businesses, but useful ideas are often based on how easy they are to share.
Create something of value. And then find a reason why people will eagerly choose your version and happily pay extra for it. https://seths.blog/
2. Bitmine -75% from Highs…Goal was to Acquire 5% of Ethereum
StockCharts
3. XRT S&P Retail ETF Holds 200-Day
StockCharts
4. Aerospace and Defense Stocks Above 50-Day Moving Average for 3rd Longest Streak Ever
Bespoke Investment Group With the successful test of the 50-DMA, the Aerospace and Defense industry has closed above its 50-DMA for 139 trading days. That’s the longest streak since a record 151 trading days in 2017 and ranks as the third-longest in the last 30 years.
Bespoke
5. It’s All About the Power….Data Centers Need Electricity
Semafor
6. LLY Break-Out New All Time Highs
StockCharts
7. Five Takeaways From Warren Buffett Thanksgiving Letter
Business Insider Here are five main takeaways from the letter, paired with key quotes:
1. He’s not planning to sell a bunch of stock right now
Buffett said he plans to keep a “significant” amount of his class-A shares. That is, until shareholders reach the same level of comfort with newly appointed Greg Abel as they had with Buffett and his long-time partner, Charlie Munger.
Key quote: “That level of confidence shouldn’t take long. My children are already 100% behind Greg as are the Berkshire directors.”
2. He’s accelerating donations
Buffett said he’ll donate more than $1.3 billion of Berkshire Hathaway shares to four family foundations: his late wife’s, and one for each of his three children.
Key quote: “The acceleration of my lifetime gifts to my children’s foundations in no way reflects any change in my views about Berkshire’s prospects.”
3. He wants Berkshire CEOs to be humble — and in it for the long haul
Buffett said he hopes that, “with a little luck,” Berkshire will only have five or six CEOs over the next century.
Key quote: “It should particularly avoid those whose goal is to retire at 65, to become look-at-me rich, or to initiate a dynasty.”
4. He thinks pay transparency efforts have backfired
Buffett said that reforms aimed at pay transparency actually sought to “embarrass” CEOs, but instead made them more competitive.
Key quote: “The new rules produced envy, not moderation.”
5. He says investors should expect big stock drawdowns — and be patient for rebounds
Buffett noted that Berkshire stock has fallen 50% or more on three separate occasions in its 60 years under his leadership — and has always come back eventually.
Key quote: “Don’t despair; America will come back and so will Berkshire shares.”
8. Top 1% of Earners Now Have More Wealth than Middle Class America Combined
Zach Goldberg Jefferies
9. 50-Year Mortgage Math
A 50 year mortgage will not work to durably create any sort of affordability.
first off, it changes the monthly payment very little.
on a $500k home with 20% down, you pay $2,199/month on a 50 vs $2,480 on a 30.
$281/month savings. that’s simply not going to move the needle on affordability and when you look at the overall interest costs over the life of the loan, they rise 87%.
10. Discover Yourself by Expanding Your Mental Map
Psychology Today Personal change is like expanding a map, except the territory is inside you- Nick Kabrel
Key points
We apply the neuroscience of cognitive mapping to explain how learning and personal change might work.
Getting stuck might mean repeatedly navigating within the confines of our narrow cognitive maps.
Learning and personal change require expanding the map by exploring uncharted territories within.
Imagine you live in Europe in 1490. The map you see below (Figure 1) is what you think the world looks like; it’s all there is. A few years later, explorers discover a whole new continent, expanding the map of known territory. This fundamentally changes your understanding of the planet beneath your feet.
A new theory of psychological change, published by my colleague Jaan Aru and me in Perspectives on Psychological Science, proposes that internal transformations mirror this expansion of geographical maps, only the territory we navigate and expand lies within ourselves (Kabrel & Aru, 2025).
The core idea: Your mind as a map
To model how people change, we used psychotherapy as a prime example of how humans explore and transform their inner world. But the same process can describe learning in general, whether through therapy, education, coaching, consulting, or everyday life.
In short, the core idea is this: Your mind can be represented as a map or network of interconnected concepts, ideas, sensations, memories, beliefs, attitudes, and so on. Sometimes, this map may be too narrow, like Europeans’ conceptions of the world in 1490.
Most of the time, we think, feel, and act within familiar territories. Human development, whether it’s an emotional breakthrough in therapy, an insight in coaching, or a creative idea in business, requires us to go beyond the known map and expand it, thereby transforming what is known. Now, let me explain all this in detail.
Not just a metaphor
Back in the 1940s, researchers discovered that if you train a rat to run through a maze, its brain builds what they called a “cognitive map” of that space. In the hippocampus (the brain area crucial for memory and navigation), individual cells fire when the rat is in a specific place. As it moves, different cells fire in sequence. Together, these cells form a kind of internal map of the territory.
What’s remarkable is that the same neural system that allows a rat to navigate a maze, or you to find your way from home to work, also activates when we think about abstract concepts. When you move through a chain of thoughts, your hippocampal cells fire in similar sequential patterns. Thinking, in other words, is “mental navigation”: You’re traversing an internal territory of ideas, memories, and associations.
Modern network science allows us to make this more tangible. By analyzing large amounts of language use, scientists can visualize a prototype of someone’s “mental map” (Beaty & Kenett, 2023). For example, your family members are likely represented in your mind as conceptually closer to you than your colleagues, just as cities on a map cluster by region. (See below.)
Neuroscientists also discovered that if you engage in different cognitive tasks, like searching your memory, categorizing objects, or making decisions, your brain engages the hippocampal cognitive maps to guide you (Viganò et al., 2025). This means that the idea of the mind as a map is not merely a metaphor: Evidence increasingly suggests it reflects how information is actually stored, organized, and accessed in the brain.
Our cognitive maps are built on our experience. Most of the time, this is highly adaptive: It allows us to predict, learn, and respond effectively to familiar patterns in our environment. But sometimes, it can also backfire.
For instance, when facing a complex problem that demands creativity, we might get stuck in a loop, returning to the same familiar but ineffective solutions.
In therapy, a person who learned in childhood that “people are hostile” may continue to navigate within that same map, avoiding emotional openness long after the original context has changed.
In organizations, a leader might hold a rigid belief that “AI must be integrated immediately,” overlooking broader contextual or ethical challenges.
The key point is that we often become trapped within the borders of our existing cognitive maps. Metaphorically, it’s as if we keep walking the same corner of our internal landscape, never exploring the broader territory that lies beyond.
Here again, neuroscience helps explain why this happens. We can’t simply “decide” to think differently, because the neural pathways we use most often become the strongest. Every time a thought pattern activates, the same neurons fire together, and those connections strengthen. It’s like a beaten path through grass: the more often you walk it, the more defined it becomes, and the harder it is to take a new route.
Expanding the narrow cognitive map
Expanding your cognitive map is a challenging task, precisely because it requires you to step off those familiar mental trajectories. That’s why we often need other people—therapists, coaches, teachers, or consultants—to help us break through these limitations.
For example, in our paper, we conceptualize the therapist as a skilled navigator—someone who helps you leave the narrow confines of your existing map and chart new, previously unvisited territories within your own mind.
Think about it: The therapist asks questions. You follow your thoughts. You notice things you haven’t noticed before. The therapist points out patterns. You explore connections you’ve never explored. Gradually, you map new territory.
This isn’t just kitchen talk. It’s active navigation through your own neural space. Except, instead of following your habitual route A-B-C-D-E, the therapist helps redirect you to A-B-F-G-H – places you’ve never gone before. (See below.)
Explore
The world wasn’t smaller in 1490; people’s understanding of it was. The same holds for our minds. Our internal map has the potential to be broad, containing many possible neural states, yet in our lifetimes, we visit only a small fraction of them. Most of the time, we move along familiar paths, following patterns that feel safe and efficient.
As we tried to show with a new theory, expanding our cognitive maps requires curiosity, guidance, and the willingness to step off the beaten track, exploring routes the mind hasn’t traveled before.
