1. Hyperscalers Plus NVDA Debt Equal to 2/3 of U.S. Government Bond Issuance
Dave Lutz Jones Trading AMZN started selling sterling bonds for the first time on Wednesday as hyperscalers rush to diversify their funding sources to finance the AI boom. The deal is the latest example of how hyperscalers are increasingly selling bonds across markets outside of the U.S. this year, from euros to Swiss francs and the yen, as they make sure they can raise capital wherever they can, given their huge funding needs.
2. Global Revenue Estimates for AI $229 Billion Annualized
Global AI revenue. “Our revenue estimate for the AI economy reached $229 billion annualized by the end of August – up 3.5x in one year. Growth is going strong. Trailing twelve-month revenue reached $140 billion last month, 3.2x the August 2025 value of $44 billion.”
3. Market Returns are Above Average When S&P Is Concentrated
Ben Carlson-Stock market concentration is a bull market phenomenon. Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan found that S&P 500 returns were above average when concentration in the index was rising and below average when it was falling: I first wrote about concentration worries all the way back in 2018. The market has only become more concentrated since then. And we’ve been in a raging bull market.
Coincidence? I think not.
A Wealth of Common Sense
4. Rheinmetall German Defense Stock -50% from Highs after Post Ukraine Invasion Run Up
StockCharts
5. Homebuilders Slow Summer
Rick Palacios Jr.
6. Less New Homes =Supply Coming Down in Overbuilt Sun Belt Region
Business Insider-The Sun Belt’s housing headspin-Struggling real estate markets in the South, like Texas and Florida, just hit rock bottom — and could be set up for a comeback. By James Rodriguez
Business Insider
7. The Magic of Compounding Warren Buffett
Peter Mallouk
8. Cost of Living Index by State
9. Americans Drink Half as Much Milk as 1975
USAFacts
10. Leaders are Readers
The Daily Stoic Not all the Stoics were leaders, but all of them were readers.
And the ones who were leaders? Well, they were the biggest readers of them all.
Marcus Aurelius opens Meditations by thanking the teacher who taught him to read attentively—and who loaned him the copy of Epictetus that shaped the rest of his life. Scipio Aemilianus, one of Rome’s great generals and patron of Stoicism, was said to be constantly “engaged in the pursuit of arms or his studies, he was either training his body by exposing it to dangers or his mind by learning.” Literally in the final moments of his life, Cato took another pass at reading Phaedo. As president, Theodore Roosevelt was always squeezing in time to read, and later, out of office, he took a copy of Epictetus with him on his perilous journey down the River of Doubt. Stockdale talked about how, deployed in the South China Sea, when he was not flying, he was in his bunk, reading Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and the other ancients.
These were men of action…and lifelong learners. Reading deeply and thoughtfully gave all of them what they needed to succeed. The knowledge to be great leaders. The virtue to be good people. The will to survive.
In English and history classes, reading often meant memorizing names, dates, and places. Who, what, when, and where—less so the how or why or what it means for us. Our whole approach to books got Jeopardy-ized. You learned to extract what the teacher needed you to remember, not what the author wanted you to know, not the moral and philosophical lessons the books (and the events) were meant to teach.
If you want to be a better leader, you’re going to have to become a better reader.
How?
That’s what our Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge is for. Over five weeks, Ryan Holiday walks you through not only the system he’s used for writing his bestselling books, but also the reading practice he uses in his life every day—to help him become a better professional, a better parent, and a better person. You’ll learn how to find the books that are worth your time, how to work through ones above your level, how to keep what matters, and how to turn what you read into action. You’ll build the beginnings of a real library, a foundation for lifelong learning—and you’ll do it alongside a community of other readers.
1. S&P Stocks Trading Over 40x Forward P/E at Covid Lows-Chart Kid Matt
Chart Kid Matt
2. MSCI All World Index Getting Cheaper�Not Just S&P Forward P/E
The MSCI All Country World ex-US index trades at a 13.1x forward P/E, below the 19.8x for the US MSCI. Both those figures have declined sharply since January, as data from Yardeni Research shows.
Phil Rosen
3. AI Buildout is Accelerating�Construction Money Spent +57% Year Over Year
Wolf Street
4. Software SMH Having Run But�On 1-Year Basis Semiconductors Outperforming Software by 100%
YCharts
5. Consumer? WMT -3% and COST +6% Trailing S&P 2026
YCharts
6. LULU Hit $516 in 2023 About to Break $100 on Chart �..-81% from Highs
StockCharts
7. China Selling U.S. Paper for 15 Years
Barchart
8. Six Nuclear Bills Pass House without a Single No Vote
ZeroHedge
9. Australia Legislation to Ban Social Media Algos
1. S&P Total Return History Following Start of Military Conflict
@Charlie Bilello
2. History of S&P Returns After 10 Year Rises .75 Basis Points
Capital Group
3. Stocks and Bonds Correlation Hit 30-Year High in June
Barron’s
4. Huge Debasement Trade Inflows $4B
NDR
5. Russia Moves Gold to Hong Kong
6. 5 Year CDS—Banks Narrowing While Tech Widening
Topdown Charts Blog Credit Check — Tech vs Banks: a similar divergence is playing out in Tech vs Bank sector CDS. Credit investors are treating tech borrowers with greater scrutiny, while banks are seen as lower risk than usual. This tells us that there are no systemic issues right now (calm on banks), but again, there are pockets of concern. If tech borrowers did start to default you can bet that will ripple across markets.
7. Since the Fed Started Hiking, Multiple Expansion Has Nearly Vanished as a Source of PE Value-Torsten Slok
The Liquid Network said Sunday that purported white-hat hackers withdrew about 4,000 bitcoin, worth about $320 million, from the federation wallet that backs L-BTC.
Bridge nodes were disabled, and the sidechain was paused. Other issued assets, including USDT, DePix and RWAs, were unaffected, the official account said on X.
The Liquid Network is a federated sidechain of Bitcoin, founded by Adam Back’s Blockstream. The Liquid chain issues a variety of assets such as LBTC, which it backs with BTC on the Bitcoin main chain, held in a large multisig of 15 corporate and known members. 11 of the 15 members need to sign a valid multi-signature transaction to move coins from the treasury. Before the hack, the treasury held over 4200 BTC; after the hack, Blockstream’s proof of reserves page reports a little over 207 BTC left.
The hackers withdrew 4,019.4 BTC from the reserve address in a peg-out transaction using the SideSwap Peg-out Authorization Key. SideWap is a bridge exchange and a member of the Liquid Federation. While details on the mechanism of the hack are not confirmed yet, it appears an inflation bug on the LBTC side chain was exploited by the hackers to create over 4,000 LBTC that did not exist before, and cash them out for on-chain bitcoin from the federation. Because the transaction appeared as valid, given the consensus bug, the federation members’ HSM security servers signed the BTC withdrawal transaction, worth roughly 320 million at the time.
3. Short Interest at Record Levels—Not Behavior Near Tops in Market.
X – @KobeissiLetter
4. Top 10 Has Shown Low PEG Levels in Past….Why? Longer-Term Earnings Growth Estimates are at Highest Level Since 1995
P/E vs. PEG. “Despite the forward P/E, the PEG ratio in the top graph is cheap because the longer-term earnings growth estimate shown in the bottom graph is at its highest level since at least 1995.”
Daily Chartbook
5. Stocks vs. Inflation 50 Year Chart.
X – @PeterMallouk
6. Why Nvidia wants Hugging Face — and a bigger say in the future of AI-Business Insider
What does $12.9 billion buy Nvidia these days? A bigger say in what AI gets built and what it runs on.
Nvidia has acquired Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, giving the chip giant control of a platform that hosts open-source AI models. That lines up with Nvidia’s strategy, as it has been beating the drum about open-source AI models that anyone can use and build on.
Open models could stave off a future dominated by giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which create closed, proprietary models. If top AI labs dominate the models being used and build their own chips to run them — as OpenAI is doing with Jalapeño — they could eventually cut Nvidia out.
“Open source is an important counterweight to closed platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic,” said Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology. “The more AI development stays open and fragmented across many models and developers, the more opportunity Nvidia has to remain the underlying infrastructure provider.”
There’s a more immediate payoff, too: selling more chips. Developers using models from Hugging Face have to decide which hardware and software to run them on, and owning the hub could give Nvidia more sway over their choices.
Spice Capital founder Maya Bakhai, who invested in Hugging Face while working on venture investments at NBA star Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures, said embedding Nvidia more deeply into developers’ workflows could also give it greater visibility into emerging use cases such as robotics.
It joined a $235 million funding round in 2023, and it distributes its own family of open models, Nemotron, on Hugging Face. Last year, Nvidia proposed a $500 million investment in Hugging Face at a $7 billion valuation, which the startup rejected, the Financial Times reported.
Hugging Face said at the time it didn’t want a single investor wielding too much influence. That’s because one of its hallmarks is its openness, with models that run on competing chips and cloud companies, including AMD and Google.
That makes Nvidia’s acquisition a striking reversal, and it creates a tricky balance.
“The biggest risk is neutrality,” Gastwirth said. “Hugging Face has a lot of value because developers see it as an open platform. Nvidia would have to be careful not to undermine that.”
While Nvidia now has greater control over Hugging Face, it may have to use it sparingly to preserve the openness that makes the startup so valuable.
8. New House Prices Drop Below Existing Prices First Time Ever
X – @Barchart
9. Russia Helping Iran Develop Supersonic Missiles
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
10. Why Your Brain Needs Nature
Psychology Today The emerging science of how our surroundings shape attention, stress, and cognition. Michiko Kimura Bruno
KEY POINTS
Being in nature may benefit our physiology, including autonomic and stress responses.
Nature may support brain functions, including attention, mood, and cognition.
Nature’s “soft fascination” may give our constantly directed attention a chance to recover.
Environmental neuroscience studies how our surroundings influence the brain.
We have all experienced it: stress at work. You are staring at your computer, deadlines mounting, stuck on a project. Taking a walk seems like a waste of time, but you decide to go outside anyway. Maybe there is a small park near your office or home. You breathe in the air, look at the sky and clouds, and notice some greenery; trees, grass, perhaps a few flowers. You hear a bird in the distance and feel the wind against your face.
And suddenly, you feel lighter. Your mood lifts. A random idea connects. You remember a coworker from a previous project whom you can ask for help.
Or, even better, you go for a hike on the weekend. The crisp air, the smell of trees, the chirping of birds, the sound of a stream all feel refreshing. Your worries begin to recede.
And the restorative effect lasts even after you come home and turn the computer back on. Sure, your legs are sore and your muscles a little tired, but mentally, you feel refreshed, ready to face the task that seemed so daunting before.
The Emerging Field of Environmental Neuroscience
Marc G. Berman, author of Nature and the Mind, studied this exact effect of nature on our brain in a scientific fashion.
In a now-classic experiment, participants first completed a cognitive task called the backward digit span, which requires them to listen to a series of numbers and repeat them in reverse order. Then, they took a walk outside for about an hour. One group walked in the Arboretum, in a trail following a river through the evergreeens, and the other, in the busy part of the town, navigating intersections along the commercial storefronts. When they returned, they repeated the same test. The participants who walked in nature significantly improved their scores, but those who did the urban walk did not.
Later, the researchers switched the routes, so the same people served as their own controls and the result was the same: nature walk improved attention and memory, but urban walk did not. The walking was similar. The people were the same. What changed wasthe environment.
The researchers suggested that nature captures our attention gently, without demanding it. Urban environments, in contrast, are filled with stimulation that demands our attention, such as traffic, signs, people, and potential hazards. Nature, they suggested, gives our directed attention a chance to recover.
Berman is now considered to be one of the leaders of an emerging field, environmentalneuroscience, which studies how features of our environment influence the brain, including our attention, cognition, mood and stress. In retrospect, this seems obvious. Our brain is the interface between our inner world and the world outside us. Why wouldn’t the environment in which it operates matter?
Environmental Neuroscience Taps Traditions Like Shinrin-Yoku (Forest Medicine)
The idea that nature can help our health is not new. Research from another tradition suggests that nature’s effects may extend beyond cognition into the body itself.
In Japan, interest in the health effects of shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing,” has grown, alongside an emerging discipline known as “forest medicine.” Shinrin means “forest” in Japanese, and yoku means “bath.” It is specifically noted that Shinrin-yoku is not exercise, or hiking. Rather, it is the act of being in nature, bathing in the forest atmosphere and connecting with it through our multisensory system of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch.
Studies have associated forest exposure with lower cortisol levels, changes in autonomic measures, improvements in mood, and changes in measures of immune function.
One intriguing hypothesis involves phytoncides, volatile organic compounds released by trees. Laboratory and small human studies suggest that these compounds may contribute to some of the physiological effects associated with forest exposure, including changes in natural killer cell activity. But they are unlikely to explain the whole story.
Why Nature Helps our Brain
Recent studies using tools such as functional MRI and EEG are beginning to show that natural and urban environments engage the brain differently, including networks involved in attention, stress, emotion, and self-referential thought.
According to Attention restoration theory (ART), “attention” is a finite resource, that can be depleted by constant stimulation.
Modern life constantly demands directed attention: ignore the notification, answer the email, switch between windows, remember the deadline at work—while also scheduling the dentist appointment, arranging the car safety check, and figuring out the family vacation.
Our attention rarely gets to be off duty.Nature captures attention differently. A cloud moving, leaves rustling, water flowing, birds calling—these attract us without demanding that we concentrate on them.
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.
