TOPLEY’S TOP 10 June 10, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Mag 7 Underperforms 2026

Opening Bell Daily

2. QQQ Still Above 50day

StockCharts

3. Cybersecurity ETF Broke Out to New Highs Before Last Weeks Pullback

StockCharts

4. Ethereum Down -70% From Highs….Testing 2023 Support

StockCharts

5. CPI Numbers Today …..5 Year Break-Even Inflation Rate 2.5%

FRED

6. Truflation Inflation Rate Below 2%

Truflation

7. China Debt Problems + Demographics Problems

Michael A. Arouet

8. The Majority of Americans Pick “The Lesser of Two Evils” When They Vote

Reuters

9. Should I Gamble or Dollar Cost Average into S&P?  95% of Online Sports Bettors Lose

Perplexity

10. Stress and Recovery Habits Success.com

Stress and Recovery Habits (53-65)

Stress is not the enemy. Unrecovered stress is. These habits are about building a resilience system that lets you handle pressure without letting it accumulate into something that breaks you.

53. Spend at least 20 minutes in nature every week. Research published in a 2025 meta-analysis found that even brief nature exposure—sitting outdoors for 20 to 30 minutes—significantly reduces salivary cortisol. Your brain on nature is measurably different from your brain in an office. Neuroscience confirms that natural environments restore the directed attention your work depletes.

54. Meditate or practice mindfulness for five minutes daily. You don’t need a 45-minute session. Consistent short practice—five minutes of breathing attention—meaningfully reduces cortisol, improves emotional regulation and lowers baseline anxiety over weeks. Meditation’s impact on focus and output is well-documented.

55. Practice box breathing before high-stakes moments. Inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. This technique activates the parasympathetic nervous system in under two minutes. Use it before difficult conversations, presentations or any moment where you need to be fully present and regulated.

56. Build white space into your schedule every week. Unscheduled time is not wasted time. It’s where integration happens; where your brain processes, connects and generates insights that can’t emerge during back-to-back calls. Protect at least two to three hours of unstructured time per week.

57. Set hard stops on your workday and defend them. Without a defined end to the workday, work expands. A hard stop—6 p.m., 7 p.m., whatever is realistic for your life—creates a container that forces prioritization and protects your recovery window.

58. Take all your vacation time. This sounds obvious. Almost no one does it. Burnout recovery research is consistent: Time fully away from work is not just a reward. It’s a biological necessity for sustained performance.

59. Name your stressors—don’t just feel them. Keep a brief stress log. Write down what’s generating anxiety each morning in two sentences. The act of naming reduces the amygdala response to stressors and prevents undifferentiated anxiety from building.

60. Have a transition ritual between work and personal time. A 10-minute walk, a specific playlist, a changed outfit—any consistent cue that signals the shift between roles helps your nervous system disengage from professional mode and engage with personal life.

61. Practice strategic incompetence once a week. Let one noncritical thing be imperfect. Send the good-enough email. Submit the 90% report. Perfectionism has a carrying cost, and practicing release in low-stakes situations builds the flexibility to tolerate imperfection in high ones.

62. Say no more often than feels comfortable. Every yes is a no to something else. High-performers who protect their capacity by declining low-leverage commitments aren’t being difficult. They’re being strategic. Practice declining with warmth and brevity.

63. Audit your digital consumption quarterly. Pull your screen time data. Review which apps you’re using and whether they’re producing or consuming energy. Most people are surprised and then change something.

64. Limit news consumption to one defined window per day. Staying informed is legitimate. Passive, constant exposure to often distressing news is physiologically stressful in ways that compound. Set a time—15 to 20 minutes in the morning or evening—and close the tab when it’s done.

65. Monitor your heart rate variability (HRV) over time. HRV—the variation in time between heartbeats—is one of the best physiological markers of stress load and recovery. Modern wearables track it automatically. Watching your HRV trend down over several days before a burnout event is the kind of early signal that gives you a window to act.

https://www.success.com

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 June 09, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Biggest Short-Term Large Cap Tech Rally Ever

Tech vs. SPX. “US large cap Tech recently outperformed the S&P 500 by +6 standard deviations over the prior 50 days. No other rally since 2015 comes anywhere close. Prior periods of lesser but still statistically significant outperformance suggest further gains, even with Friday’s selloff…”

@datatrekmb

2. Space Related Stocks Run Up to Space X IPO……UFO Space ETF -20% Correction Back to 50 Day

StockCharts

3. Space Frenzy Hitting China

Dave Lutz Jones Trading SpaceX’s $75 billion initial public offering (IPO) is fuelling a frenzy among investors in Asia for exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and supply chain partners linked to Elon Musk’s rocket company that are likely to benefit from the blockbuster deal.  Shares of several European companies, including French satellite operator Eutelsat, German satellite maker OHB and Luxembourg-based SES, have posted double-digit gains in 2026.

4. Margin Debt in China Skyrocketing

The Kobeissi Letter

5. IPO Proceeds of Big 3

Prof G Media

6. The Stock Market Constantly Renewing Itself

Meb Faber

7. Employees Taking Home Lowest % of Corporate GDP Since 1948

Zack Goldberg Jefferies–Schwab shows employee compensation as a % of corporate GDP has fallen to ~54%, the lowest since records began in 1948. Since 2001, employee compensation as a % of corporate GDP has declined -10 points. Over the same period, the corporate profits proportion of GDP has doubled. Workers are keeping less of what they produce than at any point in history.

8. 1200 School Districts Lawsuits Against Big Tech

Google

9. Home Markets Where Sellers Outnumber Buyers

Miami, Florida is the strongest buyer’s market in America with home sellers outnumbering homebuyers by 148%.

REDFIN Blog

10. Movement Habits Success.com

Movement Habits (14-26)

You don’t need a marathon training program. You need consistent, varied movement woven into your week. A comprehensive umbrella review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2025 confirmed that regular exercise improves general cognition, memory and executive function in both healthy individuals and those with clinical conditions. The dose threshold is lower than most people think.

14. Move before 10 a.m. when you can. Timing matters. Morning exercise optimizes circadian rhythms, stabilizes cortisol and primes your brain for focused work later. Research has found that people who exercised more than usual on a given day performed better on memory tests the following day.

15. Take a daily walk—even if it’s just 15 minutes. Walking is underrated as a performance input. It increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for decision-making and focus. Bonus: Do it outside, and you stack two habits at once.

16. Aim for 150 minutes of moderate activity per week. This is the WHO’s threshold for meaningful health benefits. Broken into five 30-minute sessions, it’s less daunting than it sounds.

17. Add resistance training at least twice per week. Muscle mass is a metabolic reserve. Strength training also improves mood, sleep quality and insulin sensitivity, all of which feed back into cognitive performance.

18. Take a movement break every 90 minutes. Extended sitting degrades circulation, focus and metabolic function. Set a timer. Stand, stretch or walk to the kitchen. Two minutes is enough to reset.

19. Make one weekly workout social. Accountability dramatically improves exercise adherence. A training partner, fitness class or group run removes the daily opt-in decision and adds relational energy on top of physical.

20. Exercise outside at least once a week. The combination of movement and natural environments produces stress reduction effects greater than either alone (see the nature exposure habits below for the research on why this works).

21. Stop counting exercise as a reward for productivity. The most common mistake high-performers make with fitness is treating it as a bonus, something they do if the day goes well. Protect it like a meeting. It is not an optional recovery. It is the input that makes output possible.

22. Track your steps as a floor, not a goal. Fewer than 4,000 steps per day is associated with meaningfully worse health outcomes; 7,000 to 8,000 is a more realistic and effective target for most non-athletes. You likely don’t need 10,000.

23. Don’t use travel as an excuse to stop. Build a minimal-equipment workout routine you can do anywhere: bodyweight circuits, hotel gym standards or walking routes in unfamiliar cities. Consistency across contexts is what separates habits from hobbies.

24. Stretch for five minutes when you wake up. Not for flexibility. For activation. Light movement in the morning increases circulation, reduces cortisol and signals the body to shift from rest to alert mode.

25. Pick at least one physical activity you genuinely enjoy. Discipline is not unlimited. The habits that last are the ones that have some intrinsic pull. If you hate running, stop insisting running is your habit. Find what you’ll actually do.

26. Do something physically challenging at least once a month. A hike, a race, a new class, a sport. Novel physical challenges train the brain’s adaptive capacity and break you out of habituation—the point where comfort becomes stagnation.

https://www.success.com/healthy-habits-high-performers

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 June 08, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Rare Occurrence-Chart Kid Matt

But today there’s one stat that I feel is worth sharing with you all.

And here it is:

As of 2:45 PM EST, the S&P 500 is down 2.1% but 51% of stocks are ADVANCING on the day.

Here’s the scatter. Feast your eyes.

This is extremely rare and it’s only happened two other times: 4/19/1999 and 4/12/2000.

Am I saying this time is like that time?

No. This is data, I’m just the messenger.

But wow, things are feeling wild out there.

There’s so much data worth painting and I’m over the moon.

To another week with data worth painting, I hope you all have an amazing weekend. I will talk to you soon.

https://chartkidmatt.com

2. Mondays After Big Friday Selloffs in Nasdaq

OddStats

3. Operating Margins and Profit Margins S&P

Chartr Much of it comes down to the index’s new center of gravity: a handful of unusually profitable tech giants. The Magnificent 7 alone account for more than a third of the S&P 500’s total market value, and they’re punching far above their weight, posting 63.2% earnings growth in Q1, which is nearly 4x the rate of the other 493 companies. 

Chartr

Bloomberg data through Thursday shows the trend still holding, with both operating and net profit margins at their highest in at least two decades. This means that companies are making more from their core businesses, as well as keeping more for shareholders after costs, interest, and taxes are paid.

4. But….Revenue Per Employee Falling for Small Cap Companies….Margins Flat for S&P 493

Apollo

5. Goldman Sachs Non-Profit Tech Index Down Double S&P Friday

6. AI Demand ..What Inning?

AI demand. “AI demand indicators remain bullish across the board. Overall, token expenditure looks robust, while the memory chip shortage continues to boost memory chip prices. Meanwhile, Nvidia data centre revenue shows no sign of slowing down, while overall AI adoption remains low”. 

DAILY CHARTBOOK

7. Tesla Retail Investors 42% of Float…Space X Wants Same Model

Financial Times

8. When speculative small stocks win big, often it’s because investors aren’t thinking straight…Penny Stocks Outperforming

WSJ James Mackintosh Speculation is most obvious in the tiniest companies. Penny stocks, usually defined as those that trade for less than $5 a share, are often opaque and get zero attention from Wall Street analysts. When they go up this quickly, it’s often more about a frenzy among investors than underlying economic fundamentals. 

Since March 30, penny stocks have risen 28% on average, well above the 22% of non-penny stocks in the Microcap index—and beat the Mag 7 of Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Unlike the Mag 7, the tiniest companies were slightly up in the first quarter, too.

Gambling in penny shares adds to a sense of wild speculation more widely in stocks. Just look at the demand for AI-linked stocks: Three loss-making IPOs are about to be among the most-valuable listed companies. Investors are cheering on capital spending so big that it moves the economy without knowing quite how it will make money. And companies have quintupled or more their value simply by announcing they are pivoting their business.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/small-stocks-are-trouncing-market-giantsand-thats-not-a-good-sign-ea06ebc1?mod=hp_lead_pos6

9. AI Driven Electricity Price Growth

10. Talent is Earned in “Dark Hours”

through the dark hours.

I call them “dark hours” because no one sees them. You don’t have a boss, you don’t have a clock, other people are off doing their thing, and it’s just you and the work. You play, experiment, and learn one dark hour at a time.

What looks like skill is mostly just a lot of work in the dark. 

https://fs.blog/about/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 June 05, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Emerging Markets Now Tech Stock ETF—44% Weighting

Google

2. Korean and Taiwanese AI Export Boom

3. Chinese Investors Dumping Hong Kong Stocks—Buying Chinese AI and Chips

4. Bitcoin ETFS Longest Streak in a Row of Net Outflows

On Tuesday, bitcoin ETFs registered their 12th day in a row — and longest streak ever — of net outflows, according to SoSoValue. Net assets across bitcoin ETFs fell to $85 billion from $107.8 billion on May 14.

Bitcoin is down 12% week-to-date after some fear-based unloading on Monday — following Strategy’s minor sale of 32 coins — triggered a cascade of long liquidations that accelerated the downward pressure.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/03/bitcoins-high-conviction-holders-are-selling-as-price-hits-new-lows.html

IBIT ETF New YTD Low.

StockCharts

5. COIN Coinbase Stock at Support Going Back to 2024

StockCharts

6. LLY Breaks Out to New Highs

StockCharts

7. Data Center Build Out 70% Of Americans Oppose

Semafor

8. The World Will Need 3x the Amount of Magnets in 10 Years….China 80% of Production

IDTechEx

9. Mega-IPOs Will Be Small Weight in Indexes

How Will Mega-IPOs Change the Face of the US Stock Market?

The effects of SpaceX and other big private companies going public won’t be sweeping or come all at once. Dan LefkovitzThe Alexes estimate initial weights for the mega-IPOs in CRSP market indexes based on their float-adjusted market capitalization. The impact is smallest in the total market index but greater for both the CRSP US Large Cap Index and the CRSP US Mega Cap Index. At a $75 billion float-adjusted market capitalization, SpaceX would receive a 12-basis-point (0.12%) weight in the total market index, falling well outside the top 100 constituents. (As weights adjust and constituents are reshuffled, indexes will experience some turnover, which is quantified in the paper.)

Estimated Impact of Including Mega-IPOs in CRSP US Market Indexes

Source: Alex Poukchanski and Alex Bryan’s analysis based on data from PitchBook, CRSP US Market Indexes, and FinancialPress. Data as of March 31, 2026. Except for SpaceX, valuations are based on PitchBook valuation estimates. Except for SpaceX, offering sizes computed under the assumption of 5% float; SpaceX valuation and offering size based on media reports; estimates of weight and change in top 5 constituents of CRSP US Market Indexes based on March 2026 data.

Morningstar

10. Habits of High Performers

Cognitive Performance Habits (40-52) success.com

Your brain is not built for constant output. It operates in cycles. These habits are about working with your neurology rather than against it.

40. Time-block your deep work in two-hour windows. Research on ultradian rhythms—the brain’s natural 90- to 120-minute focus cycles—suggests that peak cognitive performance happens in distinct windows, followed by dips. Two-hour blocks align with this cycle. Schedule your hardest work in your biological peak hours.

41. Do your most important task before noon. For most people (non-night-owls), prefrontal cortex activity is highest in the first half of the day. Use it on creative, strategic or complex work. Use the afternoon for communication, admin and meetings.

42. Shut off notifications during focus time—completely. Not silenced. Off. A notification doesn’t need to be read to break focus; the awareness that one arrived is enough to fragment attention. Studies consistently support the foundational finding that it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to deep focus after an interruption.

43. Write down your top three priorities before you start each day. Not a full to-do list. Three things. This practice forces prioritization under constraint and sets an intention that survives the reactive pull of the morning.

44. Do a weekly review every Friday afternoon. Block 30 minutes. Review what you completed, what didn’t get done and why, and what your top priorities are for next week. This practice prevents the feeling of being perpetually behind and connects daily work to longer-term goals.

45. Read intentionally for 20 minutes a day. Not scrolling. Not trade newsletters. Books. Long-form reading builds sustained attention, strengthens vocabulary and exposes you to ideas at a depth that short-form content cannot replicate.

46. Avoid multitasking during deep work—completely. Your brain does not actually multitask. It switches between tasks rapidly, and each switch carries a cognitive cost. What feels like efficiency is usually just faster degradation of output quality.

47. Create a “shutdown ritual” to end your workday. Close your tabs, write tomorrow’s top three goals and say a specific phrase that signals the day is done. This ritual—as small as it is—trains your brain to disengage from work mode and makes the transition to personal time more successful.

48. Keep a decision journal. Log important decisions with your reasoning at the time. Review it quarterly. High-performers who track decisions improve their judgment not because they think harder in the moment but because they learn from patterns they would otherwise forget.

49. Batch your email and Slack into two or three windows per day. Constant inbox monitoring is the cognitive equivalent of allowing interruptions every 10 minutes. Set windows—morning, midday, late afternoon—and let the rest wait.

50. Learn something new outside your domain once a week. Cross-domain learning is consistently linked to creative thinking—research shows that knowledge breadth, especially in mid-career, is one of the strongest predictors of creative output. Read something in a field adjacent to yours. Take a course. Attend a talk.

51. Reduce daily decision volume wherever possible. Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck was famously a decision-reduction strategy. You don’t need to go that far. But standardizing low-stakes decisions—meals, clothes, default responses—preserves cognitive resources for decisions that actually matter.

52. Protect your thinking time like it’s revenue-generating. Because it is. Block 30 to 60 minutes of unstructured thinking time on your calendar at least twice a week. No deliverables. No agenda. Just space to process, connect and generate. Most high-performers consider this their most productive time once they build the habit.

https://www.success.com/healthy-habits-high-performers

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 June 03, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. 17.3% Gain in 8 Weeks 99th Percentile Move

Nasdaq Dorsey Wright

2. Annual IPOS 25 Years ….2021 SPAC Frenzy….2026 Running at Average Pace but Big 3 are Difference

Dorsey Wright There have been 152 IPOs already this year, looking at data through the end of May. IPOs are rarely consistent month-to-month, but if we did continue at that pace in the second half of the year, we’d be close to the pace of the 347 IPOs seen in 2025. This puts us in the average to above-average range for historical IPO counts going back through 2000.

Nasdaq Dorsey Wright

3. IPO ETF Breaks to New Highs…50day thru 200Day to Upside

StockCharts

4. 30 Major IPOS-One Year Drawdown

Josh Schafer

5. Tokenization of Stocks Expanding

The Kobeissi Letter

6. Joe Weisenthal List of Reasons for Crypto Winter

Joe Weisenthal

7. IBM Beating XLK Tech ETF

Abnormal Returns

8. Gold Overtakes US Government Bonds as the World’s Top Reserve Asset-FT …Single Biggest Buyer of Gold 2025 Tether

Financial Times

9. Biggest Central Bank Buyers 2025

Perplexity

10. 2 Frustrating Habits of the Most Intelligent People

Why intelligent minds often face misunderstandings from others.-Psychology Today —Mark Travers Ph.D.

Key points

  • Intelligent people often update beliefs mid-conversation, reflecting cognitive agility.
  • Higher intelligence tolerates ambiguity and thrives on revising ideas.
  • Belief updating showcases intelligence, while fence-sitting signals cognitive weakness.

We tend to picture intelligence as exemplary mental organization: crisp opinions, sharp delivery, and confident stances held firmly. The “smart person” in the room isn’t the one who hedges or backtracks. It’s the one who walks in already knowing the answer, delivers it cleanly, and moves on. But that picture, research increasingly suggests, has it backwards.

Highly intelligent people are not always faster, calmer, or more decisive. Sometimes, their minds are busier, slower, and more conflicted. In my work as a psychological researcher, I’ve noticed that people with higher cognitive ability are often misunderstood simply because their mental habits don’t always look the way we expect intelligence to look. Two habits in particular tend to get them misread, and both are far more cognitively sophisticated than they appear.

1. Changing Their Mind Mid-Argument

Few things irritate people more in conversation than someone who contradicts themselves. Someone who states a position with apparent confidence, then stops mid-thought and says, “Actually, I think I was wrong about that.” It reads as wishy-washy, underprepared, or lacking conviction. In a meeting, it can cost someone credibility. In an argument, it looks like surrender.

What it actually reflects, however, is one of the clearest behavioral markers of higher intelligence: belief updating, or the willingness to revise a held position when confronted with new evidence, even when that confrontation happens in real time, in public, at social cost.

A 2024 study published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications found consistent evidence that individuals with higher fluid intelligence changed their attitudes more readily in response to correction, while those with lower reasoning ability showed a stronger tendency to persist with misinformation even after receiving a correction message. In other words, the person in the room most willing to say “I was wrong” is often, cognitively speaking, the most capable one there.

This connects to a broader pattern researchers have identified in how intelligent people relate to uncertainty. Research shows that individuals with a lower need for cognitive closure tend to tolerate ambiguity more easily, and separate lines of work suggest that higher cognitive ability is associated with greater openness and cognitive flexibility. Where most people feel pressure to land on a position and hold it, highly intelligent individuals are more comfortable sitting in the revision process, even when that process is visible to others.

The frustrating part for observers is precisely this: the intelligent person doesn’t feel the urgency to perform with certainty before they’re ready. And if the thinking is still happening, they’ll do it out loud.

Consider the colleague who, midway through a strategy meeting, says, “I want to walk back what I said ten minutes ago,” and the room visibly deflates. To everyone else, it signals confusion. To that person’s brain, it signals that something more accurate just became available, and loyalty to the original position would mean ignoring it.

The distinction worth drawing is between belief updating and chronic fence-sitting. Updating is responsive, that is, it moves in reaction to new evidence. Fence-sitting is avoidant, as it moves in reaction to social pressure. One reflects cognitive strength. The other can signal the opposite. But in everyday settings, the two tend to get collapsed into the same frustrated label: unreliable.

2. Giving Too Much Unnecessary Context

Imagine you ask a simple question to someone and receive a five-minute answer that starts three steps before the point. There are caveats, qualifications, historical background, and exceptions to exceptions. The person doesn’t seem to register that you needed a sentence, not a seminar. It can feel patronizing, exhausting, or simply socially tone-deaf.

What you are almost certainly witnessing, however, is a well-documented cognitive phenomenon called the Curse of Knowledge—and it correlates directly with genuine expertise and deeper cognitive ability.

The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that causes the brain to overestimate how much other people understand. When we master an idea, we lose access to the memory of how it felt not to understand it. This creates a blind spot that makes it difficult to empathize with people who don’t share our background. The deeper the knowledge, the harder it is to locate the entry point for someone who doesn’t share it.

Highly intelligent people have often, entirely unconsciously, built elaborate mental scaffolding around a topic over years of thinking about it. When they try to explain it, they dismantle that scaffolding from the top down, which means they start with all the architecture you don’t yet have, rather than with the ground-floor answer you actually asked for.

When experts develop complex mental models for organizing information, the problem in communication arises because those models aren’t shared—the explanation becomes accurate, thorough and, for the listener, completely impenetrable.

To the person on the receiving end, this registers as a failure of social awareness. But it’s a side effect of too much knowledge, not too little. The highly intelligent person isn’t unable to read the room; they genuinely can’t locate where the room is relative to where their own thinking begins.

Think of the researcher who responds to “what do you work on?” with a ten-minute tour of their entire field. Or the engineer who answers “how does this feature work?” by explaining the underlying architecture from first principles. The intention is almost always generosity: a desire to give you the real answer, the full picture, the thing that actually makes sense of it. The social effect, unfortunately, is often the opposite.

It’s worth noting that the Curse of Knowledge doesn’t excuse poor communication—over time, it’s a skill gap worth closing. But understanding its origin matters. The next time someone overexplains to the point of frustration, the more useful question isn’t “why can’t they read the room?” It’s “how much do they actually know about this?” The answer, often, is more than they can easily compress.

A version of this post also appears on Forbes.com. 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202606/2-frustrating-habits-of-the-most-intelligent-people