2. But Gold Still Very Small Share of ETF Holdings
Topdown Charts
3. 20% Pullbacks With and Without Recession
Charlie Bilello
4. Tesla 50-Day thru 200-Day to Downside…I am not sure of Bearish Crosses in TSLA
StockCharts
5. Tesla Bounced at Summer of 2024 Levels. That Level Goes Back to Mid-2023
StockCharts
6. Foreign Currencies vs. US Dollar Month to Date
Bloomberg
7. Foreign Tourism to US Falling Fast
Spencer Hakimian
8. APPS-Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger—98% of META Business
Sherwood News
9. Betting Line Recession 52%
The Irrelevant Investor
10. Seth Godin on How to Win an Argument with a Toddler
You can’t.
That’s because toddlers don’t understand what an argument is and aren’t interesting in having one.
Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat earthers, folks committed to a specific agenda and radio talk show hosts) may indicate that they’d like to have an argument, but they’re actually engaging in connection, noise, play acting or a chance to earn status. It can be fun to be in opposition, to harangue or even to use power to change someone’s position.
An argument, though, is an exchange of ideas that ought to surface insight and lead to a conclusion.
If you’re regularly having arguments with well-informed people of goodwill, you will probably ‘lose’ half of them–changing your mind based on what you’ve learned. If you’re not changing your mind, it’s likely you’re not actually having an argument (or you’re hanging out with the wrong people.) While it can be fun to change someone else’s position, it’s also a gift to learn enough to change ours.
The toddler puts on a show of having an argument, but they are holding a tantrum in reserve. If they ‘win’ the argument, no tantrum is needed. If they lose, they can tell themselves that they tried but the other person deserved the tantrum because they didn’t listen.
“Tell me about other strongly-held positions you’ve changed as the result of a discussion like this one…” is a direct way to start a conversation about the argument you’re proposing to have. “What sort of information would make it likely you could see this in a different way?”
It probably doesn’t pay to argue over things we have chosen to believe as part of our identity.
1. Asset Class Returns Rising vs. Falling US Dollar
Nasdaq Dorsey Wright
2. Global Investors Moving Away from Overweight US
BofA Blog
3. Palantir $120 to $60�Back to $98
StockCharts
4. Rare Earth Imports from China
StockCharts
5. LVMH Luxury Goods Leader -32% from Highs
StockCharts
6. Zero-day Options are Fueling the Unprecedented Volatility on Wall Street amid Tariff Chaos
Key Points:
The trading volume of 0DTE options tied to the S&P 500 surged to 8.5 million in April, a 23% jump since the beginning of the year and accounting for roughly 7% of the total volume in U.S. option markets, according to data from JPMorgan.
These securities have become a popular tool for investors, big and small, to make a quick buck or hedge against sudden event-driven moves in the broader market.
Via CNBC: Wild intraday gyrations in stocks since liberation day have put investors more on edge than ever, and the popularity of zero-day-to-expiration options is partly to blame.
Zero-day-to-expiration options are cracts that expire the same day that they’re traded. The trading volume of 0DTE options tied to the S&P 500 surged to 8.5 million in April, a 23% jump since the beginning of the year and accounting for roughly 7% of the total volume in U.S. option markets, according to data from JPMorgan.
These securities have become a popular tool for investors, big and small, to make a quick buck or hedge against sudden event-driven moves in the broader market. Many cend that large volumes of these short-lived vehicles can exacerbate price swings in the market as dealers and market makers buy and sell underlying assets to balance their positions.
You’re seeing the zero data options market amplify and exaggerate almost up or down. If you go back 10, 20 years, you didn’t have these catalysts, said Jeff Kilburg, CEO and CIO of KKM Financial. It’s almost like gasoline on a fire when you see a move being exaggerated by the underlying options move.
7. Tariff vs. Semiconductors
Semafor
8. New Vehicle Sales Jumped 13% in March
Wolf Street
9. Apple Has Over 100 Suppliers in China
China Global South Project
10. The Power of Single-Tasking
Multi-tasking is ineffective. For productive work, time-boxing is better.
Key points:
Multi-taskers are less productive, because our brains have a cognitive bottleneck.
Time-boxing, time-blocking, and deep work productivity techniques are based on single-tasking.
Simple changes to your daily routine can help you make better use of your time by single-tasking.
Via Psychology Today: Distractions are everywhere. Emails pop up while you try to finish a task. You remember that your taxes are due soon, but you are busy trying to meet a deadline. It often feels like we should be doing a dozen things at the same time. The temptation is to multi-task answering your email while monitoring social media and listening to a presentation.
Our brains do not work that way. For example, a number of studies have looked at the cognitive performance of heavy (media) multi-taskers (Ophir, Nass, and Wagner 2009, Uncapher and Wagner 2018). Those are people used to working with lots of distractions, permanently on their smartphones while reading on the computer and listening to music. Heavy multi-taskers thought that they were more productive than light multi-taskers, but they were wrong. Multi-taskers are less productive.
The Myth of Multi-Tasking
The problem is that our brains cannot engage in two cognitive tasks at once (anything involving thinking). Research has shown that our minds have a cognitive bottleneck, first described by Pashler (1992). You essentially work by iterating a see-think-move loop. First, you see stuff (perception phase). Then, you process it, think about it, and decide what to do (cognition or central processing phase). Finally, you do something about what you have decided, maybe by typing a sentence or grabbing an object (motor phase). Alas, your brain can only engage in one cognition phase at once. You can monitor a waiting room while working on a report, and you can walk while thinking about a problem, but you cannot answer an email while you follow and actually understand a presentation.
When you try to multitask, your brain just queues the cognitive phases of the different tasks, never managing to engage in more than one at a time (for example, see Lee and Chabris, 2013). If you try to work on two cognitive tasks at the same time, your brain just switches back and forth between them, never really concentrating on either one and making mistakes. The meeting ends, you have missed half of what the speaker said, and there are mistakes in every email you sent.
Multi-tasking taxes your (working) memory, which is limited. A study by Colom et al (2010) found that people with larger working memory capacity are better at multitasking. But even those people would probably have been more productive by giving their undivided attention to each task, one after the other. One fMRI study worryingly suggested that multi-tasking for long periods of time might even result in permanent brain alterations, including lowered gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain associated with cognitive crol (Loh and Kanai, 2014).
Time-Boxing, Task-Batching, and Time-Blocking
If multi-tasking does not work, how can we be more effective? Productivity experts like Cal Newport speak about deep work and distraction-free environments. But you don’t need to completely reorganize your life to reap the benefits of that. You simply need to realize that single-tasking is often more effective.
Many modern time-management techniques are all about concentrating on a single task at a time. For example, time-boxing means setting a block (or box ) of time where you will work only on one specific task, making sure that you stop when the time is up. For instance, you schedule answering emails from 9 to 9:30 and from 16:00 to 16:30, but you stop (and close the email program) once the alarm clock sounds. Or you clean and organize your desk every Thursday from 16:30 to 17:00. Or you work on that report you need to write from 10:00 to 12:00, with every program in your computer shut down except for the word processor and whatever you actually need for the report.
If time-boxing seems too rigid for you, try task-batching. Instead of scheduling individual tasks, think about the different kinds of work and chores you do, and set longer time blocks for each kind of work. This will look very different depending on the kind of work you do. For instance, a writer might do research in the mornings and distraction-free writing in the afternoons. If you work on a schedule (9 to 5 or similar), talk to your supervisor about lumping together all the tasks that you can do alone and keeping all your meetings within two fixed days of the week.
Time-blocking is taking time-boxing to the extreme, and filling your entire (work) schedule with boxes for specific tasks so that you always know what you are supposed to do. This might sound daunting, but it can work if you approach it as a preliminary schedule and keep tweaking and adjusting it (maybe with a 15-minute review at the end of each day) until it clicks into place. For instance, if your 30-minute email slots keep spilling over, make them 45-minute slots.
Do Not Take It Too Far
Some advocates of time-blocking will tell you to time-block your entire life, including leisure and family time. That might not be a good idea for everybody. Research has shown that, if you schedule leisure activities the same way you schedule work, you will enjoy them less (Malkoc and Tonietto, 2019). If you treat having coffee with a friend the same way you treat a dentist’s appointment, you will end up seeing pleasurable activities as chores.
So where is the sweet spot? Start small. Look at those tasks that really get in the way, like answering emails or putting files away, and schedule them into time boxes. Move them around and adjust how long they are until you are comfortable with them, but remember that, when the boxes end, you stop. Then, look at specific tasks you have to complete, like writing a report or cleaning a room at home. Schedule time boxes for those, and keep experimenting. If you end up planning your entire work day (including domestic chores) and you are comfortable with that, go ahead. If you end up with only half of your week time-boxed, that is also OK. In any case, resist the temptation to go beyond your work and chores time. You are supposed to enjoy your free time, not turn it into work!
2. Updated: Foreigners Own 33% of U.S. Treasury Market
BofA Blog
3. International Stocks Outperforming for 2025 but Down in April EFA Developed Markets -5% April
StockCharts
StockCharts
4. Casino Stocks -50% High To Low
StockCharts
StockCharts
5. Volatility of Largest Company in World, AAPL
Talk about a roller coaster. After peaking just after Christmas, shares of AAPL lost more than a third of their value in less than four mhs and have since recovered more than 23% when you consider this morning’s gains. Volatility of this magnitude is notable when it occurs in just about any stock, but this is the largest company in the world we’re talking about. Are we really to believe that the company’s value has fluctuated by this magnitude in such a short period?
Bespoke Premium
With today’s 5% rally in the pre-market, AAPL is on track for its second straight daily gain of over 4%. Since the iPod was launched in 2001, the only other time the stock had a higher number of consecutive 4%+ daily moves was in October 2008 when there were three in a row. The current streak of back-to-back gains, if it holds, would be the first such streak since coming out of the Financial Crisis, but before that, they were common as the market cap was much lower.
Bespoke Premium
6. Due to Companies Like AAPL The U.S. has a Trade Surplus with China in Services
Liz Ann Sonders
7. 30-Year Mortgage Rate Flirting with 7% Again
Mortgage News Daily
8. Crypto Platform Kraken Rolls Out Stock Trading
Kraken unveils phased rollout for US stocks and ETF trading, shares plans for UK and European expansion.
Quick Take
Kraken now supports equities trading on its digital asset exchange, powered by a brokerage deal with Alpaca.
The firm teased the move in March after disclosing plans to acquire CFTC-regulated NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion.
Via The Block: San Francisco-based crypto exchange Kraken has added U.S. equities trading to its mobile and web platforms in a step forward for its offerings. The move will allow U.S. customers to manage crypto, stocks and Wall Street funds from a single account, similar to brokerages like Robinhood.
This expansion, executed in collaboration with licensed broker-dealer Alpaca, enables customers to trade over 11,000 U.S.-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds commission-free. More than half of the new offerings will include fractional investment, meaning buyers can purchase less than one whole share.
The program will initially be exclusive to select U.S. states with plans to expand nationwide as part of a phased rollout, according to an announcement on Monday. Additionally, Kraken has eyes on markets in the UK, Europe and Australia.
9. 600M Chinese Live on $140 a Mh
10. Countries with the Most High-Net Worth Individuals
1. XLK Tech ETF Holding 200-Week Moving Average on Long-Term Chart
StockCharts
2. Semiconductor ETF SMH-Same Story
StockCharts
3. $2 Trillion in Prime Brokerage Borrowing
Apollo
4. ROBO-Everyone Talking Robots…ETF New Lows
StockCharts
5. Same with Lithium ETF
StockCharts
6. Small Cap Discount Now in 4th Percentile
VettaFi
7. RIP to the IPO comeback…It Will Be 4 Years in a Row with Lower Number of IPOs
Via Business Insider: A few months ago, after years of abysmal performance, it looked like IPOs were finally set for a comeback. ServiceTitan, a software platform for general contractors, saw its stock soar by 35% after its debut in December. A bunch of hot companies were lined up to go public: the buy-now, pay-later lender Klarna, the ticket reseller StubHub, and the AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave. Silicon Valley, it seemed, was about to return to the good old days, when snazzy new startups could expect a huge payoff on Wall Street. “All signs were pointing to 2025 as the year when we would finally get some IPOs,” says Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital.
But now, the long-anticipated boom in IPOs has suddenly gone bust. CoreWeave’s public offering in March was the biggest tech IPO since 2021, but it was forced to price itself well below the expected range. And on Friday, StubHub and Klarna both delayed their planned IPOs, as Donald Trump’s tariffs sparked a huge slide in the stock market. IPO analysts at Renaissance now estimate that there could be as few as 150 deals this year, which would make 2025 the fourth straight down year for IPOs.
“This is going to shut down the IPO market,” Kennedy says. “The question is, for how long?”
StockCharts
8. Housing in South Update
New single-family houses for sale in the South, where Florida is by far the largest housing market, have ballooned past the Housing-Bust high since mid-2024 to a range between 290,000 to 304,000 houses for sale, with 296,000 new houses for sale in February, up by 72% from February 2019, according to Census Bureau data, which doesn’t provide state-level data, only regional data.
Those new houses are adding large amounts of additional supply to the surging inventories of existing homes. Homebuilders are the pros in this business, they know how to move the inventory: price cuts, building at lower price points, large-scale mortgage-rate buydowns, and incentives. And homeowners wishing to sell have to compete with this supply of new houses and increasingly aggressive builders.
Buyers are still on strike: In the South, pending sales of existing homes rose month-to-month in February, seasonally adjusted, but were down by 3.4% from the collapsed levels February last year, and booked the worst February in the data from the National Association of Realtors. Compared to 2019, pending sales plunged by 29%.
Concepts First: Learning the fundamental principles instead of just the immediate behaviors is the difference between being a cook and being a chef.
It Needs To Be Difficult: If you’re doing it right, you don’t feel like an expert; you feel like a person who has been mildly electrocuted by their own ambition. It’ll make you wonder if ignorance really is bliss. But an arduous process is what creates mastery.
Don’t Cram: Distributed practice is the sensible Volvo of studying techniques. You’re supposed to take things step-by-step, day after day, until the knowledge seeps into your brain and settles down like a retired couple moving to Florida. Your brain hates the quickie approach and prefers to be seduced gradually, like a Jane Austen character.
Feedback: It’s not “feedback”; it’s a forensic investigation into your incompetence. Find a mentor.
Retention: The “decay curve” is like a ski slope, except there’s no lodge at the bottom — just a pit of “Whoops, I forgot how to speak Spanish.” Overlearning is repetitive, it’s boring, it’s the linguistic equivalent of hitting your head against a wall until the wall starts to feel bad for you. But that’s how you make stuff stick. Wax on, wax off, Daniel-sa
3. 2008 GFC & 2020 Covid Only Periods with Similar Intra-Day Volatility
In yesterday’s session, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) traded in an incredible intraday range of 10.8%. Even crazier is that on Tuesday, the intraday range was 7.3% while Monday’s range was 8.6%! Since SPY was launched in 1993, the last three days represent just the sixth time that the ETF has had an intraday range of more than 5% for three or more days. The only periods with as many or more consecutive intraday ranges of at least 5% were in the fourth quarter of 2008 (four separate occurrences) and March 2020. These levels of sustained volatility are truly historic.
Bespoke
4. Every Pundit on Planet Arguing Whether Tariffs are Inflationary or Deflationary (demand destruction); CPI Today
CNBC
5. The Rent Lag in CPI Number
Charlie Bilello
6. 300m Chinese Moved to Middle Class Selling to U.S.
Semafor
7. Solar is Adding More Generation than Any Energy Sources
Sherwood News
8. TAN Solar ETF Straight Down…All-Time High $104 2021…$28 Last
StockCharts
9. American Poll on Illegal Immigrants
Food for Thought: Americans’ views on the deportation of immigrants living in the country illegally
The Daily Shot Brief
10. For Your Weekend Read: NVDA Stock Fell -90% Twice
The New King of Tech-How Jensen Huang built Nvidia into a nearly $3 trillion business’
Via The Atlantic: Another day, another new AI large language model that’s supposedly better than all previous ones. When I began writing this story, Elon Musk’s xAI had just released Grok 3, which the company says performs better than its competitors against a wide range of benchmarks. As I was revising the article, Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which it says outperforms Grok 3. And by the time you read this, who knows? Maybe an entirely new LLM will have appeared. In January, after all, the AI world was temporarily rocked by the release of a low-cost, high-performance LLM from China called DeepSeek-R1. A month later, people were already wondering when DeepSeek-R2 would come out.
The competition among LLMs may be hard to keep track of, but for Nvidia, the company that designs the computer chips—or graphics-processing units (GPUs)—that many of these large language models have been trained on, it’s also enormously lucrative. Nvidia, which, as of this writing, is the third-most-valuable company in the world (after Apple and Microsoft), was started three decades ago by engineers who wanted to make graphics cards for gamers. How it evolved into the company that is providing almost all the picks and shovels for the AI gold rush is the story at the core of Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine. Framed as a biography of Jensen Huang, the only CEO Nvidia has ever had, the book is also something more interesting and revealing: a window onto the intellectual, cultural, and economic ecosystem that has led to the emergence of superpowerful AI.
That ecosystem’s center, of course, is Silicon Valley, where Huang has spent most of his adult life. He was born in Taiwan, the son of a chemical engineer and a teacher. The family moved to Thailand when he was 5, and a few years later, his parents sent him and his older brother to the United States to escape political unrest. Eventually, his parents relocated to the U.S. as well, and Huang grew up in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. In the early 1980s, after majoring in electrical engineering at Oregon State (which at the time didn’t offer a computer-science major), he got a job at Advanced Micro Devices. The company—then the poor cousin of the chip giant Intel—was headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, near US 101, the highway that runs from San Jose to Stanford. Since then, Huang’s career has unfolded within a five-mile radius of that office.
