Topley’s Top 10 – April 10, 2023

1. S&P 500 performance around the end of Fed hiking cycles – GS

Internet Bubble was only negative returns since the 1980s after Fed ends rate hike cycle


2. Q1 ETF Leaders All Technology


3. Micro-Cap Stocks Make New Lows as Large Cap Dominates Q1


4. IPO Market Chart to Watch

IPO ETF look for break above this red downtrend line on chart


 

 

5. 20-Year Treasury Bond 4th Run at New High

 www.stockcharts.com


6. Just a Reminder that 10-Year Treasury Yield Broke Downtrend Line Going Back to 1981

 www.stockcharts.com


7. U.S. Federal Government Spending vs. Inflation

@Charlie Bilello A look at federal government spending tells the story, with a 185% increase over the last 20 years, far greater than the overall rate of inflation (64%).


8. Lumber $360 Would Be New Lows….$1700 in May 2021

www.stockcharts.com


9. Billionaires Pouring Money into Fountain of Youth

EXCLUSIVE: First anti-aging pills to hit shelves in 2028, expert predicts – as Silicone Valley races to conquer death

Pills that can help a person reverse the effects of aging could be on the market in the next five years, according to an expert.

Sam Altman, 37, was revealed to have funded biotech startup Retro BioScience to the tune of $180million last month. He is the latest in a long line of Silicon Valley billionaires to throw their considerable wealth behind the science of aging.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is reported to have invested $3billion in life-extension startup Altos Labs. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel invested in the Methuselah Foundation, which has the goal of making ’90 the new 50′.

 

Steele said: ‘With these billionaires, I’m sure some of them are doing it purely for personal gain — they’ve got all this money and they can’t possibly spend it in a single human lifetime.

‘But… if you’re a savvy investor, you can see that anti-aging medication is a huge business opportunity because the potential market is every living human.

‘I think it’s going to be the biggest revolution in medicine since the discovery of antibiotics — and as a savvy business person, you want to be on the leading edge of that revolution.’

While aging does not directly kill people, older people are at risk of many deadly diseases such as Alzheimer’s, heart disease and cancer.

Researchers might have found a way to teach someone’s body to refresh their old blood

Around 100,000 people die from age-related diseases every day, according to the World Health Organization.

Mr Steele says: ‘Aging is the greatest humanitarian challenge of all time.

There are ’20 to 30’ companies developing new drugs known as ‘senolytics’ which kill aging cells in the body, he explained.

In mice, these drugs cause elderly animals to become lively and healthy suddenly.

‘Many of these drugs are drugs that we already understand and use for different purposes, so we don’t have to develop new medications,’ Mr Steele said.

An example of a senolytic treatment is the combination of datasinib, used for chemotherapy, and quercetin, a molecule found in fruits and vegetables.

Used together, they remove aged ‘senescent’ cells responsible for many of the problems associated with aging.

Another potential general anti-aging drug is metformin. First approved in 1994 for type 2 diabetes, the drug has shown promise extending lifespans by improving blood vessel health.

‘Some of those companies are trying to develop new and more effective drugs that could do the same thing better,’ the author said.

‘That’s the sort of thing that’s very, very close to clinical realization. And I’d be shocked if in five years we don’t have some senolytics in the clinic.

‘It probably won’t be for aging at first. It’ll be for a specific disease – and maybe in 10 years, we’ll use it for aging.

‘These things are very, very near term.’

Jeff Bezos’s investment in Altos Labs — the biggest biotechnology company launch of all time — is a longer shot, Steele believes.

The firm specializes finding and developing cell therapies that can halt and eventually reverse the process of aging.

Mr Steele says: ‘This relies on a process called cellular reprogramming. It’s been shown to work on cells in a dish, and there’s some evidence it works in mice – but it’s an incredibly complicated piece of science.

‘It’s like science that seems to have fallen through a wormhole from the future – and even if it does work, do we have the biological applied understanding in the 2020s to turn that into a workable treatment?’

When Altos Labs was announced, Elon Musk quipped on Twitter about the Amazon mogul: ‘If it doesn’t work, he’s gonna sue death!’

 

With labs launching in America and Cambridge, the company is reputed to pay scientists poached from the world’s top universities salaries of up to a million dollars a year.

Steele says that, realistically, treatments we are likely to see in the near term will extend ‘healthspan’ by dealing with age-related diseases — delaying the onset of problems such as dementia.

Dr Cathy Slack, a biologist from the University of Aston, in the UK, agrees, telling DailyMail.com: ‘The goal is to increase the number of years of healthy lifespan rather than extending the late-life period of poor health.’

She said there are now ‘many’ published studies that show that genetic or environmental changes can extend a healthy lifespan.

She says: ‘Many of the biological systems that have been shown to play a role in healthy aging in these animal models are also present in humans and perform similar functions – so there is every reason to believe that these same processes are impacting on human aging.

‘The ultimate goal is really to try and manipulate these systems during human aging to maintain health and quality of life.’

Dr Slack believes that successful treatments are likely to be a combination of drugs and lifestyle changes – and look holistically at all the diseases that afflict people in later life.

She says: ‘Historically, we have viewed the various diseases associated with older age as distinct entities – so research tends to focus on each one rather than looking at them more holistically together as a direct consequence of biological aging.

‘We already know that there are lifestyle changes that will help to maintain multiple aspects of heath during aging.

‘Exercise, for example. But supplementation with drugs that target multiple physiological parameters of aging could have a huge impact on quality of life for older adults.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11844303/First-anti-aging-pills-hit-shelves-2028-expert-predicts.html


10. The Daily Stoic Are You Showing Them How To Be A Student?

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

—Mahatma Gandhi

If you think back to when you were a kid, what appeared to you to be the best part about being an adult? No more school. Our parents didn’t have to carry around heavy books or do homework. We never saw them applying to get into this school or that one. It’s sort of sad that, by and large, we show our kids that education stops. That while adulthood is isn’t always fun, one perk is that you no longer have to go to class. That graduation is a final destination.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s the story of Epictetus teaching one day when a student’s arrival caused a commotion in the back of the room. Who was it? Hadrian, the emperor. Hadrian’s example clearly had an impact on his successor and adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. Late in his reign, a friend spotted Marcus heading out, carrying a stack of books. “Where are you going?” he asked. Marcus was on his way to a lecture on Stoicism, he said, for “learning is a good thing, even for one who is growing old. I am now on my way to Sextus the philosopher to learn what I do not yet know.

If you want your kids to value learning, if you want them to never stop furthering the education you’ve been investing so much time and money and care and worry into, then we have to show them what an adult committed to lifelong learning actually looks like. We have to show them we have not graduated, we are not on summer break, we have not arrived at the final destination of education.

Wisdom, they must learn, is an endless pursuit.

 https://dailystoic.com

Topley’s Top 10 – April 06, 2023

1. Feb and March 2023….Top 5 S&P Stocks vs. Other 495

Liz Ann Sonder Schwab

https://twitter.com/LizAnnSonders


2. Tech Shares Trading at Large Premium to the Rest of S&P

Equities: Tech shares are trading at a substantial premium to the S&P 500.

Source: The Daily Shot


3. Covid Bank Accounts Whipsaw

@JeffWeniger Wisdom Tree

https://twitter.com/JeffWeniger


4. Europe’s Mega Cap Index FEZ—About to Break to New Highs.

www.stockcharts.com


5. Gold and Silver—Gold Breaks Out to 3-Year Highs

Silver No Break Out Yet…approaching 2022 highs


6. Gold and Silver Miners.

GDX Gold Miners-no highs yet

Silver Miners well off 2021 highs

www.stockcharts.com


7. Bespoke Investment Group–Smartphones Closing in on TAM; Longer Replacement Cycles

For nearly ten years now we’ve been running our Pulse survey of 1,500 US consumers balanced to census that asks them dozens of questions related to personal finance and economic sentiment.  With nearly ten years of data, these survey results are invaluable and give us as good of a read on consumer trends as we can find.  (If you would like to learn more about our monthly Bespoke Consumer Pulse survey and the report we produce that accompanies it, you can do so here.)

Along with broader questions about things like employment, credit card payments, new home purchases, and risk tolerance, we also dive into consumer interest across things like smartphones, streaming services, social media use, and e-commerce.  In regards to smartphones, every month we ask survey takers a simple question: “Do you own a smartphone?”  Below is a chart showing the percentage of respondents that answered “yes” to that question on a monthly basis dating back to July 2014.

In the mid-2010s when we began asking the question, our survey results showed that smartphone penetration in the US was still between 75-85%.  By 2020, that number had moved up to ~90%, and since then it has steadily ticked higher to its current level of 97.2%, which hit a new all-time high this month.  At 97.2%, there’s basically no runway left when it comes to the total addressable market (TAM) of smartphones in the US.  Everyone has one at this point!

The two main competitors in the smartphone space are iPhones and Androids.  In our monthly Pulse survey, we closely track trends in this space for investors and companies that are interested in this data.

Along with there now being basically no room to expand smartphone ownership in the US, another problem for smartphone makers is that consumers are replacing them less often.  Below are the results from a question we ask survey-takers on how long they typically keep their smartphone before getting a new one.  Most respondents to this question typically keep their smartphones for 2+ years before replacing them, but this number actually started to trend lower from 2019 through mid-2021.  During that time, respondents reporting that they replace their smartphones every year or less ticked higher.  This trend shifted again in 2021, however, and since then we’ve seen a larger and larger share of respondents say that they typically keep their smartphone for 2+ years.  Longer replacement cycles mean fewer sales, which is why it’s important for a company like Apple (AAPL) to introduce meaningful new iPhone features that will get consumers to replace their existing iPhones sooner.  (Also, remember that longer-lasting batteries and more durable hardware are great for customers, but they also increase the replacement cycle.)

If you would like to check out our full Bespoke Consumer Pulse report, here’s a link that tells you how to do that.

https://www.bespokepremium.com/interactive/posts/think-big-blog/smartphones-closing-in-on-tam-longer-replacement-cycles


8. Walmart Ecommerce vs. Amazon.

Aisle meet you online

Walmart has revamped its website and app to look less like a standard online storefront, and a little more like a social media feed, with video content and big glossy images of products.
The retail giant’s e-commerce chief explained the importance of the digital refresh, saying “everyone knows that 90% of the U.S. population lives within 15 miles of a Walmart store, but the closest store to our customers is the one in their pockets”. That store is getting bigger, busier and more lucrative for Walmart every single quarter.

Walmart vs. AmazonWalmart, like almost every other company that sells anything on the internet, got a huge boost from the pandemic when consumers were forced to change their shopping habits. Domestic e-commerce sales soared 43% in 2020 alone and, while they generally cooled off a little last year, Walmart’s are still going strong.   That may even be a bit of an understatement — Walmart’s online business accounted for 13% of its total sales last year, and its growth mirrors the pattern from the kings of e-commerce themselves, Amazon. Indeed, Walmart’s US online sales are tracking on a comparable trajectory to Amazon’s, growing from ~$3bn of sales per quarter to ~$17bn of sales per quarter in a similar amount of time — Amazon’s growth period just happened to start 12 years earlier.

Walmart’s growth is obviously less novel, buying online is much more common than it used to be, but it’s impressive nonetheless considering it’s not the company’s core focus. If the slick new social-media-inspired interfaces work, the comparison with Amazon could last a little longer.

www.chartr.com


9. Top U.S. Banks by Uninsured Deposits.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com


10. Five Ways to Live with Integrity

Psychology Today Five Ways to Live with Integrity Jessica Koehler Ph.D.

1.   Self-reflection: Spend time reflecting on your values and beliefs to better understand what is important to you. By identifying your core values, you can make more informed decisions that align with your principles.

2.   Accountability: Take responsibility for your actions, both successes and failures. Own up to it when you make a mistake and learn from the experience. Demonstrating accountability increases trust and credibility with others, strengthening your integrity.

3.   Consistency: Strive to be consistent in your words and actions. Ensure that your behavior aligns with your values and principles, even when no one is watching. Consistency is critical to building a solid foundation of integrity.

4.   Honesty and transparency: Be honest and transparent in your communication with others. Share your thoughts and feelings openly and be willing to listen and consider different perspectives. Practicing honesty and transparency helps cultivate trust and fosters strong relationships.

5.   Ethical decision-making: When faced with difficult decisions, consider your choices’ ethical implications and potential consequences. Seek guidance from trusted friends, family, or mentors to determine the best action.

Impact on Future Generations

Integrity is a critical component of personal character that has far-reaching implications for individual and collective well-being. H. Jackson Brown Jr. once said, “Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring, and integrity, they think of you.” This quote is a powerful reminder of the lasting impact of our actions on future generations. By understanding and promoting the value of integrity, we strive to be role models, embodying fairness, caring, and integrity in every aspect of our lives. In doing so, we can work towards a more compassionate and resilient world where the well-being of individuals and communities is prioritized and nurtured.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-school-walls/202304/the-integral-role-of-integrity