1. Crypto $6B Week of Inflows
Crypto asset flows. “Digital asset investment products attracted [a record] US$5.95bn last week … Bitcoin saw a record US$3.55bn in inflows, Ethereum US$1.48bn, while Solana (US$706.5m) and XRP (US$219.4m) also set notable records.”
James Butterfill – CoinShares
2. History of 30% Six-Month Gains
Below are the twelve days since 1953 where the S&P gained more than 30% in the prior six months (for the first time in at least a year). In terms of forward market performance following these days, the S&P has definitely shown some weakness in the very near term, but going out three months to one year, returns are slightly better than normal.
Bespoke Investment Group
3. Fear and Greed Index
CNN
4. Nasdaq Has Become the Market of Choice for Dubious Penny-Stock IPOs
Jonathan Weil – WSJ
5. European Large Cap Stocks 25-Year Breakout
@Callum Thomas (Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm)
6. Tech 2025 vs. 1999
Mike Xaccardi
7. China Youth Unemployment Chart New Highs
Semafor
8. Nationally-There are 35% More Home Sellers Than Buyers
@CharlieBilello
9. Driverless Taxi Usage Update in California
Derek Thompson – Substack
10. The Daily Stoic -Everything we need to do draws on the same ability
Every problem we face, every decision we make, every risk we take, every belief we choose to accept or question—it all requires the skill of discernment. Life, business, ethics, success, it comes down to being able to see what’s what in a given situation.
…what to do
…when to do it
…and how to do it.
And no skill was more cultivated by the Stoics than this. Epictetus talked of money changers who could tell, just by banging a coin on the table, whether it was counterfeit or not. This, he said, was what a philosopher had to be able to do—to know a good impression from a bad one, a good response from a bad one, a virtue from a vice. This is what Seneca was doing in his evening reviews. It was what Marcus Aurelius was trained in by Rusticus and Fronto and Antoninus.
To be able to see what’s in front of you with clarity. To know what’s important and what isn’t, how things work. That’s what wisdom is. It’s not an encyclopedic knowledge of facts and figures but something both profound and applied—for it was not Gandhi’s sharp legal mind that made him the mahatma.
No one is born with this critical and all too rare ability. It is not something, Seneca reminds us, that can be delegated to someone else. There is no technology that can do it for you. There is no app. No teacher who can simply download everything into your brain. No guru who can lead you to enlightenment or shaman who can give it to you in a dose.
No, I say (it’s Ryan here), wisdom takes work (that’s the title of the new book, by the way, and you can preorder signed, numbered first-editions here!). Lots of work. Lots of reading. Lots of teachers. Lots of experience. Lots of reflecting. It took lots of work in the ancient world and it takes lots of work today. But where would we be without it? Who would we be without it?
The reason we need discernment is that life is constantly putting us in difficult situations, asking us difficult questions, putting us in ethical dilemmas. Especially in a world of social media and algorithms—where we are bombarded with information, with noise, with temptations, with endless distractions. How can we navigate this? How can we make sense of it?
Without wisdom, we cannot. We will be carried away. We will be misled. We will do the wrong thing.