Category Archives: Daily Top Ten

1. S&P Makes New Highs Without Tech Leadership

Sam Ro

2. Equal Weight S&P Leading 2026…Tech Earnings this Week

Kevin Gordon

3. AI Adoption=Cost Savings

“The next leg of AI adoption is in small caps: every 1% labor cost saving translates to a ~2% EPS boost for SPX, but >6% for RTY” – Wells Fargo Dave Lutz Jones Trading.

4. Gold Volatility vs. S&P All-Time Highs

Bloomberg

5. Starbucks 50day thru 200day to Upside

StockCharts

6. Credit Card Debt Delinquencies are Receding

Jeff Weniger

7. Your House is a Liability not an Investment

Bespoke Investment Group-As shown below, most cities tracked have seen annualized home price gains of less than 3% over the last twenty years. That’s worse than the 3.1% annualized return for the long-term Treasury ETF (TLT).

Bespoke’s

8. Price Changes 25 Years

Joseph Brown

9. Poll on Trump U.S. Government Direct Investments

Semafor

10. I’ve been investing for 45 years: 5 dumb mistakes nearly every investor makes

by Stacy Johnson CPA

Our team of professional journalists has more than 100 years of combined experience writing articles like this. Help us continue producing award-winning content by clicking the follow button above.

I bought my first stock more than 45 years ago. Since then, I’ve lived through the crash of 1987 (Black Monday), the dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, and the post-pandemic inflation spike.

Market cycles change, but one thing never does: human nature.

In my four decades of watching people try to build wealth, I have noticed that the biggest threat to your portfolio is rarely the Federal Reserve, the President, or the price of oil. It is the person staring back at you in the mirror.

We’re all hardwired to make bad financial decisions. We run from pain (selling when the market drops) and chase pleasure (buying when the market soars).

If you want to retire rich, you have to stop acting like a human and start acting like an investor. Here are five things to avoid.

1. Trying to time the market

This is the classic ego trap. You convince yourself you can get out before the crash and get back in before the rebound. Let me be clear: You can’t. Even the professionals can’t.

When you try to time the market, you have to be right twice. You have to sell at the top and buy at the bottom. If you miss by just a few days, you destroy your returns.

According to data from J.P. Morgan, if you stayed fully invested in the S&P 500 from 2005 to 2024, you earned an annualized return of roughly 10%. But if you tried to get cute and missed just the 10 best days in that 20-year period, your return drops to a bit over 6%.

Think about that. Missing two weeks of action over two decades cut your gains almost in half. The market’s biggest jumps often happen right after its biggest drops. If you are freaking out about the stock market and waiting for the “dust to settle,” you have already lost.

2. Paying high fees because you aren’t paying attention

In every other area of life, you get what you pay for. A Ferrari costs more than a Ford because it’s faster and presumably better made. You get something for your money. In investing, the opposite is often true. You can pay more for the same, or even worse, performance.

It’s just this simple: The more you pay in fees, the less you keep.

3. Thinking you can pick winning stocks

I’m a believer in buying individual stocks. The reason is simple: I’ve made a ton of money over the years doing it.

I’ve owned stock in Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Google and other big winners for many years; in the case of Apple, 25 years. Of course, I’ve also had losers along the way, but I’ve definitely beaten the returns I would have gotten from a broad-based S&P Index fund or ETF.

But here’s the thing: I spent 10 years as an investment advisor and for decades I’ve spent several hours every weekday reading about this stuff. Every weeknight I watch a couple of CNBC shows for tips and information.

Sound like you? If it doesn’t, don’t buy individual stocks.

The data shows how statistically unlikely you are to beat the market over the long run by picking individual stocks. Consider this: over a 15-year period, nearly 90% of active large-cap fund managers fail to beat the S&P 500. And the managers of these actively-managed funds are professional investors, with institutional research and every bell and whistle at their fingertips.

If they can’t beat the index, what makes you think you can?

Unless you’re willing to invest a lot of time into research, stop trying to find the needle in the haystack and just buy the haystack.

As I cover in the golden rules of becoming a millionaire, a low-cost S&P 500 index fund will outperform the vast majority of stock pickers over a lifetime.

4. Letting your emotions drive the bus

When the market tanks, your brain screams “Sell!” to stop the pain. When your neighbor brags about making a killing in crypto, your brain screams “Buy!” to avoid missing out.

This emotional whiplash is expensive. The research firm Dalbar publishes an annual “Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior” (QAIB) report, and the results are always depressing.

In 2024, the S&P 500 returned a massive 25.02%. But the average equity fund investor? They only earned 16.54%.

That is a gap of nearly 8.5 percentage points. Why? Because investors panicked, sold at the wrong times, or chased trends that had already peaked. The market did its job. The investors didn’t.

Here’s something I’ve learned over the years. If you lay awake at night staring at the ceiling because you’re worried about your stocks, you have too much invested in stocks. That’s going to cause you to make mistakes.

5. Focusing on the rear-view mirror

There is a cognitive bias called “recency bias.” It means we give more weight to what happened recently than what happened further in the past.

If tech stocks soared last year, we dump all our money into tech. If bonds crashed, we sell all our bonds. We chase past performance, assuming it will continue forever. It rarely does.

Winners rotate. The hot sector of 2025 might be the dog of 2026. If you constantly chase what just worked, you are buying high and selling low—the exact opposite of how you build real wealth.

Stick to a diversified plan. Rebalance when things get out of whack. And for heaven’s sake, stop looking at your account balance every day.

How savvy investors double their retirement savings (Sponsored)

A Vanguard study found that, on average, a hypothetical $500,000 investment over 25 years would grow to $1.7 million if you manage it yourself, but more than $3.4 million if you work with a financial adviser. That’s twice as much!

If you’ve got $100,000 in investible assets, you qualify for a free appointment with a vetted financial advisor in your area.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/i-ve-been-investing-for-45-years-5-dumb-mistakes-nearly-every-investor-makes/ar-AA1V0ZPb?ocid=socialshare\

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 27, 2026

January 27, 2026

Matt Topley

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Silver Intra-Day Reversal

The Kobeissi Letter

2. Silver Volume Running at 15x Average…More than S&P Yesterday

3. Sell America Not Showing Up in Flows

PROF G MARKETS

4. Sell America Not Showing Up In Flows

Barrons-Healthy capital inflows into U.S. capital markets, which totaled some $1.569 trillion in the 12 months through November, according to the latest Treasury International Capital Data. That included $481 billion going into Treasury notes and bonds and government agency securities.

But while market watchers tend to concentrate on foreign purchases of Treasuries as an indication of global support for Uncle Sam’s borrowing needs, the biggest international inflows of the past 12 month were into U.S. equities. Not surprisingly, the world was coming to America to participate in the artificial-intelligence boom, buying $689 billion of U.S. equities, or 44% of long-term securities purchases, in the span. Foreign purchases of corporate bonds (an increasing amount of which funds AI buildouts) accounted for a quarter of long-term securities purchases. So, AI is not only an essential factor in the stock market’s advance but also a key component in funding the U.S. current-account deficit.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/trump-greenland-stock-market-world-order-ad183bd1?mod=past_editions

5. The Rise of Retail Trader-Irrelevant Investor Blog

The Irrelevant Investor

6. Productivity Improvements from AI Showing Up

7. China Trains AI-Controlled Weapons With Learning From Hawks, Coyotes

Beijing’s military focuses on swarming drones that can pick off prey or robots that can chase down enemies

WSJ

8. 30-Year Mortgage Bounced Off 6%

Wolf Street

9. Books Coming Back?

Chartr-Then, after hedge fund Elliott Management acquired the chainfor $683 million in 2019, B&N’s fortunes began to change. Headed by a new CEO, the company attempted a return to itsindie roots — stripping back offerings like games and toys and giving store owners more autonomy, all while absorbing two other independentlocal booksellers.

Chartr

10. Warren Buffett Says 5 Fundamental Habits Separate Successful People From the Pack

Five principles that quietly drive long-term success.

EXPERT OPINION BY MARCEL SCHWANTES, INC. CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, EXECUTIVE COACH, SPEAKER, AND AUTHOR @MARCELSCHWANTES

If you’re willing to move from agreement to action, these five classic Buffett principles still hold up remarkably well.

1. Get rid of bad habits

Most leaders and entrepreneurs already know what’s holding them back. The hard part is doing something about it.

Buffett has been blunt about the damage caused by self-destructive patterns. Speaking to graduating students at the University of Florida many years ago, Buffett said, “I see people with these self-destructive behavior patterns. They really are entrapped by them.” He noted that identifying your bad habits early on is key.

Here’s the thing: Bad habits don’t announce themselves as dangerous. And some of them are blind spots that fly below your radar. Over time, those bad habits grow quietly and affect the people around you. By the time you feel their weight, to Buffett’s point, they’re much harder to break.

For leaders, this shows up as avoidance, stonewalling, micromanagement, impatience, unaccountability, and letting standards slide. The sooner you confront these behaviors, the less damage they do—to you, your business, and to the people you lead.

2. Don’t risk what you have for something you don’t need

Buffett has watched businesses and individuals gamble away stability in pursuit of “more”—often driven by ego or greed.

His warning is simple: If something truly matters to you, don’t put it at risk for something that doesn’t. Here’s Buffett:

If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just doesn’t make sense. I don’t care if the odds you succeed are 99 to 1 or 1,000 to 1.

This is especially relevant for founders who are chasing scale too fast, leaders who are taking on unnecessary debt, or executives who are sacrificing culture for short-term wins to please shareholders. Just because the odds look good doesn’t mean the risk is worth it

3. Learn from your mistakes and become better

Buffett’s final shareholder letter, released in November, reads less like a financial document and more like a master class in the dos and don’ts of leadership.

Buffett opens with rare vulnerability: “Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes—learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve.”

Here’s a man who has made billion-dollar errors, yet he views failure not as a cause for shame but as an opportunity to learn. That’s the essence of resilience and a growth mindset; it’s humility wrapped up in fierce resolve, backed by action.

Buffett’s advice to “get the right heroes and copy them” underscores the importance of mentorship and modeling. He credits “wonderful friends” for helping him learn “how to behave better,” a reminder that none of us evolves in isolation.

4. Choose colleagues and mentors wisely

One of Buffett’s most enduring lessons about success is surrounding yourself with the right people.

He once told a young shareholder, “It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”

This message resonates in today’s leadership circles. As leaders seek to build resilient teams, meaningful cultures, and long-term influence, Buffett’s classic principle stands the test of time: You become like the people you spend the most time with. So, choose wisely.

If you aim to grow your business or advance in your career, relationships, or leadership, be deliberate about whom you choose to learn from.

5. Do what you love

This advice gets dismissed as idealistic, but Buffett has consistently argued that people do their best work when they enjoy what they’re doing. In his own words: “The people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.”

Many professionals stay in well-paid, secure roles they quietly resent. Over time, that dissatisfaction bleeds into their leadership, decision-making, and health.

You don’t have to love every task. But if you fundamentally dislike your work, it shows—and it costs you more than you realize.

www.inc.com

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 26, 2026

January 26, 2026

Matt Topley

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Government Shutdown Betting on Polymarket Explodes

James Bianco

2. Hyperscalers Debt is a Small Part of EBITA

It’s that flood—and not default risks—that worry many analysts. Microsoft’s gross debt is only 0.22 times its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda, which means it could theoretically pay all its debt in under three months. Alphabet has the next best ratio at 0.49 times, while Amazon’s leverage ratio is 0.56 times and Meta’s is 0.57 times. Even including lease commitments barely moves the needle, except for Amazon, whose leverage ratio rises above a still unconcerning 1. Barrons

Barron’s

3. S&P 500 Margin Expansion All Tech-Torston Slok

The Daily Spark

4. Skyrocket on ETF Fund Flows….$400B in 3 Months

Fund Flows: meanwhile, as documented previously, sentiment is running hot — and here’s the latest sentiment snippet showing speculative splurging into equity ETFs.

Tracy Shuchart

5. Vanguard Value (VTV) Outperforming Growth (VUG) by 6% to Start 2026

YCharts

6. Healthcare Market Cap as a Percent of S&P Market Cap at 1995 Lows

Kailash Concepts

7. Tether Freezes $182M USDT in Largest-Ever Crackdown — Is Venezuela’s Crypto Lifeline Under Siege?

Key Takeaways

Tether froze $182 million in USDT across five Tron wallets on Jan. 11, 2026, marking one of its most significant single-day actions to date.
This occurred amid Venezuela’s heavy reliance on USDT for oil trade, with 80% of PDVSA revenue now in stablecoins to evade sanctions.
The freeze highlights USDT’s dual role: lifeline for Venezuelans facing hyperinflation, yet a tool for compliance with U.S. authorities targeting illicit flows.

Prediction Market powered by

Tether, the issuer of USDT, has carried out its largest asset freeze to date, sparking speculation that the funds may be linked to Venezuela.

This action comes amid escalating scrutiny over USDT’s role in Venezuela, where the stablecoin has become a critical financial tool for both the government and citizens to navigate U.S. sanctions, hyperinflation, and economic isolation.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tether-freezes-182m-usdt-largest-105442400.html

8. 10 Most Powerful Air Forces

Visual Capitalist

9. #1 Cause of Disease Inflammation-Dr.Hyman

Mark Hyman

10. Keep Forgetting Things? To Improve Your Memory and Recall, Science Says Start Taking Notes (by Hand)

And then do a quick review the next morning. BY JEFF HADEN @JEFF_HADEN

When I spoke at the Arabian Business Awards a few years ago, I showed a slide describing research that shows meetings literally make people dumber: a study published in Transcripts of the Royal Society of London found that meetings cause you to (during the meeting) lose IQ points.

A bunch of people in the audience took photos of that slide.

The same was true when I presented a slide describing research published in Journal of Business Research showing that not only do 90 percent of employees feel meetings are unproductive, but when the number of meetings is reduced by 40 percent employee productivity increases by 70 percent.

A bunch of people took photos of that slide, too.

Both findings seem easy to remember, if only because the research confirms what most people feel about meetings: Most of the time, the only person who thinks a meeting is important is the person who called the meeting. But what if you really wanted to remember that meetings tend to make participants dumber, and tend to negatively impact overall productivity?

Or, more broadly, have a better shot of remembering things you really want to remember? Don’t take photos.

In a study published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, researchers evaluated the effectiveness of a variety of memory-boosting strategies: taking photos, typing notes, and writing notes by hand.

As you can probably guess, people who wrote notes by hand scored the highest on subsequent recall and comprehension tests, even when people who took photos or typed verbatim notes were allowed to review those items before they took the tests.

Or maybe you couldn’t guess that: The researchers also found that “learners were not cognizant of the advantages of longhand note-taking, but misjudged all three techniques to be equally effective.”

So why does taking notes by hand work so well? According to the researchers:

Longhand note-takers mind-wandered less and, in turn, demonstrated superior retention of the lecture content.

Which makes sense. Taking a photo requires no “mental participation” at all. You don’t have to consider, synthesize, decide how you’ll capture the information in shorthand, etc. Typing notes verbatim — for example, transcribing a lecture or meeting recording — is more of a process than a thought exercise. The focus is on accuracy, not retention. (I can type fast enough to capture everything someone says in real time, but that doesn’t mean I remember any of it without reviewing what I’ve typed.)

Maybe that’s why Richard Branson carries a notebook everywhere he goes. (Literally: I’ve seen him with one at least 10 times.) Summarizing, putting concepts or ideas in your own words, deciding not just what to write, but how to write it — all those things engage different parts of your brain, and therefore improve your retention and recall.

Especially if you don’t stop there. According to a study published in Psychological Science, people who study before bed, then sleep, and then do a quick review the next morning can not only spend less time studying, they also increase their long-term retention by 50 percent.

Try it. At night, take a quick look at notes you’ve written during the day. Take a few moments to remember not only what, but why: why you’ll use what you jotted down. When you’ll use it. Why it will make a difference in your professional or personal life. Then do a quick review the next morning.

Unless you’re a compulsive note-taker, both exercises will take only a minute or two.

After all, if it was important enough to write down, it’s important enough to remember — and more to the point, to do something with.

Because knowledge is useful only if you do something to make it useful.

www.inc.com

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 22, 2026

January 22, 2026

Matt Topley

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Russia’s Militarization of the Arctic

Business Insider

2. Not Political ….Interesting History of the Region

Geiger Capital

3. 2026 Year to Date Returns..Big Rotation Out of Tech

Charlie Bilello

4. 2026 Dow Transports +4.5% Dow Jones +2.20% vs. Mag 7 -3.5%

Ycharts

5. The Small Cap Outperformance from Previous Letters Showing Up in Higher Price to Book

Zach Goldberg Jefferies

6. Small Cap Stocks Still Seeing Outflows in Last 12 Months

Small cap ETF flows. “If you look at small cap ETFs, all of them together, over the last year there are still outflows”.

Daily Chartbook

7. Supreme Court Tariff Ruling Odds Polymarket

Cresset

8. Home and Car Insurance Rates vs. CPI

Dave Lutz at Jones Trading

9. The Implosion of American Union Construction Workers

The New York Times

10. The Spreadsheet Trap

Why obsessing over retirement math might be keeping you from the life you say you want

Jordan Grumet

Spreadsheet jockeys, listen up.

There’s a reason you exist. A reason you keep tweaking assumptions, adjusting cells, rerunning Monte Carlo simulations, and debating withdrawal rates deep into the night. And in my opinion, that reason might not be entirely healthy.

I say this as someone firmly inside the personal finance community. I create content here. I spend a lot of time talking about technicalities. Safe withdrawal rates. Inflation assumptions. Asset allocation. How many years you’ll be retired. Whether 70/30 is reckless or 60/40 is outdated. On and on and on.

So this isn’t an attack from the outside. It’s an observation from within.

Because alongside the creators (myself included), there’s a huge group of people quietly hunched over spreadsheets, trying to get the numbers exactly right. Debating who’s correct. Who’s being irresponsible. Who’s being conservative enough. As if precision itself is the prize.

At some point, I think we need to stop.

Not stop caring about money. Not stop understanding the math. But stop believing that more calculation will save us from what we’re actually avoiding.

Because I think this obsession fulfills a need. A psychological need. And that need doesn’t always serve us.

Here are three reasons people become spreadsheet jockeys—and why I don’t think any of them ultimately help.

1. Spreadsheets protect us from the leap of faith

At the core of all this number-crunching is a simple, uncomfortable truth: retirement is a leap of faith.

At some point, no matter how sophisticated your model is, you have to step into an unknowable future. You can’t spreadsheet your way around that. You can only delay facing it.

Markets will do things no model predicts. Black swan events will arrive uninvited. Your health, relationships, interests, and identity will change in ways no spreadsheet cell can capture. The future is not just uncertain—it’s fundamentally unknowable.

And that’s terrifying.

So we respond the way humans often do: by trying to control what can be controlled. We tighten assumptions. Lower withdrawal rates. Stress-test scenarios. Run worst-case projections until we feel safe again.

But here’s the uncomfortable part: safety is an illusion.

No amount of modeling removes the leap. It only postpones it. Eventually, you still have to choose to act without complete certainty. That’s not a failure of planning. It’s the nature of life.

The spreadsheet isn’t wrong. It’s just incapable of giving you what you’re actually asking for: a guarantee.

2. Numbers give us permission to chicken out

This is the one I see most often, and it’s the hardest to admit.

There are people with more than enough money to retire—by any reasonable standard—who stay in jobs they actively dislike. Not because they need the income, but because the spreadsheet says “maybe not yet.”

And if it doesn’t say that at first, they can make it say that.

All it takes is a slightly lower return assumption. A longer lifespan. A higher inflation estimate. A more conservative withdrawal rate. Eventually, the spreadsheet delivers the verdict they’re hoping for: You can’t retire.

Anxiety relieved.

Back to work they go. Miserable, but comfortable. Unfulfilled, but certain.

Retirement sounds great in theory. Leaving an identity behind? Much scarier. Letting go of a role where you know who you are, what you’re good at, and how you’re valued? That’s a real loss. And spreadsheets provide a socially acceptable excuse to avoid grieving it.

People say they want freedom. What they often want is freedom without risk, identity loss, or discomfort. And that version doesn’t exist.

So instead, they optimize numbers until inaction feels responsible.

3. Numbers are easier than meaning

Here’s the deepest reason spreadsheets are so seductive: they let us redefine winning.

If winning is having the right net worth, the lowest withdrawal rate, or the most conservative plan, then the game becomes measurable. Definable. Clean.

And crucially, it keeps us out of a much harder arena.

Because the real questions—the ones money is supposed to support—are messy and undefinable. What do you want your days to look like? Who do you want to spend them with? What feels meaningful now that achievement and accumulation aren’t the point?

Those questions don’t have formulas.

So instead, we convince ourselves that getting the numbers right is the purpose. That financial optimization is the end goal, not the tool. We stay outside the arena, pencil in hand, erasing and recalculating, while life happens elsewhere.

Spreadsheets allow us to avoid vulnerability. Avoid experimentation. Avoid failure. Avoid meeting people doing hard things. Avoid discovering that the life we thought we wanted might not actually satisfy us.

They give us something to polish instead of something to live.

Putting the calculator down

Let me be clear: understanding your finances is healthy. Running the numbers is responsible. You should know where you stand. You should plan. You should model scenarios.

But perfection is not the goal. Adequacy is.

At some point, the marginal benefit of another spreadsheet iteration drops to zero. Beyond that point, you’re no longer planning—you’re hiding.

Money is a means, not a moral achievement. Wealth is not proof that you lived well. It’s only useful if it creates space for you to actually show up to your life.

So yes, spend some evenings with your spreadsheets. Learn the math. Build confidence. But then, this is the important part, put the calculator away.

Go live.

Believe it or not, becoming a spreadsheet jockey can be an excuse. An excuse to delay the very things money is supposed to enable: freedom, connection, curiosity, and meaning.

The numbers don’t need to be perfect.

Your life doesn’t either.

https://jordangrumet.substack.com/p/the-spreadsheet-trap