2. SMCI Super Micro -45% Correction Going into NVDA Number Last Night
StockCharts
3. Draftkings -50% From Highs
StockCharts
4. Global Bank Stock Index Breaks Out to Highs Going Back to 2008 Crisis
Topdown Charts Bank Stocks –Lastly, it’s also worth pointing out the strength we’ve seen in global bank stocks. Breadth across countries is running at a very strong pace, and after retesting its previous big breakout in April, the global bank stock index has now broken out to new all-time highs.
It’s been a long time coming for banks to finally recover to pre-GFC levels, and as I’ve noted with a few other big breakouts we’ve been seeing this year — it follows a long period of ranging and consolidation (and repair/restructure) so it’s a highly significant development.
Very interesting itself as far as the stocks go, but also interesting as another arguably quite positive macro sign and signal here.
5. Construction Spending on Data Centers +400% Since 2021
Wolf Street
6. Rate Cut Uncertainty Sends Homebuilders Back Below 200-Day
StockCharts
7. Japan Letting Zombie Companies Die—Bankruptcies Up 13%
What’s key to creating good habits and achieving your goals?
Eating chocolate. I’m serious as a heart attack.
When I spoke to Charles Duhigg, author of the bestseller The Power of Habit, he told me that if you add a little celebratory reward after engaging in a good habit you want to build, it’s a powerful reinforcer.
Did you go running this morning and want to make sure you go again tomorrow? He suggests treating yourself to a little bit of chocolate after today’s run. Here’s Charles:
The research shows that every habit has three components. There’s the cue, which is a trigger for an automatic behavior to start. Then, a routine, which is the behavior itself. Finally, a reward. The reward is really important because that’s how your brain essentially learns to latch onto a particular pattern and make it automatic. Chocolate, after running, is an obvious example of a reward that many people enjoy. It doesn’t have to be chocolate. What matters is that if you want to make a behavior into a habit, you need to give yourself something you enjoy as soon as that behavior is done.
Sound too simple to be effective? Wrong. Little celebrations for small accomplishments make a huge difference in motivation for even the toughest tasks.
As bestselling author Dan Pink explains, the research on motivation is clear: “small wins” are a big deal. Taking a moment to be happy about the little good things that happen is far more motivating than thinking you need to win that Nobel Prize or Academy Award before you’re allowed to feel satisfied.
And this works with the toughest challenges. How tough?
Appreciating the small fleeting victories is what former Navy SEAL Platoon Commander James Waters says is key to getting through seemingly impossible challenges like Navy SEAL “Hell Week”:
When you’re at BUD/S, it’s the small victories that matter. Let’s say you made it through a two and a half hour long PT session. You throw that log down, get together with your class, and go run a mile to dinner. That’s a small victory. It feels good. You sit down, have a nice meal, and feel like everything’s great. Then as soon as dinner is done, the instructors see you and say, “Go get wet and sandy.” They torture you again and you’re back down into the muck. BUD/S is a constant cycle of peaks and valleys. Even your brightest moments are constantly transformed into bad ones. When you finish Hell Week you feel like you’re on top of the world until you realize you still have nearly a year of training left to go. But you’ve got to be able to accept these peaks and valleys, these small victories and recognize that, yes, so many things are bad but they do have a start and an end.
(To learn the secrets of how to motivate yourself and others, from expert Dan Pink, click here.)
Are you doing any party planning yet? Let’s round up the info and learn how small celebrations can lead to you looking at your entire life in a more positive light…
1. S&P History of Closes Below 50-Day after Long Rallies
SPX vs. 50DMA. “$SPX finally closed below its 50 day moving average, after 138 days! Here’s what $SPX did next after such long rallies ended.”
DAILY CHARTBOOK
2. Private Credit Fears Growing….Private Lender Blue Owl Stock -41% YTD…Breaks thru Liberation Day Lows
StockCharts
3. Most Bitcoin ETF Holders are Not Up Much…Average Cost Basis $89,600
Bloomberg
4. Bitcoin History
Bespoke
5. Retail Investors are Not Buying the Dip in Bitcoin
“The one-year growth in U.S.-based ETF holdings have slowed down from 441K BTC on Oct. 10, to 271K BTC today, indicating slower demand from U.S. investors,” Julio Moreno, CryptoQuant’s head of research, told MarketWatch. “Retail investors are not buying the dip, as suggested by the average order size in the bitcoin spot market.”
MarketWatch
6. NVDA Earnings Wednesday After Close….Valued at 3x the Entire Energy Sector that We Need to Power AI
Otavio (Tavi) Costa
7. Price Disparity in Electricity China vs. U.
Prof G blog–The most important part of this story is the price disparity: Kimi K2 costs $2.50 per million output tokens — that’s 4x cheaper than GPT-5 for comparable performance. Chinese AI models from Alibaba and DeepSeek are also roughly 10x less expensive than American alternatives.
Why are Chinese AI models so cheap? Energy. China produces 2x more wind power, 3x more solar, and 6x more hydroelectric power than America. That, plus government subsidies, makes their electricity half as expensive as ours.
This administration is only making our energy problem worse. They’re actively gutting renewable projects and making the permitting process way more difficult. If you want to build more solar energy in America today, there’s a new rule where you have to get a personal sign-off from Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. It’s just a bureaucratic nightmare.
Prof G Markets
8. India Buying Record Gold ETFs
Apollo
9. Married Couple Households Plummet
chartr
10. 3 Cognitive Habits of People Who Get Things Done-INC
High-achieving workers have these things in common.
Marcus leads a team of eight direct reports, and Jennifer is his star employee. While the other seven team members struggle to complete tasks on time or in the way Marcus asks for them, Jennifer seems to ace any task she’s given. She asks questions when she’s unclear and owns up to her mistakes. Any time the other employees mess up, Marcus wishes he could clone Jennifer seven times and save himself the hassle.
Sound familiar?
You may not be able to clone your star employees, but you can help your team replicate the cognitive habits of people like Jennifer to build the skill of accountability across your team. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we’ve spent the past year reverse-engineering what accountable people do from a cognitive perspective. Quite literally, we’ve asked, what are the cognitive habits—the habits of mind—of people who do this well? Three have come into focus: syncing expectations, driving with purpose, and owning one’s impact.
In short, accountable people get clarity in what they’re supposed to do, execute tasks deliberately and intentionally, and learn from the outcomes they produce, whether good or bad.
Featured Video
Alexis Ohanian is Betting on Women’s Sports as a Billion-Dollar Opportunity
3 habits of accountability
When people attend to these habits in the course of their work, we call it proactive accountability. That is, they see accountability as a way to grow, develop, and innovate. They take ownership of their responsibilities and learn from their mistakes. Proactive accountability stands in contrast to punitive accountability, a practice in which leaders create environments of fear, blame, or punishment that hinder learning and growth, as well as permissive accountability, in which leaders assume performance issues will simply work themselves out.
Sync expectations
A major factor in cultures with low accountability is a mismatch in expectations. The manager thinks the team member will do one thing, but the team member thinks they’re supposed to do something else. Disappointment and broken trust follow.
In the brain, unmet expectations are processed as error signals. Levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine drop, sapping motivation and causing us to feel frustrated or angry, which forces us to adjust our expectations. When expectations are met, however, there is no error signal, dopamine levels hold steady, and trust and satisfaction remain strong.
The first habit of proactive accountability, Sync expectations, involves the employee getting clear about what’s expected of them. This is an important first step because shared understanding is the foundation of being effective. In the brain this is represented by a temporary synchronization of neural activity, known as neural synchrony.
During neural synchrony, neurons in both people’s brains are firing in the same patterns because their minds are processing information in nearly identical ways. For this to happen, both people need to discuss and eliminate any potential misunderstandings before moving forward.
Syncing expectations also has benefits for relationships at the end of the project because fulfilled expectations breed trust, while unmet expectations erode trust. When two teammates sync expectations up front, they make an investment in sustaining the relationship long-term.
Tactic: Encourage your team to sync expectationsby communicating in a way that’s succinct, specific, and generous (SSG). SSG communication uses a narrow focus to support working memory (succinct); it uses visual, explicit language to enhance processing (specific); and it’s tailored to create ease of understanding (generous). It’s not “Get me this report by 5 p.m.”—rather, it’s “Email me this report by 5 p.m. Eastern Time, and please attach the report as a PDF.”
SSG communication creates clarity, which promotes synchrony and aligns expectations.
Drive with purpose
Once the leader and employee have synced expectations, the employee must own the responsibility to execute the task at the highest level. Highly effective people often do this by connecting the goal at hand to a higher purpose, and then working to create the right outcomes with that purpose in mind.
Purpose ignites motivation. When we know why we’re asked to do something, and we can see how the work creates a meaningful impact, we’re more intrinsically motivated to act. Compared to extrinsic motivators, such as money and status, intrinsic rewards, like a sense of accomplishment or mastery over a task, are much more powerful. Consciously or not, effective people find deeper meaning in their work to summon the energy to keep pushing.
They also act deliberately, rather than hastily, investigating as many possibilities as they can and assuming almost nothing. In addition, they check their biases to avoid making rash judgments. Since cognitive biases act as mental shortcuts, they pose risks for an employee completing a task effectively. Someone who acts with an expedience bias, for instance, might move too quickly and miss a crucial part of the work.
Tactic: Help your employees identify the impact this work will have on them. Perhaps the project is an opportunity for them to build a new skill or to contribute to an important organizational goal. Asking questions that elicit a clear “why” will help the employee form a stronger sense of purpose and ownership over their work.
Own the impact
Accountability doesn’t just involve getting things done as expected; it means seeing how those actions play out going forward. Even the best laid plans can produce unexpected results. Accountable leaders own their team’s impact, regardless of people’s positive intentions, and then they devise new plans to keep pushing toward success.
Proactive accountability requires us to maintain a growth mindset, or the belief that mistakes are chances to improve rather than signs of incompetence. When people always seem to get things done, it’s because they’re not getting mired in failure or basking in success. They may pause to experience their emotions, but ultimately they’re focused on achieving the next set of goals in front of them.
Tactic: The most important time for leaders and team members to own their impact is when things don’t go as planned. Help your team apologize well by following (and modeling) a three-step approach: taking responsibility, saying how you’ll fix things, and asking for others’ input. Choosing to learn from our mistakes preserves trust and promotes growth: two outcomes that sit at the heart of proactive accountability.
With these three habits, Marcus feels more empowered to help his team build the skill of accountability. Jennifer may have a natural talent for getting things done at a high level, but there’s no “secret” to her efficacy. When a new project comes her way, she merely goes through the prescribed steps that neuroscience shows will naturally produce accountability.
It will take time to develop the behaviors of proactive accountability and make them habits. But with the right focus, you can help everyone on your team, including yourself, become the kind of person who meets or exceeds expectations in whatever they do. What seems like magic will really just be brain science at work.
Insiders. “What is catching my eye is that while sentiment is leaning bullish among retail investors and Wall Streeters, corporate insiders are selling at the highest level since 2000 … They have all kinds of reasons to sell shares … but given the conversation about valuation and bubbles and loft earnings goals, the current 25:1 sell/buy ratio is something that gives me pause.”
Drills of this kind, which took place in the Kursk region bordering Ukraine and were broadcast on Russian state television, are happening across Russia as the Kremlin reaches into the country’s schools to prepare potential combatants for future wars.
It is part of a dramatic transformation of Russia’s education system that gained pace after the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 but was supercharged by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As the conflict approaches the four-year mark, military-style training and war topics are embedded in Russia’s school curriculum, while the budget for such programs has ballooned as the focus has turned to the youngest grades.
By eighth grade, weapons training—once extracurricular—is now mandatory. Teens are taught army discipline, military history and how to assemble Kalashnikovs and fly drones.
History textbooks portraying the West as Russia’s enemy and Ukraine as its stooge will soon be rolled out for the youngest grades, the government says. Outside of the classroom, the Defense Ministry has its own Youth Army, with a claimed 1.85 million members age 8 to 18 integrated into the school system.
9.Mark Hyman’s Facts on Food
10.Shane Parish Interview Ron Shaich
The Knowledge Project
Top restauranteur Ron Shaich reveals how to scale a business, find the inputs that matter, and create long term success.
Ron is the founder of Panera Bread, chairman of CAVA, and managing partner at Act III Holdings. He created the fast-casual dining category.
Here are 10 of the maxims I took away from this episode and my research:
Complexity kills more companies than competition.
Long-term greedy, not short-term stupid.
Commitment owns you. You don’t own it.
The best seek out the details.
Failing fast works in software, not restaurants.
There is no balance. You make choices.
Obsession isn’t a problem. It’s an advantage.
People want to feel special in a world where they don’t.
The greatest risk is underinvesting in what works.
Build something worthy of those who believed in you.
2. The Counter Argument to My Negative Equity Risk Premium Charts from Yesterday
Equity risk premium. “These negative risk premium charts circulating again. Reminder: stocks are real assets: EPS, Divs demonstrated they [grow] with inflation over time. Earnings Yields vs TIPs are the right comp. Risks premiums roughly 1/2 last 20 yrs but stocks still better than bonds. Rule of 72 says time to double purchasing power: 39 years in TIPS, 17 years in S&P 500.”
Jeremy Schwartz
3. Bitcoin IBIT Below 50day and 200day
StockCharts
4. So I asked Perplexity About Past Historical Example of Bitcoin Below Moving Averages
Perplexity
5. One-Year After Bearish Closes ?
Perplexity
6. Ethereum Holding Above 200-Day
StockCharts
7. Bitcoin Treasury Firms -30-50%
Sherwood
8. Mag 7 vs. Country Market Caps…3 American Companies are Larger than Every Country Ex-Japan
Charlie Bilello
9. Streaming Inflation
Wolf Street Companies have spent billions of dollars buying sports programming, and they have shuffled programming around, and some have stripped some programming from basic streaming services. So prices alone may not reflect the whole picture.
Since 2019, subscriptions have soared, according to the WSJ:
Regularly listening to music is linked to a lower risk of developing dementia, according to a new study.
In the study, published in October, researchers looked at data spanning a decade and involving more than 10,000 relatively healthy people, aged 70 and older, in Australia. People who listened to music most days slashed their risk of developing dementia by 39 percent compared with those who did not regularly listen to music, the study found.
“I have started myself listening to music more than I was,” Ryan said. “I would encourage people to be listening to music, because if it’s something they take pleasure from and it’s also stimulating their brain, why not?”
What happens to the brain when we listen to music
At Princeton University’s Music Cognition Lab, researchers have conducted studies looking at what happens to people’s brains when they listen to music. They’ve found that various parts of the brain are activated, including motor areas, sensory areas, the regions that process emotions and those involved in imagining or daydreaming. This could be the key to what makes music powerful for boosting brain health.
“One of the things that seems to be really important is just getting all those areas to talk to each other in meaningful ways,” said Elizabeth Margulis, director of the lab and a trained pianist who wasn’t involved in this new study. “That’s something music is exceptionally good at doing.”
Margulis pointed out that the study’s finding applies to listening to music as well as playing it. There was slightly less benefit associated with regularly playing music, with a 35 percent reduction in the risk of dementia, though the researchers suspect that’s because it’s a smaller group of people than those who regularly listen to music.
Music also has a transportive quality, Margulis said. If you listen to a song that you first heard during a certain time of life, you may find yourself transported back to that time, especially with the music you listened to in adolescence.
“That tends to be the music that people remember best and have the most memories associated with,” Margulis said. She added that adolescence often is the time when people are defining themselves, which gives that music added meaning.
This can even be seen in people who are experiencing cognitive decline or diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
“They may not even recognize themselves in a mirror, they don’t know where they are or how they got there, but you put on a song from when they were 14, and they reconnect with that self they had lost,” said neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin, who also wasn’t involved in the new research.
Anecdotally, Margulis said, the effect seems to remain for a while even after they listen to the music.
“They’re a little more present, a little more able to interact,” Margulis said.
Music as medicine
Levitin has written a new book, “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine,” bringing together research about how music can be used as therapy for things including depression, pain and neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s.
“Listening to music is neuroprotective,” said Levitin, explaining that it builds resiliency and protects the brain by wiring new neural pathways. “It’s a myth that you don’t grow new neurons, and throughout the lifespan, you’re growing new pathways.”
Levitin added that while listening to music from the past can bring back memories and provide comfort, there is also a benefit to listening to new music and challenging yourself. He also encourages people to play music.
“You can start playing an instrument at any age, and you don’t need to be Herbie Hancock,” Levitin said. He recalled giving his grandmother a keyboard for her 80th birthday and watching her practice almost every day until she died at 97. Levitin said for him, playing music brings an immersive joy.
“If I’m lucky, I disappear, and the music plays me,” he said.
But he emphasized that just being around music — whether that’s listening or playing it — shows benefits. And it’s something pretty much everyone has access to.
“That’s the lovely thing,” Margulis said, on how accessible music is to everyone.
