1. January Close Gives Us Good Probability for 2026
Ryan Detrick
2. Historically February Has Been Weak Month
Dave Lutz at Jones Trading February is one of two months (September being the other) that is negative on average since 1950, the past 10 years, and the past 20 years.
3. Change in Fed Chair Has Historic Short-Term Volatility
4. Material Stocks Massive Inflows to Start 2026-10x Past Years
Mike Zaccardi
5. Gold Market Cap vs. Global Stock Market Still Low
Tavi Costa
6. AI Productivity Boost Just Kicking in for Companies??? Prof G Market Letter
PROF G MEDIA
7. Revenue Per Employee on the Upswing
Gavin Baker
8. Space X IPO $1.5T
chartr
9. Greenland 1.5m Metric Tons of Rare Earths
Visual Capitalist
10. Ray Kroc -He Opened McDonalds at 52 Years Old
Brain Food Shane Parish
Ray Kroc turned McDonald’s from a single roadside restaurant into a system built to scale.
At 52, after decades of selling paper cups and milkshake machines, he opened “the first McDonald’s” in 1955 and helped grow it to nearly 8,000 restaurants worldwide.
Here’s the story of McDonald’s
Some Tiny Lessons from this episode:
“I was an overnight success all right. But thirty years is a long, long night.”
Do a few things. Do them perfectly.
Trust isn’t built in grand gestures. It’s built when you could take the last slice and don’t.
What you refuse to do matters more than what you do.
Dreams are only wasted if they’re not linked to action.
1. The Average Bitcoin ETF holder is in the Negative
BTC ETF average cost. “The average purchase for all the flows into all the spot $BTC since inception (January 2024) is $90,200. With today’s plunge, the AVERAGE $BTC ETF holder is about $5,000 (or ~7% underwater).”
DAILY CHARTBOOK
2. MSTR Average Bitcoin Price is $76,000
ZeroHedge
3. MSTR -75% from All-Time Highs…Sitting on Long-Term 200 Week Moving Average….Stock was at $25 in 2023
StockCharts
4. S&P Tech Sector 2024-2025 vs. 1999-2000
5. One Bearish Indicator Insider Selling
Yardeni noted, we asked our friend Michael Brush for an update on insider buying activity: “Insiders remain quite bearish. Actionable buying has dried up relative to selling. The combination of insider bearishness and the elevated investor sentiment reflected in the Investors Intelligence Bull/Bear Ratio of 3.99 suggests the market is quite vulnerable to a pullback here (chart).”
Zach Goldberg Jefferies
6. CRM-Salesforce Heading to 2023 Levels
StockCharts
7. USA 2026 Economic Growth? -Capital Group
Capital Group
8. 400 Chinese EV Companies Went Under 2018-2025….100 Still Operating in Price War
EVBoosters
9. Average Chinese Rural Pension $25-$30 a Month
Perplexity
10. Why Critical Thinking Is the Most Important Skill in Your Life
Pausing, checking, and doubting yourself may matter more than talent or IQ. Psychology Today Lixing Sun Ph.D.
Key points
Critical thinking keeps you alive by helping you avoid bad information that can harm your health.
It beats brilliance because breakthroughs and fortunes often come from questioning the obvious.
Your brain works against critical thinking; it’s wired to agree with others and protect your existing beliefs.
Critical thinking can be trained by checking original sources and getting comfortable with being wrong.
Ever wonder why rats are so spectacularly successful in our cities? They live in our walls, our subways, our basements. They flourish in places we find impossible. Why? Because they are critical thinkers, sort of.
City rats face a daily buffet. Pizza crusts. Half a bagel. Spilled fries. But mixed into this feast could be poisons. One careless bite and that is the end of the story. So how do rats survive?
They hesitate.
When a rat encounters unfamiliar food, it often lets another rat eat first. If nothing happens, the observer will join in later. If the taster gets sick or dies, that food is banned forever. Rats remember these lessons for days, which makes poisoning entire colonies difficult. This behavior, known as bait shyness, has been documented for decades. It is a primitive version of critical thinking, eerily similar to what kings and emperors would do to avoid being murdered: make their chefs the tasters.
Now, before you feel offended by the comparison, consider this. Humans are not always as careful as rats. In fact, we are often far worse.
We live in an age of endless information. News, hot takes, rumors, screenshots, and confident nonsense stream past us all day long. Some of it is nutritious. Some of it is toxic. And unlike rats, we often swallow first and think later.
Take vaccines. If you believe the false claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism, a claim thoroughly discredited by large epidemiological studies (Madsen et al., 2002; Hviid et al., 2019), you may choose not to be vaccinated. The cost is to expose yourself to the risk of measles, mumps, and rubella, which have been on the rise in parts of the United States.
During the COVID pandemic, the pattern repeated. Multiple studies showed that people who refused vaccination died at far higher rates than those who accepted it, especially among old adults (Johnson et al., 2022). Critical thinking, in other words, can be a matter of life and death.
But even when death is not on the line, critical thinking quietly shapes success.
Science runs on it. Galileo questioned the heavens. Darwin questioned creation. Einstein questioned time itself. Marie Curie questioned what matter was really made of. None of them accepted the obvious answer. Each insisted on testing ideas against evidence, even when that evidence was inconvenient or unpopular.
Business does too. Warren Buffett built his fortune not by following the crowd, but by distrusting it. His most famous advice sounds almost insultingly simple: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” Behind the slogan is a disciplined habit of independent mind that behavioral economists later formalized (Kahneman, 2011).
And the cases can go on and on.
Critical thinking is not about sounding smart at dinner parties. It is about not being fooled. And it is harder than it sounds. Real critical thinking requires knowledge. You cannot evaluate medical claims without some biology. You cannot judge economic arguments without understanding incentives and tradeoffs. Thinking well is not free. It costs time, effort, and homework.
It also requires practice. Like a muscle, it weakens when unused. Repeated exposure to the same claim makes it feel true, even when it is not, a phenomenon psychologists call the “illusory truth effect.” Familiarity quietly replaces evidence.
This is where one simple rule matters more than almost any other. Whenever possible, check the original source. The actual study, the original data, the primary document. Not the headline or a tweet about the study. Even a brief look at the original often reveals caveats and limitations that vanished somewhere along the sharing chain.
Then there are the two major roadblocks built into human nature.
The first is the inclination to be agreeable. Humans are social animals. We evolved to get along. Disagreeing with the group once meant exile, and exile usually meant death. Even today, pushing back against a crowd can feel uncomfortable.
The second is confirmation bias. We favor information that supports what we already believe and discount what may feel a threat to our identity or pride. This bias is so robust that it has been observed across cultures, political ideologies, and levels of education (Nickerson, 1998).
Put these together, and you get echo chambers. Inside them, bad ideas flourish, receive applause, and start selling merchandise. This is why critical thinking may be the most valuable skill you can develop.
The good news is that it can be trained. And here are a few practical steps:
? Start with a pause. When you encounter a claim that makes you angry, thrilled, or smug, stop. Strong emotions are often a warning sign.
? Ask dull questions. Who is making this claim? What do they gain if I believe it? What evidence would change my mind?
? Seek disagreement on purpose. Read thoughtful people you do not agree with. Not trolls. Not loudmouths. Serious critics. And,
? Practice intellectual humility. Being wrong is not a personal failure. It is the entry fee for learning. Every corrected mistake is a rat that did not eat the poison.
Critical thinking will not make you omniscient. It will not guarantee success. But it will dramatically reduce the odds that you wreck your life, or your society, by swallowing something lethal simply because everyone else around you already did.
3. One-Year Chart-Semiconductors +74% (SMH) vs. Software -7.5% (IGV)
YCharts
4. Software Scorecard 2026
Here’s the Software scoreboard right now sorted by today’s σ move:
Ticker
Today %
Today’s Stdev Move
YTD %
SAP
-16%
7.6
-18%
MSFT
-11%
7.5
-11%
WDAY
-11%
4.6
-21%
NOW
-11%
4.4
-25%
TEAM
-12%
3.4
-26%
INTU
-7%
3.4
-25%
ADSK
-6%
3.4
-15%
HUBS
-11%
3.3
-30%
CRM
-7%
3.3
-20%
DT
-7%
3.2
-13%
BL
-7%
3.0
-13%
FRSH
-8%
2.8
-14%
ZS
-7%
2.7
-12%
DDOG
-8%
2.6
-4%
CRWD
-8%
2.6
-7%
SNOW
-8%
2.5
-9%
GWRE
-6%
2.5
-24%
KVYO
-10%
2.4
-28%
PEGA
-8%
2.4
-24%
DOCU
-8%
2.4
-23%
NTNX
-7%
2.4
-25%
Dan Stratemeier Jefferies.
5. Gold vs. Silver Mint Ratio
Dorsey Wright Mint Ratio Calculation & Context
The Mint Ratio is calculated by dividing the price of one ounce of gold by the price of one ounce of silver. It expresses how many ounces of silver are required to purchase a single ounce of gold, making it a useful gauge of the relative valuation between the two metals. The importance of the ratio lies not in its absolute level, but in how it changes over time and what those changes suggest about broader market trends. Since gold is widely regarded as a safe-haven asset, a rising Mint Ratio typically indicates that gold is outperforming silver, signaling increased demand for safety. Conversely, silver’s substantial industrial demand is more closely related to an increase in economic growth. When the Mint Ratio declines, it indicates that silver is outperforming gold, reflecting improving growth expectations and thus greater appetite for risk.
The chart below illustrates the historical behavior of the Mint Ratio dating back to 1975. Over this period, the ratio has averaged a value of roughly 63.5, meaning that it has historically taken about 63.5 ounces of silver to purchase one ounce of gold. Between 2012-2025, the ratio has largely remained above its long-term average, indicating sustained relative strength in gold. Over the past year, however, this trend reversed sharply as silver began to outperform. The Mint Ratio peaked just above 100 in April of 2025 before entering a sustained downtrend. Notably, the ratio fell below its historical average in December, signaling a shift away from defensive positioning and toward a more offensive, risk-oriented market postures.
Nasdaq Dorsey Wright
6. Coinbase 50day thru 200day to Downside…Speculation Moves to Kalshi and Polymarkets?
Lack of skill, focus, practice, care or just temperament means that we don’t do the task as well as we might. This might be anything from promptness to conflict to high-stakes negotiation. It could include filling in forms, taking notes or brainstorming innovative ideas. Perhaps it’s living with uncertainty…
Once you realize your areas of terrible, choices arise:
We can choose to put in the effort to become not-terrible.
We can avoid the tasks, automate or delegate and simply avoid our terrible areas.
When asked, we can announce we’re terrible, setting expectations so we don’t let folks down.
The one that’s probably worth avoiding is: Accepting tasks and making promises and then quietly doing a terrible job.
1. Central Banks Now Own More Gold than Treasuries
Special Situations
2. URA Uranium Break Out….Anything that Produces Power
StockCharts
3. TAN Solar ETF Breaking-Out…Anything Producing Power
StockCharts
4. Software ETF 50day thru 200day to Downside 2026
StockCharts
5. 2026 XLP (defensive) Consumer Staples +7% vs. S&P +2%
Ycharts
6. XLP Consumer Staples Chart Breaks Out
StockCharts
7. Record Inflows into Emerging Markets
The Irrelevant Investor
8. Household Debt to Asset Ratio at 50-Year Low
The Daily Spark
9. Mass Deportation by the Numbers
ICE arrests are growing but fewer have a criminal history. WSJ By The Editorial Board
At the beginning of 2025, 87% of ICE arrests were immigrants with either a prior conviction or a criminal charge pending, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. Only 13% of those arrested at the beginning of 2025 didn’t have either a conviction or a pending charge.
But the criminal share of apprehensions has declined as the months have gone on. By October 2025, the percentage of arrested immigrants with a prior conviction or criminal charge had fallen to 55%. Since October, 73% taken into ICE custody had no criminal conviction and only 5% had a violent criminal conviction, according to a Cato Institute review of ICE data.
Syracuse professor Austin Kocher, who tracks official ICE data, finds that between Sept. 21, 2025, and Jan. 7, 2026, single-day ICE detentions increased 11,296. But only 902 of those were convicted criminals, 2,273 had pending criminal charges and 8,121 were other immigrant violators. ICE arrests have been trending upward since January 2025, but criminal arrests have plateaued.
Psychology Today Think of attention as a vital tool for self-development in the 21st century. Bruce Rosenstein
Key points
Paying careful attention, and cultivating attention to detail, are crucial for lifelong learning.
Pay attention to what you read, view, and listen to.
Your attention is a crucial asset and resource. Its proper application can be a differentiating factor in your life and work, in distinguishing you in relation to other people and, crucially, in what you can offer to the world that artificial intelligence/AI can’t.
Attention can also be a valuable component of self-development. Thinking of attention as one of your most closely-guarded assets can be life-changing. Applying inner resource tools like listening, observation, mindfulness, memory, self-awareness, self-efficacy, and the mind-body connection can help you place your attention where it really belongs.
Peter Drucker and the Attention to Detail
Peter Drucker, the founding father of modern management, was a master of inwardly and outwardly-focused attention, a major contributing factor to his success as a writer, professor, and consultant in a career spanning more than 70 years. He kept an attentive eye and ear for information that helped him see around corners and glimpse a future that others could not.
He listened carefully while interacting with his students at the Drucker School of Management and with his consulting clients. If he did not focus his attention, he could not have written the nearly 40 books he did nor contributed regularly to such publications as the Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal.
Drucker learned the importance of attention to detail in an early, formative professional experience, as a 20-year old journalist in Germany. It laid the foundation of a diligent work ethic.
His first reporting assignment, at the newspaper Frankfurter General-Anzeiger, was to cover a criminal trial. As he remembered it, when he returned to the office from court to write his article, the editor asked him the name of the prosecutor. Drucker had missed that crucial piece of information. He had to make an embarrassing visit to the judge’s home to get the necessary detail.
If attention is not scattered on unimportant tasks and actions, Drucker believed, it could serve larger work and life goals and purposes. Attention sometimes needs to be turned to what seems urgent, but such activities may turn out not to be so important.
Attention to Lifelong Learning
Drucker was a major practitioner and proponent of lifelong learning, which requires paying careful attention whether or not you are a formal student. Think conferences, seminars, webinars, in-person and virtual meetings, and more, but always choose them carefully. Some might be unavoidable, Others may not be a productive use of your time.
No matter the experience, attention can always be enhanced by thoughtful note-taking, focused listening, minimizing distractions, and finding alternative ways of capturing thoughts and ideas—visual aids or meeting by careful review, which may spark further useful ideas and knowledge.
Teaching Immersive Attention
Some methods for training attention may seem extreme at first but could yield significant benefits. In a Harvard Magazine article titled “Teaching Students the Value of Deceleration and Immersive Attention,” Harvard art historian Jennifer L. Roberts reports that she assigns students to spend three full hours in front of a single painting in a museum, noting their own “evolving observations as well as the questions and speculations that arise from those observations.”
The lesson about art, vision, and time, she insists “goes far beyond art history. It serves as a master lesson in the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and skepticism about immediate surface appearances. I can think of few skills that are more important in academic or civic life in the twenty-first century.”
The Leader’s Attention
Jeremy Hunter, one of Drucker’s academic colleagues, has been a pioneer in teaching the management of attention to busy and often-distracted executives. He is the founding director of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute and was one of the earliest professors to incorporate mindfulness into an MBA program—as a tool for focusing attention.
In an article in Leader to Leader, “How to Recapture Leadership’s Lost Moment,” Hunter, along with the University of Virginia’s Lili Powell, writes that “to recapture leadership’s lost moment, leaders can learn to refocus on their immediate experience so they can lead more mindfully. Our approach emphasizes using intention, attention, and awareness to act and perform skillfully and dynamically in real time. Using diverse practices ranging from meditation, yoga, athletics, and the performing arts, leaders can learn to experience a moment in a high-definition way that increases the potential for better choices and leadership results.”
The Attention Economy
There will always be a scarcity of anyone’s attention. Information overload is rampant and will only increase. Time is often limited for absorbing what others write and say. The digital universe is set up to constantly hijack attention.
We are, it is said, now living in “the attention economy.” Yet the book that introduced the concept, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, was published 25 years ago—before the introduction of the smartphone and social media. You can expect the introduction of new formats of information delivery that further challenge your ability to maintain attention focus.
Attention: A Concrete Resource
Consider attention as a concrete resource rather than as an abstract concept. It is an overlooked aspect of self-management that takes time, effort, and care, but can pay dividends now and in the future.
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
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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.
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.
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