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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
