2. The American Consumer Keeps on Spending…XRT Retailer ETF New Highs on chart….+5% 2026
Google Finance
3. Supreme Court Tariff Ruling Tomorrow
More Than 1000 Companies Suing Trump Over Tariffs-Bloomberg
Bloomberg
4. S&P Revenue Per Worker Breaks Higher Out of a 15 Year Sideways Pattern
The Irrelevant Investor
5. Goldman Clients Record Bearish on Oil
Bloomberg
6. Current Middle East Natural Gas
Semafor
7. Wildcatters Head to Venezuela
“Wildcatter” oil entrepreneurs are racing to secure deals in Venezuela, as they seek to get ahead of energy majors that are still weighing the risks of re-entering the country after the US capture of Nicolás Maduro. Many have experience of working in Venezuela, while some have previously struck deals in the country, which may enable them to resume operations more speedily if the US lifts sanctions and they can secure funding.
In a very real sense, the meaning of life is therefore to create meaning.
So how does one create meaning? Two ways:
Solve Problems. The bigger the problem, the more meaning one will feel. The more work you do towards that problem, also the more meaning you will feel. Solving problems basically means finding ways to make the world a slightly better place. Can be as simple as fixing up your aging mother’s dilapidated house. Or as complex as working on the new great breakthrough in physics.
The point here is not to be picky. It’s easy, when we start thinking of how insignificant we are on a cosmic scale of the universe, to start thinking there’s no point in doing anything unless we’re going to save the world or something. This is just a distraction. There are tons of small, everyday problems going on around you that need your attention. Start giving it.
Help Others. This is the biggie. As humans, we’re wired to thrive on our relationships. Studies show that our overall well-being is deeply tied to the quality of our relationships,2 and the best way to build healthy relationships is through helping others. In fact, some studies have even found that giving stuff away makes us happier than giving stuff to ourselves.3 Go figure.
As such, it seems to be a “hack” in our brains that helping out other people gives us a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Just the fact you can say to yourself, “If I died, then someone is better off because I lived,” creates that sense of meaning that can propel you forward.
1. Friday Supreme Court Decision on Tariffs…Kalshi and Polymarket Odds Favor Tariff Vote Down
CryptoSlate
2. Dow Jones and Dow Transports Both Make New Highs-Triggering Dow Theory
From Dave Lutz at Jones Trading
The Dow Theory was triggered yesterday – “A primary trend signal is only considered valid if both the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and the Dow Jones Transportation Average (DJTA) move in the same direction, reflecting a consistent economic condition across production and distribution sectors
Investopedia
3. Investors Allocation to Bonds Back to Lows of 2008
Topdown Charts
4. Short-Term Traders—Energy 3 Standard Deviations Over 50 Day
Bespoke
5. Trump Wants to Ban Institutional Investors Buying American Homes…..Invitation Home 5-Year Negative Return
DJT “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “People live in homes, not corporations.”
Google Finance
6. Blackstone Stock Action
The Kobeissi Letter
7. U.S. Mortgage Rates Drop to Lowest in One Year…Approaching 6%
Bloomberg
8. Marcus Lemonis Lost $50m Over 10 Years on The Profit TV Show
Perplexity
9. The New American Food Pyramid
Business Insider
10. Polypharmacy -7.6M Seniors Were Simultaneously Prescribed 8 or More Meds
The WSJ recently published an article on the dangers of Polypharmacy, patients ingesting eight or more medications simultaneously.
They uncovered some alarming data concerning seniors’ healthcare.
In 2022, 7.6 million seniors were simultaneously prescribed eight or more medications for at least ninety days.
Of those seniors, 3.9 million took 10+ drugs at once.
More than 419,000 were prescribed 15+ drugs at the same time.
Among those in the analysis taking eight or more drugs, 3.6 million had prescriptions for at least one medication that geriatricians say elderly patients should avoid.
1. Profit Adjusted Forward P/E Model Not Expensive …Do Your Own Research Here
Profit-adjusted valuation. “Using our profitability-adjusted model, today’s P/E comes out to about 16.6x, just a touch higher from its 20-year average of 16.2x.”
Daily Chartbook
2. Only 2 Mag 7 Stocks Outperformed S&P 500 in 2025
@Charlie Bilello
3. Oil Service Stocks OIH Pops +9%
Google Finance
4. TAN Solar ETF Left for Dead Last Year Making Run at 2023 Highs
StockCharts
5. Space UFO ETF—2025 Broke Out of 5-Year Sideway Pattern….Broke to New Highs Yesterday
StockCharts
6. IPO Market 2026? Some Whales in Pipeline
The Irrelevant Investor
7. Median Age of Company Going Public 14 Years
Abnormal Returns
8. Natural Gas Back to Lows
Barchart
9. 4% Mortgage Update
Wolf Street Combined, the share of below 4%-mortgages dropped to 51.5% of all mortgages outstanding, the lowest since Q4 2020, as homeowners, facing changes in life – new job in a different city, divorce, growing family, death, etc. – ever so reluctantly sell their home and thereby let go of these ultra-low interest-rate mortgages.
At the peak in Q1 2022, over 65% of all mortgages outstanding had interest rates below 4%.
Wolf Street
10. Genetics, Environment, and Personality
Psychology Today Why personality has less to do with upbringing than many assume. Mark L. Ruffalo LCSW
Genetic factors account for much of the variation in personality traits across the lifespan.
Shared upbringing plays a smaller role in adult personality than many clinical models assume.
These findings have important implications for psychotherapy practice.
Most clinicians still underestimate the degree to which genetic factors shape personality traits and personality development. This is not controversial within behavioral genetics, but it remains surprisingly controversial in everyday clinical thinking.
Twin and adoption studies converge on a striking conclusion. Roughly half or more of the variance in most personality traits is attributable to genetic factors (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015). When combined with non-shared environmental influences, that figure exceeds 90%. What is notably absent is a large role for the shared environment, including broad features of upbringing that many psychotherapeutic models implicitly treat as decisive (Krueger et al., 2008).
This evidence has led me to revise my own thinking over the past few years. Like many clinicians trained in the psychoanalytic tradition, I once assumed that early relational experience held explanatory primacy for adult personality. I now believe that view substantially overstates what childhood environment can plausibly explain, even while underestimating what psychotherapy itself can still accomplish.
What the Data Actually Show
Genetic influence does not imply immutability or biological determinism. Traits can be shaped, moderated, and expressed differently over time, including through psychotherapy. What genetics challenges is not the possibility of change, but the assumption that adult personality structure is best explained by early childhood experience.
Shared family environment accounts for surprisingly little variance in adult personality. Siblings raised in the same home are often no more similar than strangers, once genetic relatedness is accounted for (Krueger et al., 2008). By contrast, non-shared environmental influences account for much of the remaining variance and often occur well outside early childhood (Plomin, 2011).
This creates a problem for psychotherapeutic models that rely on a simple developmental narrative. In those models, enduring traits are often treated as sequelae of trauma, attachment failure, or parental misattunement. Such explanations are compelling, but they often exceed what the evidence can support.
Implications for Psychotherapy
If core personality traits are strongly influenced by genetics, then many of the features patients bring into treatment are not the products of childhood adversity. They are part of the individual’s constitutional disposition. Recognizing this does not diminish the role of psychotherapy; it simply clarifies its task.
Psychotherapy can and does help patients change. It can alter patterns of affect regulation, interpersonal behavior, self-understanding, and the way personality traits are expressed over time. It does so not by locating a childhood origin for every enduring feature of personality, but by helping patients understand how their relational patterns repeatedly play out in the present.
Some contemporary psychodynamic approaches already reflect this reality. Treatments such as Kernberg’s transference-focused psychotherapy and Gunderson’s good psychiatricmanagement explicitly acknowledge temperamental and genetic factors, and they focus less on excavating hidden childhood causes than on helping patients understand current patterns of affect, relationships, and behavior.
This distinction matters clinically. Affective intensity, impulsivity, suspiciousness, and obsessionality may reflect enduring traits rather than the lasting effects of trauma. When clinicians assume otherwise, treatment can drift into elaborate reconstructions of childhood that are not well supported by the evidence.
Childhood experience still matters, but its role is often misunderstood. Development reflects an interaction between innate temperament and environment, with children shaping their environments as much as they are shaped by them. What looks like a pathogenic upbringing may in part reflect a difficult temperament eliciting more conflict or misattunement.
The arguments advanced here rest on a simple assumption that is not always made explicit: that what is true matters, and that clinical theory should be guided by the best available evidence rather than by tradition or preference.
Psychotherapy’s effectiveness lies in helping patients live more flexibly and consciously with the psychological structure they actually possess—one shaped by an interaction between innate temperament and largely non-shared environmental influences. A therapy grounded in that reality is not more limited. It is more honest, and ultimately more humane.
In professional fields, like law, medicine or accounting, it’s expected that you’ve done the reading. A professional has seen what has come before, understands the best practices and eagerly duplicates effective methods that have been shown to work.
As our understanding of marketing, management and tech has grown, there’s been a rise in intentionally naive wannabe entrepreneurs who decide that energy and authenticity are far more important than knowledge. That didn’t used to be a choice, now it is.
Sure, someone is going to win the startup lottery, but it probably isn’t going to be you. The good news is that there’s a lot to learn, all from easily accessible sources. It’s way less stressful to do it right than it is to do it over again.
The Department of Justice is asking for help reviewing 5.2 million pages of unreviewed documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, seeking to enlist 400 lawyers total from its criminal and national security divisions along with the U.S. attorneys’ offices in Florida and New York, according to people familiar with the matter.
As Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas in an interview earlier this month, the DOJ already had nearly 200 lawyers working to review the files.But in recent days, department leadership has made clear to the workforce that more help is needed.
The New York Times was first to report the development. The review of the documents is expected to take much of January, the sources said. The reorienting of resources from both the criminal and national security divisions has already raised concerns among current and former DOJ officials given the department has already diverted many of those resources towards immigration enforcement, according to sources familiar with the matter.
9. Executions in Iran estimated to have doubled in 2025, report says
Sebastian Usher Middle East analyst
The number of executions in Iran in 2025 is estimated to have more than doubled compared to the number that took place across the country in 2024.
Norwegian-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) group told the BBC it had verified at least 1,500 executions up until the start of December, adding that many more have taken place since.
Last year, IHR was able to verify 975 executions – although the exact number is never completely clear as Iranian authorities do not give official figures.
However, the analysis shows another significant annual rise, and the figures chime with those provided by other monitoring groups.
Iran’s government has previously defended its use of the death penalty, saying it is limited to only “the most severe crimes”.
Execution figures were already on the rise before mass demonstrations broke out across the country in 2022 following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini.
The 22-year-old Kurdish woman was detained by morality police in Tehran for allegedly wearing her hijab “improperly”.
That protest movement represented the biggest challenge to the legitimacy of Iran’s theocratic leadership for many years.
In response, authorities intensified the rate of executions from around 520 in 2022 to 832 the following year – according to the figures verified by IHR.
There have been some executions for protesters or alleged spies – but 99% of those executed have been for murder or drug offences – a ratio which has remained constant.
Activists have said that the rate of executions in Iran increases when the regime feels under threat and that the aim is to forestall internal opposition by instilling fear in the population.
It seems to be borne out by the fact that since the 12-day war with Israel in June, as well as major setbacks for Iran’s proxy forces across the region, there’s been another big surge.
