Category Archives: Daily Top Ten

https://insideevs.com/news/791999/tesla-unsold-inventory-record-q1-2026

1. Retail Investor Put/Call Ratio Highest in 20 Years

The Kobeissi Letter

2. Put Volume Surge Chart

Lance Roberts

3. Polymarket Odds Ceasefire Before $120 Oil

Polymarket

4. Energy and Tech Sectors History

5. Goldman Private Credit Interval Fund 5% Redemption Request

Bloomberg

6. Goldman Held 200 Day 3x in Last Month

StockCharts

7. Tesla Is Sitting On A Record 50,000 Unsold EVs

The American EV brand’s sales rebounded in the first quarter, but a new problem is making its presence felt.

Tesla has never had so many new cars sitting on lots.
The company experienced an uptick in sales during the first quarter, but production significantly exceeded deliveries.
Recently, Tesla discontinued the Model S and Model X to focus more on robotics and automation.

Tesla manufactured significantly more electric cars in the first quarter than it delivered, leading to a new record number of cars on lots. The American EV brand is sitting on 50,363 unsold vehicles, more than the company has ever had since going into business two decades ago.

The company manufactured 408,386 cars in the first quarter, a nearly 13% increase year-over-year. Meanwhile, deliveries accounted for 358,023 units, Tesla said in its latest quarterly report.

The Elon Musk-led EV maker has traditionally been quite good at matching production numbers with deliveries, striking a delicate balance between manufacturing and demand. The last time it had such a big difference was in the first quarter of 2024, when production surpassed deliveries by 46,500 units, according to Business Insider.

Tesla’s sales performance is a win for the company, as the American car industry is facing a slowdown. That said, the company’s figures did not live up to analysts’ expectations, with a recent forecast by Bloomberg forecasting 372,160 sales.

After the Trump administration scrapped the $7,500 federal tax credit for new EVs last year, several automakers have been reevaluating their electrification plans. Ford has discontinued the F-150 Lightning pickup truck, Honda has canceled three upcoming electric models, and Stellantis has scrapped all of its U.S.-bound plug-in hybrid models.

Tesla, too, is slimming down its portfolio. The Model S and Model X were discontinued on April 1, after over a decade in service, leaving just the Model 3 and Model Y to bring in the money. The Cybertruck is available, too, but its sales numbers pale compared to the company’s breadwinners, with fewer than 16,000 units reaching new customers from January through March.

Overall, 28% fewer EVs have been sold in the U.S. in the first three months of 2026, according to Cox Automotive estimates, and car companies are feeling the heat. However, not all brands are slashing models left and right. Rivian is gearing up for the launch of the R2, BMW is bringing the new iX3 and i3, and Volvo is on track to start deliveries of the new EX60 later this year.

8. Space X IPO Price to Sales

Prof G Markets

9. No pressure, SpaceX, but your blockbuster IPO could reshape the market as we know it-BI

By Joe Ciolli Author of the First Trade newsletter

SpaceX has filed to go public, and its IPO is expected in the next couple of months.
The size and influence of the offering will be nearly unrivaled in the history of markets.
Detailed below are three ways a SpaceX IPO could reshape markets as we know them.
How might SpaceX’s IPO affect other sectors?
Why is SpaceX’s IPO timing significant?
What challenges do mega-IPOs face today?
What are the risks of concentration in indexes?
How does SpaceX’s IPO compare to others?

Did you hear about the trend in markets that was red-hot until the Iran war came and threw cold water on it?

I could be talking about any number of things. But, in honor of SpaceX’s recent filing to go public, I’m speaking specifically today about the IPO market.

On the surface, 2026 has started strong enough. The $24 billion in proceeds raised by IPOs in the first quarter is nearly double the same period in 2025. But after the start of the Iran war in late February, the IPO count and total capital raised were cut in half in March, Bloomberg data shows.

The fact that SpaceX is forging ahead with an offering during macro instability tells you how confident CEO Elon Musk is in the company’s public-market prospects.

And, despite its immense size (the latest reports say SpaceX is seeking a valuation north of $2 trillion), the offering itself will pale in comparison to the wide-reaching impact it has on the IPO market and other companies overall.

Here are three major considerations as SpaceX prepared to reshape public markets:

1. It could reset valuations across the space economy

SpaceX going public is expected to add legitimacy to an industry that was previously treated as a high-risk frontier investment.

A re-rating of space stocks has already started occurring across multiple subsectors. Rocket Lab, the purest comp for SpaceX, is up 7% since reports of the IPO filing.

Other launch-adjacent names like Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines have seen even bigger gains of roughly 25%, while satellite providers like Planet Labs and Viasat are up double-digit percentages over the period.

2. It could supercharge concentration risk in major indexes

One controversial development associated with the SpaceX IPO has been Nasdaq’s proposed “fast entry” rule. Basically, Nasdaq wants SpaceX to be in the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index as soon as possible, so they’re considering shortening the inclusion timeline from three months to 15 days.

While this would hasten the ability of everyday investors to buy exposure to SpaceX, it also could ramp up concentration risk. The argument goes: If a few market-cap titans can dictate the direction of a whole index, that’s too much power, and leaves the gauge vulnerable. It’s a dynamic investors have contended with for years amid the rise of the Magnificent 7.

3. It will set the tone for mega-IPOs to come

As SpaceX prepares for its public debut, other private juggernauts like OpenAI and Anthropic will be watching closely. How SpaceX fares could ultimately determine when they file to go public, how much they’ll aim to raise, which

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-ipo-outlook-stock-market-impact-openai-anthropic-concentration-risk-2026-4

10. Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger: “If you’re a pure socialist, you’re a nutcase. An absolute nutcase. And not a modest nutcase — a real nutcase.” “You can be a perfect nut with a high IQ.” “If we want a productive society, we can’t help but have these personal incentives to handle your own affairs — and if you do that, you get unequal wealth outcomes. The price of plenty is that you can’t have socialism.”

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 April 06, 2026

April 6, 2026

1. AI Spending Dwarfs Other Booms

Capital Group

2. Private Credit Redemption Requests

Zero Hedge

3. Summary of Investor Redemptions from Private Credit Quarterly-WSJ

WSJ

4. Good Jobs Numbers and Loan Growth at U.S. Commercial Banks Still Very Strong

Loan growth. “Loan growth at US commercial banks remains very strong, with no sign of a credit crunch emerging. We suspect banks may be stepping up to purchase private loans at attractive distressed prices.”

Ed Yardeni – Yardeni Research

5. Buybacks Due Back Soon

Lance Roberts

6. Global Market Share Cloud Providers-Prof G

Prof G Media

7. Top 10 Energy Producing States

The Philadelphia Inquirer

8. Russian Territorial Gains in Ukraine Shrinking

Russia made no territorial gains in March, the first time its progress has stalled entirely in more than two years. Ukrainian forces even recaptured small areas of territory, the Institute for the Study of War data showed. Moscow’s advance has been slowing since late last year: It took just 123 square miles in January and 47 in February, the smallest gains since April 2024. The ISW said Ukrainian counteroffensives were one reason, as well as technological issues that have hindered battlefield communication: Starlink has cut Russia’s access to its satellite internet, and the Kremlin prevented its own troops from using the messaging app Telegram in favor of a state-run option.

Semafor

9. 43% of Iran’s Population in Under 25 Years Old

10. 5 Neuroscience-Backed Tips for Beating Procrastination

The real reason you can’t start that important task has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with how your brain handles being overloaded.

“I don’t know why I’m procrastinating on this.”

I hear this constantly from people who are clearly motivated, clearly capable, but stuck on one important project. It’s been on their list for weeks. They see it every day. They know it’s important. And yet, week after week goes by with no progress.

Their prescribed fix? Wake up earlier. Be more disciplined. Push through.

That almost never works, because the diagnosis is wrong.

What’s actually happening isn’t procrastination at all. It’s cognitive overload. And treating it like procrastination is why so many smart, driven people stay stuck.

In cognitive overload, your brain goes on defense

When you’re cognitively overloaded, the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain responsible for focus, judgment, and executive function) goes offline, and your more primitive limbic system takes over. Stress hormones like cortisol spike, preparing your body to act on instinct rather than careful consideration. Your brain shifts from rational decision-making mode into survival mode. And in survival mode, the brain does two things reliably: it reaches for what feels familiar, and it avoids anything that feels threatening or overwhelming.

That means that difficult, value-additive and important projects become even harder to take action on, while straightforward tasks like email processing and doing the dishes end up sucking up your most valuable energy of the day.

Studies on cognitive overload show that when information demands exceed mental capacity, people shift toward avoidance and low-effort tasks. Not because they lack motivation, but because the brain is protecting itself from overload. And in digitally saturated work environments, where employees juggle emails, chat messages, documents, and meetings all via a computer screen, cognitive load rises quickly and sustained focus becomes dramatically harder.

Dr. Samantha Madhosingh, leadership consultant and psychologist, puts it plainly: “When the thinking part of your brain goes offline, you cannot make decisions in the way you need to. You’ve got to get that part back online.”

Why traditional advice fails

Cognitive overload doesn’t always manifest in the same way. In our coaching work, we see two distinct patterns among high performers. The first is flight — running to low-stakes, cognitively easy work. This is the person who clears their inbox before tackling the big project. They answer easy questions from team members, attend to small requests, handle anything that isn’t the one important thing. Their brain is busy, but it’s busy on the wrong things. At Lifehack Method, we call this the “rush mentality,” where you’re moving fast in all directions, mistaking motion for progress.

The second is freeze — what looks, from the outside, like laziness. This is the person who is fully aware they need to work on something but hours pass and they’re still playing a game on their phone, or doom scrolling on Instagram. High performance coach Tiffany Toombs Clevinger calls this a “functional freeze.” The brain isn’t being lazy; it’s in shutdown mode, seeking the dopamine relief of passive consumption to escape an overwhelming internal state. It can even manifest as such intense mental fatigue that you feel compelled to lie down and take a nap.

In both cases, the traditional advice (get more disciplined, wake up at 5 a.m., just push through) fails because it doesn’t address what’s actually happening. You aren’t stuck because you’re lacking discipline or need to push harder. You’re stuck because your attention is fragmented and your cognitive bandwidth is maxed out.

How to get your brain back online

Once you understand the actual issue, the fixes become much clearer. Here’s how high performers take a step back and regain control:

1. Fill up the mental gas tank.

The counterintuitive first move when you’re overwhelmed is to slow down and take a brain break. Remember that working at a computer doesn’t tire your body, but it does tire your brain. Taking a short break every few hours can tamp down on the buildup of digital fatigue and keep your brain functioning optimally, according to Microsoft’s Work Index Report. (Yes, even if you’re in a “flow state” and don’t want to stop.)

Clevinger says this approach helps you improve your focus and concentration. “Our bodies have something called an ultradian rhythm. Mentally, we can focus well for anywhere between one to two hours. Ninety minutes is kind of the sweet spot. Then we need a 20–30 minute break to refresh and come back with more clarity. It’s like filling the gas tank in your car.”

A short change of scenery is an easy way to get your prefrontal cortex back online. In many cases, it’s enough to shift your nervous system out of that high-alert state and help you regain perspective.

2. Reduce cognitive load before you try to work through it.

One of the biggest mistakes high performers make is treating every item in their inbox and task list as equally urgent, which essentially lets the loudest voice in the room set their agenda. This is a guaranteed path to overwhelm.

When you take a closer look, tasks that feel incredibly urgent typically are not all that urgent. At Lifehack Method, we teach task list triage as a strategy to counteract this tendency to over-inflate urgency. When you start from the premise that not everything will get done this week, it makes it easier to accept that you need to make hard decisions about what will get done and what will fall to the wayside.

Ask yourself: how can I do the most good with my limited supply of time this week? Which of these tasks is truly mission-critical? What can be pushed, delegated, or dropped entirely? The best analogy is a triage doctor on a battlefield: you cannot treat everyone at once, and pretending otherwise actually saves fewer patients. Ruthless prioritization is an act of service, not selfishness.

3. Protect your best cognitive energy.

Most professionals scatter their deep work throughout the day, wedging it between meetings, emails, and requests. This is like trying to write a novel in the middle of a busy airport. Technically possible, but wildly inefficient and unenjoyable.

Instead, schedule your high-leverage, cognitively demanding work earlier in the day and earlier in the week, when your mental energy is freshest. Monday and Tuesday mornings are your most valuable hours of the week for this reason. Push meetings and shallow work later in the day and later in the week (many professionals find value in scheduling all their meetings on Thursdays and Fridays, for example).

Batch your email and Slack chats into two or three dedicated windows per day and close your inboxes in between. Tell your colleagues to call your phone in a genuine emergency, so you can focus on deep work with confidence.

4. Choose one leveraged priority for the week.

Instead of asking yourself what needs to get done this week (the answer is always “everything”), ask yourself: What can I accomplish this week that makes every future week easier?

This is a leveraged priority. It’s the thing that, if you do it, reduces the friction for everything that comes after. Often, it’s something that isn’t even on your radar because no one is breathing down your neck asking you to get it done. And yet, if you take the time to identify your leveraged priority, you’ll find yourself moving swiftly and smoothly toward your long-term goals.

Most professionals never ask this question because they’re lost in the swirl of daily overwhelm. They react to what’s loudest, and then wonder why they feel behind. Choosing one clear, leveraged priority every week is how you get off defense and onto offense.

5. Get started by “breaking the seal.”

One of the most common frustrations I hear from clients is that starting is harder than continuing. Once they’re into it, it flows. It’s that first 5 minutes that feels impossible. If you find yourself facing this issue, don’t stare down the whole project. Instead, commit to doing the very first, smallest piece of the task, with no goal other than beginning. That might look like navigating to a website, finding a phone number, or opening up a blank document. Once the seal is broken, you’ll breathe easier knowing that the ball has started rolling.

This works because the brain’s resistance to starting a difficult task is highest before you’ve made any progress. Clevinger describes this as a momentum window, designed to get dopamine flowing through quick wins. “For an author, task one is to open your computer and open a Word document. Task two is to write the first sentence. And it doesn’t even have to be the first sentence of the first chapter, just any sentence. Then write another one. Dopamine from [achieving these tasks] kicks in around the 10-minute mark.”

Breaking the seal exists purely to get the engine started. Once the momentum kicks in, stopping becomes harder than continuing.

If you lead a team, this is your problem too

Cognitive overload isn’t only an individual issue. Managers and HR professionals increasingly recognize it as an organizational problem, and for good reason. Burned out employees cost companies real money in lost productivity and turnover. A study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates that burnout costs American companies between $4,000 and $21,000 per employee. For a company with 1,000 employees, that could mean losses of $5 million annually.

The friction you create for your team has a direct impact on their cognitive capacity. Meeting overload, unclear priorities, last-minute requests, and reactive communication cultures all add to the load your team carries.

The question worth asking is: am I building an environment where deep work is possible, or am I inadvertently making it harder? A few small team-wide changes (such as protected focus blocks, meeting-free days, and no communications outside of work hours) can meaningfully replenish the cognitive bandwidth your team needs to do their best work.

Be mindful of your cognitive load

The reason traditional anti-procrastination advice fails so often is that it asks you to out-discipline an evolutionary state. That’s not a fair fight.

Cognitive overload is manageable, but not by pushing harder through it. The professionals making the most progress take care of their brain’s health through intentional breaks, make deliberate choices about what to protect and what to let go, and build an environment that makes focus possible.

Be incredibly mindful of your cognitive load. Small changes compound faster than you’d expect. And the next time you catch yourself thinking “I’m so behind” — pause. That feeling isn’t evidence of a character flaw. It’s a signal that something in your system needs adjusting.

That’s a much more solvable problem.

By Carey Bentley

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 April 02, 2026

April 2, 2026

1. Momentum on Tuesday

The Kobeissi Letter

2. Truflation Moves Down from 1.77% to 1.26%

Truflation

3. Foreign Central Banks Holdings of Treasuries-FT

Financial Times

4. SuperMicro C-Suite Fraud…Not Totally Breaking to Zero…

StockCharts

5. China Large Cap-Failed to Make New High Multiple Times…50day thru 200day to Downside

StockCharts

6. Emerging Markets Held 200-Day in Iran War Pullback

StockCharts

7. Emerging Markets (EEM) was About to Move Ahead of S&P (SPY) on 3-Year Return Basis Before Iran Bombing

YCharts

8. Huge Volatility in Silver-Never Got Close to 200-Day Break

9. Venture Dollars are Concentrating into a Handful of Deals

The Irrelevant Investor

10. 7 Types of Rest

Brilliance Brief

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 April 01, 2026

April 1, 2026

1. Bear Market History

Bear markets. “Looking at the other 11 bear markets since the S&P 500 became 500 stocks shows that they usually start with a quick drop from ATHs. In fact, down 5% in only 14.5 days on avg those times. The recent 5% mild pullback took a very long 35 trading days, which would by far be the most ever should this turn into a bear market.”

The Daily Shot

2. AAPL Traded Right to 200-Day

StockCharts

3. MSFT Worst Quarter Since 2008

Yahoo Finance

4. MSFT Cheaper than S&P….Microsoft Now Lags S&P by Earnings Multiple

CNBC

5. Historic Selloff in Asian Emerging Markets

Dave Lutz Jones Trading Many Asian economies saw factory activity slow in March, business surveys showed on April 1, a sign surging fuel costs and heightening global uncertainty from the Iran war were taking a toll on the region – Manufacturing activity in March slowed in economies ranging from Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, other PMIs showed, highlighting the pain the Middle East conflict was already inflicting on businesses. Japanese Input prices rose at the fastest rate since August 2024 as the Middle East war drove up energy and raw material prices, adding to cost pressures from a weak yen and labor shortages.

6. This Chart Shows XLE Energy ETF vs. XLF Financials ETF for 2026…Bulls Need this Chart to Reverse Down

StockCharts

7. Earnings vs. S&P Chart

Chart Kid Matt

8. Mid-Term Elections Polymarket

Jack Ablin Cresset Notwithstanding the difficult environment for Republicans, Democrats still face a tough map as they look to win the four seats to claim a majority in the Senate, and will have to win some long-shot races to get there. Republicans are defending nearly two-thirds of the Senate seats on the ballot in 2026. Prediction markets suggesting that Democrats have a nearly equal chance of retaking the Senate after the midterm elections are overstating the likelihood.

Cresset

9. Japan has 9 Million Vacant Homes-13-14% of its Total Housing Stock…Bad Demographics

Perplexity

10. 60% of Americans Now Live in South or West

Pew Research Center

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 31, 2026

March 31, 2026

https://www.success.com/brain-on-nature-mental-performance-outdoors

1. S&P Valuation Below 20x Forward P/E Still Well Above Median and Liberation Day Levels

JP Morgan Asset Management

2. ACWI Global Stock Index 12 month and 24 month Forward P/E Lower

3. Seasonality for Q2 Presidential Cycle

Ryan Detrick

4. 30-Year Treasury Close to 5%…Close to Highest Level Since GFC

Barchart

5. INDA India Stock Market Now Down on One-Year Basis

Google Finance

6. Trump Approval Rating Suffering

Prof G Media

7. Trump Media Stock DJT -37% 2026…Breaks to New Lows

StockCharts

8. Waymo 500k Trips Per Week

chartr

9. Fidel Castro Wealthy Parents

Perplexity

10. Your Brain on Nature: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Mental Performance and the Outdoors

By SUCCESS Staff March 27, 20268 min read

You’ve probably dismissed the afternoon walk more times than you can count.

There’s a deadline. There’s a meeting. There’s a message that needs answering. The idea of stepping outside for 20 minutes feels indulgent at best, irresponsible at worst—like something you’ll reward yourself with once the work is done.

Here’s the thing: The neuroscience says you have it exactly backward.

Spending time in natural environments isn’t a break from high performance. According to a growing and increasingly rigorous body of research, it’s one of the most direct routes to it. This isn’t wellness advice dressed up in productivity language. This is brain imaging data, randomized controlled trials and cortisol measurements—pointing to the same conclusion. Your brain on nature performs measurably better than your brain without it.

Here’s what the research actually shows—and how to use it.

Science Has Finally Caught Up to What You Already Suspected

For years, the benefits of being outdoors were treated as anecdotal—a feeling, not a fact. That’s no longer a defensible position.

A comprehensive scoping review published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews in early 2026 synthesized neuroimaging findings from EEG, fMRI and structural MRI studies conducted across real-world settings, controlled labs and even virtual environments. Across all these settings, exposure to natural stimuli was reliably associated with acute reductions in activity within stress-related and self-referential brain circuits, shifts toward brain states consistent with attentional restoration and longer-term structural advantages in cognition.

Read that carefully. This isn’t self-reported relaxation. This is measurable neurological change—visible on brain scans—from exposure to nature.

The review goes further, noting that natural environments may function as “spontaneous regulators” of the nervous system, passively guiding the brain toward states that are otherwise cultivated through intentional contemplative practice—states that most high-performers spend significant time and money trying to replicate through meditation apps, breathwork and recovery protocols.

Nature, it turns out, may do it for free.

Why Your Brain Needs a Different Kind of Input

To understand why the outdoors restores mental performance, you need to understand what depletes it in the first place.

Modern work environments are relentlessly demanding on a specific cognitive resource: directed attention. Every email, notification, decision and open browser tab requires your prefrontal cortex to actively filter, prioritize and select. This is effortful work—and like any resource, it has a limit.

Attention restoration theory, developed by researcher Stephen Kaplan, proposes that natural environments restore this capacity because they engage attention in a fundamentally different way. Natural settings are engaging to look at, but in a way that does not place much demand on executive attention resources—allowing the directed attention system to rest and recover.

The analogy that holds up: Your directed attention is like a muscle. Working in a screen-saturated environment flexes it continuously, without recovery. Nature gives it something to engage with that doesn’t require effort—and that difference is measurable at the neural level.

What Happens to Your Brain on a Nature Walk

A 2024 randomized controlled trial published in Scientific Reports put this directly to the test with 92 participants, comparing a 40-minute nature walk against an urban walk of identical time, distance, pace and physical exertion.

While positive affect improved for both groups, nature walkers showed a significantly greater boost in mood than urban walkers. EEG data revealed greater frontal midline theta activity following the urban walk compared to the nature walk, suggesting the urban walk placed higher demands on executive attention, while the nature walk left those resources intact and available.

The practical implication is significant. When you return from a city walk—navigating traffic, pedestrians, noise—your attention system has been working the whole time. If you return from a park walk, it has been quietly recovering. The same amount of time produces meaningfully different cognitive states.

But it doesn’t stop there.

The Stress Hormone Effect Is Measurable and Fast

Mental performance and stress physiology are inseparable. When cortisol—the primary stress hormone—is chronically elevated, it impairs memory consolidation, narrows creative thinking and degrades decision quality. Managing it isn’t optional for high performance; it’s foundational.

Nature exposure produces measurable cortisol reduction. A randomized controlled study published in Environment and Behavior found that walking in nature resulted in lower cortisol levels than either watching nature on screen or walking on a treadmill indoors—and the effect was strongest during periods of real-life stress.

More recently, a 2025 study published in Scientific Reports found that repeated forest walks produced lower cumulative hair cortisol concentrations—a marker of chronic rather than acute stress—alongside measurable improvements in emotional well-being. This matters specifically for leaders and professionals carrying sustained workloads: The benefit isn’t just a momentary reset. Regular outdoor exposure appears to shift the baseline.

The key is to understand this as a performance input, not a mood enhancement. Lower cortisol means sharper recall, wider thinking and better judgment—the exact cognitive outputs that drive professional results.

Walking Outdoors Increases Creative Output

Here is one of the most practically useful findings in this entire body of research.

Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz published a landmark study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology demonstrating that a person’s creative output increased by an average of 60% when walking compared to sitting, with the overwhelming majority of participants showing improved performance on divergent thinking tasks while in motion.

Divergent thinking—the ability to generate multiple novel ideas from a single prompt—is the cognitive mode most associated with problem-solving, strategic brainstorming and creative work. It’s exactly what gets compressed under pressure, after a string of back-to-back meetings or when you’ve been staring at the same problem for too long.

The researchers noted that the benefits of walking applied specifically to divergent thinking, but not to convergent thinking—the focused, analytical work that requires a single correct answer.

So what does this mean for you? Walking isn’t a substitute for deep focus work. It’s a tool for a specific cognitive mode—idea generation, reframing, strategic thinking—and it works best when deployed intentionally at the front end of that kind of work, not after it.

The Attention Restoration Effect Kicks In Faster Than You Think

One of the most common objections to building outdoor time into a workday is the assumption that meaningful restoration requires significant duration. The research does not support this.

A review examining short-term nature exposures ranging from 10 to 90 minutes found that in 12 out of 14 studies, cognitive benefits—specifically directed attention restoration from mental fatigue—merged across all educational levels following even brief contact with nature.

Twenty minutes is enough to move the needle on attentional capacity. Forty minutes is enough to produce measurable changes in brain activity. This is not a prescription for a two-hour retreat. It’s a case for a lunch break that actually restores something.

The accumulated evidence has practical implications for workplace architecture, urban planning and mental health interventions, suggesting that incorporating nature exposure into daily routines represents a scientifically grounded strategy for enhancing resilience, reducing stress and supporting cognitive performance.

How to Build This Into Your Real Schedule

The research is consistent enough to act on. Here’s a practical framework that doesn’t require overhauling your calendar.

Use the walk as a premeeting cognitive primer. The creativity data shows a residual boost that persists after walking ends. A 15-to-20-minute outdoor walk before a strategy session, a difficult conversation or a brainstorming block loads your brain with exactly the cognitive resource that work will draw on.

Treat outdoor breaks as attentional recovery, not time off. Reframe the narrative. You are not stepping away from work; you are recovering the directed attention capacity that makes work productive. A 20-minute park walk midafternoon is an investment in the quality of the three hours that follow.

Prioritize green space over built environments when you can. The research consistently shows that natural settings outperform urban settings for cortisol reduction and attentional restoration, even when physical exertion is the same. Your commute walk doesn’t count in the same way, so seek out a park, a trail or even a tree-lined street.

Go without your phone when the goal is restoration. Checking messages during an outdoor walk reactivates the directed attention demands you’re trying to recover from. It defeats the mechanism. For the walk to function as a cognitive reset, give your prefrontal cortex permishttps://www.success.com/brain-on-nature-mental-performance-outdoorssion to disengage from inputs entirely.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 30, 2026

March 30, 2026

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/202603/something-to-live-for-lessons-from-the-science-of-purpose

1. Drawdowns from Highs

Ben Carlson

2. NVDA Officially Hits -20% from Highs…Big Support Line

StockCharts

3. IGV Software Index Big Support Line

StockCharts

4. Blue Owl…In Danger of Hitting 2022 Lows

StockCharts

5. PLTR Palantir….Ran Back Up to 200-Day Twice and Failed

StockCharts

6. Luxury Industry in Severe Drawdown

Luxury Hangover? Inside the Industry’s Sudden Collapse

For the better part of the last two decades, luxury was the place to be.

A growing upper-class drove greater volumes, brands consistently raised prices, and profit margins expanded.

But starting around 2023/2024, cracks started to show.

And now, the entire industry is in a severe drawdown.

Fundamental Charting

7. Hedge Fund Selling

Macro Charts

8. Space-X Private Shares …The Modern Day IPO-How Much is Priced In?

Barron’s

9. LNG Exports ….The World Does Not Have an Emergency Reserve

WSJ

10. Something to Live For: Lessons from the Science of Purpose

Sources of purpose are more universal than we might think.-Psychology Today Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D.

Key points

Purpose in life is linked to physical and mental health benefits.
A recent study identified 16 sources of purpose, examining how each predicts the three pillars of a good life.
Across four cultures, people were similar in how they endorsed these sources of purpose.

In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s stories, God leaves it to humans to think of a purpose for everything, including “all this.” Purpose gives us something to live for. It also provides the foundation to pursue that something. In our day-to-day lives, in ways big and small, we experience the truth of what philosophers have long posited: the why leads us to the how.

In psychology, purpose is defined as “a central, self-organizing life aim that organizes and stimulates goals, manages behaviors, and provides a sense of meaning.” When our lives are guided by an overarching sense of purpose, we reap a wealth of benefits for our physical and mental health – from greater life satisfaction to a slower cognitive decline.

What are some of the common places where humans find their purpose?

As a poignant reminder of our shared humanity, we tend to derive purpose from similar sources despite the remarkable diversity of our lives.

The Pillars of a Good Life

A recent study explored the various sources from which humans find purpose and then mapped them onto the three fundamental pillars of a good life: happiness, meaning, psychological richness. The authors sought to understand how having different kinds of purpose predicted these three dimensions of a good life. From an initial pool of over 2000 open-ended responses from US participants, Mask et al. (2025) identified 16 common sources of purpose in life.

Self-improvement – Becoming the best version of yourself through acquiring knowledge, exploration, pursuit of hobbies.
Family – Providing for your family; having children; looking after your loved ones.
Relationships – Forming and nurturing close connections with others, including friends and romantic partners.
Religion/Spirituality – Living in alignment with your religious or spiritual beliefs and values.
Recognition – Earning respect and recognition from others; having high social standing in professional, community or peer settings.
Happiness – Taking pleasure in and enjoying life, being happy, feeling good.
Self-sufficiency – Having the capacity to take care of yourself physically and financially; being free to choose your own path.
Material Wealth – Accumulating wealth and material possessions; “buying whatever you want.”
Internal Standards – Living in accordance with your personal principles, beliefs and values; “knowing who you are” and demonstrating authenticity.
Positive Impact – “Making the world a better place.” Engaging in actions that promote charitable, political, environmental or scientific betterment.
Mattering – Creating a lasting contribution and legacy; inspiring others; leaving an impact.
Occupational Fulfillment – Discovering a sense of purpose and calling through work; excelling at your work.
Persevering – Coping well with life’s challenges and persevering through adversity.
Physical Health – Prioritizing caring for your physical health and body.
Inner Peace – Cultivating gratitude, acceptance, mindfulness, and emotion regulation and savouring positive experiences.
Service – Contributing to the well-being of others in your community; serving others and honoring your responsibilities.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 27, 2026

March 27, 2026

1. Mag 7 -15% from Highs…Next Watch for 50day thru 200day to Downside

StockCharts

2. Tech Stock Premium Over S&P Has Vanished

Tech vs. SPX. Tech’s premium over the S&P 500 has all but vanished: now at the lowest since early 2019.

Duality Research

3. MSFT Drawdown Worse than Liberation Day and Covid

Mike Zaccardi

4. Vanguard Growth VUG vs. Vanguard Value VTV 2026….VTV +3.5% vs. VUG -9%

YChart

5. S&P on Track for 5^th Straight Down Week

Barchart

6. Private Credit Playing Out …Will Private Equity Underlying Holdings Get Marked Down?

Dave Lutz Jones Trading–The accumulation of unsold private assets on investors’ balance sheets is a warning that some may be overvalued — and a spark could trigger a widespread markdown, according to Lloyd Blankfein, former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs. “At some point there needs to be a forcing function or a reckoning that causes you to come to grips with what your balance sheet really is worth,” Blankfein said. “The analogy I like to give is you accumulate tinder on the floor of the forest and eventually a spark will come,” Blankfein said. “But the longer between intervals where there’s a spark that sets it on fire, the more that accumulates”

7. Private Equity Funds Raised the Most Money in 2025

PitchBook

8. 30 Year Fixed Mortgage Post War

Adam Kobeissi

9. $417B Sports Industry

Visual Capitalist

10. Ego Self vs. Best Self

Ben Sands

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 26, 2026

March 26, 2026

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-much-it-could-cost-to-fix-mideast-oil-and-gas-production-damaged-by-the-iran-war-47f11ed1?mod=home_lead

1. Magnificent 7 Stocks Pullback from 52 Week Highs

Evan

2. META at Support Level

StockCharts

3. Summary of Demands for Iran Ceasefire

Giovanni Staunovo

From Dave Lutz at Jones Trading.

Here’s how much it could cost to fix Mideast oil and gas production damaged by the Iran war

4. Rystad Energy puts the price tag on eventual repairs to energy infrastructure in the tens of billions of dollars

Marketwatch By Claudia Assis

Key Points

About This Summary

Damage to Middle East oil-and-gas infrastructure will cost at least $25 billion and take years to repair, hindering production restoration.
Hopes for a U.S. cease-fire proposal led to lower crude-oil futures and U.S. stock gains, as markets reacted to potential de-escalation.
U.S. oil-field service companies, including Weatherford International and SLB, are well positioned to benefit from eventual recovery.

The damage to oil-and-gas infrastructure in the Middle East caused by the war with Iran will take years and billions of dollars to repair, which would hamper efforts to fully restore production even if the conflict were to end soon.

Analysts at Rystad Energy are among the first to put a price tag on estimates to fix it: at least $25 billion, and very possibly more.

Oil Services ETF OIH-Breakout and 50week crossing to Upside 200week on Long-Term Chart.

StockCharts

5. Solar Not Winning with Higher Oil Prices….FSLR -30% from Highs…50day Close to Crossing Below 200day

StockCharts

6. Monthly Claude.AI Visits Worldwide

WSJ

7. History suggests that most productivity gains have gravitated toward capital owners. ….In 1990 Capital Exploded vs. Labor

Jack Ablin

8. Number of Americans Worth Eight to Nine Figures is Up in Size

WSJ The number of Americans worth eight or even nine figures is up markedly. It’s transforming the U.S. economy. Rachel Louise Ensign

WSJ

9. Americans Thoughts on Iran

The Associated Press

10. Top 25 Places to Live-Niche.com

See the list of the top 25 places to live below:

Atlantic Station (Neighborhood in Atlanta, GA)
Colonial Village (Neighborhood in Arlington, VA)
Evergreen Park (Neighborhood in Palo Alto, CA)
Downtown North (Neighborhood in Palo Alto, CA
Clarendon Hills (Suburb of Chicago, IL)
Midtown (Neighborhood in Atlanta, GA)
Ardmore (Suburb of Philadelphia, PA)
Devon (Suburb of Philadelphia, PA)
Penn Wynne (Suburb of Philadelphia, PA)
College Terrace (Neighborhood in Palo Alto, CA)
Innsbrook (Suburb of Richmond, VA)
Chesterbrook (Suburb of Philadelphia, PA)
University Heights (Suburb of Cedar Rapids, IA)
Radnor/Fort Myer Heights (Neighborhood in Arlington, VA)
Harbour Island (Neighborhood in Tampa, FL)
University South (Neighborhood in Palo Alto, CA)
City Center (Neighborhood in Santa Monica, CA)
Cambridgeport (Neighborhood in Cambridge, MA)
Cinco Ranch (Suburb of Houston, TX)
Brookline (Suburb of Boston, MA)
Kensington (Suburb of New York City, NY)
Pinehurst Estates (Neighborhood in Overland Park, KS)
Triangle State (Neighborhood in Austin, TX)
Columbia Heights (Neighborhood in Arlington, VA)
Ballston/Virginia Square (Neighborhood in Arlington, VA)

You can visit the Niche.com study for the full ranking

https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5797250-these-are-the-best-places-to-live-in-the-us-for-2026-study-finds/?ipid=promo-link-block2

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 25, 2026

March 25, 2026

https://seths.blog/page/2/

1. Defensive Stocks Expensive According to PEG Ratio

Chart Kid Matt The PEG ratio adjusts “P/E” for “long-term earnings growth”.

Higher earnings growth relative to P/E will get you a lower PEG
Lower earnings growth relative to P/E will get you a higher PEG

Earnings growth is assessed on a forward basis based on consensus estimates.

The point is, P/E has little value without understanding how the “E” is expected to change in the future.

Because PEG takes the forward change of the “E” into account, I think it’s a superior fundamental metric to watch than just looking at the P/E.

So in today’s chart, I took the Russell 3000 constituents with available data and plotted the median PEG ratio by sector.

I want to see where the “cheap” and “expensive” stocks are based on this metric.

Here it is, sorted by Cyclicals, Near Cyclicals, and Defensives:

Remember, a higher PEG ratio means a “higher valuation.”

https://chartkidmatt.com

2. Price Increases Shipping, Fertilizer, and Chemicals-Ed Elson

Prof G Markets

3. Gulf Share of World Production-Barrons

Barron’s

4. Prices Since Start of Iran War

@Charlie Bilello

5. Investors Selling Consumer Discretionary Stocks Due to Higher Inflation….XLY -10% …Close Below 200-Day

StockCharts

6. Traders placed $580mn in oil bets ahead of Donald Trump’s social media post on Iran talks Thousands of Brent and WTI contracts changed hands 15 minutes before president’s message on Truth Social-FT

Financial Times

7. Summary of Withdraw Requests from Private Equity Credit Funds

8. INDIA Highest AI Adoption Rate

Visual Capitalist

9. Americans Large House vs. Small House

Pew Research Center

10. Look for Green Flags Not Red Flags

Green flags

We were taught to look out for red flags. Little signs that something is wrong, that we should be careful or even turn around.

Don’t let that distract you from being on the lookout for green flags.

We might need encouragement to leap forward. If you look for the green flags, you’re more likely to find them.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 24, 2026

March 24, 2026

1. Record Volume Downside Friday and Upside Monday

Up vs. down volume. “A day after the heaviest down volume in NYSE history, we get the heaviest up volume. Totally normal market.”

Daily Chartbook

2. One-Month Returns IGV Software ETF Outperforming QQQ and Semis (SMH)

YCharts

3. Silver Down 10 Days in a Row. -21% One Month

Google Finance

4. BETZ Sports Gambling ETF Negative 5 Year Returns

Google Finance

5. Anthropic Catching Open AI in Revenues

The Irrelevant Investor

6. Bonds Correlated to Stocks During Inflation

“Higher inflationary pressures limit central banks’ ability to help and some will be forced to hike into a down growth cycle to arrest inflation and also FX depreciation,” said Trinh Nguyen, a senior economist at Natixis in Hong Kong.

Bloomberg

7. Coal Still 25-30% of Global Energy ….80% in Asia

Oilprice

8. Ukraine Takes Back 150 Miles from Russia with Some Help From Elon Musk

Ukraine Is Suddenly on the Offensive, With Help From Elon Musk

Kyiv’s forces have notched their biggest domestic territorial gains in more than two years after Russia lost the use of Starlink

WSJ

9. 16-24 Year Olds Believe in Astrology-Prof G Markets

Prof G Markets

10. Science Explains Why You Wake Up at 3 a.m., and How to Go Back to Sleep

About one in five people have middle-of-the-night insomnia.

EXPERT OPINION BY MINDA ZETLIN, AUTHOR OF ‘CAREER SELF-CARE: FIND YOUR HAPPINESS, SUCCESS, AND FULFILLMENT AT WORK’ @MINDAZETLIN

What should you do if you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep? This is one of the most common—and frustrating—forms of insomnia. It turns out there’s a biological reason for it. And there are things you can do that may help you drop off again quickly.

If you’re an entrepreneur or business leader, this may have happened to you more than once. Starting a business and being responsible for a team of employees means you may have a lot to worry about. In the middle of the night, those worries seem to grow more powerful and harder to set aside or ignore. You find yourself stuck going round and round in an endless cycle of negativity. Pretty soon, it’s morning, and you have to face the day feeling exhausted.

Middle-of-the-night insomnia.

Middle-of-the-night insomnia affects about one out of every five people. It’s even more common than having trouble falling asleep in the first place. And there’s a biological explanation, according to psychologist and sleep expert Michael Breus. In a recent Washington Post interview, he explained: “Every person on earth wakes up between 1 and 3 o’clock in the morning.” This is because our body temperature naturally starts falling around 10 p.m. That sets off melatonin production and signals our bodies that we should start heading for sleep. Between 1 and 3 a.m., our temperature naturally starts to rise again, and we shift into a lighter stage of sleep. Often, we wake up, but most of us are barely aware of it. We shift positions and go back to sleep.

Except, sometimes we don’t. Some of us have a lot more trouble falling back asleep, a problem that may be worsened if we have a lot on our minds. We wind up, mentally spinning our wheels, and sleep becomes that much harder.

If this happens to you, here’s what to do.

1. Resist temptation.

Your hardest assignment for falling back to sleep might be not doing most of the things you instinctively want to do. For example: Do not pick up your phone or other mobile device, or even an e-book. Many studies have shown that looking at screens interferes with falling asleep, even if what you’re looking at is something relaxing, such as a puzzle or light reading. You may really, really want to break this rule. Don’t.

You might also be tempted to get out of bed, especially to go to the bathroom. But standing up and walking will raise your heart rate, making it harder to fall back asleep, Breus said. And, he added, sleeping on your side can create the false sense that you need to pee. So he recommends lying on your back and counting to 30. If you still need to go to the bathroom, then go.

Finally, and perhaps most frustrating, do not look at the time. A sleep expert told me this years ago and I find it a hard instruction to follow. But I can attest that if I resist the urge to see what time it is, I do fall back asleep more quickly. Looking at the time throws your brain into planning mode, and that’s not what you want.

2. Do some controlled breathing.

Breus recommends 4-7-8 breathing, in which you inhale for a count of four, hold your breath for a count of seven, and then exhale to a count of eight. I’ve used this method many times myself to fall asleep and it really does work. Anahad O’Connor, the Washington Post health columnist who interviewed Breus, writes that it’s made a huge difference to his own chronic middle-of-the-night insomnia.

The reason this breathing technique is so effective is that it affects your vagus nerve, the longest nerve in your body. When you slow your breathing and make your exhalations longer than your inhalations, it slows your heart rate and sends a message to your body to relax. This means that any breathing technique that makes your exhalations longer than your inhalations may help you fall asleep faster. Even something very simple, such as counting to four on your inhalation and six on yur exhalation, can work. In yoga, techniques like these are called pranayama, or controlled breathing. They are a powerful way to help yourself relax.

3. Stop your worries from overwhelming you.

I’ll admit that it was much easier for me to write that sentence than it is for any of us to actually master our worries. But you can be certain that, whatever troubles you may be facing, sleep deprivation will only make them worse. So it’s worth making the effort.

Meditation is one very effective way to conquer your worries and help yourself sleep—and you can do it while lying in bed. Breus suggests tensing and then releasing one part of your body after another—for instance, starting with your toes and working your way up your legs. This is similar to a form of meditation called a body scan and can help you calm down and fall asleep.

O’Connor also recommends cognitive shuffling, which is a clever way to introduce completely random images into your mind. This mimics the way our minds tend to wander just as we’re dropping off, and it provides a good distraction from whatever we’re fretting about. Whichever technique you try, the more you can do to pull your mind away from whatever’s bothering you, the higher your chances of dropping off quickly and winding up with a good night of sleep.

There’s a growing audience of Inc.com readers who receive a daily text from me with a self-care or motivational micro-challenge or tip. (Want to learn more? Here’s some information about the texts and a special invitation to a two-month free trial.) Often, they text me back about their thoughts and experiences and we get into a conversation.

Many of my subscribers are solopreneurs or run small businesses, and some of them struggle with middle-of-the-night insomnia themselves. Trying some of these techniques might help them—and you—finally get a better night’s rest.

Like this column? Sign up to subscribe to email alerts and you’ll never miss a post.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 23, 2026

March 23, 2026

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-brain/202602/toxic-people-makes-us-age-faster

1. Gold Largest Monthly Decline Since 2013

Bespoke Gold’s double-digit percentage decline this month is on pace for the largest monthly decline in the commodity since June 2013 and, if it holds, would rank as the eighth largest one-month decline in gold since at least 1975. What’s even more interesting is that this month’s decline follows a double-digit percentage gain in February.

Bespoke’s

2. Non-Software Private Loans Not Showing Distress

Apollo

3. Silver SLV Chart –Blue Support Line Goes Back to 2022 ..Huge Level Held

StockCharts

4. Gold GLD Same Blue Support Line—Nowhere Near It

StockCharts

5. GDX Gold Miners -30% from Highs….Right on 200-Day

StockCharts

6. Drone deals fueled VC’s 139% surge into defense robotics

Pitchbook By Jacob Robbins, Technology Reporter

Defense and security robotics attracted $8 billion in VC across 234 deals in 2025, a 139% year-over-year increase, according to our debut Robotics & Physical AI VC Trends report. The subsector also surpassed all of its peers.

Much of defense robotics’ rise is coming at the expense of logistics and warehousing, which historically has captured the lion’s share of investor attention. The latter shed 28.5% of its deal value in 2025 compared to 2024.

The shift may reflect more than just a brief reallocation.

“Warehousing and logistics has moved out of the hype phase and into a tougher environment where investors want clearer differentiation, better margins and proof that these companies are not just selling into a slower industrial CapEx cycle,” said Ali Javaheri, PitchBook’s senior emerging spaces research analyst and the author of the report.

“Robotics capital is no longer just chasing automation in the abstract—it is flowing toward segments where buyers need capability now and are willing to pay for it,” he said. “Defense fits that perfectly.”

PitchBook

Autonomous drones were the main driver of the surge in funding in defense robotics, raking in $6.2 billion across 169 deals on a trailing-12-month basis as investors pour capital into a market reshaped in real time by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Overall, the robotics and physical AI sector raised a record $27.6 billion across 1,009 deals in 2025, more than double the $13.7 billion invested in 2024 from 851 pacts.

Some of the biggest deals in Q4 were for defense and security robotics startups.

German autonomous-drone specialist Quantum Systems—which has deployed its drones for the Ukrainian army—raised $208.6 million in new funding and tripled its valuation to $3.5 billion in November.

And Forterra, a startup developing autonomous robotic military vehicles, raised a $238 million Series C in November as well.

Defense robotics’ boom is part of a broader investment wave for autonomous systems. Last year, VC investments into the sector were up 143%.

7. Market History Fact—1989 Japan was 45% of Global Market Cap

Google

8. China Doubles Down on Crypto Ban-China Document 42

Perplexity

9. Medicaid and Autism

WSJ The bet paid off. In 2023, the state paid Mitchell’s company, Piece by Piece Autism Centers, $29 million to provide therapy to just 84 patients—about $340,000 a child—according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicaid billing records.

That amount surpassed what Indiana Medicaid typically spends in a year treating a newly diagnosed lung-cancer patient or covering a year of nursing-home care.

Piece by Piece became one of Medicaid’s most expensive providers in part by raising its prices, triggering reimbursements as high as $640 an hour for routine therapy that can be administered by workers with little more than a high-school diploma. Its highest payments were more than 10 times higher than the nation’s average.

Mitchell said her company complied with Indiana’s rules and the state never objected to her prices.

“I don’t think Indiana really had any oversight, or not much,” said Mitchell, who bought a series of properties, including a $2.5 million home on Florida’s Sanibel Island and a $600,000 waterfront house on the Tippecanoe River in Indiana, while her company’s Medicaid billings soared.

WSJ

10. How Toxic People Make Us Age Faster

Psychology Today A new study shows how unpleasant people lead to accelerated biological aging. Sebastian Ocklenburg, Ph.D.

Key points

Toxic people can cause a lot of stress with their behavior
Studies have shown that stress can accelerate biological aging
A new study investigated the effect of toxic people on biological aging
Having a toxic person in the social network accelerated aging by 1.5%.

How bad are toxic people for physical health?

Supportive and positive social relationships with friends and family members can have many positive effects on health and mental well-being. In contrast, toxic friends or family members that are overly hostile, permanently passive-aggressive, or purposefully difficult can become huge stressors. Chronic stress has all sorts of negative effects on both mental and physical health. For example, stress research has shown that chronic stress can accelerate ageing and increase inflammation.

This implies an intriguing research question: Do toxic people not only worsen our mental health, but do they maybe also have a very real effect on biological age and accelerate the ageing process due to all the stress they cause?

A new study on toxic social ties and accelerated aging, and inflammation

A new study, just published in the prestigious scientific journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America” (or in short: PNAS), was focused on finding out whether toxic people accelerate biological aging (Lee and co-workers, 2026). In the study entitled “Negative social ties as emerging risk factors for accelerated aging, inflammation, and multimorbidity”, the research team led by scientist Byungkyu Lee from New York University used an advanced biological method called DNA methylation-based biological aging clocks. This method allowed them to determine the biological age of the volunteers in their study. Overall, data from more than 2300 volunteers from Indiana were analysed in the study. For each volunteer, the scientists determined their social networks and whether they had one or more “hasslers” In their social network. “Hasslers” were people who caused the person too much stress and difficulty. Moreover, saliva samples were collected from the volunteers to perform the advanced DNA methylation-based determination of their biological age. Moreover, the volunteers filled out further questionnaires on health and mental health.

Results of the study: Toxic people accelerate aging

Overall, the volunteers identified 8.1 percent of the overall number of people in their social networks as toxic “hasslers.” Overall, 28.8 percent of volunteers reported having one or more toxic people in the social network. 10 percent of volunteers had two or more toxic people in their social network. Women were more likely than men to have at least one toxic person in their social network. Moreover, people who felt like others depended on them a lot were more likely to have toxic people in their network.

The analysis showed that each toxic person led to a 1.5 percent faster ageing process. On average, the biological age of volunteers with toxic people in their social networks was 9 months higher than that of people of the same birth age without toxic friends or family members. Interestingly, toxic family members or toxic friends had stronger effects on ageing than toxic spouses. This may be the case because the positive effects of marriage, such as reduced loneliness, may buffer some of the negative effects of toxic social contacts. Last but not least, having a toxic person in the social network also affected multiple further biological parameters beyond biological ageing, such as inflammation levels.

Take-Away: Stay away from toxic people

The study clearly showed that toxic friends or family members have very real biological effects. They not only cause reduced mental well-being and frustration but also accelerate ageing and increase inflammation in the body. This suggests that for healthy ageing and general wellbeing, reducing contact with toxic people is highly important.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 20, 2026

March 20, 2026

1. Rate Cut Expectations Back to 2013 Levels

Zerohedge-Rate-cut expectations for 2026 plunged (hawkishly) today (dropping with oil’s gains early and then extending after The Fed). 2026 rate-cut expectations are down from over 62bps to just 15bps today since the start of the war…

Zerohedge

2. 5 Year Break Even Rate Heads Back to 2022 Levels

Kevin Gordon

Google

3. Gold -16.4% from Highs

StockCharts

4. Silver -43% from Highs

StockCharts

5. Gold to Oil Ratio Hit Covid Levels

Perplexity

Macrotrends

6. Truflation Chart Moving the Wrong Way…..Goods Inflation Highest in 3 Years

Truflation

7. S&P 500 After Geopolitical Events-Irrelevant Investor

The Irrelevant Investor

8. Rivian Partners with UBER….Still -87% from Highs

Google

9. 33% of 18-29 Year Olds Say Being Extremely Rich is Morally Wrong

Pew Research Center

10. Growth in Select Average Housing Costs

America’s homeowners are getting swamped by insurance costs, HOA fees, and property taxes-Business Insider.

Business Insider

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 19, 2026

March 19, 2026

https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/san-francisco-housing-market-ai-8c4e3f59

1. Bitcoin Holding 2024 Lows

Bitbo.io

2. MSFT Holding 2025 Lows and 200 Week Moving Average

StockCharts

3. Euro Currency Rolling Over Post Iran War—FXE Euro ETF

StockCharts

4. 422 Members of S&P were Negative Yesterday

5. Short Interest has Tripled in Oil Funds

The Kobeissi Letter

6. Annual CO2 Emissions

Our World in Data

7. Dubai Airport Flights Fall Off Cliff

Semafor

8. NYC Spends More Per Homeless Person than NYC Median Household

Charlie Smirkley

Perplexity

9. San Fran Housing—Bidding Wars $400k Over Asking and Rents Up +14%

WSJ Katherine Bindley San Francisco’s housing market is experiencing a significant rebound, driven by the AI boom and municipal leadership changes.

SAN FRANCISCO—At a Pacific Heights open house in January, a line of people made their way up the steps of a two-bedroom, one-bath cooperative. There were 85 of them—steps, not people. Eight flights, no elevator.

The property received 14 offers and sold for over $1.62 million, more than $400,000 over the asking price.

While much of the U.S. housing market has been stuck in a rut, slowed by elevated mortgage rates and home prices near record highs, pockets of San Francisco are rebounding in a big way.

The AI boom, a new mayor and other changes in municipal leadership have helped to bring the city back, reversing a yearslong slump that was compounded by the ripple effects of the pandemic, crime and persistent struggles with homelessness.

Rents citywide were up 14% year over year in February, the fastest growth in the country, according to Apartment List. Mansions have been getting snapped up. An uptick in demand coupled with the city’s notorious lack of housing supply means that fierce bidding wars are breaking out again for single-family homes and condominiums in desirable neighborhoods.

10. Post 50-Actively Invest in Someone Else’s Growth

The Pump Club

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 18, 2026

March 18, 2026

1. Private Credit Defaults Hit 9.2%

Michael A. Gayed

2. Private Credit Books at Large Firms Bigger than Private Equity Side

Gain

3. Betting on 5 Minute and 15 Minute Moves in Crypto-Financial Times

Financial Times

4. Follow Up to Yesterday’s Under the S&P Hood Slide….40% of S&P Stocks -20% from Highs

Special Situations

5. XLF Financial Sector ETF –50day About to Cross Below 200day to Downside

StockCharts

6. Defense Company Valuations Post Trump II-Prof G

Prof G Markets

7. Small Cap Holding Above 200-Day

8. Gasoline Prices Still Below 2024 Highs

Wolf Street

9. Home Buyers vs. Sellers

Bilello

10. Natural Dopamine

Mark Hyman

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 17, 2026

March 17, 2026

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-psychology-of-weight-loss/202405/cultivating-a-lucky-mindset

1. Where Does Hormuz Oil Go?

2. Hormuz Traffic -98%

Sherwood News With attacks on vessels in the narrow transit corridor escalating last week, Bloomberg data shows that daily ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has plunged 98.5% over the past three weeks, from 67 vessels on February 22 to just one ship on March 16.

The only maritime gateway between the Persian Gulf and the open ocean, the strait handles roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil and liquefied natural gas shipments, with very few alternatives if closed.

Sherwood

3. Mag 7 Market Cap History-Bespoke

Bespoke’s

4. INDA India ETF Hit -20% from Highs…Closed Below 200-Week Moving Average

StockCharts

5. Value of Private Equity Deals Held for More than 7 Years Hits $1T

Financial Times

6. Quarterly Performance of S&P 500 When Yield Spreads Narrow vs. Widen

Nasdaq Dorsey Wright The economy and the stock market are not one in the same, but there is a typically a strong relationship between the two and US equities have historically performed significantly better when high yield spreads are narrowing, indicating favorable economic conditions. The table below shows the quarterly performance of the S&P 500 when high yield spreads are narrowing versus when they are widening. It is also apparent that the magnitude of the change is also change is also significant as the S&P has performed better during quarters when spreads narrowed significantly and worse when they widened by a large amount.

Nasdaq

7. High Dispersion Under the Hood of S&P

Axios

8. VC Backed Crypto Companies Investing in Non-Crypto Businesses

Pitchbook-So far in 2026, VC-backed crypto companies have invested $1.4 billion in startups outside the industry, more than twice the $600 million they invested in crypto-focused startups, according to PitchBook data.

PitchBook

9. Probability of a Rate Hike Higher than Cut as of March

10. Cultivating a Lucky Mindset

Looking for the lucky explanations in life can transform our experiences-Psychology Today Dayna Lee-Baggley Ph.D.

Key points

Train your brain to find lucky interpretations with practice and repetition.
Acknowledge reality and reframe it positively without ignoring negative events.
Practice finding the lucky explanation to create new neural connections and change your mindset.

There was a study of people who considered themselves lucky and people who considered themselves unlucky (see Wiseman, 2003). They had to read a scenario and discuss it. One of the scenarios: You’re at the bank, and while you’re at the bank, there’s a robbery, and you get shot in the arm.

The unlucky people said, How unlucky am I? I’m at the bank, and I get shot during a robbery.
The lucky people said, How lucky am I? I only got shot in my arm.

This begs the question: Do they have a lucky life, or did they find ways to find a “lucky” interpretation?

Cultivating a Lucky Mindset

Most of us don’t automatically come up with a lucky explanation when faced with adversity. It requires conscious effort and practice. However, with time and repetition, you can spontaneously train your brain to expect and generate these positive interpretations.

Acknowledge the Reality: It’s crucial to understand that adopting a lucky mindset doesn’t mean ignoring or downplaying negative events. The lucky participants in the study acknowledged the fact that they had been shot. They weren’t engaging in toxic positivity, which involves denying or minimizing genuine distress.

Reframe the Situation: After acknowledging the reality, intentionally look for a positive angle. For instance, “I got shot in the arm, but how lucky am I that it wasn’t more serious?” In psychology, a well-known effect highlights the importance of who you compare yourself to. When researchers examine the happiness levels of Olympic medal winners, they find an intriguing pattern: gold medalists are the happiest, followed by bronze medalists, with silver medalists being the least happy. This phenomenon occurs because each group has different reference points for comparison. Bronze medalists tend to compare themselves to those who did not win any medal, which makes them pleased and grateful for their achievement. In contrast, silver medalists often compare themselves to gold medalists, feeling disappointed that they did not win the top prize. Think about your comparison group when proposing a lucky explanation.

Practice Regularly: Like any skill, this mindset requires regular practice. Whenever you encounter challenges, make it a habit to finish the sentence with, “How lucky am I?” As you repeat this process, you create a new neural connection. Over time, your brain will begin to do this automatically.

Conclusion

Science shows us that adopting a lucky mindset doesn’t mean ignoring life’s challenges. It’s about finding a balanced perspective that acknowledges difficulties while recognizing the positives. Consciously practicing this technique can train your brain to seek the lucky explanation. This can make life feel way more manageable and hopeful.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 16, 2026

March 16, 2026

https://www.barrons.com/articles/hormuz-strait-iran-mines-reopening-news-tankers-hit-7d83dbef?mod=past_editions

1. S&P Short-Term Oversold

Barchart

2. Financial Stocks Leading S&P Lower

3. Financials Correction Started with Private Credit Sell-Off….Now Moving to Investment Grade?

Tavi Costa

4. MAG 7 Official -10% Correction….Closes Below 200-Day

StockCharts

5. Jet Fuel Chart Breaks Above Ukraine Invasion Highs

Jet fuel. “Jet fuel costs have increased by 81% since the start of the war in Iran and are up by 124% this year.”

Joseph Brusuelas – RSM

6. 87% of Asian Crude Flows thru Strait of Hormuz

Barrons -87%-The percentage of crude oil shipped through the Strait of Hormuz that was sold into Asian markets in 2025.

The problem is that the strait can’t be cleared solely through a bombing campaign, or an attack by destroyers. Iran’s navy has been severely depleted by the U.S., but the country doesn’t need large attack ships to scare commercial vessels away. Its weapons include mines, fast attack boats, missiles and drones. Layered on top of each other, they become exceptionally difficult to remove.

“They’ve created an integrated, vertical stack of threats that can cover the strait from undersea all the way to above the surface,” said Jonathan Schroden, chief research officer at the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded nonprofit that does research for the Navy.

Once mines are in the water, this becomes “one of the most dangerous scenarios that people who focus on the Middle East have been thinking about for decades,” he said.

Prof G Chart

7. The Remaking of NY Times

New York Times – News Subscribers v. Bundle/Other

Over the last 4 years, the New York Times has successfully pivoted away from its 175 year history as a news-first company.

News-only subscribers have collapsed by 65%, while bundle and other single-product subscribers have increased by 157%. Now, only 1 in 10 subscribers are coming to the New York Times strictly for the news.

This successful pivot is a byproduct of the New York Times’ growth in mobile gaming (acquired Wordle in 2022), podcasts, cooking content, and personalized sports content (acquired The Athletic in 2022 as well).

This rebrand also helped revitalize the business from a profitability perspective. From 2007 to 2022, operating income at the New York Times went from $187 million to $202 million. Over the last 3 years, operating income has exploded to $432 million.

Fiscal.ai

8. Venezuala Owes $150B to Foreign Creditors

Google

9. Share of New Car Sales that are EV’s

Semafor

10. Shane Parish Interview with Marriott

J.W. Marriott built the foundation of the world’s largest hotel company.

But he didn’t open his first hotel until he was 55.

Everything started with a nine-seat root beer stand in Washington, DC, and a simple goal: serve people well and build something that lasts. And of course, he didn’t just go from restaurants to hotels; along the way, he started the airline catering industry.

This episode explores the timeless principles that guided his success, including his obsession with downside risk, his practice of isolating variables, and his expansion during the Great Depression while his competitors folded.

A few of the Tiny Lessons I took away:

“Manage your time. Short conversations to the point. Make every minute count.”
Take care of your people before your customers. People who feel disposable deliver a disposable experience.
“Guard your habits. Bad ones will destroy you.”
The person who wrote the rule might say yes if you actually show up and ask.
“Discipline is the greatest thing in the world. Where there is no discipline, there is no character.”

https://fs.blog/about/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 11, 2026

March 11, 2026

https://thecryptoadvisor.substack.com

1. Redemption Requests for Non-Traded BDC’s

Bloomberg

2. South Korea Leverage Stocks Bets Hit Record

Dave Lutz Jones Trading Retail traders in Asia are loading up on borrowed money to fund purchases in their brokerage accounts, traders and dealers said, as they chase oil and energy prices higher and scoop up sinking stocks. Investors have made fresh margin payments to extend positions as well as top up where they have incurred losses, brokers said. The ⁠behavior is emblematic of a habit of dip buying honed in seemingly unstoppable markets in the years since retail trading exploded in popularity during pandemic lockdowns – one which has repeatedly proven highly lucrative.

3. 2012-2024 Tech vs. Energy/Materials

The Kobeissi Letter

4. Banks -10% Correction

Barchart

5. TSLA Holds Level for 4^th Time in One-Year

StockCharts

6. HIMS Pulled Back to 2024 Levels Before this Week’s Rally…40% of Float Short

StockCharts

7. Tether And The Hidden Demand For U.S. Treasuries-The Crypto Advisor Blog

One of the more remarkable data points in digital assets today is this: if Tether were a country, it would rank among the top-20 foreign holders of U.S. government debt. According to the company’s most recent attestation, Tether holds roughly $122 billion in direct U.S. Treasury bills backing its USDT stablecoin. At that level, it would sit around 17th place globally, ahead of countries such as Israel and Germany and just behind major sovereign holders like Saudi Arabia and Brazil. For context, the threshold to enter the top 10 foreign holders of Treasuries is roughly $310 billion, meaning Tether would need to add about $190 billion more – more than double its current holdings – to reach that tier.

What makes this especially notable is how quickly those reserves have grown. Tether’s Treasury exposure has expanded dramatically alongside the growth of stablecoins and digital-dollar liquidity inside crypto markets.

Q4 2021: ~$34.5B in U.S. Treasury bills
Q4 2022: ~$39.2B
Q4 2023: ~$63.1B
Q4 2024: ~$94.5B
Most recent: ~$122B

Over roughly four years, Tether’s direct Treasury holdings have increased by more than $85 billion, including about $27–28 billion added in just the past year. This rise closely tracks the expansion of USDT itself. Tether’s market capitalization has grown from roughly $68 billion at the end of 2021 to more than $180 billion today, reinforcing the direct relationship between stablecoin issuance and demand for short-term U.S. government debt.

8. What is Gaesa? Cuba’s Military Business Conglomerate

Perplexity

9. Expected vs. Actual Costs Afghanistan and Iraq-Prof G Blog Ed Elson

Ed Elson’s

10. Healthiest Way to Make Coffee at Home-Perplexity

Perplexity

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 10, 2026

March 10, 2026

1. War and the Market

Barron’s

2. Iran Regime Structure

3. Iran Volunteer Militia-Basij…40k-54k Bases in Country

Perplexity

4. American Support for Military Action-Prof G Newsletter

Prof G Markets

5. History of Bitcoin -50% Bears

Nasdaq Dorsey Wright

Nasdaq Dorsey Wright-There have been six other instances in which BTC fell more than 50% from highs before returning to all-time highs. Once Bitcoin officially moves 50% away from its highs, it tends to do pretty well over the following months. Specifically, it averages a 14% return, which is roughly in line with Bitcoin’s 17.1% gain over the last month. However, things usually take a turn for the worse after the first month. Of those six instances, five of them were lower after a full year, averaging a one-year decline of 19%, which bodes poorly for the upcoming year. That said, if Bitcoin’s outlook has taken a turn for the worse, when could we expect the cryptocurrency to potentially bottom and recover?

Of those six instances in which Bitcoin fell an initial 50%, it averaged a maximum drawdown of 76.6%. Said differently, Bitcoin typically gets cut in half for a second time after the initial 50% decline. Additionally, it took an average of 5.7 months after falling 50% before it reached those respective bottoms. Extrapolating that to our current environment, six months from our initial 50% decline would mean that things could bottom in August of this year, but downside has persisted for more than a year as well. Once Bitcoin finally bottomed out in those instances, it took an average of 15 months to get back to all-time highs. However, it’s also taken as long as 25 months and as short as 4 months.

One interesting trend with Bitcoin is that it tends to see a pronounced decline roughly every four years, bottoming in late 2011, 2015, late 2018, and 2022. However, those steeper declines have gradually become less intense over time. For context, Bitcoin was down 76.6% in 2022, but it would’ve needed an additional 70% decline from that point to match 2011’s 93.1% decline. Using some guesswork and continuing that trend, it wouldn’t be surprising to see things bottom out around a drawdown of 70%, which would correspond to a price of around $38k for Bitcoin. Granted, that’s a guess assuming things continue lower, but it also falls roughly in line with the ~75% average drawdown when Bitcoin does fall 50%.

6. Fear & Greed Index

CNN Network

7. U.S. Gasoline Consumption Sideways for 25 Years

Wolf Street

8. Solo Leisure Activities Trending Up

Chartr

9. Number of Countries by Continent

10. Americans Support for Election Law Policies-Gallup

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 06, 2026

March 6, 2026

1. Crypto ETF Demand Flips Back to Positive

The Kobeissi Letter

2. DBO Oil ETF-Another Chart Looking to Break Above 4 Years Sideway Pattern

StockCharts

3. Post Start of War Tech Stocks Lead Sectors

The sectors you would expect to outperform in the event of war would be defensives like Utilities, Consumer Staples, and Health Care. But guess what? They’re three of the four worst-performing sectors with declines of at least 1% each! While the S&P 500 is surprisingly higher this week, the rally is primarily due to the 1%+ gain in the Technology sector. On an equal weight basis, the index is down 1.04%, and 60% of its components are down MTD.

Bespoke

4. Leading Emerging Market…South Korea Volatility

5. Emerging Markets Post U.S. Military Moves

NASDAQ DORSEY WRIGHT

6. Solana (SOLZ) ETF was -70% from Highs at $8

StockCharts

7. Countries with the Most Gold

Yonni Cohen

8. This is Going Lower

The Irrelevant Investor

9. See Where Mexico’s Cartels Are in Control

Crime syndicates in the states of Sinaloa and Jalisco have expanded their territory

WSJ

10. Alwaya a Good Reminder…Cognitive Bias List

Eric Partaker

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 05, 2026

March 5, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/world/americas/cuba-tourism-travel-canada-trump.html

1. Energy ETF XLE Beating XLK Tech ETF on One-Year Basis

Ycharts

2. AAPL Triangle Pattern on Chart -Important for Tech/Mag 7 to Break Higher.

3. VHT Vanguard Healthcare ETF Breaks Out of Long Sideways Pattern-4 Years.

StockCharts

4. XLE Energy ETF Same Pattern…Breakout of 4-Years Sideways.

StockCharts

5. Most Publicly Traded BDCs are Trading Below their Net Asset Value.

Financial Times

6. Iran Top 5 World Oil Producer

Chartr

7. Polymarket attracts record trading ‘world’ volumes as U.S.-Iran bets top $529 million

A prediction market about military strikes on a sovereign nation now sits alongside presidential election bets as one of the most-traded contracts the platform has ever hosted.

By Shaurya Malwa|Edited by Nikhilesh De

What to know:

Polymarket has rapidly become a hub for betting on the U.S.-Iran conflict, with traders wagering on ceasefire dates, regime change and potential U.S. ground involvement.
A contract on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leaving power by March 31 drew $45 million in volume, while a long-running market on whether the U.S. would strike Iran has amassed $529 million, making it one of Polymarket’s largest ever.
Onchain analysts have flagged six wallets that made about $1.2 million by correctly betting on a Feb. 28 U.S. strike on Iran, intensifying scrutiny of potential insider trading as Polymarket promotes its markets as a source of real-time geopolitical insight.

CoinDesk

8. Aging Population, Booming Real Estate and Equity Markets for Boomers.

9. How Can Cuba Build So Many Hotels When Occupancy So Low? Military Owns the Real Estate in Case of Democracy. (You can’t make it up)

With Fuel Running Out, Cuba’s Tourism Is Collapsing-NYT

By Frances Robles and Vjosa Isai The Trump administration’s decision to cut off foreign oil to the island is devastating its tourism industry, a key source of income for a government being pushed to the edge. Cuba’s state-run hotels are managed by Gaviota, a subsidiary of the military-run conglomerate GAESA, which controls the Cuban economy. That means Cuba’s best hotels and prime real estate are in the hands of military officials, Mr. Spadoni said.

“One key misconception is: How can Cuba build so many hotels when the occupancy rate is so low?” Mr. Spadoni said. “One thing people miss is that to the Cuban military, these are real estate investments more than tourism.”

Military officials are likely taking the “long view” by wanting to be in control of valuable properties should the Communist government transition to democracy, he said.

Some new luxury hotels, like the iconic Torre K in Havana, are largely empty.

In the past 15 years, the Cuban government invested about $24 billion in hotels, said Emilio Morales, a Miami-based former marketing official for Cimex, Cuba’s retail conglomerate, who now studies Cuba’s tourism industry and is a harsh critic of its government.

“There were many hotels, and in two or three and a half years, everything shut down or kept deteriorating,” Mr. Morales said. “They didn’t invest in the other sectors that support tourism, such as the energy grid itself.”

10. States with Fastest Rising Incomes 2019-2024

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 March 03, 2026

March 3, 2026

1. War in Middle East-Volatility Index Down on 5 Day Chart.

2. Oil Move Not Large by Historical Standards.

Bespoke It’s been a large move, but today’s gain would only rank as the 80th largest one-day gain in crude oil since 1984. Given the enormity of the military action, an even larger move in crude oil wouldn’t have been a surprise.

Bespoke Premium

3. A Couple Numbers from Prof G Monday Newsletter.

-Tesla’s robotaxis have been involved in crashes at 8x the rate of human drivers. Waymo, by contrast, estimates that its vehicles get into injury-causing crashes 80% less than human drivers

Prof G Markets

4. Bank Selloff–U.S. Banks Lent $300B to Private Equity Credit Providers.

Dave Lutz Jones Trading

A recent Moody’s report showed U.S. banks had lent nearly $300 billion to private credit providers as of June 2025. Banks loaned a further $285 billion to private equity funds and had $340 billion in unutilized bank lending commitments available

5. Meta Balance Sheet Debt Up by $60B

The Wall Street Journal

6. Record Buying to Record Selling in Small Cap

7. Mecahnical Contracting vs AI…..FIX Comfort Systems USA HVAC Company (FIX) 5 year Chart +2134% vs. NVDA +1184%

Google – Morningstar

Ycharts

8. Demographics is Destiny…We need Population Growth in U.S.

The Wall Street Journal

9. 2025 Russia Gained Less than 1% of Ukraine Territory….Russian Killed or Wounded 400-450k

Perplexity

10. U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) has a Budget that Would Rank in Top 10 as a Country in World.

Perplexity

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 26, 2026

February 26, 2026

1. 45 Years America Still #1

2. One-Year Chart AMD +98% vs. NVDA +48%

YCharts

3. The Mag 7 Premium is Gone

Chart Kid Matt

4. Financials Closed at 5-Year Low vs. S&P 500

TrendLabs

5. Hedge Funds Selling Stocks

The Kobeissi Letter

6. Tech and Innovation Create Jobs

Spilled Coffee

7. Fear and Greed Index

CNN Business

8. Google Search “can’t sell house”

NoLimit

9. U.S. Mortgage Rates Breaking 6%?

10. Sarcasm self-defeats-Seth’s Blog

Sarcasm is an easy way to amplify feedback.

It has two hidden costs:

It reveals low status. People with power don’t need to use sarcasm to make a point. If you want to lead with status, using sarcasm undermines that goal.
It adds emotion where it’s not always needed. The emotion is an amplifier, but it often causes division and defensiveness.

If you have confidence in your standing and your idea, then sarcasm is simply getting in the way, because it undermines both.

https://seths.blog/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 25, 2026

February 25, 2026

1. Margin Debt Update

DAILY CHARTBOOK

2. 5 Year Chart-S&P +91% vs. Bitcoin +35%

Ycharts

3. Cybersecurity ETF CIBR -20%…Close to Liberation Day Lows

StockCharts

4. XLF Financials ETF Closes Below 200-Day First Time Since Liberation Day Sell Off

StockCharts

5. Net Outflows Crypto ETFs

Marketwatch “By Gordon Gottsegen U.S.-based spot ETFs have sold a net of $2.6 billion so far in 2026. This contrasts with net buying of $4.3 billion in the same period of 2025. This is a $6.9 billion buying gap from 2025,” Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, told MarketWatch.

MarketWatch

By this time last year, bitcoin ETFs had added $4.3 billion to the crypto market. This year, they’re pulling liquidity away. Photo: CryptoQuant

6. Big Names Below All-Time Highs

Charlie Bilello

7. The Weight Loss Winner Is…..LLY +220% vs. NVO -44% 3-Year Chart

Ycharts

8. AI Cash Burn $218B

Chartr

9. I Asked Perplexity About Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) for Mag 7

Perplexity

10. Share of U.S. Adults Using Each Social Media Platform-Ed Elson

PROF G MEDIA

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 24, 2026

February 24, 2026

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/02/drinking-2-3-cups-of-coffee-a-day-tied-to-lower-dementia-risk/

1. Consumer Staple Stocks and PEG Ratios-Prof G Newsletter

Prof G Markets

2. Retail Investor Not Buying Bitcoin Dip….5 Weeks of Outflows from ETF

3. MSFT -30% from Highs…Hitting Liberation Day Support Levels

StockCharts

4. Software ETF IGV Hitting 2 ? Year Support Levels

StockCharts

5. Private Equity’s Dry Spell Worse Than 2008 Crisis, Bain Says

By Preeti Singh

Bloomberg

6. Is China Really Dumping US Treasuries?

Advisor Perspectives by Lance Roberts of Real Investment Advice, 2/23/26

However, just because China owns U.S. Treasuries does not mean it must have custodial holdings in the U.S. Look at the same holdings table and focus on Belgium and Luxembourg. In the November 2025 snapshot, Belgium shows about $481 billion in Treasury holdings, and Luxembourg shows about $425 billion. Those are massive totals for very small countries that are not building reserves at that scale

In reality, Luxembourg and Belgium are “hosting custody” for China. Just for reference look at the chart of US Treasury holdings of China and Belgium. Over the same period, while China’s holdings fell by $600 billion, Belgiums rose by $500 billion.

Advisor Perspectives

7. Single Family Housing Construction -6.9% Year Over Year

Wolf Street

8. Philadelphia Leads Job Growth in Large Metro Areas

The Philadelphia Inquirer

9. Philadelphia Sees Largest Annual Increase in Home Prices

10. Drinking 2-3 cups of coffee a day tied to lower dementia risk

The Harvard Gazzette Marked differences between caffeinated, decaffeinated drinks in analysis of more than 130,000 people

Mass General Brigham Communications

February 9, 2026 4 min read

Evidence from a study of more than 130,000 people suggests that two to three cups of coffee a day can reduce dementia risk and slow cognitive decline.

The research — published in JAMA and led by investigators from Mass General Brigham, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard — analyzed data from the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study.

“When searching for possible dementia prevention tools, we thought something as prevalent as coffee may be a promising dietary intervention — and our unique access to high-quality data through studies that have been going on for more than 40 years allowed us to follow through on that idea,” said senior author Daniel Wang, associate scientist with the Channing Division of Network Medicine in the Mass General Brigham Department of Medicine and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. Wang is also an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan School and an associate member at the Broad Institute.

“While our results are encouraging, it’s important to remember that the effect size is small and there are lots of important ways to protect cognitive function as we age. Our study suggests that caffeinated coffee or tea consumption can be one piece of that puzzle.”

“While our results are encouraging, it’s important to remember that the effect size is small and there are lots of important ways to protect cognitive function as we age.”

Daniel Wang

Early prevention is especially crucial for dementia, since current treatments are limited and typically offer only modest benefit once symptoms appear. Focus on prevention has led researchers to investigate the influences of lifestyle factors like diet on dementia development.

Coffee and tea contain bioactive ingredients like polyphenols and caffeine, which have emerged as possible neuroprotective factors that reduce inflammation and cellular damage while protecting against cognitive decline. Though promising, findings about the relationship between coffee and dementia have been inconsistent, as studies have had limited follow-up and insufficient detail to capture long-term intake patterns, differences by beverage type, or the full continuum of outcomes — from early subjective cognitive decline to clinically diagnosed dementia.

Data from Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study help to overcome these challenges. Participants repeated assessments of diet, dementia, subjective cognitive decline, and objective cognitive function, and were followed for up to 43 years. Researchers compared how caffeinated coffee, tea, and decaffeinated coffee influenced dementia risk and cognitive health of each participant.

Of the 131,821 participants, 11,033 developed dementia. Both male and female participants with the highest intake of caffeinated coffee had an 18 percent lower risk of dementia compared with those who reported little or no caffeinated coffee consumption. Caffeinated coffee drinkers also had lower prevalence of subjective cognitive decline (7.8 percent versus 9.5 percent). By some measurements, those who drank caffeinated coffee also showed better performance on objective tests of overall cognitive function.

Higher tea intake showed similar results, while decaffeinated coffee did not — suggesting that caffeine may be the active factor producing these neuroprotective results, though further research is needed to validate the responsible factors and mechanisms.

The cognitive benefits were most pronounced in participants who consumed two to three cups of caffeinated coffee or one to two cups of tea daily. Contrary to several previous studies, higher caffeine intake did not yield negative effects — instead, it provided similar neuroprotective benefits to the optimal dosage.

“We also compared people with different genetic predispositions to developing dementia and saw the same results — meaning coffee or caffeine is likely equally beneficial for people with high and low genetic risk of developing dementia,” said lead author Yu Zhang, a student at Harvard Chan School and a research trainee at Mass General Brigham.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 20, 2026

February 20, 2026

1. Crypto Highest Outflows Since 2022

Crypto flows. “Crypto sees biggest outflow since 2022. Money is leaving the market at one of the fastest rates since the last bear market.”

DAILY CHARTBOOK

2. But…Crypto ETF Positive Flows Were Much Higher than Predicted

Eric Balchunas

3. Flows Move Away from Mega Cap Tech Stocks

Dave Lutz Jones Trading–At the end of the fourth quarter, mega-cap tech stocks were the most under-owned relative to their weightings in the S&P 500 Index in 17 years, according to Morgan Stanley analysis citing 13-F filings. Bloomberg reports

4. Online Spending Surging

5. LLY Stock Sideways Pattern Since November 2025

StockCharts

6. 1.4 Billion Barrells of Oil Sitting at Sea

Google

7. China Debt Worse than U.S. and Europe

Michael A. Arouet

8. Musk cuts Starlink access for Russian forces – giving Ukraine an edge at the front

Paul Adams-Reuters

The Starlink system has become a vital tool to give troops in Ukraine internet access

Evidence is mounting that Elon Musk’s decision to deny Russian forces access to his Starlink satellite-based internet service has blunted Moscow’s advance, caused confusion among Russian soldiers and handed an advantage to Ukraine’s defenders.

But for how long? And what can Ukraine’s military achieve in the meantime?

“The Russians… lost their ability to control the field,” a Ukrainian drone operator who goes by the callsign Giovanni told us.

“I think they lost 50% of their capacity for offence,” he said. “That’s what the numbers show. Fewer assaults, fewer enemy drones, fewer everything.”

It’s still early to assess the impact of a change that only came into effect at the beginning of the month, after Ukraine’s defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, asked Elon Musk’s SpaceX company to block Russian access to Starlink.

But in some areas of the long front line, especially east of the city of Zaporizhzhia, there is some evidence of Russian forces being forced to retreat.

BBC

9. Map of Highest Homicide Rates in America

Newsweek

10. America-Work Down Leisure Time Up-Irrelevant Investor Blog

The Irrelevant Investor

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 19, 2026

February 19, 2026

https://www.ft.com/content/b2f299f6-2a82-4a43-bcbf-86cac3937550

1. S&P Under the Hood 2026….117 Stocks Up or Down More than 20%

Bespoke

2. 857 Unicorns-Private Companies Valued at More than $1B

Apollo

3. Exxon was Replaced in Dow Jones by Salesforce in 2020

Ryan Detrick

4. First Six Weeks 2026 …Massive ETF Flows Double 2025

Eric Balchunas

5. Investor bullishness falls to 12-week low

Marketwatch By Jamie Chisholm

6. Blue Owl permanently halts redemptions at private credit fund aimed at retail investors

FT New York investment group backtracks from earlier plan to reopen to withdrawals
Private credit group Blue Owl will permanently restrict investors from withdrawing their cash from its inaugural private retail debt fund, backtracking from an earlier plan to reopen to redemptions this quarter. The New York investment group on Wednesday said investors in Blue Owl Capital Corp II would no longer be able to redeem their investments in quarterly intervals but that the company would instead return investors’ capital in episodic payments as it sells down assets in coming quarters and years.

OWL -50% One Year…Back to 2023 Levels.

StockCharts

7. Demographics is Destiny

Semafor

8. Condo Sales About to Break Below Covid Crisis Levels

Wolf Street

9. Americans believe Epstein files show the powerful get a pass, Reuters/Ipsos poll

finds

By Jason Lange Reuters

Reuters

10. 3 Unique Ways Smart People Think

Three ‘odd’ thinking patterns are consistently linked to higher intelligence.-Psychology Today Mark Travers Ph.D.

People often picture intelligence as mental efficiency. We tend to imagine a smart person as someone who responds quickly, has strong opinions, and sees things clearly. However, highly intelligent people are not always faster, calmer, or more decisive. Sometimes, their minds are busier, slower, and more conflicted.

In my work as a psychologist, I’ve noticed that people with higher cognitive ability are often misunderstood simply because their mental habits don’t always look the way we expect intelligence to look. These tendencies get labeled as overthinking, indecision, or hesitation when, in reality, they reflect deeper cognitive processing.

1. Smart People Mentally Replay Conversations and Think of Future Scenarios

People often think that replaying conversations in their minds or constantly envisioning different future conversations is a symptom of anxiety or rumination. And, of course, it can be. But what’s also been shown is that mentally replaying conversations is also a function of advanced mental simulation.

Studies show that people with high fluid intelligence can process multiple “what if” scenarios concurrently, helping them see ahead, identify concealed dangers, and plan their actions.

This mode of thinking requires a lot of working memory because the brain isn’t looping idly; it’s stress-testing every single possibility that comes to mind. This might be why these people seem to be frequently lost in their thoughts, even when they’re alone. Their brains are processing social interactions and the implications of every possible choice they have to make.

We can, however, distinguish this process from maladaptive rumination. While rumination is repetitive and emotionally sticky, mental simulation is flexible and exploratory. It shifts perspective, updates assumptions, and often leads to insight. People often conflate the two because, from the outside, both include silence, distraction, or apparent overthinking.

However, it does come with some cost. This kind of over-processing can exude an air of indecisiveness, especially in situations where reaction time matters. However, in terms of cognition, this pattern indicates a mind that is preparing rather than stalling.

2. Smart People Are Comfortable Holding Two Conflicting Ideas When They Think

Most people feel dissonant toward contradictory beliefs because they examine them as problems to be solved. We find ways to simplify or justify it, and are often eager to take a side. However, highly intelligent people are often able to endure this discomfort for longer.

People with higher cognitive ability are better able to evaluate multiple valid perspectives simultaneously, even if they conflict. They do not jump to resolutions; instead, they allow competing perspectives to co-exist while the individual weighs the evidence for an often indefinite period.

This may seem confusing to onlookers. A person who argues, “I see merit on both sides,” can be perceived as being evasive. However, the same tendency can also be seen as a demonstration of cognitive flexibility, which involves the ability to withstand a need for closure and remain amenable to revision.

A 2023 study found that those with high IQs display a low need for cognitive closure and also tend to be more tolerant of ambiguity. These people do not find ambiguity threatening because their conceptual structures can handle complexity.

Of course, this comes with social costs. In fast-moving discussions or polarized environments, nuance is often mistaken for weakness. But from a psychological perspective, the ability to hold contradiction without collapsing is a hallmark of sophisticated thinking. It allows for better judgment, deeper understanding, and more accurate belief updating over time.

3. Smart People Take Longer to Answer, Even When They Know the Material Well

Speed is frequently treated as a proxy for intelligence; quick thinkers are assumed to be smart thinkers. Yet cognitive science consistently shows that one of the defining features of higher intelligence is not speed, but control.

Dual-process theories of cognition distinguish between fast, intuitive thinking and slower, analytical thinking. While everyone uses both systems, more intelligent individuals are better at inhibiting automatic responses when they sense that those responses may be misleading.

A 2022 study found that higher intelligence predicts a greater tendency to pause, override intuition, and engage in deliberate reasoning, especially when problems are complex or counterintuitive. Intelligent individuals are often slower precisely because they are monitoring their own thinking.

That pause can be misread. In classrooms, meetings, or interviews, hesitation is sometimes interpreted as uncertainty or lack of knowledge. But, in many cases, it reflects a recognition that the first answer is not always the best.

Higher intelligence is related to stronger error-monitoring abilities. Such people are more vigilant about potential errors, so they tend to pace themselves when accuracy is more important. However, the drawback is that this measured approach would not always be suited to environments where speed is rewarded. But from a cognitive standpoint, being able to inhibit premature responses is a strength. It is a reflection of a mind that values accuracy and meaning more than speed.

In reality, intelligence is not always smooth. These odd patterns of thinking are not always an asset in all situations. Nor are these patterns always associated with high intelligence. Higher intelligence correlates with an improved capacity for mental simulation, managing uncertainty, and internal impulse control. What seems inefficient from the outside appears so from a functional standpoint.

It is important to understand this distinction, not to glorify intelligence, but to understand the implications that there may be some mental processes with which we may be trying to intervene too quickly for our own best interests, the very processes our brains are designed to do.

A version of this post also appears on Forbes.com. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202602/3-unique-ways-smart-people-think

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 18, 2026

February 18, 2026

1. Mag 7 ETF Right on 200 Day

StockCharts

2. NVDA Flat for 6 Months

Google Finance

3. AAPL Sits Out the AI Capex Boom

Anish Moonka

4. Equal Weight Indexes Breaking-Out Across Board

TrendLabs

5. Salesforce -25% 5 Years

6. Kalshi and Polymarket Line on Bitcoin

Crypto Advisor Letter

The Crypto Advisor

7. Bitcoin ETF IBIT Put Volume Spike

The Irrelevant Investor

8. Global Hedge Funds Buy Record Amount of Asian Stocks

The Kobeissi Letter

9. Where Universities Distribute Endowment Money

Barron’s

10. The next generation of AI businesses-Seth’s Blog

The first generation was built on large models, demonstrating what could be done and powering many tools.

The second generation is focused on reducing costs and saving time. Replacing workers or making them more efficient.

But you can’t shrink your way to greatness.

The third generation will be built on a simple premise, one that the internet has proven again and again:

Create value by connecting people.

We haven’t seen this yet, but once it gains traction, it’ll seem obvious and we’ll wonder how we missed it.

Create tools that work better when your peers and colleagues use them too. And tools that solve problems that people with resources are willing to pay for.

Problems are everywhere, yet we often ignore them.

And communities (existing and those that need to exist) are just waiting to have their problems solved.

[Here’s a list of network-based tech companies you may have heard of: Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Discourse, Airbnb, Etsy, Stack Overflow, Pinterest, Twitch, eBay, Squidoo, Snapchat, GitHub… You can’t use them alone, and they work better when others use them too.]

So far, most AI projects ignore the very network effects that built the internet. That’s almost certain to change.

For those with paraskevidekatriaphobia, consider this your opportunity to build something worth building instead of just waiting for the negative consequences of this change to arrive…

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 17, 2026

February 17, 2026

1. Chart of the Week

Michael Batnick

2. Software Stocks Premium in P/E Valuation vs. Rest of Market Drops to Even

3. Software ETF Right on Its 200 Week Moving Average

StockCharts

4. BETZ Sports and Gaming ETF Falls Back to Liberation Day Levels …Polymarket and Kalshi Competition?

StockCharts

5. Number of Small Cap Stocks Trading at 10x Sales Back to Normal Levels

The chart-“Despite broader concerns around market valuations, our data on the percentage of Russell 3000 companies trading at 10x price-to-sales does not currently raise red flags,” say Ryan Grabinsky and Jon Byrne at Strategas Securities. “At 7.1%, the reading is among the lowest levels observed in the post-COVID period. That said, it is worth noting that this metric offered limited signal in the run-up to the financial crisis, so we remain mindful of its limitations,” they add.

MarketWatch

6. 2026 Returns S&P Equal Weight +7.5% Above QQQ

Nasdaq Dorsey Wright

7. Vanguard Value VTV +8% vs. QQQ -2% 2026

Ycharts

8. Last 12 Months….Euro Trust Currency ETF +14% vs. UUP U.S. Dollar Chart -5%

Ycharts

9. Americans are Stock Nation vs. Rest of World…Double Percentage of Holdings Versus China/Europe

WSJ

10. Older Americans on Phones as Much as Kids

Chartr

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 12, 2026

February 12, 2026

https://ryanholiday.net/26-rules-to-be-a-better-thinker

1. Tech vs. Non-Tech Stocks

Tech Top (Relative Terms): on a relative basis US tech stocks have not only peaked but broken sharply lower vs non-tech stocks.

2. S&P Companies Replacing Stock Buybacks with Capital Spending

Kalani o Māui

3. Stock Trading Daily Turnover $1 Trillion

The Kobeissi Letter

4. Robinhood -34% 2026….. 4^th Quarter Crypto Trading Revenues Decreased -38%

Google Finance

5. Rolling Mini-Bear Markets in Sub-Sectors Due to AI Disruption

Real Estate Services Stocks Sink in Latest ‘AI Scare Trade’-Bloomberg

By Janet Freund and Arvelisse Bonilla Ramos

Bloomberg

6. Central Banks Buying and Selling Gold 2020-2025

Visual Capitalist

7. Social Security and Poverty-Ben Carlson

A Wealth of Common Sense

8. Russia Running Out of Soldiers

Semafor

9. Majority of Americans Low Confidence in Journalists to Act in Public’s Best Interest

Pew Research Center

10. 26 Rules to Be a Better Thinker in 2026

What follows is my advice for what you’re going to need more than ever in this brave new world—26 rules for becoming a better thinker.

– Take another think. The problem with our thoughts is that they’re often wrong—sometimes preposterously so. Nothing illustrates this quite like what’s called an “eggcorn,” words or expressions we confidently mishear and then contort to match our misperception. “All for not” instead of all for naught. “All intensive purposes” instead of all intents and purposes. But the greatest eggcorn is doubly ironic: people who say “you’ve got another thing coming” are, in fact, proving the point of the actual expression, “you’ve got another think coming.” We need to be able to slow down and use a second think. Especially when we’re sure what we think is right. (And by the way, at least 50% of the time I have to ask ChatGPT to think again because it’s answers are obviously wrong).

– Take walks. For centuries, thinkers have walked many miles a day—because they had to, because they were bored, because they wanted to escape the putrid cities they lived in, because they wanted to get their blood flowing. In the process, they discovered an important side-effect: it cleared their minds and made them better thinkers. Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field—one of the most important scientific discoveries in modern history—on a walk through a Budapest park in 1882. Hemingway took long walks along the quais in Paris whenever he was stuck and needed to think. Nietzsche—who conceived of Thus Spoke Zarathustra on a long walk—said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” I have never taken a walk without thinking, after, “I am so glad I did that.”

– Embrace contradiction. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The world is complicated, ambiguous, paradoxical. To make sense of it, you must be able to balance conflicting truths.. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The world is complicated, ambiguous, paradoxical. To make sense of it, you must be able to balance conflicting truths.

– But don’t confuse complexity with nonsense. Stupid people are especially good at having a bunch of contradictory thoughts in their head at once. So the first-rate mind Fitzgerald described isn’t just about tolerating contradiction—it’s really about the ability to examine and interrogate it. It’s asking, Does this actually make sense?

– Go to first principles. Aristotle taught that one must go to the origins of things, go all the way to the primary truth of the matter, instead of just accepting common observation or belief. Don’t just blindly accept what everyone else seems to say or believe. Go to first principles. Instead of engaging with an issue from a headline, a tweet, or a take, go to the beginning. Break things down and build them back up. Put every idea to the test, the Stoics said. The good thinker approaches things with a fresh set of eyes and an open mind.

– Think for yourself. Generally, people just do what other people are doing and want what other people want and think what other people think. This was the insight of the philosopher René Girard, who coined the theory of mimetic desire. He believed that since we don’t know what we want, we end up being drawn—subconsciously or overtly—to what others want. We don’t think for ourselves, we follow tradition or the crowd.

– Don’t be contrarian for contrarian’s sake. Peter Thiel, widely considered a “contrarian,” (and a big fan of Girard) once told me that being a contrarian is actually a bad way to go. You can’t just take what everyone else thinks and put a minus sign in front of it. That’s not thinking for yourself. So in fact, if you find yourself constantly in opposition to everyone and everything (or most consensuses) that’s probably a sign you’re not doing much thinking. You’re just being reactionary.

– Ask good questions. When Isidor Rabi came home from school each day, his mother didn’t ask about grades or tests. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” This doesn’t seem like much, and yet it is everything. After all, questions drive discovery. The habit of asking questions turned Rabi into one of the greatest physicists of his time—a Nobel Prize winner whose work led to the invention of the MRI. Questions are the key not just to knowledge but to success, discovery, and mastery. They’re how we learn and how we get better. And they don’t have to be brilliant, probing, or incisive. They can be simple: “What do you mean?” They can be inquisitive: “How does that work?” They can aim for clarity: “Sorry, I didn’t understand, can you explain it another way?” The point is to stay curious. To never stop asking questions.

– Watch your information diet. When I’m not feeling great physically — tired, irritable, sluggish — usually it’s because I’m eating poorly. In the same way, when I feel mentally scattered and distracted — I know it’s time to focus on cleaning up my information diet. In programming, there’s a saying: “garbage in, garbage out.” Aim to let in the opposite of garbage. Because that leads to the opposite of garbage coming out.

– Go deep. I thought I knew a lot about Lincoln. I’d read biographies, watched documentaries, interviewed scholars, visited the sites. I’d even written about him in my books. So when I sat down to write about him in Part III of Wisdom Takes Work, I thought I was set. I wasn’t even close. So I went deeper. I read Hay and Nicolay. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page Team of Rivals. Michael Gerhardt’s 496-page book on Lincoln’s mentors. David S. Reynolds’s 1088-page Abe. David Herbert Donald’s 720-page Lincoln. Garry Wills’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Gettysburg Address. I spoke with the documentarian Ken Burns about him, and Doris too. I read Lincoln’s letters and speeches. I went, multiple times while writing the book, to the Lincoln Memorial. In the end, I spent hundreds of hours reading thousands and thousands of pages on the man. Basically, I “dug deeply,” as Lincoln’s law partner once said of Lincoln’s own approach to learning, in order to get to the “nub” of a subject. This is a skill you need. Whether you’re an author, politician, lawyer, entrepreneur, scientist, educator, parent—you have to be able to pursue an idea, a question, a thread of curiosity until you’ve gotten to the nub and wrapped your head completely around it.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 11, 2026

February 11, 2026

1. Staples Sector Forward PE Equal to Tech

The Irrelevant Investor

2. Market Breath Surging….65% of Stocks Outperforming Over Last 3 Months

3. Small Cap Earnings Growth at Highest Level in 3 Years

R3K earnings growth. And finally, “earnings growth for the median Russell 3000 stock is at its highest level in four years. Fundamentals are in line with the stock market broadening.”

Daily Chartbook

4. Goldman Predicting Record IPO Year 2026

Google

5. Huge Amount of Short Selling…Not Usually a Sing of Market Top

Hedge fund shorts. “Short selling across single stocks last week was the biggest on record going back to 2016”.

Goldman Sachs via @macrocharts

6. Copper Inventories at All-Time Highs

Bloomberg The US has quietly built up its biggest stockpile of copper in decades, distorting flows of the red metal to the rest of the world.

The influx of copper into American inventories has gathered momentum over the past year and added to upward pricing pressures. The higher prices have reverberated across the copper supply chain.

Bloomberg

7. U.S. Total Oil Production Declining for the First Time in 5 Years

Otavio (Tavi) Costa

8. Polymarket Odds 57% that Digital Asset Clarity Act Passes

Perplexity

9. Leading Crypto Political PAC Raises $193M

Axios

10. 2 “Annoying” Habits That Actually Signal Intelligence

If you’re prone to these two “annoying” habits, you could be smarter than you think. Mark Travers Ph.D.

Key points

Mind wandering can support creative thinking and cognitive flexibility.
Talking to oneself can support self-regulation, planning, and metacognition.
When we idealize focus, discipline, and a silent mind, we overlook powers of the brain beyond concentration.

We often judge habits like a drifting mind or moments of spontaneous “zoning out” as flaws. To most people, these are considered signs of poor focus, weak discipline, or even cognitive decline.

However, what we often fail to factor in is that our perceptions are influenced by the culture of relentless productivity and tangible rewards that surrounds us. From this lens, these mental habits will obviously look like distractions that need to be corrected, rather than cognitive processes that simply need to be understood.

Psychological research tells us that, under the right conditions, these seemingly unproductive behaviors can reflect cognitive flexibility, creative problem-solving, and the brain’s ability to adaptively shift between modes of thought. In other words, rather than being mental glitches, they may be signs of an active mind doing important background work.

Here are two common behaviors many people dismiss or try to suppress, as well as what they really mean, when they can be helpful, and how to start approaching them with greater psychological nuance.

1. A Habit of Daydreaming

Mind-wandering, or the drifting of attention away from the present task toward self-generated thoughts, has long been considered a telltale sign of inattention. However, recent studies show that it can also support creative thinking and cognitive flexibility.

For example, a 2025 study involving more than 1,300 adults found that deliberate mind-wandering (that is, a person intentionally allowing themselves to daydream) predicted higher creative performance. Neuroimaging data suggested this effect was supported by increased connectivity between large-scale brain networks involved in executive control and the default mode network, a system associated with self-generated thought and imagination.

People with higher spontaneous mind-wandering tendencies also show better performance on task-switching paradigms, meaning they can shift mental sets more quickly, which is a clear sign of flexible thinking.

Another habit closely related to mind-wandering is an individual’s capacity for spontaneous thought. A 2024 study published in PNAS Nexus analyzed spontaneous thought samples from more than 3,300 participants using natural language processing. According to the results, unprompted thoughts tend to organize around goal-relevant information and support memory consolidation. In other words, this means that “idle” thinking often serves adaptive cognitive functions rather than being random mental noise.

It’s important to note, however, that mind-wandering isn’t a magic bullet. Its benefits will only take root when balanced with attention control. If you find your mind often drifting, and if you also have good focus and self-awareness, then you might be tapping into a mental mode that supports creativity, flexible thinking, and problem-solving.

2. A Habit of Talking to Yourself

Talking to yourself, whether silently in your head or softly out loud, might look odd or even neurotic from the outside. However, recent psychological research suggests that inner speech and self-talk can actually be used to support self-regulation, planning, and metacognition (the act of thinking about your own thoughts).

According to a 2023 study of university students published in the journal Behavioral Sciences, there is a considerable correlation between reported use of inner speech and measures of self-regulation and self-concept clarity. In other words, individuals who “talked to themselves” more often than others would report significantly clearer self-identity as well as better self-regulation.

Of course, this does not mean that self-talk directly signals higher intelligence. Instead, it suggests that inner speech may function as a cognitive scaffold, or as a way to organize complex ideas, sequence actions, and monitor goals.

This means that by externalizing thoughts internally (or quietly aloud), the brain may find it easier to reduce cognitive noise. As a result, it may also impose structure on abstract or emotionally charged problems more efficiently and effectively. So, if you catch yourself murmuring through your thoughts, it could be your brain’s way of scaffolding complex ideas, turning chaotic thinking into ordered plans or self-reflection.

However, as with mind-wandering, self-talk also benefits only in moderation. Excessive or negative self-talk, especially in the form of rumination or harsh self-criticism, can undermine focus and mental well-being. When used constructively, however, that same internal dialogue can transform half-thoughts into actionable plans.

What to Do if You Have These ‘Annoying’ Habits

If you have one or both of these supposedly “annoying” habits, then you must always remind yourself that there isn’t anything wrong with you; they’re both incredibly common and totally normal. However, despite their benefits, they aren’t necessarily guaranteed markers of genius, either.

In reality, the relationships between these habits and their associated productive behaviors are contextual and conditional. This means minds that wander with purpose, self-talk used for planning rather than rumination, and rest that is balanced with effort will correlate most strongly with enhanced thinking or creativity.

On the other hand, when these behaviors spiral into chronic distraction, anxiety, or disorganization, then they may risk becoming problematic. However, if an individual engages in them consciously and moderately, they can indeed be used as valuable tools. Here are three steps you can follow to use them adaptively:

Notice context. Pay attention to when and where you typically start mind-wandering or talking to yourself. Are you daydreaming during monotonous tasks? Do you talk to yourself when trying to focus on something critical? Try giving yourself a 10-minute idle moment first, then return to the task.
Use inner speech consciously. When planning or thinking through ideas, speak (silently or quietly) as if guiding yourself. That structure can help shape clarity.
Allow mental rest. Schedule micro-breaks for reflection. Sometimes, the best ideas come when the brain has space and freedom to wander.

When we idealize focus, discipline, and silence inside the mind, we overlook the powers of the human brain beyond sheer concentration. The next time you catch your mind drifting, hear a soft whisper of self-talk, or notice your gaze drifting out the window, don’t immediately judge it as laziness or lack of control. Sometimes, it’s just your mind thinking in a language beyond tasks and deadlines.

A version of this post also appears on Forbes.com. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202602/2-annoying-habits-that-actually-signal-intelligence

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 10, 2026

February 10, 2026

1. History of Emerging Market vs. S&P Cycle

Ben Carlson

2. Fund Flows Post October Nasdaq Peak

Since the Nasdaq peaked on October 29th, the money has been flooding into emerging markets, thematic funds, and cyclicals. ETF flow data shows a clear exodus from mega-cap tech into overlooked corners of the market.

Todd Sohn via Daily Chartbook

3. Notable Drawdowns

4. Big 4 Companies Spending $650 Billion 2026 on Capex

Dave Lutz Jones Trading ROTATION WATCH– Four of the biggest US technology companies together have forecast capital expenditures that will reach about $650 billion in 2026 — a mind-boggling tide of cash earmarked for new data centers and the long list of equipment needed to make them tick, including artificial intelligence chips, networking cables and backup generators.

The four companies “see the race to provide AI compute as the next winner-take-all or winner-takes-most market,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson. “And none of them is willing to lose.”

5. Russian Oil and Gas Revenue -50% in January

Janis Kluge

6. The Most Valuable Private Companies

7. The $20 Trillion Increase in U.S. Debt

King Report-US debt under Trump soared $8 Trillion or 40% from his January 2017 inauguration until Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. US debt soared $8 Trillion during Biden’s term, or 28.77%. US debt during Trump’s 2nd term has jumped $2.32 Trillion in ONE YEAR!

The King Report

8. Bitcoin ETF Hits 2024 Levels of Support

StockCharts

9. Disney Flip in Operation Income Over 10 Years-Prog G

Prof G Markets

10. How Do Family Offices Allocate-Barrons

Barron’s

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 09, 2026

February 9, 2026

1. The Magnificent 2

2. MAGS Mag 7 ETF Chart …Sideways Since Sept 2025

StockCharts

3. Software Forward PE Drop ….Forward P/E of Software ETF 55x to 35x

Perplexity

4. IGV Software ETF Right on Liberation Day Lows

StockCharts

5. Private Equity ETF PSP Failed 4x at New Highs

StockCharts

6. Defensives Still Close to Lowest Weighting in S&P 500 Since 1990

After a fascinating week in markets, today’s CoTD —updated from last week’s pack (link here)—shows that US defensive stocks remain close to the “cheapest” levels we’ve seen since our dataset begins in 1990. In other words, even with the recent rotation out of tech, the broader picture still shows limited impact when you zoom out.

For more colour on positioning and flows behind the recent equity move, see Parag Thatte’s latest weekly report (link here). Two themes stand out:

Tech bounced on Friday from the bottom of its 10-year relative channel versus the S&P 500. Notably, it was sitting at the top of that channel back in October when the rotation began.
The rotation away from tech began around the time Q3 earnings revealed a broadening of earnings growth—from a narrow set of sectors (mainly tech) to most sectors.

This second point is particularly interesting: improving earnings elsewhere may have helped create the conditions for the tech sell-off just as much as anything happening within tech itself. And while tech still shows the strongest earnings growth, today’s chart suggests that as other sectors improve, relative valuations become compelling enough for investors to reallocate.

Deutsche Bank

7. Murder Rate Per 100,000 People

Semafor

8. Source of Power by State 2025

Orennia

9. Unemployment Rate for College Grads in U.S. 2.5%-2.8%….Vs. China/India

Perlpexity

10. Super-Aged Societies-Demographics is Destiny

Visual Capitalist

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 06, 2026

February 6, 2026

https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/why-your-brain-needs-everyday-rituals

1. Crypto Assets Lose $1.7 Trillion in Value Since October

Bloomberg

2. 2 X Leverage an Already Leveraged MSTR -97%

Ben Carlson

3. For Short-Term Traders

Highs vs. lows. “This is a very split market. 16% of S&P 500 stocks are at 52 week highs while 5% are at 52 week lows. This only happened 3 other times: July 1990, August 2015, March 2025. Each were followed by at least a -10% $SPX correction in the next 2 months”.

@themarketstats

4. Palantir PLTR-A Series of Lower Highs and Close Below 200 Day

StockCharts

5. XLP Consumer Staples 15% Over QQQ 2026…XLP +12% vs. QQQ -3%

YCharts

6. Top 5 P/E with Exposure to Enterprise Software

Pitchbook

7. Countries with Largest Copper Reserves

Semarfor

8. Chile ETF +62% One Year

Google Finance

9. Home Sellers Outnumber Buyers Nationally

Barchart

10. Why your brain needs everyday rituals-The Big Think

Rituals serve psychological functions that go far beyond mere habit or tradition.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Key Takeaways

Rituals — repeated, meaningful routines — give the brain structure when life feels uncertain.
Their predictability can calm stress, reduce mental load, and improve social interactions.
You can design small, personal rituals to actively program your brain for resilience, clarity, and connection.

A few years ago, during a particularly chaotic period at work, I started making my morning coffee the exact same way every day: same mug, same timing, same two minutes of silence while it brewed.

It wasn’t intentional; I was just too overwhelmed to think about it. But something interesting happened: Those two minutes became the calmest part of my day. Even when everything else felt out of control, I had this one predictable moment that somehow made the rest manageable.

I had just experienced the power of rituals completely by accident, and it wasn’t until I left tech to study neuroscience that I understood why that simple coffee routine had been so effective.

Rituals are some of the most powerful technologies invented by humankind.

Most people think of rituals as elaborate religious ceremonies or ancient traditions. But your life is actually filled with them.

Waiting for everyone to be served before eating, giving presents for birthdays and holidays, saying “hello” and exchanging scripted pleasantries, clapping at the end of a performance — all of these are rituals woven throughout our days.

Since the dawn of time, humans have used rituals to acknowledge one another, signal belonging, mark beginnings and endings, and more.

In fact, I believe rituals are some of the most powerful technologies invented by humankind. Think of them as repetitive, patterned, often culturally transmitted “software” that serves psychological functions that go far beyond mere habit or tradition.

The psychology and neuroscience of rituals

When people face stress, danger, or major life changes, rituals provide a sense of stability through structured actions. Having something concrete to do when everything appears uncertain reduces anxiety and feelings of helplessness.

This sense of agency extends to rituals’ broader social function: Shared routines make cooperation easier in times of stress. When a team huddles before a game, the action signals membership and commitment to the group.

Rituals also help us make sense of life’s most challenging moments. They mark transitions — such as birth, puberty, marriage, and death — and help us navigate events that feel overwhelming. They also support us as we forge a new identity through rites of passage. That’s why graduation ceremonies don’t just celebrate achievement; they help transform a person’s identity from “student” to “graduate.”

Lastly, rituals transmit culture across generations. Children learn gratitude from family dinner traditions, not from lectures about being thankful. Repeatedly doing something together works better than just talking about it.

Rituals are like a software upgrade for your nervous system. They affect your brain and body in three specific ways:

Calm. Rituals help quiet the brain’s threat-detection system, especially the amygdala. When that system calms down, we feel more grounded. This is one reason repeating familiar sequences of actions helps during chaotic transitions.
Clarity. Predictable steps activate parts of the prefrontal cortex involved in planning, which reduces mental load as your brain doesn’t have to constantly decide what comes next. This makes challenging tasks feel more manageable, especially under stress.
Connection. When people move or speak in sync, the brain releases bonding chemicals, such as oxytocin and endogenous opioids. These make social interactions feel warmer and more trusting. That’s why shared rituals create a sense of “us.”

Most rituals are inherited from the culture around us — we simply adopt what we see others doing. But here’s the part I find most exciting: You don’t have to copy-paste rituals from others. You can consciously design rituals that serve your specific needs.

How to design your own rituals

Creating personal rituals that serve your specific needs only takes a bit of observation, experimentation, and reflection.

Start with observation. Notice the moments in your day when you feel scattered, stressed, or disconnected. These transition points are perfect opportunities for designing a new ritual.
Next, experiment. Pick one specific moment in your day and try a simple ritual. Maybe it’s making your morning coffee the same way each day, arranging your desk before work, or taking three deep breaths before important meetings. The key is choosing something small enough to stick with yet meaningful enough to feel intentional.
Finally, reflect and adjust. After a week or two, ask yourself: Does this ritual actually help? Does it feel natural or forced? Pretend to be a scientist and answer these questions from a place of curiosity. Tweak as needed.

The most effective personal rituals are simple enough to remember, specific enough to feel meaningful, and flexible enough to adapt to different circumstances. Start small with one daily ritual, then gradually expand your toolkit.

These repeated patterns of action will help you actively program your brain for resilience, clarity, and connection. Use them before exams, competitions, or challenging conversations. Keep experimenting and adapting them as you and your circumstances change.

Your brain is already wired to respond to rituals — you just need to give it the right patterns to follow.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 05, 2026

February 5, 2026

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/the-vibe-in-the-crypto-market-right-now-stay-alive-9f3ee79c

1. Retail Investor Flow Jumped 60% from 2024 to 2025

Retail Flows Hit Record Highs

Here’s the part that should make Wall Street nervous: retail isn’t just maintaining presence, it’s accelerating. JPMorgan data shows that retail flows in 2025 jumped 60% from 2024 levels and are running 17% higher than the 2021 meme stock peak.

Retail investors are now over 20% of the total U.S. trading volume. Retail has now become a bigger force in the market than institutional long only and hedge funds.

Daily Chartbook

2. IGV Software ETF -30% from Highs ….Right on 200-Week Moving Average

StockCharts

3. Worst Performing Software Stocks-Bespoke

Bespoke’s

4. History of Consumer Staple Rally vs. Tech

“Due to the AI disruption fear in Service Businesses, Legal tools, Consulting and Advertising -we are seeing rotation into Consumer Staples and Cyclicals that are less threatened by AI” Noted JonesTrading’s Mike O’Rourke. Yesterday the Defensive sector XLP was up +2%, while tech sector XLK was down -2% – “This only happened in 2000-2001 dot-com bust & January 2025 (before Trump tariffs crash)” noted Twits.

5. $227 Million Out of Bitcoin ETFS….IBIT Breaks Below April 2025 Levels

WSJ-$227 Million in Net Withdraws from Bitcoin ETFs Ending Jan 28^Th

StockCharts

6. 44% of Bitcoin Supply is Now Negative Returns

BTC supply in profit. “44% of Bitcoin supply is now underwater.”

DAILY CHARTBOOK

7. Fidelity Launched Dollar Backed Stablecoin in Direct Competition with CRCL…..CRCL -35% Year to Date

StockCharts

8. Solar ETF +70% 12 Months Despite Trump and Silver Prices

Google

9. 10-20% of Solar Manufacturing Cost is Silver

Perplexity

10. More trouble than it’s worth-Seth’s Blog

This is the hallmark of projects that turn out to be worth doing.

The trouble might be a symptom that we’re onto something that others don’t care enough to do.

And the things that are obviously worth doing are probably already being done.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 04, 2026

February 4, 2026

1. Truflation Update

Truflation

2. Silver Pulled Back to Jan 9^th 2026 Prices

Robin Brooks

3. Bitcoin Whales Buying Pullback?

BTC whales. Bitcoin whales (i.e., addresses holding >1k bitcoin) have been accumulating since late 2025.

Caitlin Long

4. Natural Gas -25% on Commodities Pullback

Barchart

5. Precious Metals Trading Volume-Irrelevant Investor

The Irrelevant Investor

6. Only 10% of Chinese Exports Go to U.S.-Torston Slok

The Daily Spark

7. Defensive Stocks Lead January

S&P Dow Jones Indice

8. Office CMBS Delinquency New Highs on Two NYC Manhattan Towers

Wolf Street-Spike of defaults was triggered by two huge Manhattan office towers.

One Worldwide Plaza, $1.2 billion of debt–One New York Plaza, $835 million loan

Wolf Street

9. Kalshi Betting 90% Sports

Perplexity

10. Good Fats vs. Bad Fats-Dr. Hyman

Mark Hyman

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 03, 2026

February 3, 2026

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.

https://fs.blog/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 February 02, 2026

February 2, 2026

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lies-and-deception/202601/why-critical-thinking-is-the-most-important-skill-in-your-life

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.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 30, 2026

January 30, 2026

1. Big Tech Capital Spending

WSJ

2. Finra Margin as % of Russell 3000

The Irrelevant Investor

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?

StockCharts

7. Small Cap Materials ETF Breakout

StockCharts

8. General Motors Chart Breakout…+75% One-Year

StockCharts

9. Boeing Ran Up to 2024 Highs then Reversed

StockCharts

10. Terrible-Seth’s Blog

Most of us are terrible at some things.

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.

https://seths.blog/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 29, 2026

January 29, 2026

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/mass-deportation-trump-administration-ice-criminals-minnesota-tim-walz-kristi-noem-7f3bb88b

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.

10. The Art and Value of Paying Attention

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.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-peter-drucker-files/202601/the-art-and-value-of-paying-attention

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 28, 2026

January 28, 2026

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\

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.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 27, 2026

January 27, 2026

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

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.

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.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 26, 2026

January 26, 2026

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

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.

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.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 22, 2026

January 22, 2026

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

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.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 21, 2026

January 21, 2026

1. Wall Street Cross-Asset Sell Off

Bloomberg

2. 2025 Returns Driven by Earnings Growth

A Wealth of Common Sense

3. Mag 7 $450-$500 B in Cash

Perplexity

4. Small Cap Negative Earnings Companies Still Beating Positive Earnings Firms

Torsten Slok

5. Stocks as a Percentage of Household Assets

MarketWatch

6. CPI Electricity Prices Since 2020-Wolf Street

Wolf Street

7. World’s Biggest Aid Donors….China Not on List

Semafor

8. Ukraine Close to Their Own Long-Range Missiles

Inside Ukraine’s Quest to Build a Missile to Strike Deep in Russian Territory-WSJ By Matthew Luxmoore

WSJ

9. Gen X and Millennials Will Inherit Trillions in Real Estate Over the Next Decade

WSJ How luxury homeowners are preparing their children for the great wealth transfer By Katherine ClarkeFollow

WSJ

10. Americans View Congress Having the Lowest Morality of Any Profession

Sherwood Media

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 20, 2026

January 20, 2026

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/innovation-you/202601/what-are-you-designed-to-do

1. Small Cap Outperformance 6 Months…IWM (small) +21% vs. S&P 500 +11.5%

YCharts

2. XLE Energy Sector ETF Breakout

StockCharts

3. OIH Oil Service Approaching 3-Year Breakout

StockCharts

4. 2026 Energy ETF +6.5% vs. Software ETF IGV -7%

YCharts

5. LIT Lithium ETF Breaks Out Above 2022 Levels

StockCharts

6. 2026 YTD INTEL INTC +31% vs. S&P +1.5%

YCharts

7. Netflix -34% From Highs..Hitting Support

StockCharts

8. Estimated Global Earnings Growth-Capital Group

Capital Group

9. Women vs. Men College Enrollment-Prof G Media

Prof G Media

10. What Are You Designed to Do?

Why purpose is about pattern, not passion. Jeff DeGraff Ph.D.

Key points

Purpose comes from design, not desire—where your gifts, skills, and context align.
Your job isn’t your identity; it only expresses your deeper pattern.
Stress reveals your design. How you act under pressure shows your true strengths.
Design evolves—your gifts grow through practice, reflection, and service.

4 Ways to Discover What You’re Designed to Do

Study your defaults under pressure.
Look beyond your job title.
Experiment, don’t declare.
Refine through service.

When stress rises, notice what you instinctively do. That pattern—your natural mode of problem-solving or connecting—is a clue to your design.

As Viktor Frankl (1959) observed, purpose is not found in what we get from life but in what life expects from us. Your profession may be a vehicle, but your design is the engine.

Treat your design as a prototype. Try new contexts, collaborators, and challenges. Growth, as Dweck (2006) reminds us, is iterative.

The surest test of a gift is its value to others. When your work creates coherence, insight, or uplift in others, you’ve likely found alignment between your design and your purpose.

To ask What am I designed to do? is not to surrender freedom—it is to locate it. It means working with the grain of your nature rather than against it, shaping your life as a craftsman shapes wood: respecting the knots, the curves, the tensile strength that make it beautiful.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1934) once wrote, “Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.” That place—the confluence of gift, growth, and grace—is where design becomes destiny.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 16, 2026

January 16, 2026

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/half-of-glp-1-users-ditch-their-injections-and-some-are-turning-to-other-weight-loss-methods-instead-8effac61?mod=home_lead

1. Trading Desks Build Out Predictions Market

Trading on prediction markets surged since the start of the NFL season last fall

Financial Times

2. Small Cap Stocks on Best 10 Day Start Since 1987

Zach Goldberg Jefferies …The Russell 2000 is up roughly 8.3% so far in January. This puts it on track for its best 10-day start to any year since 1987, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The index has gained 2.4% in this week alone and has outpaced the S&P 500 over the past three months.

3. Broadening of Market Leadership

Reuters

4. Mag 7 Lagging

Abnormal Returns

5. Large Money Center Banks

Bespoke Investment Group While large brokerage/investment banking-centric firms like Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) are seeing modest reactions to earnings, the same can’t be said for the largest money center banks, which reported this week. Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), and Wells Fargo (WFC) all traded down at least 3% on their reaction days this week. For most, it was their worst earnings reaction day performance in over a year, and for BAC, it was the worst since October 2020!

Bespoke

6. Bond Market Calmest Ever

Bond market calm. “The bond market has never been so quiet … the 30-day trading range for the benchmark 10-year US Treasury, which is now the tightest it’s been since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the trading range for the 30-year has reached a record low.”

Bloomberg

7. CEO’s Keep Spending on AI

Semafor

8. Half of GLP-1 users ditch their injections — and some are turning to other weight-loss methods instead

New research has found that 50% of patients regain the weight they lost if they stop taking Wegovy and Zepbound By

Jaimy Lee

Points-Marketwatch

About This Summary

Approximately half of individuals discontinuing GLP-1 medications regain all lost weight within two years, often experiencing the return of associated medical problems.
A study of 77,310 adults in Denmark revealed that 52% of Wegovy users stopped treatment within a year due to cost or gastrointestinal side effects.
New oral GLP-1 options are emerging as potential maintenance treatments.

Millions of Americans have tried GLP-1s, but some people find that the weight-loss drugs have too many side effects, are expensive or just don’t work for them.

Patients also have to deal with changes to their health insurance at the start of a new year, and more employers have withdrawn coverage of the pricey medications. About half of the people who stop taking GLP-1s, like Eli Lilly’s

Wegovy, discover that they gain back all the weight they lost within two years.

“The only way that they work is if you keep taking them,” said Scott Isaacs, an endocrinologist at the Grady Health System in Atlanta. “And when people stop taking them, they have a lot of weight regain, and the medical problems that went away tend to come back.”

9. Do these 5 stretches every day to keep your body young

Patrick Franco, Contributor

Modern life is optimized for comfort, especially while sitting, but not for longevity. We relax on soft couches, work in rigid desk chairs, and spend hours driving or scrolling on our phones. Over time, these habits pull the head forward, round the spine and tighten the hips.

Those patterns quietly erode posture, mobility and the ability to rest with ease, which are all important for aging well. But I always tell my clients that a short, intentional daily stretching routine can help counteract the physical strain of modern life.

Just a few minutes a day can improve posture, calm the nervous system and keep the body resilient for years to come. Here are five stretches I do every day to help with just that.

1. Seated spinal twist

Why it’s important: Spinal rotation helps maintain mobility, improves posture, decompresses the spine and reduces stiffness caused by prolonged sitting.

How to do it: Sit cross-legged on the floor or upright in a chair. Inhale to lift the arms, then exhale as you twist to the right, rotating from the belly through the ribs, chest, shoulders, head and neck. Hold for five slow breaths, then repeat on the other side.

2. Lunge

Why it’s important: Sitting with bent hips, whether at a desk or in a car, shortens the hip flexors and pulls the torso forward. Lunges lengthen these muscles, supporting better posture and helping prevent low back pain.

How to do it: Step one foot forward and lower the back knee. Reach the arms overhead, gently firm the glutes and engage the abdomen to protect the lower back. Hook the thumbs if comfortable to lengthen the torso and lift the chest. Hold for five to eight breaths, then switch sides.

3. Supported fish pose

Why it’s important: This pose counteracts “tech neck” and upper-back rounding by opening the chest, throat and thoracic spine.

How to do it: Lie back over a rolled blanket, foam roller or yoga block placed beneath the shoulder blades. Use a blanket if you need additional support for your head. Keep the knees bent so the focus stays on the upper back. Let the arms fall open with palms facing up and allow gravity to do the work. Stay for one to two minutes.

4. Bridge pose

Why it’s important: Bridge pose strengthens the back body — glutes, hamstrings and spinal muscles — while opening the front of the hips, supporting both posture and spinal health.

How to do it: Lie on your back with knees bent and feet hip-width apart. Press into the heels to lift the hips. Keep the chest broad by tucking the arms underneath and pressing them down. Hold for five breaths, then lower. Repeat three times.

5. Legs up the wall

Why it’s important: This simple and gentle inversion helps reset the nervous system, improves circulation and relieves swelling in the legs after long periods of sitting, standing or travel.

How to do it: Sit sideways next to a wall and swing the legs up as you lie back. Open the arms with palms facing up. If a wall isn’t available, rest the legs over a couch or chair. Close the eyes, slow the breath and stay for at least five to seven minutes.

You don’t need long workouts to boost longevity. These five stretches work together to undo some of the physical strain of modern life. They will help you you stand taller, move more freely and rest more deeply.

Patrick Francois a yoga instructor and co-director at YogaRenew Teacher Training Online. He leads in-person and online teacher trainings all over the world, and focuses primarily on yoga sequencing and the business of yoga, infusing his own enthusiasm and grounded approach to spirituality into every class he teaches.

https://www.cnbc.com/world/?region=world

10. Food Companies Employ Thousands of Chemists to Get You Addicted-Mark Hyman

Mark Hyman

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 15, 2026

January 15, 2026

http://www.pitchbook.com/

1. Rotation Out of Mag 7 to Small Cap

Barron’s

2. IPO Boom From VC/Private Still Not Yet

2025 IPO boom wasn’t enough to solve VCs’ problems

By Kyle Stanford, Director of US Venture Research

US VC-backed exits totaled nearly $300 billion in value during 2025, nearly double 2024’s total—but making it only the fourth-highest value in the past decade, according to our latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

VCs expected 2025 to finally bring back significant liquidity, which it delivered to a point. While total value did increase, the uncertainty created by the new US tariffs and the government shutdown in early Q4 put a damper on the year’s IPO count.

The number of completed listings barely surpassed the prior couple of years. And by year’s end, only a small pipeline of companies had begun the registration process, not the long line of candidates the industry would hope for.

The aggregate value of unicorns has jumped to $4.3 trillion, further straining the problem. The ongoing lack of liquidity comes after years of robust fundraising by VCs, fueled by growing private market valuations.

But with returns remaining unrealized, LPs are left waiting and wishing. The impact of the overall lack of liquidity is obvious: 2025 recorded the lowest VC fundraising total since 2018.

3. IPO ETF Below Highs

StockCharts

4. Residential Investment as a Share of Real GDP is Close to All-Time Low

The irrelevant investor

5. Home Sellers Pull Listings Off Market Until Spring

Sales of Existing Homes in 2025 Drop to Lowest since 1995, Sellers Massively Yank Listings off the Market, Waiting for Spring-by Wolf Richter

6. Institutional Investors Most Bullish on Financials and Healthcare

7. Record Number of Americans Live Alone

chartr

8. 25k Russian Soldiers Being Killed Per Month in Ukraine.

Russia’s ‘massive’ losses in Ukraine have it heading toward a breaking point, NATO’s top official says

NATO’s secretary general said up to 25,000 Russian soldiers are being killed in Ukraine each month. By Jake Epstein

Mark Rutte described the carnage as “unsustainable” for Moscow.
That suggests that a breaking point is coming, though it remains unclear when.

Russia’s military is suffering heavy losses fighting in Ukraine, with up to 25,000 soldiers killed a month, NATO’s top civilian official said this week, calling the carnage “unsustainable” for Moscow.

“The Russians, at the moment, are losing massive amounts of their soldiers thanks to the Ukrainian defense,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told European lawmakers at a forum in Brussels on Tuesday. He said that 20,000 to 25,000 troops are dying each month as the war drags on.

“I’m not talking seriously wounded. Killed.” Rutte clarified. He compared the incredibly high losses to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, where an estimated 15,000 of its soldiers were killed over a period of more than nine years.

“Now they lose this amount or more in one month,” he said of the number of Russian soldiers killed every month. “So that’s also unsustainable on their side.”

Russia has not disclosed official casualty figures, but Ukrainian and Western estimates paint a grim picture for Moscow.

https://www.businessinsider.com/massive-russian-losses-ukraine-pushing-it-to-breaking-point-nato-2026-1

9. Iran Execution-WSJ

WSJ

10. Life Lessons from Eric Soda

Life Lessons

Caring What Others Thought: This was my biggest waste of energy. I used to worry about how my choices looked to people who weren’t even living the life I wanted. The truth? Nobody cares as much as you think they do. Do what’s right for you.

The Cost of Waiting is Real: Whether it’s traveling, building a home, or starting a renovation, waiting will almost always cost you more money. Materials go up, labor goes up, and time disappears. If you have the means, do it now.

Helping Others: I did not help others soon enough. Sharing what you know can change someone’s life. Business, investing, or otherwise. It’s why I started to gift my book as much as I have. Make sure you give back.

Life is a Series of Routines: We are what we do every day. If your routine is nothing but stress and spreadsheets, that’s what your life will be. So build good ones.

Work to Live, Don’t Live to Work: We all have to grind sometimes, but don’t let the grind become your identity. Work is the engine that funds the life you want to lead, not the other way around.

The U-Haul Principle: You’ve heard it before, there’s no U-Haul behind a hearse. You don’t want to be the richest man in the graveyard. Use your investments to fund a life you actually enjoy today, not just a number for a future you might not see.

Spreadsheets Don’t Capture Everything: You have to do what you want to do, not just what looks mathematically optimal on a spreadsheet. Sometimes the “right” move for your life doesn’t fit into a cell in Excel. Not everything fits on a spreadsheet. You do what works for you, not what looks right to others. Who cares.

https://www.spilledcoffee.co

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 14, 2026

January 14, 2026

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-brain/202601/good-news-study-shows-that-most-men-are-not-toxic

1. Powell has the Highest Approval Rating of any American Political Leader

Approval ratings. “Powell has the highest approval rating of any ‘political leader’ in the country.”

Daily Chartbook

2. Kalshi Handicap of Mid-Terms

Kalshi

3. Spending by Billionaires on Elections

Prof G Media

4. Japanes Yen Close to Breaking 3 Year Lows

StockCharts

5. Japanes Stock Market New Highs with Weak Currency

StockCharts

6. S&P 500 Buyback Blackout Period Now

Dave Lutz Jones Trading More than half of SPX is in a buyback blackout window ahead of Q4 earnings.

7. Netflix Back Liberation Day Selloff Lows

StockCharts

8. Social Skills Rank Highest in Employment and Wages

The American Community Survey shows how important social skills are…

Census

9. Iran’s Biggest Trading Partners

Semafor

10. Good News: Study Shows That Most Men Are Not Toxic

A new study investigated how common toxic masculinity is. Here’s what it found. Sebastian Ocklenburg, Ph.D.The Asymmetric Brain

Key points

“Toxic masculinity” is often mentioned online but there is not much psychological research on it.
A new study in more than 15,000 mean investigated eight markers of toxic masculinity.
Only 10.8 percent of men included in the study showed clear signs of toxic masculinity.
Hostile and benevolent toxic masculinity need to be differentiated.

“Toxic Masculinity” is a buzzword widely used online that broadly captures troubling attitudes about masculinity that may be harmful to others. However, little actual psychological research has been conducted on it. This is a problem, since it leaves unclear what defines toxic masculinity and how common it is.

A new psychological study on toxic masculinity

A new study entitled “Are Men Toxic? A Person-Centered Investigation Into the Prevalence of Different Types of Masculinity in a Large Sample of New Zealand Men,” published in “Psychology of Men & Masculinities,” a scientific journal by the American Psychological Association APA, focused on toxic masculinity (Hill Cone and co-workers, 2026). In the study, the research team, led by scientist Deborah Hill Cone from the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, analyzed data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. Overall, data from more than 15,000 male heterosexual volunteers aged between 18 and 99 years were included in the study. The volunteers included in the study had filled out various questionnaires, and the scientists concentrated on analyzing eight factors that could indicate problematic or toxic masculinity:

Gender identity centrality: This psychological construct measures how important it is for someone’s sense of self to be a man.
Sexual prejudice: This psychological construct measures negative thoughts about other people based on their sexual orientation.
Disagreeableness: A personality trait that includes being unpleasant and offensive to other people.
Narcissism: A personality trait that includes an increased sense of self-worth, often at the cost of other people.
Hostile sexism: Overtly negative attitudes towards women.
Benevolent sexism: Attitudes towards women that are not overtly hostile but still view them in a stereotypical way.
Opposition to domestic violence prevention initiatives: Being opposed to initiatives helping prevent violence towards women in relationships
Social dominance orientation: A preference against equality in social groups and for having a dominance hierarchy within groups.

Results of the study: Only about 11 percent of men show toxic masculinity

The scientists used advanced statistical modelling to identify subgroups of men characterized by distinct profiles across the eight toxic masculinity markers included in the study. These “latent profile analyses” revealed five distinct groups of men regarding toxic masculinity. The good news is that most men did not show toxic masculinity.

The largest group was called “Atoxics” (35.4 percent). These men showed low values across all eight indicators of toxic masculinity.

The second and third largest groups (27.2 percent and 26.6 percent of volunteers) both showed low to moderate values across the eight indicators of toxic masculinity.

Only the two smallest groups showed high levels of toxic masculinity. These included the “Benevolent Toxic” group (7.6 percent) that showed high values on benevolent sexism and sexual prejudice and moderate-to-high values on the other markers of toxic masculinity. The smallest group was the “Hostile Toxic” group (3.2 percent) that showed the highest values on hostile sexism, opposition to domestic violence prevention, disagreeableness, narcissism, and social dominance orientation.

Takeaway

Taken together, only 10.8 percent of the volunteers in this large study showed clear signs of toxic masculinity, while 89.2 percent did not. This finding indicates that the vast majority of men are not “toxic” and do not believe in destructive male attitudes. The study also showed that there seem to be two forms of toxic masculinity: the hostile and the benevolent. The scientists suggested that this finding should be kept in mind when developing measures to protect against toxic masculinity.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 13, 2026

January 13, 2026

1. $9Trillion Money Markets Here We Come

The Kobeissi Letter

2. Credit Spreads Approaching Historically Tight Levels

Capital Group

3. KWEB Chinese Internet ETF Still 65% Below 2021 All-Time Highs

The Irrelevant Investor

4. Dollar Weakened Yesterday But Off Last Year’s Lows and 50 day thru 200day to Upside

StockCharts

5. FRDM ETF Excludes Authoritarian Regimes vs. Other Emerging Markets ETFs…..3 Years FRDM +100% vs. EEM +50%

YCharts

6. Waymo has Ambitious Expansion Plans

Zvi Mowshowitz

7. Rare Earths-Prof G

PROF G MEDIA

8. $700m Green Cash was Declared in 2 Years Moving Out of Minneaplis Airport

Perplexity

9. America is Closing in on Half the Country Being Registered Independent Voters

Gallup

10. Oldest Boomers Turning 80

Pew Research Center

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 12, 2026

January 12, 2026

Goldman Sachs via @mikezaccardi

1. History of +1% Starts to the Year

Good Start, Good Year: the strong start to 2026 bodes well for the rest of the year, as Ryan Detrick Notes: “The S&P 500 is up more than 1% after the first 5 days of 2026. Historically, when this happens, the full year is positive more than 87% of the time and up nearly 16% on average.”Thinking it through, the main logic to this statistical boon is probably a combination of momentum effects and the absence of bad macro/fundamental news.

Ryan Detrick

2. 12% of S&P 500 at 52-Week Highs

Spilled Coffee

3. GDP x FFR vs. SPX P/E. “Accelerating/stable GDP growth with Fed cutting supports multiple expansion…best combination”

Daily Chartbook

4. Tech Debt 2026 vs. 1999…Not An Issue Yet

At least no debt, yet TMT debt growth – this is the key difference between the Dot Com and AI CAPEX booms.

Goldman

5. Tech Capital Spending is Back to Previous Highs But They are Using Cash

BCA Research

6. Risk-On Small Cap, Meme ETF, High Yield Bonds

Bloomberg

7. IWM Small Cap +5.72% vs. S&P +1.78% to Start 2026

YCharts

8. AMZN Dominating Large Tech to Start 2026…AMZN +7% vs. MAGS (Mag 7 ETF) Flat

9. How Often are Housing Returns Positive?

Ben Carlson

10. Room temperature-Seth’s Blog

Left alone, a cup of coffee will gradually cool until it reaches room temperature.

Stable systems regress to the mean. Things level out on their way to average, which maintains the stability of the system.

The same pressures are put on any individual in our culture.

Sooner or later, unless you push back, you’ll end up at room temperature.

(As I write this, the built-in grammar tool has made suggestions to every single sentence, pushing to make it sound less like me and more like normal.)

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 09, 2026

January 9, 2026

https://www.ft.com/content/34b476fe-ddc8-4cfb-b1cf-acf8ffde5ca5

1. Non-Tech Sectors Leading 2026

Bespoke

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.

8. The World is Sobering Up

WSJ

9. Single-Family Rentals 1% of Inventory

Nick Timiraos

10. How to Find Meaning in Your Life

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.

https://markmanson.net/the-meaning-of-life

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 08, 2026

January 8, 2026

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.

Tony Isola

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 07, 2026

January 7, 2026

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/from-freud-to-fluoxetine/202512/genetics-environment-and-personality

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 psychiatric management 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.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 06, 2026

January 6, 2026

1. Tech Sector Saw the Biggest Valuation Contraction in 2025 vs. Other Sectors

The Irrelevant Investor

2. Copper New Highs

Bloomberg

3. Dow Transports Breaking Out

StockCharts

4. Financial Stocks XLF Make New Highs….Copper, Transports and Financials Make New Highs-Not the Setup for Slowdown or Recession

StockCharts

5. CES Conference Highlights

Perplexity

6. Norway 96%$ EV Cars…. Population is 5.6m

Chartr

7. Iran Inflation

Statista

8. Iran Protests…. Over 40% of Iran Unemployed are University Grads

Google AI

9. Home Affordability by County

The Daily Dirtnap

10. What you don’t know-Seth’s Blog

Are entrepreneurs professionals?

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.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 January 05, 2026

January 5, 2026

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/doj-seeks-enlist-400-attorneys-review-5m-pages/story?id=128809409

1. Margins Expand in 2025

Carson Group

2. Strong Retail Demand for Gold

Apollo

3. Stock Based Compensation of AI Companies

WSJ

4. NYT Stock-NY Times vs. S&P 500 from Trump I Election to Today….NYT +588% vs. S&P 500 +278%

YCharts

5. Tesla Historical Deliveries

Wolf Street

6. Comparing AI Rally

Bloomberg

7. MSTR Shares Since It Began Buying Bitcoin

8. DOJ seeks to enlist 400 attorneys to review more than 5M pages of Epstein records: Sources

The review of the documents is expected to take much of January, sources said. ByKatherine Faulders and Alexander Mallin

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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3v1g227p4xo?utm_source=semafor

10. Rage Bait-Dr. Hyman

Mark Hyman

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 30, 2025

December 30, 2025

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/29/safest-most-dangerous-cities-2025/87568616007

1. Game On…Bet on Anything

Callum Thomas

2. U.S. Dollar Worst Year Since 2003

Hedgeye

2. FTSE 100 UK Market Outperformed S&P for First Time Since 2009

Barron’s

3. Copper Miner FCX Making Run at 20-Year Breakout

Google Finance

4. Private Equity Selling a Record Amount of General Partner Stakes

WSJ The market for general-partner stakes—investments in a private asset manager that typically let the buyer share in management fees and deal profits—rebounded in 2025 after three lean years. GP-stake deal volume totaled $3.5 billion through the end of October, on pace to easily exceed the record of $3.6 billion set in 2015, according to PitchBook data. And the market could expand dramatically over the next two years. A survey of fund managers by law firm Dechert showed that 77% plan a stake sale in the next 24 months, up from 34% in last year’s survey.

WSJ

5. Post Tariffs—Still Large Increase in Foreign Demand for U.S. Assets

Continued Strong Foreign Demand for US Assets

Despite the turbulence surrounding Liberation Day in April, foreign investors ended up buying more US assets in 2025 than in 2024, see chart below.

Note: 2025 data is annualized. Sources: US Department of Treasury, Macrobond, Apollo Chief Economist

6. CPA Exam Goes Back to In-Person

Semafor

7. Google Now Keeps Line Item for “Euro Fines”

The Kobeissi Letter

8. U.S. Religion Per 100 People

Visual Capitalist

9. USA’s safest and most dangerous cities ranked

Crime rates are often viewed as the best way to determine if a city is safe, but a recent push seeks to expand the definition of safety.

N’dea Yancey-Bragg

USA TODAY

What are the top 10 safest cities?

The top 10 safest cities in the United States, according to WalletHub, are:

Warwick, Rhode Island
Overland Park, Kansas
Burlington, Vermont
Juneau, Alaska
Yonkers, New York
Casper, Wyoming
South Burlington, Vermont
Columbia, Maryland
Lewiston, Maine
Salem, Oregon

What are the top 10 most dangerous cities?

The nation’s top 10 most dangerous cities (or the least safe of the 182 ranked), according to WalletHub, are:

New Orleans
Memphis, Tennessee
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Detroit
Baltimore
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Houston
San Bernardino, California
Philadelphia
Cleveland

10. Michael Jordan Says His Bulls Contract Had a Clause He’s Positive No Players Today Have. It’s the Secret to Becoming the Best

In a recent interview, Michael Jordan speaks about the “love of the game” clause from his playing days, and how that helped shape the player he became.

EXPERT OPINION BY JUSTIN BARISO, AUTHOR, EQ APPLIED @JUSTINJBARISO

is widely recognized as one of the best basketball players to ever live. In a recent interview, Jordan revealed one of the secrets to his success:

His love of the game.

Jordan says he loved the game so much he made sure to have a special clause included in his contract when playing with the Chicago Bulls, one which he’s “positive” players today don’t have: the “love of the game” clause.

“If I was driving with you down the street, and I see a basketball game on the side of the road, I can go play in that basketball game,” Jordan told NBC’s Mike Tirico. “And if I get hurt, my contract is still guaranteed.”

Jordan went on to explain that constant practice, not just doing drills but playing real games, helped him and other NBA players like Larry Bird master their craft. It was playing in games that helped players develop their love of basketball, and helped them remain passionate about the game, rather than just viewing it as a job.

“I love the game so much, I would never let someone take the opportunity for me to play the game away from me,” Jordan said.

Jordan’s “love of the game” clause teaches us an important secret to finding career success, namely: To truly become the best at what you do, you have to love it.

This secret is related to emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage emotions to reach a goal. How can you leverage emotional intelligence to master what you do? Let’s explore. (If you enjoy this article, consider signing up for my free emotional intelligence course.)

Leveraging your ‘love of the game’

To clarify, Jordan wasn’t speaking about becoming the best basketball player ever.

Although countless fans and analysts alike have pegged Jordan as the GOAT (greatest of all time), Jordan typically steers away from that conversation, saying that title disrespects the basketball legends who’ve come before him, and the players who play today.

Rather, Jordan was primarily interested in reaching his full potential—and his love of the game fueled that drive. “Basketball was that type of love for me,” Jordan said. “I had to find a way to make sure I was the best basketball player I could be.”

Jordan’s success led to his becoming the wealthiest professional athlete in history. Most of his earnings didn’t come from his playing contracts, though. Rather, they resulted in multiple business ventures and branding deals, most notably the Jordan brand with Nike.

But Jordan says for him, the brand never affected what he was going to do on the basketball court.

Maximizing Productivity: How a Busy Event Design and Production Firm Saves Time, Money, and Hustle

“I put the work first, and then the brand evolved based on the work,” Jordan said. “We would play this game for free. We did. And now we just happen to get paid for it.”

So, how can you apply this to your own work?

There are several reasons business owners run the businesses they do. You may have taken over a family business. Maybe you dabbled in the world of self-employment and discovered you enjoyed the freedom it offered. Other entrepreneurs become so out of necessity: Mark Cuban started his first business after getting fired.

But regardless of how you got into the business you now run, the secret to mastering your craft is to develop a love for what you do.

Ask yourself:

What aspects of my work do I really love? The things I’d do for free?
How can I practice those things as much as possible?
How can I further leverage that love to master my craft?

As you answer those questions, and as you put in the work, you’ll find yourself constantly improving, continually growing, and consistently becoming a better (work) version of yourself. Because if there’s one thing that Michael Jordan taught us, it’s that natural ability, talent, and skill will get you far, but love is what makes you the best.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 29, 2025

December 29, 2025

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/bitcoin-miners-thrive-off-a-new-side-hustle-retooling-their-data-centers-for-ai-bdc408a9?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqeiGFl2ziNeFUgJinPRdKgwAYnB7HPOWWtgC7oVvtkwBNMiM6uwpMpFbB-lQUA%3D&gaa_ts=694ef376&gaa_sig=17wIACkXmqrcS96rNoMnT3yJO4ZVZNTthlIJSsYSVkBr544GXsQa3e6plYtTjWYVzkoK00ttLmOSWZf9dSlwDA%3D%3D

1. U.S. ETFs Attracted $1.4 Trillion in 2025…..1000 New Products Entered the Market

ETF stats. “US-listed ETFs have attracted a staggering $1.4 trillion in 2025, shattering the annual flow record set just last year. At the same time, more than 1,000 new products have entered the market — another unprecedented sum. Trading volume in the ETF market also hit a new yearly high. The last time all three measures hit a record in a single year was in 2021.”

Katie Greifeld – Bloomberg

2. Interval Funds Doubled the Number of Launches

Reuters

3. VIX Volatility Index Broke to New Lows this Week

StockCharts

4. Tech Companies Moved $120B of Data Center Spending Off their Balance Sheets

FT-Tech companies have moved more than $120bn of data centre spending off their balance sheets using special purpose vehicles funded by Wall Street investors, adding to concerns about the financial risks of their huge bet on artificial intelligence. Meta, Elon Musk’s xAI, Oracle and data centre operator CoreWeave have led the way on complex financing deals to shield their companies from the large borrowing needed to build AI data centres.

Financial Times

5. Bitcoin Mining ETF WGMI +71% 2025

Bitcoin Miners Thrive Off a New Side Hustle: Retooling Their Data Centers for AI

The pivot to AI has lifted a bitcoin-mining ETF by around 90% this year, even as bitcoin itself has slumped.

Google Finance

6. WGMI -40% from 2025 Highs

StockCharts

7. China Investigated 63 High-Ranking Party Leaders in 2025

Semafor

8. Share of U.S. 30-Year Olds Who…Prof G Blog

Prof G Media

9. States Renters vs. Home Owners %

Visual Capitalist

10. Building Health for Future

Mark Hyman

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 26, 2025

December 26, 2025

1. S&P 500 Eyes Longest Monthly Win Streak Since 2018

Bloomberg

2. KWEB China Internet Stocks Failed at 2021 Highs

StockCharts

3. RIVN Stock Self-Driving Bump…Broke Out of Sideways Pattern

StockCharts

4. RIVN Making Run at 2023 Highs

StockCharts

5. Crude Oil Falls to Lowest Level Since 2021

Sentimen Trader

6. Midterm Election History

Carson

7. Binance-Resident of Venezuelan Slum Moves $93m thru his Account

Financial Times-Binance failed to stop hundreds of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency from flowing through suspicious accounts, even after promising to improve its conduct in a landmark $4.3bn US criminal settlement in 2023. A Financial Times investigation of leaked internal files detailing thousands of transactions shows such accounts continued trading despite red flags including links to terror financing networks, improbable log-in patterns and failed identity checks. One user of the world’s largest crypto exchange was the resident of a Venezuelan slum who moved $93mn through his account between 2021 and this year. Some of those funds came from a network later accused by the US of covertly moving money for Iran and Lebanon’s Hizbollah militant group. Many of the accounts reviewed by the FT continued to trade after Binance’s plea agreement with the US despite behaviour that experts say would normally prompt freezes or investigations at a regulated financial institution.

8. German’s Military Spending Increase

WSJ

9. Saudi’s Executed 347 People in 2025

Semafor

10. Our practice-Seth’s B log

What do you do regularly?

Where do you show up, what do you publish? Who do you ask, and what do you answer to? What gets better because you persist?

Are there systems you support or work to change?

What do you do when you don’t feel like it? Especially then.

The ocean is made of drops. And our practice turns those drops into something of significance.

It’s a practice if we show up even if it’s not working (yet). And it’s a practice if we understand how to make it better.

Our actions become our habits, and our habits attract others. That becomes our community, and our community builds systems. Those systems feel awkward until they become normal, and then, once normal, they become the status quo.

Bolts of lightning rarely change the world, but erosion does. Streams turn into rivers, and rivers persist.

https://seths.blog/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 22, 2025

December 22, 2025

1. Tech Earnings Still Rising

Earnings contribution. And finally, the Tech sector’s contribution to S&P 500 operating earnings is expected to rise above 30% by Q4’26.

S&P Global

2. S&P Sector Performance Since October 8th

Bespoke Investment Group While the S&P 500 hasn’t really gone anywhere, sector performance has been disparate. Communication Services and Health Care are both up over 6%, and another three sectors have outperformed the S&P 500 gain of 0.3%. At the other end of the spectrum, Utilities is down over 5%, but right behind it, Technology has declined 3%. The fact that Technology, which makes up over a third of the S&P 500, has declined over 3%, and the market has treaded water, indicates a broadening of performance. It also illustrates how hard it is for the market to make headway without Technology participating.

Bespoke Premium

3. U.S. Mid Cap Stocks vs. S&P 500 Record Cheap…Below 1998 Record Lows.

Substack David Marlin

From @Callum Thomas (Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm)

4. META Cap-Ex Acceleration Projected to Continue.

5. META +10% YTD vs. MAG 7 ETF +23%

Google Finance

6. China Has Doubled Its Power Capacity in 8 Years.

KobeissiLetter

7. Chinese Investment in African Mining +400% in One Year.

Google

8. Obesity Rates Declining.

Chartr

9. TikTok’s Long-Awaited Sale Has Finally Arrived. Here’s What to Know

The agreement has been years in the making.

BY AVA LEVINSON, NEWS WRITER

After years of false starts, TikTok announced a deal to sell its U.S. assets to a group of mostly American investors under a new venture. The move isn’t yet finalized, but it means the app would continue to function within the country.

CEO Shou Chew sent a memo to employees on December 18, according to CNN.

“We have signed agreements with investors regarding a new TikTok U.S. joint venture, enabling over 170 million Americans to continue discovering a world of endless possibilities as part of a vital global community,” said Chew.

Going forward, nearly half of the new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, will be controlled by investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX. Current ByteDance investor affiliates will own around 30 percent, and ByteDance itself will control just under 20 percent.

Featured Video

The Smartland Initiative – MEDC – Webinar

The venture will be held accountable for “retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” as reported by Axios.

U.S. Government Orders

Trump has long been demanding that ByteDance sell its U.S. entity, with his first related executive order issued in 2020. In 2024 a law passed banning the app unless it was sold, but Trump continued to extend enforcement to give time for sale negotiations.

He said in September that the administration and China had agreed to hand over control of the app to mostly American investors.

When the deal is finalized, it “will operate as an independent entity with authority over U.S. data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance, while TikTok global’s U.S. entities will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing,” the memo said.

RTO Mandate

Another announcement from TikTok came yesterday, when the company told U.S. employees they’d be returning to in-person work five days a week by the end of next year, staffers told Business Insider. The rule will span several large sectors, and one employee predicts much of the company’s U.S. staff will be included in the regulation.

But that could change if TikTok finalizes the sale of its U.S. cohort. The deal is currently set to close by January 22, with approval from the Chinese government.

10. The Decline of Reading

The Financial Times has a chart about the percentage of teenagers who read in their leisure time:

Ben Carlson Blog

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 19, 2025

December 19, 2025

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/north-korea-just-had-its-biggest-year-ever-stealing-cryptocurrency-130002485.html

1. Bitcoin Recently Trading at .80 Correlation to Goldman Non-Profit Tech Stock Index

Sherwood

2. Yesterday QQQ +1.31% vs. IBIT (Bitcoin) -0.47%…Bitcoin was up 4% at One Point Before Crashing to Negative on Day

Ycharts

3. North Korean Hackers Steal $2B Crypto 2025

Yahoo Finance North Korean hackers had their biggest year yet for stealing cryptocurrencies in 2025. David Hollerith

Cyber attackers sponsored by the rogue regime have swiped over $2.02 billion in crypto since January, according to the latest findings from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.

Through early December, the Chainalysis report shows thieves supported by North Korea have stolen over 50% more in crypto this year than in 2024, bringing their total identified haul from crypto theft since 2016 to $6.75 billion.

The findings are just the latest example of how the heavily sanctioned nation has exploited security vulnerabilities in the crypto world to create a significant revenue source. As far back as 2019, national security officials for the US and UN have stated that funds stolen from these affiliated hacker groups support North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles programs.

“The reality is that cryptocurrency, because of its global 24/7 access, creates a unique value proposition for the regime to target,” Chainalysis head of national security intelligence Andrew Fierman said.

The crypto industry saw $3.4 billion in theft in 2025 through early December, according to Chainalysis. The bulk came from a single breach in late February, when Dubai-based exchange Bybit suffered a $1.5 billion theft at the hands of North Korea-affiliated hackers. In terms of stolen funds, it was the industry’s largest ever.

Crypto heists have become “the easiest way for DPRK cyber actors to fund their regime,” said Eun Young Choi, an attorney at Arnold & Porter and a former federal prosecutor with experience investigating cyberattacks.

4. Africa ETF Break-Out +65% 2025

Stockcharts

5. Cash levels are at a record lows for Professional Managers

Businessinsider

BofA Global Fund Manager Survey

6. However American Households Hold Record Cash

Household cash. “Households continue to hold near-record cash balances (98th percentile historically), leaving substantial dry powder should confidence and risk appetite continue to improve. We see this ‘buy-the-dip’ behavior, every day in our data at Citadel Securities.”

Scott Rubner – Citadel

7. Current Passive AUM = $24 Trillion….Flows 2025

Zerohedge

8. Lennar Home Builder Average Price Sold Post Covid.

Wolfstreet

9. Lennar Stock Back to 2023 Levels.

Stockcharts

10. Zillow’s Top 20 Most Popular Housing Markets (2025)

The following cities comprise the top of Zillow’s annual “Most Popular” list, which focuses on where shoppers are most active:

Rockford, Illinois (Ranked #1 overall)
Berkeley, California
Albany, New York
Dearborn, Michigan
Toledo, Ohio
Carmel, Indiana
South Bend, Indiana
Abilene, Texas
Springfield, Illinois
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Cincinnati, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Virginia Beach, Virginia
Cleveland, Ohio
Miami, Florida
Boston, Massachusetts
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Detroit, Michigan
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (The only major metro area in the top 20)
Birmingham, Alabama

Market Trends for 2025

Affordability: Most of the top 10 markets feature home prices under $350,000, offering relief from high costs in major coastal hubs.
Regional Dominance: The Midwest accounts for the majority of the top markets due to its balance of job access and lower living expenses.
Alternative Lists: Zillow also publishes a “Hottest Markets” forecast based on projected competitiveness (e.g., home value appreciation). For 2025,

Buffalo, NY, and Indianapolis, IN led that separate list.

www.googlesearch.com

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 18, 2025

December 18, 2025

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/other/having-more-muscle-and-less-hidden-abdominal-fat-gives-you-a-younger-brain-heres-how-to-get-strong-healthily/ar-AA1ShJsm

1. Divergence in AI Related Stocks….Google Exposed vs. Open AI Exposed

Michael Batnick

2. Bitcoin Whales Back to Buying…Most Purchases in 13 Years

BTC whales. Over the last 30 days, Bitcoin whales have accumulated 269,822 BTC worth $23.3bn, the most in 13 years.

Daily Chartbook

3. LULU Stock 5-Year Negative Return Before Elliot Investment Today

Google Finance

4. MSOS Largest Weed ETF…+65% YTD….Still -80% Since Initial Legalization

Google Finance

5. MSOS Not Even Back to 2024 Highs Yet

StockCharts

6. Curaleaf is Largest Market Cap U.S. Weed Stock….Just Hitting 2024 Levels

StockCharts

7. States Are Raking In Billions From Slot Machines on Your Phone-NYT

NYtimes

8. Robinhood Rolls Out the Prop Bets

CNBC

9. Small Fraction Behind Most Online Hate

Semafor

10. Having more muscle and less hidden abdominal fat gives you a younger brain. Here’s how to get strong healthily

Story by Rachel Boswell

As if the benefits of strength training weren’t extensive enough, we have another perk to add to the pile: a younger brain.

That’s right – according to brand-new research that will be presented at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting later this month, having more muscle mass can protect against brain ageing. Meanwhile, having more visceral fat – that is, the hidden fat that sits deeper within your body, which lines your abdominal walls and surrounds many of your vital organs – accelerates brain ageing.

Here’s what the study discovered and what you can do to strengthen your body and think sharp for the long haul.

Strong muscles, strong mind

Thanks to several studies, we already know the importance of building and maintaining muscle mass for the sake of better physical health. Strong, well-functioning muscles not only help you to run more powerfully, become less prone to injury, develop a nice aesthetic and reduce your risk of various diseases and chronic conditions, but also play a big role in combatting age-related problems like sarcopenia.

So carrying more muscle can help you to live in a more youthful body, for longer. But what does it do for the brain?

That’s what the latest science set out to determine. For the new study in question, researchers tested 1,164 healthy adults – 52% women, with an average age of 55 – by putting them each through a full-body MRI scan. MRI scans provide a distinct view of a person’s fat, muscle and brain tissue and can reveal the biological age of the brain based on its structure.

Following the participants’ full-body MRI scans, the researchers used an AI algorithm to precisely measure their total normalised muscle volume, their visceral fat and their subcutaneous fat, which is the fat that you can pinch just under the skin. They also used this AI algorithm to predict each participant’s brain age.

The results showed that subcutaneous fat had no significant impact on predicted brain age. However, the participants who demonstrated a higher visceral fat to muscle ratio had a higher predicted brain age, while those who carried more muscle had younger-looking brains.

‘Healthier bodies with more muscle mass and less hidden belly fat are more likely to have healthier, youthful brains,’ concludes Dr Cyrus Raji, the study’s senior author and associate professor of radiology and neurology at Washington University School of Medicine, who adds that better brain health lowers the risk of diseases like Alzheimer’s.

‘While it is commonly known that chronological aging translates to loss of muscle mass and increased hidden belly fat, this work shows that these health measures relate to brain ageing itself,’ he adds.

How to build muscle mass

You don’t have to be a fat-free, Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque bodybuilder to develop a more youthful brain. Instead, to maintain a healthy fat-muscle ratio, complete at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week, like walking or cycling, or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity a week, like our favourite, running. It’s also important to do two or more weekly strength sessions, which target all the major muscles groups in the body.

While a recent study has found that doing just one strength workout a week is enough to generate improvements, two or more is optimal when it comes to enhancing your overall running performance, resilience and longevity – not to mention, as we now know, your brain function. If you’re unsure how or where to start with strength training, our expert-led guide for beginners will show you how to build a decent strength base in just four weeks.

To maintain a robust body, you should also remember to hydrate well, follow a regular sleep schedule – involving around seven to nine hours of shut-eye per night – and stick to a balanced, nutritious diet that contains a sufficient amount of protein. The recommended daily target for protein is 0.8g per kilogram of body weight, spread out evenly across mealtimes, although active people – especially runners – may need more than this to support muscle recovery and brain-friendly muscle growth.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 17, 2025

December 17, 2025

1. Gold Price Today vs. 1970’s

2. Crude Oil 52-Week Lows

Bespoke Investments As mentioned above, crude oil prices are down over 1% this morning, and while not quite at 52-week lows on an intraday basis, if these losses hold, it will mark a new 52-week closing low. After briefly trading over $80 per barrel in January, prices have been in a steady decline almost all year. The only exception was back in June when prices briefly spiked after Israel launched airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Even though crude oil is sinking towards new 52-week lows, the S&P 500 Energy sector has been holding up relatively well. While it’s underperforming the S&P 500 on a YTD basis, it’s still much closer to 52-week highs than 52-week lows. That may be partly due to the strength of natural gas, although even that commodity has weakened in the last few days, falling from $5.25 MMBtu on 12/5, down to $3.94 this morning…

Bespoke

3. Big American Auto Non-Player in EV

WSJ-American automakers want to boost their profits by selling high-margin gas guzzlers today, all while not falling behind on electric-vehicle technology. It will be difficult to do both.

Look at the list of regulatory changes this year, and it is all but impossible for U.S. automakers to not lean into selling big SUVs and trucks. Car manufacturers no longer face penalties for failing to meet federal fuel-economy standards, which are themselves also being revised to become less stringent. The $7,500 tax credit for buying EVs expired. California no longer has the ability to set its own tailpipe-emissions standards, which were a big driver of EV investment. BloombergNEF estimates that 24% fewer EVs will be sold in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with a year earlier.

It isn’t just the U.S. The European Union, U.K. and Canada are all pulling back or rethinking their ambitious EV mandates.

WSJ

4. CoreWeave -55% in 6 Months

Google Finance

5. Invitation Homes Started Buying Houses in 2012…Back to 2023 Lows…50day thru 200day to Downside

StockCharts

6. COIN Stock Negative For 2025….Sideways 2 Years.

Stockcharts

7. Lithium Stocks Up this Morning….LIT ETF Doubled Off Bottom Back to 2023 Levels.

CNBC Lithium stocks — Lithium prices soared in China after the government announced plans to revoke mining, sending miners stocks higher. Atlas Lithium jumped nearly 9%, while Albemarle and Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile each rose about 4%. Lithium Argentina gained 5% and Lithium Americas added nearly 2%.https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/17/stocks-making-the-biggest-moves-premarket-.html

Stockcharts

8. Who Imports Venezuelan Oil?

Statista

9. Largest Asset Managers….Vanguard Behind Blackrock.

Inves7

10. How High Net Worth Advisors Rate Professional Traders.

Chris Bendtsen

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 15, 2025

December 15, 2025

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-much-money-heisman-trophy-finalists-mendoza-pavia-and-love-made-from-nil-deals-this-season-9c527fbc?mod=home_lead

1. History of All-Time Highs

Chart of the Day

Why you shouldn’t fear all-time highs.

Charlie Bilello

2. History of Rate Cuts Near All-time Highs

Subu Trade

3. History of Volatility Index Dropping Below 15

VIX. “$VIX has dropped below 15 for the first time in over 2 months, signaling a return to more normal volatility. Past cases saw $SPX higher 13 out of 14 times after 3 weeks & higher every time 1 year later.”

Subu Trade

4. Mag 7 Lagging S&P 2025

Phil Rosen

5. Retail Investors Selling Mega Cap Tech???

Retail flows. “Flows show retail investors rotating away from megacap tech toward ETFs.”

The Daily Shot

6. Nasdaq Has Doubled Since ChatGPT

7. Fermi Stock -70%

Google Finance

8. UBS Poll of Billionaire Investors Intentions for Next 12 Months

UBS

Business Insider

9. Here’s how much money Heisman Trophy finalists Made in NIL

Fernando Mendoza, QB, $2.6 million

Diego Pavia, QB, $2.5 million

Julian Sayin, QB, $2.5 million

Jeremiyah Love, RB, $1.6 million

10. Actions and beliefs-Seth’s Blog

It’s tempting to believe that our actions follow our beliefs. That’s what we do, it seems, and so others must as well.

In fact, just about always, our beliefs arise as a result of our actions.

If you want to change what people believe, change how they act.

https://seths.blog/page/2/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 12, 2025

December 12, 2025

https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement

1. Oil at Parity with Silver for the First Time Since 1980

Marketwatch This chart from Bank of America notes that oil is at parity with silver (actually, a little below) for the first time in 1980.

Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett, framed it as a reaction to global bond market turmoil — the Austrian 100-year bond has collapsed — while the Trump administration has made clear it doesn’t want Treasury yields to get too high. “Productivity jump = boom & lower yields, otherwise square circled by much weaker US dollar…why silver hit parity vs oil for 1st time since 1980,” he wrote.

Steve Goldstein

MarketWatch

2. Inflation Swaps Not Worried About Tariffs

Inflation swaps. “Market signals suggest that concern about rising inflation, and in particular the impact of tariffs, has almost evaporated … The market thinks the one-time price effect of the tariffs will be over a year from now. Market and Fed seem to agree that inflation has been tamed.”

Daily Chartbook

What are Inflation Swaps?

Perplexity

3. Mexico Approves Tariffs on Asian Imports

TARIFF LADY– Mexican lawmakers gave final approval for new tariffs on Asian imports, broadly aligning with US efforts to tighten trade barriers against China, as President Claudia Sheinbaum seeks to protect local industry. Mexico’s Senate on Wednesday voted in favor of the bill that imposes tariffs of between 5% and 50% on more than 1,400 products from Asian nations that don’t have a trade deal with Mexico. The bill passed with 76 votes in favor, five against and 35 abstentions.

The new levies will take effect starting next year and hit a wide range of products from clothing to metals and auto parts, with the massive output of Chinese factories emerging as the legislation’s focus. While Sheinbaum Dave Lutz Jones Trading

4. ORCL Free Cash Flow Chart-Irrelevant Investor

The Irrelevant Investor

5. ORCL Traded Right Back Down to Recent Lows

StockCharts

6. Cannabis stocks surge on reports Trump will reclassify marijuana; Tilray jumps 33%

CNBC

7. Disney Chose To Embrace AI …Stock Negative -35% 5-Year Chart

The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI reach landmark agreement to bring beloved characters from across Disney’s brands to Sora

Google Finance

8. Savings Rate by Income

MarketWatch

9. Do Your Own Research to Check these Stats

Gaming The System: Huge Proportion Of ‘Elite’ University Students Claiming Disabilities

by Tyler Durden Just when you thought the ongoing cultivation of weakness in American youth couldn’t get much worse, huge proportions of the student bodies at US universities are enrolling with official disability designations that bestow various accommodations upon the students who claim them. As you may have expected, the alarming trend is most pronounced at what are supposed to be the most “elite” institutions.

We’re not talking about people in wheelchairs, but rather students snagging diagnoses for ADHD, anxiety and depression from indulgent doctors. “It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests,” an un-tenured professor at a selective university told The Atlantic‘s Rose Horowitch. Apparently fearing backlash, he requested anonymity.

The numbers are jarring. Harvard and Brown’s undergraduate student body is 20% “disabled.” Amherst has hit 34%, while Stanford’s disability rate is a head-shaking 38%. At one unidentified law school, 45% of students have been awarded academic accommodations. In stark contrast, only 3 to 4% of students at public two-year colleges get disability accommodations.

“Obviously, something is off here,” observes Emma Camp at Reason. “The idea that some of the most elite, selective universities in America—schools that require 99th percentile SATs and sterling essays—would be educating large numbers of genuinely learning disabled students is clearly bogus.”

Disabled students are often given time-and-a-half or double-time to finish a test, and the freedom to turn in papers well beyond the given due date. However, extra time isn’t the only benefit. At Carnegie-Mellon, a social-anxiety disorder can ensure a student isn’t called upon by a professor without advance notice.

Schools also let supposedly learning-disabled students take tests in “reduced distraction testing environments,” as being in a room with 80 other people is apparently just too taxing for them. However, a University of Chicago professor told the Atlantic that a deluge of students taking tests in the “reduced distraction testing environments” means those rooms are pretty much as “distracting” as a conventional classroom supposedly is.

In what may be the most darkly amusing accommodation, a public college in California allowed a student to bring her mother to class — which backfired when the mother went beyond whatever role she was expected to play and eagerly participated in the discussions, tuition-free.

Professor Paul Graham Fisher, who’d previously co-chaired Stanford’s disability task force, told the Atlantic:

“I have had conversations with people in the Stanford administration. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 percent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?”

Plenty of these students are likely motivated by a cut-throat desire to gain advantage. However, equally bad, it’s possible a majority of these students sincerely consider themselves disabled. “Over the past few years, there’s been a rising push to see mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions as not just a medical fact, but an identity marker,” writes Reason’s Camp, who notes that social media and other factors foster a rush to attribute common human fallibilities as some kind of medical condition. “The result is a deeply distorted view of ‘normal,'” says Camp. “If ever struggling to focus or experiencing boredom is a sign you have ADHD, the implication is that a ‘normal,’ nondisabled person has essentially no problems.”

The disability rush isn’t limited to elite college campuses. High school students are using disability designations to score extra time on SAT and ACT tests. “We are also well aware of fliers in the district circulating among parents of doctors in the area who are known to hand out ADHD diagnoses,” a high school teacher at an affluent public school told We Are Teachers. “In some cases, I think what’s happening is a pay-to-play situation.”

And the decline of the West proceeds apace…

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/gaming-system-huge-proportion-elite-university-students-claiming-disabilities

10. The 9 Habits of Self-Improvement

Hagen Growth

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 11, 2025

December 11, 2025

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-lights/202512/the-new-college-version-of-the-dog-ate-my-homework

1. Aggregate Net Asset Value of Bitcoin-Treasury Companies

Marketwatch The chart below shows that the aggregate market net asset value of bitcoin-treasury companies — or the aggregate market capitalization of such companies divided by the value of bitcoin they held — has fallen sharply from earlier this year.

MarketWatch

2. ORCL Capex Chart

ZeroHedge

3. Apple Capex vs. Big Tech Leaders-Barrons

Barron’s

4. MAG 7 Vs. NFLX Chart….NFLX -23% in 6 Months

StockCharts

5. You Tube vs. NFLX

A Wealth of Common Sense

6. ARKK Big Year…5 Years S&P +15.20% CAGR vs. ARKK -6.2%

Google Finance

7. Projections by the 19 FOMC members for the midpoint of the federal funds rate

Wolf Street Amid 3 dissenters in both directions, FOMC cuts by 25 basis points. “Dot Plot” sees 1 cut next year, 3 members see 1 hike. Reserve management purchases of T-bills begins.

The FOMC voted today to cut the Fed’s five policy rates by 25 basis points, as widely expected, the third cut in 2025, after cutting by 100 basis points in 2024.

There were 3 dissenters of the 12 voting FOMC members, the most dissenters since September 2019, under Powell. Two dissenters (Goolsbee and Schmid) wanted no cut. Miran wanted a 50-basis-point cut. Dissents are a breath of fresh air.

Projections by the 19 FOMC members for the midpoint of the federal funds rate by the end of 2026 (bold = median):

1 sees 6 cuts
1 sees 4 cuts
2 sees 3 cuts
4 see 2 cuts
4 see 1 cut
4 see no change
3 see 1 rate hike.

Wolf Street https://wolfstreet.com/2025/12/10/this-fed-meeting-must-have-been-an-epic-circus/

8. Global Long-Term Bond Yields Hit 16-Year Highs

Yahoo Finance

9. Getting Less Than 7 Hours Of Sleep Linked To Shorter Life Expectancy Across America

Reviewed by John Anderer

Study Finds

10. The New College Version of “The Dog Ate My Homework”

Psychology Today Personal Perspective: Students are using mental health excuses for academic shortcomings. Deborah J. Cohan Ph.D.

As a college professor for 30 years, I’m no stranger to the range of excuses that students provide for missed work or poor performances. But in the past year, a new phenomenon has emerged in relation to excuse-making.

First, students are relying on AI to craft emails to professors. In fact, one of my colleagues just shared with me that a student sent an email to him with the salutation, Dear Professor Last Name. I would have fantasies of writing back to that student, Dear Student First Name.

I’m left wondering if and how students are relying on faculty for good faith responses when they are querying with bad faith questions and excuses.

But the more pressing problem is when students use AI to craft these messages while also incorporating lengthy commentary about mental health, alluding to how, for example, their depression got in the way of their ability to do their work.

I get the importance of mental health. I’ve spent my career researching, writing, and teaching about mental health issues and have also worked as a counselor for years. I don’t take it lightly when students share difficult things. I’ve sat for hours with students in crisis, reeling from trauma, and struggling to heal.

These emails are not that.

Following the sentences about how they forgot about classwork, didn’t plan their time well, and generally forget their hybrid and online classes, students launch into the mental health issue and simultaneously ask if I might have it in my heart to change their grades. They tell me how much it would mean to them if I would just add a few more points or give them an extra assignment or extra credit days before the semester is ending. They add, “I know it never hurts to ask,” not understanding that it most certainly does. I feel like a film director, wanting to yell “Cut!” I experience these messages as desperately manipulative.

Students are active agents in the larger cultural discourse around mental health, and they have intuited that they can pull on the heartstrings of their teachers to get what they want. Moreover, this comes across as controlling because they also know that an educator will have a much harder time maintaining a penalty if there is a mental health issue, because what educator working with young people would be so mean? They’ve surmised that it’s insufficient to just say that they forgot or that they did not prioritize the classwork.

As I discuss in my book, The Complete U: Over 100 Lessons for Success in and out of the College Classroom, students don’t simply state that they are sad. They diagnose themselves as being depressed. They are not nervous about a test; they suffer from anxiety. And when they’re really nervous, they’re having a panic attack. Everything is at full throttle—except for any zest and curiosity about actual learning.

The trouble with these messages is how predictable and formulaic they are. Moreover, where are these students all semester long? The emails I receive from students are no longer about concepts they don’t thoroughly understand or about something they read or learned in another class that connects with what we’re talking about in our class, or a movie they saw that reminds them of a theory I had been teaching, and they want me to know about it. Those came in the days when students connected with me and other faculty in a human-to-human relationship and made critical and analytical connections. Now the emails are about wanting a few more points for something, or having an issue with technology, or saying that they’re confused even though they later admit to having never read whatever they said they were confused about.

Two things happened in higher education around the same time, both of which have been fairly detrimental to the whole experience: One is the openness of the online gradebook; the other is email. Of course, many things have contaminated higher education both from the outside and from the inside, but two things are for sure: The instantly transparent grade book gives students the chance to immediately react to a grade, and they can then email a professor with their dissatisfaction.

This is one of those moments where I can really say I did walk a mile and trudge uphill in the snow to find out about a grade. I was an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and when professors posted grades, it was on a sheet outside their office door, and since we didn’t have email, we just relied on when they said they might be posting the grades. It was common to arrive at the door and find that nothing was posted yet. We did not bang on the door, asking why it had taken a little longer. We didn’t march to the provost’s or president’s office and demand to talk to someone about our complaints. Instead, we walked back downhill, picked up a coffee, and headed home. A day or two later, we would try again. And if we had questions about those grades, we checked the syllabus for when the office hours were and planned to see the professor then.

Students aren’t discerning what is an emergency, or when it is appropriate to contact someone, or why it’s inappropriate to ask for special favors like redos, extra assignments, or extra credit. Do they really think I’m going to do it for them and no one else? And if they think their begging and quibbling will get me to offer an opportunity to the whole class, they’re not thinking about the massive undertaking it is to add additional grading assignments to a syllabus.

It’s the world larger than themselves that I’m forever trying to get them to see.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 10, 2025

December 10, 2025

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rich-people-poorer-morals-wealthy-are-most-likely-rip-self-checkout-machines

1. XLK Tech ETF Up 11 Days in a Row

XLK is up 11 straight days. This is the 3rd longest streak in history! Dave Lutz Jones Trading

2. AI Mentioned in 306 Earnings Calls Q3 by S&P Companies

FactSet

3. Utilities that Power AI Pulling Back…XLU Utility ETF

StockCharts

4. Next Bid AI Event….ORCL Earnings Wednesday …Stock 1/3 Off Highs

Barrons

StockCharts

5. Leveraged ETFs Hit $239B AUM

Barchart

6. Recovery from Covid ….Restaurants and Hotels Lead

The Irrelevant Investor

7. India IPO Boom

Semafor

8. 10-Year Treasury Going the Wrong Way

9. Small Cap Stocks Need Lower Rates (IWM) ..Ticks from New Highs

StockCharts

10. Rich People, Poor Morals: Wealthy Are The Most Likely To Rip Off Self-Checkout Machines

by Tyler Durden Rich people, poorer morals? A new LendingTree report claims the shoppers most likely to rip off the self-checkout machine aren’t the desperate — they’re the well-off, according to the NY Post.

Americans making over $100,000 a year are twice as likely to steal at self-checkout compared to low-income shoppers. A hefty 40% of six-figure earners admitted they’ve deliberately skipped scanning an item, while just 17% of those making under $30,000 confessed to the same.

The Post writes that middle-income households didn’t look much better: 27% of people earning between $50K and $99K say they’ve helped themselves without paying. And men are the biggest culprits overall, with 38% admitting to theft versus only 16% of women.

Even with AI scanners and weight sensors trying to outsmart sticky fingers, self-checkout theft is still rising.

A chunk of shoppers don’t feel bad about it either. Nearly one-third say big retailers make plenty of money, so swiping something “doesn’t hurt.” Another 35% defend the habit by claiming they’re basically unpaid store workers and grabbing an item or two is “compensation.”

Still, most blame inflation rather than guilt-free shoplifting. Forty-seven percent say rising prices are forcing people to cheat at the register — meaning even wealthy shoppers might be feeling the squeeze, just not enough to pay for everything in their cart.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 09, 2025

December 9, 2025

1. AI Pace of Change

UBS shows, “The longest human task (by duration) that an LLM can complete with at least 50% success rate is doubling every 7 months.”

Zach Goldberg Jefferies

2. Semiconductor ETF SMH…A Couple Ticks from New Highs

StockCharts

3. Schwab vs. Robinhood

Michael Batnick

4. Market Tops Usually Preceded by IPO Boom….IPO ETF Not Booming….+1% Last 12 Months

StockCharts

5. IPO Drought ….Companies Staying Private Longer

Blackrock Institute

6. Waymo Vehicles Far Less Crashes

chartr

7. Nancy Pelosi $130M in Stock Trade Profits

Peter Mallouk

8. Pentagon Deploys Kamikaze Drones $35k

WSJ The drone is fully autonomous, meaning it can operate with little or no human interaction, relying on sensors and artificial intelligence to navigate to its target. It can fly for about six hours, according to SpektreWorks.

Each FLM 136, also known as Lucas, costs $35,000, according to Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for Central Command. The MQ-9 Reaper drones cost an estimated $16 million, according to a spokesman for General Atomics, its manufacturer. In many cases, kamikaze drones cost far less than the interceptors used to shoot them down.

WSJ

9. Dr. Mark Hyman Longevity

Mark Hyman

10. Prof G on the State of U.S. Education

PROF G MEDIA

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 08, 2025

December 8, 2025

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-regret-free-life/202511/how-purpose-envy-misleads-us

1. Credit Default Rates Improving-Torsten Slok

Apollo

2. Markets Don’t Top Out When Investors are Pessimistic…How About 2025 Being 4^th Most Pessimistic Year on Record?

Nasdaq Dorsey Wright

3. Was Trump the Bottom in Clean Energy Stocks? Global X CleanTech +60% YTD

4. Trump was Bottom in Clean Energy Stocsk….Invesco Clean Energy ETF +54% YTD

Google Finance

5. Commodites Index Breaking Out of 3 Year Sideways Pattern

StockCharts

6. Never Bet Against the American Consumer Spending Money….Retail Index About to Make New Highs for XMAS

StockCharts

7. Polymarkets New World for “Insider” Trading—From Howard Lindzon

haeju.eth

8. Markets with Biggest Rent Deflation

Nick Gerli

9. 39% of U.S. Land is Farmland

Mapped: Farmland by State in 2025

Niccolo Conte Ryan Bellefontaine Joyce Ma

Mapped: Farmland by State in 2025

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Key Takeaways

Farmland covers 876 million acres, or 39% of U.S. land.
Great Plains states dominate: Nebraska tops the list at 89.5% farmland.

Much of the vast space of the U.S. is occupied by farmland, which produces many of the most demanded commodities. But which states have the most of their area used by farms?

The map uses the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to show the share of each state’s land area used for farming.

Visual Capitalist

10. How Purpose Envy Misleads Us

Stop chasing someone else’s life path and build a meaningful one of your own.-Psychology Today

Key points Jordan Grumet M.D.

Envy harms well-being, especially when comparing others’ purpose to our own.
Purpose envy is fueled by social media, influencers, and unrealistic highlight reels.
You can’t co-opt someone else’s purpose; true purpose must align with your own values.
Focus on what you want and are willing to work for; envy fades when you’re embracing your path.

Envy arises when we compare ourselves to someone else and conclude they’re better off. We’ve all been there. Envy is a universal emotion, but it’s also a corrosive one. In a large longitudinal study of more than 18,000 adults, researchers found that higher levels of envy predicted poorer well-being years later. Put simply: The more envious we are, the worse we tend to feel over time.

Most of us would love to sidestep that emotion entirely. But when it comes to purpose—our sense of direction and meaning—it’s getting harder than ever to avoid.

Although psychologists haven’t yet named it formally, purpose envy is becoming a modern condition. We scroll through feeds full of people who seem to know exactly why they’re here and what they’re meant to do. They’ve branded their purpose, packaged it beautifully, and broadcast it to millions. For young people in particular, this can be intoxicating. Searching for a relatable version of purpose, they often model their lives on the influencers they follow: the entrepreneur building a seven-figure business, the traveler living out of a van, the artist who “made it” by 25.

The problem isn’t admiration. It’s imitation. When we confuse someone else’s highlight reel for a road map, we end up chasing a life that isn’t ours.

And it’s not just a Gen Z issue.

When Admiration Turns to Envy

I’ll admit it: I’ve felt purpose envy myself. I’m a fan of Scott Galloway—the professor, podcaster, and author whose work (like The Algebra of Wealth and The Prof G Pod) dives deep into ideas that matter to me. He’s articulate, accomplished, financially successful, and undeniably purposeful.

I admire him. But I also envy him.

That envy used to sting until I realized something important: As much as I admire Galloway, I don’t actually want to be him. That insight changed everything. It revealed why escaping purpose envy might be simpler than we think.

Here are three truths that helped me, and might help you, put purpose envy in its place.

1. Purpose Can’t Be Co-Opted

Everywhere you look, someone is trying to sell you a version of purpose.

Social media influencers wrap it around whatever they’re promoting. If they’re selling designer sneakers, purpose becomes fashion. If they’re promoting travel, purpose becomes seeing the world. If they’re pushing protein supplements, purpose becomes fitness.

Advertisers do the same. They frame purpose as luxury, vitality, or success. Anything that convinces you their product will complete you. Even family members can unintentionally project their version of purpose onto you (“We just want you to have the opportunities we didn’t”).

The catch? All of these versions of purpose serve their goals, not yours.

To “co-opt” means to absorb something for your own use, often in a way that dilutes its original meaning. When we internalize someone else’s idea of purpose—whether it’s an influencer’s, a brand’s, or a parent’s—the result is usually frustration, not fulfillment.

Your purpose can’t be bought, borrowed, or inherited. It’s not something you “find” by copying someone else’s story. It’s something you build by paying attention to what makes you feel alive, and what you’re willing to work for.

2. Ask Yourself: Am I Willing to Put in the Work?

It’s easy to envy someone else’s life when you’re only seeing the rewards. But purpose isn’t built on envy; it’s built on effort.

When I catch myself wishing I had Scott Galloway’s platform or career, I ask a simple question: Am I willing to do what he does to get it?Do I want to travel constantly, spend long weeks recording podcasts, running businesses, and giving talks? Do I want to live that pace, that public life?

The honest answer is no.

Many of us want the outcomes of someone else’s purpose, but not the sacrifices it requires. We envy the destination without wanting to take the journey. And that’s a sign that what we’re craving isn’t their purpose—it’s the feeling of fulfillment we imagine they have.

Once you realize that, envy starts to lose its grip.

3. You Don’t Have to Want the Whole Package

When we compare ourselves to others, we tend to fixate on the highlights: the parts of their lives that look enviable. But we rarely consider the full picture.

I might wish I had Galloway’s platform, but I don’t necessarily want his schedule, his scrutiny, or his stress. Like most people, I only envy select pieces of his life.

Purpose envy tricks us into forgetting that every life is a bundle of trade-offs. You can’t have the good parts without the costs that come with them. And when you look closely, you may find that you don’t actually want the whole package. You just want a more authentic version of your own.

When I remember that, I’m reminded that my life, as ordinary as it sometimes feels, already reflects a set of choices I value: time with family, creative autonomy, work that feels meaningful on my own terms.

The Paradox of Purpose Envy

Here’s the irony: Envy isn’t always bad. Sometimes, it’s a compass. It points to something you value but haven’t yet developed. Seeing another writer or podcaster succeed can spark the motivation to improve your craft or commit to a project you’ve been neglecting.

But if you let envy steer the ship, you’ll end up chasing other people’s dreams instead of building your own.

Purpose envy thrives on comparison. It fades when you start paying attention to your own direction.

In the End

Purpose envy is common, but it rarely serves us. It encourages us to adopt someone else’s story, complete with their costs, instead of writing our own.

The truth is, most of us are already living parts of our purpose; we just overlook them because they don’t look grand or glamorous. The envy we feel toward others can be a cue, not a curse: a reminder to get curious about what truly drives us.

Because in the end, purpose isn’t something you envy. It’s something you earn by paying attention, doing the work, and refusing to let anyone else define what it means for you.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 05, 2025

December 5, 2025

https://news.theideafarm.com/p/50-facts-from-2h-2025

1. GOOGL +87% vs. NVDA +28% One Year

YCharts

2. Gold Now Outperforming S&P 500 for 30 Years

Barchart

3. Retail Investors Buying Gold ETF

Retail and GLD

Retail has bought as much GLD in 2025 as in the previous 5 years.

ZeroHedge

4. Open AI vs. Historical Young Start Up Cash Burners

Jim Reid Deutsche Bank On the subject of ChatGPT, it’s been eye-opening to read of the predicted losses that OpenAI will likely experience in the next few years. Based on a Wall Street Journal report, which cited company projections provided to investors over the summer, OpenAI forecasts revenue of $345 billion between 2024 and 2029. Assuming this is all cash, we then calculate $488bn of spending, mainly to pay for access to compute, to arrive at their projected cumulative free cash flow of $143bn. And that was before the most recent announcements of $1.4 trillion in data centre commitments. A broker has more recently said the cash burn could exceed $200bn by 2030.

I thought it would be interesting to look at the largest cumulative losses in history from a young company or a start-up before they turned in a profit. So I asked ChatGPT to give me a table of these companies, detailing the total losses and over which years. We used this to create today’s CoTD. We added in OpenAI’s expected cash burn and also included its rival Anthropic, also using data from the Journal. I double-checked the historic numbers against Bloomberg data and they were broadly in line.

ChatGPT also pointed out that some companies had reported larger annual losses, citing AOL Time Warner’s $99 billion loss in 2002 and a similar size loss for AIG in 2008. Meanwhile, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lost $77bn and $59bn respectively within only three quarters when the GFC struck. However, these were well established companies with long track records of profitability before huge troubles hit.

5. Mag 7 Outperforms QQQ and SPY 9 of Last 10 Years

Koyfin

6. Quality Stock Factor Underperforming 2025

Quality Underperformance…BofA noted, Globally, the Quality style has underperformed by 5.5% YTD, and the Global Steady Compounders have experienced the worst 12-month relative return in 25 years. 3 reasons stand out. Firstly, the global earnings cycle is improving, and earnings stable Quality stocks tend to lag in upturns. Secondly, the Risk style – almost the opposite of Quality – has had one of the best years on record. Thirdly, a few themes have driven market performance this year (including AI, Defense, Gold, Rare Earth, Nuclear Energy, and Quantum Computing) and these stocks have a high average beta (1.28).

Zachary Goldberg-Jefferies

7. American Eagle Stock One Tick from New Highs

StockCharts

8. Japanese Government Bond Yields Highest in 20 Years

Mohamed A. El-Erian

9. International Stocks on Track for First Outperformance vs. U.S. in 16 Years

Novel Investor

10. Facts from The Idea Farm

The Idea Farm

Investing

If you randomly picked a trading day for the Dow Jones Industrial Average between 1930-2020, there is over a 95% chance that the Dow would close lower on some trading day in the future. That means that roughly 1 in 20 trading days would provide you with an absolute bargain. The other 19 would give you the feeling of buyer’s remorse at some point in the future. Link

More than 10 funds will distribute at least 25% in capital gains this year. Link

Since the 1990s, the World Portfolio has grown from 75% to over 200% of world GDP. Link

Of the largest 10 stocks in the S&P 500 Index in 1985, none are still in the top 10. Link

The Thiel Fellowship has a 5.9% Unicorn hit rate. Link

Just 3% of companies generated all the shareholder wealth in the US stock market from 1926-2022. Source: Bessembinder

If you break down the distribution of cumulative returns for stocks in the S&P 500 for the past 25 years:

The median/arithmetic return was 59%/452%.
The average return has been greater than the median for The S&P 500’s constituents in 20 out of the past 24 years. Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices

In 1812, financial stocks—banks and insurance companies—constituted an estimated 71% of total U.S. stock-market capitalization. No other sector even amounted to 14%. Link

Alternative Investing

There are more private equity funds than McDonald’s restaurants in the world. Link

Nearly half of gold production is used for jewelry. Link

39% of U.S. land area is used by farms, totaling 876 million acres of farmland. Link

On Jan. 1, 2015, there were 1,345 alternative mutual funds in existence. Only 341 still existed on June 30, 2025 – a 75% mortality rate. Link

In 2021 alone, 478 (30.7%) of all U.S. unicorns hit the $1B mark. Link

Most unicorns exit after a median (average) of 8 (9) years, counting from founding. “Exit” means going public, acquisition, or liquidation/bankruptcy. Link

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 04, 2025

December 4, 2025

Sonu Varghese – Carson Group

1. 2025 Powered by Margins and Sales

Return drivers. The S&P 500’s returns in 2025 have been powered mostly by earnings (sales + margin growth), with some multiple expansion.

2. Gas Prices Falling Below $3

Bespoke

3. Gas Helping Transports…Good for Economic Outlook…Transports Breaking Out to New Highs

StockCharts

4. Netflix -22% from Highs…50day Close to Crossing Below 200day on Chart

StockCharts

5. The Market is Bearish on Netflix Buying Warner Bros…What Would They Be Gaining?

chartr

6. Another $1 Trillion Bump in Money Markets

The Big Picture

7. Interesting Chart on from Callum Thomas Blog on Bond Bear Market

Bonds Basing? It’s a question many are pondering, and while TLT is still basically in bear market, we’re also seeing a clear basing process in progress.

Source: @Mr_Derivatives @Callum Thomas (Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm)

8. The Counter Argument? Valuations?

Gina Martin Adams

9. Members of House are Quitting Congress at Record Rate-AXIOS

Axios

10. 7 Ways to Learn Faster and Improve Your Memory, Backed by Neuroscience-Inc.

1. Test yourself.

A classic study published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest shows self-testing is an extremely effective way to speed up the learning process.

Partly that’s because of the additional context you create. Test yourself and answer incorrectly and not only are you more likely to remember the right answer after you look it up, but you’ll also remember the fact you didn’t remember. (Especially if you tend to be hard on yourself.)

So, don’t just rehearse your sales pitch. Test yourself on what comes after your intro. Test yourself by listing the four main points you want to make. Test your ability to remember cost savings figures, or price schedules, or how you will respond to the most common questions or types of customer resistance.

Not only will you gain confidence in how much you do know, but you’ll also more quickly learn the things you don’t know — at least not yet.

2. Learn two or three things at (nearly) the same time.

The process is called interleaving: studying related concepts or skills in parallel. Instead of focusing on one subject, one task, or one skill during a learning session, purposely learn or practice several subjects or skills in succession.

It turns out interleaving is a much more effective way to train your brain and train your motor skills. Why?

One theory proposed in a study published in Educational Psychology Review is that interleaving improves your brain’s ability to differentiate between concepts or skills. When you block practice one skill, you can drill down until muscle memory takes over and the skill becomes more or less automatic. When you interleave several skills, any one skill can’t become mindless.

And that’s a good thing, because you’re instead constantly forced to adapt and adjust. You’re constantly forced to see, feel, and discriminate between different movements or different concepts.

And that helps you really learn what you’re trying to learn, because it helps you gain understanding at a deeper level.

Speaking of adapting …

3. Change the way you study or practice.

Repeating anything over and over again in the hopes you will master that task will not only keep you from improving as quickly as you could; in some cases, it may actually decrease your skill as well.

According to research published in Johns Hopkins Medicine, practicing a slightly modified version of a task you want to master helps you “actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row.” The most likely cause is reconsolidation, a process where existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge.

Say you want to master an investor pitch. Do this:

Rehearse the basic skill. Run through your pitch a couple of times under the same conditions you’ll eventually face when you do it live. Naturally, the second time through will be better than the first; that’s how practice works. But then, instead of going through it a third time …
Wait. Give yourself at least six hours so your memory can consolidate. (Meaning that you may need to wait until tomorrow before you practice again, which, as you’ll see in a moment, is a great approach.)
Practice again, but this time:

Go a little faster. Speak a little — just a little — faster than you normally do. Run through your slides slightly faster. Increasing your speed means you’ll make more mistakes, but that’s OK — in the process, you’ll modify old knowledge with new knowledge, and lay the groundwork for improvement. Or …
Go a little slower. The same thing will happen. (Plus, you can experiment with new techniques — including the use of silence for effect — that aren’t apparent when you present at your normal speed.) Or …
Break your presentation into smaller chunks. Almost every task includes a series of discrete steps. That’s definitely true for presentations. Pick one section of your pitch. Deconstruct it. Master it. Then put the whole presentation back together. Or …
Change the conditions. Use a different projector. Or a different remote. Or a lavaliere instead of a headset mic. Switch up the conditions slightly; not only will that help you modify an existing memory, but it will also make you better prepared for the unexpected.

4. And keep modifying the conditions.

You can extend the process to almost anything. While it’s clearly effective for learning motor skills, the process can also be applied to learning almost anything.

4. Say it out loud.

Mentally rehearsing is good. Rehearsing out loud is better.

Research published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition found that compared with reading or thinking silently (as if there’s another way to think), the act of speech is a “quite powerful mechanism for improving memory for selected information.”

According to the researchers, “Learning and memory benefit from active involvement. When we add an active measure or a production element to a word, that word becomes more distinct in long-term memory, and hence more memorable.”

So don’t just practice that investor pitch in your head. Rehearse out loud. That way you’ll remember what you thought, and also what you heard yourself say.

5. Learn in bursts.

Once you’ve drafted that pitch, run through it once. Then take a few minutes to make corrections and revisions.

Then step away for a few hours, or even for a day, before you repeat the process, because a study published in Psychological Science shows “distributed practice” is a much more effective way to learn. Why?

The study-phase retrieval theory says each time you attempt to retrieve something from memory and the retrieval is more successful, that memory becomes harder to forget. If you go over your pitch back to back to back, much of your presentation is still top of mind — which means you don’t have to retrieve it from memory.

Another theory regards contextual variability. When information gets encoded into memory, some of the context is also encoded. That’s why listening to an old song can cause you to remember where you were, what you were feeling, etc., when you first heard that song. The additional context creates useful cues for retrieving information.

Either way, distributed practice definitely works. So give yourself enough time to space out your learning sessions. You’ll learn more efficiently and more effectively.

Especially if you …

6. Sleep on it.

According to a 2016 study published in Psychological Science, people who studied before bed, then slept, and then did a quick review the next morning not only spent less time studying, but they also increased their long-term retention by 50 percent.

Why? One factor is what psychologists call sleep-dependent memory consolidation. As the researchers write:

Converging evidence, from the molecular to the phenomenological, leaves little doubt that offline memory reprocessing during sleep is an important component of how our memories are formed and ultimately shaped.

Sleeping after learning is definitely a good strategy, but sleeping between two learning sessions is a better strategy.

Or in non-researcher-speak, sleeping on it not only helps your brain file away what you’ve learned, but it also makes that information easier to access — especially if you chunk your learning sessions by studying a little the next morning.

7. Exercise.

Want to learn information faster? A study published in Scientific Reports found that moderate-intensity workouts — keeping your heart rate between 50 and 80 percent of max — dramatically improve recall and associative learning and increase your brain’s ability to absorb and retain information.

Want to learn or improve a task where motor skills are involved? According to a different study published in Scientific Reports, 15 minutes of cycling at 80 percent of max heart rate (“intense” exercise) resulted in better memory performance than 30 minutes of moderate exercise, which was better than no exercise at all.

In other words, exercising hard for 15 minutes “fired up” participants’ brains and allowed them to learn motor skills better and faster. To a lesser degree, so did 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise.

And then there’s this. A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows exercise can increase the size of your hippocampus, even if you’re in your 60s or 70s, helping to mitigate the impact of age-related memory loss.

Yep: Exercise helps make your brain healthier, too — which helps you be smarter and stay smarter.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 03, 2025

December 3, 2025

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/vanguard-finally-dips-a-toe-into-crypto-waters-after-bitcoin-slump-58e9191d?mod=home_lead

1. Investor Allocation to Bonds Hit Previous Lows…Internet Bubble and GFC

Topdown Charts

2. Investment Grade Corporate. Bonds AI Exposure-WSJ

WSJ

3. Tether Gold Buying

Tether vs. gold. “Even the crypto world itself is warming to gold. As the chart shows, Tether has been steadily buying more of it over the last 18 months. It now owns about the same amount as Mexico or South Africa … If even DeFi is buying it, the case for gold’s bull market remaining intact is quite hard to refute.”

Daily Chartbook

4. Vanguard Allows Investors to Buy IBIT

Vanguard finally dips a toe into crypto waters as bitcoin’s bounce goes past $91,000

By Steve Goldstein and Joy Wiltermuth

Key Points

About This Summary

Vanguard began allowing clients to purchase third-party crypto exchange-traded funds, including BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF.
Bitcoin increased approximately 6%, to over $91,000 on Tuesday, despite a 31% decline from its record high, reached in October.
The average cost basis for U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs since January 2024 was around $84,000 — a level that could indicate further selling if breached.

Vanguard on Tuesday for the first time started letting clients buy crypto exchange-traded funds managed by third parties — just in time for a bounce in the beleaguered digital asset.

The news, first reported by Bloomberg, was confirmed by Vanguard on Tuesday. The company noted that its clients could buy products like BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF

, other third-party cryptocurrency ETFs and mutual funds for purchase through its brokerage platform.

5. Healthcare Stocks Have Biggest One Month Outperformance in 25 Years

Bespoke Investment Group. So far this month, the Health Care sector is outperforming the broad S&P 500 by more than ten percentage points. As shown below, that hasn’t happened since November 2000!

Bespoke

6. CSCO Stock About to Get Back to Internet Bubble Highs 25 Years Ago

The Return of Cisco

7. Holiday E-Commerce Has Tripled in 10 Years

In 2015, just 17% of American online holiday shopping took place on smartphones — a share that’s expected to hit 57% this year, per Adobe estimates. Total online spending has surged more than 3x over the same period and now, with some shoppers turning to AI for product discovery and recommendations, that growth seems likely to continue.

Indeed, from November 1 through 28, AI-referred traffic to retail sites was up 805% from the same period last year. More than 4 in 10 consumers already use AI to shop, a survey from Mastercard found— led by 61% of Gen Z, who rely on it for deal-checking and filtering out bogus reviews. www.chartr.com

8. Ecommerce vs. Department Store

Jack Ablin Cresset Capital In-store traffic continued its long decline, though the drop was moderate. This year recorded a 3.6% year-over-year decline in Black Friday foot traffic according to RetailNext, while Sensormatic reported a 2.1% slide. These numbers represented an improvement relative to earlier weeks, suggesting that meaningful in-store demand persists, particularly in higher-quality malls and value-focused stores. Observations from multiple malls across the country described steady crowds, even if consumers were more cautious once inside.

Cresset

9. New York City Increasing Apartment Supply Thru Office Conversions

WSJ

10. Seth Godin Blog on Better Shopping this Year

Build a better alternative to Black Friday

About thirty years ago, Jerry Shereshewsky invented “Cyber Monday” as an alternative to Black Friday. The idea was that you’d wait until you got to work on Monday after the Thanksgiving break (where there was high speed internet and you wanted to avoid doing drudge work) to do your shopping from your desk. After all, who wants to get trampled at a big box store?

Of course, since then, the hype machine that is Black Friday has shifted its focus from mobs in the store to mobs online. And the media is still all in in promoting the orgy of consumption and fake deals that happens today.

We’re still going to shop for the holidays. A blog post probably isn’t going to change that. But perhaps we can counter the downward spiral of Amazon’s recommendations, fake reviews and search ads with some AI oomph of our own.

With Claude’s help I built a simple “project” that lets me automatically do powerful research and searches with no junk or distractions. Here’s a bit of what it gave me when I asked it for ‘healthy dog chews’:

If you have a claude.ai account, here’s how to do it. It takes about a minute to set it up. You’ll find that the searches are way slower than the instant overoptimized Amazon results, and the pause is worth it.

Open your Claude account on the web or in their app and look for PROJECTS on the left hand column. Until Claude taught me about this, I had no idea it existed.

Start a new project. Name it something fun and then hit Create Project to save it.

On the next page, it will ask you to “add instructions”. Hit the plus sign to the right…

Copy what’s below and you’re done. Now, every time you do a search with this project, you’ll find thoughtfully researched results. As a bonus, I’ve added a line that adds my affiliate code, which generates royalties for charity (this year, it’s buildon.org.) Feel free to delete that or substitute your own.

All you need to do is hit the + sign in the basic Claude user text entry box every time you want to use it. The first choice is “use a project”.

One other benefit: when it finds something great that’s not on Amazon, you’ll know it when you click through and it’s not there. Then you can go buy it somewhere else…

Okay, here’s the text to copy and paste:

You help people find products worth buying by cutting through Amazon’s ad-filled, fake-review-laden search results. When someone tells you what they’re looking for, do actual research and recommend 4-5 genuinely good options.

How to research:

Use web search for every query. Check multiple source types:

Expert reviewers (Rtings.com, Consumer Reports, specialty publications)
Specialty retailers and enthusiast shops
Reddit and forum discussions (what do people say after 6 months?)
Professional recommendations (vets for pet products, audiophiles for audio, etc.)

What to deliver:

Start with 2-3 sentences of context: what matters in this category, common mistakes to avoid, or pitfalls.

Then give 4-5 picks. For each:

A label (Best Overall, Best Value, Best for Power Users, etc.)
Who it’s ideal for (one phrase)
Why it wins (3-4 specific reasons from your research)
Tradeoffs (every product has them—be honest)
An Amazon search link with this format: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=[search+terms]&tag=permissionmarket-20

Tone:

Be opinionated. If something is the clear winner, say so. If a category has safety issues or scams, warn them. You’re a knowledgeable friend who actually did the homework—not a hedging AI or a generic listicle.

Don’t recommend anything you couldn’t verify across multiple sources. If you can’t research a category well, say so.

Have fun!

https://seths.blog/2025/11/build-a-better-alternative-to-black-friday/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 01, 2025

December 1, 2025

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/alzheimers-disease-most-common-neurodegenerative-disease-here-are-causes

1. P/E Has Gone Nowhere in 2025-The Compound

The Irrelevant Investor

2. JP Morgan Update P/E of S&P 490

JPMorgan Chase & Co

3. Breadth Thrust Indicator

Breadth Thrust: Yet as noted, we’ve seen a sharp surge in breadth — and if you look at the first chart you can see we had a few months of deteriorating breadth… this can sometimes act as a sort of stealth correction. Then add to that the point that there was probably a bit of offside money waiting for a pullback to buy.

But onto this chart, Subu has put together analysis tracking the activation of DeGraaf + Zweig Breadth Thrust signals. While no indicator is infallible, this is a pretty good track record, and seasonality tends to also be decent in December. So it’s certainly some bullish food for thought.

Subu Trade

4. Foreigners Buy $650B of U.S. Stocks in the Last 12 Months

US net capital inflows. “Foreign private purchases of US equities totaled a record $646.8 billion over the past 12 months. Over the past 12 months, foreign private purchases of US equities outpaced those of US Treasury notes and bonds.”

MSN

5. S&P 500 Effective Tax Rate Has Been Falling for 40 Years

Topdown Charts

6. Housing Market Slowing But Here are Top Cities Increases Since 2020-Bespoke

Bespoke

7. Motgage Rates are Normal…It’s Huge Increase in Prices and Lack of Supply

Wolf Street

8. Referral Traffic to Retail Sites from Generative AI +1200% in October…16% More Likely to Purchase-Barrons

WSJ

9. Philadelphia Apartment Searches Coming from NYC

The Philadelphia Inquirer

10. Lifestyle and Environmental Factors for Alzheimers

Lifestyle and Environmental Factors

Lifestyle habits and environmental exposures play an important role in brain health and may influence the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Social Isolation: Social isolation increases the risk of dementia by up to 60 percent.
Lack of Mental Stimulation: Low cognitive activity can accelerate mental decline, whereas mentally stimulating work is associated with a lower risk of developing dementia later in life.
Chronic Stress: Chronic stress leads to prolonged elevated cortisol levels. High cortisol can damage the hippocampus, impair neuronal plasticity, promote neuroinflammation, and accelerate amyloid beta and tau pathology.
Lack of Sleep: Poor or insufficient sleep may contribute to protein buildup. Most people benefit from six to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep each night.
Unhealthy Diet: Diets high in processed foods, sugar, and unhealthy fats may raise the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by contributing to cardiovascular problems, reduced blood flow to the brain, and neuroinflammation.
Lack of Exercise: Regular physical activity supports heart health, blood flow, and oxygen delivery to the brain, which helps maintain cognitive function.
Excess Belly Fat: Excess abdominal fat, particularly visceral fat, promotes chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, vascular dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, and oxidative stress—all of which contribute to brain atrophy and cognitive decline.
Nutritional Deficiencies: Lack of certain micronutrients—such as manganese, selenium, copper, and zinc, and vitamins A, B, C, D, and E—may increase Alzheimer’s risk. People with Alzheimer’s disease have also been found to have lower brain levels of lutein, zeaxanthin, and lycopene.
Exposure to Pollutants: Higher exposure to fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) is linked to more severe Alzheimer’s-related brain changes and greater dementia severity because these tiny particles can travel into the bloodstream and the brain, where they trigger chronic inflammation and oxidative stress.
Exposure to Environmental Toxins: A 2020 review found that infections caused by viruses, bacteria, or fungi can trigger inflammation, which may gradually shrink brain tissue and contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.
Nighttime Light Exposure: Greater exposure to outdoor light at night is linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease, especially in people under 65, because it disturbs the body’s natural circadian rhythm, increases inflammation, and weakens disease resistance.
Smoking: Smoking damages blood vessels and reduces blood flow to the brain, with studies suggesting a 30 percent to 50 percent increased risk of dementia. Quitting smoking, even later in life, can lower this risk.

Genetics

Both types of Alzheimer’s disease have significant genetic components, although they are driven by different underlying causes, ranging from direct gene mutations to a complex mix of genetic and environmental risk factors.

PSEN1 or PSEN2 Genes: Early-onset Alzheimer’s can sometimes be inherited, known as familial Alzheimer’s disease, caused by mutations in the APP, PSEN1, or PSEN2 genes. These mutations lead to the overproduction of amyloid beta, which accumulates into amyloid plaques in the brain.
APOE Gene: The APOE gene is a well-known risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s. A 2024 study found that people with two APOE4 genes almost always showed Alzheimer’s-related brain changes by age 55, and most developed abnormal amyloid levels by age 65.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 26, 2025

November 26, 2025

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/human-brains-5-epochs-development-rcna245663

1. Cash on Big Tech Balance Sheets

WSJ

2. SoftBank Stock -46% from Highs…Approaching 200day

StockCharts

3. Three Weeks of Redemptions Leveraged ETFs

Last week both SPX and NDX leveraged ETF AUMs dropped for a third week to the least since Aug from the 52-week highs three weeks ago.

Zach Goldberg Jefferies

4. Oil Trading at 4.5 Year Lows

Barchart

5. UBER Failed 4x to Breakout…..-18% from Highs

StockCharts

6. Disney in Purple Negative 10-Year Returns

YCharts

7. AI Mega Deals Dominate Q3 2025

PitchBook

8. Massive Scramble to Launch ETFs

Topdown Charts

9. Human Brain has 5 Distinct Epics

By Evan Bush

As we age, the human brain rewires itself.

The process happens in distinct phases, or “epochs,” according to new research, as the structure of our neural networks changes and our brains reconfigure how we think and process information.

For the first time, scientists say they’ve identified four distinct turning points between those phases in an average brain: at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83. During each epoch between those years, our brains show markedly different characteristics in brain architecture, they say.

The findings, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, suggest that human cognition does not simply increase with age until a peak, then decline. In fact, the phase from ages 9 to 32 is the only time in life when our neural networks are becoming increasingly efficient, according to the research.

During the adulthood phase, from 32 to 66, the average person’s brain architecture essentially stabilizes without major changes, at a time when researchers think people are generally plateauing in intelligence and personality.

And in the years after the last turning point — 83 and beyond — the brain becomes increasingly reliant on individual regions as connections between them begin to wither away.

“It’s not a linear progression,” said Alexa Mousley, a postdoctoral researcher associate at the University of Cambridge, who is the study’s lead author. “This is the first step of understanding the way the brain’s changing fluctuates based on age.”

03:59

The findings could help identify why mental health and neurological conditions develop during particular phases of rewiring.

Rick Betzel, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the research, said the findings are intriguing, but more data is needed to support the conclusions. The theories may not hold up to scrutiny over time, he said.

“They did this really ambitious thing,” Betzel said of the study. “Let’s see where it stands in a few years.”

For their research, Mousley and her colleagues analyzed MRI diffusion scans — which are essentially images of how water molecules move within the brain — from about 3,800 people from newborns to age 90. The goal was to map the neural connections across the average person’s brain at different stages in life.

In the brain, the bundles of nerve fibers that transfer signals are encapsulated in fatty tissue called myelin. Think of it like wiring or plumbing. Water molecules diffused in the brain tend to move in the direction of these fibers, rather than across them, meaning researchers can infer where the neural pathways are located.

“We can’t crack open skulls … we rely on non-invasive approaches,” Betzel said of this type of neuroscience research. “What we’re trying to figure out is where these fiber bundles are at.”

Based on the MRI scans, the new study maps the neural network of an average person across a lifespan, determining where connections are strengthening or weakening. The five “epochs” it describes are based on the neural connections the researchers observed.

The first phase is up to age 9, they suggest. The brain rapidly increases in gray and white matter; it prunes extra synapses and restructures itself.

From ages 9 to 32, there is an extended period of rewiring. The brain is defined by rapid communication across the entire brain and efficient connections between different regions.

Most mental health disorders are diagnosed during this time period, Mousely said: “Is there something about this second era of life, as we find it, that could lead people to be more vulnerable to the onset of mental health disorders?”

From 32 to 66, the brain plateaus. It’s still rewiring itself, but less dramatically and more slowly.

Then, from 66 to age of 83, the brain tends toward “modularity,” where the neural network is divided into highly connected subnetworks with less central integration. At age 83, connectivity declines further.

Betzel said the theory described in the study likely jives with people’s lived experiences with aging and cognition.

“It’s intuitively something we gravitate towards. I have two kids and they’re really young. I think all of the time, ‘I’m getting out of my toddler era,’” Betzel said. “Maybe the science ends up being there. But are those the exact right ages? I don’t know.”

In the ideal version of a study like this, he added, the researchers would have MRI diffusion data for a large group of people, each of whom were scanned during every year of life from birth to death. But that wasn’t possible because the technology wasn’t available decades ago.

Instead, the researchers combined nine different data sets containing neuroimaging from previous studies and attempted to harmonize them.

Betzel said each of those data sets varies in quality and approach, and the effort to make them correspond with one another could wash away important variability, ultimately leading to bias in the results.

Nonetheless, he said the authors of the paper are “thoughtful” and skilled scientists who did their best to control for that possibility.

“Brain networks change over the lifespan — absolutely. Is it discrete such that there are five exact change points? I’d say stay tuned. It’s an interesting idea.”

10. This Tool Could Help Prevent Dementia

Psychology Today 5 ways to boost your brain reserve today. Austin Perlmutter M.D.

Key points

Cognitive decline starts decades before dementia diagnosis, but higher cognitive reserve can delay symptoms.
Education, complex work, and active learning could reduce dementia risk.
Exercise, social ties, and new experiences help grow brain networks and boost cognitive reserve.

With dementia now estimated to impact 42 percent of people who make it past age 55, everyone should be taking steps to help decrease their risk for developing the condition. Yet while much of the conversation focuses on supplements, diet, and pharmaceuticals, one of the less publicized tools to mitigate risk could be one of the most important.

For background, it’s key to understand that, as it relates to dementia, brain changes can begin decades before a person experiences symptoms of cognitive decline. Yet not all people with dementia-related changes in their brains experience clinical dementia, and there are major differences in the severity of cognitive impairment, even in people with similar brain pathology (like amyloid buildup). But why?

A major breakthrough in unpacking this complexity came from a 1994 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). In this publication, Yaakov Stern and his co-investigators looked at about 600 healthy adults aged 60 years or older and followed them for up to four years to look for the development of dementia. They discovered that people who had more formal education or more complex occupations had a significantly lower chance (less than half) of developing dementia. They proposed that “increased educational and occupational attainment may reduce the risk of incident [Alzheimer’s disease], either by decreasing ease of clinical detection of AD or by imparting a reserve that delays the onset of clinical manifestations.”

This early work has since been expanded, and the framework described by the early work is now classified as “cognitive reserve” (CR). There is now an increased understanding that multiple methods of expanding brain connectivity and even growth of new brain cells could help to delay or potentially even offset the risk of developing dementia. Many now recommend various steps to help raise CR, which, in addition to pursuing formal education and engaging in cognitively demanding tasks (e.g., a complex job), include certain leisure activities, exercise, and social engagement.

It is important to note that the brain protection associated with higher CR isn’t necessarily a prevention of dementia itself, but rather, may promote a delayed decline. Research recently published in the journal Neurology suggests that having higher CR leads to a slowing of progression in stages of brain decline that precede a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, potentially compressing the cognitive impairment into a shorter period of time after dementia is present. With all this in mind, what are practical strategies to help boost CR?

Lifelong Learning: Education is one of the strongest contributors to CR. Higher educational attainment is linked to a significantly lower dementia risk in many studies, including up to a 44 percent reduction in some data. Importantly, this isn’t just about early life schooling. Learning later in life is an excellent step to continue to promote CR.
Cognitive Training: In one of the largest trials of its type, researchers in the ACTIVE Cognitive Training Trial tested whether 10 sessions of cognitive training (plus boosters after 11 and 35 months) could lead to improvements in cognition in around 3,000 people. They found that reasoning and speed training led to improvements in brain function observable 10 years later.
Physical Activity: Regular physical activity may be the most important daily activity for promoting brain health, but, specific to cognitive reserve, aerobic and resistance exercises may be especially beneficial for growing brain cells and protecting against dementia. One of the most striking examples is a 2011 study showing that one year of exercise (specifically walking) appeared to grow the brain’s memory center (the hippocampus).
Social Engagement: Strong and positive social interactions have been consistently linked with better brain health, but how? In a 2021 publication, researchers compared people’s social networks to brain imaging (MRI) testing. They found that people with more ability to span social roles had better cognitive testing and that this was linked to slowing of atrophy in parts of the brain linked to social processing.
Novelty: Our brains are tasked with responding to an incredible diversity of environmental inputs. However, consistently challenging ourselves with new experiences may be a way to beneficially augment this process to boost CR. To this end, learning a new instrument or a new language, traveling, or picking up a new hobby are great ways to inject novelty into your life.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-brain/202511/this-tool-could-help-prevent-dementia

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 25, 2025

November 25, 2025

1. Mag 7 vs. Four Horseman of 1999—Nowhere Near Valuations Now

Mag 7 vs. Four Horseman. “The P/E ratios of the Mag 7 today are elevated nowhere near the Four Horseman of the ’90s (Cisco, Msft, Dell, Intel). Mag 7 is trading at 36.8x earnings, below the 47.3x in 2021 and well below the 80!) of the Four Horseman pre-dot com crash.”

Daily Chartbook

2. Yesterday’s Rally Followed Record Put Volume Trades

Barchart

3. Tech Capex Spending vs. GDP Right at 1999 Levels

Peter Berezin

4. Capex as a Share of Operating Cash Flow from AI Players-Prof G Markets

Prof G Markets

5. MSFT Did Not Make New Highs This Fall …Pulled Back to 200-Day Moving Average

StockCharts

6. RNMBY European Defense Company -30% from Highs…Closes Below 200-Day

StockCharts

7. European Financials were Sideways for a Decade…Big Breakout

StockCharts

8. Biotech Left for Dead…+27% 2025…Big Base

StockCharts

9. Bill Ackman Pershing Square Core Investment Principles

Koyfin

10. The High Cost of Building Nuclear Plants

Semafor

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 24, 2025

November 24, 2025

1. Dollar Bullish Chart Action ..Dollar Above 200-Day First Time Since April…50day thru 200day to Upside

StockCharts

2. Narrow rally. The number of SPX stocks outperforming the index is the third lowest since 1960. The share trailing by at least 10% is the fourth-most

Daily Chartbook

3. ORCL -40% from Highs. Close Below 200-Day

StockCharts

4. Ethereum Close Below 200day

StockCharts

5. Five-Percent Pullback in S&P But -20-40% in Momentum Favorites

Bespoke

6. KWEB Chinese Internet Stocks 16% Correction …Right on 200-Day

StockCharts

7. Weight Loss War…LLY vs. NVO …Lilly is Huge Outperformance Since Late 2024…This Chart Shows LLY vs. NVO

StockCharts

8. 70% Spread in Return Year to Date …LLY Over NVO (Novo Nordisk)

YCharts

9. CRCL IPO Retail Favorite Collapses Back to IPO Price….Stock Hit $260 on Highs

Barchart

10. Do Your Own Research but According to ChartR Harvard Grade Inflation Started with Avoiding the Vietnam Draft

chartr

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 21, 2025

November 21, 2025

1. The End of U.S. Dollar Never Works …..Dollar Foreign Exchange Volume Increasing the Last 3 Years

Barchart

2. NVDA Data Center Business 11x Larger than AMD

Fiscal AI

3. NVDA Big Sideways Base for Months

StockCharts

4. AMD Looks Similar for Months

StockCharts

5. ORCL ChatGpt Announcement of $300B Deal….Since Event Stock Lost $315B Market Cap

The Financial Times

6. The U.S. Stock Market is One of the LEAST Top Heavy in the World

Ryan Detrick

7. Sector Performance Year to Date vs. Since October

Bespoke

8. Walmart More Expensive Stock than Amazon

Koyfin

9. The World has Crushed “Extreme Poverty”

Our World in Data

10. Fastest Growing States in U.S.

Visual Capitalist

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 20, 2025

November 20, 2025

https://time.com/4315078/life-improvement-celebrate

1. Levered ETF Growth

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%

Bloomberg By Kanoko Matsuyama

Bloomberg

8. AI is Not Causing Job Cuts Yet

9. The Deadliest Roads in America-Washington Post

10. A Tip on Motivation-Eric Barker

Motivation

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…

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 19, 2025

November 19, 2025

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.

BY FAST COMPANY

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 expectations by 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.

By David Rock and Chris Weller

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 18, 2025

November 18, 2025

1.Earnings Have Positive Momentum.

2.NVDA Wednesday Earnings..Guidance will be Key.

3.Insider Selling is 25:1 vs. Buying.

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.”

@timmerfidelity

4.Howard Marks on Future Returns vs. Current Valuations.

5.HOOD Robinhood Stock -25% Correction

6.CoreWeave -45% in One Month.

7.Fear and Greed Index “Extreme Fear”

8. Saw This in Howard Lindzon Newsletter….The Ultimate Tumbling Dice Economy ….Pump.Fun Coins.

9.Comparative Returns with Insider vs. Outsider Elected as New CEO

10.Note to Self—Don’t Run for Mayor in Mexico

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 17, 2025

November 17, 2025

1.Bitcoin Officially in the Red Negative 2025

2.Bitcoin Whale Selling Coming from All Long-Term Age Brackets.

BTC long-term holders. “Interesting visual from crypto quant on long term holder bitcoin selling, seems like it’s been coming from all age brackets.”

@wclementeiii

3.Bitcoin, Micro Strategy and GLD Comparison 2025…..GLD outperforming MSTR by 86%

4.Bitcoin Decouples from Tech Stocks.

5.Is Crypto Following Trump Approval Rating?

6.Other Hot Trade Pulling Back Quantum Computing….IONQ -48% from Highs…Holding Above 200day

7.Quantum Stock QBTS -52% ..Still Above 200-Day.

8.Read of the Month—While American Kids are Scrolling Instagram, Russian Kids are Preparing for War Starting in 1^st Grade.

WSJ By Matthew Luxmoore

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.

https://fs.blog/about/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 14, 2025

November 14, 2025

https://wolfstreet.com/2025/11/12/inflation-rages-in-streaming-services/

1. Healthcare Stocks Rising…PPH Healthcare ETF Positive Yesterday vs. Nasdaq -2%

Bloomberg

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:

Disney+ +172%
Apple TV +160%
Peacock +120%
Hulu +58%
Paramount+ +40%
Netflix +38%
HBO Max +23%

10. Listening to music most days could guard against dementia, study suggests

Story by Maggie Penman-Washington Post

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.

A takeaway is you don’t need to learn an instrument to benefit from engaging with music, though research has shown that taking music lessons can increase gray matter in the brain, even for people who aren’t particularly skilled.

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.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/listening-to-music-is-linked-to-lower-dementia-risk-study-suggests/ar-AA1QnacJ

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 13, 2025

November 13, 2025

1. U.S. Equity Risk Premium Turns Negative

Barchart

2. History of Negative Equity Risk Premium

Perplexity

3. Inflation Ticking Up in 55% of CPI Items

Apollo

4. Semiconductor Stocks $1.3B Inflows Last Week…Retail Buying

The Kobeissi Letter

5. Gold Trading with High Correlation to S&P

Bloomberg

6. Big Tech CDS Spreads Widening

Big Tech CDS. “The Big Tech CDS has surged this year with Oracle CDS leading the rise. The big Tech CDS is now highest in over 2 years, rising from cycle-lows. While the standalone chart show concerns, when compared with the broader IG market, the spreads are still below the aggregate Investment Grade credit and that the IG CDS is still near cycle lows.”

Manish Kabra – SocGen

7. Historical Returns After 2% Dip-Marketwatch

Joseph Adinolfi

8. AAII Bears History

9. Subprime Auto Loan Delinquencies Break-Out Above 1990’s Record

Reuters

10. A good business vs. a useful idea

Ideas open doors, lead to connections and make things better.

But not all good ideas are good businesses.

Crop rotation is a good idea. So is sous vide cooking and the sport of juggling. But these aren’t good businesses.

A business thrives when it can charge a premium–selling something for more than it costs. That means that there has to be a competitive advantage, an asset that produces value. Easy substitutions are a challenge for businesses, but useful ideas are often based on how easy they are to share.

Create something of value. And then find a reason why people will eagerly choose your version and happily pay extra for it. https://seths.blog/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 12, 2025

November 12, 2025

https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-berkshire-hathaway-thanksgiving-letter-main-takeaways-greg-abel-2025-11

1. Artificial Intelligence Index

The Irrelevant Investor

2. Bitmine -75% from Highs…Goal was to Acquire 5% of Ethereum

StockCharts

3. XRT S&P Retail ETF Holds 200-Day

StockCharts

4. Aerospace and Defense Stocks Above 50-Day Moving Average for 3^rd Longest Streak Ever

Bespoke Investment Group With the successful test of the 50-DMA, the Aerospace and Defense industry has closed above its 50-DMA for 139 trading days. That’s the longest streak since a record 151 trading days in 2017 and ranks as the third-longest in the last 30 years.

Bespoke

5. It’s All About the Power….Data Centers Need Electricity

Semafor

6. LLY Break-Out New All Time Highs

StockCharts

7. Five Takeaways From Warren Buffett Thanksgiving Letter

Business Insider Here are five main takeaways from the letter, paired with key quotes:

1. He’s not planning to sell a bunch of stock right now

Buffett said he plans to keep a “significant” amount of his class-A shares. That is, until shareholders reach the same level of comfort with newly appointed Greg Abel as they had with Buffett and his long-time partner, Charlie Munger.

Key quote: “That level of confidence shouldn’t take long. My children are already 100% behind Greg as are the Berkshire directors.”

2. He’s accelerating donations

Buffett said he’ll donate more than $1.3 billion of Berkshire Hathaway shares to four family foundations: his late wife’s, and one for each of his three children.

Key quote: “The acceleration of my lifetime gifts to my children’s foundations in no way reflects any change in my views about Berkshire’s prospects.”

3. He wants Berkshire CEOs to be humble — and in it for the long haul

Buffett said he hopes that, “with a little luck,” Berkshire will only have five or six CEOs over the next century.

Key quote: “It should particularly avoid those whose goal is to retire at 65, to become look-at-me rich, or to initiate a dynasty.”

4. He thinks pay transparency efforts have backfired

Buffett said that reforms aimed at pay transparency actually sought to “embarrass” CEOs, but instead made them more competitive.

Key quote: “The new rules produced envy, not moderation.”

5. He says investors should expect big stock drawdowns — and be patient for rebounds

Buffett noted that Berkshire stock has fallen 50% or more on three separate occasions in its 60 years under his leadership — and has always come back eventually.

Key quote: “Don’t despair; America will come back and so will Berkshire shares.”

8. Top 1% of Earners Now Have More Wealth than Middle Class America Combined

Zach Goldberg Jefferies

9. 50-Year Mortgage Math

A 50 year mortgage will not work to durably create any sort of affordability.

first off, it changes the monthly payment very little.

on a $500k home with 20% down, you pay $2,199/month on a 50 vs $2,480 on a 30.

$281/month savings. that’s simply not going to move the needle on affordability and when you look at the overall interest costs over the life of the loan, they rise 87%.

great for banks, bad for borrowers. https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/trumponomics-50-year-debt-and-a-worrying?publication_id=323914&post_id=178390014&isFreemail=true&r=8smvi&triedRedirect=true

10. Discover Yourself by Expanding Your Mental Map

Psychology Today Personal change is like expanding a map, except the territory is inside you- Nick Kabrel

Key points

We apply the neuroscience of cognitive mapping to explain how learning and personal change might work.
Getting stuck might mean repeatedly navigating within the confines of our narrow cognitive maps.
Learning and personal change require expanding the map by exploring uncharted territories within.

Imagine you live in Europe in 1490. The map you see below (Figure 1) is what you think the world looks like; it’s all there is. A few years later, explorers discover a whole new continent, expanding the map of known territory. This fundamentally changes your understanding of the planet beneath your feet.

A new theory of psychological change, published by my colleague Jaan Aru and me in Perspectives on Psychological Science, proposes that internal transformations mirror this expansion of geographical maps, only the territory we navigate and expand lies within ourselves (Kabrel & Aru, 2025).

The core idea: Your mind as a map

To model how people change, we used psychotherapy as a prime example of how humans explore and transform their inner world. But the same process can describe learning in general, whether through therapy, education, coaching, consulting, or everyday life.

In short, the core idea is this: Your mind can be represented as a map or network of interconnected concepts, ideas, sensations, memories, beliefs, attitudes, and so on. Sometimes, this map may be too narrow, like Europeans’ conceptions of the world in 1490.

Most of the time, we think, feel, and act within familiar territories. Human development, whether it’s an emotional breakthrough in therapy, an insight in coaching, or a creative idea in business, requires us to go beyond the known map and expand it, thereby transforming what is known. Now, let me explain all this in detail.

Not just a metaphor

Back in the 1940s, researchers discovered that if you train a rat to run through a maze, its brain builds what they called a “cognitive map” of that space. In the hippocampus (the brain area crucial for memory and navigation), individual cells fire when the rat is in a specific place. As it moves, different cells fire in sequence. Together, these cells form a kind of internal map of the territory.

What’s remarkable is that the same neural system that allows a rat to navigate a maze, or you to find your way from home to work, also activates when we think about abstract concepts. When you move through a chain of thoughts, your hippocampal cells fire in similar sequential patterns. Thinking, in other words, is “mental navigation”: You’re traversing an internal territory of ideas, memories, and associations.

Modern network science allows us to make this more tangible. By analyzing large amounts of language use, scientists can visualize a prototype of someone’s “mental map” (Beaty & Kenett, 2023). For example, your family members are likely represented in your mind as conceptually closer to you than your colleagues, just as cities on a map cluster by region. (See below.)

Neuroscientists also discovered that if you engage in different cognitive tasks, like searching your memory, categorizing objects, or making decisions, your brain engages the hippocampal cognitive maps to guide you (Viganò et al., 2025). This means that the idea of the mind as a map is not merely a metaphor: Evidence increasingly suggests it reflects how information is actually stored, organized, and accessed in the brain.

Our cognitive maps are built on our experience. Most of the time, this is highly adaptive: It allows us to predict, learn, and respond effectively to familiar patterns in our environment. But sometimes, it can also backfire.

For instance, when facing a complex problem that demands creativity, we might get stuck in a loop, returning to the same familiar but ineffective solutions.

In therapy, a person who learned in childhood that “people are hostile” may continue to navigate within that same map, avoiding emotional openness long after the original context has changed.

In organizations, a leader might hold a rigid belief that “AI must be integrated immediately,” overlooking broader contextual or ethical challenges.

The key point is that we often become trapped within the borders of our existing cognitive maps. Metaphorically, it’s as if we keep walking the same corner of our internal landscape, never exploring the broader territory that lies beyond.

Here again, neuroscience helps explain why this happens. We can’t simply “decide” to think differently, because the neural pathways we use most often become the strongest. Every time a thought pattern activates, the same neurons fire together, and those connections strengthen. It’s like a beaten path through grass: the more often you walk it, the more defined it becomes, and the harder it is to take a new route.

Expanding the narrow cognitive map

Expanding your cognitive map is a challenging task, precisely because it requires you to step off those familiar mental trajectories. That’s why we often need other people—therapists, coaches, teachers, or consultants—to help us break through these limitations.

For example, in our paper, we conceptualize the therapist as a skilled navigator—someone who helps you leave the narrow confines of your existing map and chart new, previously unvisited territories within your own mind.

Think about it: The therapist asks questions. You follow your thoughts. You notice things you haven’t noticed before. The therapist points out patterns. You explore connections you’ve never explored. Gradually, you map new territory.

This isn’t just kitchen talk. It’s active navigation through your own neural space. Except, instead of following your habitual route A-B-C-D-E, the therapist helps redirect you to A-B-F-G-H – places you’ve never gone before. (See below.)

Explore

The world wasn’t smaller in 1490; people’s understanding of it was. The same holds for our minds. Our internal map has the potential to be broad, containing many possible neural states, yet in our lifetimes, we visit only a small fraction of them. Most of the time, we move along familiar paths, following patterns that feel safe and efficient.

As we tried to show with a new theory, expanding our cognitive maps requires curiosity, guidance, and the willingness to step off the beaten track, exploring routes the mind hasn’t traveled before.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-neuroscience-of-personal-growth/202510/discover-yourself-by-expanding-your-mental-map

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 10, 2025

November 10, 2025

https://www.profgalloway.com

1. Bitcoin Whale Sales

2. Correlation of Bitcoin to Gold Zero=0%

Chart 1 shows the correlations between Bitcoin and various asset classes using monthly returns over the past five years. The speculative nature of many markets over the past several years has caused asset correlations to rise, thus limiting the number of potentially diversifying asset classes.

However, the correlation to gold is 0%, which suggests there is virtually no relationship whatsoever between “digital gold” and actual gold. Uncorrelated assets, like gold is to Bitcoin, are typically good diversifying assets.

Advisor Perspectives

3. Bitcoin Decouples From Nasdaq

Risk Rattles: I keep coming back to this chart as barometer of speculative risk appetite and liquidity (+potential early-warning indicator). To that end, with bitcoin rolling over and tech topping out, it’s not a good sign.

Topdown Charts

4. S&P Breadth at Lows

Zerohedge

5. 72% of Server Farms in 1% of Counties

WSJ

6. Argentina ETF ARGT Hit All Time Highs

7. Today, Airbnb generates nearly as much revenue as the 3 largest US hotel chains (Marriott, Hilton, & Hyatt) combined!

Facial AI

8. Only Fans $7.2B in Revenue 46 Employees

Prof G Blog Loneliness is lucrative. Leonid Radvinsky, the secretive owner of OnlyFans, received a $700 million windfall last year, while the platform’s top tier of content creators — mostly women — earn millions annually. With $7.2 billion in annual gross revenue and just 46 employees, OnlyFans may be one of the most profitable companies on the planet. The site is viewed as a porn-centric hub where men pay women for sexual content. The company claims it’s giving creators and their 378 million fans (greater than the population of the U.S.) something mor: an opportunity to forge “authentic connections.”

Some crazy stats:

The top 0.1% of creators capture 76% of revenue and earn an average of $146,881 per month. The average creator earns just $150 to $180 per month.
Private messages drive about 70% of revenue vs. only 4% from actual subscriptions. Seventy-one percent of users are male, but 84% of creators are female. About 0.01% of subscribers are “whales,” who generate more than 20% of all revenue.
Eighty-five percent of users access the site via mobile.

9. From breadwinners to bystanders: The death spiral of the American working man

by John Mac Ghlionn, opinion contributor – 09/30/25 7:30 AM ET

Something strange is happening in America’s job market. For the first time in living memory, young men with college degrees are struggling to find work, while women with the same qualifications are thriving. What once seemed fixed — the old order of men filling the top jobs and women fighting for entry — has been flipped. And the consequences could be severe.

The numbers paint a disturbing picture. Men with college degrees are now more likely to be out of work than women with the same education. To compound matters, men’s pay has barely budged since 1979, whereas women’s earnings keep climbing. More worrying still, a growing number of men are no longer looking for work at all. They have simply checked out.

This isn’t the ebb and flow of a normal cycle. In truth, it looks like a structural shift.

The industries that once absorbed educated men — technology, finance, law, consulting — are no longer safe havens. Tech firms are cutting staff. Startups are sputtering. Artificial intelligence is eliminating entry-level jobs faster than new ones appear. White-collar ladders that once led to stability are now missing rungs or disappearing altogether.

The opposite is happening in sectors long seen as female domains. Health care, education and social services are adding jobs at breakneck pace as the population ages. America needs more nurses, teachers, and caregivers every year. These are professions with real future demand. Yet men remain mostly absent. They linger at the margins, clinging to shrinking fields while growth passes them by.

This matters far beyond the job boards. When young men cannot find meaningful work, the effects ripple outward. Families weaken. Communities fracture. Depression, drug abuse and social withdrawal rise. Marriage rates drop because men cannot offer the stability once expected of them. Birth rates sink as couples delay children under financial strain — a slow suffocation of society itself.

The economy, too, suffers. If half the workforce fails to adapt to where jobs exist, the mismatch will create permanent dysfunction. Some industries will be desperate for workers, while others sit crowded with idle men. Growth will sputter. Productivity will sag. A two-speed society will emerge: women advancing into the expanding professions of care and communication, men languishing in declining sectors or falling out of the labor force altogether.

The road ahead looks grim unless something changes. The future will be built on jobs that demand patience, empathy and steady communication. Teaching, nursing, counseling and care work form the backbone of any strong society. They keep communities together, help the sick recover and guide children into adulthood. They carry respect, decent pay and growing demand. Yet men hold back.

Pride and habit stand in the way. Nursing carries a feminine label. I’ll admit it myself — when I hear the word “nurse,” my mind still drifts to a woman in scrubs. The teaching of small children is dismissed as women’s work.

That instinct feels natural, but it is a learned reflex. It blinds men to jobs that could offer real stability and meaning. And it can’t go on. The shortages grow deeper, the gaps wider and the cost heavier.

This requires a radical rethink. No lectures, no guilt trips — just a cultural reset. Men should feel pride in classrooms and hospital wards — the same pride they feel on construction sites or in boardrooms. These jobs build the future as surely as bridges or businesses. Without men stepping forward, the nation grows weaker, poorer and more unprepared.

The stakes are enormous. If men cannot find their footing in the economy of tomorrow, America will face not only labor shortages but a fracture along gender lines. The divide will not be between rich and poor alone, or Black and white, but between men and women. Women, by instinct and tradition, tend to marry up — to seek partners with stability and status. But what happens when millions of men cannot offer either?

The country is already seeing the rise of sexless young men, drifting without purpose, cut off from work, family and the prospect of building a future. Whole swaths of men risk becoming spectators to prosperity. And history leaves little comfort here: when large groups of disaffected men gather at the margins, frustration festers into something darker — resentment, rage and revolt.

America has a choice. It must recognize this great gender flip for what it is — a slow-motion crisis — and act while there is still time. That means breaking down the cultural barriers that keep men from entering growing fields. It means raising wages and status in the professions that need workers most. It means preparing boys from an early age for a world where communication and care matter as much as coding and capital. That does not mean treating boys like girls, but equipping them with the full range of skills needed to lead families and hold their own in tomorrow’s economy.

Or we could do nothing. We could pretend the market will sort itself out, that men will adapt on their own, that things will somehow balance. But inaction carries a heavy price. If men continue to fall behind, the consequences will reach every corner of society. The crisis will not stay confined to the job market. It will spread to the school, to the streets, to the very spirit of the nation.

John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life. https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5528062-gender-flip-job-crisis/

10. Interview with Steve Wozniak from FS Blog

The Knowledge Project

Steve Wozniak is the engineer who built Apple.

He gave millions of his own money to early employees, stepped away from power, and refused to play by the rules everyone else was following.

Woz’s philosophy of open architecture, the very one a young Steve Jobs fought against, is what saved Apple long enough for it to become Apple.

This is the story of the reluctant co-founder who won by refusing to compromise, and a blueprint for success without selling your soul.

Here are 10 of the maxims I took away from this episode and my research:

1. Committees kill revolutions.
2. Learning is the prize.
3. Hold your ideas with the right grip. Let go of incorrect ideas.
4. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth giving it 100%.
5. Obsession isn’t a problem. It’s an advantage.
6. Time will do the work for you if you align with how the world works.
7. Move with urgency. You can do it much faster than you think.
8. Obsess over customers.
9. You win in the dark, when everyone else is partying or sleeping.
10. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

https://fs.blog/about/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 07, 2025

November 7, 2025

1. Earnings Guidance Spread Chart

Bespoke Investment Group As shown below, our guidance spread chart, which shows the percentage of companies raising minus lowering guidance on a rolling three-month basis, has spiked to a level we’ve only seen once before, which was the period coming out of the COVID Crash in 2020. These big spikes in guidance have historically happened in the early part of periods following max uncertainty.

Bespoke

2. Crypto Lending Hit $74B in Q3

Crypto lending. The recent drop in crypto prices was preceded by a record-breaking $73.6 billion in crypto lending in Q3.

DAILY CHARTBOOK

3. Kalshi Now Sports Betting App…$800m a Week

4. AI Borrowing Getting Boost from Private Lending…Blue Owl Chart Pulls Back to Liberation Day Lows

StockCharts

5. I Agree…Good Chart to Watch

Mike Zaccardi

6. XLK Tech ETF Has Been Above 50-Day Since Liberation Day Lows…Pulled Back and Held Multiple Times

StockCharts

7. META Hard Close Below 200Day….Oversold Short-Term RSI 25

StockCharts

8. Job Postings at Covid Levels

The Kobeissi Letter

9. 2M Cars Repossessed in 2025

Liz Ann Sonders

10. Three Highlights from Scott Galloway New Book-“Notes on Being a Man”

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei writes:

Axios

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 06, 2025

November 6, 2025

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm274lmg7m1o

1. ORCL Gives Back All of the Last Gap Up….-27% from Highs…New Debt to Equity Ratio 500%

StockCharts

2. Oracle 5-Year CDS Spike

Dave Lutz Jones Trading Oracle shares have soared 54% in 2025, set for their most powerful annual rally since 1999. Its AI-driven surge in revenue has made it one of Wall Street’s most valuable companies. Yet a surge in its credit default swaps – a form of insurance against default for bondholders – shows investors are worried about the U.S. tech giant’s debt levels.

3. Big Tech Cash Flow is Still Stronger than Capex

The Irrelevant Investor

4. Robinhood Growth by Product

Fiscal.ai

5. Rare Earth ETF -20% from Highs..Closes Below 50-Day for First Time Since June

StockCharts

6. Big Level for U.S. Dollar DXY

Wolf Street Blog The DXY tracks the USD against the euro, yen, British Pound, Canadian dollar, Swedish krona, and Swiss franc.

Wolf Street

7. U.S. Financial Conditions Index

The Kobeissi Letter

8. Narco-sub carrying 1.7 tonnes of cocaine seized in Atlantic

James Gregory-BBC

The sub was located 1,000 nautical miles off the coast of Lisbon

Four people have been detained after Portuguese authorities intercepted a narco-sub carrying more than 1.7 tonnes of cocaine in the mid-Atlantic.

The semi-submersible vessel was bound for the Iberian peninsula and was seized in recent days, according to officials.

Footage shows the police and navy surrounding the vessel before boarding, seizing the Class A substance and arresting four crew members, who are said to be from South America.

The suspects, including two Ecuadorians, a Venezuelan and a Colombian, were remanded in pre-trial custody after their court appearance in the Azores on Tuesday, said police.

Vítor Ananias, head of Portugal’s police unit to combat drug trafficking, told a press conference that their different nationalities showed the organisation behind them was not just based in one country.

The Lisbon-based Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre (MAOC) said it had received information in recent days indicating that a criminal organisation was in the process of dispatching a submersible loaded with cocaine destined for Europe.

A few days later, a Portuguese ship successfully located the submersible approximately 1,000 nautical miles (1,852km) off the coast of Lisbon, in an operation backed by the UK’s National Crime Agency and the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

Having seized the vessel, the navy said it could not be towed back to shore due to poor weather and its fragile construction, and it later sank in the open sea.

9. Rising Law School Applications

Reuters

10. 7 Things Remarkably Happy People Do Often

Thomas Northcut—Getty Images

By Inc.

August 30, 2014 5:45 AM EDT

This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally published at Inc.com.

By Jeff Haden

Happiness: everyone wants it, yet relatively few seem to get enough of it, especially those intheir early forties. (I’m no psychologist, but that’s probably about when many of us start thinking, “Wait; is this all there is?”)

Good news and bad news: unfortunately, approximately 50 percent of your happiness, your “happiness set-point,” is determined by personality traits that are largely hereditary. Half of how happy you feel is basically outside your control.

Bummer.

But, that means 50 percent of your level of happiness is totally within your control: relationships, health, career, etc. So even if you’re genetically disposed to be somewhat gloomy, you can still do things to make yourself a lot happier.

Like this:

1. Make good friends.

It’s easy to focus on building a professional network of partners, customers, employees, connections, etc, because there is (hopefully) a payoff.

But there’s a definite payoff to making real (not just professional or social media) friends. Increasing your number of friends correlates to higher subjective well being; doubling your number of friends is like increasing your income by 50 percent in terms of how happy you feel.

And if that’s not enough, people who don’t have strong social relationships are 50 percent less likely to survive at any given time than those who do. (That’s a scary thought for loners like me.)

Make friends outside of work. Make friends at work. Make friends everywhere.

Make real friends. You’ll live a longer, happier life.

2. Actively express thankfulness.

According to one study, couples that expressed gratitude in their interactions with each other resulted in increases in relationship connection and satisfaction the next day–both for the person expressing thankfulness and (no big surprise) for the person receiving it. (In fact, the authors of the study said gratitude was like a “booster shot” for relationships.)

Of course the same is true at work. Express gratitude for employee’s hard work and you both feel better about yourselves.

Another easy method is to write down a few things you are grateful for every night. One study showed people who wrote down 5 things they were thankful for once a week were 25 percent happier after ten weeks; in effect they dramatically increased their happiness set-point.

Happy people focus on what they have, not on what they don’t have. It’s motivating to want more in your career, relationships, bank account, etc. but thinking about what you alreadyhave, and expressing gratitude for it, will make you a lot happier.

And will remind you that even if you still have huge dreams you have already accomplished a lot–and should feel genuinely proud.

3. Actively pursue your goals.

Goals you don’t pursue aren’t goals, they’re dreams, and dreams only make you happy when you’re dreaming.

Pursuing goals, though, does make you happy. According to David Niven, author of 100 Simple Secrets of the Best Half of Life, “People who could identify a goal they were pursuing(my italics) were 19% more likely to feel satisfied with their lives and 26 percent more likely to feel positive about themselves.”

So be grateful for what you have… then actively try to achieve more. If you’re pursuing a huge goal, make sure that every time you take a small step closer to achieving it you pat yourself on the back.

But don’t compare where you are now to where you someday hope to be. Compare where you are now to where you were a few days ago. Then you’ll get dozens of bite-sized chunks of fulfillment–and a never-ending supply of things to be thankful for.

4. Do what you excel at as often as you can.

You know the old cliché regarding the starving yet happy artist? Turns out it’s true: artists are considerably more satisfied with their work than non-artists–even though the pay tends to be considerably lower than in other skilled fields.

Why? I’m no researcher, but clearly the more you enjoy what you do and the more fulfilled you feel by what you do the happier you will be.

In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Anchor says that when volunteers picked, “…one of their signature strengths and used it in a new way each day for a week, they became significantly happier and less depressed.”

Of course it’s unreasonable to think you can chuck it all and simply do what you love. But you can find ways to do more of what you excel at. Delegate. Outsource. Start to shift the products and services you provide into areas that allow you to bring more of your strengths to bear. If you’re a great trainer, find ways to train more people. If you’re a great salesperson, find ways to streamline your admin tasks and get in front of more customers.

Everyone has at least a few things they do incredibly well. Find ways to do those things more often. You’ll be a lot happier.

And probably a lot more successful.

5. Give.

While giving is usually considered to be unselfish, giving can also be more beneficial for the giver than the receiver. Providing social support may be more beneficial than receiving it.

Intuitively I think we all knew that because it feels awesome to help someone who needs it. Not only is helping those in need fulfilling, it’s also a reminder of how comparatively fortunate we are–which is a nice reminder of how thankful we should be for what we already have.

Plus, receiving is something you cannot control. If you need help–or simply want help–you can’t make others help you. But you can always control whether you offer and provide help.

And that means you can always control, at least to a degree, how happy you are–because giving makes you happier.

6. Don’t single-mindedly chase “stuff.”

Money is important. Money does a lot of things. (One of the most important is to create choices.)

But after a certain point, money doesn’t make people happier. After about $75,000 a year,money doesn’t buy more (or less) happiness. “Beyond $75,000… higher income is neither the road to experience happiness nor the road to relief of unhappiness or stress,” say the authors of that study.

“Perhaps $75,000 is the threshold beyond which further increases in income no longer improve individuals’ ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-being, such as spending time with people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and enjoying leisure.”

And if you don’t buy that, here’s another take: “The materialistic drive and satisfaction with life are negatively related.” Or, in layman’s terms, “Chasing possessions tends to make you less happy.”

Think of it as the bigger house syndrome. You want a bigger house. You need a bigger house. (Not really, but it sure feels like you do.) So you buy it. Life is good… until a couple months later when your bigger house is now just your house.

New always becomes the new normal.

“Things” only provide momentary bursts of happiness. To be happier, don’t chase as many things. Chase a few experiences intead.

7. Live the life you want to live.

Bonnie Ware worked in palliative care, spending time with patients who had only a few months to live. Their most common regret was, “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

What other people think–especially people you don’t even know–doesn’t matter. What other people want you to do doesn’t mater.

Your hopes, your dreams, your goals… live your life your way. Surround yourself with people who support and care not for the “you” they want you to be but for the real you.

Make choices that are right for you. Say things you really want to say to the people who most need to hear them. Express your feelings. Stop and smell a few roses. Make friends, and stay in touch with them.

And most of all, realize that happiness is a choice. 50 percent of how happy you are lies within your control, so start doing more things that will make you happier.

https://time.com/3225614/things-happy-people-do

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 05, 2025

November 5, 2025

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-eat-12-servings-vegetables-day-mark-hyman-md-lc6wc/?trackingId=WFkL6HjLCn7cTpaTodcTiw%3D%3D

1. Mag 7 Call Options at FOMO Levels

ZeroHedge

2. Chinese Chipmakers Higher P/E Ratios than U.S.

3. Biotech Long Bear Changing? +46% Off Liberation Day Lows…Breaks Above 3-Year Pattern

StockCharts

4. Investment Grade Credit ETF Closes Below 50-Day First Time Since May

StockCharts

5. Bitcoin IBIT -20% from Highs….Closes Below 200 Day First Time Since April

StockCharts

6. Microstrategy Pulls Back to March/April Lows. Down -45% from Highs

StockCharts

7. Good News P/E Ratios Adjusted for Profitability Are Much Lower than 1999-2000

Profitability-adjusted valuation. “Anyone comparing today’s valuations to the Dotcom era on a basic P/E basis is missing the point … higher profitability demands a higher valuation premium. Using our profitability-adjusted model, today’s P/E comes out to 17.75x — less than one standard deviation above its 20-year average of 16.2x.”

Duality Research

8. Tesla European Registrations Down -50-90%

Semafor

9. How to Eat 12 Servings of Vegetables a Day

Mark Hyman, MD

Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer of Function Health

12-a-Day: A Meal-by-Meal Guide

To get to 12+ daily veggie servings—or 6+ cups— think of vegetables as the foundation of each meal.

Try to include at least 1 to 2 cups of veggies for each of your main meals and another cup for a snack.

Do that and you’ll reach 6+ cups by day’s end.

Use the following meal-by-meal ideas for inspiration.

Breakfast

By sneaking greens and chopped veggies into smoothies and egg dishes, you can check off three or more veggie servings by the end of your morning meal.

Veggie-loaded smoothie: Blend 1 cup packed greens, ½ a cucumber, and half a zucchini with 1 cup unsweetened almond or coconut milk, ½ an avocado, the juice of half a lemon, one tablespoon chia seeds, ¼ cup frozen berries, and one scoop protein powder.
Veggie-loaded egg scramble: Chop a total of one cup of mushrooms, bell peppers, and onions. Sauté these with a cup of chopped greens. Once they’ve softened and reduced in size, mix in two pasture-raised eggs. Serve with lightly dressed greens on the side.

Lunch & Dinner

Turn lunch and dinner into a percentages game.

Cover 75% of your plate with vegetables. For instance, I enjoy preparing three vegetable dishes for every meal. So, on a dinner plate, I might include a steamed artichoke, a tossed salad, and sautéed broccolini.
Sneak more veggies into the remaining 25%. Look for ways to sneak finely chopped or pureed veggies into the meals you already make. Use spiralized zucchini as a substitute for pasta. Add veggies to stir-fried tofu, beef, or chicken. Wrap ground chicken in lettuce. Top chicken or fish with sauteed mushrooms, onions, and greens. Mix chopped veggies into meatballs, meatloaf, and burgers.

To follow the 75/25 rule, try the following:

The Big Salad: Cover a dinner plate with a cup or more of your favorite greens. Mix a cup or more of your favorite chopped vegetables, along with a handful of sprouts. Include a sprinkle of sesame seeds for some crunch. Top with leftovers, roasted veggies, or cooked chicken, salmon, or another protein.
The Veggie Bowl: Use a cup of greens as your base. Add a cup or more of roasted or steamed veggies of your choice. Great options include Brussels sprouts, zucchini, and cauliflower. Top with a half cup of crunchy veggies like shredded carrots or sliced radishes. Sprinkle on your favorite herbs. Then top it off with chicken, salmon, or beef.
Soup, Stews, and Chili: Mix pureed greens, carrots, zucchini, or cauliflower into chicken or vegetable stock for your base. Then add chopped onions, garlic, peppers, celery, and other veggies. Greens disintegrate into soup. Experiment by adding handful after handful. Then fill out the soup with your favorite protein.

Snack

Net two+ servings by munching on a cup or more of pre-cut veggies — think bell peppers, cucumbers, and carrots—dipped in hummus. Here are some of favorite homemade versions:

10. “I’ve got your back”-Seth’s Blog

This is not a promise to be made lightly.

It’s not, “I’ve got your back until it becomes difficult or inconvenient for me.”

It puts us on the hook, without exception.

This is a powerful promise, a commitment that can change the life of both parties. Don’t do it lightly, but do it. It’s worth it.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 November 04, 2025

November 4, 2025

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-practice/202108/20-subtle-signs-that-youre-stressed-out

1. Record Profit Margins S&P

Kantro

2. Tech Sector Even Bigger Record Profit Margins

The Kobeissi Letter

3. Big Tech Moves from Asset Lite to Asset Heavy-Prof G

Today, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet each invest a larger share of revenue in capex than the average global utility.

Prof G Market

4. 2x Microstrategy ETF MSTU $31 highs to $3…Down -65% Year to Date

StockCharts

5. YouTube vs. Netflix Share of Streaming

Howie Town

6. Restaurant Stocks Back to Liberation Day Lows—EATZ ETF

StockCharts

7. Rate Cut Odds

ZeroHedge

8. Homebuilders ETF XHB Never Made New Highs

StockCharts

9. Undersupply of Housing vs. 1960

Samuel Harnisch

10. 20 Subtle Signs That You’re Stressed Out

Signs of Stress- Alice Boyes Ph.D.

Expect you’ll relate to some of these and not at all relate to others. As you read, consider grabbing a piece of paper and jotting down the numbers beside any that ring true for you.

You’re forgetful—perhaps you don’t make your list when you go shopping, or you leave your keys in your door after unlocking it.
A noise you could usually tune out bothers you and makes it hard to concentrate.
You don’t take your daily medications or vitamins.
You choose to eat food that’s very easy to consume, like potato chips, rather than food that requires cutting and chewing.
You put off tasks that would take under five minutes.
You double-handle things—for example, you read an email that only needs a two-sentence reply, but you decide you’ll reply later, or you open a check but put it in a pile to deal with later rather than e-depositing it straight away.
You endure physical discomfort unnecessarily, such as your heels being cracked, but instead of putting lotion on them, you put up with them hurting.
You avoid accessing customer service, such as, you would like to call to ask for your internet bill to be lowered, but making the call feels like too much. Or, you don’t return an item that’s the wrong fit and keep it regardless.
Fun does not seem fun; playing a game with your child, for instance, feels like a hassle.
Your refrigerator ends up full of expired items or fruits and vegetables that have gone bad because you didn’t get around to eating them.
You feel jumpy—perhaps when driving, cars changing lanes around you feel anxiety-provoking.
Cognitive tasks, like judging distance when crossing the road, seem to take more energy than usual.
You’re disorganized—for instance, you almost run out of gas, or you’re inefficient in the ways you run errands.
You buy food that’s easy to consume (e.g., ice cream) and plan to consume a regular portion, but eat more than you planned.
You put off committing to plans for no good reason.
You feel slighted or misunderstood much more easily than usual. You personalize events and interactions more.
You act against your values—e.g., throwing a recyclable container in the garbage because you can’t be bothered washing it out.
You use self-criticism to try to motivate yourself to do better.
You have a strong urge to reduce overstimulation; perhaps you dream of spending a day in bed watching TV with the curtains closed.
Even when other people try to support you, it feels like they never get it right enough. You still feel slightly irritated, even when people’s intentions are good.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 30, 2025

October 30, 2025

Dian ZhangIgnacio Calderon

1. The S&P has Hit 40+ Record Highs This Year..What Happens Next?

Nasdaq Dorsey Wright In yesterday’s trading, the S&P 500 (SPX) reached a new all-time high for the 43rd time in 2025. While this is an impressive feat, it still puts the index behind last year’s pace when it notched 51 record highs by the end of October, on its way to 62 high watermarks for the year. With the S&P possibly on track to hitting 50 records in back-to-back years, we were reminded of an article published in Bloomberg around this time in 2023, the first year in a decade that S&P didn’t reach a new all-time high.

2. Yesterday’s Top 10 Had Record Foreign Holdings of U.S. Stocks….Foreign Holdings of U.S. Overall Assets are Surging.

Source: Isabelnet

3. Equal Weight Underperforming Market Cap Weighted by Biggest Margin Ever

Barchart

4. CSCO Max Market Cap 1999 vs. NVDA 2025

Michael J. Kramer

5. In One Day…..Fiserv Gave Back All Stock Gains Going Back to 2016

Google Finance

6. 10-Year Treasury Yield Trending Back Up

CNBC

7. The Era of Negative Bonds Yields is Officially Over

The Kobeissi Letter

8. CNN Fear and Greed Index is in Fear

CNN

9. Healthcare Premiums for Average U.S. Family

10. Beep. Boop. Busted. Here’s how math nerds caught the NBA’s Terry Rozier

USA TODAY

The numbers did not compute.

Even before Terry Rozier dropped out of the 2023 NBA game in which he’s accused of rigging his statistics, computers at an “integrity monitor” firm flagged a flood of bets that did not match a mathematical model of how this game should go. The company, now called IC360, alerted the NBA and sportsbooks about the unusual bets coming in on Rozier’s performance.

The investigation that led to the arrest of the Miami Heat point guard and dozens of others for illegal gambling started with math. It ended Oct. 23 with Rozier charged with manipulating his performance in that 2023 game so that gamblers in the know could win tens of thousands of dollars.

Beep. Boop. Busted.

Federal authorities allege more than $200,000 poured in betting that Rozier would turn in a below-average performance in that game after Rozier told another defendant he would drop out of the game early with an injury. Rozier played 9 minutes, 34 seconds for the Charlotte Hornets in the game against the New Orleans Pelicans before leaving with an injury and finished under his usual totals for points, assists and 3-pointers.

Earlier this year, similar mathematical models flagged unusual betting on individual pitches thrown by Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Louis Ortiz. Both were placed on indefinite leave.

How do you use math to catch a cheater?

Detection starts with prediction.

“When you do the odds compiling, you have a predicted model for how you expect the game to go,” said Chris Rasmussen, who teaches sports integrity at the University of New Haven and has spent years investigating sports betting fraud for the World Lotteries Association.

Based on the data behind the teams and players in the game, the model expects certain points for those players and predicts “expected behaviors.” When real-world betting behavior starts to deviate from the model’s prediction, that’s when “we are starting to look,” Rasmussen explained. “Why does it deviate, and how much does it deviate, and what’s going on?”

Bookmakers, the businesses or platforms that take bets on sporting events, often work with integrity monitors like IC360 that analyze sports and betting data across the market and flag unusual activity.

“It’s not necessarily the sportsbook’s job to prove cheating,” said Frank DiGiacomo, an attorney who practices law in gaming, sports betting, and lottery. “Their obligation is to flag a situation and report it.” Then, state regulators could launch investigations with law enforcement.

The monitoring model analyzes expected behavior and tracks outliers, numbers outside the expected range, whether they come from events in the game itself or from people placing unexpected bets on it. Then the model signals when it detects something more than luck at work.

A new account placing a maximum bet immediately raises red flags. “That’s really weird,” Rasmussen said. A new bettor would probably place $10, $15 or $20 in a new account, he said, not thousands of dollars.

Similarly, if an existing account that typically bets $50 on certain games suddenly places a $1,000 bet, that outlier behavior could trigger an investigation.

“Of course, you can be lucky one time,” Rasmussen said. “But if you keep being lucky, there’s probably something in it.”

How hard is it to catch cheaters?

Since the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, 39 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have legalized some form of sports gambling.

With hundreds of thousands of bookmakers today, Rasmussen said cheating in sports betting is harder to catch because there are more betting opportunities. While bettors once could only bet on major games, they can now bet on games from college sports to eSports, and there are more ways to hide.

“The criminals are working 24/7,” he said, “and we in law enforcement and so on are working … not the same as the criminals.

Rasmussen emphasized the importance of human monitors to identify cheating, even though algorithms and artificial intelligence can process vast amounts of data.

“You still need a human behind,” he said. “You really need to understand the betting market… You need to understand what prop bets, the handicap, and so on mean, and you need to understand that there’s also the local aspect… There’s a difference from Chicago to LA to New York.”

Prop bets, which stand for proposition bets, allow bettors to wager on specific events or outcomes within a game rather than the final result—betting on who scores first, for example. Or whether Terry Rozier performs under his average stats. Or whether Louis Ortiz will throw an outside slider.

To DiGiacomo, the sports betting lawyer, a “fundamental trust that the games are fair and results are fair” is the core of the sports betting industry.

“Otherwise, people will not bet if they think the match is rigged,” he said.

If a gaming operator fails to notify a regulator, the consequences can be warnings, fines, and ultimately losing their license. “Licenses are their lifeblood, so operators take that seriously,” DiGiacomo said.

The same goes for players, but the consequences can be severe and career-ending. Given the salaries professional athletes could earn today, “losing years or perhaps being banned from a sport is a significant financial penalty, probably, I would assume, more significant than what they could win on a bet,” he added.

With Rozier’s arrest making headlines, athletes “will certainly, or should certainly” know that they’re not going to be able to get away with the regulated sports betting system, DiGiacomo warned.

“It’s a sad day for sports and for sports betting,” he said. “But I would say, this is the system working.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/10/24/nba-rozier-betting-cheating-math-monitors/86857550007/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 29, 2025

October 29, 2025

1. Cutting Interest Rates Near All-Time Highs Bullish

Ryan Detrick

2. Allocations to Gold Still Low

Gold Market Chartbook

3. Amazon Cutting 30,000 Corporate Jobs in Biggest Layoff Ever…The Stock Never Got Above 2024 Highs

StockCharts

4. NFLX Chart -20% from Highs…About to Close Below 50day for the First Time Since 2023

StockCharts

5. U.S. Announces Financial Backing of Nuclear $80B to Start …One Chart Tells Why

ZeroHedge

6. URA Uranium ETF Still Below Earlier 2025 Highs

StockCharts

7. Mag 7 Chinese Revenue Exposure

The Irrelevant Investor

8. Foreign Investors Love U.S

9. Child Social Media Bans Gaining Momentum

Statista

10. 900,000 vs 9-Seth’s Blog

It takes about 900,000 minutes to become a board-certified dermatologist. At that point, you might be very skilled and well-informed.

It takes less than nine minutes to make your patient feel seen, understood and reassured.

If you skip the 9 minutes, you wasted the 900,000. https://seths.blog/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 28, 2025

October 28, 2025

https://english.elpais.com/health/2025-10-27/guided-missiles-targeting-tumor-cells-open-a-new-route-to-combat-cancer.html#

1. American GDP vs. Open AI Energy Needs-Prof G Markets

Prof G Market

2. Another Look at Breadth Improving Beyond Mag 7

Capital Group

3. Semiconductor ETF Break-Out

StockCharts

4. Acceleration of Tech Adoption-Capital Group

Capital Group

5. ChatGPT vs. Internet

Peter Mallouk

6. 13M Meme Coins Launched in 2025

Bloomberg

7. Global Private Investment in AI …U.S. 10x China

Semafor

8. Alternative Investments in 401k Plans….Evergreen Funds are Private Debt and Real Estate

PitchBook

9. That was Fast…AI Equal Amount of Web Articles as Humans

chartr

10. Guided missiles targeting tumor cells open a new route to combat cancer

A major European clinical research event in oncology gives a boost to antibody–drug conjugates, treatments that work like a Trojan horse, delivering chemotherapy to the interior of malignant cells

A researcher at the Clinic Barcelona Comprehensive Cancer Center handles biological samples in the lab. Jessica Mouzo

If more than half a century ago, science looked expectantly at the potential of chemotherapy to combat cancer; or 15 years ago, oncologists did the same with immunotherapy, which energized the immune system’s own defenses to attack tumor cells; now the spotlight has turned to an innovative treatment that is reaping promising results: antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs), treatments that function like a Trojan horse, delivering chemotherapy to the interior of tumor cells to destroy them. The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress, Europe’s main meeting for clinical cancer research, was held last week in Berlin, and it has given a boost to a new generation of these precision missiles. At the event, there were study presentations that demonstrated ADCs’ potential in several types of breast cancer and at various stages, not just metastatic.

These Trojan horses are formed by an antibody that targets a kind of antenna on the surface of tumor cells. These molecules carry a hidden chemotherapy payload, and when they reach their target, they bind to those receptors and release the entire drug into the tumor cells to selectively kill them. “ADCs are here to stay. It’s a validated line of research and it is like a highway along which we can continue to advance,” noted Aleix Prat, director of the Clinic Barcelona Comprehensive Cancer Center. Other studies presented at the event showed that this therapeutic approach also has potential for other tumors, such as ovarian, endometrial, and pancreatic cancers.

In breast cancer, these precision missiles have shaken up the prognosis of the most aggressive tumors. They entered the therapeutic arsenal more than a decade ago, but new generations of these drugs are gaining more ground. Three years ago, for example, research demonstrated that one of the new ADCs, trastuzumab-deruxtecan, increased the survival rate of women with HER2+ tumors (this subgroup accounts for 20% of all breast cancers) in metastatic stages. And a new study presented this year at ESMO and published simultaneously in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has also shown that another of these new precision missiles, sacituzumab govitecan, is more effective than conventional chemotherapy in treating triple-negative breast cancer (the most aggressive type, affecting 15% of patients) in advanced stages: median progression-free survival was almost 10 months in those treated with this Trojan horse (in those treated with chemotherapy alone it was seven months).

Javier Cortés, director of the International Breast Cancer Center in Barcelona and author of this research, asserts that, with this study, science confirms that when breast cancer metastasis appear; that is, when malignant cells have spread to other parts of the body, these drugs are positioned as the first treatment option. “This study adds another twist and improves the prognosis for these patients. Little by little, we are making slow but steady progress. At this congress, immunoconjugates have positioned themselves as the most innovative, the hottest, and the most spectacular,” notes the doctor, who is also scientific director of the IOB Institute of Oncology Madrid.

But this therapeutic strategy isn’t just suitable for the most advanced stages of cancer. Another study presented at the conference and published in the Annals of Oncology showed that in patients with high-risk, HER2-positive early breast cancer — who are more likely to have the disease recur — administering the ADC trastuzumab-deruxtecan followed by standard therapy before surgery improves the pathological complete response. This means that there are no tumor cells in the breast or lymph nodes at the time of surgery after this treatment, a key parameter for reducing the risk of relapse.

Santiago Escrivá de Romaní, an oncologist at the Breast Cancer Group at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, participated in this research: “We found an 11% higher rate of complete pathological response [when incorporating ADCs into treatment].” The doctor asserts that the development of Trojan horses is “a turning point” in oncology: “ADCs are gaining significant traction. They don’t allow us to rule out chemotherapy, but they greatly help us target it more precisely to tumor cells,” he adds.

Regarding this research, Prat asserts that in these early contexts, the therapeutic potential they anticipate from these Trojan horses means that “they can cure more patients.”

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 27, 2025

October 27, 2025

https://sherwood.news/personal-finance/almost-a-quarter-of-american-employees-havent-taken-a-single-vacation-day-in

1. Non AI Stocks Outperforming

2. Number of Leveraged ETFs

ChartStorm via @BarChart

3. Sector Level Earnings Surprises

The Daily Chartbook

4. Bank Loans to Non-Depository Institutions (private lenders)

Irrelevant Investor Blog

5. Small Cap Stocks are Underperforming QQQ by Record Margin

@BarChart

6. Concentration of Returns is Not Abnormal

@MikeZaccardi

7. America is Running Away with Data Center Build Out Race

5,426 Data Centers in the US

There are about 5,500 data centers in the US, and in Germany there are 529, see chart below. The bottom line is that the rest of the world is far behind the US when it comes to AI.

Apollo Academy

Note: Data as of March 2025. Sources: Statista, Cloudscene, Apollo Chief Economist

8. U.S. One of 10 Countries Working More Hours than OECD Average….Mexico and Costa Rica Off the Charts

Sherwood

Sherwood News-With summer now well and truly over for most, some of us might be starting to feel like it’s been ages since we were on vacation.

For a considerable share of Americans, though, it really has been a while.

The grind bind

A new survey from FlexJobs asked over 3,000 US workers about their paid time off, and found that, while most employees (82%) are offered vacation leave — a luxury not guaranteed in the only advanced economy without a minimum PTO mandate — almost a quarter (23%) said they hadn’t taken a single vacation day over the past year.

According to the study, a major concern for employees was falling behind on their workload — with 43% saying they simply had too much to do. But is America really on the grind much more than other countries?

Zooming out to a global scale, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that US employees dowork relatively hard compared with other member nations of the economic group, notching 1,796 hours worked per person last year — about 59 hours longer than average calculated across 36 OECD members. However, no country racked up as many hours worked as America’s southern neighbor, Mexico.

Though the US was one of only 10 nations that worked more than the OECD average, Mexico and Costa Rica racked up over 2,000 hours worked per person in 2024, equating to roughly 42 additional days of work per year above the mean, assuming a 10-hour workday.

At the other end of the spectrum were the usual suspects in these global labor force studies: workers in Germany did ~405 hours less work than the OECD average, closely followed by Scandi nations Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

So, why do Americans refuse to take vacation days? Maybe, as Gallup has mentioned, AI-enhanced work practices are allowing employees to get in a few holiday-mode hours while they’re still on the clock. But the larger factor is probably just good old-fashioned “vacation guilt.

9. Americans Worry About Inflation and Crime

Statista

10. Interview with Jim Clayton of Clayton Homes -Shane Parish

Here are 10 of the highlights I took away from this episode and my research:

“If you have to swallow a frog, don’t look at him too long. If you have to swallow two frogs, swallow the big scudder first.”
All complaining comes at the expense of improving.
“Positive action produces positive attitudes, which produce a positive atmosphere.”
Make your plan conform to the territory, not the other way around. Either work with the world the way you find it, or it will teach you a lesson.
The best legal department is happy customers.
“There are 3 kinds of people: those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and occasionally, someone who doesn’t know what happened.”
Sometimes you don’t need to be great, you just need to be better than the competition.
Bad loans are a virus.
“The strong feed during depressions.”
“In business as in flying, your instruments beat your instincts.”

https://fs.blog

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 24, 2025

October 24, 2025

1. More Earnings Stats

Beat rate. “The proportion of US companies beating earnings expectations this quarter is the highest in more than four years … About 85% of S&P 500 firms to have reported third-quarter earnings so far have surpassed profit estimates, on course for the best performance since 2021.”

Farah Elbahrawy – Bloomberg

2.Companies Beating Earnings are Underperforming

3.Sector Performance Since Highs on 10/8

4.Capex is Flat Outside of AI Build Out

5.Single Stock Leverage ETFs Trailing Stocks

WSJ Jack Pitcher The brutal divergence in performance is caused by what traders call “volatility decay,” or the tendency of price fluctuations to erode the long-term returns of a leveraged fund, even if the underlying asset goes up. And it is why leveraged-fund managers are quick to warn that their funds shouldn’t be held for long periods.

“Everything that is problematic about these funds is more problematic the more leverage or volatility you add to them,” said Dave Nadig, an industry veteran and director of research at ETF.com.

Money managers say that most leveraged funds aim to amplify returns for a single day, and shouldn’t be held for longer periods.

One of the most popular funds provides an extreme example. Last November, two recently launched ETFs that offered to double the daily returns of bitcoin-linked stock MicroStrategy (now known as Strategy), began to soar. The outsize gains attracted attention on social media, and thrill-seeking individual investors began to pile in at a pace never seen before for a leveraged single-stock fund.

Many of those investors are now sitting on huge losses, despite the fact that the underlying Strategy shares are up over the past year. Strategy shares rose 28% in the 12 months ended Wednesday, while one of the leveraged funds, the Defiance Daily Target 2x Long MSTR ETF, plunged 65%.

6.Low Quality Small Cap Rallying But See Long-Term

7.Dominant Active and Passive Managers…Vanguard and Blackrock 66% of Passive Combined

8.Mortgage Rates Closing in on 6%

9.Debt to GDP Europe

10.As Stated in My Quarterly Letter.. The U.S. is a Now a Stock Market Nations….Half of Private Sector Employees in 401k

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 22, 2025

October 22, 2025

1. Earnings are Doing the Work

The Irrelevant Investor

2. Another Look at Earnings

@ryandetrick

3. Remember Gold was Most Short-Term Overbought in History….It Has Not Even Broken Its 20-day in Green Yet

StockCharts

4. Silver Closed Below 20Day Still Well Above 50day/200day

StockCharts

5. Going into Earnings Last Night…NFLX was Below Highs, Trading Sideways 3 Months

StockCharts

6. Chinese Stocks Massive Inflows

7. New MEME Stock Beyond Meat +360% 5 Days

Google Finance

8. Peak TED Talk 8 Years Ago

chartr

9. The Quiet Expansion of the USA’s Bitcoin Balance Sheet

It’s not every day the U.S. government quietly adds $15 billion in Bitcoin to its balance sheet – without authorizing a single purchase.

Last week, the Department of Justice announced the largest crypto forfeiture in U.S. history: roughly 127,000 BTC linked to an international fraud network led by Cambodian billionaire Chen Zhi. The Bitcoin was recovered from unhosted wallets and is now in federal custody.

At first glance, it’s a simple enforcement story. But look a little closer, and it’s something more consequential – a real-world example of how Washington’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) may begin to take shape in practice. Under the framework established by President Trump’s executive order, seized Bitcoin doesn’t just sit idle. It’s classified as a strategic national asset, meaning each enforcement action now doubles as a form of accumulation.

From Seizure to Strategy

Senator Cynthia Lummis was quick to connect the dots. In a post on X, she wrote:

“The seizure of 127,000 bitcoin underscores two urgent priorities for Congress: first, passing clear digital-asset market-structure legislation to ensure law enforcement can act decisively against bad actors while protecting innovation. Second, codifying how seized bitcoin is stored, returned to victims, and safeguarded for future generations.”

Her statement gets to the heart of what’s unfolding: the U.S. government isn’t just seizing Bitcoin – it’s beginning to define what national ownership looks like. And under the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, that process is no longer ad hoc. It’s structured, audited, and explicitly designed to treat Bitcoin as a long-term strategic holding rather than an expendable asset.

Today, the United States holds approximately 325,447 BTC, worth roughly $36.3 billion at current prices – more than most public companies and sovereign treasuries combined. None of it was purchased. It’s the cumulative result of years of enforcement actions, now woven into an official framework that treats those assets as part of a reserve strategy. https://thecryptoadvisor.substack.com/

10. Foggy Mirror-Seth’s Blog

Foggy mirror

It’s easy to believe we have an accurate understanding of ourselves. After all, we spend a lot of time looking in the mirror.

It might be worth wondering about why the mirror is deemed to be accurate at reflecting what we see as our flaws, real or metaphorical, but indistinct and a little fuzzy when we consider our opportunities, assets and contributions.

When we remind ourselves what we have to offer, it’s more likely we use those resources, but rehearsing our defects simply holds us back.

Amplifying one’s flaws is a non-productive hobby. https://seths.blog

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 21, 2025

October 21, 2025

https://www.businessinsider.com/leveraged-etfs-single-stock-crypto-funds-sec-government-shutdown-2025-10

1. Margin Debt Has Soared

Key Points-Barrons

Margin debt increased by 32% to $1.3 trillion over five months through September, a pace suggesting market optimism may be peaking.
Year-over-year margin debt growth of almost 40% as of September indicates potential risk for investors in high-yield bonds.
Historically, when margin debt exceeds 40% year-over-year, high-yield spreads have increased by 1.21 percentage points in six months.

www.barrons.com

Y-Charts 10 Year FINRA margin debt chart—Breakout Above 2021 Levels.

Y-Charts

2. Companies with Negative Earnings Outperforming

Torsten Slok-Apollo

Apollo

3. Altcoin Index Update

Bloomberg

4. Gold and Silver $34B Inflows Ten Weeks

Dave Lutz Jones Trading Gold and silver have attracted a record $34.2 billion in inflows over the past ten weeks, marking the largest surge ever recorded.

Apollo

5. VC Funding for Defense Startups Hits $10B

PitchBook

6. Prof G with Summary of AI Electricity Needs

AI’s Electricity Needs Are Growing Faster Than the Grid Can Handle

Tech companies are racing to build new data centers to handle the surge in AI computing demand. These facilities use massive amounts of electricity — just this year, electricity demand from data centers in the U.S. is estimated to rise 22%.

The problem is that the electrical grid isn’t built for that kind of growth. Power shortages are already delaying data center projects by two to six years. Which raises two questions: Can the U.S. actually produce and deliver enough electricity to sustain this boom — and if it can, who’s paying for it?

Nowhere is that question more extreme than with OpenAI. OpenAI wants to build out a chip network that would consume 250 gigawatts (GW) of energy by 2033. That is equivalent to a fifth of America’s entire electric generation capacity.

To put that in perspective: If OpenAI had 250 GW of capacity today, it would rank as the seventh-largest country in the world by electricity production capacity — ahead of France, South Korea, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. added a record 56 GW of new power capacity last year. Even if that pace continued annually, OpenAI’s plan would require the company alone to use more than half of all the new electricity the country adds over the next eight years.

Where would that power come from? Nuclear is the popular talking point, but to generate 250 GW from nuclear alone, you’d need roughly 250 new reactors at an estimated cost of $12.5 trillion. Each one can take 15 years or more to build, so the math and the timeline don’t add up.

Natural gas isn’t a realistic option either, as much as Trump wants it to be. Just 12.5 GW of natural gas capacity is expected to come online this year, one of the biggest additions ever. OpenAI’s target is 20x that.

The obvious answer is solar. Renewable power like solar and onshore wind is the least expensive and quickest power generation source to deploy in the U.S., even without government subsidies. Of the 56 GW of capacity added last year, more than half of it came from solar.

But politics are getting in the way. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act scraps key tax credits and adds new permitting hurdles, including a requirement that new projects be personally approved by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. These changes could cut U.S. solar capacity projections by roughly 20%.

Energy isn’t the only challenge. Local communities are increasingly pushing back against new data centers. About $64 billion worth of projects have been blocked by residents who don’t want them in their communities. Their criticism is simple: These projects raise costs without giving much back.

In major data center hubs, electricity prices have jumped as much as 267% over the past five years, according to Bloomberg. And despite the huge price tags, they don’t create many jobs.

Apple’s data center in North Carolina was a $1 billion investment, but resulted in fewer than 100 permanent jobs.

For many communities, the math just doesn’t work: higher electricity bills, environmental impacts, and little economic benefit — all to power the infrastructure behind an AI boom that may be running faster than the grid, the economy, or the public can keep up with. https://www.profgmarkets.com/subscribe

7. Crude Oil Heading to 2025 Lows

Koyfin

8. Emerging Market ETF Record Highs

StockCharts

9. 5x Levered ETFS Coming….Levered ETFs 55% have Closed and 17% have Lost 98% of their Value

Business Insider

An ETF provider has filed for 27 new levered ETFs, including some 5x-levered products.
Leveraged ETFs are risky; 55% have closed, and 17% have lost over 98% of their value, Morningstar says.
The SEC’s current shutdown has left a question mark hanging over the approval of the funds.

10. 4 Simple Strategies to Boost Your Brain Power

New research shows how easy (and cheap) it is to get your brain in shape-Psychology Today Susan Krauss Whitbourne

Key points

Worry about loss of memory and development of a dementing illness can lead people to feel there’s no hope.
The large and well-controlled study, the U.S. POINTER shows how 4 simple lifestyle changes can pay off.
Adopting these 4 changes will more than pay off over the years in your physical and mental health.

People worry about losing their memory as they get older, or worse, developing a dementing illness such as Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s hard not to get caught up in a cycle of fear as you read the headlines everywhere proclaiming that this form of dementia is spreading uncontrollably like a wildfire through the aging population.

Even though there are more nuances to the data on dementia’s prevalence, this doesn’t minimize the desire that people have to keep their brains healthy and sharp. Puzzles abound on hundreds of websites and apps, all claiming to provide an antidote to the caving in of your mental skills over time. But can they work?

POINTER: The Latest Demonstration that Training Works

In a newly published paper, Baker et al. (2025) report on POINTER U.S., a two-year intervention program on 2,111 adults considered at risk for cognitive decline and/or dementia. The study compared two training programs into which participants (average age 68 years) were randomly assigned to either a structured or self-guided training. The training itself consisted of a set of lifestyle changes and activities known from previous research to address cognitive decline.

The philosophy of (and prior evidence supporting) POINTER is that cognitive decline in later adulthood need not be inevitable. However, it’s not just a one-and-done. As the authors note in their first, methods-oriented paper (Baker et al., 2024), a “multidomain” approach is needed to “increase cognitive resilience and protect against cognitive decline” (p. 770). POINTER did just that.

Why, and How, Does Training Work?

One of the underlying tenets of POINTER is that cognitive decline occurs in part due to lack of physical fitness; specifically, heart health. Putting this simply, the brain needs blood, and without it, brain cells die. The job of the heart is to provide that blood. When you’re physically fit, you give your heart as much of a chance as possible to do this job.

Physical fitness depends partly on exercise but also, as you might guess, on a healthy diet. It’s becoming increasingly clear in the research community that what you eat does affect your cognitive functioning. The scientifically validated “MIND” diet, or Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, capitalizes on all of the good things included in the two diets that form its title. You can eat pretty well on a MIND diet, which includes grains, nuts, berries, fish, and veggies, but you also have to watch your intake of cheese, sweets, red meat, and fried foods. Small sacrifice compared to getting heart disease or dementia.

Returning to POINTER, it very simply combined the best of all worlds from exercise and diet in an intervention package that was either delivered in person by training staff or taken home in the form of a self-guided set of activities and programs. Amazingly enough, not only did both interventions work, but the self-guided one just about reached the improvement level of the in-person training, as reported by Baker et al., 2025.

So, what was in the secret sauce that participants could use on their own? Although exact details aren’t available in the study itself, you can see from the structured intervention what its elements should ideally include:

Adhere to the MIND diet: The MIND website has extensive coverage on the components of this healthy diet. You can also visit Myplate.gov, which provides individualized menus based on your age, health, and preferences.
Incorporate aerobic and resistance exercise into your day: Now we’re getting real! In the structured group, participants worked out in local gyms with consultation from group leaders. However, the exercises were pretty basic: moderate-to-high intensity and weight-bearing activities such as you might find here.
Play some cognitive games: The POINTER participants had access to commercially based resources, but you can get similar ones for free just by browsing around online. The key is to maintain a steady intellectual diet and find activities that motivate you, whether word games or visual puzzles. Keep them up, and you’ll soon build an impressive “streak”!
Reach out to others: Both interventions in POINTER involved some type of interaction with fellow participants or team leaders. Not only can these interactions keep you engaged with others, but they also ensure you stay motivated. Knowing that someone else is monitoring your progress (or even competing with you)can add that extra boost of reinforcement. It only took six meetings for the self-guided intervention to be effective.

Putting POINTER’s Findings to Use for You

As much as the self-guided intervention proved effective in terms of boosting cognitive performance over the two years of the study, the structured group actually did show a significantly greater improvement, but only by a fraction. Ideally, to make the POINTER findings work best, you’d try to find a comprehensive hands-on training opportunity rather than relying on your own ability to put something together. If that’s not an option, build your own program, write it down, and stick to it.

Indeed, as the editor of the prestigious journal in which the study was published (JAMA) noted: “Rather than the difference, the more striking finding is perhaps the similarity of the cognitive benefits across both groups, despite the self-guided group requiring only a fraction of the engagement and interventions.” Not only that, but the self-guided group was cheaper to administer. It can also, the editor argues, be delivered remotely.

One other point worth mentioning is that POINTER worked without any costly “memory” supplements such as those advertised incessantly on broadcast TV and YouTube. You’re only paying for the food you would eat anyhow, or at least healthy versions of that food. You may need to get new sneakers, but everyone needs shoes.

To sum up, there’s no reason to give up on your cognitive abilities just because you don’t feel you have the time or resources. You can change your eating and exercise habits as well as your engagement in games and social interaction without a huge investment. The rewards of preserving your mind and your health will more than pay off in terms of your health and fulfillment.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-at-any-age/202510/four-simple-strategies-to-boost-your-brain-power

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 20, 2025

October 20, 2025

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2025-10-17_09-07-04.jpg?itok=F_TjyubV

1. Cash-Fund Managers Running Record Low Cash Allocation

Cash is Trash — Fund Managers: And as such, fund managers are running very low allocations to cash. Definitely a sign of the times… and they’re not the only ones.

Source: @KobeissiLetter @Callum Thomas (Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm)

2. Retail Investors Lowest Cash Allocation Since 2007

3. 100 Days Without 5% Pullback in S&P—Average is 59 Days

Even with renewed volatility, it has been 100 days since the S&P 500 has had a 5% pullback. The average is 59 days. That shows just how smooth of a road the stock market has had over the past three months.

Eric Soda Spilled Coffee blog https://www.spilledcoffee.co

4. Top 10 Stocks Weighting in S&P 25% Higher than Previous Record

5. The Most Patient Trade in Stock Market History…Buffett vs. Internet Bubble

6. IBIT Approaches 200-Day for First Time Since April

http://www.stockcharts.com/

7. Crypto Liquidations $1.2 B

http://www.sherwood.com/

8. Anthropic vs. Open AI

http://www.chartr.com/

9. Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead

Consumer Report By Paris Martineau
Much has changed since Consumer Reports first tested protein powdersand shakes. Over the past 15 years, Americans’ obsession with protein has transformed what had been a niche product into the centerpiece of a multibillion-dollar wellness craze, driving booming supplement sales and spawning a new crop of protein-fortified foods that now saturate supermarket shelves and social media feeds.

Yet for all the industry’s growth and rebranding, one thing hasn’t changed: Protein powders still carry troubling levels of toxic heavy metals, according to a new Consumer Reports investigation. Our latest tests of 23 protein powders and ready-to-drink shakes from popular brands found that heavy metal contamination has become even more common among protein products, raising concerns that the risks are growing right alongside the industry itself.

For more than two-thirds of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day—some by more than 10 times.

Recommended Better Choices

Owyn
Pro Elite High Protein Shake

Serving Size:
330 ml (1 carton)

Transparent Labs
Mass Gainer

Serving Size:
194 grams
(2 scoops)

Optimum Nutrition
Gold Standard 100% Whey

Serving Size:
30.5 grams
(1 scoop)

BSN
Syntha-6 Protein Powder

Serving Size:
47 grams (1 scoop)

Momentous
Whey Protein Isolate¹

Serving Size:
26.5 grams (1 scoop)

Dymatize
Super Mass Gainer

Serving Size:
333 grams
(2.5 scoops)

Muscle Tech
100% Mass Gainer

Serving Size:
357 grams
(6 scoops)

https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-shakes-contain-high-levels-of-lead-a4206364640/?EXTKEY=NH5AHTHE3&utm_source=acxiom&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20251019_nsltr_health&utm_nsltr=health&utm_segment=nbp

10. Putting Yourself in Positions for Good Things to Happen

A lot of success in life is just putting yourself in a position for good things to happen to you.

+ Be reliable
+ Avoid drama
+ Help other people win
+ Take care of your body
+ Take care of your mind
+ Live below your means
+ Treat your job as if it matters
+ Take care of your relationships

Simple, but not easy. https://fs.blog

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 17, 2025

October 17, 2025

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/trump-says-india-agreed-stop-buying-oil-russia

1. 10-Year Treasury Closes Below 4% First Time in 12 Months

CNBC

2. Tech Doesn’t Care About More Credit Cockroaches?? XLK Closed Higher Yesterday

Google Finance

3. Retail Options Trading

Retail traders’ demand for call options has outpaced puts for 24 consecutive weeks, which ties with November 2023 for the longest streak ever, said Citadel Securities’ Scott Rubner, citing data going back to 2020. Retail traders’ conviction in the stock market “remains extraordinary” he says.

Dave Lutz Jones Trading

4. U.S. ETFs Monthly Flows 3.5x the Usual Seasonal Average

Bloomberg

5. MicroStrategy -38% from Highs…50day thru 200day to Downside in October

StochCharts

6. Ethereum ETF-A Couple Attempts to Break-Out to New Highs Failed

Stock Charts

7. Massive Spread in Just 11 Month Period High Beta vs. Low Volatility…..At Highs +68% vs. +7%

WSJ

8. India Pre-Ukraine Invasion Bought $1B of Russian Oil Imports….2024 India Imported $52.7B of Russian Oil 36% Of Total

Perplexity

Zerohedge- “Within a short period of time, they will not be buying oil from Russia,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a press conference.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, India’s annual crude oil imports from Russia hovered at about $1 billion. But since the war began, imports have skyrocketed, reaching $25.5 billion in 2022, $48.6 billion in 2023, and $52.7 billion in 2024, according to the U.N. Comtrade database.

Experts at the Observer Research Foundation think tank estimate that India accounts for more than one-third of Russia’s crude exports, behind China’s 50 percent share.

“Indian refiners have temporarily ramped up Russian crude imports, without any visible signs of concern emerging from the political leadership,” the foundation wrote in a report.

The United States has accused India of reselling Russian oil on the open market, allegedly further benefiting Russia.

“India’s subsequent reselling of this oil on the open market, often at significant profit, further enables the Russian Federation’s economy to fund its aggression,” Trump’s executive order reads.

In December 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Modi signed a flurry of trade and arms deals. Putin and Modi also signed nine agreements related to trade, research, and climate action in July 2024.

According to the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, the U.S. goods trade deficit with India was almost $46 billion in 2024, representing a 5.9 percent increase from 2023.

9. Most Affordable Global Cities…Salt Lake, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta

Bloomberg

10. Nick Saban-The 5 Enemies of Greatness

Peter Mallouk

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 16, 2025

October 16, 2025

1. A Bad Year for Stock Pickers…Momentum Ruled Over Fundamentals 2025

Bloomberg

2. October Volatility Common…Highest Vol Month

Nasdaq Dorsey Wright October historically sees significantly more volatile days than other months. Gong back to 1987, the S&P 500 averages just under seven days of 1% movement, the highest average of any month. This volatility tends to trail off as we get close to year-end. November and December each average about five 1% days, among the lowest average of any month.

NASDAQ DORSEY WRIGHT

3. China ETF (FXI) Breaks Out vs. India (INDA)

StockCharts

4. China Back in Lead vs. India…3-Year China +78% vs. India +32%

YCharts

5. Small vs. Large. “Small-caps today are hitting the highest levels since February relative to Large-caps.”

DAILY CHARTBOOK

6. Since 1956 Argentina has Received 23 Bailouts for the IMF

Since 1956, the country that gave the world Diego Maradona and the tango has received 23 bailouts from the International Monetary Fund (largely funded by the U.S.). Not only have the bailouts not fixed the underlying problems facing Argentina, but the country has defaulted on its sovereign debt nine times, including three defaults since 2000. https://fundstrat.com/

Semafor

Argentina ETF -16% YTD

Google Finance

7. Year to Date ETF Flows

The Irrelevant Investor

8. Share of Americans Drinking Alcohol Breaks to New All-Time Lows

WSJ

9. College Tuition vs. Inflation 40-Year Chart

Peter Mallouk

10. Wealth Breakdown Among Millionaires

MSN

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 October 15, 2025

October 15, 2025