Zach Goldberg Jefferies …. The US M2 money supply surged +4.8% YoY in July, to a record $22.12 trillion. This also marks the 21st consecutive monthly increase.
In 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble, revenue from internet subscriptions, e-commerce and PCs (which many bought to access the internet) was about $1.5 trillion (in 2024 dollars), which is orders of magnitude larger than the $20 to $30 billion in revenue likely to be generated this year for AI software. It is hard to imagine AI users paying more for services that can’t be used, in situations where the costs of mistakes are substantial.
Jeffrey Funk is a retired professor, tech consultant and the author of “Unicorns, Hype and Bubbles: A guide to spotting, avoiding, and exploiting investment bubbles in tech.”
Gary Smith is the author of more than 100 academic papers and 20 books, including “Standard Deviations: The truth about flawed statistics, AI and big data” (Duckworth, 2024) and (co-authored with Margaret Smith): “The Power of Modern Value Investing: Beyond Indexing, Algos and Alpha” (PalgraveMacmillan, 2024).
Bespoke Investment Group If you thought comparing NVIDIA to entire countries was wild, our next chart shows just how far ahead it is of some of America’s most iconic companies. With a market cap north of $4 trillion, NVIDIA is worth 6 Walmarts (WMT), 11 Costcos (COST), 20 McDonald’s (MCD), or 25 Citigroups (C). Taking it further, it could swallow 38 Nikes (NKE), 45 Starbucks (SBUX), or 50 Dells (DELL). At the extreme end, NVIDIA’s value equals about 60 UPS (UPS), 78 Chipotles (CMG), 94 Fords (F), 102 Targets (TGT), or 103 eBays (EBAY). Put simply, NVIDIA’s market cap isn’t just massive, it’s in a league of its own, making even household corporate giants look like small caps by comparison.
8. Real Estate Still Ranks High as Investment for 21-44 Year Old
While crypto has been popular for wealthy Americans, real estate continued to hold greater appeal. And it’s the smart real estate entrepreneurs that know where to disrupt.
Take the $1.3T vacation home market1, where houses have traditionally been too expensive or too much hassle. After selling his own company to Zillow for $120M, Austin Allison applied his proptech expertise to create Pacaso: a co-ownership platform for luxury vacation homes.
Since inception, the company has generated $1B+ worth of luxury home transactions and service fees across 2,000+ owners. Well-known VCs have already invested — and until 9/18, Pacaso is offering everyday investors the chance to share in their growth at $2.90/share.2
Learning to play a musical instrument can protect your brain from aging, building up a defense against cognitive decline that lasts a lifetime.
Researchers from Canada and China discovered older adults who had spent years playing music were better at understanding speech in noisy environments, like a crowded room, compared to those who didn’t play music.
Their brains worked more like younger people’s brains, needing less energy to focus than older non-musicians’ brains had to use to make up for age-related mental declines.
Playing music was found to build up a person’s ‘cognitive reserve,’ which is like a backup system in the brain.
This reserve helps the brain stay efficient and work more like a younger brain, even as someone grows older.
Years of music training strengthened connections between brain areas that handle hearing, movement, and speech, making it easier to process sounds in tough situations, like when it’s hard to single out one voice in a crowd.
Researchers said their findings debunked the idea that older brains always need to work harder to compensate for aging.
Instead, regularly practicing an instrument for about 12 hours a week, regardless of how well you play, can build up a ‘reserve’ that keeps the brain from having the think too hard unnecessarily.
Luck writes the first chapter, but your actions write the rest.
**
Something I try to teach the kids is the concept of ‘one more.’
One more rep. One more step. One more minute. One more revision. One more practice test.
It’s so easy to stop, but most of the value comes from one more.
***
School often teaches that correct answers are obvious. Reality is the opposite.
We drill kids on facts that seem obvious once known, never mentioning that almost all of them were buried behind a door of ‘that doesn’t make sense.’ Gravity baffled us for millennia. We didn’t think hand washing mattered, even the idea of germs causing sickness sounded insane.
Every breakthrough started as heresy. But we teach kids to flee from the very feeling that precedes discovery.
EPS outlook. “S&P 500 forward earnings per share rose to yet another new record high during the week of August 21 as industry analysts raised their 2025 and 2026 earnings estimates.”
Nvidia announced on Monday that its latest robotics chip module, the Jetson AGX Thor, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit.
The company calls the chip a “robot brain.” The first kits ship next month, Nvidia said last week, and the chips will allow customers to create robots.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company’s largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence.
Nvidia announced Monday that its latest robotics chip module, the Jetson AGX Thor, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit.
The company calls the chip a “robot brain.” The first kits ship next month, Nvidia said last week, and the chips will allow customers to create robots.
After a company uses the developer kit to prototype their robot, Nvidia will sell Thor T5000 modules that can be installed in production-ready robots. If a company needs more than 1,000 Thor chips, Nvidia will charge $2,999 per module.
CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company’s largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence, which has led to Nvidia’s overall sales more than tripling in the past two years.
“We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software,” said Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s vice president of robotics and edge AI, on a call with
WSJ Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court granted cities more power to penalize people for sleeping outside, handing city leaders a new tool with which to clear homeless people from the streets.
WSJ
10. Appeal to System 1 thinking -INC
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, said the human brain makes decisions based on two ways of thinking, or what he called systems. System 1 is your brain’s autopilot. It assesses a situation quickly without a sense of voluntary control. System 2 takes its time. It’s more logical and deliberate. When people hear a message for the first time, System 1 kicks into action. It decides almost instantly, “Is this useful to me?”If the answer is yes, it pays attention. If the answer is no, it tunes out.
One of the brain’s primary functions is to conserve energy, so it’s constantly scanning its environment to pay attention to those things that matter and ignore the rest. When the brain locks on to something important, System 2 takes over. It will look for logical arguments supported with facts, figures, data, and evidence. System 1, however, acts as the gatekeeper.
The importance of audience-centric communication
In audience-centric communication, it’s critical to make the benefit clear in the first 30 seconds of a presentation. If your listeners have to work too hard to decipher what you say and how it applies to them, you’ve lost their attention. It’s important to make your topic worth their mental energy.
One easy way to get your audience locked in is to start with the benefit, and then back into the topic. For example, when I began a keynote presentation for an AI summit at MIT, I opened with this line: “Full disclosure. I am not here to tell you how to do your job.” Since the audience was made up of researchers who are deeply involved in the field of AI, it was important that I acknowledge the obvious—I’m not an AI scientist.
In my second sentence, just 14 seconds after I took the stage, I said, “I am here to elevate the job you do by giving you specific, tactical tools and techniques that will help you sharpen the most critical leadership skill that you can build today.”
I could have used the first 30 seconds or so to talk about my books, credentials, or experience, but none of those things would have given the audience a reason to care. Those details support my ideas and lend credibility to my argument, but they won’t make it through the System 1 gatekeeper. Play to the gatekeeper first. Once you get your audience to lean in, you’ll have their attention, and they’ll be eager to hear what you say next.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
2. Microstrategy Fourth Time in 2025 Hanging Around 200-Day Moving Average…Still Down -37% from 2024 Highs
StockCharts
3. Ethereum Fastest Asset to $500B in History
Milk Road
4. First Day Trading IPOs Best in 20 Years
Callie Cox
5. 1995-2000 1400 Technology Stock IPOs ….Less than 10% Survived
Perplexity
6. It is Official…More ETFs than Stocks 2025
Bloomberg
7. Oh Canada! Canadians Load Up on American Stocks
Dave Lutz Jones Trading Canadian investors have injected C$124 billion ($89.7 billion) into US stocks in 2025, even as Trump’s trade war disrupted the two countries’ longstanding, largely tariff-free relationship, according to data compiled by Warren Lovely at National Bank of Canada Financial Markets. That’s on track for the largest yearly inflow since at least the 1990s.
@Callum Thomas (Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm)Seasonal Buybacks: Interesting snippet on seasonality — the next couple of months have historically been a seasonal dry patch for buybacks. And indeed, it’s Sep/Oct which have historically tended to see the worst seasonal stockmarket performance.
4. Reallocation Away from U.S. Stocks Already Reversing?
Barron’s
5. Global Investors Bought $163 Billion of U.S. Stocks in June
chartr
6. China Trade Surplus was $1 Trillion in 2024
Paul Krugman
7. Draftkings and Fanduel Performance “in football season” vs. “offseason”
Nasdaq Dorsey Wright
Nasdaq
8. Private Equity Exits Running at Half of Last Years Count
WSJ-Following a binge of acquiring companies during the post-Covid deal frenzy, it is generally proving harder to now sell those companies on. There have been some notable initial public offerings this year of private-equity-backed companies, such as the roughly $1.4 billion IPO for cybersecurity company SailPoint. But the overall number of exits in the second quarter—which also includes sales to other financial sponsors or to corporations—slowed to about 10% below the typical prepandemic quarterly average, according to PitchBook.
