Spilled Coffee Blog Yes, money market balances are at all-time highs. But so is the value of everything else. The S&P 500’s total market cap has surged over the last decade. Even as cash balances look large in absolute terms, they haven’t grown nearly as fast relative to total asset values. As a percentage of total market cap, cash hasn’t really budged. In fact, as a percentage of the S&P 500 market cap, it’s near a record low.
Spilled Coffee LLC
Dan Greenhaus
2. AI is Now Largest Segment of Corporate Debt-$1.2 Trillion
3. UAE and Singaport Lead AI Adoption
Jim Reid Deutsche Bank
4. Capital Spending From Major AI Hyperscalers
The Irrelevant Investor
5. AMD Yesterday’s Rally Kicked It Above 2024 Highs
StockCharts
6. Gold vs. U.S. Dollar Chart
StockCharts
7. Dan Ives M&A Target List-CNBC
CNBC
8. IBIT $100B
Eric Balchunas
9. 30-Year Home Mortgage Rates Chart
Wolf Street
10. Interesting Poll of Pennsylvania College Kids….2% Trust Politicians, Climate/Environment Ranks Last in List of Worries, and Academics Come In Last for Information Sources
Crypto asset flows. “Digital asset investment products attracted [a record] US$5.95bn last week … Bitcoin saw a record US$3.55bn in inflows, Ethereum US$1.48bn, while Solana (US$706.5m) and XRP (US$219.4m) also set notable records.”
James Butterfill – CoinShares
2. History of 30% Six-Month Gains
Below are the twelve days since 1953 where the S&P gained more than 30% in the prior six months (for the first time in at least a year). In terms of forward market performance following these days, the S&P has definitely shown some weakness in the very near term, but going out three months to one year, returns are slightly better than normal.
Bespoke Investment Group
3. Fear and Greed Index
CNN
4. Nasdaq Has Become the Market of Choice for Dubious Penny-Stock IPOs
Jonathan Weil – WSJ
5. European Large Cap Stocks 25-Year Breakout
@Callum Thomas (Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm)
6. Tech 2025 vs. 1999
Mike Xaccardi
7. China Youth Unemployment Chart New Highs
Semafor
8. Nationally-There are 35% More Home Sellers Than Buyers
@CharlieBilello
9. Driverless Taxi Usage Update in California
Derek Thompson – Substack
10. The Daily Stoic -Everything we need to do draws on the same ability
Every problem we face, every decision we make, every risk we take, every belief we choose to accept or question—it all requires the skill of discernment. Life, business, ethics, success, it comes down to being able to see what’s what in a given situation.
…what to do
…when to do it
…and how to do it.
And no skill was more cultivated by the Stoics than this. Epictetus talked of money changers who could tell, just by banging a coin on the table, whether it was counterfeit or not. This, he said, was what a philosopher had to be able to do—to know a good impression from a bad one, a good response from a bad one, a virtue from a vice. This is what Seneca was doing in his evening reviews. It was what Marcus Aurelius was trained in by Rusticus and Fronto and Antoninus.
To be able to see what’s in front of you with clarity. To know what’s important and what isn’t, how things work. That’s what wisdom is. It’s not an encyclopedic knowledge of facts and figures but something both profound and applied—for it was not Gandhi’s sharp legal mind that made him the mahatma.
No one is born with this critical and all too rare ability. It is not something, Seneca reminds us, that can be delegated to someone else. There is no technology that can do it for you. There is no app. No teacher who can simply download everything into your brain. No guru who can lead you to enlightenment or shaman who can give it to you in a dose.
No, I say (it’s Ryan here), wisdom takes work (that’s the title of the new book, by the way, and you can preorder signed, numbered first-editions here!). Lots of work. Lots of reading. Lots of teachers. Lots of experience. Lots of reflecting. It took lots of work in the ancient world and it takes lots of work today. But where would we be without it? Who would we be without it?
The reason we need discernment is that life is constantly putting us in difficult situations, asking us difficult questions, putting us in ethical dilemmas. Especially in a world of social media and algorithms—where we are bombarded with information, with noise, with temptations, with endless distractions. How can we navigate this? How can we make sense of it?
Without wisdom, we cannot. We will be carried away. We will be misled. We will do the wrong thing.
1. Large Cap vs. Small Cap History of Wide Performance Spreads
Jeff Weniger
2. AMD Massive Move Short-Term Overbought
Bespoke Investment Group-With today’s gain, shares of AMD will also be trading at “extremely extreme” overbought levels. Over the last 45 years, there have only been a handful of other days when the stock traded four or more standard deviations above its 50-DMA, and if the stock holds onto these gains throughout the trading session, today would be another one.
Bespoke
3. Clean Energy Not Dead Yet….PBW ETF +30% One Month
Google Finance
4. American Energy Production Straight Up from 2010
chartr
5. Inflation 60% Items in CPI Basket Growing Faster than 3%-Torsten Slok Apollo
Apollo Academy
6. CMBS Office Delinquency Rates Pass 2008
Barchart
7. Bitcoin IBIT Clear Break-Out of Previously Mentioned Sideways Pattern
StockCharts
8. Small Percentage of Social Media Creators Receive All the Eye Balls-Prof G
Prof G Blog The bigger issue isn’t whether the AI-generated art is “good” or “bad.” It’s that most consumers don’t actually want to create it in the first place. Media consumption has long followed the “1% rule”: Only a small fraction of people create content, while the vast majority consume it.
4% of YouTube videos account for 94% of views on the platform.
5% of videos on TikTok generate 89% of the views.
On Instagram, 3% of videos earned 84% of all views.
The top 25 podcasts reach nearly half of U.S. weekly listeners.
10. Great Majority of Wealthy Parents Giving to Adult Children
Barrons The great majority of wealthy parents are giving their adult children financial support, according to a new survey by Ameriprise. Three-quarters of the survey’s 554 respondents are footing the bill for their adult children’s big-ticket items, like down payments on homes or tuition for graduate degrees. Nearly two-thirds are also covering ongoing costs like phone bills.
Just about everything seemed to be in the green in Q3. It should’t be a shock that it was one of the best quarters in the past decade.
Ryan Detrick – Spilled Coffee Blog
2. Nasdaq Up 7 Months in a Row
Take a look at the Nasdaq over the last 7 months. It’s a thing of beauty. It has been up 7 months in a row. The best streak since 2016-2017.
Barchart
3. AI Related Spending =75% of S&P 500 Returns
Market Ear
4. Dow Jones Transports Still Below 2024 Highs
Stock Charts
5. Charts I Watch—Stock Spin-Off ETF New Highs
Stock Charts
6. Stock Buyback ETF Has Held Long-Term 200 Week Average for Years…New Highs
Stock Charts
7. 19k Private Equity Funds vs. 14k McDonalds……Chart Below Compares KKR to MCD Last 18 Months
Bloomberg “There are 19,000 private equity funds in the US. There are 14,000 McDonald’s in the US. How are there more private equity funds than McDonald’s? That’s actually crazy, right?” KKR & Co. partner Alisa Wood said Wednesday at Bloomberg’s Women, Money and Power event in London. “Capital coming back is really important. The mark-to-market paper gains only take you so far.”
Bloomberg
8. Gen Z Revolts Update
IN scenes resembling a dystopian blockbuster, furious so-called Gen Z protesters have left a trail of carnage in nations from Asia to Africa as they oust leaders and set cities on fire. Now, it’s feared discontent could spread to the UK – with “powerful” younger generations being rallied by fast-spreading messages on social media.
The Sun
9. America’s Trust in Mass Media
Gallup
10. Americans Move Towards Negative View on Sports Betting