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.
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
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
