Category Archives: Daily Top Ten

1. WallStreetBets Sentiment Is Back To Its Earlier Highs

Via Callum Thomas (Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm)

2. Assets In Leveraged Long ETFs Exceed Short Product By Record

3. Momentum Stocks Down 4.4% Yesterday

Sachs has what it calls the “high beta momentum long/short index,” and on Monday that grouping tumbled 6.1%, its worst daily performance since Feb. 2023. Morgan Stanley has its own momentum long index, which fell 4.4%; Bloomberg’s ‘pure momentum’ factor suffered its worst day in two years. The definitions slightly vary but all agreed that momo, as it’s called, was a mess.

Momentum stocks after five-day drawdowns.

Via Marketwatch By Steve Goldstein

4. Best Performing 2024 Stocks Were Down 2.9% Yesterday

If you’ve had a good year so far in the stock market, chances are you had a pretty bad day in the market today. On the surface, today’s action wasn’t awful. The S&P 500 (SPY) was down 0.5% while the Russell 1,000 was down 0.7%. Within the Russell 1,000, the average stock was down even less at -0.33%.

So what’s the big deal? Well, what made today noteworthy was the near-perfect performance distribution based on how stocks had performed so far this year heading into today. In the chart below, we’ve broken up the Russell 1,000 into deciles (10 groups of 100 stocks each) based on YTD stock performance through last Friday. Decile 1 contains the 100 best-performing stocks YTD, decile 2 contains the next best 100, and so on until you get to decile 10, which contains the year’s bottom 10% of performers. In the chart, we show the average performance today of the stocks in each decile. As shown, the decile of the best-performing stocks YTD through last Friday was down 2.9% today, while the decile of the worst-performing stocks YTD was up 2%! As you work your way down from the best decile to the worst, today’s performance gets better and better.

Via Bespoke Investment Group

5. Intraday Momentum Vs. Value Chart

From Dave Lutz at Jones Trading: Mike O’Rourke noted the unwind tied to the Morgan Stanley US Momentum Index. “The Long/Short index had a return of 65% year to date coming into today’s session. The index cratered 6.7% in the first 90 minutes of trading today before settling in for a 5.5% decline on the session. It was the largest single day decline for the index since early February of 2023.”

6. Will This Lead To Small/Mid Rotation?

Via Marketwatch

7. MSTR $540 to $365 Approaching First Support Levels

8. ORCL Jumped 70 Points Since Summer

https://fundstrat.com

9. Lithium Supply Surplus Set To Stay With Battery Makers’ Help

Per Reuters: Many lithium mines, led by Chinese operators, are maintaining production of the raw material needed for electric vehicle (EV) batteries, in defiance of prices weak enough to trigger mass output cuts – providing a boon for battery makers.

The continued production raises the prospect of years of oversupply and of weak prices.

Some battery makers own mines or have injected cash into operations to keep them operational, company reports show.

Mines were also maintaining production to retain market share and good relations with governments and because closures and restarts can lead to technical issues, according to interviews with miners, consultants and analysts.

So far, around a dozen lithium producers have temporarily shut loss-making mines, trimmed output or delayed expansions.

Many others are still operating, meaning the global supply glut of the mineral needed for batteries for stationary storage, as well as for EVs, is likely to last for several years and keep prices low, the industry insiders and analysts said.

10. Carpe Diem In A Distracted World

Sum up: We’ll get insight from Roman Krznaric’s book, “Carpe Diem: Seizing the Day in a Distracted World.”

Alright, let’s get seizing…

Here are your options for how to “seize the day”…

Live This Day As If It Were Your Last: On the surface this sound like you’re trying to turn your life into some sort of Jackass-meets-the-Purge situation. But it doesn’t need to be that extreme. If you’re not occasionally ditching responsibilities to belt out “Total Eclipse of the Heart” to a crowd of strangers in a karaoke bar at 2 a.m., you’re not living.
Live This Year As If It Were Your Last: It’s not the end… but you can see it from here. You have time, but not too much time. This can help you prioritize without going crazy. And you’ll be more grateful.
Live This Day As If It Were Your First: “Be present” isn’t just a Pinterest quote for people who wear hemp. Really look around and notice the things you’ve come to ignore. See the world like a child again.
Live This Day As If You Were Living It For The Second Time: With the weight of that invisible, non-existent first day looming over you like a disapproving gym coach, you’ll skip some of the dumb decisions that usually leave you feeling like you’ve been hit by the regret bus. And you’ll seize those opportunities that make life memorable.

Via Eric Barker’s blog

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 09, 2024

December 9, 2024

Matt Topley

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. XLY -Consumer Discretionary ETF New All-Time Highs

2. Small Caps Have Been Cheap for Long-Time vs. Large Cap But No Momentum …Fund Flows Picking Up

Equities: Small-cap fund inflows have surged this year.

Source: BofA Global Research

3. Who is Buying Bitcoin? U.S. Spot ETFs

4. And MicroStrategy

5. And Over 600m Global Citizens

Triple A Industry Insights

https://www.triple-a.io/blog/crypto-ownership-report

6. History of Bubbles

7. Capital Group -We Tend to Overestimate Short-Term/Underestimate Long-Term

https://www.capitalgroup.com

8. Fundstrat -Odds of December Rate Cut Rise to 85%

https://fundstrat.com

9. China Increased Its Gold Reserve from 3.5% in 2022 to 5.9% 2024

MarketEar Blog

https://themarketear.com/newsfeed

10. 7 Powerful Communication Skills That Separate the Best Leaders From All the Rest

Research shows that leaders spend more than 75 percent of their time communicating.

EXPERT OPINION BY PETER ECONOMY, THE LEADERSHIP GUY @BIZZWRITER
What separates extraordinary leaders from those who aren’t so great? What do the most respected leaders have in common? Research shows that leaders spend more than 75 percent of their time communicating, and extraordinary leaders have developed powerful communication skills as part of their personal leadership practices.
Which leads to this question: What communication skills do these highly successful leaders consistently use? The answers reflect both science and art. The best leaders have high self-awareness and are flexible, adaptable, and balanced between chaos and stability. They are acutely aware that they must first manage themselves if they hope to successfully communicate with others.
Here are seven powerful communication skills that separate the very best leaders from the rest:
1. They are fearlessly authentic.
The most successful leaders courageously open themselves up to others. It takes equal measures of confidence and humility to be vulnerable. Vulnerability in turn creates safety, liberating the organization from battles for survival to help them unleash their innate creativity, drive, and self-organization. Top executives refuse to hide behind polite discomfort, creating safety for others to openly offer differing views.
2. They carefully listen to the emotion behind the words.
Top leaders don’t pay as much attention to the words themselves as they do to the emotion behind the message. Identifying the underlying emotion eliminates the defense or pretenses and helps them quickly cut through all the noise that stands between them and the core issues at play.
3. They don’t blame or accuse others.
The best leaders take responsibility for their own emotions. Therefore, they never blame others for how they feel. As masters of their own emotions, they consciously decide how they will feel and how they will react. By practicing focused awareness, Leaders avoid blaming and accusing others by not projecting onto others their own leftover negative mental models from past experiences.
4. They are grounded and centered.
When listening, great leaders don’t get triggered by assigning their own meaning to what others say and react automatically. They can imagine what it must be like for the other person by stepping into their shoes.
At the same time, they are comfortable in their own skin and therefore do not attempt to please others. When a team member states, “I don’t feel fulfilled in my job,” the leader doesn’t hear, “You are a bad leader.” Instead, they hear, “I need help.” This ability to be grounded creates safety for others and allows their reality to exist with equal merit as their own.
5. They are curious, not judgmental.
While listening for emotions, leaders are open to and curious about all possibilities. If a colleague comes across as irrational, ridiculous, or overreacting, the best leaders become curious and carefully explore what is happening deeper without jumping to a conclusion.
They know that judgment shuts off avenues for important discovery and learning. During this discovery, they can put aside their own emotions and pay focused attention. They can empathically imagine what must have happened for others to create the reality that comes across as irrational and validate that reality for them.
6. They look for patterns.
Leaders have one ear on what others are saying (content) and the other on the interaction pattern (process). They are constantly scanning themselves, people, and processes to identify patterns and changes in the patterns.
Through this constant, unbiased observation, the best leaders notice early indicators of an underlying issue. They then use their judgment-free curiosity to discover the source and manage it proactively.
7. They create a safe space.
Highly successful leaders know their most important job is to create safety and belonging in their organization, which sets members free to unleash their innate creativity, innovation, passion, and drive. Whether delivering an address to the entire organization—or within a one-on-one meeting—they convey a sense of community and belonging.
Great leaders protect and nurture their people under their wings. Top executives create a culture that does not tolerate behaviors that threaten that sense of safety and belonging, such as bullying, kingdom building, or favoritism.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 06, 2024

December 6, 2024

Matt Topley

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. November’s Sector Performance

Via Ned Davis

2. Sector % Above 200-Day Moving Average

Via Marketwatch

3. 2025 IPO Market Upswing?

4. $2 Trillion Could Come Out Of Money Markets

Via The Irrelevant Investor

5. But…We Are At “Extreme” Levels Of Inflows

Equities: US fund inflows are hitting extreme levels.

Via Goldman Sachs; @Marlin Capital

6. Energy Transition And Infrastructure Funds

7. Good Reminder: 30-Year Mortgage Rates Were Never Below 5% Until Jan 2009

The average 30-year fixed mortgage rates were never below 5% in the data from Freddie Mac, which goes back to 1971, until the Fed started buying MBS in January 2009, which pushed mortgage rates below 5% for the first time ever.

8. Housing Supply: Still Undersupplied By Millions Of Units

Housing affordability remains one of the top economic issues facing American households. Both homeowners and renters have seen the cost of housing increase faster than other consumer prices, putting a significant strain on household budgets. As we have documented in several previous research notes, the root cause of decreased housing affordability is the fact that housing supply has not increased enough to match demand. Inadequate housing supply leads homeowners and renters to bid up the sale price and rent of available housing, which puts a squeeze on affordability.

In this spotlight we provide an updated estimate of the housing supply shortage relative to long-run housing demand. In our last published estimate from May of 2021, we estimated that the U.S. housing shortage was 3.8 million units as of Q4 2020. Our updated estimate based on data through Q3 2024 is that the U.S. housing shortage has declined slightly to 3.7 million units.

Exhibit 2 below breaks down how we arrived at the new estimate and compares it to prior estimates. Since our previous estimate for Q4 2020, the U.S. housing stock has increased by 5.8 million units, or an average annual rate of 2.1 million units per year. However, over that same time the number of households increased by 6.3 million (2.3 million annual rate), while target or latent households increased by 6.9 million (2.5 million annual rate). But despite the increases in housing stock and the much larger increase in household formation, our estimate of housing shortage is slightly lower than our previous estimate.

That’s due to our lower target vacancy rate assumption. Our previous analysis assumed a target vacancy rate of 13% which was the average vacancy rate during the period between Q1 1990 and Q2 2018. The target vacancy rate assumed units held off market would continue to remain high as was the trend at that time. However, since our last estimate, housing market conditions have changed, and the units held off market have been declining, especially since 2022. Therefore, we revised our target vacancy rate assumption to correspond to the stable period in the housing market which we consider was from Q1 1994 – Q4 2003. Thus, our target vacancy rate declined from 13% to 11.7%, reducing the number of vacant housing units needed by 1.3 million.

Via Freddie Mac

9. Google Says AI Weather Model Masters 15-day Forecast

A new artificial intelligence-based weather model can deliver 15-day forecasts with unrivaled accuracy and speed, a Google lab said, with potentially life-saving applications as climate change ramps up.

GenCast, invented by London-based AI research laboratory Google DeepMind, “showed better forecasting skill” than the current world-leading model, the company said Wednesday.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) produces predictions for 35 countries and is considered the global benchmark for meteorological accuracy.

But DeepMind said GenCast surpassed the precision of the center’s forecasts in more than 97 percent of the 1,320 real-world scenarios from 2019 which they were both tested on.

Details of its findings were published in Nature, a leading science journal.

ECMWF chief Florence Rabier told AFP the project was a “first step” towards integrating AI in weather forecasting but that “it is indeed a leap forward.”

At this stage it can be used to supplement their current models, she said.

“We are progressing year by year,” she added. “Any new method that can enhance and accelerate this progress is extremely welcome in the context of the extreme societal pressures of climate change.”

The model was trained on four decades of temperature, wind speed and air pressure data from 1979 to 2018 and can produce a 15-day forecast in just eight minutes — compared to the hours it currently takes.

“GenCast provides better forecasts of both day-to-day weather and extreme events than the top operational system… up to 15 days in advance,” a DeepMind statement said.

DeepMind said GenCast “consistently outperformed” the current leading forecast model when predicting extreme heat, extreme cold and high wind speeds.

“More accurate forecasts of risks of extreme weather can help officials safeguard more lives, avert damage, and save money,” DeepMind said.

Extreme weather is becoming more common and more severe as a result of human caused climate change.

In August 2023, a series of wildfires in Hawaii killed around 100 people. Authorities were criticized by locals who said they were given no warning of the impending blaze.

This summer, a sudden heatwave in Morocco killed at least 21 people over a 24-hour period. And in September, Hurricane Helene killed 237 people in Florida and other southeastern US states.

“I am confident that AI-based weather forecasting systems will continue to incrementally improve in the future, including better prediction of extreme events and their intensity, for which there is a lot of need to improve upon,” said David Schultz, a professor of synoptic meteorology at Manchester University, who was not involved in the research.

But he said these forecasting systems are reliant on the weather prediction models that are already running, such as that operated by ECMWF.

Via Barron’s

10. Tim Harford On How To Give A Good Speech

I was recently leading a seminar about public speaking, when one woman asked me how she should deal with speaking to reluctant audiences. She worked in health and safety, she explained, and people only attended talks about health and safety because they were compulsory. She seemed self-effacing and glum.

“Do you think health and safety is important?” I asked her. Yes, she did. “Do you think that if people understood your ideas better, it might prevent an awful accident?” Yes. Well, I suggested, perhaps that might be a starting point.

She might build her talk around the message, “The simplest-seeming details could save your life.” But not necessarily. Another good talk about health and safety could emphasise that when you pay attention to safety, you raise your game more generally: “health and safety doesn’t just save lives, it saves money.”

Or maybe there’s a different angle altogether. I’m not a health and safety expert, after all. But most people, I would hope, have at least one interesting thing they might want to share with the world. If you have one, start there.

In his book TED Talks, Chris Anderson (the head of TED, the conference that has become synonymous with compelling public speaking) emphasises the “throughline” — the thread that should connect everything in the speech, every story, every joke, every slide and every rousing call to action.

The throughline is the most important idea in public speaking. A good speaker mixes things up, varying tone and pace and subject-matter — but the one thing they should never mix up is their audience. That means linking everything, from tear-jerking anecdotes to statistical analysis, to the throughline. More fundamentally, it means knowing what the throughline is.

It isn’t easy to speak compellingly in front of an audience, but our fear of the occasion does us more harm than good. It’s best not to prepare in a defensive crouch. Instead, start with having something to say. Then say it.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 25 October 2024. Full article is here.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 05, 2024

December 5, 2024

Matt Topley

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. First Newsletter I Ever Read Starting in 1998…Art Cahsin RIP

2. Art Knew Communism Sucks…U.S. Productivity Separates From the Pack

A Wealth of Common Sense Blog—Joey Politano breaks down the productivity boom in the U.S. and how it compares to the rest of the developed world:
He explains:Productivity growth is nothing short of the bedrock of progress–in the long run, creating more with the same amount of labor is the only way to durably increase wages, consumption, and society’s overall prosperity. That makes it such a historic achievement that American economic output per hour worked has risen 8.9% over the last five years–faster than the five years prior or any point in the 2010s–in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/12/u-s-markets-are-swallowing-the-rest-of-the-world/

3. U.S. Oil Production Per Day 47% Higher than Saudi Arabia in October

The Wall Street Journal reported that US officials anticipate the US will produce an average of 13.2 million barrels of oil per day this year, which was 47% higher than Saudi Arabia’s average in October.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61523

4. Software Valuations

Marketwatch-Altimeter Capital founder Brad Gerstner pounded the table for software stocks back in June, arguing the sector was trading 15% below its 10-year average. The call was prescient: the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF
+3.89%
has jumped 42% from its August lows. He shared this chart showing software multiples are still below their average and trading at a discount to pre-COVID multiples.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-analyst-talked-of-100-000-bitcoin-a-decade-ago-heres-what-he-says-now-3ac0e726?mod=home-page

5. Small Caps are Only Group Trading Below 10-Year Average

Equities: Only small caps are trading at multiples below their 10-year average.

Source: The Daily Shot

6. Ethereum Close to Break-Out

ETHE no full break-out yet.

7. Morgan Stanley Projection on Weight Loss Drugs

8. Internet Retail Spike Post Covid

Jack Ablin Cresset Capital

9. xAI Raised $10B One-Year

10. Elites vs. elitism -Seth Godin

Tom Brady is an elite athlete. Few have even approached the stats he had playing football. And Catherine Walker, NSTA Science Teacher of the Year, is an elite, because her pedagogy and understanding give her the ability to create better outcomes for her students. There’s a hospital for special surgery, but all surgery is special if it’s surgery on someone you care about, so we seek out an elite doctor because outcomes matter.

Our culture prizes performance, we spend a lot of time ranking and measuring output. Fans of a team are rooting for their side to win, because identity is easily hooked into performance.

But this is not at all related to elitism. Elitism is a barrier, where we use a label to decide who gets to contribute and who is offered dignity. A law firm that only hires from a few law schools is elitist–they have no data to confirm that these recruits are more likely to contribute than others, they’re simply artificially limiting the pool they draw from.

Opening our filters and seeking a diversity of experience undermines elitist insecurity and creates the possibility for even better solutions and connection.

Elitism also shows up when elites who are arguably very good at something believe that this means that they’re also good at everything.

The scientific method isn’t elitist, nor is a stopwatch used to record the 100 meter dash. Seeking coherent arguments, logical approaches and a contribution that leads to better outcomes isn’t elitist, in fact, it’s precisely the opposite.

We can celebrate elite performance without being elitist. In fact, it’s the best way to do so.
https://seths.blog/2024/12/elites-vs-elitism/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 December 04, 2024

December 4, 2024

Matt Topley

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. U.S. Stock Market Concentration

From Irrelevant Investor Blog

https://www.theirrelevantinvestor.com/p/animal-spirits-the-leverage-mania

2. S&P 500 Forward P/E Back to 2021 High 22.5x

Equities: The forward P/E ratio climbed to 22.5x, indicating elevated valuations

Source: @TheTerminal, Bloomberg Finance L.P.

3. Short-Sellers Capitulate

Bloomberg-By Michael Msika

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-03/wall-street-short-sellers-throwing-in-the-towel-citigroup-says?srnd=homepage-americas&sref=GGda9y2L

4. S&P 500’s December After +25% Through November

5. AI Enters the Oil Market

Barrons
Oil companies are on a relentless quest to produce more oil at lower costs, and AI is boosting that effort. Their success has already been remarkable. Over the past decade, the U.S. pumped out 60% more oil a day with 40% fewer workers. The industry’s annual productivity gains in that stretch outpaced even those of online retailers, and are roughly seven times as large as those of the average U.S. business. By extracting more oil while reducing capital expenses and manpower, they’re lowering the costs at which they can drill profitably. In the Permian, the “break-even” price for oil producers has fallen to $40 a barrel from over $90 in 2012, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. AI should take that number even lower, boosting oil company margins and cash flow.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/ai-oil-industry-profit-permian-basin-8adcacdd?mod=past_editions

6. Banks at Historical Lows Still vs. S&P

State Street

https://www.ssga.com/us/en/individual/insights/sector-opportunities-for-q4-2024?WT.mc_id=social_etf-sec_sectors-pb_us_lkdin_img_n_mf2_n_nov24&spi=673b613f4ef36f459f33a3d7

7. Canada Exports to U.S.

Dave Lutz Jones Trading
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised President-elect Donald Trump that Canada would toughen controls over the long undefended joint border, a senior Canadian official said on Sunday. Trudeau flew to Florida on Friday to have dinner with Trump, who has promised to slap tariffs on Canadian imports unless Ottawa prevents migrants and drugs from crossing the frontier. Canada sends 75% of all goods and services exports to the United States and tariffs would badly hurt the economy.

8. The Ethereum-Bitcoin Ratio

Yahoo Finance Bram Berkowitz, The Motley Fool
Given their history and the fact that cryptocurrencies can be hard to value because they have no intrinsic value, many investors have looked for trends between the prices of Ethereum and Bitcoin. After all, groups of stocks are often compared to one another to determine relative valuation. A simple way to track Bitcoin and Ethereum is by looking at the relationship between Ethereum’s and Bitcoin’s prices by dividing the price of Ethereum by the price of Bitcoin. Seeing where this ratio has trended over time can offer clues as to which looks undervalued or overvalued relative to the other.

Data source: TradingView. Chart by author.
As you can see in the chart, the Ethereum-Bitcoin ratio recently fell toward 0.035, the lowest level seen since April 2021. The average ratio dating back to 2020 is 0.0538. Ethereum has performed well since Election Day, up roughly 38% compared to Bitcoin’s 44%. However, Bitcoin has widely outperformed this year.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/bitcoin-ethereums-relationship-doing-something-103000709.html

9. Expensive Zip Codes

NY Times By Josh Ocampo

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/realestate/most-expensive-zip-codes.html

10. AI Predicts Neuroscience Study Results Better Than Experts

Psychology Today LLMs beat human neuroscience experts in predicting study outcomes.

The results were clear—each LLM (Large Language Model) beat human neuroscience experts by a wide margin. The LLMs average accuracy of 81.4 percent far exceeded the 63.4 percent average of human experts.

Next, the scientists created a new LLM called BrainGPT by fine-tuning an existing version of Mistral and training data from twenty years of neuroscience publications from a hundred journals published during 2002-2022. BrainGPT had an 86 percent accuracy in predicting neuroscience study results, which was a three percent gain from the general-purpose version of Mistral.

“LLMs can be part of larger systems that assist researchers in determining the best experiment to conduct next,” the researchers wrote.

The ability to predict results of neuroscience research in advance can help guide neuroscientists to optimize limited resources such as time and money, enable timely adjustments based on probable outcomes, and augment our understanding of the brain and central nervous system that may lead to better treatments and health interventions.

This proof of concept is not limited to neuroscience. According to the scientists, none of their methods used was specific just to neuroscience and can be applied more broadly to other knowledge-intensive domains in the future.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-future-brain/202412/ai-predicts-neuroscience-study-results-better-than-experts