Barrons Strategists at Deutsche Bank warn that we may be entering worrisome territory, noting that the 18% increase in margin usage is among the fastest increases since the tech bubble of the late 1990s. The fastest two-month increase in margin debt—24.6%—was recorded in December 1999, according to Deutsche Bank. The second fastest—20.3%—was notched in May 2007. By Andrew Welsch
3. Heavily Shorted Stocks +25% In July….Meme Danger
Bespoke noted, July has been a banner month for investors long the most heavily shorted stocks (and brutal for those short them). Below is a chart looking at the average month-to-date performance of Russell 3,000 stocks with market caps above $1 billion based on short interest levels. While all stocks are up an average of 4.3% in July, the 20 most heavily shorted stocks (based on short interest as a percentage of float) are up 25.2%.
Do you respond or react to the feedback that’s coming in? Do you seek it out or wait for it to arrive?
Does vivid online feedback from anonymous trolls carry more weight than honest but more subtle feedback from actual customers?
Pick your feedback, pick your future.
Which sort of feedback changes your behavior or attitude?
Delivered with enthusiasm or a scowl
In private or in public
In writing or verbally…
The goal might not be to find a way to only get positive applause, because your project may very well benefit from thoughtful feedback.
The useful path is to figure out which sort of feedback suits you in what stage of the project. “It’s not for you,” and “I don’t want to show it to you right now,” are valid approaches to our creative process.
1. Not Just Tech Rally…Equal Weight ETF Makes All-Time Highs
Stock Charts
2. Slow Rise Up….22 Trading Days without 1% Move in S&P
One day One percent: And in terms of being “due” for some volatility, it’s now been 22 trading days since we last saw a 1% move up or down. If you feel like it’s been a little quiet lately —that’s why.
Source: @Barchart
3. Finra Margin Debt to GDP Not at 2021 Levels Yet
Eric Soda Blog Margin debt vs. GDP. FINRA margin debt crossed above the $1 trillion mark in June. Relative to GDP, it remains below the 2021 peak but above Dotcom and GFC levels.
5. Net Foreign Purchases of U.S. Surged to a Record in May….So Much for Selling America
Ned Davis
6. Tesla Auto Profitability History
Bespoke
7. Zyn First Tick Down….202m Cans to 190m Cans
Stock Twits
8. U.S. Mortgage Rates Mid-2022 to 2025 Sideways
Yahoo! Finance
9. Demographics is Destiny
The fertility rate in the US has fallen to a new record low
New CDC data released Thursday shows that America’s fertility rate dropped to an all-time low of just under 1.6 children per woman on average in 2024.
For context, this is lower than the UN’s projection for the world’s overall rate (2.25), as well as the figure forecast for the US (1.62) in its World Population Prospects report for 2024. Imperatively, it also falls well below the replacement level of 2.1 — or, the birth rate required for a population to replace itself from one generation to the next.
Sherwood
Like much of the developed world, the US has seen its fertility rate slump in recent years as an increasing number of adults have decided to delay — or opt out of altogether — having kids, citing economic and social limitations (though it seems that many still can’t decide whether there are currently too many children or not enough).
Natal attraction
As plunging fertility rates worldwide have pointed to an impending global baby bust, governments are experimenting with incentives to encourage citizens to have more children.
Among these is the US, with raising the national fertility rate being one of the Trump administration’s priorities. Back in April, as part of their pro-natalist push, the White House reportedly considered a $5,000“baby bonus” for new mothers.
Interestingly, last year saw a rare child-rearing win for the country with world’s lowest birth rate. South Korea’s birthrate rose for the first time in nine years to 0.75 in 2024, as reported in February, and just this week the country announced notching record birth growth in the first five months of this year.
Daniel Kahneman (1934 to 2024) won the Nobel Prize for proving we’re not as rational as we think.
You’d never know it by listening, but this conversation with Danny took place years ago, and most people reading this have never heard it.
In a world of disposable content, this conversation, which is both timeless and timely, is exactly the type of conversation I try to have on the Knowledge Project.
As I re-listened this summer, I created a list of 11 takeaways for myself:
Delay Your Intuition: Most people form an impression in seconds and spend the rest of their time confirming it. The best wait for all the information before letting their intuition speak.
Loss Aversion Creates Permanent Programs: Once you give people something (a perk, a feature, a benefit), it’s nearly impossible to take back. The founder who would offer free lunch on day one can’t cancel it on day 1000. Small groups lose something specific, while large groups gain something abstract. Every time.
Your Rules Become Your Default: Danny was human just like us; he often said yes to things he didn’t want to do. So he created a rule. Not a goal, not an intention, a rule. It reprogrammed his unconscious mind, turning his desired behavior into his default behavior.
Facts Don’t Form Beliefs: “I believe in climate change,” Kahneman said. “I believe in the people who tell me there is climate change. The people who don’t believe in climate change, they believe in other people.” This is how we form all beliefs. We don’t examine evidence and reach conclusions. We trust people we like, then adopt their views. “The reasons are not the causes of our beliefs,” he explained. They’re the stories we tell ourselves afterward. Want to change someone’s mind? Facts won’t do it. They need to trust you first. If they admire you, they’ll find reasons to agree. If they dislike you, the best evidence won’t matter. Smart people believe opposite things because they trust different people.
The good news is that with these seven strategies, you can eliminate the bad stuff to cultivate your best brain ever.
Eat real food. When I say real food, I mean whole, organic, fresh, local and unprocessed food. If it has a label or a barcode, you should probably avoid it. If your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, don’t eat it. Processed junk foods mostly exist in the middle aisles of the grocery stores, so avoid those aisles!
Eat lots of colorful fruits and vegetables. These colorful super-foods come loaded with brain-boosting stuff like phytonutrients. The dark, deep reds, yellows, oranges, greens and blues mean these foods contain powerful anti-inflammatory, detoxifying antioxidants and energy-boosting, brain-powering molecules. Enjoy an array of colorful plant foods like blueberries and dark leafy greens like kale, Swiss chard, spinach, watercress, and arugula.
Go for slow carbs, not no carbs. Cauliflower and an ice cream sundae fall under the “carbs” category, but you know the former is healthy and the latter isn’t. Eating whole plant foods with plenty of fiber, including small amounts of beans, non-gluten whole grains, nuts and seeds, keeps toxins moving out of your body and keeps your gut bacteria healthy. A healthy gut means a healthy brain!
Eat plenty of healthy fat. I provide an excellent, detailed healthy fat food plan in my new book Eat Fat, Get Thin.Fat is actually very good for your brain. In fact, 60 percent of your brain is made up of DHA – an omega-3 fat that you get from algae and fish. My brain worked pretty well before, but embracing fat (even good saturated fats like coconut oil and MCT oil) pushed my mental clarity through the roof.
Optimize protein. We need about 30 grams of protein per meal to build muscle. When you lose muscle, you age faster and your brain takes a huge hit! Eat protein at every meal, including omega-3 eggs, protein shakes nut butters, even fish for breakfast.
Stop poisoning your brain. Eliminate sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats, food additives and preservatives, all of which poison your brain and disrupt your biochemistry. If it’s not real food, don’t eat it.
Supplement. A high-quality multivitamin, as well as magnesium, vitamin D3, omega-3 fatty acids, probiotics, folic acid, B6 and B12 are all necessary for your brain to function optimally. You can find the cleanest and best versions of these essential nutrients along with other brain-boosting supplements here.
Retail vs. non-profitable Tech. “The 10-day average of retail participation in non-profitable technology companies reached 23% — the highest level since a Goldman Sachs trading desk began tracking it — and rose to 25% this week.”
Here is the meme-stock recipe for creating a gamma squeeze, which appears to be the case with Opendoor Technologies , which all saw similiar sharp moves the week. As you’ll see, options gamma—an obscure way traders measure changes in the value of an options contract and associated stock—plays a role, but the activity is far more coordinated.
The first ingredient: Find a stock that can be easily pushed around. A heavily shorted stock is often a great place to start because it means that many investors have borrowed shares from their broker and sold them short in the market in anticipation that the stock will decline.
It also means that many investors are painfully sensitive to the potential of a stock rally. If the stock advances, those investors who have shorted the stock must buy it back at higher prices. If those investors panic, they create “a short squeeze,” which means they are basically competing with each other to buy back their stock at ever-higher prices. Kohl’s short-interest ratio is about 49%, which basically describes a pressure cooker.
The second ingredient: Buy at-the-money call options on the targeted stock. Such calls are basically the same as stock, but they have a superpower. Calls with strike prices that match the stock price often force options market makers to buy stock to hedge the stock’s gain.
Why? Because dealers always hedge risk, and when customers buy calls in anticipation that the stock will rise, the dealers must buy stock so they don’t lose money. The combination of aggressive call buying and dealers buying stock is what makes a stock like Kohl’s surge. The phenomenon is popularly called a gamma squeeze.
The third ingredient: Use social media to create awareness of the unusual stock and options trading. Make as many people as possible think that something extraordinary is happening, and that they should buy calls and stock. The social-media activity tends to create a huge wave of stock and call buying that the engineers of the gamma squeeze need to take profits.
The activity has a certain odor. Market regulators have done little more than watch from the sidelines. Rest assured, what happened with Kohl’s, GameStop, and so many other stocks will happen again.
5. Options Volume is Booming Again in 2025
MarketWatch
6. Rolex Traded Watch Index Rising with Meme’s and Crypto
Zerohedge
7. ETHA ETF AUM Doubles
8. YouTube is King 12.5% of All Viewing Time
@CharlieBilello
9. Nashville Tops List of Favorite U.S. Cities
10. Ten Tips for Calming Your Mind
ViaMark Hyman Here is what we know about how to influence the mind-body and the body-mind system. Consider these essential survival skills. You cannot thrive without them!
1. Address the Underlying Causes of Stress — Find the biological causes of problems with the mind by working on the 7 Keys to UltraWellness. Mercury toxicity or a magnesium or vitamin B12 deficiency or a toxic gut chemical or a gluten allergy could be changing your brain. So, by changing your body, you can change your mind!
2. Relax — Learn how to ACTIVELY relax. To engage the powerful forces of the mind on the body, you must DO something — you can’t just sit there watching television or drinking beer.
3.Learn New Skills — Try learning new skills such as meditation, deep breathing, yoga, biofeedback, and progressive muscle relaxation or take a hot bath, make love, get a massage, watch a sunset, or walk in the woods or on the beach.
4.Move Your Body — Exercise is a powerful, well-studied way to burn off stress chemicals and heal the mind, so just do it! It has been proven to be better than or equal to Prozac for treating depression.
5.Optimize Your Nutrition — Clean up your diet from mind-robbing molecules like caffeine, alcohol, and refined sugars and eat regularly to avoid the short-term stress of starvation on your body.
6. Supplement — Take a multivitamin and nutrients to help balance the stress response, such as vitamin C; the B-complex vitamins, including B6 and B5 or pantothenic acid; zinc; and most important, magnesium, the relaxation mineral.
7.Try Herbs — Use adaptogenic herbs (herbs that help you adapt and balance your response to stress) such as ginseng, Rhodiola rosea, Siberian ginseng, cordyceps, and ashwagandha.
8.Use Heat Therapy — Take a hot bath or a sauna to help your body deeply relax and turn on the relaxation response.
9. Change Your Beliefs — Examine your beliefs, attitudes, and responses to common situations and consider reframing your point of view to reduce stress.
10.Find a Community — Consciously build your network of friends, family, and community. They are your most powerful allies in achieving long-term health.
Weekly ETF flows. “Over past week, flows into U.S. large-cap ETFs soared by nearly $10B … investment-grade bonds saw largest outflows, followed by U.S. small caps.”
Liz Ann Sonders
4. Putting Mega Cap Mag 7 in Perspective
The Irrelevant Investor
5. No Surprise…The Marriage of Tech and Defense VC Europe
PitchBook
6. Goldman Sachs and BNY join Forces to Transform $7.1 Trillion Money Market Industry with Digital Tokens
Key Points
Goldman Sachs and Bank of New York Mellon have created the ability for institutional investors to purchase tokenized money market funds, CNBC has learned.
Clients of BNY, the world’s largest custody bank, will be able to invest in money market funds whose ownership will be recorded on Goldman’s blockchain platform.
Via CNBC: Goldman Sachs and Bank of New York Mellon are set to announce that they’ve created the ability for institutional investors to purchase tokenized money market funds, CNBC has learned.
Clients of BNY, the world’s largest custody bank, will be able to invest in money market funds whose ownership will be recorded on Goldman’s blockchain platform, according to executives of the two firms.
The project has already signed up fund titans including BlackRock, Fidelity Investments and Federated Hermes, as well as the asset management arms of Goldman and BNY.
The Wall Street giants believe that tokenizing the $7.1 trillion money market industry is the next leap forward for digital assets after President Donald Trump last week signed a law marking the arrival of U.S.-regulated stablecoins. The GENIUS Act is expected to boost the popularity and use of stablecoins, which are typically pegged to the U.S. dollar, and JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America have said they are exploring their use in payments.
But unlike stablecoins, tokenized money market funds pay owners a yield, making it an attractive place for hedge funds, pensions and corporations to park their cash.
“We have created the ability for our clients to invest in tokenized money market share classes across a number of fund companies,” said Laide Majiyagbe, BNY’s global head of liquidity, financing and collateral. “The step of tokenizing is important, because today that will enable seamless and efficient transactions, without the frictions that happen in traditional markets.”
Money market funds are mutual funds that are typically invested in safer, short term securities including Treasuries, repo agreements or commercial paper. They are generally considered the most cash-like of investments that still offer a yield. Traditional money market funds can be liquidated within a day or two, though redeeming shares only happens during market hours.
Institutional and retail investors have rushed into the asset class in recent years, pouring roughly $2.5 trillion into them since the Federal Reserve began a rate-hiking cycle in 2022.
The banks view tokenized money market funds as setting the foundation for a future in which the assets are traded in a real-time, always-on digital ecosystem. Investors and corporations could lean on stablecoins for global payments and tokenized money market funds for cash management.
But tokenizing the asset class gives the funds new capabilities beyond speed and ease of use; the digitized funds could eventually be transferable between financial intermediaries without having to first liquidate funds into cash, according to BNY and Goldman.
That could bolster its use by the world’s largest financial players as collateral for a multitude of trades and margin requirements, said Mathew McDermott, Goldman’s global head of digital assets.
“The sheer scale of this market just offers a huge opportunity to create a lot more efficiency across the whole financial plumbing,” McDermott said. “That is what’s really powerful, because you’re creating utility in an instrument where it doesn’t exist today.”
7. U.S. Beef Prices …Protein Bull Market Adding to Supply/Demand Factors
Yahoo!Finance via SpilledCoffee
8. Meat Replacement Beyond Meat Stock -97%
Google
9. 46% of American Homes Being Purchased by 60+ Year Olds
In 2024, more US homebuyers were aged 70 and above (20% of buyers) than under 35 (around 15%). In fact, 46% of homes were purchased by those aged 60 and over. DB noted: “Over the long run, property is an asset that ultimately gets redistributed from one generation to the next. Right now, that handoff is being stalled by high interest rates and elevated home prices. At some point, either—or both—will have to adjust, or real wages for younger people will need to rise sharply. Eventually, the younger generation will own the homes currently held by the older generation. We just don’t yet know what the price will be.”
