3. A List of Well Known Hedge Fund Managers Calling for IPO Boom Under Trump
IPO ETF…50 week thru 200 week to upside on long-term chart.
StockCharts
4. Trump SPAC No New High Post Election
StockCharts
5. Defensive Consumer Staples New Lows
J.C. Parets
6. Canada and Mexico Since U.S. Election
Bespoke Investment Group: In the chart below, we show the relative strength lines of the country ETFs for Mexico (EWW) and Canada (EWC) versus the United States (SPY). As shown, the two ETFs have seen relative performance drop since the election as tariff tensions have become more of a reality, but that weakness is in the context of longer-term underperformance that has been persistent throughout the past year.
Bespoke Investment Group
7. Income Required for Median Rent
Rental affordability. The income required to afford the median asking rent for a US apartment is $63,680, the lowest since early 2022. However, that’s still 16% higher than the estimated median income for renters.
Redfin
8. Opinion Poll on Our Nation’s Political System
NY Times
9. Consumer Reports Test on 300 Foods Found 86% Contained Harmful Chemicals
Mark Hyman
10. Don’t steal the revelation: Seth Godin
Learning is a journey of incompetence. First, we realize that there’s something we don’t know. Then we see that we’re going to be better at it, and we’re not good at it yet. Then we figure it out and we’ve succeeded. Repeat. When we pre-process the information and simply test people on it, there’s no real learning going on. We become what we do, and if we actually solve the riddle, we’re more likely to have it stick than if someone simply tells us the answer. The job of the teacher is to create the conditions for the student to explore their incompetence long enough to learn something useful.
1. Time Spent in Recession by Decade….Last 15 Years, Almost Zero
Ben Carlson
2. Record Positive 5-Day Breath in S&P
SentimentTrader notes we had a week for the history books. The S&P 500 just strung together 5 straight days with more than 68% of its stocks advancing. That ties the record going back to 1928.
Jason Goepfert
3. Clean Energy ETF New Lows
StockCharts
4. Netflix has Record Subscriber Growth
Bloomberg
5. January Global Fund Manager Flows…Into Eurozone and Commodities?
The Daily Shot Brief
6. With Canada Entering Political Upheaval, the Canadian Dollar is Hitting Lows
Barchart
7. Apple Underperformer Yesterday
Pulls back to September 2024 levels….200-Day in play.
StockCharts
8. 20-Year Chart of Mortgage Rates
Wolf Street
9. World Citizens Reaction to Trump Presidency
The FT
10. Dive In: Cold Water Can Be Good for Your Brain-Psychology Today
Via Psychology Today: Research demonstrates the mental benefits of cold water swimming.
Key points:
People have been immersing themselves in cold water for thousands of years.
Modern research shows that cold water immersion provides cognitive and mood benefits.
That may be connected with the effect of cold-water swimming on cortisol levels.
If you live near a body of water in the northern latitudes, you likely have heard of your local polar bear club — usually made up of a group of hearty swimmers who take part in cold water swimming.
Immersing in cold water dates back to ancient civilizations, with the first documented evidence appearing in an Egyptian text in 3,000 BC. Fast forward to modern times, a group of swimmers founded the first cold water swimming organization in the U.S. in 1903. Today, the Coney Island Polar Bear Club still holds weekly ocean swims from November to April.
Cold-water swimmers tout the numerous benefits of those icy dips: reduced inflammation in muscles and joints, boosted metabolism, improved sleep and enhanced libido. But what does the evidence say?
A growing body of research verifies that cold water plunges do provide benefits, particularly for mood and cognitive performance.
In a study published this year in the journal Physiology & Behavior, 13 healthy subjects submerged themselves in 10-degree Celsius water for 10 minutes, three times per week. Researchers evaluated participants’ cognitive performance, self-reported well-being, sleep quality and worry. They found participants’ cognitive processing speed and mental flexibility improved over the four weeks of the study. Participants also reported fewer sleep disturbances and scored lower on assessments of worry.
Two earlier studies back up these findings. In the first, participants reported a significant decrease in negative emotions like tension, anger, depression, fatigue and confusion after a 20-minute dip in chilly ocean water. In the second study, participants who immersed in a cold bath for five minutes reported feeling more active, alert, attentive, proud and inspired.
What’s going on here? Researchers don’t exactly know. But they have established that those good feelings likely have something to do with cold water immersion’s effect on cortisol levels.
Cortisol is a hormone released into the bloodstream when you experience stress; it prepares your body for the fight-or-flight response. If you have too much cortisol, or if your body releases it too often, it can lead to weight gain, mood swings, insomnia, and fatigue.
Researchers expected a cold-water plunge would elevate cortisol levels, but studies have found that cortisol levels remain relatively stable during cold immersion, and decrease significantly in the hours afterward. This likely explains why cold-water swimmers report improved mood and cognitive performance.
It’s important to note there are health risks associated with cold-water swimming including hypothermia, hyperventilation, and muscle cramping. It’s important never to swim in a body of open water alone, and to check with your doctor before cold immersion if you have any chronic health conditions.
That said, there is clear evidence that cold-water immersion can help boost your mood and cognitive performance, and may also help prevent sleep disturbances.
1. The Dollar is +10% Since September Lows…Going Up with Fed Cutting Rates
StockCharts
2. Unleaded Gasoline Prices Up 8.8% in Last Month
StockCharts
3. Transports Index Down -12% in Correction from December 2024
Holding Right on 200-Day.
StockCharts
4. 3rd Year of Bull Market Historical Returns Muted
Callum Thomas: And as I’ve previously highlighted, the 3rd year of the bull market (which we are now in) tends to be troublesome. This excellent chart maps out the average path of bull markets during the 3rd year. I suspect there’s probably a bit of variation around it, but it does go to show that we’re likely in for a fair amount of range-trading and volatility this year. So embrace the chop?
Todd Sohn
5. Small Cap Holding 200-Day
Via Barrons: The iShares Russell 2000 exchange-traded fund (ticker: IWM), at $217, has held strong above its 200-day moving average of $214. It has remained above the 200-day moving average for 280 consecutive days, the longest stretch since late 2018, according to Dow Jones Market Data. When it has such a stretch, or a longer one, it has gone on to see a gain most of the time over the following 12 months of as much as 19%.
StockCharts
6. Nasdaq 100 QQQ-Second Longest Streak Ever Over 200 Day
Charlie Bello
7. Netflix Chart Closes Below 50-Day
Netflix straight up since August…It has first close below 50-day.
StockCharts.com
8. Netflix straight up since August…It has first close below 50-day.
Barron’s
9. Wine Sales -6% from 2023
Via NBC News: The losses keep stacking up for the U.S. wine industry. Wine sales in the U.S. last year tumbled approximately 6% from 2023, according to data from the industry data group SipSource. The drop is the latest in a long-term decline in wine demand in restaurants, bars and stores that some are calling an “existential threat” to the industry.
NBC News
10. Open AI 15 Page Manifesto to America
From Sherwood: Framed as a plan for ensuring American superiority in AI, the document warns that overregulation will drive hundreds of billions of dollars to Chinese AI projects.
OpenAI just published a 15-page manifesto titled “AI in America: Open AI’s Economic Blueprint.” But if you read between the lines, the blueprint boils down to a wish list of things that OpenAI wants from the US government:
🚦 Voluntary “rules of the road” instead of federal regulation
⚖️ Exclusion from the patchwork of state AI regulations
🪖 Classified national-security briefings
🚔 Defense, national-security, and law-enforcement contracts
🎟️ Exclusion from any AI regulations if the companies work on national-security applications
📊 Mountains of digitized government data to train its AI on
From WSJ: Shares of single-family landlordsInvitation HomesINVH ( 1.90% increase – green up pointing triangle) and American Homes 4 Rent (AMH 1.25% increase) are trading at 35% and 20% discounts to their net asset values, respectively, according to real-estate analytics firm Green Street. Invitation Homes’ stock has traded at a particularly large discount to NAV since interest rates began to rise in early 2022, but the gap has widened by 10 percentage points in the past year.
Put another way, while the average house in the metro areas where Invitation Homes owns its properties sells for $415,000 based on Green Street’s analysis of prevailing market values, the company’s share price implies that investors think $310,000 is more appropriate.
Invitation Homes
StockCharts
American Homes
StockCharts
5. UNG Natural Gas Fund +17% YTD
StockCharts
6. Biotech No Bounce
XBI -4% YTD….and -12% in last 6 months.
StockCharts
7. Mag 7 Pulls Away from Euro Granola Stocks
Europe gains have also been concentrated in one group of stocks.
This next chart shows the prift margins of the S&P going up and to the right. It seems implausible in 2017 that this would continue to increase. But that’s just what happened.
Travel advisers agree. Some of the most sought-after journeys are already sold out for the entirety of 2025 and booking well into 2026. “Think about how River Cruises blossomed in the past decade,” says Jack Ezon, founder and managing partner of luxury travel consultancy Embark Beyond. “Train travel, which is super niche and limited, will go prime time in the same way by 2030.” “Requests for train trips have grown 158% in the past five years, especially among a younger generation,” he adds, as part of a zeitgeisty obsession with throwback luxuries. “It’s the millennial and Gen Zer obsessed with vintage record players and Polaroid cameras, buying the $1,000 cashmere Ritz Paris Frame hoodie and clamoring for a room in an uber-traditional hotel.”
From Seth Godin: Process is the investment we make in inefficiency now to prevent errors from costing us later.
Jet airlines are the safest form of travel ever created, largely because of the inefficient process that we put in place. They’re over tested and over staffed, with checklists and feedback loops in place to ensure that errors don’t occur. It would be way less costly if one person simply jumped onto the plane with you and took off–less costly, but less reliable as well.
If you want to see this taken to a higher level, consider a typical hospital emergency room. If you’ve ever sat waiting, you’ve noticed that it seems inefficient and very process focused. But as a result, the system doesn’t rely on good luck or heroics to save the day. Instead, they’ve invested in process.
An institution that is 100% contemptuous of process may create vividly creative outputs, but it won’t last long. And one that’s 100% process focused will rarely create a breakthrough. We can take a hard look at our culture and decide if we need more (or less) process.
What does it cost to be wrong? What does it cost to avoid being wrong?
