TOPLEY’S TOP 10 April 15, 2025

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. High Volatility VIX History

Charlie Bilello

2. Updated: Foreigners Own 33% of U.S. Treasury Market

BofA Blog

3. International Stocks Outperforming for 2025 but Down in April EFA Developed Markets -5% April

StockCharts

StockCharts

4. Casino Stocks -50% High To Low

StockCharts

StockCharts

5. Volatility of Largest Company in World, AAPL

Talk about a roller coaster. After peaking just after Christmas, shares of AAPL lost more than a third of their value in less than four mhs and have since recovered more than 23% when you consider this morning’s gains.  Volatility of this magnitude is notable when it occurs in just about any stock, but this is the largest company in the world we’re talking about. Are we really to believe that the company’s value has fluctuated by this magnitude in such a short period?

Bespoke Premium

With today’s 5% rally in the pre-market, AAPL is on track for its second straight daily gain of over 4%. Since the iPod was launched in 2001, the only other time the stock had a higher number of consecutive 4%+ daily moves was in October 2008 when there were three in a row. The current streak of back-to-back gains, if it holds, would be the first such streak since coming out of the Financial Crisis, but before that, they were common as the market cap was much lower.

Bespoke Premium

6. Due to Companies Like AAPL The U.S. has a Trade Surplus with China in Services

Liz Ann Sonders

7. 30-Year Mortgage Rate Flirting with 7% Again

Mortgage News Daily

8. Crypto Platform Kraken Rolls Out Stock Trading

Kraken unveils phased rollout for US stocks and ETF trading, shares plans for UK and European expansion.

Quick Take

  • Kraken now supports equities trading on its digital asset exchange, powered by a brokerage deal with Alpaca.
  • The firm teased the move in March after disclosing plans to acquire CFTC-regulated NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion.

Via The Block: San Francisco-based crypto exchange Kraken has added U.S. equities trading to its mobile and web platforms in a step forward for its offerings. The move will allow U.S. customers to manage crypto, stocks and Wall Street funds from a single account, similar to brokerages like Robinhood.

This expansion, executed in collaboration with licensed broker-dealer Alpaca, enables customers to trade over 11,000 U.S.-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds commission-free. More than half of the new offerings will include fractional investment, meaning buyers can purchase less than one whole share.

The program will initially be exclusive to select U.S. states with plans to expand nationwide as part of a phased rollout, according to an announcement on Monday. Additionally, Kraken has eyes on markets in the UK, Europe and Australia.

9.  600M Chinese Live on $140 a Mh

10. Countries with the Most High-Net Worth Individuals

The Visual Capitalist

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 April 11, 2025

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1. XLK Tech ETF Holding 200-Week Moving Average on Long-Term Chart

StockCharts

2. Semiconductor ETF SMH-Same Story

StockCharts

3. $2 Trillion in Prime Brokerage Borrowing

Apollo

4. ROBO-Everyone Talking Robots…ETF New Lows

StockCharts

5. Same with Lithium ETF

StockCharts

6. Small Cap Discount Now in 4th Percentile

VettaFi

7. RIP to the IPO comeback…It Will Be 4 Years in a Row with Lower Number of IPOs

Via Business Insider: A few months ago, after years of abysmal performance, it looked like IPOs were finally set for a comeback. ServiceTitan, a software platform for general contractors, saw its stock soar by 35% after its debut in December. A bunch of hot companies were lined up to go public: the buy-now, pay-later lender Klarna, the ticket reseller StubHub, and the AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave. Silicon Valley, it seemed, was about to return to the good old days, when snazzy new startups could expect a huge payoff on Wall Street. “All signs were pointing to 2025 as the year when we would finally get some IPOs,” says Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital.

But now, the long-anticipated boom in IPOs has suddenly gone bust. CoreWeave’s public offering in March was the biggest tech IPO since 2021, but it was forced to price itself well below the expected range. And on Friday, StubHub and Klarna both delayed their planned IPOs, as Donald Trump’s tariffs sparked a huge slide in the stock market. IPO analysts at Renaissance now estimate that there could be as few as 150 deals this year, which would make 2025 the fourth straight down year for IPOs.

“This is going to shut down the IPO market,” Kennedy says. “The question is, for how long?”

StockCharts

8. Housing in South Update

New single-family houses for sale in the South, where Florida is by far the largest housing market, have ballooned past the Housing-Bust high since mid-2024 to a range between 290,000 to 304,000 houses for sale, with 296,000 new houses for sale in February, up by 72% from February 2019, according to Census Bureau data, which doesn’t provide state-level data, only regional data.

Those new houses are adding large amounts of additional supply to the surging inventories of existing homes. Homebuilders are the pros in this business, they know how to move the inventory: price cuts, building at lower price points, large-scale mortgage-rate buydowns, and incentives. And homeowners wishing to sell have to compete with this supply of new houses and increasingly aggressive builders.

Buyers are still on strike: In the South, pending sales of existing homes rose month-to-month in February, seasonally adjusted, but were down by 3.4% from the collapsed levels February last year, and booked the worst February in the data from the National Association of Realtors. Compared to 2019, pending sales plunged by 29%.

Wolfstreet

9.  Where AI Infrastructure Money is Spent

Capital Group

10. How to Become an Expert

Via Barking Up The Wrong Tree: Here’s how to become an expert at anything:

Concepts First: Learning the fundamental principles instead of just the immediate behaviors is the difference between being a cook and being a chef.

It Needs To Be Difficult: If you’re doing it right, you don’t feel like an expert; you feel like a person who has been mildly electrocuted by their own ambition. It’ll make you wonder if ignorance really is bliss. But an arduous process is what creates mastery.

Don’t Cram: Distributed practice is the sensible Volvo of studying techniques. You’re supposed to take things step-by-step, day after day, until the knowledge seeps into your brain and settles down like a retired couple moving to Florida. Your brain hates the quickie approach and prefers to be seduced gradually, like a Jane Austen character.

Feedback: It’s not “feedback”; it’s a forensic investigation into your incompetence. Find a mentor.

Retention: The “decay curve” is like a ski slope, except there’s no lodge at the bottom — just a pit of “Whoops, I forgot how to speak Spanish.” Overlearning is repetitive, it’s boring, it’s the linguistic equivalent of hitting your head against a wall until the wall starts to feel bad for you. But that’s how you make stuff stick. Wax on, wax off, Daniel-sa

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 April 10, 2025

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1. Sector Return Grid

MarketWatch

2. Hedge Against Inflation? Stock Dividends

Axios

3. 2008 GFC & 2020 Covid Only Periods with Similar Intra-Day Volatility

In yesterday’s session, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) traded in an incredible intraday range of 10.8%. Even crazier is that on Tuesday, the intraday range was 7.3% while Monday’s range was 8.6%!  Since SPY was launched in 1993, the last three days represent just the sixth time that the ETF has had an intraday range of more than 5% for three or more days. The only periods with as many or more consecutive intraday ranges of at least 5% were in the fourth quarter of 2008 (four separate occurrences) and March 2020. These levels of sustained volatility are truly historic.

Bespoke

4. Every Pundit on Planet Arguing Whether Tariffs are Inflationary or Deflationary (demand destruction); CPI Today

CNBC

5. The Rent Lag in CPI Number

Charlie Bilello

6. 300m Chinese Moved to Middle Class Selling to U.S.

Semafor

7. Solar is Adding More Generation than Any Energy Sources

Sherwood News

8. TAN Solar ETF Straight Down…All-Time High $104 2021…$28 Last

StockCharts

9.  American Poll on Illegal Immigrants

Food for Thought: Americans’ views on the deportation of immigrants living in the country illegally

The Daily Shot Brief

10. For Your Weekend Read: NVDA Stock Fell -90% Twice

The New King of Tech-How Jensen Huang built Nvidia into a nearly $3 trillion business’

Via The Atlantic: Another day, another new AI large language model that’s supposedly better than all previous ones. When I began writing this story, Elon Musk’s xAI had just released Grok 3, which the company says performs better than its competitors against a wide range of benchmarks. As I was revising the article, Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which it says outperforms Grok 3. And by the time you read this, who knows? Maybe an entirely new LLM will have appeared. In January, after all, the AI world was temporarily rocked by the release of a low-cost, high-performance LLM from China called DeepSeek-R1. A month later, people were already wondering when DeepSeek-R2 would come out.

The competition among LLMs may be hard to keep track of, but for Nvidia, the company that designs the computer chips—or graphics-processing units (GPUs)—that many of these large language models have been trained on, it’s also enormously lucrative. Nvidia, which, as of this writing, is the third-most-valuable company in the world (after Apple and Microsoft), was started three decades ago by engineers who wanted to make graphics cards for gamers. How it evolved into the company that is providing almost all the picks and shovels for the AI gold rush is the story at the core of Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine. Framed as a biography of Jensen Huang, the only CEO Nvidia has ever had, the book is also something more interesting and revealing: a window onto the intellectual, cultural, and economic ecosystem that has led to the emergence of superpowerful AI.

That ecosystem’s center, of course, is Silicon Valley, where Huang has spent most of his adult life. He was born in Taiwan, the son of a chemical engineer and a teacher. The family moved to Thailand when he was 5, and a few years later, his parents sent him and his older brother to the United States to escape political unrest. Eventually, his parents relocated to the U.S. as well, and Huang grew up in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. In the early 1980s, after majoring in electrical engineering at Oregon State (which at the time didn’t offer a computer-science major), he got a job at Advanced Micro Devices. The company—then the poor cousin of the chip giant Intel—was headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, near US 101, the highway that runs from San Jose to Stanford. Since then, Huang’s career has unfolded within a five-mile radius of that office.

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 April 08, 2025

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1. Russell 1000 Average Stock -30% from 52-Week High

Bespoke

2. Small Cap Healthcare Stocks Officially Flat for 7 Years

Kevin Gordon

3. The Biotech Bear Market in Small Cap…Disappearing IPO Market

Barron’s

4. High Yield Euro Bonds Spreads Widening

Bloomberg

5. Ethereum -55% YTD…Almost Back to 2023 Levels

StockCharts

6. AAPL -31% from Highs…Right on 200-Week Moving Average Long Term Chart

StockCharts

7. Amazon -32% High to Low

StockCharts

8. Jackson Hole Real Estate…$2m to $10m in 15 Years

WSJ

9.  China’s Humanoid Robot Market

WSJ

10. Ten Million Less Viewers without Caitlin Clark

March Madness hit badly in Caitlin Clark’s absence as women’s Final Four TV ratings revealed.

Via MSN: UConn’s Final Four win over UCLA averaged 4.1 million viewers on Friday, which was a drop of over 10 million viewers compared to last season when the Huskies faced Iowa and Caitlin Clark.

When the Hawkeyes advanced to their second consecutive national championship game with a dramatic 71-69 win over UConn, it drew a record 14.2 million viewers. While the Huskies’ win over the Bruins in 2025 was the fifth-most watched women’s college basketball game ever on ESPN, the absence of Clark was felt.

“I feel like we’re just scratching the surface. If you would have told people this is where the WNBA is, five years ago … people probably wouldn’t have believed you, because they never thought that was possible.

“They never thought people would buy tickets; they never thought we’d play on ABC, never thought we’d be on ESPN. They never thought there could be sold out arenas or little kids wanting to wear WNBA jerseys.”

MSN

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 April 07, 2025

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. S&P Biggest 2 Day Decline Since 1950—What Does History Say?

Charlie Bilello

2. Forward P/E Correcting Fast…Ex-Mag 7 Closer to 15

Bloomberg

3. Last Week Higher Dollar Amount was Lost than 2008 Crisis

StockCharts

4. S&P 50day Still Above 200day…Break Today?

StockCharts

5. Crude Oil Fell -13.6% in 2 Days, THU and FRI

StockCharts

6. Ten Year Treasury Moved Back Above 4% Last Night

CNBC

7. China Tariffs…U.S. Does Not Export Much to China

Markets are freaking out about China retaliating hard against the United States, with a 34% tariff on all US goods. But in economic terms, this isn’t such a big deal: China barely imports from the US in the first place.

Chartbook

8. The Top in Globalization was in Motion

StockCharts

9. Another Contra Indicator?

Hedge funds capitulate, investors brace for margin calls in market rout.

Summary:

  • Some hedge funds offload all stocks as selloff widens
  • Prime brokers say leverage falling, more selling coming
  • Sales triggered by margin calls rise in South Korea

Via Reuters: Some hedge funds say they are offloading all or most of their holdings of stocks as U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war wipes out trillions of dollars of market value and forces them to curtail trading using borrowed cash.

In the three trading days following Trump’s announcement of broad reciprocal tariffs on almost all countries, stock markets across the world have plummeted, and bonds have become both a haven and a bet on rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, turning on their head market assumptions before Trump took office.

The selloff on Wall Street has been vicious as investors that bet on U.S. exceptionalism and economic might stampede out of its markets.

The benchmark S&P 500 index (.SPX), opens new tab fell 10.5% over two days and lost about $5 trillion in market value. China’s CSI300 (.CSI300), opens new tab blue-chip index fell more than 5% on Monday, while the pan-European STOXX index (.STOXX), opens new tab is down nearly 12% from its March 3 all-time closing high and in correction territory.

William Xin, chairman of hedge fund Spring Mountain Pu Jiang Investment Management based in Shanghai, said he had liquidated all of his stock positions as the current geopolitical landscape is messy, and the risk of a global recession is rising.

10. Atomic Habits Chart

James Clear