“Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”
— Maya Angelou
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“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already.”
— Tolstoy
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“People spend too much time on the last 24 hours and not enough time on the last 6,000 years.”
— Will Durant
Tiny Thoughts
The highest form of leverage is reputation.
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Imagine what you could accomplish if you weren’t focused on being right all the time.
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Reasoning in public forces discipline of thought.
It’s like doing math on the chalkboard in front of the class. Every step must be clear and correct, or someone will point out the mistake. There’s no room for fuzzy thinking or skipped steps.
If your reasoning is correct, you have nothing to fear. If it’s wrong, you have everything to learn.
4. GE Announced Split of Company in November 2021….Spin-Offs Jan 3, 2023
GE +62% Year to Date.
5. Copper Breaks to New Highs
6. Druckenmiller Bets 15% of His Portfolio on Russell 2000 Small Cap Calls….Tom Lee Pick of Year is Small Cap
Here’s what Druckenmiller did as he sold Nvidia — it’s a risky bet on an unloved asset By Barbara Kollmeyer
The market wanted a reason to rally and got it on Wednesday after data showed slowing inflation and an economy that’s also ratcheting down. That data combination, in theory, may make it easier for the Fed to justify an interest-rate cut, and the market hopes soonish.
But lower rates could also help another group of stocks, which have a tough run this year — small caps. And one big investor seems ready for this bunch of equities to take off. Our call of the day focuses on billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who just revealed a big bet on the Russell 2000 RUT in a newly released 13-F regulatory filing. Through his Duquesne Family Office, Druckenmiller invested a 15% chunk of his portfolio in call options on the iShares Russell 2000 ETF IWM in the first quarter. The filing also confirmed the firm reduced holdings in tech names Nvidia NVDA, +3.58%, which Druckenmiller discussed earlier this month, and Seagate Technology STX, +2.60%. That Russell 2000 bet would indicate that Druckenmiller’s firm smells opportunity for struggling small caps, which investors have struggled to love or even like in recent years.
Business Insider-3 reasons an overlooked area of the stock market is poised for 50% gains this year, according to Fundstrat Tom Lee
“Our top idea for 2024 is small-caps, where we see at least 50% upside,” Fundstrat’s head of research Tom Lee said in a note on Wednesday, noting that small caps are so disdained by the market that even a “wrong-way Charlie” can confidently bet against their success. Lee, who nailed his 2023 stock market forecast, laid down three fundamental reasons to take a closer look at this unloved segment of the roaring US equities market. First, Lee notes that Russell 2000 firms are poised for substantial revenue growth, outpacing the S&P 500 by a significant margin in 2025 from 2024 thanks to the Fed’s potential rate cut this year.
“Now, you may be surprised, but small-caps actually have faster revenue growth. 6.9% versus 5.5%, that’s 140 basis points faster or nearly 25% faster growth, and that’s true in every quintile” Lee said in a video on the topic posted this week.
Second, Lee also highlighted small-caps’ earnings growth potential, projecting 19% growth is earnings-per-share, outpacing the S&P 500’s 12% EPS growth. He said small-caps have an advantage in their lower P/E ratios compared to large-cap stocks, making them look more affordable to investors.
Finally, the Fundstrat CEO noted that institutional investors have been dumping small caps for years, making them ripe for a turnaround trade. “[M]ulti-cap investors have multi-decade low allocations to small-caps even as small-caps have begun to outperform. We see this performance chasing as a key factor for small-caps to sustain gains,” he added.
Item 1 of 7 Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico looks on during a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Germany, January 24, 2024. REUTERS/Nadja Wohlleben/File Photo
Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico looks on during a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Germany, January 24, 2024. REUTERS/Nadja Wohlleben/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
Summary
Slovak PM was shot five times at close range on Wednesday
Hospital says his condition is ‘very serious’ but stable
Police charge suspect with attempted murder, says website
Slovakia’s president, president-elect call for calm
Security council, cabinet are meeting on Thursday
BANSKA BYSTRICA, Slovakia, May 16 (Reuters) – Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico was in a “very serious” but stable condition on Thursday, a hospital official said, after he was shot five times in an assassination attempt that has laid bare deep political divisions in the country. The shooting was the first major assassination attempt on a European political leader for more than 20 years, and spurred international condemnation, with political analysts and lawmakers saying it was indicative of an increasingly febrile and polarised political climate across the continent. Advertisement · Scroll to continue Slovak President Zuzana Caputova called for a calming of political tensions and said she would invite all parliamentary party leaders for a joint meeting. Fico ally and President-elect Peter Pellegrini urged parties to suspend or tone down their campaigning for next month’s European Parliament elections. “If there is anything the people of Slovakia urgently need today, it is at least a basic consensus and unity among Slovaks’ political representatives,” said Pellegrini, who won an April election for the mainly ceremonial post of president. Advertisement · Scroll to continue News website tvnoviny.sk reported on Thursday that police had charged the suspect with attempted murder and that he could face life imprisonment. Miriam Lapunikova, director of the F.D. Roosevelt University Hospital in Banska Bystrica where Fico is being treated, said the 59-year-old prime minister had undergone five hours of surgery with two teams to treat multiple gunshot wounds. “At this point his condition is stabilised but is truly very serious, he will be in the intensive care unit,” she told reporters. Slovakia PM Fico’s condition still ‘very serious’ after surgery | Reuters
9. Longer-Term Perspective on Crime..Violent Crime in the U.S. Since 1990s Big Dowtrend
“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.”
This passage has been highlighted by 11,590 readers in the Kindle edition of Gregory Hays’ translation of Meditations. It’s the most popular quote in the most popular edition (we think that it’s the best edition too).
The reason it resonates is that it articulates in simple terms a timely and timeless truth that is as empowering as it is profound: it’s not events themselves that cause our suffering but how we choose to interpret them. Events are objective, our interpretations are not. They are a guess, a story, an opinion as to what’s happened and what it means, and whether or not our actions are governed by those instant interpretations is a good indicator of exactly how stoically we’re behaving.
Remember Epictetus’s famous observation that every situation has two handles—or two interpretations—and that we choose which one to grab. We decide what story to tell ourselves. We decide how we react. We decide to feel harmed or to not feel harmed. And once we make that choice–choosing not to be offended, choosing to see an opportunity to practice a virtue–then we really haven’t been harmed.
There’s a reason so many people have highlighted that passage. It’s because it’s true.
Gas prices are down for a third straight week. As of May 13th, the price of regular and premium gas fell 3 and 4 cents from the previous week, respectively. According to GasBuddy.com, California has the highest average price for regular at $5.25 and Mississippi has the cheapest at $3.05.
Currently, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline stands at $3.61 with premium gasoline averaging $4.51 per gallon. One year ago, regular gas was priced at $3.54 per gallon, while premium gas was at $4.36 per gallon.
Wolf Street Bankruptcies continue to scrape along the historic bottom, with just 121,000 consumers with bankruptcies in Q1, compared to the already low levels of the Good Times of around 200,000:
I still remember when I first heard the song by Peter Gabriel, “Solsbury Hill.” Something about that song—the lyrics, the melody, the unusual 7/4 time signature—gave me chills. Even now, years later, it still can make me cry.
Who among us doesn’t have a similar story about a song that touched us? Whether attending a concert, listening to the radio, or singing in the shower, there’s something about music that can fill us with emotion, from joy to sadness.
Music impacts us in ways that other sounds don’t, and for years now, scientists have been wondering why. Now they are finally beginning to find some answers. Using fMRI technology, they’re discovering why music can inspire such strong feelings and bind us so tightly to other people. “Music affects deep emotional centers in the brain, “ says Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University who studies the brain on music. “A single sound tone is not really pleasurable in itself; but if these sounds are organized over time in some sort of arrangement, it’s amazingly powerful.”
How music makes the brain happy How powerful? In one of her studies, she and her colleagues hooked up participants to an fMRI machine and recorded their brain activity as they listened to a favorite piece of music. During peak emotional moments in the songs identified by the listeners, dopamine was released in the nucleus accumbens, a structure deep within the older part of our human brain. “That’s a big deal, because dopamine is released with biological rewards, like eating and sex, for example,” says Salimpoor. “It’s also released with drugs that are very powerful and addictive, like cocaine or amphetamines.”
There’s another part of the brain that seeps dopamine, specifically just before those peak emotional moments in a song: the caudate nucleus, which is involved in the anticipation of pleasure. Presumably, the anticipatory pleasure comes from familiarity with the song—you have a memory of the song you enjoyed in the past embedded in your brain, and you anticipate the high points that are coming. This pairing of anticipation and pleasure is a potent combination, one that suggests we are biologically-driven to listen to music we like.
But what happens in our brains when we like something we haven’t heard before? To find out, Salimpoor again hooked up people to fMRI machines. But this time she had participants listen to unfamiliar songs, and she gave them some money, instructing them to spend it on any music they liked. When analyzing the brain scans of the participants, she foundthat when they enjoyed a new song enough to buy it, dopamine was again released in the nucleus accumbens. But, she also found increased interaction between the nucleus accumbens and higher, cortical structures of the brain involved in pattern recognition, musical memory, and emotional processing.
This finding suggested to her that when people listen to unfamiliar music, their brains process the sounds through memory circuits, searching for recognizable patterns to help them make predictions about where the song is heading. If music is too foreign-sounding, it will be hard to anticipate the song’s structure, and people won’t like it—meaning, no dopamine hit. But, if the music has some recognizable features—maybe a familiar beat or melodic structure—people will more likely be able to anticipate the song’s emotional peaks and enjoy it more. The dopamine hit comes from having their predictions confirmed—or violated slightly, in intriguing ways.
“It’s kind of like a roller coaster ride,” she says, “where you know what’s going to happen, but you can still be pleasantly surprised and enjoy it.”
Salimpoor believes this combination of anticipation and intense emotional release may explain why people love music so much, yet have such diverse tastes in music—one’s taste in music is dependent on the variety of musical sounds and patterns heard and stored in the brain over the course of a lifetime. It’s why pop songs are, well, popular—their melodic structures and rhythms are fairly predictable, even when the song is unfamiliar—and why jazz, with its complicated melodies and rhythms, is more an acquired taste. On the other hand, people tend to tire of pop music more readily than they do of jazz, for the same reason—it can become too predictable.
Her findings also explain why people can hear the same song over and over again and still enjoy it. The emotional hit off of a familiar piece of music can be so intense, in fact, that it’s easily re-stimulated even years later.
“If I asked you to tell me a memory from high school, you would be able to tell me a memory,” says Salimpoor. “But, if you listened to a piece of music from high school, you would actually feel the emotions.”
Dave Lutz Jones Trading KITTY ROARS– Wall Street is feeling meme stock déjà vu. An army of small investors this week have been driving up the price of GameStop, the video game retailer whose enormous 2021 rally led to fame for the stock’s chief social-media savvy booster (Keith Gill, known as Roaring Kitty), a Netflix series and a movie, a congressional hearing, an investigation by securities regulators — and steep losses for those who mistimed the stock’s rapid rise and fall.
The transmission mechanism of monetary policy is weaker because a rising share of US homes don’t have a mortgage, and about half of all mortgages have an interest rate locked-in below 4%, see charts below.
Torsten Slok, Ph.D.Chief Economist, Partner
8. No Shock with Rates Higher and Post-Covid Boom Hangover….Second Home Sales at 6-Year Low
8. China Overtakes U.S. as Largest Coffee Shop Market. Luckin and Cotti Open 11,000 Outlets vs. Starbucks 785
World Coffee Portal. China leads significant coffee shop growth across East Asia -China has overtaken the US as the largest branded coffee shop market in the world by outlets, growing 58% over the last 12 months to reach 49,691 outlets. Growth was led by the rapid expansion of small store format and delivery focused Luckin Coffee and Cotti Coffee, which added 5,059 and 6,004 net new stores respectively. Starbucks opened net 785 outlets in China during the period and is the second largest branded coffee operator in the country by outlets. China is the fastest growing market in East Asia ahead of Malaysia (28%) and the Philippines (15.3%). Overall, six of the largest 10 markets by outlets achieved double-digit outlet growth over the last 12 months.
9. CHOP restored eyesight for two children with one injection. It’s one more step for gene editing using CRISPR.
By Abraham Gutman-Philly Inquirer
The 10-year-old and 14-year-old patients had their eyesight improved about 10- to 100-fold after a single injection to their retina. A new study from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that gene editing in the eyes of children can restore vision safely.Patrick Sison / AP
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia physicians restored eyesight in two children by performing a gene therapy technique entirely inside their eyes to correct a genetic mutation causing blindness, a first-of-its-kind treatment for kids.
The 10-year-old and 14-year-old patients had their eyesight improved about 10- to 100-fold after a single injection to their retina, the area in the back of the eye that converts light into electric signals that the brain can process.The procedure is known as gene editing, a type of therapy used to correct a deficiency in a person’s DNA causing disease. It is typically performed outside of the body by taking cells out and then transplanting them again after the genetic correction.
“It’s the first time that gene editing has been used in the eyes of children, and proved safe and successful,” said Tomas Aleman, a retina specialist at CHOP and one of the study’s authors. The study focused on the safety of the procedure, finding the gene-editing injection to the eye to be safe. But researchers also saw vision improvement in half of the patients, including the two children treated at CHOP.
The children still did not leave the hospital with 20/20 eyesight, said Aleman, who is also a professor at Penn Medicine. He hopes that delivering the treatment to children when they are younger will lead to greater improvement in eyesight. The study is part of an ongoing collaboration that includes CHOP, University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Oregon Health and Science University, and the University of Michigan.The research was funded by Editas Medicine, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based gene therapy company.
Spell checking Gene therapy fixes errors in the body’s genetic code using an approach analogous to editing a text, said Eric Kmiec, executive director and chief scientific officer of ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute, which was not involved in the study.
A deficiency in a gene is like a misspelled word.Gene therapies a decade ago could only fix the error by injecting corrected DNA next to it within the cell, like striking out a word and writing it the right way by its side. The newer generation of therapies instead fix the misspelling itself using a technology called CRISPR.
Physicians most often apply gene therapy by taking cells out of the body, fixing the genetic error, and then transplanting the cells back into the patient. That’s how CRISPR works to cure sickle cell disease: Bone marrow cells are corrected to produce red blood cells in the right shape, and are returned to the body where they multiply.That approach has a few problems, Kmiec said. The body can reject the corrected cells like any transplantation. And cells in the nervous system don’t multiply.
These problems have led scientists to work on ways to fix the mutations in cells while they are inside the body. Kmiec’s research focuses on doing that with cancerous tumors. The CHOP team is focusing on editing genes in the eye.“This is remarkable right? You can correct a mutation in the human gene in the body,” Kmiec said.
In Brooks’ recent book with Oprah Winfrey, the pair explain that your goal in life should not be to attain happiness, but to constantly strive for “happierness.” Brooks often emphasizes that happiness is not a destination, but a direction — something that you should aim to increase without an end goal in mind. “It’s not just, ‘Go get happier.’ That’s too general,” Brooks said on a new episode of the “Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris” podcast. “I talk about the sub-parts, the macronutrients of happiness.”
“When I meet somebody, I can figure out pretty quickly where their ‘diet’ is not up to snuff, where they’re lacking in their macronutrients of happiness and we can work on the subdimensions,” he added.
The happiest people “enjoy their lives. They get a lot of satisfaction in their activities and they have a sense of meaning about why they’re alive,” Brooks said on the podcast. “These are the protein, carbohydrates and fat of happiness.”
The 3 ‘macronutrients of happiness’
Enjoyment
Satisfaction
Purpose
Enjoyment People often assume that enjoyment is simply pleasure, Brooks said, which isn’t an accurate way to think of it. Constantly chasing purely pleasurable experiences “is a terrible way to live a fulfilling life,” he said. “What we need to do, by the way is not to get rid of the sources of pleasure, but to add two things that will make them more human.” You can experience enjoyment when you take a source of pleasure and add people and memory to the mix, Brooks said: “If you’re doing something that’s pleasurable and can be addictive [and] you don’t do it alone, then you can get enjoyment which is a source of actual authentic and enduring happiness.” There are experiences that you can enjoy solo like reading a book, meditating or listening to music, but he suggested engaging in social activities like going out for drinks or watching funny videos on social media with people you enjoy spending time with.
Satisfaction “Satisfaction is the joy, the reward, that you get after you struggle for something,” Brooks said. “We as humans, we need to struggle, we need to strive, we need to sacrifice, we even need pain in our lives, because that’s actually how we earn something.” When you feel like something you have is something you’ve earned, it makes it much more valuable to you in the end, he said. Brooks shared an analogy from his father-in-law that illustrates the concept of satisfaction: “The reason people aren’t as happy as they should be is because they don’t enjoy their dinner,” he said. “Because they’re never hungry.” He also used the example of how his students at Harvard wouldn’t be as satisfied by acing a test if they cheated, compared to if they worked really hard to study for the exam. “We want to defer our gratification for real rewards,” he explained.
Purpose Purpose is the feeling that your life has a sense of meaning, Brooks said. Of all three “macronutrients,” purpose is the one that you need to experience the most. Brooks said that there are three sub-parts to meaning:
Coherence: Why do things happen the way they do?
Purpose: Why is my life unfolding the way it is? What are my goals, and what’s my direction?
Significance: Why does it matter that I am alive?
And there aren’t right answers to these questions, he said, because the answers are subjective for everyone. The only wrong answers to these questions are no answers, “which is not failure. It’s actually a really good outcome if you fail because you know what to start looking for,” Brooks said. “It takes a lot of work” to find your purpose, he added, but it’s really important to think about it and have a sense of direction.
