1. Earnings Tomorrow NVDA After Close…The Only Chart that Matters this Week.
NVDA-2 Lower Highs in place…Need to close above $140 for breakout.
2. Real Estate Leading Sector for Last Month of Trading.
(7/31 – 8/23) SPDR Fund XLRE leads the major 11 sectors with a 5.29% gain.
3. Japan Stock Market +23% from Lows.
4. Corporate Buyback Data from B of A
Equities: Corporate cash as a share of total assets has been trending lower, indicating that we could see a pullback in share buybacks.
Source: BofA Global Research
5. Alternative Energy Stocks Hyrdrogen and Biofuel Sell Off.
WSJ
6. Allbirds Sneaks -97%
Business Insider-The Rise and Fall of Allbirds
- Allbirds was founded in 2015 and soared to prominence with its iconic wool sneaker.
- The company went public in November 2021. Shares rose 90% on the opening day of trading.
- Sales have since slowed and the company reported a nearly 27% decline in quarterly revenue.
With the closure of 14 underperforming stores, CEO Joe Vernachio told investors the past 18 months have been a period of reinvention for the company as it looks to reinvent itself in a leaner, more focused organization.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-allbirds-rise-fall-2023-4
7. Communism Sucks…Chinese Consumer Sentiment Chart.
8. Taliban Vice and Virtue Laws -AP News
Article 13 relates to women. It says it is mandatory for a woman to veil her body at all times in public and that a face covering is essential to avoid temptation and tempting others. Clothing should not be thin, tight or short.
Women should veil themselves in front of all male strangers, including Muslims, and in front of all non-Muslims to avoid being corrupted. A woman’s voice is deemed intimate and so should not be heard singing, reciting, or reading aloud in public. It is forbidden for women to look at men they are not related to by blood or marriage and vice versa.
Article 17 bans the publication of images of living beings, threatening an already fragile Afghan media landscape.
Article 19 bans the playing of music, the transportation of solo female travelers, and the mixing of men and women who are not related to each other. The law also obliges passengers and drivers to perform prayers at designated times.
9. Fare Evasion Surges on N.Y.C. Buses, Where 48% of Riders Fail to Pay
Every weekday in New York City, close to one million bus riders — roughly one out of every two passengers — board without paying. The skipped fares are a crucial and growing loss of revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is under severe financial pressure.
New York’s long-running fare evasion problem, among the worst of any major city in the world, has intensified recently; before the pandemic, only about one in five bus riders skipped the fare.
Yet public officials have done relatively little to collect the lost revenue from bus riders. Instead, they have focused almost exclusively on the subway system, where waves of police officers and private security guards have been deployed to enforce payment, even as fare evasion rates on trains are dwarfed by those on buses.
During the first three months of this year, 48 percent of bus riders did not pay, according to the latest available statistics from the transit authority, while 14 percent of subway riders evaded fares. Roughly twice the number of people ride the city’s subways as ride its buses.
Fare evasion has led to startling financial losses for the M.T.A., the state agency that runs the city transit system. In 2022, the authority lost $315 million because of bus fare evasion and $285 million as a result of subway fare beaters, according to a 2023 report commissioned by the M.T.A.
Transit experts say some New Yorkers don’t pay to board the bus because they cannot afford the fare. Others find it far easier to board a bus without paying than to sneak into the subway system, where turnstiles and gates block access. The standard fare for subway riders and most bus passengers is $2.90 per trip.
Fare beaters might also feel emboldened, experts say, because heavy traffic and a lack of bus lanes means that bus service can be slow and unreliable. For some riders, it is simply not worth the price of admission. The pandemic also reinforced the perception that fares were optional, after the authority made bus rides free for a few months in 2020.
“In the public’s mind, they don’t see the bus system as the real source of fare evasion,” said David R. Jones, an M.T.A. board member and the chief executive of the Community Service Society, a nonprofit supporting lower-income New Yorkers. “We have to get people to recognize that this is no longer acceptable.”
Even before the pandemic, bus fare evasion was a serious problem in New York. The evasion rate was roughly 18 percent in 2018, according to a 2019 M.T.A. report. Around that time, the rate was 11 percent in Paris and 5 percent in Toronto. In London, where riders can face fines exceeding $1,000, the fare evasion rate on buses was only 1.5 percent.
Transit leaders in New York have struggled to balance their desire to enforce the rules against the safety of drivers and the needs of low-income commuters. When Andy Byford, the former leader of the city’s subway and bus systems, suggested in 2019 that the M.T.A. needed “cops on buses,” the backlash was swift. The authority for years has sent groups of unarmed employees, known as “eagle teams,” to patrol buses and give tickets to riders who do not pay. Last year the agency expanded the routes they covered.
https://dnyuz.com/2024/08/26/fare-evasion-surges-on-n-y-c-buses-where-48-of-riders-fail-to-pay/
10. The problem isn’t that life is unfair – it’s your broken idea of fairness
Unless you’re winning, most of life will seem hideously unfair to you.-Oliver Emberton The truth is, life is just playing by different rules. The real rules are there. They actually make sense. But they’re a bit more complicated, and a lot less comfortable, which is why most people never manage to learn them.
Let’s try.
Rule #1: Life is a competition
That business you work for? Someone’s trying to kill it. That job you like? Someone would love to replace you with a computer program. That girlfriend / boyfriend / high-paying job / Nobel Prize that you want? So does somebody else.
We’re all in competition, although we prefer not to realise it. Most achievements are only notable relative to others. You swam more miles, or can dance better, or got more Facebook Likes than the average. Well done.
It’s a painful thing to believe, of course, which is why we’re constantly assuring each other the opposite. “Just do your best”, we hear. “You’re only in competition with yourself”. The funny thing about platitudes like that is they’re designed to make you try harder anyway. If competition really didn’t matter, we’d tell struggling children to just give up.
Fortunately, we don’t live in a world where everyone has to kill each other to prosper. The blessing of modern civilisation is there’s abundant opportunities, and enough for us all to get by, even if we don’t compete directly.
But never fall for the collective delusion that there’s not a competition going on. People dress up to win partners. They interview to win jobs. If you deny that competition exists, you’re just losing. Everything in demand is on a competitive scale. And the best is only available to those who are willing to truly fight for it.
Rule #2. You’re judged by what you do, not what you think
Society judges people by what they can do for others. Can you save children from a burning house, or remove a tumour, or make a room of strangers laugh? You’ve got value right there.
That’s not how we judge ourselves though. We judge ourselves by our thoughts.
“I’m a good person”. “I’m ambitious”. “I’m better than this.” These idle impulses may comfort us at night, but they’re not how the world sees us. They’re not even how we see other people.
Well-meaning intentions don’t matter. An internal sense of honour and love and duty count for squat. What exactly can you and have you done for the world?
Abilities are not prized by their virtue. Whatever admiration society awards us, comes from the selfish perspectives of others. A hard working janitor is less rewarded by society than a ruthless stockbroker. A cancer researcher is rewarded less than a supermodel. Why? Because those abilities are rarer and impact more people.
We like to like to think that society rewards those who do the best work. Like so:
But in reality, social reward is just a network effect. Reward comes down mostly to the number of people you impact:
Write an unpublished book, you’re nobody. Write Harry Potter and the world wants to know you. Save a life, you’re a small-town hero, but cure cancer and you’re a legend. Unfortunately, the same rule applies to all talents, even unsavoury ones: get naked for one person and you might just make them smile, get naked for fifty million people and you might just be Kim Kardashian.
You may hate this. It may make you sick. Reality doesn’t care. You’re judged by what you have the ability to do, and the volume of people you can impact. If you don’t accept this, then the judgement of the world will seem very unfair indeed.
Rule #3. Our idea of fairness is self interest
People like to invent moral authority. It’s why we have referees in sports games and judges in courtrooms: we have an innate sense of right and wrong, and we expect the world to comply. Our parents tell us this. Our teachers teach us this. Be a good boy, and have some candy.
But reality is indifferent. You studied hard, but you failed the exam. You worked hard, but you didn’t get promoted. You love her, but she won’t return your calls.
The problem isn’t that life is unfair; it’s your broken idea of fairness.
Take a proper look at that person you fancy but didn’t fancy you back. That’s a complete person. A person with years of experience being someone completely different to you. A real person who interacts with hundreds or thousands of other people every year.
Now what are the odds that among all that, you’re automatically their first pick for love-of-their-life? Because – what – you exist? Because you feel something for them? That might matter to you, but their decision is not about you.
Similarly we love to hate our bosses and parents and politicians. Their judgements are unfair. And stupid. Because they don’t agree with me! And they should! Because I am unquestionably the greatest authority on everything ever in the whole world!
It’s true there are some truly awful authority figures. But they’re not all evil, self-serving monsters trying to line their own pockets and savour your misery. Most are just trying to do their best, under different circumstances to your own.
Maybe they know things you don’t – like, say, your company will go bust if they don’t do something unpopular. Maybe they have different priorities to you – like, say, long term growth over short term happiness.
But however they make you feel, the actions of others are not some cosmic judgement on your being. They’re just a byproduct of being alive.
Why life isn’t fair
Our idea of fairness isn’t actually obtainable. It’s really just a cloak for wishful thinking.
Can you imagine how insane life would be if it actually was ‘fair’ to everyone? No-one could fancy anyone who wasn’t the love of their life, for fear of breaking a heart. Companies would only fail if everyone who worked for them was evil. Relationships would only end when both partners died simultaneously. Raindrops would only fall on bad people.
Most of us get so hung up on how we think the world should work that we can’t see how it does. But facing that reality might just be the key to unlocking your understanding of the world, and with it, all of your potential.
