3. 43% of U.S. Market Cap Reporting Earnings this Week
Twits note the breakdown of earnings in the weeks to come.
4. Another Small Cap vs. Large Cap Stock Chart
Small cap stocks are about as cheap as they get versus large caps, says Callum Thomas at Topdown Charts, who provides the image below. “All those stories and narratives about Large Growth are already in the price, and then some. Longer-term contrarian minded investors should take note,” says Thomas.
SOURCE: TOPDOWN CHARTS
5. S&P vs. IWC Microcap Stocks
This chart compares S&P vs. Smallest U.S. stocks…straight up 2023 but failed to make new highs yet.
6. We are Fast Approaching the Amount of Public Companies Being Cut in Half Since 1990s
7. Europe 96% of $100m Companies are Private
Torsten Slok, Ph.D.-Chief Economist, Partner
8. We Showed Solar ETF Making New Lows Last Week….LIT Lithium ETF Close
Theme investing not easy …Solar and Lithium ETFs -50% from highs.
Semafor Private equity’s latest trade: The financial futures of millions of retiree-Liz Hoffman
A brisk new trade in the financial futures of millions of retirees is unnerving some US workers, regulators, and politicians who worry that private equity firms will invest corporate pensions recklessly. Recent lawsuits challenging AT&T, Lockheed, and Alcoa’s plans to turn their pensions over to Athene, which is owned by Apollo, casts a broader spotlight on private equity’s push into new corners of finance. Sen. Sherrod Brown has held hearings, cheered on by the Teamsters, and the Labor Department is weighing whether to require companies to at least consider whether an insurance business is owned by private equity before turning over their pensions. Companies like AT&T and IBM don’t want to be in the retirement business. So they’ve been offloading their pension plans to insurance companies. The 773 deals last year broke 2022’s record of 568, according to Aon, which advises corporate pensions.
Journal story from earlier in the week, citizens can’t sell their homes, but if they could exit….It would move to U.S. treasuries bonds and dollar WSJ Cao Li —Zhao has moved away from the village, heading to the nearby city of Changchun, where there are more job opportunities. She said her property portfolio could be worth as much as $500,000, if only she could find a buyer. And when she does sell, she has no plans to put the money back into China’s shaky property market. “How great it would be if I could sell them and use the proceeds to buy dollars, U.S. Treasury bonds, or bitcoin,” she said.FXI China ETF held 2022 low for now
I.“If you feel resistance before you begin, it’s usually procrastination and you need to get started. If you feel resistance after you begin, it’s usually feedback and you need to make adjustments.”
II. “Focus is how you knit the hours of the day together. With focus, the day becomes a beautiful tapestry. Without focus, you end up holding a bundle of loose string.”
III. “Anytime in my life when I have managed to go from a vision to a reality, the vision has not been a plan but a practice.
In other words, what matters is not having a vision, but rather making a habit of returning to and revising the vision. For the big things in my life, I’m always coming back to them week after week—sometimes day after day. As new information arrives, the vision gets updated. The dream becomes more crystallized over time. It’s a habit of thinking about where you want to go with an ever-increasing degree of clarity.
You do not need a vision, you need the practice of envisioning.”
A series of lower highs….50 day and 200 day sloping downward.
3. Bonds vs. Other Assets All Trending Down.
4. Japanese Stocks in Bull Market…..Yen 34-Year Low Helping Exports
YEN new lows
5. Chinese Loading Up on Gold.
From Dave Lutz at Jones GOLDEN– Huge bets by Chinese speculators on rising gold prices have helped super-charge the precious metal’s rally to an all-time high this month, in a sign that Asian traders are beginning to eclipse their western counterparts in their influence on the bullion market. Long gold positions held by futures traders on the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE) climbed to 295,233 contracts, equivalent to 295 tonnes of gold. That marks a rise of almost 50 per cent since late September before geopolitical tensions flared up in the Middle East. A record bullish position of 324,857 contracts was hit earlier this month, according to Bloomberg data going back to 2015, FT reports.
6. AMD -31% from high …200-day in play
Tech/AI name about to test 200day
7. Spotify Massive Free Cash Flow Growth
8. Effective Fed Funds Rate Over 5%…..Savings Accounts paying 0.5%
Data from Standard & Poors shows personal providers of home and auto insurance have been losing money for a few years now:
The payouts exceed the premiums earned from customers.
So what happens from here?
Used car prices are coming down after the dramatic re-pricing during the pandemic. Hopefully, that will filter through to lower prices and lower premiums now that supply chains have healed.
It’s harder to see the other problem areas improve in the years ahead.
We Americans love driving massive trucks and SUVs. With new technologies, our vehicles are becoming increasingly complex. Unless we ban smartphones while driving, I don’t see a path to a road full of better drivers until we have fully self-driving cars.
And natural disasters only seem to be increasing in their frequency and severity.1
It’s difficult to envision a scenario in which insurance rates drastically decline to levels consumers were accustomed to.
My only financial advice is to shop around when your insurance comes due and you see higher premiums.
And get used to paying higher insurance prices, especially in certain states.
4. Same Story Fund Flows…Investors Buying Large Cap and Selling Small Cap
From Dave Lutz at Jones
5. No Move Up Small Cap vs. QQQ
6. Tesla Market Cap Today vs. November 2021
Jim Reid Deutsche Bank
7. Ferrari Vs. Tesla
This chart compares Ferrari stock RACE vs. TSLA
8. Threads just dethroned X, according to this key metric-Business Insider
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg before Congress, alongside Linda Yaccarino of X and Shou Zi Chou of TikTok.
Threads is now consistently surpassing X in daily US users, data shows.
While X’s user base remains relatively flat, it still has Threads beat on monthly users.
Threads is still gaining ground with users and could be on its way to becoming bigger than X.
Meta’s newest app, launched last summer on the back of Instagram’s tech, has seen daily active users grow consistently since November, according to usage estimates from Apptopia. Threads is a direct rival of X, formerly Twitter, which has struggled to maintain its user base since Elon Musk acquired the platform about 18 months ago.
Now, Threads has more daily users in the US than X, a trend that’s been ongoing since December, when Threads became Apple’s most downloaded app.
“Threads DAUs in the US passed X in December 2023 and it has not looked back,” Thomas Grant, Apptopia’s VP of research, said. It’s currently the third most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store, while X is in 41st place. In the Google Play Store, Threads is in 12th place among free apps, while X is in 44th place.
9. Covid Response (20% of GDP) vs. Marshall Plan (5% OF GDP)
Torsten Slok, Ph.D.Chief Economist, Partner The Marshall Plan was 5% of US GDP, and the US fiscal response to covid was 20% of US GDP, see chart below.
When you’re first starting, you may or may not have a job. You don’t have any money. You’re at a complete uncertainty about your career.
What I learned early on is that if I put in the effort, I can learn almost anything. It may take me a long time, but by putting in the effort I taught myself technology, I taught myself to program. … It was time-consuming, painfully so, but that investment in myself has paid dividends for the rest of my life.
I learned that learning truly is a skill … and that by continuing to learn to this day, I can compete and get ahead of most people, because the reality is most people don’t put in the time to learn … and that’s always given me a competitive advantage.
And here’s the thing. Research on achievement and success by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck shows that most people embrace, whether consciously or not, one of two mental perspectives on talent:
Fixed mindset: The belief that intelligence, ability, and talent are inborn and relatively fixed. Someone with a fixed mindset might think, “I’m not good at sales, so I probably shouldn’t try to start a business.”
Growth mindset: The belief that intelligence, ability, and talent can be learned and improved with effort. Someone with a growth mindset might think, “I don’t have any sales experience, but with a little time and effort I can surely develop the skills I need.”
Embrace a fixed mindset — assume that you aren’t (and will never be) particularly smart, or skilled, or adept, etc. — and whenever you find yourself struggling you’re likely to quit. If who you are — and will always be — isn’t good enough, why try?
Embrace a growth mindset and the world — with time, effort, and dedication — can be your oyster.
Because, at least in part, embracing a growth mindset can also change your brain at a neurological level:
A study published in Psychological Science foundthat people with a growth mindset exhibit a higher Pe (error positivity) waveform response, which correlates to paying greater attention to mistakes — and makes those individuals much more receptive to corrective (whether internal or external) feedback.
A study published in Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience found that a growth mindset was related to ventral and dorsal striatal connectivity with the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (the brain region responsible for learning and self-control), therefore improving error-monitoring and behavioral adaptation. (In non-researcher-speak, wiring you to better learn from your mistakes.)
A study published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience found that a larger Pe difference helps people perform with greater accuracy after making mistakes. Why? People with a growth mindset aren’t as afraid of messing up along the way, because they see making mistakes as part of the developmental process.
Yep: Embracing a growth mindset wires your brain to be more willing to make mistakes. To be better at accepting feedback. To be better at correcting and, more important, learning from mistakes.
Given time, having a growth mindset won’t be a conscious decision. It won’t be a mindset you’ll need to remember to embrace. At a neurological level, it will be how you operate.
As our brain is plastic, it is able to undergo reorganization and development. Growth mindset relates to brain processes, and brain processes relate to motivated behaviors.
Likewise, motivated behaviors can affect cognition as motivation shapes what and how people think.
Add it all up, and changing how your brain functions means you won’t have to remember that mistakes are part of the process. You won’t have to remind yourself that learning new skills is hard. You won’t have to remember that, with time and effort, you can become something you curently are not.
You won’t even think about it.
Because the neural pathways you’ve built will do it for you.
