1. Corporate Cash at All-Time Highs
2. MAG-7 64X Larger than Bank Index
Jim Reid Deutsche Bank To illustrate, today’s CoTD looks at the market cap of the Mag-7 versus that of the US Regional bank equity index with 50 constituents, and the S&P Financials index with 72 members including the mega banks. The Mag-7 are collectively c.64 times bigger than the entire US Regional Bank index.
3. AAPL-Two Lower Highs and Close Below 200-Day
4. Is SMCI the New MEME?
Bloomberg Carmen ReinickeStill, short sellers are sticking to their bets that Super Micro’s climb will eventually end. In the last 30 days, the group has increased shares shorted by 12%, piling an additional $623 million into bets against the artificial intelligence darling, per S3.
On Friday, the cost of puts — which serve as downside protection — sank less than equivalent calls, which give exposure to added gains. That dynamic reversed trading patterns earlier in the week, when seemingly boundless euphoria for artificial intelligence pumped interest in call options and propelled the one-month call skew to its highest level in more than a year.
Short sellers may be emboldened by the San Jose, California-based company’s sharp moves higher. The stock rallied 246% in 2023 and is up 183% so far this year, a jump that has some resemblance to the social media-fueled gains of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and GameStop Corp. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/super-micro-short-sellers-notch-124640928.html
5. Largest YTD ETF Flows-IBIT #3
Jim Bianco https://twitter.com/biancoresearch
6. Transports -5% Correction
Transport stocks approaching blue one-year trendline.
7. Private Clients Flows…TIPS, Japan, and EM Debt
The Daily Shot Brief Rates: BofA’s private clients are getting back into TIPS. https://dailyshotbrief.com/
Source: BofA Global Research
8. Housing Starts -14.8% Month Over Month
Business Insider Yuheng Zhan Housing starts collapsed 14.8% month-over-month in January to a five-month low, according to Census Bureau data released Friday.
The annualized rate of 1.331 million units came as as a surprise compared to consensus estimates, and the sudden plummet was even more stark relative to a big upward revision to December’s 1.562 million, up from an initial 1.46 million Building permits also dropped 1.5% to 1.47 million, falling short of the forecast of 1.512 million. Private housing completions also disappointed, dropping 8.1% below the revised December estimate to 1.416 million.
Building of single-family homes experienced a 4.7% decline following a 6.4% drop in December — marking the sharpest consecutive decline in that segment of the market since the summer of 2022.
Homebuilder ETF New Highs
9. Top 12 Fastest-Growing US States (by percentage growth rate)population
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/fastest-growing-states
10. The 4-Word Phrase That’s a Sure Sign of Low Emotional Intelligence, According to Star Psychologist Adam Grant
Stop thinking and speaking about your feelings in this way, and you’ll instantly level up your emotional intelligence.
Life is full of difficult emotions. That’s unavoidable. What you do with those difficult emotions is what determines your level of emotional intelligence.
According to best-selling author and star psychologist Adam Grant, there’s one response that’s a sure sign your EQ is very low — and it can be captured in just one four-word phrase.
When someone at work does something selfish, thoughtless, or manipulative, it’s entirely natural to feel a spike of anger (it can even be productive if channeled properly, research shows). What’s not healthy, Grant insisted on a recent episode of his podcast ReThinking featuring fellow psychologist Susan David, is to blame the other person for your rage.
“I don’t judge emotions, but I do judge the way that people give up agency over their emotions,” Grant tells David. “A sign of emotional intelligence is abandoning the phrase ‘You made me feel.’ Because you’re giving other people power over your emotions. No one can make me feel anything, to take the line misattributed to Viktor Frankl.”
Which means if you regularly use that same phrase — “You made me feel” — you might be sitting on an opportunity to significantly improve your own EQ.
It’s not that other people don’t influence our emotions. Of course they do. Nor is anyone arguing that other people’s behavior can’t be genuinely awful and worthy of our anger, sadness, or disappointment. Grant is also at pains to emphasize his comment should not be seen as letting genuine bad actors off the hook.
“I’m not talking about abusive relationships here. If you’re being, you know, gaslit by a manipulative narcissist, that is not what we’re describing,” he underlines.
But the two psychologists stress just how disempowering it is to believe there is no freedom of action — no conscious choice — between other people’s everyday problematic behavior and our mental and emotional response to it. “There is a space between stimulus and response. You control your behavior, but I choose my reactions,” Grant insists.
A Wiser approach to your emotions
The idea that we have the capacity to choose how we respond to provocations and disappointments is appealing. But it also raises an important question. If “You made me feel” is a red flag for low emotional intelligence because it implies other people control our feelings entirely, what is the alternative approach? How exactly do you create and employ that “space between stimulus and response” Grant talks about?
Grant and David share some ideas in the podcast. David, for example, suggests a subtle but important switch in how you think about your emotions: “If we think about the language that we use, when we say, ‘I am,’ I am sad. I am angry. I am being undermined … You are showing complete linguistic fusion between yourself and your emotion.”
Here, there is no space between stimulus and response in which you can make a different choice. Instead of “I am sad,” David suggests, tell yourself “I’m noticing that I’m feeling sad.” Research shows emotions are stories we tell ourselves to explain physical and mental sensations. When you use language to remind yourself they are constructed in this way, you give yourself space to tell different, better stories.
That’s a fascinating approach — and one I’ve written about before — but I recently read about a more practical method that translates academic theory into simple, everyday practice. It’s called the Wiser method and it’s endorsed by decades of research. Wiser stands for watch, interpret, select, engage, reflect.
You can read about it in detail here, but it basically boils down to exactly what Grant recommends. Rather than feeling hijacked by your emotions, you observe and probe them before choosing how you want to label your feelings and respond in practice. In this model, others can give you unpleasant fodder for consideration, but they can’t make you feel anything that doesn’t serve you.
Trying to tamp down or ignore emotions through sheer force of will seldom works, but taking a step back and considering your feelings before acting on them is an excellent way to significantly increase your emotional intelligence.
