Topley’s Top 10 – October 12, 2022

1. VIX No Spike Yet…2008 and Covid Had Big VIX Spikes.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2603/vix-volatility-index-historical-chart

www.stockcharts.com


2. Crash Confidence Indicator from Robert Shiller …First Time I Saw this Indicator.

Marketwatch Mark Hulbert  

@MktwHulbert

 

(Because this chart can be confusing, care needs to be exercised when viewing it. The chart does not show the percentage of investors who think a crash is probable. It instead shows the percentage who believe that this probability is low. So lower values on the chart indicate that crash anxiety is more widespread, and vice versa. For example, the 22.8% current reading for individual investors means that 77.2% believe there’s a greater-than-10% probability of such a crash.)

To appreciate the strength of this contrarian indicator, consider the data in the table below. It contrasts the average S&P 500 SPX, -0.04% total real-return in the wake of either the 10% of months when crash anxiety was highest or the decile when that anxiety was lowest. The differences are significant at the 95% confidence level that statisticians often use when assessing whether a pattern is genuine.

Crash confidence index readings: Fear of crash is… Average S&P 500 total real return over subsequent 12 months Average S&P 500 total real return over subsequent 2 years (annualized) Average S&P 500 total real return over subsequent 5 years (annualized)
Lowest 10% of historical readings Highest 25.6% 19.5% 15.3%
Highest 10% of historical readings Lowest 5.6% 6.6% 6.1%

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/robert-shiller-created-an-index-that-shows-investors-fear-of-a-stock-market-crash-heres-what-its-saying-now-11665470643?mod=home-page


3. Bloomberg AGG Bond Index Worst Year Ever….-10% Worst Than Second Worst Year Ever.

Double Line Research


4. Intel and Cisco Charts Back to 1999 Tech Bubble Levels…..20 years of FLAT Performance.

These leaders of Internet bubble never regained highs again, maybe a lesson to Millennials on chasing the last bull markets winners (FAANG).

Trading View Charts   https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-CSCO/


5. International Bond Index Breaks to New Lows.

www.stockcharts.com


6. QQQ New Lows and Hard Close Below 200 Week Moving Average


7. Software ETF New Lows.

www.stockcharts.com


8. 100% Electric Vehicles = 11% Of New Vehicle Sales Globally!

And 15% of new vehicles sold across the world have a plug. By

José Pontes

Global plugin vehicle registrations were up 60% in August 2022 compared to August 2021, reaching 847,000 units. This is the best result ever for an off-peak month (as in, not the final month of a quarter). So, expect not only that Q3 will be the best quarter ever for plugins, but also that September will provide the mother of all record months! I expect September will be the first time the world reaches one million plugin vehicle registrations in a month. With China (surely), the USA (likely), and Europe (maybe?) posting record months in September, expect the end of Q3 to be another time of celebration.

Year to date, the plugin share grew to 13% (9.2% BEV). That’s all great, but the internet loves lists, so here you go: The top 20 electric car sales leaders!

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/02/100-electric-vehicles-11-of-new-vehicle-sales-globally/   Found at Bespoke Investment Group https://www.bespokepremium.com/interactive/posts/think-big-blog/bespoke-brunch-reads-10-9-22


9. Five Ideas That Will Reshape Capitalism’s Next Century

From Advisor Perspectives  By  Adrian Wooldridge,

The Harvard Business Review is celebrating its 100th birthday with a fat book of its most influential and innovative articles and an electronic fanfare of videos, charts and online articles.

HBR was founded 14 years after its mothership, the Harvard Business School, to provide the fledgling discipline of business with a bit of academic heft. The new discipline faced a lot of sneering from the Brahmin establishment who ran Harvard in those days for lacking academic rigor as well as social cachet. Wallace Brett Donham, HBS’s dean from 1919 to 1942, hoped that the review would address one of these complaints by pioneering a “theory of business” based on rigorous research and capable of teaching fledgling businessmen sound judgment. Without such a theory, he wrote in the inaugural issue, business would be “unsystematic, haphazard, and for many men a pathetic gamble.”

Donham’s brainchild succeeded beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. HBR articles launched billion-dollar management ideas, such as re-engineering or asset-lite management, that changed entire industries. The few Brahmins who remain in Harvard look out from their little cubby holes at the business school across the river and gnash their teeth with envy. A magazine that was once described by one of its editors as being written by people who can’t write for people who can’t read is now a bible of corporate America.

Which is why the current volume is such a disappointment. The brief introduction makes a few interesting points— notably that the magazine’s focus has shifted from the tangible aspects of management, such as how to allocate financial resources or organize production, to more intangible subjects such as how to get the most out of your workers or enthrall your customers. But it fails to tackle any of the hard questions. Why is a discipline that is supposed to make business less of a haphazard gamble subject to so many fads and indeed frauds? And how does HBR explain its role in promoting ideas such as re-engineering or companies such as Enron? The HBR doesn’t necessarily owe us humility, but it does owe us introspection.

The collection includes some great articles which it’s nice to have in one place (two of my favorites are the articles that bookend the collection, Peter Drucker on managing oneself and Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad on strategic intent). But it also contains some inexplicable gaps. How can you produce a collection of the most interesting and innovative articles in the HBR without including Michael Jensen’s “the eclipse of the public corporation,” an intellectual tour de force which defined an era? In general, the collection is ludicrously heavy on current preoccupations (such as authenticity) and light on yesterday’s passions (globalization as well as private equity). The book eschews chronological organization without embracing any thematic alternative that I could work out.

The extras are even more variable in quality. HBR asked some leading thinkers to speculate about what’s next for some big topics. Some of what they had to say was interesting (Ram Charam on the future of organizations); some was merely platitudinous (Marcus Buckingham on what a “good job” would look like). Where the package hit its nadir is about the future of management. HBR asked “a panel of global experts” what management will look like in the next 100 years. The answer that came back from each of the experts was almost identical: Management will become cuddlier and less command-and-control. Sut I Wong of the Norwegian Business School says that management will be all about “empathy.” Frederic Frery of ESCP Business School says that management will/should “forget about the art of war and focus instead on the art of seduction.” Rachel Spivey, the head of Google’s Stay & Thrive team, says that the future will be “all about fostering a direct, transparent and empathetic approach to management.”

What twaddle! I suspect the empathy-first approach that dominates today’s business schools will not survive the next five years intact let alone the next 50 or 100, or else will simply become so ossified that nobody outside a tiny clique will listen to it. Today’s focus on inclusion and empathy was dictated by the peculiar combination of a prolonged bull market on the one hand and the shock of the societal rifts exploited and widened by the Trump presidency. The focus will shift significantly in the future as recent preoccupations, notably diversity, become bureaucratized, and companies desperately adjust to the fracturing of the global economy, the rise of Asia and the long-term decline in productivity.

It would be churlish for me to be so brutal about the HBR panel’s predictions without offering some alternative predictions of my own (and with them my head, at least metaphorically, for anybody who wants to chop it off). I think that business life over the coming decades will be dominated by five great trends that will reshape management just as dramatically as did world wars, whether hot or cold, or the invention of the computer.

The return of a wartime economy

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has inaugurated a new era in business affairs, not just because it has forced business to respond to Russia’s immediate aggression but also because it has forced it to wake up to China’s geostrategic ambitions. President Xi Jinping will be further emboldened if, as is widely expected, he is effectively made president for life in the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Competition between China and the West for resources, ranging from food, fish and water to rare earths, will only intensify as the world shifts to battery power and the war in Ukraine continues to threaten grain supplies.

So far most of the great initiatives have come from governments, particularly from the US government. President Joe Biden has passed a CHIPS Act to reduce dependence on Chinese semiconductors. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has sung the praises of “friend-shoring.” Businesses are still playing catch-up — belatedly creating new supply chains in India or Vietnam to supplement their existing ones in China for example.

They will surely become more proactive as they adjust to a new world in which military spending is an increasingly powerful driver of the global economy and potential conflict an ever-present danger. A growing number of start-ups will shift their focus from consumer goods to military supplies. High-tech companies will follow the example of Palantir Technologies Inc. and challenge the power of companies such as Lockheed Martin Corp. and General Dynamics Corp. that were born before the digital age. Indeed, in the longer term a military-digital complex will likely replace the old military-industrial complex. Companies of all description, whether or not they are formally part of the digital-industrial complex, will beef up their political risk departments to pay more attention to military and strategic risks. Frederic Frery mocks the bad old days when “business strategy was often taught by military officers who looked to generals such as Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz for management insights.” In fact, companies will turn to military men and women, schooled in hard realities at West Point and on the front line, for leadership and advice.

The great knowledge-worker cull

First, they came for the agricultural workers. Then they came for the industrial workers. Now they are coming for the knowledge workers. The great labor relations theme of the rest of the current century is that intelligent machines will do for workers by brain what dumber machines did previously for workers by hand — destroying their jobs, suppressing their wages, battering their psyches and generally driving them to the margins of society.

Techno-optimists like to put a positive spin on the march of the machines. Knowledge workers will become more productive by working with machines rather than against them, they said; machines would stop at the most sophisticated jobs — making leaps of imagination of thinking profound thoughts — thereby leaving human beings to do what they do best while the grunt work is taken care of by computers. Don’t believe a word of it.

Intelligent machines have already moved on from jobs that simply involve processing lots of data (compiling tax returns or reading medical charts or searching for the best value stocks) to jobs that require what used to be regarded as “the human touch.” Machines can produce plausible-sounding news reports. IBM Corp. and the Baylor College of Medicine have developed a system called KnIT (“knowledge integration toolkit”) that scans the medical literature and generates new hypotheses for research problems. Software regularly outperforms humans in predicting the outcome of court cases ranging from patent disputes to landmark Supreme Court rulings.

The great problem of management will shift inexorably from how to manage knowledge workers (who will be progressively “outplaced”) to how to manage the marginalization of knowledge workers. Ever more senior figures who have spent their lives celebrating technological progress and decrying Luddism will find themselves surplus to requirements (imagine the howl from columnists as columns are automated!) Ever more university graduates will find themselves working in the bowels of the service economy. And ever more university departments, having profited briefly from the academic arms race, will have to close as potential students realize that no number of qualifications will save them from the knowledge-worker cull.

Disappointed brainworkers have always provided combustible fuel for revolutions in the past: Look at the role that alienated intellectuals played in driving the Russian revolution or downwardly mobile graduates played in the rise of Nazism in Germany. From a social point of view, the next wave of technological progress is likely to prove the most disruptive yet.

The rise of the trillion-dollar trust fund baby

In the next decade or so we will see the birth of a new kind of baby: trillion-dollar trust fund babies who are destined to inherit fortunes that are bigger than the GDPs of small countries or the stock-market valuations of large companies.

These trillion-dollar trustafarians are the product of two trends. The first is the return of giant fortunes that are comparable with those of Rockefeller and Carnegie. The second is a concerted campaign from the right, particularly in the United States, to reduce or even abolish the inheritance tax (which conservatives have brilliantly rebranded “the death tax”). “Only morons pay estate tax,” was the proud boast of one of Donald Trump’s economic advisers, Gary Cohn, of a tax that, for 35 years after 1941, stood at 77%. Over the next 25 years about half of the $72 billion that will be passed from one generation to another will come from the richest 1.5% of households.

The rise of the trillion-dollar trust-fund baby will put yet more strain on the meritocratic idea that is the rocket fuel of capitalism. How can you talk about equality of opportunity when some people inherit fortunes that outstrip the endowments of entire universities? And how can you laud the work ethic when we have an ever-expanding permanent leisure class?

The rise of trillion-dollar babies will further tilt the overall economy away from wealth creation and toward inheritance curation: Why risk your hand at entrepreneurship when you can have a highly remunerated career as a “money-butler” to the super-rich, either as a lawyer devising ever more elaborate trusts, a political consultant lowering the inheritance tax still further or a private banker making giant fortunes even bigger still.

The next frontier of competitive advantage: genetics

The West has understandably remained nervous about exploiting the potential of genetic science since the horrors of the Holocaust. That is likely to change in the coming decades — indeed genetic science may be for the next 40 years what computer science was for the past 40 years.

There are lots of reasons for this. Genetics has been advancing at an astonishing rate since the sequencing of the human genome, not just as an abstract science but as a set of technologies. The unease engendered by the memories of the 1940s is fading. Genetic screening for abnormalities is now commonplace, and is sometimes followed by the termination of pregnancies. The fashion for enhancing your body with computer parts is spreading from university-based sub-cultures into wider society. What will really tip the balance, however, will be China, which has already tolerated the selective abortion of millions of female fetuses, and where researchers sparked controversy by editing the genome of a human embryo. Notwithstanding the subsequent official condemnation of that work, China will surely be tempted to exploit the military, and perhaps the commercial, possibilities of genetic science.

This will put a series of profound questions at the heart of business (and create a thriving sub-discipline in management ethics). What limits should the West place on genetic research? Should we impose tighter limits on the IVF industry? Or should they be free to sell, in effect, genetically superior offspring? Should insurance companies be given access to DNA tests that predict an individuals’ potential to fall ill? And should regular companies be able to select their employees based on “polygenic scores,” based on computerized surveys of thousands of genetic differences that predict their ability to thrive in their jobs? Can the West retain its focus on individual rights in the face of an economic and military competitor which might use genetic screening to discover and even create superior human beings? Or will further abandoning liberal individualism be just another price we have to pay in order to remain competitive?

The new road to serfdom

The great clarion call of market societies is freedom: freedom to exchange the fruits of our labor in the marketplace for goods and freedom to express our views in the marketplace of ideas. Yet there is a growing risk that we are losing our freedoms not only to a new generation of intellectual censors but to watchers who monitor our every move. Friedrich A. Hayek warned that the road to serfdom was being paved by the state — and certainly the Chinese government has led the way to our current dystopia with its construction of the world’s most elaborate surveillance society. But the great free marketeer failed to reckon with the opportunism of the private sector. Internet giants grow fat by sucking up information about our spending habits and selling it to third parties. Corporations increasingly used spyware of various kinds to monitor their workers ever more closely and sanction them if they paused in their productivity.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to serfdom is paved with minor conveniences. Consumers wanted the “free services” that Google and its fellow surveillance capitalists offered (smilers with knives underneath their coats, to borrow a phrase from Chaucer). So, they gave them the right to spy on their lives. Workers wanted the convenience of being able to work from home. So, they allowed their employers to monitor their productivity from afar.

Can capitalism be revamped so that we can reclaim our lost freedoms without losing the benefit of our improved capacity to, say, fight crime or improve productivity? We need a new generation of management thinkers to devote themselves to thinking about this subject. Should we allow individuals to charge companies to use their data? Or should we go for the opposite approach and simply nationalize the IT giants on the grounds that private entities should not be trusted with such intimate knowledge? But alas at present the few people with the intellectual firepower and technical expertise to answer these questions either work for the IT companies themselves or for think tanks that depend on Silicon Valley money.

The best management gurus have played an outstanding role not only in identifying business problems but also in helping to solve them. Peter Drucker persuaded his readers to take more responsibility for “managing themselves” in order to cope with the disappearance of jobs-for-life and the extension of life expectancies. Michael Jensen arguably delayed the onset of the recent stagnation by unleashing the creative force of leveraged buyouts and private equity (though for a contrary view see Nicholas Lemann’s excellent Transaction Man). Clay Christensen helped young companies to take advantage of disruptive new technologies that changed the way that businesses operated.

During its first 100 years, the Harvard Business Review has been an invaluable bridge between the management theory industry on the one hand and the broader business public on the other. That bridge will be needed more than ever, given the tendency of academics to turn in on themselves and as businesses obsess over the long term. But in order to succeed, HBR will have to be more honest about why it has made such glaring mistakes in the past. It will also have to broaden its current somewhat blinkered focus — not only giving space to a wider range of voices on fashionable topics such as corporate social responsibility but also looking to the darker forces all too likely to transform business in the century ahead.

Bloomberg News provided this article. For more articles like this please visit bloomberg.com.

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2022/10/10/five-ideas-that-will-reshape-capitalisms-next-century


10. 5 Ways Our Intuition Leads Us Astray

We are not programmed to see the world in an objective manner. KEY POINTS– Frank T. McAndrew Ph.D.

  • Many people feel very confident about following their intuition.
  • We easily fall into predictable cognitive traps when we blindly follow intuition and disregard new information.
  • We can become more socially effective by becoming aware of the limits of our intuition.

I frequently encounter people who pride themselves on their intuition. They humbly, and sometimes not-so-humbly, brag about their ability to quickly size up social situations and other people, and then make snap judgments. At the beginning of a new academic term, I have occasionally had excited students tell me how much they look forward to my class because they “know people” or are “good with people,” and they are confident that this will serve them well in pursuit of good grades in psychology courses.

I am always polite when these conversations take place, but such comments raise red flags signaling that the individual I am talking to probably is not as astute in social situations as they think they are. “Going with your gut” and believing that taking some time to process new information about others is unnecessary reflects a naivete about how we think.

Becoming aware of the limitations of our intuition and the cognitive traps that it can lead us into is essential for making us as socially effective as we can be. Knowing that intuition can lead us astray will not completely protect us from our cognitive biases, but it may make us more cautious about the conclusions we draw and more willing to change our minds as new information comes to light.

Why would our intuition be designed to ever steer us wrong?

Evolution Has Not Designed Our Minds to See the Social World Objectively

Natural selection has ruthlessly shaped our perceptual machinery to accurately decode what is going on in the physical world around us. People who could not tell where the edge of the cliff was or whether the animal at their feet was a kitten or a rattlesnake did not do very well. Modern humans who cannot be sure if a vehicle is approaching as they cross a busy street would be at a similar disadvantage. Consequently, our perceptions about the physical world are usually pretty reliable.

On the other hand, seeing the social world in a totally objective fashion may not have always been advantageous. Being acutely aware of our own shortcomings or being realistically pessimistic about our future could undermine our ability to persevere in the face of hardship and place us at a disadvantage in competition with others who saw themselves and their futures through more rose-colored glasses. Similarly, too easily finding fault with our in-groups could undermine loyalty and lead to ostracism from the group, which would have been tantamount to a death sentence in our prehistoric ancestral environment.

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And so, we came to see the social world in ways that were advantageous to us rather than as it actually is. Psychologists have identified a long list of cognitive biases that can get us in trouble; here are five that are pervasive:

We Confuse Observations with Inferences

When I lecture about this in my classes, I frequently hold up a piece of chalk and ask my students what they can tell me about it just by looking at it. Frequent responses include, “it is white,” “it will break if you drop it,” “it is cylindrical,” and “you can write with it.” Not all of these statements are observations. Seeing the object as cylindrical and white are observations, but believing that it will break if it falls or that you can write with it are inferences that are drawn on the assumption that the object is, in fact, a piece of chalk. If the object turns out to be a small piece of white plastic or a cigarette, the inferences would lead to incorrect predictions.

In this same way, we may confuse behaviors and traits that we have actually observed in ourselves and others with assumptions that we are making, and blurring this distinction can lead to misguided social decisions.

Confirmation Bias

When we believe that something is true, we work very hard at finding evidence that we are correct. It does not come naturally for us to try to disprove our beliefs by seeking contradictory evidence. Consequently, we notice and easily remember things that confirm our beliefs but gloss over stuff that contradicts them. A person who believes that a full moon results in all sorts of crazy behavior will say, “Ah-Hah!” and vividly remember incidents that fall in line with that belief, but that same individual is likely to ignore all of the times when weird stuff happens in the absence of a full moon or when there is a full moon and nothing unusual occurs.

We carry this same bias into social situations. The information that we process about other people is guided by our stereotypes of groups and our first impressions of individuals, and we are just as motivated to preserve these illusions as we would be to preserve our belief in the behavioral effects of the full moon.

In other words, we take unfair advantage of coincidences to protect our view of how the world and other people work.

Hindsight Bias

Psychology can be difficult to study because many of the conclusions drawn by researchers seem like common sense to us and we convince ourselves that this was something we already knew. So, students skimming through the textbook see information that sounds right and the upcoming test looks easy because they lull themselves into thinking that we are simply covering stuff that they already understand.

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The problem is that we all have been exposed to common bits of folk wisdom that are floating around and there are different bits of wisdom available to explain almost anything. Social psychologists have sometimes referred to this common wisdom as “Bubbapsychology.” The word is derived from an old Yiddish word for grandmother, Bobe, and it is psychology that everyone’s grandmother already knows to be true, so why bother doing research on it?

A classic example of this is the contradictory beliefs about what draws people together in romantic relationships. We all know that “opposites attract,” but we also know that “birds of a feather flock together.” Thus, a student forced to choose between these two alternatives on a multiple-choice test in a social psychology class may be in trouble if they are relying on bubbapsychology rather than on what they have learned through careful study of the textbook.

The Power of the Particular

We evolved in a world where we, or at least one of our relatives, knew everyone who mattered to us. Our ancestors had to cooperate with each other for success against out-groups, but they also had to recognize that these same in-group members were their main competitors when it came to dividing limited resources.

The cognitive skill that delivered the greatest payoff in this world was remembering details about individuals: Who was a reliable, trustworthy person, who was a cheater, and who would be a reproductively valuable mate. There was little need for thinking statistically about large numbers of unknown others, and, to this day, we like stories about individuals. The nightly news is usually a series of tales about particular people: the scandals of celebrities, the suffering of hurricane victims, and the wrangling of politicians.

Because of this, we find ourselves strongly persuaded by individual examples, and we give these a lot more weight in our deliberations than abstract but potentially more accurate information.

The Fundamental Attribution Error

One of the most durable of our cognitive biases is the fundamental attribution error. This is our tendency to hold other people more accountable for their actions than we should by attributing their behavior to internal motives or personality traits while disregarding the influence of situational constraints and other external forces on their behavior. As a result, we tend to praise and blame people more than we probably should in situations where their behavior results in good versus bad outcomes.

Curiously, we only do this when we are judging others. When explaining the causes of our own behavior, especially when it leads to bad outcomes, we are much more likely to use expressions such as “I really didn’t have much choice” or “I was just doing what I was told” to make sense of what happened.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-ooze/202210/5-ways-our-intuition-leads-us-astray

Topley’s Top 10 – October 10, 2022

1. 5-Year Breakeven Inflation Rate Back to 2.5%

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T5YIE

2. Last Time Sentiment was this Bearish was October 1990

@charliebilello Why Fear is Good

Given the losses outlined above, it should come as no surprise that investor sentiment has soured. Bears outnumbered Bulls by over 43% in a recent AAII Sentiment Survey.

With data going back to 1987, the only times we’ve seen sentiment more bearish than today was in October 1990 (-20% bear market that bottomed in Oct 1990 w/ a recession in 1990-1991) and March 2009 (week of the lows).

Historically, fear has been good to long-term investors who’ve embraced it as we’ve seen above-average forward returns following bearish sentiment extremes. We observe the opposite after periods of extreme greed (high percentage of bullish investors), where forward returns are well below average. This is not to say that stocks can’t go lower (they most certainly can), but that the risk/reward is much better today than it was at the start of the year.

3. P/E Ratios of World Markets

Europe hits single digit forward P/E ratios

Barrons -Jack Hough

https://www.barrons.com/articles/strong-u-s-dollar-invest-foreign-markets-51665173738?mod=past_editions

4. Covid Favorite Domino’s Pizza -45%….Gives Back All of Post Covid Gains.

Domino’s Pizza breaks below 2021 support

www.stockcharts.com

5. Another Fast Food Stock Makes Move to Full Robotics….Robot to prepare 350 meals per hour.

Barrons Chipotle Mexican Grill CMG –1.87% CMG-NYSE
by Stifel
In July, the company revealed a stake in Hyphen—a robotics company that has developed an automated make line. We believe that Chipotle may be nearing a point where it could start testing Hyphen’s flagship product, The Makeline. The Makeline has the potential to be a transformational innovation that could largely automate Chipotle’s make line, significantly improving throughput and unlocking meaningful labor efficiencies. The Makeline assembles orders via a conveyor system at the bottom of the unit while still allowing employees to interact with guests to select their ingredients. The Makeline can prepare 350 meals per hour, or about three times Chipotle’s peak pre-Covid throughput levels. Based on our checks, we would not be surprised if the company announces stage-gate testing in select stores as early as next year. Price target: $1,750. https://www.barrons.com/articles/chipotle-stock-could-heat-up-here-comes-a-speedy-robo-burrito-maker-51665190986?mod=past_editions

www.stockcharts.com

6. Chinese Companies Make Up 56% of EV Battery Market

Chinese Dominance

Despite efforts from the United States and Europe to increase the domestic production of batteries, the market is still dominated by Asian suppliers.

The top 10 producers are all Asian companies.

Currently, Chinese companies make up 56% of the EV battery market, followed by Korean companies (26%) and Japanese manufacturers (10%).

The leading battery supplier, CATL, expanded its market share from 32% in 2021 to 34% in 2022. One-third of the world’s EV batteries come from the Chinese company. CATL provides lithium-ion batteries to Tesla, Peugeot, Hyundai, Honda, BMW, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo.

These Are The Top 10 EV Battery Manufacturers In 2022 | ZeroHedge

7. The Future of NYC Office Space? Trending back toward 40% occupied.

Bloomberg The stickiness of flexible work arrangements could reduce the value of New York’s office buildings by about $50 billion, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. By
Matthew Boyle

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-04/working-from-home-is-sticking-as-return-to-office-stalls?sref=GGda9y2L

8. Homebuyer Demand Collapse in One Chart

@nickgerli1

https://twitter.com/nickgerli1

9. Top U.S. Business Schools Report A Dramatic Decline in MBA Applications

The most prestigious B-schools across the U.S. are seeing fewer applicants as prospective students forego grad school to stay in a hot job market.By Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

Business School and other top MBA programs are seeing an application decline.

Top business schools across the U.S. are experiencing a steep decline in MBA applications.

The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania reported a 13% drop in MBA applications for the 2024 cycle, while Harvard Business School saw applications fall by more than 15%, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Meanwhile, applications for business schools at Yale University, New York University and the University of Chicago dropped by 10% or more. And they fell by 20% at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, according to Crain’s Chicago Business.

A competitive job market and a waning interest in longer master’s programs have led to the decrease in applications, which rose during the Covid-19 pandemic as universities extended deadlines and waived certain requirements.

Top U.S. Business Schools Report A Dramatic Decline in MBA Applications | Observer

10. 5 Red Flags That Someone Is Not Fit to Lead People

People leave managers, not companies.

BY MARCEL SCHWANTES, INC. CONTRIBUTING EDITOR AND FOUNDER, LEADERSHIP FROM THE CORE@MARCELSCHWANTES

As an executive coach, I do a lot of listening to managers worried about losing good employees. People-oriented managers understand what they need to do to get the best out of people. I’m not concerned about them.

I am concerned about managers being promoted into leadership roles when they have no business being there. Leadership is demonstrated through competence, not attitude, confidence, or charisma. It takes ability and skills.

That’s why the single biggest decision any organization will make is whom they name manager. When you name the wrong person manager, nothing fixes that bad decision.

We’ve all heard this tune play like a broken record: People leave managers, not companies.

So what have I seen over the course of 20 years that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that someone is not fit to lead?

1. Managers who look after only themselves

These managers aren’t concerned with fulfilling the company mission or aligning team goals to organizational objectives. It’s about their individual performance and getting that annual bonus. Managers with this attitude are playing for the name on the back of the jersey and are concerned only about their own accomplishments and how they look to their superiors.

2. Narcissistic tendencies

This manager often belittles a team member’s work and might even ridicule staff at meetings. When he needs something from you, he may become threatening. At his most toxic, he will make you doubt yourself and your ultimate value to the company.

3. Treating people like numbers

In top-down power structures, employees are considered to be objects or expenses rather than assets; there is little concern for their happiness or well-being since the motive for hiring them was purely productivity and profit. In these pressure-cookers, there’s little evidence of leaders displaying compassion and empathy in seeing employees as valued human beings. As a result, you’ll encounter high levels of stress, turnover, absenteeism, and burnout.

4. Too much control

The work environment is overbearing and stifling because managers want control over all decisions. Such managers distrust the team, so tasks rarely get delegated to others. There’s hardly room for group discussion or input because the management style is autocratic, which limits creativity and the team’s desire to learn new things.

5. Taking the spotlight from the team

The team puts together a wonderful product and the client is happy with the results. And then it happens: The manager takes all the credit. No praise for the team, no celebration of everyone’s success, no recognition of team members for their contributions. This type of manager will steal the light and thunder away from the team, which is a total employee-engagement killer.

https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/5-red-flags-someone-is-not-fit-to-lead-people.html?cid=sf01003

Topley’s Top 10 – October 07, 2022

1. 2000-2021 Returns…S&P Not the Winner.

JP Morgan Guide to the Markets

https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/adv/insights/market-insights/guide-to-the-markets/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw-fmZBhDtARIsAH6H8qi8JUsh8a2jMW-dL7i9oVNRYNU1duITvfMD4z-MSZU8krg_Ws_nR9waAoyoEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds


2. Presidential Cycle Stock Market Seasonality

Dan Stratemeier Managing DirectorEquities, Event Driven Strategies-Jefferies


3. Rally in Market Happen without Stock Buybacks and Retail Investor Buying.

From Dave Lutz at Jones Trading.

This rally has been occurring with nearly 70% of companies are in the “Buyback Blackout” ahead of Earnings

And without retail participation – According to AAII survey results, retail investors are selling in size to raise cash for the first time since the COVID crash.


4. PKW Buyback ETF Holding 200 Week Moving Average

www.stockcharts.com


5. Carmax -55% …No More Used Car Price Inflation

www.stockcharts.com


6. Canadians Own 32% of American Farmland

Noah Wicks

https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/17107-foreign-interests-keep-buying-us-acreage-with-focus-on-southwest


7. Solar Power and Batteries Account for 60% of Planned New U.S. Electric Generation

From Barry Ritholtz Blog

https://ritholtz.com/2022/10/10-thursday-am-reads-405/


8. Sequencing Human Genome Getting Cheaper and Cheaper.

CHARTR.com Nobel efforts Svante Pääbo, a Swedish scientist, has won the Nobel Prize for his reconstruction of a full genome for Neanderthals and other extinct hominins. Pääbo’s prize, officially the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, carried a 10m Swedish Kronor prize (~$920k USD) and was the first of the six awards to be announced this week. The impressive work, which saw Pääbo pioneer methods to extract and analyze DNA from Neanderthal bones, is experimentation that will hopefully get easier over time, as the cost of genome sequencing continues to fall.

Indeed, Illumina  a company which has some 80% share of the global gene sequencing market — unveiled two new sequencing instruments this week. The company claims these tools will bring the cost of sequencing a full genome to less than $240 and give the company capacity to sequence ~20,000 genomes a year, up from 7,500. Tell those numbers to a scientist from the year 2000, when one human genome sequence would cost close to $100m, and they’d likely laugh you out of the lab.

The whole gene

What about that $99 at-home DNA test kit you bought online? That only takes a snippet, usually around 0.02% of your DNA, using clues to predict your disease risks and ancestry.

Whole-genome sequencing, on the other hand, provides 4,000 times more data on your DNA than at-home tests, and is likely to lend a hand in major medical breakthroughs. The process helped the speedy creation of vaccines for Covid-19, can help the early detection of disease outbreaks, identify inherited disorders and even characterize genetic cell mutations in cancer patients.

www.chartr.com


9. RANKED: Alaska, New Mexico and Tennessee top the list of states with the highest rates of murder, rape and other violent crime, while Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have the lowest, study says

  • Alaska has the highest violent crime rates: 837.8 per 100,000 people
  • The Last Frontier has more men and more heavy drinkers than elsewhere in the U.S. 
  • Lawmen are spread thin across the vast 665,000 square mile territory
  • Indigenous people also make up 19.6 percent of the state’s population
  • Low-crime states like Maine and Vermont benefit from ‘social safety nets’, experts say
  • Still, most crime is ‘hyper-concentrated’ in rough parts of a city, says expert Rafael Mangual

By JAMES REINL, SOCIAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT, FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

RANKED: Alaska, New Mexico and Tennessee have highest rates of murder, rape and other violent crime | Daily Mail Online


10. 8 Foods That Contribute to Anxiety and Depression

… and how to limit or avoid products that can jeopardize mood.

 

KEY POINTS  Susan McQuillan

 

  • Some foods are likely to affect your levels of anxiety and depression more than others.
  • Commercially processed foods can negatively affect your mental health.
  • Common junk foods are the worst offenders; they contain too much sugar or unhealthy fats, and are nutritionally depleted.

 

When university and medical school researchers from North and South America* set out to explore the theory that processed foods contribute to poor mental health, they found ultra-processed foods (UPF) to be the worst offenders. Ultra-processed foods are commercially prepared convenience food products that contain little to no whole food ingredients, often lack essential nutrients, and often contain additives, such as flavorings, colorings, and other products that make the food more appealing to consumers. In other words, they in no way resemble the original food sources from which they are made.

UPF products are generally quick and easy to prepare or ready to eat out of their packaging, and they are often less expensive than whole foods, especially when they are available from generic or store brands. That helps explain why more than 70 percent of all packaged foods sold in the United States are deemed UPF, and those food products represent around 60 percent of all calories consumed in this country.

Upon review of self-reported, nationally representative dietary records of more than 10,000 men and women age 18 and older, the study authors were able to name the eight UPFs most commonly consumed. These include:

  • Sugar-sweetened drinks
  • Reconstituted meat products
  • Packaged snack foods
  • Chips
  • Breakfast cereals
  • Cookies
  • Cake
  • Bread

The researchers also collected data from the participants to measure three specific mental health symptoms: general mild depression, number of anxious days, and number of mentally unhealthy days. They found that those participants who reportedly consumed the most UPFs had a significantly higher rate of mild depression and reported significantly more anxious and mentally unhealthy days.

Previous research has found that food additives used in UPF, such as artificial sweeteners and emulsifiers, are linked to changes in the brain, increased inflammation, and altered metabolism. Other studies have found that people who lack essential nutrients in their diet and consume large amounts of food high in sugar are at significantly higher risk of developing depression and anxiety than those who eat a healthier diet, such as a Mediterranean-style diet that’s higher in natural, nutrient-rich, and less processed foods, such as seafood, vegetables, olive oil, legumes, and nuts.

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*Researchers are affiliated with Charles E Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University, University of Sao Paulo, University of South Carolina Department of Medicine, Georgetown University Medical Center, and University of Kentucky College of Medicine.

Facebook image: Flotsam/Shutterstock

LinkedIn image: Trzykropy/Shutterstock

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cravings/202208/8-foods-contribute-anxiety-and-depression

Topley’s Top 10 – October 05, 2022

1. Q3 Final Performance Grid

From Nasdaq Dorsey Wright www.dorseywright.com

2. Hedge Funds are Record Short

3. Midcap and Small Cap Forward P/E Back to 2008 Levels.

Ed Yardeni –S&P still high…Mid/Small back 2008

https://twitter.com/yardeni

4. Historical October Lows in Market

Callum Thomas Chart Storm

https://chartstorm.substack.com/p/weekly-s-and-p500-chartstorm-2-october

5. 30 Worst Performing Stocks in Russell 1000

Bespoke Investment Group

https://www.bespokepremium.com/interactive/research/think-big-blog/

6. Since 2000 The Average Move on the 10 Year Treasury During Major Moves Higher is 1.8%……We Moved 3.4% Since August 2020

LPL Research

https://lplresearch.com/2022/10/04/raising-our-10-year-treasury-yield-year-end-forecast/

7. Global M2 Money Supply has Decreased $4Trillion

Morgan Stanley Chief Equity Strategist Mike Wilson -M2 for the “big four” economies: the U.S., China, the eurozone and Japan, peaked in March 2021, and thereafter, has decreased by $4 trillion, according to Wilson’s data.

Tracking the rate of change in the money supply for these economies is important, Wilson said, since it tends to be correlated with lower equity prices, as the chart below shows.

MORGAN STANLEY

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/stocks-will-continue-falling-even-after-fed-pivots-warns-morgan-stanley-strategist-who-predicted-bear-market-11664821513?siteid=yhoof2

8. 97% of Stocks were Positive 3 of Past 5 Trading Days

This stock market comeback is unprecedented by one measure

Alex Harring@ALEX_HARRING
KEY POINTS

  • Susquehanna noted that 97% of S&P 500 stocks are up for the third time in the past five trading days.
  • It is the first time since at least 2000 that the broader market index has seen such strength at the stock level.

Traders work on the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., May 20, 2022.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters

The S&P 500 has done something it hasn’t in at least two decades, according to Susquehanna.

Chris Murphy, Susquehanna’s co-head of derivatives strategy, noted that 97% of S&P 500 stocks are up for the third time in the past five trading days. It marks the first time since at least 2000 that the broader market index has seen such strength at the stock level.

Investors watch the 97% marker because the index typically pulls back after a day with that percentage of its components up, Murphy said.

He also noted that prior to last week, this week marked the first time since Aug. 25, 2015 that 97% of S&P 500 components were up in two of the previous five trading days. After that, the S&P 500 rebounded about 13% before hitting a new low six months later, he said.

The relief rally seen this week follows a difficult last month and quarter for the stock market, as the major indexes slid and jittery investors grew increasingly concerned about the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes and the probability of an incoming recession.

Through the week’s first two trading sessions, the S&P 500 is up more than 5%. Tuesday was the best day for the S&P 500 since 2020.

—CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/this-stock-market-comeback-is-unprecedented-by-one-measure.html

9. Wolf Street-Office Space Major Cities

Commercial real estate advisory Savills today released the first batch of its Q3 quarterly office market reports on the major markets in the US, 12 markets in total. Houston tops the list in terms of the largest share of vacant office space on the market, with an availability rate of 30.7%. San Francisco is second with 28.9%, and shooting higher. A big issue is sublease space. This is space for which companies are still paying rent to the landlord, but they’re not occupying it, and instead they’re trying to find sublease tenants for it to help defray the expenses of that space. These companies will price their sublease space aggressively since they don’t have to make a profit on this office space, but just want to lower their costs of holding it until the lease expires. Sublease space puts downward pressure on effective rents – even as landlords are typing to hold the line.

https://wolfstreet.com/2022/10/04/office-reits-massacred-as-the-future-that-office-markets-were-built-for-got-cancelled-by-working-from-home/

10. 3 Exercises to Nail Your Point-INC

Use these techniques to concisely communicate the big goal and how to get there.
BY JOEL SCHWARTZBERG, AUTHOR, “THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP”@THEJOELTRUTH

Photo: Getty Images

One of the most important ideas running through my trainings, articles, podcasts, and books is this: To make a point, you must know your point. And knowing your point starts with knowing what a point is.

If you don’t have or know your true point, everything you say will be pointless — and neither your team nor you want that.

An effective point combines two elements:

  1. An articulation of the impact.
  2. A mechanism to produce that impact.

It isn’t the mechanism alone (“We will streamline our sales process!”) or the impact alone (“We must increase revenue!”). A solid point connects both, as in:

“Streamlining our sales process will enable us to double revenue by the fourth quarter.”

Getting from a non-point to a sharp point in your communications is not just a matter of choosing the right words but having the right mindset. As Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Below are three easy exercises to help you build that understanding, construct meaningful points, and express them simply and sharply.

1. The “I Believe That” Test

Can your point fit into this phrase: “I believe that ________________” so that it forms a complete sentence?

Let’s take some random professional points and apply the test. If you took Language Arts in junior high, you know these are not complete sentences:

“I believe that increasing fourth-quarter revenue”

“I believe that the new online scheduling system”

“I believe that investing in cloud technology”

In forcing you to construct a complete sentence, this test will prompt you to produce lines like these:

“I believe that celebrity endorsements will increase our fourth quarter revenue.”

“I believe that the new online scheduling system will make our sales process more efficient.”

“I believe that investing in cloud technology will reduce our carbon footprint.”

Once you have a complete sentence, you are well on your way to making a sharp point. If you don’t have a complete sentence, reconstruct it so that it would earn you a check-plus in that Language Arts class.

2. The Formula

In my experience, effective points also follow a simple equation (far simpler than E=mc2):

“If we do X, Y will result.”

X is the mechanism, Y is the impact, and you can see how they manifest in the “I believe that” examples above.

“I believe that the new online scheduling system (X) will make our sales process more efficient (Y).”

Just make sure your X is a specific process, tool, resource, or commitment. Simply “doing better” and “working harder” will not suffice.

Keep your Y specific as well, and make sure you are expressing the most valuable or ultimate impact, not just a “badjective” or a short-term milestone:

Is the ultimate goal simply increasing website traffic or selling more product?

Is the ultimate goal merely spreading social awareness or increasing community activity?

Is the ultimate goal increasing financial contributions or saving lives with those funds?

Think of the people on the other side of the table or screen — perhaps a client, a customer, a partner, or your team. At the end of the day, what impact do they value most? The answer to that question should match your Y.

3. The Magic Words

To ensure my students and clients do more selling than sharing, I encourage them to adopt these point-forcing power phrases:

I propose

I recommend

I suggest

Similar to “I believe that,” these phrases force the creation of a true point that includes — maybe with mild tweaking — both a mechanism and an impact.

These phrases are also attention magnets. Saying “Here’s what I propose…” is a beacon for audience interest, and you certainly can’t say “I propose,” “I recommend,” or “I suggest” without proposing, recommending, or suggesting something. Magic!

These phrases are also valuable for professional development. Don’t immediately make a recommendation when someone you supervise comes to you with a status report or situation. Instead, ask them for one — “What do you recommend?” If you keep asking this question, sooner or later, that person will say, “Here’s the situation… and here’s what I recommend we do.”

I believe that people who use these power phrases are seen as leaders and eventually become them.

What happens when leaders elevate their broad ideas and topics into sharp points? They don’t just inform. They engage, they inspire, and they activate impact. That’s the power of having a point and the point of having power.

3 Exercises to Nail Your Point | Inc.com

Topley’s Top 10 – October 04, 2022

1. Credit Suisse CDS Hits 2008 Levels.

https://twitter.com/zerohedge/


2. Is the Dollar Finally Hitting a Pause in Rally?

www.stockcharts.com


3. MOVE Bond Volatility Index Hit Previous Highs

Bond VIX volatility index hit $155….Historically the top in rising rates.

Barrons By Lisa BeilfussThe Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Estimate, or MOVE, index, shows how violent the action has been in the U.S. Treasury market. Jim Bianco, president of Bianco Research, notes that the index, which captures bond-market volatility much like the Cboe Volatility IndexVIX –0.69% , or VIX, does with the stock market, hit about 159 during the past week. That is the highest level since 2009, with a lone exception in March 2020, early in the pandemic. Bianco says that every time the MOVE index has gotten above 155, the Fed has panicked and eased policy.

For investors conditioned to expect the Fed to backstop markets, this would suggest that at least a pivot away from aggressive tightening is in sight—and a return to rate cuts and QE might not be far behind that.Don’t bet on it just yet. Not only is the current turbulence the consequence of the Fed waiting too long to address inflation; it is also the result of some policy makers and investors missing the point that the economy has fundamentally changed since the pandemic, Bianco says.  https://www.barrons.com/articles/federal-reserve-put-stock-market-economy-51664579357?mod=Searchresults

https://markets.ft.com/data/indices/tearsheet/summary?s=MOVE:PSE


4. 2000 and 2008 Last Time S&P was Down 3 Quarters in a Row

Michael Batnick For just the third time in a long time, the stock market has declined for three consecutive quarters.

Making Lemonade in the Stock Market – The Irrelevant Investor


5. Inflation Slowdown?…COMT Commodity ETF…Bearish Chart Action

COMT 50day thru 200day to downside….trading below 200 day most of September


6. Inflation Slowdown? Baltic Dry Shipping Index -70% from Highs


7. U.K. Stock Market ETF…Just Above Covid Lows…Trading at 8.5x earnings.


8. VNQ-Vanguard Real Estate Trades Back to Covid Levels.

A lot of charts below 200 week moving average and back to covid levels

www.stockcharts.com


9. Electric vehicle startups face an uphill climb

Joann Muller, author of Axios What’s Next

UPS-backed electric vehicle startup Arrival built its first delivery van last week — a significant milestone, considering the challenges it and other upstart EV makers like it are facing.

Why it matters: Arrival and other fledgling commercial EV companies are struggling to launch production as funding dwindles and bigger rivals like GM and Ford start to crank out electric trucks and vans of their own.

  • Some newbies have already collapsed, like Electric Last Mile Solutions, which went bankrupt in June.
  • For the rest, the goal is to at least show progress to investors — which is why Arrival made such a big deal about producing a single van on what happened to be the last day of the third quarter.

Driving the news: Arrival said Friday it had missed its third-quarter target to start serial production, but celebrated the fact that it produced its first “production verification vehicle” — in other words, an early prototype.

  • “Although we have not yet achieved serial production, we are focused on making it happen,” founder and CEO Denis Sverdlov said in a statement.
  • Scaling is more difficult than he imagined, Sverdlov told Reuters. “We are going through our own production hell,” he said, echoing Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s comments during the troubled launch of the Model 3.

The big picture: Other struggling EV manufacturers face similar challenges as financing options tighten.

  • Lordstown Motors last week said it began production of the Endurance, an electric pickup truck for businesses. So far, it has built a grand total of two and aims to build 50 by year-end. It too is looking to raise more cash.
  • Faraday Future said it will start production of its long-delayed FF 91 sports car by the end of 2022 with $100 million in new financing after resolving an investor dispute.
  • Canoo, which is also struggling to start production, has decided to outsource manufacturing to a third party.
  • Rivian is leaning on a lucrative Amazon contract while it boosts consumer production — but it too recently laid off 6% of its workforce.

https://www.axios.com/2022/10/03/electric-vehicle-startups-arrival


10. How to Harvest Your Hidden Intelligence

Three ways to enhance experiential intelligence. Lindsey Godwin Ph.D.

KEY POINTS

  • Our popular notions of IQ and EQ are no longer sufficient to predict success in today’s perpetually disrupted world.
  • Experiential intelligence offers a complement to IQ and EQ by inviting us to leverage the wisdom we accumulate through our experiences.
  • There are specific strategies we can employ to enhance our experiential intelligence and gain new wisdom to set us up for success in the future.

As autumn returns with its promise of pumpkin spice lattes, corn mazes, and fall festivals, my mind turns to the notion of harvesting. Defined as collecting a resource in order to use it in the future effectively,” there are many things we harvest this season to sustain us through the year. Reflecting on our psychological resources, there is one garden in our lives we often neglect to fully harvest during the year: our experiences. Our myriad of past experiences, however, provides each of us with a cornucopia of wisdom to be leveraged into future successes if we take the time to harvest it.

Exploring the rich harvesting that is available to us through our experiences is exactly what Dr. Soren Kaplan does in his forthcoming book, Experiential Intelligence: Harness the Power of Experience for Personal and Business Breakthroughs. Kaplan (2023) defines experiential intelligence (XQ) as “the combination of mindsets, abilities, and know-how gained from your experiences.” More specifically, the three elements are:

  • Mindsets: Attitudes and beliefs about yourself, other people, and the world.
  • Abilities: Competencies that help you integrate your knowledge, skills, and experiences so you can respond to situations in the most effective way possible.
  • Know-How: Knowledge and skills.

For more than a century since German psychologist William Stern coined the term intelligence quotient (IQ), we have explored the notion of general intelligence as a gauge of future success. Nearly 50 years ago, we added emotional intelligence (EQ) as a complementary piece to the success puzzle of life. What we have yet to fully harvest and recognize as an important element for cultivating success is the latent intelligence that comes from our lived experiences. While the notion of multiple forms of intelligence endures within our zeitgeist, we have primarily focused on IQ and EQ as the core pillars for understanding our personal and professional achievements. Yet, perhaps we have been missing an important piece of the puzzle in our neglect to explore the wisdom gained through our array of past experiences. Experiential intelligence offers a complement to IQ and EQ by providing a framework for harvesting the accumulated wisdom and talents we have grown over time through our personal and professional experiences.

In many ways, XQ offers us a new lens through which to unpack our history in a way that sets us up for success in the future. Just as many have written about ways to increase our EQ, and even possibly expand our IQ (for example, see Relational Frame Theory that suggests IQ is a reflection of learned relational skills that can be enhanced over time), so too can we enhance our XQ. Specifically, we can:

1.   Get Curious About Successes. Our XQ can be deepened through unpacking our past wins. Too often we treat our successes as accidents, or not worthy of deeper inquiry, when in fact just the opposite is true. Much had to go right in order for our successes to have occurred, and reflecting upon how we were able to exercise our unique mindsets, abilities, and know-how to create those successes is key to developing our XQ. The next time something goes right at work or home, ask yourself, “What were the mindsets, abilities, and know-how that led me to be successful and how can I leverage them further in the future?” Success can beget success if we harvest our learnings from our experiences.

2.   Reframe Failures. If we begin to see all experiences as an opportunity for expanding our XQ, we begin to recognize that even when things didn’t turn out as we hoped, there is rich learning to be gained from reflecting on our experience. Instead of kicking ourselves for not succeeding, we can instead ask ourselves, “What are the mindsets, abilities, and know-how I will need in the future to be successful?” This simple shift can increase our XQ and help turn breakdowns into breakthroughs.

3.   Cultivate New Experiences. We can also bolster our XQ through the intentional pursuit of new and diverse experiences. Seeking out and creating diverse experiences offers an opportunity to add new chapters to our life’s book. The more diverse experiential text we have to draw upon, the more opportunities we have to deepen our XQ. Ask yourself, “What new experiences might help me expand my mindsets, abilities, and know-how?”

Farrah Gray once said, “Inside every seed is the potential for an incredible harvest.” Similarly, inside every experience is the potential for an incredible harvest of learning to expand our mindsets, abilities, and know-how. XQ invites us to become perpetual harvesters of our past to create better futures.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/possibilitizing/202210/how-harvest-your-hidden-intelligence