1. QQQ Chart
RSI short-term overbought.
2. IHistory of Buying the Largest Stock
Marketwatch By Mark Hulbert
This is illustrated in the accompanying chart, which plots the performance of a hypothetical strategy that each year invested in the U.S. stock with the largest market cap at the end of the prior year. Notice that the strategy significantly lags the S&P 500 SPX.
3. Stock Buyback Update
4. Buyback ETF PKW Trailing YTD…+4%
5. China Housing Market Not Improving
6. France Election Sell-Off was Coming Off +20% Spike
Rate-Cut Mania’s 20.7% Spike in French Stock Market Comes Home to Roost
7. E-Bikes Growth
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/e-bikes-market-report
8. Defense Expenditures Per NATO Country
Invesco
US Presidential Election 2024 (invesco.com)
9. Half of the World’s Uranium Comes from Two Countries
10. Surgeon General: Social media needs cig-like warning
MorningBrew
The top health official in the US is urging Congress to pass legislation that would stamp social media apps with a surgeon general’s warning “stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents,” he wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times yesterday.
Upping the pressure: Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s push for a warning label follows years of alarm-sounding with his strongest appeal to lawmakers yet.
- In his statement, Murthy referenced a 2019 study that found risks of depression doubled among teens who scroll for more than three hours per day, and a 2023 Gallup poll showing that US teens log a daily average of 4.8 hours on social media.
- “Why is it that we have failed to respond to the harms of social media when they are no less urgent or widespread than those posed by unsafe cars, planes or food?” Murthy wrote, alluding to driverless car permits getting rescinded, Boeing groundings and listeria-related dairy recalls this year.
Adding a warning label is likely to make some parents think twice about unsupervised scrolling, according to a recent Brookings study. Still, Murthy acknowledged that it wouldn’t be enough to make social media a kid-friendly space. So, he also asked Congress to pass measures that would:
- Protect minors from online abuse and exposure to inappropriate content, bar social media platforms from gathering sensitive data from child users, and set limits on features including push notifications, autoplay, and infinite scrolling.
- Require social media companies to be publicly transparent about their platform’s mental health effects and undergo independent safety audits.
Some states are already grinding. Laws enacted in Florida and Utah since March 2023 have raised the minimum age for social media account ownership. A recently passed New York bill that would ban companies from sharing children’s data and using algorithms in their feeds is awaiting the governor’s signature. More than 40 states have also sued Meta, alleging that it intentionally tries to get kids addicted to its platforms.—ML