1.U.S. Five Year Inflation Expectations Hit 20 Year High.
From Dave Lutz at Jones Trading
2.Public Companies with Bitcoin Reserves.
3.Musk Blasts Past Bezos
Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) / Twitter
4.Biggest cryptocurrency exchanges based on 24hour volume in the world
https://www.statista.com/statistics/864738/leading-cryptocurrency-exchanges-traders/
Regulation ? Close to $3B in Fines
The crypto industry has racked up $2.5 billion in fines since bitcoin was launched in 2009—Isabelle Lee
5.Bulk of Earnings Coming in the Next Week.
Heavy Hitters on Deck for Earnings
Earnings season is now off to the races and the week ahead is one of the busiest of the season. Of the S&P 1500 index members, 472 are scheduled to report over the coming week, and another 557 are scheduled to report the following week. In terms of market cap, that is more than $20 trillion this week and $7 trillion the next. Obviously, there is a huge divergence in the number of companies reporting and the size of those companies over the next couple of weeks. As we noted in today’s Chart of the Day and as shown in the chart below, one big reason for that is the fact that the FAAMG cohort is reporting this week. Today, Facebook (FB) is the first of those stocks with its $900+ billion market cap. Similarly, Tuesday will see Alphabet (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) report, and their combined market cap is over a trillion dollars more than the 86 other S&P 1500 members reporting that day. Even more impressive, on Thursday, Amazon (AMZN) and Apple’s (AAPL) combined $4 trillion market cap outweighs the entire market cap of every other S&P 1500 stock reporting that day. In other words, this week has a huge number of stocks reporting, but the overall market’s direction will likely be dictated by the results of a small handful of names.
https://www.bespokepremium.com/interactive/posts/think-big-blog/heavy-hitters-on-deck-for-earnings
6.Energy High Yield Spreads Fall to 2013 Levels.
https://dailyshotbrief.com/the-daily-shot-brief-october-22nd-2021/
7.Tesla Gained More than the Market Cap of GM and Ford in One Day.
Here Is The Gamma Bomb That Just Sparked Tesla’s Insane Meltup BY TYLER DURDEN-ZEROHEDGE If you, like us, are watching the insane meltup in TSLA which not only topped $1 trillion in market cap today, but has gained more than $140 billion since opening, a value that is almost as big as the market cap of GM and Ford, and is now rising by $1 billion every 5 seconds…
… the last thing you care about is what is behind this move (clearly it is not fundamentals). Still, some may ask just what is the driving force in this market that allows a $1 trillion company to trade like a pennystock, and gain over $100 billion in market cap the answer – to no one’s surprise – is gamma, and specifically $900 call shorts who were trapped by today’s jerk higher and who have been unable to exit their positions in time, creating a gamma vacuum above $900…
… that sparked a covering feedback scenario which has sent the stock surging and forcing yet another Volkswagen-like squeeze.
The full explanation in the clip below courtesy of our friends at Spot Gamma.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/here-gamma-bomb-just-sparked-teslas-insane-meltup
8. Remote work is bringing the city to the suburbs….The number of net new households that moved to the suburbs grew 43 percent last year
VOX–By Rani Molla@ranimolla In the spring of 2020, many of the typical draws to cities — plays, nightclubs, restaurants — shut down. Space took on a premium, as small apartments close to others felt particularly claustrophobic. All of a sudden, a big home in the suburbs for the same monthly price as a tiny apartment in the city got a whole lot more attractive. The lifestyle also seemed safer, as you could travel in the isolation of your own vehicle and play in personal green spaces with less fear of infection. More companies than ever are allowing employees to work from home, and studies say that between 13 and 45 percent of the workforce is now remote some or all of the time.
As a result, a new rush to the suburbs is well underway. The number of net new households that moved to the suburbs grew 43 percent last year, according to data from the Wall Street Journal, compared to 2019. While that naturally slowed in the first half of 2021, urban areas are still losing people as they relocate to suburban and rural areas.
People who left their city apartments for houses in the suburbs aren’t just living in the suburbs, they’re working there now, too. In turn, the people and services these workers may have relied on in city centers are moving to the suburbs as well. All of this will affect which businesses thrive and what real estate develops in the suburbs. It could also change traffic patterns, exacerbate urban sprawl, and heighten inequality.
New suburban businesses and improved real estate trends could lead to revitalized communities, less travel, and better quality of living for some. But not everyone will benefit. Sprawl is bad for the environment and can make life worse for the poorest Americans
Housing in the suburbs is changing, too. It’s getting more expensive. Due to high demand and limited supply, housing prices in the suburbs and exurbs have skyrocketed, while prices in major city centers have stagnated. For example, central Boston saw its home value grow 9 percent in the last two years, while prices for places within commuting distance of the city like Worcester and Providence grew about 30 percent, according to data from Zillow and HERE Technologies.
The difference is even more apparent in New York City — a city with a high concentration of remote workers — where the median home price in urban areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens actually declined while prices for homes 90 minutes away went up about 25 percent in the past two years.
“Small, expensive homes close to the office that previously benefited from a short commute as well as proximity to urban amenities — those homes saw a lot of their appeal decline,” Jeff Tucker, senior economist at Zillow, said. That’s because many of the city amenities were curtailed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the home office became the new office.
“The relative value of space definitely went up,” he said.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22714777/remote-work-from-home-city-suburbs-housing-traffic
9.Opinion: These are 5 promising ways to live healthier for longer – and it’s more than diet and exercise
By Richard Faragherand Lynne Cox
However fit you are and well you eat, your immune system will get less effective as you age — how to fight back
Most people want to live a long and happy life – or at least avoid a short and miserable one. If you’re in that majority, then you’re in luck. Over the last decade, a quiet research revolution has occurred in our understanding of the biology of aging.
The challenge is to turn this knowledge into advice and treatments we can benefit from. Here we bust the myth that lengthening healthy life expectancy is science fiction, and show that it is instead scientific fact.
1. Nutrition and lifestyle
There’s plenty of evidence for the benefits of doing the boring stuff, such as eating right. A study of large groups of ordinary people show that keeping the weight off, not smoking, restricting alcohol to moderate amounts and eating at least five servings of fruit and vegetable a day can increase your life expectancy by seven to 14 years compared with someone who smokes, drinks too much and is overweight.
Cutting down calories even more – by about a third, so-called dietary restriction – improves health and extends life in mice and monkeys, as long as they eat the right stuff, though that’s a tough ask for people constantly exposed to food temptation. The less extreme versions of time-restricted or intermittent fasting – only eating during an eight-hour window each day, or fasting for two days every week – is thought to reduce the risk of middle-aged people getting age-related diseases.
2. Physical activity
You can’t outrun a bad diet, but that doesn’t mean that exercise does not do good things. Globally, inactivity directly causes roughly 10% of all premature deaths from chronic diseases, such as coronary heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and various cancers. If everyone on Earth got enough exercise tomorrow, the effect would probably be to increase healthy human life expectancy by almost a year.
But how much exercise is optimal? Very high levels are actually bad for you, not simply in terms of torn muscles or sprained ligaments. It can suppress the immune system and increase the risk of upper respiratory illness. Just over 30 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous physical activity is enough for most people. Not only does that make you stronger and fitter, it has been shown to reduce harmful inflammation and even improve mood.
3. Boosting the immune system
However fit you are and well you eat, your immune system will, unfortunately, get less effective as you get older. Poor responses to vaccination and an inability to fight infection are consequences of this “immunosenescence”. It all starts to go downhill in early adulthood when the thymus – a bowtie-shaped organ in your throat – starts to wither.
That sounds bad, but it’s even more alarming when you realize that the thymus is where immune agents called T cells learn to fight infections. Closing such a major education center for T cells means that they can’t learn to recognize new infections or fight off cancer effectively in older people.
You can help – a bit – by making sure you have enough key vitamins, especially A and D. A promising area of research is looking at signals that the body sends to help make more immune cells, particularly a molecule called IL-7. We may soon be able to produce drugs that contain this molecule, potentially boosting the immune system in older people.
Another approach is to use the food supplement spermidine to trigger immune cells to clear out their internal garbage, such as damaged proteins, which improves the elderly immune system so much that it’s now being tested as a way of getting better responses to COVID vaccines in older people.
4. Rejuvenating cells
Senescence is a toxic state that cells enter into as we get older, wreaking havoc across the body and generating chronic low-grade inflammation and disease – essentially causing biological aging. In 2009, scientists showed that middle-aged mice lived longer and stayed healthier if they were given small amounts of a drug called rapamycin, which inhibits a key protein called mTOR that helps regulate cells’ response to nutrients, stress, hormones and damage.
In the lab, drugs like rapamycin (called mTOR inhibitors) make senescent (aged) human cells look and behave like their younger selves. Though it’s too early to prescribe these drugs for general use, a new clinical trial has just been set up to test whether low-dose rapamycin can really slow down aging in people.
Discovered in the soil of Easter Island, Chile, rapamycin carries with it significant mystique and [has been hailed] in the popular press as a possible “elixir of youth”. It can even improve the memory of mice with dementia-like disease.
But all drugs come with pros and cons – and as too much rapamycin suppresses the immune system, many doctors are averse to even consider it to stave off age-related diseases. However, the dose is critical and newer drugs such as RTB101 that work in a similar way to rapamycin support the immune system in older people, and can even reduce COVID infection rates and severity.
5. Clearing out old cells
Completely getting rid of senescent cells is another promising way forward. A growing number of lab studies in mice using drugs to kill senescent cells – so-called “senolytics” – show overall improvements in health, and as the mice aren’t dying of disease, they end up living longer too.
Removing senescent cells also helps people. In a small clinical trial, people with severe lung fibrosis reported better overall function, including how far and fast they could walk, after they had been treated with senolytic drugs.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Diabetes and obesity, as well as infection with some bacteria and viruses, can lead to more senescent cells forming. Senescent cells also make the lungs more susceptible to COVID infection, and COVID makes more cells become senescent. Importantly, getting rid of senescent cells in old mice helps them to survive COVID infection.
Aging and infection are a two-way street. Older people get more infectious diseases as their immune systems start to run out of steam, while infection drives faster aging through senescence. Since aging and senescence are inextricably linked with both chronic and infectious diseases in older people, treating senescence is likely to improve health across the board.
It is exciting that some of these new treatments are already looking good in clinical trials and may be available to us all soon.
Richard Faragher is a professor of biogerontology at the University of Brighton in England. Lynne Cox is an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Oxford, also in England. This was first published by The Conversation — “Life extension: the five most promising methods – so far“.
10.A Stoic Response to Bad News
A Stoic Response, Wisdom, and More
“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.” Marcus Aurelius
Life can knock us on our ass, can’t it? Just out of nowhere, our legs are suddenly in the air and we’re on the ground. An email from your investors—they are pulling out. A phone call from your wife—your place has burned down. The specifics vary for each one of us but in a second, your whole life changes. How do you respond? How do you carry on?
Step 1) Get control of yourself.
We must steady our nerves and take hold of any extreme emotions (anger, fear, resentment). Replace them with grace. The modern day Stoic and philosopher Nassim Taleb would write that in some moments we are only left with one solution: dignity in the face of the unthinkable. As he would advise, “Start stressing personal elegance at your next misfortune. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit self-pity. Do not complain. The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior.”
“The first qualification of a general is a cool head,” Napoleon once said. So too for the Stoic.
Step 2) Focus on what you’re going to do about the bad news.
What happened, happened. Now the question is, what are you going to do about it? The great astronaut Chris Hadfield would say, “I know that this is dangerous, but there are six things that I could do right now, all of which will help make things better. And it’s worth remembering, too, there’s no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse also.”
The Greeks had a word for this: apatheia. It’s the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don’t let the negativity in, don’t let those emotions even get started. Just say: No, thank you. I can’t afford to panic. I can’t afford to make it worse.
The student of Stoic philosophy learns many things but the first and the most important: Don’t make hard things harder by losing your cool.
Step 3) Look for some good in the situation.
Viktor Frankl, when he lost nearly everyone he loved in the Holocaust, was able to find solace in the fact that they were spared the pain that he felt. That they did not have to live through the horrors he faced.
This is only a small consolation of course, but small is better than nothing.
Think of Seneca here: “A good person dyes events with his own color . . . and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.”
The great philosopher Nietzsche’s recipe for greatness was the phrase amor fati. “That one,” he said, “wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it.” What he meant was that since we cannot change what happened, we can at least embrace it. We can embrace it as something that was chosen for us. The bestselling author of 48 Laws of Power Robert Greene has talked about how amor fati is a kind of power, a power “so immense that it’s almost hard to fathom.” “With it,” he said, “you feel that everything happens for a purpose, and that it is up to you to make this purpose something positive and active.”
The Stoics were not only familiar with this attitude but they embraced it. Two thousand years ago, writing in his own personal journal which would become known as Meditations, Emperor Marcus Aurelius would say: “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” Another Stoic, Epictetus, who as a crippled slave has faced adversity after adversity, echoed the same: “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.”
It is why amor fati is the Stoic mindset that you take on for making the best out of anything that happens: Treating each and every moment—no matter how challenging—as something to be embraced, not avoided. To not only be okay with it, but love it and be better for it. So that like oxygen to a fire, obstacles and adversity become fuel for your potential.
Step 4) Remember that the Stoics actually practice mental preparation for future disasters so that bad news will not hurt so much in the future.
“Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation,” Seneca wrote to a friend. Why? Because he engaged in the Stoic practice of premeditatio malorum (premeditation of evils). It is a simple exercise that asks you to visualize all the things that can and will go wrong. A writer like Seneca would begin by reviewing or rehearsing his plans, say, to take a trip. And then, in his head (or in writing), he would go over the things that could go wrong or prevent it from happening—a storm could arise, the captain could fall ill, the ship could be attacked by pirates.
Let us dig in and be prepared from this point forward. The specifics of the attacks might be unknowable, but that they are coming? Well, you’re on notice.