Catapult Note · IWM (Russell 2000)
The crowd betting against small caps (IWM) is at a three-year extreme, and insurance against being wrong is near its three
The market did fine. Investors, not so much
From 2002 to 2021 the S&P 500 returned 9.5% a year. The average investor earned 3.6%, barely above 2.2% inflation.
Sou
A rare kind of new high
Hi Mount Research counts just 26 instances in 55+ years where the S&P 500 posted new highs while new lows outnumbered new highs. Most
Barrier Growth Note · XLV (S&P 500 Health Care)
Health care insiders are still buying. A year after past buying waves, XLV was higher 97% of the time.
Corporate
Good luck beating the index
Only about 30% of S&P 500 companies have beaten the index over the last three years. On a chart back to 1991, the only stretches that
Record highs, record lows, same day
The S&P 500 closed at a record high on October 6 with 48 NYSE stocks hitting 52-week highs and 126 hitting 52-week lows. The
Growth Note · EUFN (Europe Financials)
Everyone is in the AI trade, and since 2022 European banks have beaten it.
Since January 2022, XLK, the ETF for the S&P 500
Take out AI and the party gets quiet
Since the August 24 peak, chip stocks are up 9% and the S&P 500 is up 0.4%. Everything that isn't AI is down 5.4%.
Source:
AI agents now use 5x the tokens humans do
On OpenRouter, agentic token usage hit 7.3 trillion per week, a 14x increase since February. Humans peaked around 1.4
Protection Booster · Worst-of AMZN / MSFT / GOOG
What if the rally itself bought the downside protection?
The five biggest cloud companies (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta
The Big get Bigger
The AI Big 10 (the Magnificent 7 plus Broadcom, AMD and Micron) now make up 41% of US market cap, the same peak share tech, media and telecom
Big Mac or a Blackwell?
Nvidia and McDonald's both trade at roughly 19x forward earnings. One is growing revenue 91% with 65% operating margins into the largest
