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Black Friday Sales Results
Based solely on Black Friday sales data, the holiday shopping season may be decent despite poor consumer sentiment. According to Adobe Analytics, which draws data from over one trillion retail site visits, Black Friday online sales hit a record $11.8 billion, up 9.1% from last year. Per MasterCard’s SpendingPulse, retail sales, including online and in-store […]
Dec 3, 2025
Overheating Financial Markets Highlight Data Centers Handicap
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) trading platforms were shut down for approximately 4 hours due to overheating after its cooling system at its Illinois data center failed. The outage began around 10:00 p.m. ET on November 27, halting about 90% of global derivatives volume on the Globex platform across futures and options for equities, bonds, […]
Dec 2, 2025
HSBC Casts Doubt On OpenAI’s Future
Per the Financial Times (LINK), HSBC has serious doubts about OpenAI’s financial wherewithal. The following bullet points outline HSBC’s assumptions, which highlight the challenging financial path OpenAI faces. The graphic below from the article shows that HSBC expects OpenAI to run a massive operating loss in the year 2030. Accordingly, they have serious concerns about […]
Dec 1, 2025
The K Shaped Economy In One Graph
Tuesday’s weak Consumer Confidence report was a good reminder of why some economists are calling our economy the K shaped economy. The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index fell 6.8 points to 88.7 in November, below expectations of 93. Moreover, it sits at levels similar to those of early 2020, when the pandemic shuttered the economy. […]
Nov 28, 2025
TPUs Or GPUs: Is Nvidia’s Moat Eroding?
Markets have priced Nvidia as the clear winner in AI chip production. To some, its moat appears impenetrable. Google’s developments suggest there may be some competition. Google has been training and serving its AI platform with in-house tensor processing units (TPUs). These chips are more cost-effective and power-efficient than Nvidia’s GPUs. By using TPUs in […]
Nov 26, 2025
Ray Dalio Says Sell: But Not Yet
Ray Dalio is considered by many investment professionals to be a market maven. This is because of the wild success of his hedge fund, Bridgewater, with assets under management of $136 billion, as well as several best-selling economics/finance books he has written. In recent times, Ray Dalio has repeatedly emphasized that markets are in a […]
Nov 25, 2025
Permanent Job Losers: A Worrying Facet Of Today’s Economy
Given the two-month delay, Thursday’s BLS employment report on September labor market conditions was not nearly as pertinent as the BLS data typically is. Despite it being old news, it is worth sharing that the number of jobs increased by 119k, but the unemployment rate ticked up from 4.3% to 4.4%. The markets didn’t seem […]
Nov 24, 2025
Rate Cut Odds Slip Due To Lack Of Data
As we share below, the odds of a Fed Funds rate cut at the December FOMC meeting are down to 33%. On Wednesday, there was an abrupt repricing of rate cut odds after the BLS cancelled the October employment report and delayed the November data until December 19th. Furthermore, the BLS JOLTS report for September […]
Nov 21, 2025
Oracle And CoreWeave CDS Spreads Widening: Omen Or Jitters
Fear is being spread on social media that some AI players are nearing default. The evidence, some say, lies in the Bloomberg graphs below showing the widening CDS spreads of Oracle and CoreWeave. Before getting into some details about what the CDS markets may be warning about Oracle and CoreWeave, let’s explain what CDS is. […]
Nov 20, 2025
Margin Debt Sets Records: Should We Be Concerned?
There is a strong historical relationship between margin debt and the stock market. Given that margin debt just set a record at $1.18 trillion, it’s worth appreciating the mechanics that support this relationship and what it may tell us about how much longer the bull market may run. When stocks rise, the wealth effect kicks […]
Nov 19, 2025
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