🇫🇷🇩🇪 10Y OAT-Bund Spread, in basis points…

📈 CHART WATCH 📉

🇺🇸 Will Lisa Cook, fired from the Fed over financial fraud, be arrested by September 30th?

Newly trading on Polymarket.

🤩 CHART WATCH 👿

🇺🇸 Apple's ($AAPL) $100 billion stock repurchase plan is the biggest among US announced buybacks so far this year, followed by Alphabet’s ($GOOG)…

🍎 CHART WATCH 🔍

🇺🇸 Buffett’s Top Stocks (1978-2024)

🍎 CHART WATCH 🌟

🌐 The gold price (GCV25) is extremely compressed with upward trending lows & flat highs.

It’s gonna blow!

🪙 CHART WATCH 🪙

🇨🇴🇵🇪🇧🇴 The production of cocaine is at an all-time high.

🧪 CHART WATCH 🧪

🌐 Average Altcoin Price (Top 150 Coins by Market-Cap, Equally-Weighted)

💰 CHART WATCH 🤑

🇺🇸🇨🇳 The number of Chinese students in America over time by educational level…

📚 CHART WATCH 🎓

🇺🇸 The chart shows cash burn at the Meta. The author is pointing out that in both 2022 & 2025, Zuckerberg was blowing through capital expenditure.

In 2022, investors punished $META with a 77% decline from its peak. This time, despite blowing a similar percentage of cash, the stock is up 45%.

I have a theory: in 2022, Zuck was wasting all of that money on the metaverse. People found that whole concept dubious. No one was all that interested in trading in reality for a new virtual life, and so the spend seemed asinine.

This spend is on AI & other market trends. It is congruent with the contemporary bubble narrative. Meta may be deluded once again, but if so, this time so are the investors…

📱 CHART WATCH 📱

🇺🇸 Gavin Newsom’s non-campaign presidential campaign has paid off for him so far this summer, according to new polling from Emerson College.

At least with people who fall for that sort of thing…

❌ CHART WATCH ❌

🇺🇸 September seasonality for the S&P 500: 56% declines of an average of -1.17%.

🔴 CHART WATCH 🔴

🇺🇸 Payroll growth has sharply decreased since May (monthly change in thousands)…

🔺️ CHART WATCH 🔺️

🌎 Bitcoin is at a critical point in its price action. It’s re-testing the December-January resistance.

Is 108.5-109.5 now support? Or are we in for a spill? Either way, something significant is likely to occur.

In fact, there’s a number of assets with volatility that seems eerily low.

😰 CHART WATCH 😰

🇧🇷 Lula’s approval-disapproval has gone negative this August. The conflict with Trump over Bolsonaro’s prosecution and as a result trade temporarily buoyed Lula’s numbers, but that has since transitioned to a new low.

The same (first-rate) polling conducted research into potential outcomes in the 2026 presidential elections:

The survey found that Lula is behind the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, former minister of the Bolsonaro government, with 48.4% to 46.6% in a hypothetical second round.

The survey showed him tied at 48.3% with Bolsonaro, who is prevented from running. He is ahead of former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, who is among the family members considered potential alternatives to the former president, with 48.8% to 47.9%.

✅ CHART WATCH ❌

🇺🇸 The PCE Chain Price Index:

The PCE Chain Price Index increased 0.2% (2.6% y/y) after rising an unrevised 0.3% in June and an unrevised 0.2% in May. The y/y gain steadied at 2.6%.

📈 CHART WATCH 📈

🇺🇸 Grok 4 Heavy continues winning the artificial intelligence tests. This one is Humanity’s Last Exam, a more advanced, expert-tier product developed by the Center for AI Safety & Scale AI when LLMs starting doing too well on their MMLUs:

“HLE aims to push the boundaries by featuring questions at the “frontier of human knowledge”—crowdsourced from nearly 1,000 subject-matter experts (mostly professors, researchers, and graduate degree holders) affiliated with over 500 institutions in 50 countries.”

“It consists of approximately 2,500 to 3,000 publicly released questions (with a private held-out set to prevent overfitting and data contamination) across over 100 subjects, including mathematics (about 41% of questions), physics, biology/medicine, humanities/social sciences, computer science/AI, engineering, chemistry, and more. Roughly 14% of questions are multi-modal.”

🎨 CHART WATCH 🎨

🇺🇸 Trump’s approval-disapproval index has fallen to -8.

He still has strong approval from a third of the country, but it seems capped there, likely by the trifecta that continues to bedevil him: Gaza, Ukraine, and the Epstein Cover-Up.

✅ CHART WATCH ❌

🇯🇵 🇩🇪 Government debt (lhs, % of GDP), serving costs thereof (rhs, %), and the rate of inflation (rhs, %) in two of the world’s most prominent developed economies, Japan & Germany.

You don’t have to grow to maintain a welfare state, but you may have to depreciate your currency.

📉 CHART WATCH 📈

🇺🇸🇨🇳 Don’t look now, but Alibaba Group is outperforming Nvidia Corp.

Most of $BABA’s outperformance was in Q1, and while $NVDA caught up in Q2, never completely. On Friday, $BABA gained 16.8% on $NVDA—will Q3 be like Q1?

📈 CHART WATCH 📉

🇩🇪 The German statistics office has made dramatic revisions to the GDP data. The updates revealed Germany had experienced a recession after all.

I, for one, thought the oscillation back & forth between positive & negative was slightly odd, but these are some monster changes.

📉 CHART WATCH 📉