🇺🇸 Will there be a government shut down by October 1st? The denizens of Polymarket think there's a 93% chance of that (screaming up from 76% this morning).

Top picture is the past month of trading in this market. The past week and today are on the bottom. More on this later...

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🇺🇸 The trillion dollars plus in infrastructure improvement legislated by the federal government is picking up pace, with around 70% of funds allocated.

The spending will continue well into 2026 and even a little beyond in some cases. This will include industrial construction, data center construction, and building out chip manufacturing capacity.

There are two key American ETFs for infrastructure: (1) the Global X U.S. Infrastructure Development ETF ($PAVE), which is largely industrial, construction, and raw materials companies, and (2) the iShares U.S. Infrastructure ETF ($IFRA), which has those but also includes companies in utilities & energy.

$PAVE has appreciated against $IFRA for most of its history. $PAVE is the more pure infrastructure play, but $IFRA has the higher yield, as you'd expect from the make-up.

None of this is financial advice.

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🇺🇸 $XLV, the S&P Healthcare Sector ETF, and $XAV1! (the futures market for same) suddenly rallied 5.5% Tuesday & Wednesday.

It's now broken out of the last dynamic resistance and has returned to March prices after a long consolidation that I pointed out early & at the lows.

Will it catch up to the S&P 500 on the year? It's on the way. The ratio of the sector to the broader market ($XLV/$SPY) is up 4.5% this week.

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🇷🇺 🇺🇦 Average Daily & Total September Advance of the Russian Armed Forces

September saw the Russians acquire 492.01 km² for an average of 16.4 km²/day. This is 29.4% quicker than the pace in August, and much more like the speed of early summer.

In fact, it's the fourth most successful month of the entire Russian offensive, and you have to go back to the third most successful (May 2025) to find a higher daily average (17.75 km²/day). The average gain per day for the whole of the two-year offensive stands at 9.66 km²/day, so they took 70% more land per day than normal last month.

Almost a third of this territory was taken in the Kremennaya-Krasny Liman direction, and a little over a fifth was taken in that most successful of directions for the Russians, Avdiivka-Krasnoarmeysk. They actually gave up 7.9 square kilometers in Sumy, which is the most they've pulled back in some time.

The latest in-depth data covers 9/23–9/26. The Russian Armed Forces claimed a total area of 100.37 km² during this interval. This is an average of +25.1 km²/day, which is the highest per day average since the first week of June. It's 53% faster than the already above average speed in September overall.

In other words, no matter how you split the timeframes, things are briskly snowballing in the last days of summer in eastern Ukraine...

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