🇺🇸 There's also been a lot of attention paid to something called the Hindenburg Omen, which is not intended to be applied to anything other than the NYSE, but people insist on using it with all indices. Here are the rules:

1️⃣ A large number of stocks hit new 52-week highs and new 52-week lows simultaneously.
2️⃣ The number of new highs and new lows must both be greater than a certain threshold (often 2.2% of all issues traded).
3️⃣ The NYSE index is above its value from 50 days ago (i.e., the market is not in a long-term downtrend).
4️⃣ The McClellan Oscillator is negative (indicating market breadth is weakening).
5️⃣ New highs cannot be more than twice the new lows (to avoid false positives in strong bull markets).

This chart looks at simultaneous triggering of the Hindenburg Omen and the Titanic signal in the NASDAQ 100 in history.

📉 CHART WATCH 📉

🇰🇷 🇨🇩 Once upon a time, South Korea had a higher fertility rate than the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Now, they are in deep shit, to borrow an academic term.

Side Note: Both of these countries put a lot of effort into their flags. That's good to see.

🍼 CHART WATCH 🍼

🌎 The Returns Leaderboard for the week ending in November 7th:

🥉 Gold 💎 (+0.4%)

🥈 Japanese Yen 🇯🇵 (+0.6%)

🥇 American REITs 🇺🇸 (+1.5%)

🔽 Bitcoin 💰 (-5.7%), The Magnificent 7 🇺🇸 (-3.3%), The NASDAQ 100 🇺🇸 (-3.0%)

🔼 CHART WATCH 🔽

🇺🇸 "ICE Removals" Under Trump

Obviously it's nothing.

Excluded? What? You're even counting that?

#Remigration now.

🔺️ INTELRUNNER 🔺️

🌎 The Most Prompted Artists for AI Videos & Images

Makes sense. He really did great work...

3️⃣ Norman Rockwell

2️⃣ Leonardo Da Vinci

1️⃣ Rembrandt

The ranking was created by building a "seed list of keywords across eight different categories of prompt style (e.g., artist names) and subject (e.g., media franchises) using the Midlibrary database and manual research."

Then the researchers "recorded the number of Al video and image prompts containing these keywords."

🖼 CHART WATCH 🖼

🇺🇸 Trump wants 600,000 children of wealthy CCP functionaries to be students at top institutions in order to bail out the broken, misaligned university system (that he was supposed to fix).

MAGA apparatchiks rushed to his defense, citing silly post-pandemic, post-migration numbers about educational ability. Here's one example by way of utter clown Bill Mitchell:

"Folks may want not want to hear that, but our education system has gotten so bad that we just don't have as much elite educated talent as we need, especially in technology. It's just a fact."

In 2019, a study by Loyalka, Liu, Li, et al found that STEM student "seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia by 0.76-0.88 SDs and score comparably with seniors in elite institutions in these countries." You don't say?

An update study focused on computer science & electrical engineering in 2021 conducted by a similar crew of authors concluded that there were "stark differences in skill levels and gains among countries and by institutional selectivity. Compared with the United States, students in China, India and Russia do not gain critical thinking skills over four years."

It's a bunch of nonsense designed to exclude native Americans, and I won't countenance any other conclusion. It's Howard Lutnick's speciality: making America great again by replacing Americans.

Hey, wait! Wasn't that also Biden's policy?

📊 INTELRUNNER 📊

🇺🇸 According to the Pew Research Center, a growing share of Americans say Israel is "going too far."

Their other options were "not going far enough," "taking about the right approach," and "not sure." The 3 columns, from left to right, show results from December 2023, September 2024, and September 2025.

"Too far" is now the most popular answer at 39%, finally eclipsing "not sure," the top answer a year ago...

🇮🇱 INTELRUNNER 🇵🇸

🇪🇺 The Euro area saw business activity increase in Q3...

Business registrations were up 4% QoQ, and bankruptcy declarations increased 4.4% YoY.

📈 INTELRUNNER 📈

🇺🇸🇲🇽🇨🇦 The North American Energy Trade

Do we really need to integrate power grids? We are already stable, and we're not caught up in the bullshit in Canada & Mexico.

Just saying.

Canada is actually the largest energy supplier of US imports (and the second-largest energy importer from the US), serving for example as the source of 60% of all US oil imports.
With this in mind, and knowing how sensitive Americans are about prices at the gas pump, the Trump administration kept Canadian oil and energy tariffs at 10%, rather than the 25% slapped on everything else from Canada (and Mexico).
But don't think North American energy integration is exclusive to the US-Canadian border.
So if Canada anchors 60%, where does Mexico's $78B actually change the calculus?
As the two largest trading partners, the US and Mexico also have a significant energy relationship, albeit one smaller than its US-Canadian counterpart.
Mexico and the United States traded an impressive $78B (almost the size of Uruguay's economy) in energy goods last year, a majority of which was also in fossil fuels like oil or natural gas.

⚡️ INTELRUNNER ⚡️

🇺🇸 ASC Super Regional Bank Index is breaking out and looks froggy.

Banks creep me out right now. Especially this tier, I think. Maybe I'm making an error—but banks in general...

📈 INTELRUNNER 📈

🇺🇸 Gas Prices in America [2022-2025]

One small credit to Trump (he needs all he can get) is the 2025 gas price is just barely lower than Biden got it in 2024, just before the election, by dumping supply and bothering foreign nations that don't like him.

It's much lower than what Biden, Trudeau, London, Paris, and Brussels caused in 2022 & 2023.

In fact it's down 1% year-over-year to $3.084. It's really only war in an oil-relevant country (so involving unlikely war candidate nations like Iran, Russia, Venezuela—countries like that) that threatens to raise energy prices here.

🛢 INTELRUNNER 🛢

🇪🇺 The Cumulative GDP Growth Since the End of 2024

🥇 Spain 🇪🇸

🥈 Czechia 🇨🇿

🥉 Sweden 🇸🇪

👎 Finland 🇫🇮

📊 INTELRUNNER 📊

🇦🇷 🇹🇷 Argentina's inflation rate has now dipped under Turkey's rate. Argentina has fallen to 31.8% year-over-year as Turkey sits at 32.9%.

The two have of late resumed their notoriously terrible fiscal behavior of the late 20th century. Turkey double peaked at 85% & 75% in 2022 & 2024 respectively while Argentina peaked at 292% in 2024. Both have suffered from hyper-political and relatively corrupt regimes.

Argentina's 31.8% is a serious historical improvement; they've averaged 205% per year since 1980! Turkey is actually slightly under its trend as well: for the past 65 years, they've inflated 34% per year.

➗ INTELRUNNER ➗

🇺🇸 Now, don't get me wrong.

I don't mind obstructing this (latest) clown president in many ways, particularly as he serves 10% of the country 90% of the time.

That said, Democrats in Georgia (and let's be real, across the country) must be doing alright to remain most focused on obstructionism as a priority issue.

This speaks to the mental rot in America (although, far from only America). And nowadays we have quite a bit of affirmative TDS as well as all the negative TDS.

As the man in office said many a time before: sad!

📊 INTELRUNNER 📊

🇺🇸 According to the Pew Research Center poll we covered a couple days ago, there's been meaningful movement since 2019 in Americans' views of three groups involved in the Gaza "conflict."

The Palestinian people have risen from a +1 favorability differential to a +11 one. A majority of Americans (52%) now have a favorable view of them.

The Israeli people went from a +36 differential in 2019 to a +18 in late September. That's an incredible move. Only 56% now support them, down from 2/3rds in 2022.

And, finally, the Israeli government has been repudiated, renounced, and rejected. They have an interesting polling history. They were at a -10 differential in 2019, but during the pandemic they managed to shift it to +4 in 2022. Now it sits at -24 with 59% of American asserting disapproval of the Israeli government (with 35% approving).

🇮🇱 INTELRUNNER 🇵🇸

🇨🇳 The October drop in investment into China is calculated by Bloomberg to be around 11%—a number so decisive that it has Chinese economic officials claiming they meant to do it.

Naturally, they did not, and if they cannot arrest this trend (as they've been trying to do for some time), we will see further consequences as a result. This is the worst monthly performance since lockdowns.

Foreign direct investment is down from $344 billion in 2021 to $18.6 billion in 2024. This is further damage beyond that, and it's been accruing since the summer.

As fewer & fewer Western companies set up shop, technology transfers & spillover R&D decline, and the Chinese economy becomes more & more a function of the Chinese state and Chinese credit.

What we've seen in the wake is capital flows shifting to Southeast Asia, Indian manufacturing, and Latin American re-shoring. Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers have been increasingly forced to sell domestically, amplifying deflation.

Having stimulated their brains out, China will trying out more negative list reductions, pledging "equal treatment for foreign firms," and expanding the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) "pilot program." (There's 22 of them and they've been accumulating since 2013; what pilot program? Just admit you need free trade).

📉 INTELRUNNER 📉

🇨🇳 This is why such a rough month for foreign direct investment is an especial problem for China. Investment makes up close to half of Chinese GDP.

There's just no getting around this being a problem. The article these come from stumbles through a few clumsy expert opinions into confusion, but I'll address that on News from Underground in a piece on the broader economic travails in China (in due course).

So where has the investment gone?

(1) Geopolitics & American Politics - Beyond the accelerating martial tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea, there's also the matter of "de-risking" and "friend-shoring" envisioned during poor Chinese behavior during the pandemic (which probably had something to do with the U.S. national security state framing them for COVID-19, to be fair). The insecurity of China making all of the pharmaceuticals, for example, was enough to inspire a renewed effort to diversify away from China. So as the multinationals pursue a China+1 strategy, Western investment has shifted to Southeast Asia, Indian manufacturing, and Latin American near-shoring (particularly in Mexico).

(2) Trade War - President Trump has amplified this strategy with strategic tariffs (and: some other tariffs). Europe has joined in with trade controls as China sought to lean more into their market in response. This problem will compound as China runs around the world disrupting domestic industries with exceedingly cheap goods. As such, much of this supply glut turned inward, fueling intense competition and deflation, and thereby contributing to the sense of unease around getting involved in their mess. Their typically authoritarian response isn't helping that feeling.

(3) National Security - In this case, I refer to their own. A new anti-espionage law and data security laws introduce tremendous additional risk for companies looking to do business in China. Raids on consultancies and detentions of employees have made simple economic tasks like market research or data collection frightful propositions. How do you expand to China if your expansion can't even relay information to headquarters? Their tyranny (or "planning") is too stressful.

(4) Substantial Economic Headwinds - Gone is the double-digit GDP growth of decades past, when the West foolishly threw open its doors to anything and everything pouring out of Chinese factories. They've succeeded in making the immense technological strides they've been pursuing, but it hasn't translated into much additional profit in the current context (especially given the sustained hangover from their world-leading lockdowns; they've only been open for a few years and the "revenge spending" everyone expected never showed up). Unemployment is high, domestic & global demand is limited, and property market crisis persists. It's no wonder Chinese consumers feel this aforementioned uncertainty too and so are more inclined to save.

In short, no, they didn't mean to do it, and they aren't as good at planning as they insist they are to us online every single day...

🔠 INTELRUNNER 🔠

🇺🇸 The S&P 500 is down 5% from its intraday highs and it's taken out some significant technical support.

📈 INTELRUNNER 📈

🪐 The Largest Bodies of Water in the Solar System


Bodies like Titan and Ganymede hide multilayered oceans sealed beneath thick pressure-formed ice, a structure so unlike Earth that ordinary intuition fails to grasp how vast these reservoirs are.



The Moon and Mercury, often assumed barren, actually preserve pockets of frozen material in permanent shadows-minuscule compared to planetary reserves, but astonishing given their exposure to relentless solar radiation.

🌕 INTELRUNNER 🌑