🌍 The Global Returns Leaderboard for the week ending in February 13th:

🥉 Japanese Yen 💰 (+2.97%)

🥈 U.S. Treasuries 🇺🇸 (+3.32%)

🥇 Japanese Equities 🇯🇵 (+4.98%)

🔽 Ethereum 🔷 (-5.89%), Magnificent 7 🍏 (-3.11%), Chinese Equities 🇨🇳 (-2.14%), Bitcoin 🪙 (-2.12%)

🔼 I N T E L R U N N E R 🔽

🌍 This is a Latin America-wide poll conducted by the preeminent AtlasIntel in January. In this case, these are the country-by-country approval-disapproval ratings for:

Do you approve or disapprove of the U.S. military operation that arrested Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, on charges related to drug trafficking?

Who knew the Caribbean was so excited to have the U.S. Navy around? Mexico and Brazil (and Latinos on American territory) were always going to have a large number of haters.

It's interesting to see approve win the day across the board.

🇻🇪 I N T E L R U N N E R 🇻🇪

🇺🇸 This is a historic high for the Labor Force Participation Rate.

We're reaching levels we haven't seen since the Dotcom peak.

🛠 I N T E L R U N N E R 🛠

🇺🇸 Stock Market: Tuesday Performance by Sector

Financials came to life, and Real Estate is looking good as well. Industrials were solid.

Health Care, Technology, and Discretionary were mixed while Communication was relatively flat.

Staples, Materials, and Utilities mostly showed weakness. Energy was in the red, but not too strongly.

🔻 I N T E L R U N N E R 🔻

🌍 Consensus GDP Forecast for 2026, 6-Month Change (in percentage points)...

Taiwan is booming from the AI race.

📊 I N T E L R U N N E R 📊

🇺🇸 The Polymarket odds for the 2028 Democratic Primary (with 5-month delta in brackets):

🛑Gavin Newsom 27.3% [-8.7pp]
🛑Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 8.5% [-2.5]
🛑Kamala Harris 5.8% [+1.8]
🛑Josh Shapiro 4.5% [+0.5]
🛑Jon Ossoff 4% [0]
🛑Pete Buttigieg 4% [-2]
🛑Andy Beshear 3%
🛑Wes Moore 2% [-3]
🛑Gretchen Whitmer 2% [-2]

It is quite obvious that Newsom, AOC, and Whitmer all did damage to their presidential prospects in Munich. I halfway think Kamala got the boost just from not being them.

That 8.7% drop for Newsom has to hurt. He's at his lowest point since August.

The caliber of these politicians is in free fall...

🇺🇸 I N T E L R U N N E R 🇺🇸

🇺🇸 Stock Market: Wednesday Performance by Sector

Energy enjoyed a dominating position once again (+1.92%).

Tech and Discretionary bounced back today, while Materials and Financials enjoyed majority strength.

Industrials, Health Care, and Communication finished with mixed performance. Staples limped.

Utilities continued to struggle (-1.66%), and Real Estate appears to be heading into that anticipated correction (-1.34%), I suspect.

🔻 I N T E L R U N N E R 🔻

🇮🇷 Strait of Hormuz: Iran temporarily closes key route for global oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade

🛑 Exports through the strait over the first five months of 2025
(daily average): 19.5 million barrels of crude oil & 50bcm of LNG.

🛑 Shipments through the strait: 31% of the global seaborne oil trade & 20% of the global LNG trade

🛑 Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter of oil through the strait, while Qatar leads in LNG exports.

🛑 80% of trade originating in the strait goes to Asia (a whole lot to China) and 20% goes to Europe (AKA not an American problem).

🛢 I N T E L R U N N E R 🔥

🪙 Risk Indicator: the Realized Price, the True Market Mean, and the Short-Term Holder-Realized Price

"In the absence of an unexpected macro catalyst, the $79k True Market Mean and the $54.9k Realized Price are likely to define the primary resistance and support corridor for the mid-term market structure."

🤑 I N T E L R U N N E R 🤑

🌎 How Cyberattackers Gain Access

◽️65% of access is now identity-driven. Hackers are rarely attacking software vulnerabilities compared to credentials. The hacks are against people, not computers, in the main.

◽️Social engineering accounts for 43% of identity-driven attacks. Combined with credential misuse/brute force (21%), human-targeted attacks are 2/3rds of the total.

◽️8% are insider threats; 3% come from IAM misconfigurations. These are internal weaknesses, and they're especially dangerous because they bypass perimeter defenses.

Organizations should treat identity as their primary security control point. They should invest more in properly configured MFA, privileged access management, and user behavior analytics rather than focusing on traditional vulnerability management.

💻 I N T E L R U N N E R 💻

🇺🇸 Gold's 30-day volatility is highest in since 2008.

I wonder if it it's a similar point in the cycle...

🪙 I N T E L R U N N E R 🪙

💎 Bitcoin's Supply in Profit Drops to 55%

This is classic early bottom stuff. Doesn't mean we can't have additional 20-30% drawbacks from here.

We absolutely could. Here are the 3-, 6-, and 12-month returns from the other four times we've reached this point:

January 14th, 2015
3M: +21%, 6M: +61%, 12M: +136%

December 15th, 2018
3M: +23%, 6M: +159%, 12M: +123%

March 13th, 2020
3M: +64%, 6M: +81%, 12M: +985%

November 21st, 2022
3M: +54%, 6M: +72%, 12M: +127%

📉 I N T E L R U N N E R 📉

🇺🇸 This week’s AAII Sentiment Survey shows bears outnumbering bulls for the first time since Thanksgiving.

The bulls are at 34.5 and the bears are reading 36.9...

🐻 I N T E L R U N N E R 🐂

🇺🇸 S&P 500 Super Sectors: Earnings Share

Tech's earnings share has more than doubled from around 22% in the 00s to 45% today. The post-2010 acceleration reflects the years spent wandering the ZIRP desert, and the acceleration post-2020 is the semiconductor boom.

Traditional Cyclicals peaked at 55% in 2006-7's much more industrial-financial economy. It crashed during the GFC, slightly recovered, and then declined to 35%.

Defensives have had a steady down trend, falling from 25% to 22% over the period. There are brief spikes during crises when earnings resilience matters. Their earnings are multi-decade lows, reflecting ZIRP's effect on utilities/staples/real estate.

We are now in a rising interest rate cycle and monetary policy is constrained like never before in American history. AI has produced a bifurcation between tech that can and can't survive the new reality, but AI itself is failing to deliver revenues that even remotely correspond to the capital invested.

I will be shocked if this hasn't changed in five years.

📈 I N T E L R U N N E R 📉

🇺🇸 Where American States Rank in the Global Economy

Little baby countries.

It just goes to show the original confederation would've worked just fine in the end if we didn't have so many natural enemies of liberty and sovereignty abroad...

🌎 I N T E L R U N N E R 🌎

🇬🇧 Latest polling out of Great Britain, albeit a little old because I forgot to post this. That said, it's probably representative of a week ago. Restore Britain is born.

I'm guessing things have accelerated since Farage's betrayal, but the UK's population moves slower than I anticipate sometimes. I think some of them may get it right, and in any event, all of this open opposition should be making their current position clear to native British.

Only 5 of Restore Britain's 10% share a week ago was harvested from defection from the Reform Party. The other 5% comes from people who had stopped voting, which is interesting. One wonders what the size of that demographic may be...

Of course the lunatic Greens are ascendant on the left. Conservatives are in shambles—that could be even worse now. Labour was on the ropes before again being tied to Epstein.

It's genuinely difficult to envisage what sort of government would form. It is highly dependent on the voting—more so than usual.

🗳 I N T E L R U N N E R 🗳

🇺🇸 American Stocks Are the 6th Worst Performer Among 45 Major Countries

Definitely one of the worst opening years for America (relative to the world) as well...

We got into the likelihood of this becoming a full-blown mean reversion last Monday.

📉 I N T E L R U N N E R 📉

🇺🇸 Teacher Salaries vs. Home Prices, by State

This is cute, isn't it?

Why would American teachers deserve houses?

I wouldn't give them a cardboard box for their performance since 2019.

And I'd only give them the box for prior to it.

Maybe when the kids can read and add again, we can talk about housing you.

📈 I N T E L R U N N E R 📈