Animal Spirits

Peacock has lost approximately $11 billion since its 2020 launch and $6 billion since 2023 alone; despite growing to 46 million subscribers, it suffers the worst churn rate of any major streaming service because it relies on sports to acquire customers who cancel immediately after key events.

A Goldman Sachs survey showing ~40% of people earning $500K+ 'live paycheck to paycheck' is misleading because the survey defines the condition as 'find it tough to make progress on any financial goals' — not actually running short of cash — making the headline statistic uninformative about real financial distress at high incomes.

An unnamed asset manager that deployed an AI system for equity research coverage actually increased its analyst headcount, because the tool allowed the team to track far more stocks — particularly in under-followed small- and mid-cap names — generating more sellable research output per analyst.

Hamilton Lane changed its fee structure from carry-on-realized-gains to NAV-based carry, collecting $58 million in fees in its fiscal year ended 2025 by marking secondaries bought at a discount straight up to par — critics argue this pulls forward years of potential carry and inflates compensation tied to unrealized marks.

Since Tim Cook became Apple's CEO 15 years ago, Apple's market cap has added an average of $684 million per day ($250 billion per year); Apple Pay now has 785 million users worldwide, is accepted at over 90% of US retailers, and eliminated $1 billion in fraud in its most recent fiscal year.

The average monthly car payment for negative-equity borrowers hit $932 in Q1 2026, the highest level ever recorded; negative-equity buyers financed an average of ~$56,000 for a new vehicle — about $12,000 more than the typical new-car buyer — a direct legacy of pandemic-era vehicle price distortions.

Jane Street's 2024 profits exceeded Walmart's, illustrating that algorithmic and quantitative trading firms are among the most profitable enterprises in the global economy, and that the professional market-maker class has grown more dominant even as retail indexing has expanded.

Vanguard's VOO became the first ETF ever to cross $900 billion in AUM and is on pace to record $100 billion in annual inflows for the third consecutive year — a feat no ETF has ever accomplished — dwarfing the so-called 'degenerate' speculative economy in scale.

Despite fears from many credible commentators that zero interest rate policy would destroy the dollar, from 2009–2026 cumulative CPI inflation is only in the low single digits cumulatively — far below the ~80% cumulative inflation seen during the 1982–1999 bull market — suggesting the monetary crisis narrative was wrong.

The S&P 500 has compounded at 17% per year since the March 2009 bottom over 17 years, and the 2020s decade is currently running at approximately 15% annualized — a higher pace than the 2010s bull market.

S&P 500 blended earnings growth (reported plus estimated) is running at 13.7%, and the technology sector ex-Nvidia and Apple is tracking closer to 45% earnings growth, suggesting the AI capex cycle is already generating measurable ROI.

OpenAI raised $122 billion in the largest Silicon Valley funding round in history but expects to burn through that entire amount within three years, and its CFO has privately warned that the company may not be able to pay for its data center computing contracts if revenue growth stalls.

Bank of America's consumer loan book shrank dramatically relative to the overall economy: consumer credit cards are down 36% and home equity loans down 83% versus 2009 levels, suggesting far less systemic leverage risk than pre-GFC.

Since end of 2019, the bottom 90% of wealth holders have seen higher asset/net worth growth than the top 10%, a counterintuitive outcome that the Fed's data shows but which received little mainstream attention.

Prediction market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi saw trading volume explode from roughly $500 million to $6 billion in approximately one year, driven primarily by sports betting legalization.

Bank of America's consumer credit card charge-off rate improved from 4.05% in Q1 2025 to 3.64% in Q1 2026, suggesting consumer credit quality is strengthening, not deteriorating.

Bank of America tracks $4.5 trillion in annual consumer spending; that figure was up 5% in 2025 versus 2024, and the same 5% growth rate held in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025, indicating consumer resilience is continuing.

Austin's 2015 zoning reforms that enabled large-scale apartment construction — a 30% increase in housing stock, triple the US growth rate — caused rents to fall from among the highest in the country to below the national median, even as population grew by 18,000.

HyperLiquid, a crypto derivatives exchange, has 11 employees, generated over $900 million in profits in 3 years, has a $10 billion market cap, and has taken zero venture capital.

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) has posted a generational four-year run: up 73%, 40%, 50%, and 29% YTD in successive years.

Semiconductors now represent 16% of the S&P 500, closing in on the combined weight of energy, healthcare, staples, and utilities — a historically concentrated sectoral dominance.

The current bull market is tracking the 1982 bull market almost precisely, having logged a ~57% move higher and approaching 450 all-time highs since 2013 versus 505 from 1980 to the dot-com peak in March 2000.

American corporate earnings are rising faster now than after the 2017 tax cuts and at a pace typically only seen during a recovery from recession.

S&P 500 price and forward EPS are highly correlated and moving in the same direction, meaning the market's recent strength is fundamentally justified by accelerating earnings estimates, not irrational optimism.