Anthony Stafford, CFA

The market is going to have to signal pretty quickly some significant demand destruction unless Trump walks away with his tail between his legs.

⚠️US investors HAVE NEVER been this leveraged: Net credit balance, investor cash minus margin debt, has collapsed to -$992 billion as of May 2026, an all-time low. TAP IMAGE TO SEE FULL INSIGHT👇 globalmarketsinvestor.beehiiv.com/p/us-equities-…

The cracks are building from within.

U.S. forces resumed the naval blockade against vessels transiting to and from Iranian ports and coastal areas today at 4 p.m. ET. There are currently more than 20 U.S. Navy warships and hundreds of military aircraft operating across the Middle East. American forces remain vigilant, lethal, and ready.

@KobeissiLetter We have seen this before - it is like he is reruning his early April play. He wants a deal and will escalate to get it - the question is if Iran calls his bluff - will he follow through?

BREAKING: President Trump says the U.S. is going to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges next week if Iran does not “come to the table” and negotiate. “We are going to knock out all of their power plants, we are going to knock out all of their bridges,” Trump says.

@BullTheoryio The methodology is flawed - by accruing historical wealth generated at the bill rate it is over-weighting recent company wealth generation. Further the wealth generated should be in real dollars. Would love to see this re done and what the conclusions are.

96 out of every 100 US companies never made their investors any money. A new study from Arizona State tracked every stock listed on US markets from 1926 to 2025. That is 29,754 stocks over 100 years. The market created $90.96 trillion in that time. All of it came from just 1,082 companies. The other 27,999 gave investors nothing. Most stocks lose money. Only 48% of stocks made any money at all. Only 41% beat a savings account. 59% of companies lost money for shareholders. The median stock lost 6.87%. But the average stock returned 30,621%. That gap is the whole story. A few enormous winners pull the average up while most stocks bleed. So who were the winners? • Apple: $5.02 trillion • Nvidia: $4.58 trillion • Microsoft: $4.03 trillion • Alphabet: $3.57 trillion • Amazon: $2.27 trillion These are not market caps. This is total wealth created for shareholders since the company listed, measured against what that money would have earned sitting in Treasury bills. Apple and Nvidia alone made 10.6% of all the wealth the US market has created since 1926. The same researcher ran this study in 2018 with data through 2016. Back then it took 89 companies to make up half of all the wealth ever created. Nine years later, it takes only 46. In the 90 years up to 2016, the top 30 companies made 31% of all the wealth. In the nine years since, the top 30 made 61%. Nvidia by itself made 9.32% of everything created since 2017. Concentration doubled in nine years. And those nine years are exactly the years the AI trade took over the market. The typical company got worse at the same time. In the first six decades of the study, the median stock returned 63.6% per decade. In the last four decades, it dropped to 5.8%. The market kept going up. Most companies stopped going up with it. People keep saying the S&P is being carried by a handful of AI stocks, as if this is something new. It is not. The market has always run on a tiny number of winners. What changed is how few of them there are now.

The banks getting paid to take SpaceX public are the same ones telling you to buy the stock. In the words of Charlie Munger: "Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome."

Another example of extreme model efficency. People over focus on the frontier. Real game is taking that frontier and making it fit for purpose. Most value will be created here and it challenges the endless demand compute view that exists.

Love it but also laughing at the idea of a Last Exam 2.0.

I recall all the forecasts of battery costs heading to $50/kwh. Maybe sodium will help reduce it - but the reality is that the balance of the battery (incl. labour) other than the cells is not the dominant cost.

Goldman: Over the past 3 weeks, market leadership has been tested, with the momentum factor delivering the sharpest sell-off since the early 2000s. As we highlighted a month ago, the cumulative outperformance of the S&P 500 Momentum Index relative to the S&P 500 Low Volatility Index had risen close to the peaks reached in 2000, fuelled by the AI capex spending boom.

BofA Warns Stock Bulls to Consider Curbing Aggressive Buying Global investors buying stocks aggressively should consider reducing exposure, according to Bank of America Corp.’s fund manager survey. Asset allocators have become extremely bullish, a typical warning sign for markets, with cash levels falling to an “uber-low” level of 3.6% of assets from 4.1% last month, strategists from the bank said. Positioning on US equities is now at its highest level since December 2024 at a net 24% overweight, the survey showed. “BofA Bull & Bear Indicator at extreme bull reading of 9.4 says reduce equity and high-beta exposure,” the team led by Michael Hartnett wrote in a note. The BofA gauge has a range of one to 10. “Summer upside for risk assets to remain stymied by bull positioning.” (Bloomberg)

🔴THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE: South Korea's margin call to receivables ratio has spiked to ~5%, the 3rd-highest level on record. This ratio measures the share of outstanding margin loans that has been flagged for a margin call, where brokers demand additional collateral or forcibly liquidate positions after prices move against borrowers. This is more than 4 times its typical range of ~1% to 2% over the past 2 years. Furthermore, brokerage receivables, the total value of outstanding margin loans, have exceeded KRW 2,000 billion (~$1.34 billion), up from a typical range of KRW 900-1,000 billion (~$640 million). This comes as South Korean retail investors have piled into leveraged ETFs at a pace unlike anything seen before. Meanwhile, ~1.2 million trading accounts have triggered margin calls, with 320,000–360,000 ultimately forcibly liquidated by brokers. This means hundreds of thousands of retail investors have had their positions forcibly closed, with some still owing money to their brokers after liquidation. This is becoming one of the most painful unwinds for retail investors in history.

"Gap between forward and trailing earnings at multi-year high" -Apollo Slok

Show makes a lot more sense now

@cryptopsychdoc Preview of what is to play out with US retail. Last in first out. Low risk aversion until they run away in fear or broke or both.

Koreans received the biggest ever wealth boom from memory stocks and immediately shoved it into 3x leveraged positions and got wiped out

@sffed My takeaway - listen to the people operating in the real world and not "professional economists"

Do inflation expectations held by businesses align with those of professional forecasters? sffed.us/4pov2Cc New research finds that firms' views on inflation diverged from forecasters during the pandemic-era surge.

JD Vance: "I empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East. I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents" (2025)

🚨 1.2 million Koreans just got margin called in a single crash. That is roughly 1 in every 30 working age adults in the entire country. Korea's Financial Supervisory Service says over 1.2 million leveraged retail accounts triggered margin calls as of July 13. Between 320,000 and 360,000 of them were fully liquidated by brokers, principal wiped out, and some now owe money to their brokerage. The KOSPI fell 8.95% on Monday, its third worst day since Lehman, and triggered the 7th circuit breaker of the year. SK Hynix CRASHED 15.37%, its biggest fall on record. Samsung CRASHED 10.7%. Retail brokerage deposits have collapsed by ₩30 trillion to ₩107.1 trillion, the lowest since February. And the forced selling data runs two days behind. Monday's crash has not even shown up in the numbers yet.

@jimcramer Why will it stop - the implied cost of equity is probably below current cost of debt for these firms - rational for them to fill their bags until the cost of equity is pushed back up.

Every time we think we are done with new supply, we get another big chunk, this time possibly Samsung. We are going to be out of cash soon enough... we need some time to breathe between deals...