Volatility Pulse - Inflation Nation
Your cell phone bill is causing inflation
Wireless telephone service is 1.6% of the core CPI basket and it caused 33.5% of August's entire monthly increase. Three small categories, under 5% of the basket between them, drove 60% of it.
Source: Duality Research
Healthcare got cheaper???? I must have missed that
The government's own CPI index for health insurance is down 35% over the last four years, from 209 to 136. Ask anyone who actually pays a premium how that tracks.
Source: BLS via Charlie Bilello
The Death of Software was greatly exaggerated
The software basket trades at 22.0 times forward earnings against 21.1 for semiconductors and 21.9 for the Nasdaq-100. Earlier this year it sat well below both of them.
Source: Koyfin via @KoyfinCharts
Seeds of discontent...
Worker pay is down to roughly 50.4% of gross domestic income, the lowest reading in a series that starts in 1947. It peaked near 58.7% around 1970.
Source: HSBC via Mike Zaccardi
Business investment stopped making jobs
The ten year rolling correlation between business investment and job creation ran between 0.3 and 0.85 for seven decades. It has collapsed to just below zero, the weakest on a chart that starts in 1948.
Source: Paulsen Perspectives
Venture capital is a handful of people
The top 1% of venture investors account for 56.7% of the industry's net profits and the top 5% take 90.2%. 62% of them have no credited successful investment at all.
Source: a16z
One IPO beat five years of exits
Venture backed exit value hit $2,188 billion in the first half of 2026, and the SpaceXAI listing was about $1,700 billion of that. The five years from 2021 through 2025 produced $1,573 billion combined.
Source: PitchBook via a16z
Most stocks never made anyone money
Across more than 29,000 US companies since 1925, about 52% produced a negative lifetime return. Roughly one in ten returned over 1,000%, and that thin tail is effectively the whole market.
Source: Meketa Investment Group via Meb Faber
Retail bought every dip but two
The S&P 500 has fallen 0.5% or more on 37 days this year. Robinhood customers were net buyers of single stocks on 35 of them.
Source: Sherwood News via Luke Kawa
Stocks nearly caught housing
Equities are 26.61% of US household net worth against 27.61% for real estate. The stock share is the highest on a chart that starts in the 1940s, and real estate's is the smallest since 1973.
Source: Bloomberg via @boes_
Oil ripped and stocks barely noticed
Crude rallied 55.8% over 49 trading days to just under $101. The S&P 500 sits about 2% below an all time high it set during that same run.
Source: TradingView via Caleb Franzen
This year's winners are one trade
SanDisk is up 588% in 2026, ahead of Moderna at 388% and Aehr at 369%. Almost the entire top fifteen is memory, chips or AI hardware, and even Intel is up 179%.
Source: Futurum Equities via @StockSavvyShay
Just Because...
"Eavesdropping" comes from this
An eavesdrop was originally the water that fell off the edge of a roof, and then the strip of wet ground where it landed. An eavesdropper was a person standing in that strip, pressed up against the house, listening in. The word is really a description of a posture.
