Volatility Pulse - Top Heavy
All the money went one place
Technology funds pulled in roughly $190 billion over the past twelve months. The next best sector managed about $55 billion, and consumer goods lost around $20 billion.
Source: Deutsche Bank via @neilsethinew
Fund managers are underweight the winner
Across $16.8 trillion of US funds, information technology is the single biggest underweight at 9.3%. Industrials sit at their largest overweight in five years.
Source: Variant Perception
Nvidia outweighs five sectors
Nvidia is now about 8.3% of the S&P 500, which makes one company bigger than five of the index's eleven sectors. Energy, utilities, real estate and materials are each less than half its size.
Source: Augur Infinity via @KobeissiLetter
The most hated stocks are winning
A basket of the most heavily shorted Russell 3000 names is up about 37% this year against roughly 12% for the S&P 500. Betting against things has been a rough trade.
Source: Goldman Sachs via @LJKawa
Somebody has to power all this
Thirteen AI mega-campuses announced or under construction in the US add up to about 75 gigawatts of capacity. The largest single site, in Texas, is 11 gigawatts on its own.
Source: Keenable via @unusual_whales
AI is retraining more than firing
Among service firms using AI, 34% retrained workers this year while 4% laid anyone off. Among manufacturers using it, 22% retrained and none reported layoffs at all.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Except in midterm years
Buying the S&P at the end of August in the 19 midterm years since 1950 was positive a year later 18 times, averaging 20.4%. None of the 19 saw a 20% drawdown over that year.
Source: Bluekurtic Market Insights
Retail takes the month off
September is when individual investors stop adding. Their share of net notional falls to about 4%, against 17% in January, and on down days they buy at roughly half their usual rate.
Source: Citadel Securities
The cushion is nearly gone
US diesel inventory now covers 27.2 days of demand and dipped to 26 earlier this year. Around 26 days is what triggered shortage warnings in October 2022, and the heaviest draw season is still ahead.
Source: RSM US
Pensions are finally full
The largest US corporate pension plans are about 112% funded, the highest since 2001 and the 98th percentile of the past 25 years.
Source: Milliman via Citadel Securities
Stocks moved onto the blockchain
Tokenized equity holders went from 45,000 a year ago to 1.9 million. The count more than doubled in the past month alone.
Source: RWA.xyz via @KobeissiLetter
Texas outgrew most of the world
Every country shaded red on this map has an economy smaller than the state of Texas. Russia, Brazil, Australia, Mexico and Spain are all in red.
Source: @amazingmap
Just Because...
A 12-Year-Old Invented Vanilla
Vanilla orchids outside Mexico would not fruit, because the bee that pollinates them lives only there. In 1841 Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Reunion, worked out how to do it by hand with a sliver of bamboo. Almost every vanilla bean on Earth is still pollinated his way. He died with nothing.
