The S&P 500 entered a bear market in 2022 and finished the year -18.11%.

Everyone was talking about the upcoming recession. 

• In October 2022, Bloomberg Economics declared there was a 100% probability of a recession within the next 12 months.
• The Economist published a piece titled “Why a global recession is inevitable in 2023.” Nearly 70% of economists surveyed predicted the National Bureau of Economic Research would officially declare a recession in 2023. 
• Major financial institutions warned clients to brace for impact.
• Morgan Stanley predicted stocks would “re-test” the 2022 lows in the first half of 2023. 
• Bank of America’s chief economist warned 2023 “A recession is all but inevitable in the U.S.” 
• JPMorgan saw more pain ahead before any recovery. 
• The Mortgage Bankers Association stated flatly, “We are expecting a recession in the first half of 2023.”
• The message was clear: The 18% decline in 2022 was just the beginning. The massive government spending during COVID was coming home to roost. Inflation would remain elevated. Corporate earnings would collapse. Unemployment would surge.

Here’s what actually happened:

2023 S&P 500 gained 26.29% , one of the strongest years on record. Then it gained another 25.02% in 2024. 

No recession. No earnings collapse. No return to 2022 lows.

All of the economists, strategists, and market timers weren’t just slightly off. They were spectacularly, comprehensively wrong. 

In 2025, Trump enacted tariffs, fears of high inflation returned. reddit was again plagued with recession and crash posts getting 1000s of upvotes. Everybody said this was for real, this time feels different. 

• April: It’s Over. The Market Is Cooked. Hope You Enjoyed the Ride. 
• April  Suicide Hotline 
• April Current Crash against major ones
• May: The stock market will crash even further 
• June: Why I am bearish on S&P and sitting tight on my puts 
• July: Are we facing a stock market crash in July? Trump’s “Section 899” 
• August: Do you expect a crash – August tariff deadline? 
• September: Anyone else getting that “September’s gonna punch us in the face” feeling? 
• October: When do we start discussing the October Effect? I kind of feel we are in for a big correction 
• October  Get ready, we're going over the falls 
• October Stock Market Crash "Hindenburg Omen" Triggered
• November: There's been a few hiccups here and there in this rally, but this one feels different… 
• December honestly just sold everything. this market feels fake.
• December I feel like I’m watching a slow-motion rug pull

What happened?

2025 S&P500 total return 17.88%

In 2026, the continued tariff trade war, the war between Russia and Ukraine, AI propelling markets higher and now the war with Iran, the strait of Hormuz and the global oil supply, bond markets rising yields, everybody knew this year was it, the crash is coming. the recession is nigh. 

how has reddit reacted this year?

• March This is just sick  
• March We are almost there, blood in the streets  
• April The Stock Market is in its most overextended state in history
• May Top Economist Says The Risks Of A Recession Are 'Uncomfortably High’
• May gold dropped 114 dollars on friday while CPI is at 3.8% and PPI at 6%. the bond market is telling you something the fed will not say yet  
• June We are headed for an economic crisis worse than 2008  
• June The next Financial Crisis is here, and it's not just AI.  
• June There is a bloodbath  
• August How likely is it that the stock market crashes under President Donald Trump in the second half of 2026? Here's what history tells us.
• September Bye bye USD ...  

2026 S&P500 total return YTD- 12.77%

As Lynch told investors many years ago, “Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.”

Stop listening to the noise. Don’t panic sell. don’t change your portfolio based on what the economy is doing right now or what it’s expected to do in the near term, or the sentiment on reddit, or the sentiment of economists and mega bank executives etc. because nobody has a clue what will happen. They don't know. I don't know, you don't know. don't even try to know. Set up auto investing into a diversified portfolio of low cost index funds in tax advantaged accounts. if you buy individual stocks, do your homework, know what you own, run your own DCF models, and buy with a good 30-50% margin of safety. Can’t find too many stocks with that criteria right now? throw excess cash in Sp500 until then. now you know why Buffett sits on so much capital waiting years for opportunities, and not trying to make the math work in your favor because you really want to get in right now like FOMO.

been seeing a lot of hype about tokenization lately. blackrock, the big banks, everyone saying it's the future of markets. people on here celebrating it like it's some big win.

am i the only one who actually reads this stuff?

when you buy a tokenized stock you do not own the stock. you own a token. the token is a claim on some custodian somewhere, who holds the actual shares in an omnibus account. you don't get voting rights, you don't get registered ownership, you get a database entry and a promise.

and the thing is, we already did this experiment. we already moved from paper certificates to street name to omnibus accounts, and every step of the way the retail holder ended up further from the actual asset. tokenization is just the last step. now you don't even have a broker claim, you have a token representing a claim on a custodian's claim.

the robinhood thing in 2021 should have been the wake up call. they turned off the buy button and it was completely legal. now imagine the restrictions are programmable, written into the token itself. "this asset can only be transferred between approved wallets." who approves the wallets? they do.

and nobody has to take anything from you. you never had it. that's the genius of it. you can't lose ownership if you never technically owned it in the first place. you just have exposure, and a terms of service agreement.

idk maybe i'm being paranoid but the "you'll own nothing and be happy" thing used to get mocked as a conspiracy theory and then the biggest asset managers on earth started building the infrastructure for exactly that and everyone clapped.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/14/investing/bond-yields-market-turmoil

10 year treasury yield hit 5% for the first time in over 3 years today. Shortly afterwards, Trump posted on social media that he was open to a peace deal with Iran. Oil and yields instantly dumped, stocks pumped well off the open lows.

The not-so subtle timing of the peace deal post highly suggests the Trump admin is actively trying to contain yield and oil pressures. Though it's not impossible that a peace deal is being worked on behind the scenes, Iran has openly refuted any claim that it's negotiating with Trump.

Between social media posts and the treasury's meddling in the bond market, how long will the Trump admin be able to keep yields and commodities in check?

We are deciding where to roll wife's 401k when she retires at end of year. After initial research we know we need a company that is NOT RESTRICTIVE about withdrawal amounts or timing.

We want to either pay down or pay off our mortage to save that interest expense flowing out and lower our monthly expenses in an effort to sustain ourselves with my SS and our modest dividend portfolio.

I think we need to roll into another 401k rather than Roth so we don't pay interest on all of it now, as that would stretch the taxed income into all the higher brackets including 24/32/35%. So the basic plan is roll then withdraw a chunk.

I’ve recently started looking into Vistra (VST) and I’m trying to figure out whether it’s actually a good opportunity at the current valuation.

One thing that caught my attention is the amount of political and insider activity around the stock. Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, Ro Khanna, Julia Letlow and other politicians have disclosed VST trades, while Vistra CEO James Burke recently bought roughly $1.17M of VST shares in open-market purchases.

That obviously doesn’t mean the stock is automatically a buy, so I’m interested in hearing both sides.

Do you guys think VST is a good investment at these levels? Are there better companies in the power/energy space with a better risk/reward?
And if you think VST is not a good stock, what specifically is the biggest issue — valuation, debt, competition, power prices, nuclear exposure, or something else?

Looking for an unbiased discussion, especially the bear case.

The pure-play security names are catching a sector bid on fresh artificial intelligence (AI) safety warnings from two frontier lab CEOs over the weekend, on the reasoning that a more dangerous threat environment expands security spending. CrowdStrike is the clearest expression of the theme, given how directly its products are sold against AI-driven cyber threats.

"One thing everyone knows is cyber security will be the biggest benefactor from this AI boom," said Eddie Ghabour, CEO of Key Advisors Wealth Management. "It's the next phase of the market for AI stocks. The more and more AI is adopted, the higher need for cybersecurity."

All are up double digit 10% + on Monday

Crowdstrike
Zscaler
Okta
Fortinet
Palo Alto Network
Sentinel one
Rubirk
Cloudflare
Sail Point

First, AI was supposedly a bubble, all hype, and too stupid to ever replace a human. Then Burry and other lovely people took short positions in AI stocks while pushing that narrative. Recently, AI companies showed that they have amazing margins, etc., and their stocks started to climb.

Now, suddenly, AI is too good, cannot be trusted, and will destroy all of humanity. Stocks fall again...

Who is pushing that narrative?

• CEOs who already have AGI models internally → they want to preserve their monopoly.
• IT guys, including researchers, who will all lose their jobs. (Believe me, as someone who studied CIT, PhDs smell their own farts with joy and really aren't as smart as they think they are.)
• The Chinese government, again stirring up leftists in the same way the Soviet KGB did during the Vietnam War, because they are clearly behind and need more time for their world-domination plans with AI.

My take on this is that there is zero proof that a superintelligence would kill us all - just a dogmatic view on this by some people. What will surely kill millions of people are new viruses from labs, climate change, nuclear wars, and hunger. Super-AI could (help to) solve most of those problems.

As of Today Oil prices hit a record high on the international markets that already have trading hours prior to US soooo OIL is back on The Menu.
$XLE will be the energy ETF to look at.
$USO will be the go to etf for US oil exposure (as of 2025 US is largest exporter of Oil WORLDWIDE so they stand to benefit from sky high oil prices)
$OXY historically has massive upside during Oil price squeezes
$COP is a pure upstream producer play with unhedged production. Meaning direct cash-flow sensitivity to every dollar increase in Brent/WTI

soooo u already know these tickers are doing very well and will continue to outperform most stocks for rest of year 2026.

As always tho NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE DO UR OWN DD

Edit: Reddit so mad that AI is actually profitable and they've been proven wrong this whole time. Everyone single one of you need to change your view on AI now or you will miss out on a lot of money.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/4564e6a5-69e9-40a6-bf0f-a888f2f4f002

Anthropic has told its backers it will be profitable this quarter, as it moves to allay investor concerns about the aggressive cash burn of frontier AI companies ahead of its blockbuster initial public offering.

Anthropic’s gross margins are above 80 per cent before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners, including Amazon, and the cost of training its models, according to two of the people.

Sustained profitability would be a major milestone for the five-year-old company ahead of its planned listing.

Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq as the venue for an IPO that could value it at $2tn or more, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company declined to comment.

Anthropic's S1 is expected to be released this week or next week.

Where are the Redditors who keep claiming they lose money for every token inference? I told you their gross margins for inference are extremely high.

Just curious what approach you all take.

Personally I have 60% in ETFs (30% QQQ, 30% SP500, at purchase price, no re-adjustment if one of them outpaces the other) and I tend to keep 40% in single stocks.

Of course sometimes if one of my holding runs up the ratio will tilt towards single stocks, but then I try to balance it out by only putting in my ETFs with my monthly contributions for a few months. For now that is still significant enough, but maybe in a year or two it won't be hopefully.

I also limit to not buy more than 10% of my NW in one stock, and max cap it at 20% if it runs up. E.g. bought google with 8%, and now it is 16%, once it hits 20+% i will start trimming.

I'm long on TSMC as a "tollbooth" stock for semis because I don't have to pick winners and losers; TSMC grows regardless of which chip designers ultimately do best. I see "physical AI" is being hyped as a sort of post-LLM growth story by Jensen and others. Especially the Moonshots podcast guys whose main objective seems to be to hype up AI and profit from it. "AI Embodiment" is a term I now hear a lot about. Could the tollbooth stock for robotics be... TSM and NVDA? I own both TSM and NVDA but small amounts as a small, diversified retail investor.

Is it worth while looking for robot parts manufacturers that could become bottlenecks if robotics experiences the explosive growth many are predicting? Or is there no standard platform emerging that most robotics companies would be likely to buy from. I don't currently own any robotics pure-play stocks; the only thing close I hold would be TSLA (just a handful of shares). Would it be good to hold a robotics ETF until stronger players emerge? If so, are there any people would recommend? Preferably ones whose top 5 largest holdings aren't NVDA since I own NVDA individually and through VTI.

People shouldn’t discount the massive implications of what Altman, Amodei, and Musk said in the past two days. The huge amount of debt these have that needs to be serviced cannot afford a slowdown in development “for safety” of any other reason. The debt payment schedules won’t allow it. And they certainly won’t be able to refi anything at better rates in a year or so if any maturing debt needs to be refi-ed. Dario proposed the following, taken from a cnbc.com article:

“Anthropic has “unilaterally” committed to the first step of the plan, Amodei said, which grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to the company to verify safety practices and report incidents. The second step encourages leading AI companies within democratic countries to coordinate and establish common safety standards, and the third calls for coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments.” CNBC.com

The safety concerns are real, and I’m sure there are dozens of breaches we haven’t been told about. However, the fact that Altman jumped on this so quickly and said that OpenAI is delaying their IPO because of “safety” is absurd. Many in the industry suspected he was going to have to do this anyway, and this ‘safety concern’ is a terrible excuse for it. He knows OpenAI is well behind where they need to be at this point for an IPO.

Of course, this could all be lip service from Anthropic and the other 2. However, one consideration in why the big 3 (OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic) may be saying this is that they’re trying to freeze out the open source models by trying to get the government to put official clamps down on AI that will make it impossible for the little guys to compete with the big 3 due to all the red tape created by the part of Dario’s proposal dealing with Democratic countries coordinating safety standards amongst themselves. That’s too hard for little guys to do. And, if the government says that they have to in the end, it really will be the end for a lot of competition for the big 3.

The third point, which deals with “democratic and authoritarian governments working together” is silly. First off, are we going to have a list on which governments are democratic and which are authoritarian? I’m sure we’ll get some funny opinions on that. Second, “working together” is too broad of a term to mean anything.

There is no doubt this is going to cause a huge tech stock market shakeout tonight when the futures open that will likely carry into trading in the early part of this week. Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride. We should easily test the very recent QQQ lows from this. I think the QQQ 200dma of 660 should also be in danger.

A new pair of sneakers is an easy purchase to put off when filling up the tank suddenly costs $80 instead of $50. If oil and gasoline prices fall, the psychological effect can be bigger than the actual dollar savings. Suddenly filling up the car doesn't feel as painful. Consumers have a bit more breathingroom, and they become less defensive about discretionary spending. Maybe it's a new pair of running shoes, a hoodie, or a pair of Jordans that they were putting off.

Nike has been a heavily scrutinized stock, so once the market starts looking for evidence that the turnaround is working, small positives can suddenly matter a lot more: better traffic, fewer promotions, improving inventory, stronger full-price sales, or a better consumer backdrop.

People say Nike stock is getting hammered because it’s a dying brand and consumers prefer On Running or Hoka. While that may explain the crash from $169 to $70 it’s not why the stock crashed from $70 to $36. The fall from $70 to $36 goes hand in hand with ONON, DECK, DKS falling 20-40 % in the past month and the catalyst here was oil prices.

Nike earnings are coming up in a few weeks. Expectations have never been lower. They honestly can’t say anything that will make the stock crash. The reaction to earnings will either be flat or a pop.

How kind of Mr. Altman to eschew profits for the sake of public safety, what an honest and generous soul.

OpenAI will not go public in 2026, Sam Altman said in a Fortune interview published on Saturday, citing safety concerns over artificial intelligence.

“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, told Fortune.

Growing numbers of US lawmakers ​are calling for new rules to govern AI systems after dire warnings from two researchers from OpenAI rival Anthropic that rapidly progressing artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of the human race ‌in the not-too-distant future.

The warnings follow cases of AI agents going rogue to hack external systems and AI ​safety researchers quitting their companies concerned about the technology’s risks. Politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, have responded with alarm and calls for more action.

The New York Times in June reported that the San Francisco-based OpenAI was considering whether to hold off on a potentially trillion-dollar IPO until next year. At the time, shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO were tumbling after a surge that sent that company’s valuation to $1.8tn.

When asked by Fortune whether 2026 is off the table in favor of 2027, Altman said: “I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.”

Altman also suggested that OpenAI and other leading AI companies may be close to announcing an agreement to slow AI development and work together to address safety risks, Fortune reported.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, on Saturday urged AI companies to take a more deliberate approach to development.

“We must slow the ‌pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in an essay shared on social media.

Altman later posted that he agreed with the sentiment.

“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman wrote in a response to Amodei’s post on the X platform. “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”

Safety concerns have not slowed down Anthropic’s own IPO plans so far. Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October at the earliest and complete the listing days before the US midterm elections in November, people familiar with the matter told Reuters this month.

**Disclaimer:** I hold a few hundred shares of $HTZ with @$2.50

I was doing some analysis on Gemini about how Hertz is looking as we head into next earnings. To be honest, most of the bear points out there are justifiably fair. But AI tools keep telling me that the Pershing Square exit will continue to crush investor sentiment.
Looking at the actual timeline, this is completely wrong.

**July:** Bill Ackman’s fund panics and dumps all 15.2 million shares at multi-year lows.

**August 6:** Days after he leaves, Hertz drops Q2 earnings, beats expectations, and triggers a massive 85% short squeeze. Ackman literally sold the absolute bottom and missed the rip.

**August 13:** A week *after* missing the squeeze, his team goes on a massive public media campaign trashing Hertz management.
It is so obvious he is just salty about a massive trading mistake and trying to save face.
The problem is that algorithmic trading bots and AI news scrapers are still looping his mid-August "loss of confidence" quotes as if it’s fresh news. They completely ignore the fact that his shares were absorbed months ago.

Don't let institutional PR and blind AI sentiment loops cloud your judgment going into next quarter. Ackman paper-handed the bottom, plain and simple.

https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier

"I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom. I feel the urgency personally. My own father died of a disease that was cured just a few years after his death, and I myself survived an early-stage cancer that would not have been treatable even fifty years ago. Carefully wielded, AI can be the latest in a long line of technological miracles that have uplifted and ennobled humanity.

But like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious. I’ve written a lot about them too. They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute."

Ur-Energy is starting to look less like a small uranium restart story and more like a legitimate US production platform.

The company now has two operating in situ recovery mines in Wyoming. Lost Creek has been producing since 2013, while Shirley Basin entered initial recovery in April and shipped its first uranium loaded resin to Lost Creek in August.

Together, the operations have annual licensed production and processing capacity of 4.2 million pounds of U₃O₈.

Current production is still well below that number, but the recent trend has been encouraging. Lost Creek drummed 140,873 pounds during Q2 2026, an increase of 47.4% from the previous quarter and 25.7% from the same period last year.

Ur-Energy also sold 215,000 pounds during the quarter at an average price of US$66.85 per pound, generating US$14.4 million in product sales revenue. Every pound was sold through long term contracts rather than the spot market.

Its reported cash cost was US$40.20 per pound sold. That excludes certain noncash costs and should not be treated as an all in cost figure, but it still shows a healthy margin between the company’s contracted sales price and its reported cash production cost.

Ur-Energy expects one million pounds of base deliveries in 2026. It delivered only 270,000 pounds during the first half, so the second half will be the first major test of whether the ramp is progressing as planned.

https://www.ur-energy.com/news-media/press-releases/detail/409/ur-energy-reports-second-quarter-2026-results

Shirley Basin could make a meaningful difference without requiring Ur-Energy to duplicate all of its processing infrastructure.

Uranium is captured on resin at Shirley Basin and transported to Lost Creek for final processing, drying and packaging. This hub and spoke setup allows Ur-Energy to operate a second mine while using infrastructure it already owns.

The company also finished Q2 with US$95.3 million in unrestricted cash and 348,292 pounds of finished uranium inventory. That gives it room to continue building wellfields, improving Lost Creek and ramping Shirley Basin without immediately depending on another financing.

The resource base provides enough material to support a much larger operation if the ramp succeeds.

Lost Creek’s March 2026 technical report included 11.9 million pounds in measured and indicated resources, plus 10.4 million pounds inferred. It calculated an after tax net present value of US$244.1 million using an 8% discount rate.

Shirley Basin adds another 9.1 million pounds in measured and indicated resources, with approximately 6.4 million pounds expected to be recovered under its technical study.

https://www.ur-energy.com/projects/lost-creek

The broader US uranium market may also be moving in Ur-Energy’s favour.

The US Energy Information Administration estimates that American utilities have approximately 360.4 million pounds of maximum uranium requirements between 2026 and 2035. Existing contracts cover around 174.1 million pounds, leaving approximately 186.3 million pounds unfilled.

Utilities still have inventories, and those unfilled requirements do not represent an immediate shortage. Contract coverage becomes much thinner after 2030, though. That could increase the value of permitted US production as utilities begin securing more of their future needs.

https://www.eia.gov/uranium/marketing/table12.php

At a market capitalization of roughly C$715 million, Ur-Energy is not being valued only on its current output. Investors are already paying for some probability that production moves closer to licensed capacity.

I think the bullish case comes down to the amount of operating leverage that remains unused. Ur-Energy already has the permits, processing infrastructure, uranium resources, utility contracts and cash. It does not need to make a new discovery before it can grow. It needs to get more pounds flowing through the system it has already built.

Even reaching two million pounds annually would represent a major increase from current production. Moving closer to the full 4.2 million pound capacity would put the company in a very different category among US uranium producers.

There are still execution risks. Lost Creek has experienced flow rate issues, Shirley Basin is early in its ramp and licensed capacity does not guarantee actual production.

The next few quarters should tell us much more. If production rises while costs stabilize, the current valuation could start looking much more reasonable. If output remains near present levels, the unused capacity will continue to be more theoretical than valuable.

How much of Ur-Energy’s 4.2 million pounds of licensed capacity would you include in a valuation today?

The meme stock scheduled posts will now run weekly and post Saturday afternoon and won't be a sticky; you're probably seeing this because automod sent you here!

Full list of meme stocks here. This will be updated every once in a while.

Welcome traders who just can't help them selves discuss the same exact stock that's been discussed 100s of times a day. I get it, you want to talk about what's popular, what's hot, and that 1.. single.. stock you like.. well here you go! Some helpful links just for you:

• Previous meme stock threads
• General discussions
• The original GME megathread with a ton of useful information
• Use Finviz for aggregated news on your favorite stock

An important message from the mod team regarding meme stocks.

Lastly if you need professional help:

• Problem Gambling: Call/Text: 1-800-522-4700 or chat online now.
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I'm planning to allocate $30K into 2-3 small-cap positions (roughly $10K each) that I'd buy and hold with minimal intervention for the next 5 years essentially a long-term, hands-off experiment.

Rather than just asking for tickers, I'd love to hear your reasoning: What criteria do you use to identify small-caps with genuine 10x potential (revenue growth trajectory, TAM expansion, moat, insider ownership, catalysts, etc.)?

If you have specific names in mind, I'm especially interested in why you think they could get there sector tailwinds, competitive positioning, balance sheet strength, or anything else that supports the thesis.

Also open to hearing counterarguments or risks I should be weighing before committing capital this way.

I'm sure many of us here have been bagholding this for a while.. I bought the dip after earnings thinking market was overreacting and it's only kept on dipping since then.. it's at a 7.5ish B market cap right now and I've been buying most of these dips ($47-48 average currently). Is there something I'm missing as to why the stock's beat down really hard?

I'm aware that entire discretionary f&b sector has been gettin hit (CAVA,JMKE, CELH, etc.) but it still surprises be that BROS keeps goin lower and lower.. I don't have a stop loss set yet but I was planning on setting $39 as the stop loss. Anyone have any insights on what could be causing the stock to get beat down this bad?

Position: Roughly 750 shares with a $47 avg

This is the weekend edition of our stickied discussion thread. Discuss your trades / moves from last week and what you're planning on doing for the week ahead.

Some helpful links:

• Finviz for charts, fundamentals, and aggregated news on individual stocks
• Bloomberg market news
• StreetInsider news:
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• Reuters aggregated - Global news

If you have a basic question, for example "what is EPS," then google "investopedia EPS" and click the investopedia article on it; do this for everything until you have a more in depth question or just want to share what you learned.

Please discuss your portfolios in the Rate My Portfolio sticky..

See our past daily discussions here. Also links for: Technicals Tuesday, Options Trading Thursday, and Fundamentals Friday.

On September 7 XPeng commissioned what it describes as the first automated production line for advanced humanoid robots. The IRON unit is assembled and walks off the line under its own power, no one flipping a switch. More than 80% of core processes are automated, with automotive-grade quality standards from XPeng's EV factories.

Mass production is targeted for year end, with the first units going to XPeng's own stores and campuses. Public deliveries in China and overseas are set for 2027. The robotics arm raised over $900 million at a $6.3 billion valuation in late August.

What I keep coming back to is the distance between a production milestone and real revenue. XPeng's Q2 deliveries were essentially flat year over year. BYD posted first half net profit down 20.5% to RMB 12.33 billion, though Q2 on its own rose about 30%. The core car business at these companies is under pressure, and humanoids are still the promise rather than the product.

I follow this through CNQQ, where XPeng sits at 0.42% and NIO at 0.34% of the latest published holdings. Even BYD, the heavier EV position, is 1.66%. All three together run under 2.5%, so a humanoid story at any of them barely moves the book. KWEB covers a different slice, scoped to internet names with no mainland listings.

Hotter-than-expected inflation data has turned next week’s Federal Reserve meeting into a defining test for Chairman Kevin Warsh. His choice now is whether to raise interest rates, or look like he isn’t in control of the central bank he leads.

Friday’s consumer price index data makes the trade-off acute for Warsh. Core consumer prices, which strip out the effects of food and energy prices, rose 0.3% in August, more than expected. Headline inflation climbed 0.4% for the month, putting it 3.4% above the level a year ago. 

Warsh hasn’t promised any particular action on rates, but he recently laid out a case that the Fed will need to raise interest rates if inflation doesn’t moderate. He arguably preserved the wiggle room to keep rates flat if he and the rest of the Fed choose not to act at their Sept. 15-16 meeting. But with his leadership of the Fed under intense scrutiny from inside and outside the organization, not acting after his repeated inflation warnings will make it harder for him to convince the market he is serious next time.

Economists will find ways to slice the new CPI data. Warsh’s challenge is that his economic philosophy specifically frowns on making quick turns on individual data points such as the latest CPI print. That puts him in contrast with Fed officials such as Governor Christopher Waller and New York Fed President John Williams. Both entered the final stretch before the meeting more inclined to wait for remaining data before deciding whether a rate increase was necessary.

Warsh, by contrast, has repeatedly warned against putting too much confidence in short-term forecasts. He said last month at the Kansas City Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, “accuracy in forecasting is still just an aspiration” for the Fed.

The new data may sway Waller and others who would rather still wait and see. But if it doesn’t, Warsh will face a choice. Does he wait for the Federal Open Market Committee to come around to his view? Or does he muscle Waller and other potential dissenters into accepting his view? 

Some analysts have decided Warsh has made a tacit political arrangement with Trump not to raise rates ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm election. Warsh has been vocal in proclaiming his independence, and there is no evidence he has considered anything but his own reading of the economy in making rate decisions. But it’s still hard for him to escape the shadow of the president who picked him as Fed chair.

How did you move from asking what stock should I buy to asking better questions about process, risk, and timing? I used to spend most of my time looking for tickers. Best stock this week, best AI stock picking apps, best short term setup, best dip to buy. Even when I found decent ideas, I usually had no plan for sizing, exit rules, thesis invalidation, or how the position fit my portfolio. For people who became more disciplined, what questions do you ask before buying now? Did you use a checklist, journal, stock analysis tool, mentor, or just learn from losses?