Bear markets. “Looking at the other 11 bear markets since the S&P 500 became 500 stocks shows that they usually start with a quick drop from ATHs. In fact, down 5% in only 14.5 days on avg those times. The recent 5% mild pullback took a very long 35 trading days, which would by far be the most ever should this turn into a bear market.”
The Daily Shot
2. AAPL Traded Right to 200-Day
StockCharts
3. MSFT Worst Quarter Since 2008
Yahoo Finance
4. MSFT Cheaper than S&P….Microsoft Now Lags S&P by Earnings Multiple
CNBC
5. Historic Selloff in Asian Emerging Markets
Dave Lutz Jones Trading Many Asian economies saw factory activity slow in March, business surveys showed on April 1, a sign surging fuel costs and heightening global uncertainty from the Iran war were taking a toll on the region – Manufacturing activity in March slowed in economies ranging from Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, other PMIs showed, highlighting the pain the Middle East conflict was already inflicting on businesses. Japanese Input prices rose at the fastest rate since August 2024 as the Middle East war drove up energy and raw material prices, adding to cost pressures from a weak yen and labor shortages.
6. This Chart Shows XLE Energy ETF vs. XLF Financials ETF for 2026…Bulls Need this Chart to Reverse Down
StockCharts
7. Earnings vs. S&P Chart
Chart Kid Matt
8. Mid-Term Elections Polymarket
Jack Ablin Cresset Notwithstanding the difficult environment for Republicans, Democrats still face a tough map as they look to win the four seats to claim a majority in the Senate, and will have to win some long-shot races to get there. Republicans are defending nearly two-thirds of the Senate seats on the ballot in 2026. Prediction markets suggesting that Democrats have a nearly equal chance of retaking the Senate after the midterm elections are overstating the likelihood.
Cresset
9. Japan has 9 Million Vacant Homes-13-14% of its Total Housing Stock…Bad Demographics
1. S&P Valuation Below 20x Forward P/E Still Well Above Median and Liberation Day Levels
JP Morgan Asset Management
2. ACWI Global Stock Index 12 month and 24 month Forward P/E Lower
3. Seasonality for Q2 Presidential Cycle
Ryan Detrick
4. 30-Year Treasury Close to 5%…Close to Highest Level Since GFC
Barchart
5. INDA India Stock Market Now Down on One-Year Basis
Google Finance
6. Trump Approval Rating Suffering
Prof G Media
7. Trump Media Stock DJT -37% 2026…Breaks to New Lows
StockCharts
8. Waymo 500k Trips Per Week
chartr
9. Fidel Castro Wealthy Parents
Perplexity
10. Your Brain on Nature: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Mental Performance and the Outdoors
By SUCCESS Staff March 27, 20268 min read
You’ve probably dismissed the afternoon walk more times than you can count.
There’s a deadline. There’s a meeting. There’s a message that needs answering. The idea of stepping outside for 20 minutes feels indulgent at best, irresponsible at worst—like something you’ll reward yourself with once the work is done.
Here’s the thing: The neuroscience says you have it exactly backward.
Spending time in natural environments isn’t a break from high performance. According to a growing and increasingly rigorous body of research, it’s one of the most direct routes to it. This isn’t wellness advice dressed up in productivity language. This is brain imaging data, randomized controlled trials and cortisol measurements—pointing to the same conclusion. Your brain on nature performs measurably better than your brain without it.
Here’s what the research actually shows—and how to use it.
Science Has Finally Caught Up to What You Already Suspected
For years, the benefits of being outdoors were treated as anecdotal—a feeling, not a fact. That’s no longer a defensible position.
A comprehensive scoping review published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews in early 2026 synthesized neuroimaging findings from EEG, fMRI and structural MRI studies conducted across real-world settings, controlled labs and even virtual environments. Across all these settings, exposure to natural stimuli was reliably associated with acute reductions in activity within stress-related and self-referential brain circuits, shifts toward brain states consistent with attentional restoration and longer-term structural advantages in cognition.
Read that carefully. This isn’t self-reported relaxation. This is measurable neurological change—visible on brain scans—from exposure to nature.
The review goes further, noting that natural environments may function as “spontaneous regulators” of the nervous system, passively guiding the brain toward states that are otherwise cultivated through intentional contemplative practice—states that most high-performers spend significant time and money trying to replicate through meditation apps, breathwork and recovery protocols.
Nature, it turns out, may do it for free.
Why Your Brain Needs a Different Kind of Input
To understand why the outdoors restores mental performance, you need to understand what depletes it in the first place.
Modern work environments are relentlessly demanding on a specific cognitive resource: directed attention. Every email, notification, decision and open browser tab requires your prefrontal cortex to actively filter, prioritize and select. This is effortful work—and like any resource, it has a limit.
Attention restoration theory, developed by researcher Stephen Kaplan, proposes that natural environments restore this capacity because they engage attention in a fundamentally different way. Natural settings are engaging to look at, but in a way that does not place much demand on executive attention resources—allowing the directed attention system to rest and recover.
The analogy that holds up: Your directed attention is like a muscle. Working in a screen-saturated environment flexes it continuously, without recovery. Nature gives it something to engage with that doesn’t require effort—and that difference is measurable at the neural level.
What Happens to Your Brain on a Nature Walk
A 2024 randomized controlled trial published in Scientific Reports put this directly to the test with 92 participants, comparing a 40-minute nature walk against an urban walk of identical time, distance, pace and physical exertion.
While positive affect improved for both groups, nature walkers showed a significantly greater boost in mood than urban walkers. EEG data revealed greater frontal midline theta activity following the urban walk compared to the nature walk, suggesting the urban walk placed higher demands on executive attention, while the nature walk left those resources intact and available.
The practical implication is significant. When you return from a city walk—navigating traffic, pedestrians, noise—your attention system has been working the whole time. If you return from a park walk, it has been quietly recovering. The same amount of time produces meaningfully different cognitive states.
But it doesn’t stop there.
The Stress Hormone Effect Is Measurable and Fast
Mental performance and stress physiology are inseparable. When cortisol—the primary stress hormone—is chronically elevated, it impairs memory consolidation, narrows creative thinking and degrades decision quality. Managing it isn’t optional for high performance; it’s foundational.
Nature exposure produces measurable cortisol reduction. A randomized controlled study published in Environment and Behavior found that walking in nature resulted in lower cortisol levels than either watching nature on screen or walking on a treadmill indoors—and the effect was strongest during periods of real-life stress.
More recently, a 2025 study published in Scientific Reports found that repeated forest walks produced lower cumulative hair cortisol concentrations—a marker of chronic rather than acute stress—alongside measurable improvements in emotional well-being. This matters specifically for leaders and professionals carrying sustained workloads: The benefit isn’t just a momentary reset. Regular outdoor exposure appears to shift the baseline.
The key is to understand this as a performance input, not a mood enhancement. Lower cortisol means sharper recall, wider thinking and better judgment—the exact cognitive outputs that drive professional results.
Walking Outdoors Increases Creative Output
Here is one of the most practically useful findings in this entire body of research.
Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz published a landmark study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology demonstrating that a person’s creative output increased by an average of 60% when walking compared to sitting, with the overwhelming majority of participants showing improved performance on divergent thinking tasks while in motion.
Divergent thinking—the ability to generate multiple novel ideas from a single prompt—is the cognitive mode most associated with problem-solving, strategic brainstorming and creative work. It’s exactly what gets compressed under pressure, after a string of back-to-back meetings or when you’ve been staring at the same problem for too long.
The researchers noted that the benefits of walking applied specifically to divergent thinking, but not to convergent thinking—the focused, analytical work that requires a single correct answer.
So what does this mean for you? Walking isn’t a substitute for deep focus work. It’s a tool for a specific cognitive mode—idea generation, reframing, strategic thinking—and it works best when deployed intentionally at the front end of that kind of work, not after it.
The Attention Restoration Effect Kicks In Faster Than You Think
One of the most common objections to building outdoor time into a workday is the assumption that meaningful restoration requires significant duration. The research does not support this.
A review examining short-term nature exposures ranging from 10 to 90 minutes found that in 12 out of 14 studies, cognitive benefits—specifically directed attention restoration from mental fatigue—merged across all educational levels following even brief contact with nature.
Twenty minutes is enough to move the needle on attentional capacity. Forty minutes is enough to produce measurable changes in brain activity. This is not a prescription for a two-hour retreat. It’s a case for a lunch break that actually restores something.
The accumulated evidence has practical implications for workplace architecture, urban planning and mental health interventions, suggesting that incorporating nature exposure into daily routines represents a scientifically grounded strategy for enhancing resilience, reducing stress and supporting cognitive performance.
How to Build This Into Your Real Schedule
The research is consistent enough to act on. Here’s a practical framework that doesn’t require overhauling your calendar.
Use the walk as a premeeting cognitive primer. The creativity data shows a residual boost that persists after walking ends. A 15-to-20-minute outdoor walk before a strategy session, a difficult conversation or a brainstorming block loads your brain with exactly the cognitive resource that work will draw on.
Treat outdoor breaks as attentional recovery, not time off. Reframe the narrative. You are not stepping away from work; you are recovering the directed attention capacity that makes work productive. A 20-minute park walk midafternoon is an investment in the quality of the three hours that follow.
Prioritize green space over built environments when you can. The research consistently shows that natural settings outperform urban settings for cortisol reduction and attentional restoration, even when physical exertion is the same. Your commute walk doesn’t count in the same way, so seek out a park, a trail or even a tree-lined street.
Go without your phone when the goal is restoration. Checking messages during an outdoor walk reactivates the directed attention demands you’re trying to recover from. It defeats the mechanism. For the walk to function as a cognitive reset, give your prefrontal cortex permishttps://www.success.com/brain-on-nature-mental-performance-outdoorssion to disengage from inputs entirely.
8. Space-X Private Shares …The Modern Day IPO-How Much is Priced In?
Barron’s
9. LNG Exports ….The World Does Not Have an Emergency Reserve
WSJ
10. Something to Live For: Lessons from the Science of Purpose
Sources of purpose are more universal than we might think.-Psychology Today Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D.
Key points
Purpose in life is linked to physical and mental health benefits.
A recent study identified 16 sources of purpose, examining how each predicts the three pillars of a good life.
Across four cultures, people were similar in how they endorsed these sources of purpose.
In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s stories, God leaves it to humans to think of a purpose for everything, including “all this.” Purpose gives us something to live for. It also provides the foundation to pursue that something. In our day-to-day lives, in ways big and small, we experience the truth of what philosophers have long posited: the why leads us to the how.
In psychology, purpose is defined as “a central, self-organizing life aim that organizes and stimulates goals, manages behaviors, and provides a sense of meaning.” When our lives are guided by an overarching sense of purpose, we reap a wealth of benefits for our physical and mental health – from greater life satisfaction to a slower cognitive decline.
What are some of the common places where humans find their purpose?
As a poignant reminder of our shared humanity, we tend to derive purpose from similar sources despite the remarkable diversity of our lives.
The Pillars of a Good Life
A recent study explored the various sources from which humans find purpose and then mapped them onto the three fundamental pillars of a good life: happiness, meaning, psychological richness. The authors sought to understand how having different kinds of purpose predicted these three dimensions of a good life. From an initial pool of over 2000 open-ended responses from US participants, Mask et al. (2025) identified 16 common sources of purpose in life.
Self-improvement – Becoming the best version of yourself through acquiring knowledge, exploration, pursuit of hobbies.
Family – Providing for your family; having children; looking after your loved ones.
Relationships – Forming and nurturing close connections with others, including friends and romantic partners.
Religion/Spirituality – Living in alignment with your religious or spiritual beliefs and values.
Recognition – Earning respect and recognition from others; having high social standing in professional, community or peer settings.
Happiness – Taking pleasure in and enjoying life, being happy, feeling good.
Self-sufficiency – Having the capacity to take care of yourself physically and financially; being free to choose your own path.
Material Wealth – Accumulating wealth and material possessions; “buying whatever you want.”
Internal Standards – Living in accordance with your personal principles, beliefs and values; “knowing who you are” and demonstrating authenticity.
Positive Impact – “Making the world a better place.” Engaging in actions that promote charitable, political, environmental or scientific betterment.
Mattering – Creating a lasting contribution and legacy; inspiring others; leaving an impact.
Occupational Fulfillment – Discovering a sense of purpose and calling through work; excelling at your work.
Persevering – Coping well with life’s challenges and persevering through adversity.
Physical Health – Prioritizing caring for your physical health and body.
1. Mag 7 -15% from Highs…Next Watch for 50day thru 200day to Downside
StockCharts
2. Tech Stock Premium Over S&P Has Vanished
Tech vs. SPX. Tech’s premium over the S&P 500 has all but vanished: now at the lowest since early 2019.
Duality Research
3. MSFT Drawdown Worse than Liberation Day and Covid
Mike Zaccardi
4. Vanguard Growth VUG vs. Vanguard Value VTV 2026….VTV +3.5% vs. VUG -9%
YChart
5. S&P on Track for 5th Straight Down Week
Barchart
6. Private Credit Playing Out …Will Private Equity Underlying Holdings Get Marked Down?
Dave Lutz Jones Trading–The accumulation of unsold private assets on investors’ balance sheets is a warning that some may be overvalued — and a spark could trigger a widespread markdown, according to Lloyd Blankfein, former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs. “At some point there needs to be a forcing function or a reckoning that causes you to come to grips with what your balance sheet really is worth,” Blankfein said. “The analogy I like to give is you accumulate tinder on the floor of the forest and eventually a spark will come,” Blankfein said. “But the longer between intervals where there’s a spark that sets it on fire, the more that accumulates”
7. Private Equity Funds Raised the Most Money in 2025
Damage to Middle East oil-and-gas infrastructure will cost at least $25 billion and take years to repair, hindering production restoration.
Hopes for a U.S. cease-fire proposal led to lower crude-oil futures and U.S. stock gains, as markets reacted to potential de-escalation.
U.S. oil-field service companies, including Weatherford International and SLB, are well positioned to benefit from eventual recovery.
The damage to oil-and-gas infrastructure in the Middle East caused by the war with Iran will take years and billions of dollars to repair, which would hamper efforts to fully restore production even if the conflict were to end soon.
Analysts at Rystad Energy are among the first to put a price tag on estimates to fix it: at least $25 billion, and very possibly more.
