TOPLEY’S TOP 10 May 28, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Free Markets Work-One-Year Chart South Korea (EWY) +248% vs. China (FXI) +2%

Ycharts

2. Chips are 17% of S&P….Tech Hardware got to 25% of S&P at Top of Internet Bubble

Market Radar

3. 15 Stocks Hit $1 Trillion Marketcap

Bespoke

4. Small Cap Tech Stocks Outperforming Large Cap in 2026

Reuters

5. More ETFs than Public Stocks

Apollo

6. Contra Indicator—Consumer Sentiment Bad…Stock Market Big Returns

Peter Mallouk

7. Is the Debasement Trade Dead?

the ‘debasement trade’ dead? Outflows from gold and bitcoin ETFs suggest investors are moving on Steve Goldstein

Marketwatch-Steve Goldstein He points out that bitcoin exchange-traded funds have seen two weeks of outflows, and so have gold ETFs. “These outflows appear to be more consistent with a broad retreat by investors from the debasement trade, potentially in anticipation of an Iran-U.S. deal, rather than with a rotation from bitcoin to gold,” he says.

A similar process is underway with respect to bitcoin futures hat are more popular with institutional investors. Panigirtzoglou said bitcoin futures were the vehicle for institutional investors to play the debasement trade since war broke out, given that gold peaked in price at the end of January. But now, they have also reduced their exposure.

Market Watch

8. Robinhood Rolling Out AI Agent Trading

 Robinhood to let AI make trades, buy stuff for you. Yesterday, the company announced Agentic Trading and the Agentic Credit Card, which will allow users to connect their AI agents of choice to the tools to carry out investment or spending plans with limited human interaction. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in a statement, “Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all, and now, that mission extends to AI agents.” Robinhood said that the agentic trading accounts are separate from a user’s main portfolio, require the user to set spending caps, and will give the user notifications about transactions, as well as the ability to immediately disconnect an agent from an account. Morningbrew

https://www.morningbrew.com

9. America is Full of Vacant Homes

USAFACTS.org There are many ways to assess the housing market, one of which is the home vacancy rate. This is the share of habitable homes that are not occupied as permanent residences. Maine had the nation’s highest gross vacancy rate in 2024: 20.6%. Vermont was second highest at 18.9%, and Alaska was third (17.5%). Connecticut had the lowest at 5.6%.

USAFacts

10. The Real AI-Seth’s Blog

To quote the great Steve Wozniak, “Actual Intelligence.” The kind we’re born with and can develop if we choose. It’s worth more now than ever before. Alas, it’s rarely taught in school.

The difficult work of making choices.

The act of curation.

The responsibility of putting your name on it.

The judgment to ask the right questions and skip the other ones.

The imperative to ship useful work.

The pursuit of good taste.

The patience to sit with the right problem rather than solving the wrong one.

The generosity to create for someone specific.

Seeking justice.

Offering dignity.

Knowing when to stop.

Investing in deep empathy, not a shallow substitute.

Taking initiative and doing the reading.

Being patient, or impatient, depending on what’s needed.

Ignoring the noise.

Making something that matters.

Caring.

MAY 24, 2026

https://seths.blog

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 May 27, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Margins in Non-Tech Sectors Hitting Records

Chart Kid Matt

2. AI-Tech is Driving the Margin Expansion

The Kobeissi Letter

3. Time Between Reaching $500B and $1 Tillion Valuation…MU vs. AAPL

WSJ

4. Equal-Weight S&P 500 Beating Mag 7

Opening Bell Daily

5. Japanese Citizens—Only 14% Allocation to Domestic Stock Market

Barrons- Japanese retail investors have just 14% allocated to stocks. If they inch nearer to Europe’s 25%, Morgan Stanley estimates that could translate to $1.7 trillion in equity purchases. That’s about 20% of the market cap of Tokyo Stock Market Prime Exchange, which lists the biggest companies. https://www.barrons.com/articles/japan-value-stocks-bargains-fd7069bb?mod=past_editions

StockCharts

6. China Complaining About Japanese Defense Spending—-China $350B Spend vs. Japan $50B

Semafor

7. Bill Ackman Stock Portfolio

Boyan Girginov

8. Wild Swing from Oversold to Overbought-Bespoke

Bespoke

9. Cost of Living Index by State

Visual Capitalist

10. The New University=Read Zero Books and Study 1/3 of the Hours = A

The university voted last week to limit A’s to 20% of the undergrads in each course. But the problem isn’t just that we give too many A’s. It’s that we don’t demand enough work in exchange for them. by Jonathan Zimmerman | Columnist

In 1960, 15% of grades at American colleges were A’s; in 2011, the figure was 43%. And over roughly the same period, the average amount of studying by people in college went down by almost 50%, from 25 to 13 hours a week.

Things have almost certainly gotten worse since then. Students are anxious and distracted, professors report, and they balk at reading entire books. So we assign excerpts or articles, in the hopes that they’ll learn something — anything — from us

The gates of Harvard Yard at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass., in September.Charles Krupa/AP

These trends were even more pronounced at elite schools. By 2021, 79% of grades awarded by Harvard were in the A range (A+, A, or A-). And many students barely broke a sweat along the way.

In a revealing 2024 essay, Harvard undergraduate Aden Barton said he failed to complete most of the assigned readings for a class and still got an A. One of his friends didn’t attend any classes for an entire month.

No problem! The friend still had to submit work, but there wasn’t much of it. And he could rest assured that almost anything he turned in would receive an A.

“Rising grades permit mediocre work to be scored highly, and students have reacted by scaling back academic effort,” Barton wrote. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve guiltily turned in work far below my best, betting that the assignment will nonetheless receive high marks.”

Nobody should get an A for less-than-stellar work, of course. But simply capping the percentage of A’s — as Harvard did last week — won’t correct for that.

Instead, we should insist that professors assign more work. In 2011, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that one-third of the 2,300 students in their sample studied less than five hours per week (yes, you read that right). And over half of the people in the sample said they hadn’t taken a single course in the previous semester that demanded a total of 20 pages of writing.

Things have almost certainly gotten worse since then. Students are anxious and distracted, professors report, and they balk at reading entire books. So we assign excerpts or articles, in the hopes that they’ll learn something — anything — from us.

That’s a scandal, or it should be. Every college should establish minimum reading and writing requirements and make sure professors enforce them. And they should also make attendance mandatory. If my students don’t learn more by coming to my class than by blowing it off, I shouldn’t be a teacher.

We also need to institute rigorous evaluation of instruction to see if students are learning at all. That’s become ever more important in the age of artificial intelligence, when ChatGPT can do your homework for you.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/harvard-faculty-grade-restriction-20260523.html

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 May 26, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Did We See Generational Bottom in Interest Rates?

Patrick Karim

2. Rising Rates-Stock Market Does OK But There is a History of Drawdowns

A Wealth of Common Sense

3. S&P 500 Dividend Yield About to Break Internet Bubble Lows

4. The History of Largest U.S. IPOs-Barrons

Barron’s

5. One-Year Chart Emerging Markets (EEEM) +45% vs. India (INDA) -11%

Ycharts

6. Roundhill’s DRAM ETF Breaking Bitcoin ETF IBIT Record

7. China is Producing 2x as Many Solar Components as the World Needs

WSJ Energy crisis is making some governments more protectionist, a good sign for solar investors By Carol RyanThe problem is that China is producing twice as many solar components as the world needs. This flood of supply has pushed down prices, encouraging uptake of the technology but destroying profitability.

WSJ

8. Year Over Year Wage Growth Turns Negative

After 35 consecutive months of positive YoY wage growth, this important indicator has turned negative for the first time since April 2023.

@Charlie Bilello

9. Another Strait….The Strait of Malacca Carries 25% of Global Trade

The Chokepoints That Could Choke Us

At the same time, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a 20-mile-wide passageway that ships from the Persian Gulf must cross to enter the Suez Canal, is under stress as Yemeni Houthis continue to target Israel with drones and missiles. Ship insurers have classified the strait as a high-risk area and hiked premiums. The increased price of insurance acts as a tax on global trade, further eroding the margins of firms that have already invested heavily in diversifying their supply bases, and triggering a massive rerouting of commercial vessels around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. The detour adds 10 to 14 days to transit times, significantly increasing shippers’ operational costs. https://www.barrons.com/articles/hormuz-chokepoints-supply-chains-shipping-taiwan-e0938d67

10. Navy Seal on GRIT

What we can learn from James, the SEALs and the research on how to have grit:

  1. Purpose and meaning. It’s easier to be persistent when what we’re doing is tied to something personally meaningful.
  2. Make it a game. It’s the best way to stay in a competitive mindset without stressing yourself out.
  3. Be confident — but realistic. See the challenges honestly but believe in your own ability to take them on.
  4. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Grit comes a lot easier when you’ve done the work to make sure you’re ready.
  5. Focus on improvement. Every SEAL mission ends with a debrief focusing on what went wrong so they can improve.
  6. Give help and get help. Support from others helps keep you going, and giving others support does the same.
  7. Celebrate small wins. You can’t wait to catch the big fish. Take joy where you can find it when good times are scarce.
  8. Find a way to laugh. Rangers, SEALs, and scientists agree: a chuckle can help you cope with stress and keep you going.

Real grit and dedication pays dividends long after the challenges are over. They build bonds that last a lifetime.

After James left active service he found out one of his teammates had tragically died in a training accident. Most of the platoon had already left their Hawaii training base and relocated all over the country.

But they all returned for the memorial service. Every single one. And it never occurred to him that everyone wouldn’t. Here’s James:

We had guys in Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida – really all over the place. There was just no question we’d all come back for the memorial service. No question. Everybody was there and it was a really sad, sad event and we all miss Matt a lot… I was so proud of our guys. I think it said a lot about the quality of our experience and the caliber of our guys that there was no question they’d return. I think a lot of SEAL platoons are exactly like that. It was just nice to know that everybody’s got each other’s back, just like we always did.

In my next weekly email I’ll have more from James including his analysis of the type of people who make it through SEAL training (and people who don’t), along with discussion of the four methods the Navy used to increase SEAL passing rates. To make sure you don’t miss it, join here.

https://bakadesuyo.com/2015/01/grit/

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 May 22, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. S&P 500 Call Volume Soars to Highs

Barchart

2. Internet Boom was Massive Job Creator

Capital Group

3. DRAM ETF Raises $10B in 45 Days

Morningstar Roundhill Memory ETF amassed nearly $10 billion in net assets in just 45 days.

Jeffrey Ptak, CFA

Morningstar

4. SpaceX Prospectus -The One Business that Works is Starlink

One business that works-OM Blog

Starlink generated $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025. Operating income was $4.4 billion. Adjusted EBITDA was $7.2 billion, a margin of 63%. Revenue grew 49.8% year over year. Operating income more than doubled.

Comcast, providing cable broadband to 32 million American subscribers for decades, runs EBITDA margins in the mid-30s. AT&T is around 35%. Starlink, which commercially launched its first satellite in 2020, is running circles around both. It is not fiber broadband, but it is not selling that anyway.

The service had 2.3 million subscribers at end of 2023. By end of 2024, 4.6 million. By end of 2025, 9.2 million. The S-1 discloses 10.3 million subscribers as of March 31, 2026, across 164 countries. In November and December 2025, Starlink was adding 20,000 new customers per day.

Om Malik

5. Powell Outperformed Greenspan and Yellen

6. Wal-Mart Made New Highs Then Pulled Back to Support

StockCharts

7. One Year Chart-COST +27% vs. WMT +3%

Ycharts

8. Stocks Wealth Now Exceeds Real Estate Wealth in U.S.

Kevin Gordon

9. Kuwait Oil Exports at Complete Standstill….70% of Population (5.1m) are Expats

10. Warren Buffett Once Revealed the No. 1 Sign Someone Is Destined for Success

According to Buffett, people with this learnable skill may be the ones most likely to succeed.

EXPERT OPINION BY MARCEL SCHWANTES, INC. CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, EXECUTIVE COACH, SPEAKER, AND AUTHOR @MARCELSCHWANTES

Good communication skills are often perceived as confidence, charisma, or the ability to give dynamic presentations in front of a room full of people. Warren Buffett sees it differently.

For Buffett, communication determines whether your ideas stay trapped inside your head or actually influence people, build trust, and move organizations forward.

Here’s how he once explained it:

You’ve got to be able to communicate in life, and it’s enormously important. Schools, to some extent, underemphasize that. If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.

That last sentence hits harder than most people realize.

Alexis Ohanian is Betting on Women’s Sports as a Billion-Dollar Opportunity

You’re giving up your potential.

Buffett is saying that even if you’re highly intelligent, have a strong vision for your career or business, and an amazing work ethic, it won’t matter much if the people you come in contact with cannot clearly understand you.

The pattern that keeps showing up

I’ve spent years studying leadership behavior and coaching executives, and one pattern keeps emerging: The leaders who struggle most are rarely the least capable in the room. They’re often the least clear communicators in the room.

They overexplain. They ramble. They hide behind jargon. When faced with navigating conflict, they avoid hard conversations. When having to show up authentically to deliver bad news, they delegate it to avoid criticism. They assume people “should already know.” They talk at employees instead of with them. You get the picture.

Then they wonder why trust erodes and why peers and co-workers question their credibility.

I believe a major facet of effective communication, especially in leadership roles, is reducing confusion and ambiguity. That’s the real job of a strong communicator.

What the best communicators do

The best communicators make people feel safe, informed, and aligned. Their team members and colleagues know where they stand. They know why decisions are being made.

And in workplaces drowning in uncertainty and constant change, which is the current reality for many businesses, clarity has become a leadership advantage.

Also, we can’t forget that communication is a two-way street. One of the biggest misconceptions is that speaking matters more than listening. In reality, leaders who dominate conversations without truly listening usually miss the data sitting right in front of them.

Practicing emotional intelligence is also strongly linked to great communication. In fact, they are inseparable. For example, many executives unintentionally sabotage themselves by communicating under pressure with the wrong delivery, tone, or body language, rather than being fully present, responsive, and grounded. In meetings, they rush conversations or jump straight into fixing mode.

But leadership communication is different; it’s relational work. People remember how leaders make them feel during difficult conversations. Especially during uncertainty, layoffs, restructuring, conflict, or performance feedback.

If you want people to trust you as a leader, here’s some free advice: Stop trying to sound perfect and start trying to sound human.

Buffett is right. Schools underemphasize communication. But many workplaces do too.

We promote technically brilliant people into management roles without teaching them how to navigate conflict, deliver feedback, listen with empathy, or communicate vision in ways people can emotionally connect to.

Then we act surprised when teams disengage.

The good news is that communication is trainable. You can learn to ask better questions, listen without interrupting, and slow down before reacting emotionally.

You can learn to speak with clarity by simplifying your message. You can even learn to have difficult conversations without avoiding them.

And when you do any of that, something important happens. You start working and leading with newfound confidence, authenticity, and ownership. That’s when leadership multiplies.

Buffett understood that decades ago. The leaders who will stand out over the next decade will be the clearest, calmest, and most emotionally grounded communicators.

Like this article? Subscribe here for more related content and exclusive insights from executive coach and global speaker Marcel Schwantes.

https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/warren-buffett-prediction-success-individual-leadership/91345798?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=INC+-+This+Morning+Newsletter.2026-05-20+-+10718&leadId=1548979&mkt_tok=NjEwLUxFRS04NzIAAAGh5COlPzRV1qfMsaLsDlvI–2YxfxXvUqmFAV0IxngD_kz384RGaAAnwO7D2HZsxla5TbneyZGY0wX0FymENXCoLD_AMuCfBOK-ChTfcJP8gwi

TOPLEY’S TOP 10 May 21, 2026

Daily Top Ten No Comments

1. Tech Flows from March 30th Lows $20B vs.Rest of Stock Market -$334M

Sector ETF flows. Since the March 30th low in the S&P 500, Tech ETFs have seen over $20bn in cumulative inflows. The rest of the sectors have seen a combined outflow of $334m.

Todd Sohn – Strategas

2. NVDA Numbers—Does Buildout Have Durability 2027 and 2028?

Dave Lutz Jones Trading “Nvidia delivered another beat, but at this point that’s ⁠essentially priced in as it keeps beating quarter after quarter,” said analysts. “The lingering question is whether it can convince investors the AI buildout has durability into 2027 and 2028, ​especially as the narrative shifts toward inference workloads and competing silicon from Google, Amazon, AMD, and Intel.”

3. Trump Quantum Bet

The Kobeissi Letter

4. Margin Debt High but Not at Previous Tops

Topdown Charts

5. Gold GLD Close to 200-Day

StockCharts

6. Sectors Trading at Highs

Liz Ann Sonders

7. Ground Beef Prices 2020-2026

Wolf Street Ground beef: The average price of ground beef, 100% beef (excluding round, chuck, sirloin, and preformed patties) spiked by 3.0% in April from March, and by 18.9% year-over-year to a record $6.90 per pound, according to the detailed CPI data from the BLS. Since January 2020, the price has shot up 78%.

Wolf Street

8. Physical Attacks Related to Crypto Theft

CHartr-According to 2025 data from blockchain security company CertiK, cited by Bloomberg, the number of physical attacks related to crypto rose 75% last year to 72 verified incidents. The double dose of bad news for enthusiasts? One: that figure’s thought to be a serious underestimate, given the amount of crimes that go unreported and the ones that are dealt with privately (paid off), and two: according to an update earlier this month, 2026 is tracking to be even worse.

Chartr

9. Google Biggest Upgrade to Search in 25 Years

A new era for AI Search-Google

We’re bringing our advanced model capabilities to Search with new AI features, enabling you to use agents just by asking a question. We’re also introducing a new, intelligent AI-powered Search box, marking its biggest upgrade in over 25 years.

Elizabeth Reid

VP, Search

The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate.

To make this possible, we’ve continued to reimagine what Search can do with AI. The momentum has been incredible: Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have realized just how much more Search can do for them, they’re searching more than ever before — so much so that last quarter, we saw queries reach an all-time high.

Today at I/O, we shared the next step in our journey to bring together the best of a search engine with the best of AI. Here’s a look at what we announced.

Powerful AI, right in Search

Starting today, we’re upgrading Search with Gemini 3.5 Flash — our newest Flash model delivering sustained frontier performance for agents and coding — as the new default model in AI Mode for everyone globally.

Because your curiosity doesn’t always fit into keywords, we’re also introducing the biggest upgrade to our Search box in over 25 years — now completely reimagined with AI. This intelligent Search box puts our most powerful AI tools right at your fingertips, making it easier to ask your questions.

It’s more intuitive than ever, dynamically expanding to give you space to describe exactly what you need. Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete. And you can search across modalities, using text, images, files, videos or Chrome tabs as inputs. You’ll continue to get a range of results from Search, just like you do today. The new intelligent Search box is starting to roll out today, in all countries and languages where AI Mode is available.

We’re also making it even simpler to continue the conversation with Search. You can easily ask a follow-up question right from an AI Overview, and flow into a conversational back and forth with AI Mode. Your context stays with you, and as you explore more deeply, the links and supporting articles get even more relevant. This seamless experience is live today across desktop and mobile, worldwide.

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/?utm_source=chartr&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=chartr_20260520#powerful-ai

10. Our Champagne Socialists-WSJ

Old, failed ideas have a way of appealing to young, naive people.

By Andy Kessler

Thanks to capitalism, we are living in unprecedented good times. Space launches. Weight-loss wonder pills. Happy-hour-friendly autonomous cars. AI bots that will meet our every imaginable need. A more peaceful Middle East on the horizon. A resurging middle class around the globe. But that’s nothing that a few commies—er, democratic socialists—couldn’t destroy in a generation.

Socialism adoration comes from brainwashing. A recent City Journal survey of 120 “prominent colleges and universities” showed that a grand total of zero schools required economics courses to graduate. Only 15% required some U.S. government or history classes, while half required diversity, equity and inclusion-like courses. Ugh. So bye to jobs, hello socialism.

We need to educate our youth with a full-throated defense of capitalism and free markets because for too many, the most intelligent thing they say coming out of college is, “It’s like, whatever.”

Write to kessler@wsj.com.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/our-champagne-socialists-3534e4b4