The Speed Of Debt… The national debt crossed $40 trillion this week. But the size of the number isn’t nearly as striking as the speed we’re adding to it. Forty trillion is hard to picture. Six weeks isn’t. From 1776 to 1976 — through the Civil War, two World Wars and the Great Depression — the United States accumulated roughly $550 billion in federal debt. That took 200 years. This summer, America added roughly the same amount in about six weeks. And this week, the total pushed past $40 trillion. The chart makes the acceleration hard to miss. But the more interesting story...

Wait, The Treasury Buys Treasuries? The Treasury just announced it will at least double the size of one of its bond buybacks. Which sounds extremely boring. Until you see what happened next. Long-term Treasury yields moved lower, while equity futures moved higher. And the timing made it more interesting: Treasury had published its quarterly buyback schedule only two weeks earlier. This increase wasn’t on it. So why did markets care? Here is the story. ⇩ SPONSOR BREAK presented by MarketWise* “I called Tesla in 2019. Here’s what I’m buying now.” Everyone said Tesla...

Target vs. Walmart source:Yahoo Finance Apparently, growing faster doesn’t always win you the checkout line. Last quarter, Walmart grew revenue 7.3%. Target managed 6.7% — the slowest growth among the four big-box retailers we tracked. Then the stocks went in opposite directions. Target beat revenue, EPS and gross-margin expectations, and its shares climbed 21.7% after the report. Walmart beat on revenue too, but softer-than-expected earnings guidance helped send its shares 11.9% lower. Now we get the rematch. Target reports Wednesday. Walmart follows Thursday. And beyond who beats or...

How Much? source:Yahoo Finance SpaceX has roughly $100 billion in cash — an enormous cushion by almost any standard. Sounds like plenty… until you start pricing Elon Musk’s plans. His spending list keeps growing. Starship is scaling. Starlink is expanding. And SpaceX is pushing into an AI compute buildout. All of that requires capital — a lot of it. And for investors, the question is becoming more about what it will cost to get there. KeyBanc analyst Michael Leshock put a number on it: Another $325 billion. That’s how much he estimates SpaceX may need to raise over the next...

Season Two. Bill Ackman and Netflix have done this before. Pershing Square built a major position in the streamer in early 2022, then exited just months later after Netflix’s subscriber slowdown sent the shares sharply lower. The round trip cost the fund more than $400 million. Roll the credits. Or so it seemed. Four years later, Pershing Square’s latest filing arrived with Netflix back in the portfolio — 3.15 million shares, accounting for 4.9% of the fund. And Netflix wasn’t the only new addition. The filing revealed five other new positions in Pershing Square’s first public disclosure...

Season Two. Bill Ackman and Netflix have done this before. Pershing Square built a major position in the streamer in early 2022, then exited just months later after Netflix’s subscriber slowdown sent the shares sharply lower. The round trip cost the fund more than $400 million. Roll the credits. Or so it seemed. Four years later, Pershing Square’s latest filing arrived with Netflix back in the portfolio — 3.15 million shares, accounting for 4.9% of the fund. And Netflix wasn’t the only new addition. The filing revealed five other new positions in Pershing Square’s first public disclosure...

Zero ”Sell ratings”. That’s unusual. What’s more unusual is what the stock has done while Wall Street has been this confident. Over the past year, Alphabet gained 69%. Amazon gained 21%. Microsoft fell. You could explain that away if Microsoft’s business had fallen behind too. But:→ Azure kept growing. → Earnings kept beating expectations. → Microsoft’s contracted revenue surged. → And analysts kept their Buy ratings. So we have three hyperscalers riding the same AI boom, two stocks that took off — and one that Wall Street still thinks has some catching up to do. Here...

Zero ”Sell ratings”. That’s unusual. What’s more unusual is what the stock has done while Wall Street has been this confident. Over the past year, Alphabet gained 69%. Amazon gained 21%. Microsoft fell. You could explain that away if Microsoft’s business had fallen behind too. But:→ Azure kept growing. → Earnings kept beating expectations. → Microsoft’s contracted revenue surged. → And analysts kept their Buy ratings. So we have three hyperscalers riding the same AI boom, two stocks that took off — and one that Wall Street still thinks has some catching up to do. Here...

The ”Perimeter of Debt”. Burry just added to his four biggest shorts and compared today’s market to 2005 — right before the mortgage crisis. His latest warning: the debt the market may not be counting. After building bearish positions across semiconductors and some of the market’s biggest AI names, he added again this week — including to Nvidia, Palantir, Oracle, Caterpillar, and SOXX. Then he brought up 2005. His concern goes deeper into the AI supply chain — long-term leases, purchase agreements, power contracts, and other commitments that companies may be taking on today to secure...

…coincidence? Maybe. Defense tech is having a very good week. Or… the Pentagon just put a number on the bottleneck. Within days, a $1.37 billion raise, a $300 million funding round, and a company targeting a $2.53 billion IPO valuation all landed across different corners of the defense industry. Normally, those would be three separate stories. Except the Pentagon just told its biggest contractors to figure out how to build weapons faster. Recent conflicts have put pressure on US missile inventories, while the systems used to find and track targets have become considerably faster and...

The Pattern. Jeff Bezos has impeccable timing. Or… a trading plan established nine months ago. Amazon crossed $3 trillion in market value for the first time this week after a blockbuster earnings report. Not long after, a multibillion-dollar Bezos stock sale hit the filings. Normally, that would be an interesting coincidence. Except something similar happened around Amazon’s previous trillion-dollar milestones too. Three milestones. Three increasingly large rounds of selling. Let’s follow the money.⇩ SPONSOR BREAK presented by Brownstone* Do this before November 3 For the...