📈 Chart of the Week 9/20/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA A Long Term Look at “Normal” Pull back far enough and the panic about “high rates” starts to look a little silly. This week’s chart runs from 1870 to today. That’s 156 years of what it cost Uncle Sam to borrow for the long haul. The shaded band marks 3% to 6%. Yields sat inside it 62% of the time. The 10-year bond yield is sitting around 5% right now. That puts us square in the middle of the fairway. The abnormal stretc

📈 Chart of the Week 9/13/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA 📉 When Everything Moves Together This week’s Chart might make one a little uneasy, and that’s precisely because it looks so calm. Realized correlation across the S&P 500 has fallen to roughly 0.10, one of the lowest readings in 25 years. Stocks are doing their own thing. The AI winners rip, staples drift, energy zigs while tech zags. On the surface, a stock-picker’s paradise. But consider the last two times correlation

📈 Chart of the Week 9/6/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA 💸 Cassandra and the Capital Cycle At the risk of sounding a bit Cassandra-esque, I return this week with my cautionary tale of the potential for poor returns on capital in the coming years from the current AI cycle. You may remember Cassandra, a figure from Greek mythology who was cursed to speak the truth and be believed by no one. The capital-cycle warning works the same way. It is accurate, it is old, and it is dull,

📈 Chart of the Week 8/30/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) 👶 The Baby Bummer Meets the Machines I firmly believe that the key to successful investing over the coming decade or more will be what happens at the intersection of demographic shifts, longevity research, and the impact of AI on society and the global economy. Which is why it’s a recurring theme in the Sunday Drive. This week’s Chart comes from a recent NBER working

📈 Chart of the Week 8/23/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA 🍼 From Birth to 80, and the 80 That Follow Most weeks, the article discussing the Chart of the Week focuses on investing or financial market related topics. But every now and again, I run across a chart or, in the case of this week, an infograph, that is really thought provoking and focused on longer-term trends. As I reflected on it, it’s amazing just how far we’ve come in the postwar period and how our lives and soci

📈 Chart of the Week 8/16/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Is the Gap in the K-Shaped Economy Narrowing? The “K-shaped economy” became shorthand for a two-track world: the top arm of the K climbing while the bottom stalls or slides. We have been living inside that letter for several years now, and most of the recent data has done nothing to challenge it. The last few weeks brought some genuinely soft prints, enough to have people whispering about a labor market cooling and poss

📈 Chart of the Week 8/9/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA 🪜 The First Rung Is Missing Two charts this week, and together they tell a story about our younger generations. The first chart shows that new business applications are still strong; Americans keep forming companies at a healthy clip. But look at the red line: applications from businesses with a “high propensity to hire” are rolling over. The right-hand panel is instructive. Across millions of small businesses, payroll

📈 Chart of the Week 8/2/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: Goldman Sachs 💥 Situational Awareness: Oh, The Irony! This week’s Chart is a vivid illustration of the power of leverage, in both directions. George Soros’ term “reflexivity“ comes to mind when one looks at the forced selling that occurred in July in many of the high flyers that had done so well in recent years... and it may have been catalyzed by a single hedge fund. A 25-year-old with no trading experience too

📈 Chart of the Week 7/26/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA When Bonds Stop Helping The case for a 60/40 stock and bond portfolio largely rests on one assumption: when stocks fall, bonds rise and cushion the blow. This week’s Chart shows how conditional that assumption really is. It shows the rolling 24-month correlation between stocks and bonds going back to 1975. Above zero, the two move together. Below zero, they offset each other, which is the behavior a classic 60/40 portfo

📈 Chart of the Week 7/19/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA The Rate That Prices Everything The 30-year real Treasury yield is the price of patient money. It’s what you earn, after inflation, for handing capital to Uncle Sam for three decades and asking no favors in return. Nearly every other asset gets priced off it, or its 10-year cousin, whether investors admit it or not. For most of the 2010s that price sat near zero, and for a stretch it went negative. Free money, in real t

📈 Chart of the Week 7/12/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA 📈 The Estimates Are Climbing, And That’s The Weird Part The most dangerous words in investing are “this time is different.” This week’s Chart does show us something that looks different. You can decide if it is. Sell-side analysts almost always start the year too optimistic, then walk their numbers down as reality sets in. Over the past 20 years, the bottom-up EPS estimate for a given quarter has fallen an average of 4

📈 Charts of the Week 7/5/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: Electricity generation per capita (Ember / Energy Institute, via Our World in Data) and population (UN), 2023; GDP per capita in current US$ (World Bank, 2023; Afghanistan 2022). Bubble area is proportional to population. Both axes are logarithmic. Source: EIA retail electricity prices and BLS Consumer Price Index, indexed to 100 in 2019; cumulative change since 2019 (Brookings analysis). ⚡ No Country Gets Rich

📈 Chart of the Week 6/28/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: Bank of America 👴🏼 The Kids Are De-Risking the Wrong Direction This week’s Chart is from a Bank of America study of households with $3M+ in assets which found Gen Z and Millennial investors holding just 32% of their portfolios in stocks, as compared to 58% for the Gen X and Boomer crowd. The gap gets filled with 15% in alternatives and 13% in crypto. Two-thirds of the youngsters told BofA they no longer believ

📈 Chart of the Week 6/21/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Does the Bull Market End With the Boomers? It’s been a while since we had a demographic-related Chart, so when I ran across this one, I found it interesting enough to write about. Here’s the worry on the minds of many investors. Baby Boomers hold about $89.7 trillion in net worth, more than the Silent Generation, Gen X, and Millennials combined. Boomers and the generation ahead of them own close to 70% of all the stocks

📈 Chart of the Week 6/14/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA The Quiet in the Index Is the Real Risk This week’s Chart contains a one-line caption: Worry about individual stocks is at an all-time high. I think the caption has the story backwards. The line in the Chart shows the spread between two fear gauges. The VIX measures how nervous traders are about the whole market, the S&P 500, over the next month. Think of it as the price of insurance on the index. The VIXEQ does the sam

📈 Chart of the Week 6/7/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: SpaceX S-1 SEC Filing 🛰️ The Biggest TAM In History (Maybe) SpaceX filed its S-1 last month and included a chart that will make every sell-side analyst smile and every skeptic roll their eyes. The company claims a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion. Space and connectivity together: $1.97 trillion. AI: $26.5 trillion. Yes, they put AI in their TAM. You can debate whether a rocket company belongs in that n

📈 Chart of the Week 5/31/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: PwC A Different Story The narrative around AI and jobs is pretty well established at this point. AI is coming for your job. Wages will fall. Inequality gets worse. It’s a compelling story. PwC analyzed nearly a billion job ads, thousands of company financial reports, six continents. What they found doesn’t match the story. Start with productivity, where the conventional wisdom holds that AI hasn’t moved the need

📈 Chart of the Week 5/24/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA A Different Type of Supply Side Economics This week’s Chart highlights something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, the SpaceX IPO. The numbers are pretty straightforward: somewhere between 24% (passive funds only) and 48% (passive plus benchmarked active funds) of SpaceX’s entire post-IPO float will end up in the hands of index funds. The immediate reaction is to say: great for SpaceX’s stock price. And it probably

📈 Chart of the Week 5/17/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA When the Rocket Launches From the Rooftop This week’s Chart shows the S&P 500’s run from March 27 through May 8, a 16.2% gain in just six weeks, making it the 11th-biggest six-week rally going back to 1950. Rarefied air to say the least. But the thing that makes this rally genuinely unusual is something I thought was worth discussing. Every other rally on that list, every single one, started from a market that was eithe

📈 Chart of the Week 5/10/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA There Is No “Lump of Labor” Friday’s April employment report came in well above expectations: nonfarm payrolls rose +115,000 versus a consensus estimate of just +55,000, while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%. March was revised up to +185,000 — the first back-to-back monthly gains in nearly a year, and a meaningful tell that the so-called “low-hire, low-fire” labor market may finally be finding its footing agai