📈 Chart of the Week 5/3/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Good Things Come in Small Packages For the better part of the past decade, the story of the U.S. equity market has been written almost exclusively by the largest companies on the planet. The Magnificent 7. The hyperscalers. The trillion-dollar club. Meanwhile, the smallest, scrappiest, most speculative names, the micro-caps, were left for dead. The narrative was clean, simple, and seemingly bulletproof: small caps are un

📈 Chart of the Week 4/26/2026 By Michael Allison, CFA The 99.7% Discount: AI, Aging, and the Reinvention of Work Take a long look at this week’s Chart. In 2005, launching even a modest business required $40,000 or more in upfront costs: legal documents, a website, marketing strategy, business plan, logo, financial model. Today, the same toolkit costs roughly $100. That’s a 99.7% drop in twenty years, with most of the collapse occurring in the last 36 months. If you’re not

📈 Charts of the Week 4/19/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: Duality Research Source: Duality Research Similar Setup, Very Different Story The S&P 500 is back at all-time highs. You’d be forgiven for assuming nothing has changed. But look at this week’s two Charts above and you’ll see something worth paying attention to: price is essentially where it was, but the forward P/E is not. That gap is the whole story this week. The first Chart tells it visually. It shows the

📈 Chart of the Week 4/12/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: StockCharts.com | ZeroHedge The Dow’s Hall of Fame Problem I found this week’s Chart to be not just interesting, but also borderline comical. Since August 2020, Exxon Mobil, unceremoniously dumped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average after 92 consecutive years as a member, has returned roughly +271%. Salesforce, the company brought in to replace it, is down approximately -32%. That’s a gap of more than 300%

📈 Chart of the Week 4/5/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: CrossBorder Capital The Tide That Moves Everything I found this week’s Chart very thought provoking. It tracks the Global Liquidity Cycle for advanced economies going back to 1965. Sixty years of data. The pattern is interesting and shows a near-rhythmic 65-month wave, roughly 5 1/2 years from trough to trough, pulsing through markets like a heartbeat. Understanding this cycle, I’d argue, is one of the most un

📈 Chart of the Week 3/29/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: The Chart Report Down But Not (Washed) Out The S&P 500 closed last week at yet another year-to-date low, extending what is now its longest weekly losing streak since the 2022 bear market. If your social media feed and the financial headlines are any indication, you’d be forgiven for thinking the market is crashing. But here’s the thing: the data isn’t confirming the panic, and to me, that’s actually the beari

📈 Charts of the Week 3/22/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Why Fertilizer Could Be the Real Inflation Story This week’s Chart tells a familiar story: energy prices are surging. Heating oil up 107%. Brent crude up 56%. WTI crude up 44%. The boxes drawn around those numbers tell you what the market is focused on. But there may be a far more consequential story hiding just below the surface. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, now entering its fourth week following U.S.-Israe

📈 Charts of the Week 3/15/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA When The Bond Market Gets Nervous Every once in a while the bond market clears its throat. When it does, equity investors should at least look up from their screens. This week’s Chart shows the $MOVE Index , often referred to as the bond market’s equivalent of the VIX. It measures implied volatility in U.S. Treasury options, essentially how uncertain investors are about the future path of interest rates. After spend

📈 Charts of the Week 3/8/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA History Doesn’t Repeat, But It Rhymes As I write this week, I fully acknowledge that the situation in the Middle East is very fluid and the shelf life of this piece could be very short. However, given the importance of current events, I thought it was still worth discussing. This week’s Charts tell a story that feels eerily familiar, and yet fundamentally different. The first Chart shows ship traffic through the Stra

📈 Chart of the Week 3/1/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA On Second Thought… For decades, venture capital operated on a simple exit playbook: build, scale, and eventually distribute gains through an IPO or strategic sale. This week’s Chart shows that exits have become “a third, a third, a surprising third”. The playbook seems to have been quietly rewritten. Secondary transactions, just 3% of exits a decade ago, now rival IPOs and M&A as a core liquidity channel. At its core,

📈 Chart of the Week 2/22/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Timing is Everything: The Lag Between Productivity Growth and Job Growth One mistake investors often make is assuming that economic progress and labor-market health move in lockstep. History suggests otherwise. Productivity can surge while job growth stalls.This week’s Chart shows just such an example: strong real GDP growth alongside weakening payroll gains deep into an expansion. This divergence isn’t a bug. It’s a

📈 Chart of the Week 2/15/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Navigating Markets Through the Lens of Dunning–Kruger The first Chart above shows a graphical version of Gartner’s Technology Hype Cycle that is very familiar to many investors. Interestingly, it is quite similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect shown in the second Chart. In a world of AI-driven angst and optimism, retail investor-driven meme stocks, concentrated stock indexes, and fiscal and monetary policy uncertainty

📈 Chart of the Week 2/8/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Many charts allow for various interpretations. This week’s Chart is one of those. According to the Chart, insider selling is at a 5-year high. The obvious and most typical interpretation is that company executives and other insiders see trouble ahead for their companies. However, I think it’s also worth considering that after such a dramatic rise in equities over the last several years, it’s understandable that inside

📈 Chart of the Week 2/1/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Navigating AI Risk: Returns and Real Growth I ran across a very interesting piece from The Carlyle Group entitled, “ Bubbles as a Feature, Not a Bug” and I thought it was worth discussing. As markets grapple with the scale and speed of artificial intelligence adoption, the real economic story is often obscured by headline-chasing narratives about bubbles and “irrational” valuations. But from a strategic investment a

📈 Chart of the Week 1/25/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA A “Normal” Japan and the Unwinding of the Carry Trade This week’s Chart shows that following the global inflation scare of 2021-22, long term interest rates in Japan have continued to rise, but unlike in other countries, at an accelerating pace. Some say this is due to Japan’s reemergence as a “normal” economy which is being framed as a curiosity: an end to deflation, a long-overdue policy shift, a local story. That

📈 Chart of the Week 1/18/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Performance, Construction and Diversification You’ve probably seen headlines crowning NVIDIA as the unstoppable force powering the stock market in 2025. It was the largest contributor to the S&P 500 Index’s total return last year, a title it earned not by being the best performer, but by performing reasonably well and being the biggest company in the index . That’s the message of the first Chart this week. Here’s

📈 Chart of the Week 1/11/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Thoughts on Productivity-Led Economic Growth This week’s Chart shows a marked upturn in productivity in the first half of this decade as compared to the last. While still below the levels of the mid-1990s to mid-2000s during the height of the internet-driven “New Economy” , I believe that productivity is poised to go even higher from current levels, perhaps reaching or exceeding prior levels. Many would agree that we

🔮 Fearless Forecasts for 2026 By Michael Allison, CFA Once again, we lay out our outlook for the coming year as a collection of fearless forecasts. But first, in the spirit of “often wrong, but never in doubt” , let’s see how we did in 2025. 2025 Report Card ( link to 2025 Forecasts): U.S. Equity Returns Moderate: We see a moderation of U.S. equity market returns, in particular the S&P 500 compared to 2023 and 2024. Result: The S&P 500 did moderate over 2023 and 2024, but

📈 Chart of the Week 1/4/202 6 By Michael Allison, CFA Big Things Happen When a Word Changes Its Class Googol: the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. While doing a search for available domain names, the founders of Google originally misspelled the name of their new company. They found the incorrect spelling to be more visually appealing and the name Google stuck. What they built changed the internet and the advertising business forever… and changed the word “g

📈 Chart of the Week 12/28/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Valuation of Hyperscalers The Chart of the Week shows, at least according to Carlyle, that the big AI spenders have returned to a sustained level of relative overvaluation - meaning that their P/Es are well above those of the rest of the S&P 500. In my opinion, in the near to intermediate term, there’s more risk to their earnings multiples than their earnings. As these companies are transitioning from asset light to