📈 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

📈 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