📈 Chart of the Week 12/21/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Recession Fears in 2025: From Panic to Perspective If you wanted a real-time case study in how markets process uncertainty, overreact, recalibrate, and eventually move on, 2025 has certainly delivered. This week’s Chart tracks the implied probability of a U.S. recession during 2025, derived from prediction-market pricing. It’s an unfiltered window into investor psychology, one that tells us as much about narrative ri

📈 Chart of the Week 12/14/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: Tier1 Alpha A Few Thoughts on Volatility: Part 2 Last week , we focused the Chart of the Week discussion on volatility regimes and the potential benefit of paying attention to trends in volatility rather than on the level of volatility. Volatility Regimes With this week’s Chart, we also look at trends in volatility, only this time through the lens of a “risk on / risk off” investing environment. A “risk on”

📈 Chart of the Week 12/7/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA A Few Thoughts on Volatility The equity and bond markets have been eerily quiet of late, and it has gotten me thinking about volatility, or lack thereof, and what may lie ahead in 2026. Every market environment carries a rhythm. Sometimes it’s steady and predictable; other times it’s chaotic and dissonant. But if you step back far enough, volatility has a way of revealing what’s happening beneath the surface, not by i

📈 Chart of the Week 11/30/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Whither Bitcoin? This week’s Chart shows the price of Bitcoin, which has been quite weak of late. We often get questions from advisors about crypto and their appropriate role in client portfolios. A lot of the discussion tends to be framed as a risk and return question. While Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are indeed quite volatile, this recent move seems, at least to me, to be a bit more than just “risk off” . A

📈 Chart of the Week 11/23/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA You Are Here 🎯 This week’s Chart shows the Nasdaq 100 Index plotted against a number of historical bubbles. When investment bubbles are discussed, it’s common for folks to ask, “Where are we in the cycle?” I find historical comparisons interesting, but not necessarily helpful. I think that the end of an investment cycle approaches as financial stress begins to show in the results of the players in the ecosystem, and

📈 Chart of the Week 11/16/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA The Next Productivity Boom Is Upon Us We’re seeing quite a lot of hand-wringing lately by investors concerned about equity valuations and the pace and sustainability of capital spending by the AI Hyperscalers. However, this week’s Chart highlights the silver lining of the AI spending boom which will likely benefit the economy more broadly over the coming years, perhaps by quite a lot. I thought it was worth talking a

📈 Chart of the Week 11/2/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: Bespoke Investment Group Don’t Be Early One of the most important and timely questions that investors must ask themselves today is “Where are we?” in the current technological transformation we call Artificial Intelligence. Critically thinking about the answer and getting it right, or at least somewhat right, can create enormous wealth. Or...and this might be even more important these days, prevent its destruc

📈 Chart of the Week 10/26/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Seasonality…. Am I right? The Chart of the Week shows that 3rd quarter performance for the S&P 500 is historically by far the weakest quarter of the year. Q4 performance by contrast is historically the strongest period, and by a significant margin. After a solid year-to-date showing in the first half of the year, with the S&P 500 up 6.2%, most experienced investors and prognosticators had what many could reasonably c

📈 Chart of the Week 10/19/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Following on last week’s Debasement Trade discussion, this week’s Chart shows the year-to-date performance of gold, Bitcoin, and Ethereum. It shows quite a divergence thus far in 2025. Gold’s relatively smooth and steady climb has stood in sharp contrast to the choppy and volatile trading patterns of the two leading cryptocurrencies. Many regard cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin in particular, as “digital gold”—a decentrali

📈 Chart of the Week 10/12/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: www.exponentialview.co/p/is-ai-a-bubble The Chart of the Week captures one of the defining investment narratives of the post-2020 era: the so-called “Debasement Trade.” In simple terms, the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has steadily eroded while asset prices—stocks, homes, gold, and inflation-linked measures—have soared. Since January 2020, gold has risen roughly 148%, the S&P 500 is up over 106%, and

📈 Chart of the Week 10/5/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: www.exponentialview.co/p/is-ai-a-bubble The AI Investment Boom: Gauges...

📈 Chart of the Week 9/28/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Calm Seas Make for Poor Sailors Since the 20% drawdown this past spring,...

📈 Chart of the Week 9/22/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA AI Adoption: Don't Panic Just Yet I found this week’s Chart especially...

📈 Chart of the Week 9/14/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA The Oracle of Austin This week’s Chart helps build on last week’s musings...

📈 Chart of the Week 9/7/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Interest Rates - Some Historical Perspective This week’s Chart shows the Fed...

📈 Chart of the Week 8/31/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA There Are More Recipes Than Ingredients When you walk into a kitchen, you...

📈 Chart of the Week 8/24/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA This week’s Chart tells a clear story: mobility in America has been in steady...

📈 Chart of the Week 8/17/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research Index Concentration: A Bit of...

📈 Chart of the Week 8/10/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA The Importance of Staying the Course One glance at the history of S&P 500 bull...

📈 Chart of the Week 8/3/2025 By Michael Allison, CFA AI is the New Railroad (Sort of) This week’s Chart puts the current AI data...