TOPLEY'S TOP 10

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1. QQQ On 200-Day Moving Average

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2. Hedge Funds De-Risked Stock Exposure to Record Levels

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3. Defensive Stocks Expensive and Growth Cheap???

Safe is expensive. "The S&P 500 Low Vol Index now trades at ~19x, back near the highs of the year. The Dividend Yield factor is in 90th percentile, and the Valuation factor is trading in the 80th percentile (10y). Meanwhile, Growth (40th pctl) and Momentum (30th pctl) have become cheap.”

Brian Garrett - Goldman Sachs via @blakemillardcfa

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4. NVDA Stock Trading at Discount to S&P Value Index

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5. Drawdowns on Well Know Names Huge

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6. 12,000 Customers Pay Anthropic $100k Per Year

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7. Superjumbo Loans Increased by 50%-Barrons

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8. Americans are Doubtful that the Government will do the Right Thing

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9. Prison Mark-Up $75m to $495M

By Ernesto Londoño

CoreCivic, a private prison company, approached the Minnesota Department of Corrections last year offering to sell a long-shuttered detention facility. The price: $75 million.

State officials passed. They didn’t have the funds to buy the Prairie Correctional Facility in western Minnesota, nor did they need a prison of its size or have the ability to staff it.

Last summer, to their astonishment, the 1,600-bed prison sold for more than $495 million. The buyer: the Department of Homeland Security.

“The price tag is so different than the conversations we were having last year,” said Safia Khan, the deputy commissioner and chief of staff for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. “It was a shock.”

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10. VOTE

The Daily Stoic The single most important practice in Stoic philosophy is differentiating between what we have control over and what we don’t. Epictetus said,

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…”

Today, we are calling on you to perform your “chief task in life.”

You don’t control the dark money that has flooded politics. You don’t control the mediocre (or awful) candidates out there. You don’t control that more than 50% of the population doesn’t bother voting. You don’t control the gerrymandering and voter suppression. You don’t control who ultimately gets elected.

But the act of casting a ballot is in your control. You control whether or not you engage in the democratic process. And the Stoics are explicit on this point: the philosopher, they say, is obligated to contribute to the polis, and to participate in politics. This is an essential difference between the Epicureans and the Stoics (Seneca said, “Epicurus says: ‘The wise man will not engage in public affairs except in an emergency.’ Zeno says: ‘He will engage in public affairs unless something prevents him.’”)

While it is hard to argue with the statistics that any individual’s vote makes a difference, think about how dangerous it would be when that logic is extrapolated out. Almost no difference is made by the individual who decides to do the right thing, to do an act of kindness, to insist on the truth when a falsehood is easier, to be a good parent, to care about the quality of their work. Is that a reason to be a liar, a cheat, an asshole, a bad parent, or a poor craftsman? Of course not. And imagine what the world would look like if everyone insisted it was?

A better world is built “action by action,” Marcus Aurelius said, vote by vote. We vote, we do good things, not because it has a noticeable or significant impact on the world, but because it is our duty. We make our tiny contribution to the common good—today, in the next election, in every election. We perform our chief task in life—today, tomorrow, every day.

Daily Stoic

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