TOPLEY'S TOP 10

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1. Another Chart on Trading in Leveraged ETFs

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2. CapEx as a Share of GDP – Ed Elson

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3. Where are the Equity Returns Coming From in 2026

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4. 1999 Earnings Peak vs. 2026

Earnings vs. valuation. "Note that in 1999 the earnings peak was already well in place, and all the gains came from valuations. That's the opposite of what we have today (for now at least)."

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5. Open AI and Anthropic Captured 50% of Venture Deal Value in First Half 2026

AI startups raised over $407 billion in VC funding in the first half of 2026—blowing past the $264 billion invested in the sector in all of 2025, according to our Q2 2026 AI Report. But OpenAI and Anthropic alone accounted for more than half of the H1 tally, totaling about $217 billion.

“The concentration of capital into frontier models shows the conviction investors have in OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s ability to not just scale their own platforms but the vertical applications built on top of them,” said Dimitri Zabelin, a PitchBook senior analyst.

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6. Private Equity Is Stuck With 33,575 Unsold Businesses – NYT

By Maureen Farrell
The long-awaited deal-making boom has finally arrived. SpaceX set a record for the world’s largest initial public offering. David Ellison is pursuing a $110 billion deal linking Paramount with Warner Bros. The utility firm NextEra Energy has struck a deal to buy Dominion Energy that values it at more than $120 billion.

But private equity — a deal-making machine for decades — is largely sitting on the sidelines. For the third consecutive year, private equity firms are saddled with a rapidly increasing number of companies that they cannot sell or take public at the returns their investors expect.

As of June 30, private equity firms had 33,575 unsold companies in their portfolios, according to PitchBook, an industry data firm. That’s up from 32,451 companies at the end of last year and 15,923 companies a decade ago.

The growing backlog is a challenge for private equity’s core business model. Typically, such firms aim to buy a company, often add large amounts of debt to its balance sheet, improve its financial performance and then sell it for a profit, usually within five to seven years.
As the backlog grows, private equity firms continue to underperform the broader stock market. From July 1, 2022 to March 31, 2026, U.S. private equity firms generated annualized returns of 6.4 percent, according to the most recent data from MSCI, an index firm. That’s far below the 15.2 percent annualized returns of the S&P 500 and the 19.3 percent of the Nasdaq during the same time period.

“Buyers and sellers still have too big of a valuation gap,” said John Maldonado, managing partner at Advent International, a private equity firm.

But for many private equity firms, I.P.O.s have not been a viable path to selling their businesses.

Since 2022, only 70 private equity-backed companies have gone public on U.S. exchanges, according to the data firm Dealogic. From 2017 to 2021, 424 private equity-backed companies did so.

NYT

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7. WhatNot Retailer Higher Valuation than Best Buy and Lulu

Whatnot said that its gross merchandise volume in the first half of 2026 exceeded the $8 billion it recorded in all of last year, and that the number of buyers on the platform has more than doubled over the past 12 months. Whatnot now hosts more than 550,000 hours of live shows each week.

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8. How predatory trade schools drained $300 million from the GI Bill and cheated veterans

Washington Post The institutions defrauded Veterans Affairs while cheating thousands out of career training, with some offering training on how to grow grass and make fake rocks, a Post investigation found.

By Craig Whitlock and Andrew Ba Tran

trade schools that educate military veterans under the GI Bill have bilked the federal government out of more than $300 million, often by charging eye-popping sums for basic classes that last only a few days or weeks, according to a Washington Post investigation.

In New Hampshire, an “organic lawn care institute” taught veterans how to grow grass in a course that took, at most, five days. The school typically billed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) $14,900 per student, more than triple what it charged civilians not covered by the GI Bill. The federal government paid the school more than $2 million before it came under investigation and closed, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show.

Another GI Bill trade school based in New Hampshire charged $18,500 in tuition to teach veterans how to make fake rocks out of concrete, federal documents show. That course lasted eight days. The school owner, a convicted tax evader, exploited veterans as free labor on building projects, according to public records and interviews. Before officials forced it to shut down, VA paid the school $17.8 million over nearly seven years.

In Texas, a destitute high school dropout opened a “boot camp” that trained novices to become heating and air-conditioning technicians in just six weeks. Tuition and fees ran around $20,000. Within three years, the school had reaped $72 million from the GI Bill to enroll more than 3,500 veterans. The owner bought a Lamborghini, a Ferrari and a Bentley — and spent almost $200,000 at strip clubs — before being arrested and convicted of fraud, court records show.

At the owner’s trial, several veterans described the boot camp as a slapdash operation that duped them with hollow promises of a good-paying career.

“I feel bamboozled,” testified Ryan DiFranco, a Marine veteran who said the school’s deficient training caused him to lose three jobs. “It’s a nightmare that lives in the back of my mind all the time.”

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9. U.S. Homeowners Equity ..$10Trillion to $35 Trillion Since 2010

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10. Spain Border Fences

Consider Spain. The country has taken an open border policy toward Latin Americans, most of whom can enter visa-free and apply for citizenship after just two years of legal residence. It is a ready-made labor force for an aging economy that shares language, culture and religion, and are therefore less controversial for Spanish voters.
Not so for migrants from elsewhere. Before Sánchez took office, he railed against the barbed wire fence crisscrossing Ceuta’s ridgeline, claiming Spain had a moral duty toward refugees. Yet over his eight year term, Spain’s grant rate for asylum seekers has dropped from 35% to 12%—far below many other countries, including the U.S. And the 19-foot tall barbed wire symbol Sánchez campaigned to remove has been replaced by an even taller set of three fences, the highest reaching 33 feet, twice the height of the more well-known barrier built in Hungary by former Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

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