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1. Mid-Term Election Years-October Strong Month

And it’s not just the S&P. Since 1950, the Dow has averaged a 3.2% gain in midterm Octobers. The Nasdaq has averaged 3.2% too.

2. What Stocks Outperform When Yields Rising?

Factors vs. yields. "When yields have risen, High Beta has outperformed the S&P 500 by the widest margin, followed by Pure Value and GARP. The biggest laggards have been Low Volatility and Dividend Aristocrats, while Momentum has also tended to suffer."

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3. MU Reports this Week …Memory Stocks Record Low Forward P/E

Memory valuation. "Memory stocks currently trade at a 2-year forward P/E of 4x"

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4. Vanguard REIT Index Negative 5-Year Returns

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5. Inflation? Consumer Discretionary Stocks IYC ETF -8% vs. S&P +18% One-Year Return

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6. Meta’s Muse Product Throws Curveball into VC World

Meta’s Muse is a free agent. VCs say startups can’t compete.

By Jacob Robbins
Technology Reporter

It took less than two weeks for Meta’s new AI assistant application Muse to reach number one on the iOS App Store. In its first 12 days on the market, Muse garnered more downloads than ChatGPT’s debut, according to data from Apptopia.
“This is the ChatGPT moment for agents,” said Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield, which is an investor in Hello Haven, a personal AI assistant startup.
But while Muse has introduced AI agents to a much larger market, investors say startups can’t compete with Meta’s offering on price, distribution, and access to compute.
“If you’re going to give it away for free, other startups are going to have to raise billions of dollars to compete, and I think OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, they’re not far behind,” Chaddha said. “It’s a game changer, but in consumer, it might be death or consolidation of other horizontal consumer agents.”
Meta’s moat isn’t the underlying model. It’s what the company can afford to give away.
“He who has the gold that gets the compute makes the rules,” said Ed Sim, founder and GP at Boldstart Ventures, an investor in agent identity company Keycard.
For startups, the enterprise and infrastructure layers are still where the most opportunities lie, investors say. https://pitchbook.com/

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7. Pensions Fully Funded

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8. America is Biggest Diesel Exporter in World

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9. Deisel Prices Effect Everything

WSJ Esther Fung Laura Cooper and Costas Paris

It’s costing more and more to get stuff in the hands of American shoppers.
Trucking expenses are at their highest level since the Covid pandemic snarled operations around the world. Diesel prices are up 77% in the past year. Freight railroads are adding surcharges. And the nation’s busiest port is the busiest it’s ever been.
There’s virtually no way for businesses to avoid paying more, and they’re passing on the pain to consumers. It all adds up to extra inflationary pressure on a U.S. economy that has been wrestling with rising prices for years.
Among the key drivers is the soaring price of diesel fuel. It hit a record of $6.53 on Sept. 22, according to AAA.
Also contributing to the rise in trucking costs, companies say, is a shortage of truck drivers, a byproduct of the Trump administration’s tightened enforcement of rules on who can qualify for a commercial driver’s license. Tens of thousands of immigrants—often the ones most willing to handle the less popular long-haul trucking routes—have lost their certifications.

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10. 6 Questions to Help You Design Your Life

Psychology Today You don’t have to just react to what life throws your way. Robert Taibbi L.C.S.W.

 Key points

• We can choose to react to our life or create it by proactively mapping out our goals and priorities.

• The keys are defining what gives you purpose, your values, and imagining your ideal everyday life.

• The challenges are avoding these questions by being passive, distracting yourself, or accepting what you get,

You’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase, “Life is what you make it.” At first glance, it seems to be about responding to and accommodating the challenges and opportunities, problems and hardships that come with being alive. But you can also hear it as a call to be proactive—the making—where life is less a workaround and more like a lump of clay you can shape and mold as you see fit.

Here are six questions and their challenges to help you design your life:

1. What do you want to invest your life doing?

This is the question you likely struggled with in high school or at the start of college—essentially, what do you want to be when you grow up?

The challenge is to think outside the box—not be constrained by family or cultural expectations—and tap into your potential: your talents and skills, passion, and sense of purpose.

2. What do you want your everyday life to be like?

If the first question is about the big picture, this is about life in the details, the day-to-day behaviors that make a good day: time with family and friends, balancing time for self and time for others, and setting priorities.

The challenge is that you don’t set priorities and instead fall victim to your own routines and lifestyle. You become reactive and passive rather than proactive and creative. Rather than running your life, your life runs you.

3. What does it mean to be an adult?

This is about values; you choose what a responsible adult and a good person look like. Again, it is about setting priorities, regulating your emotions, and ultimately crafting your self-image.

The challenges, driven by passivity, are two: Rather than defining your values, you substitute rules and blindly adhere to the shoulds handed down by parents and people in authority. The other is that you believe you’re powerless to change your personality—“That’s just the way I am” becomes your motto, an excuse to avoid the work of shaping yourself. Just as you can become a victim of your lifestyle, you can also become a victim of yourself.

4. How do you want to treat others?

If the question above is about shaping you, this is about shaping relationships—with partners, children, colleagues, and strangers. Again, imagine, set standards, and take action.

The challenge is that you forget you get back what you put out and that the world will gladly adapt to whatever lens you choose to look through. If you mistreat others, they will likely mistreat you. If you see others as manipulative, dangerous, or competitive, you will certainly find them, but you’ll undoubtedly be anxious and lonely.

5. What is the ultimate purpose of it all?

What is the meaning of life? Do you believe, like the Stoics, that life is an opportunity to be virtuous in the face of adversity? Do you think, like Buddha, that it is about attaining enlightenment, or, like Nietzsche, that it is about being creative and living up to your potential? Or, like the existentialists, that life is about building a life through choices and personal responsibility? Or, like Jesus, that it is about love and serving others, or, like Epicurus or Whitman, that life is about simply experiencing and savoring it?

The challenge is that you avoid the question by staying busy, accepting others’ answers, or failing to translate your beliefs into concrete action.

6. What do you want the moral of your life to be?

What would you like others to say about you at your funeral? What epitaph would you want on your tombstone? How do you need to live to have the fewest regrets?

Leave room for change

Your answers to some of these questions may change over time as you grow older and hopefully wiser, as life experiences do their own shaping. Keep your ear close to the ground so your life stays in lockstep with you, and so your outer life reflects your inner one.

And maybe that’s the biggest challenge of all.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fixing-families/202609/6-questions-to-help-you-design-your-life

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