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1. Mag 7 Revenues and EPS at Record Highs…Not Dead Yet

Mag 7 vs. SPX. The Mag-7’s forward revenues and forward earnings share both are at new record highs of 11.8% and 22.6%.

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2. S&P Ex-NVDA Trails Japan and Europe Since 2022

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3. VIX Volatility Index -50% in One Month

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4. Valuations Back to Highs

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5. U.S. GDP Growth Turns Negative

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6. Private Equity Distributions 11% vs. Average 25%

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7. Import Surge of Pharmaceuticals

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8. Monthly Payment for Mortgage Doubled in Last 5 Years

The biggest constraint continues to be affordability, with the median housing payment needed to afford the median priced home nearly doubling over the past five years.

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9. Money Pours into American Soccer

More money is pouring into US soccer as the sport’s popularity grows in the country. Sponsorship revenue for Major League Soccer is up more than 10% so far this year compared to 2024, CNBC reported, alongside a surge in ticket and merch sales; much of that is owed to Argentinian superstar Lionel Messi joining Inter Miami in 2023. Newfound corporate support — coupled with next year’s men’s World Cup in North America — bodes well for soccer’s future in the US, an expert wrote in Sports Business Journal: American clubs still pale financially in comparison to the European giants, but “a perfect storm exists for one of the world’s oldest sports to reach a new zenith of popularity.”

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10. Face the Criticism (The Daily Stoic)

Marcus Aurelius was the public face of an empire. Seneca published plays and books. Cato and Cicero ran for office. Epictetus was a slave to a powerful Roman, at his whim and his mercy.

In other words, they knew what it was like to be criticized. They knew what it was like to be received warmly by the audience…and not so warmly. They were subject to withering abuse, talked about as if they were not standing right there or as if they didn’t have normal human feelings.

But of course they did.

So what Stoicism aimed to help them with was enduring the pains and blows of feedback and critique and attack. “If only they really knew me,” Epictetus once joked, “they say even worse things!” This was his way of making light of the cruel things he would have often heard from his abusive owner. “We care about ourselves more than other people,” Marcus Aurelius writes with bafflement in Meditations, “but care about other people’s opinions more than our own.” In another passage, he reminds himself to consider the character and the habits of the person attacking him—thinking about what they were doing in private just a few minutes ago.

These public-facing Stoics would have loved the response of the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau when he was told that Richard Nixon had called him an “asshole.” “I have been called worse things by better people,” he said with a shrug.

Being criticized is part of the job—any and every job. So is being misunderstood. Being abused isn’t fair…but no one gets out of life without experiencing some share of it.

We have to be ready for it…and ready to put it in its proper context. We have to be ready to shrug it off…and count ourselves as lucky that it wasn’t worse. Because it always can be!

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