The Weekly Insight

Thursday was the worst day after a midterm election since at least 1950. Not by a little. By nearly 2x. The S&P 500 fell 4.36%. The previous post-midterm worst was −2.28% in 2002. It's tempting to blame Washington. We don't. The election was the trigger. The cause was a market crowded into one trade — AI — waiting for a reason to run. Governors in Texas and other states pledged to pa...

Google grew revenue 25% last quarter. Cloud revenue more than doubled. The stock fell nearly 14% in two days. That's not a contradiction. It's the clearest signal yet of what the market is actually grading. One year ago this week, Meta's earnings report started a question the market couldn't shake: how does all this AI spending pay for itself? This year, Google beat expectation...

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-the-american-moat/

One dollar of income can cost a retired couple $2,000 a year.  That's how IRMAA works. Cross a Medicare income threshold by $1, and your Part B premium jumps for the entire year.  Most retirees see IRMAA as a wall to avoid at all costs.  We ran the numbers on a hypothetical couple, both 65, with a $5 million IRA:  → Convert to Roth for 10 years, filling the 24% bracket: about $107,000 in IRMA...

Every financial commentator is about to show you the same chart. Midterm years are historically the market's worst. The year after? The best. Since 1954, the S&P 500 has climbed in the 12 months after every single midterm election. 18 for 18. So 2027 should be great, right? Not so fast. When the market was down through September of a midterm year, the next 12 months averaged +20.4%. When...

"Something always breaks." That was the warning in a CNBC story last week, citing 16 times since 1970 that a rapid rise in rates came with a financial crisis. With the 10-year Treasury at 5.18%, up 121 basis points since February, it's a fair question. So, we ran the numbers. What we found: → There weren't 16 rapid rises in the 10-year since 1970. We count 32. → 69% of the 16 o...

The Fed didn't hike rates last week. The market did. By the close of business the day before Kevin Warsh's decision, traders had priced in a 90%+ chance of a rate hike. Bank of America's own strategist put it plainly: at that point, NOT hiking would have been "nearly unprecedented." So, Warsh delivered exactly what was priced in. He then held the shortest press conference...

Not a single recession indicator is flashing red right now. That should be reassuring. It isn't. And the reason why traces back to an economist who's been dead for almost 30 years. This week, we dig into Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis, a trillion dollars of AI infrastructure debt, and why one AI company just got an "investment grade" rating on debt secured by a...

The bond market doesn't make headlines like stocks do. No breakouts. No "to the moon." Just yields, spreads, and math. But right now, it might be telling us more than the stock market is. Here's what's happening: the 50-year-old recession indicator everyone trusts hasn't fired. High-yield bond traders are acting like this is one of the calmest environments in 20 years...

Four years ago, Jerome Powell used Jackson Hole to warn markets that rate hikes were going to be painful and longer than expected. It became one of the most consequential speeches of his tenure. Last Friday, new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh stood at the same podium. The market reacted like it got the same kind of signal. Odds of a September hike jumped from 35% to 60% by the time he finished talking....

Moderna's melanoma trial results moved the stock this week — and a lot of the healthcare sector with it. The excitement is real. Personalized, tumor-built cancer treatment is a genuine medical leap. But here's the number that should temper the "this fixes healthcare spending" take: cancer treatment is only 6.7% of U.S. healthcare spend. Cure it completely, and the number that a...

Wall Street just posted one of its greediest readings in over 20 years. The American consumer just posted one of the most pessimistic readings we've ever measured — in 74 years of data. Both can't be right. But here's the thing: neither is a forecast. Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-time-to-pick-a-side/

A client of ours spent $80,000 to teach his family how money works. He'd built something over 30+ years. What kept him up wasn't whether his kids would inherit it. It was whether they'd know what to do with it when they did. So, three years ago he opened eight accounts — two kids, their spouses, four nephews — and put $10,000 in each. The rules were simple. Three years. Whatever you...

Alphabet had a tremendous quarter on Wednesday. The market took $299 billion from them anyway. By Thursday's close, the Magnificent Seven had lost $895 billion in a single day. Not the market — those seven companies. Two weeks ago we wrote that raised expectations made this earnings season dangerous. We were right about the asymmetry. We were wrong about the mechanism, and the mechanism is th...

Six politicians. Two parties. Twenty years. The exact same promise: "I will not touch your Social Security." Every one of them was making a promise the math couldn't keep. In 2005, the last president who tried to actually fix Social Security got crucified for it. Washington learned the lesson: never touch the third rail. So, for two decades, both parties competed to promise they&apo...

Nearly every quarter, Wall Street lowers the bar right before earnings season. It's not a conspiracy — it's self-preservation. An analyst who calls 2% growth and sees 3% looks smart. Call 3% and get 2%, and you were wrong. So estimates drift down, companies "beat," and everyone celebrates. This quarter, the opposite happened. Analysts raised earnings expectations by 3.4%, just...

The Magnificent 7 are down over 10% since October 29th. The other 493 stocks in the S&P 500 are up nearly 15%. That's a 25-point gap. And almost no one is talking about it. This week's Weekly Insight breaks down the eight-month rotation that's reshaping portfolios: → Why "Technology" leading the sector charts isn't the Mag 7 comeback it looks like  → The Q1 earnin...

The Fed spent the better part of a decade talking too much. On Wednesday, Kevin Warsh signaled that era is over. His first press conference as Fed Chairman didn't just announce a rate hold. It announced a philosophy — one that's fundamentally different from anything we've seen in the Powell era: Forward guidance: gone Warsh's own dot plot projection: withheld entirely Five task...

Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-235-billion-has-to-come-from-somewhere/

Three months ago we published a memo called "The Chokepoint" — written the morning the U.S. started bombing Iran. We laid out exactly what a prolonged Strait of Hormuz closure would do to oil prices, inflation, and global GDP. This week we went back and checked our work. The market has hit all-time highs. Brent crude pulled back from $138. The ceasefire has been enough — for now. But the...

Everyone wants SpaceX shares. The phones haven't stopped. So, we did what we always do: we looked at the data first. What is SpaceX actually selling? Three businesses. One is wildly profitable. One is losing money. One is a $6.4 billion annual cash furnace that every major AI company is running right now. The $1.75 trillion price tag wraps all three together and asks you to believe in a futur...

Consumer sentiment just hit its lowest reading since 1952. The lowest in history. At the same time, Redbook same-store sales just spiked to 9.6% — one of the strongest retail readings in years. Both of those things are true simultaneously. And that gap is exactly where the most important question in the market lives right now. Read more here: https://insightwealthgroup.com/the-weekly-insight-the-s...

Most families spend years worrying about the estate tax. Here's the reality: fewer than 2,000 deaths will trigger a federal estate tax payment this year. That’s 0.07% of all estates.  The tax your heirs will actually pay isn't in the estate code. It's sitting inside your IRA. And there's a limited window — retirement to age 73 — to do something about it. Read more here: https:/...

Two politicians. Same day. Completely opposite claims about what gas prices are doing to American households. Rep. Ro Khanna: $5,000 per household. Treasury Secretary Bessent: "All cylinders are firing. Gas prices are coming down." Both are wrong. So, this week we did the actual math. The real number is approximately $1,400 per year — or $117 a month — for the average household. That&apo...

John Maynard Keynes may be the most influential economist who ever lived. He was right about Versailles. Right about the Depression. He redesigned the global financial system at Bretton Woods. He also lost his entire fortune in the market. His lesson: it doesn't matter how right you are. If the market stays irrational longer than you can stay solvent, you lose. LTCM had two Nobel laureates. L...