Wednesday, October 14, 2026

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October 2026 Random Ramblings

October 2026 market commentary covers SOLS’s cancelled merger, a hypothetical Starbucks-Chipotle deal, Russell 2000 weakness and AI premiums for Oura and home builders.

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Fajasy on X

The S&P 500 lost 18% in 2022, and the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate, the main U.S. bond index, lost 13%, its worst year since it began in 1976. Over the same year, $XLE, the S&P 500 energy sector ETF, returned 64%, gold was flat, and cash earned ~1.5%. Now what if I told you there's a framework that would've said to own cash and energy in 2022, not stocks and bonds? That framework is called Gave's Four Quadrants, after Charles Gave, co-founder of Gavekal, a macro research firm. It uses two ratios built from market prices, the S&P 500 vs. Oil and Gold vs. Treasuries, to place the economy in one of four environments, and it describes what to own and what to avoid in each. Here's how stocks, bonds, gold, and cash tend to perform in each environment: → Deflationary boom: Stocks, bonds, and cash rise, and gold underperforms. → Inflationary boom: Stocks and gold rise, cash does very little, and bonds fall. → Deflationary bust: Bonds and cash rise, gold stays fairly stable, and stocks fall. → Inflationary bust: Gold and cash rise, while stocks and bonds fall. In my backtest of Gave's rules from 1970 to September 2026, a portfolio split equally between cash, the S&P 500, and either 10-year Treasuries or gold, whichever the framework favored, would have returned 5.7% per year after inflation. Its max drawdown was 28%, vs. 54% for the S&P 500. As of the end of September 2026, the two ratios place the U.S. in an inflationary boom phase. But since January 2025, the S&P 500 to gold ratio has been below its 7-year average, which has often come a few months before the S&P 500 to oil ratio drops below its own 7-year average. If that happens, the U.S. is back in an inflationary bust phase, like 2022. So how do you read the two ratios yourself, and what do they say to own today? That's what I walk through in my new ~20-minute video!

Lennar, Part One: The Story

Lennar grew from a Miami builder into one of America’s two largest homebuilders, controlling land largely through options and land banks…

Lennar, Part Two: The Deep Dive

Lennar’s second audio program examines the homebuilder’s business for professional investors and housing analysts.

Insider activity September 2026

Asian insider buying rose 19% to US$2.4 billion across 930 September transactions, led by Grab CEO Anthony Tan’s US$30 million purchase…

SRTA · long

Strata Critical Medical INC

Strata Critical Medical, SRTA, supplies organ-transport products tied to U.S. transplant growth.

Expert Call | Corning

Corning’s NVIDIA-backed 10x fiber expansion, enterprise connector demand and carrier capacity plans frame its optical communications…

Vicor Update, Part Two

Vicor uses ITC exclusion-order cases to license power-module patents, with published royalty multipliers rising from 1.0x before filing to…

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