"US business is booming"

1. US Flash PMIs. "US business is booming, with firms reporting the fastest output growth for over four years so far in the third quarter as the expansion picked up further momentum in August. The survey data for [Q3] are currently pointing to annualized growth approaching 3.0%, up solidly from the 1.5% pace seen in [Q2]".

2. Global oil inventories. "With global oil demand recovering, inventories are again falling quickly and will reach all-time lows (in a series available back to 2018) if the Strait of Hormuz doesn't reopen soon."

3. Retail BTFD. "For retail traders on Robinhood, this period of consolidation in the S&P 500 after hitting record highs has been treated as an opportunity to aggressively add risk in single stocks."

4. New lows. "With the notable exception of the NYSE, new lows remain subdued ... Unlike the environment leading into the Q1 2025 correction, none of the measures I follow ... are currently signaling a problematic expansion in 52-week lows."

5. Open vs. closed capability gap. "There have been three eras thus far in the history of LLMs: early scaling, reasoning, and agentic ... with each generation, open-source models take half as long to catch up to the first closed-source model of the era."

ICYMI