Some guy buying the SP500 every month, grilling burgers in his backyard right now, and doing 0 research, will outperform a shocking number of people who spend 8 hours a day analyzing the stock market.

🇺🇸 The cadets of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy learn to sail on this ship. Adolf Hitler attended its launch. The Coast Guard’s USCGC Eagle was built in Germany. She hit the water on June 13, 1936 in Hamburg. She is a 295-foot tall ship originally named the Horst Wessel, built to train cadets for the Germans. In 1946 the Allies divided the remaining German sailing ships by drawing lots. The Soviets initially drew the Horst Wessel. An American officer persuaded them to trade. Coast Guard Captain Gordon McGowan was ordered to bring her home, but there was a catch. The American crew lacked experience sailing a large square-rigger. To get across the Atlantic, he kept the German captain and dozens of surrendered German sailors on board to show the Americans how the rigging worked. In June 1946, they set sail for Connecticut. Together. Men who had been at war a year earlier now worked the lines together. Mid-Atlantic, they got caught in a hurricane and had to fight large waves side by side just to keep from sinking. She was re-commissioned as the USCGC Eagle. Today, she is called “America’s Tall Ship.”

Brazilian authorities and media are trying to find out where Flavio Bolsonaro is. Brazil's notorious authoritarian Judge Alexandre de Moraes -- before the votes were counted -- already had an order prepared to seize Bolsonaro's passports and bar him from leaving the country even though **he's been charged with no crime** (there are various pending financial investigations). Moraes signed the order barring Bolsonaro from leaving Brazil SEVEN MINUTES after Lula was declared the winner on Sunday night. A media outlet in Argentina this morning reported that Bolsonaro entered Argentina to fly to the US. His friends and allies deny this, but Flavio could easily just appear in Brazil or even by video and has not done so. Argentina is being sketchy, evasive and somewhat uncooperative with Brazil's federal police (Lula and Milei are obviously not allies). Whatever else is true, it is not exactly a sign of a healthy, normal or functioning democracy when the candidate who narrowly loses a presidential race -- and concedes defeat -- is suddenly barred from leaving the country by a Supreme Court Judge now globally notorious for censoring, imprisoning and otherwise persecuting his critics and opponents of Lula's government. It is also worth noting that Bolsonaro's party dominates the Senate, having run on a vow to impeach Moraes, and this is seen by many as a kind of leverage/hostage ploy by Moraes to cling to power.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warns Europe is falling dangerously behind America economically… and blames anti-business, anti-investment, and anti-innovation policies. 🇺🇸🇪🇺 “If you don’t believe me, go to Europe, folks. Europe used to have a GDP per person of 90% of America’s. It’s now 65%. It’s on its way to 50%. That will jeopardize the health of Europe itself over time. And it’s all anti-business, anti-investment, anti-innovation. They kind of know it. If they don’t fix it—and we should help them fix it, because Europe matters—it’s really bad for the Western world, too. We should do it wisely.” Europe shift over the past three decades has proven decimating for their economy. Aging population forces mass immigration in order to maintain adequate growth. Crazy regulation and bureaucracy slows innovation and investment… forcing the economy further down. At the same time, the United States has pulled ahead exponentially and will continue to do so. Europe is struggling.

"Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!" - President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸

HY is really three markets right now: > Generic HY: holding up, headline spreads only slightly wider > AI-linked credit: +100bps in last month > CCCs: 4-year wides, with a handful of names doing most of the damage The index average hides almost all of it.

The $34 prime rib at Outback is the one steak on the menu the cooks basically can't screw up. By the time you order it, it's already been in an oven for four hours. Think about how a normal steak gets made at a chain on a Saturday night. One guy is working a packed grill with a rail full of tickets, and he gets a few minutes per steak to hit a temperature he can't even see. If he's off by 15 degrees, your medium rare shows up medium well. That's where most bad steakhouse meals go wrong. Prime rib never touches that grill. Outback roasts the whole thing low and slow for about four hours and then carves your slice off to order. So while the guy at the grill is rushing the ribeye for the next table, your slice already had four hours of an oven's undivided attention. Here's where it gets nerdy, because cooking it that slowly actually changes the meat. Beef has its own built-in tenderizers, enzymes called calpains and cathepsins. They're the same ones doing the work when a fancy steakhouse dry-ages beef for weeks. They chew through tough muscle protein faster and faster as the meat warms up, right until the heat kills them around 130°F. A steak on a grill rips through that window in a couple of minutes, but a big roast in a low oven hangs out in it for hours, so the oven is basically running a mini dry-age while it cooks. It also explains why good prime rib looks almost raw. Myoglobin, the protein that makes beef red, turns gray once it gets past about 140°F. To get the middle of a grilled steak right, the outside has to go way past that, which is why even a perfect medium rare ribeye has a gray ring around the pink. A slow roast never overheats the outside, so it comes out pink from edge to edge. If you grew up on grilled steak, that much pink can look underdone even when it's cooked perfectly. Fun one to fight about at dinner. The "prime" in prime rib comes from the primal rib section of the cow and has nothing to do with USDA Prime, so the slice on your plate can be Choice beef and still be prime rib. Oh, and the fries. Outback has been frying in beef tallow since the '80s (the fries use a tallow and canola blend). McDonald's dropped tallow back in 1990 after the saturated fat scare, and last year Steak n Shake made switching back to tallow a whole national ad campaign. Outback just never stopped, so they've been accidentally ahead of the trend for almost 40 years. A lot of people are only noticing now because Outback spent the last year fixing itself. The chain had been falling behind the other steakhouses for years and closed dozens of underperforming locations. In late 2025 it launched a turnaround that's putting about $50 million into the brand this year, with half going to food quality. Servers went from covering six tables at peak to four, and its most recent quarter was its best for same-store sales since early 2023. The average Outback customer only goes about twice a year, so tons of people are walking in for the first time in ages and finding a better restaurant than the one they remember. Getting 662 restaurants to cook the same steak the same way every night is about the hardest thing in casual dining, and with prime rib the answer is pretty much a timer.

United's CEO says he won't buy JetBlue. I think he'll buy the best parts of it anyway. Scott Kirby's words: "The last thing I'm going to do is buy a route network that loses money." To make it work, he said, United would have to improve JetBlue's margin by 25 points, which "seems mathematically close to impossible." Asked again on last week's earnings call, he said he'd done enough talking this year about the "c word." But JetBlue is now worth $990 million, its loyalty bonds trade under 50 cents on the dollar, and United already has a foot in the door. Their Blue Sky partnership lets members earn miles on both, and United gets up to 7 daily round trips from JetBlue's new JFK terminal as early as 2027. What United would really want is JFK. It left in 2022 after failing to get enough slots. JetBlue holds 337 of JFK's 1,497. Together they'd have 26%, still behind Delta's 29%. The problem is everywhere else. Together they'd be #1 in Boston with 34% of seats and have 35% of Fort Lauderdale. Judges blocked JetBlue's alliance with American in 2023 and its Spirit deal in 2024. So the more likely path is a bankruptcy sale, airline by the piece. American bought TWA's assets out of bankruptcy in 2001 for about $742 million, and regulators let it through. This year Spirit's slots, gates, and planes went to different buyers. The catch is TrueBlue. The loyalty program and its credit card deals are pledged to $2.7 billion of debt, and those lenders just hired advisers. Whoever wants TrueBlue deals with them first. So United never buys all of JetBlue. If JetBlue files, United goes after the JFK slots, maybe Boston, and the newer A321neos, maybe even the A220s. Blue Sky gives it the inside track, though Delta or American could get in the mix. The TrueBlue lenders end up owning what's left.

Imagine the Supreme Court stopping the count after polls close and ordering polls reopen for two hours ONLY in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, and you sort of get the scope of what's currently happening in Brazil.

Howe's men move into the attack for the 250th anniversary of White Plains.

Another proof? Look at South America. It's the live experiment, running right now in front of us. For two decades, the continent was the showroom of 21st-century socialism. Chávez, Maduro, Morales, Correa, Kirchner, Petro. Endless promises, endless crises, endless enemies to blame. Then voters turned. Argentina elected Milei, who inherited 211% inflation and brought it down to around 34%. Bolivia ended nearly twenty years of socialist MAS rule. Chile elected José Antonio Kast with 58% of the vote. Ecuador kept Noboa. Peru moved right. And Colombia, after four years of Gustavo Petro, elected Abelardo de la Espriella. Look closely at Colombia, because it's the clearest case. Petro's flagship policy was "Total Peace": negotiating with guerrillas and narco organizations, treating armed groups as political partners. De la Espriella did the opposite. Within weeks he ordered a "total offensive" against the ELN guerrilla and the FARC dissidents and ruled out any negotiation with what he calls narco-terrorism. Daily arrests. Strikes against the Clan del Golfo, the country's largest cartel. Same country, same army, same cartels. Different will. That's the question that should keep you up at night. If crime can be confronted the moment someone actually decides to confront it, why wasn't it? My answer: because the problem was the business model. A left that solves problems makes itself unnecessary. Its entire apparatus, the parties, the unions, the NGOs, the consultants, the international conferences, the careers built on "managing" poverty, violence and inequality, lives off the problem continuing. Solve crime and you lose the fear that justifies your programs. Solve inflation and you lose the state that controls prices. Solve poverty and you lose your clients. I'm not saying they plotted it in a back room. I'm saying every incentive points the same way, and people follow incentives. A movement that lives off chaos will never be in a hurry to end it. Its status, its funding, its standard of living depend on the problem never going away. And that's what is collapsing today. Across South America, voters looked at decades of problems that were "managed" but never solved, and they fired the managers. Brazil is the last big piece. If it follows, the five largest economies on the continent will all be governed from the right. The lesson for the rest of us, for Americans voting in a few days, for Europeans watching their countries drift: a problem that is never solved is not always a failure. Sometimes it's the product. Free people solve problems because they have something to lose when problems persist. Collectivists manage problems because they have something to lose when problems end.

FT comments never miss. I don’t think I’ve read such a rational analysis of the situation we’re in for a long time.

And they burned the ladder behind them.

Everyone planning to sail solo asks a million questions about sleep schedules, catnaps, and keeping a proper lookout. Then you reach a certain age and apparently just say, “F it. I’ve had a good life.” And sleep for 11 straight hours. 💀

The USAID money stolen from taxpayers to fund leftwing elections all over the world, has disappeared. And suddenly, leftwing parties all over the world are losing elections in historical fashion. What a coincidence.