Animal Spirits: When Genius Failed, Again
On today's show we discuss a crazy month in the stock market, Situational Awareness, leverage always gets you, the semiconductor crash, 60/40 will never die, the behavior gap lives, One Wish Willow for the economy, a theory about the Fed, the economy is still booming, apathy for Bitcoin, the biggest movie weekend ever and much more. The post Animal Spirits: When Genius Failed, Again appeared…
In July 2026, the S&P 500 experienced a dispersion, with a 0.1% drop. Three stocks - NVDA, AAPL, and MSFT - saw positive returns, with MSFT increasing by 24.6%. Six sectors also saw returns of over 1%, including XLE (up 12.1%) and XLF (up 6.2%). However, sectors XLK and SMH saw declines of -8.0% and -17.6% respectively. The S&P 500 momentum index was down by 11.1%.
A Carson Research tweet noted that AAPL was down 12%, MSFT was up 17%, META was down 7%, and AMZN was up 18%. Carlson tweeted that "everything happens at warp speed now."
On July 31, Warren Pies tweeted that semiconductor single-stock volatility had risen to 75%, the third-highest level in recent history. The other two instances occurred in March 2020 and April 2025. Bespoke noted a comparison between the current situation and the Long Term Capital Management blowup, with a reference to the Netscape/ChatGPT timeline.
Retail sold a net of $243 million in single stocks on July 29, which marked the largest one-day outflow since the Covid crash. Gunjan Banerji reported that 3-month outflows for the Mag 7 ETF were approaching the peak level of net inflows the fund saw at its January 2025 peak.
A separate tweet stated that DRAM earned an estimated 88% cumulative NAV return since inception, while investors lost a cumulative $1.6 billion due to late inflows. This potential pitfall demonstrated the risks associated with streaky products. Jeffrey Ptak estimated DRAM's cumulative NAV return. The tweet also mentioned that over 100,000 customers had opened agentic trading accounts, the busiest day for commercial air travel ever, and Hollywood's biggest weekend in box office history.
Written by urgent.news from A Wealth of Common Sense's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
