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The Fed Just Hiked for the First Time Since 2023 — and the Bond Market Had Already Moved Further

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🏦 The Fed Just Hiked for the First Time Since 2023 — and the Bond Market Had Already Moved Further Welcome back, everyone! 📊 I’m your Quant Analyst, filtering out market noise using data, statistical modeling, and systematic insights. 👩‍💻✨ Yesterday the FOMC raised rates for the first time in over three years. The 25 basis points is not the interesting part — it was well telegraphed. To cut straight to the chase: the committee was unanimous about today and is deeply split about next year, and the bond market had already priced more tightening than the Fed delivered — by the widest margin in nearly three years . ▲ The Fed sets one overnight rate. The 2-year Treasury prices the whole path — and it moves first 📌 First, the actual numbers On September 16, 2026 the FOMC voted to “raise the target range for the federal funds rate by 1/4 percentage point to 3-3/4 to 4 percent...

AI Leaders Called for a Slowdown. What the Capex Filings Actually Show

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🧠 AI Leaders Called for a Slowdown. What the Capex Filings Actually Show Welcome back, everyone! 📊 I’m your Quant Analyst, filtering out market noise using data, statistical modeling, and systematic insights. 👩‍💻✨ Last weekend produced the strangest AI headline of the year: the people building frontier models publicly asked the industry to build them more slowly. Semiconductors sold off. To cut straight to the chase, after reading the filings rather than the reaction: what was actually proposed was a limit on capability advancement, not on spending — and the last reported quarter shows hyperscaler capex accelerating, not slowing . ▲ The debate is about how fast models get smarter. The capital is committed to how much compute exists. Those are not the same variable 📌 First, the actual numbers On September 12, 2026 , Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,...

Buybacks vs Stock Compensation: How Much of That $90 Billion Actually Shrank the Share Count?

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💵 Buybacks vs Stock Compensation: How Much of That $90 Billion Actually Shrank the Share Count? Welcome back, everyone! 📊 I’m your Quant Analyst, filtering out market noise using data, statistical modeling, and systematic insights. 👩‍💻✨ “The company returned $90 billion to shareholders” is one of the most repeated sentences in equity research, and it is measured in the wrong units. A buyback is only worth what it does to your share of the company — and every dollar of stock handed to employees pushes in the opposite direction. So I pulled the annual filings for six megacaps and measured both. To cut straight to the chase: the amount of buyback needed to retire one percent of the share count varies by more than fourteen times across companies people file in the same bucket . ▲ The headline number is always the cash going out. The number that matters is what came back the other way 📌 First...

Space Stocks After the SpaceX IPO: What the Filings Say and What to Actually Watch

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🚀 Space Stocks After the SpaceX IPO: What the Filings Say and What to Actually Watch Welcome back, everyone! 📊 I’m your Quant Analyst, filtering out market noise using data, statistical modeling, and systematic insights. 👩‍💻✨ The space sector got its benchmark this June, and the mood since has been strange — the biggest listing in the industry’s history, followed by a broad drift lower. So I pulled the actual 10-Q data for six listed space companies from SEC XBRL rather than reading commentary. To cut straight to the chase: the thing to watch in this sector is not revenue growth or launch cadence — it is how many quarters of cash each company has left, and on that measure the ranking is not the one you would guess . ▲ Every one of these companies is spending today against revenue that arrives years from now. That gap is the whole investment case, and the whole risk 📌 First, the actual num...

Does Stock Market Seasonality Actually Work? I Tested Santa, Easter and “Sell in May” on 10 Years of Data

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📅 Does Stock Market Seasonality Actually Work? I Tested Santa, Easter and “Sell in May” on 10 Years of Data Welcome back, everyone! 📊 I’m your Quant Analyst, filtering out market noise using data, statistical modeling, and systematic insights. 👩‍💻✨ Every December someone tells you about the Santa Claus rally, every May someone says sell and go away, and every September someone posts the chart of the worst month. So I stopped arguing and computed all of it from the actual index data. To cut straight to the chase: most of these effects do not survive the last decade, one of the most famous ones has the wrong sign, and the reason is arithmetic — a calendar effect gives you exactly one observation per year . ▲ Fittingly open at November — which turns out to be the one month in this sample that genuinely stands out 📌 First, the actual numbers Everything below is my own calculation on th...