November 5, 2026
What’s New: Monday, we published a note on how we viewed the midterm elections’ potential impact on capital markets. In this note we quickly update our thinking in light of the actual result. Background As…
November 4, 2026
Charts of the Week: MLB’s Proposed Salary Cap and Floor, and the Possible Impact on Attendance of a Lockout A lockout is widely expected in December, in large part due to the MLB’s push for…
November 2, 2026
Editorial note: This is the first note from Optimal Advisory’s new head of policy analysis, Blair Levin. In a note later this month, Blair will describe his approach to the task and his framework for…
November 1, 2026
Summary: (1) Home sellers are more motivated the last 60 days. We update our housing analysis as mortgage rates have moved about 50 bp higher since Labor Day. We have calculated that ~15%+ of jobs…
October 30, 2026
The Optimal Advisory Cost Factor dipped for a second straight week. For the year, costs are up +22.9% y/y, down -2.3% in the last 2 weeks, but up from +3.5% y/y in early July threatening…
October 29, 2026
(1) Microsoft’s fiscal first quarter validated the core of our Monday pre-earnings note: the Microsoft IQ stack helped drive Azure growth, with over 19,000 customers now using Foundry and Fabric together, nearly 60,000 accessing context…
October 28, 2026
Chart of the Week: Tennis, Flag Football, and Golf Are Winning Over Younger Kids We’ve spent a lot of time discussing and writing about youth sports recently, and so we wanted to research which sports…
October 27, 2026
Key Issues We’re Watching Wednesday Our Keys to MSFT EPS: Microsoft IQ growth, Model Economics and FCF, and Frontier Lab dependencies We expect MSFT’s Wednesday’s earnings to reinforce our core Enterprise thesis: enterprise cloud, integrations,…
October 27, 2026
Please see 12 pics below from our recent store walk through Nike’s House of Innovation flagship store on Fifth Avenue, looking at execution, innovation, and merchandising. We visit this store regularly and note better tone…
October 25, 2026
Summary: (1) Last week the BLS release of 3Q26 median weekly wages showed stalling / falling real wages across declines, see Chart of the Week; (2) Our math shows Consumer Velocity decelerating for a third…
October 23, 2026
The Optimal Advisory Cost Factor dropped (-2%) & decelerated y/y this week after rising for 15 consecutive weeks. For the year, costs are up (+24.1% y/y, up from just +3.5% y/y in early July) which…
October 22, 2026
(1) Our conversations have focused on META and the neoclouds where we’re most non-consensus and bearish on the AI Trade. Our 10/19 META pre-earnings note identified ad revenue and margin from Family of Apps, Capex…
October 21, 2026
Chart of the Week: Private Equity NFL Stakes Continue to Reflect Rising Team Valuations We’re two years into PE investments in NFL teams and a consistent theme in our discussions is how institutional money is…
October 21, 2026
Aspirational KR Plans Seem Like a Good First Draft. Yesterday, new (February 2026) CEO and WMT veteran Greg Foran outlined bold plans to fight back against rising competition led by WMT and AMZN, including a…
October 20, 2026
Our attached 41-page Consumer Discretionary Briefing Book summarizes our updated October analysis of hundreds of public and private companies for non-normal change, examines spending and inflections by category, sentiment by ticker, early-indicator mindshare traction, and…