Industry Momentum
... its everywhere!
If you go long the 5 best industries by relative strength, you end up outperforming the market. A note on Industry Momentum.
Markets this Week
More here: country ETFs, fixed income, currencies and commodities.
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Research
The Labor Market Impacts of GLP-1s (NBER)
We find that GLP-1 treatment reduces long-term sickness leave by 17.3%.
We estimate total fiscal benefits of GLP-1 initiation of approximately
1.3–1.5% of annual labor income per employed individual.
India
India’s first hydrogen train has started passenger service (indianexpress).
With Skyroot rocket launch, Indian space industry crosses a milestone (indianexpress).
Central Know-Your-Customer 2.0: Indian banks and insurers will launch a common customer identification system in August, with asset managers joining later allowing customers to access financial products without separately submitting identification documents (reuters).
The pipeline of prospective mutual fund (MF) players remains sizeable
despite the rapid expansion in the number of fund houses in recent years, with nine entities awaiting regulatory approval from SEBI. India now has 55 operational fund houses (business-standard).
SEBI proposes a whole bunch of portfolio management related regulations (reuters).
Efforts to curtail equity derivatives trading have prompted some of the country's mom-and-pop investors to shift into leveraged stock bets, driving a surge in margin loans (reuters).
The US has imposed a 10% tariff on most Indian imports under Section 301 (outlookbusiness).
Nearly a third of India's 140 small- and medium-sized solar panel
makers, which make up 60% of manufacturing capacity, have halted output
and the rest cut cycles to three to four days as they face waits stretching up to eight months for domestic components to replace Chinese imports as the government pushes to beef up domestic manufacturing (reuters, livemint).
After decades of uncertainty, the Ken-Betwa river linking project, India’s first inter-basin river transfer that aims to irrigate the parched Bundelkhand region, is now racing to meet new deadlines (indianexpress).
China doesn’t dominate rare earths because it owns the mines. It dominates because it spent 30 years learning to refine them — a lead money alone can’t close (thehindubusinessline).
A Cockroach Joke Turns Into a Giant Modi Headache (bloomberg).
row
There’s a new mathematical formula that predicts TACOs (marketwatch).
The US will collect duties of between 10% and 12.5% on imports from most major trading partners, its biggest move yet to reconstruct Trump’s tariff wall that was struck down by the Supreme Court (bloomberg).
The biggest obstacle to undoing Mr. Trump’s tariffs after 2028 won’t be legal. It will be financial. With the national debt clocking in at a staggering $39.6 trillion, the market responsible for selling this debt has quickly grown addicted to the money coming into the government every day thanks to tariffs (nytimes).
The SEC has proposed amendments to its periodic reporting framework that would allow domestic reporting companies to report on a semiannual basis as an alternative to quarterly reporting (kpmg).
Hidden debt at U.S. tech giants swelled eightfold in roughly four years to an estimated $1.65 trillion as artificial intelligence investments ballooned (nikkei).
The U.S. Department of Education began rolling out a new accountability test that most colleges and universities will soon have to pass: If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college, that program could be cut off from federal student loans. The same goes for any graduate program whose graduates earn less than someone with only a bachelor's degree (npr).
The U.S. has an imperial appetite, but a tourist's approach to it (npr).
Foreign investors applied to invest $40.6 billion in Thailand in the first half of 2026, up 80% from a year earlier, amid a wave of investments in artificial intelligence and data center projects (bloomberg).
A record number of people are leaving New Zealand, with 111,900 departures in the 12 months to April (bloomberg).
The Coming Clash Between China and Europe (foreignaffairs).
China is gaining troubling military know-how from Russia (economist).
Netflix and YouTube are on a collission path (spyglass).
A.I.
Extremely basic AI prompt cracks decades-old maths problem (newscientist).
In 204 days, AI systems were credited with solving or refuting 118 distinct open mathematics problems (claude).
OpenAI’s models were not exactly trying to take over the world. The company says that it was running some routine evaluations in what is known as a “sandbox”—a walled-off environment that limits internet access, lest the bots simply search for the test’s answers. But these AI systems, including GPT-5.6 Sol, which is available to consumers, broke out of the sandbox and accessed the open web by exploiting a previously undetected vulnerability. The models discovered that the answers to this particular evaluation were on Hugging Face, a company that hosts and publishes many AI models and papers, and then broke in to steal them.
A Startling Glimpse at AI’s Ruthless Efficiency (theatlantic)
An agent left notes apparently for future versions of itself. The notes, found in a part of OpenAI's infrastructure, laid out instructions for how agents could free themselves from OpenAI’s internal constraints (reuters).
Anthropic pays $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude (reuters).
America’s AI labs are under threat from cheap Chinese rivals (economist).
Odds & Ends
Call Her Mommy: Gen-Z women are paying for, and parenting, their boyfriends (thecut).
Meme of the Week
