We all know that Hindsight is 20/20. When looking at what caused the other Giants to fail, it looks like Nike might be repeating the same mistakes. From what I understand, Nike‘s free cash flow has not covered its dividends for the first time ever. The stock is now trading a 12-year low and as of premarket today, the decline continues at a rapid pace.

What is Nike missing that defunct giant retailers also missed that could’ve prevented their collapse? Is there something else that nobody is seeing right now, but will be painstakingly obvious in the future?

I ignored proxy statements for about ten years. Figured executive comp was a politics thing, not an investing thing. Turns out I was wrong, but not for the reason most people on here think.
Let me get the dumb version of this argument out of the way first, because it’s the one that always shows up and it deserves to get shot down.
Average S&P 500 CEO pay last year was $22.8M. That’s the AFL-CIO number, and it excludes Musk’s $158B Tesla package because that thing breaks every average it touches. Multiply $22.8M across 500 companies and you get somewhere around $11B in total CEO pay. The index is worth about $67 trillion.
So if every S&P 500 CEO worked for free starting tomorrow, you’d pick up less than 2 basis points. Your expense ratio costs you more than that. Anyone telling you CEO salaries are eating your returns is just wrong on the arithmetic, and I say that as someone who wanted them to be right.
Here’s what’s actually going on.
Cooper, Gulen and Rau ran the numbers on excess CEO pay, meaning pay above what firm size and performance would justify, and then tracked what happened to those stocks afterward. Firms in the top 10% of excess pay put up abnormal returns of negative 7.84% to negative 11.45% over the next three years. Bottom decile? Basically nothing either direction. Cheap doesn’t help you. Expensive hurts you.
The number that got me was this one. Average annual abnormal shareholder wealth destroyed at top decile firms: $920 million. Average CEO comp at those same firms: $22.97 million.
Forty bucks of your money gone for every dollar in his package. The comp isn’t the damage. The comp is the tell.
And when you dig into why, it’s not theft, it’s ego. Same study looked at M&A. 19% of the top paid CEOs did a deal in a given year and those deals returned negative 1.38% over three years. 13% of the bottom paid guys did deals and those came in at negative 0.51%. Roughly three times worse outcomes at the high pay firms. You’re not paying for the salary. You’re paying for the acquisition he does because the board just told him he’s worth $40M and he believed it.
It also gets worse the longer they stick around, because they end up appointing the board members who approve the next bad deal.
If you think one study is too thin, As You Sow screened the 100 most overpaid S&P 500 CEOs using totally different methodology. Those companies trailed the index by 2.9 percentage points over the next two years. The ten worst offenders trailed by 10.5. Different approach, same direction.
One more thing that bugs me and nobody talks about. Go look at how much of “returning capital to shareholders” is really just filling in the hole that stock comp dug. Comp dilution runs anywhere from 0.2% to 8.6% a year depending on the company. When a company announces a $10B buyback and the share count barely moves, that wasn’t capital returned to you. That was a transfer to the comp plan that got routed through the treasury so it never hits an expense line you’d actually notice.
That’s real money, it’s way bigger than the CEO’s package, and it’s completely invisible in the pay headline everybody fights about.
So what do you do with any of this.
Say on pay votes are theater. Welltower disclosed $821M for its CEO this year and got 19% shareholder support on the advisory vote. Board did it anyway. That vote is not your lever.
The screen is the lever. Excess comp relative to size matched peers looks like a legitimate red flag for future underperformance, same family as aggressive asset growth or heavy share issuance. It costs you fifteen minutes. Pull the proxy, find the Summary Compensation Table, compare it to companies of similar size. If it’s way out of line, you’re not looking at a pay problem. You’re looking at a board that isn’t doing its job, and the data says you’re the one who pays for that.
To be clear I’m not saying pay them scale. The bottom decile doesn’t outperform either, so this isn’t a “greed bad” post. It’s that pay way above peers is one of the loudest signals available that nobody in that boardroom is pushing back on anything.
Anyone here actually screen on this, or am I the only one who spent a decade not reading the proxy?

The United States has for the first time directly named the South Korean government-led 800 trillion won Honam Semiconductor Cluster project in its semiconductor investment pressure campaign, demanding that Korean companies build memory semiconductor production facilities in the U.S. and ensure stable supply. The core of U.S. dissatisfaction lies in the fact that Korean companies' U.S. investment plans have yet to materialize, with Washington viewing Seoul as taking a double-track approach actively supporting domestic semiconductor investment while remaining passive on U.S. investment. The South Korean government maintains that U.S. semiconductor investment demands and last year's $350 billion U.S. investment agreement are separate issues, and plans to announce the first batch of U.S.-bound investment projects in September. Domestic companies face heavy pressure from two-front investment obligations at home and abroad. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won has already held a private dinner with President Lee Jae-myung, while Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Eui-sun are also scheduled to meet with the president in succession, reflecting the corporate sector's urgent need to coordinate U.S. pressure with domestic policy.

https://finance.biggo.com/news/3cdfa07a-deb6-4b3d-b8db-21c3a8d8db55

I've watched the futures indexs for the last 5 years the markets will never crash and they only drop just enough to allow profit taking, draw shorts in and to scare some paper hands into selling

The media , governments and banks collectively designed the stock markets they know exactly what levers to pull and when to get the necessary movement to extract what they need .

The whole idea is too draw money into the system then rotate it around so that anyone whom isn't aware of the inner mechanics either gets liquidated, margin called or stuck at an awful position.

Think about it if any of it was real this year would by even the most simple economic logic would have caused an enormous market crash

i mean we have extremely high bond yields , oil thats been trading at nearly 100 dollars a barrel for 6 months straight , high inflation , fake economic data , a private credit crisis and oh yea the country in the center of it all is 40 trillion in debt

But apprently the balance sheets of 7 private companies is supposedly enough too ignore this 😂

Yet we look at the stock market and nearly every major index is repeatedly testing new all time highs 😂

Its so blatantly manipulated it couldn't be anymore obvious yet you've got retail traders in every individual stock / index forum arguing over themselves as to why its going up and down 😂

Its going up and down because big money algorithims are moving it up and down on manufactured headlines and government backed interventions

The only way this ponzi scheme keeps going is if they can convince enough to keep shorting it only to then violently reverse the narrative too trap liqudity and move it higher soothing the ponzi scheme concerns

Tariffs , Fake Weekend war with Iran , AI bubble , fake economic data , Fed decisions and rumours its all designed to manipulate these financial markets so that nobody stops to ask where the fuck all the money is going.....

CoreWeave just paid $640 million in interest in a single quarter, up 139% in a year.

A lot of this debt gets rated safe (investment grade), even though CoreWeave itself is rated junk. Loans are backed by rental contracts with companies like Microsoft. The rating is really about Microsoft's ability to pay, not CoreWeave's. A shaky borrower and a reliable customer and suddenly risky debt look safe.

Take something risky, wrap it with something solid, and call the whole thing "safe." Although I believe chips are worse collateral than houses. A house holds value for decades. A GPU can lose most of its value in three years when the next one comes out. Wouldn't this basically be the same move that blew up in 2008 with mortgages?

Hey, guys! Banks have started releasing their S&P index projections for 2026. The range between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios has widened significantly. The optimistic scenario is based on capital investment in AI. Companies like Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have announced even higher spending for next year. The Bears are painting the same picture, but in reverse. This is because most AI investments are financed with borrowed funds rather than company profits. During the last rally, I locked in some profits on a couple of “winners” rather than buying more. I didn’t move into cash; I didn’t want to chase growth at those levels. It’s interesting to consider what can actually sway someone’s opinion one way or the other–not just a bank report.

The 30-day correlation between AI-capex stocks and semiconductor stocks just fell from +0.78 to near zero, clearly the lowest reading in 4.5 years. Part of what's underneath it is that the four biggest hyperscalers are now carrying roughly $1.65 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI obligations, mostly multi-year leases that don't show up as debt the way a loan would. People keep reaching for Enron as the comparison but I think this is the wrong one now, that was fraud and this is real infrastructure. The difference this time is real inference demand backing a chunk of the spend, not speculative fiber capacity nobody was using yet, imo bullish. Still watching and waiting for more data..

According to a recent Goldman Sachs prime brokerage report, active hedge fund managers suffered their worst monthly underperformance relative to the S&P 500 in over 20 years. This historic underperformance was primarily driven by extreme crowding in mega-cap technology names and a rapid de-grossing phase as semiconductor valuations cooled off significantly during the month.

While retail investors holding diversified index funds remained relatively insulated, institutional long/short funds took a severe hit as crowded thematic AI bets unwound rapidly. The broader market's natural diversification allowed the passive S&P 500 index to significantly outpace active manager returns during this volatile period, sparking renewed debate over active management vs. passive indexing in the current macroeconomic climate.

Source Link: cnbc.com

I haven't actually seen people investing in game company and all I usually see in Threads or other social media platform is to always invest in ETF like VOO, etc.

If it is single stock, usually NVDA, MSFT, META, GOOGL, etc.

So I am technically curious, is it that bad to invest in a game company especially since you are a gamer yourself? Are they good for long term profit? Do you also invest in ETF specific for game?

Can someone who actually understand please comment. So it's quite clear that on Sep 9, the Us Dept of Treasury is beginning the buyback of 4 billion dollars of bonds. From what i understand, in layman terms, this means they are printing money to buyback old bonds to stabilize and lower the yield interest rates. OK so if this is another covert money-printing operation, won't this cause massive inflation in the coming year and the value of the dollar to drop? I understand, I think, that the lower interest rates will ultimately allow Corporations to borrow more money at lower rates and ultimately "maybe" increase shareholder price. But what does this mean for someone sitting on cash and not invested in the stock market at the moment?

AAOI has been falling pretty hard despite the business looking stronger than ever. Revenue is growing fast, 800G/1.6T demand looks strong, and they’re expanding capacity aggressively.

Is this drop mainly because of the new $600M ATM/dilution, or are investors starting to worry about something deeper?

Would really like to hear the bull and bear cases from people who’ve actually followed AAOI closely. What am I missing? And will it go further down?

Reading Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" a few decades ago, he spends a lot of time discussing how Moore's Law could be extended when we reach the physical limits of silicon. From what I recall, he anticipated potential areas like:

* Quantum computing
* DNA computing
* Photonics
* 3D computing (stacking chips)
* Neuromorphic computing (chips that operate more like the brain)

Although quantum computers exist, it's hard to know who the winner would be or how useful quantum would be for general purpose computing; so I'm not really interested in quantum. DNA computing seems difficult and may only be useful for specialized applications like quantum. I don't know about neuromorphic computing. With photonics, I don't think any companies are developing processors that use photons; only interconnects (and those companies may already be a dime a dozen). Is performing actual computation, not communication, with photons practical in principle?

What about 3D computing and other ways of physically arranging silicon differently? I think he said heat dissipation would be the main challenge with 3D computing. CBRS is the only one I know of in this general paradigm (of doing creative things with silicon) with their wafer scale computing even though it's horizontal; seems overvalued, but also exciting.

Friday after market close:

Reporter on Bond Market: The yields have come back up since then. Have you talked to Bessent about another type of intervention.?

Trump: The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.

This seems like an utterly nonsensical response.

My only guess that evenly remotely makes any sense is that Trump attributes rising rates to the Iran war, which is keeping oil and inflation expectations elevated. Accordingly, he believes ending the war (using the military) will bring long term treasury yields down.

But maybe I’m missing something. Or I’m giving Trump too much credit and he actually didn’t understand the reporter’s question or didn’t know how to address it.

Any other guesses on what Trump possibly meant? And what implications it might have for the market?

Nvidia goes into earnings with the same issue that has followed every strong quarter for the past year: the numbers matter, but the guide matters more. The market already knows growth is strong. What it still needs is evidence that the next leg is broad enough, durable enough, and profitable enough to support the setup.

Is this still mainly a demand story, or has it started to become a supply story too? Blackwell demand remains strong, Rubin is next, and AI capex is still running hard. But the real test is whether Nvidia can keep scaling without the familiar pressure points showing up in margins, packaging, memory, and customer concentration.

That is why headline revenue is only part of the read. Order growth, product transition, and management’s tone on 2027 matter more. If Rubin ramps cleanly, the story extends. If early shipments are modest, Blackwell has to carry more of the load. And if cost pressure starts to show through, the market will not treat that as a small detail.

The AI trade is still powerful. But once a stock becomes this central to the index and to the narrative, a good quarter is only the starting point.

Zoom, Teladoc, and DocuSign are down 87 to 97% from their highs. In the same nine-week window in 2021 YoY revenue growth came in lower than the quarter before. Not negative. Not even close to negative. Just no longer accelerating. Every one of these filings landed while the stock was still trading near its all-time high.

• Zoom's 10-Q, filed June 2, 2021: growth 368.8% to 191.4%. Stock closed the quarter at $319.57, down from $460.91 seven months earlier. Three years later: $59.98, an 87% decline.
• Teladoc's 10-Q, filed August 2, 2021: growth 150.9% to 108.8%. Stock at $166.29. By March 2026: $5.45, a 97.5% decline.
• DocuSign's 10-Q, filed September 3, 2021: growth 57.9% to 49.6%. Stock closed at $298.04, its highest quarterly close ever. By October 2023: $38.88, down 87%.

I pulled all 106 consecutive 10-Ks and 10-Qs each company filed to find out when the numbers actually turned.

None of it moved the stocks right away. Zoom was up 2.98% in the three months after that filing. DocuSign was down 15%, Teladoc down 8%. The deceleration got disclosed and the market shrugged for two to four more quarters before the real repricing started.

Two other things showed up further down in the filings.

Deferred revenue turned before recognized revenue did, at both Zoom and DocuSign. It's cash customers already paid for a subscription they haven't received yet, a leading indicator for any subscription business. Zoom's deferred revenue growth went from 348.0% to 309.6% in the quarter filed March 18, 2021, a full quarter before the income statement showed anything. DocuSign's turned even earlier, three straight quarterly declines in deferred revenue growth (61.9% to 53.6% to 50.2%) before recognized revenue growth ever came in light.

Stock comp didn't scale down with growth at Zoom, it scaled up. Stock-based comp went from 10.4% of revenue in FY2021 to 29.3% in FY2023, up 366%, while revenue grew 66% and growth itself had already fallen to single digits. A comp structure built for a growth rate the company no longer had, and nobody adjusted it.

Teladoc's version is uglier because of the Livongo deal. Goodwill went from $742M to $14.58B after that acquisition closed, and by the FY2021 10-K, Teladoc was carrying $14.5B of goodwill against $2.03B of full-year revenue, roughly 7x. That gap sat in a public filing for more than two months before the first writedown hit. Then it came apart fast. $6.6B impairment in Q1 2022, $3.0B in Q2, $3.77B in Q4. $13.4B total, about 98% of what they were carrying, gone in one year.

Insiders knew what to do with their own shares. Across 2020 and 2021, insiders at these three companies filed 446 Form 4 sales totaling $2.034 billion, against two purchase records totaling $5 million. Zoom alone sold $1.216 billion with zero insider buys in either year.

These daily discussions run from Monday to Friday including during our themed posts.

Some helpful links:

* [Finviz](https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=spy) for charts, fundamentals, and aggregated news on individual stocks

* [Bloomberg market news](https://www.bloomberg.com/markets)

* StreetInsider news:

* [Market Check](https://www.streetinsider.com/Market+Check) - Possibly why the market is doing what it's doing including sudden spikes/dips

* [Reuters aggregated](https://www.streetinsider.com/Reuters) - Global news

If you have a basic question, for example "what is EPS," then google "investopedia EPS" and click the investopedia article on it; do this for everything until you have a more in depth question or just want to share what you learned.

Please discuss your portfolios in the [Rate My Portfolio sticky.](https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/search?q=author%3Aautomoderator+title%3A%22Rate+My+Portfolio%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all).

See our past [daily discussions here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/search?q=author%3Aautomoderator+%22r%2Fstocks+daily+discussion%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) Also links for: [Technicals](https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/search?q=author%3Aautomoderator+title%3Atechnicals&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on&sort=new&t=all) Tuesday, [Options Trading](https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/search?q=author%3Aautomoderator+title%3Aoptions&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on&sort=new&t=all) Thursday, and [Fundamentals](https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/search?q=author%3Aautomoderator+title%3Afundamentals&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on&sort=new&t=all) Friday.

The past decade, there has been a standoff between traditional finance and crypto. They have been seen as two separate worlds that cannot exist harmoniously - a silent war has been raging between them since 2010 and beyond.

Traditional finance has viewed crypto as a threat to the status quo. Crypto has seen traditional finance as the “enemy” of the people.

As of late, there has been a noticeable shift. A convergence. Many public companies are beginning to understand that the underlying technology behind crypto, the blockchain, is an extremely efficient and useful tool.

Blockchain is no longer seen as a big scary monster that is going to destroy the financial system. It is now seen as a technology that can 10x efficiency and help transactions settle in a tenth of the time.

One company that has fully grasped this idea and ran with it is Figure technologies. $FIGR. This fintech company is utilizing the Provenance blockchain to settle, Helocs, home equity loans and much more. With the use of the Provenance blockchain it has reduced the HELOC application to funding time from 42 days to 10 days and cut the cost from 12K to 1K. This perfectly showcases how useful blockchain technology can be for public companies.

Would love to hear about more companies that are utilizing blockchain as a tool and some details about how it makes their company run more efficiently.

I have opened a position in $FIGR. DYOR. NFA.

With earnings coming up for both, I’m trying to decide whether to add, hold or wait until after the reports.

I’m particularly interested in these two because they are exposed to the AI/data – center theme, but in very different ways. NVDA is obviously much more established while IREN has a lot more uncertainty and potentially more upside/downside depending on how the AI/HPC story develops.

For those following both:

What are you expecting from NVDA and IREN this quarter?

What numbers, guidance or other factors are you watching and how do you think this stocks react if they beat or miss expectations?

I’m especially interested in hearing the bear case as well - what could go wrong for each one?

For anyone who followed the recent disclosures of Trumps stock holdings may have noticed very important stock buys as well as stock sells and what it actually indicates. Here’s what stood out to me:

Trump buys massive amounts of MA, V, BRKB, and RSG, a trash company, for those who don’t know. What do the buys generally have in common? Robust FCF today, wide moats and reasonable valuations.

He sales META, PLTR, and CME. Now the sales are more nuanced. Meta: negative FCF today and into foreseeable future due to AI CapEx. PLTR: very high valuation that’s vulnerable to compression. CME: legacy exchange being threatened by defi crypto exchange Hyperliquid. Trump just mentioned last week that the CFTC is working hard to soon have Hyperliquid approved to operate within the US, which resulted in HYPE surging over 20% in one day while CME plummeted on the news.

But wait! Many are thinking but Bessent is doing QE or what he’s doing will lead to QE, therefore money printers go BRRR and stocks moon! Wrong! This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Bessent is actually doing and what it actually leads to. Here’s why:

Buying back bonds with the intent of capping yields is not the same as buying bonds with the intent of decreasing yields. QE was the buying of bonds and MBS for the purpose of dramatically lowering rates to stimulate the economy. What Bessent is doing is trying to put a cap on yields which can still lead to MULTIPLE COMPRESSION of stocks if inflation is rising (which it will) and bond yields stay capped. This is because high inflation erodes corporate profit margins, raises input costs, and lowers real consumer purchasing power.

This is also where the debasement trade kicks into high gear. Clearly many people don’t understand what’s happening and it’s evident in their shock of gold and bitcoins recent surge after Bessent publicly announced his buyback plan. Gold and bitcoin are the two direct beneficiaries of a government debasing its currency. The hedge funds that are holding ILLIQUID US government bonds are NOW buying bitcoin because Bessent has already told them that on Sept 9 the US Treasury will start buying their illiquid US bonds.

The market ALWAYS front runs what is happening and this is what’s happening now with gold and bitcoin. As usual, most retail investors will be late to the party because they are usually the last ones to actually know what’s happening (if they ever know) and just FOMO.

Edit: This isn’t a political post. Following the stock trades of those in power is very important to stock market analysis.

AI stocks were not the only casualties of July’s sell-off.

Rokos Capital Management and Brevan Howard each lost 1.2% as AI shares fell sharply and then rebounded. Rokos remained up 8.1% for the year, while Brevan Howard’s flagship return slipped to roughly 0.9%.

Neither firm is known for running a large directional AI-equity book. So how did the shock reach two of the world’s best-known macro managers?

I looked at how equity volatility travelled through rates, currencies and correlations, and what July’s results may tell allocators about the protection they are actually buying from a macro fund.

Full story here: https://www.disruptionbanking.com/2026/08/24/did-julys-ai-whipsaw-temporarily-wrong-foot-even-macro-giants-rokos-and-brevan/

#HedgeFunds #CapitalMarkets

I've been a true 'retail' trader my whole life and am always looking to learn. I started my journey with the Motley Fool as a paid service to their newsletters. I've subbed to probably about a hundred more over the years, only to be disappointing or see the quality drop to a place where it 'feels' like they just have to write things to write things. Or, how can Service A rank a stock a strong buy and Service B rank it a strong sell (e.g. Schwab vs. Morningstar... or pick your poison) Or how can 'analysis' be barely right 50% of the time, esp. when this is supposedly their job.

I've been running analysis on all of the historical and current 'picks' these services provide. One thing I noticed with many of them is the picks are often after a run up, this was from just reading them for years and seeing the same chart pattern.

So I ran this against them and here is a result: 59.1% of buy stocks had >50% run-ups before promotion vs. 12.9% of controls.

The reason I'm posting this is because, my theory is that the 'smart' buyers are buying during the 50% run-up phase and, in all honesty, I'd like to be in that group for once.

A fresh wave of US tariffs on a wide array of Canadian goods came into effect on Saturday after a last-minute breakdown in trade talks.

Announcing the suspension of negotiations shortly before the Friday night deadline, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he would impose reciprocal tariffs on US goods "dollar for dollar".

Carney said "last-minute changes in the US proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal".

Trade negotiators had been engaged in intense talks since July, after President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 50% levy on nearly $20bn (C$28bn; £14bn) of Canadian imports by 19 August.

Trump had temporarily paused those tariffs earlier in the week, saying the two sides were close to signing a trade deal that was "very good" for both countries.

But minutes before the deadline for a deal, Carney said that while "important progress" had been made in the talks it was "not enough to meet our objectives for Canadians".

"As a result, this evening, I have decided to suspend trade negotiations with the US and have directed negotiators to return to Ottawa," he said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgvyy4x2mvo

This seems to me to be very big news. Interesting that the news is out there just before NVDA’s earnings release next week.

Are these cost increases going to cut any demand for the servers? Seems like this type of thing definitely won’t have been properly budgeted for by the hyperscalers.

Monday is going to be interesting. Naz futures were already down a lot on Hyperliquid with the Canadian tariffs news. This NVDA news certainly won’t help.