We’re nearing the end of a choppy month. We just got a rate hike. And some of the biggest stocks in the market are slowly drifting lower.

One day stocks are up. The next, they’re down.

There’s been very little traction in either direction.

But while everyone is focused on the Fed and complaining about this difficult trading environment, something very different is happening under the surface.

In fact, I’d call it a revolution.

A group of stocks is breaking out right in front of us. But hardly anyone is talking about it.

I think this could become one of the biggest stories of the fourth quarter — and potentially one of our best opportunities to find huge trading gains in the months ahead.

The interesting part is that these stocks aren’t waiting for the rest of the market to get its act together.

They’re moving right now.

So today, I want to show you one chart that caught my attention.

Because once you see it, I think you’ll understand exactly what’s going on beneath the surface of this market — and why I’m paying such close attention to these stocks heading into Q4.

[wistia id="ianiriqknp"]

Don’t let all the noise surrounding the Fed and this choppy September market distract you from what’s actually happening beneath the surface.

Some stocks are already breaking out. And if the broader market firms up from here, I suspect we’ll see plenty more opportunities emerge in the weeks ahead.

So keep your eyes open. Things are about to get interesting.

Happy trading,

The Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the United States and Soviet Union very close to nuclear war.

Then, one afternoon, a rumor swept through Wall Street that Russian missiles were already flying.

Stocks began to fall.

Cashin's instinct was to bet against the market. But one of his earliest mentors, an older trader he called “Professor Jack,” gave him some strange advice.

If you hear that the missiles are flying, he said, you don’t sell stocks. You buy them.

Why?

Because if the report is wrong, stocks will recover.

And if it's right, the trade won't matter because everyone will be dead.

Cashin, who went on to spend more than six decades on Wall Street, later became famous for a simpler version of that lesson…

“Never bet on the end of the world. It only happens once.”

I’m reminded of this 64-year-old Wall Street story today as investors once again worry about the end of the world.

But instead of nuclear missiles, this time it’s artificial intelligence.

AI Doomsday Goes Mainstream

The latest debate exploded last week after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and accused leading AI companies of “gambling with our lives.”

Then Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic's Alignment Science team, said he believes there’s a greater than 10% chance AI could wipe out humanity within the next decade.

Then Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised the stakes.

In an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier, Amodei argued that AI development is moving so quickly that safety research may not keep up.

He warned about everything from cyberattacks and biological weapons to advanced AI systems that could move beyond human control.

Then something even more unusual happened.

Some of Amodei's biggest rivals agreed.

Elon Musk responded, “Dario is right.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.”

And Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis said Amodei's proposal pointed toward “the right path forward.”

Think about that.

Some of the most powerful people competing to build the world's most advanced AI systems are publicly warning that the technology may be moving too fast.

But not everyone is buying it.

Some equally recognizable names have come down firmly on the other side.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back repeatedly against AI doomsday predictions.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected the call for a coordinated slowdown this week, arguing that companies already have strong reasons to build their systems safely and should do so themselves.

President Trump has also rejected the doomsday argument and opposed slowing U.S. AI development, particularly as America competes with China.

Respected AI researchers have also questioned whether anyone can credibly assign a percentage to something as uncertain as AI causing human extinction.

In other words, this debate is far from settled.

So, we have some of the biggest names in technology warning about an extreme threat to humanity.

We also have other major figures saying those claims go far beyond the evidence.

Call me cynical, but I find the timing of this debate quite curious.

Anthropic is preparing for what could become one of the largest IPOs ever.

The company is expected to begin marketing its offering next month and could seek a valuation above $2 trillion.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has pushed its own expected IPO into next year.

And reports surfaced this week that the company is discussing another huge private funding round that could value it at $1.2 trillion.

None of that proves AI executives are exaggerating these risks to boost their companies' valuations.

But the financial backdrop is worth knowing.

After all, when an AI company tells the world that the technology it is building could become powerful enough to transform, or even threaten, human civilization, that warning also sends another message…

This technology is incredibly powerful.

Some critics point out that these warnings about AI can also reinforce the idea that the technology, and the companies controlling it, are extraordinarily important.

Maybe the warnings prove justified. Maybe they're overstated.

Right now, we don't know. And that's where Art Cashin comes back into the story.

If This All Sounds Familiar… There’s a Reason

In 1962, investors watched the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold while the world's two nuclear superpowers stared each other down.

The threat was serious enough to rattle Wall Street. But diplomacy prevailed.

The Soviet Union removed its missiles from Cuba, the U.S. pledged not to invade the island, and the missiles never flew.

Nearly four decades later came Y2K.

As 1999 drew to a close, Americans heard warnings that computers unable to handle the switch to the year 2000 could disrupt banks, power grids, transportation, and other critical systems.

Source: Wikipedia

The concern even reached financial markets.

The New York Fed described a period of “extreme risk aversion” as traders and banks tried to reduce activity around the calendar change.

Then midnight arrived.

And virtually nothing happened.

Scattered computer glitches occurred, but none of the widespread breakdown many had feared.

The SEC reported that U.S. securities markets experienced no problems as the new year arrived overseas, and Wall Street entered 2000 near record highs.

Supporters credited years of preparation. Skeptics said the danger had been wildly overstated.

Either way, the feared catastrophe never came.

Now it's AI. Different technology and different threat, but it’s the same problem for investors…

How do you invest when the worst possible outcome is so bad that, if it happens, your portfolio won't matter anyway?

That brings me back to that 64-year-old story.

Cashin's lesson wasn't that investors should ignore risk. He spent more than six decades navigating wars, crashes, recessions, and financial crises.

It was about understanding what you're actually betting on.

There's a big difference between preparing your portfolio for risks you can measure and building your financial future around the assumption that there won't be a financial future.

We can diversify, keep some cash, and hedge when it makes sense.

We can also avoid investments whose valuations no longer match the facts. And when the facts change, we can change with them.

But we shouldn't treat the worst outcome imaginable as the most likely outcome simply because it makes the scariest headline.

That's why I’m not betting on the end of the world when it comes to this latest AI debate.

I'll stay on top of the warnings, the pushback, and the enormous sums of money flowing through

And if this time really is different?

Well, then our portfolios will be the least of our concerns.

I just wanted to give you a list of what I was seeing in the derivatives market, potential plays, and whatnot.

But the trend I found is much more important.

Now, digging through unusual options activity is tough work.

It’s not as simple as “Someone just bought a ton of AAPL calls expiring after earnings. They must know something!”

No.

It’s more like “Hmmm. Some money moved into AAPL calls after earnings. Okay, was it a sweep that tore through multiple exchanges, or one negotiated block? Did it fill at the ask, at the bid, or somewhere in the middle?

Is it opening or closing? I won’t know for sure until open interest updates tomorrow morning. Was there a matching leg at the same timestamp? A higher strike sold against it? A put sold to finance it? Stock bought or shorted at the same time to hedge the delta? Because if so, this isn’t a bet at all. It’s a spread, a collar, or a hedge wearing a costume.

What did implied volatility do? If IV jumped, the buyer paid up and didn’t care. If it didn’t budge, maybe a market maker was already sitting on the other side. And how much of that premium is about to get crushed the morning after earnings?

Where are dealers positioned? Long gamma or short gamma near this strike? Any dark pool prints in the stock right before or after? Did the same strikes light up yesterday? Last week? Is anyone doing the same thing in MSFT or the QQQs? Was there a headline two minutes earlier that I missed?”

… And on and on and on and on.

You know what? After all that investigative work, the answer is usually... nothing. There was news. Or other traders were already piling on. Nothing unusual about it at all.

Now imagine doing that with hundreds of stocks a day, across hundreds of expirations and strike prices. (Yes, I have filters. I’m not a psychopath.)

But it’s still a lot of data crunching, math, and theory.

That’s why, when I was compiling today’s list, one trend stopped me. It was hard to see at first.

A lot of this is happening in airlines right now.

I mean, hey. It’s airlines. It’s like trading bank stocks. (Are you still awake? This is serious!)

• Delta: 119,000 calls traded Monday. About five times normal.
• United: 73,000 calls traded Tuesday. About 11 times normal.
• JetBlue: More than 23,000 calls, nearly all bought at the ask (just means more likely buyers of the options than pure volume), late Tuesday.

Meanwhile, American, Southwest, and Alaska Air? Business as usual. Someone is oddly picking their spots.

And I think this could be the setup for a great contrarian play.

WTI crude is jumping up around $103 a barrel. Brent is around $107. Jet fuel eats up roughly a quarter of an airline’s operating costs, so the market did the obvious thing: it sold airlines. Hard. Delta is 17% below its 52-week high. United is 23% below its June peak. JetBlue has lost more than a third of its value.

But, you know, the thing here is that airlines pass that fuel bill on to you and me. Fares were up 25.5% year over year in July. United says it will recover 80% to 90% of its higher fuel costs this quarter, and all of it by the fourth. The stocks are priced for fuel pain. The companies say they’re outrunning it.

It could be true.

Implied volatility — how expensive or cheap the options are — has ticked up this month, but all three names sit in the bottom 40% of their 52-week range. IV rank is 37 for Delta, 33 for United, and 29 for JetBlue. Pair that with beaten-down share prices, and the dollar cost of a bet here is small.

The icing on the cake is earnings. Delta is expected to kick off the season on Oct. 8, with United around Oct. 14. JetBlue comes later, around October 27.

All the unusual options contracts we’ll talk about today expire Oct. 16.

Let’s use our magnifying glasses…

Delta

I am not Delta neutral. Delta is easily my favorite airline to fly, even if I live right outside the Southwest hub that is the Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

Delta is the best-run shop in the group. It remains investment grade at all three major rating agencies. And it owns something unusual for an airline: its own oil refinery, in Trainer, Pennsylvania. Refinery revenue jumped 83% last quarter to $2.09 billion. When jet fuel runs hotter than crude, Delta collects on the other side of the trade.

Now look at what hit the tape late Monday.

See that big green bar?

Someone bought 52,339 of the October 16 $87.50 calls for $1.66 and sold 52,339 of the $97.50 calls for $0.23. That’s what’s called a bull call spread, just a complicated options tactic to cut risk while capping profits. They spent around $1.43 per spread, or about $7.5 million all in.

Remember all that digging I talked about?

This is where it pays off. Check the open interest column. Open interest is contracts owned at one time, while volume is the contracts trading. Before this trade, there were just 525 contracts open at the $87.50 strike and 83 at the $97.50. In other words, this was a brand-new bet.

Delta’s total call open interest jumped by nearly 108,000 contracts overnight, right in line with two legs of 52,339.

Is that a stretch? A bit.

The options market is pricing in about an 8.7% move over the next 30 days, which would put Delta around $86. So this trader needs a bigger rally than the market expects.

The good news for them is that the catalyst sits right inside the window. Delta reports about eight days before these contracts expire.

Back in July, Delta guided third-quarter earnings to $2 to $2.50 a share, while analysts were at $2.02. That guidance came before oil’s latest run, so the report will tell us fast whether the fare increases are keeping up.

And look at the chart.

Delta has spent two weeks chopping between roughly $78 and $80. That towering green bar on the right is this trade. It’s the biggest burst of options volume on the chart by a mile. Over the full seven days, Delta call buyers spent about $30 million in premium versus $10 million on puts.

United Airlines

If Delta is the blue chip, United is its high-beta cousin.

It leans harder on long-haul and international flying, and its options carry more volatility, with 30-day IV at 51%. On Tuesday, the stock fell 2.3% to $106.44. And right into that weakness, call volume exploded.

Look at the two lines on that chain.

The Oct. 16 $120 calls traded 33,873 contracts against open interest of just 5,279, and 94% of that volume went off at the ask. Those are buyers.

The Oct. 16 $135 calls traded 31,710 contracts against open interest of 2,474, and 99% went off at the bid. Those are sellers.

Nearly matching volume, same expiration, opposite sides of the market, and both hitting early Tuesday. That’s the fingerprint of another call spread: long the $120s, short the $135s.

Why would anyone want that trade? Because the bar United has to clear isn’t that high.

In July, United guided third-quarter earnings to $2.50 to $3.50 a share, below the $3.60 Wall Street expected, and the stock sold off.

But that same day, United raised its full-year range to $9 to $11 a share. It even said it would beat the top end if fuel fell back to early-July levels. At $106, with a $10 midpoint, UAL trades at about 10.6 times this year’s earnings guidance.

The risk is just as clear. That guidance assumed jet fuel at about $3.69 a gallon. Fuel is running closer to $4 now. If oil stays here, there’s a hole in those numbers.

And there’s a timing risk. If United reports on Oct. 14 as expected, this trade gets its answer two days before expiration. If that date slips a week, these calls expire before anyone hears a word from management.

Still, the seven-day picture is lopsided: about $25 million in United call premium versus $11 million in puts.

JetBlue

And then there’s JetBlue. This is the speculative one.

JetBlue is a $1.6 billion airline trading at $4.32 a share. It’s down about 35% from its 52-week high of $6.62, and Wall Street has been piling on. Last week, Goldman Sachs, TD Cowen, and UBS all cut their price targets to $4. Barclays cut its target from $7 to $5.

Keep that $5 number in mind.

Late in Tuesday’s session, 23,390 of the Oct. 16 $5 calls traded against open interest of 8,179, with 97% of it at the ask. At around $0.12 a contract, that’s roughly $280,000 in premium.

That’s pocket change next to Delta and United. But look at the chart. That green bar on the far right is the single biggest 30-minute burst of JetBlue options volume in two weeks.

Yes, this is the only one where the option expires before the earnings report.

But that doesn’t really matter.

If Delta crushes earnings, if any other airline crushes earnings and brings us good industry news wrapped in gold cloth, I can imagine a company like JBLU will also ride with the tide.

I’ll be watching the price action closely on these over the coming weeks.

Put these on your watchlist as well. We might see something no one (except these options traders) expects.

Those numbers tell us where we are, but they don’t tell us anything about how we got there.

That's worth remembering this week.

Wall Street enters Wednesday's Federal Reserve meeting expecting Kevin Warsh and company to raise interest rates.

Meanwhile, oil has climbed above $100 as the conflict with Iran escalates.

Most of the conversation is focused on the levels.

Where will interest rates be after Wednesday's meeting, a few months from now, or even next year? How high could oil go?

But there's another part of the equation: how quickly they're moving.

Think of it as level versus velocity.

Looking at both gives us a much better sense of what's happening right now — and where the real risks could emerge next.

Let’s start with interest rates.

How Much Does One Rate Hike Matter?

The Consumer Price Index rose 0.4% in August and 3.4% from a year ago, while gasoline jumped 3.9% last month.

That pushed market expectations heavily toward a Fed rate hike at the September meeting.

Kalshi's odds of a hike this week are sitting around 85% right now.

Source: Kalshi

If the Fed does end up raising rates, it will likely be by 25 basis points, or one-quarter of a percentage point.

I'm not dismissing that. It would be the Fed's first hike in some time and send a clear change in direction.

But everybody has been talking about it for days. Markets have already priced in much of that possibility.

More importantly, a 25-point hike isn't unusual.

However, if Warsh suddenly raised rates by, let’s say, 100 basis points, he'd have my full attention. Why?

Because the size and speed of the move would tell us the Fed sees a problem serious enough to demand quick action.

That's where velocity comes in.

No magic number of rate hikes automatically causes a recession. But history gives us a useful lesson about speed.

Consider 2022.

The Fed began that year with rates near zero. By December, it had raised them 425 basis points, including four straight 75-point hikes.

The effects came quickly.

Stocks entered a bear market. Housing slowed. Borrowing costs surged. And real GDP contracted during the first two quarters of 2022.

Now compare that with the cycle leading into the Great Recession.

From 2004 through 2006, the Fed raised rates from 1% to 5.25%. But it did so through a long series of smaller, 25-point moves.

The recession didn't technically begin until December 2007.

I'm not suggesting Fed hikes alone caused either downturn. Economies are far more complex than that.

But the comparison supports an important idea.

The level matters, and so does the speed.

A quarter-point move Wednesday would be worth watching. A rapid series of hikes would be something else entirely.

That brings me to the part of the market that concerns me more than interest rates.

Something Has Changed in the Oil Market

Throughout the Iran conflict, I've focused on one question: Is the world's ability to produce and move oil actually being damaged?

For months, the answer was largely no. Oil jumped and fell with each new attack, ceasefire, and diplomatic pause.

Meanwhile, crude kept moving through alternative routes and the so-called "dark" fleet.

But that has changed recently.

Iran has attacked U.S. assets and ships.

The U.S. has retaliated against Iranian oil infrastructure and has now destroyed 10 Iranian tankers.

Source: U.S. Central Command

Iran-aligned Houthi forces have also stepped up their attacks on Saudi Arabia.

And last Thursday, they hit something especially important.

Saudi Arabia temporarily shut down its critical East-West crude oil pipeline following multiple projectile and drone attacks. The strikes caused fires and injuries.

Why does that matter?

The East-West pipeline has become a lifeline for Saudi oil. It moves crude across the country to the Red Sea, allowing Saudi Arabia to bypass the troubled Strait of Hormuz.

Now that alternative is under pressure, too.

Meanwhile, Houthi forces have pushed farther along Yemen's Red Sea coast, increasing the threat around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, another key route for global shipping.

The effects are becoming measurable.

Saudi crude supply fell sharply in August to its lowest level in more than three decades.

Think about what's happening.

First, Hormuz became harder to use.

Then Saudi Arabia relied more heavily on moving oil west toward the Red Sea.

Now the pipeline that helps get that oil west has been attacked, while the shipping route on the other side faces a growing threat.

This isn't merely another headline from the Middle East.

The system that moves millions of barrels of oil around the world is being damaged at multiple points.

Oil Has a Velocity Problem, Too

Oil above $100 isn't historically extreme.

Brent crude briefly approached $150 per barrel in 2008. It climbed above $120 in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.

The world has lived through expensive oil before.

Again, the important question is how quickly prices are moving and why.

Brent moved above $100 last week and approached $105 earlier today.

And this time, the move reflects damage to the system that produces and transports oil.

Consider those 10 Iranian tankers.

A Very Large Crude Carrier (or VLCC) can carry roughly 2 million barrels of oil. A new one can cost well over $100 million and take roughly two years to build.

So, if all 10 ships were that size, they could carry about 20 million barrels of oil on a single voyage.

And you can't replace that capacity next week.

Of course, not every tanker is a VLCC. The point isn't that these 10 ships alone will devastate the global oil market.

It's that ships are being destroyed while pipelines, production sites and shipping routes are coming under attack.

We're already seeing the cost of that risk.

The freight charge to move oil aboard a giant tanker from the Gulf of Oman to China recently surged to roughly $11.50 for every barrel carried, according to Baltic Exchange data.

In other words, the conflict isn't just affecting oil prices.

It's making the oil itself far more expensive to move.

That's velocity.

And unlike a quarter-point rate hike, markets can't easily price where this escalation ends.

It All Comes Back to Your Portfolio (and Pocket)

We all know that oil doesn't stay in the oil market. It reaches our wallets.

U.S. diesel prices are now around $6 per gallon, and gasoline also rose sharply in August.

Higher diesel costs make it more expensive to move food, clothes, and building supplies.

Higher jet fuel costs hit airlines.

Higher shipping costs hit retailers and manufacturers.

Eventually, much of that reaches consumers.

And that's where our two stories collide.

Higher oil means higher inflation. Higher inflation means pressure for higher rates.

That can squeeze consumers, slow the economy, and hurt company profits. Eventually, it can hurt stock prices, too.

Wall Street will spend the next few days focused on Kevin Warsh. And I'll be watching Wednesday's Fed decision just like everyone else.

But a 25-basis-point hike isn't what concerns me most right now.

Oil is.

We've spent months watching this conflict while crude remained within ranges the global economy has handled before.

Now production is falling, infrastructure is being hit, tankers are being destroyed, and shipping routes are becoming harder and more expensive to use.

The level matters.

But the velocity matters too. For investors, that's the change worth watching.

Wasn't this breaking information about companies and stocks? Well, sure. That's true.

But when you really get into the data, once you’re fully immersed in this tango with Mr. Market, you come to realize that the biggest, fastest moves in individual stocks usually don't happen because of an earnings report, a CNBC story, or a post on X.

It’s usually because of the numbers. Institutions, hedge funds, price… and paperwork.

For the latter, it’s often government forms that some compliance officer at a hedge fund or a pharmaceutical company was legally required to file, in a format nobody enjoys reading, posted to a government website nobody visits for fun…

And then the stock moves 40% before lunch.

It's just how the plumbing works.

The U.S. government runs what amounts to the largest, most boring, and most consistently profitable information service in the world. And it gives the information away for free.

The catch is that it's buried in acronyms, filed in bulk, and formatted like a tax return.

So the professionals read it, and everyone else finds out from a headline three days later, after the move.

Let’s talk about four of these documents right now.

The 13D

If you buy more than 5% of a public company's voting stock and you intend to do something about it — push out the CEO, force a sale, grab board seats — you have to tell the SEC. The form is called a Schedule 13D, and once you file it, it's public.

A billionaire spends months quietly accumulating shares, and of course, nobody knows. Then a legal deadline forces him to stand up in public and announce exactly what he owns and exactly what he plans to do with it.

On Aug. 5, 2024, Elliott Investment Management filed one on Southwest Airlines. The filing disclosed just under 42 million shares, and Southwest rose 3.4% in after-hours trading — after Elliott made clear it wanted new leadership at the airline.

Academic research on hedge fund 13D filings has found an average positive abnormal stock price response of roughly 7% in the targeted company. And that return doesn't fade away afterward.

A Harvard Business School study of activist filings between 1993 and 2006 found 10.3% excess returns over the 18 months beginning one month before the filing.

A 7% pop, on average, from a piece of paper. And a disclosure form no less!

The key here is that the filer had up to ten days to submit it. They, of course, knew before you did. The form exists precisely because Congress decided you deserved to find out at all.

The 13F

Every institutional manager with over $100 million has to disclose their U.S. stock holdings every quarter. The form is a 13F. It publishes 45 days after quarter-end, which means by the time you read it, the information is a month and a half stale.

Doesn't matter though. Stocks still move.

When Berkshire Hathaway revealed a roughly $7 billion position in Chubb — a stake the SEC had let them keep confidential while they were still buying — Chubb shares jumped more than 7% in after-hours trading on the disclosure.

When Berkshire's Q3 filing showed a surprise position in Alphabet, the news moved the stock 3.5% higher after hours — on a purchase that had happened weeks earlier.

Revenue, customers, profits… Nothing actually changed about either company.

The only thing that happened was that a document got published and the rest of the world found out what somebody already owned.

The pattern we’re developing right now is that the stock moved because of the disclosure, not the decision. The decision was old news to the person who made it.

The FDA Briefing Document

This one is the most brutal and the most ignored.

Before the FDA convenes an advisory committee to vote on a drug, the agency posts its reviewers' written analysis publicly, usually about 48 hours ahead of the meeting.

Please, do yourself a favor and never read one. It's a dense PDF written for scientists.

It also routinely detonates biotech stocks before votes are cast.

A couple of months ago, the FDA posted briefing documents ahead of Capricor Therapeutics' advisory committee meeting on its Duchenne muscular dystrophy therapy.

Shares dropped more than 60% that Monday.

Reviewers said Replimune's melanoma trial data isn't interpretable. A lot of us know this story.

The stock crashed nearly 32% in a session, its fifth straight day of losses, down roughly 47% over that stretch.

Now there's the twist here that tells you everything about how this game really works.

Two days after those documents gutted Replimune, the FDA's own advisory committee voted 10–3 that the data were evaluable and clinically meaningful, contradicting the criticism the agency's reviewers had written down two days earlier!

The Pattern

Let’s together take a step back and look at what those first three have in common.

Each one is:

• Public
• Free
• Published on a schedule, or at least on a deadline
• And reliably moves stock prices at the moment of publication, not at the moment the underlying event occurred

That gap between when something becomes true and when it becomes known is where a specific kind of money gets made.

That's how casinos work, too. They’re not hiding the deck (lol). They’re just counting on most people not really paying good enough attention.

Wall Street, as you know by now, looks.

They've built entire desks around these filings — people whose whole job is to open the PDF at 8:00 a.m. and know what it means by 8:04. Retail investors, meanwhile, find out from a push notification that says a stock is "surging on activist interest," which is a polite way of saying you're late.

The Fourth Document

Which brings me to why I'm writing this.

There's a fourth document I wanted to talk about...

It's also published by a government-authorized regulator. It's also completely free. And it's released on a fixed, published schedule that anyone can look up.

And almost no individual investor in America has ever opened it.

JC Parets has. He's spent years building a system around it. And according to that document, the next window opens on September 24th.

And on Thursday, September 17th at 1:00 PM ET, James Altucher is sitting down with JC to walk through exactly what that document is, how to read it, and which stocks it's pointing at right now.

We’ll talk about some market plumbing again soon. I promise.

I have a few ideas about volatility and how to make yourself the “house” with options trading. It’ll be fun. Again, I promise.

I gotta say, it sucked every time. But my world didn't end either.

That's how the market feels right now. Euphoria is coming… but we're all about to get punched in the face first.

Last month, I showed you how the stock market is sprinting toward a full-on feeding frenzy. Conditions are perfect for a melt-up in its purest form: a generational move not seen since the final phase of the 1990s dot-com boom.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe this mega-boom is lurking in the shadows. Artificial intelligence euphoria is literally right around the corner.

But before we break the glass to retrieve our 1999 market playbook, a choppy, corrective market needs to plant the seeds of doubt in every investor’s mind.

The herd needs to experience a little angst before we light the fuse. It’s already happening right on cue!

And we can thank the forces of seasonality and some well-timed worries shaking investor confidence this week.

Beware the Ides of… September?

September is a month of change. Summer ends, decision-makers return to the office, and a new school year begins.

It’s also a sketchy time for the markets. In fact, the “September Effect” is a real phenomenon market watchers have tracked for decades. Over the past century, September infamously stands out as the worst month for stock market returns, averaging out at -1%.

Does this mean every September is rough for investors? Of course not!

Last year, stocks ripped higher in September with the S&P gaining 3.5% on the month. In 2024, September was also strong, with the S&P flashing a 2% gain.

Right now, the averages are teetering in the red to begin the month. Following a strong summer punctuated by an impressive August rally, investors are suddenly confronted with a laundry list of stock market concerns.

Let’s build the wall of worry, brick by brick:

• Yields continue to rocket higher this week with the 10-year approaching October 2023 highs, teetering on the edge of a bigger breakout.
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent challenges the market with his “I am the house” comments on the administration’s Japanese Yen intervention.
• Crude crossing back above $100 for the first time since May as the Iran conflict continues with no end in sight.
• Trump floats a $5,000 “dividend check” for every adult in America if Republicans win in November.
• Probability of a 25 basis-point rate hike next week just climbed to 90%

Then, we have this week’s inflation data, which deserves its own extended explanation since the Fed is meeting next week.

August PPI came in a little higher-than-expected at 5.4%. Futures immediately took a dive. But if you were paying close attention to the tape, you might have noticed the negative reaction was already baked into the cake.

The numbers did not deviate too far from expectations, which is clearly not what the market wanted. Without some sort of a major outlier in the data this morning, the sellers were already testing the waters. Market participants wanted something to cling to that would convince them rising yields are going to calm down and the Fed won’t raise rates.

The key piece of information here is that the selling started 45 minutes before PPI hit the wire. Futures then cascaded lower once the numbers were out. Traders were already leaning on their sell buttons ahead of the date.

While this morning’s CPI report did nothing to stem rate-hike fears, the release was followed by a decent stock market rally.

A sign of volatility to come leading up to next week’s Fed meeting?

“You Are Here”

Investors are getting skittish right on cue. It’s September, and we enjoyed a relatively strong summer trading season.

Now, we have all the ingredients we need for a little volatility to scramble the bulls’ brains.

Here’s how I see the month setting up…

Midterm years are notoriously rough in the middle, as noted by the Stock Traders Almanac. The average midterm seasonal pattern begins with a rally that tops out in the spring, followed by months of weakness before stocks finally bottom out in early October ahead of a strong Q4 rally:

It’s important to note that the averages are outkicking their coverage considering we’re smack in the middle of a midterm election year.

The S&P 500 is up double-digits year-to-date. While we’re still in the “chop zone” of the midterm cycle, we are approaching the beginning of that strong fourth-quarter thrust that begins in early October. The strong performance and constructive consolidation over the summer bode well for year-end strength.

If we do encounter turbulence heading into the end of the month, it could be setting us up for the next big move higher.

Turning to our dot-com analog, we can see how the Asian currency crisis in Q3 1998 helped set up the final, face-ripping rally into early 2000.

The Nasdaq Composite endured a 25%-plus correction that lasted more than two months heading into Q4 1998. And we all know what happened next.

The dot-com bull quickly recovered and began its breakneck rally to its penultimate highs in March 2000, gaining 240% along the way

While I’m not expecting a correction as severe as 1998, any bout of volatility or downside we endure this month is likely to resolve to the upside and lead to a strong Q4 performance.

If we experience a rally that’s even half as powerful as what the market delivered in 1999, we’ll be swimming in a fantastic sea of trading opportunities.

Whatever you do, don’t get too caught up in any bearish narratives if the market loses its footing this September.

History says we’re pushing toward a generational rally. When it begins, you’ll need to be mentally prepared to take advantage of the euphoric action.

It's a question economists have struggled to answer.

The economy grew 2.1% over the past year. Unemployment remains low. And the stock market has created enormous wealth.

Even inflation, while still a problem, is nowhere near its 2022 peak.

Yet Americans aren't buying the good news.

A recent Gallup survey found that 45% of Americans rate the economy as "poor." Just 19% call it "good" or "excellent." Other major surveys tell a similar story.

Share of People Who Rate Economy as "Good" or "Excellent" Minus "Poor"

Source: Gallup via The Wall Street Journal

So, who’s right… the people or the economists? I say both are.

The economic data isn’t necessarily wrong. Neither are all the Americans who say something still doesn't feel right.

Here’s one theory for why such a huge gap exists: The COVID economy never really ended.

There’s Before… and Then There’s After

It’s easy to forget how normal the economy felt immediately before COVID.

There were good years and bad years. Prices went up and down. But most of us had a basic idea of what things should cost.

Then, almost overnight, COVID blew up those expectations.

Businesses closed, factories shut down, and supply chains seized up. Suddenly, we couldn’t even get a hold of necessities like toilet paper.

And when people could find certain products, they often paid much more for them.

Economics 101 played out in real time. Supply disappeared while demand shifted wildly.

Eventually, the economy reemerged. Factories reopened, stores restocked their shelves, and supply chains started to improve.

By most measures, the economy began growing again. But something important didn’t return to normal...

Prices.

Check out the chart below showing how much consumer prices have climbed over the past decade.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis

Consumer prices today are about 28% higher than they were just before the pandemic.

That’s a crucial point for understanding why Americans remain unhappy.

We hear that inflation has fallen from its 2022 peak. That’s true.

But lower inflation doesn’t mean lower prices. It just means already-high prices are rising more slowly.

If something that cost $100 rises to $128, slowing inflation doesn’t magically make it cost $100 again.

Americans still see the new price every time they walk into a grocery store, pay an insurance bill, or go out to dinner.

For older Americans, the inflation shock of the past few years may have brought back memories of the 1970s and early 1980s.

But for many Gen Xers, Millennials, and younger Americans, sustained inflation was something they had only read about in history books.

Then it became part of everyday life.

At the peak in June 2022, consumer inflation reached 9.1%.

It’s fallen sharply since, but the effects of that burst didn't disappear when inflation did. And not everybody’s paycheck kept up.

A recent study using payroll data found that 34% of workers saw their wages fail to keep pace with inflation between the end of 2020 and the end of 2025.

So the economy can grow while millions of individual households legitimately feel as though they’re falling behind.

Nowhere is this clearer than housing.

According to the Atlanta Fed, a household now needs about $124,674 a year to afford a median-priced home (assuming housing costs equal no more than 30% of income).

That’s about 45% more than the median household earns. At the end of 2019, payments on a median-priced home were actually about 3% below that affordability threshold.

Housing Affordability

Source: Atlanta Fed via The Wall Street Journal

Look at those two lines.

For years, household income and the income needed to buy a typical home weren’t terribly far apart.

Then came COVID.

Today, the gap is roughly $40,000.

And traditional inflation statistics don’t fully capture this problem because home prices and mortgage rates aren’t directly included in the Consumer Price Index.

The average 30-year mortgage rate recently stood at 6.71%, up from 3.51% in January 2020.

You don’t need an economics degree to feel that difference.

Then Washington Did Something Unprecedented

Prices and inflation tell only part of the COVID story. We also need to remember what happened during the pandemic.

Businesses were ordered closed or restricted. Schools and public facilities shut their doors. Travel collapsed. And millions of Americans suddenly found themselves working from home.

Faced with a historic crisis, Washington responded on a historic scale.

Six major COVID relief laws enacted in 2020 and 2021 provided roughly $4.6 trillion in federal pandemic relief, according to the Government Accountability Office. About $4.4 trillion was ultimately spent.

Here’s some perspective on just how enormous that number is.

In fiscal 2019, the last full year before COVID, the federal government spent about $4.45 trillion on everything.

Social Security. Medicare. Defense. Federal agencies. Interest on the debt. Everything.

In other words, Washington authorized more COVID relief than the federal government had spent during an entire pre-pandemic year.

Where did it go?

The IRS issued more than 476 million stimulus payments totaling over $814 billion through three rounds of checks.

The Paycheck Protection Program approved nearly $800 billion in loans, many of which were designed to be forgiven if businesses met the program’s rules.

Hundreds of billions more went toward enhanced unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments.

And that was only the fiscal response.

The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates toward zero and bought enormous quantities of securities.

Its balance sheet grew from roughly $4.2 trillion before COVID to nearly $9 trillion by early 2022.

To be clear, this isn’t an argument over whether those policies were right or wrong.

The country faced an emergency, and policymakers under both the Trump and Biden administrations were trying to prevent a public-health crisis from turning into an economic depression.

But we shouldn’t forget what an extraordinary economic experiment it was.

Parts of the economy were effectively frozen while trillions of dollars flowed to households, businesses, and financial markets.

Then the country reopened while the supply of many goods, and even workers, remained constrained.

We are still living with some of the consequences.

Two Economies Can Both Be Real

This brings me back to the disconnect between economic data and public sentiment.

GDP can grow. Unemployment can remain low. Stocks can rise. And Americans can still feel lousy about the economy.

That’s because when people think about "the economy," they probably aren't thinking about quarterly GDP.

They’re thinking about their economy.

What does my paycheck buy?

Can I afford a home?

Why does everything cost so much more than I remember?

In other words, Americans aren’t necessarily comparing today's economy with last year's. They’re comparing it with the economy they remember before COVID.

That’s why both sides can be true.

The official numbers tell us how the economy is doing today.

Americans are telling us how far their buying power was knocked off course over the past six years.

Sentiment matters a great deal to us as investors.

After all, consumer spending drives roughly two-thirds of the U.S. economy.

If Americans still feel squeezed, it can shape where they spend, which companies win, and ultimately where the market goes next.

The pandemic may be behind us. But economically, we’re still living in its shadow.

What Americans are feeling — and how they are spending — might tell us more about what comes next than the headline numbers alone.

OpenAI sits near the center of an enormous web of spending on chips, data centers, power, and other infrastructure.

If its growth slows or its massive spending plans change, the effects could spread to companies many investors already own.

I didn’t expect to revisit the topic this soon. But a lot has happened in just the past two weeks.

And now, I’m more concerned about OpenAI’s downfall than ever.

So today, I want to run through six new signs that the OpenAI-pocalypse is fast approaching.

#1: The Executive Exodus

When I first laid out my OpenAI-pocalypse theory, roughly a dozen senior leaders had already left or stepped back this year.

Now that number has climbed to at least 14 executives, according to a new Business Insider tally.

The departures include former COO Brad Lightcap, Applications CEO Fidji Simo, Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser and, most recently, data-center chief Chris Malone.

Other senior researchers and leaders have left as well.

Executive turnover happens at every fast-growing company.

But losing leaders across revenue, operations, science, technology, hardware, and infrastructure just before one of history's most anticipated IPOs deserves our attention.

And management is only one of OpenAI's many problems.

#2: The Token-Price Collapse

Last week, CNBC reported that AI token prices are hitting new record lows.

Multiple outlets, analysts, and AI industry researchers are now reporting on the sharp decline in what users pay to access large language models.

Silicon Data's LLM Token Expenditure Index recently fell to just $0.97. That's its lowest reading ever and more than 50% below its summer high.

This is fantastic news for consumers. But for frontier AI labs, maybe not.

OpenAI has committed to spending huge sums on chips, computing power and data centers. Yet the price of the product produced by all that infrastructure keeps falling.

Competition is a big reason why. Cheap and free open-source models are improving, Chinese models are pressuring prices, and OpenAI itself cut prices on two GPT-5.6 models in July.

Falling computing costs add even more pressure.

Businesses, institutions, individuals, and even governments now have more cheap or free alternatives. That should put even more pressure on token prices.

Last week, Nvidia made an extraordinary bet on that trend.

It agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the world's largest platforms for open AI models, for nearly $13 billion. Nvidia says it intends to keep the platform open.

Think about that.

The company making billions selling chips to frontier labs just made a $13 billion bet on the open-model ecosystem.

And that only adds to the pressure on OpenAI’s business model.

OpenAI has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building the infrastructure needed to produce AI.

But the price of what it produces keeps falling.

#3: The Commoditization Threat

Then came an extraordinary announcement out of South Korea.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

South Korea plans to give free AI access to its entire population of more than 50 million people, with at least 80% of usage expected to run through Korean-built models.

Read that again…

One of the world's most advanced nations plans to give AI away!

South Korea could be the first of many.

Other wealthy nations could eventually follow its lead and treat AI as a public good, much like education or basic digital infrastructure.

In other words, treating AI as a citizen's right.

That might sound far-fetched. But it sounded considerably more far-fetched before South Korea decided to do it.

And governments have a huge advantage over OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier labs.

They don't necessarily need to make money selling tokens.

If taxpayer-backed models can provide citizens with AI for free, it creates even more competition for private companies that try to charge for the same basic service.

That could further erode the value of AI tokens just as frontier labs prepare to ask public investors for enormous valuations.

Which brings us to Anthropic.

#4: The Anthropic IPO Rush

OpenAI and Anthropic were both preparing to go public when we last talked about the OpenAI-pocalypse.

But things have moved quickly.

Anthropic reportedly plans to unveil its IPO prospectus after Labor Day and could begin trading as soon as late September or early October.

Why the rush?

I don't know. Maybe Anthropic sees strong investor demand and wants to strike while the iron is hot. But consider what's happening around it.

Token prices are plunging, open models are improving, and governments are funding alternatives. Questions about the cost of the AI buildout are growing too.

Maybe Anthropic wants to get it while the getting is good. If it can go public now at an enormous valuation, why wait?

For the first time, investors will value a frontier AI lab every trading day, comparing its revenue, losses, and growth against falling token prices and rising competition.

If Anthropic's IPO struggles, or its shares eventually fall as investors question the economics of frontier AI, that could make OpenAI's own path to Wall Street much harder.

I could even see Anthropic getting through the IPO window before it closes… but not OpenAI.

#5: The Adoption Backlash

The pressure isn't coming only from competitors.

Last week, New York City announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI for elementary and middle-school students.

That's roughly 600,000 students in America's largest school district. Then, just days later, Los Angeles followed.

Think about how quickly this changed.

In the span of just a few days, America's two largest school systems have both slammed the brakes on student AI use.

One district could be an outlier. Two starts to look like a trend.

What happens if Chicago, Miami, Houston and other major school systems follow?

For years, one of the core assumptions behind AI adoption has been that today's children will grow up using these tools as naturally as previous generations grew up with the internet and smartphones.

Maybe they will. But New York and Los Angeles just reminded us that AI adoption isn't guaranteed to move in a straight line.

#6: The Data-Center Backlash

Then there are the buildings that make AI possible.

Data centers have become political targets because of their huge electricity needs, effects on utility bills, water use, and demands on local infrastructure.

And the opposition is increasingly bipartisan.

New York recently became the first state to impose a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers. Other states are considering their own restrictions.

That's another wrinkle in my original theory.

Two weeks ago, I asked where OpenAI would find enough money to fund its enormous infrastructure plans.

Now there's another question…

What if OpenAI can raise the money, but its partners can't build everything as quickly or cheaply as planned?

This Isn't Just About OpenAI

You don't need to own OpenAI or Anthropic to have money riding on their success.

The AI spending boom reaches Nvidia and other chipmakers, cloud companies, data-center operators, utilities, networking companies, and plenty of other stocks you probably own.

And none of what I’ve shown you means AI is going away.

In fact, cheaper AI could cause usage to explode.

But exploding usage and exploding profits are not the same thing.

If AI becomes cheaper, more open, and harder to monetize, the companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build it may eventually have to rethink those plans.

And if that happens, the effects won’t stop with OpenAI. They’ll ripple through the entire AI investment boom.

That’s what the OpenAI-pocalypse is really about.

On July 27, Apple briefly became the world’s most valuable company again. It held the title for many years — becoming the world’s first $1 trillion, and then $3 trillion company — before losing the top spot to Nvidia.

Now Apple is working on something that might make it the first $10 trillion company. That may sound crazy, but they’ve already become the second company to achieve a historic $5 trillion valuation.

See, Apple has been very strategic these last few years during the AI race. They weren’t interested in spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to invent their own AI model. Instead, they’ve been biding their time, waiting for the right moment to enter the race.

That time is upon us.

September is going to be a massive month for the company, driven by two major developments inside both Apple’s leadership and its product lineup.

The first just happened on Tuesday, and we’re only a few days away from the second.

Not only will this be big news for Apple, but it’s also going to drive the next stage of the AI story.

First Jobs. Then Cook. Now Him…

Steve Jobs was a legend. He reshaped consumer culture by designing products with a sleek, minimal aesthetic, with beautiful and intuitive user interfaces, backed by brilliant marketing.

But Tim Cook? He proved to be an operational and strategic genius. He never designed a hot product — at least not on the scale of the iPhone or iPad. But he built the most efficient supply chain in the world and turned Apple into a juggernaut, overseeing a more than 1,000% return in the stock.

Apple’s newest CEO will be just as pivotal.

On September 1, John Ternus — their chief hardware engineer and a 25-year Apple veteran — took over as CEO.

He has big shoes to fill. Jobs was a visionary. Cook was the operator.

But Ternus is no slouch. Over the last handful of years, he’s been credited with reversing what was perceived as a period of declining hardware quality. He oversaw the transition from Intel chips to their own in-house Apple Silicon. And today, he controls the products that generate 80% of the company’s revenue.

Now, it’s his job to make Apple the next king of AI.

And we’ve already gotten a glimpse of how he will do it.

Back in June, during Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Cook and Ternus previewed a major overhaul to Apple Intelligence…

An overhaul that is expected to commence with the launch of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max on September 9. Just one week after Ternus takes over.

This timing is not coincidental. This is Apple telling us hardware is the answer to their AI problem.

And there’s a way to invest in it… without needing to own Apple’s stock directly.

The Bottleneck — and the Opportunity

AI, at its core, is just powerful software. But the software can only be as powerful as the hardware that supports it

We’ve seen that on a colossal scale with the AI data center buildout — and how that has benefited stocks like Intel and Micron Technology. Now, Apple has to compress all that computation into a single, handheld device.

This is why Apple is elevating its chief hardware engineer to the top job.

AI has finally started to mature. And in order to keep growing, Apple has no choice but to harness its power. And the only way to do that is with hardware.

Ultimately, the reason why it has taken Apple so long to make its big AI move comes down to historical hardware limitations — limitations that are now being resolved.

Fortunately, one company has spent more than 20 years mastering this exact challenge: cramming the most intelligence into the least power, right there on a single chip. Its technology already sits inside more than a billion devices.

And it just built a dedicated chip for AI robots, running 700 trillion calculations a second, that the most advanced robot makers on Earth, including one backed by Nvidia, Microsoft, and Jeff Bezos, are already using.

That company is Qualcomm (QCOM). Besides robotics hardware, they have a longstanding relationship with Apple and supply them with radio frequency (RF) chips. These chips work alongside the cellular 5G modem inside the iPhone to connect to the Internet.

This is critical for AI, which can only work as fast as it can download data from the cloud. The RF chips and 5G modem work hand-in-hand to unlock full AI capabilities on the iPhone.

Qualcomm has the potential to triple, or even quadruple if Apple doubles. And that’s just one way to play it.

I’ve been researching much smaller companies that will be essential to unlocking Apple’s next wave of growth. Expect to hear more about these opportunities soon.

Why I’ll Be First in Line

Long story short, starting September 9, we’re going to begin seeing new AI capabilities in the next generation of iPhone.

Helping us plan trips… book reservations… order food…

Think about all the stuff you manually do on your iPhone now. Now, imagine just being able to tell Siri to do it for you.

This is the breakthrough that’s going to cause people to fall in love with AI.

I have never been the type to camp outside a Best Buy the night before an iPhone launch to be first in line — or ever really care about a new iPhone to begin with. I bought the iPhone X and had it for five years. I’ve had my current iPhone for two years.

But I’m buying the iPhone 18 Pro the week it comes out.

Since 1928, the S&P 500 has lost an average of about 1.1% during September, making it the worst month on the calendar.

And it gets even more interesting when you look at volatility.

The CBOE Volatility Index, better known as the VIX, measures market expectations for S&P 500 volatility over the next 30 days.

When investors become nervous, the VIX generally rises.

Since 1990, the VIX has gained an average of 8.2% in September, its strongest average month.

Source: Benzinga

Click to enlarge

More strikingly, it has risen in each of the past five Septembers:

• 2021: +40.3%
• 2022: +22.2%
• 2023: +29.1%
• 2024: +12.0%
• 2025: +6.1%

If it rises again this month, that will mark the first six-year September winning streak since the VIX began in 1990.

But there’s an important catch.

Despite that 8.2% average September gain, the VIX has risen in only 18 of the past 36 Septembers. That’s exactly 50%.

In other words, blindly betting on higher September volatility has historically been about as reliable as a coin flip.

So how can the VIX average such a large September gain if it only rises half the time?

The Bad Septembers Are Really Bad

The answer is that September’s average is skewed by some enormous spikes in volatility.

During the financial crisis in September 2008, for example, the VIX soared more than 90%.

A handful of huge jumps like that pull the historical average higher.

So the historical signal isn’t that volatility always explodes in September.

It’s that when markets do become stressed, September has produced some unusually large volatility shocks.

Why?

Nobody knows for certain. But there are some logical explanations.

Think about what happens during summer.

People go on vacation, Wall Street trading desks thin out, and portfolio managers spend more time away from their screens.

A 2009 study published in the Journal of Financial Markets examined 51 stock markets and found that trading activity falls during summer vacation periods. Both large and small investors traded less.

Another study, published in Financial Management in 2017, examined school holidays across 47 countries. It found that stock returns during the month following major school holidays were 0.6% to 1% lower than during other months.

The researchers found that reduced investor attention during vacations may cause information to get reflected in stock prices more slowly.

Then September arrives.

Kids go back to school, adults go back to work, and portfolio managers return to their desks. And they’re returning with plenty of fresh information.

Second-quarter earnings season is almost over, and investors have a new set of earnings, guidance, and management forecasts to consider.

Meanwhile, the third quarter is nearing its end, giving funds another reason to reassess and rebalance their portfolios.

None of this proves why September is volatile.

But it does create an interesting setup: A lot of investors return at the same time, armed with fresh information and reasons to move money around.

More trading isn’t bearish, of course. Investors can just as easily come back from vacation and buy.

However, if all that fresh activity happens when the market is stressed, we can see some large moves.

What About This September?

Wall Street isn’t returning to an empty calendar.

The Federal Reserve meets starting on Sept. 15 with interest rates, inflation, and the economy once again front and center.

Any surprises in the Fed's decision, projections, or comments could quickly move stocks, bonds, and volatility.

The Fed isn’t the only unknown.

The November midterm elections are now just two months away, with control of Congress potentially up for grabs.

Markets don’t like uncertainty, and the election gives investors another major variable to consider.

Add an already complex situation for inflation, interest rates, oil, and global politics, and Wall Street has plenty to think about.

None of that means stocks are headed lower. In fact, there are even reasons to feel good.

The S&P 500 started September well above its 200-day moving average.

This setup has often produced much better September returns than when the market enters the month below that key metric.

So I’m not predicting a selloff, and I’m not saying the VIX will rise for a sixth September in a row. But I certainly want to follow it closely.

September has historically been Wall Street's worst month. When volatility does hit, the moves can be unusually large.

And this year, we have several events that could put that history to the test.