Foreign born population of each country :
Jan 2001 Jan 2025
🇦🇹 8.7% 22.5%
🇧🇪 8.4% 20.2%
🇩🇰 4.8% 14.4%
🇫🇷 5.5% 14.0%
🇩🇪 8.9% 20.5%
🇬🇷 6.9% 11.0%
🇮🇸 3.1% 21.8%
🇮🇪 4.0% 23.3%
🇱🇺 37.5% 51.5%
🇳🇱 4.1% 16.8%
🇳🇴 4.1% 18.7%
🇸🇮 2.1% 15.5%
🇪🇸 3.4% 19.3%
🇸🇪 5.3% 20.8%
🇬🇧 4.3% 20.0%
Now add children born to foreign parents and the situation looks even worse.
We are living through the demographic annihilation of the people of Europe.
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SpaceXAI just launched Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 - its most capable speech-to-speech model yet
The numbers are so impressive:
• 82.9% overall Speech-to-Speech Quality Index
• 97.2% on speech reasoning
• 56.5% on agentic voice tasks
• Just 0.70 seconds to first audio
• Uses only 0.4× the reasoning tokens of Think Fast 1.0
Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 now ranks ahead of GPT-Realtime-2.1 and Gemini 3.1 Flash on overall speech-to-speech benchmarks
But the biggest improvement is real-world listening
Across thousands of short phrases in 24 languages, it delivers 1.5–2× better transcription accuracy than Deepgram Nova 3 and ElevenLabs Scribe v2
In noisy environments and compressed phone calls, that advantage grows to around 10×
It can also reason while speaking, allowing tool calls to begin before it even finishes its first sentence.....with no added latency
Conversations now feel much more natural:
• Shorter responses
• One question at a time
• Less filler
• More fluid dialogue
• Better guidance through complex tasks
SpaceXAI has already deployed it on Starlink's phone line and saw significant increases in both sales conversion and customer support containment
Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 becomes the default grok-voice-latest model on August 5
Pricing: $0.08 per minute of audio
Voice AI is rapidly evolving from scripted assistants into intelligent agents that can listen, reason, speak, and take action in real time
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Last wk, S&P/Nas/Mag7 +0.4%/+0.1%/-0.8%. Cooler inflation (CPI, PPI) & economic data (consumer sentiment, retail sales) but +5% oil steepened the yield curve but lowered odds of a rate hike.
Looking forward, I continue to believe the impact of Agentic AI with the advent of OpenClaw on January 30th has at least a year to run:
1) Token production has gone up roughly ~7.5x from the end of January more than offsetting the nearly 50% token cost reduction seen since open-weight model usage started to take off in May.
2) Combined annualized run-rate revenues for OpenAI and Anthropic which ended last year at $29B seems to be around $100B currently with Anthropic getting profitable in Q2.
3) Capex from the Big6 hyperscalers accelerated from 84% y/y/ in CQ1 to 92% in CQ2 with forecasts for nearly 100% in Q3. But this is being supported by cloud revenue growth at the 3 Big Public cloud vendors of $AMZN $MSFT $GOOGL accelerating from 23% y/y in Q1:25 to 35% in Q1:26 to 43% in Q2:26. Arguable more important is public cloud operating margins expanded from 34% to 37% and 39% during those time periods.
4) The $500B financing deal backstopped by up to $125B from $NVDA adds even more lower cost money to fund AI capex spend for the non-hyperscaler players. Nvidia gained 0.5% last week.
5) The liquidation of Situational Awareness and retail accounts during July cleared out some of the frothiness in the AI related names
In terms of negatives:
1) The cost of money (yields on government bonds) remain near the highest levels for the 30 yr tenor at 5.3% since 2007.
2) Given large scale offensive US military actions are seemingly off the tablein favor of financial sanctions, probably driven by current election polls, I now believe Iran is likely to hold the Strait of Hormuz hostage until past the US mid-terms. This would be akin to them releasing the US hostages in 1981 (they were held for 444 days) just hours after President Reagan was sworn in replacing Carter. There were severe financial sanctions then also.
3) Since 1990, which happens to be the Gulf War, from the end of July through November 9th, which covers the reaction to all mid-term results, the performance is worse than non mid-term years. For mid-term years the median S&P500 gain from 7/31-11/9 is 0.9% with gains 56% of the time but the median peak loss from 7/31 is 6.2% (intra-period median peak loss of 9.9%.) For non mid-term years the median gain is 2.7% from 7/31-11/9 with gains 59% of the time and the median peak loss from 7/31 is 3.5% (intra-period median peak loss of 5.2%.) This year with the momentum seen by the Socialists which are not big business friendly, I see more risk than normal.
4) The easy money on the AI technical rebound from oversold levels on 7/29 due to the forced sale by Situation Awareness is probably over. There were negative stock reactions to headline beat and raise earnings on both revs & EPS for AI infrastructure winners $CSCO (-8% for the week but still up +45% YTD), $AMAT (-6%/+97%) and $COHR (-14%/+77%). While negatives can always be found, their biggest crime was arguably their recent bounce from 7/29-8/7 of 8%, 24% and 71% respectively and their market beating YTD gains.
In summary, I remain bullish. Even from the end of July through November 9th during mid-term years since 1990, the S&P has an additional median gain of 4.2% to its peak before giving some of that back closer to the election. Given some of the negatives, especially the reaction to solid earnings data, I would add some hedges back on further market gains and get more selective. Consumer discretionary hedges should also make sense if oil is higher for longer.
I believe value should continue to accrue to the infrastructure layer which includes 1) the public cloud vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and 2) the semiconductor companies. $INTC, my favorite semi company, still gained 0.8% last week despite: 1) a $20B equity offering which causes ~5% dilution and 2) being up 178% YTD. This clears the funding overhang.
All the best in the week ahead.
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The cheapest MiCA-regulated crypto exchanges ↓
(bookmark for later)
Revolut – 0% / 0.09%
OKX – 0.08% / 0.1%
Gate – 0.1% / 0.1%
Bybit – 0.1% / 0.3%
Bitvavo – 0.2% / 0.3%
Blockchaincom – 0.2% / 0.4%
Bitpanda – 0.3% / 0.3%
Kraken – 0.3% / 0.4%
Bitstamp – 0.3% / 0.4%
Cryptocom – 0.3% / 0.5%
Robinhood – 0.5%
Bit2Me – 0.5% / 0.6%
Coinbase – 0.6% / 1.2%
eToro – 1%
Swissquote – 1% / 1%
Data from
@DefiLlama.
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The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2171.96, down 0.2% (-4.96) since 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
Thirteen of 20 assets are trading higher.
Leaders: $ICP (+9.7%) and $DOT (+1.7%).
Laggards: $BCH (-1.2%) and $NEAR (-1.0%).
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🇺🇸US DATA RUNS HOT: INFLATION STICKY, DEMAND FIRM
INFLATION
• Headline PCE MoM: +0.2% vs +0.1% est.; prior -0.1%
• Headline PCE YoY: +3.7% vs +3.6% est.; prior +3.7%
• Core PCE MoM: +0.2% vs +0.2% est.; prior +0.1%
• Core PCE YoY: +3.3% vs +3.3% est.; prior +3.3%
GDP
• Q2 GDP annualized: +1.5% vs +1.5% est.; prior +1.5%
• Personal consumption: +3.4% vs +3.2% est.; prior +3.2%
• GDP Price Index: +6.4% vs +6.2% est.; prior +6.2%
• Core PCE QoQ: +3.6% vs +3.4% est.; prior +3.4%
INCOME & SPENDING
• Personal income MoM: +0.4% vs +0.2% est.; prior +0.2%
• Personal spending MoM: +0.2% vs +0.1% est.; prior +0.3%
• Real personal spending MoM: 0.0% vs 0.0% est.; prior +0.4%
DURABLE GOODS
• Durable goods orders MoM: +1.1% vs +0.5% est.; prior +0.5%
• Durables ex-transportation: +0.4% vs +0.6% est.; prior +0.7%
• Core capital goods orders: +0.2% vs +0.7% est.; prior revised to +1.7%
• Core capital goods shipments: +1.4% vs +1.0% est.; prior revised to +2.4%
BOTTOM LINE: Inflation remains sticky while consumer demand and headline durable goods beat expectations. GDP growth was in line, but stronger price pressures could keep the Fed cautious on rates.
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Im playing in the gen g showdown today for best of ivern and forgot to tweet about it
I am currently 2-3-1 going into the final round against one other ivern player who is 2-4-0
Today's been full stress I went to time every game but one I was sweating all day
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Here are the largest holdings in the S&P 500
Nvidia $NVDA 8.4%
Apple $AAPL 6.8%
Microsoft $MSFT 4.8%
Amazon $AMZN 4.2%
Alphabet $GOOGL 3.6%
Broadcom $AVGO 3.2%
Alphabet $GOOG 2.9%
Meta $META 2.1%
Tesla $TSLA 2.0%
Micron $MU 1.4%
Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B 1.4%
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U.S. HOME PRICES BEAT EXPECTATIONS IN JUNE
U.S. 20-city home prices rose 0.2% month-over-month in June, above the 0.1% consensus and matching May.
Prices increased 2.1% year-over-year, accelerating from 1.6% in May and beating expectations of 1.7%.
On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, prices rose 0.4%, slowing from May’s 0.9% gain.
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