Options traders seem unperturbed by the US midterm elections, creating a potentially precarious setup for a stock market already dealing with a rout in bonds and uncertainty about the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate path.

Optimism continued to rebound in latest @AAIISentiment (week ending 9/30/26) but still remains below its historical average of 37.5%; pessimism ticked down to 46.5% ... this week’s special question polls AAII members on the November midterm elections

optics/AI infrastructure players LONG I never expected ECOC to become this widely discussed. Even when I started on X in 2025, I was surprised by the attention. This year, 2026, feels completely different. So many Substackers and people on X are now covering ECOC announcements and the companies behind them almost in real time. Optical networking and photonics are clearly no longer niche topics.

Optimists work harder and plan to keep working longer, according to Duke University finance professors Manju Puri and David Robinson. The most extreme optimists went the other way: they worked fewer hours and saved less money. Each person's guess about how long they would live became the optimism score. Puri and Robinson took answers from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances and compared them with official life expectancy tables, so people who expected to outlive the statistics counted as optimists. The score lined up with standard psychology tests of optimism and with people's hopes for the economy. The study appeared in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2007. Optimists worked more hours each week and expected to retire later. They saved more, put more money into individual stocks, and were more likely to remarry after a divorce. Self-employed people scored as more optimistic than regular employees. Extreme optimists, the people who expected to live far longer than the tables predicted, looked different. They worked fewer hours, saved less, were less likely to pay off their credit cards regularly, and were more likely to smoke. Survey data like this can't show which comes first, since hard work and savings might also make people feel more hopeful. Across American households, a moderate overestimate of your future went with working harder and planning ahead, and a wildly inflated one went with the opposite.

Optimizing large scale inference systems is what we do, so we decided to write down what we know. Our LLM Inference Handbook is a free reference covering TTFT, TPOT, goodput, continuous batching, chunked prefill, prefix caching, KV cache math, prefill-decode disaggregation, quantization, and more. It includes 20+ interactive visualizations, is updated continuously, and is open to PRs.

Options desks are leaning hard into an AI rebound. $INTC saw 1.3M contracts trade Thursday, 3x its average, with calls crushing puts. $AMD, $CRWD, and $SPCX all lit up too. Bulls are back.