u/BreadSea7272

Been tracking the gap between SPX (cap weighted) and RSP (equal weight) for about two years. Last week the trailing 12 month return spread widened to 13.8 percentage points in favor of cap weighted. That level has only been reached twice before in the modern era: March 2000 and November 2021.

Both of those times, mega caps went on to significantly underperform over the next 18 months. Which, you know, doesn't prove anything on its own. But it got me curious enough to dig through the full history.

Going back to 2001 I found six distinct periods where this gap exceeded 10 percentage points. In five of those six, RSP outperformed SPX over the following 24 months by an average of 14.3%. The lone exception was right before COVID, which was its own kind of black swan that scrambled everything.

What actually made me take this more seriously was the earnings picture. I had MuleRun pull constituent level earnings and revenue growth across all 500 names going back to 2001, then spot checked the outputs against Bloomberg. The numbers lined up, so I kept going.

The pattern that jumped out most clearly: the concentration premium tends to unwind fastest when top decile earnings growth decelerates relative to the median. And Q1 2026 is showing exactly that. Top 10 names posted 11.2% year over year growth, down from 22.4% a year ago. Meanwhile the median company posted 7.8%, up from 4.1%. So the gap is compressing from both directions at once.

Now the immediate pushback is "this isn't 2000" and that's completely fair. Today's mega caps are genuinely profitable with massive free cash flow. Nobody with a straight face is comparing NVIDIA to Pets.com. But profitability alone doesn't save you from multiple compression when growth rates converge. Cisco was a legitimately excellent business in 2000. Still took 15 years to see that price again. The lesson from that era was never really about business quality. It was about what happens when the market prices in perfection and then perfection stops accelerating.

Random tangent but this also connects to something that bugs me about how people talk about "passive" investing. If 38% of your index is concentrated in 10 names, up from about 27% just three years ago, you're functionally running a momentum strategy whether you signed up for it or not. That's been phenomenal for three years. But at what point does "I just buy the index" become a thesis that deserves the same scrutiny as any active bet?

Anyway. I've shifted about 20% of my equity allocation from VOO into RSP and IVOO over the past month. Still majority cap weighted. Fully possible I end up underperforming if concentration keeps expanding. Last two times the gap was this extreme, RSP beat SPX by 18% and 11% respectively over the next two years. Combined with the earnings convergence it felt like enough to act on, but I realize I could be reading too much into historical patterns that may not repeat in a structurally different market.

Could be wrong. Probably overthinking it. But 13.8% is 13.8%.

Morgan Stanley confirmed they're launching crypto trading on E*Trade before 2026, charging 0.5% in fees.

Most people probably see this as just another traditional institution getting into crypto, but I think what actually matters is the user base behind E*Trade. Millions of accounts that already have KYC done, bank accounts linked, and are used to buying stocks on there. The friction for these guys to buy crypto is basically 0, it's just a tap away.

0.5% fee isn't cheap by crypto standards, Binance maker fees are under 0.1%. But for E*Trade stock users that never touched a CEX in their life, they're not even gonna compare that. Their reference point is buying stocks, not Binance.

I'm more interested in how this affects market structure. These traditional investors behave completely differently from crypto natives. They don't check funding rates, don't trade perps, don't chase alts, they just buy spot and hold. Which means BTC's circulating supply gets locked up even more.

I went on bydfi and coinbase to compare the recent funding rates between BTC and ETH when the news came out. I found BTC side has been pretty stable, ETH is way more volatile. If traditional users really only buy those two after E*Trade launches, that divergence could get even more obvious.

What do you think, are traditional brokerages adding crypto a threat to existing CEXs or actually good for them? Or are these just completely different user groups that don't even compete with each other?

Mac power user here, freelance engineering plus some writing on the side. on a typical tuesday im moving across Linear, three browser windows, Slack, Notes, Cursor, a clients Notion, one or two PDFs in Preview, sometimes Figma. by friday i routinely cant remember which slack thread had the requirements clarification, or which PR had the function i wanted to reference, or which PDF had the chart i wanted to pull. its not a memory problem in any clinical sense, its a context problem. the work is spread across too many apps and none of them know about each other. cmd+shift+f wasnt designed for this.

ive spent most of this year poking at tools that promise to fix it and wanted to compare notes with people who do similar work.

first thing i tried was heavier note discipline. obsidian with the usual plugin stack, then DEVONthink for a stretch. works fine if you write everything down, but i dont and no one i know actually does. quit after about 4 months of trying to be a better note-taker than i am. browser-side recall was the next attempt, the built-in history search plus a couple of browser-native journaling extensions, decent if your work lives in the browser but mine doesnt, half of it is native apps and PDFs and meetings.

Rewind was actually useful in the months it worked for me, then Meta bought them last December and the Mac app went away. screenpipe, the open source option, i tried earlier this year and the search quality wasnt where i needed and the app-level metadata felt thin, could be better now, this was a few months back. also briefly considered just keeping a better journal, failed at week 3 in february like every other time ive tried.

what im currently running is AirJelly. paid Mac app, captures stay on disk, the vision pass goes to their backend on cropped frames. my main gripe is that theres no API yet and no way to bring your own key, which limits how much i can wire it into the rest of my setup.

the things i actually want and havent found anywhere yet, mainly a shared context layer at the OS level that any Mac app could read and write to with permission, instead of every product reimplementing screen capture and OCR separately. surprised Apple hasnt shipped this as a system thing, feels like it should live underneath the app layer. also project-scoped recall, when i ask what was i doing on tuesday i mean on the client-X project, not including the 40 minutes i read hacker news at lunch. and real handoff, when i drop a project for 2 weeks and come back i want to summon the whole prior thread, not keyword-search it.

so im curious what other Mac people are actually running for this. might be sleeping on an obvious option.

I've had this growing backlog of Suno songs I genuinely care about. A moody synthwave piece, a folk ballad I wrote for my daughter, a couple of lo fi hip hop instrumentals. They all just sit on SoundCloud with static waveforms. Nobody clicks a static waveform. Every time I opened DaVinci Resolve or CapCut, I'd spend two hours failing to sync anything to the beat and close the laptop in frustration.

Last week I was procrastinating on Reddit and stumbled into a thread about using an ai music video generator from lyrics. I tried Freebeat because you can paste a Suno link directly without downloading and converting.

Started with the synthwave song. Picked Storytelling MV mode since it has a clear verse/chorus/bridge structure with a narrative. The storyboard split into scenes that followed the song's sections. Two scenes were too bright for the vibe, swapped those for something darker, let it generate. Took maybe 12 minutes total.

Result wasn't something I'd confuse with a production shoot, but it was watchable. Transitions hit on downbeats, chorus scenes had more energy, the bridge calmed down visually in a way that felt intentional. I cut a vertical version and threw it on TikTok. Got more engagement in two days than any previous still image posts.

I ran three more songs through that evening. The folk ballad got soft watercolor scenes that fit the mood. The lo fi song in Abstract mode got flowing visuals that pulse with the rhythm. One scene had a visual artifact I couldn't fix without regenerating, and the free tier watermarks mean I'll need to upgrade for clean exports.

Four songs from invisible to shareable in one evening. The backlog doesn't feel so overwhelming now.