S&P 500 Q2 EPS Surges 47% as Margins Hit Record 16.7%

S&P 500 Q2 EPS rose 47% YoY and operating margins hit a record 16.7%, raising mean-reversion questions. — via 1 2
Raoul Pal forecasts 80 AI agents per person and argues machine-to-machine payments will move to crypto. — via 1 2
Muddy Waters shorted Sumitomo Chemical/Pharma in a ¥116 billion 'Swiss Shuffle' report. — via 1
Marc Andreessen pushes Congress on the CLARITY Act as a generational U.S.-leadership and anti-FTX move. — via 1 2
Jason reads the Airtable deal as the start of a cleanup of SaaS-bubble-era transactions. — via 1

S&P 500 Q2 earnings per share grew 47% year over year, the fastest since Q2 2021. Charlie Bilello says the jump is driven by mega-cap tech, explicitly naming SpaceX and Anthropic, and that outside post-recession bounces he has rarely seen this level of growth. — via 1
Q2 operating margins in the S&P 500 reached 16.7%, a record. Bilello draws on Grantham's warning that profit margins are among the most mean-reverting series in finance; if high profits don't attract competition, capitalism itself is called into question. — via 1
The current U.S. economic expansion is now 74 months old, versus a historical average of 67 months. The longest U.S. expansion lasted 128 months from 2009 to 2020, and the shortest was 12 months in 1980–81. — via 1
Ben Carlson notes the S&P 500 returned to record highs despite weak Mag 7 and semis, Iran headlines, higher oil, and rising long-term rates, calling the tape 'remarkable.' He also shares the view that a global investment boom is just beginning. — via 1 2

Raoul Pal expects billions of AI agents to be deployed in the economy and says Coinbase, Sui, Google, and Anthropic are positioning for it. His estimate is 80 agents per human, forming a second economy that runs much faster than the human one and marks the start of an economic singularity. — via 1
Pal argues traditional banks cannot serve AI agents, so the machine economy will settle on crypto rails with millions of transactions per second. — via 1
Marc Andreessen urged Congress to pass the CLARITY Act, calling it a generational opportunity to keep the U.S. ahead in technology and finance. He also amplified the view that crypto market-structure rules can prevent events like FTX and preserve American leadership in digital asset innovation. — via 1 2

Muddy WatersResearch published a short report on Sumitomo Chemical and Sumitomo Pharma (tickers 4005 and 4506) headlined 'The ¥116 billion Swiss Shuffle,' citing an amount of ¥116 billion. — via 1
Jason points to the Airtable acquisition as evidence that the market is finally clearing out transactions from the SaaS bubble peak about five years ago. He wants to invest in a small-cap SaaS roll-up under $100M revenue, and is surprised Google and Microsoft didn't bid. — via 1
Jason flags Japan as an acquisition market as businesses without successors close amid a population loss of nearly one million per year. He highlights a founder who turned to port robots after being banned from a shrine for street research. — via 1 2 3

Charlie Bilello says the way to build long-term wealth is to be an owner, not a lender, and that stocks are more likely than bonds or cash to double within ten years. — via 1
Meb Faber warns against excessive leverage, using the imagined regret 'if only I hadn't used so much leverage' as a reminder of risk; he also describes gold as the inverse of confidence in fiat-backed paper money. — via 1 2
Ben Carlson suggests investors in a bull market ask themselves whether they are diversified, have a clear plan, are taking too much risk, and can balance FOMO against loss aversion. — via 1

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