Brunch Reads – 10/11/26
Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of some of our favorite articles over the past week. The links are mostly market-related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.
Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!: On October 11, 1975, Saturday Night Live debuted on NBC, thanks in part to Johnny Carson wanting fewer nights on the job. Carson asked the network to save its weekend Tonight Show reruns for weeknights, leaving an opening on Saturday nights. NBC executive Dick Ebersol teamed up with Lorne Michaels, who envisioned a live comedy show that spoke to younger viewers.
The first broadcast, then called NBC’s Saturday Night, was a little different from the show we know today. George Carlin hosted but performed stand-up rather than joining the sketches. Billy Preston and Janis Ian supplied the music, Andy Kaufman lip-synced to the Mighty Mouse theme, and even Jim Henson’s Muppets appeared. Some familiar pieces were there from the start, though, including Chevy Chase behind the Weekend Update desk and a cast featuring John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Gilda Radner.
Fifty-one years later, SNL’s influence extends well beyond Saturday nights. It helped launch generations of comedy stars, including Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Tina Fey, and Kristen Wiig, and turned sketches like Wayne’s World into movies. Now in its 52nd season, the show still pairs live comedy with musical performances, reaching audiences on NBC and Peacock. What began as a hole in the weekend schedule became one of television’s longest-running comedy institutions.
Sports & Entertainment
Maryland fans really, really like Testudo Lager. Here’s what the data shows. (Baltimore Sun)
Maryland’s own Testudo Lager brought in nearly $239,000 at its athletic venues during the 2025–26 season, more than any other alcohol brand. At basketball games, it even outsold Michelob Ultra despite generally costing $11 versus $8.50, with fans willing to pay a little extra for a beer named after their mascot. [Link]
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The Bespoke Report – 10/9/26 – The Great Wall of Worry
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If the market climbs a wall of worry, this bull just pulled off an Everest-level climb. Just in time for its fourth birthday next week, the “AI” bull market made a new high on Tuesday, and the road to new highs wasn’t easy. Look no further than the three prongs of our three-headed monster of the 10-year yield, the US Dollar Index, and WTI crude oil. For all the talk about how oil prices are uncomfortably high, its chart looks like a bunny slope compared to the black diamonds of the 10-year yield and the Dollar Index, which are at multi-decade and multi-year highs, respectively.
Daily Sector Snapshot — 10/9/26
September 2026 Headlines
A Short Second Half
After a wondrous first half for investors, especially for those in growth stocks, the second half of 2026 has been a struggle. The Russell 3,000 — which represents roughly 98% of publicly traded US stock market cap — is up about 3% in the 2nd half, but the average stock in the index is actually down 4.4%.
Along with rising interest rates hurting the most interest-rate sensitive areas of the market, it appears as if the shorts are betting big and winning these days.
We broke the Russell 3,000 into deciles (10 groups of roughly 300 stocks each) based on each stock’s short interest as a percentage of its equity float. We then calculated the average 2nd half percentage change of the stocks in each decile.
Decile one in the chart below all the way to the left of the image, contains the decile of most heavily shorted stocks in the Russell 3,000. Stocks in this decile are down an average of 13.6% in the 2nd half. As short interest levels get smaller, performance gets better, and the two deciles containing the least heavily shorted stocks are actually averaging gains in the 2nd half.
During big market rallies, shorts feel the pain and usually push prices higher as they rush to cover. We’re definitely not in that type of environment now, and we haven’t been for months.
On the flip side, as the shorts get more confident from their winning ways, the spring gets coiled further. The next time we get a positive market development that brings investors back into equities, be it from lower oil prices, lower rates, upside earnings, economic surprises, or something that’s not on anyone’s radar right now, the ensuing short covering could be more extreme than usual.
For now, though, the shorts are winning big in the second half.
For those interested, below is a list of the most heavily shorted stocks in the Russell 3,000. At the top of the list are Wolfspeed (WOLF), Hertz (HTZ), Groupon (GRPN), and Lucid (LCID). Other notables include Rent the Runway (RENT), Xerox (XRX), Dave & Buster’s (PLAY), NANO Nuclear (NNE), and Upstart (UPST).
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 10/9/26 – iPhone Déjà Vu
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“From financial history and from my own experience, I long ago concluded that regression to the mean is the most powerful law in financial physics.” – Jason Zweig
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
AI stocks, which had been the only area of the market holding up recently, took a hit mid-day yesterday when an FT story broke that OpenAI’s current revenue run rate might be smaller than previously expected. The reaction was swift, with most AI infrastructure names selling off sharply intraday. In fact, not one stock in our AI Infrastructure basket was in the green yesterday, as shown below:
More notable is what happened in non-AI stocks when the OpenAI story hit. They rallied…
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The Closer – Revenue Redux, Chart Check, Foreign Demand Resurgence – 10/8/26
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- News of overstated revenues was the catalyst for a sizable pullback in AI stocks today, and multiple mega-cap charts are at crossroads as a result.
- Particularly for 30-year Treasury bonds, foreign demand at primary auctions has surged recently.
- Wholesale inventories have risen for seven months in a row and wholesale trade sales have risen at least 1% MoM for nine of the past twelve months.
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Chart of the Day – Triple Play All-Stars Step Up to the Plate
MORTGAS Misery Index Hits New Record
During the inflationary pressures of 2022, we created our “MORTGAS” consumer misery index that is simply a sum of the price of gas ($/gallon) and the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate.
Our MORTGAS index hit a record low in the early 2020s when mortgage rates got below 3% and prices at the pump briefly got below $2/gallon. Those days are long gone.
Gas prices first spiked in early 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, then they trended lower for the next few years until they spiked again this year with the US invasion of Iran.
Mortgage rates went from 3% up to 7% during the Fed’s massive tightening cycle to address runaway inflation in 2022. They too had been trending lower over the past few years, but they’ve moved higher again this year since the Iran War began.
Combined, our MORTGAS index is actually at a new record high right now, eclipsing the peak seen back in October 2023. Consumers are feeling the pain as we head into midterm elections less than a month away.
