Together with Waldo
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The New York Times wrote about the Rich Habits Network for a reason: it's where 900+ members invest in venture-backed companies like SpaceX, Apptronik, and Perplexity before they go public. 30+ deals closed.
Everything the Rich Habits Podcast can't fit into an episode — deals, coaching, research & 8 hours of video courses for 900+ members and counting.
We’re currently running deals for two private companies:
A neocloud company offering the world’s fastest inference (2,000+ tokens per second) — competing with Nebius, Fluidstack, and CoreWeave at a fraction of their valuations.
A hardware company well on its way to an IPO that is 3D printing structures (homes, military barracks, etc) faster and cheaper than the competition — has already 3D printed an entire neighborhood in collaboration with Lennar.
A quick breakdown — in case you don’t have the time.
⭐ A record number of stocks are rising on down days.
⭐ The future of summer travel (AI is changing everything).
⭐ Tracking AI shows GPT-5.6 achieving a 136 IQ score.
⭐ Retail buying is running 3.2x above average.
Market Overview
As of Market Open 7/16/26
ETF Winners & Losers
Chart of the Week
A record number of stocks are rising on down days.
Market weakness is becoming increasingly selective. Over the last 20 S&P 500 down days, an average of 239 stocks still finished positive — the highest reading on record.
That is a massive shift from prior periods of stress. This reading is nearly double the 20-year average of 133 stocks and roughly triple the levels seen during the 2022 bear market.
Since June 1st, 9 of the last 14 down days in the S&P 500 saw a majority of index names close higher. In other words, the index may be down on the day, but under the surface, many stocks are still finding buyers.
That tells us something important about this market.
Weakness is not broad-based right now. It is being driven by a smaller group of stocks while capital rotates into other areas of the index. Investors are not abandoning equities — they are moving around inside the market. Pullbacks are normal, but when more stocks are rising than falling on down days, it suggests underlying demand remains strong.
This doesn’t mean stocks can’t go down. It means sellers are not in full control. Until market weakness becomes more widespread, the path of least resistance remains higher.
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In Case You Missed It…
In this week's Monday-morning episode of the Rich Habits Podcast (linked here) — Austin and Robert sat down with Michael Sindicich, president of Navan, the AI-powered corporate travel and expense platform.
Michael's story is a masterclass in betting on yourself — he went from premed at UCLA to sleeping on an air mattress in a Palo Alto hacker house to running a multi-billion dollar public company.
Here’s what they covered…
The Calculated Risk — Michael was on the doctor track since middle school, doing brain surgery on rats for his UCLA honors thesis. He realized building companies lit him up more than the lab ever did. So he drove to Silicon Valley, moved into a shed with 11 roommates for $600/month, taught chess on Craigslist, and drop-shipped gym tanks from Alibaba — all while interviewing at startups. His framework for evaluating early-stage companies: check the seed investors, study the founders' track records, and trust your gut on the size of the market.
AI Isn't Killing Jobs — Michael pushed back hard on the fear that AI is eliminating entry-level roles. From where he sits, companies are hiring more than ever — especially engineers and new grads who grew up natively in the AI era. His argument: instead of pocketing AI-driven efficiency gains, the best companies reinvest them to scale revenue faster — and public markets reward growth more than margin anyway.
Travel Is a Revenue Driver — The biggest mistake companies make is treating travel and expense as a line item to cut rather than a business lever to pull. Navan's own data shows that salespeople who travel the most are the ones making President's Club, and deals closed in person convert at significantly higher rates than Zoom calls.
Financial Literacy Keeps the Money From Leaking Out — Making money and keeping money are two different skills. Austin and Robert break down the core areas that matter most: compound interest, tax strategy, debt management, asset allocation, cash flow, and the simple order of operations — match, Roth, 401(k), then taxable brokerage.
How Navan Actually Saves You Money — Three levers: (1) aggregating every inventory source — GDS, consumer sites like Booking.com, plus direct airline connections — so corporate travelers aren't overpaying compared to what they'd find on their own; (2) a behavioral rewards engine that pays employees to choose cost-effective options and lets them use the savings for personal travel; and (3) automating 70%+ of expense reports so nobody's sitting at home on Sunday night photographing receipts.
Whether you're a 22-year-old weighing the "safe" career path vs. the startup leap, or a CFO wondering where your travel budget is actually going — this one's worth the listen.
Here’s a link to the Q&A episode that was posted on Thursday. We switched up our scheduling this week!
You can submit questions for episodes by asking them inside of the Rich Habits Network, replying to this email, or sending us a DM on Instagram.
The Rich Habits Podcast is available on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, YouTube, and wherever else you get your content!
Austin’s Callout
Tracking AI shows GPT-5.6 achieving a 136 IQ score.
Two years ago, GPT-4 scored around 85. Now we're at 136. That's a 60% improvement in measured cognitive ability in roughly 24 months. And the gap between models is compressing — Claude-5 Fable sits at 130, Grok and Gemini cluster around 120-123. The entire top tier of AI is now operating above the average college graduate.
This matters for investors because AI isn't replacing manual labor first. It's replacing cognitive labor. Legal research, financial modeling, diagnostic analysis, code architecture — the $200-400/hour work. McKinsey estimated last year that 60-70% of knowledge work tasks are automatable with current-gen AI. At a 136 IQ, that number only goes up.
Microsoft's Copilot revenue tripled year-over-year. ServiceNow's AI attach rate hit 40%. Palantir's commercial business is growing 55% annually. They're businesses converting cognitive automation into actual margin expansion.
People have wondered when AI will surpass human intelligence. For 99% of humans, it already has. Now it's a race toward how quickly that intelligence can interact with humans in the physical world, which is why inference is so important.
Long Cerebras (CBRS)!
Robert’s Callout
Retail buying is running 3.2x above average.
One of the bigger shifts in this cycle is how consistent retail investors have become as buyers of U.S. equities. Even after a strong rally, retail has not started selling. In fact, there has not been a single net sell day so far in July.
That is not normal background noise. Average daily retail net buying this month is running roughly 3.2x above the historical monthly average. July 2026 is currently tracking as the second-strongest month for retail net buying since January 2020 and the strongest July in the dataset.
This matters because retail has become a real source of market demand. For years, people treated retail investors as emotional buyers at the top and panic sellers at the bottom. But the data is showing something different this cycle: retail continues to deploy capital consistently, even through volatility.
That does not mean retail buying guarantees stocks move higher. It also does not mean every stock retail buys will work. But it does mean there is a steady bid underneath the market that did not exist at this scale in prior cycles.
The bigger lesson is simple: participation has changed. Between automatic contributions, brokerage apps, ETFs, fractional shares, and younger investors treating the market as a long-term wealth-building vehicle, retail flows have become more structural than speculative.
Markets are still driven by earnings, rates, and liquidity, but consistent retail buying is now part of the demand picture. And right now, that demand remains very much alive.
The Rich Habits Radar
👉 PayPal received a $53B buyout bid from Stripe and Advent.
👉 Banks smashed earnings, led by JPMorgan’s record quarterly profit.
👉 IBM tanked 25% after poor preliminary earnings results.
👉 Warsh vowed to deliver price stability and a Fed “regime change.”
👉 CPI fell for the first time since Covid, dropping to 3.5% YoY.
👉 U.S. replaced its 20% Hormuz fee plan with Gulf investment deals.
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