Together with Waldo
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The survey only takes a few minutes and helps capture how investors are using ETFs, what they’re looking for next, and where the ETF market may be headed.
Join us Friday, July 10 at 12 PM ET for a live, hands-on webinar with Public’s COO, Stephen Sikes, where we’ll build AI Agents in real time from community prompts.
Bring your ideas — buy-the-dip rules, covered calls, cash sweeps, dividend reinvesting, and more — and Stephen may build yours live on stream.
Let’s dive into this week’s analysis!
A quick breakdown — in case you don’t have the time.
⭐ The consumer economy is becoming more uneven.
⭐ Are these 3 credit myths holding you back?
⭐ AI mania has taken semis to a place only seen once before.
⭐ Micron’s memory demand has no end in sight.
⭐ JPMorgan raised its S&P 500 target to 7,800.
Market Overview
As of Market Open 6/25/26
ETF Winners & Losers
Chart of the Week
The consumer economy is becoming more uneven.
On the surface, consumer spending still looks resilient. But this chart shows why that strength is not being felt evenly across the country.
The top 20% of earners now drive roughly 58% of all personal spending in the United States, the highest share on record. The bottom 80% now account for roughly 42%, the lowest share on record.
That is a major change from the 1990s, when spending was much more evenly split. Back then, higher-income households and the rest of the country each represented close to half of total personal outlays. Today, the gap has widened meaningfully.
The reason is fairly straightforward. Higher-income households have benefited from rising stock prices, higher home values, stronger wage growth in certain industries, and more interest income on cash and bonds. Lower- and middle-income households are still spending, but a larger share of that spending is going toward essentials like rent, groceries, insurance, childcare, and transportation.
That helps explain the disconnect we keep seeing in the data. Retail sales can look solid, GDP can continue growing, and corporate earnings can hold up — while many households still feel like they are falling behind.
Higher-income households are still spending aggressively, while lower- and middle-income households are being squeezed by the cost of everyday life. Keep investing consistently, avoid lifestyle creep when times are good, and remember that building assets is what separates the top 20% from everyone else over time.
Together with Waldo
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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 are joined by Bo Hanson and Brian Preston from The Money Guy Show for the first-ever Fantasy Finance Draft.
Here’s what went down…
The Format — Snake-style draft, four players, 20 wealth-building tools on the board. Each person drafted five tools to build their ultimate wealth-building roster — then they debated whose team was best for a 25-year-old, a 45-year-old, and which team would create the most millionaires.
The Teams — Austin built around the S&P 500 index fund, side hustles, rental real estate, bonds, and dividend ETFs. Brian went 401(k), networking, cash-flowing real estate, international stocks, and covered call ETFs. Robert drafted the Roth IRA, Bitcoin, small business ownership, private equity & venture, and gold. Bo rounded it out with the HSA, skill development, house hacking, entrepreneurship, and career switching.
The Big Debate — Austin argued his team creates the most millionaires — start a side hustle, funnel income into the S&P 500, then diversify into real estate and income-producing assets. Brian made the case for tax-advantaged compounding through the 401(k) with a diversified, all-weather approach. Robert leaned into asymmetric upside — Bitcoin, private equity, and small business ownership as the path to deca-millionaire status. Bo pitched the young person's playbook — invest in yourself first through skills and career moves, then let the HSA quietly compound tax-free in the background.
The Takeaway — All four teams worked, and that was the point. Personal finance is personal. Whether you're 25 or 45, the best wealth-building strategy is the one that fits your risk tolerance, timeline, and lifestyle — and the earlier you start deploying any of these tools, the better off you'll be.
Here’s a link to the Q&A episode that was posted on Thursday.
You can submit questions for these 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
AI mania has taken semis to a place only seen once before.
Semiconductor stocks are up +246% over the last 14 months. That surpasses the +234% surge semis posted during the peak of the dot-com bubble — making this the single largest 14-month rally in the sector's history.
The obvious comparison is 1999-2000, when semiconductor stocks ripped on the promise of internet infrastructure and then crashed 80% when revenue couldn't keep up with the hype. The difference this time: AI semis are posting real numbers.
Nvidia just reported $81.6 billion in quarterly revenue, up 85% year-over-year. Broadcom's AI semiconductor revenue hit $8.4 billion in a single quarter, up 106% year-over-year. In the dot-com era, the buildout was speculative. In 2025-2026, hyperscalers are spending hundreds of billions annually on AI infrastructure and accelerating, not decelerating.
That doesn't mean 246% in 14 months is sustainable. These kinds of moves always mean-revert at some point — through a correction, a consolidation, or just time. But the direction of travel matters more than the speed. The dot-com semiconductor rally collapsed because the revenue never showed up. This one is being funded by the largest capital expenditure cycle in corporate history, by companies generating record free cash flow.
The chart below illustrates that.
The risk isn't that AI demand is fake. It's that it's getting pulled forward — that we're building 2028's capacity in 2026 and the inevitable digestion period hits harder than expected. That's a real risk. But it's a cyclical risk inside a structural trend, not a bubble built on vaporware.
This chart does a great job illustrating how investors are now completely disregarding the cyclical nature of semiconductors and treating them as if these profits are permanent.
Be careful. When people start treating an investment as “this time is different,” I begin to get skeptical. Sure, the AI buildout is real and this is real revenue these companies are generating.
But that chart illustrating the price-to-sales ratio skyrocketing alongside higher net margins while knowing those net margins aren’t permanent makes me pause.
Robert’s Callout
Micron’s memory demand has no end in sight.
I’ve been talking about Micron for a long time, and I was pounding the table on this stock when it was trading around $90 last April. The reason was simple: everyone was focused on GPUs, but AI does not work without memory.
That thesis is now showing up in a massive way.
Micron just reported record revenue, record profits, and guidance that blew past expectations. The company generated roughly $365 million in profit per day last quarter, driven by surging demand for high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI infrastructure and data centers.
The guidance was even more impressive. Micron now expects Q4 revenue of roughly $50 billion versus expectations of $43 billion, EPS of $31 versus expectations of $25.07, and gross margins near 85%.
The company also announced $22 billion in multi-year customer supply agreements, including take-or-pay contracts, cash deposits, and pricing floors. In plain English, customers are paying up and locking in supply because memory has become mission-critical to the AI buildout.
The biggest opportunities in a new technology cycle are not always the most obvious ones. Nvidia was the obvious winner because GPUs are the engine. But once the AI buildout scaled, the bottlenecks started spreading into memory, networking, power, cooling, storage, and data center infrastructure.
Micron sits directly inside one of those bottlenecks. And now, the market is treating it as a critical supplier to one of the largest infrastructure cycles we have ever seen.
When a major investment cycle begins, follow the bottlenecks. That is where pricing power shows up, that is where margins expand, and that is where the market eventually starts paying attention.
The Rich Habits Radar
👉 SK Hynix targeted a $29B U.S. listing.
👉 Oil fell near four-month lows.
👉 The U.S. dollar hit a one-year high.
👉 Gold dropped to a seven-month low.
👉 JPMorgan raised its S&P 500 target to 7,800.
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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or a recommendation for any investment. The content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Disclosure: This content is sponsored by NEOS Investments. The creator is compensated by NEOS to discuss NEOS ETFs. This content is for informational purposes only, and is not personalized investment, tax, or legal advice, and does not constitute an offer to buy or sell any security. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Before investing, carefully review the NEOS ETFs prospectus at neosfunds.com.