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A quick breakdown — in case you don’t have the time.
⭐ This AI rally is still being powered by earnings.
⭐ Episode 182: you’ve invested your first $100k, what’s next?
⭐ China is winning the AI usage battle on price.
⭐ Bitcoin is holding its long-term support zone.
Market Overview
As of Market Open 8/13/26
ETF Winners & Losers
Chart of the Week
This AI rally is still being powered by earnings.
The 1999 comparison keeps showing up because parts of this market do feel familiar. A major technology platform is pulling capital into a narrow group of winners, valuations are elevated, and investors are trying to figure out how much of the future is already priced in.
But the setup is not identical.
In the late 1990s, the market kept climbing even after earnings growth had already peaked. At that point, a lot of the upside came from investors paying higher and higher multiples.
Today, at least for now, earnings are doing more of the work. Valuations are high, but the biggest AI and mega-cap technology companies are still producing real profit growth. That gives this rally a stronger foundation than a pure multiple-expansion story.
That does not remove the risk. If earnings roll over and valuations keep expanding, the market becomes much more fragile. But right now, the AI trade is still being supported by actual earnings power, not just excitement.
Today’s Rich Habits Newsletter is brought to you by Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build your portfolio for the long haul with stocks, options, bonds, crypto, and more.
Beyond the assets, Public integrates AI in ways that are actually useful. You can get real-time context on why a stock you care about is moving, instant earnings call summaries—you can even build a custom index from a prompt.
In Case You Missed It…
In this week’s Monday-morning episode of the Rich Habits Podcast (linked here) — Austin and Robert break down what to do after you’ve invested your first $100,000.
Here’s what they covered…
The $100K Playbook Changes — Getting to your first $100K invested is the hardest part, but the strategy that gets you there is not necessarily the strategy that gets you to $1M. Index funds, Roth IRAs, and 401(k) contributions still matter — but once your base is built, the question becomes what you stack on top of it.
Diversify Beyond the Stock Market — Austin and Robert discuss adding exposure to assets that do not move perfectly in line with equities. That could include Bitcoin, gold, real estate, fine art, farmland, or other alternative assets. The goal is not to abandon your stock portfolio — it is to make sure your entire net worth is not dependent on one asset class.
Make Asymmetric Bets — Once you have a real financial foundation, you can afford to allocate a small percentage of your portfolio to opportunities with capped downside and potentially life-changing upside. Austin and Robert use pre-IPO investing as the example: a 2% to 5% allocation may not ruin your plan if it goes to zero, but one winner can materially accelerate your wealth trajectory.
Buy Cash-Flowing Businesses — This is where the conversation shifts from investor to owner. Laundromats, roofing companies, fencing businesses, landscaping operations, and other simple service businesses can generate monthly cash flow while also becoming more valuable over time. The key is buying businesses with repeat demand, simple operations, existing profit, and a margin of safety.
Protect What You’ve Built — The final pillar is estate planning, umbrella insurance, and term life insurance. These are not exciting, but they are what keep one lawsuit, medical emergency, or unexpected death from wiping out years of progress. The people who build lasting wealth are not just good at growing money — they are good at keeping it.
The bottom line: the first $100K proves you can save and invest. The next phase is about thinking like an owner, diversifying like an institution, taking calculated asymmetric risk, and protecting the financial foundation you worked so hard to build.
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
China is winning the AI usage battle on price.
For most of the AI boom, U.S. models were the default choice. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta owned developer mindshare and most of the token traffic.
That changed fast. Chinese models went from almost no share in late 2024 to more than 60% of OpenRouter token traffic by July 2026. That is not a small shift. That is a change in who developers are actually choosing when they have options.
The reason is pretty simple: the models got good enough and their prices became cheap enough that developers made the switch. DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax, and other Chinese models are no longer side experiments. They are taking real usage from the biggest names in AI.
This does not mean U.S. labs are finished. But it does mean the AI race is shifting. The winner may not be the company with the cleanest demo or the highest benchmark score. It may be the company that gives developers strong enough performance at the lowest cost, with the least friction.
That matters for investors because lower model costs can push AI deeper into software, workflows, and business operations. If intelligence keeps getting cheaper, the next wave of winners may be the companies that use AI well, not just the companies that build the models.
Robert’s Callout
Bitcoin is holding its long-term support zone.
Bitcoin has been frustrating lately. It has been sitting around $65,000 with no obvious catalyst strong enough to push it meaningfully higher or lower.
But the chart is not broken.
Bitcoin is still trading above its long-term power-law support line, and it remains inside the same broad support zone that has mattered during past parts of the cycle. That does not mean it has to rip higher tomorrow, but it does suggest the bigger structure is still intact.
The interesting part is the divergence underneath the price chart. Bitcoin has been weak relative to gold, which makes sense because gold has had the cleaner momentum recently. When investors are looking for scarcity assets, gold has been the easier trade.
That does not mean Bitcoin is finished. It may just mean Bitcoin needs its own catalyst before it can take leadership back. If gold keeps building momentum, that could help the broader hard-asset trade and eventually pull Bitcoin and Ethereum with it.
For now, Bitcoin is not leading. But it is still holding the zone it needs to hold. That is the part that matters.
The Rich Habits Radar
👉 CPI cooled in July and gave the Fed more room to wait.
👉 CoreWeave doubled revenue as AI compute demand stayed hot.
👉 Nebius surged after AI cloud revenue jumped 514%.
👉 SpaceX stock rallied hard on Grok fueled boost
👉 S&P 500 earnings posted the largest aggregate earnings surprise on record.
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