Together with Wall Street Favorites

Before we begin, we have two reminders for you below:

1) Rich Habits Retreat (May 1-2 in Austin, TX)

There are five tickets remaining for the Rich Habits Retreat (May 1-2 in Austin, TX). Taking place at Capital Factory, the #1 seed fund in the entire state of Texas — this hands-on experience will give you direct access to venture capital leaders, while uncovering steps to better prepare for the future of venture investing.

2) Wall Street Favorites

Wall Street Favorites is a stock research platform that ranks hundreds of stocks daily using a blend of analyst price targets, institutional data, and technical signals — all in one dashboard.

It simplifies decision-making by turning complex data into actionable rankings across multiple lenses like upside potential, momentum, and conviction score. The platform also tracks “smart money” by analyzing thousands of institutional filings, helping investors see where hedge funds and top managers are allocating capital.

In short, it’s built to help investors quickly identify high-conviction opportunities using the same data Wall Street professionals rely on — without the guesswork.

A quick breakdown — in case you don’t have the time.

The federal government is the smallest employer it's been in 60 years.

The federal government shed another -18,000 jobs in March, dropping its payroll to 2.66 million — the lowest level since 1966. That marks the 14th consecutive monthly decline. Since the beginning of 2025, the federal workforce has contracted by hundreds of thousands of positions. Meanwhile, private payrolls have averaged just +15,000 jobs per month over the last six months according to Fed research released this week, which concluded that "breakeven" job growth is now effectively zero.

Connect those two dots and you get a very uncomfortable picture: the one employer that used to act as a recession shock absorber is now firing employees at a historic pace, while the private sector isn't creating enough jobs to cover even normal population growth. We're not in recession — but we are in the weakest labor backdrop of the entire post-COVID cycle.

Every time the federal workforce has contracted at this pace historically — 1946, 1969, 1981, 1995, 2013 — it's either coincided with or directly preceded a recession. The 2013 episode was the one exception, and that was only because the Fed was running full-throttle QE at the time. Today, the Fed isn't doing QE. It's sitting on a balance sheet it's still trying to shrink.

👉 Episode 164: How to Build Wealth on $60K, $100K, & $250K Incomes

In this week’s Monday-morning episode of the Rich Habits Podcast (linked here) — Austin and Robert break down how to actually build wealth at three different income levels: $60K, $100K, and $250K.

The core idea? Income matters — but behavior matters more. This episode walks through what actually changes as you earn more… and what surprisingly stays the same.

Here’s what they covered…

The bigger message: it’s not what you make — it’s what you keep and how consistently you invest it. The same habits that build wealth at $60K are the ones that sustain it at $250K.

👉 Q&A: Buying a $600K Beach House, Newly-Married Finances, & Employer Matches

Here’s a link to the Q&A episode that was posted this morning.

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!

Retail is the most bearish it has been in twenty years.

The ROBO Put/Call Ratio — which tracks retail opening buy orders in the options market — just hit 1.0. That's the highest reading in at least 20 years. It means retail traders are buying puts at nearly a 1-to-1 ratio with calls, something we haven't seen through COVID, through 2022, or through last April's flash crash. On top of that, the recent put volume surge ranks as the third largest on record.

In my view, this is the kind of setup that almost always marks a local bottom — not because retail is "dumb money," but because positioning gets so one-sided that any positive catalyst has nothing to fight against. Cash levels are elevated, bond funds just saw their biggest investment-grade outflow since April 2025 (-$5.35 billion in a single week), and volatility is subsiding. All of it lines up with a market that's already done most of its de-risking.

The takeaway is clear: the crowd is defensive, the mechanical indicators are flashing contrarian, and history says the 3rd-largest put surge on record is not the kind of thing that happens at tops. Capital is rotating — out of crowded mega-cap tech and into names where the story has gotten too cheap to ignore.

I pulled up a few of my favorites on Wall Street Favorites.

META still shows +47% upside to the $847 Wall Street price target across 18 analysts, with 5,238 institutional holders (net +141 new holders last quarter). NVDA has +58% upside to $282, with 6,100 funds holding and nearly +400 new net holders added. When fear is this extreme in the options market and the fundamental data underneath the mega-caps still looks this healthy, history says the right move is to sharpen your shopping list — not tear it up. Always do your own research.

Gas prices just had their biggest 5-week spike in 30 years.

Gas at the pump has jumped from $2.98/gallon to $4.14/gallon in roughly five weeks. That's a +39% spike — the largest we've seen in the last 30 years. It pushes the national average to its highest level since August 2022, directly driven by oil above $100 and the ongoing supply disruption out of the Gulf.

For markets, gasoline is the cleanest real-time read on the consumer. It hits the headline CPI instantly, it drags down real wages, and it shows up in consumer confidence surveys within days. Wall Street forecasters are already calling for a March CPI print around +0.9% month-over-month, which would push year-over-year headline inflation from 2.4% up to 3.3% in a single reading.

For regular people, this is the kind of number that changes behavior overnight. A family that drives 1,000 miles a month in a car that gets 25 mpg is suddenly spending an extra $46 a month on fuel — and that's before you count the second vehicle and the commute. That $46 doesn't disappear; it gets pulled out of restaurant spending, clothing, discretionary retail, and the categories that actually drive earnings for the companies in your portfolio.

The data on Wall Street Favorites shows Dollar General with +25% upside to a $152 street target across 42 analysts — the classic trade-down beneficiary. UnitedHealth shows +22% upside to $377 across 45 analysts as defensive healthcare bids return. When energy taxes the consumer, capital quietly rotates into the names that get paid regardless of gas prices.

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