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Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A federal appeals court on July 20 ruled against former President Joe Biden, finding that he was not entitled to an injunction blocking the release of audio recordings and transcripts of his interviews with his memoir’s ghostwriter.

“Biden has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits,” Circuit Judges Sri Srinivasan and Gregory Katsas in Washington said.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, sued the government in 2024, alleging it wrongly withheld most of the recordings and transcripts from conversations Biden had with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in 2016 and 2017.

After President Donald Trump took office in 2025, the Department of Justice said that it planned to disclose the withheld materials to The Heritage Foundation and a House of Representatives panel. Biden intervened, seeking court rulings prohibiting the disclosure of the materials.

Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in June ruled in favor of The Heritage Foundation, citing how the case “involves an unusually strong public interest in the release of law enforcement materials,” which she said outweighs the privacy interests protected by exceptions to the Freedom of Information Act, which allows requests for government-held information.

Friedrich stayed her order to let Biden appeal if he chose, and he did, leading to Monday’s decision.

A majority of the split panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that the primary question is whether Biden will likely succeed in showing exemptions to the act apply to the recordings and transcripts.

One exemption sought by Biden protects law enforcement records that, if shared, would reasonably be expected to invade personal privacy.

There is significant public interest in a special counsel investigation of Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified information, and because the special counsel relied on the tapes and transcripts, “the requested materials are germane to that interest,” the majority said.

The “extensive redactions” that the Department of Justice entered on the version of the records it plans to release help protect Biden’s privacy, and the public interest outweighs any remaining personal privacy interest, they added later.

The panel gave Biden until Aug. 3 to appeal to the full appeals court or the Supreme Court.

Special counsel Robert Hur’s year-long investigation produced a 345-page report, published in February 2024, that concluded that no criminal charges were warranted against the then-81-year-old president. Hur said the evidence was insufficient to prove a criminal case beyond a reasonable doubt.

A lawyer representing the former president did not return a request for comment by the time of publication.

Jeffrey Clark, vice president of litigation for the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, said in a July 20 post on X that “we continue to beat Joe Biden’s heavily overcompensated lawyers trying to continue to hide the Autopen Presidency.”

Circuit Judge Florence Pan said in a dissent that she would have sided with Biden.

“In my view, Biden has shown a substantial privacy interest,” Pan wrote, adding that the interest of the public does not outweigh the privacy of Biden because many of the materials from the special counsel investigation have already been made public.

“Even if the substantial competing interests might ultimately weigh in favor of releasing the materials, there is no urgency that requires revealing them at this time,” Pan said.

The entitlement never stops, even when illegal migrants are convicted of murder and thrown in prison, they still expect free stuff and access to the American Dream.

Brandon Ortiz-Vite, a Mexican national who was living in the U.S. illegally, was convicted of the 2024 murder of his girlfriend, Ruby Garcia, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, carjacking, carrying a concealed weapon, and felony firearm.  He shot Garcia multiple times (including a shot to the head after she was already wounded), dumped her body on the side of U.S. 131, and later turned himself in.

He was sentenced to a minimum of 39 years in prison and a maximum potential sentence of over 100 years.

The migrant killer had already received substantial coverage from the media in the lead up to his trial and conviction.  However, Donald Trump used Ortiz as an example of illegal alien crime during his 2024 election campaign bid and made the man into a mascot for mass deportations.  

Ortiz had DACA status (which expired in 2019), was deported by the Trump administration in 2020 after prior arrests, but re-entered the US illegally as soon as Joe Biden took office. The case was highlighted by Trump’s 2024 campaign in ads and speeches using his mugshot and details to criticize the Democrat Party’s  open border policies.

After his conviction for murder, Ortiz has filed a handwritten complaint in federal court, naming Trump and White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Steven Cheung as defendants.  Ortiz claims that he has suffered “emotional distress” do to the highly public nature of his conviction, making him the target of ridicule by his fellow inmates. 

He claims that public scrutiny pressured him to take a plea deal, and that the use of his mugshot by Trump’s campaign was illegal. He describes feeling “belittled,” having his “dignity shattered,” public “humiliation,” becoming a “target” and “publicly infamous.”

Brandon Ortiz-Vite demands compensation of $75 million, U.S. citizenship and a public apology from Trump.

Ortiz is self represented in the case and the lawsuit is likely to be thrown out for frivolity.  Mugshots and case details are a matter of public record, they are not private information.  Campaign speech is highly protected under the 1st Amendment and the convicted killer would face serious hurdles in any civil case against a sitting president with immunity.  Furthermore, “humiliation” is much more difficult to establish than defamation; they are not the same thing. 

Suing over a subjective feeling is nearly impossible.

Of course, no one cares if a murderer has his feelings hurt and the fact that he entered the country illegally to commit a murder makes Ortiz an even more detestable character in the eyes of many.  The notion that the man was “pressured” into a plea deal holds no water, given the substantial amount of evidence against him. 

Beyond the mountain of forensic evidence linking him to Garcia’s death, Ortiz made a full confession several months before the Trump Campaign picked up on the case.  His conviction was assured regardless of Trump, and his plea deal had nothing to do with public pressure. 

What is most interesting about this situation is not the lawsuit, but the level of entitlement consistently displayed by illegal migrants when they are captured or convicted of a crime.  Ortiz is not an isolated anomaly; he is representative of a cultural attitude held by third world foreigners seeking easy access to the “American Dream” (the American economy and a government subsidized life). 

The third world views the west as a global open air bazarr, a wealthy market that is ripe for exploitation.  They think all they have to do is cross the border and take what they want.  US laws mean nothing to them, and under Democrat rule in blue states and cities, the laws are rarely applied to illegal migrants. Too many arrests or prosecutions of aliens would make Democrat sanctuary policies look bad.

And so, under Biden, many repeat offenders flooded back into the US, including Ortiz, and started pillaging once again.  They were so emboldened by the open border and progressive pro-immigration rhetoric that they now think they can sue the US when they do finally get punished.      

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A viral video from inside a Home Depot in Dearborn, Michigan shows department signs for the likes of Appliances, Paint, Plumbing now carrying Arabic script alongside the English.

This is not some minor accessibility tweak. It is another clear marker of demographic transformation in a city where Middle Eastern and North African ancestry already exceeds 54 percent.

The footage captures shoppers navigating orange-and-black signs that translate core retail categories into Arabic. A woman in full niqab walks the aisle as the camera pans across the bilingual displays. The same pattern has appeared at other major chains serving the area, including Walmart, Costco, Kroger and Albertsons.

WOW ? Home Depot in Dearborn, Michigan has added Arabic to their signs inside the store

This is not assimilation, this is an Islamic Takeover of America

I found many major retailers in Dearborn have also added Arabic, locations at stores like Walmart, Home Depot, Costco,… pic.twitter.com/bWPmpeuHyO

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) July 16, 2026

This represents the quiet rewriting of the public commercial space to accommodate a parallel linguistic reality.

Dearborn has long been held up as the model of successful Arab-American settlement. What the signs demonstrate is something different: the expectation that American businesses will adapt to the language of the newest arrivals rather than the other way around.

One commenter wrote, “That doesn’t encourage integration. It only causes increased segregation for a people which don’t want to integrate anyway. If I were to move to an Arabic country. I would never expect them to learn to speak English. I have too much respect for other lands to consider thinking like that. US citizens have been down that road, encouraging segregation is wrong.”

Another simply stated, “Gross. Never going to Home Depot again, it’s tainted now.” A third declared, “Damn, I guess I’ll be shopping at ACE or Lowe’s from now on. This is fucking absurd.”

Dearborn’s large immigrant population from Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries is the stated rationale for the change. Yet the practical effect is to normalize foreign-language dominance in everyday American retail.

English remains the common language of the country. Private businesses are free to chase customers however they choose. That does not make the visual result any less revealing of the direction of travel.

This development sits on a continuum of institutional accommodation that has also reached local law enforcement in the same metro area.

Just months earlier, the Dearborn Heights Police Department became the first in the United States to introduce an official uniform patch featuring Arabic script. The episode revealed how quickly “diversity” initiatives move from optional gestures to official symbols of authority.

Dearborn Heights has a combined Middle Eastern and North African population of around 40 percent, while nearby Dearborn has a majority 55 percent.

Both areas, along with other towns such as Hamtramck, have attracted Arab communities with immigration from Lebanon, Yemen, and other Middle Eastern countries.

Islamization of Michigan!

Just days ago, thousands of Shia Muslims marched down the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, in the Tenth Annual Ashura Procession.

This controversial event took place in Muslim Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s district, and as you will notice, there… pic.twitter.com/Gwxj9zUUfR

— Amy Mek (@AmyMek) July 17, 2024

This is Dearborn, Michigan.

It’s known for being the first Muslim-majority city in the US.

What many don’t know is that before Muslims moved there, it was a majority Middle Eastern Christian town, mostly populated by Lebanese Christians and Assyrians fleeing persecution.

The… pic.twitter.com/WK8VSVvwDx

— Dr. Maalouf ? (@realMaalouf) April 15, 2025

The city of Dearborn in Michigan is home to the largest Muslim population in the United States per capita as well as the largest mosque in North America.

Large anti-Israel protests have been taking place there over the past 24 hours. pic.twitter.com/WqxgGgQp3X

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 7, 2024

While there are Arabic speaking Orthodox Christians in Dearborn from earlier immigration movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they have become proportionally smaller due to immigration trends favoring Muslim-majority groups, which now define much of the city’s Arab identity.

Did you know that before becoming America’s jihad capital, Dearborn, Michigan, was a thriving center of Middle Eastern Christian culture?

Not a lot of people know, but Dearborn was initially settled in the early 20th century by Lebanese Christians and Assyrians/Chaldeans fleeing… pic.twitter.com/quIAQ2933K

— Dr. Maalouf ? (@realMaalouf) February 5, 2024

This has sparked controversies, such as over public broadcasts of the Islamic call to prayer.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Chips are scorching hot on Tuesday, but not the kind made by Nvidia, AMD or Intel.

Shares of Utz Brands, the Hanover, Pennsylvania-based snack maker known for its potato chips, cheese balls and red-and-white “Little Utz Girl” logo, erupted after European snack giant Intersnack agreed to take the company private.

Utz Brands surged 90% after European snack maker Intersnack agreed to take the potato-chip producer private for $14.25 a share in cash.

Utz Brands

The transaction will be financed with about $920 million from Intersnack, new term and asset-backed loans, and rollover equity from the Rice and Lissette family. BofA Securities advised Intersnack and arranged the debt financing.

“Intersnack shares our vision for Utz, and their marketing, manufacturing, and technology capabilities will be invaluable as we continue to invest in our brands and accelerate our strategy,” Utz CEO Howard Friedman said.

The Utz take-private deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, pending shareholder and regulatory approvals. Holders controlling about 42% of the stock have agreed to support the transaction. Utz will delist from the NYSE, with Intersnack and the Rice and Lissette family each owning 50%. Dylan Lissette will become executive chair.

“Our partnership with the Rice and Lissette Family, and commitment to Utz, represents a compelling opportunity for Intersnack to expand our exposure into the large and attractive US snacking market, where we do not currently have a presence,” Intersnack Executive Chairman Johan van Winkel said.

The deal gives Intersnack its first foothold in the US snack market. Utz, which maintained its 2026 organic-sales growth forecast of 2% to 3%, reports second-quarter earnings early next month.

Utz shares are trading nearly 90% higher, close to the $14.25 take-private price. Short interest stands at roughly 11% of the float, equivalent to about 8 million shares and 3.9 days to cover, likely amplifying the move.

Shortly after Utz completed its SPAC merger with Collier Creek Holdings in August 2020 at roughly $10 a share, the stock surged to nearly $30 before entering a five-and-a-half-year downtrend.

 

Authored by Molly Schwartz, Rabobank cross-asset macro strategist,

Trading Playbooks

The advancement of one of China’s AI models, Kimi, has sharpened attention on the latest US plans to counter China’s growing AI challenge. Kimi is reportedly more powerful than several US flagship models, though not yet as powerful what lies on the frontier. However, Kimi operates at a fraction of the cost per token. That cost advantage raises the competitive threat to US AI leadership more broadly, including for other leading firms in the space, and Trump is once again taking a page out of China’s playbook by cracking down on the free market and unfettered competition. With tariffs, the US sought to limit China’s influence to bolster its own struggling manufacturing sector. Now, the more immediate question is whether Washington will do the same in an attempt to maintain its lead in the AI race…and if it will be successful.

According to Axios, “the Commerce Department last year considered adding multiple Chinese AI labs to its ‘Entity List,’ which would effectively cut off US access without a license.” The US is considering other avenues of approach as well, such as banning Chinese AI for national security reasons. But not all in the land of the free are happy with Trump’s interventionist approach to global markets. Axios reports that David Sacks said on X that “we are at a critical inflection point in AI policy,” warning that leading closed labs want the government to eliminate their open- source competition. For markets, the issue is not just who builds the best model, but whether AI becomes another front in the fragmentation of global capital, technology, and trade flows.

But protecting US AI dominance domestically may not be enough. China has made itself the manufacturing hub of the world, exporting cheap, shiny goods at a rapid pace and allowing its sphere of influence to grow throughout developing and emerging markets. As these same markets adopt the need for AI infrastructure, who are they more likely to turn to? The niche technically superior (?) and more expensive US AI models, or the cheaper Chinese alternatives that do almost as good of a job?

While the US tries to restrict China’s access to new customers in the AI market, the Houthis may be unintentionally squeezing China’s access to its existing customers in the physical goods market. The Houthis have announced that they plan to impose a sea navigation ban against the Saudis, blocking off the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which separates the Red Sea (and the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal) from the Arabian Sea.

As the flow of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz remains limited under the current escalation, additional risks to the global supply chain are the last thing global economies need. Brent crude oil opened above $90/bbl yesterday—the highest price since June 11—and diesel traded around $16/bbl—the highest price since May. Additional upward pressure on oil prices because of the Houthis only further increases the fears of a supply-side-driven inflation shock and a consequential slowdown in economic activity as consumers struggle to keep up with the cost of living.

That means fewer consumers willing and able to purchase Chinese imports. A significant part of the current energy narrative, which is also informing our energy forecasts, is that China has more oil reserves than many once thought, giving China more room to wait out the war by drawing on its reserves. Therefore, yes, disruptions to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait may have little direct impact on China’s energy supply, but Xi is unlikely to welcome the pressure they put on China’s customers.

Europe, meanwhile, remains firmly behind the curve on both AI development, and the situation in the Middle East. It is, however, seeking to build its own additional barriers to global trade as Brussels tries to enforce new sanctions on Russia. But the EU’s habit of regulating itself into irrelevance is once again making an appearance, and several member states are putting up barriers of their own against Brussels. The Financial Times reports that Greece refused to sign on to the sanctions agreement, demanding a carve-out that would allow it to continue transporting Russian LNG. Austria, France, Greece, Germany, Italy, and Portugal also came to the table with their own demands. The FT cites a diplomat saying that “around the table, the moral imperative is functioning less and less. Capitals all agree on tough rhetoric and talk of solidarity, but then it all melts away.”

Over the weekend, the World Cup was able to do what the USMCA wasn’t – bring the leaders from the US, Canada, and Mexico together. Many people (mostly economists and market-types) wondered if the three would have some trilateral conversations about trade and the ambiguous status of the USMCA. An announcement from yesterday would suggest that if those conversations did happen, they didn’t go especially well for Canada.

As highlighted earlier in this article, Trump is no stranger to trading playbooks with leaders from more centrally planned economies, and tariffs have emerged as a signature tool of this Administration. Yesterday, Trump signed three proclamations to enforce additional tariffs on Canadian goods, covering motor vehicles, alcoholic beverages, and dairy. These proclamations enforce 50% tariffs across several product lines “ranging from wine to hockey sticks to cement” by leveraging Section 388 of the Tariff Act of 1930. Bloomberg notes that Section 338 has never been used by a President to impose tariffs. As a major distinction from previous tariffs we have seen the Trump Administration enforce on Canadian and Mexican goods, these explicitly “apply to all covered goods regardless of whether a good originates under the USMCA.” They are currently scheduled to take effect in 30 days.

Just because proclamations are signed does not mean that these tariffs will come to fruition, or that even if they do come to fruition, they will be long-lasting. This is not the first time the Trump Administration has leveraged tariffs as a negotiating tool, and then dampened them once demands were met. Given the USTR National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, issues involving the dairy, alcohol, and vehicles were always bound to come to the forefront in the USMCA negotiations. These tariffs likely serve as an intended message to Canada that the US wants to “even out the playing field” and will not take no for an answer.

The next step is for Ottawa to negotiate with the US before these tariffs come into effect, or, forbid, try to call Washington’s bluff.

Brent crude futures are trading in the low $90s as the Gulf area escalation enters a tenth consecutive day. Iran attacked a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, while two tankers carrying Saudi crude reversed course in the southern Red Sea after warnings from Iran-backed Houthi forces placed another critical maritime chokepoint under threat.

For more color on energy markets, Goldman commodities expert Daan Struyven warned clients on Monday that Brent crude futures could surge above $120 a barrel by the fourth quarter if disruptions in the Hormuz maritime chokepoint persist; he noted that such an outcome is not his base case.

Struyven sees Brent around $80 in the fourth quarter and $75 next year, assuming US and Iran tensions ease, but warned that risks remained tilted to the upside as Persian Gulf flows fall below 45% of prewar levels and Houthi threats in the southern Red Sea chokepoint.

“Escalation in the Middle East and the decline in estimated Persian Gulf flows to below 45% of pre-war levels have pushed oil prices back up,” Struyven said.

The key upside price risks are:

• Shipping disruptions in Hormuz–and potentially the Red Sea–as the estimated 5mb/d rise since the start of the war in pipeline flows via Yanbu to the Red Sea, to more than 6mb/d (Exhibit 3), has played a key role in offsetting part of the decline in Hormuz flows. Damage to energy infrastructure from the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine wars.

• While the Iran war has likely not caused lasting major damage to oil production capacity so far, our analysis of the 5 largest prior supply shocks shows an average 42% hit to production in the affected country after 5 years, often reflecting infrastructure damage, underinvestment, or tight sanctions (Exhibit 4).

Struyven noted, “Brent might exceed $120/bbl in 2026Q4 and average $100 in 2027 if Hormuz remains disrupted through 2027 (Exhibit 2, red line). This scenario assumes Gulf output only fully recovers by Dec27, supported by pipeline extensions.”

Struyven touched on how China’s retreat from the crude market has temporarily capped prices, with net seaborne imports falling 4.7 million barrels a day from a year earlier in June. Weaker refinery runs, a 21% drop in retail gasoline volumes and estimated crude destocking of more than 1 million barrels a day drove the decline. He said imports may remain subdued if prices rise, given China’s estimated 2 billion barrels of inventories and its ability to substitute coal and electricity for some oil consumption.

Struyven recommends clients buy the December 2026 to March 2027 European diesel timespread to hedge persistent Middle East and Russian supply risks. Diesel markets were already tight before the Iran war, while Russian refinery outages, low inventories and seasonal demand could push spreads higher. European diesel is preferred over crude, gasoline and US diesel because of constrained refinery output, less price-sensitive demand and fewer US policy-related risks.

According to the latest Bloomberg data, Hormuz traffic is at a near standstill. Analysts at Rystad Energy AS warned in a note that the Houthi threat against crude flows means that Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea export route “is now directly in the line of fire.”

“If a ceasefire does not materialize, and Hormuz remains largely closed while the Houthi threat to Red Sea shipping intensifies, the risk of a significant rebound in oil prices would be substantial,” said Rystad analyst Jorge Leon.

Henri Patricot, Paris-based energy equity research analyst at UBS, also has an upside scenario for Brent:

In the near term, we see the main potential upside risk coming from a breakdown of negotiations and further escalation, pushing oil prices back to ~$100+/bbl. If major oil infrastructure in the region is targeted and the conflict extends beyond the summer, prices could spike to $120+/bbl. This would drive more severe demand destruction, with limited OPEC+ ability to act. While such a price may be short-lived, a structurally higher risk premium could keep prices in the $80s/bbl range and ongoing disruptions would keep it even higher.

The big risk now is that Hormuz disruption is unfolding after global oil buffers have already been depleted, with Cushing inventories reportedly near “tank bottoms.” That leaves the market with limited capacity to absorb a prolonged supply shock and will likely increase pressure on the Trump administration to revive diplomacy once the US military has sufficiently degraded Tehran’s missile and drone capabilities used to threaten commercial shipping through the strait.

 Gloal inventories

The US national average for regular gasoline breached $4 a gallon on Monday, intensifying pressure on the Trump administration to pursue Gulf diplomacy.

Gas prices may go higher…

The $4 threshold is both economically and politically sensitive, as it is where lower-income consumers typically begin cutting discretionary purchases and trading down across gas stations, convenience stores and quick-service restaurants, further weighing on consumer sentiment.

Professional subscribers can read the full GS note here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Decades of data across global markets reach the same verdict: the more frequently retail traders trade, the worse they perform. The infrastructure has never been more inviting. The losses have never been more documented. Here are some key statistics we will dive into further.

Retail traders have never had it so easy. Zero commission platforms, options on your phone, social media feeds full of “10 bagger” tips, and a Reddit thread for every stock in the S&P 500. The infrastructure for frequent trading has never been more frictionless, more democratized, or more psychologically seductive.

And the evidence is overwhelming that it is destroying investor wealth at scale.

The data is not subtle. It is not marginal underperformance that can be dismissed as noise. Across decades of academic research, multiple global markets, and every asset class retail traders favor, from stocks to complex options, the conclusion is remarkably consistent: the more frequently retail traders trade, the worse they perform. Not slightly worse. Dramatically, often catastrophically, worse.

The Behavioral Gap Is Growing

Every year, DALBAR publishes its Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior, the most comprehensive long-term study of how retail investors actually perform versus the benchmarks they chase. The 2025 report covering 2024 returns delivered yet another indictment.

The average equity investor earned 16.54% in 2024. The S&P 500 returned 25.02%. That 848-basis-point shortfall was the second-largest investor performance gap of the past decade. In one of the strongest bull markets in recent memory, retail traders left nearly a third of available returns on the table. And 2024 was not an anomaly. Retail traders have now underperformed the S&P 500 for 15 consecutive years.

DALBAR’s “Guess Right Ratio,” meaning how frequently investors correctly time their entries and exits, fell to just 25% in 2024, tying a record low. Retail traders got market direction right just once out of every four times. And yet, the urge to act, reposition, and trade around every headline only intensified.

The compounding consequences are brutal. A hypothetical buy and hold investor who started 2024 with $100,000 in the S&P 500 finished the year with $125,020. The “average” investor, mimicking the behavioral cash flows DALBAR tracks, ended with $112,774, over $12,000 less in a single calendar year, simply from repositioning at the wrong times. Extended over twenty years, that same $100,000 left untouched in the S&P would have grown to $717,503. The average behavioral investor ended up with $345,614, forfeiting more than half their potential wealth, not to the market, but to their own decisions.

The Hazardous Truth About Stock Trading Frequency

The academic literature on trading frequency and performance is unambiguous, and it dates back decades. The landmark 2000 study by Professors Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, “Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth” (Journal of Finance), analyzed 66,465 household brokerage accounts from 1991 to 1996. Its central finding was stark: retail traders who traded most aggressively earned an annual return of just 11.4%, while the market returned 17.9%. That is a 6.5 percentage point annual performance drag attributable entirely to excessive trading.

Even the average household in the study, turning over 75% of its portfolio every year, still earned 1.5 percentage points less than a simple buy-and-hold strategy. The gross returns were nearly identical across groups. All the destruction happened after transaction costs and the accumulated impact of poorly timed decisions. Overconfidence was the root cause Barber and Odean identified. Retail traders consistently overestimated their informational edge, leading them to trade when sitting still would have served them far better.

Subsequent research confirmed the finding globally. A study of the Colombian Stock Exchange covering 5.38 million trades by over 42,000 individual investors from 2006 to 2016 found that retail investors generated negative abnormal returns of 4% to 4.4% per year, before transaction costs. The most active traders performed the worst, even on a gross basis. The problem is not just the cost of trading. It is the trading itself.

Day Trading: Where Retail Traders Go to Lose Everything

If frequent stock trading is hazardous, day trading is in a category of its own. FINRA data from 2020 showed that 72% of day traders ended the year with financial losses. Among proprietary traders, those treating it as a professional business, only 16% were profitable. A mere 3% earned more than $50,000 for the year.

The survival statistics are equally grim. 80% of day traders quit within the first two years. Nearly 40% abandon it within one month. After three years, only 13% remain active. Only 1% of day traders maintain consistent profitability over a five-year horizon.

The most comprehensive single market study, a 2020 examination of Brazilian equity index futures traders who persisted for more than 300 trading days, found that 97% lost money. Only 1.1% earned more than Brazil’s minimum wage, and all of them experienced substantial volatility. No survivorship bias. Every trader who tried was measured over an extended period.

Retail traders, undeterred by the data, have gotten more aggressive since COVID. Post-pandemic research found that poor market timing, which cost investors roughly 0.53% per year before 2020, nearly doubled to 1.01% per year since. The explosion in retail participation, fueled by social media and zero-commission apps, has not produced better outcomes. It has produced worse ones.

Options: A Wealth Destruction Engine

If day trading is a casino, retail options trading is the casino where the house advantage is structural, invisible, and relentless. The research here is particularly damning.

A landmark study by de Silva, Smith, and So (“Losing is Optional,” MIT Sloan and Stanford, 2022) found that retail traders lost approximately $3 billion in options trades over the period from January 2010 through February 2021. Market makers were the primary beneficiaries.

Bryzgalova, Pavlova, and Sikorskaya (Journal of Finance, 2023) calculated that the aggregate retail options portfolio lost $2.1 billion from November 2019 through June 2021 alone, with the bulk of those losses coming not from bad directional calls, but from the cost of trading itself. Retail traders in options incur average gross monthly losses of 1.81%, described by researchers as “economically large and statistically significant.”

The mechanics of the losses fall into three repeating behavioral traps. First, retail traders systematically overpay for options relative to the realized volatility the underlying actually delivers, especially around earnings announcements. Second, they incur bid-ask spreads averaging roughly 8% of the option’s value on a round trip, an immediate structural headwind equivalent to a 9 to 10% drag on invested capital before any directional bet pays off. Third, they hold losing positions well past the point where price decay accelerates after a catalyst passes, sitting on deteriorating contracts as volatility collapses around them.

Since the introduction of zero-commission complex options trading, retail volumes surged by more than 75%. More access did not produce better results. It produced more frequent losing trades.

The Common Thread: Overconfidence

Across every study, every market, and every asset class, the behavioral driver is the same: overconfidence. Retail traders overestimate their ability to predict short-term price movements. Unsurprisingly, they trade more after a strong recent performance, buy into momentum precisely when the easy money has already been made, and sell winners 50% faster than they sell losers. In other words, they confuse activity with skill.

Short-term trading is largely a zero-sum game. For every retail trader who profits, a more sophisticated, better capitalized, algorithmically equipped counterparty sits on the other side. The house advantage embedded in options markets alone, via bid-ask spreads and market maker flow, is the financial equivalent of playing blackjack at a table where the dealer wins on ties.

The antidote is not complicated, even if it is psychologically difficult. Discipline, lower turnover, longer time horizons, and a ruthless focus on what can actually be controlled, including cost, diversification, and behavior, remain the only reliable defenses against the retail trading trap.

Five Tactics to Navigate Risk Without Overreacting

None of the evidence above argues for passivity in the face of market risk. Risk is real, volatility is real, and periods of genuine portfolio danger require thoughtful responses. The problem is not that retail traders care about risk. The problem is that their responses to it, frequent repositioning, speculative options bets, and tactical timing, reliably make outcomes worse rather than better. The following five tactics are designed to keep investors engaged and protected without triggering the behavioral traps revealed by the data.

1. Write a Personal Investment Policy Statement. A written Investment Policy Statement (IPS) is the single most underused tool in retail investing. Furthermore, it forces the investor to commit, before any market stress arrives, to their asset allocation targets, acceptable drawdown thresholds, rebalancing triggers, and the conditions under which they will and will not make changes. When markets fall 15%, and every instinct screams to act, a pre-committed IPS replaces emotion with a predetermined framework. Writing an IPS does not eliminate risk. It eliminates the most dangerous variable in the portfolio, which is the investor’s own unguided reaction to it.

2. Rebalance on a Schedule, Not a Sentiment. Rules-based rebalancing, triggered by calendar dates or percentage drift thresholds rather than market headlines, captures one of the few mechanical edges available to individual investors: it systematically forces buying of what is cheap and trimming of what is expensive. Research from Vanguard and Morningstar consistently shows that disciplined annual or threshold-based rebalancing adds 10 to 50 basis points of return per year over time while materially reducing drawdown severity.

3. Replace Speculative Options with Defined-Risk Structures. For investors who use options, the research is clear about where losses concentrate: in naked or leveraged directional bets, especially around earnings announcements, when bid-ask spreads widen and volatility collapses after the event destroys premium value. Instead, use defined-risk structures, including covered calls on existing long equity positions, protective puts sized to hedge a specific portfolio drawdown threshold, and vertical spreads that cap both gain and loss, to generate a fundamentally different statistical profile.

4. Require a Three-Day Waiting Period Before Any Non-Scheduled Trade. Before executing any trade that is not part of a pre-scheduled rebalance, the investor imposes a mandatory 72-hour waiting period and writes down, in plain language, why they are making the trade, what the exit criteria are, and what price action would tell them they are wrong. Most trades that feel urgent on Monday look considerably less urgent on Thursday. The behavioral literature consistently finds that the speed of a trading decision is inversely correlated with its quality. Slowing the process forces the investor to engage their deliberate reasoning rather than their reactive instincts.

5. Calculate Your Own Behavioral Return Gap Every Year. The exercise is straightforward: take the time-weighted return of each position as if it had been held without any transactions, then compare it to the account’s actual dollar-weighted return, including every buy, sell, and repositioning decision made during the year. The difference is the personal behavioral gap, the exact cost in dollars of every trade made. For most active retail traders, this number is negative and larger than they expect. For some, it represents tens of thousands of dollars in self-imposed performance drag per year. Seeing that number concretely, attached to actual dollars rather than abstract percentages, is the most powerful behavioral intervention available.

The market will always be there tomorrow. The question is whether your capital will be, and whether the decisions you make today will compound in your favor or against you.

ASP Isotopes announced Tuesday that its Quantum Leap Energy subsidiary signed a research agreement with the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station to advance and de-risk the commercial production of uranium hexafluoride, or UF6.

The work will focus on gathering data on the reactions used to convert uranium concentrate (yellowcake or U3O8) into UF6. The research is intended to support process design, modeling, scale-up, cost reductions, and the eventual commercialization of QLE’s conversion technology.

This is the unglamorous but essential middle of the nuclear fuel chain. Uranium miners can produce all the yellowcake they want, but commercial enrichment facilities cannot use it until it has been converted into UF6. The US currently has only one operating commercial conversion facility, ConverDyn’s Metropolis Works plant in Illinois, while the World Nuclear Association counted only four conversion suppliers globally as of 2025.

In other words, conversion has quietly become one of the tightest links in an already strained Western fuel cycle.

Our readers know we have been tracking ASPI’s attempt to position itself across that chain. We first highlighted the company as the next nuclear story stock, followed the Trump-linked investment in QLE, and more recently covered its agreements involving a major US nuclear operator, TerraPower, Fermi America, South Africa’s Necsa, and an unnamed European advanced reactor developer.

The Texas A&M agreement adds conversion research to those enrichment and HALEU ambitions, but ASPI is not alone in spotting the bottleneck. 

Uranium Energy Corp launched United States Uranium Refining & Conversion Corp last year and is studying a facility designed to produce roughly 10,000 metric tons of uranium annually as UF6. UEC received an NRC docket number for the project in March and is advancing feasibility work with Fluor.

FluxPoint Energy has separately announced plans for another 10,000-ton U.S. conversion plant. Silex Systems and Cameco-backed Global Laser Enrichment are pursuing a different route at Paducah, where depleted UF6 tails would be re-enriched to natural-grade UF6. Because that material has already been converted, the project could effectively release additional supply without first processing fresh yellowcake.

For QLE, the Texas A&M deal remains research, not production. A commercial facility will still require engineering, capital, permits, customers, and execution. 

But, it does bring attention to how America’s nuclear buildout will need far more than reactors and uranium mines. It will also need the conversion capacity connecting the two.