Hi! As the Labor Day weekend draws to a close, we'd like to wish intrepid travelers looking to get on the road between 1 PM and 4 PM — the worst times to travel by car, according to AAA — all the luck (and patience) in the world. Today we're exploring: |
- Excess funds: There are more ETFs in the US than individual stocks.
- ChatPHD: Back-to-school season is upon us, and students are returning to AI chatbots.
- Stock's up: By some measures, American stocks have never been more expensive.
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There are now more ETFs than stocks in the US, and many of them aren't vanilla |
According to Morningstar data first reported by Bloomberg last week, there are now some 4,400 exchange-traded funds listed in the US, surpassing the number of American public companies. |
Typically offering a tax-efficient, flexible, and easy-to-access vehicle for investing, the ETF market has exploded with more than 640 new funds launched this year, as investors have piled $660+ billion into the ETF market in the first seven months of this year. |
As Tker.co's Sam Ro comments, it's like having "more recipes than there are ingredients" — just like chicken can go great in a sandwich, a roast dinner, or a curry, now major stocks routinely find themselves in hundreds of ETFs. Apple, for example, is in a bunch of tech ETFs, US-based ETFs, dividend ETFs, and mega-cap ETFs, to name but a few. The trailblazers of the ETF world — passive, low-cost ,vanilla index-tracking funds like VOO or SPY — are still the biggest in the game. What's changed in recent years, however, is that the recipes have been getting spicier. Indeed, as of July this year, 37% of all new money in the ETF world flew into active ETFs compared to only 3% in 2015. Rather than track a simple benchmark or theme, managers of these funds make investment decisions in the hope of finding better returns. They also tend to charge higher fees. Many of these active ETF strategies follow classic investing styles like value, momentum, or income. Others are getting creative with derivatives, or niche categories, like the politically conservative YALL, or the "sin stocks" fund VICE. Some of the biggest, like Cathie Wood's innovation-heavy ARKK, have experienced serious boom and bust periods. Once hailed as a simple way to invest with just a few options, now there's an ETF for everything... if you have the patience to trawl through all 4,400 of them to find it. |
ChatGPT use is picking up again, just as students head back to school |
Pencil case? Check. Textbooks? Check. Large language model with multi-step reasoning capabilities? Check. With the long weekend signaling the final dregs of summer, students across the country are gearing up for the new term. And, in 2025, back-to-school for many high school and college students means reconnecting with their study buddy: ChatGPT. |
As reported by Futurism in August, daily usage of OpenAI's flagship chatbot plummeted in early June, when summer semesters wrapped up, according to data from AI platform OpenRouter. Based on a 2.5 million-strong user base, peak usage coincided with the middle of finals season on May 27, as users generated more than 97 billion tokens (a unit for data processing equivalent to roughly four English characters). Soon after, average monthly usage more than halved from May to June, when summer vacation began, to 36.7 billion tokens per day, and remained low throughout July. Now, as a new school year looms, ChatGPT usage is picking back up again. |
Per Futurism, other drops in ChatGPT usage throughout the school year coincided with weekends; a Google report on shopping trends also outlined that searches for "AI laptops" more than quadrupled from mid-April to the end of May during exam season; and a Pew Research survey from January found that the share of teens who said they use ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled to 26% from 2023 to 2025. Although even the most esteemed institutions for learning advocate for supporting education with AI tools, the impact that over-reliance on the tech could have on skill development, intellectual standards, and research integrity — particularly at college level — is yet to be seen. |
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Investors are paying record prices for every dollar of future S&P 500 revenue |
US stocks may be breaking new ground, but with every fresh high, the chorus of people asking "are stocks overvalued?" gets a little bit louder. According to the Wall Street Journal, the S&P 500 now trades at about 22.5× its projected earnings for the next year, well above the three-decade average of 17.1×, and inching closer to the dot-com peak of over 25× in 1999. |
Things look even more stretched on a price-to-sales basis: the index is now at a record 3.2× forward revenue, meaning investors are paying more than ever for every dollar of sales that S&P 500 companies are expected to generate over the coming 12 months. |
In fact, the split between the two ratios shows a deeper issue in today's market: its reliance on Big Tech. The 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 now make up nearly 40% of the index's total value, and most of them are mega-profitable, mega-cap tech stocks — their tasty margins keeping a lid on the P/E ratio. Nvidia, for example, has an operating profit margin near 60%, and it alone represents more than 7% of the index — dominating the S&P 500 more than any company has for 44 years. Back in 1990, by contrast, the top 10 companies were less dominant and came from a more varied mix of sectors, including names like Exxon, IBM, Walmart, and Coca-Cola. Put simply: stocks are undeniably expensive, whether measured on profits or sales. But whether you think that's a problem depends a lot on if you think the BATMMAAN stocks are about to collectively stumble. |
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- Big draw: The Powerball jackpot has reached a whopping $1.1 billion ahead of tonight's draw, making it the 5th largest prize pot in the game's history.
- Big difference: There's a gender gap in generative AI use, per a new paper — women make up just 42.4% of monthly Perplexity users, 42% of ChatGPT's base, and only 31.2% of Claude users.
- Big weekend: "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd yesterday became the first song in history to cross 5 billion streams on Spotify.
- Big game: Americans are reportedly set to stake a record $30 billion on the NFL this season, the American Gaming Association has estimated.
- Big sleep: The average American adult's bedtime is 11:37 PM and most of us aren't getting 7 hours of shut-eye, per Apple Watch data. See which states are hitting the hay the latest here.
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- How the .ai web address domain now accounts for more than 20% of Anguilla's national government revenues.
- America's "Sex Recession" explained in charts by the Institute for Family Studies.
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Off the charts: Having partnered with Nvidia earlier this year on its AI-powered drive-thrus, which fast-food giant is now reportedly rethinking its use of the tech, on the back of glitches and prank orders? [Answer below]. |
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