Hi! We hope those of you who have one will enjoy the three-day weekend ahead of Martin Luther King Day — we'll still be in your inbox as usual on Monday, so see you then. Today we're exploring: |
- The first time was so nice… Could Sandisk top the S&P 500 for the second year in a row?
- Wiki birthday: The free encyclopedia's awkward relationship with AI, as it hits 25.
- Silver lining: Gold is no longer retail traders' favorite precious metal.
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Sandisk beat the entire S&P 500 in 2025… and it's doing the same again this year |
The New York Yankees. Italy's national soccer team in the 1930s. The Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. The New England Patriots 22 years ago. Winning back-to-back titles etches your name in history. And, though we're only two weeks into the year, Sandisk is making a strong early case for its name to be added to the annals of stock market lore. After topping the S&P 500 Index with a whopping 559% total return in 2025, the stock is once again beating out around 500 of America's largest companies this year too, already notching a 72% return since the calendars flipped to 2026. |
Back-to-back S&P 500 champ? |
Though we have index-level data for the S&P 500 going all the way back to the 1920s, when it was a composite benchmark of far fewer names, getting comprehensive year-by-year returns of its constituents is a trickier business. But, from our research this morning, we found that no stock has ever managed to top the list twice in a row. That's certainly the case in the modern era, though AppLovin made a strong defense of its 2024 title last year, finishing 11th with a 108% gain, while another AI-adjacent name, Palantir Technologies, came pretty close in both of the last two years. After gaining more than 350% to end 2024 in second place, Palantir led the index at various points last year, before Sandisk went parabolic to take the crown. While other memory and storage companies like Western Digital, Seagate, and Micron have made serious gains, none have ripped as hard as SNDK. Reemerging as a stand-alone company from Western Digital in February 2025, Sandisk's focus on flash storage (specifically NAND) has made it an investor favorite as a pure-play company, benefiting from the enormous troves of data stored by hyperscalers to train and deploy their AI models — demand that is only likely to grow as adoption surges. Could Sandisk manage the back-to-back? The math (and the history) would suggest it's very unlikely, even after a blistering start. |
As Wikipedia turns 25, its future will depend on AI — for better or worse |
Yesterday, "Wikipedians" — among them, presumably, many of the ~250,000 volunteers that write and edit the site's ~65 million articles across more than 300 languages — celebrated Wikipedia Day. On Jan. 15, 2001, cofounder Jimmy Wales first wrote "Hello, World!" onto a blank web page that would soon become one of the world's most popular websites for the next 2.5 decades, ballooning with knowledge provided for free by scores of contributors. This year, though, the online encyclopedia might want to turn to its own "quarter-life crisis" page. |
This article has been skimmed through by AI |
Wikimedia Foundation, the site's nonprofit operator, just announced partnerships with several Big Tech giants, including Microsoft and Meta, that will see the companies pay to use Wikipedia's vast collection of articles to train their AI models. However, as reported by The Verge, many of the listed companies joined Wikimedia's program over the past year, or even before that — meaning that the site has actually been helping to grow the AI tech that threatens to supersede it. |
Looking at Wikipedia's site visits, the past 20 months in a row have seen total page views slump behind figures recorded the year prior — coinciding, perhaps not so coincidentally, with the dizzying rise of AI chatbots. Indeed, web traffic was down 9% year-over-year in April, the same month that visits to ChatGPT officially overtook visits to Wikipedia. Like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia is now caught up in tech's circular coal mine, where the companies that feed on the platform's information trove might ultimately end up being the ones that replace it. Still, Wales seemed rosy enough about the situation, telling the Associated Press: "I'm very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it's human curated." |
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For retail traders, silver is still the new gold — and it's sending trading volumes for one ETF booming |
Silver is holding on to its gold medal — at least for retail traders. Per data from SwaggyStocks, the iShares Silver Trust has been the top trending ticker in the r/WallStreetBets subreddit over each of the past 12 hours, 1 day, and 1 week — with mentions in the last 7 days roughly tripling those for the SDPR Gold Shares ETF. Since they really became popular with retail traders last October, gold and silver have only shone brighter, with each seeming to make gains in both risk-off and risk-on environments. |
Just this week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell's comment on the Department of Justice subpoenas gave both of the precious metals a chance to prove their mettle as a store of value. However, silver's volatility and relentlessly positive price action — prices have nearly tripled in the last year — are seeing it win over more fans on Reddit. That increased retail attention is translating into serious trading activity, with volumes for the SLV ETF hitting an average turnover of $9.6 billion over the last five trading sessions, 61% more than what changed hands in GLD. With super high electrical conductivity, silver is widely used in electronics — making it more vulnerable to supply shocks. Indeed, the silver market is currently experiencing thin inventories in London (where benchmark silver prices are set), just as new export restrictions from China, a leading silver producer, started on January 1. |
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- Social media giants have wiped 4.7 million accounts in the first month of Australia's ban on under-16s using the platforms— for context, there are only 2.5 million 8-15 year olds in the nation.
- Listening up: Spotify is hiking its monthly individual premium plans from $12 to $13 starting next month, while also raising fees for its family plans, in the streamer's third round of price rises in 3 years.
- After 14 years, five feature films that have grossed over $5 billion worldwide collectively, and numerous major TV shows, Star Wars boss Kathleen Kennedy will step down as president of Lucasfilm.
- Ethereum treasury company BitMine is investing $200 million in Beast Industries, the business arm of YouTube Star Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast.
- Tinned food titan Progresso is bringing back its popular Soup Drops hard candy for the 2nd flu season in a row, releasing chicken noodle, tomato basil, and beef pot roast flavors.
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| - Nominal value: Which names are more likely to be used as middle names rather than first?
- Gallup charts whether Americans feel more threatened by Big Government, Big Business, or Big Labor.
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Off the charts: Which European nation is exploring the idea of capping its population at 10 million people following decades of growth? [Answer below]. |
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