Dave Lutz Jones Trading But Insider buying has plunged this year, with corporate executives showing more caution than the broader investor pool who have driven markets to record highs, Bloomberg reports. Insider purchases totaled just $6 billion in 2025 through July, the slowest pace in eight years, according to data from EPFR Global.
7. Overseas Buying of U.S. Assets Has Doubled in Last 15 Years.
8. 179 Weapons Systems Supplying Europe Military vs. 33 for U.S.
Barrons The result is a hodgepodge of 179 weapons systems supplying European militaries, compared with 33 in the U.S., where the top four contractors soak up more than half of Pentagon procurement, according to Morningstar research. “Joint procurement will be the key to expanding Europe’s defense base,” Muharremi says. https://www.barrons.com/articles/europes-defense-stocks-cool-2-buck-trend-1dc8e6c2?mod=past_editions
Looking for the best finance blogs to follow in 2025? Whether you’re a retail investor, finance professional, or just curious about markets, this curated list of 60 top finance and investing blogs offers deep insights across macro, stocks, tech, and more. These blogs are carefully selected for their originality, consistency, and thought leadership — from hedge fund managers to fintech insiders. Updated regularly by Snippet Finance.
You can find the whole list in the Content Hub where it is regularly updated. There, the blogs are categorized, you can rate them, and add any you think we missed.
Want bite-sized insights from these blogs? Subscribe to Snippet Finance and get curated highlights twice a week.
To discover the 60 best finance and investing blogs, keep reading. Note these are not in order of best to worst but simply the 60 best.
1. Net Interest Category: Financials Smooth, insightful, and effortless writing on everything and anything related to the financial sector.
2. Bits about Money Category: Financials Go deep on the most important financial topics.
Earnings Surprise! And if you want something to support that, here’s one interesting stat; 63% of the S&P 500 beat their consensus earnings estimate by at least 1 standard deviation. Now to be fair there is a bit of gaming around earnings estimates (companies talk down prospects to analysts to try lower the bar for outperformance — you can see this potentially becoming more endemic over time with big beats trending up and misses trending lower to sideways). But even still, this is a notable datapoint.
4. Free Cash Flow Slowing Down Due to Huge Capex Spends.
8. Secondaries are becoming second nature-Pitchbook
According to Evercore’s latest Secondaries Market Report, global secondaries transaction volume reached a record $102 billion in the first half of the year.
Once a niche strategy, secondaries have become a core part of the private capital toolkit, offering GPs and LPs alike a flexible, scaled solution for liquidity and portfolio management. LP-led deals made up 53% of total volume, reflecting steady demand from institutional sellers like endowments, foundations, and family offices.
Headline transactions such as Yale’s $2.5 billion sale and the New York City pension system’s $5 billion portfolio sale to Blackstone show how dramatically the market has evolved. What was once a quiet corner of alternatives is now handling transactions at the scale and complexity of large buyouts.
Meanwhile, GP-led deals totaled $48 billion, with multi-asset continuation vehicles gaining traction and syndication options expanding. These structures continue to adapt, balancing alignment with investor optionality and unlocking value from aging assets.
Still, the market is far from saturated. Our estimates suggest that secondaries activity represents only about 3% of total NAV held in funds older than five years, which is where most transaction volume is concentrated. That leaves trillions in legacy fund value as potential future deal flow.
Dry powder has kept pace, growing to an estimated $255 billion, up from less than $180 billion five years ago, based on our estimates. The pools of capital have also grown more specialized, with new strategies targeting credit, real estate, venture, and bespoke GP-led transactions.
In a slower exit environment, secondaries have increasingly become second nature and a central part of the private market landscape.
For related research, our colleagues in Europe have sized the institutional direct VC secondaries market at nearly $15 billion last year in a recent analyst note. Access prior editions of the PitchBook Weekly Commentary in our dedicated workspace.
Psychology Today Why Einstein’s brilliance owed more to method, curiosity, and work than IQ. T. Alexander Puutio Ph.D.
Key points
Raw intelligence is common; genius emerges when it’s systematically developed.
We overrate talent because it’s visible and underrate the hidden work behind it.
Genius can be cultivated through productive skepticism and deliberate practice, even if its a slow process.
Émile Zola, the French novelist, once quipped: “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”
The very same can be said about geniuses, and, in fact, it should be said much more often than it is.
Our fixation on thinking about intelligence as a feature induces a harmful kind of myopia that does nothing to help us run our engines better. When we look at geniuses like Einstein, what they had going on inside their craniums was only the beginning.
Think of it this way. If genius were a cake, Einstein would have had a bigger kitchen. What he still needed was the right ingredients, the right process, and the willingness to bake. And not just bake, but to make something exquisite.
The work, it turns out, matters much more than the raw brainpower. Without it, we would never have heard of Einstein at all.
Why intelligence doesn’t always germinate into performance
Intelligence is not as rare a commodity as we tend to think.
Statistically speaking, there are likely hundreds of Einstein-level minds walking among us today. There were likely just as many when our earliest ancestors roamed the plains, when their collective intelligence amounted to little more than sharper bits of obsidian and an improved way of roasting meat.
When thinking about geniuses of yore, we often fall for a post-hoc fallacy: We see extraordinary people and their accomplishments, and we attribute those accomplishments entirely to the intelligence they harbor. What we don’t see is the grind behind the scenes and the years of reading, tinkering, failing, and recalibrating, and the failures they’ve left behind. We underweight the work, and in doing so, we miss the true lesson that the rare glimpses of true genius we see could teach us.
Psychologist Françoys Gagné offers a useful lens for why we don’t generate more Einsteins and da Vincis than we do. He divides human abilities into two broad categories: natural abilities and systematically developed ones. We tend to notice the first, the obvious talent, but the second is invisible to us. That invisibility creates the double bind where we overemphasize natural talent because it’s salient, and we underemphasize systematic development because it’s hidden. As a result, we copy the wrong things.
Worse still, those who do find their way to systematic development often struggle to explain it to others. In fact, we often keep them as far away from teaching their methods as we can, and only want to hear of the outcomes instead. Einstein and da Vinci are perfect examples.
What Einstein and da Vinci actually did differently
Einstein, though widely revered today, was no star student in the conventional sense. He disliked rote memorization and distrusted the authoritarian style of teaching that had been passed down since Comenius coined the term didactics in the 17th century.
Instead, he gravitated toward teachers and peers who matched his yearning for independent thought. One such influence was his “Olympia Academy,” a self-made discussion group with fellows Maurice Solovine, a philosophy student, and Conrad Habicht, who was a mathematician and Einstein’s neighbor. Together, they read voraciously across fields, debating philosophy, science, and literature. They weaponized curiosity for no other reason than the joy of it, and that’s how Einstein first encountered Ernst Mach’s The Science of Mechanics, along with other concepts without which we would not be talking of his genius today.
For da Vinci, the formative influence wasn’t in books but in pure, unstructured experimentation. In Andrea del Verrocchio’s workshop, he learned a restless, cross-disciplinary way of working where switching from sculpture to painting to hydraulics without warning; leaving projects half-finished when a new obsession seized him was the norm. Pope Leo reportedly sighed, “Alas, this man will never finish a thing,” while Michelangelo openly mocked him for his unorthodox approach to work and learning. But that habit of wandering into new domains was precisely what fueled da Vinci’s breakthroughs.
In both men, you see the same threads: non-orthodoxy, early exposure to experimentation, and an almost aggressive curiosity. The same pattern runs through Richard Feynman’s safe-cracking physics, Alan Turing’s chess-playing machines, and countless others.
And yet, when we try to “recreate” genius today, we do the opposite. We hand out standardized textbooks, map out linear career paths, and treat curiosity as a distraction rather than the primary fuel for what we hope to come out at the end. Good luck to all involved.
Could you become a genius too?
The question isn’t as naive as it sounds.
We dismiss the thought because we’ve bought the myth that genius is a feature, an inborn gift, rather than a result. Many will even tell you that geniuses are born, not made. But the truth is that genius is cultivated, and, better yet, the cultivation process is accessible to almost everyone.
Adopting productive skepticism and weaponizing your curiosity will build a mind capable of surprising things. Even if your engine runs slower than Einstein’s, remember: This is not a race. Einstein himself took decades to reach his greatest insights, and in some cases, he was wrong.
A good place to start is the work ethic. You can borrow the tools, try your own thought experiments like Einstein, and explore fields you know nothing about like da Vinci. You could even chase ideas you have no immediate use for, just to create space for lateral thinking in the future.
I can’t promise you’ll solve quantum dynamics any better than Einstein did, but I can promise this. If you commit to the same kind of practice, you’ll end up in the rarest labor pool of all, the fellowship of people who are doing the work that creates genius. And that, more than IQ points, is what changes the world.
Trump’s political operation has amassed commitments for $1.4 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter—roughly the same amount as contributions in 2024 to Trump’s committees, super PAC and the Republican Party.
Regression to the mean explains that in statistics, outlying events tend to be overcome by average ones. But in society, the opposite is often true. A small headstart becomes a bigger one, or a small stumble can turn into something that is hard to overcome.
Individuals can work to amplify their good luck.
And society is obligated to create the conditions for bad luck to fade into the background.
Remember, whether any of the habits below nudge Spearman’s g one inch up or down is beside the point. What matters is that research has shown that they measurably improve performance. And if you’re serious about performing better, you need to get just as serious about the habits that drive it.
First, we know that learning isn’t a brute-force effort. It works best when we interleave what we’re learning, mixing subjects and testing ourselves regularly. It’s more effortful, yes, but much like lifting weights, that struggle is what makes the brain grow.
And sorry, podcast junkies—recent research by Hui and Godfroid showed that reading beats listening for retention, which isn’t all that surprising if you’ve followed the breadcrumbs of how ease in the process of learning often means a deficit in the results.
We also know that chunking helps us remember more, and that the memory palace method can turn almost anyone into a Roman orator, delivering entire speeches without a papyrus in sight. If these feats aren’t effective IQ in action, I don’t know what is.
To really hit home the brain-body duality, we also know that movement sharpens our cognition. Kim and colleagues weren’t exactly burying the lede in their 2011 article “Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory,” and numerous studies after theirs have shown how aerobic activity can improve executive function. In fact, in older adults, regular mobility is directly linked to better cognitive performance and lower risk of dementia.
If you’re surprised, remember that our brains didn’t evolve to operate in stillness. They evolved to think in motion, walking, navigating, reacting to the world around them. In fact, one of the most overlooked habits for improving cognitive performance is giving your brain the kind of environment it evolved for.
We didn’t get smart by sitting still or memorizing lists. We got smart by exploring the world, spotting patterns, making predictions, and adjusting course when we were wrong. That’s how our neural architecture was built by nature, through movement, curiosity, and conversation.
It’s no wonder then that brains perform better when they’re engaged in real-time experiential learning, in the company of others. People who stay mentally sharp into old age aren’t the ones who passively consume what they’re given; they’re the ones still asking questions about the world, expecting each answer to only beget another question.
What Really Matters About Intelligence
The truth about IQ is that the figure you got from WAIS or Stanford-Binet doesn’t define you, and it never did. What matters is how well you drive the mind you’ve got, and how seriously you take the road ahead.
So, if you want to maintain your edge, seek out novelty. Debate your ideas. Explain something out loud. Step into unfamiliar territory—and remember to sleep well before you do. The brain rewards exploration and punishes stagnation.
And above all, remember that your effective intelligence isn’t fixed. It’s as responsive and powerful when correctly tuned as it is fragile if neglected.
As with most things in life, you’re bound to fall to the level of your habits. And the truth about IQ is that we have much more agency over how it manifests in our lives than most ever dare to imagine.
Dave Lutz Jones Trading Insiders at just 151 S&P 500 companies bought their own stocks last month, the fewest since at least 2018, according to data compiled by the Washington Service. And while July’s selling by corporate insiders slowed from June’s pace, purchases dropped even more, pushing the ratio of buying-to-selling to the lowest level in a year, the data shows.
5. Tokenization Market Value.
Charts tell stories. Hockey-stick charts tell big stories.
One of the biggest stories today is that tokenization — the idea of moving stocks, bonds, and other real-world assets over blockchains instead of traditional networks — is having a moment.
