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- 📉 The Economy Is Slowing
📉 The Economy Is Slowing
Pip Munch
February 11, 2026
Want to make more money from trading? Stop trading your small $500 account. It’s a waste of time. Want to make some real money? You need prop firms.
☕️ GM Munchers! Mark Zuckerberg is relocating to Miami in a $150 million mansion. I'm relocating my desk closer to the window and calling it a lifestyle upgrade. We're both optimizing our environments. His optimization involves a yacht dock.
On today’s menu:
📉 The American Consumer Is Struggling
✝️ The Vatican Just Launched Stock Indexes
🪶 Robinhood Crashes 10%
💄 Estée Lauder Is Suing Walmart
🇨🇦 Is The CAD A Buy Right Now?
Yesterday’s numbers:
S&P 500 | 6,941 | -0.33% |
Nasdaq | 23,102 | -0.59% |
Dow Jones | 50,188 | +0.10% |
Bitcoin | $68,950 | -1.43% |
BREAKING NEWS
🛍️ American Consumers Took December Off
Here's the deal: The December retail sales report dropped yesterday and it was not the gift anyone wanted.
What happened:
Retail sales: flat in December (after a 0.6% increase in November)
Economists expected: +0.4%
Annual sales growth: 2.4%—not even keeping up with December's 2.7% inflation reading
Translation? Americans spent more money but bought less stuff. That's not growth—that's inflation doing the heavy lifting.
When you dive into the report, you find that higher-end consumers kept spending through 2025, but lower-income shoppers pulled back hard. Costco and Walmart both dropped more than 1% on the news.
Why markets care: Weak consumer spending is the first domino. When people stop buying things, companies stop making money. When companies stop making money, stocks go down. It's a simple chain reaction with very unpleasant consequences.
The Munch Take: Today we get the delayed Jobs Report and CPI drops Friday. There's now a 54% chance the Fed cuts rates by 0.25% in June. Weak retail data pushes that probability higher. If you're positioned for rate cuts, this data just gave your thesis a small Christmas gift—one month late.
✝️ The Vatican Just Launched Stock Indexes (Yes, Really)
If you’re tired of listening to the standard pundit on CNBC, good news. In what might be the most unexpected financial headline of 2026, you can now listen to the Vatican Bank instead, which launched its first-ever official stock indexes on Tuesday.
Partnering with Morningstar to create two benchmarks:
Morningstar IOR US Catholic Principles Index
Morningstar IOR Eurozone Catholic Principles Index
Each index tracks 50 large and mid-sized companies vetted against Catholic social doctrine.
What gets cut: Companies involved in abortion, contraception, weaponry/defense, child labor, or pornography.
What gets kept: Companies scoring high on social responsibility, environmental stewardship, and human dignity.
The US index includes Meta and Amazon. Make of that what you will.
Why this exists: The Vatican Bank has a famously scandalous financial history (money laundering accusations in the 80s and 90s). This is their "we've changed, we promise" era under Pope Francis—providing a standardized benchmark for Catholic institutions worldwide that manage billions in assets.
The Munch Take: Now you can lose money but at least feel good about it. Faith-based investing is officially Wall Street's newest product category. If you're a Catholic investor, you now have a Vatican-approved cheat sheet. If you're not, it's still fascinating that Amazon made God's portfolio while PayPal apparently did not.
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STOCKS
🪶 $HOOD Robinhood Crashes 10%: Democracy Has a Price
Robinhood—the app that made your cousin think he was Warren Buffett during Covid—just got a brutal reality check from Wall Street, crashing 10% after earnings. Now trading below $80, down from an ATH of nearly $150. The app that democratized investing just got absolutely humbled by it.
The Numbers:
Revenue: $1.28B vs $1.34B expected — miss
EPS (GAAP): $0.66 vs $0.64 expected — beat
Adjusted EBITDA: $761M vs $832.3M expected — miss
Assets Under Custody: $324B (+68% YoY)
Net Deposits: $68.1B (+35% YoY)
The brutal summary: Revenue grew 27%, deposits are surging, net income hit $605M—and the stock still got torched. Miss revenue by 3.9% and suddenly, Wall Street acts like the building's on fire. CEO Vlad Tenev responded with: "Our vision hasn't changed: we are building the Financial SuperApp." Inspirational timing, Vlad.
The Munch Take: The underlying business is genuinely strong. This isn't a broken company. It's an expensive stock that got ahead of itself at $150 and is now reacquainting itself with gravity. Getting interesting below $80… reply to this email and let us know what you think of the stock.
MARKET OVERVIEW
🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers
💄 $EL Estée Lauder is suing Walmart for allegedly selling counterfeit beauty products on their online marketplace, calling the situation "despicable." Bold word choice from a company that charges $80 for moisturizer. The market loved the drama—EL climbed while WMT took a hit.
✈️ $PLTR Palantir and Airbus just signed a 10-year contract extension worth ~$1 billion. Both stocks dropped which feels appropriate for a company that's been operating for 20 years and still can't be explained at a dinner table. Government AI stuff? Data sorcery? Defence magic? Sure. Whatever it is, Airbus is paying a billion dollars for another decade of it.
🚀 Elon Musk took a significant L yesterday as Tony Wu—cofounder of xAI—resigned, joining several other cofounders who've recently walked out the door. Musk launched xAI in 2023 to compete with OpenAI and Google. It's now hemorrhaging the talent that was supposed to beat them. The company is still expected to go public with SpaceX later this year.
🏦 $SCHW Charles Schwab dropped over 6% after fintech platform Altruist launched an AI-powered tax planning tool, sparking fears that their advisory business just got a very unwelcome competitor. Nothing humbles a 50-year-old financial institution quite like a startup with an algorithm and a grudge.
🎵 $SPOT Spotify absolutely exploded, surging ~15% after adding a record 38 million new users in Q4 alone, bringing total monthly active users to 751 million. For context, that's roughly twice the population of the United States paying monthly to avoid ads or listen to true crime podcasts. Both are valid life choices.
PREDICTION MARKETS
🎰 The World's Worst Insider Trader Lost $174,000 on Two Bets
Remember that $100K Polymarket bet we covered yesterday—the guy betting the US would strike Iran by end of day Monday? We suspected insider trading. We were spectacularly wrong.
The Polymarket account "thesecondhighlander" has been fully exposed, and the numbers are painful:
All-time P&L: -$174,261.88
Total predictions: 2
Win rate: 0%
Bet #1: Trump wouldn't win 2024 — Lost $74,997.91
Bet #2: US strikes Iran by Feb 9 — Lost $99,263.97
Two bets. Two 100% losses. $174K incinerated with surgical incompetence. As one Twitter account perfectly put it: "Never attribute to insider trading what can adequately be explained by someone being a massive idiot."
The Munch Take: Prediction markets are legitimate tools for informed traders—and apparently a highly efficient mechanism for separating overconfident people from their money at industrial speed. This wasn't insider information. It was extreme conviction with zero accuracy. A rare and brutally expensive combination. Don't be this person.
From the financial renegade who has predicted almost every major economic event since the late ‘90s comes an urgent new warning:
America Is About To Be Displaced, Forever
An unstoppable new force is about to destroy millions of Americans financially (Goldman Sachs estimates 12,400 daily), while generating millions of dollars for others… Which side will you be on?
🚀 Pre-Market Fuel
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