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📉 This Changes Everything
Pip Munch
February 17, 2026
Tired of trading your small account? The game has changed, and you no longer need to trade your own money. You need prop firms.
☕️ GM Munchers! Spent my Sunday writing this instead of spending time with my wife, only to realize as soon as I finished that the market was closed yesterday. Please read this with gratitude. I’m sleeping on the couch again.
On today’s menu:
📉 Inflation Cools & Massive Jobs Revision
🏈 DraftKings: When Super Bowl Ads Can't Save You
👀 Daily Breakdown: Coinbase, Expedia & Rivian
📅 The Week Ahead: Consumer Reality Check
😬 The Worst-Performing Stock This Year
Friday’s numbers:
S&P 500 | 6,836 | +0.05% |
Nasdaq | 22,546 | -0.22% |
Dow Jones | 49,500 | +0.09% |
Bitcoin | $68,390 | -1.96% |
BREAKING NEWS
❄️ Inflation Takes a Chill Pill (Finally)
Friday's CPI report delivered news that's been rarer than a bearish take on Nvidia: inflation is actually cooling down. The print came in at 2.4% annually—down from December's 2.7% and below the expected 2.5%. It's the slowest pace since May 2025.
What this means: The Fed Rate Cut odds just got slightly more interesting. There's a 93% chance they do nothing in March, but prediction markets now show a 26% chance of TWO rate cuts this year—the highest probability right now.
The Munch Take: Unless we nosedive into a full recession, rate cuts are rocket fuel for stocks. These odds will swing wildly as more data drops, but for now, the inflation story is moving in the right direction. We'll do the boring research and keep you up to date so you don't have to.
📊 The Million-Job Phantom: Uncle Sam's Math Problem
Turns out the government's calculator was broken all of 2025. The government just revealed a massive revision showing that job gains were overstated by over 1 million jobs—the largest annual downward revision in decades.
Instead of adding 584,000 jobs, the real number was 181,000.
The kicker? Healthcare added 391,000 jobs, meaning every other sector COMBINED lost 210,000 jobs last year.
Why this matters: This completely rewrites the economic narrative traders operated under for 12 months. Markets are now aggressively repricing rate cut odds, creating volatility whiplash as traders can't decide whether to trust terrible historical data or surprisingly decent January numbers.
The Munch Take: This is like not knowing whether to trust the news or your sketchy uncle whose conspiracy theories end up being right 50% of the time. Do we focus on the massive revision or the solid January report? Nobody knows. The market will be voting with its money this week.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
Stop trading your own money.
Here's the brutal truth: Your $500 account isn't making you rich—it's making you frustrated. A 10% monthly gain gets you $50. Congrats, you just earned enough to cover… one tank of gas?
This is why prop firms exist.
How It Works:
Sign up for a challenge at Lark Funding
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The Math: 5% monthly return on a $100K account = $4,500 in your pocket. On your $500 personal account? That's $25. Which one sounds better?
Stop grinding pennies. Start trading with actual capital.
STOCKS
🏈 DraftKings: When Super Bowl Ads Can't Save You
Did you notice in between the boring Super Bowl game and the questionable halftime show that almost every commercial was for sports betting? Millennials are paying for their burritos in 4-part installments but clearly still have money for sports betting.
Either way, turns out DraftKings needed better ads—the stock crashed 13.5% on Friday despite beating profit expectations.
The reason? Management issued weak revenue guidance for the year, and in this market, that's an instant guillotine. It also doesn’t help that the competition is absolutely brutal right now.
Polymarket and Kalshi are stealing volume with prediction markets, while every legacy sportsbook is hemorrhaging cash on customer acquisition costs. It's a race to see who can lose money the fastest while gaining market share—a strategy that works great until it doesn't.
The stock's down 57% over the past year—which is actually better than most of their customers' betting records.
The Munch Take: We're not touching this with a 10-foot pole. When a company's biggest growth strategy is Super Bowl ads and hoping people lose money faster, that's not an investment thesis—that's a casino.
MARKET OVERVIEW
🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers
🚀 $COIN Coinbase ripped 16.46% Friday despite missing earnings expectations. Apparently Wall Street doesn't care about revenue when you're generating $3.07 billion in free cash flow. Our average cost basis from 2025 is ~$165/share, so we're not complaining.
✈️ $EXPE Expedia crashed 6.41% after beating earnings. The crime? Management mentioned AI-powered travel platforms might eventually become competition. Someone should tell Wall Street that booking a flight with ChatGPT sounds like a nightmare.
🚗 $RIVN Rivian only delivered 9,745 vehicles as US EV sales collapsed 36% and the stock absolutely launched 26.64%. Why? They beat expectations. The bar was apparently set at "please don't go bankrupt this quarter," and investors celebrated accordingly. Nothing says healthy market like rewarding a company for losing slightly less money than expected.
📉 $PINS Pinterest nosedived 16.83% after their earnings call blamed tariff disruptions and retailers pulling ad spending. The real reason? My wife must have finally cut back on online shopping. When the suburban moms stop browsing, Pinterest's business model evaporates faster than my trading account during earnings season.
Watch Now! Porter Stansberry & Luke Lango join forces to unveil:
The Three Titanic Forces Converging To Unleash A New 1776 Moment
“We have never seen wealth created at this size and speed"
- MIT Researcher
OUTLOOK
📅 The Week Ahead: Consumer Reality Check
Now that Big Tech earnings are behind us, it's time to see if the average American can still afford groceries.
Walmart Reports Thursday: As the largest retailer on planet Earth, their earnings call is basically a nationwide consumer health check. If they say shoppers are pulling back, the entire retail sector gets nuked. Other major reports include DoorDash (are people still ordering $47 poke bowls?) and Booking Holdings (travel demand check).
The Fed's Secret Diary Drops Wednesday: The FOMC Meeting Minutes hit Wednesday afternoon, and traders will be reading these notes like they're the Dead Sea Scrolls. At the last meeting, Jerome Powell hit pause on rate cuts. Now everyone wants to know: How worried is the Fed about inflation? Are they secretly panicking about the labour market revision? Did anyone mention the word "recession"?
The Munch Take: Walmart's guidance matters more than any Fed speech right now. Consumer spending is 70% of GDP—if that cracks, nothing else matters.
🚀 Pre-Market Fuel
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