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- NYSE volume 5% below its one-month average
- NASDAQ volume 15% above its one-month average
- VIX index: down 1.20% to 20.56
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 4:40 PM EDT
Thanks so much for reading my Diary today.
I will be out of the office tomorrow, but my replacement is the luminous, inventive and indefatigable, the Lenny Harris of pinch hitters... Sarge!
Enjoy the evening.
Be safe.
See you back early Friday morning.
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 4:15 PM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 4:00 PM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 3:31 PM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 3:05 PM EDT
I am back shorting the indices with the S&P cash +31 handles:
* SPY $665.28
* (QQQ) $602.52
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 2:55 PM EDT
I will be out of the office tomorrow.
Our pinch hitter will be the talented Sarge Guilfoyle.
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 2:35 PM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 2:25 PM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 2:15 PM EDT
From Randorama (I think this study got the cannabis sector going this afternoon):
Randy
Legalizing Medical Marijuana Leads To ‘Significant Reductions’ In Opioid Prescriptions, Another Study Shows
Medical marijuana legalization is “associated with significant reductions in opioid prescribing,” yet another new study has found.
Researchers at the University of Georgia and University of Colorado analyzed prescription claims for 15 to 20 million insured Americans annually from 2007-2020, comparing the prevalence of opioid prescriptions in states with and without medical cannabis programs in place.
“We find that [medical cannabis laws, or MCLs] are associated with significant reductions in opioid prescribing,” the study, published in the American Journal of Health Economics, found. “Among treated states, the rate of patients receiving opioid prescriptions fell by 16% on average, masking substantial heterogeneity across states, with individual state declines reaching 22%.”
Medical marijuana legalization is “associated with significant reductions in opioid prescribing,” yet another new study has found.
Researchers at the University of Georgia and University of Colorado analyzed prescription claims for 15 to 20 million insured Americans annually from 2007-2020, comparing the prevalence of opioid prescriptions in states with and without medical cannabis programs in place.
“We find that [medical cannabis laws, or MCLs] are associated with significant reductions in opioid prescribing,” the study, published in the American Journal of Health Economics, found. “Among treated states, the rate of patients receiving opioid prescriptions fell by 16% on average, masking substantial heterogeneity across states, with individual state declines reaching 22%.”
CBD Can Help Treat Pain, Cancer, Schizophrenia, COVID And Other Conditions
“We also find significant decreases in the intensive margin, both in the daily supply and prescriptions per patient,” the researchers said. “Among subpopulations, decreases were relatively uniform across sex, age, and race/ethnicity, though cancer patients, and non-cancer Black patients experienced a larger reduction (over 20%).”
The study also identified increases in the frequency of use of NSAID pain medications, “suggesting that MCLs are associated with substitution away from opioids toward safer alternatives.”
“These findings support the potential of MCLs as a policy tool for reducing opioid use and promoting safer pain management,” the study authors said.
“Specifically, we find a 15.8% average decrease in the rate of patients with opioid prescriptions, relative to the baseline prior to legalizing cannabis, or 107.1 fewer patients each quarter with opioids prescriptions filled per each 10,000 non-cancer enrolled patients. While all twelve MCL adopting states of our timeframe experience decreases, average results mask substantial heterogeneity across implementing states, as some state exhibit negligible decreases (e.g. Illinois), and other states show drops of over 20% in opioid prescription rates (e.g. Minnesota, New York).”
The study provides one of the first estimates on the impact of medical marijuana legalization laws being adopted based on “patient level characteristics,” the researchers wrote.
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 1:45 PM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 1:15 PM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT
I am making (MSOS) my Trade of the Next Month.
I have done a lot of leg work on rescheduling over the last several weeks.
Based on my contacts in Washington, D.C. I believe the rescheduling of cannabis will finally occur over an investable (and maybe/hopefully trading) timeframe.
I give rescheduling at least a 80% probability by year-end.
I am adding to MSOS more aggressively — with a $5 buy top.
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 12:40 PM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 12:15 PM EDT
With S&P cash up by only +18 handles I have taken in all of my index shorts for a profit (I was scaling higher all morning):
* (SPY) $664.51
* (QQQ) $601.75
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 11:58 AM EDT
I have two research calls at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. today.
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 10:22 AM EDT
I moved to medium-sized Index shorts with S&P cash +56 handles:
* (SPY) $667.71
* (QQQ) $603.61
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 9:50 AM EDT
* Good beat by (BAC)
* Great beat by (MS)
* Poor results at (PNC)
BAC First Look
MS First Look
PNC First Look
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 9:45 AM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 9:32 AM EDT
-OMER +72% (Novo Nordisk and Omeros announce asset purchase and license agreement for Omeros’ clinical-stage MASP-3 inhibitor zaltenibart (OMS906))
-VERI +47% (reports prelim Q3; announces VDR contracts)
-TE +27% (Nextracker and T1 Energy partner on US-made steel solar frames; Deal valued over $75M)
-BTDR +21% (reports Sept BTC Produced 452 v 375 m/m)
-HI +19% (to be acquired by Lone Star for $32.00/shr cash at EV ~$3.8B)
-FLNC +18% (hearing BMO raises price target)
-PZZA +11% (renewed talk of $64/share bid from Apollo)
-SPRC +9.6% (to acquire Miza III Ventures at EV $3.3M to which it will transfer its Advanced Clinical Stage Pharmaceutical Portfolio)
-DLTR +7.8% (guidance from Investor Day)
-CRDO +6.6% (planning to develop custom silicon for AI data centers)
-BG +5.4% (adjusts guidance)
-UUUU +5.2% (nuclear, uranium stock strength off escalating US/China trade tensions)
-APLD +4.7% (strength following Blackrock, Nvidia led group $40B data center agreement)
-ASML +4.6% (earnings, guidance)
-MS +4.6% (earnings, color)
-BAC +4.5% (earnings, guidance)
-RUN +4.4% (BMO Capital Markets Raised RUN to Market Perform from Underperform, price target: $19)
-SARO +3.8% (lands maintenance deal with Mauritania Airlines)
-CFG +3.1% (earnings, guidance)
-FHN +2.5% (earnings, guidance)
-NVDA +2.5% (reportedly investment consortium that includes BlackRock, Nvidia, xAI and Microsoft to acquire Texas-based Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management for $40B)
-SOC -23% (issues statement on California Coastal Commission Litigation; Court ruled it would deny Sable's claims; Sable vigorously disagrees with the court’s tentative ruling)
-ASPI -9.7% (prices 17.2M shares in $210M underwritten public offering)
-KARO -6.5% (earnings, guidance)
-EQBK -3.7% (earnings, guidance)
-PNC -3.0% (earnings, guidance)
-ABT -2.6% (earnings, guidance)
-FFIV -2.3% (discloses unauthorized access by a nation-state threat actor)
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 9:20 AM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 9:09 AM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 8:45 AM EDT
9:30 a.m.: Fed Board Governor Miran (Voter, Dovish Dissenter) participates in conversation before the CNBC Invest in America Forum
(No text. Q&A from moderator. Livestream at https://www.cnbc.com/);
12:10 p.m.: Fed Bank of Atlanta President Bostic (Non-Voter) participates in moderated conversation and Q&A on "Economic Mobility" before the United Way Regional Summit on Economic Mobility for Children and Youth, Atlanta, GA
(Livestream available. Audience Q&A expected. No media Q&A. No embargoed text);
12:30 p.m.: Fed Board Governor Miran (Voter, Dovish Dissenter) participates in a panel discussion at the Nomura Research Forum, Washington DC (No text. Q&A from moderator and audience);
1:00 p.m.: Fed Board Governor Waller (Voter) speaks on artificial intelligence before the 2025 DC Fintech Week event, Washington DC (Text available. Q&A from moderator.
1:35 p.m.: Fed Bank of Kansas City President Schmid (Voter) speaks on monetary policy, the outlook and the Federal Reserve at event hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's Omaha branch, Omaha, NE (No text. Q&A with moderator and audience. Livestream available)’
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 8:40 AM EDT
From Peter Boockvar:
Before I get to the key earnings comments, I’ll start by saying we’re seeing rally in French bonds as it seems the political crisis there is calming down but I argue only temporarily. That is because Prime Minister Lecornu (which he got, lost and got back all within a week) can keep his job because he got support from the socialist party after he backed off from the pension reforms of a few years ago that raised the retirement age to 64 from 62. So calm for now, but a costly concession. Bonds in the region are rallying too.
I’m next going to the earnings calls and starting with comments from JP Morgan as there were a lot of interesting comments on key things like the macro and the situation in private credit. Generally, banks are talking about a resilient consumer, mixed comments on corporate (large companies more steady than small) while those selling to consumers are still seeing a very bifurcated customer.
From JP Morgan:
“Consumers and small businesses remain resilient based on our data. While we are closely watching the potentially softening labor market, our credit metrics, including early stage delinquencies, remain stable and slightly better than expected.”
When talking about private credit generally, “It probably is true at the margin that some of the new direct lending initiatives involve underwriting at slightly higher expected losses. And that’s significant, because as we’ve been discussing here, the wholesale charge off rate has been very, very low for a long time. And I think simply having that normalized would produce some increases in wholesale charge-offs.”
Specifically for JP Morgan, they had zero exposure to First Brands but took a $170mm hit from Tricolor.
On a question about their exposure via loans to private credit and the like, otherwise known as Non-Depository Financial Institutions, “the vast majority of that type of lending that we do is highly secured or in some way structured or securitized. In other words, it’s not like we’re doing extremely high risk, low rated lending to the NFDI community. And so that doesn’t mean that there’s no risk. That doesn’t mean things can’t go wrong. And obviously if you’re doing secured lending and there are problems with the collateral, that’s an issue, which is clearly evident in the case of Tricolor.”
“a lot of the private credit actors are large, very sophisticated, very good at credit underwriting. So I don’t think you’re supposed to jump to the conclusion that there are necessarily lower standards...And to the extent that we lend to some of these folks who are clients of ours as well as competitors of ours, that lending follows our normal practices, it’s often highly secured, and everything we do is in one way or another risky. But I’m not sure that our lending to the NDFI community is an area of risk that we see as more elevated than other areas of risk, I guess is what I would say.”
Jamie Dimon then chimed in and said this, “They know what they’re doing, they’ve been around a long time, but they’re not all very smart. We don’t even know the standards that other banks underwriting to some of these entities. And I would suspect that some of those dealers may not be as good as you think. Hopefully, we are very good though.”
“But we think we’re quite careful and obviously we scour the world looking for things that we should be worried about. But I do remind people we’ve had a bull market for a long time. Asset prices are high. A lot of credit stuff that you would see out there, you will only see if there’s a downturn.”
On Tricolor, “my antenna goes up when things like that happen. And I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see a cockroach, there are probably more, and so everyone should be forewarned on this one.”
Back to the CFO, “And obviously, as we’ve been discussing a lot in consumer over the last couple of years, when you’re in that normalization moment, you’re constantly wondering, is this normalization or have we switched to deterioration? I don’t know if we’re seeing that yet in wholesale, but it’s also worth nothing that the current portfolio is going to have a slightly different mix from what we have had over the last 10 or 15 years. And so the expected charge-off rate is going to be a little bit higher, although it’s equal, but obviously that comes with appropriate revenues and returns.”
To some macro from them, “Now talking to our economists, I was struck by something that Mike Feroli said about thinking about the current labor market in this moment of what people are describing as a low hiring, low firing moment. You can think of that as potentially explained by employers experiencing high uncertainty. And so if you believe that and you think about this moment as a moment of high uncertainty, I think tipping point is a little bit too strong a word. But certainly as you look ahead, there are risks.”
“We already have slowing growth. There are a variety of challenges and sources of volatility and uncertainty. And so it’s pretty easy to imagine a world where the labor market deteriorates from here. And if that happens, obviously we’re going to see worse consumer credit performance. So I wouldn’t say we’re pounding the table with this view, but we’re just noting as we always do, that there are risks and that the fact that things are fine now doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to be great forever.”
Here was some macro from Jane Fraser at Citigroup:
“Taking a step back, the macro environment reflects a global economy that’s proved more resilient than many anticipated. The US continues to be a pace setter, driven by consistent consumer spending as well as tech investments in AI and data centers. That said, there are pockets of valuation frothiness in the market, so I hope discipline remains. But overall, while growth is cooling somewhat and we’re keeping an eye on the labor market, America’s economic engine is indeed still coming.”
“In Asia, China’s domestic spending has slowed, However, the investments they are making in technology are staggering, and the world should take notice. India’s fundamentals of a young, tech savvy labor force and robust domestic consumption continue to drive high growth there. But in Europe, structural challenges still need to be dealt with for the continent to escape this low growth cycle.”
From Wells Fargo:
“Loan growth accelerated in the third quarter, increasing from both the second quarter and a year ago. Our credit performance was strong and continued to improve.”
Loan growth came in C&I and “Securities based lending in wealth and investment management, credit card, and auto loans...while residential mortgage loans declined.” They are also lending into the non bank financial sector.
“What we’re not seeing is growth in the commercial bank yet. And really that’s just because the utilization rates and the revolvers continue to be pretty stable now for a number of quarters. I think that likely picks up over time as people continue to gain more confidence that the economy is going to end up in a really good place and some other factors there, rates start to come down help as well.”
On credit quality, “Commercial net loan charge-offs were stable from the second quarter with lower losses in our commercial and industrial loan portfolio, largely offset by higher commercial real estate losses. Office valuations continue to stabilize, and although we expect additional losses, which could be lumpy, they should be well within our expectations.”
Consumer net loan charge offs declined “with the exception of auto.”
On the consumer, “the performance of the consumer is just very, very consistent. Consumer spend kind of week after week is up the same amount that we’ve seen over the past bunch of months on both credit and debit. If fuel prices go up, then you see less discretionary spendign and vice versa. And we don’t see any meaningful changes across different affluence levels. And again, we don’t have any real subprime to speak of in our book, so it might not be representative of necessarily what everyone else might see out there, but we just see a lot of consistency.” My bold.
“In fact, when we look at it, payment rates are better as opposed to even flat or worse. Deposits remain strong. And so when you look at it, you see really strong credit results. You see strong consumer spend and stable deposits. And those things just kind of paint a picture of a consistently strong consumer, even though, what you read about is would lead you to believe that they’re being more cautious. Our results just say that there’s a high degree of consistency there without any real pockets of slowing”
“On the corporate side, we do see consistency in terms of middle market companies being cautious, whether it’s not replacing people, not building inventories as they want to see, the whole tariff outcome play out and anything on the broader market.”
“And then specifically in the auto business, the answer for us is we don’t see any real change in our results....So no negative surprises there at this point.”
More on the consumer from Domino’s Pizza:
“It was a great Q3 for our US business...Our carryout business was positive, our delivery business was positive, and our order count growth was positive. All of this resulted in meaningful market share growth.”
Helping was their Best Deal Ever program and the tasty parmesan stuffed crust pizza.
That all said, “Our third quarter financial results continue to be impacted by a challenging macro backdrop...We continue to expect our US comp for the year to be 3% and to grow our market share meaningfully in QSR pizza. Our comp could be pressured by the macro environment in the US, which we have seen intensify across the restaurant industry at the start of our fourth quarter.” I bolded to highlight.
More on this, “I think what we did want to point out was we’ve definitely been seeing a slowing across restaurant industry sales to start our fourth quarter, and that’s just a factor that’s out there.”
From Albertson’s on the US consumer:
“So what we’ve seen from the consumer is a continued focus on value, a shift to trading down, maybe it’s smaller package sizes, a focus on own brands...We see an increased usage in coupons. We see them sticking closer to their shopping list, maybe not buying that extra item that extra bottle of whatever. They’re kind of shortening their list and sticking to it.”
“On the other side of it, too, we’re still seeing a lot of impacts from healthier eating, I think it’s an overall awareness of making better choices, categories like functional beverage, protein shakes, protein enhanced milks and those kind of things, supplements, all of those continue to grow.”
From LVMH and its stock is jumping:
“LVMH showed good resilience in the first 9 months of 2025 with improved trends in Q3 across all business groups. Fashion and leather goods, in particular, benefited from solid local demand in its key nationalities with Mainland China turning positive in Q3, solid growth in the US, which improved sequentially compared to Q2 and positive growth with Europeans in line with the previous quarter.”
From ASML, also its stock is rallying:
“We have seen continued positive momentum around investments in AI, and have also seen this extending to more customers.” And they expect higher sales next year than this year.
To the overseas data of note, while China’s September CPI fell .3% y/o/y it was all due to a drop in food prices of 4.4%. Prices ex food and energy were actually higher by 1% y/o/y, the quickest all year but overall China is actually living through some price stability that is actually stable. PPI fell 2.3% y/o/y as expected as price competition remains intense particularly in manufacturing. Stocks there rebounded overnight and are certainly having a stellar year.
Before I get to the key earnings comments, I’ll start by saying we’re seeing rally in French bonds as it seems the political crisis there is calming down but I argue only temporarily. That is because Prime Minister Lecornu (which he got, lost and got back all within a week) can keep his job because he got support from the socialist party after he backed off from the pension reforms of a few years ago that raised the retirement age to 64 from 62. So calm for now, but a costly concession. Bonds in the region are rallying too.
I’m next going to the earnings calls and starting with comments from JP Morgan as there were a lot of interesting comments on key things like the macro and the situation in private credit. Generally, banks are talking about a resilient consumer, mixed comments on corporate (large companies more steady than small) while those selling to consumers are still seeing a very bifurcated customer.
From JP Morgan:
“Consumers and small businesses remain resilient based on our data. While we are closely watching the potentially softening labor market, our credit metrics, including early stage delinquencies, remain stable and slightly better than expected.”
When talking about private credit generally, “It probably is true at the margin that some of the new direct lending initiatives involve underwriting at slightly higher expected losses. And that’s significant, because as we’ve been discussing here, the wholesale charge off rate has been very, very low for a long time. And I think simply having that normalized would produce some increases in wholesale charge-offs.”
Specifically for JP Morgan, they had zero exposure to First Brands but took a $170mm hit from Tricolor.
On a question about their exposure via loans to private credit and the like, otherwise known as Non-Depository Financial Institutions, “the vast majority of that type of lending that we do is highly secured or in some way structured or securitized. In other words, it’s not like we’re doing extremely high risk, low rated lending to the NFDI community. And so that doesn’t mean that there’s no risk. That doesn’t mean things can’t go wrong. And obviously if you’re doing secured lending and there are problems with the collateral, that’s an issue, which is clearly evident in the case of Tricolor.”
“a lot of the private credit actors are large, very sophisticated, very good at credit underwriting. So I don’t think you’re supposed to jump to the conclusion that there are necessarily lower standards...And to the extent that we lend to some of these folks who are clients of ours as well as competitors of ours, that lending follows our normal practices, it’s often highly secured, and everything we do is in one way or another risky. But I’m not sure that our lending to the NDFI community is an area of risk that we see as more elevated than other areas of risk, I guess is what I would say.”
Jamie Dimon then chimed in and said this, “They know what they’re doing, they’ve been around a long time, but they’re not all very smart. We don’t even know the standards that other banks underwriting to some of these entities. And I would suspect that some of those dealers may not be as good as you think. Hopefully, we are very good though.”
“But we think we’re quite careful and obviously we scour the world looking for things that we should be worried about. But I do remind people we’ve had a bull market for a long time. Asset prices are high. A lot of credit stuff that you would see out there, you will only see if there’s a downturn.”
On Tricolor, “my antenna goes up when things like that happen. And I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see a cockroach, there are probably more, and so everyone should be forewarned on this one.”
Back to the CFO, “And obviously, as we’ve been discussing a lot in consumer over the last couple of years, when you’re in that normalization moment, you’re constantly wondering, is this normalization or have we switched to deterioration? I don’t know if we’re seeing that yet in wholesale, but it’s also worth nothing that the current portfolio is going to have a slightly different mix from what we have had over the last 10 or 15 years. And so the expected charge-off rate is going to be a little bit higher, although it’s equal, but obviously that comes with appropriate revenues and returns.”
To some macro from them, “Now talking to our economists, I was struck by something that Mike Feroli said about thinking about the current labor market in this moment of what people are describing as a low hiring, low firing moment. You can think of that as potentially explained by employers experiencing high uncertainty. And so if you believe that and you think about this moment as a moment of high uncertainty, I think tipping point is a little bit too strong a word. But certainly as you look ahead, there are risks.”
“We already have slowing growth. There are a variety of challenges and sources of volatility and uncertainty. And so it’s pretty easy to imagine a world where the labor market deteriorates from here. And if that happens, obviously we’re going to see worse consumer credit performance. So I wouldn’t say we’re pounding the table with this view, but we’re just noting as we always do, that there are risks and that the fact that things are fine now doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to be great forever.”
Here was some macro from Jane Fraser at Citigroup:
“Taking a step back, the macro environment reflects a global economy that’s proved more resilient than many anticipated. The US continues to be a pace setter, driven by consistent consumer spending as well as tech investments in AI and data centers. That said, there are pockets of valuation frothiness in the market, so I hope discipline remains. But overall, while growth is cooling somewhat and we’re keeping an eye on the labor market, America’s economic engine is indeed still coming.”
“In Asia, China’s domestic spending has slowed, However, the investments they are making in technology are staggering, and the world should take notice. India’s fundamentals of a young, tech savvy labor force and robust domestic consumption continue to drive high growth there. But in Europe, structural challenges still need to be dealt with for the continent to escape this low growth cycle.”
From Wells Fargo:
“Loan growth accelerated in the third quarter, increasing from both the second quarter and a year ago. Our credit performance was strong and continued to improve.”
Loan growth came in C&I and “Securities based lending in wealth and investment management, credit card, and auto loans...while residential mortgage loans declined.” They are also lending into the non bank financial sector.
“What we’re not seeing is growth in the commercial bank yet. And really that’s just because the utilization rates and the revolvers continue to be pretty stable now for a number of quarters. I think that likely picks up over time as people continue to gain more confidence that the economy is going to end up in a really good place and some other factors there, rates start to come down help as well.”
On credit quality, “Commercial net loan charge-offs were stable from the second quarter with lower losses in our commercial and industrial loan portfolio, largely offset by higher commercial real estate losses. Office valuations continue to stabilize, and although we expect additional losses, which could be lumpy, they should be well within our expectations.”
Consumer net loan charge offs declined “with the exception of auto.”
On the consumer, “the performance of the consumer is just very, very consistent. Consumer spend kind of week after week is up the same amount that we’ve seen over the past bunch of months on both credit and debit. If fuel prices go up, then you see less discretionary spendign and vice versa. And we don’t see any meaningful changes across different affluence levels. And again, we don’t have any real subprime to speak of in our book, so it might not be representative of necessarily what everyone else might see out there, but we just see a lot of consistency.” My bold.
“In fact, when we look at it, payment rates are better as opposed to even flat or worse. Deposits remain strong. And so when you look at it, you see really strong credit results. You see strong consumer spend and stable deposits. And those things just kind of paint a picture of a consistently strong consumer, even though, what you read about is would lead you to believe that they’re being more cautious. Our results just say that there’s a high degree of consistency there without any real pockets of slowing”
“On the corporate side, we do see consistency in terms of middle market companies being cautious, whether it’s not replacing people, not building inventories as they want to see, the whole tariff outcome play out and anything on the broader market.”
“And then specifically in the auto business, the answer for us is we don’t see any real change in our results....So no negative surprises there at this point.”
More on the consumer from Domino’s Pizza:
“It was a great Q3 for our US business...Our carryout business was positive, our delivery business was positive, and our order count growth was positive. All of this resulted in meaningful market share growth.”
Helping was their Best Deal Ever program and the tasty parmesan stuffed crust pizza.
That all said, “Our third quarter financial results continue to be impacted by a challenging macro backdrop...We continue to expect our US comp for the year to be 3% and to grow our market share meaningfully in QSR pizza. Our comp could be pressured by the macro environment in the US, which we have seen intensify across the restaurant industry at the start of our fourth quarter.” I bolded to highlight.
More on this, “I think what we did want to point out was we’ve definitely been seeing a slowing across restaurant industry sales to start our fourth quarter, and that’s just a factor that’s out there.”
From Albertson’s on the US consumer:
“So what we’ve seen from the consumer is a continued focus on value, a shift to trading down, maybe it’s smaller package sizes, a focus on own brands...We see an increased usage in coupons. We see them sticking closer to their shopping list, maybe not buying that extra item that extra bottle of whatever. They’re kind of shortening their list and sticking to it.”
“On the other side of it, too, we’re still seeing a lot of impacts from healthier eating, I think it’s an overall awareness of making better choices, categories like functional beverage, protein shakes, protein enhanced milks and those kind of things, supplements, all of those continue to grow.”
From LVMH and its stock is jumping:
“LVMH showed good resilience in the first 9 months of 2025 with improved trends in Q3 across all business groups. Fashion and leather goods, in particular, benefited from solid local demand in its key nationalities with Mainland China turning positive in Q3, solid growth in the US, which improved sequentially compared to Q2 and positive growth with Europeans in line with the previous quarter.”
From ASML, also its stock is rallying:
“We have seen continued positive momentum around investments in AI, and have also seen this extending to more customers.” And they expect higher sales next year than this year.
To the overseas data of note, while China’s September CPI fell .3% y/o/y it was all due to a drop in food prices of 4.4%. Prices ex food and energy were actually higher by 1% y/o/y, the quickest all year but overall China is actually living through some price stability that is actually stable. PPI fell 2.3% y/o/y as expected as price competition remains intense particularly in manufacturing. Stocks there rebounded overnight and are certainly having a stellar year.
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 8:25 AM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 8:00 AM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 7:45 AM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 7:35 AM EDT
* In the premarket
Here are today's things:
* Reshorted (SPY) at $666.21 and (QQQ) at $603.12.
* Added small to my very large (GRNY) short at $35.40.
* Added to (MSOS) at $5.17.
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 7:25 AM EDT
* The Russell Index is no longer a value index...
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 7:15 AM EDT
* Technicians "top ticked" Mag 7 and then top ticked bitcoin
* Technicians are "ga ga at the go go" (h/t Hair, The Musical) about the Russell Index now... will they top tick mid-cap as well?
Bonus — Here are some great links:
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 6:45 AM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 6:35 AM EDT
* 5:15 AM Edition
I have moved up to small sized short the indices (with futures +44 handles):
* (SPY) $666.70
* (QQQ) $603.69
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 6:25 AM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 6:15 AM EDT
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 6:05 AM EDT
The S&P Short Range Oscillator stands at -0.55% vs. -1.07%.
That is basically in neutral gear.
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 5:55 AM EDT
I am back (again!) shorting the indices:
* (SPY) $665.36
* (QQQ) $602.08
BY Doug Kass · Oct 15, 2025, 5:45 AM EDT