Friday Charts 2025: Buckle Up—Your Portfolio Won’t Like This

Crypto’s playing chicken with reality again. These charts either scream ‘buy the dip’ or ‘run for the hills’—no in-between.

Volatility is back on the menu. Bitcoin’s 20% weekly swing isn’t a glitch—it’s the system working as designed (for maximal pain).

Altcoins: Still pretending they’re not leveraged Bitcoin calls. Ethereum’s gas fees just funded a small country’s GDP—congrats, degens.

Meanwhile, Wall Street’s ‘blockchain experts’ are still using 2017 TA textbooks. Good luck with that.

Closer: Whether you’re stacking sats or shorting memecoins, remember—the market takes no prisoners. Especially on a Friday.

Meta said last week it’s making a high return on its giant AI investments because it makes its ads more effective. The rest of corporate America doesn’t seem to be benefiting just yet.

If you’re not paying for the product, the product is you:

Meta is so good at targeting ads, it makes $25 of revenue off of each and every one of its users, each and every month.

The not-so-magnificent 493:

The Mag 7 continues to grow earnings at a double-digit pace, but the rest of the S&P is expected to grow at 3% or less over the last three quarters of the year — less than the rate of inflation.

The US stock market is narrow and expensive:

Nvidia now makes up almost 8% of the S&P 500 and trades on 58x P/E. In 1994, the largest stock was GE, which was only 3% of the S&P 500 and traded on just 8x P/E. 

Fewer college kids:

The Association of International Educators estimates that new international enrollment to American universities will be down as much as 40% in the upcoming semester.

Fewer immigrants, fewer jobs:

Claudia Sahm says “reduced labor supply is likely the key driver” of the weak jobs growth reported last week. That is bad news, but maybe less bad than if weak demand was more to blame.

Kids today, ugh.

The FT’s John Burn-Murdoch runs the numbers on Gen Z and millennials and….one sec. Sorry, I thought I had a notification on my phone. Anyway, kids today, right? The good news for young job seekers is that it won’t be hard to look good by comparison.

Looking good by comparison:

In the US, we’re worried that interest on the national debt is now eating up a record high 18% of government revenue. In China, though, one-third of provinces spend over 100% of revenue on debt repayments. I feel better now — it’s always nice to have a friend doing worse than you are.

ChatGPT usage is booming:

And GPT-5 is even better — an excellent but incremental and non-threatening evolution of the LLM. Is that enough to justify the $500 billion valuation that OpenAI has reportedly assigned itself? That WOULD put it on a rich but not ridiculous valuation multiple of about 25x this year’s sales.

It’s not very good at charts, though:

This misproportioned chart crime was included in this week’s GPT-5 livestream. I take that as evidence AGI is further away than Sam Altman would have us think. 

Google is pulling back ahead:

As good as GPT-5 is, Google’s Genie 3 LLM, also released this week, was even more impressive. Polymarket odds now give Google a 53% chance of having the best AI model by the end of the year, vs. OpenAI at just 17%.

Disagree?

It might be better if you do.

Have a great weekend, agreeable readers.

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