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Reddit’s Stock Pickers Are Having a Monster Year. Allegedly.
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AI Has a Grid Backlog
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A Reddit thread recently asked a question that should make every financial advisor a little nervous: What’s your current YTD return from picking stocks?
TL;DR: 169 people on r/ValueInvesting (post) shared their 2026 returns. 64% said they’re up 30% or more. The S&P 500 is up about 13.5%. Either Reddit found the secret to beating the market, or something funny is going on. (It’s the second one.)
So I did what any reasonable person would do. I read every comment and put all 169 answers in a spreadsheet.
Here’s what Reddit says it did this year.
The typical commenter says they’re up 30–50%. The market is up 13.5%.
Out of 169 answers:
108 people (64%) said they’re up 30% or more
27 people (16%) said they’re up 100%+. That means they doubled their money in under nine months.
17 people (10%) said they’re up less than 10%
9 people (5%) admitted to losing money
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is up about 13.5% this year, dividends included.
That means at least 130 of the 169 commenters, 77%, say they beat the market by a mile. And 27 of them say they beat it by roughly 7x.
For comparison, 79% of professional large-cap fund managers lost to the S&P 500 last year. These are people with Bloomberg terminals, analyst teams, and MBAs from schools with ivy on the walls.
Apparently they should have been on Reddit.
Beautiful.
So is everyone on Reddit a genius?
Probably not. Click below to read the full story.
The Fed’s first rate hike since 2023 has left six in ten S&P 500 stocks below trend
On September 16 the Federal Reserve raised its policy rate by a quarter point to a range of 3.75% to 4%, a unanimous decision and the first increase in more than three years. Kevin Warsh, who replaced Jerome Powell as chair in May, signaled at least one more before the year is out.
The equity market had been telling on itself for weeks beforehand. Barchart figures via Investing.com show 39.96% of S&P 500 members trading above their 100-day moving average as of September 22, down from a peak near 75% in late July and below the 50% line since early this month.
Inflation explains most of the change in tone. The personal consumption expenditures index rose 3.7% in the year through June, with core at 3.3%, both of which Fed Governor Lisa Cook flagged in an August speech as well above target. Warsh then used Jackson Hole to say recent improvements did not show that underlying trends had meaningfully improved, and odds of a September hike on CME FedWatch moved from roughly 30% to 56% within days.
The speed of the reversal owes something to positioning. Citadel Securities counted a 22% rally from the March 30 low, worth about $12 trillion in added market value across five months, before leveraged ETF assets fell $70 billion (31%) from their June peak, with semiconductor funds down 50%.
Seasonality is not helping. September has been the weakest month of the year since 1928, closing lower in 55% of years and averaging -1.5% in midterm years, per the same Citadel note, and the second half of the month is historically the worst two-week stretch on the calendar. With one more hike penciled in, that 40% reading has a few sessions left to survive.
America’s planned data center capacity is 6.2 times what is currently running
US data centers in operation today draw 61.8 GW. The figure sitting in the planned column is 385.8 GW, a multiple of 6.2x, which means that for every gigawatt currently humming away in a server hall, another 5.2 exist so far on paper.
The pipeline is also wildly uneven by state. Texas has 97.9 GW planned against an operating base of just 7.2 GW, a ratio of 13.7x and comfortably the most lopsided of any major market. Indiana, a relative newcomer to the hyperscaler map, sits at 11.5x, with 15.6 GW planned on a base of 1.4 GW. Ohio (6.1x), Georgia (5.5x), and Arizona (3.5x) are building on bases of 4.1 GW, 3.0 GW, and 3.7 GW respectively.
Virginia is the exception. Long the default address for American internet infrastructure, it has the biggest operating fleet on the list at 17.3 GW and a comparatively restrained 34.8 GW planned, giving it the lowest ratio here at 2.0x. That is roughly what a mature market looks like once the cheap land and the spare substation capacity have gone.
Naturally, “planned” is doing a lot of work in a dataset like this. Projects get announced, queued for interconnection, resited, and shelved, and no utility is budgeting for the full 385.8 GW to show up. How much of it does get energized will be settled in interconnection queues and transformer order books, which move at a rather different speed than a chip fab.
Stock of the Day
GMAB: Genmab A/S
Genmab is emerging as a Biotech Therapeutics leader as sustained institutional accumulation and strong relative strength have pushed shares near a 52-week high in a confirmed uptrend.
Not investment advice. Do your own research.
Note: This article does not provide investment advice. The stocks mentioned should not be taken as recommendations. Your investments are solely your decisions.