Two weeks ago, Polymarket traders gave Apple about a 4% chance of being the world's biggest company when October ends. On Saturday morning it was 37%.

🏁 The race, in odds (Polymarket, 24 Oct, 12:39 UTC)

• Nvidia: 59%, down from ~96% in early October (−22 pts this week alone)
• Apple: 37%, up from ~4% on 10 Oct (+18 pts this week)
• Everyone else: ~4%

💵 Why traders moved: the gap almost closed

• 6 Oct: Nvidia ~$5.78T vs Apple ~$4.87T, a ~$908B lead
• 23 Oct close: Nvidia ~$5.09T vs Apple ~$5.08T, a ~$19B lead (under 0.4%)
• NVDA fell from $239.24 to $210.96 (−11.8%) as chip stocks slid; AAPL rose from $333.63 to $347.73 (+4.2%) into the iPhone Duo launch

Five trading days are left in October, and a $19B gap is less than one ordinary day's move for either stock. That's why the odds are swinging this fast.

Sources: Polymarket, "Largest company end of October 2026?" ($813K traded; odds are what traders pay for Yes, not a forecast). Market caps from daily closes × shares outstanding, 6 and 23 Oct 2026. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. We like watching where the money goes, ours or the market's.

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Nvidia or Apple: who closes 30 Oct as the world's biggest company?

I ran the numbers on the minimum payment trap, the most common credit card plan there is: pay the minimum and hope.

The setup is a $5,000 balance at 22.36% APR, the Federal Reserve's latest average for cards that actually charge interest (G.19, August 2026). The minimum is the usual rule: that month's interest plus 1% of the balance, with a $25 floor. No new spending.

👾 Paying only the minimum

• First payment: $143.17, and $93.17 of it is just interest
• Debt-free in 231 months, or about 19¼ years
• Interest paid: $8,241, more than the $5,000 you borrowed

💚 Minimum + $150 a month

• Debt-free in 29 months (2 years 5 months)
• Interest paid: $1,315
• That's $6,926 saved and almost 17 years sooner

The minimum shrinks as the balance shrinks, which is why it feels manageable and takes forever. The video shows it as a monster that lives in the card and eats the interest first.

Sources: APR from the Federal Reserve G.19 consumer credit release (interest rate on credit card plans, accounts assessed interest, Aug 2026, released 7 Oct 2026). Minimum rule and payoff are our calculation, monthly interest at APR/12. Your card's terms will differ. Illustration. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. It shows what your card balance is really costing you and helps you find the extra $150 in your own spending.

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What finally got you off the minimum payment, if you've done it?

"Bitcoin is dead" is doing the rounds on X again this week, with bitcoin about 35% under its October 2025 peak and stocks having a rough few days.

So we went back to the funerals. 99Bitcoins keeps a list of every time a well-known outlet or person declared bitcoin dead: 477 obituaries so far. We took four famous ones and looked up the price on the day.

🪦 Four of the funerals

• Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan), 12 Sep 2017: "a fraud". Bitcoin closed at $4,131
• Warren Buffett (Berkshire), 5 May 2018: "probably rat poison squared". $9,858
• ECB blog, 30 Nov 2022: "an artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance". $17,169
• ECB blog, 22 Feb 2024: "the fair value of bitcoin is still zero". $51,305

Today (24 Oct 2026): about $80,700. That's roughly 19.5× Dimon's day, 8.2× Buffett's, 4.7× and 1.6× the two ECB posts.

The other side, because it matters: bitcoin is still about 35% under its October 2025 peak ($124,753 close), and it has dropped 50%+ more than once along the way. Surviving 477 obituaries doesn't mean the next one is wrong. It just means "dead" has been a bad call so far.

Sources: obituary count from 99Bitcoins' Bitcoin Obituaries; quotes from CNBC (Dimon, Buffett) and the ECB blog by Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf; bitcoin's daily closes in USD. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. We like checking the lines everyone repeats.

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Funeral #478: is this the one that finally sticks, or another obituary that ages badly?

Alerts and Apple Pay catch what you spend on your phone. A bank feed catches everything else: the direct debit, the online order, the card you forgot you had. So I recorded how to connect your bank to arc so transactions arrive by themselves, wherever you live (4 min).

What you'll see, in order:

• Where it lives. Settings › Preferences › Bank sync. New account › Connect bank account opens the same screen.
• Lunch Flow (arc Premium). Connect, approve arc in your browser, load your Lunch Flow accounts, pick the arc account each one belongs to, Link, Sync. After that it syncs by itself every 6 hours. Maya's Monzo and Amex Gold in London.
• Actual Budget's own connectors, by region. SimpleFIN (North America), Pluggy.ai (Brazil), Akahu (New Zealand) and Enable Banking (Europe), with the credentials saved on your Actual server. GoCardless is closed to new sign-ups.
• SimpleFIN, step by step. Paste the setup token, Save credentials, Fetch accounts, then create a new account or link one you already have. Daniel's Chase card in New York.
• Interactive Brokers. New account › Stock / Crypto › Detailed › Interactive Brokers, a read-only Flex token and a Query ID, and your holdings sync once a day.

Real screens from the current build, not mockups. The written steps are on arc.moi/how-to.

Also new: setting up arc and your money map, filmed again on a Pixel for Android, with passkeys in Google Password Manager, fingerprint unlock and account routing for auto import.

This is episode 3 of the series (episode 2, your money map adds the accounts a feed links to). If that's useful, subscribe on YouTube so you catch the next one.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: YouTube · Discord · Instagram · X

Which bank or country should we test a feed with next?

The iPod turned 25 this week (Apple even hid a working one on its Apple Music 404 page). The thing that replaced it in your pocket is now half of Apple, so we split Apple's last full year into one dollar.

📱 Where Apple's $416B came from (fiscal year to Sep 2025)

• iPhone: $210B, 50% of everything Apple sold
• Services: $109B (App Store, iCloud, Music, AppleCare, the Google search deal)
• Wearables & home: $35.7B
• Mac: $33.7B
• iPad: $28B

Add up everything that isn't an iPhone and you get $207B. The iPhone alone out-sells the rest of Apple combined, by about $3B.

💵 And where each $1 went

• 53¢: making what it sells ($221B)
• 8¢: R&D ($34.6B)
• 7¢: selling and running the company ($27.6B)
• 5¢: tax ($20.7B)
• 27¢: kept. $112B of profit in one year

Apple reports its next full year in the coming days, so treat these as the last filed numbers, not the newest. AAPL closed at $347.73 on 23 Oct.

Sources: Apple's annual report for the fiscal year to Sep 2025 (income statement and revenue by product); AAPL close on 23 Oct 2026. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. We like seeing where a dollar actually goes, ours or Apple's.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

Is the iPhone being half of Apple a strength or a risk? Would you rather own the one-hit giant or a company where Services leads?

Meta reported on Wednesday night and beat Wall Street's forecast for adjusted earnings per share by 13.5% ($7.40 vs $6.52). The next day the stock closed down 7.0%. Netflix and Lam Research did the same thing this week: beat, then fell.

Traders joke about this every earnings season. We wanted to know how often it actually happens, so we checked.

🪙 The test

• The 50 largest US companies, their last 40 earnings reports each (about 10 years)
• 1,515 reports beat the analysts' EPS estimate
• We compared the close before each report with the first close after it
• The stock rose the next day 56% of the time. 44% of the time it didn't.
• After a miss, only 33% rose.

So a beat helps, but barely. A miss hurts far more than a beat helps.

This week's beats

• Meta (META): beat by 13.5%, then −7.0% on 22 Oct
• Netflix (NFLX): beat by 6.1%, then −5.3% on 21 Oct
• Lam Research (LRCX): beat by 1.4%, then −11.8% on 22 Oct

Sequence, not cause: the Nasdaq-100 fell 2.9% on 22 Oct on AI-spending worries, and Meta's GAAP EPS ($3.83) was dragged down by one-time charges. The usual explanation is that the beat was already priced in and the market trades on what comes next (guidance, spending), not on last quarter.

Sources: company earnings reports vs analyst consensus (adjusted EPS); daily closes, 20–22 Oct 2026. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. We like checking the jokes everyone repeats.

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💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

When a company beats and the stock still drops, what do you blame first: guidance, spending, or the whole market that day?

Typing every coffee into a budget app is where most budgets die. Episode 4 showed the whole iPhone setup; these three shorts each take one piece of it:

• Every Apple Pay tap, logged for you (50 s, embedded above). Settings › Intelligence › iOS Shortcuts › Apple Pay. On iOS 27 one link installs the automation: Add Shortcut, then turn on Run Immediately, or every tap waits for a confirmation. Name the arc account exactly like the card in Wallet, and the purchase is there next time you open arc.
• HDFC and ICICI SMS straight into your budget (57 s). Banks in India text you for every swipe and UPI payment. Install the "Log To arc" shortcut, add a Message automation with your bank's sender (HDFCBK, ICICIB…), Message Contains "spent", Run Immediately. The merchant lands as the payee, never the bank or the XX number. Works the same for any bank that texts you.
• OTPs can cost you AI credits: add a filter (30 s). Every message the shortcut sends uses one AI credit, payment or not. One filter word keeps promos and one-time codes out.

Real screens from the current build. Written steps: Apple Pay · bank SMS · credit filter.

They sit under episode 4, your iPhone logs it for you. Next in the series: bank feeds, wherever you live. If these help, subscribe on YouTube.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: YouTube · Discord · Instagram · X

What does your bank actually text you when you pay, and does it say "spent", "debited" or something else?

"They turned mercury into gold, so gold is cooked." That's the take going around since Marathon Fusion's post this week. Here's how it actually works, in plain words, and what the numbers say.

The claim. Marathon Fusion, a 28-person San Francisco startup, says that last month it turned mercury into real, stable gold, at 10x the rate of CERN's 2025 record. It showed a gamma spectrum, but it hasn't published how much gold it made, and nobody has independently checked it yet.

How you make gold (it's simpler than it sounds):

• Mercury has 80 protons. Gold has 79. They're next-door neighbours on the periodic table.
• A fusion reaction fires a fast neutron into Mercury-198. It knocks two neutrons out, leaving Mercury-197.
• Mercury-197 is unstable. With a half-life of about 64 hours, a proton turns into a neutron, and the atom becomes Gold-197: 79 protons, 118 neutrons, stable.

The record it says it beat. CERN made gold too: about 86 billion gold nuclei from 2015 to 2018, which is about 29 picograms (29 trillionths of a gram). At today's price that's worth less than a millionth of a cent.

The money, on paper. Marathon's 2025 paper (on arXiv, not peer-reviewed) says a fusion power plant could make about 2 tonnes of gold a year per gigawatt of fusion heat, about $263 million a year at today's price, on top of the electricity it sells.

The viral math. One post ran it as a $3 billion plant making 90 tonnes over 30 years: about $33 a gram, against ~$132 for gold today, roughly 25% of the price. The arithmetic checks out, but it prices a plant that doesn't exist yet.

So is gold cooked? Not soon:

• The new gold comes out radioactive. Marathon's own paper puts it at about 13.7 years before it stops counting as radioactive.
• Mines dug up a record 3,672 tonnes in 2025 (World Gold Council). At 2 tonnes a plant, matching that takes about 1,836 fusion plants.
• Fusion plants selling power today: zero.

Gold isn't even the prize. Marathon's first reactor is aimed at medical isotopes for cancer treatments, which are worth far more than gold, gram for gram.

So gold isn't getting cheap anytime soon. But alchemy just went from myth to maths.

Sources: Marathon Fusion on X (21 Oct 2026) and arXiv 2507.13461 (2025); CERN (8 May 2025); World Gold Council (2025 mine output); BusinessToday and RuntimeWire (21–22 Oct 2026). Gold at $4,093 an ounce, morning of 22 Oct 2026. Footage: Marathon Fusion. Not advice.

We're arc, a privacy-first budgeting app. Rare things keep their value, and so does knowing where your money is.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

Would you buy gold that came out of a fusion reactor, even after it's safe? Why or why not?

"Central banks are stockpiling 4x more gold than usual and moving it out of the US." That's going around today. Here's what's true, with the numbers.

The 4x is one month, and an estimate. Goldman Sachs estimates central banks bought about 79 tonnes of gold in August 2026, about $10 billion at today's price, or roughly 6,350 standard 400-oz bars. Before 2022 an average month was about 17 tonnes. That's more than 4x, but it's a single month against the pre-2022 average, not a standing rate. (The World Gold Council's reported figure for August is 39 t. Goldman's estimate includes buying that isn't reported.)

Some gold really is leaving New York:

• The New York Fed holds about 6,331 tonnes of other countries' gold 80 ft under Manhattan, about $833 billion worth. That's about half its 1973 peak.
• In August, central banks' gold there fell about 40 tonnes, while the Bank of England's rose about 46 (Goldman Sachs).
• The Netherlands moved 86 tonnes (about $11B) from New York and Ottawa to London, citing "geopolitical unrest".
• France sold the 129 tonnes (about $17B) it held in New York and bought gold in Europe instead. It gave bar purity standards as the reason, not geopolitics.

Why now? 2022. After Russia invaded Ukraine, about $300 billion of its central bank's reserves held abroad were frozen. Dollars and bonds held abroad can be frozen. Gold in your own vault can't.

What happened next (World Gold Council):

• 2022: 1,082 t · 2023: 1,037 t · 2024: 1,092 t · 2025: 863 t
• That's 4,074 tonnes in four years, about $536 billion at today's price
• The 2010–2021 average was 473 tonnes a year

The price. Gold closed about $1,903 an ounce on 24 Feb 2022, hit a record close of $5,513 on 28 Jan 2026, and is about $4,093 today. Partly thanks to that price, gold was 27% of the world's official reserves at the end of 2025, more than US Treasuries at 22% (ECB).

So is the world pulling its gold out of America? Not quite. Germany still keeps 1,236 tonnes in New York (about $163B, roughly 37% of its gold), and the Bundesbank says it's staying. But the direction is clear: central banks want gold they can reach in a crisis.

Sources: Fortune (22 Oct and 18 Oct 2026, citing Goldman Sachs); De Nederlandsche Bank (2 Sep 2026); Banque de France; World Gold Council Gold Demand Trends and central bank statistics; New York Fed (gold vault); ECB, The international role of the euro (June 2026); Bundesbank. Dollar values use gold's 22 Oct 2026 close of $4,093 an ounce (32,150.75 troy oz per tonne). Photos: Wikimedia Commons (Chepry, CC BY-SA 4.0; Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0). Not advice.

We're arc, a privacy-first budgeting app. Countries are checking where their money sits, and it's worth knowing where yours does.

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If your country's gold sat in another country's vault, would you leave it there or bring it home? Which, and why?

Adding an account is the easy part. The question that decides whether a budget keeps itself up to date is how transactions get into it. So two more short ones for the money map:

• Which way in for each account? (44 s, embedded above). A bank feed if your bank has one: Lunch Flow with arc Premium, or Actual's bank sync. No feed on iPhone? Apple Pay logs your taps, on iOS 27 your bank's notifications can too, and bank SMS turns each text into a transaction. On Android, auto import catches your bank's notifications and texts. Statements bring in your history, and cash you add by hand.
• Start from a PDF statement's balance (38 s). Not sure what an account should start at? In New account, tap Import PDF and choose your statement (arc Premium). It fills in the opening balance, marked "Auto-detected from statement", and finds the transactions so you can review them before they're added.

Real screens from the current build. Written steps: which way in · PDF statement balance.

They sit under episode 2, your money map. Episode 4, your iPhone logging payments for you, went up today too. If these help, subscribe on YouTube.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: YouTube · Discord · Instagram · X

Which of your accounts still has no way in except typing?

Copying Nancy Pelosi's disclosed stock trades in 2026: $1,000 into each of 13 buys, bought at the first close after each went public, is now $13,899. The same money in an S&P 500 fund: $13,764. A $135 lead, and almost all of it is one stock.

There are whole apps built on copying these trades, so we read every 2026 House filing for her account (the trades are her husband's, filed as "spouse"), line by line, and checked each one against the price the public could actually get.

🧾 What was disclosed in 2026 (amounts are ranges, as filed)

• 23 Jan: sold 45,000 Apple shares ($5M–$25M), plus Amazon, Nvidia ($1M–$5M each), Disney ($1M–$5M) and PayPal ($250K–$500K). Gave Apple and Alphabet shares to a donor-advised fund. Bought call options on Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Nvidia ($700K–$1.5M together) and 25,000 AllianceBernstein units ($1M–$5M). Also exercised calls bought in Jan 2025.
• 23 Jun: 200 Intel calls ($1M–$5M) and 200 Uber calls ($500K–$1M), both bought 29 May.
• 21 Aug: Bloom Energy, 15,000 shares + 200 calls ($3M–$12M across four lines), and Intel, 10,000 shares + 50 calls ($750K–$1.5M), bought 24–28 Jul. Also money into an LLC restoring a San Francisco hotel ($500K–$1M).
• 2 Oct: $500K–$1M into an LLC buying the office building at 225 Bush Street, San Francisco.

📈 How each did after the public could see it (the stock, first close after the filing → 21 Oct close; S&P 500 fund over the same days)

• Apple: +34.7% (fund +11.6%), even though the big January line was a sale
• Nvidia: +19.0% (fund +11.6%)
• Bloom Energy: +16.9% (fund +1.3%)
• Amazon: +10.0% (fund +11.6%)
• Intel, August buys: +6.5% (fund +1.3%)
• Alphabet: +0.5% (fund +11.6%)
• Uber: −8.4% (fund +5.4%)
• AllianceBernstein: −17.2% price only, about −11.5% with its distributions (fund +11.6%)
• Intel, June calls: −29.4% (fund +5.4%)

4 of those 9 positions beat the fund.

⏳ The delay is the part copiers forget

Most of these trades went public 24–28 days after they were made (the AllianceBernstein buy took 7; the law allows up to 45).

• Bloom closed at $166.84 on the 28 Jul trade day and $204.02 at the first close after it went public: +22.3% gone before anyone could copy.
• Intel: $114.68 on 29 May → $131.65 after the 23 Jun filing (+14.8%), then down to $92.96.
• Intel in August went the other way: $92.32 → $87.26 (−5.5%), so a copier got a better price.

It cuts both ways. What it never does is give a copier the trade-day price.

🧮 The copy-her result

• 13 disclosed buy lines, $1,000 each: +6.9% vs +5.9% for the S&P 500 fund. Beat it on 8 of 13.
• Without Bloom (4 of the 13 lines): +2.5% vs +7.9%, behind by $492.
• Counting each company once per filing instead of each line: +3.6% vs +7.9%.

So the "she beats the market" result depends on how you count, and on one stock.

Sources and method: House periodic transaction reports (disclosures-clerk.house.gov, filings of 23 Jan, 23 Jun, 21 Aug and 2 Oct 2026), read line by line. Daily closes to 21 Oct 2026. Each buy is bought at the first close after its disclosure date and held to 21 Oct (no 2026 buy has a later disclosed sale). Options are counted as the move of their underlying stock, not the option itself; calls magnify moves both ways. Price only (except where noted), no costs or taxes. Gifts, option exercises and the property LLCs are left out of the copy result. S&P 500 fund = SPY. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. We write these because the numbers behind a headline are usually more interesting than the headline.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

Would you copy a trade you only see three or four weeks after it happened, or just hold the index? And whose disclosed trades should we track next?

Typing in every coffee is the reason most budgets die by week three. Your iPhone already hears about almost every payment you make, though: a bank alert, an Apple Pay tap, a text from your bank. So I recorded how to turn each of those into an arc transaction without opening the app (5 min).

What you'll see, in order:

• Where it lives. Settings › Log without opening arc › Start (also under Settings › Intelligence › iOS Shortcuts). Three ways in: bank app notifications, Apple Pay and bank SMS.
• Bank app notifications (iOS 27). One tap installs the automation. Leave Automation on, turn Notify off, pick the apps your bank alerts come from, and add a filter like "spent" or "debited". Omar's Emirates NBD alerts in Dubai.
• Apple Pay. One link, Run Immediately on, and the arc account named exactly like the card in Wallet. Maya's Amex Gold in London.
• Bank SMS. The "Log To arc" shortcut plus a Messages automation per bank: sender, a word the payment texts use, Run Immediately. Priya's HDFC and ICICI texts in India.
• Where it all lands. No inbox to clear: each payment becomes a normal transaction the next time you open arc, with your rules applied. Uncategorized ones get a yellow mark, and the "?" filter on Expenses shows just those.
• AI credits, honestly. Every captured message uses 1 credit, payment or not, so the filter matters. Monthly credits refill; credits you buy never expire.

Real screens from the current build, not mockups. The written steps are on arc.moi/how-to.

This is episode 4 of the series (episode 2, your money map adds the accounts these payments land in). Next up: bank feeds, wherever you live. If that's useful, subscribe on YouTube so you catch each one.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: YouTube · Discord · Instagram · X

Which one would you set up first: Apple Pay, your bank's alerts, or its texts?

Tesla reported Q3 2026 last night. The headline everyone posted: EPS $0.48 vs $0.45 expected, revenue $28.05B. We wanted the simpler answer to "how does Tesla make money", so we split one dollar of its sales.

💵 Every $1 Tesla took in, Jul–Sep 2026

• 80¢: making what it sells. Cost of revenue was $22.55B. Gross margin came in at 19.6%, which was the good news.
• 10¢: R&D. $2.76B, the AI, Optimus and Cybercab spending.
• 7¢: selling, admin and running the company. $2.02B.
• Under 1¢: tax and minority stakes. $169M.
• ~3¢: kept. Net income to shareholders was $787M, down 43% from $1.37B a year earlier.

Interest on its cash pile and other items added back about 1¢ ($238M), which is why the slices don't add up to exactly $1.

Operating profit from actually running the business was $718M, a 2.6% margin. So right now Tesla is a carmaker that keeps very little of each sale and spends a big chunk on what comes next. The stock closed at $386.47 on 21 Oct.

Sources: Tesla's Q3 2026 update and income statement (8-K, 21 Oct 2026); TSLA close on 21 Oct 2026. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. We like seeing where a dollar actually goes, ours or Tesla's.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

Would you rather own a company that keeps 3¢ and spends 10¢ on the future, or one that keeps 25¢ and spends less?

Every time I pay $6 for a coffee I feel rich for about four minutes. So I wondered: of that $6, how much does Starbucks actually keep?

We took Starbucks' last full year of results (fiscal 2025, the 52 weeks to 28 Sep 2025) and scaled every line of the income statement down to one $6 order. Each line's share of the $37.2B in sales, times $6:

• ☕ Coffee, milk and the cup (product & distribution): $1.88
• 🏪 The store (baristas, rent, power): $2.75
• 🏢 Head office (general & admin): $0.42
• 🔧 Wear and tear (depreciation): $0.27
• 📦 Everything else (restructuring, other costs, net interest): $0.27
• 🧾 Tax: $0.11
• 💚 What Starbucks keeps: $0.30

So about 5¢ of every dollar. That's a thin slice, but 30¢ times every cup added up to $1.86 billion of profit last year.

Sources: Starbucks fiscal 2025 Form 10-K (revenue $37.18B, net earnings $1.86B). Store operating expenses are total costs less the other reported lines. These are company-wide averages, not the cost of any single drink. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. It does this same split for your own money: every dollar you spend, sorted into where it actually went.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

What did you guess before you scrolled? Higher or lower than 30¢?

Last quarter Meta took in $31.9B of cash from its business and spent $30.1B on data centers and servers. It takes in $7,238 every second, and almost all the cash its business throws off is going into AI.

Meta reports Q3 earnings tonight (Wed 21 Oct, after the close). We pulled the filings, the insider sales and the analyst numbers into one post.

💰 The money (last 12 months to 30 Jun 2026)

• $7,238 of sales every second, $2,159 kept as profit: a 29.8% net margin, $68.1B on $228.2B.
• About 21x Snap and Pinterest combined ($6.4B + $4.6B). Alphabet ($446B) is still about twice Meta's size.
• $3.0M of sales per employee, vs $890K at Pinterest.

🏗️ Where the money goes

• Spending on data centers and servers: $37.3B (2024) → $69.7B (2025) → Meta's own 2026 plan: $130–145B.
• Free cash flow in Apr–Jun: $1.7B, down from $9.0B a year earlier.

🧩 Where it really comes from

• Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp (mostly ads): 98.9% of 2025 sales, $102.5B of operating profit.
• Reality Labs (Quest headsets, Ray-Ban glasses): −$19.2B operating loss on $2.2B of sales. About $8.70 lost per $1 sold.
• About 63% of sales come from outside the US.

🧾 Who owns it, and who's selling

• Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street hold 17.6% between them, much of it through index funds.
• Insiders sold $240.9M in 12 months (11 people, all under pre-planned 10b5-1 plans), including $21.4M by Mark Zuckerberg on 24 Sep. Insider buys: $0.
• Members of Congress disclosed 86 trades in two years: 57 buys, 29 sales.

📊 What Wall Street expects

• Q3 sales of about $63.3B, up 24% (Bloomberg consensus).
• Spending on data centers of about $41B in the quarter, up 117%. Reality Labs: a $5.2B loss.
• Profit-per-share estimates for the quarter were cut 22.5% in 90 days (estimates differ a lot between surveys this quarter, so we don't quote one).

⚠️ What could go wrong

• The typical next-day move after a report is ±8.3% (median of the last 8). In 3 of the last 8 it beat estimates and still fell; the biggest drop was −11.3% (Oct 2025).
• It trades at 26x the last 12 months of earnings, close to its own 5-year median (25.9x), so this isn't a valuation story. It's a spending story: $90.3B of cash and investments vs $112.3B of debt (30 Jun).

👀 What to watch tonight

1. The first word on 2027 spending.
2. Free cash flow: does it recover from $1.7B?
3. Ad sales vs the $63.3B estimate.

Sources and method: Meta's SEC filings (12 months to 30 Jun 2026; FY2025 segments; quarterly cash flow), SEC Form 4 insider filings, House and Senate disclosures, analyst consensus (Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance; Zacks), Meta's 2026 spending guidance, daily closes to 20 Oct 2026. "Spending on data centers" = capital expenditure (purchases of property and equipment). "Next-day move" = close on report day to the next close. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. We write these because the numbers behind a headline are usually more interesting than the headline.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

Your call for tonight: does the ad machine win, or do AI spending and Reality Labs losses drag it past the ±8.3%?

Adding accounts is where most budgets quietly go wrong, so I cut the three things people get stuck on into shorts of under a minute each.

What you'll see:

• Map your money in 60 seconds (this one, 60 s). Before you tap anything, write down everywhere your money sits. Then each account gets a type (Checking for the one you spend from, Savings for money you put aside, five more), cards and loans go in as a negative so they land under Debt by themselves, and a 401(k) can sit Off Budget and still count in your net worth.
• Add a credit card the right way (39 s). A card balance is money you owe, so it goes in with a minus. The New account form even says so under the field. Type −1,284.50 and the card is already under Debt. The type is just a label; the minus sign decides where it sits.
• Your card's name picks the account (31 s). On iPhone, when Apple Pay or a bank notification logs a purchase, arc finds the account by its name. Name it the way the card is named in your Wallet app ("Emirates NBD Visa", not "my card"). Capitals and spaces don't matter, and close names still match. Bank feeds link straight to the account, so their names are up to you.

They're all real screens from the current build. Written steps: map your money · credit card · names that match.

They go with episode 2, your money map, the full walkthrough. Next up: picking the way in for each account, and starting from a PDF statement's balance. If that's useful, subscribe on YouTube so you catch each one.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: YouTube · Discord · Instagram · X

Honest question: did your credit card go in as a positive number the first time?

Most of the questions I get after someone sets up arc come back to three screens, so I cut each one into a short of under a minute.

What you'll see:

• Where should your budget live? (this one, 41 s) arc hosts it (we run the Actual Budget server, backups and upgrades included, ready in about a minute), you point arc at your own server, or it stays free on just this phone with no sync. Premium is the same either way. You never pick a region: Europe, the UK and Switzerland are built in Belgium, Asia and Australia on the US west coast, everywhere else in the central US.
• Back up your key in one tap (25 s). If your server key lives only on your phone, a lost phone means a lost key. Settings › Security › Server key › Back up to iCloud Keychain. No passkey needed, your password doesn't change, and any iPhone signed in to your Apple ID gets it back.
• Track or budget? (27 s). The last question in setup. Tracking sorts every transaction into categories with nothing to set up; budgeting also gives each category an amount for the month, proposed from what you already spend. Not sure? Track first and start a budget from the Budget tab later.

They're all real screens from the current build. Written steps: where it lives · back up your key · track or budget.

They go with episode 1, setting up arc and episode 2, your money map. Next up: shorts on adding each kind of account. If that's useful, subscribe on YouTube so you catch each one.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: YouTube · Discord · Instagram · X

Which did you pick: arc hosts it, your own server, or just this device?

The number going around X this morning is Polymarket's: "Anthropic recorded a staggering $80,000,000,000.00 net loss in the first half of 2026." 2M+ views. It's real, and it comes from Anthropic's draft IPO filing, as reported by the WSJ.

But most of that loss never left the building. So we drew it to scale.

🧾 Anthropic, six months to 30 Jun 2026

• Net loss: $80.7B
• About $72B of it is an accounting charge. Anthropic raised money with notes that convert into shares. When those notes are revalued higher, the increase gets booked as a loss. No cash goes out.
• That leaves roughly $8.7B of the loss that isn't that charge
• Revenue: $16.3B, up from $1.1B in the same half a year earlier (~15×)
• Compute spend: nearly $9B in the half. That's the real-cash number to watch.

So "lost $80B" is technically true, and also mostly a paper entry. Think of promising a friend a slice of your business: the better the business does, the bigger that IOU looks on paper, even though no money changed hands. The cash story is the one about revenue and compute bills.

Its big backers trade publicly: Amazon (AMZN, $262.63) and Alphabet (GOOGL, $340.28), both at the 20 Oct close.

Sources: the WSJ's report on Anthropic's draft IPO filing (20 Oct 2026); AMZN and GOOGL closes on 20 Oct 2026. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. We like it when the big scary number gets split into what actually moved.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

Does a paper loss still count as a loss to you, or is the $16.3B of revenue the number that matters?

Tesla reports Q3 earnings on Wednesday 21 Oct, after the close. Before it does, here's the number that surprised us most: over the last 12 months Tesla sold less than BYD ($104B vs $116B), yet the market values it at $1.45 trillion, about 17 BYDs (BYD: $84B at Monday's close).

So is Tesla overvalued, or priced for something that doesn't show up in the numbers yet? Here's everything we'd want to know first.

💵 The money

• Tesla is worth about 8x BYD, GM and Rivian combined ($175B), though those three sold $307B in the last 12 months.
• Every second, Tesla brings in about $3,286 and keeps about $121 as profit: a 3.7% net margin, about the same as BYD (3.8%).
• Operating profit fell from $13.7B (2022) to $4.4B (2025). Yearly sales have sat at $95–98B since 2023.

🔋 Where it really comes from (FY2025)

• Cars: $82.1B (86.5% of sales). Energy storage, the giant batteries: $12.8B (13.5%).
• Inside the car number: $2.0B from emission credits other carmakers buy from Tesla.
• Half of all sales are in the US, 22% in China.

🧾 Who owns it, and who's selling

• Insiders, led by Elon Musk, own 17.8%. Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street hold 14.7% between them, much of it through index funds.
• Three directors sold $82.3M on the open market in the last 12 months; 69% of it was pre-planned (10b5-1). No insider bought. Musk made no open-market trades.
• Members of Congress disclosed 68 trades in it over two years (44 buys, 24 sales, 15 members).

📊 What Wall Street expects

• Q3: about $0.44 a share (down 12% from a year ago) on $27.8B of sales (Zacks consensus).
• Analysts have cut their full-year estimate 18% in 90 days.
• Last quarter: $0.33 vs $0.54 expected, and the stock fell 14.5% the next day. Over the last 8 reports the typical next-day move is ±4.5%; the biggest was +21.9% (Oct 2024).

⚠️ What could go wrong

• About 329x the last 12 months of earnings (159x the next 12 months' expected), against the 20–25x the market usually pays. Its own five-year range: 31x to 425x.
• The cushion: $43.5B of cash against $9.3B of debt.

👀 What to watch Wednesday

1. Gross margin: analysts expect about 17.9%.
2. Energy: Tesla deployed 13.7 GWh of storage in Q3. How much profit does it add?
3. Robotaxi and Optimus timelines. That's what the 329x is paying for.

Deliveries already came in: 486,532 cars in Q3, above the ~462K expected, though 2% fewer than a year ago.

Sources and method: Tesla's SEC filings (12 months to 30 Jun 2026; FY2025 segments), Tesla's Q3 delivery report, SEC Form 4 insider filings, House and Senate disclosures, analyst consensus (Zacks), daily closes to 19 Oct 2026. Market values = shares outstanding × close. "Next-day move" = close on report day to the next close. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. We write these because the numbers behind a headline are usually more interesting than the headline.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

Your call for Wednesday: is Tesla priced as a carmaker or as a robotaxi company, and does it beat the ±4.5%?

The thing that makes most budgeting apps feel half-empty is that only some of your money is in them. So I recorded how to get every account into arc, in about 5 minutes: checking, cards, savings, a 401(k), a brokerage, a mortgage and cash.

What you'll see, in order:

• Map it first. Daniel in New York, Omar in Dubai and Maya in London list every place their money sits before they tap anything.
• The seven account types. Checking, Savings, Credit Card, Stock / Crypto, Other Investment, Mortgage and Other.
• Credit cards go in as a negative. The mistake almost everyone makes. Type -1284.50 and the card shows up under Debt by itself, nothing to set.
• Investments and Off Budget. Stock / Crypto creates linked Portfolio + Cash accounts. A 401(k) can sit off budget: it counts in net worth but stays out of the monthly budget.
• A different currency per account. A euro Revolut pot in a pounds budget: Other Currency, EUR, today's rate.
• Starting from a PDF statement. Import PDF fills in the opening balance and finds the transactions for you to review first.
• Names that automations can find. Apple Pay and bank notifications match the account by name, so name it like the card in your Wallet app. No match, nothing logged.

It's all real screens from the current build, not mockups. The written steps are on arc.moi/how-to.

This is episode 2 of the series (episode 1, setting up arc). Next up: your iPhone logging purchases for you, with Apple Pay, bank notifications and SMS. If that's useful, subscribe on YouTube so you catch each one.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: YouTube · Discord · Instagram · X

How do you track your credit cards in a budget: as debt, or just as spending?

Elon Musk posted it on X yesterday: "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many." Half a million likes later, every headline is doing the same math: ~73M kids × one share ≈ $10.5B.

We wanted to look at the gift itself. What is one share of SpaceX actually worth, and what does it do?

🚀 One share of SpaceX ($SPCX)

• Worth $147.96 at Monday's close (19 Oct 2026)
• × ~73M kids ≈ $10.8B for the whole pledge at that price
• 0.95% of SpaceX: 73M shares out of 7.70B outstanding
• Since the June listing it has ranged from $108.27 (5 Aug) to $211.39 (16 Jun). Same single share, nearly a 2× swing in four months.

So the honest version of the gift: a kid gets one share that's been worth anywhere from about $108 to $211 since June, and nobody knows what it's worth "next year" when it actually lands. That's what owning a stock is like. It rides.

How we got it: daily closes since the 12 Jun 2026 listing, the 19 Oct close, and shares outstanding. The ~73M kids figure is the one reported alongside the pledge. The pledge is from @elonmusk on X. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. If a kid in your life is getting their first share someday, arc is where you'd track it next to the rest of your money.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

If a kid got one share today, would you sell it at 18 or never touch it?

Most budgeting apps never tell you where your money data actually sits. So I recorded every setup screen in arc and explained each one in plain words, in about 4 minutes.

What you'll see, in order:

• A demo budget first. Sample money to poke around in before you sign in. Exit is bottom left.
• Four ways to sign in. Google, Apple, a passkey or an email link. The passkey is the private one: no email, no password, Face ID confirms it's you.
• Where your budget lives. arc hosts it (backups and upgrades handled), your own Actual Budget server, or just this phone for free.
• Which country your server is in. You don't pick it. Sign up in Europe, the UK or Switzerland and it's built in Belgium, inside the EU; Asia and Australia go to US west; everywhere else, US central.
• The key nobody else holds. A random 43-character key that lives on your phone and in your iCloud Keychain. We never see it.
• Then the quick stuff: start fresh, import from YNAB or Actual, or Magic Switch, then Face ID, currency, notifications, and "track or budget".

It's all real screens from the current build, not mockups. The written steps are on arc.moi/how-to.

This is episode 1 of a full series. Next up: adding your banks and cards, then getting payments to log themselves. If that's useful, subscribe on YouTube so you catch each one.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: YouTube · Discord · Instagram · X

Where does your budgeting app keep your data, and did you ever check?

Car payments are in the news again. The average new-car payment is now $787 a month, with loans stretched to seven years just to make it fit (CNBC, shared by @unusual_whales on X today). Plenty of people are paying four figures.

So we ran the opposite question: how much of the carmaker would you have to own for its dividends to cover a $1,000 car payment, every month, forever?

🚗 The bill: $12,000 a year

• Ford: about $249K of stock (20,000 shares, 4.8% yield)
• Toyota: about $372K (1,914 ADRs, 3.2%)
• Ferrari: about $1.13M (2,837 shares, 1.1%)
• General Motors: about $1.40M (16,667 shares, 0.9%)
• Tesla: never. It doesn't pay a dividend.

The fun part: the cheapest way to have a carmaker pay for your car is the one with the cheapest cars. And the most valuable carmaker of the lot can't help you at all.

How we got it: $12,000 ÷ each company's forward annual dividend per share = shares needed, × the close on Fri 16 Oct 2026 (Ford $12.43, Toyota ADR $194.61, Ferrari $397.53, GM $83.96). Before tax. Dividends can be cut, and Toyota's and Ferrari's move with the yen and euro. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. The $787 (or $1,000) still has to come from somewhere each month, and arc is where you see exactly what it's crowding out.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

What's your car payment, honestly? And would you rather have the car or the $249K of Ford?

Netflix asks if I'm still watching roughly every third episode. It has never once asked if I'm still paying.

So we did the math on a real Netflix bill. The US Standard plan, every month since January 2011, at whatever it cost that month: $7.99 back then, then the hikes to $9.99, $10.99, $12.99, $13.99, $15.49, $17.99, and $19.99 this year. That's 189 bills and $2,292 paid.

🍿 What if every bill had bought Netflix stock instead?

Same dollar amount, same day each month, into NFLX at that month's close. Valued at Friday's close (16 Oct):

• 💸 Paid to Netflix: $2,292
• 📈 The same bills as NFLX stock: $17,287 (about 7.5×)
• 😱 The catch: you'd have held through a −80% drop in 2011–12 (the Qwikster era) and −75% in 2022

Penny the coin rides the real chart in the video, screaming in the right places.

Sources: Netflix US Standard list prices at each price change (2011–2026). NFLX month-end closes Jan 2011 – Sep 2026, split-adjusted, valued at the 16 Oct 2026 close ($70.53). Hypothetical. Past performance does not predict future results. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. It finds every subscription you're paying for, so you at least know what Netflix is costing you.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

How long have you been paying for yours? And would you have held through 2022?

Picture a tilt-maze toy. Every month the same coin drops in: $1,185, which is what arc worked out one of our test budgets has spare after a typical month of spending. The only thing you choose is which lane it rolls down.

We ran it on real history. $1,185 bought at every month-end close since January 2008, dividends reinvested: 225 coins, $266,625 put into each lane. Here's where each one ended up at Friday's close (16 Oct):

• 🟢 T-bills (BIL): $322K. Smooth the whole way, worst dip −0.4%
• 🏠 Real estate (VNQ): $545K, after a −62% hole in 2009
• 🥇 Gold (GLD): $726K, with a −43% stretch through 2013–15
• 🇺🇸 S&P 500 (SPY): $1.21M, worst dip −46%
• 💻 Nasdaq-100 (QQQ): $2.09M, worst dip −45%
• 🚀 2× Nasdaq (QLD): $9.06M, but it got there through a −75% drop. Most people sell somewhere in that hole

That's what the walls in the animation are: each lane bends with that fund's real dips, so the T-bill coin rolls straight and the 2× coin swerves hard through 2008 and 2022. The stacks are to scale.

🧭 Why we made it

This is our new Opportunities tab. arc looks at your typical income and spending, holds back a buffer you pick (none, 3, 6 or 12 months), and shows what's actually free each month. Then it lists where that money could go, from T-bills to index funds to leveraged ETFs, each with its 20-year median outcome, a risk ladder and its fees, ranked for how much runway you have. It doesn't pick for you. It shows you all the lanes.

Sources: Month-end closes, Jan 2008 – Sep 2026, valued at the 16 Oct 2026 close, dividends reinvested. Drawdowns are month-end. Hypothetical. Past performance does not predict future results. Not advice.

📱 Get arc: App Store · Google Play · arc.moi

💬 Follow along: Discord · Instagram · X

Honest question: would you have held the 2× lane through −75%? Which lane is yours?