Welcome Friends, 

Here’s an assortment of posts shared this week on Trends with Friends. Let’s dive in…

LONG LIVE THE CASHTAG

Howard Lindzon is grateful for the death of the #hashtag this holiday season. He writes, 

This tweet warmed my heart…

Amen to the ‘$ Cashtag’ which we created back in 2008 at Stocktwits.com.

The other day Elon announced what I assume his algorithms had already done…killed the HASHTAG (#)…

The first comment was from my hilarious and anonymous ‘fintwit’ friend Ramp Capital who loves to tweet about stocks and markets:

Back in 2007 when Stocktwits created the ‘$ cashtag ‘ we did so because we knew the hashtag would get polluted with spam and I needed a way to talk about stocks on Twitter which was my favorite product. By 2008 the ‘hashtag’ was mostly worthless.

It took forever for the ‘cashtag’ to become a thing because it really was meant to curate market and stock talk.

While Elon killed the hashtag, he won’t/can’t kill the ‘cashtag’. He could care less about the financial markets, but $TSLA has sure been good to him and the tens of millions talking about his stock on Twitter tagging $TSLA is great for Tesla and Elon.

While Elon won’t kill the ‘cashtag’, the hundreds of millions of bots and scammer and spammers have made it useless on Twitter.

That is fine with me because for 17 years we have been subscale at Stocktwits, quietly and tirelessly curating, filtering and promoting the use of the cashtag. The cashtag has never been more relevant.

Of all the weird and smart and silly and useless ideas I have, this one is by far the one that has travelled the farthest and am proudest of.

THIS WEEK IN AI

Michael Parekh reviews OpenAI’s “12 days of Shipmas,” Nvidia’s opportunities in AI data centers, Dell, Broadcom, Salesforce and more in this week’s AI Summary.

It’s a must read.

2 THINGS ON MY SEASONALITY WISHLIST

Larry Thompson has 2 requests from Santa – breadth expansion and price appreciation. The technician writes, 

The Santa Rally is Set to Begin…

Seasonality is a great tool for the market. It shows us, backed by data, that history may not repeat but often rhymes. This creates a useful ‘rule of thumb’ for what tends to happen during certain times of the year.

This time of year, we often hear about what is referred to as the Santa Claus Rally.

I won’t dive into the details, but you can check out the excellent work of technicians Ryan Detrick and Jeffrey Hirsch here. What I want to focus on is not opening the gift early.

The market took a jab straight to the face this week, dropping over 2%. However, it managed to rally on Friday, bringing hopes of this seasonally strong period.

But I’m not opening the gifts early.

Here are the 2 Things On My Wishlist Before Opening the Seasonality Gift from Santa:

1. Friends Joining the Party

2. Getting Above Tactical Levels

Read Larry’s latest today. 

THIS WEEK IN CHARTS

Charlie Bilello curates the most important charts and themes in markets. This week, Charlie comments on warming inflation, animal spirits and Nasdaq 20K. 

He writes, 

All signs are pointing to warming inflation in the US…

CPI moved up to 2.7% in November and is expected to increase again in December (Cleveland Fed’s current estimate: 2.86%).

Truflation’s real-time US inflation gauge has moved back above 3%, the highest level in over a year.

The Market Cap of a new crypto meme coin called “Fartcoin” (yes, you read that correctly) crossed above $1 billion yesterday.

At the same time, the Fed cut interest rates again with a 25 bps move down to 4.25-4.50%. This was the third rate cut in as many meetings with 100 bps in total rate cuts since September.

The Nasdaq Composite hit 20,000 for the first time last week, doubling over the past four and a half years.

This was a far shorter path to doubling than the journey from 5,000 to 10,000 which took over 20 years following the peak of the dot-com bubble in 2000.

The Nasdaq actually went 15 years without hitting an all-time high (from 2000 to 2015), a drought that would be unfathomable to new investors today.

HUMAN-CURATED SOCIAL

Om Malik shares his take on Surf – a human curated social media platform. Malik mentions, 

Surf is centered on human curation, authentic connection, and a rejection of the interruption-driven media models we’ve endured for far too long. Just as vinyl records pushed back against a generation of digitized, algorithm-driven music, Surf is a retro reimagination of our algorithm-fueled, advertising-driven information economy.

What people want is “easy access to trusted content without managing multiple platforms, creating new profiles, or using separate apps for video, audio, and text,” McCue said. They desire a streamlined consumption experience. “It’s a complete rebuild of Flipboard, leveraging everything we’ve learned, built from scratch on W3C’s ActivityPub and AT Proto foundations,” McCue said.

Surf emerges as an antidote to this fractured media landscape. It reimagines the web browser not as a tool for managing tabs and URLs but as an integrated curator of the social web. “Users can create feeds that combine articles, photographs, videos, and podcasts, regardless of the original platform,” McCue explained. “You can interact with posts—like, comment, boost—and your interactions appear on the platforms you’re logged into. These feeds can also be shared, so if you create a great photography feed, others can follow it.”

The result is a seamless stream that pulls together content from across platforms—whether it’s photographers on Mastodon, YouTubers, or podcast creators—into a coherent, personalized experience. Surf is built on open protocols like ActivityPub and AT Protocol. This means it doesn’t lock users into a specific platform or ecosystem. Whether you’re pulling content from Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, or a legacy RSS feed, Surf integrates it seamlessly.

Read Om’s full post here.

TRENDS WITH NO FRIENDS

Trends With No Friends sifts through the noise and discovers stocks above $1B market cap with high relative strength and low social following.

The publication shares 52-Week Highs and Lows sorted by followers on Stocktwits. 

Why is high relative strength and low social following important?

Stocks that are outperforming tend to continue to outperform. Stocks that have a low social following are, by definition, undiscovered by the crowd. Stocks that have both Relative Strength and Low Social Following can really outperform as more investors discover them.

This week, Trends with No Friends featured… 

Grid Dynamics ($GDYN), Bel Fuse ($BELFB), Banco BBVA Argentina ($BBAR), Credo Technology Group ($CRDO) and more.

THIS WEEK’S EPISODE

And in case you missed it… Howard Lindzon, Michael Parekh, Phil Pearlman and Riley Rosebee are joined by Tyler Denk (CEO, Beehiiv) and Ben Cahn to discuss the future of content creators, email’s importance, Beehiiv’s AI approach, Argentina and more in the latest episode of Trends with Friends. 

Tune in today.

GET IN TOUCH

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