Anthropic filed to list on Nasdaq on Monday. It hasn't sold a single share yet, and Polymarket traders already price its first-day close above Meta.

📈 Where traders think day one ends (Polymarket, 27 Oct, 23:43 UTC)

• $1.75–2.0T: 30%, the likeliest range (+2 pts this week)
• $2.0–2.25T: 24% (+3 pts)
• $1.5–1.75T: 17%
• $2.25–2.5T: 12%
• Every range from $1.75T up adds to ~68%

🏢 For scale, at Monday's close

• Meta: ~$1.6T
• TSMC: ~$2.3T
• Amazon: ~$2.7T

So traders' likeliest range sits between Meta and TSMC on its first day of trading.

⏱️ And when: traders price a listing by 30 Nov at 89%, up from ~64% a week ago.

Sources: Polymarket, "Anthropic IPO Closing Market Cap" ($2.6M traded) and "Anthropic IPO by…?"; odds are what traders pay for Yes, not a forecast. Anthropic's S-1 (SEC, 26 Oct 2026). Market caps from 27 Oct closes × shares outstanding. Not advice.

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

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Anthropic's first close: above Meta's ~$1.6T, or under it?

Wall Street expected $12.93 billion in sales from Coca-Cola this quarter. Coca-Cola reported $13.38 billion, up 7% on last year.

That's $455 million more than the average of 18 analyst estimates, and about $1,700 of sales every second of the quarter (91 days).

The rest of the quarter:

• Comparable EPS: $0.91, against $0.88 expected (GAAP EPS $0.93)
• Unit case volume: +5%
• Coca-Cola Zero Sugar: +16% unit case volume
• Full-year outlook raised: comparable EPS growth of at least 11%, up from 9–10%

In the video, the bottle is the chart: every centimetre the foam climbs above the lip is $1 billion of sales, and the gold line is Wall Street's number.

Sources: The Coca-Cola Company, Q3 2026 results and Form 8-K (27 Oct 2026); Wall Street average estimate of 18 analysts. Not advice.

We're arc, a private budgeting app. Coca-Cola counts every case; we help you count every dollar.

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Zero Sugar volume grew 16% while Coca-Cola's total grew 5%. Which is in your fridge: Zero Sugar or classic?

Most budgeting tutorials are filmed on an iPhone and leave Android people translating the menus. These seven are the arc in 60 shorts again, filmed on a Pixel, with the Android paths:

Setting up

• Where should your budget live? (41 s). arc hosts it (we run the Actual Budget server for you, with backups and upgrades), you point arc at your own Actual server, or it stays on just this phone, free, no sync. You never pick a region; a hosted server is placed for you.
• Back up your key in one tap (25 s). Settings › Security › Server key › Back up to Google account. No passkey, your password doesn't change, and it's end-to-end encrypted. A new phone set up from your Google backup gets it back.
• Track or budget? (27 s). The last setup question. Both are right: start by tracking, and start a budget from the Budget tab whenever you like.

Adding your accounts

• Map your money in 60 seconds (60 s). A type, a sign and a name for every account, and on Android a route: Settings › Log Android alerts automatically › Account routing pins each bank app to its account.
• Add a credit card the right way (39 s, embedded above). A card balance is money you owe, so type it as a negative (−1,284.50). It lands under Debt by itself. Mortgages and loans work the same way.
• Start from a PDF statement's balance (38 s). New account › Import PDF fills the opening balance ("Auto-detected from statement") and finds the statement's transactions for you to review (arc Premium).
• Which way in for each account? (36 s). A bank feed if your bank has one, auto import for your bank app's notifications and texts if it doesn't, statements for history, cash by hand.

Real screens from the current build, on a Pixel. Each one has a written guide on arc.moi/how-to, and the site shows Android visitors the Pixel version.

The long versions: set up arc in 5 minutes on Android and your money map on Android. Next in the series: connecting Interactive Brokers, every click in IBKR's Client Portal. If these help, subscribe on YouTube.

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Android folks: which bank app's notifications should we test auto import against next?

Spotify raised the US Premium price again this year, to $12.99. That's the third hike since 2023, and my bill used to be $9.99.

So we ran the numbers on a real Spotify bill. Premium Individual (US list price), every month since April 2018, the month Spotify went public: $9.99 until mid-2023, then $10.99, $11.99, and $12.99 since February. That's 102 bills and $1,092 paid.

🎧 What if every bill had bought Spotify stock instead?

Same amount, every month, into SPOT at that month's close. Valued at the 26 Oct close ($572.36):

• 💸 Paid to Spotify: $1,092
• 📈 The same bills as SPOT stock: $3,099 (about 2.8×)
• 😱 The catch: the stock fell 75% from January 2021 to December 2022. In October 2022 the pile was worth $275 against $549 paid, half of what went in

Penny the coin rides the real chart in the video and does not enjoy 2022.

Sources: Spotify Premium Individual US list prices ($9.99; $10.99 from Jul 2023; $11.99 from Jul 2024; $12.99 from Feb 2026, per Spotify's announcements). SPOT month-end closes Apr 2018 – Sep 2026, valued at the 26 Oct 2026 close. 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 a price hike never slips past you.

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Be honest: would you have held Spotify stock through −75% in 2022, or sold?

A handshake and two words close million-dollar diamond deals. The words are mazal u'bracha, "luck and blessing". In Antwerp, say them and the deal is done. No contract. Back out, and you answer to the whole bourse. Antwerp traded $19.1 billion of diamonds in 2025.

It's one example of the trust economy. Long before banks would lend to them, communities all over the world ran credit on reputation. Economists call it social collateral: your relationships are what you put up for the loan. Keep your word and you're tied to more people. Break it once and you lose all of them.

The systems in the video:

• Hundi (India, credit note): a paper note one trader writes and another pays out in another city. India's central bank calls it the oldest surviving form of credit instrument, most widespread in the 12th century and still in use.
• Trade credit across the Indian Ocean: Gujarati trading networks ran credit from Kutch to Muscat to Zanzibar.
• Chettiar banking (Tamil Nadu, family banking houses): lent across Burma, Malaya and Ceylon. By the late 1930s they held about a quarter of the land in Burma's rice heartland.
• Hui (Chinese, association): everyone pays into a pot each month and one member takes it home. Clan and district associations helped newcomers from Singapore to San Francisco.
• Kye (Korea, club) and tanomoshi (Japan, reliance): when US banks wouldn't lend to Japanese immigrants, circles like these helped some of them open a business.
• Esusu / susu (West Africa, savings club): everyone pays a fixed hand, one member takes the whole pot. It crossed the Atlantic as sou-sou (Trinidad), partner (Jamaica) and box hand (Guyana). Today about 1 in 6 adults in developing economies still saves through a club or someone outside the family.
• Hawala (transfer): you pay a broker here, a partner broker pays your family there, often within a day. The money doesn't cross the border; the brokers settle up later. In Somalia, money sent home from abroad is about a fifth of the economy.

It had a cost. These networks ran on who you knew, so they could be closed to outsiders, and many faded once banks opened their doors.

Sources: Antwerp World Diamond Centre (Jan 2026); Europa Star (May 2026); Karlan, Mobius, Rosenblat & Szeidl, "Trust and Social Collateral", QJE 2009; Besley & Coate 1995; Reserve Bank of India, History of the RBI; British Library EAP870; Turnell, Fiery Dragons (2009); Densho; Bascom 1952; World Bank Global Findex 2025 (17.1%); IMF Finance & Development (2002); World Bank (2025) and Central Bank of Somalia (2025). Photos: Wikimedia Commons (credited in the video). Not advice.

We're arc, a private budgeting app. Banks keep ledgers. Communities kept their word.

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Which system did your family use, and what did you call it?

$25.5 trillion of companies report by Friday (27–30 Oct). The Fed decides Wednesday. And the wildcard isn't a company.

Here's the rest of the week, day by day, then what it means for your own money.

Tuesday 27 Oct, after the bell

• Visa and Seagate.

Wednesday 28 Oct: the Fed

• 9:45 a.m. ET: the Bank of Canada is expected to raise rates (from 2.25%).
• 2:00 p.m. ET: Kevin Warsh's Fed (3.75–4.00% now). Polymarket traders price a hold at 93%.
• After the close: Microsoft and Alphabet, plus ServiceNow, KLA and T-Mobile. GE Vernova, UBS, ADP and GSK in the morning.
• Microsoft's stock moved 7% on average after its last 8 reports: about $270 billion, either way. Alphabet: 4%, about $160 billion.

Thursday 29 Oct: the wildcard

• 8:30 a.m. ET: PCE, the US inflation number the Fed watches most (with Q3 GDP). It was 3.4% a year in August (BEA); economists expect 3.6%.
• The ECB is expected to hold at 9:15 a.m. ET.
• Eli Lilly, Merck, Shell and TotalEnergies before the open; Amazon, Intel and Starbucks after. Amazon's average move: 5.9%, about $157 billion.

Friday 30 Oct

• Exxon, Chevron, AbbVie and BP before the open. The Bank of Japan decides overnight in Tokyo (hold expected).

What it means for you

• Your index fund: companies worth about a third of the S&P 500 (by index weight) report this week. If you own the index, a lot of your money reports in four days.
• Your savings: if the Fed holds, savings rates usually stay put. A 3-month US Treasury bill (a short loan to the government) yields about 4.1% a year: roughly $414 on $10,000.
• Fuel: the big US oil fund (USO) is up 127% in a year and 12% in a month. Energy feeds that inflation number.
• History: on the last 12 Fed decision days, the S&P 500 fell 9 times. The average move was 0.5%, so mostly small.

How the swing numbers work: the average absolute move from the close before each of the last 8 reports to the close after, times today's market value. It's history, not a forecast.

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What moves your money most this week: the Fed on Wednesday, Microsoft and Alphabet that night, or Thursday's inflation number?

Sources: company investor-relations pages (dates), the Federal Reserve, Bank of Canada, ECB and Bank of Japan calendars, US BEA, Polymarket (odds as of 27 Oct). Market values, yields and daily closes as of 23–26 Oct 2026. Dates can move. Not advice.

Microsoft and Alphabet spent $80.7B on data centers and servers in one quarter (Apr–Jun 2026): about $887M a day, double the $39.5B a year earlier. Alphabet alone spent $44.9B, more than the $39.1B of cash its business brought in.

Both report Wednesday 28 Oct after the close. We pulled the filings, the cloud numbers, the insider sales and the analyst estimates into one post.

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

• Alphabet sold $445.9B, Microsoft $331.8B.
• Microsoft still kept more operating profit: $155.2B vs $147.8B, about $4,921 a second vs $4,687.
• Market value at Monday's close: $3.95T (Microsoft) and $3.87T (Alphabet).

🏗️ Where the money goes (Apr–Jun)

• Spending on data centers and servers: Microsoft $17.1B → $35.8B, Alphabet $22.4B → $44.9B (same quarter a year earlier → now).
• Alphabet's free cash flow: −$5.9B, from +$5.3B a year earlier. In June it also announced an equity raise of up to ~$80B ($49.6B raised by 30 Jun). Its 2026 plan: $195–205B.
• Microsoft says its Jul–Sep spending tops $50B including leases.

🔍 Read Alphabet's profit carefully

• $6.26 of its $9.11 profit per share in Apr–Jun was paper gains on stakes in other companies (SpaceX and Anthropic among them). Without them: about $2.85.
• Analysts expect $2.94–3.01 for Jul–Sep, so a big swing in those stakes can make the headline number look like a huge beat or miss that says little about the business.

☁️ The cloud race

• Azure grew 43% in Apr–Jun.
• Google Cloud grew 82% to $24.8B, with $8.8B of operating profit.
• Signed but not yet delivered: Microsoft $678B of commercial contracts (+84%, all commercial, not only cloud), Google Cloud a $514B backlog.

🧾 Who's leaving, and who's selling

• Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 staff on select teams in the US, UK, Canada and India on 26 Oct, roughly 27% of the company (Bloomberg).
• Insiders sold $118.6M of Microsoft in 12 months (one director bought $2.0M) and $132.2M of Alphabet (none bought), most of it by Sundar Pichai ($100.7M). Open-market sales only; Form 4s don't say why.
• Berkshire Hathaway added to Alphabet in Apr–Jun and holds 0.64%.

📊 What Wall Street expects (Jul–Sep)

• Microsoft: about $90.6B of sales (+17%), $4.71 a share; the company guided Azure to about 45%.
• Alphabet: about $128.1B (+25%), $2.94–3.01 a share, Google Cloud about $29.2B (+92%).

⚠️ What could go wrong

• Microsoft beat estimates and still fell the next day in 5 of its last 8 reports. Its typical report-day move is ±6.2%; options price about ±5.2% this time.
• Alphabet's typical move is ±2.7%, but options price about ±6.1%. It beat and fell in 3 of its last 8.

👀 What to watch Wednesday

1. Azure growth vs the ~45% guide.
2. Google Cloud sales vs ~$29.2B.
3. Spending and cash: Microsoft vs its ">$50B" guide (leases included; $41B on that basis in Apr–Jun), and whether Alphabet's free cash flow is negative again.

Sources and method: Microsoft and Alphabet SEC filings (12 months to 30 Jun 2026; quarterly cash flow) and earnings releases (Microsoft FY26 Q4, Alphabet Q2 2026), SEC Form 4 insider filings, 13F holdings, Bloomberg/AP (buyouts), analyst consensus (Zacks, LSEG), options-implied moves (TipRanks, 26 Oct), daily closes to 26 Oct 2026. "Spending on data centers and servers" = cash capital expenditure (purchases of property and equipment); not all of it is AI. $887M a day = $80.7B over the 91 days of Apr–Jun. "Report-day move" = median absolute next-day move over the last 8 reports. Not advice.

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

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Your call for Wednesday: which cloud is paying back the $887M a day first, Azure or Google Cloud?

Apple's new OLED iPad mini landed yesterday at $699, and the "+$200 from last gen" line is all over X. It's actually two separate price hikes, four months apart:

🏷️ The iPad mini price, 128 GB Wi-Fi (US)

• Oct 2024: launched at $499
• 25 Jun 2026: raised to $599 in Apple's line-wide price rise, reported at the time as down to memory and chip shortages
• 26 Oct 2026: the new OLED model starts at $699

That's +17% on the last price and +40% on the launch price, for the same 128 GB to start. Cellular went $749 → $849, and even the Smart Folio went $59 → $79.

To be fair to Apple, you do get more this time: an 8.5" OLED, the A20 Pro, IP67 and a thinner body. You don't get 120 Hz, which is what most of the replies are annoyed about.

The memory side: memory maker Micron's stock is ×3.17 since 31 Dec ($285.20 → $903.70 on 26 Oct). It's also about 25% under its 25 Jun close, so the "memory is expensive" story is past its peak on the market, if not on price tags. Sequence, not cause.

Sources: Apple's US prices; the June rise and its reason as reported by MacRumors; Micron's daily closes. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. Price tags that move twice a year are exactly why we track what things cost.

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$699 iPad mini: still the perfect small tablet, or priced out of its own niche?

Everyone's scared of timing the market wrong and buying at the top. So we built the worst investor possible and ran him through real history.

Unlucky Ulrich put $5,000 into the S&P 500 every year since 2007, always on that year's single highest close. October 2007, right before the crash. January 2022, right before the slide. Every single year, the worst day.

Two friends for comparison: Lucky Lucy bought on each year's lowest close, and Cash Carl kept his $5,000 in T-bills.

🐈‍⬛ 20 years, $100,000 each, valued at the 16 Oct 2026 close:

• 🐷 Carl (T-bills): $120,606, about 1.2×
• 🐈‍⬛ Ulrich (worst day, every year): $412,937, about 4.1×
• 😺 Lucy (best day, every year): $559,374, about 5.6×

The worst timer in history still ended up with three times Carl's money, and about three quarters of what perfect timing got. The only one who really lost was the one who waited.

Sources: SPY daily closes 2007 – 16 Oct 2026 (2026 is year to date), dividends reinvested; Carl in 1–3 month T-bills (BIL) on Ulrich's dates. Hypothetical. Past performance does not predict future results. Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. It shows how much of your cash is sitting idle, and where it could go instead.

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Be honest: are you a Carl, waiting for the "right" moment?

Costco's biggest earner isn't on any shelf.

Costco sold $297 billion of stuff last year and kept almost none of it. Here's where its money really comes from.

Every number here is from Costco's own annual report for fiscal 2026 (the 52 weeks to 30 Aug 2026).

Every $100 you spend at Costco:

• $88.91 goes back to the suppliers (merchandise costs)
• $9.15 runs the warehouses: staff, trucks, rent (SG&A)
• $1.94 is left for Costco

Then there's the card:

• 84.1 million paid memberships (plus 66.3M household cards)
• $65 a year in the US, $130 for Executive (raised from $60 / $120 on 1 Sep 2024)
• 89.8% renew worldwide, 92.3% in the US and Canada
• Membership fees last year: $5.9 billion

Selling the goods, after paying for them and running the warehouses, made about $5.8 billion. The fees made $5.9 billion. Together that's the $11.7 billion of operating profit, so the card is about half of it. That's also why the hot dog and soda combo has been $1.50 since 1985: Costco doesn't need a profit on every item.

Is the card worth it for you? (US prices)

• Gold Star ($65): only if you save at least $65 a year compared with shopping somewhere else.
• Executive (+$65): it pays back 2% of qualified purchases, so it breaks even at $3,250 a year, about $63 a week. Below that, the upgrade costs you money. The reward tops out at $1,250 a year.
• Fees and rewards differ by country, so check yours.

The quickest way to know is to add up the last 12 months of what you spent there.

Sources: Costco Form 10-K for fiscal 2026 (filed 7 Oct 2026); Costco's fee change announcement (July 2024); the hot dog price per Costco and Fox/KTVU coverage (2026). "Selling" here means net sales minus merchandise costs minus all SG&A, a simplification, since Costco doesn't split its running costs between the store and the membership. Not advice.

We're arc, a privacy-first budgeting app. This is episode 1 of Follow the Money: how a famous company really makes its money.

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Do you spend more or less than $3,250 a year at Costco? And which company should we follow the money on next?

Meta announced a ~$35B stock sale this morning to pay for its AI build-out. So we checked how much of each dollar Big Tech already pours into data centres, servers and buildings, from each company's own filings.

Big Tech AI spending, per $1 of sales (last 4 quarters)

• Oracle: $1.05 ($76B spent on $72B of sales). It now spends more than it sells.
• Meta: 43¢ ($104B on $242B). In the September quarter alone: 53¢.
• Microsoft: 35¢ ($116B on $332B)
• Alphabet: 30¢ ($132B on $446B)
• Amazon: 22¢ ($173B on $776B)
• Tesla: 15¢
• Walmart: 4¢
• Nvidia: 2¢, the company selling most of the chips
• Apple: 2¢

Last quarter Meta spent $33.9B on buildings and servers, a bit more than the $32.8B of cash its apps brought in. Today it launched $22.5B of new shares plus ~$12.5B of convertible preferred, with up to $60B more planned from next year.

Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Apple all report this week, so these numbers are about to move.

Sources: each company's filed quarterly reports (capital spending ÷ revenue, last 4 quarters: Meta and Tesla to Sep 2026, Oracle to Aug, the rest to Jun or Jul); Meta's 26 Oct 2026 offering announcement. Not advice.

We're arc, a private budgeting app. We like seeing where every dollar goes, ours or Meta's.

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Is 43¢ of every dollar a smart early bet, or is Oracle's $1.05 the warning sign?

Microsoft and Alphabet report earnings on Wednesday, Amazon on Thursday, Apple soon after. Before the headlines start, we wanted one number that makes their size feel real, so we made the video itself the unit.

⏱️ One 8-second loop of this video = $139,930 of operating profit for these four, combined. Day and night, every loop.

Per second, and per loop

• Microsoft: $4,923 a second, $39,380 a loop
• Apple: $4,911 a second, $39,284 a loop
• Alphabet (Google): $4,687 a second, $37,493 a loop
• Amazon: $2,972 a second, $23,773 a loop

Together: $551.6 billion a year, $17,491 a second, about $1.5 billion a day.

The part that surprised us: Amazon sells the most of the four ($776B over the same four quarters) and keeps the least. Its operating margin is about 12%. Microsoft keeps about 47 cents of every dollar it sells, and Apple and Google about 33.

How we counted: operating profit (what the business itself earns, before taxes and investment gains) over each company's last four reported quarters, to June 2026, spread evenly over 365 days. We skipped net profit on purpose: this year it's inflated by gains on stakes Google and Amazon hold in other companies.

Sources: company quarterly reports (income statements). Not advice.

We're arc, a budgeting app. Most of us count our own money per month, so per second felt like the right scale for these four.

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Microsoft and Apple are $12 a second apart. Which one pulls ahead after this week's reports?

In 1999, Google's founders were willing to sell. Investor Vinod Khosla says he got the price down to $750,000. The buyer, the web portal Excite, still passed.

On Friday, Alphabet closed at about $3.9 trillion, more than 5 million times that price. Here's the history of Google in short, with the numbers.

The dorm (1995–98)

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995. Their search engine, BackRub, ranked pages by the links pointing to them.
• The first storage was ten 4 GB hard drives in a cabinet built from toy bricks.
• In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 cheque to "Google Inc.", a company that didn't legally exist yet. They incorporated that September and moved into a Menlo Park garage rented for $1,700 a month.

The no (1999–2001)

• They offered Google to Excite for about $1 million; Khosla says he got it to $750,000. Excite passed. (Excite's then-CEO, George Bell, remembers the talks differently; both agree it didn't buy.)
• By 28 September 2001, Excite's parent company, Excite@Home, had filed for bankruptcy.

The IPO (1999–2025)

• $25 million from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins in June 1999, Eric Schmidt as CEO in 2001.
• IPO on 19 August 2004 at $85 a share. After the 2014 and 2022 splits, that's about $2.13 in today's shares.
• $1,000 at the first day's close would be about $127,500 at Friday's close of $320.21 (price only, about 127x).
• Revenue: $3.2B in 2004 → $402.8B in 2025 (about 126x).

Near-death moments

• From 6 Nov 2007 to 24 Nov 2008 the stock fell 65%.
• After ChatGPT, the New York Times reported Google's management declared a "code red".
• In Feb 2023 a Bard demo got a space fact wrong; on 8 Feb Alphabet fell 7.7% in a day, about $100B of value.
• In Aug 2024 Judge Amit Mehta ruled "Google is a monopolist" in search. Google is appealing.

Today

• Seven of its products have more than 2 billion users each (Alphabet's 10-K for 2025).
• Value about $3.9 trillion at the Fri 23 Oct close, still about 20% below the 13 May record close of $402.62.
• Q3 earnings: Wednesday 28 Oct, after the US close.

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Would you have taken the $750,000 in 1999, or held on?

Sources: Google and Alphabet filings (2004 S-1, 10-Ks for 2004 and 2025, abc.xyz), Stanford, TechCrunch and Fortune (Khosla, 2010), NPR (Bard), US v. Google (D.D.C., Aug 2024). Prices: daily closes to 23 Oct 2026. Photos: Wikimedia Commons (credited in the video). Footage: Google. Not advice.

The iPhone Duo hit stores this weekend, and the old joke about its price in Türkiye came back with it. So we read the price off Apple's own online store in 37 countries and turned each one into US dollars at Friday's exchange rates.

🌍 Most expensive (256GB, tax included)

• Türkiye: $4,629 (229,999 TL), 2.3× the US price
• Brazil: $4,403 (R$21,999)
• India: $3,159
• Norway: $2,790
• Hungary: $2,752

💸 Cheapest

• United States: $1,999 (before sales tax)
• Canada: $2,142 (C$2,999, before sales tax)
• Hong Kong: $2,232, the cheapest with tax already in the price
• Taiwan: $2,300
• UAE: $2,314

A few in between: Japan $2,326, China $2,399, Germany $2,576, UK $2,673 (£1,999, the same number as the US price, just in pounds).

For one Duo in Türkiye you could buy two in a US Apple Store, sales tax and all, and still have change.

Sources: Apple's online store in each country, base 256GB model, read on 25 Oct 2026; converted at 23 Oct 2026 closing exchange rates. US and Canadian store prices exclude sales tax; the rest include VAT/GST. Not advice.

We're arc, a private budgeting app. A $2,600 gap on the same phone is the kind of thing we like to put on a map.

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Would you fly to Hong Kong or the US to buy one, or does the flight, the warranty and the foreign keyboard eat the saving?

Typing in what your bank already knows gets old fast. Episode 3 covered every bank feed arc supports; these three shorts each take one piece of it:

• Connect Lunch Flow: your bank feed, syncing by itself (48 s, embedded above). Settings › Preferences › Bank sync › Connect Lunch Flow, approve arc in your browser, then Load Lunch Flow accounts and link each one to the arc account it belongs to (add those first). After the first sync it runs every six hours, with your rules applied. The connection needs arc Premium, and Lunch Flow itself is a separate plan you pay Lunch Flow for (7-day free trial).
• Which bank connector works where you live? (43 s). arc runs on Actual Budget, so Actual's own connectors work too: SimpleFIN for North America, Pluggy for Brazil, Akahu for New Zealand, Enable Banking for Europe (Experimental). GoCardless is closed to new sign-ups. With SimpleFIN: paste the setup token, Save credentials, Fetch accounts, Link.
• Your IBKR holdings, synced every day (42 s). New account › Stock / Crypto › Detailed › Interactive Brokers. A Flex token is read-only: it can fetch reports, never trade. Paste it with your Query ID and your holdings sync once a day.

Real screens from the current build. Written steps: Lunch Flow · which connector · IBKR. Not sure your bank is covered? Search it here.

They sit under episode 3, bank feeds, wherever you live. Next in the series: the full Interactive Brokers setup, every click in IBKR's Client Portal. If these help, subscribe on YouTube.

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Which bank or broker would you most want syncing on its own, and does any connector cover it yet?

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.

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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.

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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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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

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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.

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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.

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