👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🛒 The trade-down is real: Walmart fell 9% on its slowest US sales in six years while Ross Stores posted 10% and raised its guidance.

• ⛽ Brent heads toward $94: Oil is up more than 5% this week and Walmart named fuel costs as the reason shoppers cut back.

• ₿ Bitcoin clears $77,000: The best week since 2023 pulled XRP up another 9% to $1.39, with $606 million of ETF inflows behind it.

• 📊 The last number before Wyoming: US flash PMI lands at 2:45pm UK, 9:45am ET, a week before Warsh speaks at Jackson Hole.

• 🇬🇧 Britain splits in two: July retail sales fell 0.5% while August business surveys reached a four-month high and confidence a two-year high.

• 💉 Moderna gives it back: Shares fell 23.5% on Thursday, one day after the largest single-session gain in company history, with no new data.

• 🇯🇵 Japan inflation reaches 2.0%: Prices rose for a third straight month, which strengthens the case for the Bank of Japan to raise rates.

• 🇪🇺 Europe’s factories speed up: Eurozone manufacturing output hit a 54-month high and export orders grew for the first time since early 2022.

• 🚜 Deere posts its first profit rise in three years: Construction profit jumped 84% and the company lifted its full-year forecast to as much as $5 billion.

• 📈 A short squeeze, and I expect a lower high: Chart of the Day covers XRP at 1.30, 1.50 and 1.71, and the dollar line below.

🧠 One Big Thing

Walmart told you exactly why its shoppers spent less last quarter. Fuel. The company said customers are making trade-offs because petrol costs more, and its US sales grew 2.6%, the slowest in over six years. Brent crude is heading for a second straight weekly gain near $94, up more than 5% since Monday, because Washington and Tehran are still deadlocked over the Strait of Hormuz. A standoff in the Gulf is now showing up in the checkout total of the world’s largest retailer. That chain, from the strait to the pump to the till, runs through most of what you own.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

2.6%

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +9.53% Strategy Inc. rallied with the broader crypto complex as bitcoin broke above $70,000 overnight to its highest level since early June, swinging the company’s 840,447 coin position back to an unrealized gain of roughly $1.4 billion. Strive (ASST, +9.49%) climbed on the same move.

• : +7.98% Ross Stores surged after second quarter earnings of $2.66 per share crushed the $1.94 consensus on 10% comparable store sales growth and a 13% revenue rise to $6.26 billion, its widest beat in at least two years. Management raised full year EPS guidance to $8.61 to $8.77 and lifted the 2026 store opening plan to 115 locations.

• : +8.07% Freeport-McMoRan advanced as the metals complex caught a strong bid, with gold pushing above $4,500 an ounce and copper holding near the record $6.77 per pound struck earlier this month on persistent supply tightness. Southern Copper (SCCO, +3.41%) rose on the same tape.

Losers

• : -13.60% OSI Systems dropped after fiscal fourth quarter revenue fell 4.1% to $484.1 million against a $529 million consensus and full year guidance came in about 2% light. Record adjusted EPS of $3.78, up 17%, was overshadowed by deferred Security division deliveries and a cautious outlook.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $77,610 (▲ 6.34%)
Ethereum (ETH): $2,386 (▲ 2.58%)
XRP: $1.39 (▲ 9.59%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,687 (▲ 0.32%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,461 (▲ 0.55%)
FTSE 100: 10,757 (▲ 0.26%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.70% (▼ 0.17%)
Oil (WTI): $87 (▲ 0.81%)
Gold: $4,597 (▲ 1.73%)
Silver: $69.93 (▲ 2.76%)

Data as of: UK: 12:23pm BST / US: 7:23am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 8:23pm JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🛒 Walmart falls 9% and Ross Stores answers it

$114.30 on Wednesday. $103.84 on Thursday. Walmart lost about 9% in a single session and dragged the Dow down 703 points with it. The headline quarter was fine: adjusted earnings beat and full-year guidance went up. US comparable sales grew 2.6%, the slowest pace in more than six years and well short of the 3.7% analysts had modelled. Management said shoppers are making trade-offs as petrol costs rise. Third-quarter earnings were guided to 62 to 64 cents against the 68 cents expected. (Yahoo Finance)

Six hours later, Ross Stores told the other side of the same story. Earnings of $2.66 a share against $1.94 expected. Revenue of $6.3 billion against $6.15 billion. Comparable sales up 10% on higher traffic and higher spending, a second consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. The off-price chain raised its full-year earnings guidance to $8.61 to $8.77. Shares had closed down 2.43% before the numbers, then rose 7.95% to $247.20 after hours. (PR Newswire)

People are still buying. They are buying at cheaper shops, and Ross running 10% comps against Walmart’s 2.6% is what trading down looks like in the numbers rather than in the commentary. The next reads come on 27 August, when Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Best Buy all report.

⛽ Oil heads for $94 with sanctions still to land

The plan Trump promised on Wednesday still has not been published, and the oil market has already started pricing it. Brent traded near $93.46 on Friday morning, on course for a weekly gain of more than 5% and a second consecutive weekly rise, with West Texas Intermediate around $87. The Truth Social post threatened the “most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country”, with penalties on any nation whose banks, businesses or airports give Tehran a lifeline. (Bloomberg)

Iran has lived under sanctions for most of two decades, which is why the detail matters more than the volume. The campaign extends Operation Economic Fury, running since April, and the new element is secondary pressure on third countries rather than on Iran itself. Trump has also said oil continues to flow through the waterway and that he would be open to talks at some point. Both statements are true and they point opposite ways for the price. (The Washington Post)

The consumer link got sharper this week. Walmart named higher fuel costs as a drag on what its customers could spend, which is the largest retailer in America confirming the transmission from the Gulf to the till.

₿ Bitcoin clears $77,000 and XRP runs to $1.39

Was Wednesday’s move real buying or shorts being run over? Thursday’s flows argue for buying. US spot bitcoin funds took in $606 million on 20 August, up from $517 million the day before, and every listed crypto fund drew money on the same day. That is a different signature from a one-session liquidation spike. Bitcoin passed $77,000 on Friday for the first time since May, its best week since 2023. (CoinDesk)

XRP has run hardest of the majors. It cleared $1.30 for the first time in months after gaining 18% on Thursday, then added close to 10% again on Friday to trade around $1.39. That is roughly 40% above the 99 cents it printed on 11 August, when a 635-day run above a dollar ended. Ether reached roughly $2,386 and Solana added about 11%. (CryptoPotato)

Leverage is still doing part of the work, with roughly $1 billion of short positions liquidated in the latest 24 hours. Two supports hold this up at once: Treasury yields staying down after the buyback announcement, and Washington keeping the CLARITY Act alive into the 15 September vote. On Thursday, CFTC chairman Michael Selig ordered staff to draft a backup crypto rulebook if that bill stalls. (CoinDesk)

A rulemaking does not need 60 senators, which makes Selig’s fallback the more durable of the two Washington routes.

📊 The last big American number before Jackson Hole

At 2:45pm UK, 9:45am ET, S&P Global publishes its flash reading of the American economy for August. It is the earliest look at the month everyone is actually living in, drawn from purchasing managers who see orders before they reach official statistics. July was strong: the composite index came in at 54.5, its highest since October 2025, and services finished at 54.6, a nine-month high. (Quartz)

Two caveats sit under that. The strongest demand came from consumer-facing services tied to the World Cup and Independence Day, both of which have passed. Input cost inflation hit its highest level since May 2025 on tariffs and energy. Against July payrolls at minus 23,000, retail sales down 0.6% and a Walmart print blaming fuel, today’s survey is where the soft data either confirms the slowdown or refuses to. Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole keynote as Fed chair next Friday, 28 August, 19 days before the 16 September rate decision.

Alberto Musalem of the St Louis Fed told CNBC on Thursday that he will not prejudge September. He voted for a rise in July, and he repeated that underlying inflation is running between 2.5% and 3% against a 2% target. (Reuters)

🇬🇧 Britain’s shops fell, Britain’s businesses rose

Britain published two readings on itself this morning and they disagreed. Retail sales volumes fell 0.5% in July, the first decline since April, partly reversing a downwardly revised 0.7% rise in June. Core sales excluding fuel dropped 0.9% against forecasts for a 0.5% fall. Online sales values fell 3.9%. The Office for National Statistics pointed to hot weather and thinner discounting, with June’s promotional boost fading. (ONS)

Two and a half hours later the picture flipped. The flash composite index for August rose to 52.5 from 52.2, a four-month high, against a Reuters poll expecting a fall to 51.6. Services climbed to 52.8, a six-month high, and beat every forecast in that poll. Manufacturing cooled to 51.5. Consumer confidence this month reached its best level since August 2024. (Reuters)

One set is July. The other is August. Retail sales measure what was spent in shops last month, and the survey measures what companies say is happening now, which is why the Bank of England is likely to weight the newer one more heavily. UK inflation came in at 2.9% on Wednesday, so the rate-cut case was already thin.

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💉 Moderna gives back a quarter of its record day

Moderna fell 23.5% on Thursday, closing near $131, one day after the 177% gain that gave it the largest single session in its history. No new data arrived to justify the reversal, and roughly $18 billion of market value came off. The Phase 3 melanoma result stands: its personalised mRNA vaccine given alongside Merck’s Keytruda extended the time before high-risk melanoma returned. What changed was the price attached to it. The company reported a net loss of $782 million for the second quarter, so holders were balancing an oncology pipeline against present-day losses. Merck and BioNTech also gave back part of Wednesday’s gains. (Forbes)

🇯🇵 Japan’s inflation reaches 2.0%

Japanese consumer prices rose 2.0% in the year to July, up from 1.7% in June and a third consecutive monthly increase. Core inflation excluding fresh food came in at 1.8%, and the measure stripping out fresh food and energy rose to 1.9% from 1.7%. Businesses are passing on higher energy and raw material costs, though government fuel subsidies are still absorbing part of the oil move. Core inflation has now sat below the Bank of Japan’s 2% target for a seventh straight month. A firmer inflation run alongside July exports up 23.2% strengthens the argument for the next rate rise. (The Japan Times)

🇪🇺 Eurozone factories hit a four-and-a-half year high

The flash eurozone composite index rose to 52.1 in August from 52.0, a nine-month high, with manufacturing output at 53.4 from 52.9, the strongest in 54 months. Services were unchanged at 51.7. New orders grew for a second month and at the fastest pace in 40 months, and new export orders increased for the first time in four and a half years, ending a run of falling overseas demand that has dogged European industry since early 2022. A weaker dollar is part of that, since the greenback sits at a three-month low after the Treasury buyback announcement. (ADVFN)

🚜 Deere posts its first profit rise in three years

Deere reported third-quarter net income of $1.379 billion and earnings of $5.10 a share, up from $4.75 a year earlier, its first year-on-year profit increase in roughly three years. Total net sales and revenues rose 5% to $12.61 billion. Construction and forestry carried it: segment sales climbed 18% to $3.62 billion and operating profit jumped 84% to $436 million. Large farm machinery stayed weak. A $110 million tariff refund helped the quarter, making Deere the third company this week to lean on one. Deere raised its full-year net income forecast to between $4.75 billion and $5 billion, and the shares rose 6.94% to $620.94. (RTÉ)

📈 Chart of the Day - XRP (XRPUSD)

Read more

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🏛️ Treasury buys its own bonds: Washington doubled its long bond buybacks, yields fell, and three days of selling reversed in one session.

• 🏦 Fed minutes were the hawkish part: Many officials said higher rates would be needed if inflation refused to come down.

• 🛢️ Trump promises economic warfare: He is preparing sanctions on anyone helping Iran, while a secret US oil corridor runs nightly.

• 🪙 Bitcoin clears $71,000: Ether is back above $2,000 and almost $2 billion of leveraged crypto positions were wiped out.

• 🛒 Walmart beat and fell 6%: It raised full-year guidance, then guided the current quarter light, and the shares dropped anyway.

• 💉 Moderna’s best day ever: Shares closed 177% higher and short sellers took a paper loss of about $5 billion.

• 🇯🇵 Japan’s exports jump 23%: Chip shipments rose 49% in July, a fifth straight month of growth for Japanese exporters.

• 🇨🇦 Canada tariffs paused again: Trump shelved 50% duties on some Canadian goods hours before they were due to start.

• 💻 Nebius raises $4.5 billion: The AI cloud company sold convertible notes and its shares fell almost 13% on the news.

• 🔍 Wednesday in three parts: The bond move, the short squeeze that followed it, and what the Fed minutes actually said.

• 📈 The counter-trend rally arrived: Chart of the Day covers XRP at $1.00 support, resistance at $1.22, and $1.31 above it.

🧠 One Big Thing

Your portfolio moved yesterday because of a press release from the US Treasury. Governments have been borrowing so much that the price of long-term borrowing hit levels last seen in 2007, and everything you own is priced against that number. On Wednesday the Treasury said it would double the amount of its own long bonds it buys back each week. Yields fell and shares rose. Gold went through $4,500, Bitcoin reached $69,000, and Korea took back everything it lost the day before. No company reported anything. The cost of money changed.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

$40 trillion

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +13.41% Webull Corporation posted record second quarter revenue of $198.8 million, up 51 percent year over year, with adjusted earnings of five cents beating estimates as the June elimination of the Pattern Day Trader Rule drove record trading volumes.

• : +11.00% Strategy Inc extended Wednesday’s surge as bitcoin pushed toward $72,000 following the president’s meeting with crypto executives and regulators and a fresh SEC digital asset rulemaking proposal.

• : +10.52% Strive, Inc. rallied alongside the broader bitcoin move as its SATA perpetual preferred approached par value for the first time in two months and a board director disclosed an open market purchase of 15,900 Class A shares.

• : +5.81% Robinhood Markets, Inc. climbed for a second session as the crypto rally lifted expectations for its digital asset trading revenue.

Losers

• : -14.06% Advance Auto Parts Inc. reported second quarter sales of $2.0 billion, flat year over year and short of estimates, and set full year revenue guidance with a midpoint below consensus, overshadowing an adjusted EPS beat that leaned on roughly 31 cents of tariff refunds.

• : -13.86% Coty Inc. posted an adjusted quarterly loss of two cents against expectations for a one cent loss and guided first quarter earnings to 11 to 13 cents versus the 14 cents analysts expected, framing the coming year as a transition period.

• : -6.18% Walmart Inc. beat on second quarter earnings at 81 cents and raised full year guidance, but third quarter adjusted EPS guidance of 62 to 64 cents landed below consensus and sent shares lower.

• : -3.45% Alibaba Group Holding reported a 76 percent drop in quarterly net income to 10.54 billion yuan as heavy AI infrastructure spending outweighed 9 percent revenue growth and 45 percent external cloud revenue growth.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $71,860 (▲ 3.72%)
Ethereum (ETH): $2,287 (▲ 1.57%)
XRP: $1.16 (▲ 4.74%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,727 (▼ 0.02%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,504 (▼ 0.03%)
FTSE 100: 10,711 (▼ 0.29%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.68% (▲ 0.84%)
Oil (WTI): $87 (▲ 2.91%)
Gold: $4,486 (▼ 0.80%)
Silver: $66.77 (▼ 0.21%)

Data as of: UK: 12:13pm BST / US: 7:13am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 8:13pm JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🏛️ Washington starts buying back its own bonds

The Treasury said on Wednesday it will at least double the size of its liquidity support buyback operations in the 10 to 20 year and the 20 to 30 year parts of the market. The maximum per operation goes from $2 billion to at least $4 billion. The change takes effect on 9 September and runs through 4 November. Long yields fell within minutes. The 30-year gave up around 9 basis points to close at 5.19%, having touched 5.33% on Tuesday, its highest since 2007. The 10-year fell about 6 basis points to 4.647%. (CNBC)

A buyback is the government going into the open market and purchasing bonds it has already issued. That is a different thing from money printing, because the Treasury funds it out of regular borrowing and creates no new reserves. The department described the increase as liquidity support in a part of the curve where buyers had gone quiet since late June. The timing tells you why it was needed. Federal debt passed $40.05 trillion on 18 August, five months after crossing $39 trillion in March, and it has more than doubled since 2017. (The Washington Post)

The reaction ran through every market at once. The S&P 500 added 16 points to 7,708 and the Dow gained 120 points to 53,463, both snapping a three-day losing run, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 41 points to 26,331. Gold climbed more than 3% through $4,500, its highest since 4 June, and the dollar fell to a three-month low. Overnight the trade reached Asia. Korea’s KOSPI closed 5.89% higher at 6,852.58, taking back all of Wednesday’s 5.80% collapse, with SK Hynix up more than 12% and Samsung Electronics more than 9%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 1.36% to 66,216.79. By Thursday lunchtime the 10-year had backed up to 4.68%, giving part of the move straight back.

🏦 The Fed minutes were more hawkish than the vote

The July record landed at 7:00pm UK, 2:00pm ET on Wednesday, and it describes a committee closer to raising rates than the 9-3 vote suggested. Many participants judged that higher rates would likely be necessary if inflation did not decline. Some said financial conditions might not be restrictive enough to return inflation to the 2% target. A few of those who wanted a rise at the meeting argued that moving then would forestall the need for more tightening later. Several noted that price increases over the past year had been broad based across goods and services. (Federal Reserve)

Fed language is graded, so the words carry counts. “Several” sits above “a few” and below “many”, which means the hawkish camp inside that room was wider than the three names on the dissent. Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan were the ones who voted for a quarter point. The document also carries something nobody was looking for. Kevin Warsh told the committee that six scheduled meetings a year, roughly one every two months, would let more information accumulate between decisions. No vote was taken and the 2026 calendar is unchanged. The Fed has met eight times a year since 1981. (investingLive)

Every word of it was written before July payrolls came in at minus 23,000 and before retail sales fell 0.6%, so the hawkishness describes an economy that has since softened. Markets treated it as history and bought bonds anyway.

🛢️ Trump promises economic warfare, and a secret oil corridor surfaces

“I am announcing the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY.” That was Trump on Truth Social on Wednesday, promising economic warfare and isolation against Iran on an unprecedented scale, with penalties threatened against any country helping Tehran evade sanctions. The plan is due to be set out next week. On the same day the United Arab Emirates suspended all trade and financial transactions with Iran, after two ballistic missiles launched from Iran fell into its territorial waters causing no damage. (CNBC)

Underneath the rhetoric, something quieter has been running for weeks. Axios reported that the US military has established its own shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz, moving 15 to 20 tankers each night along a southern channel off the coast of Oman. Roughly 10 million barrels a day are getting out that way, about half the pre-war volume. Brent pushed toward $93 on Thursday morning, up more than 4% on the week, with West Texas Intermediate near $87. US crude inventories rose 4.4 million barrels last week while refinery runs hit their highest since September 2019. (Trading Economics)

Half the oil is still moving, which makes the shortage smaller than the headlines imply. The sanctions plan is what could change that, because squeezing the buyers of Iranian crude takes barrels off the market.

🪙 Bitcoin clears $71,000 as Washington opens the door

Bitcoin touched $69,000 on Wednesday for the first time in two months, and it has kept going since, trading near $71,860 by Thursday lunchtime. Ether jumped 10% back above $2,000, its first visit since May, and reached $2,287. XRP added another 4.7% on Thursday to $1.16. Three things landed inside 24 hours. The Treasury doubled its bond buybacks, the SEC published its proposed “Regulation Crypto Assets” framework on Tuesday afternoon, and Trump hosted the industry at the White House on Wednesday. Leveraged traders positioned the wrong way lost $1.93 billion in liquidations over the day, and $1.75 billion of that was short positions. (The Block)

Under the SEC proposal, an issuer could raise up to $5 million over four years, or up to $75 million a year with audited accounts and regular reporting, without registering the offering as a securities sale. Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Brad Garlinghouse of Ripple, Vlad Tenev of Robinhood, Arjun Sethi of Kraken and Jeff Sprecher of Intercontinental Exchange all sat with Trump, SEC chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC chairman Michael Selig. Armstrong called the 15 September CLARITY Act vote the most important next step. Crypto-linked equities rose with the coins, Strategy and Bitmine each around 10%. (The Washington Post)

🛒 Walmart beat, raised the year, and fell 6%

Did American shoppers stop buying, or start buying cheaper? Walmart answered at midday and the shares fell 6.18% on it. Adjusted earnings came in at 81 cents against the 73 cents analysts had modelled, and the company raised its full-year guidance. Then it guided third-quarter adjusted earnings to 62 to 64 cents, below consensus, and that is the line the market traded. John Furner delivered his first August print as chief executive alongside finance chief John David Rainey. Around 90% of American households shop there in a given year. (Walmart)

Wednesday set an uncomfortable table. Target beat earnings expectations and raised its annual sales forecast, with comparable sales up 3.8% and store traffic up 3.6%, and the shares fell close to 3%. A $994 million tariff refund supplied about 40% of the quarter’s earnings per share. Lowe’s beat on earnings, matched on revenue, then trimmed its comparable sales guidance citing pressure in do-it-yourself spending, and fell about 3.5%. TJX beat and raised its full-year profit forecast, guided the current quarter light, and dropped more than 3%. Analog Devices beat, guided above consensus, improved gross margin and fell 3.5%. Estée Lauder was the exception, up 18.4% on a beat and a strong outlook. (TheStreet)

Five companies beat this week and five share prices fell.

The market is pricing the guidance rather than the quarter, and Walmart has now failed the same test its rivals failed a day earlier.

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💉 Moderna posts the best day in its history

Moderna closed at $174.38 on Wednesday, up 177% from Tuesday’s $62.96, the largest single-day gain the company has ever recorded. The move followed interim Phase 3 results showing its personalised mRNA cancer vaccine, given with Merck’s Keytruda, cut the recurrence of surgically removed melanoma and slowed its spread to new sites. Merck rose about 12% and BioNTech gained more than 19%. Short sellers held 13.5% of the free float going in, and took a paper loss of roughly $5 billion on the day, taking their mark-to-market losses for the year past $7 billion. Moderna is up 355% in 2026. (The Motley Fool)

🇯🇵 Japanese exports jump 23% on chip demand

Japan’s exports rose 23.2% in July from a year earlier, a fifth consecutive month of growth, with semiconductor shipments up 49%. The AI build-out is the direct cause, because Japanese suppliers make the memory, the wafers and the manufacturing equipment that data centre construction consumes. The figure arrived on the same morning Japanese and Korean chip shares rebounded hard, with Kioxia and SoftBank both up more than 5% in Tokyo. It also complicates the Bank of Japan’s position, since a strong export run and a yen near 158 to the dollar both argue for tighter policy. (investingLive)

🇨🇦 Trump pauses 50% Canadian tariffs for three days

Trump postponed a 50% tariff on a range of Canadian goods late on Tuesday, hours before it was due to take effect, covering roughly $20 billion of imports including dairy, wine, lumber and hockey equipment. He wrote on Truth Social that the pause runs three days and that Canada and the United States have a deal subject to the finalisation of documents, which puts the deadline back on Friday. Talks with Prime Minister Mark Carney still have market access, automotive trade, alcohol sales and digital trade rules unresolved. (CNN)

💻 Nebius raises $4.5 billion and falls 13%

Nebius Group fell 12.7% on Wednesday after disclosing a private offering of $4.5 billion in convertible senior notes, split between $2.75 billion maturing in 2030 and $1.75 billion maturing in 2034. A convertible note is debt the lender can swap for shares later, which is cheap money for the borrower and dilution for existing holders if the price rises. The AI cloud sector is funding its data centre build with borrowed money at a point when long-term borrowing costs sit at 19-year highs. Dell fell 7.2% and CrowdStrike 7.1% in the same session. (TheStreet)

🔍 Deep Dive - Wednesday in Three Parts: The Buyback, the Squeeze and the Room at the White House

Read more

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🔻 Korea’s market cracks: The KOSPI fell 5.8% as rising bond yields tore through chipmakers, with SK Hynix down 9.93%.

• 🏦 Fed minutes land tonight: The record of July’s triple-dissent meeting arrives at 7pm UK, 2pm ET, already three weeks stale.

• 🛢️ Brent nears $92: Trump says there are no talks with Iran, and eight ships have been hit this month.

• 🇬🇧 UK inflation back to 2.9%: Gas bills rose 14.7% in July, the biggest jump since October 2022, after the price cap moved.

• 🔨 Meta on trial in Oakland: Twenty-nine states accuse it of hooking children, and Meta says the bill could reach $1.4 trillion.

• 💉 Moderna almost doubles: The first late-stage win for a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine, in 1,137 melanoma patients.

• 💸 SK Hynix buys back $28bn: Korea’s largest buyback ever starts tomorrow, and the shares still fell almost 10%.

• 🚀 SpaceX closes the Cursor deal: The $60 billion all-stock purchase is the largest startup acquisition ever recorded.

• 🏛️ Crypto goes to the White House: Coinbase, Ripple and Kraken sit down with Trump, Atkins and Selig today.

• 📡 Keysight books record orders: Orders topped $2 billion for a second straight quarter while the rest of the chip trade sold off.

• 🔍 Cheat Sheet before the minutes: Three dissents, one document, and the lines to look for the second it drops.

🧠 One Big Thing

Your fund fell overnight and no company did anything wrong. Governments are borrowing enormous sums, and the price of that borrowing has reached levels last seen in 2007, with the US 30-year yield touching 5.33% on Tuesday. When safe government debt pays that much, the expensive stocks that need years of future growth to justify today’s price get marked down against it. That is why chipmakers were sold first and sold hardest. Korea’s market fell 5.8% on Wednesday morning and its exchange froze programme selling five minutes after the open. Nothing about the AI build-out changed. Borrowing costs did.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

48

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +98.22% Moderna nearly doubled after its personalized mRNA cancer vaccine with Merck met both endpoints in a Phase 3 melanoma trial, the first positive Phase 3 result for any mRNA-based cancer treatment.

• : +15.88% Eikon Therapeutics extended a two-day run on the melanoma read-across to its own Keytruda combination trial, ahead of a PARP inhibitor investor event on Thursday.

• : +9.23% Merck rose on the same readout, the first regimen to beat Keytruda alone in adjuvant melanoma, with regulatory filings now in play.

Losers

• : -23.90% WhiteFiber sank after pricing an upsized $270 million convertible note offering to fund data center expansion.

• : -6.11% Nebius Group extended Tuesday’s slide as rising yields and oil prices drove a broader retreat from AI cloud names.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,464 (▼0.32%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,922 (▲0.29%)
XRP: $1.01 (▲0.40%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,716 (▲0.02%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,512 (▼0.25%)
FTSE 100: 10,722 (▲0.03%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.69% (▼0.42%)
Oil (WTI): $85 (▲0.28%)
Gold: $4,364 (▲0.71%)
Silver: $63.54 (▲0.36%)

Data as of: UK: 12:59pm BST / US: 7:59am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 8:59pm JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🔻 Korea’s market breaks under the weight of yields

The KOSPI closed down 5.80% at 6,471 on Wednesday, a second straight fall and by far the deeper one. The Korea Exchange froze programme selling five minutes after the open, the 48th time it has done that this year. SK Hynix fell 9.93%, Samsung Electronics 7.54% and SK Square 11.54%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 closed 3.16% lower. Shanghai fell 2.51%. The selling began in New York on Tuesday, where a closely watched gauge of semiconductor firms dropped 5.5% and the Nasdaq composite fell 1.3%, with Micron, SanDisk and Western Digital all down 4% or more. (Trading Economics, Yahoo Finance)

So why chips, when the trigger sat in the bond market? Because the AI build-out is being paid for with borrowed money. The yield on 30-year US government debt hit 5.33% on Tuesday, the highest since 2007, and long yields reached multi-year highs in Japan, Germany and France in the same week. Higher borrowing costs tighten financial conditions even when the Fed does nothing, so the most expensive and longest-dated growth stories get repriced before anything else. Korea is the concentrated version of that trade. S&P 500 futures were roughly flat on Wednesday morning, which leaves the American open to settle whether this is a Korea story or a global one.

🏦 The Fed opens its books tonight

Three officials voted to raise rates at the July meeting. Tonight the rest of the record arrives. The Fed publishes the minutes of its 28 and 29 July meeting at 7:00pm UK and 2:00pm ET. That meeting left rates at 3.50% to 3.75% and produced the first same-direction triple dissent since 2016. Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan all wanted a quarter point. In the days after that vote, futures markets put the odds of a September rise at roughly two thirds. They have collapsed to around a third since, after July payrolls came in at minus 23,000 and July retail sales fell 0.6%. (Federal Reserve, CNBC)

These minutes describe a world that has gone. They were written before payrolls went negative and before the American consumer stopped spending, so every hawkish line inside them comes from a committee looking at a stronger economy than the one on the screen today. What the document can still settle is how close the rest of the committee came to joining the three dissenters. A record showing several others were wavering puts a September rise back on the table and pushes long yields higher again. A record showing the three were isolated says the July vote was the high-water mark for the hawks. A 20-year Treasury auction lands an hour earlier, at 6:00pm UK and 1:00pm ET.

🛢️ Brent pushes toward $92 with no talks left

Brent crude traded around $91.50 on Wednesday morning, a fourth consecutive session of gains, with West Texas Intermediate near $85.50. Trump said this week that Washington is holding no talks with Tehran. The US naval blockade stays in place. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman replied that the blockade has to go before the Strait of Hormuz can fully reopen. Eight vessels transiting the strait have been attacked this month, including ships linked to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Industry data showed American crude stocks fell by 328,000 barrels last week, after a 9.07 million barrel build the week before. (Trading Economics)

The 60-day memorandum signed in June expired on Monday with nothing put in its place. That leaves oil as the swing factor in every inflation forecast this autumn, which is a large part of why the bond market has been so ugly for a week. Petrol and diesel feed into consumer prices with a lag, so central banks that were being asked about cuts in September are being asked about rises instead. Gulf producers are routing around the chokepoint. Saudi Arabia has begun offering cargoes sourced outside the strait, following the route the United Arab Emirates took first. (Reuters)

🇬🇧 UK inflation climbs back to 2.9%

2.9%. That is where annual inflation landed in July, up from 2.6% in June and the highest in four months. Economists had pencilled in exactly that. Housing and household services did most of the work, running at 4.1% against 2.7% a month earlier. Gas prices were 14.7% higher than a year ago, the largest increase since October 2022. Ofgem lifted the energy price cap by 13% at the start of July. Electricity added 3.6%. Core inflation held at 2.6% for a third month, and producer prices slowed to 3.1%, a four-month low. (Trading Economics, FXStreet)

Energy did the damage, and an energy step like this one drops out of the annual comparison next July. Underneath it, core inflation has now been stuck at 2.6% for three straight months, and services inflation was 3.6% in June, which is the measure the Bank of England watches most closely. Transport inflation fell to 3.6% from 5.7% as the average price of diesel dropped 8.8 pence a litre between June and July. UK 10-year gilt yields sat above 5.05% on Wednesday, caught in the same global move that broke Seoul. Markets went into this print expecting the Bank to hold rates for the rest of the year. Nothing here forces a change of mind.

🔨 Meta goes on trial over children and Instagram

A jury of eight was seated at the federal courthouse in Oakland on Tuesday, and lawyers for California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey opened the largest social media addiction case yet brought. They lead a bipartisan group of 29 states arguing that Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children, through infinite scroll, photo filters and the like button, and that it misled the public about what it knew of the harm. All 29 states also claim Meta broke the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data on under-13s. Meta rejects every part of it. The shares fell 4.45% on Tuesday. (CNN)

Meta has told the court that a loss could cost it up to $1.4 trillion, close to its entire market value. California attorney general Rob Bonta says the states have named no figure at all and that Meta is quoting that number to make the case look unreasonable. Both statements can be true. The trial is expected to run six to eight weeks with a verdict around October, and Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri are both expected to testify. Meta is fighting this while spending heavily elsewhere. Second-quarter capital expenditure was $31.1 billion, and free cash flow fell to $784 million from $8.55 billion a year earlier. (NPR)

Stories You Might Have Missed

💉 Moderna nearly doubles on a cancer vaccine result

Moderna almost doubled before Wednesday’s open and Merck rose more than 8%. The two companies said their personalised mRNA cancer vaccine, given alongside Merck’s immunotherapy Keytruda, met the primary endpoint of the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial. The study enrolled 1,137 patients whose high-risk melanoma had been surgically removed, and the combination cut recurrence compared with Keytruda on its own. It also met a key secondary endpoint on stopping the cancer spreading to new sites in the body. This is the first positive Phase 3 result for a personalised cancer vaccine from any company, and the first for any mRNA cancer treatment. The FDA cleared Moderna’s mRNA flu shot for adults over 50 on Tuesday. (Quartz, CNBC)

💸 SK Hynix approves Korea’s biggest buyback ever

SK Hynix’s board approved the repurchase of up to 40 trillion won of its own shares, roughly $28 billion. That is the largest in Korean history. The programme runs from 20 August to 19 November and covers as many as 24 million shares, which will be cancelled rather than held. The company also committed more than half of the free cash flow it generates between 2025 and 2027 to shareholder returns, answering months of pressure on both SK Hynix and Samsung to say what they intend to do with record AI memory profits. The shares fell 9.93% in Seoul on the same day. (Bloomberg)

🚀 SpaceX closes the largest startup deal on record

SpaceX completed its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the company behind the AI coding tool Cursor, with the merger effective on 14 August. Cursor’s shareholders received 389,289,254 SpaceX Class A shares, and the business now sits inside a new SpaceXAI division with access to the Colossus supercomputer. No venture-backed startup has ever sold for more. SpaceX traded at $143.04 ahead of Tuesday’s open, down 2.2%. The stock debuted at $135 on 12 June and reached a record $225.64 four days later. Deutsche Bank reiterated a $235 price target after the deal closed. (TheStreet, Yahoo Finance)

🏛️ Crypto’s biggest names go to the White House today

Trump hosts executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken, Gemini, a16z, Chainlink, Kalshi, Paradigm and the Digital Chamber at the White House today, alongside SEC chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC chairman Michael Selig. Executives from the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and DTCC, which settles US share trades, were invited too, which puts the operators of the mainstream market in the same room as token issuers and prediction markets. The meeting comes with the CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate, where a procedural vote ripens on 15 September. XRP sat either side of $1.00 overnight. (Bitcoin.com News)

📡 Keysight books a second straight record quarter

Keysight Technologies reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $1.85 billion against $1.35 billion a year earlier. Adjusted earnings came in at $3.07 a share where analysts had modelled $2.48. Orders topped $2 billion for a second consecutive quarter. The company lifted its full-year outlook. Its communications division, which sells the test equipment engineers use to prove a data centre link works before anything gets plugged in, grew 43% to $1.345 billion. The shares rose 2.6% ahead of Wednesday’s open while the rest of the chip complex was being sold. (Benzinga)

🔍 Deep Dive - FOMC Minutes Cheat Sheet: What Three Dissents Actually Tell You

Read more

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🛢️ Trump says no to a truce: The Iran ceasefire expired without an extension, Brent went above $91, and Lebanon saw its deadliest day since June.

• 🌍 Thirty-year money hits 2007 levels: America’s 30-year yield reached 5.33%, and German, British and Japanese long bonds all hit multi-year highs on the same morning.

• 🤖 Nvidia guarantees $105 billion of rent: The chipmaker is underwriting OpenAI’s 20-year lease on an Ohio data centre campus it will not own.

• 🔨 Home Depot’s best quarter since 2022: Comparable sales rose 1.7% and guidance held, with the finance chief calling housing market conditions frozen.

• 🏛️ Crypto’s week in Wyoming and Washington: Jackson Hole hosts the SEC chair today, Trump meets exchange bosses Wednesday, and CLARITY’s odds sit at 10%.

• 📊 Reddit fell 7% on index eve: Shares closed at $164.50 the day before every S&P 500 tracker fund had to own them.

• 🇨🇳 Baidu’s cloud grows, its ads shrink: GPU cloud revenue rose 283% while advertising fell 19%, and the overall result still missed estimates.

• 💡 A record quarter, punished anyway: Fabrinet grew revenue 45% and beat its own guidance, and the shares fell about 9% before the open.

🧠 One Big Thing

Long-term borrowing got more expensive everywhere at once this morning. The American 30-year Treasury yield hit 5.33%, a level last seen in 2007. Germany’s 30-year is at a 15-year high, Japan’s 10-year at a 30-year high, and Britain’s 30-year gilt sits at 5.85%. One reason sits behind all of it: oil near $91 with no ceasefire, which revives the inflation everyone thought was fading. Those yields set mortgage rates, pension values and what governments pay to borrow. That is why this matters more today than any single share price.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

$105 billion

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,221 (▼ 0.38%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,899 (▼ 0.64%)
XRP: $1.00 (▼ 0.49%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,738 (▼ 0.40%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,753 (▼ 1.14%)
FTSE 100: 10,741 (▲ 0.15%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.74% (▲ 0.30%)
Oil (WTI): $84 (▼ 0.89%)
Gold: $4,395 (▼ 0.51%)
Silver: $65.09 (▼ 1.06%)

Data as of: UK: 1:30pm BST / US: 8:30am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 9:30pm JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🛢️ Trump rules out a truce and the war widens

Asked on Monday whether Washington would extend the 60-day agreement with Iran, President Trump said no. The memorandum signed in June expired the same day with no wider peace deal behind it, and a senior Iranian official said Tehran would shift to a “fully offensive” military posture if diplomacy fails. Brent crude settled at $90.87 a barrel on Monday, up 2.65%, and traded above $91 on Tuesday morning for a third straight session of gains. West Texas Intermediate sat near $84.84. Iran and Oman are still negotiating an arrangement for Hormuz traffic, and the United States is not part of those talks. (Benzinga)

The war is spreading beyond the water.

Israel said on Sunday it had killed Abu Hassan Alaa, a senior Hezbollah commander, in southern Lebanon the day before. Eleven people died in those strikes, the deadliest day in Lebanon since the two sides agreed a ceasefire at the start of June, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the action answered an attack that seriously injured three Israeli soldiers. Trump also told Fox News that if Oman gets in the way, “we’ll bomb the s--- out of them”. Oman is the country currently brokering the Hormuz talks between Washington and Tehran. The weekly American crude inventory count lands on Wednesday at 3:30pm UK, which is 10:30am Eastern. (NBC News)

🌍 The world’s long bonds broke at once

5.33%. That is where the American 30-year Treasury yield traded on Tuesday, the highest since 2007. It did not move alone. Germany’s 10-year Bund yield climbed above 3.25%, the highest since March 2011, and its 30-year reached 3.78%, a 15-year high. Britain’s 30-year gilt traded at 5.85%. Japan’s 10-year hit 2.95%, the highest in three decades. The American 10-year sat at 4.74% and the two-year at 4.19%. Long-dated government debt sold off across every major economy on the same morning. (CNBC)

Oil is doing the work here. Brent near $91 with no ceasefire feeds straight into the inflation numbers central banks watch, and bond investors demand a higher yield when they expect prices to keep rising. Traders have already moved. The CME FedWatch tool put the odds of a September rate rise at 36.6% on Tuesday morning, against roughly 30% at Friday’s close. Gold fell 0.51% to $4,393 an ounce, because higher yields make an asset that pays no interest less attractive to hold. The minutes of the July Fed meeting arrive on Wednesday at 7:00pm UK, which is 2:00pm Eastern. (Euronews)

🤖 Nvidia guarantees the rent on OpenAI’s biggest building

Nvidia has agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion of lease, power and residual-value obligations on a data centre it will not own. SB Energy, backed by SoftBank, will build, own and operate the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, on the site of a Cold War uranium enrichment plant, and lease it to OpenAI for 20 years. The campus will exclusively host Nvidia compute. Initial capacity is 4.25 gigawatts with an option for a further 3.75, which at full size would make it the largest single AI data centre anywhere. Nvidia is also putting $1.5 billion of equity into SB Energy, and the first phases come online in 2028. (CNBC)

Nvidia sells the chips, then underwrites the rent its customer pays to house them. That is the arrangement analysts have spent the summer calling circular financing, and Jensen Huang rejects the label, pointing instead to a $600 billion compute opportunity through 2030. The size of the guarantee has already moved once, from reporting near $250 billion down to this level. Credit default swaps on Nvidia bonds, which are the contracts that pay out if a company stops servicing its debt, posted their sharpest intraday rise since they began trading actively in November. The shares closed at $225.01 on Monday. Nvidia reports second-quarter results on 26 August. (Axios)

🔨 Home Depot’s best quarter since 2022

Did the American consumer stop spending? Not at Home Depot. Sales came in at $47.9 billion for the quarter ended 2 August, up 5.7% or $2.6 billion on the same period last year. Comparable sales rose 1.7%, the strongest since the third quarter of 2022, with American comparable sales up 1.3%. Net income was $4.77 billion, or $4.79 a share, against $4.55 billion and $4.58 a year earlier. Stripping out one-off items, adjusted earnings came to $4.92 a share, ahead of the $4.73 analysts had modelled on $47.27 billion of revenue. (CNBC)

Finance chief Richard McPhail told CNBC the company is still working in what he called frozen housing market conditions, and the guidance backs him up. Full-year sales growth of 2.5% to 4.5% and comparable sales flat to up 2% were both left unchanged. Chief executive Ted Decker has been on temporary medical leave since 12 August, so McPhail ran the call. Shoppers are doing smaller jobs rather than big remodels, which is what happens when nobody moves house. July housing starts and building permits land at 1:30pm UK, which is 8:30am Eastern. Lowe’s and Target report Wednesday, Walmart Thursday. (PR Newswire)

🏛️ Crypto’s week in Wyoming and Washington

Around 500 investors, regulators and founders are in Jackson Hole this week. The Wyoming Blockchain Symposium runs to Thursday at the Four Seasons resort, hosted by SALT and the exchange Kraken, and it is invitation only. SEC chair Paul Atkins is attending, as are Senators Cynthia Lummis and Tim Scott. Ripple sponsors the event and chief executive Brad Garlinghouse is due to speak. The published themes are tokenising traditional markets, bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset, and blockchain-based AI infrastructure. XRP traded at $0.996 on Tuesday and bitcoin near $64,200. (crypto.news)

On Wednesday the same industry moves to Washington. President Trump is expected at a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with Atkins, CFTC chair Michael Selig, and executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Gemini, Polymarket and Kalshi, alongside Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and CME. The CFTC’s new Innovation Advisory Committee holds its first session the day after. The access is arriving while the legislation stalls. Galaxy Research cut the odds of the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 to 10% on 14 August, down from a peak near 75% in May, and the Senate returns on 14 September with roughly 14 scheduled session days before its October break. A procedural vote is set for 15 September. (Benzinga)

Stories You Might Have Missed

📊 Reddit fell 7% on the eve of joining the index

Reddit entered the S&P 500 before Tuesday’s opening bell, replacing AvalonBay Communities, which meant every fund tracking the index had to own the shares by Monday’s close in New York. JPMorgan put the forced buying at roughly 16.7 million shares, close to $3 billion. The shares opened at $177.51, touched $178.33, and closed at $164.50, down 7.14% on the day. Form 144 filings disclosed on 14 August had already flagged planned insider sales of up to 195,000 shares. Index inclusion creates a buyer with no opinion, and that buyer arrives once. Reddit is still down about 24% this year and trades near 40 times earnings. (TradingKey)

🇨🇳 Baidu’s cloud grows while its ads shrink

Baidu reported second-quarter revenue of 31.33 billion yuan, down 4% on the year and below the 31.95 billion consensus. Earnings came in at 7.22 yuan a share against the 9.84 analysts expected. Inside that number, AI cloud infrastructure revenue rose 50% to 7.3 billion yuan, and the GPU cloud line within it grew 283% on the year, accelerating from 184% growth the previous quarter. Online marketing, the old search advertising business, fell 19% to 13.1 billion yuan. AI applications rose 3% to 2.5 billion yuan. The shares fell about 3% before the American open. Chinese retail sales grew 0.6% in July, so the advertising line has a reason behind it. (MarketScreener)

💡 Fabrinet’s record quarter got sold anyway

Fabrinet builds the optical parts that carry data between AI servers, and it just had the best quarter in its history. Revenue rose 45% on the year to $1.316 billion and non-GAAP earnings reached $4.10 a share, both above the company’s own guidance range. Guidance for the quarter ending 25 September is $1.375 billion to $1.425 billion of revenue and $4.10 to $4.25 a share. The stock fell about 9% before Tuesday’s open. Expectations for anything attached to AI demand now sit well above the published analyst estimates, so beating the printed number no longer guarantees the shares go up. Nvidia reports on 26 August. (Benzinga)

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🛢️ Hormuz goes quiet: Zero vessels were scheduled through the strait on Sunday as the US-Iran ceasefire expires today with talks stalled.

• 💵 Thirty-year money costs 5.216%: America’s longest bond cleared at its highest auction yield since 2001, while gold held above $4,400 an ounce.

• 🇨🇳 China’s consumer stalls: July retail sales grew 0.6% against a 1.5% forecast, and every other line in the release missed too.

• 📊 Reddit enters the index tonight: Every S&P 500 tracker fund must own the shares by the New York close, replacing AvalonBay Communities.

• 🤖 Stripe buys an AI router: OpenRouter sells for over $7 billion, three months after a funding round valued it at $1.3 billion.

• 🇯🇵 Japan grows half as fast: Second-quarter growth came in at 0.3%, with disrupted crude imports flattering the trade side of the number.

• 🚁 Drone tariffs land at 100%: Heavier imported drones face a doubled price, and small American makers rallied hard on Friday’s news.

• ₿ Bitcoin funds bleed $390 million: The biggest weekly outflow in six weeks, with bitcoin near $63,000 and XRP defending the dollar.

• 📈 One chart before you go: the Chart of the Day closes today’s edition with the levels I am watching and why they matter.

🧠 One Big Thing

So. The agreement that has capped this oil war since June expires today, and the shipping data says the market made its mind up over the weekend. Five vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday. None were scheduled for Sunday. The previous weekend the count was 31. Oil has barely moved this morning because traders have been pricing a bad outcome for weeks. What matters for your money sits one step downstream: Brent near $89 feeds inflation, and inflation decides whether the Fed raises rates in September. Those odds sat near 30% on Friday.

🗓️ The Week Ahead is live. Yesterday’s issue maps every dated event between now and Friday, each one timed in UK and Eastern: the Fed minutes on Wednesday, Home Depot, Target, Lowe’s and Walmart reporting through the middle of the week, and Friday’s flash purchasing managers’ surveys. It exists so nothing on the calendar lands on you cold, and so you know which prints are worth stopping for. The link is below.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

0 ships

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +23.08% OmniAb Inc. spiked in pre-market trading with no specific catalyst identified, the move landing more than a week after the antibody discovery company raised full year revenue and cash guidance on stronger partner milestone payments.

• : +9.90% argenx SE surged after positive topline results from the Phase 3 ALKIVIA study, where VYVGART Hytrulo met its primary endpoint in autoimmune myositis with a 15.4 point greater improvement in Total Improvement Score at week 52 versus placebo. It is the first Phase 3 trial to show a statistically significant benefit in immune mediated necrotizing myopathy, a subtype with no approved therapy.

• : +5.09% Sandisk Corporation extended last week’s run as its investor day projection of roughly 80% gross margins through 2030 continued to reprice the entire NAND and memory complex higher.

• : +4.96% Bloom Energy Corporation pushed higher again on the AI data center power trade that has lifted the stock roughly 150% this year, with the recently expanded MiTAC microgrid partnership and the Nebius fuel cell endorsement still drawing buyers.

• : +4.03% SK hynix Inc. climbed with the memory group after the Kospi capped an 11.5% weekly gain and snapped a seven week losing streak, with foreign investors turning net buyers of South Korean equities.

Losers

• : -12.01% Snap Inc. dropped sharply in pre-market trading with no specific catalyst identified, unwinding the July rebound in a name already carrying an addiction litigation overhang after an appeals court cleared thousands of suits to proceed against the platform and its peers.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $63,265 (▲0.69%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,892 (▲0.94%)
XRP: $1.00 (▲0.38%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,815 (▲0.13%)
NASDAQ 100: 30,283 (▲0.47%)
FTSE 100: 10,743 (▼0.04%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.69% (▼0.04%)
Oil (WTI): $83 (▲0.92%)
Gold: $4,395 (▲0.44%)
Silver: $65.52 (▲1.25%)

Data as of: UK: 11:15 BST / US: 06:15 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 19:15 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🛢️ The Hormuz clock runs out today

Five commodity vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday. None were scheduled for Sunday. The previous weekend 31 went through. The 60-day ceasefire between Washington and Tehran expires today with no extension agreed, and a senior White House official has described the talks as “static”. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araqchi said over the weekend that Iran had not decided to resume talks with the United States. Brent traded near $88 a barrel on Monday morning and West Texas Intermediate near $83. Each contract gained more than 5% last week. (CNBC)

American strategic petroleum stocks fell to 298.7 million barrels in the week reported on 10 August, the first reading below 300 million since January 1983. Before the war began on 28 February the reserve held about 415 million. Roughly 28% of it is gone. Hormuz moved close to a fifth of the world’s oil supply back then. President Trump spent the weekend asking Americans to accept higher prices at the pump while the conflict runs. Wednesday’s weekly inventory count lands at 10:30am Eastern, which is 3:30pm UK, and the International Energy Agency has warned of the widest global supply deficit in five years. (CNBC)

💵 America pays 2001 prices to borrow

The Treasury sold $25 billion of 30-year bonds on Thursday at a yield of 5.216%. That is the highest an American 30-year auction has cleared since 2001. Demand was thin. The bid-to-cover ratio came in at 2.39 and primary dealers were left holding 11.5% of the issue, both below their twelve-month averages. One caveat belongs with the record. The Treasury stopped selling the 30-year bond in late 2001 and did not bring it back until February 2006. Several years are missing from the comparison. (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget)

Gold went the other way. Spot gold traded above $4,400 an ounce on Monday morning, close to its highest in ten weeks. The move came after last week’s inflation figures, which pushed September rate-rise odds down to roughly 30% from about 40%. The ten-year Treasury yield sits near 4.70% after testing 4.75% last week, a nineteen-month high. Long-term borrowing costs feed straight into mortgage rates and into what companies pay for debt. The minutes of the July Fed meeting arrive on Wednesday afternoon, at 2:00pm Eastern, which is 7:00pm UK. (CNBC)

🇨🇳 China’s shoppers went quiet in July

Did Chinese households spend in July? Barely. Retail sales grew 0.6% on the year when economists expected 1.5%, and June’s rate was 1.0%. Industrial output rose 4.5% against a 4.8% forecast, down from 5.3% the month before. Urban fixed-asset investment, the line covering factories, roads and property, has contracted 6.7% so far this year against an expected 6.0% fall. Urban unemployment ticked up to 5.2% from 5.0%. New home prices extended their decline. Every major line in the release missed. (CNBC)

China buys a large share of the world’s industrial metals, energy and luxury goods. That is why a soft Chinese consumer shows up in European luxury names, in Australian miners and in the earnings of anything with real Chinese exposure. Alibaba reports on Thursday. Analysts model $10.03 a share, and that print gives the first company-level read on the same quarter. The pressure on Beijing to add stimulus in the second half grew with this release.

📊 Reddit joins the S&P 500 tonight

Read more

This Week

XRP finished the week at $1.00, inside a range of 99 cents to $1.04, and on Tuesday it did something it had not done in 635 days. It traded below a dollar. Total crypto market value fell about 2.5 percent to $2.23 trillion, Bitcoin dominance rose to 57.8 percent, and sentiment sat at 34 on the Fear and Greed Index, still in Fear.

That break gave the week its shape. XRP printed 99.15 cents on Tuesday, went under again on Friday, and at the low it was worth less than RLUSD, the dollar stablecoin Ripple issues on the same ledger.

Underneath the price, four other things landed. A bridge lost almost all of its XRP in 97 minutes, and no holder was affected. Quarterly filings showed the world’s biggest banks own almost none of the XRP funds. Solana started trading on the XRP Ledger’s own exchange. And Ripple gets three days in front of American regulators from Tuesday, 26 days before the Senate votes.

The Consensus

• 💔 XRP broke a dollar. A 635 day streak ended on Tuesday at 99.15 cents, and it went under again on Friday.

• 🕳️ A bridge lost 199,916 XRP in 97 minutes. The flaw was in the bridge’s own software, and the XRP Ledger was never touched.

• 🏦 JPMorgan disclosed $1,356 in the Bitwise XRP fund. Around 113 shares, from a bank running $5.1 trillion.

• 🔗 Solana is now tradable on the XRP Ledger. Axelar is the only legitimate issuer, and copycat tokens are the risk.

• 🏛️ Ripple’s week in Washington. Jackson Hole Tuesday, the White House Wednesday, the CFTC Thursday.

The Numbers

The Chart Watch

The Ripple Effect

💔 XRP Traded Below a Dollar for the First Time in 635 Days

At 3:00pm UK / 10:00am ET on Tuesday 11 August, XRP printed 99.15 cents on Binance. That ended a run of 635 straight days above a dollar going back to 16 November 2024, and it went under again on Friday. Round numbers matter more than they logically should, because a dollar is where people set their alerts and park their orders, and a level that holds for 635 days becomes the one everybody is watching. There was a second detail at the Tuesday low, and it stung more than the first. One XRP was worth less than one RLUSD, which is Ripple’s own dollar token, engineered to be worth exactly a dollar at all times (Forbes).

The fund flows explain most of the fall. A spot ETF is a stock market listing that holds the real asset behind it, so when money goes into the fund, the fund has to go out and buy actual XRP with it. That buying has dried up. US spot XRP ETFs took in $131.94 million in May, $59.46 million in June and $27.29 million in July. Halfway through August they have taken $3.27 million, and $2.25 million of that arrived on one day. Even doubled to fill the month, August comes out at roughly a twentieth of May. Total assets across the seven funds have slipped to about $942 million from a peak above $1.25 billion (CryptoSlate).

Here is the part that sits awkwardly against the price. Active addresses count the wallets doing something on a network in a day, which is the closest thing crypto has to a footfall figure for a high street. On Friday the XRP Ledger logged 49,929 of them in 24 hours, its highest in over two months and about 3 percent above the 48,453 it managed in May, when XRP traded above $1.54. More people are using the ledger at a dollar than were using it at $1.54. Santiment counted 32 new wallets holding at least a million XRP over three months while XRP’s market value fell 29 percent, though one owner can run several wallets, so treat that as a hint rather than a headcount. And watch the flow you would expect to see if whales were queuing up to sell. Deposits from big holders into Binance have dropped to a three month average near $61 million, the lowest since 2021, against $456 million in January 2025 (CryptoSlate).

The mood went the other way entirely. Santiment tracks what people post about a coin across X, Reddit and Telegram, and negative commentary on XRP hit a three month extreme in the days to 14 August, the most bearish reading since mid-May (The Crypto Times).

🕳️ A Bridge Lost 199,916 XRP in 97 Minutes, and the Ledger Was Never Touched

Start with the bit that actually affects you, because most of the coverage buried it. If you hold XRP in a wallet, on an exchange, or through one of the spot funds, none of it was ever at risk. What got emptied on Sunday 9 August was a bridge: a piece of software that lets you move XRP off the XRP Ledger and use it on a different network. Ninety-four payments over 97 minutes drained the one connecting the XRP Ledger to tx, the network formerly called Coreum. The account held about 200,410 XRP when it started and 493.5 when it stopped, roughly $500 left of a reserve worth about $200,000 (CoinDesk).

How it happened is simpler than it sounds. A bridge is a cloakroom: you hand over real XRP, it gets locked in a vault, and you get a ticket on the other network that you can swap back later. A program called a relayer is the cloakroom attendant, watching for arrivals and writing the tickets. This attendant checked that a payment had gone through, read the note saying who to credit, and read the amount. It never checked that the coat had actually been handed in. Because the bridge issues its own token, the attacker’s transfers between two wallets he already owned showed up in the bridge’s books carrying a note that looked like a deposit. He was written tickets for coats he never handed over, then walked up to the counter and claimed real XRP with them (crypto.news).

One detail settles what kind of failure this was. Every payment out was signed off by 17 of the bridge’s 28 operator keys, and 21 separate operators independently waved that first fake deposit through as genuine. Stolen keys do not make honest operators agree with each other. Shared software that looks right and is wrong does exactly that. The team halted the bridge, patched the code, hired forensics specialists and filed a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. The stolen XRP was converted to Ether and pushed through Tornado Cash, a service that pools coins together to break the trail back to their owner. The bridge had passed multiple internal and outside audits before it went live, and none of them caught this (Protos).

Keep the scale honest and keep the blame in the right place. Two hundred thousand dollars is small money against Ronin’s $624 million, Wormhole’s $326 million or Nomad’s $190 million, and bridges have lost billions since 2021 because they are the weakest joint in the whole system. The XRP Ledger itself did exactly what it was built to do throughout, no ledger keys were compromised, and Ripple neither built nor ran this bridge. As of Sunday it is offline indefinitely pending an outside audit, and tx says it is working on compensation without yet naming an amount or a date (Crypto Briefing).

🔗 Solana Started Trading on the XRP Ledger, With One Warning Attached

You can now buy Solana on the XRP Ledger. Not the real thing, and the difference matters: what went live on Friday 14 August is wrapped SOL, which is the cloakroom ticket from the bridge story above. Real Solana gets locked away on its own chain, and a token representing it gets issued on the XRP Ledger, swappable back one for one. Axelar, a routing network linking more than 70 blockchains, does the locking and the issuing. The result trades against XRP on the ledger’s own built-in exchange through XPMarket, First Ledger and Magnetic, and swaps inside the Xaman wallet (The Crypto Times).

Now the warning, which Hussein Zangana of the XRP Ledger Foundation spent his whole announcement post on. Anyone at all can create a token on the XRP Ledger and call it SOL. The ledger identifies a token by who issued it, never by its name, so the ticker on your screen proves nothing. The genuine one comes from the account starting rfmS3zqr, which the XRP Ledger’s own documentation lists as Axelar’s gateway. The verification ticks you see are labels the trading sites add themselves, helpful but not a guarantee from the network. In practice: check the issuer before you trade, and treat a matching name as meaningless on its own (crypto.news).

Traffic has been running the other way for four months already. Wrapped XRP went live on Solana on 17 April, issued by Hex Trust, arriving with over $100 million of liquidity and access to Jupiter, Phantom, Meteora and Titan. Different bridges, different builders, opposite directions.

Two things to watch from here. Nobody has published any trading volume for wrapped SOL on the XRP Ledger yet, so whether this becomes a real market or just a listing is genuinely unknown. And a wrapped token is only ever as sound as the bridge holding the original, which is the lesson two stories up. The XRP Ledger has had a trading exchange built directly into it since 2012, making it the oldest in crypto, and a rival chain’s token now trades on it.

🏛️ Ripple Gets Three Days in Front of the Regulators

Tuesday takes Brad Garlinghouse to Jackson Hole, where he speaks at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium at 10:05pm UK / 5:05pm ET on a panel called Modernizing Financial Infrastructure. It is invitation only, 500 people at the Four Seasons, hosted by SALT and Kraken, with Ripple as a headline sponsor and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins speaking the same morning. Wednesday moves to Washington, where the White House hosts crypto executives at 7:30pm UK / 2:30pm ET. Ripple is on the guest list alongside Coinbase, a16z, Chainlink, Kalshi and Paradigm. Atkins is confirmed, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig is expected, and President Trump is expected rather than confirmed. No outlet has named Garlinghouse personally for that one, so read it as Ripple rather than the boss (SALT, The Block).

Thursday is the one you can actually watch, free, from your sofa. The CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee holds its first ever meeting from 6:00pm to 9:00pm UK / 1:00pm to 4:00pm ET, streamed live on cftc.gov. Garlinghouse sits on that committee as one of 35 members, alongside Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, the bosses of Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange’s parent, and the head of CME Group. The opening 50 minutes is titled Crypto’s Regulatory Evolution: From Uncertainty to Clarity (CFTC).

All three days land 26 days before the vote everything hangs on. The Senate returns at 8:00pm UK / 3:00pm ET on Monday 14 September, and at 7:15pm UK / 2:15pm ET the next afternoon it votes on the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act. That vote decides only whether the Senate may start debating the bill, and it needs 60 of the 100 senators. Republicans hold 53 seats, so seven Democrats have to cross. Now be precise about what the bill would and would not do for XRP, because most coverage gets this part wrong. XRP is not sitting around waiting to learn whether it is a security. A federal court answered that years ago. In July 2023 Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP sold on exchanges is not a security, the SEC dropped its appeal, Ripple dropped its cross-appeal, and the Second Circuit closed the case in August 2025 with her ruling left standing as the final judgment. That is the law of the land, and no other major token has anything like it (The Block).

CLARITY does a different job. It decides who regulates spot crypto trading in America, what rules exchanges and custodians have to follow, and where the CFTC’s authority starts and the SEC’s stops. XRP has its answer on the legal question and is still waiting on the rulebook built around it, which is what unlocks the products and the trading desks. On Polymarket, where people bet real money on political outcomes, the odds of the bill being signed this year sit at 19 percent today, down from 82 percent in February and a low of 13 percent on 5 August. Galaxy Research cut its own estimate to 10 percent this week (Polymarket, Cointelegraph).

Seen on X

Debunked

The post reads: “MORGAN STANLEY JUST FILED A 13F SHOWING XRP ETF HOLDINGS! Positions confirmed across FRANKLIN XRP ETF, REX-OSPREY XRP ETF, and BITWISE XRP ETF straight from Wall Street’s own paperwork. Big money doesn’t disclose exposure it doesn’t want.” That last sentence is the whole trick, and it is exactly backwards. A Form 13F is not a choice. It is a legal requirement, and every manager running $100 million or more has to file one whether they feel like it or not. Morgan Stanley did not decide to tell you about its XRP position. Federal law made it. Presenting a compelled filing as a voluntary signal is how you turn a rounding error into a headline.

Then read what was actually in it. Sixty-seven shares of the Bitwise fund. Not 67,000. Sixty-seven, alongside 255 of the REX-Osprey fund and 6,715 of Franklin’s, from a firm managing over $1.9 trillion. JPMorgan’s filing landed the same day: $1,356 of the Bitwise XRP fund and $3,763 of Grayscale’s, against $355.7 million in its Bitcoin fund in the same document. That is roughly seventy thousand times more Bitcoin than XRP, disclosed on the same page, and not one account posting the screenshots mentioned it. These are also 30 June figures published six weeks late, so they describe a day in June, not a decision this week. Anyone selling you that as Wall Street arriving is either not reading the filings or counting on you not to.

The Polls

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The image below is the full timetable for the week, colour-coded by how much each event matters. Everything on it is broken down in detail further down.

The Week Ahead: Every Date That Matters, 17 to 22 August:

Last Week:

US CPI (July): In line Headline consumer prices rose 0.1% on the month and 3.4% on the year, core rose 0.2% and 2.5%, and every one of those matched the consensus exactly, which is the second straight month of cooling annual inflation.

US PPI (July): Cooler Producer prices were flat on the month and up 4.7% over the year against 4.9% expected, so the pipeline pressure feeding into the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge eased rather than built.

US Retail Sales (July): Missed badly Sales fell 0.6% on the month against expectations of a 0.1% rise, the first decline since October 2025, though roughly half the damage sits in a 2.2% drop at nonstore retailers after Amazon moved Prime Day into June.

University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment (August preliminary): Missed The index dropped to 51.0 from 55.2 in July, giving back the improvement of the previous two months as households put inflation back at the top of their worry list.

The setup: inflation behaved, the consumer did not, and this week the retailers get to say which of those two stories is the real one.

This Week at a Glance

🔴 FOMC Minutes — Wednesday, 2:00 PM ET / 7:00 PM BST

🔴 Walmart Q2 Earnings — Thursday, Before Open

🔴 S&P Global Flash PMIs — Friday, 9:45 AM ET / 2:45 PM BST

🟠 Home Depot Q2 Earnings — Tuesday, Before Open

🟠 Target and Lowe’s Q2 Earnings — Wednesday, Before Open

🟠 UK CPI — Wednesday, 2:00 AM ET / 7:00 AM BST

🟠 Jobless Claims and Philadelphia Fed — Thursday, 8:30 AM ET / 1:30 PM BST

🟡 Housing Starts and Building Permits — Tuesday, 8:30 AM ET / 1:30 PM BST

🟡 Reddit Joins the S&P 500 — Tuesday, Before Open

MONDAY — August 17

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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🛒 The consumer’s turn today: July retail sales land at half past one, the first month of spending measured while payrolls were going negative.

• 🏛️ Records and the costliest bond sale since 2001: The Treasury paid 5.216% for thirty-year money hours before the S&P closed at a record.

• 💼 Silver Lake circles Workday: The software company posted its best day in ten years on a reported take-private approach worth about $43 billion.

• ₿ Crypto’s regulators go quiet: The SEC delayed two crypto rulebooks, the CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate, and MSCI moved to delete Strategy.

• 💰 Ackman buys Netflix, Visa and Mastercard: Pershing Square’s biggest overhaul in years added six names, with Netflix alone at 4.9% of the fund.

• 🔧 Applied Materials beats and falls: A record $9.1 billion quarter and a 51% growth forecast still left the shares down about 5%.

• 🪙 Tether finally gets its audit: KPMG signed off clean on the reserves behind the $180 billion stablecoin, finding a $6.8 billion surplus.

• 🟠 Reddit joins the S&P 500: The site replaces AvalonBay on 18 August, and the shares jumped about 11% after hours.

• 🛢️ Washington promises Iran economic isolation: Bessent says next week brings measures never seen before, the blockade runs indefinitely, Brent near $88.

• 📈 I sold my SpaceX position at $135: Chart of the Day covers the $150 line, $171 above it and $135 below.

🧠 One Big Thing

Every inflation number this week came in cooler. Shop prices rose 0.1% in July, wholesale prices did not rise at all, and the odds of the Fed raising rates next month have fallen below 40%. At half past one this afternoon the government publishes what Americans actually spent in July. It is the first full month of spending measured while the jobs market was shrinking, after payrolls came in at minus 23,000. Cooling prices only help if people still have jobs and are still spending. Watch whether that spending number holds up, because it decides whether this week’s good news was real.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

5.216%

The Treasury sold $25 billion of thirty-year bonds at 5.216%, the highest yield at that maturity since 2001, a day after its ten-year sale cleared at the highest since 2007.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +100.68% Capricor Therapeutics surged after telling investors it will submit an amended marketing application for Deramiocel in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, with the FDA signalling willingness to review the amendment and extend the action date beyond August 22. The update came alongside second quarter results and follows last month’s negative advisory committee vote.

• : +43.11% Digital Asset Acquisition Corp jumped after disclosing it had mutually terminated its business combination agreement with Old Glory Holding Company and indefinitely postponed the shareholder meeting that had been set for today, pushing the blank-check shares back toward trust value.

• : +28.94% Valneva SE climbed after the European Medicines Agency validated the marketing authorization application for the six-valent Lyme disease vaccine candidate it is developing with Pfizer, formally starting the review of a filing built on Phase 3 efficacy above 70%.

• : +24.75% Eton Pharmaceuticals rallied on record second quarter results, with revenue nearly doubling year over year to 37.6 million, adjusted EBITDA margin widening to 43% from 16%, and management raising full year revenue guidance to above 145 million.

• : +23.83% Heartflow rose after second quarter revenue beat expectations and the loss came in far narrower than analysts had modelled, extending adoption of its AI coronary plaque and blood flow analysis products.

• : +9.98% Nu Holdings advanced after posting its first billion dollar quarterly profit, with revenue up 39%, risk-adjusted net interest margin expanding to 12.4% from 9.9% a year earlier, and cost of credit falling sequentially.

• : +6.87% Sandisk extended gains from its 2026 investor day, where the company laid out a long term financial model and a high bandwidth flash partnership aimed at AI inference workloads, lifting the wider memory complex with it.

Losers

• : -44.72% Innventure plunged after a heavy second quarter revenue miss and the indefinite suspension of its 2026 revenue and cash flow targets for the Accelsius cooling business, which management blamed on delays in AI infrastructure deployment.

• : -32.48% Blaize Holdings collapsed after cutting full year 2026 revenue guidance to a range of 40 to 43 million, far below the roughly 130 million previously reaffirmed, citing engagements that failed to convert into orders and sharply higher memory input costs.

• : -27.71% AmpliTech Group dropped after missing second quarter earnings estimates by a wide margin and declining to reaffirm its full year revenue goal.

• : -16.42% York Space Systems fell after missing on second quarter earnings and slashing full year 2026 revenue guidance to roughly 405 million from a prior range of 545 to 595 million, with management attributing most of the cut to a shift in government acquisition methodologies.

• : -14.26% ARS Pharmaceuticals declined after a strategy reset under its new chief executive, with second quarter operating expenses ballooning on the prior consumer advertising push and the interim readout from the chronic spontaneous urticaria trial pushed back to the first quarter of 2027.

• : -5.59% Applied Materials slipped despite record third quarter revenue and fourth quarter guidance well ahead of consensus, as investors focused on near-term margin commentary after a near 100% year to date run.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $62,846 (▼ 0.91%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,878 (▼ 0.33%)
XRP: $1.00 (▼ 0.62%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,829 (▲ 0.08%)
NASDAQ 100: 30,252 (▲ 0.21%)
FTSE 100: 10,756 (▼ 0.27%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.65% (▼ 0.04%)
Oil (WTI): $82 (▲ 0.36%)
Gold: $4,366 (▲ 0.38%)
Silver: $64.97 (▲ 0.76%)

Data as of: UK: 12:54pm BST / US: 7:54am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 8:54pm JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🛒 The consumer finally gets asked

July retail sales land at half past one this afternoon, and the consensus among economists is a rise of 0.1% on the month after 0.2% in June, with sales excluding cars and petrol seen up 0.3%. A Reuters poll of 57 forecasters puts the median at the same 0.1%, though the individual guesses run from a fall of 0.5% to a gain of 0.7%, which is an unusually wide spread for a number this routine. Preliminary consumer sentiment from the University of Michigan follows at three, with the survey’s one-year inflation expectations attached (CNBC).

This is the first month of spending collected while the labour market was visibly shrinking, after July payrolls came in at minus 23,000 and revisions removed another 103,000 jobs from May and June. The rest of the week has already gone the market’s way. Consumer prices rose 0.1% in July, wholesale prices were flat against expectations of a 0.2% rise, and the odds of a September rate rise have fallen below 40% from above 50% at the start of the week. A weak spending number alongside inflation still at 3.4% is the one combination that has not been priced (CNBC).

🏛️ The costliest long bond since 2001, and a record close

The Treasury sold $25 billion of thirty-year bonds yesterday at 5.216%, a level dealers put as the highest any thirty-year auction has cleared since 2001. It came a day after the $42 billion ten-year sale cleared at 4.683%, the highest since 2007. Demand was described as decent rather than weak, which is the point: buyers turned up, but only at a price. Hours later the S&P 500 closed at 7,798.99, up 0.65% and above 7,800 for the first time, after touching 7,816.70 intraday. The Nasdaq Composite added 0.81% to 26,803.03 and the Dow rose 0.13% to 53,839.99 (Bloomberg).

Those two things pulling in opposite directions is worth sitting with. The thirty-year yield is the number mortgage rates, pension liabilities and long-dated company debt all hang off, and it is rising because the US keeps issuing more paper into a market that already owns plenty, not because growth is accelerating. Every previous stretch where long yields climbed while equity multiples expanded ended with one of the two giving way, and it has usually been the multiple. The July budget statement showed a deficit near $295 billion in a single month, so the supply is not about to stop (CNBC).

💼 Silver Lake circles Workday in a $43 billion approach

Workday shares posted their best day in ten years after Reuters reported that Silver Lake has been in talks for several months about taking the business software company private. The stock jumped as much as 26% to $220.50 before being halted for volatility, then closed up about 18% at $206.45, which values the company at roughly $51 billion against the $43 billion it carried going into the news. Silver Lake may bring in co-investors, as it did last year alongside Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Affinity Partners on the roughly $55 billion take-private of Electronic Arts. There is no guarantee a deal happens (Bloomberg).

The move erased Workday’s losses for the year in a single session. The shares had fallen about 15% in 2026 and sat more than 40% below their 2024 peak, caught in the sell-off that hit business software on fears that AI would eat subscription models from underneath. That discount is exactly why private equity is looking. When a profitable, sticky software business trades at a fraction of its old multiple because of a narrative rather than a numbers problem, buyout firms with $50 billion of firepower get interested. A completed deal at this size would rank among the largest software buyouts ever (Yahoo Finance).

₿ Crypto’s rulebook goes back in the drawer

Three things went against crypto inside 24 hours. The SEC is reportedly set to delay its long-awaited innovation exemption again, the rule meant to let tokenised securities trade on blockchain networks under existing law, after concerns from both the White House and Wall Street about its legal footing. The agency then cancelled today’s planned open meeting on Reg Crypto, its parallel effort to write fundraising rules for token projects, without setting a new date. And progress on the CLARITY Act has stalled in the Senate. Bitcoin trades near $62,850 and XRP is sitting on the $1 line (CoinDesk).

Separately, index provider MSCI opened a consultation that would exclude non-operating companies from its Global Investable Market Indexes, using a two-step screen on operating assets and five financial ratios rather than any crypto-specific test. Applied to holdings as of May, it would have deleted Strategy, Metaplanet and uranium holder Yellow Cake from the ACWI IMI index. Strategy holds 840,447 bitcoin worth about $53 billion. Feedback closes on 30 September, results come on 16 October, and any change lands no earlier than the November review. US spot bitcoin ETFs have shed $333 million this week after taking in $853 million the week before (CoinDesk).

💰 Ackman rebuilds the portfolio around six new names

Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square disclosed six new holdings in its largest portfolio overhaul in years: Netflix, Visa, Mastercard, S&P Global, Intercontinental Exchange and Alcon. The Netflix position stood at 3.15 million shares as of 30 June, worth 4.9% of the fund, and Ackman said the company has won the streaming wars, having previously exited a Netflix stake at a loss in 2022. Microsoft remains the largest holding at 12.4%, ahead of Uber and Meta. The Alcon and Intercontinental Exchange stakes were built after the quarter ended, so they sit outside the formal filing (Yahoo Finance).

The timing matters more than the names. Pershing Square Holdings in London was down 9.2% for the year through July against a 10% total return for the S&P 500, and the newly listed Pershing Square USA returned 0.6% from its April float to 11 August. A manager that far behind the index does not add six large-cap positions for fun. Visa and Mastercard are also a direct contrast with Berkshire Hathaway, which exited both under Greg Abel earlier this year. Today is the deadline for institutional managers to file their second-quarter holdings, so more of these will land through the session.

Stories You Might Have Missed

🔧 Applied Materials beats every number and falls anyway

Applied Materials reported record third-quarter revenue of $9.12 billion, up 25% on a year earlier and its largest quarter-on-quarter increase ever, with adjusted earnings of $3.50 a share against the $3.45 expected. Adjusted operating margin hit a record 34% and the company guided to fourth-quarter revenue of $10.25 billion, up 51% on the year and well ahead of the roughly $9.5 billion analysts had modelled. The shares still fell about 5% after hours to around $507, from a close of $534.54. China dropped to 28% of revenue from 35% a year earlier, and fourth-quarter gross margin is guided flat despite the revenue jump, on ramp costs and display mix. The stock has roughly doubled this year (Yahoo Finance).

🪙 Tether gets the audit it promised for a decade

Tether said KPMG has completed a full audit of Tether International’s 2025 financial statements, the first proper audit of the reserves behind the $180 billion USDT stablecoin after years of quarterly attestations that stopped short of one. KPMG issued an unqualified opinion, meaning it found no material issues requiring exceptions, and reported reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion. The work went further than the attestations, testing transactions and systems and including a physical inspection of the company’s gold bars. USDT sits underneath most crypto trading pairs, so the credibility of its backing matters well beyond the people who hold it (CoinDesk).

🟠 Reddit gets its seat in the S&P 500

Reddit will join the S&P 500 before the open on 18 August, replacing AvalonBay Communities, which leaves the index after agreeing to be bought by Equity Residential. The shares jumped about 11% in after-hours trading on the announcement, ending months of speculation about whether the company would make the cut. Eligibility turned on profits rather than size: Reddit did not post a full year of positive net income under standard accounting rules until 2025, when it earned roughly $530 million on $2.20 billion of revenue. Every index fund tracking the S&P 500 now has to own it, which is where the after-hours move came from (Bloomberg).

🛢️ Washington readies an unprecedented squeeze on Iran

Brent crude rose 0.96% to $87.91 a barrel and US crude added 1.08% to $82.13 after Washington said its naval blockade of Iranian ports could run indefinitely. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described what lands next week as economic isolation of a kind that has never been seen, paired with the blockade, while Trump has threatened 25% tariffs on any country buying Iranian goods or services, which points most directly at China. ADNOC says three of its vessels were hit while transiting the Strait of Hormuz this week, taking the total since the war began to 15. Crude is still up more than 30% on a year ago, the single largest reason American inflation has stopped falling (CNBC).

📈 Chart of the Day - SpaceX (SPCX)

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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🏛️ A Fed hawk either side of the print: Beth Hammack speaks fifteen minutes before the July PPI lands, and Tom Barkin ten minutes after.

• 💻 Cisco beats everything and falls anyway: Record revenue of $17.3 billion and $9.3 billion of AI orders, yet the shares dropped after hours.

• 🧠 Cerebras raises its forecast, drops 17%: A record $209.9 million quarter came with a loss of $2.98 a share against 18 cents expected.

• 🛢️ Oil’s six-day run ends: Brent slipped towards $88 after Trump claimed total control of Hormuz and Iran refused to reopen the waterway.

• 🇬🇧 Britain grows 0.4% through a war: Second-quarter output slowed from 0.6%, though the annual rate picked up to 1.2% from 0.9%.

• 🍔 Peltz moves on Wendy’s: The shares jumped as much as 15% and were halted, on a take-private bid expected within weeks.

• 💾 Intel raises $20 billion, not $15 billion: The chipmaker upsized its share sale and priced it at $95, diluting earnings by about 5%.

• 🔧 The AI order book reports tonight: Applied Materials is seen at about $9 billion of revenue, with advanced packaging guided up 50%.

• ₿ Bitcoin slips under $64,000: XRP holds the $1 line it has defended since November 2024, with futures bets at a ten-month high.

• 📄 PPI is the number that comes next: The PPI Day Cheat Sheet covers every outcome, the component guesses and the lines that feed the Fed’s target.

🧠 One Big Thing

Two of the biggest names in AI hardware reported last night, and both shares fell. Cisco had its best quarter on record. Cerebras raised its forecast for the whole year. Nothing was wrong with either set of numbers, but both shares had already run a long way, so a good quarter was exactly what people were already paying for. That is worth knowing whatever you own, because it is now true of most of the AI trade. Applied Materials reports tonight into the same setup, so watch what it does on a beat.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

4.683%

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +43.57% Accelerant Holdings soared after the specialty insurance risk exchange operator released its second quarter results ahead of the opening bell, its first report since a run of enhanced partnership announcements with Lloyd’s of London, Incline P&C and Hippo Holdings. The stock went into the print roughly 60% below its 52 week high, leaving room for an outsized reaction.

• : +33.57% CuriosityStream Inc. jumped after posting record second quarter results with revenue up 22% year on year and licensing revenue up 48%, and raising full year 2026 guidance while declaring a third quarter dividend of 8.5 cents per share.

• : +24.25% Harmonic Inc. rallied after second quarter broadband solutions revenue came in ahead of analyst expectations, prompting an upward revision to its annual forecast in the first full quarter following the June sale of its video business.

• : +19.11% Omeros Corporation climbed after second quarter results highlighted commercial sales momentum for newly approved YARTEMLEA alongside debt reduction and share repurchases.

• : +4.11% Dell Technologies Inc. extended a near 10% regular session gain, driven by Super Micro Computer’s fiscal 2027 revenue guidance of 65 to 72 billion against a 52.5 billion consensus and CoreWeave’s expanded backlog, both read as confirmation that AI server demand behind Dell’s own record backlog remains intact.

Losers

• : -23.24% Outlook Therapeutics, Inc. slid after pricing a public offering of 55.6 million shares and accompanying warrants for gross proceeds of about 55 million, at a combined price of 99 cents, days ahead of its August 17 Nasdaq minimum bid price compliance deadline.

• : -19.32% StubHub Holdings, Inc. dropped after second quarter profit came in near breakeven against Street expectations for a clear profit, overshadowing record revenue of 573.1 million and gross merchandise sales up 34% to 3.1 billion. Management raised full year gross merchandise sales guidance but left adjusted EBITDA guidance unchanged.

• : -18.55% Cerebras Systems Inc. fell after core revenue of 180 million missed the 194 million analysts expected, with a decline in the hardware business overshadowing raised full year revenue guidance and a remaining performance obligation of 25.4 billion.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $63,541 (▲0.19%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,881 (▲0.14%)
XRP: $1.01 (▲0.15%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,784 (▲0.17%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,875 (▲0.07%)
FTSE 100: 10,793 (▼0.49%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.67% (▼0.38%)
Oil (WTI): $82 (▼1.25%)
Gold: $4,389 (▼0.43%)
Silver: $64.91 (▼0.59%)

Data as of: UK: 11:41 BST / US: 06:41 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 19:41 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🏛️ Two hawks speak, minutes after producer prices

Producer prices for July land at half past one this afternoon, and economists expect a rise of 0.2% on the month after a fall of 0.3% in June, with the core measure seen at 0.3% and the annual rate cooling to 4.9% from 5.5%. The release tracks what factories and wholesalers charge each other, so it works as an early warning for what consumers pay later. It arrives fifteen minutes after Beth Hammack of the Cleveland Fed starts speaking, and ten minutes before Tom Barkin of Richmond follows her. Hammack was one of three officials who voted to raise rates in July, and she votes again in September. Weekly jobless claims land at the same moment, with 198,000 expected against 199,000 last week (CNBC).

Yesterday’s consumer prices did the market a favour. Headline inflation rose 0.1% on the month and eased to 3.4% on the year, core came in at 0.2% and 2.5%, and traders cut the odds of a September rate rise into the high 30s from above 50% earlier in the week. The S&P 500 added 0.26% to close at 7,749. Producer prices can undo some of that, because wholesale inflation is still running near 5% while the consumer measure sits at 3.4%, and that gap closes either by warehouse prices falling or by shop prices catching up. The bond market gives its own verdict at six this evening, when the Treasury sells $25 billion of thirty-year bonds, a day after its ten-year sale cleared at 4.683% (Yahoo Finance).

💻 Cisco beats every number and falls anyway

Cisco reported record quarterly revenue of $17.3 billion, up 18% on a year earlier, and adjusted earnings of $1.22 a share against the $1.13 analysts expected, both above the top of its own guidance range. Orders for AI infrastructure from the largest cloud companies reached $9.3 billion across the financial year, roughly four and a half times the prior year, with about $4 billion of that booked in the final quarter alone. Total product orders rose 35%. The company guided to revenue of $72.2 billion to $73.4 billion for the year ahead (Yahoo Finance).

The shares fell anyway. Cisco closed the regular session up 2.9% at $123.95, near the top of a 52-week range running from $65.75 to $130.37, then dropped more than 4% after the close once management flagged that gross margins face pressure from a heavier hardware mix. The shares were down about 6% ahead of the open this morning. That is the whole reaction in one line: a stock up around 60% this year has already been paid for a good quarter, so the next buyer needs something more. Selling more physical boxes and proportionally less software is exactly how an AI hardware boom turns up in a networking company’s margins.

🧠 Cerebras raises its forecast and drops 17%

Cerebras Systems reported record quarterly core revenue of $209.9 million, more than double a year earlier, and lifted its full-year core revenue forecast to between $880 million and $890 million from $855 million to $865 million. Core gross margin improved to 40.6%, a gain of 9.4 percentage points on the year. It also posted an adjusted loss of $2.98 a share against the 18 cents analysts had modelled, and its hardware business shrank on what management described as lumpy demand. The stock closed up 11.5% at $261.76, fell about 16% after hours, and was down more than 17% ahead of the open this morning (CNBC).

This is only the second set of results since Cerebras listed, and the second time the market has treated its growth as expensive rather than impressive. The company sells wafer-scale processors, single chips roughly the size of a dinner plate, into a market where Nvidia sets the terms, and its revenue arrives in a handful of large deals rather than a steady flow. That is what lumpy means in practice, and it is why one soft quarter of hardware sales reads as a warning rather than noise. Applied Materials reports tonight and offers a cleaner read on whether the underlying equipment orders are still growing (Bloomberg).

🛢️ Oil’s six-day run ends as Hormuz talks harden

Brent crude fell about 1.2% to just under $88 a barrel, snapping a six-session advance that had carried it above $89. The move followed a hardening of positions over the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively shut since Iran attacked commercial shipping in the Gulf earlier this year. Trump said the United States had total control of the waterway and repeated a demand for reparations from Tehran as a condition for talks. Iran rejected the claim outright and said the strait stays closed until Washington changes its behaviour (Bloomberg).

The International Energy Agency now expects the global oil market to run a shortfall of 1.8 million barrels a day this quarter, and the emergency release of 400 million barrels agreed in March, the largest in the agency’s fifty-year history, replaced only a fraction of what the closure removed. The link for readers runs straight back to the Fed. Energy is why three officials voted to raise rates in July, and yesterday’s inflation figures covered a month when petrol was cheaper. The oil price building now shows up in the August print, published in September, days before the Fed meets (CNBC).

🇬🇧 Britain grows 0.4% through a war

The UK economy expanded 0.4% in the second quarter, matching what economists expected and slowing from 0.6% in the first. Services did the work with growth of 0.5%, construction added 0.3%, and production output was flat. On the year the economy grew 1.2%, up from 0.9% in the first quarter, so the annual picture improved even as the quarterly pace eased. June was stronger than the quarter as a whole, which hands the third quarter a better starting point than the headline number suggests (Bloomberg).

The context makes it more interesting than the figure. This covers the first full quarter of the Iran war, with energy prices climbing and the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the economy still grew. That leaves the Bank of England with a version of the Fed’s problem: activity holding up while imported energy costs push inflation the wrong way. Sterling and gilts take more of their direction from this release than from any other domestic number this month, and the next set of UK inflation figures will be read against it.

Stories You Might Have Missed

🍔 Peltz prepares a bid for Wendy’s

Wendy’s shares jumped as much as 15% and were briefly halted for volatility after reports that Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management is assembling a group of investors to take the burger chain private. A regulatory filing puts Trian’s stake at 7.85% and Peltz’s personal holding at 16.24%, and the consortium may include BlueFive Capital and Flynn Group, one of the longest-serving franchisees in the system. A bid is expected within weeks, though the timing could move. Wendy’s said it would review any proposal in line with its fiduciary duties. The chain carries a market value of about $1.44 billion after a long stretch of weak demand and a change of leadership (Forbes).

💾 Intel takes $20 billion instead of $15 billion

Intel priced 210.5 million shares at $95 each, raising $20 billion after upsizing a deal originally announced at $15 billion, with underwriters holding a thirty-day option that could carry the total beyond $23 billion. Net proceeds come to roughly $19.7 billion, earmarked for general corporate purposes including capital spending. Bank of America put the dilution at about 5% of earnings per share, while arguing the size of the raise signals confidence in demand rather than distress. It follows a year in which the US government took a 10% stake in the company, and it ranks among the largest equity sales any chipmaker has done during the AI build-out (CNBC).

🔧 The AI order book reports tonight

Applied Materials publishes third-quarter results after the US close, having guided to revenue of $8.95 billion give or take $500 million, with analysts modelling about $9 billion, up 23% on a year earlier, and earnings of $3.39 a share. The company sells the machines that make chips, so its order book runs ahead of almost everyone else’s revenue. Management expects leading-edge logic, DRAM and advanced packaging to drive more than 80% of the growth in wafer fabrication equipment spending this calendar year, and has guided its advanced packaging business to grow 50% to 60%. The shares sit about 27% below their peak (CNBC).

₿ Bitcoin slips under $64,000 as XRP defends $1

Bitcoin traded near $63,500 in the hours after the inflation report, about 1.6% below the session high it set before the release, with US spot Bitcoin ETFs recording roughly $61 million of net outflows. XRP held at about $1.01, a line it has defended since November 2024, and sits around 14% below its July peak of $1.18. Open interest in XRP futures reached its highest level since October, which historically points to a larger move once the market picks a direction rather than to the direction itself (CoinDesk).

📄 PPI Day Cheat Sheet

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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 📊 The number that decides September: July inflation lands at half past one, with consensus at 3.4% annual and core easing to 2.5%.

• 🖥️ CoreWeave books a $104 billion backlog: shares jumped 18% before the open as the AI hardware trade cleared its biggest test of the quarter.

• 🛢️ Oil rises for a sixth day: Brent above $89 as the IEA cuts its 2026 demand forecast again with Hormuz still shut.

• 💸 Alphabet’s $205 billion bill: Google drew $115 billion of orders for a $25 billion bond sale funding the largest capital budget in its history.

• ₿ Bitcoin coiled at $64,000: traders bought September $70,000 calls into the print after weeks penned between $62,000 and $66,000 crushed volatility.

• 🎮 Tencent beats on sales, misses on profit: revenue up 11% to $30.3 billion while net profit rose less than 1% on heavy AI spending.

• 🛒 Sea grows 48% and jumps 15%: Shopee’s owner cleared every line, though profit rose only 11% as the lending book expanded.

• 💻 Cisco reports after the close: the networking giant has already lifted its AI order target for the year to $9 billion.

• ⚡ Fastly jumps 21% a week late: the cloud group’s results were already public, then the market decided it liked them after all.

• 🔍 A cool print describes a July that is gone: the CPI Day Cheat Sheet covers every outcome, the levels and the next 24 hours.

• 📈 I am flat on oil until it picks a side: Chart of the Day covers the $92 resistance, the trendline overhead and $78.96 below.

🧠 One Big Thing

At half past one this afternoon the government publishes what happened to American prices in July. Economists expect 3.4% on the year and 0.2% on the core monthly measure. If it lands at or below that, the Federal Reserve almost certainly leaves interest rates alone next month. If it runs hotter, a rise in September moves from a coin toss to the base case, and that touches mortgages, savings rates, share prices and crypto. Interest rate futures put the odds of a September rise near 52%, about as split as these markets get. Watch the core monthly figure, not the headline.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

$640 MILLION

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +23.21% Hyliion Holdings Corp. surged after reporting second quarter revenue of $4.9 million, more than triple the year ago figure, and raising full year revenue guidance to roughly $15 million on the back of its $41.7 million U.S. Navy contract to scale multi megawatt KARNO power modules.

• : +18.52% CoreWeave, Inc. jumped after second quarter revenue more than doubled to $2.58 billion with a smaller than expected net loss, and the company lifted 2026 revenue guidance to between $12.4 billion and $13.2 billion on a revenue backlog of roughly $104 billion.

• : +8.24% Lumentum Holdings Inc. rallied after fiscal fourth quarter revenue doubled to $1.01 billion, up 109% year over year, with adjusted earnings of $3.23 per share beating estimates and non GAAP gross margin expanding to 50.4% on AI optics demand.

• : +4.22% Sandisk Corporation climbed as strong AI infrastructure results from CoreWeave and Super Micro reinforced the demand outlook for memory used in AI systems, extending a rebound from the post earnings drawdown that followed its cautious first quarter guidance.

Losers

• : -14.89% United States Antimony Corporation slumped after reporting break even second quarter earnings on a sharp revenue miss and cutting full year revenue guidance to $60 million to $75 million, overshadowing its $245 million Defense Logistics Agency award.

• : -11.86% Savers Value Village, Inc. dropped after announcing a secondary public offering of 15 million shares by Ares private equity and opportunistic credit funds, alongside a concurrent $10 million company share repurchase, raising supply concerns just days after its second quarter print.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,008 (▲ 0.74%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,909 (▲ 1.49%)
XRP: $1.02 (▼ 0.12%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,770 (▲ 0.29%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,840 (▲ 0.72%)
FTSE 100: 10,842 (▲ 0.23%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.67% (▼ 0.55%)
Oil (WTI): $83 (▼ 0.08%)
Gold: $4,419 (▲ 1.10%)
Silver: $66.34 (▲ 2.59%)

Data as of: UK: 11:30 BST / US: 06:30 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 19:30 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

📊 The Number That Decides September

The July consumer price index lands at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET, and more rides on it than on any inflation print this year. Economists polled by Dow Jones expect prices to have risen 0.1% on the month and 3.4% on the year, easing from 3.5%, with core inflation, which strips out food and fuel, seen at 0.2% monthly and 2.5% annually. That core figure would be the softest since January. Interest rate futures put the odds of a Federal Reserve rate rise in September near 52%, which is as close to a coin toss as these markets get, and the 10-year Treasury yield sits around 4.7% going in (CNBC).

The awkward part is that June’s headline was held down by a steep fall at the pump, and that drop does not repeat, so a soft July reading has to come from somewhere else. One bottom-up forecast has core at 0.253%, close enough to the rounding line that the same underlying inflation could print as 0.2% or 0.3% and produce two completely different afternoons. Cleveland Fed president Beth Hammack, who voted to raise rates in July and votes again in September, said this week that one quarter-point move “probably doesn’t do a whole lot”. She speaks again tomorrow morning. The Treasury also sells $42 billion of 10-year notes at 6pm BST, which is the cleanest live test of how bond buyers actually read the number (Yahoo Finance).

🖥️ The AI Hardware Night That Beat Everything

CoreWeave and Super Micro Computer both reported after the closing bell, and both cleared the bar the market had spent a week worrying about. CoreWeave’s revenue rose 112% to $2.58 billion, ahead of the $2.56 billion analysts modelled, and its revenue backlog reached roughly $104 billion at the end of June, up 246% on a year earlier, before counting more than $25 billion of fresh customer commitments signed in the opening weeks of this quarter. Inside that backlog sit a $21 billion agreement to supply Meta with AI cloud capacity through 2032 and a multi-year deal to run Anthropic’s Claude models. The shares jumped about 18% before the open (CNBC).

Super Micro did the harder thing. Fourth-quarter revenue of $11.1 billion fell short of the $11.55 billion analysts wanted, but gross margin, the number that has been the entire argument on this stock for two years, recovered to 17.5% from 9.5% a year ago. Management then guided fiscal 2027 revenue to between $65 billion and $72 billion against a consensus of $54.4 billion, and reported more than $60 billion of new orders. The next line down complicates it: first-quarter margin is guided at 10.4% to 10.8%, so the recovery owes a lot to one quarter’s customer mix. The shares rose about 9% after hours (Yahoo Finance).

CoreWeave’s interest line is where this gets expensive. Net losses widened to $626 million from $290 million a year ago, and net interest expense hit $640 million in the quarter, up from $267 million. The demand is real and the backlog is contracted, but the machines are being bought with debt, and the cost of that debt is now larger than the loss itself.

🛢️ Oil Climbs a Sixth Day as the IEA Cuts Again

Brent crude pushed above $89 a barrel, a sixth straight session of gains and roughly 12% higher across five days, with West Texas Intermediate near $83. The International Energy Agency cut its 2026 demand forecast again this morning, now expecting world oil consumption to fall 1.6 million barrels a day this year, 510,000 barrels a day more than it forecast a month ago, because the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since early July. Supply is falling faster still. The agency sees global output down 4.3 million barrels a day in 2026 to 102 million, with 8.3 million barrels a day of Gulf production still shut in and global inventories down 69 million barrels in July alone (CNBC).

That is the uncomfortable backdrop to this afternoon’s inflation print. July’s data covers a month when petrol was still cheap, so the barrel now sitting near $89 lands in the August and September reports rather than this one. Pakistan’s defence minister said Washington and Tehran are close to some sort of arrangement on the strait, and Qatar has drafted a proposal, but Tehran has already said any deal would not reopen the waterway immediately. Prices have swung on those headlines for a fortnight without a single extra barrel moving, which is why the market keeps giving the rally back and then taking it again (Bloomberg).

💸 Alphabet Borrows $25 Billion and Gets Offered $115 Billion

Alphabet has raised up to $25 billion in a ten-tranche bond sale, with maturities running from two years out to 40, to help fund a 2026 capital budget the company now puts at as much as $205 billion, more than double last year. Peak investor demand reached roughly $115 billion, more than four times the amount on offer, and the 40-year piece was marketed at about 155 basis points over comparable Treasuries. Google is not short of cash. It is choosing to borrow anyway, because the data centres, servers and chips behind its Gemini models and Google Cloud are being built faster than the cash flow arrives (Yahoo Finance).

The spending has already produced Alphabet’s first quarter of negative free cash flow since it listed in 2004, and this is now the pattern across the sector rather than the exception. Technology companies including Amazon, Meta and Oracle issued about $194 billion of bonds through July, up 79% on the same period last year, and the money is going into the same thing. For an ordinary investor that changes the shape of the risk. When the build-out was funded from spare cash, a disappointing year meant slower growth. Funded with 40-year paper, it means fixed interest payments that carry on whether the demand shows up or not.

₿ Bitcoin Is Coiled, and the Print Is the Spring

Bitcoin is trading near $64,000, up about 0.7% over 24 hours, and it has been penned between $62,000 and $66,000 for weeks. That grind has crushed implied volatility to unusually low levels, which is what turns today's inflation number into a binary event for the whole asset class rather than just another data point. Ether and XRP have gone sideways alongside it, with XRP still hugging the $1 mark. The positioning shows what some traders expect: the dominant flow on the Deribit options exchange since yesterday has been the 25 September $70,000 bitcoin call, with buyers paying roughly $2.5 million in total premium for it (CoinDesk).

Underneath the derivatives the spot picture is calmer. Ether saw $49.7 million of net outflows from exchanges in a day and $164.6 million over a week, which is coins moving into storage rather than towards the sell button. The professionals are hedged the other way, with traders on Hyperliquid holding net short exposure of $46.8 million in bitcoin and $20.9 million in ether. And beyond this print sits the calendar: September has been bitcoin’s weakest month on average since 2013, down roughly 4% (CoinDesk).

Stories You Might Have Missed

🎮 Tencent Beats on Sales and Misses on Profit

Tencent reported second-quarter revenue of 204.8 billion yuan, about $30.3 billion, up 11% on a year earlier and ahead of the 201.8 billion yuan analysts expected. Domestic games revenue grew 17% to 47.3 billion yuan on the back of Delta Force and Valorant, a sharp acceleration from 6% growth in the first quarter, and advertising benefited from AI-driven targeting. Net profit was the miss: it rose 0.7% to 56 billion yuan against the 61.8 billion yuan expected, held down by the cost of the company’s AI build-out. Stripping out one-off and non-cash items, profit was 68.4 billion yuan, up 9% (CNBC).

🛒 Sea Grows 48% and the Market Finally Pays for It

Sea Limited, which owns the marketplace Shopee, the games studio Garena and the lender Monee, reported second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion, up 48.1% on a year earlier, and the shares closed up 14.56%. Shopee’s gross merchandise value, the total sold across the platform, grew 28% to $38.3 billion on 4.2 billion orders. The tension sits in the profit line, where net income rose only 10.6% to $458.1 million, because a growing share of that growth comes from lending, which consumes capital and carries credit risk a marketplace does not. Monee’s loan book expanded 62.5% to $11.1 billion (Yahoo Finance).

💻 Cisco Reports With $9 Billion of AI Orders Behind It

Cisco Systems reports fourth-quarter results after the US close, with analysts modelling $1.17 a share on $16.83 billion of revenue, which would be sales growth of about 15%. The AI order book is the part to watch. Cisco had banked $5.3 billion of AI infrastructure orders through the first three quarters of its financial year and lifted the full-year target to $9 billion from $5 billion. It is the least glamorous name in the AI trade and one of the largest, at roughly $480 billion of market value, and the shares have already climbed above their dot-com era high (Yahoo Finance).

⚡ Fastly Jumps 21% Almost a Week After Its Results

Fastly rose 21% to $27.69, its biggest single-day move of the year and the highest the shares have traded since early 2024, on results that had been public for almost a week. Second-quarter revenue grew 23% to $183.3 million, adjusted earnings were $0.15 a share against the $0.07 expected, and gross margin hit a record 65.8%. The company lifted full-year revenue guidance to between $732 million and $746 million, implying growth of about 18% at the midpoint. The delayed reaction came as analysts raised price targets and the wider AI-adjacent cloud group bounced (Yahoo Finance).

🔍 CPI Day Cheat Sheet

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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• ⚡ Riot leases 191 megawatts to Anthropic: a 20-year deal worth $9.1 billion, against quarterly revenue of $174 million, and the shares jumped 25%.

• 🛢️ Oil pushes the 10-year to 4.71%: Brent near $88 has September hike odds back above 50%, from 44% a day earlier.

• 💻 Intel wants $15 billion from shareholders: a surprise equity sale to fund AI capacity, and the shares fell about 5%.

• 🚀 Rocket Lab’s record quarter costs it 10%: revenue up 62% to $234 million, backlog $2.36 billion, and a two-cent miss.

• 🖥️ Super Micro and CoreWeave report tonight: a $60 billion backlog and a $99 billion backlog get tested within an hour.

• 📡 AST SpaceMobile misses for a fifth quarter: revenue $31.5 million against $33.9 million expected, with a $1.3 billion backlog behind it.

• 🇦🇺 Australia holds at 4.35% again: a unanimous second hold, with inflation not back at target until late 2027 on the bank’s own forecast.

• ₿ Bitcoin hands back its $65,000 reclaim: back near $64,000 with ether under $1,900 and XRP defending the $1 line.

• 🥇 Gold climbs to a two-month high: safe-haven buying ahead of tomorrow’s inflation print, with crude adding to the pressure.

• 📈 I am not adding to XRP until 93 cents: Chart of the Day covers the one dollar break, 93 cents and 80 cents.

🧠 One Big Thing

Tomorrow at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET, the US publishes its inflation figures for July, and that number will move almost everything you hold. One thing about it will get missed. It measures July, a month when petrol was getting cheaper. Since the start of August oil has jumped back to nearly $88 a barrel, and none of that is in tomorrow's number. So a soft reading could get treated as the all-clear while describing a month that has already gone. The oil happening now shows up in the August figures, published in September.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

$9.1 billion

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +34.57% Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises surged after second quarter revenue of 319.7 million more than doubled year over year and crushed the roughly 197 million consensus, with the company swinging to net income and raising its full year adjusted EBITDA target to 80 to 105 million.

• : +26.97% P3 Health Partners jumped after swinging to a second quarter profit of 15.7 million with 54 million of adjusted EBITDA and raising its full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA outlook to 80 to 110 million.

• : +18.61% Riot Platforms rallied after disclosing a 20 year, 191 megawatt AI data center lease at its Rockdale site worth roughly 9.1 billion in base revenue, with the tenant reported to be Anthropic, reversing the prior session’s earnings driven selloff.

• : +8.01% Sea Limited climbed after second quarter revenue of 7.8 billion rose 48 percent year over year and beat the roughly 7.1 billion consensus on Shopee momentum, outweighing an adjusted earnings miss.

Losers

• : -20.30% OppFi sank after second quarter adjusted earnings of 0.33 per share missed estimates by 0.11 as net charge offs climbed to 52 percent of average receivables from 43 percent, and the company cut its full year revenue and adjusted earnings guidance.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,181 0DP (▲ 0.40%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,885 0DP (▲ 0.71%)
XRP: $1.00 2DP (▼ 0.69%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,783 0DP (▲ 0.08%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,807 0DP (▲ 0.23%)
FTSE 100: 10,860 0DP (▲ 0.08%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.73% 2DP (▲ 0.43%)
Oil (WTI): $83 0DP (▲ 1.46%)
Gold: $4,380 0DP (▼ 0.25%)
Silver: $65.06 2DP (▼ 0.94%)

Data as of: UK: 11:50am BST / US: 6:50am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 7:50pm JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

⚡ Anthropic hands a bitcoin miner $9.1 billion

Riot Platforms has signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic covering 191 megawatts of capacity at its Rockdale campus in Texas, worth roughly $9.1 billion in initial contracted revenue and up to $16.1 billion if both extension options are taken. Riot’s filing named the tenant only as a leading frontier AI lab; Bloomberg identified it as Anthropic. The first 96 megawatts are due in December 2027, the balance by June 2028, and the contract runs to June 2048. Morgan Stanley has provided $573 million for early construction. Second-quarter revenue came in at $174.2 million, ahead of the $152 million to $155 million expected, and the shares rose about 25% after hours (Bloomberg).

Riot has now leased 241 megawatts in a little over six months, around $9.8 billion of contracted revenue, and the mining business that gave the company its name is becoming the smaller half of it. This is the trade the whole sector has been running since Core Scientific went the same way: a bitcoin miner already owns the two things an AI lab cannot conjure, a live grid connection and a permitted site, and it can convert them without waiting years for a substation. The re-rate happens on the announcement. Delivery starts in late 2027, and Riot has to build the thing first.

🛢️ Oil near $88 puts a rate rise back in play

Brent crude held a four-day gain near $88 a barrel after President Trump added fresh conditions to any deal with Iran, demanding compensation for people killed by Iranian roadside bombs and for protestors killed over the past fifty years. Tehran has its own list: an end to the US naval blockade of its ports, the withdrawal of American forces from around its borders, sanctions relief, unfrozen assets and war reparations. Neither side moved. Brent settled about 5% higher yesterday at $87.72 and West Texas Intermediate traded around $82. The Strait of Hormuz carried roughly a fifth of the world’s crude and LNG before the war (CNBC).

The bond market did the translating. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed above 4.71%, within reach of its January high, and September rate-rise odds moved back above 50% from 44% a day earlier, on crude alone, with no inflation data in between. July CPI lands tomorrow at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET, with consensus at 0.2% on the month and 3.4% on the year against 3.5% in June. Prediction markets are leaning cooler than that. The print covers a month when petrol was falling. Oil near $88 shows up in the August reading, published in September (CNBC).

💻 Intel asks the market for $15 billion

Intel announced an underwritten public offering of $15 billion of common stock, with underwriters holding a 30-day option on a further $2.25 billion that would take the total to $17.25 billion. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup are running the books, and the deal is expected to close tomorrow. Intel said the proceeds go to general corporate purposes, capital expenditure and working capital as it builds out manufacturing and AI capacity. The shares fell about 5% to $96.97 in early trading and closed the session lower, dragging on the chip complex while AMD, Nvidia and Broadcom held steady (CNBC).

The timing is the awkward part. Intel posted its fastest revenue growth in almost 15 years last month and lifted capital spending guidance to $20 billion on customer demand, which is usually the point at which a turnaround stops needing rescue money. A raise this size says the foundry build is running ahead of the cash the business throws off, and existing holders pay for the gap through dilution. Set it against Riot, which financed 191 megawatts with a twenty-year tenant and a bank facility. Intel is funding capacity with shareholders because it has not yet signed the tenant.

🚀 Rocket Lab’s record quarter costs it 10%

Rocket Lab reported record second-quarter revenue of $234.06 million, up 62% on a year earlier and just ahead of the $232.06 million analysts expected. Backlog hit a record $2.36 billion, up 137%, and the company signed more than $437 million of new launch contracts during and shortly after the quarter, taking the launch book past 90 missions. Third-quarter guidance of $250 million to $265 million would set another record. The adjusted loss came in at $0.08 a share against $0.06 expected. Shares closed at $80.04, down 3.37%, then fell a further 6.8% after hours (Yahoo Finance).

Two cents of miss took about a tenth off the company, which tells you what the shares were already carrying into the print. Revenue growth is paid for at this valuation, so the marginal buyer is buying the route to profit, and a wider adjusted loss argues the other way. Management also told the call it has to be “very, very careful” with a limited number of Neutron slots, a supply comment dressed as a scheduling one. Neutron is the item that changes the earnings model, and that slot remark is the first thing to read in the transcript.

🖥️ Two AI backlogs get tested tonight

Super Micro reports fiscal fourth-quarter results after the US close, with consensus at $0.96 a share on revenue of about $11.55 billion, roughly double a year earlier. The company pre-announced in July that revenue would land near the low end of its $11.0 billion to $12.5 billion guidance while gross margin came in at 15% to 17% against guidance of 8.2% to 8.4%, and it pointed to an order backlog above $60 billion. CoreWeave follows the same evening, with revenue expected around $2.55 billion, more than double last year, and a loss of $1.22 to $1.40 a share (Yahoo Finance).

These two report the same demand from opposite ends of the bill. Super Micro assembles and ships the servers, so its margin swing is a mix question and cash conversion is where the doubts sit. CoreWeave rents the finished capacity, carries a $99.4 billion revenue backlog against a $31 billion to $35 billion capital plan, and has given up roughly half its value from the high on worries about construction delays and how the build gets funded. Options are pricing a move of 13% to 15% in CoreWeave off the numbers (Yahoo Finance).

Stories You Might Have Missed

📡 AST SpaceMobile misses for a fifth quarter

AST SpaceMobile reported second-quarter revenue of $31.5 million against the $33.9 million analysts expected, with a net loss of $230.9 million, or $0.77 a share, more than double the $0.35 loss forecast. That is the fifth consecutive quarter the company has come in short. Revenue backlog stands at about $1.30 billion across commercial partners and US government awards, and full-year guidance of $150 million to $200 million was reaffirmed, which loads the work into the second half. The constellation is now 13 spacecraft after the BlueBird 11, 12 and 13 launches, with BlueBirds 17 to 46 in production. The balance sheet holds more than $3.7 billion pro forma after a $1.15 billion convertible. Shares fell about 3.5% after hours (Yahoo Finance).

🇦🇺 Australia holds at 4.35% and keeps the hike on the table

The Reserve Bank of Australia left the cash rate at 4.35% for a second straight meeting, unanimously. The board said inflation picked up materially through the second half of 2025 and that part of the rise reflected capacity pressure rather than one-off costs, with trimmed-mean inflation little changed from the March quarter. It does not expect inflation back near the middle of its target band until late 2027, and flagged upside risks to even that forecast. The statement kept open the option of raising the cash rate further if those risks come through. Australia’s big four banks expect no move for the rest of this year, with cuts starting in 2027 (Bloomberg).

📈 Chart of the Day - XRP (XRPUSD)

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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🛢️ Oil rises as Hormuz stalls: A Houthi drone hit a 400,000 barrel a day Saudi refinery, and Brent added 1.2%.

• 📈 Record high on a jobs loss: The S&P 500 closed at 7,757.64 after payrolls fell 23,000, its best week since April.

• 💻 Palantir added 118 billion dollars: Its best week since November 2024, with Atlassian up 35% and Twilio up 25%.

• 🚀 Rocket Lab reports after a 663 million win: Space Force awards worth about 30% of its backlog land before tonight’s numbers.

• 🚁 Archer reports on 2 million of revenue: The air taxi maker has 1.8 billion dollars of liquidity and a certification date that decides everything.

• 🖥️ CoreWeave’s 99 billion backlog gets tested: Revenue is seen doubling tomorrow night, with the stock down 16% in a week.

• 🏬 America’s biggest landlord reports tonight: Simon Property is expected to post 3.18 dollars of funds from operations per share.

• 🥇 Gold eases off a seven-week high: Spot slipped to about 4,337 dollars after touching 4,411 on the jobs report.

• 📈 I sold my whole SpaceX position at 135 dollars: Chart of the Day covers the 147 target, the 171 above it and the 110 line.

🧠 One Big Thing

Two AI stories are running in opposite directions and both got louder last week. Palantir added roughly $118bn of market value in five sessions and Atlassian rose 35% in one, because a beat at those companies drops straight into margin. CoreWeave fell 16% over the same week and sits around half its high, because its growth arrives attached to a $31bn to $35bn capital budget. The market has stopped paying the same multiple for both kinds of AI revenue. CoreWeave’s numbers tomorrow night and Applied Materials later this week put the capital-heavy side of that argument on the record.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

23,000

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +48.89% Varex Imaging Corporation climbed sharply in thin pre-market trade ahead of its fiscal third quarter earnings release, scheduled for after the closing bell today, with the gap driven by positioning into the print rather than a company announcement.

• : +36.12% AbCellera Biologics Inc. rallied after releasing top-line results before the open from the Phase 2 trial of ABCL635, its potential first-in-class non-hormonal antibody targeting NK3R for moderate to severe hot flashes due to menopause. The readout is the first efficacy test for the lead asset out of the company’s GPCR and ion channel platform.

• : +34.75% MarineMax, Inc. surged in pre-market trading on its long-running sale process, with Blackstone, Centerbridge and activist shareholder Donerail all in the final round of bidding for the recreational boat and yacht retailer since late July. The pre-market level sits far above the roughly $35.00 a share all-cash proposal Donerail put forward earlier this year.

• : +6.84% Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated rose as the competitive overhang on its cystic fibrosis franchise lifted, with Sionna’s closely watched NBD1 stabilizer readout landing badly for the challenger. Sell-side analysts had flagged that data as the single largest risk to Vertex heading into this month.

Losers

• : -91.67% Sionna Therapeutics, Inc. collapsed on the topline readout from PreciSION CF, the Phase 2a proof-of-concept trial of NBD1 stabilizer SION-719 added to standard of care Trikafta in cystic fibrosis patients. The study was the first clinical test of an NBD1 stabilizer in people with the disease and the company’s central value driver.

• : -82.66% Tenax Therapeutics, Inc. plunged on topline results from LEVEL, the registrational Phase 3 trial of oral levosimendan in pulmonary hypertension due to heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. The trial enrolled over 230 patients and had been powered at well above 90% to detect a 25 meter change in six minute walk distance.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $65,000 (▲0.23%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,917 (▲0.40%)
XRP: $1.03 (▲0.27%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,781 (▲0.01%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,877 (▲0.14%)
FTSE 100: 10,860 (▼0.24%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.67% (▲0.41%)
Oil (WTI): $79 (▲2.92%)
Gold: $4,329 (▼0.28%)
Silver: $63.83 (▲0.56%)

Data as of: UK: 12:18 BST / US: 07:18 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 20:18 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🛢️ A drone hits Saudi crude, and oil turns back up

Brent crude rose about 1.2% to $84.58 a barrel this morning and US crude pushed close to 3% higher, back near $79, after a weekend that put the Gulf back on the front page. A Houthi drone struck Saudi Aramco's Jazan refinery on the Red Sea coast early yesterday, starting a fire that was put out with no injuries reported. The plant processes 400,000 barrels of crude a day. The group said the strike answered Saudi drone flights over the provinces of Saada and Hajjah, and it came two days after Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement in the holy city, treating an attack on any one of them as an attack on all three (CNBC).

The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is the thing actually moving the price, and it keeps not happening. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said over the weekend that an agreement with Oman on a shipping route is “very close”, while ruling out direct talks with Washington for now over violations of June’s interim peace deal. President Trump said the United States is “low-keying” the negotiation and leaning harder on economic pressure instead. Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil normally moves through that strait. For UK and US readers the link is the July inflation report on 12 August, which covers a month when crude traded lower than it does today (Bloomberg).

📈 Wall Street set a record on a jobs report that went backwards

The S&P 500 finished last week at 7,757.64, an all-time high, up 47.68 points in the closing session and 3.58% across the five days, its strongest week since April. The Nasdaq added 1.3% and the Dow gained a quarter of a percent. The trigger was the July employment report, which showed the American economy shedding 23,000 jobs against forecasts of roughly 80,000 added. Bond markets moved with it: the 10-year Treasury yield fell more than three basis points to 4.639% and the two-year dropped more than five to 4.193%. Odds of a Federal Reserve rate rise in September slid to about 42%, from roughly 67% a week earlier (CNBC).

Futures are quieter this morning, with S&P 500 contracts at 7,791.75 and Nasdaq futures up 0.42% while Dow futures sit slightly lower and the VIX trades near 15.5. The rally is resting on one assumption, that the Fed stays still, and the July inflation report on 12 August at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET, is the test of it. Consensus is 0.1% on the month with the annual rate easing to 3.4%. June’s headline was flattered by a 9.7% one-month fall in petrol prices, a gift that does not repeat. Four and a half hours after the print the Treasury sells $42bn of 10-year notes, which gives an immediate read on how bond buyers scored it.

💻 Palantir added $118 billion in five sessions

Palantir closed out last week at $172.01, up 10.32% in the final session and 39.8% across the week from $123.06, its best week since November 2024 and roughly $117.6bn of market value added. The run started with second-quarter results seven days earlier: revenue of $1.94bn, up 93% from a year before and about $136m ahead of Wall Street, alongside a raised full-year outlook on enterprise AI demand. Bank of America restated a bullish view as the week closed, and the buying spread through the same corner of the market, with UiPath up 7% and C3.ai up 5% on the session (Yahoo Finance).

Atlassian went further. Its shares jumped 35% in that same session after fiscal fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.87 a share on $1.77bn of revenue, against forecasts of $1.50 and $1.66bn, with cloud revenue up 31% to $1.2bn and contracted future revenue up 44% to $4.82bn. Twilio rose 24.89% on its own quarter. What links them is the shape of the business: a beat at a software company lands in margin almost immediately, with no factory to build first. That is the same week CoreWeave, which rents out the hardware the AI boom runs on, fell 16% (Yahoo Finance).

🚀 Rocket Lab reports tonight after a $663 million week

Rocket Lab shares climbed 9.46% in the final session of last week to $82.83, lifting the company’s market value to around $50bn, after the US Space Force disclosed two awards with a combined value of $663m. That is close to 30% of the backlog Rocket Lab reported at the end of March, arriving in a single announcement. The larger piece, a $397m Flatellite contract, is written around Neutron launches, which matters because Neutron is the medium-lift rocket meant to carry the company out of the small-satellite niche and into the heavier government and commercial work SpaceX currently dominates (Yahoo Finance).

Second-quarter numbers land after the close tonight, with company guidance of $225m to $240m in revenue and analysts near the middle of that range at roughly $232m. Revenue is the least interesting line on the page. Neutron’s first flight has been guided to later this year, and a $50bn valuation on a company with quarterly revenue of that size is a bet on the rocket arriving and on awards like last week’s converting into flown missions. Watch for a firm Neutron date and for how much of the $663m management expects to recognise in 2027 rather than park in backlog (Yahoo Finance).

🚁 The wrong number to watch in Archer’s results

Archer Aviation publishes second-quarter results after the US close tonight, with the call at 10pm BST, 5pm ET. Analysts expect a loss of somewhere between 25 and 34 cents a share on revenue of about $1.94m, and roughly $10.05m for the whole of 2026. Those are rounding errors against a company worth billions, which is the point: the air taxi is not yet a product anyone can buy a seat on. Shares closed last week at $5.59, up 6.88% in the final session but still down about 26% so far this year. Goldman Sachs trimmed its target to $8 from $9 going in, keeping a neutral stance (Yahoo Finance).

What the market is actually pricing is the certification clock. In April, Archer became the first eVTOL company to close Phase 3 of the Federal Aviation Administration’s four-stage type certification process, pushing its Midnight aircraft into Phase 4, where it has to prove airworthiness through formal testing rather than paperwork. Management has guided to first US operations this year under the White House eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, with Hawthorne Airport being modernised and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics as the showcase, alongside early commercial flying planned in the United Arab Emirates. Archer closed the first quarter with about $1.8bn of liquidity, and in July unveiled Thunder with Anduril, a defence version whose first flight is set for 2027 (Yahoo Finance).

Stories You Might Have Missed

🖥️ CoreWeave’s $99 billion backlog goes on trial tomorrow

CoreWeave reports second-quarter results after the US close tomorrow, and expectations are extreme in both directions. Analysts model revenue of about $2.55bn against $1.21bn a year earlier, growth of more than 110%, alongside a loss of roughly $1.22 a share compared with 27 cents. The company reported a $99.4bn revenue backlog at the end of March and guides capital spending of $31bn to $35bn for this year, which is the source of the nerves: the demand is contracted, the money to serve it has to be raised and spent first. Shares fell 16.31% last week and sit roughly half below their 52-week high (Yahoo Finance).

🏬 America’s biggest mall landlord reports tonight

Simon Property Group publishes second-quarter numbers after the close tonight, and analysts expect real estate funds from operations of $3.18 a share, up 4.3% from $3.05 a year ago, on revenue of roughly $1.71bn. The company has beaten estimates in each of the last four quarters. It lands in a week built around inflation and consumer data, and occupancy and leasing spreads across 190-odd American shopping centres are a live reading on whether households are still turning up and spending, taken four days before the July retail sales report closes the week (Yahoo Finance).

🥇 Gold slips back from a seven-week high

Spot gold eased about 0.1% to trade near $4,337 an ounce this morning as buyers took profits, after touching $4,411.70 in the hours after the payrolls miss late last week, its highest in seven weeks. Silver held above $63. The metal has spent the past fortnight tracking the rate story almost tick for tick, rising as the market cut the odds on a September Federal Reserve rise from about 67% to roughly 42%. Gold remains well below the record above $5,500 set in January, and this week’s inflation report is the next thing capable of moving it in either direction (Yahoo Finance).

📈 Chart of the Day - SpaceX (SPCX)

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This Week

XRP finished the week around $1.04, inside a $1.01 to $1.09 range, and it was the only coin in the top ten to end the week lower while the rest of the market rallied. Total crypto market value rose about 6 percent to $2.29 trillion. Bitcoin dominance climbed to 57.2 percent. Sentiment ticked up to 31 on the Fear and Greed Index, still in Fear.

Washington gave the week its shape and then left town. The Senate went home on 8 August without voting on the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, and in the small hours before it left, Majority Leader John Thune filed the paperwork that puts the bill first in the queue in September. There is a full section on that below, laying out what happens next and when.

Away from Washington, three things happened that matter to anyone holding XRP: the ETF bid went missing, the XRP Ledger shipped its biggest technical release of the year, and Ripple bought equity in two British firms that had already built its first tokenised fund.

The Consensus

• 📉 XRP ETF buying collapsed 93 percent. One million dollars went in all week, against $754 million into Bitcoin funds.

• 🔧 XRP Ledger v3.3.0 is live. The upgrades now face a validator vote, including encrypted balances built for institutions.

• 🏦 Ripple took equity in Zilo and Licuido. The two British firms behind the Aviva fund already running on the XRPL.

The Numbers

The Chart Watch

The Ripple Effect

📉 XRP Was the Only Top Ten Coin to Fall, and the ETF Bid Went Missing

XRP slipped below $1.02 on Friday 7 August and closed the week the sole loser in the top ten, while Cardano led the gainers and the wider market added about 6 percent. The number underneath it is worse than the price. US spot XRP ETFs took in $1.01 million across the whole week to 8 August, down 93 percent from $14.86 million the week before, against $754 million into Bitcoin funds and roughly $195 million into Ethereum funds (BeInCrypto).

Two things pulled the money out. The CLARITY Act delay removed the only near-term catalyst anyone was positioned for, and with it gone, institutional flow went to the assets whose legal status nobody argues about. Seven US spot XRP ETFs have now been trading since November, and eleven of July’s twenty-two trading days saw zero flow in either direction. Weekly inflows have gone from roughly $200 million at launch to single-digit millions.

There is a detail in the fund data worth sitting with. Those seven ETFs have taken in about $1.51 billion in total contributions since launch, and they are holding around $1 billion in assets. The gap is not withdrawals. It is loss on the XRP they already bought, because they kept buying while the price fell. One way to read that is institutions accumulating through a drawdown. The other is that everyone who bought an XRP ETF is, collectively, underwater. Both readings come off the same number.

The wallets tell a different story from the funds. More than two million XRP left exchange venues on 6 August, and CryptoQuant’s data shows the 10 million to 100 million XRP cohort buying through the whole decline from $2.40 in January while smaller holders sold (Crypto Economy). Whale deposits to Binance sit near their lowest since January 2025. Large holders are absorbing supply that the funds are no longer taking.

🔧 XRP Ledger v3.3.0 Is Live, and the Upgrades Now Sit With the Validators

The XRP Ledger’s v3.3.0 software shipped this week and put a package of proposed amendments in front of the network’s validators for a vote (crypto.news). None of them is switched on. Under the XRPL’s own rules an amendment needs more than 80 percent validator support, held continuously for two full weeks, before it activates, and the clock restarts from zero if support slips below that line at any point. So the release date is the start of the process, not the end of it.

Two of them are what institutions have been asking for. Confidential Transfer encrypts both the balance and the payment amount on Multi-Purpose Tokens, the format Ripple has been pitching for funds and bonds. In plain terms, the two parties to a trade see the size of it and the public ledger does not, which is how every other financial market on earth already works. Batch wraps up to eight transactions so they either all complete or none of them does, the same way a house chain either completes on the day or collapses, with no single link left half done. The rest cover sponsored fees, delegated permissions and dynamic token settings, alongside a maintenance fix (Brave New Coin).

The audience for this is visible in the numbers. Tokenised real-world assets on the XRP Ledger passed $4 billion in early August, up from $897 million on 1 January (The Crypto Basic). The Multi-Purpose Token slice that Confidential Transfer actually applies to sits closer to $530 million. That is the honest scale: real assets, real growth, and about one percent of the global tokenisation market.

Worth keeping separate in your head: this is the ledger getting better, not XRP the token getting more demand. Batch and Permission Delegation were pulled in February when security flaws were found in them, and getting them back in a hardened form is a genuine engineering win. Whether any of it moves XRP depends entirely on whether the institutions these features were built for turn up.

🏦 Ripple Took Equity in Zilo and Licuido, the Two Firms That Built the Aviva Fund

On Monday 3 August Ripple converted two existing commercial relationships into ownership, taking equity stakes in the British firms Zilo and Licuido (Ripple). Zilo runs transfer agency and fund administration software, which is the register that records who owns which units of a fund, the Land Registry of the investment world. Licuido handles issuing tokenised assets and moving them through collateral and liquidity markets. Neither is a household name and both sit in the plumbing that decides whether tokenisation works at all.

The timing gives it away. Days earlier, Aviva Investors launched a tokenised share class of its US Dollar Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger, approved by the Central Bank of Ireland, with BNY Mellon holding the underlying assets and Komainu handling digital custody (Ledger Insights). Licuido supplied the tokenisation infrastructure. Zilo did the record keeping. Ripple has now bought into both of them.

Ripple’s own announcement names RLUSD as the cash leg for delivery-versus-payment settlement on the ledger, which means the asset and the money change hands in the same instant so neither side is ever left holding one without the other. That has been the gap in institutional tokenisation for years. Minting a token is easy. Financing it, pledging it and settling it as reliably as a normal holding is not.

Which brings the week to its sharpest point for XRP holders. RLUSD grew about $185 million in seven days, including $133.3 million minted on 3 August alone, and now sits near $1.58 billion, up 7.8 percent on the week (U.Today). Over the same seven days XRP fell. The stack Ripple is assembling settles in its stablecoin, and the token has to earn its place in that stack separately.

⚖️ The CLARITY Act: Where It Actually Stands

The Senate went home on Saturday without voting. Before it left, the Majority Leader put the bill first in the queue for September. Here is what happened, why it matters, how the vote works, and every date that counts.

What happened this week

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The inflation report is not the end of this week’s argument. It is the start of it. On Wednesday the July CPI lands, and consensus wants 0.1% on the month with the annual rate easing to 3.4%. Then on Thursday morning, less than 24 hours later, Beth Hammack takes a microphone. She is one of three Fed officials who voted to raise rates in July, she votes again in September, and she gets the first word on whatever Wednesday produces. Tom Barkin follows 25 minutes after her. Add a jobs report that went negative last week and a market still pricing roughly a 40% chance of a September rate rise, and Thursday morning becomes the most interesting 30 minutes of the month.

Last Week, Graded

US Jobs Report (July): Missed The economy lost 23,000 jobs against expectations of an 83,000 gain, and revisions cut a further 103,000 from May and June, which turned a soft patch into something closer to a stall.

ISM Manufacturing (July): Beat Factory activity hit 55.6 against 54.0 expected, the strongest reading since May 2022, with factory employment growing for the first time in 33 months.

ISM Services (July): Missed The services index came in at 54.1 against 54.5 expected, and the employment component dropped back into contraction at 47.4 after a 3.8 point fall.

China Inflation (July): Cooler Consumer prices rose 0.5% on the year against 0.8% expected and factory-gate inflation eased to 3.5% from 4.1%, a three-month low.

The setup: markets cut the odds of a September rate rise from roughly 58% to about 40% on Friday and pushed the S&P 500 to a record close, so Wednesday’s inflation number now carries the deciding vote.

Week at a Glance

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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 💼 Payrolls decide the week: July jobs land at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET, with hiring marked down to 80,000 and unemployment seen at 4.2%.

• Crypto's rulebook slips to September: the Senate left town without a vote and 2026 passage odds hit a record low 14%.

• 🚀 The unlock was never the risk: SpaceX’s float more than doubled to 1.55 billion shares and the stock rose 6.4% anyway.

• 🛢️ Iran’s draft bans American ships: Brent climbed to $83.52 after Tehran published Hormuz terms seizing 20% of a violating ship’s cargo.

• 🏠 Airbnb beats and guides up: revenue rose 17% to $3.61 billion, nights booked accelerated to 10%, and shares gained about 10%.

• 🎮 Take-Two’s first GTA VI numbers: the games maker reports before the open with five days of pre-orders inside the quarter.

• 🇨🇳 China’s exports keep beating: July shipments rose 23% against a 22.2% forecast, lifting the trade surplus to $112.5 billion.

• ⚡ Nuclear power raises its guidance: Constellation earned $2.55 a share against $2.34 expected and signed another 920 megawatts of contracts.

• ☁️ Salesforce loses its engineering chief: shares fell 3% after four senior roles changed hands at once, including a 14-year veteran’s exit.

• 🔍 A soft jobs print is worth less now: the Payrolls Cheat Sheet maps every combination of jobs and wages, and what each one moves.

• 📈 Silver’s 20% snapback: silver has run from $54 to $64.33 in about twenty days and now faces stacked resistance.

🧠 One Big Thing

The market spent three weeks worrying about the wrong SpaceX event. The options market priced a 14 to 15% move for the week covering both the first earnings print and the largest dollar share unlock in US history, and could not separate them because both sat inside one weekly expiry. The historical record splits them cleanly: across 18 mega-cap first reports the median absolute move is 11.85%, while across 1,948 lock-up expiries the average three-day move is minus 1.5% with 37% of them positive. What happened matched that almost exactly. The print took the shares down 13.6% to a record low. The unlock, with the float more than doubling, took them up 6.4%. Watch the September window, where the real supply sits.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

4.2%

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +92.11% Doximity Inc. shares more than doubled after fiscal first quarter revenue of $156.6 million beat consensus and management raised its full year outlook by more than the size of the quarterly beat. The company also flagged over 30% growth in workflow active prescribers and 25% sequential growth in AI search queries, easing fears that rival clinical AI tools were eroding its position.

• : +42.11% INNOVATE Corp. surged after its Infrastructure subsidiary DBM Global posted a record second quarter with revenue up roughly 78% year over year, alongside margin expansion and backlog growth.

• : +32.23% Atlassian Corporation jumped after fourth quarter revenue rose 28% to $1.77 billion and adjusted earnings of $1.87 per share beat the $1.50 consensus, with cloud revenue up 31% and remaining performance obligations up 44%. Guidance for the current quarter also came in ahead of Street estimates, calming concerns that AI coding tools would displace the platform.

• : +26.78% FIGS Inc. climbed after second quarter revenue rose 28.8% to $196.6 million and the company lifted full year revenue growth guidance to roughly 20% from a prior 14% to 16% range. Results included a $20.5 million tariff recovery that investors will need to treat as largely non recurring.

• : +15.67% Cloudflare Inc. rallied after second quarter revenue accelerated 36% to $696.1 million and management raised full year adjusted profit guidance to $1.25 to $1.26 per share. Chief Executive Matthew Prince said automated AI agent traffic exceeded half of total network traffic for the first time.

• : +7.72% Airbnb Inc. rose after second quarter revenue climbed 17% to $3.61 billion and earnings of $1.37 per share topped the $1.25 consensus, ending a three quarter run of misses. Current quarter revenue guidance of $4.69 billion to $4.77 billion also landed above expectations.

Losers

• : -42.58% CVRx Inc. collapsed after management cut full year revenue guidance to $58 million to $60 million from a prior $63 million to $67 million, citing sales force turnover, slower productivity ramps and reimbursement friction with a large Medicare Advantage payer. Second quarter revenue still grew 16% to $15.7 million with gross margin improving to 87%.

• : -27.28% The Trade Desk Inc. cratered after second quarter revenue grew just 3% to $715.1 million against a $751.4 million consensus and management guided third quarter revenue to at least $650 million versus expectations near $805 million. The company simultaneously replaced its chief financial officer, chief marketing officer and commercial chief.

• : -22.49% QuidelOrtho Corporation slumped after cutting full year revenue guidance to $2.52 billion to $2.60 billion from $2.73 billion and lowering adjusted earnings guidance to $0.65 to $0.90 per share against a $1.85 consensus. The company also withdrew free cash flow guidance, overshadowing a second quarter revenue and earnings beat.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,991 (▲ 1.14%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,915 (▲ 0.65%)
XRP: $1.03 (▼ 0.15%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,754 (▲ 0.24%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,651 (▲ 0.55%)
FTSE 100: 10,939 (▲ 0.81%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.66% (▼ 0.43%)
Oil (WTI): $77 (▼ 2.02%)
Gold: $4,325 (▲ 1.99%)
Silver: $63.99 (▲ 4.03%)

Data as of: UK: 12:40 BST / US: 07:40 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 20:40 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

💼 The Jobs Number the Whole Week Was Built Around

The July employment report lands at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET, and it is the release every other event this week has been arranged around. The Street has marked the payroll number down to roughly 80,000, with the spread running from as low as 18,000 up to 130,000, which tells you how little agreement there is. June delivered just 57,000 against a 110,000 consensus, roughly half, and the weakest reading in four months. The unemployment rate is expected to hold at 4.2%, though a 4.3% print is well within reach. Average hourly earnings are seen steady at 0.3% on the month and 3.5% on the year (CNBC).

What makes this awkward is the position the Fed has taken. The committee held its target range at 3.50 to 3.75% in July with three regional presidents voting to raise, the first three-way hawkish dissent since September 2016, and it lifted its own end-2026 projection at the same time. September now prices at 49% for a hold and 48% for a hike, with a cut under 3%. That changes what a soft number is worth: for two years weak payrolls meant cuts, and cuts meant a bid under everything, but today a soft print buys the removal of a hike instead. Smaller prize, narrower rally. Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin speaks at 3pm BST, 10am ET, ninety minutes after the release.

⚖️ The Crypto Rulebook Slips to September

The Senate has left for its summer recess without voting on the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that would finally settle which American regulator governs which digital asset. Majority Leader John Thune confirmed late in the session that Democrats would not agree to bring it up before members left Washington, and said it would be queued up first when the chamber returns on 14 September. Passage odds for this year have collapsed on the news: the Polymarket contract on the bill being signed into law in 2026 has fallen to about 14%, a record low, from above 50% as recently as late July (CoinDesk).

The obvious question is how a vote can be delayed when no vote was ever scheduled, and the answer is the whole story. Nobody defeated this bill. It simply never got floor time. Getting a bill onto the Senate floor quickly requires unanimous consent, which any single senator can block, and Democrats declined to approve the time agreement that would have compressed the chamber’s remaining pre-recess business. The alternative route is a cloture motion, which needs 60 votes and consumes several days of floor time the Senate had already committed to a Russia sanctions package and a backlog of executive, intelligence and judicial nominations. With days rather than weeks left, the arithmetic never worked.

The second question retail investors keep asking is what is actually being argued about, because it is not the part of the bill that matters for exchanges. The core text is broadly settled: the CFTC would get exclusive jurisdiction over spot trading in digital commodities, the SEC would keep authority over primary-market transactions, and exchanges, brokers and dealers would register with the CFTC. What is unresolved is the ethics section governing officials’ own crypto interests. Trump agreed to restrictions covering himself, the vice president and members of Congress, but Democrats objected that enforcement would sit with an Attorney General seen as close to him and that the rules were written to sunset on 20 January 2029. Senators Thom Tillis and Ruben Gallego took over the compromise, with illicit finance and consumer protection still open alongside it.

What that leaves is a timing problem rather than a policy one, and timing is where this gets uncomfortable. If Thune filed cloture before members left, a first procedural vote could come as early as 15 September; if he files on the return, no earlier than 16 September. Either way that vote only opens debate, it does not pass anything, and the Senate has roughly three weeks of floor time before the midterm calendar starts eating windows. The market has been repricing this all summer, through a floated Independence Day signing ceremony and a late-July window that also came to nothing, and each miss has cost more than the last, with around $670 million of leveraged positions liquidated on one of them. What is striking is how little the latest delay has moved spot: Bitcoin is holding near $64,800 and XRP just above a dollar, which says the disappointment was priced well before it was confirmed (Yahoo Finance).

🚀 The Unlock Was Never the Risk, and the Tape Agreed

SpaceX cleared the first tranche of its post-listing lock-up yesterday, freeing about 911.5 million insider shares and lifting the tradable float to roughly 1.55 billion from 639 million, taking the freely traded portion of the company from 4.9% to 11.8%. On the arithmetic alone this was the largest dollar share unlock in American market history. The shares went up, trading as much as 6.4% higher at $115.20, with short interest near a third of the float and steady buying from ARK Invest and retail accounts absorbing the supply that did arrive (CNBC).

That is what the playbook we published ahead of the print argued would happen, and it is worth being precise about why, because the reasoning is reusable. The options market priced a 14 to 15% move for the week and could not split it, since the earnings release and the unlock sat inside a single weekly expiry. Our own work split them: across 18 mega-cap first earnings reports the median absolute move is 11.85%, against a normal 5.75%, while the academic record on 1,948 lock-up expiries puts the average three-day move at minus 1.5%, with 37% of expiries actually positive. That put the unlock at roughly one to four percent of price and the print at fifteen, which is why the piece said the volatile event was the results, not the release. It landed that way. The print took the shares down 13.6% to a record low close of $108.27 in the session after it, and the unlock took them up 6.4%.

The reason unlock size flatters to deceive is that it predicts almost nothing on its own. Arm released 9.5 times its float in 2024 and rose 2.1%, because SoftBank owned ninety percent and simply did not sell. Facebook released 0.87 times its float in 2012 while trading at half its offer price and rose 12.6% on the day. Holder intent separates them, not the share count, and here the tranche was dominated by employees plus the xAI-merger holders who came in at $105.32 and are barely above water. The supply has been deferred rather than cancelled. Affiliates cannot use Rule 144 until early September because the company has been SEC-reporting for under 90 days, the first ownership filings land on 14 August, and index funds will not buy against the larger float until the mid-September reviews. The tranche released at the third-quarter print, roughly 1,276 million shares, is 65% larger than this one.

🛢️ Iran’s Hormuz Terms Turn the Oil Rally Back On

Brent crude climbed 1.25% to $83.52 a barrel this morning, extending a 3.8% jump to $82.49 in the previous session after Iranian state media published the draft terms Tehran wants attached to any reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The document is considerably harder than the market had assumed. It would bar American and Israeli vessels from the waterway entirely, require countries Iran deems to have harmed it to pay compensation before passage is granted, and impose penalties on violators worth 20% of the cargo value aboard the ship. Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil moves through the strait (CNBC).

The reversal is the story. Prices had fallen about 8% across the week after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a deal delivering freedom of movement could arrive within days, and by midweek Iran and Oman were reported to have agreed transit coordinates, with inbound traffic routed through Iranian waters and outbound through Omani. What the published draft shows is that the two sides were describing different agreements. For anyone modelling inflation, that matters more than the price itself: the July core reading came in at 0.1% on the month largely because fuel costs eased, and that easing was built on a Hormuz outcome nobody has actually signed.

🏠 Airbnb Beats, Raises Guidance, and Jumps 10%

Airbnb reported second-quarter revenue of $3.61 billion, up 17% from $3.1 billion a year earlier and ahead of the $3.58 billion expected, with earnings of $1.37 a share against $1.25 forecast. Net income rose to $816 million from $642 million. The operational lines carried the print: nights and seats booked grew 10%, an acceleration on the first quarter, gross booking value rose 16% to $27.2 billion, and free cash flow climbed 30% to $1.25 billion from $962 million. Management raised full-year revenue growth guidance to at least the mid-teens and the adjusted EBITDA margin outlook to at least 35.5%. Shares gained about 10% after the close (CNBC).

An acceleration in nights booked is the part worth holding onto, because travel demand has been the market’s proxy for discretionary household spending all summer and the read had been softening. Marriott’s revenue per available room opened the week as the first check on whether the travel boom was cooling, and Airbnb closes it in the opposite direction. That lands hours before a payrolls report expected to show a weakening labour market, which is an uncomfortable pairing: consumers are still booking trips while employers appear to have stopped hiring. One of those two signals is early and the other is late.

Stories You Might Have Missed

🎮 Take-Two Reports With GTA VI Pre-Orders Inside the Quarter

Take-Two Interactive reports fiscal first-quarter results before the open, with a call at 1pm BST, 8am ET, and the quarter to 30 June captures the first five days of Grand Theft Auto VI pre-orders after the window opened on 25 June. The company has guided to record fiscal 2027 net bookings of $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion, up around 18% on the year, and to a return to net profit after several loss-making years. Grand Theft Auto VI arrives on 19 November at $79.99 for the standard edition on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. Take-Two has not committed to disclosing a pre-order count, so the bookings line and any change to the launch date are the numbers to read (Yahoo Finance).

🇨🇳 China’s Exports Beat Again as Imports Cool

China’s July exports rose 23% in dollar terms from a year earlier, ahead of the 22.2% growth forecast, while imports climbed 27.5%, and the trade surplus widened to $112.5 billion against the $107 billion expected. Both sides slowed from June, when exports surged 27%, the fastest since October 2021, and imports jumped 36%, the quickest in five years. Export growth above 20% for a second month says the tariff regime is biting less than the headline rates imply, with routing through third countries doing some of that work. The import slowdown is the line that moves the mining and industrial complex, since Chinese buying of iron ore, copper and crude sets the marginal price in all three (CNBC).

⚡ Constellation Energy Lifts Guidance on Data-Centre Demand

Constellation Energy reported adjusted operating earnings of $2.55 a share against the $2.34 analysts expected, on revenue of roughly $7.5 billion, and raised its full-year guidance to a range of $11.50 to $12.50 a share, taking the top end well above the $11.71 consensus. The company also signed another 920 megawatts of long-term power purchase agreements running 15 to 20 years, with deliveries scheduled between 2029 and 2032. Shares rose more than 4%. The nuclear generator has become one of the most direct ways to own AI capital spending without owning a chipmaker, and contracts stretching to 2032 are the part of that trade that does not depend on next quarter’s guidance (Yahoo Finance).

☁️ Salesforce Falls 3% on a Four-Way Leadership Reshuffle

Salesforce shares fell about 3%, the heaviest drag on the Dow, after the company announced four senior changes at once. Srini Tallapragada, president and chief engineering and customer success officer, stepped down after 14 years and will advise Marc Benioff through to August 2027. Rohan Kumar, who joined from Microsoft in June, becomes chief platform and engineering officer, Miguel Milano moves up to operating chief, and Alexa Vignone takes the revenue role. Tallapragada was central to building and shipping Agentforce, the AI platform the whole investment case now rests on, which is why a reshuffle rather than the results moved the stock (Yahoo Finance).

Deep Dive: The Payrolls Cheat Sheet

The number lands at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET.

A weak jobs number is still good news for this market, but it is worth a lot less than it used to be. There are no cuts on the table any more, so a soft print only buys the removal of a hike. Smaller prize, shorter rally.

So I have built the whole thing into one playbook. What each payroll outcome does to September pricing, the S&P, the 10-year, the dollar, gold, Bitcoin, the banks and the rate sensitives. The same again for wages, which is the half of the report most people skip. A matrix of the two together, so you can find the cell that matches whatever prints and know what that combination usually does. The four things that sound alarming and mean very little, including why 4.3% unemployment can print on a perfectly healthy number. And the levels I care about on the 10-year and the 30-year.

Have a read before the print. It is attached below:

Read more

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🚀 SpaceX unlock day arrives: Roughly 911.5 million insider shares become eligible to trade today, with the stock already at a record low close.

• 💚 Nvidia lands Musk exclusivity: SpaceX will build its AI systems only on Nvidia chips, sending the shares up 4% to a fifth straight gain.

• 💾 SanDisk grows 372% and falls: Record revenue of $8.97 billion was not enough, with next quarter’s guidance landing below what the street wanted.

• 🥇 Gold climbs to a seven-week high: A fourth straight gain, peaking at $4,285.84, as traders cut this year’s Fed hike bets from two to one.

• 🛢️ Iran agrees a Hormuz route: Tehran and Oman settled the coordinates, but reopening still depends on the United States lifting its naval blockade.

• 🎮 Nintendo nearly doubles expectations: June quarter profit of ¥147.4 billion beat the ¥77.8 billion forecast, helped by Switch 2 titles and tariff refunds.

• 📊 Two labour readings before payrolls: Challenger job cuts and weekly claims land today, one day before July’s employment report and a forecast 4.3% unemployment rate.

• ₿ First US bitcoin ETF closes: Hashdex will wind up its spot fund after 17 August as inflows dry up and money chases AI.

• ⚡ Power and cloud report today: Constellation Energy, ConocoPhillips, Datadog and Airbnb all deliver results, with data centre demand the line investors care about.

• 📈 Gold breaks its downtrend: The $4,000 floor held exactly as flagged, and heavy resistance now sits between $4,300 and $4,400 on the daily chart.

🧠 One Big Thing

The market has stopped paying for growth that needs capital. SpaceX beat on revenue, adjusted EBITDA and losses and fell 13.6% to a record low, because capital spending came in at $18.4 billion against $2.8 billion a year earlier. SanDisk grew revenue 372% and fell. AMD doubled its data centre business and fell on gross margin. Nvidia rose 4% on the same news, because Nvidia is where the money lands. The dividing line running through this earnings season is who writes the cheque and who banks it. Watch which side of that line a company sits on before reading its beat.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

911.5 million

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +28.51% Aeva Technologies surged after the LiDAR maker used its second quarter report to launch an Optical Connectivity business for AI data centers, disclosing a joint development agreement with a major customer to supply its high-power optical source technology for a hyperscaler near-packaged optics solution. Initial deployment is targeted for the second half of 2027.

• : +27.23% SiTime Corporation jumped after second quarter revenue rose 127% to 157.4 million and adjusted earnings of 2.34 per share crushed the 1.93 consensus, with the precision timing company guiding third quarter revenue to 285 to 295 million following the close of its Renesas timing acquisition.

• : +25.66% SoundHound AI climbed on record second quarter revenue of 61.9 million, up 45% and roughly 18% ahead of estimates, and a raised full year outlook of 230 to 260 million driven by enterprise adoption of its OASYS platform.

• : +5.33% Parker Hannifin advanced after reporting record fiscal fourth quarter and full year results before the open and guiding fiscal 2027 organic sales growth of 5.5% to 8.5%, an outlook that excludes two pending acquisitions.

Losers

• : -28.02% LegalZoom.com tumbled after cutting full year revenue guidance to 795 to 805 million from 810 to 830 million and pairing it with a 13% workforce reduction, citing a more cautious view of customer acquisition as traffic shifts away from traditional search.

• : -25.99% BillionToOne slid despite second quarter revenue rising 64% to 109.4 million and earnings of 0.15 per share landing far above the 0.03 consensus, because the molecular diagnostics company only reiterated rather than raised its full year outlook, implying a sharp second half deceleration for a stock trading near its 52 week high.

• : -25.54% UWM Holdings dropped after reporting a 451.9 million second quarter net loss alongside a 2.05 billion preferred equity and warrant financing, a 400 million rights offering and the suspension of its dividend, a package that heavily dilutes existing holders.

• : -23.46% HubSpot sank after trimming full year revenue guidance to roughly 3.68 billion and guiding third quarter below consensus, compounded by just 7,000 net new customer additions against an internal target of 9,000 to 10,000 as its shift to trials and outcome-based AI pricing stretched sales cycles.

• : -21.43% Datadog fell even after second quarter revenue grew 36% to 1.12 billion and beat estimates, because third quarter guidance of 1.135 to 1.145 billion implies almost no sequential growth and a deceleration toward the high twenties, validating bearish arguments that demand outside the AI cohort has plateaued.

• : -19.10% AppLovin dropped after second quarter revenue of 1.92 billion missed and third quarter guidance came in light, with the chief executive blaming a lighter than usual pace of AI model improvements in core gaming advertising, though management also disclosed the SEC closed its inquiry with no action recommended.

• : -15.59% Western Digital declined after fiscal fourth quarter earnings and revenue beat and September quarter guidance topped published estimates, but implied sequential gains decelerated and fell short of the bar set by a stock that has more than tripled this year.

• : -14.71% Honeywell Aerospace slumped in its first earnings report as an independent company, cutting full year sales and profit guidance as supply chain bottlenecks capped production and pushed mix toward lower margin original equipment and domestic defense programs.

• : -9.43% Sandisk retreated after fiscal fourth quarter revenue and earnings beat expectations but forward guidance failed to clear the elevated bar set by a stock up roughly fivefold this year, extending a sector-wide storage selloff.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,582 (▼ 0.04%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,907 (▼ 0.03%)
XRP: $1.05 (▼ 1.11%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,765 (▲ 0.20%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,493 (▼ 0.41%)
FTSE 100: 10,891 (▲ 0.08%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.63% (▲ 0.39%)
Oil (WTI): $76 (▲ 0.96%)
Gold: $4,261 (▲ 0.27%)
Silver: $61.77 (▼ 0.43%)

Data as of: UK: 12:42pm BST / US: 7:42am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 8:42pm JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🚀 Nearly a billion SpaceX shares come free today

SpaceX closed at $108.27 last night, down 13.6% and its lowest close since listing, two days after its first set of public accounts. The quarter itself beat on revenue, adjusted EBITDA and losses. What the market rejected was the spending behind it: capital expenditure of $18.4 billion against $2.8 billion a year earlier, with $15.8 billion of that going into AI infrastructure, and a finance chief telling analysts the next two quarters would look much the same. The shares are quoted around $111 in this morning’s pre-market. Today the first stage of the lock-up expires, releasing roughly 911.5 million shares, worth about $99 billion at last night’s close. Each eligible holder may sell up to 20% of their own position from today, which is a per-holder cap rather than a pro-rata release. Elon Musk’s roughly 6.4 billion shares stay locked until around 12 June 2027 (Yahoo Finance).

Who is actually released matters more than the headline count. The tranche is dominated by employees and former employees, with Alphabet and non-board venture investors behind them. The venture funds sitting on the largest multiples, and the board-affiliated holders, sit in the later bucket and release nothing today. That is a December event. There is also a technical point worth knowing: SpaceX has been an SEC-reporting company for under 90 days, so company affiliates cannot use Rule 144 to sell until roughly 8 September. Expect no Form 144 filings today, and do not read their absence as evidence that insiders are holding.

The free float going in is 638.9 million shares, so today’s release is about 1.43 times the entire tradable supply, or roughly 13 days of normal volume. Lock-up expiries usually matter less than the share count implies, because most holders sit still on day one and the staggered structure spreads the rest across later dates. The awkward part is the calendar. Index funds do not adjust for the larger float until the September reviews, so August carries new supply with no mechanical buying against it. Morgan Stanley told clients the fundamentals are largely unchanged and that the level now looks like an attractive entry point (Forbes).

💚 Musk hands Nvidia the entire order

On SpaceX’s first earnings call Elon Musk said the company will build its AI services exclusively on Nvidia systems, naming the Vera Rubin architecture as the best AI computer available and citing a close partnership on several levels. Nvidia rose about 4% on the day, a fifth consecutive gain, with its market value above $5.3 trillion. Musk added that SpaceX expects to take a “very significant percentage” of Nvidia’s GPU shipments in 2027. JPMorgan read the commitment as backing for SpaceX’s plan to scale AI compute from more than 2 gigawatts by the end of this year to between 5 and 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027 (Yahoo Finance).

The exclusivity matters because the alternative was real. AMD has spent this earnings season arguing it is a genuine second source, and signed Anthropic to as much as 2 gigawatts of MI450 capacity to prove it. Losing one of the largest single buyers of the next chip generation takes a piece out of that argument. For Nvidia the read is simpler. The same $15.8 billion of AI capital spending that sank SpaceX shares yesterday arrives on Nvidia’s order book. Watch whether other large buyers follow the same exclusive route as the 2027 Vera Rubin allocations are set (Yahoo Finance).

💾 SanDisk grows 372% and the shares fall anyway

SanDisk reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $8.97 billion, up 372% on the year and 51% on the quarter, with GAAP net income of $6.90 billion, or $43.97 a diluted share, against the $8.39 billion of revenue analysts had modelled. Then came the guidance. The company sees first-quarter revenue between $10.30 billion and $10.80 billion, a $10.55 billion midpoint that sits roughly 2.5% below consensus. Shares fell as much as 8% before settling around 5% lower, and Western Digital slid a similar 5.4% in sympathy (Yahoo Finance).

Memory has been the trade of the year. SanDisk came into the print up 423% in 2026 and Western Digital up 222%, with contract prices still rising and Samsung guiding for the shortage to run into 2028. The bar moved. When a stock has more than quadrupled on a shortage, guidance that merely keeps pace with that shortage reads as a disappointment, because the price already assumed acceleration on top. That is the same reaction AMD drew on gross margin and SpaceX drew on capital spending inside the last 48 hours.

🥇 Gold runs to a seven-week high as hike bets fade

Spot gold reached $4,285.84 an ounce earlier today, its highest since 18 June and a fourth consecutive daily gain, taking the week’s advance to close to 6% before easing back toward $4,260. The dollar softened alongside it. Traders have cut their Federal Reserve expectations to a single rate rise by the end of the year, down from two as recently as last week, and central bank buying of the metal is running about 62% ahead of last year, which has held a floor under the price through a heavy summer of macro news (CNBC).

The trigger is oil. Brent slipping toward $80 on the prospect of a Hormuz reopening removes the largest upward push on headline inflation this summer. Fed Governor Lisa Cook named oil as one of three drivers she is watching, alongside tariffs and AI spending, and said she sees signs of disinflation in all three while repeating that she is prepared to raise rates if inflation does not cool. Gold rallying while the hawks are speaking says the market is trading the oil price. Payrolls tomorrow, with unemployment forecast at 4.3%, is the next test of that (CNBC).

🛢️ Iran and Oman agree a route, then attach a condition

Iran said it has agreed the coordinates of new commercial shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz with Oman after several rounds of talks, with the two countries preparing a joint statement covering technical, legal, security and environmental terms. Brent steadied near $80 a barrel on the news, with WTI holding around $76. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei then set out the condition: the strait cannot become safe while the United States naval blockade and strikes on Iranian infrastructure remain in place. He added that the deal follows “if certain third parties do not obstruct this process” (Bloomberg).

Roughly a fifth of seaborne oil normally moves through the strait, so the gap between an agreed route and an open waterway is worth several dollars a barrel. Brent has already given back most of the summer’s gains on the expectation of a deal, which means the good version is largely in the price and the disappointment is not. President Trump said this week an agreement could come within days. Watch tanker traffic and marine insurance rates, because the first commercial ships through are the only confirmation that counts (Yahoo Finance).

Stories You Might Have Missed

🎮 Nintendo and SoftBank both clear the bar in Tokyo

Nintendo posted June-quarter net income of ¥147.4 billion, about $934 million, against the ¥77.8 billion analysts expected, on revenue of ¥517.8 billion versus a ¥448.8 billion forecast. First-party Switch 2 titles carried the quarter, helped by refunds on United States tariffs. SoftBank reported a smaller decline in quarterly net income than forecast, with gains on its Intel holding offsetting weaker startup valuations inside the Vision Fund. Between them the two give a rare clean read on Japanese consumer and technology demand in a week otherwise dominated by American AI capital spending (Bloomberg).

📊 Two labour readings land before tomorrow’s payrolls

Challenger, Gray and Christmas publishes its July count of announced redundancies at 12:30pm BST / 7:30am ET, following 45,849 in June, and weekly jobless claims arrive at 1:30pm BST / 8:30am ET against 197,000 last week and continuing claims of 1.782 million. Both are warm-ups for tomorrow’s July employment report, where payrolls are seen at 91,000 after June delivered just 57,000, and where the unemployment rate is expected to tick up to 4.3% from 4.2%. A rising unemployment rate in the same month three Fed officials voted for a rate rise is the tension the week has been building toward (Yahoo Finance).

₿ The first US spot bitcoin ETF is closing its doors

Hashdex will liquidate its spot bitcoin ETF after 17 August, the first closure of a United States spot bitcoin fund since the category launched in January 2024, with dwindling inflows cited as investors chase AI returns elsewhere. Bitcoin trades around $64,600, up roughly 2% across August and close to where it sat in July, while the crypto Fear and Greed Index has fallen to 25, firmly in extreme fear. For scale, the S&P 500 has added about $2.1 trillion of market value this month alone, which is close to the entire crypto market’s total (CoinDesk).

⚡ Power, oil and cloud all report today

Constellation Energy reports before the open with analysts looking for about $2.36 a share on roughly $7.47 billion of revenue, up 22% on the year, and the line that moves it is new power purchase agreements signed with data centre operators. ConocoPhillips is seen near $2.89 a share on $19.83 billion, its first full look at a quarter in which crude handed back most of the summer’s gains. Datadog is expected at 49 cents on $1.08 billion, with spending by AI-native customers the swing factor, and Airbnb closes the travel picture after the bell (Yahoo Finance).

📈 Chart of the Day - Gold

Read more

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🚀 SpaceX beats, then slides: Revenue nearly doubled to 7.8 billion dollars, but 18.4 billion dollars of spending sent the shares down after hours.

• 🖥️ AMD’s record quarter is not enough: Data centre sales doubled to 6.7 billion dollars, and the shares still fell nine percent after hours.

• 📈 The Dow clears 54,000: Palantir surged nearly 30 percent and Caterpillar hit record revenue, lifting the index 907 points to 54,086.

• 🛢️ Oil gives up its war premium: Brent dropped below 80 dollars for the first time since 13 July on Hormuz deal hopes.

• 💊 Novo raises guidance and drops anyway: Shares fell as much as seven percent as the Wegovy pill matched forecasts rather than beating them.

• 📊 Two jobs readings land today: ADP hiring is seen slowing to 75,000 and the ISM services survey lands beside it, two days before payrolls.

• 💾 Memory reports after the close: SanDisk is up 423 percent this year and Western Digital 222 percent, both reporting tonight into a supply shortage.

• ₿ Bitcoin holds 64,000 dollars: The crypto market is worth 2.27 trillion dollars, sentiment still reads fear at 27, and XRP sits near 1.06 dollars.

• 🌑 A rocket stage hit the moon: A discarded Falcon 9 upper stage struck near Einstein Crater this morning at 5,400 miles per hour.

• 🔍 The full SpaceX breakdown: What the call added, the calls that landed, and the 911.5 million shares that come free tomorrow.

• 📈 Chart of the Day: Three paths for SPCX after the print, all of them shifted up, with a probability-weighted year end of 113 dollars.

🧠 One Big Thing

The market has stopped paying for beats. SpaceX cleared every revenue line and fell. AMD doubled its data centre business, guided higher, and fell nine percent. Novo Nordisk raised full-year guidance and dropped seven percent. The one company that soared, Palantir, did it on a 62 percent adjusted operating margin rather than on spending. That is the dividing line right now: results that convert into margin get paid, results that require another round of capital get sold. AMD’s gross margin came in at 54 percent against 56 percent expected, and that two-point gap cost more than the beat earned. Watch the margin line before the revenue line for the rest of this season.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

$18.4 billion

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : +28.18% Shopify Inc. surged after second quarter revenue grew 34 percent, comfortably ahead of the high twenties growth management had guided, with gross merchandise volume, gross profit and free cash flow all expanding more than 30 percent and free cash flow margins reaching 18 percent.

• : +26.71% Digital Turbine, Inc. jumped after fiscal first quarter revenue rose 27 percent to 166 million and adjusted net income more than tripled to 19 cents per share, led by 56 percent growth in its App Growth Platform. The company also raised full year guidance.

• : +23.88% Bloomin’ Brands, Inc. soared after adjusted earnings of 39 cents per share beat the 29 cent consensus and US comparable sales rose 2.3 percent, led by an 8.1 percent gain at Bonefish Grill. Management raised full year earnings guidance to a range of 90 cents to 1.00 per share on progress in the Outback turnaround.

• : +14.22% Eastman Kodak Company rallied after second quarter revenue climbed 18 percent to 311 million and the company swung to 17 million of net income from a 26 million loss a year earlier, with Advanced Materials and Chemicals revenue up 40 percent.

• : +12.24% Arista Networks, Inc. gained after delivering its first three billion dollar quarter, with revenue of 3.04 billion and per share earnings of 1.02 both clearing consensus, then guiding third quarter revenue to 3.3 billion against expectations near 2.95 billion.

Losers

• : -26.73% Vishay Precision Group, Inc. tumbled after second quarter revenue of 83.9 million missed estimates and adjusted earnings collapsed to 4 cents per share from 21 cents, with the operating margin turning negative. The miss lands on a stock that had roughly tripled in three months on humanoid robotics and physical AI enthusiasm.

• : -26.49% Tigo Energy, Inc. slid after second quarter revenue of 25.4 million came in well below both consensus and the company’s own guidance, as residential solar demand softened and the launch of an optimized inverter with US partner EG4 slipped.

• : -24.68% CDW Corporation fell hard on its second quarter earnings release, its second consecutive double digit post-earnings decline after shares dropped more than 20 percent in May on margin pressure and a guarded second half outlook.

• : -24.46% Criteo S.A. plunged after chief executive Michael Komasinski described second quarter top line performance as disappointing, a message compounded by the appointment of a new chief financial officer effective August 10.

• : -18.90% Taboola.com Ltd. dropped after second quarter revenue of 476.8 million grew just 2.4 percent and landed below the company’s own guidance range of 492 to 505 million, overshadowing an 11.8 percent rise in ex-TAC gross profit and a raised full year outlook on that measure.

• : -16.30% LeMaitre Vascular, Inc. declined after second quarter sales of 70.4 million came in light and the company cut full year earnings guidance to a range of 2.84 to 2.94 per share from 2.93 to 3.08, with catheter sales down 11 percent.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,033 (▼0.02%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,867 (▼0.04%)
XRP: $1.06 (▼1.17%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,797 (▲0.41%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,928 (▲0.22%)
FTSE 100: 10,851 (▼0.37%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.61% (▼0.09%)
Oil (WTI): $76 (▲1.38%)
Gold: $4,187 (▲2.69%)
Silver: $61.91 (▲4.09%)

Data as of: UK: 12:50pm BST / US: 7:50am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 8:50pm JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🚀 SpaceX beats on every line, then falls on the bill

SpaceX published its first set of accounts as a listed company last night and cleared the bar on every measure the street had set. Revenue reached $7.81 billion, up 92 percent on a year earlier, against consensus of $6.7 billion to $7.0 billion. The net loss came in at $541 million where the market had braced for something nearer $1.9 billion, and adjusted EBITDA reached $3.5 billion, up 191 percent. Starlink grew revenue 66 percent and passed 12 million subscribers, double a year earlier, adding 1.7 million in its best three months yet. The AI division grew 247 percent to $2.56 billion and turned profitable at the EBITDA line for the first time. The quarter closed with $100 billion of cash and a $47.5 billion backlog (CNBC).

Then came the spending line. Capital expenditure ran to $18.4 billion in a single quarter, $15.8 billion of it on AI computing infrastructure against $2.8 billion for the comparable figure a year ago, and the finance chief told the call the next two quarters would look very similar. The shares touched $131 as the release landed, then unwound: against a prior close of $124.74 they traded near $111 in pre-market this morning. Tomorrow sharpens it further, when 911.5 million shares come free to sell from the opening bell (Yahoo Finance).

🖥️ AMD doubles its data centre business and drops anyway

AMD reported record quarterly revenue of $11.54 billion, up 50 percent on a year earlier and 13 percent on the quarter, with adjusted earnings of $1.66 a share against the $1.62 expected. The line that mattered delivered: data centre revenue more than doubled to $6.7 billion, up 107 percent, and now makes up 58 percent of the company. Management guided the current quarter to roughly $13 billion. Alongside the numbers came the product news investors had been waiting on, with the MI400 series launched and a partnership with Anthropic to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of MI450 accelerators in AMD’s Helios racks, plus an expanded arrangement to run Helios at scale inside Microsoft Azure (CNBC).

The shares fell about 9 percent after hours regardless, having closed up 7 percent at $518.58. Two things did it. Gross margin came in at 54 percent against a 56 percent consensus, with the cost of ramping Helios the explanation, and the stock has more than doubled this year on the case that AMD is a genuine second source to Nvidia, which pushed its multiple above Nvidia’s own. That is the pattern of this earnings season rather than an AMD problem: clearing expectations has repeatedly not been enough to hold a share price, because the expectations already assumed the beat. The next read on the same question comes tonight from the memory makers (Yahoo Finance).

📈 The Dow clears 54,000 for the first time

Wall Street put together one of its strongest sessions of the year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 907 points, or 1.71 percent, to close at 54,086, its first finish above 54,000. The S&P 500 added 1.79 percent to 7,737, its first record close in two months, and the Nasdaq Composite gained 2.59 percent to 26,585. Palantir did the heavy lifting after its results the previous evening, surging almost 30 percent in its largest single-day move in more than two years and costing short sellers roughly $3 billion. Caterpillar supplied the other half, reporting record quarterly revenue of $20.5 billion, up 24 percent, with adjusted earnings of $8.17 a share against the $6.20 expected, and its shares rose about 9 percent (CNN).

Asia followed overnight, with South Korea’s Kospi leading regional gains at 4 percent, and American futures were steady this morning with S&P 500 contracts up 0.41 percent and Nasdaq 100 contracts up 0.22 percent. Two forces did the work again: AI earnings landing better than feared, and progress toward reopening the Strait of Hormuz pulling crude sharply lower. The docket today keeps testing it, with a heavy slate before the open led by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, and the memory makers after the close, then the ADP hiring figure and the ISM services survey either side of the American open (Yahoo Finance).

🛢️ Brent falls below 80 dollars as a Hormuz deal takes shape

Oil has fallen hard on signs that the Strait of Hormuz could reopen. Qatar’s foreign ministry said drafts of an agreement between Washington and Tehran are circulating and in what it called very progressive stages, with Qatar, Oman and Pakistan coordinating the exchange. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a deal to open the strait could come today or tomorrow. Brent dropped more than 5 percent yesterday to $79.50 a barrel, its first close below $80 since 13 July. The slide has paused this morning, with the American benchmark back around $76 and up 1.4 percent on the day. Iran has floated a new middle corridor route through the strait to replace the existing northern and southern shipping lanes (Bloomberg).

Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil moves through that waterway, so the price is now carrying an assumption rather than a fact. Both Qatar and Bessent were explicit that nothing has been signed, and Tehran has not confirmed progress on the strait itself. For investors the read-through runs straight into the rate debate, because energy is the reason inflation stayed sticky through the summer and June’s core measure had already cooled to 0.1 percent on the month as fuel costs eased. The Federal Reserve held last month with three officials voting for a rise, using an oil price that has since fallen roughly 15 percent from its wartime level. Governor Lisa Cook speaks tonight at 9:05pm BST / 4:05pm ET, the first Fed voice since the blackout lifted (Yahoo Finance).

💊 Novo raises its outlook and the shares fall anyway

Novo Nordisk lifted its full-year guidance and lost ground for it. The company now expects adjusted sales for 2026 to be somewhere between down 6 percent and flat at constant exchange rates, an improvement on the previous range of down 4 to 12 percent, with adjusted operating profit guided to the same band. The shares fell as much as 7.2 percent regardless. The oral version of Wegovy, the launch the whole recovery case rests on, generated 3.22 billion Danish kroner against the 3.27 billion expected, and has passed 5 million prescriptions since launch. Analysts also pointed to rebate adjustments flattering the quarter, and to another mixed clinical readout for CagriSema, the next-generation weight-loss candidate (CNBC).

The context is what makes it brutal. Eli Lilly reports on the same morning, with its call at 3pm BST / 10am ET, and comes in having guided full-year revenue to between $82 billion and $85 billion after Mounjaro sales rose 125 percent to $8.66 billion in the first quarter. Novo is worth roughly $220 billion; Lilly is valued above $1 trillion. When two companies sell into the same market and report on the same day, the smaller one is no longer graded against its own forecasts. It is graded against the gap. Novo has also brought a lawsuit against Lilly over its advertising, which tells you how the competitive position is being defended (Yahoo Finance).

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📊 Two labour readings land before the payrolls report

The week’s jobs argument gets its first proper test today. The ADP count of private-sector hiring lands at 1:15pm BST / 8:15am ET and is seen slowing sharply to about 75,000 after 98,000 in June, a figure that already came in below forecast. The ISM services survey follows at 3pm BST / 10am ET, seen at 54.2 from 54.0, with its employment component last reading 51.2 and barely above the line separating hiring from cutting. Services are roughly four fifths of the American economy, so that sub-index carries more weight than the headline. It all builds toward the end of the week, when the July employment report is expected to show payrolls at 91,000 and the unemployment rate rising to 4.3 percent from 4.2 percent (CNBC).

💾 Memory night, with two of the year’s biggest winners reporting

SanDisk and Western Digital both report after the American close, and few stocks have run harder into a print. SanDisk is up more than 423 percent this year and Western Digital more than 222 percent, driven by a shortage of memory that shows no sign of clearing. SanDisk’s most recent quarter gave the scale of it, with revenue up 251 percent on a year earlier to $5.95 billion. The move accelerated after Samsung forecast that the supply shortage would worsen through 2027 and persist into 2028. NAND pricing, enterprise drive demand from AI data centres and gross margin are the three lines that decide the reaction, and the same memory costs are now showing up in the price of consumer hardware (Yahoo Finance).

₿ Bitcoin sits 49 percent below its record while shares set new ones

Bitcoin is holding just above $64,000, roughly flat on the week and about 49 percent below the record it set in October, on the same morning the S&P 500 and the Dow are printing all-time highs. Ether is the only major token lower over seven days. The wider crypto market is worth around $2.27 trillion, with sentiment still reading fear at 27 on the standard gauge, and XRP sits near $1.06 after slipping another 1.2 percent. What makes the divergence stand out is that the usual excuses do not apply: oil has come down hard, rate expectations are easing and equities are in a risk-on rally, so the drag looks internal to crypto rather than macro. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq priced in bitcoin have just cleared their 200-week averages for the first time since 2012 (CoinDesk).

🌑 A discarded SpaceX rocket stage hit the moon this morning

A spent Falcon 9 upper stage struck the lunar surface near Einstein Crater at about 07:35 BST this morning, travelling at roughly 5,400 miles per hour. The stage weighs about 8,800 pounds and measures close to 45 feet, and the impact released energy equivalent to around three tons of TNT. It has been drifting since January 2025, when it launched the Blue Ghost and Hakuto-R landers toward the moon and was left in orbital limbo, nudged onto a collision course over eighteen months by gravity and solar radiation pressure. Observatories were watching for the impact flash and the ejecta plume, partly to test methods for locating impacts ahead of future lunar seismic experiments, and partly because artificial debris hitting the moon is becoming a genuine hazard (BBC Sky at Night).

🔍 Deep Dive - SpaceX Beat On Everything That Matters. The Stock Fell Anyway!

SpaceX reported its first set of public numbers last night. Revenue beat by almost a billion dollars, the loss came in at a third of what the market feared, and the AI division made money for the first time in its life. The stock touched $131 as the release landed and traded near $111 in pre-market this morning This is the breakdown of why, and of the far larger event that arrives on Thursday.

What landed

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🚀 SpaceX Earnings Night: the Cheat Sheet

Numbers land at 9:05pm UK / 4:05pm ET. The call starts at 9:30pm UK / 4:30pm ET.

SpaceX reports for the first time tonight, and the options market is charging for a 14 to 15 percent move either way. The whole thing is in one cheat sheet: the five lines that decide the reaction, what you get in the press release against what only comes out on the call, a bullish and bearish scoreboard, and the base rate from the last 18 mega-cap first prints.

It sits in the Deep Dive at the bottom of today’s edition, with the PDF attached, and the replay of last night’s event is underneath it. Read it before the close.

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 📊 Palantir’s blowout quarter: Revenue grew 93 percent and American commercial sales jumped 149 percent, sending the shares up ten percent after hours.

• 📈 The Dow hits a record: Big Tech and cheaper oil pushed the index up 693 points to 53,178, its highest close ever.

• 🚀 SpaceX reports tonight: Wall Street wants up to 7 billion dollars of revenue, two days before 911 million shares come free to trade.

• 🏭 Factories at a four-year high: The ISM survey hit 55.6 and its employment index crossed 50 for the first time in 33 months.

• 🛢️ BP’s profit more than doubles: Underlying profit hit 5.73 billion dollars, its best quarter since 2022, as Trump attacked oil company earnings.

• 🖥️ AMD’s turn tonight: The chipmaker guided to 11.2 billion dollars of revenue, with the MI400 ramp the number investors want to see most.

• ₿ Strategy sells at a loss: The company offloaded 1,638 bitcoin at an average 63,957 dollars, well under its 75,419 dollar cost.

• 💴 The yen rally stalls: Tokyo spent 34 billion dollars last week, and the currency has already slipped back to 157.55 per dollar.

• 🏦 HSBC reports into a record run: The bank posted interim results with profit near 9.5 billion dollars and its shares at all-time highs.

• 🔍 Tonight’s SpaceX cheat sheet: The five lines that decide the print, the scoreboard, and the base rate from 18 mega-cap first reports.

• 🎙️ Last night’s replay is up: Two hours and 48 minutes on the playbook, the unlock maths and where this can realistically go.

• 📈 Chart of the Day: SpaceX bounced off the $105 target, closed up 5.68 percent, and broke a downtrend that has run all July.

🧠 One Big Thing

Palantir has answered the question this earnings season keeps circling: who actually collects the money being spent on AI. The answer arrived on the least expected line. American commercial revenue grew 149 percent to $764 million, faster than the company as a whole, which means ordinary corporates rather than defence budgets are now the growth engine. That reframes the valuation argument instead of settling it, because a 62 percent adjusted operating margin is an invitation to competitors. AMD reports tonight and tests the same question on the hardware side. Watch whether the software names reporting behind Palantir show the same commercial acceleration, because one company is a story and three is a cycle.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

$63,957

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : 71.93% Corvex, an AI cloud computing company specializing in GPU accelerated infrastructure, moved sharply in premarket with no specific catalyst identified.

• : 34.18% Ameresco reported second quarter revenue of $515.5 million against roughly $461 million expected and raised its full year adjusted earnings outlook. Backlog grew 32% to a record $6.73 billion on $1.8 billion of new awards, $1.2 billion of which came from data centers.

• : 19.78% Applied Optoelectronics led a broad rally in US optical component makers after a Reuters report that the Trump administration is drafting a ban on imports of new models of Chinese data center optical modules. A ban would hand domestic transceiver suppliers a slice of the market currently held by Chinese rivals.

• : 17.43% Ethos Technologies posted second quarter revenue of $189.6 million, up 113% year over year, with growth accelerating across both its direct to consumer and third party agency channels.

• : 17.42% Voyager Technologies beat on both lines with second quarter revenue of $52.8 million and an adjusted loss of 70 cents per share, then lifted full year revenue guidance to $275 million to $305 million from $230 million to $255 million on record quarterly bookings of $113 million.

• : 14.99% Palantir Technologies delivered blockbuster quarterly results and raised its full year outlook, reinforcing the AI software trade a day after the Dow closed at a record high.

• : 10.72% Caterpillar cleared $20 billion of quarterly revenue for the first time in its history at $20.5 billion, with adjusted earnings of $8.17 per share against the $6.20 analysts expected. Construction Industries sales jumped 35% and power generation revenue tied largely to data center projects climbed 29%.

• : 8.39% Corning rebounded from a punishing month that erased more than a third of its value following its own late July guidance disappointment, with the proposed US restrictions on Chinese optical modules putting its fiber and connectivity franchise back in favor.

• : 7.83% Marvell Technology previewed new AI memory and storage expansion products built for agentic AI and large model inference as the FMS 2026 conference opened, driving the stock back above $200 for the first time in roughly two weeks.

Losers

• : -26.78% AdaptHealth released second quarter results before the opening bell alongside the reset of its full year guidance to account for the $235 million sale of its Diabetes Health business to Cardinal Health, now reported as a discontinued operation.

• : -20.17% Certara grew second quarter revenue just 1% to $93.3 million as services revenue fell 3% and services bookings dropped 6%, and the company swung to a $55.3 million net loss on a $49.2 million charge from the divested medical writing unit.

• : -4.39% Spotify Technology crossed 300 million premium subscribers but added 16 million monthly active users against guidance for 17 million, attributing the shortfall to ongoing product optimizations.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $63,775 (▲ 0.50%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,868 (▲ 0.52%)
XRP: $1.08 (▲ 0.10%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,653 (▲ 0.32%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,217 (▲ 1.13%)
FTSE 100: 10,900 (▲ 0.31%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.67% (▼ 0.19%)
Oil (WTI): $78 (▼ 2.94%)
Gold: $4,064 (▲ 0.23%)
Silver: $59.15 (▲ 1.71%)

Data as of: UK: 13:12 BST / US: 08:12 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 21:12 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

📊 Palantir grows 93 percent and lifts guidance again

Palantir reported after the American close last night and beat on every line that mattered. Revenue reached $1.935 billion, up 93 percent on a year earlier against consensus near $1.81 billion, with diluted earnings of 41 cents a share. Sales to American corporate customers, the segment the whole bull case rests on, rose 149 percent to $764 million. Operating income was $912 million on a reported basis, a 47 percent margin, and $1.19 billion adjusted at 62 percent. Management raised full-year revenue guidance to roughly $8.15 billion, implying 82 percent growth, from a previous $7.65 billion, and guided the current quarter to about $2.16 billion against roughly $2 billion expected (CNBC).

The shares rose 10 percent in extended trading, having been up close to 15 percent at one point. That reaction is the story as much as the numbers, because Palantir came into the print around 40 percent below its high for the year. The argument was never about whether the company could grow. It was about whether growth could justify a multiple that assumes near-perfect execution for years. Government work built this business and remains lumpy and political; commercial contracts renew and compound. If the commercial mix keeps rising, the shape of the company changes rather than just its size. The awkward base rate: Palantir has beaten both lines in every quarter for more than two years and the shares still halved from the peak (Yahoo Finance).

📈 The Dow closes at a record as the AI trade reboots

Wall Street opened August with its strongest session in weeks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 693.38 points, or 1.32 percent, to a record close of 53,178.41. The S&P 500 added 1.48 percent to 7,600.50 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 2.1 percent to 25,913.9. Microsoft led the blue chips with a 4.3 percent gain, and Boeing and Amazon both rose around 4 percent. Two forces did the work: a turn toward diplomacy with Iran that pulled crude sharply lower, and renewed confidence that heavy AI spending is producing revenue rather than only cost (CNBC).

What makes it notable is how much it reverses. July closed with technology in retreat, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down 12.5 percent in a single week and Seoul’s market swinging 17 percent in both directions inside five sessions. The evidence that turned it was Amazon’s cloud arm growing 37 percent, and last night’s Palantir print supplied a second reading in the same direction. Asia did not follow through overnight, which is the caution: MSCI’s regional gauge fell 0.5 percent, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.3 percent to 63,585.58, and the Kospi swung between a 2.1 percent gain and a 2.8 percent fall. Crude also rebounded, with Brent adding $1.15 to $84.92 (Yahoo Finance).

🚀 SpaceX opens its books tonight, two days before the unlock

SpaceX publishes its first set of accounts as a listed company tonight. The numbers land at 9:05pm BST / 4:05pm ET and the call follows twenty five minutes later. Consensus sits at $6.7 billion to $7.0 billion of revenue, with earnings estimates spread between a loss of 12 cents and a loss of 35 cents a share, which tells you how little agreement there is. Starlink subscribers stood at 10.3 million across 164 countries at the end of March, up 105 percent in a year, and the first-quarter loss ran to $4.28 billion on $4.69 billion of revenue. The calendar sharpens all of it. On 6 August the first tranche of the staggered lock-up frees roughly 911.5 million shares against a public float of 639 million, with short interest running near a third of that float, and the options market is pricing a move of 14 to 15 percent in either direction.

🏭 American factories hit a four-year high, and started hiring

American manufacturing grew at its fastest rate in more than four years last month. The ISM manufacturing index rose to 55.6 in July from 53.3 in June, well ahead of the 54.0 economists expected and the highest reading since May 2022. The detail was stronger than the headline. Production jumped to 58.5 from 52.2, new orders reached 56.7, and the employment component climbed to 52.8 from 49.7, crossing above 50 for the first time in 33 months. Above 50 means expansion, so that employment line marks the end of nearly three years of factories shedding staff. The sector has now grown for seven consecutive months (Yahoo Finance).

This is awkward for the consensus view of the week. Economists expect the July jobs report at the end of this week to show unemployment rising to 4.3 percent from 4.2 percent, and the Federal Reserve held rates last month with three officials voting for a rise. A factory survey showing manufacturers hiring again cuts against the slowdown story that Friday’s forecast assumes. The next test lands at 3pm BST today with the June JOLTS report, where vacancies are seen falling to about 7.25 million from 7.594 million, a drop of more than 340,000. Two labour readings pointing in opposite directions inside 48 hours would leave the bond market to settle the argument.

🛢️ BP’s profit more than doubles, and Trump is not pleased

BP’s second-quarter underlying replacement cost profit more than doubled from a year earlier to $5.73 billion, its strongest quarter since the third quarter of 2022 and ahead of the roughly $5 billion analysts expected. Higher oil and gas prices through the Middle East conflict did most of the work, with strong refining margins supplying the rest. The company also lifted its 2026 capital spending guidance to between $13.5 billion and $14 billion, from $13 billion to $13.5 billion, after deciding to delay planned asset sales to capture better value later. The results landed as Trump publicly criticised oil companies for making too much money (CNBC).

For UK investors the read across is wider than one set of accounts. BP and Shell together carry a heavy weight in the FTSE 100, so a quarter like this supports an index with almost no exposure to the AI trade driving American records. The problem is what the quarter was built on. Brent averaged well above $90 through the fighting and now sits near $85, having dropped five percent in a single session before rebounding $1.15 overnight to $84.92 a barrel. The profit BP has just reported reflects a price the market is in the process of unwinding, and the next quarter will not have the war premium in it (Yahoo Finance).

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🖥️ AMD reports tonight with expectations already high

AMD publishes second-quarter results after the American close, with the call at 5pm ET / 10pm BST. Wall Street is looking for about $11.3 billion of revenue and $1.61 a share, against company guidance of $11.2 billion give or take $300 million, which would be 46 percent growth on a year earlier and 9 percent on the quarter. Data centre is the line that decides it, after $5.8 billion in the first quarter. Beyond the number, investors want detail on the MI400 accelerators and the Helios rack system launched in July, which Microsoft has committed to running inside Azure from the second half of this year. AMD is the clearest test of whether anyone other than Nvidia collects the AI hardware money (Yahoo Finance).

₿ Strategy sells bitcoin for less than it paid

Strategy disclosed that it sold 1,638 bitcoin for about $105 million between 27 July and 2 August, its third disposal of the year, at an average price of $63,957 against an average cost basis of $75,419. Selling below cost is new territory for a company built on the promise of never selling, and it follows the framework it published in July authorising up to $1.25 billion of sales to fund dividends and buybacks. Bitcoin took it calmly, climbing back toward $64,000 in Asian hours, up around 2 percent over 24 hours and 1 percent on the week, with the wider crypto market adding 1.35 percent to $2.21 trillion. Flows remain the weak point: American spot fund flows have turned negative and CME open interest is back at 2023 levels (CoinDesk).

💴 The yen keeps most of what intervention bought

The yen held on to the bulk of its gains today after last week’s joint operation by Tokyo and Washington, the first coordinated purchase of the currency since 1998. It slipped 0.2 percent to 157.55 per dollar, having reached a three-month high of 155.20 in the previous session, and it remains well clear of the 163.99 forty-year low set in July. Japan spent about ¥5.33 trillion, roughly $34 billion, in a single session at the end of last week. Strategists now treat 155 as the level that decides whether this rally has staying power, and several see limited room beyond it. The real result so far is that speculators have not rebuilt their short positions (Bloomberg).

🏦 HSBC reports into a record share price

HSBC published interim results this morning, with pre-tax profit for the June quarter expected near $9.5 billion and the bank guiding to a return on tangible equity of 17 percent for the year, alongside further shareholder returns. The shares ran to record levels into the print, which is precisely the difficulty: a bank trading at an all-time high needs a reason to go higher, not merely the absence of a reason to fall. For UK investors HSBC is one of the heaviest weights in the FTSE 100, so its reaction matters well beyond the banking sector, and it arrives on the same morning BP reported its best quarter in nearly four years (Bloomberg).

🔍 Deep Dive SpaceX Earnings Night: the Cheat Sheet

SpaceX reports for the first time tonight. The numbers land at 9:05pm UK / 4:05pm ET and the call starts at 9:30pm UK / 4:30pm ET. Most of the move tends to arrive in the first fifteen minutes of the call rather than off the press release. Everything worth having in front of you is set out below, and the same thing is attached as a PDF to keep open alongside the print.

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🚀 Tonight: SpaceX Week, live on Discord

8:30pm UK / 3:30pm ET, just before the closing bell. It runs as a Stage event in the Sensei News category on Discord, and it is included with your subscription at no extra cost.

SpaceX publishes its first set of accounts as a listed company tomorrow night, and two days after that the biggest share unlock of the year begins. Tonight I am taking the whole thing apart in one sitting, live, with the slides on screen and the chat open.

Here is what we go through:

The Playbook, marked. What we published on 12 June before the stock ever traded, scored against what actually unfolded, including the call we got wrong and why being early cost more than being wrong.

What you actually own. The FY25 segment numbers, Starlink at 10.3 million subscribers with average revenue per user down from $99 to $66, Falcon’s 85 percent contribution margin, and the five Starship gates still uncleared.

Tomorrow’s earnings, built from the bottom up. Consensus sits at $6.7 to $7.0 billion. I show you what each segment has to deliver to get there, and the base rate from 18 comparable first prints.

The unlock, properly. 911.5 million shares against a 639 million float, the batch that legally cannot move, and a live calculator on screen so you can type in the closing price yourself.

The short side. 219.3 million shares short, roughly 34 percent of the float, and the about the squeeze.

🪜 My own scenarios and my own ladder, disclosed in full. I hold SPCX. My position and my own risk, not a suggestion for anyone else.

Not in the Discord yet? It is free with your subscription

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