Happy Sunday.

Quick question before we start. Where were you in December 1996?

Some of you were running desks. Some of you were building the companies you run now. And I'd bet every one of you remembers the two words that dropped that month, because they followed the market around for years afterward. Irrational exuberance. The most powerful financial voice on earth stood at a podium and politely asked whether asset prices had lost their minds.

You know what happened next, because you lived it. The Nasdaq tripled. It ran for three more years after the question was asked. The smartest man in the room was wrong, and wrong, and wrong, until one day he was right, and by September 2001 every dollar of that run was gone.

Alan Greenspan died a few weeks ago at 100. His wife's statement said he had irrational exuberance for baseball and for jazz. He was in on it to the end.

I've been chewing on that whole sequence ever since. Because the AI bubble call is now well over a year old, and it comes from serious people. Jim Chanos, the man who exposed Enron, calls this the platinum tier of fraud. The investor who called 2008 is short Nvidia and the chip sector, targeting a 30 to 40 percent correction by March 2027. The Federal Reserve just ranked AI the third biggest threat to financial stability in the country, behind only geopolitics and an oil shock.

And the market keeps not caring. Same as it didn't care in 1997. Or 1998. Or 1999.

So today I'm going to try something different. I'm not going to argue the bubble callers are wrong. Most of their math is right, and I'll show you the ugliest of it with no sugar on top. I'm going to argue they're answering a small question that happens to be sitting right next to a much bigger one. The word bubble describes what happens to prices over three years. It says nothing about what happens to the world over the next hundred.

And this buildout, whatever your portfolio thinks of it this quarter, is doing the second thing.

Every bubble is a Jurassic Park movie

A technician named Dave Lundgren has the best frame for this I've heard all year, and it's built on dinosaurs.

There are eight Jurassic Park movies now. Same story every time. Same structure, same beats, same ending. And we still reach into our pockets and pay to see it, because in the moment it feels different. Different characters, different dinosaurs, different island. New paint, same canvas.

Bubbles work exactly like that. Humans have been telling one or two stories for three thousand years, and every mania maps onto one of them. The internet bubble had its characters, its catalyst, its monster. So did housing. So did the work-from-home run after Covid. And inside every single one of them, people said the same four words. This time is different. It always feels different, because it's usually the first one you've personally lived through. So we laugh at the people who did silly things in 1929, and then we turn around and say yes, but AI is going to change the world, and there will be data centers in space.

Here's the part I love. Lundgren isn't a bear. He's long the leadership. His point is that the canvas and the paint are two different things, and you should never confuse which one you're trading. He buys and sells stocks, not narratives. As long as market structure holds, he stays long, gladly, because bubbles are where fortunes get made. The old Fidelity line is that there's plenty of money on the left side of a bubble. Semiconductors went up 600 percent from the 1998 bottom to the 2000 peak. You just have to know, every single day, why you own what you own, and it can never be because of the movie.

So let's grant the bears the canvas. It's the same movie, again.

Here's the paint.

The scoreboard says bubble

Start with the picture everyone's passing around.

Semiconductors are 19.7 percent of the entire S&P 500. One industry, one fifth of the American stock market. Highest weighting ever recorded, above even the dot-com peak. Everything else American public companies do, banking, medicine, oil, retail, food, entertainment, has been squeezed into the other 80 percent.

Zoom out a layer and it gets tighter. Seven companies are 34 percent of the index, about 22.7 trillion dollars, and they throw off roughly 70 percent of its economic profit. And because roughly 40 cents of every auto-enrolled 401(k) dollar flows into those same names through default target-date funds, this isn't a trade some people chose. It's a bet nearly every American worker is making, whether they know it or not.

Now lay the price action against every mania of the last 40 years.

Three years in, up roughly 250 to 300 percent, tracking the same arc as dot-com and Japan and housing at the same point in their lives. Every one of those lines eventually turned. Historians will tell you each cycle had different plumbing underneath, and that's true. The shape didn't care.

The behavior underneath the prices looks like the third act, too. Jeff Huge, a strategist who's been tracking this cycle closely, calls it the speculation generation. People aren't buying companies anymore. They're trading tickers with leverage. Volume in S&P 500 call options more than doubled in twelve months, from 1.2 trillion to 2.6 trillion dollars. Quick translation, a call option is a bet on a stock going up where you put down a little and win or lose a multiple of it. So that's not just record speculation. It's record speculation with the leverage baked in. Institutional allocators are sitting at their biggest overweight to stocks on record. The top 10 names are 41 percent of the index, which is the exact reading from March 2000. Price to sales, one of the only ratios you can't massage with accounting, just set an all-time record. The dividend yield on the S&P hit its lowest level ever.

Today’s Sponsor

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

The honest ugly

Here's the part the bulls skip, because I promised you the ugliest of it.

OpenAI just offered the United States government a 5 percent stake in the company. The pitch is giving every citizen a share of AI's profits. The problem is that AI has no profits, so the arithmetic works out to giving every citizen a share of the losses. Prediction markets put the odds of the government actually taking a stake in OpenAI this year under 30 percent, with Anthropic facing the same skepticism.

Days before that, Meta let slip that it plans to sell excess compute. Two words that were never supposed to sit next to each other in this story. A company that spent two years telling markets it couldn't build capacity fast enough is now a landlord looking for tenants.

There's a wrinkle inside the earnings, too. Huge points out that several megacap tech names hold big stakes in private AI labs, and under equity-method accounting, when the paper valuation of a stake doubles, the gain flows straight into reported earnings. Call it the Berkshire effect. Your portfolio marks up, your earnings look heroic, and none of it has anything to do with selling more of anything. By his math, strip those markups out of one recent quarter and some of the blowout tech beats land right on top of ordinary analyst estimates. A slice of the earnings everyone is celebrating is the boom grading its own homework.

The financing is the part that actually keeps me up. Estimates put the American AI datacenter buildout at 11 trillion dollars between 2024 and 2029, with roughly 7 trillion of it financed through debt. A growing slice sits in special purpose vehicles, off-balance-sheet structures designed to keep the borrowing away from the parent company's credit rating, absorbed by a private credit market that gets a fraction of the scrutiny banks do. Sequoia's David Cahn tracks the gap between what's spent on AI compute and what AI actually earns at roughly 600 billion dollars a year, and widening. MIT found that 95 percent of enterprise AI pilots produced no measurable return. Ilya Sutskever, the man who proved scaling worked, says the age of scaling is over. Open-source models reach 90 percent of frontier performance within months, at a fraction of the price.

Every word of that is real. If you stopped reading here, you'd sell everything.

Don't stop reading here.

The bubble isn't where you're looking

Because this is where 2026 stops rhyming with 2000, and it's the strangest thing happening in markets right now.

The best earnings in semiconductor history are getting cheaper by the day. Nvidia printed 81.6 billion dollars of revenue last quarter, up 85 percent from a year ago, and the stock has gone nowhere all year. It trades around 21 times forward earnings. That's in line with the S&P 500, it's a fraction of its own five-year average of 72 times, and it's the cheapest the stock has been since 2019. Micron grew revenue 346 percent and the stock fell 25 percent from its high. It trades near 7 times forward earnings. Samsung and SK Hynix broke records and sit in bear markets.

Quick translation. A forward P/E is what you pay today for a dollar of next year's expected profit. In March 2000, tech traded at 55 times. Today it's around 22. Chip stocks specifically trade at 18 times, cheaper than the market they supposedly inflated.

In a classic price bubble, multiples run out ahead of earnings. Right now the exact opposite is happening. Earnings are doubling and multiples are compressing. The market is actively de-rating its own winners while they report the best numbers in their history.

Here's the hole in that, though. A low multiple on a fake E isn't cheap. If part of that profit is paper markups and circular vendor financing, 21 times earnings is a mirage, not a bargain.

Fair enough. But notice what that does to the argument. It moves the fight off the price and onto the quality of the number underneath it. Which is exactly where the froth actually went.

Not into prices. Into spreadsheets. Wall Street just raised its long-term earnings growth forecast for the S&P 500 to 25.5 percent a year, the highest ever recorded. Analysts now assume chipmakers will keep 50.3 cents of every revenue dollar as profit, forever, more than triple the market's margin. Ed Yardeni put it plainly in a note last week, questioning whether analysts are being rational when they treat a historically boom-and-bust industry as a permanent secular grower.

If there's a bubble here, it isn't in the prices. It's in the forecasts. And that's the dangerous kind, because prices correct in public. Forecasts just get revised, quietly, on a Tuesday.

Bubbles end. Supercycles don't.

Here's the frame I actually believe, and it requires holding two things at once.

A bubble is a statement about prices. A supercycle is a statement about the production function, the actual machinery of how an economy turns inputs into output. They can occupy the same three years and have completely different endings. They usually do.

Electricity had a bubble. Railroads had several. The internet had the most famous one of all, and I made this point a couple weeks back with Cisco. At its March 2000 peak, Cisco traded at roughly 50 times revenue. Not earnings. Revenue. Baked into that price was total certainty that Cisco would change the world. Two things happened from there. Cisco changed the world, and the stock fell 90 percent while it was doing it. The narrative was completely right and the stock was completely wrong, at the same time, for years.

The crash wiped out the people who funded the internet. It did not wipe out the internet. Amazon and Google built most of their empires in the decade after it, on infrastructure the dead companies had already paid for.

Now look at the longest chart anyone has.

A dollar put into American stocks in 1870 is worth over 35,000 real dollars today. On that chart, the Great Depression is a bump. The technology wins. The line goes back up.

But hold onto how long that took. It matters more than it sounds like right now.

The country is paying a deferred bill

Now the deeper reason I can't sign the death certificate, and it has nothing to do with stock prices. It's about what the money is actually buying.

[CHART 5: US energy consumption versus real GDP since 2004]

American energy consumption has been essentially flat since 2004 while GDP grew by roughly 60 percent, adjusted for inflation. For twenty years, growth came from software, from code you could copy for free, and corporate America spent its cash flow on buybacks instead of concrete. We financially engineered instead of building. The grid, the transformers, the transmission lines, the generation capacity, all of it aged in place while the index kept setting records.

The 11 trillion dollar figure looks insane compressed into five years. Spread it across the two decades of buildout we skipped, and it starts to look less like a mania and more like a deferred mortgage payment coming due all at once.

That's why I think the money keeps flowing even through the defaults that are absolutely coming. When the stress hits, and it will, the balance sheet that shows up won't be a bank's. Washington is already circling stakes in these companies. The buildout has been quietly reclassified from a trade into infrastructure, and countries do not let their infrastructure fail. They nationalize the pain and keep pouring.

That's not a clean story. It might be a deeply unfair one, private upside and socialized downside, and if the bailout comes we'll all write angry letters about it.

But it tells you the direction of travel. The pouring doesn't stop.

What's actually being built

For all of recorded history, a nation's supply of intelligence was demographics plus luck plus 25 years. You needed the birth rate, then the schools, then a generation of patience, to produce one cohort of sharp young engineers and analysts and doctors. Smart young people were the scarcest strategic resource on earth, and countries fought over them with visas and universities and salaries.

That constraint is dissolving in front of us. What this buildout manufactures is cognition as a utility.

Every country, aging or young, rich or modest, is about to be equipped with the equivalent of millions of brilliant, tireless, endlessly patient young minds. They don't emigrate. They don't age out. They don't revolt. They don't ask for a corner office. Japan's demographic collapse becomes a procurement problem. The Gulf states can buy the workforce they never birthed. A talented kid in Lagos or Manila gets a research team that only Goldman could afford five years ago.

That is not a chatbot story. That's a rearrangement of what makes a nation powerful.

And it's why the next ten years matter so far beyond any drawdown. The rails being laid right now, the chips, the grids, the model standards, the alliances over who gets compute and who doesn't, will harden the same way the railroad gauges of the 1870s did. The same way Bretton Woods did in the 1940s. The same way internet protocols did in the 1990s. Nobody voted on TCP/IP. It just got built first, and then thirty years of the global economy ran on it.

We're in the constitution-writing decade of the intelligence economy. Constitutions outlive every crash that happens while they're being drafted.

So what

Usual reminder, I'm not a financial advisor and none of this is advice. You know the drill.

"The technology survives" is cold comfort if your horizon is ten years and not a hundred. Japan is the proof, and it's sitting right there in Chart 2. They saved the system. They nationalized the pain. The technology kept compounding, Japanese companies kept building world-class things, and the Nikkei took 34 years to get back to even. The rails and your returns are not the same asset. You can be completely right about the century and completely wrecked by 2030.

Which is what that chart is really saying. Since 2013, American stocks returned 11.8 percent a year after inflation. From 1928 to 1948, it was 0.6 percent. From 1966 to 1982, real returns were roughly zero for sixteen years straight. From the 2000 peak to 2013, roughly zero again. The regime you and I grew up in is the outlier, not the norm. We're not good investors. We're spoiled ones, and the market doesn't owe us the last decade twice.

So hold both. The financial structure has real rot in it. The debt is real, the circular revenue is real, and a repricing is closer to inevitable than not.

And understand that this isn't one market anymore. Lundgren describes two robust markets running at the same time, a real bull market in the AI leadership and a real bear market in everything sitting in AI's crosshairs. They're telling you two different stories about the same technology. When money does rotate out of the leaders, remember how small everything else has gotten. Huge describes the recent shifts into real estate and staples as pouring buckets of money into thimbles. The defensive sectors are now so tiny relative to tech that a trickle of rotation makes them look like rockets. A thimble overflowing is not a new bull market.

But don't let the market's verdict on 2027 earnings stand in for history's verdict on the technology. Those are two different courtrooms, with two different judges and two very different calendars. The people who confused them in 2001 sold the internet at the bottom.

Greenspan asked how anyone knows when exuberance has gone too far. Thirty years later, the honest answer is still that we don't. Not in real time. Not ever. The dot-com crash was the loudest financial event of its decade, and from a hundred years out it will barely be a footnote to the thing it briefly interrupted.

One last thing about those dinosaur movies. Lundgren is right that it's the same story every time. The fences fail, the dinosaurs get out, the people run.

But watch what happens after the credits, in every sequel, without exception.

They rebuild the park. Bigger.

Stay curious 😎

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Introducing The First Agentic CRM

Get revenue agents, workflows, and automations across every stage of your motion. Access customer data in real time through Attio's web app, MCP, API, and SDK.

Then Ask Attio anything about your business and get instant answers.

It's the CRM that runs the work behind every win.

Try Attio Now

Happy Friday

Market closed the week higher, big tech doing most of the lifting.

SK Hynix's U.S. ipo today gave folks a fresh way to play the memory chip boom. I like seeing risk appetite hold up, but the Middle East is still the part of this market I cannot ignore, the constant shaky headlines this deep into the year are a real concern. I can’t even count how many ceasefires haven’t worked out and the market seems to feel similar at this point.

Let’s dig in...

Today's Big Picture

1. SK Hynix's Debut Reshuffled The Chip Trade
   SK Hynix priced at $149, opened at $170, and raised $26.5 billion, the largest U.S. listing a foreign company has ever done. The catch: Micron and the other memory names slipped as buyers rotated into the new name. The AI trade isn't fading. It's just picking new favorites.
   

2. The Week Ended Green, Iran And All
   The S&P and Nasdaq closed out a winning week even as the U.S. and Iran traded fire again. That's the tell worth noticing: the market is treating the conflict as a headline, not a threat to earnings. Nvidia and Meta did most of the lifting.
   

3. Oil Slipped As Iran Talks Restarted
   Oil eased today after Qatar and Pakistan helped nudge the U.S. and Iran back toward the table. Bigger picture, the IEA now sees global oil demand falling this year, the first drop since 2020. Keep in mind, inventories are thin, so any flare-up still moves prices fast.

Market Overview

Index Performance (Korean exchange today)

Stock Spotlight

Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 4.03% )  
helped carry the market higher. It's one of SK Hynix's biggest memory customers, so today's debut was a quiet vote for its whole supply chain.

Delta Air Lines $DAL ( ▼ 1.81% )  
beat on revenue and profit, but the stock still fell. Its fuel bill hit nearly $2 billion, the highest ever. The offset: its own Pennsylvania refinery has brought in $2.09 billion this year on strong margins.

Meta Platforms $META ( ▲ 5.98% )  
had its best week since early 2024. Bank of America thinks its AI buildout may cost far less than feared, closer to $22 billion per gigawatt versus an earlier $45 billion guess.

Big Name Updates

Circle Internet Group $CRCL ( ▲ 4.97% )  
won approval to run a national trust bank. That lets it eventually hold the reserves behind its USDC stablecoin itself, instead of parking them at outside banks.

Oracle $ORCL ( ▼ 2.14% )  
lost a credit notch from S&P, down to one step above junk. The agency pointed at Oracle's heavy spending and how much it leans on OpenAI as a customer.

PepsiCo $PEP ( ▼ 0.35% )  
got cut to neutral by Citi, which also trimmed its price target. The bank sees no quick fix for soft food and drink sales in North America.

Other Notable Company News

EasyJet $EZJ ( ▲ 2.45% )  
agreed to a $7.6 billion buyout from Apollo, dropping an earlier deal with Castlelake.

Vodafone $VOD ( ▲ 12.54% )  
has a new top shareholder after French billionaire Xavier Niel bought E&'s stake for $5.95 billion.

J.B. Hunt $JBHT ( ▼ 0.94% )  
drew an outperform upgrade from Bernstein, with a $329 target, on a bet that truck rates turn higher.

WD-40 $WDFC ( ▲ 10.65% )  
beat on earnings and raised its full-year outlook.

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Sector Watch

Bond Market

The ten-year Treasury yield barely moved and the dollar sat flat. T. Rowe Price's Adam Marden said to expect sharper swings in shorter-dated Treasurys as the Fed gets more reactive to each data print.

Policy Watch

Fed

The Fed told Congress it's still set on getting inflation down. Warsh isn't tipping his hand on the next rate move.

Housing

Trump says he won't sign the housing affordability bill, calling it a protest over a separate voting bill. It becomes law anyway.

• A bill can pass after a 10-day waiting period even without a signature.

• It's meant to make homebuilding easier and widen mortgage access.

• It also reins in big corporate buyers of single-family homes.

Energy

Trump promoted a "Freedom Fuel Network" of cheaper gas stations as pump prices climb. Prices are ticking up partly on Ukrainian strikes against Russian refineries, with the midterms under four months out.

Iran

Qatar and Pakistan are working to restart U.S.-Iran talks. An administration official said the technical talks continue even after both sides resumed strikes this week.

What to Watch

The AI company quietly automating every Walmart distribution center. 
23 billion in orders on the book.

It's just one of seven names in this free MarketBeat report.

Warsh On Capitol Hill
Fed Chair Warsh testifies to the House on Tuesday and the Senate on Wednesday. Traders will hang on any hint about inflation or the next rate move, even if he rarely gives one.

SK Hynix's Real Test
SK Hynix moves to its permanent ticker $SKHY on Monday, with options starting Tuesday. That's when we find out if the debut had legs or was just opening-day hype.

Boeing's Max 7 Decision
The FAA could sign off on Boeing's 737 Max 7 later this month. That would finally clear the smallest Max jet for passengers after years of delays.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

The Lithium Boom is Heating Up

Lithium stock prices have more than doubled in the past year in response to ballooning costs and shortages. $ALB climbed 185%. $SQM, 133%.

But the real winner may be a stock not listed on public exchanges: EnergyX.

This $1B unicorn’s patented technology can recover up to 3X more lithium than traditional methods. That’s earned investment from leaders like General Motors.

Now they’re preparing for commercial production just as experts project 5X demand growth by 2040. EnergyX is tapping into 100,000+ acres of lithium deposits in Chile, a potential $1.1B annual revenue opportunity at projected market prices.

Unlike public stocks, you can buy private EnergyX shares alongside 50,000+ other investors. Invest for $13/share by the 7/16 deadline.

Invest in EnergyX

_{Energy Exploration Technologies, Inc. (“EnergyX”) has engaged Beehiiv to publish this communication in connection with EnergyX’s ongoing Regulation A offering. Beehiiv has been paid in cash and may receive additional compensation. Beehiiv and/or its affiliates do not currently hold securities of EnergyX.}

_{This compensation and any current or future ownership interest could create a conflict of interest. Please consider this disclosure alongside EnergyX’s offering materials. EnergyX’s Regulation A offering has been qualified by the SEC. Offers and sales may be made only by means of the qualified offering circular. Before investing, carefully review the offering circular, including the risk factors. The offering circular is available at invest.energyx.com/.}

_{Comparisons to other companies are for informational purposes only and should not imply similar results. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Market shortfall are forward‑looking estimates and are subject to substantial uncertainty.}

Good Morning

Quiet calendar, loud IPO.

SK Hynix opens today as the biggest foreign listing this market has ever seen, and somehow that's the only thing on the schedule today. Chips are red across the board in front of it. My guess is that's temporary, money ready to rotate into the new listing before it comes back to Micron and the rest once the dust settles.

Let's dig in...

Today's Big Picture

1.The Analyst Cushion Companies Usually Get Is Gone
Analysts normally trim estimates during a quarter so companies clear a lower bar. This time they raised them, because earnings have been strong enough to justify it, with profit growth tracking above 20% for a second straight quarter. That confidence removes the cushion. Delta just paid for it: beat on revenue, beat on earnings, kept a strong full-year outlook, and the stock is down anyway. Beating is now the minimum, and banks walk into that same setup Tuesday.

2. War Is Hurting Oil Demand, Not Lifting Prices
The IEA says global oil demand shrinks this year, the first drop since 2020. Blocking Hormuz didn't just cut supply, it stranded the Gulf barrels that would have been burned, so consumption falls with the exports. Only 13 tankers moved through the strait Wednesday against a normal 33, and oil still went nowhere. The IEA sees a surplus by year-end once traffic recovers, and that looming glut is capping prices even now. The rate-hike case leans on war-driven oil inflation, and that inflation keeps not showing up.

3. SK Hynix Didn't Need The Money, It Needed You
SK Hynix throws off more cash in two years than this whole $26.5 billion raise, so it wasn't after the money. It wanted American buyers who could never easily reach the stock before. The order book proved that before a single share even traded, pulling in almost $200 billion in demand, with heavyweights like Baillie Gifford and Coatue reaching for billions. So why is Micron red this morning, ahead of a debut everyone wanted in on? Because that money has to come from somewhere, and some of it is getting pulled out of the old memory names to fund the new one.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

Delta Air Lines $DAL ( ▼ 1.81% )  

Trading higher after guiding third-quarter profit above the Street and raising its dividend. CEO Ed Bastian says the pricing power airlines gained from expensive jet fuel should stick even as oil cools.

Circle $CRCL ( ▲ 4.97% )  

Up sharply after federal banking regulators approved its crypto focused bank. Stablecoin plumbing now sits inside the regulated banking system, which is the part that changes the competitive map for payments.

Vodafone $VOD ( ▲ 12.54% )  

US shares climbing after French billionaire Xavier Niel bought a stake worth about $6 billion, making him the largest shareholder. Niel built Iliad by starting price wars, so every European telecom board just got a new problem.

Apollo Global Management $APO ( ▲ 0.42% )  

Put in a $7.7 billion bid for easyJet, topping Castlelake and turning the airline into a private equity bidding war. EasyJet's board said this morning it is no longer minded to back the Castlelake deal.

Netflix $NFLX ( ▼ 2.78% )  

Ticking higher on a WSJ report that it's exploring live TV channels and streaming bundles. The subtext is engagement is slipping, and the company reports next week.

Strategy $MSTR ( ▲ 0.8% )  

Up in premarket with Bitcoin pushing back toward $65,000. Crypto is the only green corner of premarket tech, which tells you today's selling is chip specific, not risk off.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

JPMorgan And Goldman Report (Tuesday Morning)
Skip the trading revenue and go straight to credit card delinquencies and loan loss reserves. That is the cleanest live read on the consumer that exists. Clean credit books feed the broadening story. Rising reserves would be the first domino against it.

Warsh Testifies Before Congress (Next Week)
His first monetary policy testimony as Fed chair, after a first meeting that read hawkish. He wants the Fed giving less forward guidance, which T. Rowe Price argues means bigger swings in short-term yields regardless of what the data says. Anything he says about oil pass-through moves rate bets in real time.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

The 1,700%+ Lesson From SpaceX’s IPO

SpaceX IPO’d at a $1.75T valuation. Three business days later, they were the sixth-most valuable public company.

Those who bought at the opening bell saw a 40% gain. Andreessen Horowitz, who invested back in 2023? 1,700%+. The lesson? Today’s biggest growth comes at the private stage.

It’s why institutions love private-stage opportunities. A similar dynamic’s playing out in lithium, where General Motors backed $1B+ private unicorn EnergyX. Except this time, you can join them.

EnergyX’s patented tech can recover up to 3X more lithium than traditional methods. And with lithium prices up 75% this year and demand projected to grow 5X by 2040, they’re perfectly positioned.

After opening America’s largest lithium production facility of its kind, EnergyX is preparing to unlock up to 13M tons. Become a private-stage EnergyX before the 7/16 deadline.

Invest in EnergyX

^{Energy Exploration Technologies, Inc. (“EnergyX”) has engaged Beehiiv to publish this communication in connection with EnergyX’s ongoing Regulation A offering. Beehiiv has been paid in cash and may receive additional compensation. Beehiiv and/or its affiliates do not currently hold securities of EnergyX.}

^{This compensation and any current or future ownership interest could create a conflict of interest. Please consider this disclosure alongside EnergyX’s offering materials. EnergyX’s Regulation A offering has been qualified by the SEC. Offers and sales may be made only by means of the qualified offering circular. Before investing, carefully review the offering circular, including the risk factors. The offering circular is available at invest.energyx.com/.}

^{Comparisons to other companies are for informational purposes only and should not imply similar results. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Market shortfall are forward‑looking estimates and are subject to substantial uncertainty.}

Happy Thursday

Stocks rose and oil slipped, even as the US and Iran traded fire again. Chips did the heavy lifting, with Micron out front ahead of tomorrow's SK Hynix debut.

War headlines get a shrug and a chips are getting all the attention.

Let’s dig in...

Today's Big Picture

1. Chips Pop, But Big Tech Owns July so Far
Semis got a one-day lift, led by Micron on its $3 billion plan and building hype for tomorrow's SK Hynix debut. Zoom out though: the real move this month has been money heading back into Big Tech after chips cooled off from June highs. Apple's climbing again, and even Nvidia is outrunning the rest of the chip group. Today was a bounce, not a trend change.

2. Markets Ignore The Middle East
The US struck 90 targets in Iran, and Iran hit back at US-allied countries. Stocks advanced anyway. Oil fell after Trump said Iran called wanting a deal. Traders look more numb to the fighting by the day.

3. Wall Street Eyes AI Cash Flows 
Apollo's Torsten Slok flagged the huge spending going into cloud data centers. His point is simple: this whole AI rally leans on that cash flow showing up on schedule. It's the one thing worth watching while the rest of the market keeps climbing.

Market Overview

Index Performance

Stock Spotlight

Micron $MU ( ▼ 1.24% )  
said it will put up to $3 billion into the US chip supply chain, including money to help GlobalWafers expand a wafer plant in Texas. Shares led the chip group higher.

Mara Holdings $MARA ( ▼ 4.69% )  
bought a big powered land site in Matagorda County, Texas. The deal roughly doubles its potential power capacity to about 4.8 gigawatts for data centers and Bitcoin mining.

AstraZeneca $AZN ( ▼ 3.86% )  
dropped after its heart disease drug Wainua failed a late-stage trial. The drug missed its main goal of cutting deaths and heart emergencies versus a placebo.

Paramount $PARAA ( ▼ 5.93% )  
traded lower on worries about its Warner Bros. Discovery merger. A group of state attorneys general is expected to file an antitrust suit against the deal soon.

Big Name Updates

Meta $META ( ▲ 5.98% )  
plans to double its computing power by 2027 and start making its own AI chip, called Iris, in September. It's also spending about $10 billion on its first Canadian data center, in Alberta.

PepsiCo $PEP ( ▼ 0.35% )  
beat on revenue but came up short on profit. North American shoppers pulled back at the grocery store, and the CEO tied it straight to gas prices.

Costco $COST ( ▲ 0.36% )  
slipped after June sales grew slower than May. Executives said May got a lift from high gas prices, which pull bargain hunters into the warehouse.

Netflix $NFLX ( ▼ 2.78% )  
got a price target cut from Citi, which kept its buy rating. The firm pointed to soft viewership and money chasing chips instead.

Other Notable Company News

Five Below $FIVE ( ▲ 2.8% )  
got an upgrade to outperform at Mizuho, which likes how well new customers are sticking around.

Palantir $PLTR ( ▼ 1.74% )  
signed a deal with Rackspace to run its software for regulated and mid-market customers.

Bloom Energy $BE ( ▼ 4.83% )  
rejected a short-seller report from Hunterbrook, calling its accounting claims false and misleading.

Wall Street Is Crowded Into The Wrong AI Stocks

The ones supplying the chips, the cloud capacity, and the data tools everything else runs on.

Stockearnings put together a free report on 9 AI stocks I am watching. 

No eBook, no homework. Just the list and the reason each one made it.

See the 9 stocks now

_{Today’s Sponsor}

Sector Watch

Bond Market

The 30-year bond auction cleared today without much drama. Treasury yields cooled across the board as investors looked past the worst of the war fears. The dollar drifted lower too.

Policy Watch

The Federal Reserve 
A few strategists are floating a rate hike later this year, something that looked off the table just months ago. The thinking:

• The oil premium from the Middle East keeps energy costs high.

• Heavy AI spending keeps demand up for power and metals.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh argues AI will bring prices down over time. That thesis is about to get a real test.

International 
China's consumer inflation stayed weak in June, while producer prices rose at their fastest pace in nearly four years. Soft demand at home is still keeping a lid on prices.

What to Watch

The AI company quietly automating every Walmart distribution center. 
23 billion in orders on the book.

It's just one of seven names in this free MarketBeat report.

SK Hynix Listing 
The South Korean memory giant starts trading in the US tomorrow. Demand ran more than seven times the shares available, the second hottest debut behind SpaceX this year. Real test for the AI memory trade.

Strait of Hormuz Traffic 
Crossings through the waterway slowed to a near standstill today. The world has adapted so far and prices are holding. A real physical disruption would change that fast.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Stay connected abroad without expensive roaming

Traveling soon? Avoid surprise roaming charges with Saily. Get affordable data plans in over 200 destinations worldwide.

Download the Saily app, select your destination, and activate instantly, no local SIM card needed.

Saily Ultra members enjoy exclusive travel perks including airport lounge access and fast-track services.

Plus, every purchase earns you credits toward your next plan. Built-in ad blocker and security features reduce data usage by up to 28.6%, saving you even more.

Get 24/7 support and a full refund if your device isn't compatible.

Travel smart, stay connected.

Download SAILY in your app store and use code newsletter15 at checkout to get an exclusive 15% off your first purchase.

Get 15% off now

^{Chat support available 24/7. Get a full refund if your device isn’t eSIM compatible.}

Good Morning

We hit 90 targets in Iran overnight, the ceasefire's dead, and the market shrugged it off. Nasdaq futures green, oil barely moved, VIX actually lower. Yesterdays Fed minutes showed some officials want to hike, and this morning's low jobless claims just gave them more reason too.

SK Hynix IPO’ing tomorrow, war headlines, and talks about hikes again are the big catalysts I’m paying attention too.

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

1. Wall Street Is Ignoring The War

Two nights of strikes, ceasefire declared dead, and Iran hitting US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain overnight. Stocks are green anyway and the VIX is down near 16.8. Oil is the only thing still pricing the war, holding its Wednesday spike while equities shrug. The tell to trust is Hormuz traffic, which fell to 25 transits yesterday against a normal 30 to 50. Ships are voting war, stocks are voting peace, and the ships have less reason to lie.

2. A Trillion Dollar Chipmaker Prices Today

SK Hynix makes the high-bandwidth memory that goes inside Nvidia's AI chips, and it prices its US listing tonight before trading Friday under SKHY. Here's the tension: its home market just fell into bear territory on this exact trade, yet the book is running seven times oversubscribed. So the Korean market is selling the memory story while global buyers line up for a piece of it.

3. Fed Hike

The minutes showed some officials wanted to hike in June, and what they pointed to was the AI build-out driving persistent inflation. Sit with that. The thing the market is buying this morning is the same thing the Fed thinks keeps rates high. Jobless claims just came in at 215K against 218K expected, a firm labor read that gives the hike camp its first data point.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

PepsiCo $PEP ( ▼ 0.35% )  

Missed on earnings as North American beverage volumes shrank and food went flat, with management blaming tighter household budgets. International is doing all the work, and the U.S. recovery just got pushed further out.

Levi Strauss $LEVI ( ▲ 1.97% )  

Beat the quarter, raised guidance and the dividend, and the stock is still lower premarket. The third quarter earnings guide came in under estimates, and a stock priced for perfection got punished for good but not great.

AstraZeneca $AZN ( ▼ 3.86% )  

Down hard after its heart drug Wainua failed a late stage trial. Partner Ionis $IONS ( ▼ 9.37% )  is getting hit alongside it, and the miss erases a pipeline story bulls had already penciled in.

Salesforce $CRM ( ▲ 0.51% )  

Caught a downgrade at KeyBanc, which said its channel checks can't find evidence of upside from here. Software sentiment is fragile enough that a "we looked and found nothing" call moves the stock.

IBM $IBM ( ▼ 2.62% )  

Lower on a report that Starbucks is using AI to cut its reliance on IBM and Microsoft. It's the first named example of the fear stalking software all year, that AI replaces enterprise vendors instead of feeding them.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

Housing Bill Becomes Law (Friday)
The ROAD to Housing Act becomes law tomorrow without Trump's signature unless he vetoes it first. It restricts corporate buyers of single family homes and pushes zoning reform.

Fed's Williams Speaks (Later Today)
First Fed voice on tape since the minutes revealed a hike camp exists. If he validates it, September odds harden. If he downplays it, watch the front end of the curve rally.

Sam Altman On CNBC (10 AM ET)
OpenAI publicly releases its GPT-5.6 models today after the government lifted rollout limits. Anything Altman says about compute demand hits memory and chip names within minutes, one day before SK Hynix trades.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

Happy Wednesday

The ceasefire with Iran fell apart and oil moved back toward $80. Trump told the NATO summit "I think it's over" after US forces struck more than 80 targets inside Iran overnight. The bigger story imho is the Fed, where rate hike odds keep climbing. I think a hike will move money more then another ceasefire breaking.

Let’s dig in...

Today's Big Picture

1. Oil Climbs as the Ceasefire Crumbles

President Trump called the Iran truce over after Tehran attacked three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The US hit more than 80 targets overnight and Trump says more strikes are coming tonight. Crude pushed near $80 a barrel. Worth noting: tanker traffic through Hormuz is still running at a normal 40 crossings a day, so shippers aren't panicking yet.

2. Fed Minutes Reveal a Family Fight

Kevin Warsh ran his first meeting as Fed chair last month and the minutes show a genuinely split room. Many officials see rates at or below current levels by year end. Many others see them higher. The dot plot narrowly tilts toward one hike this year, and traders moved their bets further toward an October hike after today's oil spike.

3. Tech Rotation Hits the Kospi

South Korea's benchmark index dropped into a bear market today. Samsung and SK Hynix make up roughly half the index, so when chip sentiment turns, the whole market goes with it. Investors moved money into cheaper AI names like Alibaba $BABA, which had its best day in months.

Market Overview

Index Performance

Stock Spotlight

SpaceX $SPCX ( ▼ 4.51% )  
dipped below its $150 IPO price before stabilizing this morning. Analyst targets average $236, so Wall Street and investors are seeing two different companies right now.

Broadcom $AVGO ( ▼ 0.28% )  
landed a commitment from Apple worth more than $30 billion for US-made chips. Real orders, not an AI promise.

Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 4.03% )  
is trading at its cheapest forward valuation since 2019 despite record revenue. The stock rose today while the market fell. The multiple is shrinking while the business keeps growing.

Big Name Updates

Chevron $CVX ( ▲ 1.35% )  
advanced with crude, and energy stocks broadly caught a bid on the Middle East news.

Rivian $RIVN ( ▼ 3.53% )  
stabilized after yesterday's heavy drop on plans to sell more stock.

Levi Strauss $LEVI ( ▲ 1.97% )  
reports after the close. A clean read on how consumers are spending on clothing.

Other Notable Company News

American Airlines $AAL ( ▼ 0.65% )  
led travel stocks lower as jet fuel costs climb back.

Banco Santander $SAN ( ▲ 0.58% )  
fell after Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain.

GE Vernova $GEV ( ▲ 1.52% )  
got a boost from a Bank of America note projecting a 100 gigawatt US power shortfall through 2030.

Blue Origin
raising about $10 billion at a $130 billion valuation, its first outside money ever.

Costco $COST ( ▲ 0.36% )  
reports June sales later today.

Wall Street Is Crowded Into The Wrong AI Stocks

The ones supplying the chips, the cloud capacity, and the data tools everything else runs on.

Stockearnings put together a free report on 9 AI stocks I am watching. 

No eBook, no homework. Just the list and the reason each one made it.

See the 9 stocks now

_{Today’s Sponsor}

Sector Watch

Bond Market

The 10-year yield hit its highest level since May and the 30-year crossed back above 5. Investors are pricing in the inflation risk of higher energy costs, and yields rose across Europe and Asia too. Tomorrow: a $22 billion 30-year auction, worth watching with yields at these levels.

Policy Watch

Fed

Warsh cut the post-meeting statement to a third of its usual length, and most officials liked the shorter version. He also dropped the old language that leaned toward easing. Less forward guidance means fewer hints for markets and more surprises on Fed days.

Iran

The ceasefire breakdown triggered fast policy moves overnight:

• Treasury revoked the license that let Iran export oil globally.

• The military struck more than 80 targets inside Iran.

• Trump floated reinstating the naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz and taking Kharg Island, the port handling most of Iran's oil exports.

Trade & Energy

Trump said he wants to cut off all trade with Spain after Madrid closed its airspace to US planes. Spain's response: EU trade runs through Brussels, so this is easier said than done.

Russia banned diesel exports through July 31 after Ukrainian drone strikes crippled its refineries. Russia supplied about a tenth of the world's seaborne diesel last year, and New York diesel futures moved hard on the news.

What to Watch

The AI company quietly automating every Walmart distribution center. 
23 billion in orders on the book.

It's just one of seven names in this free MarketBeat report.

Tonight's Threatened Strikes

Trump says the US will hit Iran again tonight. If Iran answers by targeting more ships, oil has room to run. If Hormuz traffic stays normal, markets may shrug.

SK Hynix US Debut

The chipmaker starts trading on the Nasdaq Friday, two days after its home market entered a bear. The reception will tell us where AI appetite really stands.

Weekly Jobless Claims

Tomorrow morning. Another real-time read on the labor market, plus Fed speakers Williams and Logan later in the day, the first Fed voices since the minutes.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

The Tesla Moment for Heavy Equipment

Every excavator, forklift, and crane built today still leans on the same fluid plumbing engineers cursed forty years ago. Leaks, wasted diesel, heavy maintenance. 

RISE Robotics swaps the hydraulic cylinder for a belt-and-electric drive called Beltdraulics, delivering the force needed by operators except without oil. 

The founders came out of MIT. They hold 20+ patents, booked $9.7M in revenue, and raised $27M+ from backers who saw this early. The community round on Wefunder is now open, so everyday investors can take a stake before the next phase of production. 

Tesla rewired the car. RISE wants to rewire the machines that build everything else.

Own a piece today

Good Morning

Well, the ceasefire lasted about three weeks. Trump called it over this morning, oil's back up, and futures are red across the board.

Gold actually fell this morning. On a war headline.

To me this says traders aren't scared of the war, they're scared of paying more for oil. This pushes the Fed toward raising rates instead of cutting them, which is why I care way more about what's in those Fed minutes at 2 today than anything happening at the open.

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

1. Oil Is The Headline. The Fear Trade Isn't Buying It.

Everyone sees Brent near $78. Fewer see that hike odds for this month went from roughly one in four to better than one in three overnight, and a Fed forced hawkish by energy does not fade the way oil headlines do.

Now watch what isn't moving: gold is down again this morning, its fourth straight decline, and the VIX is barely up. This is being priced as a supply problem, not a war.

2. The Chip Selloff Is About Crowding, Not Earnings

The Kospi entered a bear market overnight with Samsung and SK Hynix making up half the index, and that concentration is the tell. Nvidia has lost about a trillion in value since May while analysts raised estimates the whole way down.

3. Apple Just Made The Opposite Bet

While the market pushes chips aside, Apple locked in $30 billion of Broadcom supply through 2031, its biggest U.S. manufacturing deal ever. Nobody commits five years of silicon spend into demand they doubt. The people with the best view of the order book are extending, not trimming.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

SpaceX $SPCX ( ▼ 4.51% )  

trying to hold its $150 IPO opening price while Bezos raises $10 billion for Blue Origin at a $130 billion valuation. Private money is paying up for space exposure the public market just spent two days selling.

Diamondback Energy $FANG ( ▲ 0.76% )  

Leading energy higher with Occidental and APA on the oil spike. Funds that spent weeks positioning for de escalation are underweight and forced to chase.

United Airlines $UAL ( ▼ 2.36% )  

Falling with Carnival and Norwegian as crude near $75 rewrites the fuel bill. Airlines that didn't hedge fuel now have to eat the cost or raise fares into a softening consumer.

Rivian Automotive $RIVN ( ▼ 3.53% )  

Down again after its worst day since early 2024. The 75 million share offering forces existing holders to either average down into dilution or step aside.

Estee Lauder $EL ( ▲ 0.82% )  

Lower after its restructuring estimate grew to $1.75 billion from $1.55 billion. Holders who bought the turnaround story now have to decide if a plan that keeps getting pricier is still a plan.

Bath & Body Works $BBWI ( ▲ 2.01% )  

Cut to sell at Goldman on fears third party distribution cannibalizes its own stores. Funds benchmarked against sell ratings have to trim, and the premarket tape shows it.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

FOMC June Minutes (2:00 PM ET)
Warsh said almost nothing at his first press conference, so these minutes carry unusual weight. If the internal debate reads hawkish with oil already moving, September hike pricing hardens and rate-sensitive names take the hit. If the language is scrubbed clean, that's your preview of a Fed that says less on purpose.

Levi Strauss Earnings And Costco June Sales (After The Bell)
A clean consumer read landing just as energy costs climb again. Soft Costco numbers and the higher oil weaker consumer narrative owns tomorrow's tape.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

The Next Breakout Might Be in Your Pocket

Everyone’s hunting for the next Unicorn.

The type of “category disruptor” that grows fast and turns early believers into big winners.

59,000+ investors think that Mode Mobile could be one of those rare finds.

Americans spend 4 ½ hours on their phones daily, and Mode Mobile is monetizing that screentime. With $1B+ earned by over 490M customers and 32,481% revenue growth, Mode’s EarnPhone is turning smartphones into income generating assets.

Their previous raises sold out, and the company is now offering pre-IPO shares at $0.52/share with up to 20% bonus, exclusive to early investors.

Being early is everything, and this window is still open.

>> Review the offer before it closes

^{*Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

Happy Tuesday

The Dow hit a record this morning and gave it back by the time I was heating up my publix sub leftovers for lunch. Tech sold off, oil ran on Middle East news, and buyers rotated into banks and healthcare. Money isn't leaving this market and all is good imho. It's just rotating a bit.

Let’s dig in...

Today's Big Picture

Iran Attacks Ships, US Pulls The Oil License

Iran hit three vessels near the Strait of Hormuz in the past day, including a Qatari LNG tanker. The US Treasury responded by revoking the license that let Iran sell oil legally. Brent pushed above $76 and the naval coalition raised the strait's threat level to severe. The June interim deal is hanging by a thread.

The Memory Trade Is Now A Bear Market

Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix and the Roundhill Memory ETF are all well off their recent highs. Semiconductors have lost roughly $1.5 trillion in market value since June 25, with Micron alone shedding nearly $350 billion. The damage spread past memory today to equipment makers like Applied Materials and Intel.

Financials And Healthcare Hit Records

Bank, insurance, and large-cap healthcare ETFs all touched all-time highs this morning. Wells Fargo's Mike Mayo called this one of the best banking environments he's seen in three decades, citing record capital markets activity and loan growth. One caution: the financials chart is overbought on momentum measures. Rallies this fast usually need a breather.

Market Overview

Index Performance

Stock Spotlight

Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 4.03% )  
closed green while the rest of the chip sector sold off. On a day this red, buyers treating one name differently tells you something.

Rivian $RIVN ( ▼ 3.53% )  
fell hard after announcing a 75 million share sale to fund a Department of Energy loan requirement for its Georgia plant. The raise makes sense, but shareholders are the ones paying for the buildout.

Caterpillar $CAT ( ▲ 1.49% )  
fell as the AI unwind hit industrials. The equipment maker had become a popular proxy for data center power demand, and proxy trades get sold with the real thing.

SpaceX $SPCX ( ▼ 4.51% )  
drifted lower on its first day in the Nasdaq-100, back near its opening-day price of $150. Forced index buying couldn't overcome a weak tape.

Eli Lilly $LLY ( ▼ 2.33% )  
caught a bid as the rotation favored healthcare. JPMorgan raised its target to $1,400 ahead of August earnings, expecting another big Mounjaro quarter.

Big Name Updates

Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 0.69% )  
priced a bond sale of at least $25 billion, four months after borrowing $37 billion. Big Tech is funding the AI buildout with debt at a pace we've never seen.

Walmart $WMT ( ▲ 1.51% )  
rose after announcing price cuts on ground beef, Coca-Cola and other staples. Trump says he requested the move for the country's 250th birthday.

Adobe $ADBE ( ▲ 0.45% )  
climbed even after Bank of America reinstated coverage at underperform with a $190 target. When a stock rallies on a bearish call, the bad news is already priced in.

Other Notable Company News

USA Rare Earth $USAR ( ▼ 2.07% )  
fell as lawmakers expanded their inquiry into the government's $1.6 billion investment in the company.

First Solar $FSLR ( ▼ 0.29% )  
rose after Deutsche Bank upgraded it to buy, citing a potential trade policy shift.

Shell $SHEL ( ▲ 1.02% )  
raised its gas production guidance despite the Middle East conflict still hampering Qatari output.

Plug Power $PLUG ( ▼ 6.3% )  
secured a 50MW electrolyzer order for a hydrogen hub in Australia.

Wall Street Is Crowded Into The Wrong AI Stocks

The ones supplying the chips, the cloud capacity, and the data tools everything else runs on.

Stockearnings put together a free report on 9 AI stocks I am watching. 

No eBook, no homework. Just the list and the reason each one made it.

See the 9 stocks now

_{Today’s Sponsor}

Sector Watch

Bond Market

Yields climbed across the curve with the 10-year back around 4.54. The New York Fed's consumer survey put one-year inflation expectations at 3.7, the highest in nearly three years. The five-year reading held at 3.0, which is the number keeping the Fed calm for now.

Policy Watch

The May trade deficit came in at $77.6 billion, up sharply from April's $54.6 billion as exports fell and imports rose. Slightly better than forecast, but the widening trend is the story.

• At the NATO summit in Turkey, the alliance agreed to buy up to ten Saab surveillance aircraft, replacing its aging Boeing fleet.

• Member nations remain under pressure to hit last year's target of 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035.

What to Watch

The AI company quietly automating every Walmart distribution center. 
23 billion in orders on the book.

It's just one of seven names in this free MarketBeat report.

Earnings Season Kicks Off

Levi Strauss reports Wednesday, PepsiCo Thursday, Delta and Hyatt Friday. Consumer names give us a cleaner read on the actual economy than anything tech-adjacent right now.

Treasury Auctions

The 10-year note prices Wednesday and the 30-year bond Thursday. With inflation expectations rising, weak demand here pushes yields higher and stocks will feel it.

BlackRock ETF Launch

The iShares Nasdaq 100 ETF starts trading Thursday under IQQ, undercutting Invesco's QQQ on fees.

Thanks for reading - you are now the more informed 🙂

- John

P.S. Every Saturday I send premium readers the market themes I'm personally positioning around.

Today’s Sponsor

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

Good Morning

Samsung posted the best quarter in its history and got sold off, so basically the good news was already priced in. The crowd is rotating into cheaper value funds to dodge the AI selloff, but the biggest value ETF is up four times the S&P this year mostly because Micron was in it and is up 670% since January.

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

A Record Quarter Wasn't Enough For Samsung
Samsung forecast its best quarter ever, near nineteen times last year's profit, and the stock still got sold in Korea. Chips are red worldwide this morning, with Micron leading the slide here. The lesson is that the good news is already in these prices. Every chip name reporting this season now faces that same bar.

SpaceX Joins The Nasdaq-100 Before The Open
Every fund tracking the index is forced to buy SpaceX starting today. The IPO banks also just got cleared to publish, and their targets run from $63 at Morningstar to $800 at Raymond James. When Wall Street disagrees by that much, nobody actually knows what this company is worth. Expect heavy volume today.

The Dow Is Green While Chips Fall
Dow futures point up this morning even as the Nasdaq points down. That split says money is moving into software and steadier names, not leaving the market. The Dow closed above 53,000 for the first time on yesterday.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 0.69% )  
green as it launches a $25 billion bond sale this morning. Borrowing that big to fund AI buildout, on the day the market is questioning AI spend, is a statement.

Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 4.03% )  

Slipped premarket after Reuters reported China's DeepSeek is designing its own inference chip to lean less on Nvidia.

Crinetics $CRNX ( ▼ 0.05% )  

Roughly doubled after Vertex $VRTX agreed to buy it for about $10 billion in cash, $85 a share, for its hormone-disorder drugs.

Fiserv $FISV ( ▼ 2.32% )  

Moved higher after the Wall Street Journal reported talks to sell its debit card network to big banks including JPMorgan and Bank of America. The banks want a route around federal caps on debit fees, so both sides have reason to keep this alive.

Rivian $RIVN ( ▼ 3.53% )  

Fell premarket even though delivery and revenue guidance beat estimates. It plans to sell 75 million new shares, and holders care more about that dilution than the beat.

Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 0.19% )  

Held green even as it cut 4,800 jobs and admitted its game studios lost money on past deals. The market reads the cuts as cleanup while AI and cloud spending climbs, so buyers stay in.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

Fed Minutes (Wednesday, 2:00 PM ET)
The first minutes under new chair Kevin Warsh land tomorrow, and Governor Waller just said risks have flipped toward inflation.

SK Hynix U.S. Listing (Friday)
SK Hynix, Samsung's main memory rival, begins trading on the Nasdaq Friday in a listing worth around $28 billion. Landing days after this selloff, it is a clean read on whether investors still want fresh chip exposure.

Oil And The Strait Of Hormuz
Iran fired missiles at commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, the channel that carries close to a fifth of the world's seaborne oil. Crude bounced off its lowest level since late February, and US-Iran talks are going nowhere. Cheap oil has quietly pushed the Dow's run, so any real disruption works against it.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

Happy Monday

Dow closed above 53,000 today. First time ever. Chips led the charge, a day after Foxconn's sales numbers gave everyone a reason to believe the AI trade still has life in it. Trump plugged Dell from the White House this morning, and the stock actually moved on it.

Let’s dig in...

Today's Big Picture

AI Trade Finds Its Footing
Foxconn's weekend sales beat is the clearest signal yet that AI chip demand hasn't cracked. Samsung reports tomorrow and is expected to post a profit jump close to 18 times last year's number. A clean print there should put a lot of the recent chip stock jitters to bed.

Oil Keeps Sliding on a Supply Glut
OPEC+ raised output again and ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz picked back up over the weekend. Both are draining out the inflation premium that built into oil during the Iran standoff. Cheaper oil gives the Fed more room, but a break in that ceasefire is still the one thing that could flip this fast.

Trump Turns a Photo Op Into a Stock Move
Trump told Americans to buy a Dell computer at this morning's Trump Accounts event, and Dell moved on it. AMD moved even more after Goldman raised its price target well above where the stock trades now. Worth watching how much more of this we get as Trump Accounts stay in the news this week.

Market Overview

Index Performance

Stock Spotlight

TeraWulf $WULF ( ▼ 5.3% )  
signed a 20 year lease with Anthropic for a data campus in Kentucky. The deal is worth roughly $19 billion over its initial term and will support about 401 megawatts of computing load once built out.

Micron $MU ( ▼ 1.24% )  
signed a long term supply deal with Ford to provide chip technology for the automaker's vehicles. Both stocks moved higher.

Solstice Advanced Materials $SOLS ( ▼ 2.39% )  
agreed to buy Element Solutions for more than $12 billion in cash and stock. Solstice fell hard on the deal even though it priced Element at a real premium.

Big Name Updates

Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 4.03% )  
pushed back on a report claiming its next generation Kyber AI servers face a year long delay. The company said its roadmap is intact, and the stock finished close to flat.

Strategy $MSTR ( ▲ 0.8% )  
sold about $216 million of bitcoin last week to help cover dividends on its preferred stock. It still holds more than 843,000 bitcoin.

Other Notable Company News

ONDS Technologies $ONDS ( ▼ 5.1% )  

agreed to buy autonomous aircraft maker DZYNE Technologies for close to $876 million in cash and stock.

Penguin Solutions $PENG ( ▼ 3.74% )  
got a price target bump from Rosenblatt ahead of Tuesday's earnings report.

NN Inc $NNBR ( ▼ 2.52% )  
landed its first orders to build parts for a robotic surgery platform.

Novartis $NVS ( ▼ 0.37% )  
agreed to buy UK cancer drug biotech Myricx Bio for up to $1.5 billion.

JetBlue $JBLU ( ▼ 2.7% )  
got downgraded by Raymond James, who sees a tougher road ahead versus rivals like Frontier.

Intel $INTC ( ▼ 2.4% )  
reportedly fixed yield issues on its 18A chip process, with Oregon and Arizona output ramping toward 30,000 wafers a month.

Today’s Sponsor

Wall Street Is Crowded Into The Wrong AI Stocks

The ones supplying the chips, the cloud capacity, and the data tools everything else runs on.

Stockearnings.com put together a free report on 9 AI stocks I am watching. 
The names positioned to lead as that spending lands, before earnings season reprices them.

No eBook, no homework. Just the list and the reason each one made it.

See the 9 stocks, now→

Sector Watch

Bond Market

The dollar strengthened against a basket of currencies while the yen stayed pinned near multi decade lows. The 10 year yield held mostly steady. Wednesday brings minutes from the Fed's first meeting under new chair Kevin Warsh, though don't expect much detail given how little he's said publicly so far.

Policy Watch

Fed
Waller said the risks the Fed is watching have completely flipped over the last year. Inflation is picking up while the labor market steadies out, which is a different problem than the one he was fighting when the Fed cut rates three times last fall.

Fiscal and Trade

• OPEC+ agreed to another output increase for next month, adding to the glut pulling oil down.

• Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz kept recovering over the weekend, another sign the ceasefire is holding for now.

International
Samsung's earnings tomorrow and SK Hynix's Nasdaq listing this week are the two clearest tests left of whether the AI chip story still holds up.

What to Watch

The AI company quietly automating every Walmart distribution center. 
23 billion in orders on the book.

It's just one of seven names in this free MarketBeat report.

SK Hynix Nasdaq Debut
Starts trading later this week in one of the largest listings ever. A good read on how much appetite is left for AI infrastructure names.

Fed Minutes Wednesday
First minutes under new chair Kevin Warsh. Given how little he's said publicly so far, don't expect much new here.

Thanks for reading - you are now the more informed 🙂

- John

Today’s Sponsor

The Tesla Moment for Heavy Equipment

Every excavator, forklift, and crane built today still leans on the same fluid plumbing engineers cursed forty years ago. Leaks, wasted diesel, heavy maintenance. 

RISE Robotics swaps the hydraulic cylinder for a belt-and-electric drive called Beltdraulics, delivering the force needed by operators except without oil. 

The founders came out of MIT. They hold 20+ patents, booked $9.7M in revenue, and raised $27M+ from backers who saw this early. The community round on Wefunder is now open, so everyday investors can take a stake before the next phase of production. 

Tesla rewired the car. RISE wants to rewire the machines that build everything else.

Own a piece today

Good Morning

Tech futures are green after the long weekend and traders are leaning back into the AI names. Two big memory makers report this week, Samsung tomorrow and SK Hynix listing Friday, both core to the AI buildout.

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

Chips Bounce On Thin Proof
The whole chip group is green today off one number, Foxconn's strong weekend sales. Foxconn builds for Nvidia, so good sales read as real AI demand. That lifts the open but settles nothing. Samsung tomorrow is the first real test.

Oil Has No Floor Yet
You've heard oil is falling for weeks, so here's what's new. Cheap crude usually tempts governments to refill strategic reserves, and that buying puts a floor under prices. This time they're waiting, so the floor isn't there and prices can keep drifting lower. That keeps inflation pressure easing right into Wednesday's Fed minutes.Wednesday's Fed minutes.

Dealmakers Come In Loaded
Five takeovers hit before the bell, from Lockheed's roughly $3.5 billion move on Ultra Maritime to easyJet's $7.3 billion sale to Castlelake. Comcast's Sky is buying ITV's TV arm, Novartis is taking Myrixc Bio, and CNBC parent Versant grabbed golf-sim maker Full Swing for $530 million. Boards don't move this fast unless confidence is high.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

ASML $ASML ( ▼ 0.38% )  

Got a target lift to $2,300 from Bernstein on a record build in both logic and memory capacity for AI. It is the one company every chipmaker depends on for gear, so funds sitting underweight the group have a harder case to stay out.

Lam Research $LRCX ( ▼ 0.8% )  

Led the S&P before the bell after Morgan Stanley raised targets across the chip tool names. Applied Materials and KLA got the same call, so anyone who sold the tool group in last week's slide now watches the analysts mark a bottom.

DataDog $DDOG ( ▼ 4.26% )  

Went the other way after Bernstein cut it to market perform on tough comparisons and non AI growth topping out. Holders who owned it as a clean AI winner have to make that call before the company reports.

T-Mobile $TMUS ( ▲ 3.38% )  

Drew an upgrade to buy from Bank of America, which says the telecom gloom is overdone after the stock's slide since February. Bears who leaned on that weakness now have an analyst telling them the worst is priced in.

Strategy $MSTR ( ▲ 0.8% )  

Firmed premarket on a turnaround meant to rebuild investor trust, but it still tracks bitcoin more than its own news. Anyone holding it has to decide if they own a company or just leveraged crypto.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

Samsung Earnings (Tuesday)
The world's biggest memory maker reports, with profit expected up roughly eighteen times from a year ago. A print near that number hands the argument to the memory bulls. A miss, and this morning's bounce gets tested fast.

SK Hynix U.S. Listing (Prices Thursday)
A roughly $28 billion Nasdaq listing, one of the biggest on record. It prices Thursday and trades Friday. Buyer appetite here is a live read on the whole AI trade.

SpaceX Joins The Nasdaq-100 (At Today's Close)
The sleeper. SpaceX enters the index Tuesday, so Nasdaq-100 funds must buy it at today's closing price. Expect a burst of late-day volume, though a small float keeps the starting weight tiny.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

One Shark Missed Billions… Another Saw This Coming

Imagine turning down Uber at a valuation of $10 million, only to watch it go public at over $80 billion.

That’s exactly what happened to Mark Cuban… a 799,900% return, gone.

But original Shark Tank investor Kevin Harrington built his career doing the opposite: spotting asymmetric opportunities before they go mainstream.

Like Uber turned vehicles into income-generating assets, Mode Mobile is turning smartphones into income streams.

They were named the #1 fastest-growing software company by Deloitte and have already helped their users earn and save over $1B.

Kevin Harrington invested early.

And at just $0.52/share, you can still get in before their potential IPO.

Secure shares at $0.52 while the pre-IPO window is still open.

^{Potential Uber return for Marc Cuban does not take into account dilution.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period in 2023.}

^{Please read the offering circular at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A Offering.}

Happy Sunday.

Everybody read the same headline this week. UBS counted nearly one million brand new millionaires minted last year, more than 1,200 a day in the US alone.

Look at who those millionaires actually are. The money is old. The first Americans born after World War II turned eighty this past January. And buried deep in that same report sits the strangest number nobody quoted, that nearly half of American net wealth is now liquid. One tap from cash. The biggest fortune in history has never been easier to move.

Put those two facts side by side and the millionaire headline stops being a birth announcement. It’s a will being read in slow motion. The largest, most liquid pile of money our species has ever stacked is starting to change hands, and the question everyone reaches for next, will the kids be responsible with it, turns out to be the wrong question entirely.

The kids aren’t going to manage this money. Something else is. And once you see what that does to the oldest rule in wealth, the one every culture on earth has a proverb for, you can’t unsee it.

But first, come stand in a Chicago trading pit with me for a minute.

 The question the floor ran on

There’s an old story from the pits, and I heard it retold this week by a strategist named Dean Christians, who started his career in the 30 year bond pit before the floors went quiet. He said the thing that amazed him was who won. You’d have a high school dropout standing shoulder to shoulder with a guy holding a Harvard degree, and the dropout, running on nothing but grit and hunger, was just as successful. Sometimes more.

The whole floor ran on one question, the old Ned Davis line every pit trader knew by heart. Do you want to be right, or do you want to make money?

The pits closed. The machines took the floor. Hold that question anyway, because the next fifty years are going to answer it permanently. And then they’re going to hand us a much harder one.

The largest, most liquid fortune ever assembled

Back to that UBS report, because the millionaire count was the least interesting thing in it. There are now about 58 million millionaires on earth, and together they own roughly 250 trillion dollars. That’s about 48 percent of everything.

Global stock market capitalization just hit a record 166 trillion dollars, up 32 trillion in a single year. Measured against global GDP, it’s the richest reading ever recorded, around 134 percent.

But the detail that matters is buried deeper in the UBS report, in a section almost nobody quotes. It’s about liquidity. In the United States, almost half of all net personal wealth is now liquid. Cash, brokerage accounts, funds, securities. And UBS says that share has been rising relentlessly for ten to fifteen years straight, in every market they track.

Think about what that means historically. Your grandfather’s wealth was a farm, a house, a hardware store. It was heavy. It needed hands on it. It took a season to turn into cash, if it could be turned at all. Today’s fortune is a screen full of tickers, one tap from money. We didn’t just build the biggest pile of wealth in history. We built the most frictionless one. The easiest to move, the easiest to hand off, and, this is the part I want you to sit with, the easiest to automate.

One more thing about the pile. It’s old, and it’s top heavy. Median wealth per adult in the United States fell almost 20 percent from 2020 to 2025, net of inflation, while average wealth rose about ten. The average went up because the top went up, and the top is grey. The postwar generation, the one that built most of this, controls roughly half of everything Americans own.

The clock started in January

On January 1 of this year, the first Americans of the postwar generation turned eighty.

That’s a date for actuaries, not greeting cards. The number of estates settling each year is expected to climb from about 2.6 million now to 4 million by 2037. Cerulli, the research firm everyone in wealth management works from, projects that 124 trillion dollars will change hands in the United States alone by 2048, with roughly 105 trillion going to heirs. UBS puts the global figure at more than 83 trillion over the next two decades. And it’s not waiting for the funerals. About a trillion dollars a year is already moving, through bequests, down-payment gifts, tuition checks, the quiet give-while-you-live economy.

To size it, the amount headed to American heirs is nearly four times what the entire US economy produces in a year. Moving one estate, one wire transfer, one closing at a time.

Everyone who writes about this asks the same next question. Will the kids be responsible with it? Will they blow it on crypto and vibes?

Wrong question. Here’s the one nobody’s asking.

They won’t manage it. Nothing personal.

Look at who’s catching this money. Gen X inherits first, but millennials inherit the most, somewhere north of 45 trillion dollars over the next quarter century. And they’re inheriting it in the middle of a very specific labor story.

Finance and information sector payrolls are shrinking by about 28,000 jobs a month this year, with AI adoption cited as the leading reason. Oracle cut 21,000 people, about 13 percent of its workforce, and named AI in the filing. The St. Louis Fed pushed back this week and said weak hiring, not AI, explains most of why young workers can’t get in the door. Fine. Either way, the outcome is the same. The junior analyst seat, the one where a 23 year old used to spend a decade learning what money does under pressure, is getting scarce. I wrote a whole letter about that machine a few weeks back, so I won’t rerun it.

Here’s the new part. The old worry was that heirs would arrive unprepared. The new reality is that they won’t need to be prepared, because the preparation is being automated out from under the question.

By the time the median inheritance actually lands, and remember, heirs are increasingly in their fifties and sixties when it does, managing a portfolio will be something you delegate to an agent the way you delegate driving directions today. Tax harvesting, rebalancing, withdrawal sequencing, estate titling. The kids inheriting this money are the first generation native to that. They already let software finish their sentences. They will absolutely let it run their brokerage account.

So the Great Wealth Transfer isn’t really parent to child. It’s parent to the child’s agent. The first inheritance in human history that arrives pre-automated.

Today’s Sponsor

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

The part that should actually stop you

Every culture on earth has the same proverb about inherited money. In America it’s shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. In Japan it’s rice paddies to rice paddies. In China, wealth doesn’t survive three generations. One generation builds it, the next coasts on it, the third loses it. It’s so universal it might as well be physics.

But it was never physics. It was human error. Fortunes dispersed because heirs got bored, managers got greedy, advisors charged too much, somebody got divorced, somebody had a hot tip. The proverb was the economy’s recycling program. Human incompetence was the one estate tax no government ever had to pass, and it worked for five thousand years.

Agentic AI patches human error out of the fortune.

Run that forward. An estate that used to depend on a competent heir now depends on a subscription. The trust fund used to be a set of instructions plus a prayer that the humans downstream would follow them. An agent-run trust is a set of instructions that execute themselves, without boredom, without ego, without a midlife crisis, for a century. The decay term drops out of the compounding equation.

UBS itself, in dry report language, notes that the global wealth pyramid may stop being pyramid-shaped within a few years, as the bottom band shrinks and the upper bands swell. They mean the geometry. I mean it bigger. The pyramid was a pyramid because wealth leaked downward through error and dispersal. Turn the leak off and the shape hardens.

And the state has noticed. UBS’s own chief economist says it out loud in the report: governments are likely to seek ways to mobilize private wealth to bring down the cost of their debt. So here’s the actual political economy of the next fifty years, and you can quote me. Forget labor versus capital. The next fifty years are the algorithm that makes fortunes immortal versus the governments that need them to die a little.

In fairness, the leak is real

The transfer will likely be be later, smaller, and lumpier than the headline number.

People live longer now, which means heirs inherit at 62, not 35. Healthcare eats estates from the inside; a memory care facility can quietly run 50,000 dollars a year for a decade before a single dollar passes down. Anyone who’s walked a parent through their last decade already knows that math by heart. Surveys show more than half of millennials expecting an inheritance anticipate at least 350,000 dollars, while most parents planning to leave one say it’ll be under 250,000. And the concentration is brutal. Roughly half the total transfer comes from about 2 percent of households.

Which means for most families this isn’t a jackpot. It’s a trickle that arrives around retirement. But notice what that does to the thesis. It sharpens it. The fortunes big enough to get the full agentic treatment, the family-office tier, are exactly the ones at the top of the pyramid. The immortality upgrade goes disproportionately to the largest piles. The proverb dies first where it mattered most.

The other honest catch is on the machine side. When every agent optimizes the same objective on the same data, you get crowding at machine speed, and whoever ends up owning the agent layer becomes the new BlackRock and Vanguard rolled into one, with a direct line into a hundred million households. That’s a concentration story we’ll be writing about for years.

What capital was never able to buy

Now the turn, and I want to bring in a voice with some weight. Joel Mokyr, the economic historian who won the Nobel last year, was asked what actually matters for long term prosperity. His answer surprised me. He said he has a hard time finding any case in history where a truly great idea was stopped by a lack of capital. If the idea is good, the money shows up. The railroads weren’t short of capital. They were short of engineers who could build and fix the things.

The constraint was never money. It was knowing what to do that was worth doing.

Now put that next to everything above. We’re heading into a world where the money side, the allocating, compounding, optimizing side, is free and automatic. Capital’s mechanical work is getting solved the way arithmetic got solved. Which means the scarce input, the thing that was always the real bottleneck, becomes almost the only input left.

The objective. The why. What is this money for. What do we fund, what do we build, what do we refuse to touch. An agent can maximize anything you can specify. It cannot want anything on your behalf. Wanting well might turn out to be the last unautomated job in finance.

So what do you actually do

The usual reminder first. I’m not a financial advisor and nothing in this letter is advice, you know the drill. Good thing this part isn’t about your portfolio anyway.

Most of you reading this are on the giving side of the transfer, not the catching side. You own the things. Your estate plan, if you have one, specifies the what with lawyerly precision. Dates, percentages, trustees, titling.

Here’s what the wealth-management people will tell you off the record. The families that blow the handoff almost never blow it on structure. They blow it because the parents and the kids never once talked about what the money is for. The heirs almost always know exactly what’s in the accounts. Almost none of them can tell you what any of it was for. The instructions transfer. The purpose doesn’t.

For five thousand years that gap was survivable, because the heir had to engage with the money just to keep it alive, and engagement forced the education. That forcing function is what the agent removes. The money will now keep itself alive without ever requiring the heir to understand it. Like inheriting a vineyard you never have to visit. The grapes get picked either way.

A while back I told you the move was to teach a young person to read the numbers. This is stranger. The numbers are going to read themselves. So skip the rebalancing lecture, the agent has that covered, and tell them the story instead. Where the money came from. What it cost you. What you’d hate to watch it become. That’s the one clause no lawyer drafts and no agent can generate. Because the software will faithfully run whatever objective it inherits, and if nobody writes one down, the default is make more money, quietly, forever, for people who were never told why.

Back to the pit

The high school dropout beat the Harvard guy because he wanted it more and carried no ego about being right. The machines carry no ego either. They don’t sleep, they don’t tilt, and over the next fifty years they’ll take every seat in the pit at once, managing the largest and most liquid fortune our species has ever stacked up, on behalf of a generation that will never have to learn how.

And if you want proof the wiring is already going in at birth, look at yesterday’s date. Trump Accounts launched on the Fourth, timed to the country’s 250th birthday. Every American baby born through 2028 gets 1,000 dollars from the Treasury, dropped into a US equity index fund managed by private firms, fees capped at a tenth of a percent, locked away until eighteen. Michael Dell pledged 6.25 billion dollars to seed kids who don’t qualify for the government money. Ray Dalio is covering Connecticut, Brad Gerstner is covering Indiana, and Uber, Intel, IBM and Nvidia are adding contributions to their benefits packages. Gerstner’s line at the White House was that this makes every child in America a capitalist from birth.

Set the politics aside, whatever you think of them, because the mechanics are this whole letter compressed into one product. Ownership from day one. Autopilot from day one. Zero engagement required for eighteen years, with the objective preinstalled: grow. These kids won’t inherit their first portfolio someday. They’ll be born already holding one, run by machines, before they can hold their own head up. The only thing the program doesn’t ship with is the one thing this letter has been circling. Nobody tells the kid what it’s for.

Do you want to be right, or do you want to make money? That question had a fifty year run. It’s solved. The machine takes money, every time, and it’s never wrong long enough to matter.

Which leaves the one question no machine can take off our hands. Not how to make it. What it’s for. The kids inheriting all of this, some of them born this holiday weekend with a portfolio already compounding in their name, will be the first people in history who never have to think about the first question. The second one doesn’t ship with the account. It gets handed across a kitchen table, and the machines don’t get invited to those. That part of the job is still yours.

Stay curious 😎

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Never worry about roaming again

Stay connected on every trip with Saily eSIM plans. From beach vacations to business travel, access data in 200+ destinations.

VIP perks available.

Activate instantly upon arrival.

Download SAILY in your app store and use code newsletter15 at checkout to get an exclusive 15% off your first purchase.

Get 15% off now

^{Chat support available 24/7. Get a full refund if your device isn’t eSIM compatible.}

Good Morning

The economy added 57k jobs in June, about half what forecasters expected. Normally weak hiring is bad news, but the market has been worried the Fed's next move is a rate hike, so the soft number actually takes pressure off of rate hikes. Futures flipped green on the print and bond yields eased.

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

The Jobs Miss Eases The Rate-Hike Fear
Payrolls came in at 57,000, half the 115,000 expected and the end of a three-month streak of gains above 100,000. That undercuts the case for a rate hike, the exact fear that pressured tech all week, and the two-year Treasury yield fell on the news. But the jobless rate slipped to 4.2 from 4.3, so hiring looks weak while the broader labor market still looks firm. Softer yields and a softer dollar give stocks room into the open.

Chips Crack Overseas, Bounce Here
The overnight session was ugly: Korea's Kospi fell so hard the exchange halted trading for five minutes, and memory names in Seoul and Tokyo got hit worst. But US chip names turned higher premarket once the soft jobs print landed, since a lower chance of a hike means cheaper financing for the AI buildout. Underneath the selling sits a real worry that the industry built more computing power than buyers need, louder after Meta said it would sell its spare capacity. Today tells us whether US buyers treat the Asian rout as contagion or as a discount.

Cheaper Oil Points The Same Way
Brent crude eased again and now trades under $71 a barrel, below where it sat before the US struck Iran in June. Cheaper oil cools inflation, and paired with this morning's soft print, both now point away from a rate hike. Progress in US-Iran talks and steadier tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz are behind the slide. It's the fourth straight weekly decline, the longest losing run in close to two years.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

Alphabet $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.48% )  

Lower premarket after Europe's top court upheld a $4.7 billion fine over how Google favored its own apps on Android. No appeal is left, so the cost is locked in, and holders now have to price a Europe that keeps fining Big Tech rather than letting it settle.

Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 4.03% )  

Lower with the chip group, but it rolled out a program handing startups computing power in exchange for a slice of their future revenue. First partners plan to deploy up to 170,000 of its chips, which forces the overcapacity bears to explain fresh demand while everyone else sells the group.

Palantir $PLTR ( ▼ 1.74% )  

Higher premarket after D.A. Davidson lifted it to buy and called the valuation the most attractive in a while. It's set to close the short week as one of the few green names in tech, which puts the shorts who leaned on valuation on the back foot.

Strategy $MSTR ( ▲ 0.8% )  

Higher as bitcoin gets back above $61,000. The catch is the company just dropped its never sell pledge and started selling some bitcoin, so holders have to reconcile a rally with a strategy that is quietly reversing.

Robinhood $HOOD ( ▼ 2.73% )  

Higher after Mizuho raised its target to $130 and pitched it as the online broker that grows across borders, not just at home. That reframes the bear case, since skeptics have priced it as a US only story and now have to weigh the wider runway.

AeroVironment $AVAV ( ▼ 2.57% )  

Higher after winning a $500 million Army contract for systems that knock enemy drones out of the sky. Clean catalyst with real money attached, and it lands while defense budgets stay in focus, so momentum buyers have a reason to stay in.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

Trump On CNBC (5 PM ET)
The president sits for a live interview after the close, with trade and the Fed both live topics. An offhand line on either could move futures into the evening. Worth half an eye if you hold anything overnight.

Bank Of Korea Decision (July 16)
South Korea's inflation just hit its highest level in more than two years, strengthening the case for a rate hike there. Higher Korean rates would add pressure on the same Seoul chip names that just cracked. If you're watching whether the memory selloff stabilizes, this is the next domino.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

Happy Wednesday

The Dow hit another record while chips took a breather after carrying the market all year. Money keeps rotating into banks and blue chips instead of leaving. Warsh gave us nothing on July today, so tomorrow's jobs report is the ballgame. It's out a day early with markets closed Friday.

Let’s dig in...

Today's Big Picture

Warsh Keeps His Cards Close

The new Fed chair made his first public appearance since his debut meeting and wouldn't say whether a rate hike is coming this month. He called the late July meeting a "good family fight" and said the inflation outlook has improved, but also that "prices are too high." Traders put the odds of a July hike around one in three. Tomorrow's jobs report just became the biggest data point of the month.

Chips Cool Off While the Dow Hits a Record

Semiconductors sold off hard as investors booked profits on the best trade of the first half. Micron and Sandisk led the way down after both more than tripled last quarter, so some giveback was overdue. The money didn't leave the market, it rotated into banks and blue chips, which is why the Dow set a record on a day the Nasdaq fell. That's a healthy market, not a scared one.

Meta Wants to Be a Cloud Company

Meta plans to sell its excess AI computing power to outside customers, per Bloomberg. The stock had its best day since January while CoreWeave fell hard, since Meta would be competing with it directly. Turning your biggest cost into a revenue line is the dream every hyperscaler chases. Meta just said it out loud.

Market Overview

Index Performance

Stock Spotlight

General Mills $GIS ( ▲ 2.78% )  
beat on earnings and revenue after a year of cutting base prices. Management says the plan worked, and now comes protein Cheerios and bolder flavors to keep the momentum.

Shutterstock $SSTK ( ▼ 2.75% )  
lost nearly a third of its value after Getty Images $GETY walked away from their $3.7 billion merger. A UK regulator wanted Shutterstock to sell its editorial business, and Getty's board said no thanks.

Nike $NKE ( ▲ 3.72% )  
beat on the top and bottom lines, but Greater China sales fell again. Wall Street mostly stayed neutral on the turnaround, with Bernstein the lone bull pointing to 2027.

Big Name Updates

Walmart $WMT ( ▲ 1.51% )  
fell for a sixth straight day and now sits well below its May high. A rough stretch for a stock that could do no wrong the past three years.

General Motors $GM ( ▲ 1.57% )  
slipped after second quarter sales came in at 714,896 vehicles, down from a year ago. The expired federal EV tax credit is doing real damage to electric demand.

Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 0.3% )  
reports second quarter deliveries as early as today, with estimates around 397,000. BYD already reported 557,090 fully electric deliveries, so the Chinese automaker likely retakes the global EV crown.

Kroger $KR ( ▲ 1.14% )  
agreed to buy Giant Eagle for $1.65 billion, adding nearly 200 stores across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the mid-Atlantic in its turf war with Walmart.

Other Notable Company News

Alcoa $AA ( ▼ 0.08% )  
fell hard after agreeing to pay up to $5.6 billion for South32's bauxite, alumina, and aluminum assets. Investors question the timing with aluminum prices down sharply from their wartime highs.

Robinhood $HOOD ( ▼ 2.73% )  
rose after unveiling perpetual futures in Europe, tokenized stocks that trade around the clock, its own blockchain, and a Canada expansion. Bold moves for a company whose crypto revenue was nearly cut in half last quarter.

SpaceX $SPCX ( ▼ 4.51% )  
got a buy rating and $190 target from Wedbush's Dan Ives, who called it one of the best AI plays in the market. The stock fell anyway, caught in the tech selloff.

Strategy $MSTR ( ▲ 0.8% )  
and Coinbase $COIN bounced with bitcoin after a rough quarter for crypto.

Datadog $DDOG ( ▼ 4.26% )  
gained after buying Adaptive ML, an AI startup that deploys specialized agents.

Constellation Brands $STZ ( ▲ 1.22% )  
beat on earnings and revenue. Its new CEO says beer demand is coming back, helped by the World Cup and the Knicks title run.

Today’s Sponsor

Wall Street Is Crowded Into The Wrong AI Stocks

The ones supplying the chips, the cloud capacity, and the data tools everything else runs on.

Stockearnings.com put together a free report on 9 AI stocks I am watching. 
The names positioned to lead as that spending lands, before earnings season reprices them.

No eBook, no homework. Just the list and the reason each one made it.

See the 9 stocks, now→

Sector Watch

Bond Market

Yields climbed overnight, then pulled back after Warsh said AI investment could expand the economy's productive capacity, with big implications for policy. The 10-year settled near 4.48 and the 2-year near 4.15.

Tomorrow's jobs report sets the tone for the July meeting. A hot number puts a hike squarely on the table.

Policy Watch

Fed

Warsh spent his Portugal appearance dodging rate questions on purpose. He wants the Fed to talk less, and he's living it.

• He reaffirmed the 2 percent inflation target is non-negotiable, even with the Fed's preferred gauge running at roughly double that.

• White House adviser Kevin Hassett pushed back the same morning, calling a rate hike "a macroeconomic mistake" in what he sees as a supply-driven boom.

• On the Supreme Court blocking Trump from firing Governor Lisa Cook, Warsh kept it simple: the Fed follows the law and stays independent.

The tension worth watching is Warsh versus his own White House. He was Trump's pick, and his first real test may be hiking rates over the president's objections.

Fiscal & Trade

The US decided against a long-term renewal of the USMCA trade deal with Canada and Mexico. It stays in force through its 10-year term, then moves to annual reviews. That trades certainty for leverage.

International

Peace talks in Qatar hit a snag as Iran said its delegates wouldn't meet with the US team. Oil slipped anyway, with Brent below $72, since Trump reportedly told aides he's fine letting talks run past the August 18 deadline.

Euro zone inflation cooled more than expected in June, easing pressure on the ECB after its first hike since 2023. The yen hit a fresh 40-year low against the dollar, and traders are watching for Tokyo to step in.

What to Watch

The AI company quietly automating every Walmart distribution center. 
23 billion in orders on the book.

It's just one of seven names in this free MarketBeat report.

June Jobs Report, Thursday Morning

Out a day early because markets close Friday for the holiday. Economists expect around 115,000 jobs after ADP's private payroll number came in soft at 98,000. This is the single biggest input for the July rate decision.

Tesla Deliveries

Numbers could land any moment. US demand is the weak spot, Europe the surprise bright spot.

Iran Talks

Oil trades on every headline out of Qatar. Gas is at $3.84 a gallon heading into the weekend, the priciest July 4th in four years.

Thanks for reading - you are now the more informed 🙂

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

Good Morning

People keep debating whether the AI boom is real or just a stock story. South Korea just settled it for me, posting its fastest export growth since 1978, almost all of it chips.

The irony is chip names are getting trimmed this premarket over here, nothing broken imho, just profit-taking. Warsh promised the Fed would "chart a new course" but declined to give any signal on the July rate decision, staying true to his stance against leading folks with forward guidance.

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

Soft Jobs Data Isn't Cooling Rate Bets
ADP payrolls came in light this morning, 98,000 against the 110,000 expected. A weak print usually pulls hike bets lower, but they barely moved, since this Fed fears inflation more than a soft job market. Across the Atlantic it's the opposite: euro zone inflation cooled and traders trimmed their ECB hike bets. Warsh speaks at 9, and I'm watching how he frames inflation.

Chips Get Sold To Open The Second Half
Micron and Sandisk are lower premarket, with Nvidia and Broadcom getting sold alongside them. It's profit-taking after a record run, but it matters because this one group carried the whole market. Strip tech from the S&P and the index is basically flat this year. Nomura says the top isn't in, while Bespoke's Paul Hickey calls the group extended.

Gold And Silver Are Falling Together
Gold just booked its worst quarter since 2013, and silver is dropping with it, harder this morning. Both are under the same pressure: rising rate bets and a strong dollar make metals that pay you nothing less appealing than Treasuries. It's a clean read on how firmly the market now expects rates to stay high.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

Nike $NKE ( ▲ 3.72% )  

Beat on both lines, but China sales kept sliding and the stock is lower premarket. Holders have to decide if this is the bottom or another leg down, and China is the number that answers it, not the headline beat.

Shutterstock $SSTK ( ▼ 2.75% )  

Down sharply premarket after its merger with Getty Images collapsed over a UK regulator's demand to sell its editorial arm. Getty walked, so Shutterstock holders now face the flood of AI generated images alone and have to reprice that fight.

Salesforce $CRM ( ▲ 0.51% )  and ServiceNow $NOW ( ▼ 1.04% )  

Both higher after Guggenheim upgraded them to buy, arguing AI won't hollow out enterprise software. That puts the bears who spent the quarter betting AI eats the SaaS names on the back foot.

Bloom Energy $BE ( ▼ 4.83% )  

Higher premarket after expanding its Brookfield partnership to finance power for AI data centers. It hands the AI power skeptics one more data point they have to explain away.

Alcoa $AA ( ▼ 0.08% )  

Lower after agreeing to buy South32's bauxite, alumina, and aluminum assets in a deal worth up to $4.1 billion. The buyer rarely gets rewarded on day one, so holders are judging a big bet near the top of a metals run.

Kroger $KR ( ▲ 1.14% )  

Lower after a $1.65 billion deal for regional grocer Giant Eagle. Grocery margins are razor thin, so holders are weighing whether new markets justify the spend.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

Tesla Q2 Deliveries (Possibly Today)
Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 0.3% )  could post quarterly deliveries as early as today, with consensus near 397,000. US demand cooled after the EV tax credits expired, but European registrations are running hot. The headline number gets the attention, but the regional split is the real story.

The Yen At A 40-Year Low (Sleeper)
The yen just hit its weakest against the dollar since 1986. If the Bank of Japan steps in to defend it, the 2024 carry trade unwind could echo. Almost everyone is watching Warsh instead.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

Happy Tuesday

That's a wrap on the first six months of the year, and it was a strong one. The interesting part is under the hood…. this whole run was a chip story, while the big tech names everyone owns mostly sat it out. This morning we got May's job openings, basically how many roles are posted, and they held up fine. Hiring is slowing and more people say work is hard to find. Thursday brings the June jobs report, the actual count of who got hired, so that's the one that settles which signal wins.

Let’s dig in...

Today's Big Picture

1. Chips Carried The Quarter, Megacaps Got Left Behind 
Semiconductors are closing their best quarter on record while the big AI spenders fell out of favor. Microsoft is staring at its worst month since the dot-com bust, and Meta ends the quarter underwater. The Russell 2000 just booked its best first half since 1991, so the rally is real and it's broadening. Investors want the companies selling the shovels, not the ones writing the biggest checks.

2. The Job Market Is Losing A Little Steam
Job openings beat forecasts in May, so the headline looked fine. Underneath, hiring stayed slow and the share of people saying jobs are hard to find hit its highest since early 2021. Consumer confidence came in lighter than hoped, with job worries creeping in. Nothing alarming yet, but it's worth half an eye into Thursday's payrolls.

3. Oil Cooled Off Hard 
Crude is closing its worst quarter since early 2020. Flows through the Strait of Hormuz are back to normal, and the war premium has drained out of the price. The market went from bracing for a supply shock to worrying about a glut in a matter of weeks. For anyone filling a tank this summer, that's a rare bit of good news.

Market Overview

Index Performance

Stock Spotlight

Air Products $APD ( ▲ 1.24% )  
scrapped its big green hydrogen project in Louisiana after years of cost overruns and pushback, taking a writeoff of up to $2.9 billion. Wall Street liked the discipline and bought the stock.

Strategy $MSTR ( ▲ 0.8% )  
walked back its famous pledge to never sell bitcoin, planning buybacks and token sales to ride out the crypto downturn. When the loudest bull starts hedging, it's worth noticing.

AeroVironment $AVAV ( ▼ 2.57% )  
beat on both earnings and revenue, and the drone maker's stock took off. Defense demand keeps showing up in the actual numbers.

Big Name Updates

Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 0.3% )  
looks set to beat its own delivery estimates this quarter by around 10,000 units, per Deutsche Bank, with Europe doing the heavy lifting. The official count lands around July 2.

Goldman Sachs $GS ( ▼ 0.08% )  
and Morgan Stanley $MS both got cut to underperform at Oppenheimer, which would rather own alternative managers like Blackstone and KKR. The call is a late-cycle trade, not a knock on either firm today.

Nike $NKE ( ▲ 3.72% )  
reports after the close tonight into a tough setup, with a soft consumer and stiffer competition at home. We'll see if the turnaround has any numbers behind it yet.

Other Notable Company News

Alumni Ventures
Opens up service to Review Curated Venture Deals.
Sign up to see vetted venture deals at no cost*

AbbVie $ABBV ( ▼ 0.73% )  
and Merck $MRK slipped after a House committee opened a probe into their clinical trials in China.

Digital Realty $DLR ( ▲ 0.6% )  
is buying stakes in three Blackstone data centers in a deal valued at $7.8 billion, and the stock dipped on the dilution.

Concentrix $CNXC ( ▲ 5.87% )  
sank after cutting full-year guidance and missing on earnings and revenue.

Logitech $LOGI ( ▲ 0.28% )  
took a downgrade from Bank of America, which sees pricier PCs and tablets pulling down demand for accessories.

Enphase $ENPH ( ▼ 0.13% )  
caught a bid on reports the White House may ban foreign solar inverters, which would favor US makers.

Today’s Sponsor

Invest in High-Potential Startups Like These

Alumni Ventures is offering readers early access to high-potential startup opportunities, including some of today’s most exciting AI, Deep Tech, Quantum Computing, Cybersecurity, and Space companies co-invested alongside top VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Bessemer, & Y Combinator.

You get:

• Curated deal flow of high-potential startups

• Invest alongside elite lead venture firms

• No cost to see deals

• No obligation to invest

See Current Startup Deals →

Sector Watch

Bond Market

Short-term yields climbed after the Fed meeting as traders swapped their rate-cut bets for hike bets. That move is the clearest sign of how much the mood shifted this quarter.

• Apollo's Torsten Slok warned that heavy borrowing by AI data center builders is crowding out Treasurys and corporate credit. His question: where does the money come from to buy $700 billion of new hyperscaler bonds?

• Japan's long bonds are selling off too, with the 30-year yield near a record high.

• The dollar sat near a 13-month high, capping gold's worst quarter in 13 years.

Policy Watch

The Supreme Court left the Fed's independence intact, blocking the White House's attempt to remove governor Lisa Cook. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh speaks Wednesday in Portugal, and that's the next place to listen for how serious the hike talk really is.

Around Washington and abroad:

• The US and Iran are set to meet in Qatar today, though Tehran disputes the timing. Secretary of State Rubio and envoy Steve Witkoff are briefing Congress on an early peace framework.

• The EU is cutting its duty-free steel quota starting July 1, with tariffs on anything above the new limit.

• The Agriculture Department is readying up to $500 million in aid for smaller meatpackers as a livestock shortage keeps beef prices high.

What to Watch

The AI company quietly automating every Walmart distribution center. 
23 billion in orders on the book.

It's just one of seven names in this free MarketBeat report.

Constellation Brands Earnings 
The beer and spirits maker reports after the bell tonight. It's a clean read on whether the consumer is still spending heading into summer.

Yen Intervention 
Traders are eyeing Friday, a thin US holiday session, as the most likely moment for Tokyo to step in and defend the currency. Japan has already spent more than $70 billion this year trying to slow the slide. Markets here are closed Friday for the Fourth.

Thanks for reading - you are now the more informed 🙂

- John

Today’s Sponsor

The Lithium Boom is Heating Up

Lithium stock prices grew 2X+ from June to January. But the real winner may be a private stock: EnergyX. Their tech can recover 3X more lithium than traditional methods, leading General Motors to invest. Now they’re preparing to unlock ~13M tons of lithium. Invest in EnergyX for $13/share by the 7/16 deadline.

Invest in EnergyX

^{Energy Exploration Technologies, Inc. (“EnergyX”) has engaged Beehiiv to publish this communication in connection with EnergyX’s ongoing Regulation A offering. Beehiiv has been paid in cash and may receive additional compensation. Beehiiv and/or its affiliates do not currently hold securities of EnergyX.}

^{This compensation and any current or future ownership interest could create a conflict of interest. Please consider this disclosure alongside EnergyX’s offering materials. EnergyX’s Regulation A offering has been qualified by the SEC. Offers and sales may be made only by means of the qualified offering circular. Before investing, carefully review the offering circular, including the risk factors. The offering circular is available at invest.energyx.com/.}

^{Comparisons to other companies are for informational purposes only and should not imply similar results. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Market shortfall are forward‑looking estimates and are subject to substantial uncertainty.}

Good Morning

Quarter's a wrap, and what a stretch it's been. S&P put up 14% and the Nasdaq nearly 20%, best qtr since 2020, and that's with a war, an oil scare, and a tech selloff all crammed into three months. Markets just kept climbing over it. Futures are a touch red this AM, but honestly, things are looking up outside of this general AI skepticism.

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

Small Caps Are Winning On A Bet
The Russell is up 21% this year, nearly triple the S&P, its best first half since 1991. Most people are calling it a healthy move out of tech into smaller, safer names. It isn't: chips and chip-gear make up 16 of its 50 top performers, several up more than 400%, so this is the same AI bet in smaller clothes. And these companies borrow at rates that climb when the Fed does, so BofA figures each hike shaves about 2% off their profits, which makes the rally everyone calls safe the most rate-exposed one out there.

The Market Is Punishing Its Best Companies
Tech closed its best quarter since 2020, but the gains were not handed out evenly. Chipmakers had their best quarter on record while Microsoft just had its worst month since 2000. The strange part is who got hit: the names with the strongest businesses and the biggest cash piles, punished for spending that cash on AI. Investors will pay up for the hardware today, but they want proof the software spending pays off before they reward it.

The Dollar Is Doing The Fed's Job
A quarter this strong usually means the Fed is about to cut rates. This time it's the opposite, with traders now betting on three hikes after expecting cuts just months ago. The yen fell to a 40-year low and the dollar keeps climbing, both signs that money is bracing for rates to stay high. A rising dollar quietly pulls cash out of stocks, so if the Fed confirms the harder line this week, this calm does not last.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

AeroVironment $AVAV ( ▼ 2.57% )  

Up sharply premarket on an earnings and revenue beat, $1.84 against estimates near $1.46, with backlog now at $1.2 billion. A beat that size forces analysts to raise their full year numbers, not write it off as one good quarter.

Constellation Brands $STZ ( ▲ 1.22% )  

Reports before the bell, the first major consumer name this quarter. Weak beer and spirits volumes would force traders to question whether the hot economy is finally cooling at the checkout.

Nike $NKE ( ▲ 3.72% )  

Reports after the close near its lowest level in eleven years. Holders are forced to pick if bottom worth buying, or a turnaround that keeps slipping, and the read is in whether demand stabilized, not the headline.

Digital Realty $DLR ( ▲ 0.6% )  

Down in premarket after agreeing to buy a stake in three Northern Virginia data centers from Blackstone for $7.8 billion. It's paying $2.3 billion of that in stock, so existing holders are getting diluted as the company expands, and they have to decide if the scale is worth it.

Merck $MRK ( ▼ 1.22% )  and AbbVie $ABBV ( ▼ 0.73% )  

Slipped after a House committee opened a probe into their China drug trials and possible military ties. Merck has run 224 trials there since 2005 and AbbVie over 100 since 2007, so both are forced to respond before this becomes a lasting overhang.

Strategy $MSTR ( ▲ 0.8% )  

Lower premarket, giving back part of Monday's run after it dropped its pledge to never sell bitcoin. Anyone holding it as a pure bitcoin proxy is forced to reprice the premium, because a company that might sell its coins is worth less than one that never will.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

Quarter-End Rebalancing, Into The Close
After a quarter where chips ran far ahead and big tech fell, funds that rebalance to fixed weights have to sell winners and buy laggards today. That mechanical flow can push against the trend in the final hour, so a quiet tape can turn choppy near 4 PM. Don't read too much into a late reversal.

Medicare Obesity Coverage, Tomorrow
Starting July 1, Medicare covers obesity drugs for the first time, opening a large new patient pool for Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. Almost no one is positioning for it, and it's a real demand catalyst for the GLP-1 makers heading into their next prints.

- John

Happy Monday

Nice bounce to start a short week. Tech snapped a big losing streak, the Dow is flirting with a record close after adding Alphabet, and the Supreme Court told the White House they can't touch the Fed.

Gold in the headlines today and is getting wrecked this quarter but that’s mainly just price discovery coming off very hot year for gold and other precious metals.

Let’s dig in...

Today's Big Picture

1. Supreme Court Protects The Fed
The court ruled 5-4 that Trump can’t fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, saying she never got due process. More importantly, the justices carved out a specific exception for the Federal Reserve while expanding presidential power to fire leaders at other independent agencies. Bond yields barely moved because this was the expected outcome, but it removes a real tail risk that had been hanging over rate policy.

2. Comcast Splits, Telecom M&A Heats Up
Comcast $CMCSA is spinning off NBCUniversal and Sky into a standalone media company. Co-CEO Mike Cavanagh will lead the new entity. The bigger story is what comes next. Charter $CHTR rallied hard on speculation that a slimmed-down Comcast bids for them after the split. Same day, Rocket Lab $RKLB announced an $8 billion deal to buy Iridium $IRDM for its satellite fleet and spectrum. Broadband companies are racing to bulk up before Starlink eats their margins.

3. Gold Posts Record Quarterly Loss
Gold fell to $4,022 an ounce, now down over $625 this quarter. That is the largest quarterly dollar decline ever recorded. Silver is off 22 percent this quarter, the worst in 13 years. Goldman Sachs still sees $4,900, calling this a structural bull market pullback. Whether central bank buying resumes at these levels will tell us a lot.

Market Overview

Index Performance

Stock Spotlight

Rocket Lab $RKLB ( ▼ 1.83% )  
is buying Iridium $IRDM at $54 per share in a cash-and-stock deal worth $8 billion. The combination gives Rocket Lab a working satellite fleet, wireless spectrum, and a real path to compete with SpaceX $SPCX beyond launch services.

Strategy $MSTR ( ▲ 0.8% )  
announced a turnaround plan that includes stock buybacks and bitcoin sales. The stock bounced but is still down over 40 percent in June. Michael Saylor is trying to stop the bleeding after both common and preferred shares fell apart this month.

Charter Communications $CHTR ( ▼ 2.69% )  
rallied on two catalysts at once. The Comcast split opened the door to a potential acquisition, and a Bloomberg report said Charter and SpaceX $SPCX have been in talks about a consumer mobile phone product.

Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 0.3% ) climbed after NHTSA closed a safety probe into power steering loss on 2023 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. Elon Musk also said FSD version 14 is rolling out to customers.

Big Name Updates

Alphabet $GOOG ( ▼ 0.34% )  
officially replaced Verizon in the Dow today. Shares climbed on day one, though the Dow’s price-weighted methodology means Alphabet won’t carry as much influence as its market cap would suggest.

Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 0.19% )  
is on pace for its worst month since December 2000. Deutsche Bank maintained a Buy rating and a $550 target, pointing to confidence in margin expansion.

Marvell Technology $MRVL ( ▼ 3.04% )  
got a price target raise from UBS to $340 from $230, driven by demand for its CXL products in AI data center memory systems. The stock is up over 200 percent this year.

Other Notable Company News

Owens Corning $OC ( ▲ 2.2% )  
climbed after the WSJ reported that Carlisle Companies $CSL made an unsolicited offer to acquire the company. Owens Corning hasn’t engaged significantly yet.

Verizon $VZ ( ▲ 1.42% )  
is forming a joint venture with BT Group for international enterprise connectivity. Verizon flagged an expected Q2 loss of up to $800 million tied to the deal.

British American Tobacco $BTI ( ▼ 0.03% )  
is cutting 5,500 jobs and outsourcing 3,500 more to save roughly $793 million by 2028.

SpaceX $SPCX ( ▼ 4.51% )  
will join the Nasdaq-100 before market open on July 7. Less than a month from IPO to index inclusion.

Baidu $BIDU ( ▲ 0.02% )  
climbed on reports that its AI chip unit Kunlunxin is targeting a Hong Kong IPO at a $50 billion valuation.

Today’s Sponsor

Learn the right AI Tools. Don’t waste your time.

Free Workshop This Weekend Only.

Outskill- the world’s first AI learning platform where over 10+ Million Learners have learnt from top industry leaders like Microsoft, NVIDIA and Google.

Learn to turn the correct AI tools into your competitive edge through their 2 day free workshop this weekend.

• Trustpilot Score: 9.8/10

Register here before they run out of seats. (free for next 72 hours only)

Sector Watch

Bond Market

Treasuries were flat. The 10-year held at 4.37 percent, the 2-year at 4.10, the 30-year just under 4.86.

Policy Watch

Fed

The Supreme Court kept Lisa Cook in her seat, 5-4. The justices said she never got due process before the firing attempt. They carved out a specific exception protecting the Fed while expanding presidential firing power over other agencies like the FTC.

• Rate hike expectations are building. Futures imply at least one hike by year end. Bank of America is modeling 75 basis points worth.

International

The US and Iran agreed to pause hostilities Sunday and reopen commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides meet Tuesday in Doha for renewed talks.

• Hormuz traffic dropped to just 22 crossings on Sunday. Hundreds of ships remain stuck in the Persian Gulf. Shipowners are still spooked despite the ceasefire.

• Oil ticked higher but stayed well below pre-war levels.

Fiscal & Trade

China blacklisted four Japanese defense research institutes and restricted exports to 20 more Japanese entities. The restrictions cover rare earths, batteries, machine tools, and chip equipment. This is a real escalation in the China-Japan trade friction.

What to Watch

The AI company quietly automating every Walmart distribution center.
Already has 23 billion in orders on the book. It's just one of seven names in this free MarketBeat report.

Doha Talks (Tuesday)
US and Iran sit down in Qatar. If talks hold, oil stays calm. If they break down, crude moves fast.

Nike Earnings (Tuesday)
Nike $NKE reports after the bell. Good read on the consumer and on how China tariff exposure is hitting the business.

Quarter-End Rebalancing
Last two trading days of Q2. Some of today's tech bounce could just be advisors cleaning up their quarterly statements.

Thanks for reading - you are now the more informed 🙂

- John

Today’s Sponsor

These are not all household names - yet.

Companies flying under the radar will transition from quiet out-performers to headline grabbers.

See them now in MarketBeat's —>
 
"The 10 Best Stocks to Own in the Second Half of 2026"

- while you still have the early mover's advantage.

Good Morning

The US and Iran shook hands again over the weekend, oil drifted back near 70, and the mood is relief heading into a short week with the close Friday for the holiday.

Quick note: I’m headed to NC for a much needed fam vacation, timing might be a little off on the afternoon reports this week but they will come (as always :)

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

The Ships Don't Believe The Truce
Stocks are buying the weekend ceasefire and oil shrugged off the fresh strikes, but the people who actually move crude aren't convinced. Only 22 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, the quietest day since the deal was signed. This is the third halt in the fighting, and Deutsche Bank told clients today to expect more volatility after Iran, not less, since Washington has shown it will use force.

Cheaper Oil Just Became Bad News
Crude slipped under 70 last week for the first time since the war began, the inflation relief everyone wanted. Here's the flip: in an economy running this hot, cheap gas means more spending, more demand, and more reason for the Fed to hike instead of cut. Gold is heading for a fourth straight losing month and the dollar is having its best stretch in a year, both betting the same way. T

The AI Bounce Is Mechanical, Not Conviction
Chips and big tech are rebounding after dragging the market down all week, but the move up looks manufactured. Funds that use borrowed money to amplify these stocks have to buy as they rise and dump as they fall, and last week in Korea that forced trading was half the daily volume in the big chipmakers. Margin debt just hit a record 1.4 trillion dollars, and Schwab is already tightening how much its clients can borrow.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom

The next A.I. boom could create massive winners just like the 1990s tech surge.

We identified 7 small tech companies positioned to benefit from the next phase of A.I. growth.

See them inside this free report 7 Stocks to Ride The A.I. Megaboom.

View the 7 Stocks

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

Comcast $CMCSA ( ▲ 0.96% )  

Splitting in two, spinning off NBCUniversal and Sky and keeping cable and wireless. Holders have to pick a side now, because the bundle that justified owning the whole thing is going away. Comcast ripping up in pre.

Charter $CHTR ( ▼ 2.69% )  

Moving on a report it held exclusive talks with SpaceX about a consumer phone, routing some satellite traffic over Charter's ground network. The wireless carriers are the ones forced to react, with a new competitor coming at them from space.

Rocket Lab $RKLB ( ▼ 1.83% )  

Buying satellite operator Iridium, bolting a working communications network onto its launch business. Iridium holders take the premium and walk. Rocket Lab investors have to decide if owning a network sharpens the company or stretches it.

$PLTR ( ▼ 1.74% )  
Shares of the data-analytics company climbed premarket, further recovering from a multi-day losing streak driven by fears about the sustainability of the artificial-intelligence rally

Apple $AAPL ( ▼ 0.29% )  

Lagging its Magnificent Seven peers after raising iPad and MacBook prices to cover rising memory chip costs. Buyers are on the spot now, paying up or waiting, and if they wait, the volumes behind those record chip margins start to crack.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

June Jobs Report (Thursday, 8:30 AM ET)
The whole hike bet runs through this number. Forecasts sit near 125,000 after May's 172,000, and it lands Thursday because Friday is closed. Watch gold and the dollar before the S&P. They move hardest if it disappoints.

Warsh At The ECB Forum (Wednesday, 9 AM ET)
He's scrapped forward guidance, so the trade is in what he doesn't say. Any hint that cheaper oil has cooled the inflation math moves rates more than the data does.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Apple’s Starlink Update Sparks Huge Earning Opportunity

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}