The Weekly Buzz 🐝 by Blossom

😰 Financial Stocks Have Their Worst Month vs the Market in Over 30 Years (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 21:21:39 +0000

TOP STORY
😬 Financial Stocks Have Their Worst Month vs the Market in Over 30 Years

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone! It was a busy week in the markets, so let’s dive right in:

🏛️ First, on Tuesday, basically every major tech leader met with Trump at the White House, where they signed a voluntary accord outlining safety standards and practices for AI, following weeks of AI doomerism.

📉 On the macro side, jobs and core inflation data were released Friday, showing the U.S. added only 29,000 jobs in September vs a forecast of 84,000, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.2%.

✨ While bad news for the economy, investors saw this partially as good news, as it means less pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates, leading to a mixed week in the markets:

The S&P 500 fell -0.27%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +0.65%
The TSX fell -0.83%

🗓️ Friday also closed out September, with the S&P 500 finishing the month down ~0.4%, its first negative month since July.

🔍 But if we look past the headline numbers, we see a story of two markets: AI stocks keep hitting records, while most of the market slipped (387 of the S&P 500's stocks fell in September).

🏦 Most notable was Financials, which lagged behind the market by the most in 36 years, falling 7% (our top story today).

💡 But before we talk about the banks, let me give a quick breakdown of 3 other big stories this week:

💸 Bond Yields Inverting
💾 Micron’s ($MU) Revenue Soars 379%
👟 Nike’s ($NKE) Woes Continue with Falling Revenue

1. 😬 Bond Yields Are Close to Inverting

🔴 Over the past couple of weeks, the 10-year Treasury yield has been rising to new heights, this week hitting 5.34%, its highest level since 2002, blowing past the 19-year high we flagged last week.

😨 All of this has led analysts to raise concerns about a possible "inversion,” when short-term bonds yield more than long-term ones. Last week, the gap between the 2-year and 10-year shrank to just 0.17 percentage points (its tightest since early 2025).

🤔 If this is all gibberish to you, basically the longer you lend the government your money, the higher an interest rate you should get paid. So when that flips, it's the bond market's way of saying it expects trouble ahead.

⚠️ The reason this is watched closely is that the yield curve has inverted before nearly every U.S. recession in the past 50 years, which has made it one of the most famous recession warning signs in all of investing (though it's not foolproof… the 2022 inversion famously came and went without one).

😮‍💨 Now, nothing has happened yet, and after this week's jobs report, the gap has widened back to about 45 basis points, with some analysts thinking the pressure is already easing.

👀 But either way, bond yields are worth keeping an eye on.

2. 🥳 Micron Reports Blowout Earnings, Growing Revenue 379%

🤖 Next, some tech news…

💾 On Wednesday, Micron ($MU), the only US-based maker of high-bandwidth memory chips, reported its earnings, crushing analyst expectations:

✅ Revenue hit $54.23 billion vs. $51.5 billion expected, up ~379% year-over-year
✅ Adj. EPS hit $33.42 vs. $31.61 expected, up 1,000%+ year-over-year

🔮 Micron is now targeting $61.5 billion for next quarter, well above expectations. But what really caught analysts' attention was the long-term outlook, with management saying more than 75% of its FY2027 shipments were already committed through supply agreements.

📈 This especially matters because the biggest fear with memory chips has been that today's boom is just a cyclical peak. But D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria said this new outlook addresses those concerns.

🤷 Despite the insane results, the stock barely moved this week, with analysts saying the market has already priced in very high expectations (Micron shares are up more than 240% in 2026).

3. 👟 Nike Continues to Freefall As Earnings Show More Rough Patches

📉 As we covered last week, Nike has been in a generational freefall, down 78% over the past 5 years, and we said this week's earnings would test whether the new CEO’s turnaround strategy is paying off.

😬 Well, unfortunately for Nike shareholders, the numbers are still in rough shape, with revenue coming in at $11.2B, below expectations and falling 4% year-over-year. Converse sales continued to fall, dropping 28%, while Nike Direct revenue fell 8%.

✂️ The company also announced more layoff plans for FY2027 despite already cutting staff twice this year…

📊 Now, there were some bright spots, specifically in Nike’s performance categories (and with North America revenue rising 2%), but the bad outweighed the good, and shares ended the week down 5%, closing out September down 9% to the stock’s lowest price since 2013 (when the iPhone 5 launched)

4. 🌼 Blossom Opens Investment Round For Accredited Investors

👀 A bit outside of the stock market news, but another big story to put on your radar: Blossom (the start-up behind this newsletter) just opened the opportunity for you to buy shares. A few investment highlights:

🤑 Over the past year, we’ve doubled revenue to $4.7M annualized
✨ Since 2023, total members have exploded from ~10,000 to nearly 1 million
💰 Revenue exceeds all non-marketing operating costs, meaning the capital raised in this round goes directly to profitable growth.
📈 In the past 2 years, the share price has grown

🔗 If you're interested in learning more, here is the link to invest, along with more details about the offering! Note: this round is only open to accredited investors.

👀 All right - now that we’ve covered bonds, Nike, and Micron, let’s turn our attention to the big story of the week: why financial stocks just had their worst month vs. the S&P 500 in over 30 years, and what it means for the market…

✨ But first, a quick word from this week's sponsor , Direxion

TOP STORY
🏦 Financial Stocks Have Their Worst Month vs the Market in Over 30 Years

😬 In September, the S&P 500 fell about 0.4%, with 9 of the 11 sectors ending the month in the red, and only Tech and Communications gaining.

📉 But of all the sectors, financials took the biggest hit, with household names like JPMorgan ($JPM) falling 7% and Goldman Sachs ($GS) dropping 12%, and the sector down ~7% overall, its worst monthly performance since March 2023.

😰 Against the broader market, it was even worse. Financials had their worst month relative to the S&P 500 since 1990, with only 3 of 75 financial stocks in the index rising in September.

🤔 So why did financials do so poorly, and what does it mean for the market? Well, let's break it down:

🪗 The Bond Market Squeezing The Banks

🏦 The first reason is that surging bond yields are hurting the banks in 2 ways:

📊 First, a flatter yield curve squeezes their profits, since banks make money by borrowing short-term and lending long-term
💼 Second, banks own a lot of bonds, and rising yields make those bonds worth less, which hurts their balance sheets even if they never sell

🏛️ With the Fed raising rates in September for the first time since 2023 (and 16 of its 19 officials expecting at least one more hike this year), continued pressure on rates and yields is hurting the banks and adding strain to private credit.

💸 Private Credit is in Rough Shape

💡 The second reason for the financial sector's downturn is private credit. As a refresher, private credit is when asset managers (instead of the banks) lend money directly to companies.

⚠️ These types of borrowers are often riskier, so when rates rise, their payments climb, and so do defaults.

🚪 Typically, private credit funds only let investors withdraw about 5% of the fund each quarter, and when more people ask for their funds, the fund pays out 5% and makes the rest wait.

👀 As we covered back in March (read our full article here), many funds have already started capping these withdrawals, and in Q3, requests blew past the cap again, with Blackstone's BCRED fund receiving requests for about 10% of its shares, while Morgan Stanley's North Haven fund had 11.4%, and Blue Owl's tech-focused fund had a massive 39%.

🔻 This is happening as the loans themselves worsen, with Fitch putting the U.S. private credit default rate at a record 6.3% in August.

📉 As a result, Blackstone ($BX) and Blue Owl ($OWL), two leaders in Private Credit, are down 18% and 23% over the past month, though Blackstone's president, Jon Gray, still expects things to turn around:

👀 But bonds and private credit aren’t the only factors at play… banks are also facing drying-up deals and a rotation into AI…

📊 But before we continue, a quick word from our other amazing sponsor this week, Public!

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TOP STORY CONT.
🏦 Financial Stocks Have Their Worst Month & What This Means For the Market

🧐 So, we’ve established that the bond market and rough private credit market are two factors at play… let’s look at two more:

🤝 Dried Up Deals

📉 The third reason is that higher yields are making dealmaking harder, and since banks and asset managers earn some of their biggest profits when companies merge, acquire, or list on the stock market, a slowdown in dealmaking can have a real effect.

📊 By the numbers, global M&A fell 41% from the prior quarter to $993 billion (the first quarter below $1 trillion since Q2 2025), with many IPOs delayed.

🗣️ Morgan Stanley’s global head of M&A, John Collins, tied it all straight back to the bond market (a growing theme), saying:

🚀 A Rotation Into AI

🤖 The fourth reason for financials’ rough month is that investors had somewhere better to go.

📈 Tech and Communication were the only S&P 500 sectors to gain in September, with chip funds like VanEck Semiconductor ETF ($SMH) up roughly 69% year-to-date, and AI-related stocks making up 45% of all retail trading volume on Blossom in September

🤖 Overall, it looks like with rates and yields rising, deals drying up and private credit looking shaky, investors are crowding into one of the few places that’s still making money: AI. And it’s not just financials that are being left out, as one analyst puts it:

🌍 But What Does This Mean For The Market?

⭐️ The strange part of all this is that while Financials were having their worst month in decades, the businesses continue to grow. JPMorgan's adjusted earnings per share rose 13% in Q2, Bank of America grew net income 28%, and Foran notes earnings estimates for financials are actually rising… which almost never happens in a bad year for the sector.

🤔 That's what makes this dip so unusual, and it's why Foran compares it to the dot-com era, when money also poured into a booming tech sector while other sectors were left behind.

👀 And if we look at history, there are two different stories we can tell:

⚠️ Warning Sign Story: The last time financials lagged this badly (1990), it came during a real banking crisis. And today's cracks are real too… record private credit defaults, gated funds, and 5%+ yields squeezing everyone who borrows.
🌈 Rotation Story: But in 1999, when financials lagged the market, it was just because the market was obsessed with tech. And when that obsession finally broke, the cheap, unloved sectors went on to lead the market for years.

🤷‍♂️ But whether this is a 1990 situation, a 1999 situation, or somewhere in between is the big question… and the good news is we’ll have more answers soon, with JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo all reporting earnings on Oct 13 and Bank of America and Morgan Stanley reporting on Oct 14.

🏦 If bank earnings keep growing while the stocks keep lagging, that’s more evidence that this is just a short-term rotation. But if credit cracks start showing up in their numbers, the warning-sign story starts looking a lot more real. Either way, I’ll be sure to keep you updated 🫡

🙏 But that’s enough for one Sunday! Thanks for reading to the end - let’s wrap up with some of the best posts on Blossom this week!

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

👇 Click to see the full post!

😰 Financial Stocks Have Their Worst Month vs the Market in Over 30 Years

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:58:49 +0000

TOP STORY
😬 Financial Stocks Have Their Worst Month vs the Market in Over 30 Years

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone! It was a busy week in the markets, so let’s dive right in:

📉 On the macro side, jobs and core inflation data were released Friday, showing the U.S. added only 29,000 jobs in September vs a forecast of 84,000, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.2%.

✨ While bad news for the economy, investors saw this partially as good news, as it means less pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates, leading to a mixed week in the markets:

The S&P 500 fell -0.27%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +0.65%
The TSX fell -0.83%

🗓️ Friday also closed out September, with the S&P 500 finishing the month down ~0.4%, its first negative month since July.

🔍 But if we look past the headline numbers, we see a story of two markets: AI stocks keep hitting records, while most of the market slipped (387 of the S&P 500's stocks fell in September).

🏦 Most notable was Financials, which lagged behind the market by the most in 36 years, falling 7% (our top story today).

💡 But before we talk about the banks, let me give a quick breakdown of 3 other big stories this week:

💸 Bond Yields Inverting
💾 Micron’s ($MU) Revenue Soars 379%
👟 Nike’s ($NKE) Woes Continue with Falling Revenue

1. 😬 Bond Yields Are Close to Inverting

😮‍💨 Now, nothing has happened yet, and after this week's jobs report, the gap has widened back to about 45 basis points, with some analysts thinking the pressure is already easing.

👀 But either way, bond yields are worth keeping an eye on.

2. 🥳 Micron Reports Blowout Earnings, Growing Revenue 379%

🤖 Next, some tech news…

💾 On Wednesday, Micron ($MU), the only US-based maker of high-bandwidth memory chips, reported its earnings, crushing analyst expectations:

✅ Revenue hit $54.23 billion vs. $51.5 billion expected, up ~379% year-over-year
✅ Adj. EPS hit $33.42 vs. $31.61 expected, up 1,000%+ year-over-year

🤷 Despite the insane results, the stock barely moved this week, with analysts saying the market has already priced in very high expectations (Micron shares are up more than 240% in 2026).

3. 👟 Nike Continues to Freefall As Earnings Show More Rough Patches

✂️ The company also announced more layoff plans for FY2027 despite already cutting staff twice this year…

👀 But with bonds, Nike, and Micron covered, let’s turn our attention to the big story of the week: why financial stocks just had their worst month vs. the S&P 500 in over 30 years, and what it means for the market…

✨ But first, a quick word from this week's sponsor , CIBC CDRs!

TOP STORY
🏦 Financial Stocks Have Their Worst Month vs the Market in Over 30 Years

😬 In September, the S&P 500 fell about 0.4%, with 9 of the 11 sectors ending the month in the red, and only Tech and Communications gaining.

😰 Against the broader market, it was even worse. Financials had their worst month relative to the S&P 500 since 1990, with only 3 of 75 financial stocks in the index rising in September.

🤔 So why did financials do so poorly, and what does it mean for the market? Well, let's break it down:

🪗 The Bond Market Squeezing The Banks

🏦 The first reason is that surging bond yields are hurting the banks in 2 ways:

📊 First, a flatter yield curve squeezes their profits, since banks make money by borrowing short-term and lending long-term
💼 Second, banks own a lot of bonds, and rising yields make those bonds worth less, which hurts their balance sheets even if they never sell

💸 Private Credit is in Rough Shape

💡 The second reason for the financial sector's downturn is private credit. As a refresher, private credit is when asset managers (instead of the banks) lend money directly to companies.

⚠️ These types of borrowers are often riskier, so when rates rise, their payments climb, and so do defaults.

🚪 Typically, private credit funds only let investors withdraw about 5% of the fund each quarter, and when more people ask for their funds, the fund pays out 5% and makes the rest wait.

🔻 This is happening as the loans themselves worsen, with Fitch putting the U.S. private credit default rate at a record 6.3% in August.

👀 But bonds and private credit aren’t the only factors at play… banks are also facing drying-up deals and a rotation into AI…

📊 But before we continue, a quick word from our other amazing sponsor this week, Global X Canada!

TOP STORY CONT.
🏦 Financial Stocks Have Their Worst Month & What This Means For the Market

🧐 So, we’ve established that the bond market and rough private credit market are two factors at play… let’s look at two more:

🤝 Dried Up Deals

📊 By the numbers, global M&A fell 41% from the prior quarter to $993 billion (the first quarter below $1 trillion since Q2 2025), with many IPOs delayed.

🗣️ Morgan Stanley’s global head of M&A, John Collins, tied it all straight back to the bond market (a growing theme), saying:

🚀 A Rotation Into AI

🤖 The fourth reason for financials’ rough month is that investors had somewhere better to go.

🌍 But What Does This Mean For The Market?

🤔 That's what makes this dip so unusual, and it's why Foran compares it to the dot-com era, when money also poured into a booming tech sector while other sectors were left behind.

👀 And if we look at history, there are two different stories we can tell:

⚠️ Warning Sign Story: The last time financials lagged this badly (1990), it came during a real banking crisis. And today's cracks are real too… record private credit defaults, gated funds, and 5%+ yields squeezing everyone who borrows.
🌈 Rotation Story: But in 1999, when financials lagged the market, it was just because the market was obsessed with tech. And when that obsession finally broke, the cheap, unloved sectors went on to lead the market for years.

🙏 But that’s enough for one Sunday! Thanks for reading to the end - let’s wrap up with some of the best posts on Blossom this week!

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

👇 Click to see the full post!

CIBC CDRs Disclaimer

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📉 Nike Just Hit Its Lowest Price In 12 Years. Can It Bounce Back? (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 14:57:02 +0000

TOP STORY
📉 Nike Just Hit Its Lowest Price In 12 Years. Can It Bounce Back?

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone!

🚀 It was another big week in the markets, with the Nasdaq-100 climbing for the 2nd week in a row, now up 32% in the past 6 months. Across the indexes:

The S&P 500 rose +1.21%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +3.25%
The TSX fell -0.02%

🏆 The biggest gains were on Monday, with the Nasdaq soaring 2.3% to a new record high (its first record since June 2nd) as Chip stocks soared, with AMD jumping 10% to join the $1 trillion market cap club for the first time, while Intel ($INTC) surged 12% and Arm rocketed 17%.

🤔 So, what sparked Monday’s Big Rally?

1) 🤑 The AI Money Train Keeps Chugging

🤖 The biggest driver was fresh signs that AI spending is still accelerating, with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon projecting AI infrastructure spending will grow from ~$300 billion in 2025 to ~$700 billion this year and hit $1 trillion in 2027.

🎯 Dimon also said that this spending is showing real returns, noting top cloud providers grew cloud revenue ~48% year-over-year last quarter, backed by a ~$1.7 trillion backlog of signed orders.

✨ Meta ($META) contributed to the Nasdaq gains, jumping 11% on Monday after a flurry of analysts hiked price targets following major new product announcements at its Meta Connect conference (one of our feature stories for today).

2) 🇨🇳 Progress on US-China Relations

🤝 Another driver was progress on US-China relations, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calling talks on trade and AI "very successful" after Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House this week (his first state visit in 11 years).

🕊️ The two sides extended their trade truce by 2 months, with Xi calling on both nations to ensure AI remains "under human control" and to "lengthen the list of cooperation, and shorten the list of issues"… though Trump rejected the idea of formal AI rules, with the topic punted to an AI summit in Shenzhen this November.

3) 💸 Falling Oil Prices and Bond Yields

🛢️ Finally, oil and bond yields both fell on Monday, with Brent Crude briefly dipping below $100/barrel and the 10-year Treasury yield slipping back under 5% (lower yields make borrowing cheaper and make stocks more attractive compared to 'safe' bonds, which is why falling yields usually give stocks a boost).

💬 As Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, put it:

😬 The good news on the Treasury Yield didn’t last long though. By midweek, the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield surged back, topping 5.23%, its highest level since 2007, as comments from Fed officials had investors pricing in a ~65% chance of another rate hike next month.

🛢️ Oil also jumped back up to $107/barrel on Thursday amid the endless geopolitical tensions in Iran.

📈 But despite it all, the market proved remarkably resilient, jumping again on Friday to cap off a winning week for all three major US indexes.

😰 But while the market overall has continued to fly, one stock has been having an incredibly tough year… which brings us to today's main story: Nike's fall from grace and whether the new CEO can still turn things around…

✨ But first, a quick word from this week's sponsor , Calamos

TOP STORY
📉 Nike Just Hit Its Lowest Price In 12 Years. Can It Bounce Back?

👟 Going as far back as Dec 2025, we’ve been covering Nike’s ($NKE) turnaround efforts and whether its “Win Now” strategy by new CEO Elliott Hill would be the fix for the company.

📉 Well… since then, shares have fallen over 40%, and are now down 76% over the past 5 years, hitting their lowest price since 2014 after a wave of analyst downgrades.

🇳🇿 Nike’s market cap has fallen from a 2021 peak of roughly $264 billion to around $53 billion today (a loss equivalent to New Zealand's annual GDP). And as of this week, it is no longer part of the S&P 100 (a position it held for nearly 18 years).

🤔 So what’s the story behind the company’s fall from grace? And is there any chance of a turnaround from here after 5 years of disappointment?

👟 Why Nike’s Empire Has Been Crumbling

📉 As you can see from the stock price, Nike’s “Win Now” strategy has been looking rough…

🇨🇳 Q1 earnings are scheduled for this coming week, but as of the company’s last earnings (which we covered here), a few specific rough patches were very evident:

❌ Overall revenue fell 1%, and management guided to a low- to mid-single-digit sales decline in the upcoming quarter
❌ Greater China revenue fell roughly 12% (the 8th-straight quarterly decline)
❌ Converse sales collapsed more than 30% year over year.

✂️ The company also cut more than $2 billion worth of classic footwear franchises in 2026, shrinking its own Sportswear and Jordan Streetwear lines to clear out oversupply, all while On ($ONON), Hoka ($DECK), and other “disruptor” brands have kept gaining shelf space and market share.

⚠️ To understand how bad that truly is, those two categories (Sportswear and Jordan Streetwear) together make up roughly 50% of Nike’s total revenue, and management expects both to stay negative through fiscal 2027.

🗣️ Even Nike’s own CEO has stopped pretending things are going smoothly, reportedly telling employees after its disappointing earnings back in April: ”I’m so tired, and I know you are too, of talking about fixing this business.”

🗓️ And if it couldn’t get worse, one analyst now says a full recovery of revenue might take all the way up until 2028:

✨ Specks of Hope: Nike’s “Sports Offense”

🧭 Despite the brutal numbers, some believe Nike's turnaround strategy shows promise (including the 3,800 holders on Blossom who are still holding on). Most notably with “Sport Offense.”

🏀 Sport Offense is Hill’s company-wide restructuring that scrapped the old setup where teams were organized by product type (shoes, apparel, etc.), and instead rebuilt them around individual sports (basketball, running, etc.), with Hill saying:

✅ And this mindset may be working. At the 2026 World Cup, Nike’s “Rip the Script” campaign passed 1.5 billion views, and its Global Football division in particular delivered positive year-over-year comps, with double-digit growth across all continents.

🏃‍♂️ Running specifically (a category Nike historically dominated and has been losing share in) is actually showing the clearest turnaround signal, with new redesigned lines driving the running division to surge more than 20% last quarter.

🥾 Product innovation is also picking up, with Nike’s new Aero-FIT material debuting globally at the World Cup and the Mercurial “Built for Speed” launch becoming the fastest-selling 24-hour cleated footwear release in Nike Direct history.

🗣️ All this even led to a change of tone for Hill, who reflected on all of this at Nike’s annual shareholder meeting a couple of weeks ago, saying:

⚖️ But do the positives outweigh the negatives?

😬 Analysts Aren’t Optimistic

🔀 Well, analysts are split, leaning negative, and in the past 2 weeks alone a wave of Wall Street cuts has hurt the stock a lot:

🐻 Sept 10: Morgan Stanley reinstated Underweight with a $31 target
⬇️ Sept 14: Baird downgraded Nike from Outperform to Neutral, slashing its target from $70 to $44
✂️ Sept 14: Citi cut its target from $45 to $39
✂️ Sept 17: UBS cut its target from $48 to $42
😬 Sept 23: Barclays, one of the last bulls left, kept its Overweight rating but trimmed its target from $52 to $48
🚨 Sept 25: Bank of America downgraded Nike to Underperform, slashing its target from $47 all the way to $30
✂️ Sept 26: Goldman Sachs cut its target from $42 to $38

✨ But not everyone has thrown in the towel. On the optimistic side, Bernstein's Aneesha Sherman and Nick Anderson say the worst of the China and Converse drag is already priced in, while Morningstar's David Swartz was even more dismissive of the bad news, calling the S&P 100 exit "a bit embarrassing, but otherwise irrelevant, in my opinion."

🌼 Blossom Continues To Beleive

📊 While Wall Street was busy cutting price targets, Blossom investors were doing the exact opposite:

🛒 Since mid-August, buyers have outnumbered sellers 2-to-1, and through the downgrade wave itself, roughly 70% of everyone trading Nike on Blossom was buying
🧘 Weekly seller counts have actually fallen since the downgrades started.
🆕 Nike is finding new fans on the way down: 39% of last week's buyers were buying Nike for the first time, up from ~20–25% all summer
⚖️ What’s most interesting is Blossom net sold Nike for five straight weeks back in January when the stock broke $55, so this dip-buying conviction is new.

🤔 So who’s right, the Blossom community or the analysts?

👀 Luckily, we won’t have to wait long for the next chapter here, as Nike reports earnings on Thursday… and I’ll be sure to give you the update next week 🫡

🔄 But on the note of turnarounds, let’s shift our attention to the turnaround king: Meta, which has soared an incredible 32% in the past month, shaking off worries about its AI spending with the launch of Muse, its AI assistant.

📊 But before we dive deeper into Meta, a quick word from our other sponsor this week, Plynk!

BIG TECH
🚀 Meta Surges 11% After Betting Big On Muse At Meta Connect

🤖 This week, Meta ($META) held Meta Connect, the company's annual two-day developer conference, where Zuckerberg made Muse (the viral AI assistant Meta launched 3 weeks ago, which we covered last week) the centerpiece of nearly everything they announced.

🥊 The Zuck came out swinging, announcing major products and partnerships that sent the stock soaring, including:

🥽 Meta VR Glasses: a new, ultra-thin VR headset starting at $1,299 USD, arriving spring 2027, with Disney+, Prime Video, and IMAX Enhanced content support
🔑 Muse Charm: a small, pocket/keychain-sized device with a fingerprint sensor that lets you talk to Muse without pulling out your phone, shipping “in time for the holidays” (price unannounced)
👓 Ray-Ban Meta Audio: Meta’s first camera-free smart glasses, $349 USD, shipping October 13
🛍️ Plus more announcements of Muse expanding into shopping, adding Walmart, Instacart, Best Buy, Gap, Wayfair, and Sephora as retail partners, plus payment support via Shop Pay and PayPal
📺 Watch the full conference here!

🚀 Meta shares jumped 10% in a single day following the conference, with shares now up roughly 32% over the past month, sitting near a 52-week high - a remarkable turnaround considering it was negative on the year just a month ago, when investors were punishing Meta for its massive AI spending with no clear return in sight.

🌎 Racing Towards a “Post-Smartphone” World

🕶️ Meta’s AI models are generally seen as behind OpenAI's and Anthropic’s, but the story has now shifted to distribution (aka actually getting AI into people’s daily lives through hardware).

📊 Meta and manufacturing partner EssilorLuxottica (parent of Ray-Ban) reportedly sold 7-7.5 million pairs of AI-enabled glasses in 2025 alone, with targets to produce 10 million for 2026.

💃 Meta’s VP of wearables Alex Himel says the strategy has been deliberate to prioritize fashion first so people want to wear the hardware regardless of features.

💡 And even though customers of Meta’s AI glasses use the smart features only about 10% of the time, the real value is that Meta’s hardware is being sold at all.

🍩 Compared to the competition: OpenAI's first hardware device (reportedly a screen-free, "doughnut-shaped" object) hasn't shipped yet, Google's ($GOOG) AI glasses are only expected to go on sale soon, and Apple ($AAPL) and Amazon ($AMZN) are still in development.

💬 What Analysts Are Saying

🤔 So what do analysts have to say about all this? Will these announcements turn around the narrative for Meta?

🎯 Judging by Wall Street's reaction, the answer is yes, with a wave of price target hikes following the Connect conference:

🟢 JPMorgan raised its target from $820 to $920
🟢 KeyBanc raised to $900 (flagging Muse as a genuine revenue driver)
🟢 Cantor Fitzgerald and Raymond James both moved to $860
🟢 Tigress Financial went as high as $995
🟢 Wells Fargo called Muse "the new metric to watch."

✅ Across the board, analysts have rated Meta as a strong buy, with an average ~$800 price target, above even the $752 price the stock is sitting at after this month’s surge.

🔥 Jefferies (which hiked its target from $710 to $875) went the furthest, calling Muse a "killer product" that "flips the narrative" on Meta's AI spending. And as William Blair's Ralph Schackart put it:

🧐 But not everyone’s convinced the new hardware actually solves anything.

🗣️ Anthony Ferry, CEO of e-commerce company Wayvia, put it bluntly:

🛒 There's also a business model question. Zuckerberg says he expects Meta will eventually "profit by taking a small fee from transactions Muse completes, but Amazon has already blocked Muse from shopping on its site (the same move it made against Perplexity, OpenAI, and Google), which cuts off a huge chunk of e-commerce.

⏳ As of today, the actual test that remains is whether Muse usage holds up once the novelty fades, and whether Meta can find a business model that survives Amazon-style blockades. It also hinges on whether people actually want an AI agent living on their face or in their pocket long-term.

🤷‍♂️ But debate aside, it’s undeniable that Zuck has completely shifted the narrative on Meta in the past month from an AI money pit to one of the most exciting AI hardware and distribution plays in the market…

🙏 But anyways, that’s enough for one Sunday! Thanks for reading to the end - let’s wrap up with some of the best posts on Blossom this week!

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

👇 Click to see the full post!

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📉 Nike Just Hit Its Lowest Price In 12 Years. Can It Bounce Back?

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 14:56:09 +0000

TOP STORY
📉 Nike Just Hit Its Lowest Price In 12 Years. Can It Bounce Back?

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone!

🚀 It was another big week in the markets, with the Nasdaq-100 climbing for the 2nd week in a row, now up 32% in the past 6 months. Across the indexes:

The S&P 500 rose +1.21%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +3.25%
The TSX fell -0.02%

🤔 So, what sparked Monday’s Big Rally?

1) 🤑 The AI Money Train Keeps Chugging

🎯 Dimon also said that this spending is showing real returns, noting top cloud providers grew cloud revenue ~48% year-over-year last quarter, backed by a ~$1.7 trillion backlog of signed orders.

2) 🇨🇳 Progress on US-China Relations

3) 💸 Falling Oil Prices and Bond Yields

💬 As Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, put it:

🛢️ Oil also jumped back up to $107/barrel on Thursday amid the endless geopolitical tensions in Iran.

📈 But despite it all, the market proved remarkably resilient, jumping again on Friday to cap off a winning week for all three major US indexes.

✨ But first, a quick word from this week's sponsor, Fidelity Investments!

TOP STORY
📉 Nike Just Hit Its Lowest Price In 12 Years. Can It Bounce Back?

👟 Going as far back as Dec 2025, we’ve been covering Nike’s ($NKE) turnaround efforts and whether its “Win Now” strategy by new CEO Elliott Hill would be the fix for the company.

📉 Well… since then, shares have fallen over 40%, and are now down 76% over the past 5 years, hitting their lowest price since 2014 after a wave of analyst downgrades.

🤔 So what’s the story behind the company’s fall from grace? And is there any chance of a turnaround from here after 5 years of disappointment?

👟 Why Nike’s Empire Has Been Crumbling

📉 As you can see from the stock price, Nike’s “Win Now” strategy has been looking rough…

🇨🇳 Q1 earnings are scheduled for this coming week, but as of the company’s last earnings (which we covered here), a few specific rough patches were very evident:

❌ Overall revenue fell 1%, and management guided to a low- to mid-single-digit sales decline in the upcoming quarter
❌ Greater China revenue fell roughly 12% (the 8th-straight quarterly decline)
❌ Converse sales collapsed more than 30% year over year.

🗓️ And if it couldn’t get worse, one analyst now says a full recovery of revenue might take all the way up until 2028:

✨ Specks of Hope: Nike’s “Sports Offense”

🧭 Despite the brutal numbers, some believe Nike's turnaround strategy shows promise (including the 3,800 holders on Blossom who are still holding on). Most notably with “Sport Offense.”

🗣️ All this even led to a change of tone for Hill, who reflected on all of this at Nike’s annual shareholder meeting a couple of weeks ago, saying:

⚖️ But do the positives outweigh the negatives?

😬 Analysts Aren’t Optimistic

🔀 Well, analysts are split, leaning negative, and in the past 2 weeks alone a wave of Wall Street cuts has hurt the stock a lot:

🐻 Sept 10: Morgan Stanley reinstated Underweight with a $31 target
⬇️ Sept 14: Baird downgraded Nike from Outperform to Neutral, slashing its target from $70 to $44
✂️ Sept 14: Citi cut its target from $45 to $39
✂️ Sept 17: UBS cut its target from $48 to $42
😬 Sept 23: Barclays, one of the last bulls left, kept its Overweight rating but trimmed its target from $52 to $48
🚨 Sept 25: Bank of America downgraded Nike to Underperform, slashing its target from $47 all the way to $30
✂️ Sept 26: Goldman Sachs cut its target from $42 to $38

🌼 Blossom Continues To Beleive

📊 While Wall Street was busy cutting price targets, Blossom investors were doing the exact opposite:

🛒 Since mid-August, buyers have outnumbered sellers 2-to-1, and through the downgrade wave itself, roughly 70% of everyone trading Nike on Blossom was buying
🧘 Weekly seller counts have actually fallen since the downgrades started.
🆕 Nike is finding new fans on the way down: 39% of last week's buyers were buying Nike for the first time, up from ~20–25% all summer
⚖️ What’s most interesting is Blossom net sold Nike for five straight weeks back in January when the stock broke $55, so this dip-buying conviction is new.

🤔 So who’s right, the Blossom community or the analysts?

👀 Luckily, we won’t have to wait long for the next chapter here, as Nike reports earnings on Thursday… and I’ll be sure to give you the update next week 🫡

📊 But before we dive deeper into Meta, a quick word from our other sponsor this week, CIBC ETFs!

BIG TECH
🚀 Meta Surges 11% After Betting Big On Muse At Meta Connect

🥊 The Zuck came out swinging, announcing major products and partnerships that sent the stock soaring, including:

🥽 Meta VR Glasses: a new, ultra-thin VR headset starting at $1,299 USD, arriving spring 2027, with Disney+, Prime Video, and IMAX Enhanced content support
🔑 Muse Charm: a small, pocket/keychain-sized device with a fingerprint sensor that lets you talk to Muse without pulling out your phone, shipping “in time for the holidays” (price unannounced)
👓 Ray-Ban Meta Audio: Meta’s first camera-free smart glasses, $349 USD, shipping October 13
🛍️ Plus more announcements of Muse expanding into shopping, adding Walmart, Instacart, Best Buy, Gap, Wayfair, and Sephora as retail partners, plus payment support via Shop Pay and PayPal
📺 Watch the full conference here!

🌎 Racing Towards a “Post-Smartphone” World

📊 Meta and manufacturing partner EssilorLuxottica (parent of Ray-Ban) reportedly sold 7-7.5 million pairs of AI-enabled glasses in 2025 alone, with targets to produce 10 million for 2026.

💃 Meta’s VP of wearables Alex Himel says the strategy has been deliberate to prioritize fashion first so people want to wear the hardware regardless of features.

💡 And even though customers of Meta’s AI glasses use the smart features only about 10% of the time, the real value is that Meta’s hardware is being sold at all.

💬 What Analysts Are Saying

🤔 So what do analysts have to say about all this? Will these announcements turn around the narrative for Meta?

🎯 Judging by Wall Street's reaction, the answer is yes, with a wave of price target hikes following the Connect conference:

🟢 JPMorgan raised its target from $820 to $920
🟢 KeyBanc raised to $900 (flagging Muse as a genuine revenue driver)
🟢 Cantor Fitzgerald and Raymond James both moved to $860
🟢 Tigress Financial went as high as $995
🟢 Wells Fargo called Muse "the new metric to watch."

✅ Across the board, analysts have rated Meta as a strong buy, with an average ~$800 price target, above even the $752 price the stock is sitting at after this month’s surge.

🧐 But not everyone’s convinced the new hardware actually solves anything.

🗣️ Anthony Ferry, CEO of e-commerce company Wayvia, put it bluntly:

🙏 But anyways, that’s enough for one Sunday! Thanks for reading to the end - let’s wrap up with some of the best posts on Blossom this week!

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

👇 Click to see the full post!

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😰 Why One Analyst Is Predicting a 30% Market Crash in 2027 (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:55:03 +0000

TOP STORY
📉 Why One Analyst Is Predicting a 30% Market Crash in 2027

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone!

👀 Over the past few months, we’ve watched the odds of an interest rate hike jump from 35% in early August to nearly 90% as inflation rises and employment numbers come back stronger than expected…

🏦 Well, on Wednesday the predictions came true, with the Fed officially raising rates by 0.25% (its first hike in more than 3 years), bringing the benchmark rate to 3.75%-4.00%, with Fed Chair Kevin Warsh citing inflation as the main culprit.

📉 As expected, stocks fell, with the S&P 500 falling 1.2%, but quickly recovered the next day and ended the week mostly flat. Across the week:

The S&P 500 fell -0.08%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +0.94%
The TSX rose +0.31%

📊 A few other key metrics to keep an eye on:

📈 The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield hit 5% for the first time since 2007
🛢️ Brent Crude soared to a 4-month high of $106/barrel on Tuesday following an attack on a Saudi pipeline.
₿ And Bitcoin ($BTC) rose more than 7% back above $80,000 for the first time since September 7 after the SEC cleared a 5-year regulatory path to trade tokenized U.S. stocks

🤖 Looking at AI stocks, the week started with panic following a 4,000-word letter by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for AI companies to slow down, backed by both Sam Altman and Elon Musk, sending chip stocks like Nvidia ($NVDA) and Intel ($INTC) falling Monday morning on fears of a broader crash.

😮‍💨 But markets shook it off, clawing back most of the losses within days (Nvidia for example, ended the week up 2%, a very different outcome than the ‘big crash’ many were predicting)

😰 But some analysts say a real crash is still on the way, with one predicting 2027 will be one of the 7 worst crashes of the past century. So, let’s talk about it…

✨ But first, a quick word from our sponsor this week, Plynk!

TOP STORY
👀 So… Are We Headed for an AI-Driven Market Crash?

💡 Let me start by saying this feature story isn’t meant to spread doom and gloom. Many analysts and experts have been calling for a crash for a few years now, and have been wrong time and time again.

🫧 But a report in Fortune this week highlighted some interesting new data points, so I think it’s worth revisiting some of latest arguments about whether a crash is on the horizon…

🔮 The recent prediction comes from Capital Economics analyst James Reilly, who called the AI trade a “late-stage bubble” and is projecting a 30% drop in the S&P 500 from its highs by 2027.

💥 If true, this would make it one of the seven worst crashes of the past century, so let’s dive into his argument.

😬 IPOs of Doom, S&P Concentration, and Negative Free Cash Flow

📊 In his report, Reilly analyzed 8 categories of market indicators (from valuations to earnings concentration) and found most sitting at levels that have historically preceded major market peaks, including:

📈 S&P 500 earnings growth concentrated almost entirely in tech and chips, now matching dot-com era peaks
💸 Combined free cash flow of the four largest AI hyperscalers projected to turn negative in 2027 due to AI CapEx
🏦 Big Tech bond issuance more than doubling year-over-year to fund the cash flow gap
🚀 A fresh wave of AI IPOs, which Reilly calls the clearest late-bubble signal (most notably Anthropic’s IPO, which he called an ‘IPO of doom’ and compared to Pets.com, whose IPO was seen as the beginning of the end for the dot-com bubble)

🎢 "Crazy Days": When One Stock Swings a Whole City

🤯 The market's own behavior lately isn't exactly calming those nerves. In late July, Microsoft's market value rose by $450B in a single day. The next day, Apple's fell by $360B, while Amazon gained $388B (with one economist noting that Apple’s loss was "3.6 Hurricane Sandys" worth of damage).

🌀 These swings have led to some of the highest stock volatility in the past decade, with Lamont’s “dispersion index” (which tracks how wildly individual stocks swing compared to the market) hitting its 3rd-highest reading in the past 11 years.

💡 Lamont does note that these price moves were after earnings, so are not necessarily a warning sign, but flags that the dot-com bubble also had high “daily dispersion”.

🏦 Rising Interest Rates Make Things Even Worse

😳 What’s interesting is that Reilly's -30% crash forecast was his ‘restrained’ scenario, arguing it would be milder than the 50% dot-com crash because he assumed the Fed would not raise interest rates (which, as we saw Wednesday, turned out to be wrong).

💡 As a quick refresher on why interest rates matter so much, higher interest rates mean all companies building expensive data centers have to borrow at higher costs.

📉 And that’s exactly how the dot-com bubble ended: between June 1999 and May 2000, the Fed hiked rates from 4.75% to 6.50%, and the S&P 500 fell nearly 50% over the next 2 1/2 years.

⚠️ So with the Fed raising rates again, it marks yet another danger for the market, with JPMorgan saying that “The Fed had painted itself into a rate-hiking corner” and UBS calling the new Fed chair “the most hawkish Chairman since 1933”.

🐻 And Reilly Isn't Alone…

⚠️ Zooming out, Reilly's report is the loudest of a growing chorus of crash warnings. A few other bear arguments made recently:

🏦 The BIS (the "central bank of central banks") issued its own warning: AI capex is increasingly funded with DEBT, credit spreads are widening, and circular financing raises the risk that one company's slowdown cascades through the whole cluster
🌎 Jefferies' Chris Wood warns AI capex is on track to hit 3.1% of GDP by 2027 (roughly 3x the dot-com telecom buildout relative to the economy). Some economists note that without AI spending, the US might already be in a recession
📄 Moody's counts $662B in data center lease commitments that hyperscalers have signed but not yet started paying, more than their combined on-balance-sheet debt

🤔 So is it time to panic? Morgan Stanley doesn't think so. In fact, they just told clients this is "silly season," not a bubble, and they're calling for the S&P to hit new highs next year.

📊 But before we dive into the arguments against the crash, a quick word about some of the cool ETFs I learned about at Futureproof!

AT FUTUREPROOF
⭐️ Some ETFs to Add to Your Watchlist from the Biggest Advisor Conference in the US

😎 This week, some of the Blossom team and I were down at Futureproof, the biggest conference in the US for Asset Managers and Financial Advisors, and I wanted to highlight a few of the cool ETFs to add to your watchlist:

$GRNY — Granny Shots US Large Cap ETF (Fundstrat): Tom Lee (the Wall Street strategist famous for his market calls) packs his team's ~40 highest-conviction US large caps into an active ETF. Nearly $4B in under two years, one of the fastest growing active-ETF launches ever.
$SSK — REX-Osprey Solana + Staking ETF: the first US-listed ETF to hold Solana and stake it, earning crypto staking rewards on top of price exposure.
$TSCM — TimesSquare Quality Mid Cap Growth ETF: an actively managed portfolio of 30–40 quality mid-cap growth stocks from a 25-year institutional manager.
$KSMH — xETFs Korean Semiconductor ETF: pure-play exposure to Korea's chipmakers, Samsung, SK Hynix and the memory/HBM supply chain, in one US-listed ticker.
$USO — United States Oil Fund (USCF): tracks the price of crude oil directly via futures, rather than owning oil company stocks.
$TMFC — Motley Fool 100 Index ETF: an index of the top 100 US stocks recommended by Motley Fool analysts.
$EVSB — Eaton Vance Ultra-Short Income ETF: an actively managed "cash-plus" fund from Morgan Stanley's income shop, very short-term, investment-grade bonds aiming to squeeze a bit more yield out of money you'd otherwise park in a savings account or T-bill ETF, with monthly payouts.

🙋‍♂️ Hope you find a few as interesting as I did!

TOP STORY CONT.
🤪 Morgan Stanley says it’s ‘Silly Season’, Not a Bubble

🚀 Now there are plenty of experts who think Reilly and the crash predictors have it wrong. Take Morgan Stanley’s CIO Lisa Shalett, who says she isn’t too worried about rate hikes and AI bubble concerns.

📐 Her reasoning? Well, the S&P 500’s forward P/E already fell from 22.5x in January to ~19.5x as of today, so stocks are getting less expensive, not more. And despite concentration issues, the market is still rocketing ahead with ~30%+ earnings growth.

🔎 And the dot-com comparison gets shakier the closer you look at the individual companies: today's leaders like Nvidia and Microsoft trade at roughly 30x forward earnings, while at the 2000 peak, Cisco and Oracle traded above 120x.

🌍 On the macro environment overall, Lisa says that rising rates, oil stress, and politics are real, but that “markets appear to be pricing them in clear-eyed fashion.” And that AI investments are “mostly rate-insensitive” anyway, so a hike or two probably won’t slow hyperscalers down, which was reiterated by analyst Bill Merz:

🤪 Overall, Shalett calls the time we’re entering (September-October) “Wall Street’s proverbial silly season,” and expects the S&P 500 to hit 8,000 by year-end and 8,300 by mid-2027.

🤔 So, What’s the Takeaway for Your Portfolio?

🤷 The takeaway here is that we're in a peculiar market with a lot of moving parts… but as Peter Lynch famously put it,

💡 For a long-term investor in particular, this doesn’t mean you should ignore the arguments - it means stress-testing your portfolio against them. If Reilly's 30% drop happened next year, would you be forced to sell, or could you ride it out (or even buy)?

🧪 This is a helpful test to make sure your portfolio matches your goals and risk tolerance, and ensure you haven’t got swept up in the hype.

🌼 What do you think 2027 has in store for us? Share your thoughts on my Blossom poll and join the conversation with 850,000+ other investors!

👉 But enough about crashes that haven't happened yet, let’s switch gears to the other top stories of the week across Meta, SpaceX, and more…

IN OTHER NEWS
🗞️ Meta Launches Muse, Buffett Steps Down and SpaceX Scores a Big Win

🥇 Meta Launches New "Muse" AI Agent & Hits #1 on the App Store

🥇 On Friday, Meta's ($META) new AI agent "Muse" officially hit #1 on the U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT (#2), Gemini (#8), and Claude (#13).
🤖 Muse is Meta's answer to GPT-6 Astra, with Meta framing it not as a chatbot, but as an assistant you delegate to. Rather than answering one question at a time, it takes on whole tasks (booking flights, managing your calendar, cleaning up your inbox) and keeps working until they're finished.
📈 Analysts called it the clearest proof yet that Meta's projected $130-145 billion in 2026 AI spending is turning into products people actually use, with JPMorgan upgrading the stock to Overweight (raising its target from $640 to $820) and the stock up over 20% in the past month.
👀 That said, downloads don’t equal victory. As Morgan Stanley's Brian Nowak put it, "we view engagement as the initial barometer": the real test is whether people are still using Muse a few months from now (and whether Meta can monetize it).

🏛️ Warren Buffett Steps Down as Berkshire Chairman

👴 Berkshire Hathaway announced Friday that Warren Buffett, age 96, is officially stepping down as chairman effective immediately, ending a run in the role since 1970. He’ll become chairman emeritus (allowed to retain the title as an honor) while remaining on the board.
👶 His son Howard Buffett, a Berkshire director since 1993, will take the role, as part of what the company called a long-term succession plan after Buffett handed the CEO title to Greg Abel at the end of last year.
💬 Buffett wrote in his letter to shareholders that “Father Time always wins,” adding “He has, however, been generous with me.”
📉 Berkshire ($BRK-B) shares barely moved on the news, with investors assumed to already have priced in the transition.

🚀 NASA Awards SpaceX Another $946 Million

📄 Also on Friday, NASA awarded SpaceX ($SPCX) a $946 million contract modification, adding three more crewed missions (Crew-15, 16, and 17) to the International Space Station under its Commercial Crew program, extending SpaceX’s role through 2030.
📈 This now brings SpaceX’s total NASA missions to 17, with the cumulative contract value totaling nearly $6 billion.
⚠️ The award comes as Boeing’s ($BA) Starliner remains grounded and still hasn’t flown an operational crew rotation mission for NASA, leaving SpaceX as the agency’s sole reliable ride to the station for now.

🎬 Paramount’s $110 Billion Warner Deal Nears Its Deadline

🥊 Paramount Skydance’s ($PSKY) $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery ($WBD), the deal that beat out a rival Netflix ($NFLX) bid back in February after Netflix declined to match Paramount’s $31-per-share offer (read our breakdown of that here), is now racing toward its self-imposed close date of September 30th.
⏰ If it slips past that date, WBD shareholders start collecting a $0.25-per-share quarterly “ticking fee” until the deal actually closes.
📚 The combined company is expected to control a film library of more than 15,000 titles, spanning franchises like Harry Potter, Mission Impossible, Lord of the Rings, and the DC Universe all under one name.
⚖️ Even if the deal shakes hands, it’s expected to still face antitrust scrutiny in both the U.S. and Europe before it can officially close.

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

👇 Click to see the full post!

Plynk Disclaimer

😰 Why One Analyst Is Predicting a 30% Market Crash in 2027

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:31:09 +0000

TOP STORY
📉 Why One Analyst Is Predicting a 30% Market Crash in 2027

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone!

📉 As expected, stocks fell, with the S&P 500 falling 1.2%, but quickly recovered the next day and ended the week mostly flat. Across the week:

The S&P 500 fell -0.08%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +0.94%
The TSX rose +0.31%

📊 A few other key metrics to keep an eye on:

📈 The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield hit 5% for the first time since 2007
🛢️ Brent Crude soared to a 4-month high of $106/barrel on Tuesday following an attack on a Saudi pipeline.
₿ And Bitcoin ($BTC) rose more than 7% back above $80,000 for the first time since September 7 after the SEC cleared a 5-year regulatory path to trade tokenized U.S. stocks

😰 But some analysts say a real crash is still on the way, with one predicting 2027 will be one of the 7 worst crashes of the past century. So, let’s talk about it…

✨ But first, a quick word from our sponsor this week, BMO ETFs!

TOP STORY
👀 So… Are We Headed for an AI-Driven Market Crash?

🫧 But a report in Fortune this week highlighted some interesting new data points, so I think it’s worth revisiting some of latest arguments about whether a crash is on the horizon…

🔮 The recent prediction comes from Capital Economics analyst James Reilly, who called the AI trade a “late-stage bubble” and is projecting a 30% drop in the S&P 500 from its highs by 2027.

💥 If true, this would make it one of the seven worst crashes of the past century, so let’s dive into his argument.

😬 IPOs of Doom, S&P Concentration, and Negative Free Cash Flow

📈 S&P 500 earnings growth concentrated almost entirely in tech and chips, now matching dot-com era peaks
💸 Combined free cash flow of the four largest AI hyperscalers projected to turn negative in 2027 due to AI CapEx
🏦 Big Tech bond issuance more than doubling year-over-year to fund the cash flow gap
🚀 A fresh wave of AI IPOs, which Reilly calls the clearest late-bubble signal (most notably Anthropic’s IPO, which he called an ‘IPO of doom’ and compared to Pets.com, whose IPO was seen as the beginning of the end for the dot-com bubble)

🎢 "Crazy Days": When One Stock Swings a Whole City

💡 Lamont does note that these price moves were after earnings, so are not necessarily a warning sign, but flags that the dot-com bubble also had high “daily dispersion”.

🏦 Rising Interest Rates Make Things Even Worse

💡 As a quick refresher on why interest rates matter so much, higher interest rates mean all companies building expensive data centers have to borrow at higher costs.

📉 And that’s exactly how the dot-com bubble ended: between June 1999 and May 2000, the Fed hiked rates from 4.75% to 6.50%, and the S&P 500 fell nearly 50% over the next 2 1/2 years.

🐻 And Reilly Isn't Alone…

⚠️ Zooming out, Reilly's report is the loudest of a growing chorus of crash warnings. A few other bear arguments made recently:

🏦 The BIS (the "central bank of central banks") issued its own warning: AI capex is increasingly funded with DEBT, credit spreads are widening, and circular financing raises the risk that one company's slowdown cascades through the whole cluster
🌎 Jefferies' Chris Wood warns AI capex is on track to hit 3.1% of GDP by 2027 (roughly 3x the dot-com telecom buildout relative to the economy). Some economists note that without AI spending, the US might already be in a recession
📄 Moody's counts $662B in data center lease commitments that hyperscalers have signed but not yet started paying, more than their combined on-balance-sheet debt

🤔 So is it time to panic? Morgan Stanley doesn't think so. In fact, they just told clients this is "silly season," not a bubble, and they're calling for the S&P to hit new highs next year.

📊 But before we dive into the arguments against the crash, a quick word from our other sponsor this week, Harvest ETFs

TOP STORY CONT.
🤪 Morgan Stanley says it’s ‘Silly Season’, Not a Bubble

🤪 Overall, Shalett calls the time we’re entering (September-October) “Wall Street’s proverbial silly season,” and expects the S&P 500 to hit 8,000 by year-end and 8,300 by mid-2027.

🤔 So, What’s the Takeaway for Your Portfolio?

🤷 The takeaway here is that we're in a peculiar market with a lot of moving parts… but as Peter Lynch famously put it,

🧪 This is a helpful test to make sure your portfolio matches your goals and risk tolerance, and ensure you haven’t got swept up in the hype.

🌼 What do you think 2027 has in store for us? Share your thoughts on my Blossom poll and join the conversation with 850,000+ other investors!

👉 But enough about crashes that haven't happened yet, let’s switch gears to the other top stories of the week across Meta, SpaceX, and more…

IN OTHER NEWS
🗞️ Meta Launches Muse, Buffett Steps Down and SpaceX Scores a Big Win

🥇 Meta Launches New "Muse" AI Agent & Hits #1 on the App Store

🥇 On Friday, Meta's ($META) new AI agent "Muse" officially hit #1 on the U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT (#2), Gemini (#8), and Claude (#13).
🤖 Muse is Meta's answer to GPT-6 Astra, with Meta framing it not as a chatbot, but as an assistant you delegate to. Rather than answering one question at a time, it takes on whole tasks (booking flights, managing your calendar, cleaning up your inbox) and keeps working until they're finished.
📈 Analysts called it the clearest proof yet that Meta's projected $130-145 billion in 2026 AI spending is turning into products people actually use, with JPMorgan upgrading the stock to Overweight (raising its target from $640 to $820) and the stock up over 20% in the past month.
👀 That said, downloads don’t equal victory. As Morgan Stanley's Brian Nowak put it, "we view engagement as the initial barometer": the real test is whether people are still using Muse a few months from now (and whether Meta can monetize it).

🏛️ Warren Buffett Steps Down as Berkshire Chairman

👴 Berkshire Hathaway announced Friday that Warren Buffett, age 96, is officially stepping down as chairman effective immediately, ending a run in the role since 1970. He’ll become chairman emeritus (allowed to retain the title as an honor) while remaining on the board.
👶 His son Howard Buffett, a Berkshire director since 1993, will take the role, as part of what the company called a long-term succession plan after Buffett handed the CEO title to Greg Abel at the end of last year.
💬 Buffett wrote in his letter to shareholders that “Father Time always wins,” adding “He has, however, been generous with me.”
📉 Berkshire ($BRK-B) shares barely moved on the news, with investors assumed to already have priced in the transition.

🚀 NASA Awards SpaceX Another $946 Million

📄 Also on Friday, NASA awarded SpaceX ($SPCX) a $946 million contract modification, adding three more crewed missions (Crew-15, 16, and 17) to the International Space Station under its Commercial Crew program, extending SpaceX’s role through 2030.
📈 This now brings SpaceX’s total NASA missions to 17, with the cumulative contract value totaling nearly $6 billion.
⚠️ The award comes as Boeing’s ($BA) Starliner remains grounded and still hasn’t flown an operational crew rotation mission for NASA, leaving SpaceX as the agency’s sole reliable ride to the station for now.

🎬 Paramount’s $110 Billion Warner Deal Nears Its Deadline

🥊 Paramount Skydance’s ($PSKY) $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery ($WBD), the deal that beat out a rival Netflix ($NFLX) bid back in February after Netflix declined to match Paramount’s $31-per-share offer (read our breakdown of that here), is now racing toward its self-imposed close date of September 30th.
⏰ If it slips past that date, WBD shareholders start collecting a $0.25-per-share quarterly “ticking fee” until the deal actually closes.
📚 The combined company is expected to control a film library of more than 15,000 titles, spanning franchises like Harry Potter, Mission Impossible, Lord of the Rings, and the DC Universe all under one name.
⚖️ Even if the deal shakes hands, it’s expected to still face antitrust scrutiny in both the U.S. and Europe before it can officially close.

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

👇 Click to see the full post!

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📲 Apple Jumps 5% After Unveiling the First Foldable iPhone (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 18:43:08 +0000

TOP STORY
📲 Apple Jumps 5% After Unveiling the First Foldable iPhone

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone! It was another busy week in the markets, so let’s get right into it…

🎢 Brent Crude officially crossed $100/barrel for the first time since July this week, with stocks falling four days straight up until Friday.

✨ On Friday, we got some good news when August inflation numbers (CPI) held steady from July, giving us the only green day of the week.

📊 Across the week:

The S&P 500 fell -0.80%
The Nasdaq 100 fell -0.59%
The TSX fell -2.24%

😬 Consumer sentiment remains at all-time lows, with the University of Michigan’s “Index of Consumer Sentiment” falling to 47.8, the second-lowest reading in the survey’s history going back to 1952 (and down 8% from August), and U.S. households now expecting 4.6% inflation over the next year (compared to 4% last month).

😰 All this has made the interest rate situation even worse, with the odds of the Fed increasing interest rates on Wednesday now sitting at 86.7%, up from 59.4% just a week ago.

📈 One bright spot is that surging oil prices have helped the Energy sector ($XLE) rise a whopping 43% year-to-date, making it the best-performing sector in the market (and a great reminder why sector diversification matters!).

🐝 But Macro picture aside, let’s get into our biggest stories of the week. Today we’ll cover:

Apple ($AAPL) jumping 5% after unveiling the first foldable iPhone
OpenAI delaying its IPO "to prioritize safety" and the growing debate over whether AI doom warnings are real or just a marketing ploy
And whether Oracle ($ORCL)’s earnings can turn things around for a stock now down 50% in the past year

🍎 Starting first with Apple…

📱 Apple Surges 5% After Unveiling the First Foldable iPhone

🍎 On Wednesday, Apple ($AAPL) held its “Surprise and Shine” event, the first event headlined by the company’s new CEO, John Ternus, where he announced the new iPhone Duo, a product Apple calls its “biggest reinvention” of the iPhone since first launching.

🌟 iPhone Duo is Apple’s first-ever foldable iPhone, with a passport-shaped 5.4-inch outer screen and a 7.6-inch tablet-sized display when opened, powered by Apple’s new A20 Pro chip.

💰 The Duo’s price starts at a whopping $1,999 in the United States ($2,999 CAD), $100 more than Samsung’s and Google’s comparable models.

📊 Other announcements at the event:

📱 The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, with new colours and a $100 price bump ($1,199 and $1,299), new 48MP variable-aperture cameras, and deeper “Siri AI” integration
⌚ The Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, with a redesigned health-sensing system and AI-powered health insights
🎧 New AirPods 5 at $129, bringing active noise cancellation to the company’s entry-level buds for the first time
📺 Watch the full event here!

💾 One big topic of convo was rising prices, a direct result of rising memory chip costs that Tim Cook warned about on his final earnings call.

📈 But despite the price increases, markets reacted positively, with Apple rising 5% the next day and up 40% over the past year.

🎯 What Analysts Are Saying About the Duo

📈 So with the stock jump, what are analysts saying about the new Duo?

📊 Well, sales estimates for the iPhone Duo cluster in the 5-6 million unit range for its first year, ~24.8% of the global foldable market, which would put it second place behind Samsung's 7.1 million (35.1% share).

✨ Some are even more optimistic, with IDC saying Apple will likely sell every unit it can make and could reach 40% of the foldable market by 2027.

💰 Wedbush's Dan Ives says the Duo's contribution to iPhone revenue "could be 15 to 20%," which at Apple's current revenue would put the high end at ~$42 billion a year.

🔄 And the upgrade math is compelling: Ives estimates ~300 million of Apple's 1.5 billion active iPhones haven't upgraded in four years, a massive pool of aging devices now staring at a genuinely flashy upgrade…

🤖 But What About AI (aka Apple Intelligence)?

😬 So the Duo answered the hardware question. But the bigger question hanging over Apple is still AI. Back in April, we covered John Ternus inheriting an AI slump as Apple's new CEO, with some on Wall Street growing impatient for Apple's answer to the AI race.

🤖 Since then, Apple has pushed hard to answer the AI doubters. Alongside the Duo, Apple also announced that on Monday it ships "Siri AI" via iOS 27: a Gemini-powered assistant that connects to your apps and messages to act as a true personal assistant, working with over 300,000 apps at launch.

⭐️ Ternus' pitch is that the iPhone becomes your "intelligent personal hub," with AI running on-device wherever possible for privacy.

💬 Bank of America's Wamsi Mohan laid out the bull case for what the means for Apple back in May:

📈 Many analysts beleive these AI upgrades and the new Duo will drive an upgrade cycle and lift the average sale price on the iPhone, driving a great year ahead for the world’s most valuable company.

🙋‍♂️ Personally, I invested in Apple a month ago after earnings, and the recent announcements make me even more bullish on Apple’s prospects!

🤖 All right, let’s shift gears to our second big story this week - OpenAI delaying its IPO and the growing debate over whether AI doom warnings are just a marketing ploy…

✨ But first, a quick word from our sponsor this week, Nasdaq!

AI DOOMERISM
😰 OpenAI Delays Its IPO “To Prioritize Safety”… but Is “AI Doom” Just a Marketing Ploy?

🚨 Moving on to AI, we had another massive story this week, with Sam Altman telling Fortune that OpenAI will NOT go public this year, calling 2026 “an ill-advised moment” for a listing, and saying the IPO won’t happen until next year so the company can focus on safety concerns around its technology.

😨 And he didn’t use gentle language either:

🤝 But if it couldn’t get more apocalyptic, the same weekend Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a ~4,000-word blog post pledging to slow model releases and add new safety measures, with both Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly backing him, right after a high-profile Anthropic researcher resigned over fears the industry is acting irresponsibly.

📅 OpenAI now expects to go public in 2027, while Anthropic’s IPO is still expected for 2026.

🧐 Is “AI Doomerism” Just a Marketing Ploy?

👀 Now, a growing criticism around these apocalyptic warnings from AI CEOs is that it’s a clever marketing ploy. Basically, saying “our product has a 10% chance of ending humanity” implies it’s the most powerful technology ever built.

😰 Communication researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt calls it “AI Panic Marketing,” while professor Lee Vinsel coined the term “criti-hype,” where any criticism of AI actually feeds the hype (because every scary headline by a tech CEO about AI’s power is still a headline about how powerful AI is / will become).

📈 And this fear has had a direct impact on stock prices, two weeks ago we covered how the "Mythos moment" (companies panicking about rogue AI) fueled CrowdStrike ($CRWD)’s best quarter ever and a sector-wide cybersecurity boom (read that article here)

✅ The Case That It’s Genuine

⚖️ On the flip side, AI safety concerns aren’t some new thing, and this summer’s “Hugging Face attack” (where rogue AI agents at OpenAI broke out of training and pulled off an autonomous cyber-attack did actually happen.

💰 In fact, the strongest counter to the “AI doom is a marketing theory,” at least for OpenAI, is that delaying an IPO is expensive, especially at peak interest.

👀 Join the debate about this on Blossom, and share your opinion on the poll below and see what the community has to say about this debate!

👀 While we’re on the topic of AI, let’s move on to our final story of the day: Oracle. Why it’s down 50% in the past year, and whether its recent earnings show signs of a turnaround…

📊 But first, a quick word from our other sponsor this week, Stock Analysis!

EARNINGS RECAP
☁️ Oracle’s Down 50% in the past Year: Can Recent Earnings Turn Things Around?

📉 Almost exactly one year ago, Oracle ($ORCL) closed at its all-time high of ~$325 after wowing Wall Street with its AI backlog. This week it reported earnings with the stock down ~50% from that peak, one of the most brutal round trips in the entire AI trade.

😰 So what happened? In short, investors stopped celebrating Oracle's AI orders and started worrying about how Oracle is paying for them. A few of the most concerning metrics:

Capital spending more than doubled last fiscal year (to $55.7 billion, from $21.2 billion)
Free cash flow has flipped deeply negative
The debt pile swelled to $125 billion, and along the way Oracle suffered a credit downgrade, a spike in the cost of insuring bonds, and the "OpenAI proxy" problem we'll get to below…

📊 So Oracle had a lot to prove in this week’s earnings. And the numbers were arguably strong:

✅ Revenue hit $19.35 billion vs. $19.14 billion expected, up 30% year-over-year
✅ EPS hit $1.92 vs. $1.74 expected, up 31% year-over-year
✅ Cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 121% to $7.4 billion, with total cloud revenue up 62%

🤯 And the demand pipeline is staggering: Oracle added 850 megawatts of data center capacity in the quarter, delivered more than 300,000 GPUs to its AI cloud customers, booked over $30 billion in new AI cloud contracts, and now sits on a $664 billion revenue backlog (up $209 billion year-over-year), with roughly half expected to convert into sales within three years.

🎢 The market reaction was mixed, with the stock first rising as much as 8% on Friday, only to reverse massively and end the day down nearly 2%.

🤔 A “Landlord of AI”

🏡 As a quick refresher, over the past couple of years Oracle has reinvented itself as the “landlord for AI” through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, where it now builds massive data centers stuffed with GPUs and rents that computing power to AI labs.

🤝 By far Oracle’s biggest customer is OpenAI (which takes up ~50% of Oracle’s backlog). And because of this large concentration, Oracle has started trading almost as a ‘shadow stock’ of OpenAI.

😬 But lately that dependency has been more of a curse than a blessing. When Anthropic overtook OpenAI in enterprise sales this year, Oracle’s stock fell.

✨ Which is why this quarter's most important number wasn't the 30% growth, it was WHO the new bookings came from: a range of new customers beyond OpenAI (including Nvidia, Meta, AMD, and SpaceX's AI business). As Barron's put it, the results should signal to Wall Street that Oracle is "so much more than a bet on OpenAI."

💸 So Why Can't the Stock Go Up?

😰 One number: $125 billion in debt. Oracle is borrowing enormous sums to build data centers, and this quarter alone it burned $5.4 billion in cash (vs just $362 million a year ago), with its free cash flow sinking deeper and deeper into the red.

💰 Oracle plans to raise another $40 billion through debt and equity this fiscal year, and on Friday it disclosed its restructuring costs (including job cuts) are rising by another $700 million to $2.8 billion.

💬 Many analysts remain bearish on the stock, with one saying:

🐂 But the bulls see it differently. Ci said the quarter checked “nearly every box and reinforces the bull case,” with KeyBanc stating that the new bookings came from a broader set of customers, making Oracle “less dependent on a small number of AI giants.”

✨ Their argument is that the cash burn was actually far smaller than feared (analysts expected ~$9.6 billion) and much of the new contracted revenue relies on customer prepayments rather than Oracle's own capital

🔥 In fact, overall on TipRanks, analysts rate Oracle a ‘Strong buy’ with the average price target 70% above the current price.

🤝 Even Larry Ellison (Oracle’s co-founder and chairman) weighed in with his wallet: after disclosing a plan to sell up to $7.5 billion of his Oracle stock, the 82-year-old founder canceled it a day later, with the company stating he "has no other plans to sell any of his Oracle stock."

💡 On fundamentals, Oracle now trades at ~19x forward earnings vs. Microsoft’s ~25x and Google’s ~22x, so the market is pricing in doubt relative to Big Tech players.

🧩 So, can Oracle turn it around after falling 50%? The puzzle pieces are there: a $664 billion backlog, a broadening customer list, customers footing more of the bill, and an attractive P/E… but whether investors can get over the declining cash flow and debt worries is the big open question.

🗓️ The next big date for Oracle is its AI World event in October, where management updates its long-term targets, so we won’t have to wait long for an update!

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

👇 Click to see the full post!

Nasdaq Disclaimer

Nasdaq® is a registered trademark of Nasdaq, Inc. The information contained above is provided for informational and educational purposes only, and nothing contained herein should be construed as investment advice, either on behalf of a particular security or an overall investment strategy. Neither Nasdaq, Inc. nor any of its affiliates makes any recommendation to buy or sell any security or any representation about the financial condition of any company. Statements regarding Nasdaq-listed companies or Nasdaq proprietary indexes are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investors should undertake their own due diligence and carefully evaluate companies before investing. ADVICE FROM A SECURITIES PROFESSIONAL IS STRONGLY ADVISED.

📲 Apple Jumps 5% After Unveiling the First Foldable iPhone

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:32:04 +0000

TOP STORY
📲 Apple Jumps 5% After Unveiling the First Foldable iPhone

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone! It was another busy week in the markets, so let’s get right into it…

🎢 Brent Crude officially crossed $100/barrel for the first time since July this week, with stocks falling four days straight up until Friday.

✨ On Friday, we got some good news when August inflation numbers (CPI) held steady from July, giving us the only green day of the week.

📊 Across the week:

The S&P 500 fell -0.80%
The Nasdaq 100 fell -0.59%
The TSX fell -2.24%

😰 All this has made the interest rate situation even worse, with the odds of the Fed increasing interest rates on Wednesday now sitting at 86.7%, up from 59.4% just a week ago.

🐝 But Macro picture aside, let’s get into our biggest stories of the week. Today we’ll cover:

Apple ($AAPL) jumping 5% after unveiling the first foldable iPhone
OpenAI delaying its IPO "to prioritize safety" and the growing debate over whether AI doom warnings are real or just a marketing ploy
And whether Oracle ($ORCL)’s earnings can turn things around for a stock now down 50% in the past year

🍎 Starting first with Apple…

📱 Apple Surges 5% After Unveiling the First Foldable iPhone

🌟 iPhone Duo is Apple’s first-ever foldable iPhone, with a passport-shaped 5.4-inch outer screen and a 7.6-inch tablet-sized display when opened, powered by Apple’s new A20 Pro chip.

💰 The Duo’s price starts at a whopping $1,999 in the United States ($2,999 CAD), $100 more than Samsung’s and Google’s comparable models.

📊 Other announcements at the event:

📱 The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, with new colours and a $100 price bump ($1,199 and $1,299), new 48MP variable-aperture cameras, and deeper “Siri AI” integration
⌚ The Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, with a redesigned health-sensing system and AI-powered health insights
🎧 New AirPods 5 at $129, bringing active noise cancellation to the company’s entry-level buds for the first time
📺 Watch the full event here!

💾 One big topic of convo was rising prices, a direct result of rising memory chip costs that Tim Cook warned about on his final earnings call.

📈 But despite the price increases, markets reacted positively, with Apple rising 5% the next day and up 40% over the past year.

🎯 What Analysts Are Saying About the Duo

📈 So with the stock jump, what are analysts saying about the new Duo?

✨ Some are even more optimistic, with IDC saying Apple will likely sell every unit it can make and could reach 40% of the foldable market by 2027.

💰 Wedbush's Dan Ives says the Duo's contribution to iPhone revenue "could be 15 to 20%," which at Apple's current revenue would put the high end at ~$42 billion a year.

🤖 But What About AI (aka Apple Intelligence)?

⭐️ Ternus' pitch is that the iPhone becomes your "intelligent personal hub," with AI running on-device wherever possible for privacy.

💬 Bank of America's Wamsi Mohan laid out the bull case for what the means for Apple back in May:

🙋‍♂️ Personally, I invested in Apple a month ago after earnings, and the recent announcements make me even more bullish on Apple’s prospects!

🤖 All right, let’s shift gears to our second big story this week - OpenAI delaying its IPO and the growing debate over whether AI doom warnings are just a marketing ploy…

✨ But first, a quick word from our sponsor this week, Global X Canada!

AI DOOMERISM
😰 OpenAI Delays Its IPO “To Prioritize Safety”… but Is “AI Doom” Just a Marketing Ploy?

😨 And he didn’t use gentle language either:

📅 OpenAI now expects to go public in 2027, while Anthropic’s IPO is still expected for 2026.

🧐 Is “AI Doomerism” Just a Marketing Ploy?

✅ The Case That It’s Genuine

💰 In fact, the strongest counter to the “AI doom is a marketing theory,” at least for OpenAI, is that delaying an IPO is expensive, especially at peak interest.

👀 Join the debate about this on Blossom, and share your opinion on the poll below and see what the community has to say about this debate!

👀 While we’re on the topic of AI, let’s move on to our final story of the day: Oracle. Why it’s down 50% in the past year, and whether its recent earnings show signs of a turnaround…

📊 But first, a quick word from our other sponsor this week, Fidelity Investments Canada!

EARNINGS RECAP
☁️ Oracle’s Down 50% in the past Year: Can Recent Earnings Turn Things Around?

😰 So what happened? In short, investors stopped celebrating Oracle's AI orders and started worrying about how Oracle is paying for them. A few of the most concerning metrics:

Capital spending more than doubled last fiscal year (to $55.7 billion, from $21.2 billion)
Free cash flow has flipped deeply negative
The debt pile swelled to $125 billion, and along the way Oracle suffered a credit downgrade, a spike in the cost of insuring bonds, and the "OpenAI proxy" problem we'll get to below…

📊 So Oracle had a lot to prove in this week’s earnings. And the numbers were arguably strong:

✅ Revenue hit $19.35 billion vs. $19.14 billion expected, up 30% year-over-year
✅ EPS hit $1.92 vs. $1.74 expected, up 31% year-over-year
✅ Cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 121% to $7.4 billion, with total cloud revenue up 62%

🎢 The market reaction was mixed, with the stock first rising as much as 8% on Friday, only to reverse massively and end the day down nearly 2%.

🤔 A “Landlord of AI”

😬 But lately that dependency has been more of a curse than a blessing. When Anthropic overtook OpenAI in enterprise sales this year, Oracle’s stock fell.

💸 So Why Can't the Stock Go Up?

💬 Many analysts remain bearish on the stock, with one saying:

🔥 In fact, overall on TipRanks, analysts rate Oracle a ‘Strong buy’ with the average price target 70% above the current price.

💡 On fundamentals, Oracle now trades at ~19x forward earnings vs. Microsoft’s ~25x and Google’s ~22x, so the market is pricing in doubt relative to Big Tech players.

🗓️ The next big date for Oracle is its AI World event in October, where management updates its long-term targets, so we won’t have to wait long for an update!

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🤖 What OpenAI’s “GPT-6 Astra” Means for the Stock Market (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:50:31 +0000

TOP STORY
🤖 What OpenAI’s “GPT-6 Astra” Means for the Stock Market

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone! I hope you're all having a lovely long weekend.

🛢️ It was another busy week in the markets, with Brent Crude rising 7% as the U.S. and Iran traded strikes for the first time since July, and the U.S. jobs report for August came back at nearly triple analyst expectations.

📊 Despite the strikes, the markets held green across the week:

The S&P 500 rose +0.09%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +0.38%
The TSX fell -0.11%

🤖 Macro aside, we have a lot to get into this week, starting with OpenAI’s Astra model sending shockwaves across the AI industry, Dell ($DELL) soaring 16% after unveiling a massive $95 billion AI backlog, and Lululemon ($LULU) crashing 17% to an 8-year low.

⚔️ But first, let’s take a quick look at the Iran war, because there were some big updates…

🛢️ Oil Prices Rise As U.S. and Iran Trade Strikes Again

Trump’s AI video of the U.S. military striking Kharg Island, posted on Truth Social

🚢 After a month of relative calm, the war in Iran came roaring back last Sunday, when U.S. forces struck Iranian rocket launchers in the Strait of Hormuz, saying Tehran was preparing to fire rockets carrying sea mines into the Strait.

😅 The same day, Trump posted an AI video on Truth Social of “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens,” although Kharg Island was not one of the targets of the strikes.

💥 On Tuesday, the U.S. launched a much larger wave of strikes targeting air defense sites, radar, maritime assets, mine-laying capabilities, and communications.

⚠️ Saturday morning things escalated with Iran launching ballistic missiles toward a U.S. aircraft carrier.

📈 Oil reacted exactly how you’d expect, with WTI jumping 10% to $91/barrel, and Brent Crude finishing up 7% to around $96/barrel.

⛽ U.S. diesel prices hit an ALL-TIME record of $5.85 a gallon, and Americans paid the highest Labor Day weekend gas prices in history. Diesel is a key price to watch because it fuels trucks, trains, and tractors, so it feeds into the price of basically everything (one economist called it a key reason government bond yields keep climbing around the world).

😬 As of the time of writing, no peace negotiation is in place after the June 17 memorandum of understanding expired unextended on August 17. Countries like Oman and Pakistan that were mediating have also now become idle.

💸 Interest Rate Hike Probability Increases to 58%

😰 Rising fuel costs and a strong jobs report make it even more likely the Fed will raise rates (which is bad for stocks), with the probability now at over 58%. But we won’t have to wait long, with the Fed’s decision coming in just 10 days on Sep 16.

🤖 Macroeconomics aside, let’s switch gears to talk about the biggest story this week: OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, its impact on the stock market, and who’s winning the AI model race…

✨ But first, a quick word from our sponsor this week: Stock Analysis!

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🤖 OpenAI’s “GPT-6 Astra” Sends Shockwaves Across the AI Industry

🤖 This was a MASSIVE week in AI, with four of the world’s leading AI companies releasing their new frontier models:

1️⃣ Tuesday: Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1
2️⃣ Wednesday: Meta launched Muse Spark 1.3, and Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash
3️⃣ Thursday: OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra

🚀 Typically, these labs ship a new flagship every few months, so four frontier launches in three days is very rare.

🏆 But despite all the launches, there was one that stole the headlines: OpenAI’s Astra.

🤖 So let's dive into what's so special about Astra, the impact it's had on the stock market, and who's actually winning the AI race…

🌟 What's Astra?

🧠 GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI’s most powerful model yet, and the company is presenting it as a massive leap in what AI can do. OpenAI’s President even went so far as to call it AGI:

🖥️ The main capability is “computer use,” aka the model can control software, browsers, and desktop apps on its own to complete multi-step tasks like filling forms, updating records, building presentations, and reviewing financials (as seen in the company’s demo video here).

📈 And while OpenAI isn’t public (yet), SoftBank ($SFTB), one of OpenAI's biggest backers, surged more than 10% overnight in Tokyo, so the market is clearly quite excited about the new model.

📊 How Does Astra Stack Up

🥇 Using both OpenAI’s published numbers and independent testing, Astra leads on computer use, math, and cybersecurity (100% on ExploitBench), and also scored near-perfect (99.9%) on the reasoning benchmark that’s been used as the marker for “AGI-like” ability.

🥈 That said, Anthropic’s Fable 5.1 still leads on general reasoning, while coding is essentially a tie between Astra, Meta’s Muse Spark 1.3, Gemini 3.8 Flash, and Claude Opus 5.

⚡ Astra’s real commercial edge is efficiency, where, on Artificial Analysis’s Coding Agent Index, it matches Fable 5 on coding at less than half the cost thanks to big token-efficiency gains.

🧑‍🔬 All in all, analysts seemed impressed with the model, with Gary Marcus, one of the loudest critics of recent AI launches, saying that Astra “looks to be pretty impressive” and appears to be a “genuine advance,” but pushing back on the “this is AGI” statement from OpenAI’s president.

📈 What This Means for the Market

📊 Regardless of who "leads" the foundation model race, the rise of true AI agents (and ‘computer use’) will continue to drive increasing demand for compute, and the market responded accordingly:

Oracle ($ORCL) rose by 6.4%
Nvidia ($NVDA) rose by 5.5%
CoreWeave ($CRWV) rose by 8.5%

💬 Goldman Sachs' head of trading Rich Privorotsky called Astra "precisely what the AI bull market has been waiting for," and explained why a smarter model matters more than a cheaper one:

🏁 But notice what Privorotsky said: Astra forces every other lab to catch up. Which raises the trillion-dollar question… if the lead changes hands with every launch, who actually wins this race?

🤔 So Who’s Actually Winning the Race?

📈 The simple answer is that there’s no single “best” model anymore because each model leads in some domains and trails in others, and the leaderboard flips constantly.

💰 On the revenue side, Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI since April as they dominate enterprise sales, so OpenAI desperately needs Astra to help it retake its lead.

🩴 But this flip-flopping leads us to an interesting dilemma… if one update can change who’s in the lead, what is the moat?

💬 Tech analyst Benedict Evans has been making this argument since early last year:

🤝 And Big Tech seems to agree, because nearly all of them have hedged their bets across labs rather than backing one winner (even the ones who have their own models):

☁️ Microsoft ($MSFT) has revenue-sharing and licensing rights to OpenAI’s models, but OpenAI also represents a huge chunk of Azure’s backlog
📦 Amazon ($AMZN) is Anthropic’s primary cloud and chip partner through AWS and Trainium, but now serves Astra via AWS too
🔍 Google ($GOOGL) builds its own frontier models and owns its own distribution, yet still holds a stake in Anthropic

👀 This matters because Anthropic and OpenAI are spending billions more than they're making, with the rationale that this will be a winner-takes-all market (as was the case with Google for search).

🤔 But given how fast the lead flips, it's unclear whether these are future monopolies or brutally competitive commodities, and with OpenAI and Anthropic’s trillion-dollar IPOs coming up quickly (with Anthropic’s estimated for mid-October and OpenAI’s planned for 2027), the answer matters a lot.

😰 If it's the latter (commodities), those trillion-dollar price tags get much harder to justify.

💡 For retail investors, this is an important reminder that "current leader" and "long-term winner" are very different things.

👀 By the time these IPOs arrive, the leaderboard may have flipped again, and it's worth noting that even the smartest money in tech aren’t picking a winner, they’re hedging across the entire market.

🧘‍♂️ But enough about OpenAI, let’s switch gears to two very different companies: Lululemon’s 17% stock drop, Dell’s 16% surge, and more…

EARNINGS ROUNDUP
📊 Dell Soars 16% and Lululemon Crashes to 8-Year Low

🗓️ Aside from AI news, there were two high-profile companies that reported earnings this week that had very different reactions from the market… starting with Lululemon.

🧘 Lululemon Crashes to 8-Year Low

📉 First up, the biggest loser of the week: Lululemon ($LULU), whose stock fell 17% on Friday, bringing it to its lowest level in 8 years, with shares now down 80% from its all-time high in December 2023.

📊 On the surface, Earnings per Share of $2.92 crushed the $1.80 expected, but almost all of that beat came from a one-time $134.5 million tariff refund, worth $0.86 per share. Strip that out, and EPS was $2.06 while revenue actually fell 4% to $2.42 billion (vs. $2.46 billion expected).

🇨🇳 Mainland China, which was supposed to be the growth engine, was the single biggest source of the miss, with revenue up just 4% (and actually down 2% in constant currency, with comparable sales down 8%) after a wave of social media backlash.

🇺🇸 But this isn't just a China problem: revenue in the Americas, still by far Lululemon's biggest market, fell 8% with comparable sales down 9%.

🔮 Lululemon now expects Q3 revenue to drop 10-11%, cutting full-year revenue guidance to $10.35-10.5 billion (down 5-7% year-over-year).

👟 The company's new CEO Heidi O'Neill (a former top Nike executive) officially takes the reins next week, inheriting a brand losing share to cheaper competitors like Alo and Vuori. With analysts cutting price targets left and right, Heidi has a big challenge ahead to bring Lulu back to its glory days.

🌼 That said, not everyone is throwing in the towel. @bradleytalksmoney (a longtime Lulu bull on Blossom) published an honest thesis review this week, calling the quarter what it is, but arguing O'Neill is the silver lining, pointing out that management insists Lululemon's problem is marketing and brand, not product quality, and O’Neill’s 25+ years at Nike were spent running exactly that: product creativity, consumer strategy, and brand:

💡 Read Bradley’s full thesis on Blossom here!

🖥️ Dell Surges 16% After Reporting a $95 Billion AI Backlog

🔔 Next up was Dell ($DELL), which posted the most jaw-dropping numbers of the week on Tuesday, sending shares surging 16% and bringing the stock's year-to-date gain to more than 310%, making it one of the best-performing AI trades of 2026.

📊 Revenue hit a record $47.0 billion, up 58% year-over-year (vs. $44.9 billion expected), while adjusted EPS came in at $7.04, up 203% year-over-year (vs. ~$4.91 expected).

🚀 But the real headline was the insane demand: Dell booked a record $60.9 billion in AI server orders this quarter (more than an entire YEAR of AI orders in three months) and reported a $95 billion AI backlog, meaning the next several quarters are essentially already sold out, with management saying the pipeline beyond the backlog is "multiples" of that figure.

⚠️ It wasn't all perfect though. Management admitted part of the revenue growth comes from higher prices driven by the same memory shortage we've been covering for months (DRAM, NAND, CPUs, and rack components are all supply-constrained), and free cash flow actually fell 47%, showing just how expensive it is to build all this AI hardware before customers pay up.

💡 Still, with AI margins nearly doubling and a soaring backlog, Dell has cemented itself as one of the best picks-and-shovel plays in the market this year.

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🤖 What OpenAI’s “GPT-6 Astra” Means for the Stock Market

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:42:48 +0000

TOP STORY
🤖 What OpenAI’s “GPT-6 Astra” Means for the Stock Market

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone! I hope you're all having a lovely long weekend.

📊 Despite the strikes, the markets held green across the week:

The S&P 500 rose +0.09%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +0.38%
The TSX fell -0.11%

⚔️ But first, let’s take a quick look at the Iran war, because there were some big updates…

🛢️ Oil Prices Rise As U.S. and Iran Trade Strikes Again

Trump’s AI video of the U.S. military striking Kharg Island, posted on Truth Social

😅 The same day, Trump posted an AI video on Truth Social of “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens,” although Kharg Island was not one of the targets of the strikes.

💥 On Tuesday, the U.S. launched a much larger wave of strikes targeting air defense sites, radar, maritime assets, mine-laying capabilities, and communications.

⚠️ Saturday morning things escalated with Iran launching ballistic missiles toward a U.S. aircraft carrier.

📈 Oil reacted exactly how you’d expect, with WTI jumping 10% to $91/barrel, and Brent Crude finishing up 7% to around $96/barrel.

💸 Interest Rate Hike Probability Increases to 58%

🤖 Macroeconomics aside, let’s switch gears to talk about the biggest story this week: OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, its impact on the stock market, and who’s winning the AI model race…

✨ But first, a quick word from our sponsor this week: Harvest ETFs!

TOP STORY
🤖 OpenAI’s “GPT-6 Astra” Sends Shockwaves Across the AI Industry

🤖 This was a MASSIVE week in AI, with four of the world’s leading AI companies releasing their new frontier models:

1️⃣ Tuesday: Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1
2️⃣ Wednesday: Meta launched Muse Spark 1.3, and Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash
3️⃣ Thursday: OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra

🚀 Typically, these labs ship a new flagship every few months, so four frontier launches in three days is very rare.

🏆 But despite all the launches, there was one that stole the headlines: OpenAI’s Astra.

🤖 So let's dive into what's so special about Astra, the impact it's had on the stock market, and who's actually winning the AI race…

🌟 What's Astra?

🧠 GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI’s most powerful model yet, and the company is presenting it as a massive leap in what AI can do. OpenAI’s President even went so far as to call it AGI:

📈 And while OpenAI isn’t public (yet), SoftBank ($SFTB), one of OpenAI's biggest backers, surged more than 10% overnight in Tokyo, so the market is clearly quite excited about the new model.

📊 How Does Astra Stack Up

🥈 That said, Anthropic’s Fable 5.1 still leads on general reasoning, while coding is essentially a tie between Astra, Meta’s Muse Spark 1.3, Gemini 3.8 Flash, and Claude Opus 5.

📈 What This Means for the Market

Oracle ($ORCL) rose by 6.4%
Nvidia ($NVDA) rose by 5.5%
CoreWeave ($CRWV) rose by 8.5%

💬 Goldman Sachs' head of trading Rich Privorotsky called Astra "precisely what the AI bull market has been waiting for," and explained why a smarter model matters more than a cheaper one:

🤔 So Who’s Actually Winning the Race?

📈 The simple answer is that there’s no single “best” model anymore because each model leads in some domains and trails in others, and the leaderboard flips constantly.

💰 On the revenue side, Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI since April as they dominate enterprise sales, so OpenAI desperately needs Astra to help it retake its lead.

🩴 But this flip-flopping leads us to an interesting dilemma… if one update can change who’s in the lead, what is the moat?

💬 Tech analyst Benedict Evans has been making this argument since early last year:

🤝 And Big Tech seems to agree, because nearly all of them have hedged their bets across labs rather than backing one winner (even the ones who have their own models):

☁️ Microsoft ($MSFT) has revenue-sharing and licensing rights to OpenAI’s models, but OpenAI also represents a huge chunk of Azure’s backlog
📦 Amazon ($AMZN) is Anthropic’s primary cloud and chip partner through AWS and Trainium, but now serves Astra via AWS too
🔍 Google ($GOOGL) builds its own frontier models and owns its own distribution, yet still holds a stake in Anthropic

👀 This matters because Anthropic and OpenAI are spending billions more than they're making, with the rationale that this will be a winner-takes-all market (as was the case with Google for search).

😰 If it's the latter (commodities), those trillion-dollar price tags get much harder to justify.

💡 For retail investors, this is an important reminder that "current leader" and "long-term winner" are very different things.

🧘‍♂️ But enough about OpenAI, let’s switch gears to two very different companies: Lululemon’s 17% stock drop, Dell’s 16% surge, and more…

📊 But first, another quick word from our other sponsor this week, Global X Canada!

EARNINGS ROUNDUP
📊 Dell Soars 16% and Lululemon Crashes to 8-Year Low

🗓️ Aside from AI news, there were two high-profile companies that reported earnings this week that had very different reactions from the market… starting with Lululemon.

🧘 Lululemon Crashes to 8-Year Low

🇺🇸 But this isn't just a China problem: revenue in the Americas, still by far Lululemon's biggest market, fell 8% with comparable sales down 9%.

🔮 Lululemon now expects Q3 revenue to drop 10-11%, cutting full-year revenue guidance to $10.35-10.5 billion (down 5-7% year-over-year).

💡 Read Bradley’s full thesis on Blossom here!

🖥️ Dell Surges 16% After Reporting a $95 Billion AI Backlog

📊 Revenue hit a record $47.0 billion, up 58% year-over-year (vs. $44.9 billion expected), while adjusted EPS came in at $7.04, up 203% year-over-year (vs. ~$4.91 expected).

💡 Still, with AI margins nearly doubling and a soaring backlog, Dell has cemented itself as one of the best picks-and-shovel plays in the market this year.

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📈 CrowdStrike Jumps 20% Amid “AI Security Boom” (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:28:06 +0000

TOP STORY
📈 CrowdStrike Jumps 20% Amid AI Security Boom

🔥 Markets scored a nice win this week, boosted by Nvidia’s blowout earnings (read my full breakdown here).

📊 Across the indexes:

The S&P 500 rose +0.49%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +0.43%
The TSX fell -0.18%

😰 But things took a slight turn for the worse on Friday after the new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh warned that the Fed still has ‘work to do’ to bring inflation under control, sending September rate-hike odds higher overnight (also sinking the Nasdaq ~1% and Gold down ~4%).

📈 At the same time, Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike ($CRWD) soared over 20% after releasing what its CEO called the best quarter in its history, and Canada’s “Big Six” banks went six-for-six on earnings, all beating analyst expectations (our two feature stories for today).

🤿 It’s a packed week, so let’s get into it, starting with the Fed chair’s speech in Wyoming, what it means for interest rates, and why the Fed Chair spent half his time talking about AI…

🎰 Odds of a September Rate Hike Soar

🤠 Every August, the world’s central bankers gather in Jackson Hole for the ‘economic Super Bowl’ to discuss monetary policy. Markets watch closely as it’s typically where the Fed signals future rate decisions.

👀 During his first speech as Fed chair, Warsh pointed out that more than half of the prices the government tracks are now rising 3% or more per year (above the Fed’s 2% target), calling inflation “broad” and stubborn, and saying the Fed has ‘work to do’.

😰 This sent odds of a September interest rate hike up from 34% to 57%, which would be bad for stocks as it raises borrowing costs and makes bonds more attractive (with the decision set for Sep 16).

🎰 Some think the odds of a hike are even higher, saying that if Warsh doesn’t act on his words, the market won’t take him seriously.

🤖 The Fed Is Also… Bullish on AI?

🤯 But apart from the regular inflation and interest rate talk, there was something very unique about Warsh’s speech… Half the entire speech was about AI (and no, that’s not normal), with Warsh saying:

👀 These comments come after Warsh said in 2025 that he believed AI would significantly increase productivity and, as a result, push down inflation.

🪄 But others aren’t so convinced AI will be the silver bullet:

💸 And the answer matters a lot for the AI boom, as the data center buildout is costing hundreds of billions in financing, and that financing becomes more expensive with every rate hike… leading some to use Friday as a chance to warn of an AI bubble (although there’s basically a new bubble call every week at this point).

🔒 And speaking of AI, there’s certainly one industry that has reached a ‘hinge point’: Cybersecurity. So let’s switch gears to CrowdStrike’s 25% stock jump and what AI means for the cybersecurity industry at large.

✨ But first, a quick word from our sponsor this week: Public!

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TOP STORY
🚀 CrowdStrike Jumps 20% After Its Best Quarter Ever

😴 While everyone was watching Nvidia on Wednesday, another popular stock reported its Q2 earnings that same night, with the CEO calling it “the best quarter in company history.”

🚀 The market agreed, sending CrowdStrike ($CRWD) soaring nearly 21% on Thursday alone (its biggest single-day jump in over two years), with its stock now up 93% year-to-date.

📊 By the numbers:

✅ Revenue hit $1.47 billion vs. $1.44 billion expected, up 26% year-over-year
✅ EPS hit $0.31 vs. $0.29 expected, up 35% year-over-year
- ✅ Net new recurring revenue jumped 51% to $333 million, blowing past the high end of guidance
- ✅ Free cash flow rose 33% to $377 million

👀 So what’s fuelling this record growth?

🤖 Rogue AI = Cyber Profits

🛡️ CrowdStrike sells cybersecurity software that protects companies’ laptops, servers, and cloud systems from hackers. But recently, it’s also been protecting them from rogue AI, which is a huge factor driving its record growth.

😨 Because AI models are advancing so quickly, they’re also getting scary good at hacking. And if you remember back in spring, Anthropic’s “Claude Mythos” model showed it could find and exploit software vulnerabilities on its own without human intervention.

🚫 This was such a concern that Anthropic held it back from public release, before eventually launching it with safeguards. But since then, OpenAI and Meta ($META) have both disclosed their own models doing the same things.

🔓 The most recent case was OpenAI, which acknowledged its models exploited and stole credentials to break into AI platform “Hugging Face” (although there is some debate as to how much of this was due to OpenAI negligence vs AI intelligence)

💬 AI has undoubtedly made cybersecurity more important than ever. In the words of one expert:

💰 All this is pushing cybersecurity budgets up across the board, which is benefiting not just CrowdStrike, but the cyber industry as a whole.

📈 What This Means for the Industry

💬 Analysts see a structural shift for CrowdStrike as a result of AI, with RBC’s Matthew Hedberg calling the quarter “a bigger beat than expected with accelerating growth driven by ongoing AI threat risk momentum… the realization that AI adoption requires a fundamentally different approach to cybersecurity.”

🏆 But the trend goes beyond CrowdStrike. Despite not reporting its earnings until next week, the CEO of one of CrowdStrike’s biggest rivals, Palo Alto Networks ($PANW), said back in June that over 1,200 customers had already reached out to the company specifically in the wake of the Mythos moment, and its shares are up more than 107% YTD betting on that demand.

🔑 Identity-security company Okta ($OKTA) also popped nearly 30% after its own earnings this week, but for them, management was upfront that AI-agent security revenue is still immaterial, even as the pipeline for it is reportedly “bigger than anything [they’ve] ever seen.”

💸 So… is CrowdStrike A Buy?

👀 Well, the story is definitely a good one, but let’s look at the price.

📊 After Thursday’s jump, CrowdStrike’s market value sits at ~$222B against $5.4B in trailing-12-month sales, or roughly 43x revenue, it’s highest level since 2022. For context, the S&P 500 is trading at ~4x revenue

⚖️ That means a lot of that future success is already baked in the price:

🎯 That said, analysts still see upside, with the average price target on TipRanks sitting at $236 and the stock rated a ‘Strong Buy’ by analysts.

Analysts argue that accelerating AI-driven demand justifies the high valuation, praising CRWD’s ‘Falcon Flex’ model, which grew 101% year over year.

🌼 What the Blossom Community Is Doing

🌼 In the Blossom community, trading volume on CrowdStrike hit a new record, jumping to nearly $1M (excluding the top 1% whales).

💡 The volume was overwhelmingly profit-taking: selling outweighed buying nearly 3-to-1, with the biggest wave of sells hitting right after CrowdStrike's earnings beat sent the stock up 11%.

👀 This was classic swing-trade behavior, with 53% of sellers making their first CRWD trade on Blossom within the last 30 days, and 69% completely exiting their position.

💰 Despite the selling, CRWD remains a popular stock in the community, with over 3,500 members holding $6M, ranking it as the #73 stock based on total assets invested. CRWD is more popular among the US community, ranking #55 compared to #93 in Canada.

🎙️ Alright, enough about CrowdStrike, let’s take a look at some of the most popular discussions in the Blossom community this week!

📊 But first, a quick word from our other sponsor this week, Fiscal AI!

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⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

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🏝️ P.S. We’ve launched a new topic on Blossom: Retirement! Make sure to follow the topic here if you want to see retirement content in your feed.

📈 CrowdStrike Jumps 20% Amid “AI Security Boom”

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:20:44 +0000

TOP STORY
📈 CrowdStrike Jumps 20% Amid AI Security Boom

🔥 Markets scored a nice win this week, boosted by Nvidia’s blowout earnings (read my full breakdown here).

📊 Across the indexes:

The S&P 500 rose +0.49%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +0.43%
The TSX fell -0.18%

🤿 It’s a packed week, so let’s get into it, starting with the Fed chair’s speech in Wyoming, what it means for interest rates, and why the Fed Chair spent half his time talking about AI…

🎰 Odds of a September Rate Hike Soar

🎰 Some think the odds of a hike are even higher, saying that if Warsh doesn’t act on his words, the market won’t take him seriously.

🤖 The Fed Is Also… Bullish on AI?

👀 These comments come after Warsh said in 2025 that he believed AI would significantly increase productivity and, as a result, push down inflation.

🪄 But others aren’t so convinced AI will be the silver bullet:

✨ But first, a quick word from our sponsor this week: Fidelity Canada!

TOP STORY
🚀 CrowdStrike Jumps 20% After Its Best Quarter Ever

😴 While everyone was watching Nvidia on Wednesday, another popular stock reported its Q2 earnings that same night, with the CEO calling it “the best quarter in company history.”

🚀 The market agreed, sending CrowdStrike ($CRWD) soaring nearly 21% on Thursday alone (its biggest single-day jump in over two years), with its stock now up 93% year-to-date.

📊 By the numbers:

✅ Revenue hit $1.47 billion vs. $1.44 billion expected, up 26% year-over-year
✅ EPS hit $0.31 vs. $0.29 expected, up 35% year-over-year
- ✅ Net new recurring revenue jumped 51% to $333 million, blowing past the high end of guidance
- ✅ Free cash flow rose 33% to $377 million

👀 So what’s fuelling this record growth?

🤖 Rogue AI = Cyber Profits

💬 AI has undoubtedly made cybersecurity more important than ever. In the words of one expert:

💰 All this is pushing cybersecurity budgets up across the board, which is benefiting not just CrowdStrike, but the cyber industry as a whole.

📈 What This Means for the Industry

💸 So… is CrowdStrike A Buy?

👀 Well, the story is definitely a good one, but let’s look at the price.

⚖️ That means a lot of that future success is already baked in the price:

🎯 That said, analysts still see upside, with the average price target on TipRanks sitting at $236 and the stock rated a ‘Strong Buy’ by analysts.

Analysts argue that accelerating AI-driven demand justifies the high valuation, praising CRWD’s ‘Falcon Flex’ model, which grew 101% year over year.

🌼 What the Blossom Community Is Doing

🌼 In the Blossom community, trading volume on CrowdStrike hit a new record, jumping to nearly $1M (excluding the top 1% whales).

💡 The volume was overwhelmingly profit-taking: selling outweighed buying nearly 3-to-1, with the biggest wave of sells hitting right after CrowdStrike's earnings beat sent the stock up 11%.

👀 This was classic swing-trade behavior, with 53% of sellers making their first CRWD trade on Blossom within the last 30 days, and 69% completely exiting their position.

🍁 Alright, enough about US stocks. For our final story today, let’s switch gears to Canada and the incredible earnings of the Big Banks!

📊 But first, another quick word from our sponsor, Fidelity Investments Canada

MEANWHILE IN CANADA
🏦 Canada’s “Big Six” Banks Go Six-for-Six Against Analyst Expectations

🏦 Aside from tech and Fed news, this week also wrapped up Q3 earnings season for Canada’s biggest banks. And despite a trade war, tariffs, and all the economic uncertainty you could ask for, every single bank beat analyst estimates.

📊 For the quarter, here’s where each bank landed:

RBC ($RY): Adj. EPS $4.28 vs $4.08 expected, +11% year-over-year
TD ($TD): Adj. EPS $2.77 vs $2.47 expected, +26% year-over-year
BMO ($BMO): Adj. EPS $3.96 vs $3.74 expected, +22% year-over-year
Scotiabank ($BNS): Adj. EPS $2.28 vs $2.10 expected, +21% year-over-year
CIBC ($CM): Adj. EPS $2.73 vs $2.53 expected, +26% year-over-year
National Bank ($NA): Adj. EPS $3.39 vs $3.21 expected, +26% year-over-year

💵 Together, the Big Six reported $20.6 billion in profit for the quarter, up from about $17.5 billion a year ago, or an ~18% increase year-over-year.

🏆 Capital Markets Strike Again

🏆 Across the board, capital markets was the primary driver of the earnings beat (yet again), with segment profits growing 35% year-over-year, even stronger than the collective 27% growth the segment saw last quarter.

🚀 TD posted record results at its capital-markets unit, with net income surging 87% year-over-year. RBC (which has the largest capital-markets business among the Canadian banks) saw capital markets earnings reach $1.54 billion, up from $1.33 billion, easily clearing the $1.45 billion analysts had forecast.

📈 BMO’s Capital Markets net income also jumped 45%, while Scotiabank’s Global Banking and Markets division hit a record $647 million, up 37%.

🌍 TD’s CFO Kelvin Tran described the quarter’s capital-markets results as ”broad-based,” pointing to equities and commodities trading, equity underwriting, and advisory fees as the drivers behind the record.

⚔️ A Trade War, and a Rocky Economy

👊 Amid the ongoing U.S.-Canada trade war, damage to banks has so far been contained.

🌊 TD’s CFO Kelvin Tran said he feels ”very comfortable with the reserve we have... the situation is still quite fluid,” adding that TD is watching the specifics of the tariffs and how long they last. CIBC’s chief risk officer Frank Guse also said its most tariff-sensitive clients represent less than 1% of the bank’s loan portfolio, with Scotiabank’s numbers showing a similar exposure.

🧭 But despite the positives, executives across the banks remain measured. CIBC’s CEO Harry Culham noted:

😌 Scotiabank’s CEO Scott Thomson leaned more bullish, framing the tariffs currently in place as ”a small impact on GDP” around 0.2% to 0.3%, and stating that strong job growth and Canada’s fiscal capacity, boosted by oil prices, are reasons the outlook is “pretty good.”

📈 Overall, Canadian banks have been absolutely crushing it, with the ZEB equal-weight banking ETF jumping another 2% this week, now up ~50% over the past year, more than double the return of the S&P 500.

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

👇 Click to see the full post!

🏝️ P.S. We’ve launched a new topic on Blossom: Retirement! Make sure to follow the topic here if you want to see retirement content in your feed.

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🚀 Nvidia Crushes Earnings, Projecting Massive 70% Growth in 2027 (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:16:26 +0000

TOP STORY
🚀 Nvidia Crushes Earnings, Projecting Massive 70% Growth Next Year

📊 Last night Nvidia ($NVDA) reported earnings, so it's time for our special edition Weekly Buzz breaking it down!

😰 And unlike last quarter when the market was in a state of greed, this time Nvidia had a much tougher crowd:

📉 Chip stocks just had their worst week since July
💸 Long-term bond yields are hovering near two-decade highs, raising the cost of the AI buildout
😬 Nvidia itself came in off a seven-day losing streak, and is up just 11% this year while AMD, Intel ($INTC) and Micron ($MU) have more than doubled

🫧 On top of that, a lot is riding on Nvidia each quarter to prove that the AI trade isn’t a bubble, so Nvidia really needed to deliver.

🥁 Well, drumroll please…

🤑 Nvidia Crushes Earnings Yet Again

👏 For the 17th quarter in a row, Nvidia smashed estimates:

✅ 💰 Revenue: $96.2B, up 106% from last year, vs. $92.2B expected
✅ 💸 Earnings per Share: $2.22, up 120%, vs. $2.10 expected
✅ 🤖 Data center revenue: $89B, up 117%, vs. $85B expected
🔮 Q3 guidance: $108B, vs. $104B expected, Nvidia's first-ever $100B+ quarter

🎢 The stock actually slipped when the numbers first hit… then CFO Colette Kress started talking, and the stock jumped ~5% after hours (and is now up 7% this morning).

👀 So… what did she say?

🤯 70% Revenue Growth Projected for Next Year (Analysts Could Hardly Beleive It)

🚀 The big surprise from this quarter’s earnings was when the CFO told analysts that Nvidia expects revenue to grow ~70% in fiscal 2028, much, much higher than the 45% estimated.

😱 For the most valuable company on earth to see growth accelerating is pretty wild…

🙋‍♂️ In fact, it was so wild that the analysts could hardly believe it, with four separate questions about the number on the call. Morgan Stanley's Joseph Moore even asked: "What gives you the confidence to guide a full-year out? You haven't been doing that."

🤯 What’s even more insane is the 70% number is the ‘supply-constrained’ estimate, and Kress said if it wasn’t for the chip shortage, revenue would double next year, with Nvidia’s order backlog now sitting at more than $2T.

💰 This ties into the massive AI spending we’ve seen all earnings season, with hyperscaler spend expected to grow from $800+ billion this year to $1.3 trillion in 2027, and a lot of that is going right to Nvidia.

🤖 Jensen Huang Says AI Has Reached an Inflection Point

💸 In the earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI has reached an inflection point, and that AI has firmly crossed into a product that generates real revenue per unit of compute:

🚩 But not everything in the report was bullish… there were two red-ish flags worth having on your radar. But before we dive in there, a quick word from today's sponsor Fiscal AI!

PARTNERSHIP WITH FISCAL AI
🔍 Research Stocks Like a Pro

🤑 Fiscal.ai is the complete stock research platform for fundamental investors.

📊 With comprehensive data on more than 100,000 stocks, Fiscal has everything you need to track and manage your investments.

💡 Fiscal.ai also provides conference call transcripts, custom dashboards (with portfolio news/notifications), Super Investor Holdings, and much more!

✨ Sign up today to try Fiscal for free or to get 15% off Fiscal Pro!

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TOP STORY CONT.
🚩 The Red-ish Flags + Analyst Reactions

✨ While overall it was an incredible earnings report, there were 2 areas some are calling red-ish flags worth having on your radar:

😰 1. The Memory Crisis & Competition

💸 First is gross margins. Due to the memory chip shortage that Tim Cook recently blamed for Apple’s price hikes, Nvidia told investors that its margins will fall from 75% to 71- 72% early next year. Nvidia plans ~15% price hikes to pass on costs.

👀 This alone isn’t a big deal, but a memory shortage is in part why Nvidia is ‘sold out’ and supply-constrained. In the words of Jay Goldberg (the one analyst with a sell rating on Nvidia):

🥊 Goldberg also sees margin pressure building next year as AMD, Google's TPUs, and the custom chips from OpenAI and Anthropic all come online at once (new competition for Nvidia).

🏭 But Jensen Huang is confident this won’t hurt demand, and that margins will improve next year, arguing that while rivals sell chips, Nvidia sells ‘the whole AI factory’.

⭕️ 2. Circular Financing & Debt

😰 The other recurring worry with Nvidia is circular financing, and those fears haven’t gone away. For the first time ever, Nvidia listed ‘debt’ as a risk factor in its quarterly filing.

🤝 For a company printing $50B+ in quarterly profit, it may sound strange to worry about debt, but Nvidia has been borrowing and making massive financial commitments: investing in OpenAI and Anthropic, backstopping customers' data center deals, and joining a $500 billion financing pool with BlackRock, KKR, and Apollo, putting tens of billions of dollars of liabilities on its books.

Nvidia's CFO didn’t shy away from this question on the earnings call, saying that the investments represent a major computing platform shift:

💰 The $1.5T Question

❓And that brings us to what The Wall Street Journal is calling ‘the $1.5T question Nvidia’s Earnings Can’t Answer.’

🤑 Basically, for all this massive AI spending to pay off, AI needs to generate massive revenue. 3 years ago, David Cahn, a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, estimated that AI needed to generate $200M for the investments to make financial sense.

😮 Now, with the soaring spending, WSJ says that number has grown to $1.5T, and points out that ‘while companies have started generating significant revenue from AI,’ there’s still a big gap to hitting this number:

🐻 This is ultimately the biggest case against Nvidia - essentially, if at some point the AI spending from the Hyperscalers scales back, so will Nvidia’s revenue. But if spending continues, so will Nvidia’s glorious results.

✨ Now, while I’ve shared a few areas for caution, I don’t want to overrepresent the bears here - most analysts are extremely optimistic about Nvidia’s future prospects, but before we cover the analyst reactions - a quick word from our other sponsor this week, Public!

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUBLIC
🎁 Sign up for Public and Get Free Blossom PRO Access!

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TOP STORY CONT.
🚀 Analysts Are Resoundingly Bullish

🎯 Of the 61 analysts covering Nvidia, 58 rate it a Buy or Strong Buy, with an average price target of $305, implying 44% upside.

💬 Gil Luria, Head of Technology Research at D.A. Davidson, thinks the market has been underestimating Nvidia's runway:

⭐ Many analysts also pointed to Nvidia’s valuation, noting that Nvidia’s forward PE ratio (a measure of how expensive a stock is) has fallen dramatically, with BofA's Vivek Arya arguing the stock is trading at a 34–50% discount to what its free cash flow is worth.

✅ To sum things up, Nvidia delivered once again, proving AI demand is hotter than ever. While there are some red flags to keep in mind, overall this was an overwhelmingly positive quarter for Nvidia investors.

🌼 To share your thoughts about Nvidia earnings and see what other Blossomers are saying, check out my discussion post here!

🎁 And as a thank you for reading to the end, I’ll be giving away 1 share of Nvidia to someone at random who likes and comments on the post - see you on Blossom!

🚀 Nvidia Crushes Earnings, Projecting Massive 70% Growth in 2027

Maxwell Nicholson — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:08:55 +0000

TOP STORY
🚀 Nvidia Crushes Earnings, Projecting Massive 70% Growth Next Year

📊 Last night Nvidia ($NVDA) reported earnings, so it's time for our special edition Weekly Buzz breaking it down!

😰 And unlike last quarter when the market was in a state of greed, this time Nvidia had a much tougher crowd:

📉 Chip stocks just had their worst week since July
💸 Long-term bond yields are hovering near two-decade highs, raising the cost of the AI buildout
😬 Nvidia itself came in off a seven-day losing streak, and is up just 11% this year while AMD, Intel ($INTC) and Micron ($MU) have more than doubled

🫧 On top of that, a lot is riding on Nvidia each quarter to prove that the AI trade isn’t a bubble, so Nvidia really needed to deliver.

🥁 Well, drumroll please…

🤑 Nvidia Crushes Earnings Yet Again

👏 For the 17th quarter in a row, Nvidia smashed estimates:

✅ 💰 Revenue: $96.2B, up 106% from last year, vs. $92.2B expected
✅ 💸 Earnings per Share: $2.22, up 120%, vs. $2.10 expected
✅ 🤖 Data center revenue: $89B, up 117%, vs. $85B expected
🔮 Q3 guidance: $108B, vs. $104B expected, Nvidia's first-ever $100B+ quarter

🎢 The stock actually slipped when the numbers first hit… then CFO Colette Kress started talking, and the stock jumped ~5% after hours (and is now up 7% this morning).

👀 So… what did she say?

🤯 70% Revenue Growth Projected for Next Year (Analysts Could Hardly Beleive It)

🚀 The big surprise from this quarter’s earnings was when the CFO told analysts that Nvidia expects revenue to grow ~70% in fiscal 2028, much, much higher than the 45% estimated.

😱 For the most valuable company on earth to see growth accelerating is pretty wild…

🤖 Jensen Huang Says AI Has Reached an Inflection Point

💸 In the earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI has reached an inflection point, and that AI has firmly crossed into a product that generates real revenue per unit of compute:

🚩 But not everything in the report was bullish… there were two red-ish flags worth having on your radar. But before we dive in there, a quick word from today's sponsor CIBC CDRs!

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TOP STORY CONT.
🚩 The Red-ish Flags + Analyst Reactions

✨ While overall it was an incredible earnings report, there were 2 areas some are calling red-ish flags worth having on your radar:

😰 1. The Memory Crisis & Competition

👀 This alone isn’t a big deal, but a memory shortage is in part why Nvidia is ‘sold out’ and supply-constrained. In the words of Jay Goldberg (the one analyst with a sell rating on Nvidia):

🥊 Goldberg also sees margin pressure building next year as AMD, Google's TPUs, and the custom chips from OpenAI and Anthropic all come online at once (new competition for Nvidia).

🏭 But Jensen Huang is confident this won’t hurt demand, and that margins will improve next year, arguing that while rivals sell chips, Nvidia sells ‘the whole AI factory’.

⭕️ 2. Circular Financing & Debt

😰 The other recurring worry with Nvidia is circular financing, and those fears haven’t gone away. For the first time ever, Nvidia listed ‘debt’ as a risk factor in its quarterly filing.

Nvidia's CFO didn’t shy away from this question on the earnings call, saying that the investments represent a major computing platform shift:

💰 The $1.5T Question

❓And that brings us to what The Wall Street Journal is calling ‘the $1.5T question Nvidia’s Earnings Can’t Answer.’

TOP STORY CONT.
🚀 Analysts Are Resoundingly Bullish

🎯 Of the 61 analysts covering Nvidia, 58 rate it a Buy or Strong Buy, with an average price target of $305, implying 44% upside.

💬 Gil Luria, Head of Technology Research at D.A. Davidson, thinks the market has been underestimating Nvidia's runway:

🌼 To share your thoughts about Nvidia earnings and see what other Blossomers are saying, check out my discussion post here!

🎁 And as a thank you for reading to the end, I’ll be giving away 1 share of Nvidia to someone at random who likes and comments on the post - see you on Blossom!

CIBC ETFs Disclaimer

^{This material is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal or accounting advice nor does it constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities referred to.}

^{The material and/or its contents may not be reproduced without the express written consent of CIBC Global Asset Management.}

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🧬 Moderna Soars 177% After Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 23:45:10 +0000

TOP STORY
🧬 Moderna Soars 177% After Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone!

🔴 Markets had their first red week in over a month as the US-Canada trade war heats up and fears rise that the Fed will increase interest rates…

📉 Across the indexes:

The S&P 500 fell -1.4%
The Nasdaq 100 fell -2.5%
The TSX fell -0.3%

🐝 In today’s Buzz, we’ll cover two big stories:

Moderna ($MRNA) soaring 177% in a single day after its cancer vaccine breakthrough, the biggest one-day jump by an S&P 500 stock in the last 25 years.
And Bitcoin ($BTC) best week since 2024 after Trump's White House crypto summit, bringing Strategy, Coinbase, and Circle along for the ride.

👀 But quickly, a few other big stories worth keeping on your radar:

⚔️ The US-Canada trade talks officially collapsed on Friday, with the US imposing 50% tariffs on ~$20 billion of Canadian goods starting Saturday and Prime Minister Carney vowing to match them "dollar-for-dollar". Trump posted that Canada "wants the benefits of being a State, without being one." Whichever side of the border you're on, tariffs mean higher prices, which is bad news for those hoping for a Fed interest rate cut.
🏦 Speaking of which, the Fed's July meeting minutes revealed many officials in favor of RAISING rates if inflation doesn't come down, briefly sending the 30-year Treasury yield to its highest level since 2007 (with odds of a September rate hike now sitting around 1-in-3)
🛒 Walmart ($WMT) fell 9.2%, its worst day in over four years, after posting its weakest US sales growth since early 2020, with its CFO flagging an "arguably softer consumer environment" as shoppers trade down.
🥇 Gold also hit ANOTHER record, closing the week at $4,660 (+5% this week alone)

🤿 But without further ado, let's dive into our top story: the biggest single-day stock surge in a quarter century, and the cancer breakthrough behind it…

💉 Moderna Doubles In a Day After the First-Ever Late-Stage Cancer Vaccine Win

😰 Coming into this week, Moderna ($MRNA) was one of the most beaten-down stocks in the entire market, down nearly 90% from its pandemic peak, with $170 billion in market value wiped out as its COVID vaccine business dried up.

🚀 But fortunes changed on Wednesday, when the stock surged 177% after Moderna announced that its personalized cancer vaccine (the first of its kind to ever reach a successful late-stage trial) helped prevent the return of melanoma (skin cancer) in a study of more than 1,000 patients who'd had their tumors surgically removed.

And it wasn’t just the markets that were excited… the American Society of Clinical Oncology's chief medical officer called the result "a monumental leap forward" for cancer treatment, with another medical leader saying:

🤔 Wait, How Do You "Vaccinate" Against Cancer?

💡 This isn't a vaccine in the flu-shot sense, it's custom-built for each patient. Unlike chemotherapy, which kills both healthy and cancerous cells, personalized cancer vaccines train the immune system to specifically target mutations found only on a person’s tumor.

🧬 Surgeons remove your tumor, the companies sequence its DNA, and an mRNA vaccine is built around up to 34 mutations unique to YOUR cancer.

😮 Earlier five-year data suggests the effect is big: the vaccine roughly HALVED the risk of the cancer returning, and cut the risk of it spreading by 55% with very limited side effects

🚀 Why the Market Went Wild

📈 Unsurprisingly, investors are extremely bullish. While trials were for skin cancer, Moderna is running trials in lung, bladder, and kidney cancer, with early studies in pancreatic and stomach cancer. Across the industry, more than 60 mRNA-based cancer vaccines are in development.

💰 And for a company that is seeing its COVID vaccine business dry up, cancer gives the stock new hope.

⭐️ As TD Cowen's Tyler Van Buren put it, it's "by far the most significant pipeline opportunity" the company has, and RBC's Luca Issi floated the dream scenario: this could become a therapy that works across MANY cancers, not just one.

👀 This all sounds very promising, so now for the obvious next question - should you buy Moderna stock? Well, before we get into that, a quick word from our sponsor this week: Plynk!

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TOP STORY CONT.
🐻 The Bear Case: The Math Doesn't Add Up (Yet)

📊 All right, let’s dive into the numbers behind this.

🤝 First off, the vaccine development is a 50-50 joint partnership between Merck ($MRK) and Moderna, so any revenue made from the vaccine is split with Merck (and, interestingly, Merck only jumped 12% this week).

👀 And according to Leerink analyst Daina Graybosch, one of the most respected voices in cancer therapeutics, even in her BULL case, where the vaccine reaches ~$10 billion in peak annual sales, this only supports ~$40B of added market value for Moderna and Merck combined.

😰 The problem is this week, Moderna added $45B in market cap in a single day, so the success of the vaccine is basically now fully priced into the stock.

💬 JPMorgan's Jessica Fye made the same point from a different angle: her model already assumed this trial would succeed (an 85% probability), so removing the remaining risk adds only 3% to her valuation.

🎰 This means Wednesday's 177% move likely wasn't about melanoma at all, it was the market betting this method works across MANY other cancers.

⚠️ And there’s good reason for caution around that assumption:

🎯 Melanoma is the easiest target; its tumors are unusually mutation-rich, giving the vaccine lots of targets. The cancers up next (kidney, bladder, and especially pancreatic) are far less forgiving
🏭 Every dose needs to be customized for one patient, one custom manufacturing run, at an estimated ~$300,000 per treatment. As a result, analysts estimate gross margins of 50-80%, well below typical blockbuster drugs
📄 We still haven't seen the actual data, the full results arrive at a medical conference this fall (likely ESMO in Madrid, Oct 23-27).

🎢 So if you're tempted to buy Moderna, understand you're buying a stock that has already priced in years of success across cancers it hasn't proven yet, with the actual trial data still unpublished until October.

👀 The next real catalysts the trials beyond melanoma, and as Graybosch put it about the ultimate dream of using mRNA to PREVENT cancer: "That could be transformative. But that frontier is nowhere close."

🎯 That said, many analysts remain bullish, with Bank of America increasing its target from $40 to $170 and many other analysts also raising their targets significantly.

🌼 What the Blossom Community Is Doing

🤯 Before this week, trading volume of Moderna on Blossom was basically non-existent (~$66K), but this week it spiked to $8.7M, 130x the 2026 average and 4x more than the entire 2026 trading volume.

💸 Across the community, there was $6.2M in selling and $2.4M of buying, with 56% of the selling coming from people who hadn’t made a single trade since May 2023, silent holders who took the stock pop as a chance to sell.

👀 92% of the buying came from first-time Moderna investors, so the trade was almost perfectly symmetrical: people who bought the vaccine hype in 2021 sold to a new wave buying the cancer-vaccine hype this week.

🪙 Alright, let’s shift gears to the other big story of the week, crypto’s big rally…

CRYPTO
🪙 Bitcoin Has Its Best Week Since 2024 After Trump's White House Crypto Summit

😴 Ten days ago, crypto was in one of its quietest stretches in years: Bitcoin had spent ten months in a bear market, down 53% from its $126,000 peak, with trading volumes drying up for months…

🚀 But this week, fortunes changed for crypto investors when Bitcoin surged 23%, its best week since March 2024, breaking above $77,000 for the first time since May. And it wasn’t just Bitcoin:

Ethereum ($ETH) jumped ~26% to back above $2,250
Robinhood ($HOOD) soared 13% Friday, the best-performing stock in the entire S&P 500
Strategy ($MSTR) surged ~32% in three days (its best stretch since 2024), its 840,447 Bitcoin, bought for $63.4 billion, are finally back in the green at $65 billion
Coinbase ($COIN) and Circle ($CRCL) gained ~26% and ~21% this week

🤔 So let’s dive into what drove the surge…

🏛️ Catalyst #1: The White House Crypto Summit

🤝 On Wednesday, Trump hosted crypto's power players at the White House, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, the Winklevoss twins, and Kraken's co-CEO, calling on Congress to pass the long-stalled CLARITY Act, the landmark bill that would regulate most crypto tokens as commodities instead of securities.

💬 In Trump's words: "It's a very, very powerful structured legislation which will keep us ahead of China, keep us ahead of everyone else." He also declared the US had "ended the war on crypto once and for all", and reports suggest a sizable government purchase of Bitcoin was even discussed at the summit.

🗳️ The CLARITY Act faces a Senate procedural vote on September 15. It passed the House over a year ago and has been stuck ever since, which is exactly why the market treated Trump's push as real news.

💵 Catalyst #2: The Treasury Juiced the Bond Market

🏦 The same day, the US Treasury announced it would double its buybacks of long-dated government bonds (to at least $4 billion each, and from two to four per quarter starting in September). Yields fell immediately, with the 30-year dropping back from its recent two-decade highs, and the US Dollar Index sliding about 2%.

💡 Lower yields and a weaker dollar make Bitcoin more attractive, so these Treasury moves were great for crypto investors (with Tom Lee citing this as a major reason for the rally).

🚀 The Next Crypto Bull Market?

💬 Coinbase's Brian Armstrong went on CNBC after the summit with a big call, saying that crypto's bear phases have historically run about 370-380 days, and this one is right at that mark:

📈 The momentum crowd agrees, Bespoke's Paul Hickey called the rally "historic," noting Bitcoin is trading more than 3 standard deviations above its 50-day average, momentum not seen since 2016.

⚠️ But not everyone is convinced. Citi points out that Bitcoin ETF flows, the steady institutional demand that powered the last leg up, "have stalled since the October 2025 liquidations, and their resumption is critical for a sustained rally."

👀 Luckily, Sept 15 isn’t too far away, so we’ll see soon whether this rally is the start of a bull market, or a short-term blip off Trump’s comments…

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

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🧬 Moderna Soars 177% After Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 23:39:33 +0000

TOP STORY
🧬 Moderna Soars 177% After Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone!

🔴 Markets had their first red week in over a month as the US-Canada trade war heats up and fears rise that the Fed will increase interest rates…

📉 Across the indexes:

The S&P 500 fell -1.4%
The Nasdaq 100 fell -2.5%
The TSX fell -0.3%

🐝 In today’s Buzz, we’ll cover two big stories:

Moderna ($MRNA) soaring 177% in a single day after its cancer vaccine breakthrough, the biggest one-day jump by an S&P 500 stock in the last 25 years.
And Bitcoin ($BTC) best week since 2024 after Trump's White House crypto summit, bringing Strategy, Coinbase, and Circle along for the ride.

👀 But quickly, a few other big stories worth keeping on your radar:

⚔️ The US-Canada trade talks officially collapsed on Friday, with the US imposing 50% tariffs on ~$20 billion of Canadian goods starting Saturday and Prime Minister Carney vowing to match them "dollar-for-dollar". Trump posted that Canada "wants the benefits of being a State, without being one." Whichever side of the border you're on, tariffs mean higher prices, which is bad news for those hoping for a Fed interest rate cut.
🏦 Speaking of which, the Fed's July meeting minutes revealed many officials in favor of RAISING rates if inflation doesn't come down, briefly sending the 30-year Treasury yield to its highest level since 2007 (with odds of a September rate hike now sitting around 1-in-3)
🛒 Walmart ($WMT) fell 9.2%, its worst day in over four years, after posting its weakest US sales growth since early 2020, with its CFO flagging an "arguably softer consumer environment" as shoppers trade down.
🥇 Gold also hit ANOTHER record, closing the week at $4,660 (+5% this week alone)

🤿 But without further ado, let's dive into our top story: the biggest single-day stock surge in a quarter century, and the cancer breakthrough behind it…

💉 Moderna Doubles In a Day After the First-Ever Late-Stage Cancer Vaccine Win

🤔 Wait, How Do You "Vaccinate" Against Cancer?

🧬 Surgeons remove your tumor, the companies sequence its DNA, and an mRNA vaccine is built around up to 34 mutations unique to YOUR cancer.

😮 Earlier five-year data suggests the effect is big: the vaccine roughly HALVED the risk of the cancer returning, and cut the risk of it spreading by 55% with very limited side effects

🚀 Why the Market Went Wild

💰 And for a company that is seeing its COVID vaccine business dry up, cancer gives the stock new hope.

👀 This all sounds very promising, so now for the obvious next question - should you buy Moderna stock? Well, before we get into that, a quick word from our sponsor this week RBC Direct Investing.

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TOP STORY CONT.
🐻 The Bear Case: The Math Doesn't Add Up (Yet)

📊 All right, let’s dive into the numbers behind this.

😰 The problem is this week, Moderna added $45B in market cap in a single day, so the success of the vaccine is basically now fully priced into the stock.

🎰 This means Wednesday's 177% move likely wasn't about melanoma at all, it was the market betting this method works across MANY other cancers.

⚠️ And there’s good reason for caution around that assumption:

🎯 Melanoma is the easiest target; its tumors are unusually mutation-rich, giving the vaccine lots of targets. The cancers up next (kidney, bladder, and especially pancreatic) are far less forgiving
🏭 Every dose needs to be customized for one patient, one custom manufacturing run, at an estimated ~$300,000 per treatment. As a result, analysts estimate gross margins of 50-80%, well below typical blockbuster drugs
📄 We still haven't seen the actual data, the full results arrive at a medical conference this fall (likely ESMO in Madrid, Oct 23-27).

🎯 That said, many analysts remain bullish, with Bank of America increasing its target from $40 to $170 and many other analysts also raising their targets significantly.

🌼 What the Blossom Community Is Doing

🪙 Alright, let’s shift gears to other big story of the week, crypto’s big rally…

📊 But first, a quick word from our other sponsor this week, Fidelity Investments Canada

CRYPTO
🪙 Bitcoin Has Its Best Week Since 2024 After Trump's White House Crypto Summit

Ethereum ($ETH) jumped ~26% to back above $2,250
Robinhood ($HOOD) soared 13% Friday, the best-performing stock in the entire S&P 500
Strategy ($MSTR) surged ~32% in three days (its best stretch since 2024), its 840,447 Bitcoin, bought for $63.4 billion, are finally back in the green at $65 billion
Coinbase ($COIN) and Circle ($CRCL) gained ~26% and ~21% this week

🤔 So let’s dive into what drove the surge…

🏛️ Catalyst #1: The White House Crypto Summit

💵 Catalyst #2: The Treasury Juiced the Bond Market

💡 Lower yields and a weaker dollar make Bitcoin more attractive, so these Treasury moves were great for crypto investors (with Tom Lee citing this as a major reason for the rally).

🚀 The Next Crypto Bull Market?

💬 Coinbase's Brian Armstrong went on CNBC after the summit with a big call, saying that crypto's bear phases have historically run about 370-380 days, and this one is right at that mark:

📈 The momentum crowd agrees, Bespoke's Paul Hickey called the rally "historic," noting Bitcoin is trading more than 3 standard deviations above its 50-day average, momentum not seen since 2016.

👀 Luckily, Sept 15 isn’t too far away, so we’ll see soon whether this rally is the start of a bull market, or a short-term blip off Trump’s comments…

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

👇 Click to see the full post!

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🏆 Nebius Soars 50%, Making It One of 2026’s Top-Performing Stocks (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:28:54 +0000

TOP STORY
🏆 Nebius Soars 50%, Making It One of 2026’s Top-Performing Stocks

☀️ Happy Sunday, everyone! It was another busy week in the markets, so let’s dive right in. In today’s Weekly Buzz, we’ll be covering:

🚀 Nebius’ ($NBIS) insane 50% stock jump this week, why NBIS is up a wild 283% in the past year, and why one of the most famous short-sellers is betting against it
👨‍💼 The biggest trades from Superinvestors: like Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment in Google and Bill Ackman’s portfolio overhaul
💴 The collapse of the Japanese Yen and why the US is spending billions to save the market

🗞️ But first, let’s do a quick market recap:

🥳 Markets notched their third straight weekly gain this week, with the S&P 500 setting fresh record highs and the TSX riding a resource-driven rally to its own all-time high after oil prices remained high amid ongoing fighting in Iran.

🌍 Across major indexes:

The S&P 500 rose +0.36%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +1.09%
The TSX rose +0.96%

⚠️ The Strait of Hormuz situation escalated this week with Iran striking more tankers (two of them from the UAE), pushing Brent Crude up 5% for the week to $88/barrel. The U.S. has since said it’s capable of keeping its naval blockade in place “indefinitely,” though negotiations with Oman and Iran are still ongoing.

🤿 But that aside, let’s dive into our top story of the week.. Nebius!

🚀 Nebius Soars 50% After Smashing Earnings

👀 This week’s top story is about a company that I’ve seen on Blossom, but haven’t had a chance to properly dive into… so let me first quickly cover what Nebius does and why it’s been one of the market's top-performing stocks in the past year.

🤔 What is Nebius?

🇷🇺 Nebius was founded and is now run by CEO Arkady Volozh, the Kazakhstan-born Russian billionaire founder of “Yandex,” also known as “Russia’s Google.”

⚔️ After the war in Ukraine, Yandex was forced to split in two, selling off its Russian assets, but leaving its international cloud and data center assets in Volozh’s control. He then took those assets and formed Nebius, which he headquartered in Amsterdam and listed on the Nasdaq with backing from Nvidia ($NVDA).

🏗️ Nebius today is what’s called a “neocloud,” or cloud computing built specifically for AI, renting computing power to companies training and running AI.

🚀 Why Nebius is Flying (and why Big Tech is Renting)

⚡ Because demand for AI computing is so far ahead of supply, Big Tech itself and other companies alike are renting overflow from companies like Nebius and its main competitor, CoreWeave ($CRWV).

🤔 So why rent instead of build it themselves? Well, a few reasons:

🐎 Speed: A data center takes 2–4 years to build, but Nebius has capacity live now, so renting is the only way to get compute this year rather than in 2028.
⚡️ Power: Power is a huge bottleneck, and Nebius already has sites across Finland, Iceland, the UK, Israel, and the US
🤖 GPUs: Nvidia can't make chips fast enough, so everyone gets an allocation. Nebius is Nvidia-backed and gets early access to new architectures (it already has the first Vera Rubin systems).
💸 Balance Sheet Optics: The markets are laser-focused on AI capex and overspending; renting turns a multi-billion-dollar construction project into an operating expense spread over five years, with the option to walk away if AI demand shifts.

😮 And all of these reasons have led to truly massive deals…

💰 Nebius is Closing Massive Deals

🤝 Last September, Microsoft signed a ~$17 billion deal to rent computing capacity from Nebius, and since then, Nebius has signed 4 contracts of over $1B each, including a 5-year $27B deal with Meta.

🤑 These deals driven massive revenue and profit growth for NBIS. This quarter:

✅ Revenue hit $582.3 million vs. $572.8 million expected, up 454% year-over-year
✅ Adj. EBITDA hit $236 million vs. $169 million expected, with the core AI cloud business now running at a 50% EBITDA margin

🔮 Nebius also expects over $9B in customer prepayments this year with total customer commitments crossing $40B.

⚠️ But despite the massive growth and deals, not everyone is so bullish on Nebius. Most notably, the famous short investor Michael Burry is making a big bet against the company… but before we dive into why, here’s a quick word from our sponsor this week Direxion ETFs!

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TOP STORY CONT.
😰 Michael Burry Says NBIS Is ‘What the Peak of a Boom Looks Like’

😬 Not everyone is bullish on NBIS… Michael Burry, the investor made famous by The Big Short for calling the 2008 housing crash, announced this week he's adding to his short position against Nebius (aka betting against the company).

🧮 Burry's argument lies in the accounting. He flagged that Nebius extended the assumed useful life of its servers from four years to five, spreading out depreciation costs and boosting today's profits.

⚠️ He also argues customers are locking in years of capacity at panic prices, the way commodity buyers overpay during a shortage, and may regret it if AI compute prices fall.

🤷‍♂️ Like most of the AI market, whether Burry is right hinges on whether the AI money train keeps rolling… if the AI spending slows down, the demand for the excess capacity could dry up. And with Nebius spending $5.7B on capex this quarter… funding it with debt and share sales… a slowdown could hit it hard.

🤑 But if AI spending continues to soar, Nebius’ revenue will continue to soar as well, and many analysts (including Bank of America’s Tal Liani) are raising their price targets for NBIS with that in mind.

👀 Whether you should buy NBIS will depend on your answer to that question… and if you want to see what other investors are saying and buying… make sure to join the discussion on Blossom!

🌼 What the Blossom Community Is Doing

💸 And speaking of the Blossom community, let’s take a look at what other investors on Blossom did.

🤑 Based on the trade data, Blossom members took profits on the NBIS stock jump, with ~$2M in net selling this week, the largest outflow from NBIS on record, with 1,017 unique sellers and 693 unique buyers (compared to ~7,000 total holders).

💡 Interestingly, 54% of this week’s sellers sold their entire position, and 33% of buyers were new investors into NBIS.

👨‍💼 Now Michael Burry wasn’t the only Superinvestor making big moves this week, 13F filings came out this week meaning all the biggest investors have to report their moves, so let’s take a look at what the top dogs are doing with their portfolios…

SUPERINVESTOR MOVES
🏦 Berkshire Piles Into Alphabet, Ackman Bets Big On New Positions

📂 The 13F filings are now in for Q2 2026, which means we have more trades made public by some of the smartest and largest portfolios in the market. And like last quarter, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (now led by Greg Abel) and Bill Ackman led the quarter's major moves.

👇 So without further ado, here are the most interesting trades by some of the biggest investors this quarter:

🤯 Berkshire Turns Into a Net Buyer for the First Time in Years

😮 It’s now Greg Abel’s second quarterly 13F since officially taking over as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway ($BRK-B) (and manager of Berkshire’s stock portfolio) from Warren Buffett in January. And the numbers show he’s being far less cautious with cash than Buffett was.

🔍 Across the board, Berkshire was a net buyer during Q2, purchasing over $19.8 billion in stock, marking the first time it’s been a net buyer since Buffett kicked off a 14-quarter selling streak back in late 2022, with over $17 billion of those buys being directed at Alphabet ($GOOG) (increasing the position by 83%).

📈 Google is now Berkshire’s 3rd largest holding, behind only Apple ($AAPL) American Express ($AXP), making up over 12% of the portfolio.

🏗️ Abel also added to Delta Air Lines ($DAL), homebuilder Lennar ($LEN), and Macy’s ($M), and opened a brand-new position in D.R. Horton ($DHI) while trimming Bank of America, Kroger, Capital One, Nucor, Ally Financial, and DaVita, and fully exiting Constellation Brands.

👀 Ackman Adds Netflix + 5 Other Positions

♟️ Next up, there’s Bill Ackman, who manages $35B+ in assets through Pershing Square Holdings.

🔄 After spending Q1 rotating almost entirely out of Alphabet and into a fresh Microsoft ($MSFT) stake, Ackman used Q2 for one of his biggest portfolio overhaul in years, unveiling 6 brand-new positions in Netflix ($NFLX), Visa ($V), Mastercard ($MA), S&P Global ($SPGI), Intercontinental Exchange ($ICE), and eye-care company Alcon ($ALC).

💬 Ackman kept the explanation simple, saying he sees each company’s earnings positioned for strong growth, which he views as the single biggest driver of investment value over time.

📊 The new positions sit alongside Ackman’s existing bets on tech and Big Tech, with Microsoft, Uber ($UBER), Meta ($META), and Amazon remaining core holdings alongside his stakes in mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

✨ Other interesting trades…

🐕 But aside from the big dogs, here were a few other notable trades for the quarter:

📱 Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank cut its TSMC ($TSM) stake by more than 70% this quarter, cashing out roughly $270 million while opening new positions in Capital One ($COF) and Life360 ($LIF).
📉 Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest also bought aggressively in Q2, most recently putting $37 million into SpaceX ($SPCX) in a single week, alongside adds to CoreWeave, Nvidia, Circle ($CRCL), and Coinbase ($COIN), while trimming Roblox ($RBLX) and Palantir ($PLTR).
🔍 Legendary macro investor Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office initiated a brand-new Alphabet position this quarter, alongside fresh stakes in AMD ($AMD) and Fox ($FOX), putting him in the same camp as Buffett/Abel on Google.

OVERSEAS
💴 The U.S. Government Just Bought Billions of Japanese Yen to Save the Market

🇯🇵 Now aside from Nebius and the Superinvestors, one of the biggest stories this week was actually about the Japanese yen… and it doesn’t just impact Japanese portfolios.

💵 Earlier this month, the yen collapsed to its weakest level in roughly 40 years, and in response, Japan unleashed the largest single-day currency intervention in its history (an estimated $52.8 billion buying yen to prop the currency back up). The U.S. then joined in, spending somewhere between $5 and $10 billion, marking the first joint U.S.-Japan yen rescue since 1998.

😅 We know the number because Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was photographed at a Camp David cabinet meeting holding a handwritten to-do list that read "Buy Japanese Yen $5-10 bil."

🤔 But why does the U.S. care about propping up Japan’s currency? Well, that’s an excellent question…

💸 The Carry Trade

📖 The simple answer comes down to something called the “carry trade,” a trading strategy some investors use to profit from gaps between interest rates in different countries.

🏦 And because Japan’s interest rates sit near zero while U.S. rates run at 3.5% or higher, investors have been borrowing cheaply in yen and plowing that money into U.S. assets, including stocks.

⚠️ The catch is that when the yen strengthens suddenly, those loans get more expensive to repay, and leveraged investors are forced to sell whatever they can fast. We saw this in August 2024, when a violent carry trade unwind crashed Japan's stock exchange 12% in a single day and dragged the Nasdaq down with it.

🤨 Which raises the question: if a stronger yen is what blows up the trade, why is the US deliberately strengthening it?

😰 Basically, every week the yen kept sliding, the carry trade gets bigger and more crowded, and the eventual snap-back more violent. By stepping in now, the US and Japan are trying to shrink the trade gradually and in a controlled way, rather than letting it balloon until the market unwinds it all at once.

👀 So, Is the Plan Working?

😬 Well, things are still looking shaky. The yen just posted its biggest weekly loss in three months, closing Friday at ¥159.43, giving back roughly half of the intervention's gains. And with no follow-up buying from either government, speculators have gone right back to betting against it. According to some, the operation isn’t working:

✨ But history has shown joint interventions have a much better track record than solo ones, and the last US-Japan team-up in 1998 helped stop the yen's slide… so we’ll have to see whether the strategy will pay off, or if we’re in for another carry-trade crash in the markets 👀

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🏆 Nebius Soars 50%, Making It One of 2026’s Top-Performing Stocks

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:21:57 +0000

TOP STORY
🏆 Nebius Soars 50%, Making It One of 2026’s Top-Performing Stocks

☀️ Happy Sunday, everyone! It was another busy week in the markets, so let’s dive right in. In today’s Weekly Buzz, we’ll be covering:

🚀 Nebius’ ($NBIS) insane 50% stock jump this week, why NBIS is up a wild 283% in the past year, and why one of the most famous short-sellers is betting against it
👨‍💼 The biggest trades from Superinvestors: like Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment in Google and Bill Ackman’s portfolio overhaul
💴 The collapse of the Japanese Yen and why the US is spending billions to save the market

🗞️ But first, let’s do a quick market recap:

🌍 Across major indexes:

The S&P 500 rose +0.36%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +1.09%
The TSX rose +0.96%

🤿 But that aside, let’s dive into our top story of the week.. Nebius!

🚀 Nebius Soars 50% After Smashing Earnings

🤔 What is Nebius?

🇷🇺 Nebius was founded and is now run by CEO Arkady Volozh, the Kazakhstan-born Russian billionaire founder of “Yandex,” also known as “Russia’s Google.”

🏗️ Nebius today is what’s called a “neocloud,” or cloud computing built specifically for AI, renting computing power to companies training and running AI.

🚀 Why Nebius is Flying (and why Big Tech is Renting)

🤔 So why rent instead of build it themselves? Well, a few reasons:

🐎 Speed: A data center takes 2–4 years to build, but Nebius has capacity live now, so renting is the only way to get compute this year rather than in 2028.
⚡️ Power: Power is a huge bottleneck, and Nebius already has sites across Finland, Iceland, the UK, Israel, and the US
🤖 GPUs: Nvidia can't make chips fast enough, so everyone gets an allocation. Nebius is Nvidia-backed and gets early access to new architectures (it already has the first Vera Rubin systems).
💸 Balance Sheet Optics: The markets are laser-focused on AI capex and overspending; renting turns a multi-billion-dollar construction project into an operating expense spread over five years, with the option to walk away if AI demand shifts.

😮 And all of these reasons have led to truly massive deals…

💰 Nebius is Closing Massive Deals

🤑 These deals driven massive revenue and profit growth for NBIS. This quarter:

✅ Revenue hit $582.3 million vs. $572.8 million expected, up 454% year-over-year
✅ Adj. EBITDA hit $236 million vs. $169 million expected, with the core AI cloud business now running at a 50% EBITDA margin

🔮 Nebius also expects over $9B in customer prepayments this year with total customer commitments crossing $40B.

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TOP STORY CONT.
😰 Michael Burry Says NBIS Is ‘What the Peak of a Boom Looks Like’

⚠️ He also argues customers are locking in years of capacity at panic prices, the way commodity buyers overpay during a shortage, and may regret it if AI compute prices fall.

👀 Whether you should buy NBIS will depend on your answer to that question… and if you want to see what other investors are saying and buying… make sure to join the discussion on Blossom!

🌼 What the Blossom Community Is Doing

💸 And speaking of the Blossom community, let’s take a look at what other investors on Blossom did.

💡 Interestingly, 54% of this week’s sellers sold their entire position, and 33% of buyers were new investors into NBIS.

🌾 But first, a quick word from our other sponsor this week, BetaPro by Global X!

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SUPERINVESTOR MOVES
🏦 Berkshire Piles Into Alphabet, Ackman Bets Big On New Positions

👇 So without further ado, here are the most interesting trades by some of the biggest investors this quarter:

🤯 Berkshire Turns Into a Net Buyer for the First Time in Years

📈 Google is now Berkshire’s 3rd largest holding, behind only Apple ($AAPL) American Express ($AXP), making up over 12% of the portfolio.

👀 Ackman Adds Netflix + 5 Other Positions

♟️ Next up, there’s Bill Ackman, who manages $35B+ in assets through Pershing Square Holdings.

💬 Ackman kept the explanation simple, saying he sees each company’s earnings positioned for strong growth, which he views as the single biggest driver of investment value over time.

✨ Other interesting trades…

🐕 But aside from the big dogs, here were a few other notable trades for the quarter:

📱 Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank cut its TSMC ($TSM) stake by more than 70% this quarter, cashing out roughly $270 million while opening new positions in Capital One ($COF) and Life360 ($LIF).
📉 Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest also bought aggressively in Q2, most recently putting $37 million into SpaceX ($SPCX) in a single week, alongside adds to CoreWeave, Nvidia, Circle ($CRCL), and Coinbase ($COIN), while trimming Roblox ($RBLX) and Palantir ($PLTR).
🔍 Legendary macro investor Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office initiated a brand-new Alphabet position this quarter, alongside fresh stakes in AMD ($AMD) and Fox ($FOX), putting him in the same camp as Buffett/Abel on Google.

OVERSEAS
💴 The U.S. Government Just Bought Billions of Japanese Yen to Save the Market

🇯🇵 Now aside from Nebius and the Superinvestors, one of the biggest stories this week was actually about the Japanese yen… and it doesn’t just impact Japanese portfolios.

😅 We know the number because Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was photographed at a Camp David cabinet meeting holding a handwritten to-do list that read "Buy Japanese Yen $5-10 bil."

🤔 But why does the U.S. care about propping up Japan’s currency? Well, that’s an excellent question…

💸 The Carry Trade

📖 The simple answer comes down to something called the “carry trade,” a trading strategy some investors use to profit from gaps between interest rates in different countries.

🏦 And because Japan’s interest rates sit near zero while U.S. rates run at 3.5% or higher, investors have been borrowing cheaply in yen and plowing that money into U.S. assets, including stocks.

🤨 Which raises the question: if a stronger yen is what blows up the trade, why is the US deliberately strengthening it?

👀 So, Is the Plan Working?

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

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🚀 SpaceX Rockets 26% After Its First-Ever Earnings Report (US)

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:59:02 +0000

TOP STORY
🚀 SpaceX Rockets 26% After Its First-Ever Earnings Report

🥳 Investors were in for a nice surprise this week, with markets soaring to a new all-time high and the Nasdaq posting its best month since last April as an Iran peace deal finally gets more concrete.

🌍 Across the indexes:

The S&P 500 rose +3.58%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +5.10%
The TSX rose +3.28%

🚀 Q2 earnings season is now nearly wrapped up, with SpaceX filing its first-ever earnings report as a public company, sending shares up nearly 26% to close the week (our feature story this week).

🛍️ At the same time, Shopify, which only a few weeks ago was down over 30% year-to-date, posted earnings and ended this week up 24% in one of the greatest turnaround stories of 2026.

📉 One piece of bad news was that the U.S. jobs report for July came in below expectations (jobs fell by -23,000 vs. the 90,000 gain expected).

📈 But despite the jobs miss, the market rose, with investors betting that added jobs pressure will give the Fed even less reason to hike interest rates next month (which is good for the stock market).

🛰️ But without further ado, let’s dive into our top story of the week, SpaceX’s first earnings report, why the stock soared, and my + analyst thoughts on the stock.

👋 P.S. For those new here, my name is Max and I'm the CEO of Blossom and the author of the Weekly Buzz (@maxstocks on Blossom), and every week I give you a breakdown of the top stories in the markets!

🚀 SpaceX Surges 26% Following Its First-Ever Earnings Report As a Public Company

🏆 This Tuesday marked the very first time SpaceX ($SPCX) reported earnings, and the numbers were a beat across the board, with growth well above expectations:

✅ Revenue hit $7.81 billion vs. $6.93 billion expected, up 92% year-over-year
✅ Earnings per share came in at -$0.09 vs. -$0.26 expected
✅ Quarterly net losses fell to $541 million, down from about $1 billion a year ago

🛰️ For the quarter, Connectivity (a.k.a., Starlink) remained the driving engine of the business, pulling in $4.3 billion in revenue on 12 million subscribers, up 66% year-over-year, while its “AI segment” (Grok and the new compute infrastructure business) saw quarterly revenue soar 247% year-over-year to $2.6 billion.

🎯 SpaceX’s CFO also said the company is on pace to hit a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by the end of this year, and that SpaceX has already pulled back its internal $1 trillion revenue target from 2031 to 2030.

📉 But even though the stock ended the week up big, shares originally fell about 8% in after-hours trading.

💸 Rising AI CapEx Spend, Lower Profits

🤖 The cause of the initial stock drop was the same theme we’ve been seeing for weeks now: jitters over rising AI spending.

💰 AI spending absolutely exploded this quarter, with $15.8B spent on AI investments in Q2. SpaceX is now projected to spend $60B across 2026, up from the $46B previously estimated.

😮 This represented a massive 105% increase from just last quarter, dwarfing the $2.6B SpaceX earned from AI revenue and landing at nearly double SpaceX’s entire revenue for the quarter.

👀 This is consistent with what I said a month or so back when we covered SpaceX’s IPO, that SpaceX is quickly becoming more of an AI story than a space company.

💡 SpaceX defended these investments, saying that unlike some of the other data center buildouts that can take many years to recover costs, SpaceX has a payback of less than one year, with Elon saying:

🤑 Basically the argument is that the AI division can fund its own growth rather than relying on Starlink's cash generation.

🚀 And despite the initial drop, these arguments were enough to ease fears over the AI spending, with SpaceX jumping the next morning and ending the week up 26%, snapping it out of a 4-week losing streak that had brought the stock down 46% from its peak.

🤔 But not everyone is so confident in the AI spending strategy… but before we dive into what analysts are saying, a quick word from this week’s sponsor, WisdomTree!

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On rates themselves, the story is more measured than a full pivot: the base case is for the Fed to stay on hold through the rest of 2026. But per the latest dot plot, half the committee now sees the next move as a hike rather than a cut. Less forward guidance plus a shifting data playbook adds up to more uncertainty, and potentially more volatility, for bond investors either way.

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TOP STORY CONT.
🧐 Some Analysts Skeptical On SpaceX’s AI Timelines

⏰ A lot of SpaceX’s strategy relies on its payback timelines, and unfortunately, accurate timelines aren’t something Elon is exactly known for… as one analyst puts it:

💬 Drew Cupps, a portfolio manager at Polen Capital, calls out that:

🙏 But says he has faith in Musk’s vision, engineering leadership and execution track record, and holds a position in SpaceX.

✨ And that’s ultimately what this comes down to, as it does with Tesla as well. Both firms are trading at the ‘Musk premium’, with the valuation based heavily on the hope that Musk can flawlessly execute his vision.

🤑 For Musk fans, that bet might be a no-brainer. For me, I’m a bit more cautious, partially due to the constantly shifting timelines on the robo-taxi and Optimus with Tesla. So personally, I’ll be staying out of this one, but for the 9,000 folks in the community that hold SpaceX, I hope I’m wrong!

Next up, let’s switch gears to a stock I do hold that also turns out to be one of my best performers (up 257% since I bought): Shopify!

🌾 But first, a quick word about our upcoming event in New York…

BLOSSOMCON 2026
🤩 BlossomCon is Coming to NYC!

🌼 If you enjoy the Weekly Buzz, you’ll love BlossomCon - the ultimate event for retail investors! And we’ll be coming to NYC on Oct 3.

🔥 If you haven’t been to BlossomCon before, it’s basically the ultimate investing conference where we bring the top voices in investing to discuss their strategies, market outlooks, and more, plus a whole festival-style vibe centered around investing.

😎 Over 300 people attended our NYC event last year, so this isn’t one you want to miss…

🎁 And as a reward for my loyal Weekly Buzz readers, the first 5 people who use the code WEEKLYBUZZ50 will get 50% off your ticket!

🎟️ Get your ticket here!

*P.S. The events are break-even, so all the money we make goes into creating a better experience 😊

TURNAROUND STORY
🛍️ How Shopify Went From Being the “AI Loser” to Having Its Best Day Since 2024

📉 2 weeks ago, Shopify was one of 2026’s biggest disappointments, down over 30% year-to-date.

🚀 But this week’s earnings turned that around, with the stock soaring 24% and notching its best day since 2024.

📊 By the numbers:

✅ Revenue hit $3.58 billion vs. $3.45 billion expected, up 34% year-over-year
✅ Earnings per Share hit $0.42 vs. $0.39 expected, up 20% year-over-year
✅ Gross merchandise volume (GMV) climbed to $115.57 billion, up 32% year-over-year

🤿 So let’s dive into the turnaround…

🔥 The Turnaround

🎯 A ton of stocks have been getting squashed by AI as investors fear their business models will be disrupted, and Shopify was caught in the crossfire.

🤷 For Shopify, the market was asking, “why build a Shopify store when a chatbot (or an AI agent) can do your shopping for you?”

😰 Google faced the same scare, with the stock tumbling as investors worried that ChatGPT would replace search.

🏆 But this quarter, Shopify is proving that, like Google, it could be an AI winner, with Shopify’s president pointing out that its growing AI partnerships are laying the foundation for Shopify to be a leader in the new age of agentic commerce:

💰 And the numbers last quarter backed this up…

🤖 In its earnings report, Shopify reported that orders coming from AI agents and other AI-related search 3x’d year-over-year. With that same traffic converting better specifically because Shopify is feeding AI clean data.

💡 Unlike other sites where AI tools have to scrape the data, Shopify is set up to feed official catalog data directly to the AI, which is leading to a 2x conversion rate in sales.

🎯 This leaves me, and many analysts, bullish - with many increasing their price targets this week after the results.

IN OTHER NEWS
🚨 Other Top Headlines

🧠 Demis Hassabis Steps Down as Google DeepMind CEO

🤖 Google had a shock to its AI team this week when DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis announced he would be stepping down as CEO of the AI division to become chairman and chief scientist at Alphabet.
😰 According to Time, Hassabis’ departure comes at a time when Gemini has faced repeated delays and fallen behind models from OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier, with Google losing top talent to competitors.
👀 But others suggest the move makes sense, with Hassabis saying he believed that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is “close at hand” and decided to switch roles “so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.”
📉 Alphabet (Google) shares ended the week down roughly 3%.

🌶️ Chipotle Falls 9% on Potential Salmonella Outbreak

🧑‍🔬 Second we had Chipotle ($CMG), which suffered this week after the company pulled jalapeños from its restaurants nationwide after they were suspected in a salmonella outbreak that has led to 345 people in 27 states getting sick, including 36 hospitalized.
✅ Officials say the risk is contained for now, with Chipotle and its distributors having removed the product, and both the CDC and FDA “do not consider there to be a current ongoing risk from these establishments to consumers in this outbreak.”
📉 Chipotle shares fell 9% on Tuesday when the outbreak was first reported, with investors reading the news as a déjà vu to the company’s rough 2015-2018 stretch where a similar outbreak at a larger scale pushed the stock down for years.

🚗 Uber Posts Record Cash Flow, Guidance Falls Short

📊 Uber ($UBER) also reported its Q2 earnings this week on Wednesday, with revenue of $14.19 billion, up 12% year over year, but missing analyst estimates of $14.21 billion by a hair. Non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.81, in line with the $0.81 expected.
🤖 One of Uber’s main focuses for the quarter was to remind investors of its push to dominate the delivery scene, most recently with its $14.8 billion agreement to acquire Germany’s Delivery Hero. The company also announced plans to commit more than $10 billion in the next few years to bring autonomous vehicles to market at scale.
📉 Shares closed about 5% lower following the report as the company’s guidance for the third quarter trailed expectations, with Q3 bookings projections of $59.25 billion falling behind estimates of $59.33 billion.

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
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🚀 SpaceX Rockets 26% After Its First-Ever Earnings Report

Maxwell Nicholson — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:51:50 +0000

TOP STORY
🚀 SpaceX Rockets 26% After Its First-Ever Earnings Report

🌍 Across the indexes:

The S&P 500 rose +3.58%
The Nasdaq 100 rose +5.10%
The TSX rose +3.28%

🛍️ At the same time, Shopify, which only a few weeks ago was down over 30% year-to-date, posted earnings and ended this week up 24% in one of the greatest turnaround stories of 2026.

📉 One piece of bad news was that the U.S. jobs report for July came in below expectations (jobs fell by -23,000 vs. the 90,000 gain expected).

🛰️ But without further ado, let’s dive into our top story of the week, SpaceX’s first earnings report, why the stock soared, and my + analyst thoughts on the stock.

👋 P.S. For those new here, my name is Max and I'm the CEO of Blossom and the author of the Weekly Buzz (@maxstocks on Blossom), and every week I give you a breakdown of the top stories in the markets!

🚀 SpaceX Surges 26% Following Its First-Ever Earnings Report As a Public Company

🏆 This Tuesday marked the very first time SpaceX ($SPCX) reported earnings, and the numbers were a beat across the board, with growth well above expectations:

✅ Revenue hit $7.81 billion vs. $6.93 billion expected, up 92% year-over-year
✅ Earnings per share came in at -$0.09 vs. -$0.26 expected
✅ Quarterly net losses fell to $541 million, down from about $1 billion a year ago

📉 But even though the stock ended the week up big, shares originally fell about 8% in after-hours trading.

💸 Rising AI CapEx Spend, Lower Profits

🤖 The cause of the initial stock drop was the same theme we’ve been seeing for weeks now: jitters over rising AI spending.

💰 AI spending absolutely exploded this quarter, with $15.8B spent on AI investments in Q2. SpaceX is now projected to spend $60B across 2026, up from the $46B previously estimated.

😮 This represented a massive 105% increase from just last quarter, dwarfing the $2.6B SpaceX earned from AI revenue and landing at nearly double SpaceX’s entire revenue for the quarter.

👀 This is consistent with what I said a month or so back when we covered SpaceX’s IPO, that SpaceX is quickly becoming more of an AI story than a space company.

🤑 Basically the argument is that the AI division can fund its own growth rather than relying on Starlink's cash generation.

🤔 But not everyone is so confident in the AI spending strategy… but before we dive into what analysts are saying, a quick word from this week’s sponsor, Dynamic!

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TOP STORY CONT.
🧐 Some Analysts Skeptical On SpaceX’s AI Timelines

⏰ A lot of SpaceX’s strategy relies on its payback timelines, and unfortunately, accurate timelines aren’t something Elon is exactly known for… as one analyst puts it:

💬 Drew Cupps, a portfolio manager at Polen Capital, calls out that:

🙏 But says he has faith in Musk’s vision, engineering leadership and execution track record, and holds a position in SpaceX.

Next up, let’s switch gears to a stock I do hold that also turns out to be one of my best performers (up 257% since I bought): Shopify!

🌾 But first, a quick word from our other sponsor this week, Harvest ETFs…

TURNAROUND STORY
🛍️ How Shopify Went From Being the “AI Loser” to Having Its Best Day Since 2024

📉 2 weeks ago, Shopify was one of 2026’s biggest disappointments, down over 30% year-to-date.

🚀 But this week’s earnings turned that around, with the stock soaring 24% and notching its best day since 2024.

📊 By the numbers:

✅ Revenue hit $3.58 billion vs. $3.45 billion expected, up 34% year-over-year
✅ Earnings per Share hit $0.42 vs. $0.39 expected, up 20% year-over-year
✅ Gross merchandise volume (GMV) climbed to $115.57 billion, up 32% year-over-year

🤿 So let’s dive into the turnaround…

🔥 The Turnaround

🎯 A ton of stocks have been getting squashed by AI as investors fear their business models will be disrupted, and Shopify was caught in the crossfire.

🤷 For Shopify, the market was asking, “why build a Shopify store when a chatbot (or an AI agent) can do your shopping for you?”

😰 Google faced the same scare, with the stock tumbling as investors worried that ChatGPT would replace search.

💰 And the numbers last quarter backed this up…

💡 Unlike other sites where AI tools have to scrape the data, Shopify is set up to feed official catalog data directly to the AI, which is leading to a 2x conversion rate in sales.

🎯 This leaves me, and many analysts, bullish - with many increasing their price targets this week after the results.

CBOE ETF ALERT
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💸 That ETF is the Franklin U.S. Quality Moat Dividend Index ETF, a fund that holds U.S. dividend-paying stocks with durable competitive advantages, strong growth, and high-quality characteristics for those seeking total return and long-term income and growth potential, tracking the Morningstar US Dividend Opportunity Index.

📊 At the time of writing, the ETF holds over 100 companies, including popular names like Broadcom, Nvidia, Mastercard, Visa, Home Depot, Eli Lily, Coca Cola, and more.

💡 Learn more about FDIV here!

IN OTHER NEWS
🚨 Other Top Headlines

🧠 Demis Hassabis Steps Down as Google DeepMind CEO

🤖 Google had a shock to its AI team this week when DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis announced he would be stepping down as CEO of the AI division to become chairman and chief scientist at Alphabet.
😰 According to Time, Hassabis’ departure comes at a time when Gemini has faced repeated delays and fallen behind models from OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier, with Google losing top talent to competitors.
👀 But others suggest the move makes sense, with Hassabis saying he believed that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is “close at hand” and decided to switch roles “so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.”
📉 Alphabet (Google) shares ended the week down roughly 3%.

🌶️ Chipotle Falls 9% on Potential Salmonella Outbreak

🧑‍🔬 Second we had Chipotle ($CMG), which suffered this week after the company pulled jalapeños from its restaurants nationwide after they were suspected in a salmonella outbreak that has led to 345 people in 27 states getting sick, including 36 hospitalized.
✅ Officials say the risk is contained for now, with Chipotle and its distributors having removed the product, and both the CDC and FDA “do not consider there to be a current ongoing risk from these establishments to consumers in this outbreak.”
📉 Chipotle shares fell 9% on Tuesday when the outbreak was first reported, with investors reading the news as a déjà vu to the company’s rough 2015-2018 stretch where a similar outbreak at a larger scale pushed the stock down for years.

🚗 Uber Posts Record Cash Flow, Guidance Falls Short

📊 Uber ($UBER) also reported its Q2 earnings this week on Wednesday, with revenue of $14.19 billion, up 12% year over year, but missing analyst estimates of $14.21 billion by a hair. Non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.81, in line with the $0.81 expected.
🤖 One of Uber’s main focuses for the quarter was to remind investors of its push to dominate the delivery scene, most recently with its $14.8 billion agreement to acquire Germany’s Delivery Hero. The company also announced plans to commit more than $10 billion in the next few years to bring autonomous vehicles to market at scale.
📉 Shares closed about 5% lower following the report as the company’s guidance for the third quarter trailed expectations, with Q3 bookings projections of $59.25 billion falling behind estimates of $59.33 billion.

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
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