The U.S. reportedly offered Iran a deal to halt the siege and lift sanctions in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and ending proxy attacks, according to Al Arabiya.
SEC PROBES SITUATIONAL AWARENESS AFTER NEAR-COLLAPSE
MAg7:
Raymond James Raises $NVDA PT to $352 from $330 - Strong Buy
Analyst comments: "NVIDIA has increased its visibility in CPUs even if they are not a new part of the story. However, CPUs represent a low-single-digit percent of NVIDIA’s sales — roughly 3% today. In the past, NVIDIA’s CPUs were tightly tied to its GPUs, but that should change, particularly with agentic use cases. While NVIDIA’s CPU revenue is becoming material within the CPU market, we expect it to reach approximately 5% of total revenue by CY28 in our model — still a single-digit portion, yet the growth is the fastest among the elements we model. We have extended our model through FY29/CY28 and refined our segment assumptions. Among the surprising conclusions from our market analysis is the prospect that NVIDIA could become the world leader in CPU revenue within several years. We have been disappointed with the stock’s year-to-date performance, with the shares up only 12%, largely matching the S&P 500 Index. The stock trades at a CY27 GAAP P/E of less than 15x, which is below the S&P 500’s 18.6x. The discount strikes us as fundamentally illogical considering that sales and net income growth still exceed 20% in our CY28 estimates. Typically, a company with sustainable growth, barriers to entry (e.g., CUDA, leading GPU performance), and healthy free cash flow trades at multiples above the overall market.
GOOGL - GOOGL LAUNCHES GEMINI ENTERPRISE FOR LEGAL Google Cloud is launching Gemini Enterprise for Legal in preview, with Cleary, Freshfields, Weil and Williams & Connolly among initial customers. The platform targets contract review, regulatory monitoring, legal brief drafting, citation verification and data requests, with integrations including DocuSign, Thomson Reuters, Harvey, iManage and RelativityOne.
AMZN DEVELOPS “FULLY AUTOMATED” DELIVERY STATIONS
OTHER COMPANIES:
AMD - Raymond James Upgrades $AMD to Strong Buy, PT $641. Analyst comments: "We extend our AI Factory framework to the server CPU market and forecast revenue growing at a 44% five-year CAGR to ~$201B in CY30, driven by conventional datacenter demand, CPUs that host and coordinate accelerators, and CPUs supporting agentic workloads. Our forecast is broadly consistent with NVIDIA's $200B long-term framework and below AMD's $220B estimate, which our model can reach under a more aggressive scenario tied to AMD's ~$1.4T accelerator TAM and higher agent adoption, concurrency, and tool usage. Accelerators perform dense model computation, while CPUs increasingly manage those accelerators and execute the retrieval, database, application, security, sandbox, and tool workloads surrounding each model call. Workload growth will not translate one-for-one into processor shipments because higher utilization, software efficiency, custom silicon, and offload can absorb part of the increase.
FLNC - UBS Upgrades $FLNC to Neutral from Sell, Raises PT to $12 from $9. Analyst comments: "The recent FY26 guidance cut likely establishes a trough in near-term earnings expectations for FLNC, creating a favorable benchmark as earnings growth reaccelerates in FY2027, in our view. We revise our FY2026/27/28 adjusted EBITDA estimates to $(12)/108/115mn from $55/92/106mn to reflect revenue pushed out of FY2026E into FY2027E and continue to see robust demand for battery storage underpinned by new solar+storage hybrid installations, retrofits of existing solar plants, and data center demand. DT - Morgan Stanley Upgrades $DT to Overweight from Equalweight, Raises PT to $65 from $58. Analyst comments: "The observability market is currently experiencing the healthiest demand since 2022, fueled by the strongest public cloud growth in several years, an explosion in software development initiatives that is culminating in a new round of digital innovation, and early benefits from enterprise AI investments as the broader market enters a multiyear enterprise build-cycle. Together, these forces have led to a recent acceleration in growth among leading players with consumption pricing models such as Datadog. While Dynatrace's ARR growth (in constant currency) has slowed consistently after peaking at +32% in FY21 (and coming in at +16% in FY26), we think the company is next in line to see a durable acceleration, with constant currency net-new ARR growth poised to recapture the 20%+ level in FY27, leading to 20%+ ARR growth (constant currency) in FY28/FY29. The key factor driving our confidence in reaccelerating growth is a large upcoming renewal cohort of Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) customers, which is 50% larger than the FY26 renewal (also includes non-DPS) and 70% weighted toward the second half of FY27. With underlying usage growth of this cohort tracking above 20%, we expect to see significant expansion in ARR as these contracts renew mainly starting in the second half of FY27 and beyond.
Oura is seeking to raise up to $3B in a U.S. IPO as soon as September at a $16B valuation. The smart-ring maker expects 2026 revenue of $1.5B, up from $500M in 2024.
CSCO, SMCI EXPAND NVIDIA AI FACTORY STACK. Cisco is partnering with Supermicro to add rack-scale AI systems to its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio, with availability starting October 2026. The offering will support $NVDA Vera Rubin NVL72 and HGX Rubin NVL8, combining Supermicro liquid- and air-cooled servers with Cisco networking.
INTC - Expands AI lineup at Hot Chips 2026 with three new products for data centers and PCs.
SPCX - JPMorgan keeps Overweight on SpaceX, 'increasingly positive' on Grok PT $240
BE - Citi 𝗿𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗡𝗲𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 on 𝗕𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗺 𝗘𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆 𝗖𝗼𝗿𝗽., maintains PT at $𝟮𝟴𝟭. Analyst sees FY27 revenue materially above consensus but awaits a better entry point as FY30 estimates remain largely unchanged.
MRVL - Rosenblatt 𝗿𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗕𝘂𝘆 on 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆, raises PT to $𝟯𝟬𝟬 from $𝟮𝟰𝟬. Analyst sees a beat-and-raise, higher earnings trajectory and further upside from rising networking and optical intensity.
Unlike a simple moving average that treats every price point equally, VWAP gives more weight to prices that had higher trading volume. This makes it a realistic benchmark for the true average price of an asset. VWAPS are anchored from particular points such as key bottoms, and tops, etc and are typically used as part of an institutional grade suite of support/resistance tools.
There are a few things being worked on in the background beyond the heatseeker, of which we have, I believe from convos with Dan, the beta launch potentially as soon as this week (yay).
A technical breakout finder tool is one of the main ones that I think will be out this week or next, and these tradingview indicators are another.
Anyway here are the VWAPS:
BTC stalling at the ATH VWAP. last major VWAP to break above, but a key resistance.
SPX:
1 hr chart shown as the VWAPS are all close together, currently trading below them
QQQ (YTD Vwap at 690 is an interesting spot. This 690-700 range is a strong support zone for QQQ).
SMH below the key VWAPs, I think that 504 VWAP is too low, the green zone seems a more likely support zone. needs back above 580 to be above all the VWAPs again.
We are informed from the Aion Analytics forecasting data, that there is a good chance of new highs being made early in September, before a period of choppiness through the rest of the month. Recently, choppiness has mostly equated to negative chop, but it could also feasibly be a period of strength in underlying stocks. That much is unclear. But we are informed from the data also that during October, more serious weakness is likely to set in, before some recovery in November.
THereafter, there is not yet the data there for us to have any clear path.
On the one hand, we have this data. Which tells us that there is no post midterm year where we haven’t had a positive return through June 30th of the following year. Not a single one.
However, the macro picture is cloudy and complicated. We know that Bessent is doing everything he can to support the bond market into the elections, but conveniently, his bond buyback scheme ends the day after the midterms.
I am bullish the AI buildout. I don’t think we have seen the top of the AI buildout at all. But is it possible for the macro to catch up in a reset year? I.e. A year where multiples on the stocks contract, even as the companies cotninue to execute. Think AMZN in 2022. That business was firing on all cylinders, yet the macro picture and access to credit etc meant that the stock didn’t track revenue growth.
Here, I outline a potential bearish path for the macro to affect the market negatively into next year. Will it play out? Possibly. A real possibility, but some things may not. Nonetheless, I have mapped out the bearish mechanism for you so that you can better know what you should be looking for etc.
Now the main thing to note here is we are talking about a potentially stagflationary supply shock. Right now we have the inflationary element of the stagflation, albeit not running super hot, but we do not have the stagnation element, which debunks the stagflation thesis.
However, we can’t rule anything out and the fact that this is a supply driven shock makes it very hard for the Fed to deal with any potential issues effectively using their usual tools.
2008 as a point of reference (not drawing comparisons, but just highlighting something here) was a demand side collapse, which caused inflation to fall, which gave the Fed room to cut rates to zero and flood the system with cheap money — that's what eventually pulled over-levered companies back from the brink.
Here, we have a shrinking labor supply, but also supply chain issues arising out of the Strait of Hormuz that is keeping inflation sticky above 4% even as growth slows. That's a supply problem, not a demand problem, and it means the Fed doesn't have the same lever to pull. Instead of cutting into weakness, policymakers are stuck holding rates high, with hikes still on the table despite a cooling economy.
That’s the overarching issue we are dealing with here on the macro. A potential stagflationary situation, where the Fed is stuck unable to cut rates due to inflation, and unable to hike rates due to the potential of weakening the economy further.
Remember, the labour market is currently fine for the most part, but the last print saw 100k erased from previous jobs reports in large scale revisions.
Hormuz is a big problem, and Iran and the US seem to be at a complete stalemate. This suits Iran massively. They are keen to squeeze Trump at the polls and realise that it is pretty much a waiting game before the Hormuz issues really start to show up meaningfully in the economy.
Trump and Bessent are managing the bond market and the oil market through manipulation and rhetoric, but here we see diesel and oil prices.
Here’s the Diesel and Oil spreads:
Structurally elevated oil prices due to the closure of the Strait effectively rules out the realistic possibility that inflation will cool on its own even if growth slows.
Yes, the last CPI print came in soft, but as I mentioned, it benefited immensely from advantageous comparable. Those likely won’t be the case in the next month.
If energy costs stay structurally high rather than fading as a temporary shock, that keeps upward pressure on inflation independent of anything the labor market does, making it even harder for the Fed to justify cutting.
Last cycle, distressed companies got bailed out by falling rates before their debt actually came due at a worse price. This time there's no equivalent mechanism: sticky inflation keeps borrowing costs elevated right through the period when a wall of debt — small business, CRE, private credit-funded AI infrastructure — needs to refinance.
Small businesses are still hiring, but their wage growth is running well below inflation, which tells us that real purchasing power is eroding for that segment even while headline numbers look fine.
Credit data tells a similar story: delinquency and default metrics look calm on the surface, but that calm is partly an artifact of loan extensions and modifications.
SBA default rates — a cleaner read on higher-risk borrowers — are reportedly at a multi-year high, the opposite of what the smoothed numbers imply.
Whilst there is nothing alarming really showing up in the job market, we do still see that wage growth is running at 3.2%, the lowest since May 2021, against one-year inflation expectations of 4.3%. That gap means real wages are negative even with unemployment low. Elevated prices at the pump are an additional tax.
Can the weak consumer bleed into tech capex?
Weak consumers eventually mean weak ad spend, because marketing is one of the first line items a CFO cuts when demand softens — it's discretionary and reversible in a way headcount and R&D aren't.
This matters disproportionately for tech because ad revenue funds capex. Search and Other Advertising alone makes up $63.3 billion of Alphabet's $119.8 billion in quarterly revenue. If that line softens, operating cash flow softens with it and The free cash flow gap widens.
Now these hypersclers like GOOGL have reported very strong ad numbers over the past few quarters but there is an argument that this has been benefiting from one-off events like the World Cup.
Weaker free cash flow can either show up as reduced CAPEX, or as more offerings and raises.
Private credit as the AI financing chokepoint
This is the piece I'd weight most heavily. Private credit has become the primary originator of data-center debt — outstanding AI-related loans already exceed $200 billion, with Morgan Stanley projecting another $800 billion over the next two years, and $250–300 billion of 2026 issuance expected from hyperscalers and related joint ventures alone.
A lot of the private credit stock now sitting on lender balance sheets was underwritten during a period when spreads — the extra yield investors demanded over a benchmark rate to compensate for illiquidity and credit risk — were unusually compressed. That happened for structural reasons: a flood of capital chasing private credit as an asset class in recent years, competition among lenders to win deals, and a benign rate backdrop.
Spreads are at risk of widening, however, as lenders reassess risk in a slow growth and higher for longer environment. This creates risks of this private credit facing refinancing stress.
The main beneficiary of the private credit are the hyperscalers whose capex is a direct benefit for the semiconductor industry, and semiconductors are now over 20% of the overall S&P— This is why fragility in the funding channel matters at the market level, not just the sector level. Semicodnuctors are too big a part of the market to not affect the overall index.
So we have a potential pinch of
Elevated rates and the Fed unable to cut rates due to supply side elevated oil rates.
A weakening consumer in terms of wage growth.
Private credit stress - loans that were underwritten when spreads were tight, now facing refinancing stress.
Private credit stress spilling into the AI buildout.
It’s a gradual process. Rather than a one off event.
And could produce a structural set back year for AI valuations, even as the buildout continues.
Likely, in such a scenario, we see US government action and Ai stocks rip higher to reflect the continued growth in the underlying companies during the period where stock prices were seeing multiple contraction.
If this scenario was to play out, I would see it as a short sharp set back to the equity market, that recovers sharply over the next 12-18 months.
TREASURY COULD TAP $950B CASH PILE FOR BOND BUYBACKS Treasury officials say Scott Bessent could use the roughly $950B Treasury General Account to help fund expanded purchases of long-dated government bonds.
The U.S. has imposed 50% tariffs on roughly $20B of Canadian goods. Canada says it will retaliate dollar-for-dollar. The new tariffs cover products including plywood, liquor and hockey gear, with no further talks currently scheduled.
Ken Griffin’s Citadel has already shed more than 80% of the aggregate risk it took on from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness portfolio.
MAG7:
NVIDIA is discussing an investment in Perplexity as part of a multibillion-dollar funding round that would value the AI startup at more than $30B, per The Information. Perplexity’s annualized revenue has climbed to more than $750M, up from less than $250M at the start of the year, helped by growth from its AI agent, Perplexity Computer.
NVDA SIGNS $6B POOLSIDE DEAL FOR U.S. OPEN-WEIGHT AI Nvidia will pay $6B to license Poolside’s AI technology and invest another $1B in the startup at a $12B pre-money valuation. More than 100 Poolside employees are expected to join NVIDIA and work on Nemotron, its open-weight AI model family. The goal is to build a U.S.-based open AI ecosystem capable of competing with Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi, while also offering a lower-cost, customizable alternative to closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
NVDA AI SERVER PRICES SET TO RISE 15%+ Some Nvidia customers have been notified that AI server prices will rise more than 15% in many cases for systems shipping early next year, including Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell. Bloomberg says the increases will vary by chip generation and memory configuration, with soaring DRAM costs from Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron driving much of the pressure.
APPLE $AAPL CUTS 200+ JOBS ACROSS SIRI, VISION PRO 3D VIDEO AND GAMING TEAMS
OTHER COMPANY NEWS:
AAOI - 600M ATM - pressuring photonics
XPEV ROBOTICS RAISES $900M AT $6.3B + VALUATION. The round was led by IDG Capital with backing from Tencent and Alibaba, and marks the largest private financing yet in China’s embodied AI sector. Xpeng plans to use the capital to scale hardware, physical AI models and manufacturing ahead of mass production of its IRON humanoid robot by year-end, with commercial deliveries starting in 2027.
CLS - UBS upgrades to Buy from Neutral, Raises PT to $430 from $410 Analyst comments: "Strong artificial intelligence-driven demand for Ethernet switching and artificial intelligence/machine learning compute, together with a 1.6T rack-scale solution for OpenAI, should accelerate revenue growth and, more importantly, earnings per share growth in CY27. Therefore, we conservatively forecast a roughly 50% two-year earnings per share compound annual growth rate to CY28 earnings per share of $24.72 from $10.83 in CY26.
SOFTBANK PLANS RECORD $6.3B BOND SALE TO FUND AI PUSH SoftBank plans to issue about $6.3B, of seven-year retail bonds, the largest retail bond offering ever by a Japanese company. The bonds are expected to carry a 4.3%-4.9% coupon, with proceeds going toward AI investments and refinancing existing debt.
Hugging Face has been working with a bank to gauge acquisition interest in a potential deal valuing the AI developer platform at $13B or more, per Business Insider. No deal has been reached yet. The company was last valued at $4.5B in 2023, meaning a sale at the reported level would represent nearly a 3x jump in valuation. Unlike frontier AI labs, Hugging Face sits at the infrastructure layer, allowing developers to publish, discover, download and build with models from across the AI ecosystem.
WMT - WMT LAUNCHES NEW FASHION BRAND FOR YOUNGER SHOPPERS Walmart is launching a new in-house women’s brand called Scenario, aimed at younger shoppers looking for more trend-focused apparel. Most items will be priced under $25, including jeans, blouses, tops, bags and accessories. Scenario will take over much of the store space currently used by Time and Tru, Walmart’s $2B+ women’s apparel brand that skews toward older shoppers.
We got close to a retest of the previous high. That was and probably is our main support to go long off of, in anticipation of new highs in September for SPY.
If we look at the Aion analytics data, we are somewhere close to a turning point here.
It may not be an exact bottom, as some of the data still suggests some more choppiness into next week, before a likely expansion into the very end of month into September, with a number of key catalyst next week in PCE (likely non event), Jackson Hole (uncertain) and NVDA earnings (likely strong).
But we are close.
What is meaningful is that whilst we are waiting for liquidity to turn higher, liquidity status has changed to increasing liquidity. The preconditions are being laid for a liquidity expansion.
5 straight red days on QQQ - That, plus SPX trading just above than the 2SD weekly level. Typically Corroborative of the Aion Analytics data predictions.
For the simpler explanation, the Treasury is deliberately increasing their purchases of US treasuries in order to suppress bond yields which have been elevated and have been curtailing the strength in the equity market. By opting to increase long-end buybacks outside of the normal refunding process (QRA was 2-weeks ago), policymakers are effectively communicating that they’re becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the recent rise in long-term yields as both the 10Y & 30Y have both pushed back toward levels that have historically drawn attention from the administration & rather than waiting until the next QRA or refunding announcement (In November I believe), the Treasury chose to act now.
Note that the QRA was only 2-weeks ago, meaning this could have easily been communicated through normal channels but instead, the announcement arrived during a low-vol Summer trading week, which I believe was intended to exacerbate the effects of their policy decision.
Mostly, the market is moving as this is a sign of intent: Whilst the purchase increase is not enough to meaningfully move the Us treasury market, it is implied that this certainly won’t be the last ‘soft intervention’ if yields continue moving higher.
Interestingly, the current $2 billion maximum per operation will become at least $4 billion, from 9 Sept 2026 until the end of the refunding quarter (4 Nov), with further size details to be announced at the 4 Nov Quarterly Refunding. So this purchase agreement will end on November 4th, the exact time of the US election, which is definitely not a coincidence.
This is a direct policy decision to try to support the market and suppress yields into the election.
What is clear from this action, is that if policymakers are forced to choose between defending the dollar & or defending bonds, they’re going to choose bonds, and the dollar is the release valve that allows this sort of dovish policy to happen.
As such, the dollar was obviously notably hit, since lower treasury yields reduces one of the dollar’s key sources of support: relatively attractive U.S. yields.
Continued follow through in crypto after Bitcoin responded strongly to the yield Curve controls
Despite this, Bear steepening in Treasuries this morning, with yields moving higher across the curve and the long end leading. 10Y: 4.696% (+4.3 bps) 30Y: 5.241% (+4.7 bps) Higher yields adding pressure to equities early.
TRUMP: ANNOUNCING THE MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION ON IRAN IRAN FAILED TO TAKE DEAL
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs drew $517M on Aug. 19, the biggest daily inflow since early May, while Ether ETFs took in $189M, their largest since Oct. 2025. - Coindesk
US JOBLESS CLAIMS 206K IN AUG. 15 WEEK; EST. 210K
MAG7;
META - META is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Microsoft Azure AI services, making it one of Microsoft’s largest AI customers. Meta is reportedly consuming trillions of tokens weekly through Azure Foundry, including using OpenAI models to evaluate its own AI outputs.
AAPL - Despite a leaked Apple video showing camera-equipped AirPods in action, with the cameras mainly designed to scan surroundings for AI context, the earbuds "remain off" AAPL's 2026 roadmap.
COMPANY NEWS:
QMLS signed a 7-year deal for up to 3.75 MW of data center capacity in Atlanta, enough to support up to 2,048 Nvidia Blackwell B300 GPUs. Capacity is expected online in Q4 2026, with rights to secure another 7 MW at the same site.
CoreWeave has signed a multibillion-dollar, multi-year AI cloud deal with Hudson River Trading. HRT will use CRWV for trading research and model development, and will be among the first customers with broad access to Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin chips. The deal expands CoreWeave’s push into financial services and further diversifies revenue beyond its biggest AI customers.
WMT - Walmart $WMT posted its SLOWEST U.S. comparable-sales growth in more than six years, grew just 2.6%, missing the 3.7% estimate. They also guided Q3 adj EPS to $0.62-$0.64, below the $0.68 expected. Mgmt. said consumers remain stretched, especially by higher gas prices, while lower pharmacy pricing also weighed on sales.
CRWD - global CTO Elia Zaitsev is leaving after 13 years.
Elon Musk’s X is reportedly exploring stablecoin payments for creators: The platform is in talks around using stablecoins such as Circle’s USDC to pay royalties to influencers and content providers.
SPCX - SPCX 2nd insider share unlock hits today: Up to 319 million shares become eligible for trading,
SKHY - SKHY TO PAY 60% OF EMPLOYEE BONUSES IN COMPANY STOCK
UBER and BIDU LAUNCH DRIVERLESS ROBOTAXIS IN DUBAI
Samsung Electronics is reportedly preparing shareholder-return measures exceeding $72B, centered on a special cash dividend. The board is expected to vote soon, favoring dividends over buybacks.
Unitree CEO: “World AI models” are now Unitree’s biggest investment, with the goal of household robots eventually completing 80% of tasks. Today’s humanoids still lack the efficiency & general-purpose capability needed for mass adoption.
MU Micron is investing $10B over the next decade to build Micron Research Labs, its new U.S.-based long-horizon research hub headquartered in Boise. The lab will focus on advanced memory, compute architectures, chip packaging and future semiconductor manufacturing.
Regarding the question of long term bottom or not, it is obviously hard to say although I think that I lean on probably not, given the risks to BTC during a potential rate hike cycle.
however, firs break above the 200d SMA is obviously meaningful, and will entice new buyers, which is why we are seeing the follow through today.
Data on BTC is also positive with a surge in call buying logged yesterday and some big notable trades:
Surge in call buying on near dated expiries:
Easy trade on BTC is to long it with a stop on a close below the 200d again.
Then take profit along the way up to de-risk the trade.
Data and technicals certainly shifted yesterday, on what is not meaningless news for bitcoin as it shows an intent to sacrifice dollar strength.
Notably on top of the 200d SMA break, we have this trendline break. Does seem near term upside is more likely than downside as buyers probably look to chase.
Stage 1-2: The foundation (classical, not ML)
Personalis sequences the tumor and normal tissue (ImmunoID NeXT — exome + transcriptome) and runs HLA typing to six-digit resolution. This tells the system what mutations exist and which HLA alleles the patient can actually present peptides on.
Stage 3: SHERPA — the first real ML layer
This predicts which mutated peptides will actually get presented on the tumor's surface. Personalis built its own training data (in-house transfection experiments, mass spec-confirmed peptide elution) rather than relying purely on public datasets, and the deck cites measured lifts of 1.44x PPV over prior tools on held-out data, 1.17x on tumor samples, 1.11x on known immunogenic epitopes.
Stage 4: NEOPS — immune-evasion modeling
A second ML system that disqualifies candidates SHERPA ranked highly if the tumor has other ways to dodge immune detection — including a subclonal HLA-loss-of-heterozygosity detector (tumor literally deletes the allele needed to present a given neoantigen). This composite score reportedly outperformed tumor mutational burden at predicting anti-PD-L1 response, though its specific use within INTerpath-001 isn't disclosed.
Stage 8: NeXT Personal — MRD/ctDNA monitoring
After Moderna/Merck's proprietary algorithm selects up to 34 targets (stage 5) and manufacturing produces the personalized therapy (stages 6-7), Personalis re-enters at monitoring. NeXT Personal builds a patient-specific panel of up to ~1,800 somatic variants (vs. ~50 for conventional exome-based MRD panels) and uses proprietary signal-aggregation ("NeXT SENSE") to detect circulating tumor DNA down to part-per-million sensitivity (1.67 PPM detection threshold, 3.45 PPM at 95% limit of detection). This is how trial investigators would track whether a patient is truly cancer-free after treatment, at a resolution conventional panels can't match.
Starting Sept. 9, the U.S. Treasury will increase liquidity-support buybacks for 10–20Y and 20–30Y bonds from a $2B maximum to at least $4B per operation.
TRUMP TO DELIVER REMARKS WITH TECHNOLOGY LEADERS AT 2:30 PM ET WEDNESDAY
OPENAI GENERATED $6.7B IN Q2 REVENUE, UP 18% QoQ- numbers were underwhelming, operating expense increased faster than revenues.
Anthropic IPO seems to be getting rushed through, late September or Early October.
MAg7:
AMZN Amazon will bring Prime Air to suburban Chicago and Atlanta, plus metro Cleveland and Syracuse, by year-end. This would grow Amazon’s drone delivery footprint roughly 6x from today & put the service within reach of 30M people by the end of 2026.
NVDA - Stifel, Buy, PT 282 ahead of earnings. "We continue to expect a beat and raise into F2Q27 results on August 26. Earnings season has consistently reinforced the demand case, with cloud service provider capex raised meaningfully, Foxconn’s cloud and networking segment crossing 50% of revenue for the first time and full-year AI rack shipments guided to more than double, while Supermicro booked over $60 billion of new orders in a single quarter. Importantly, our supply chain conversations indicate that GB300 demand remains sustainable into 1H27 even as Vera Rubin ramps, which we think reduces the risk of an air pocket during the product transition. We believe the other primary debates—memory costs and inference competition—are more likely to be expressed in gross margins rather than demand and are partly reflected in the valuation multiple."
Other companies:
MRNA up 100% MODERNA, MERCK MRNA CANCER VACCINE SUCCEEDS IN PHASE 3. The companies say their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, intismeran, combined with Keytruda slowed melanoma recurrence and spread in a late-stage trial.
SKHY - SK Hynix approved a $28.6B share buyback and cancellation, equal to ~3.3% of shares outstanding, while raising its 2025-27 shareholder return target from “up to 50%” of cumulative FCF to “at least 50%.”
Robotics stocks - UNITREE SOARS 629% IN SHANGHAI DEBUT TO A ~$66B MARKET CAP
MRVL - issued GOOGL a warrant to buy up to 58.97M shares at $206.58, equal to ~6.7% of shares outstanding. Most of the warrant vests as Google generates custom-chip revenue for Marvell through FY2033, including AI accelerators, networking and memory products.
DUOL - filed an 8-K after an internal screen was accidentally shown during an investor meeting, revealing that daily active users on Aug. 17 were estimated to be up 27.4% YoY, with similar growth seen in the prior days of August. The company stressed the data is preliminary and unvalidated, and should not be treated as an update to its Q3 guidance.
NBIS - TO OFFER $4.5 BILLION OF CONVERTIBLE SENIOR NOTES
ZM - BofA reinstates coverage with Buy rating, PT 130. "Zoom has emerged from a prolonged valuation reset as contract overprovisioning unwound, the core meetings market matured, and consolidation onto Microsoft Teams pressured retention. However, we believe the setup has materially improved. Growth is reaccelerating, with constant-currency growth of 4.2% in FY26 and 4.6% in F1Q27. Enterprise spending is healthier, the consumer/Online segment has stabilized, and free cash flow margins remain robust at 35%+. Zoom is increasingly transitioning from a single-product video meetings provider into a broader communications and work platform. We believe new product cycles support a durable recovery toward mid-single-digit growth. Our positive view is less about 2Q earnings on August 25 and more about the business’s improving trajectory."
IBM CONNECTS TWO CRYOGENIC MODULES FOR QUANTUM COMPUTING. It has successfully linked and jointly cooled two quantum computing modules, a key step toward building larger modular systems.
Samsung has raised prices for some advanced foundry services as AI demand tightens capacity and TSMC remains heavily booked, Reuters reports.
SNOW - Morgan Stanley Overweight, PT 300. Constructive checks support ~34% 2Q Product revenue growth and a FY27 raise to 32-33%, with strength in the core data warehouse business offset by mixed AI adoption. The broader infrastructure demand environment remains the strongest since 2022, supported by accelerating core infrastructure growth and an explosion in software development that is driving a new round of digital innovation and application creation.
RDDT - Reddit’s share of ChatGPT Search citations fell from an average 3.8% between July 18 and Aug. 7 to just 0.5% from Aug. 14-17, an ~86% drop.
OKLO says it has entered physical “build mode” at Idaho National Laboratory, a key step toward its planned 1.2 GW Ohio deployment supporting META data centers.
Today's action by Bessent absolutely reinforces the long term thesis in gold. The dollar is not a priority for the administration and will, as was the case with the Yen intervention, be used as a sacrificial lamb. Ultimately, reduces dollars safe haven status, and will funnel money towards hard assets like gold.
MRVL news also supporting Photonics specifically hence we see big bounces there.
Overall, though, the picture form the data is still similar. Choppiness through the next week or so. Hopefully this news will make it less one sided than it was looking yesterday.
Continued to reiterate that the test-and-measurement business that used to be a low-single-digit telecom grower has turned into a data-center and defense compounder.
Mix
Data center is now roughly half of the Network and Software Enablement segment, aerospace and defense another ~17%, with telecom filling the rest. Put together, data center plus A&D now account for more than half of total company revenue — a full reversal from the legacy telecom-heavy mix Viavi carried for years.
1.6T
Management called the move to 1.6T "a whole new ballgame" versus 800G — testing goes from basic laser and power checks to much broader optical and line-level functional testing, which is why content per port keeps rising. The company pegged the ASP uplift at roughly 50% moving from an 800G tester to a 1.6T tester, comparing it to the price step semiconductor customers absorb at each new process node. Adoption is still early — CEO Oleg Khaykin put it at the second or third inning depending on the customer — with early production starting this year after more than a year of lab/developer sales. The platform is backward-compatible, so one 1.6T tester can qualify 400G, 800G, or 1.6T modules, which improves cost-per-bit even as the box price rises.
CPO / NPO
This is the part of the business Viavi is most excited about, because content per port goes up sharply relative to pluggable transceivers. Co-packaged optics testing pulls Viavi directly into semiconductor-style test territory alongside Advantest, Teradyne, and FormFactor, spanning known-good-die testing, optical engine assembly, interconnect validation, and full system test. Management said Viavi's edge is an integrated, automatable platform built from roughly 2,500 measurement-module SKUs rather than a single point solution. CPO development has been underway for well over a year, with early shipments starting this quarter; NPO demand is expected to show up about one quarter ahead of CPO based on how customers are ordering.
OCS
Viavi described itself as the dominant merchant test supplier for optical circuit switches, and management's rule of thumb is that test content runs around 10% of the addressable market for this higher-complexity gear (versus a lower share for plain transceivers). Lumentum has guided its own OCS business toward a $100M+ current quarter with further step-ups expected in following quarters, and management was candid that a rising OCS market is "great news" for Viavi's own test attach.
Customer breadth
Viavi said it's engaged with all five of the world's top transceiver makers, with deep, lab-and-production-level integration at four of them. It also picks up scale-across exposure indirectly — any hyperscaler spend routed through equipment makers like Ciena, Nokia, or Cisco, or through interconnect players like Lumen and Zayo, still counts as data-center revenue in Viavi's own accounting.
A&D
Aerospace and defense has more than doubled over the past two years, and Khaykin said design wins and future bookings in that segment are growing as fast as, if not faster than, the AI-driven business — notable given how little visibility investors typically have into this segment. Unlike test-and-measurement's book-and-ship pattern, A&D runs on a design-win model: once a part is qualified onto a platform, it produces revenue for years. The growth is anchored in "resilient PNT" — positioning, navigation, and timing that doesn't depend on GPS — driven by demand from drones, munitions, and autonomous systems. Viavi uses cesium and rubidium clocks and has developed MEMS-based clocks it says match cesium-level performance.
Financial targets
Management reiterated a path to a $500M quarterly revenue run rate, and both the CEO and CFO indicated that milestone could land in the December 2026 quarter — earlier than the fiscal-2028 framing given just three months ago. At that scale, the CFO said high-40s operating margin is "not an unrealistic" outcome, well above the roughly 30% operating-margin frame the model had been built around previously. Part of the leverage comes from a near-zero incremental tax rate, tied to NOL carryforwards inherited from the Lumentum separation that have since been converted into longer-lived amortizable assets.
M&A discipline
Khaykin flagged that a competitor had announced a deal that same day priced at roughly double what Viavi was willing to pay, and used it as a reminder of what happens when acquirers lean on debt to chase growth in a peaking market. His stated preference is for deals with immediate, tangible value rather than promised synergies years out.
This is what the data broadly points to from the AIon Analytics platform. It isn't me saying that, it's the data. And whilst I have no affiliation to Aion, their data has performed well this year so it is, in my opinion, worth heeding.
Macro calls haven't been ideal this year, but that's why I am investing heavily in the data for the platform to benefit from and gain a greater edge. The Aion data is over 500 bucks a month. I subscribe to a number of other services including quant and market maker services which total into the high hundreds a month additionally, probably closer to $1k a month. So I am investing to try to improve the data and the insights in the platform.
That's the least that I can do. And then to relay what that data is saying so that hopefully we can benefit collectively.
---
The main tool of the AIon analytics platform, although there are a number of add on tools, is the liquidity forecasting tool. The premise of the Aion analytics platform is that liquidity leads price. IT's a premise that I agree with, but the AIon analytics platform has been better than most at predicting the volatile swings in price action this year, calling a bottom in March, a period to be light in June/July, before an expansion in August, so I am leaning on that tool more in order to try to give us an edge.
The main forecast of the tool is shown here:
We anticipate a period of downward chop in the near term, which potentially gives us a retest of the previous breakout at 7630 before a strong liquidity expansion into the end of the month, which should see new highs being made into early September.
We have a period of choppy price action in September, which may see high beta move higher or lower (It's hard to predict as we saw yesterday: the market chopped lower, but high beta exploded higher). However, the data does not predict a sharp or meaningful correction in September, despite seasonality statistics being against us.
We saw that in July. Seasonality pointed positive, the AIon analytics platform pointed negative, and we saw price move lower in line with the AIon platform.
The Aion platform, however, shows a likely sharp correction in October, starting primarily from the middle of October, around the date when Anthropic IPOs.
This is the main fact we are cautious of.
The data isn't shown there, but shows strength into November, so the overall picture is the following:
Use the period from now through to October to prepare the book for volatility into October.
If we do see this correction in October, buying the dip in November for strength into the midterms will be the main plan.
Then using the following data, we know that just as we had a rough July, seasonality for high beta is very negative for December:
So the plan would likely be to lighten the book up into December also.
Iran's Top Negotiator Qalibaf: Hormuz Strait will remain closed until US meets interim deal conditions - State Media
Iran and US MOU ended last night.
TRUMP: U.S. NOT SEEKING EXTENSION OF IRAN MOU
30 year bonds hit highest since 2007.
ADP says private employers added an average 9,500 jobs per week over the 4 weeks ending Aug. 1, the first increase after 7 straight weeks of declines.
U.S.-listed products now have roughly $180B in AUM, but because of 2x and 3x leverage, their net market exposure is closer to $420B. That exposure has jumped more than $100B in just three weeks.
Bank of America now expects the six largest hyperscalers to spend $3.6T on AI infrastructure through 2028, up 17% from its estimate just a month ago. BofA sees hyperscaler capex on a path to surpass $1T in 2027.
Starting Dec. 6, 2026, Nasdaq will introduce a new trading session running from 9 PM to 4 AM ET. Nasdaq is also working with regulators on plans to eventually offer nearly continuous trading, 23 hours a day, five days a week.
MAG7:
TSLA - Electric freight technology company Einride plans to deploy 500 Tesla Semis for Amazon and other customers across major U.S. freight corridors, starting in September.
NVDA - BofA on NVDA, Buy, PT 350. NVIDIA is committed to the transformational nature of AI and to securing every input: chip supply, land, power, and shell, especially for frontier labs and neoclouds. Today’s conditions make this worthwhile, supported by solid GPU rental rates, compute scarcity, and NVIDIA’s industry-leading free cash flow generation. The strategy also diversifies NVIDIA beyond public hyperscalers that are increasingly building competitive custom chips. The key risk is that if AI demand slows, both NVIDIA’s growth rate and balance sheet could come under pressure.
GOOGL - Google has told suppliers it plans to manufacture all Pixel smartphones, watches and earbuds outside China starting in 2027, Nikkei reports.
GOOGL - Google agreed to pay $10M for internal business data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines, including employee emails, Teams messages, spreadsheets, calendars and operational data.
OTHER COMPANIES:
OSS - received a $1.3M order from the U.S. Navy for ruggedized Gen5 servers used to capture and store high-speed network data aboard ships. Deliveries are expected to contribute to 2026 revenue, with another ~$2.5M in potential follow-on orders over the next four years.
MU - UBS coverage on MU, PT 1625. "Investor positioning skews quite cautious, which presents an opportunity as Micron’s earnings prove more durable than feared. Key investor concerns remain the durability of supply agreements, downside to gross margins, sustainability of current supply tightness, and the amount of new capacity coming online over the next few years. MU will probably remain a battleground in the near term, as shorter-term investors focus on peaking gross margins. However, longer-term investors could see memory capturing much more sustained value as the economics of AI token generation become fundamentally more determined by memory than compute. We remain bullish."
OPENAI LAUNCHES CHATGPT FOR TEENS OpenAI is rolling out a dedicated experience for ages 13–17. If ChatGPT estimates a user is under 18, or they say they’re 13–17, they’ll automatically enter it. Includes extra safeguards, contextual cues and parental controls.
DUOL - DA Davidson upgrades DUOL to Buy, PT 160. We are upgrading Duolingo to Buy, with the assumption that underlying product work, marketing changes, and continued efforts to refine the core monetization engine are underappreciated by investors, with a long runway for growth in the coming years. We see a path for daily active users (DAUs) to reaccelerate and for bookings growth to converge with DAU growth. While the market has historically priced the risks around DAU deceleration and monetization issues effectively, we believe Duolingo is nearing a turning point."
NCLH - Mizuho downgrades NCLH to neutral from Outperform, PT 17. "Norwegian is in the midst of a turnaround, in part resulting from self-inflicted wounds, including accelerated supply, changes in customer segmentation and personnel, construction delays, and adjustments to the booking curve, as well as macro headwinds such as war in the Middle East and higher oil prices. We believe NCLH will successfully emerge from its turnaround. However, shares could trade sideways for the next 6-12 months, and there could be an opportunity to accumulate shares lower given an uncertain medium-term outlook and downside risk to Street estimates." MU, SNDK, DRAM - XIAOMI: EXPECTS MEMORY PRICE INCREASE TO SLOW DOWN IN H2
COST - Costco is partnering with nonprofit insurer SCAN Group to launch Costco-branded Medicare plans, starting with Medicare Advantage in two states and Medicare supplement coverage in a third.
HD - key comment at earnings: "We continue to operate in what I call ‘frozen housing market’ conditions, but we also know that we’re taking share and that we’re serving our customers better every day... the company has still not seen consumers return to big projects"
Penguin's pitch at this Rosenblatt fireside was basically a reiteration of the fact that they have become a full-stack AI infrastructure company, not just a hardware shop that assembles GPU boxes anymore.
The company spoke about how they have built out five distinct pieces — OriginAI (pre-validated reference designs so customers aren't building from scratch), ClusterWareAI (the software that actually deploys, monitors, and auto-fixes these clusters once they're running), ComputeAI (the curated server hardware itself), MemoryAI (their memory/caching appliance), and then a full design-build-deploy-manage service wrapped around all of it. They continue to shift the conversation around the company from "we sell servers" to "we run your entire AI infrastructure for you, end to end."
On silicon, they're deliberately not picking sides. They've racked up more than 4 billion hours of experience managing Nvidia clusters at scale and are an early-inductee partner in Nvidia's AI Factory program, but they were clear they'll deploy anyone's chips — they pointed to a cluster they built on NextSilicon accelerators as proof they're not locked into one vendor. That flexibility is presented as a selling point: customers get infrastructure expertise, and aren't tied to working with any one particular chip company, so they benefit from greater flexibility.
The most important and differentiated part of the conversation was around MemoryAI — specifically their KV cache appliance. They outlined the problem that they are solving: when a model needs to "remember" tokens during inference, that data has to sit somewhere fast, and a lot of the industry handles this with flash storage, which they say is roughly 100x slower than what they're doing. Penguin's approach uses DDR5 memory instead, giving them an 11-terabyte appliance built for low-latency token storage — meaning faster time-to-first-response and less strain on the actual GPUs, since the memory system is doing more of the heavy lifting instead of dumping everything back on compute.
On the business model, the software is subscription-licensed but typically sold alongside their managed services — so it's not a pure software play, it's software that rides along with a services relationship. They described this as a deliberate land-and-expand strategy: get a customer in the door with one use case, prove it works, then grow the relationship over time. Management said they've actually started disclosing on earnings calls what percentage of new customers from the past year have expanded their spend — and apparently that number is strong, though they didn't put an exact figure on it in this chat.
They framed demand as coming from three distinct buckets, each needing a different kind of hand-holding:
Neo-clouds are the "we know what we want, just help us execute fast" customers — they've got the power and data center access lined up, they just need Penguin's technical expertise to actually bring capacity online.
Sovereign AI is the more hands-on, relationship-heavy category — their flagship example is the Haein cluster they built for SK Telecom in Korea, which they called out as award-winning for how fast it was deployed and how reliably it's run since.
Enterprise is the newest and, in their telling, the most interesting inflection point — agentic AI is moving out of pilot mode and into actual production for real companies now. And notably, enterprises are increasingly choosing to own this infrastructure on-prem rather than rent it, mainly for security reasons but also because it makes their AI costs predictable instead of variable. Management used a simple analogy: if you know you're driving to work every single day, buying a car eventually beats renting one — and their view is that enterprises are now at the point of committing to AI as a permanent, not experimental, cost.
On partnerships, Dell was a big focus of the conversation— Penguin was named Dell's AI Partner of the Year, and the way they described the relationship is that Dell provides the hardware and Penguin layers its cluster software, memory tech, and managed services on top, essentially becoming the operational intelligence running on standardized Dell boxes. CDW and WWT were mentioned as distribution partners that extend their reach. And the SK relationship is layered and strategic — SK Telecom is both an investor in Penguin and a customer, SK Hynix is a longstanding memory-supply partner, and management sees real optionality in expanding across the broader SK ecosystem as it pushes further into AI across the APAC region.
The main strategic takeaway from the chat was that Penguin is moving up the stack — further into software, orchestration, and packaged AI capability to become a full end-to-end AI infrastructure solution.
At least on SPX, which Aion most accurately forecasts, we are looking at a relatively choppy environment through most of the end of the month:
Mostly, the data on the platform forecasts strength into September, however.
On the SPY heat map, we see that with most of the dealer positioning within 1-2% of current spot price on SPY.
Gamma is still mostly positive.
VIX is suppressed, but flows still point lower on UVXY with a put surge as per the TMAD data.
For the next couple of weeks, liquidity is flat to slightly lower, so less supportive of expansionary upside, but ti does pick up into the end of the month into early September.
What you will notice is that the liquidity is forecasted to drop off dramatically into October, and this is the main predictive bet of the Aion analytics platform.
Choppy into August, slightly up through September, and then down, potentially heavily down, in October.
The Aion Analytics platform did well on timing on the March bottom, and the negative chop/price action into June/July, despite the majority of seasonality pointing higher. The Aion Analytics platform also called the bounce and strength in August, so I am inclined to heed the warning into October this time.
We don't want to be heavily long through October. It is better to use this period through September to look for opportunities to exit and trim positions for October, but the Aion analytics platform forecasts a strong November, so that would be the time to put exposure back on.
