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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance
🛢️ Oil rises as Hormuz stalls: A Houthi drone hit a 400,000 barrel a day Saudi refinery, and Brent added 1.2%.
📈 Record high on a jobs loss: The S&P 500 closed at 7,757.64 after payrolls fell 23,000, its best week since April.
💻 Palantir added 118 billion dollars: Its best week since November 2024, with Atlassian up 35% and Twilio up 25%.
🚀 Rocket Lab reports after a 663 million win: Space Force awards worth about 30% of its backlog land before tonight’s numbers.
🚁 Archer reports on 2 million of revenue: The air taxi maker has 1.8 billion dollars of liquidity and a certification date that decides everything.
🖥️ CoreWeave’s 99 billion backlog gets tested: Revenue is seen doubling tomorrow night, with the stock down 16% in a week.
🏬 America’s biggest landlord reports tonight: Simon Property is expected to post 3.18 dollars of funds from operations per share.
🥇 Gold eases off a seven-week high: Spot slipped to about 4,337 dollars after touching 4,411 on the jobs report.
📈 I sold my whole SpaceX position at 135 dollars: Chart of the Day covers the 147 target, the 171 above it and the 110 line.
🧠 One Big Thing
Two AI stories are running in opposite directions and both got louder last week. Palantir added roughly $118bn of market value in five sessions and Atlassian rose 35% in one, because a beat at those companies drops straight into margin. CoreWeave fell 16% over the same week and sits around half its high, because its growth arrives attached to a $31bn to $35bn capital budget. The market has stopped paying the same multiple for both kinds of AI revenue. CoreWeave’s numbers tomorrow night and Applied Materials later this week put the capital-heavy side of that argument on the record.
⚖️ Fear & Greed
📉 The Number That Matters
23,000
The US economy lost 23,000 jobs in July against roughly 80,000 expected, and the S&P 500 answered with a record close, because a stalling labour market cut the odds on a September rate rise to about 42%.
⚔️ Winners vs Losers
Winners
VREX 0.00%↑ : +48.89% Varex Imaging Corporation climbed sharply in thin pre-market trade ahead of its fiscal third quarter earnings release, scheduled for after the closing bell today, with the gap driven by positioning into the print rather than a company announcement.
ABCL 0.00%↑ : +36.12% AbCellera Biologics Inc. rallied after releasing top-line results before the open from the Phase 2 trial of ABCL635, its potential first-in-class non-hormonal antibody targeting NK3R for moderate to severe hot flashes due to menopause. The readout is the first efficacy test for the lead asset out of the company’s GPCR and ion channel platform.
HZO 0.00%↑ : +34.75% MarineMax, Inc. surged in pre-market trading on its long-running sale process, with Blackstone, Centerbridge and activist shareholder Donerail all in the final round of bidding for the recreational boat and yacht retailer since late July. The pre-market level sits far above the roughly $35.00 a share all-cash proposal Donerail put forward earlier this year.
VRTX 0.00%↑ : +6.84% Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated rose as the competitive overhang on its cystic fibrosis franchise lifted, with Sionna’s closely watched NBD1 stabilizer readout landing badly for the challenger. Sell-side analysts had flagged that data as the single largest risk to Vertex heading into this month.
Losers
SION 0.00%↑ : -91.67% Sionna Therapeutics, Inc. collapsed on the topline readout from PreciSION CF, the Phase 2a proof-of-concept trial of NBD1 stabilizer SION-719 added to standard of care Trikafta in cystic fibrosis patients. The study was the first clinical test of an NBD1 stabilizer in people with the disease and the company’s central value driver.
TENX 0.00%↑ : -82.66% Tenax Therapeutics, Inc. plunged on topline results from LEVEL, the registrational Phase 3 trial of oral levosimendan in pulmonary hypertension due to heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. The trial enrolled over 230 patients and had been powered at well above 90% to detect a 25 meter change in six minute walk distance.
📊 Market Snapshot
Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $65,000 (▲0.23%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,917 (▲0.40%)
XRP: $1.03 (▲0.27%)
Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,781 (▲0.01%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,877 (▲0.14%)
FTSE 100: 10,860 (▼0.24%)
Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.67% (▲0.41%)
Oil (WTI): $79 (▲2.92%)
Gold: $4,329 (▼0.28%)
Silver: $63.83 (▲0.56%)
Data as of: UK: 12:18 BST / US: 07:18 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 20:18 JST
✅ 5 Things to Know
🛢️ A drone hits Saudi crude, and oil turns back up
Brent crude rose about 1.2% to $84.58 a barrel this morning and US crude pushed close to 3% higher, back near $79, after a weekend that put the Gulf back on the front page. A Houthi drone struck Saudi Aramco's Jazan refinery on the Red Sea coast early yesterday, starting a fire that was put out with no injuries reported. The plant processes 400,000 barrels of crude a day. The group said the strike answered Saudi drone flights over the provinces of Saada and Hajjah, and it came two days after Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement in the holy city, treating an attack on any one of them as an attack on all three (CNBC).
The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is the thing actually moving the price, and it keeps not happening. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said over the weekend that an agreement with Oman on a shipping route is “very close”, while ruling out direct talks with Washington for now over violations of June’s interim peace deal. President Trump said the United States is “low-keying” the negotiation and leaning harder on economic pressure instead. Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil normally moves through that strait. For UK and US readers the link is the July inflation report on 12 August, which covers a month when crude traded lower than it does today (Bloomberg).
Sensei’s Insight: Attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure have a long record of producing a one-day spike and nothing more, provided barrels keep flowing, and the Jazan fire was out within hours. The Mecca pact is the part that changes the arithmetic, because it widens who is obliged to respond next time.
📈 Wall Street set a record on a jobs report that went backwards
The S&P 500 finished last week at 7,757.64, an all-time high, up 47.68 points in the closing session and 3.58% across the five days, its strongest week since April. The Nasdaq added 1.3% and the Dow gained a quarter of a percent. The trigger was the July employment report, which showed the American economy shedding 23,000 jobs against forecasts of roughly 80,000 added. Bond markets moved with it: the 10-year Treasury yield fell more than three basis points to 4.639% and the two-year dropped more than five to 4.193%. Odds of a Federal Reserve rate rise in September slid to about 42%, from roughly 67% a week earlier (CNBC).
Futures are quieter this morning, with S&P 500 contracts at 7,791.75 and Nasdaq futures up 0.42% while Dow futures sit slightly lower and the VIX trades near 15.5. The rally is resting on one assumption, that the Fed stays still, and the July inflation report on 12 August at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET, is the test of it. Consensus is 0.1% on the month with the annual rate easing to 3.4%. June’s headline was flattered by a 9.7% one-month fall in petrol prices, a gift that does not repeat. Four and a half hours after the print the Treasury sells $42bn of 10-year notes, which gives an immediate read on how bond buyers scored it.
Sensei’s Insight: A record high on falling employment only holds if inflation cooperates, and the July data was collected before crude turned back up. My read is that this week’s print clears the bar and August is the harder month. The auction that afternoon will tell you faster than the commentary.
💻 Palantir added $118 billion in five sessions
Palantir closed out last week at $172.01, up 10.32% in the final session and 39.8% across the week from $123.06, its best week since November 2024 and roughly $117.6bn of market value added. The run started with second-quarter results seven days earlier: revenue of $1.94bn, up 93% from a year before and about $136m ahead of Wall Street, alongside a raised full-year outlook on enterprise AI demand. Bank of America restated a bullish view as the week closed, and the buying spread through the same corner of the market, with UiPath up 7% and C3.ai up 5% on the session (Yahoo Finance).
Atlassian went further. Its shares jumped 35% in that same session after fiscal fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.87 a share on $1.77bn of revenue, against forecasts of $1.50 and $1.66bn, with cloud revenue up 31% to $1.2bn and contracted future revenue up 44% to $4.82bn. Twilio rose 24.89% on its own quarter. What links them is the shape of the business: a beat at a software company lands in margin almost immediately, with no factory to build first. That is the same week CoreWeave, which rents out the hardware the AI boom runs on, fell 16% (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Moves of 35% in a day happen when a stock was priced for deceleration and delivered acceleration instead. Atlassian had guided cloud growth to 13%. It printed 31%. That gap, and how long it can last, is what I am watching into the next quarter.
🚀 Rocket Lab reports tonight after a $663 million week
Rocket Lab shares climbed 9.46% in the final session of last week to $82.83, lifting the company’s market value to around $50bn, after the US Space Force disclosed two awards with a combined value of $663m. That is close to 30% of the backlog Rocket Lab reported at the end of March, arriving in a single announcement. The larger piece, a $397m Flatellite contract, is written around Neutron launches, which matters because Neutron is the medium-lift rocket meant to carry the company out of the small-satellite niche and into the heavier government and commercial work SpaceX currently dominates (Yahoo Finance).
Second-quarter numbers land after the close tonight, with company guidance of $225m to $240m in revenue and analysts near the middle of that range at roughly $232m. Revenue is the least interesting line on the page. Neutron’s first flight has been guided to later this year, and a $50bn valuation on a company with quarterly revenue of that size is a bet on the rocket arriving and on awards like last week’s converting into flown missions. Watch for a firm Neutron date and for how much of the $663m management expects to recognise in 2027 rather than park in backlog (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Backlog is a promise and revenue is a receipt, and this stock trades on the promise. A slip in the Neutron schedule tonight would cost more than a revenue miss, because the schedule is the entire argument for the valuation.
🚁 The wrong number to watch in Archer’s results
Archer Aviation publishes second-quarter results after the US close tonight, with the call at 10pm BST, 5pm ET. Analysts expect a loss of somewhere between 25 and 34 cents a share on revenue of about $1.94m, and roughly $10.05m for the whole of 2026. Those are rounding errors against a company worth billions, which is the point: the air taxi is not yet a product anyone can buy a seat on. Shares closed last week at $5.59, up 6.88% in the final session but still down about 26% so far this year. Goldman Sachs trimmed its target to $8 from $9 going in, keeping a neutral stance (Yahoo Finance).
What the market is actually pricing is the certification clock. In April, Archer became the first eVTOL company to close Phase 3 of the Federal Aviation Administration’s four-stage type certification process, pushing its Midnight aircraft into Phase 4, where it has to prove airworthiness through formal testing rather than paperwork. Management has guided to first US operations this year under the White House eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, with Hawthorne Airport being modernised and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics as the showcase, alongside early commercial flying planned in the United Arab Emirates. Archer closed the first quarter with about $1.8bn of liquidity, and in July unveiled Thunder with Anduril, a defence version whose first flight is set for 2027 (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Pre-revenue aviation companies are priced on dates, and dates slip. Archer has $1.8bn in the bank against a couple of million a quarter coming in, so the cash is not the worry. What I want tonight is a month for the first paying passenger.
Stories You Might Have Missed
🖥️ CoreWeave’s $99 billion backlog goes on trial tomorrow
CoreWeave reports second-quarter results after the US close tomorrow, and expectations are extreme in both directions. Analysts model revenue of about $2.55bn against $1.21bn a year earlier, growth of more than 110%, alongside a loss of roughly $1.22 a share compared with 27 cents. The company reported a $99.4bn revenue backlog at the end of March and guides capital spending of $31bn to $35bn for this year, which is the source of the nerves: the demand is contracted, the money to serve it has to be raised and spent first. Shares fell 16.31% last week and sit roughly half below their 52-week high (Yahoo Finance).
🏬 America’s biggest mall landlord reports tonight
Simon Property Group publishes second-quarter numbers after the close tonight, and analysts expect real estate funds from operations of $3.18 a share, up 4.3% from $3.05 a year ago, on revenue of roughly $1.71bn. The company has beaten estimates in each of the last four quarters. It lands in a week built around inflation and consumer data, and occupancy and leasing spreads across 190-odd American shopping centres are a live reading on whether households are still turning up and spending, taken four days before the July retail sales report closes the week (Yahoo Finance).
🥇 Gold slips back from a seven-week high
Spot gold eased about 0.1% to trade near $4,337 an ounce this morning as buyers took profits, after touching $4,411.70 in the hours after the payrolls miss late last week, its highest in seven weeks. Silver held above $63. The metal has spent the past fortnight tracking the rate story almost tick for tick, rising as the market cut the odds on a September Federal Reserve rise from about 67% to roughly 42%. Gold remains well below the record above $5,500 set in January, and this week’s inflation report is the next thing capable of moving it in either direction (Yahoo Finance).