This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).
Quick note before we start. Today's edition is late and shorter than usual, and I apologise for both. A few of the regular sections are missing this morning. The top stories are all still here, and the main ones are written up as normal, so you are not missing the news itself. I am travelling at the moment, building the next big perk for newsletter members. More on that soon. Back to the full edition tomorrow.
👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance
🛢️ Trump says no to a truce: The Iran ceasefire expired without an extension, Brent went above $91, and Lebanon saw its deadliest day since June.
🌍 Thirty-year money hits 2007 levels: America’s 30-year yield reached 5.33%, and German, British and Japanese long bonds all hit multi-year highs on the same morning.
🤖 Nvidia guarantees $105 billion of rent: The chipmaker is underwriting OpenAI’s 20-year lease on an Ohio data centre campus it will not own.
🔨 Home Depot’s best quarter since 2022: Comparable sales rose 1.7% and guidance held, with the finance chief calling housing market conditions frozen.
🏛️ Crypto’s week in Wyoming and Washington: Jackson Hole hosts the SEC chair today, Trump meets exchange bosses Wednesday, and CLARITY’s odds sit at 10%.
📊 Reddit fell 7% on index eve: Shares closed at $164.50 the day before every S&P 500 tracker fund had to own them.
🇨🇳 Baidu’s cloud grows, its ads shrink: GPU cloud revenue rose 283% while advertising fell 19%, and the overall result still missed estimates.
💡 A record quarter, punished anyway: Fabrinet grew revenue 45% and beat its own guidance, and the shares fell about 9% before the open.
🧠 One Big Thing
Long-term borrowing got more expensive everywhere at once this morning. The American 30-year Treasury yield hit 5.33%, a level last seen in 2007. Germany’s 30-year is at a 15-year high, Japan’s 10-year at a 30-year high, and Britain’s 30-year gilt sits at 5.85%. One reason sits behind all of it: oil near $91 with no ceasefire, which revives the inflation everyone thought was fading. Those yields set mortgage rates, pension values and what governments pay to borrow. That is why this matters more today than any single share price.
⚖️ Fear & Greed
📉 The Number That Matters
$105 billion
Nvidia has guaranteed up to $105 billion of lease, power and residual-value obligations on an Ohio data centre it will not own, so that OpenAI can rent it for 20 years.
📊 Market Snapshot
Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,221 (▼ 0.38%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,899 (▼ 0.64%)
XRP: $1.00 (▼ 0.49%)
Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,738 (▼ 0.40%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,753 (▼ 1.14%)
FTSE 100: 10,741 (▲ 0.15%)
Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.74% (▲ 0.30%)
Oil (WTI): $84 (▼ 0.89%)
Gold: $4,395 (▼ 0.51%)
Silver: $65.09 (▼ 1.06%)
Data as of: UK: 1:30pm BST / US: 8:30am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 9:30pm JST
✅ 5 Things to Know
🛢️ Trump rules out a truce and the war widens
Asked on Monday whether Washington would extend the 60-day agreement with Iran, President Trump said no. The memorandum signed in June expired the same day with no wider peace deal behind it, and a senior Iranian official said Tehran would shift to a “fully offensive” military posture if diplomacy fails. Brent crude settled at $90.87 a barrel on Monday, up 2.65%, and traded above $91 on Tuesday morning for a third straight session of gains. West Texas Intermediate sat near $84.84. Iran and Oman are still negotiating an arrangement for Hormuz traffic, and the United States is not part of those talks. (Benzinga)
The war is spreading beyond the water.
Israel said on Sunday it had killed Abu Hassan Alaa, a senior Hezbollah commander, in southern Lebanon the day before. Eleven people died in those strikes, the deadliest day in Lebanon since the two sides agreed a ceasefire at the start of June, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the action answered an attack that seriously injured three Israeli soldiers. Trump also told Fox News that if Oman gets in the way, “we’ll bomb the s--- out of them”. Oman is the country currently brokering the Hormuz talks between Washington and Tehran. The weekly American crude inventory count lands on Wednesday at 3:30pm UK, which is 10:30am Eastern. (NBC News)
Sensei’s Insight: Trump said no and oil went up 2.65%. That is the whole trade right now. Watch Oman, because it is the only party talking to both sides, and threatening to bomb the mediator does not usually speed a deal up. That is my read.
🌍 The world’s long bonds broke at once
5.33%. That is where the American 30-year Treasury yield traded on Tuesday, the highest since 2007. It did not move alone. Germany’s 10-year Bund yield climbed above 3.25%, the highest since March 2011, and its 30-year reached 3.78%, a 15-year high. Britain’s 30-year gilt traded at 5.85%. Japan’s 10-year hit 2.95%, the highest in three decades. The American 10-year sat at 4.74% and the two-year at 4.19%. Long-dated government debt sold off across every major economy on the same morning. (CNBC)
Oil is doing the work here. Brent near $91 with no ceasefire feeds straight into the inflation numbers central banks watch, and bond investors demand a higher yield when they expect prices to keep rising. Traders have already moved. The CME FedWatch tool put the odds of a September rate rise at 36.6% on Tuesday morning, against roughly 30% at Friday’s close. Gold fell 0.51% to $4,393 an ounce, because higher yields make an asset that pays no interest less attractive to hold. The minutes of the July Fed meeting arrive on Wednesday at 7:00pm UK, which is 2:00pm Eastern. (Euronews)
Sensei’s Insight: Remember what the market was telling us on Friday. A September hike was dead, odds near 30%. Everyone relaxed. One weekend of oil headlines later it is 36.6% and thirty-year money costs 2007 prices. Rate pricing is nowhere near settled, and that is my read.
🤖 Nvidia guarantees the rent on OpenAI’s biggest building
Nvidia has agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion of lease, power and residual-value obligations on a data centre it will not own. SB Energy, backed by SoftBank, will build, own and operate the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, on the site of a Cold War uranium enrichment plant, and lease it to OpenAI for 20 years. The campus will exclusively host Nvidia compute. Initial capacity is 4.25 gigawatts with an option for a further 3.75, which at full size would make it the largest single AI data centre anywhere. Nvidia is also putting $1.5 billion of equity into SB Energy, and the first phases come online in 2028. (CNBC)
Nvidia sells the chips, then underwrites the rent its customer pays to house them. That is the arrangement analysts have spent the summer calling circular financing, and Jensen Huang rejects the label, pointing instead to a $600 billion compute opportunity through 2030. The size of the guarantee has already moved once, from reporting near $250 billion down to this level. Credit default swaps on Nvidia bonds, which are the contracts that pay out if a company stops servicing its debt, posted their sharpest intraday rise since they began trading actively in November. The shares closed at $225.01 on Monday. Nvidia reports second-quarter results on 26 August. (Axios)
Sensei’s Insight: Nvidia is guaranteeing the rent on a building it does not own so its customer can afford the chips it sells. Call that what you like. Reported at $250 billion three weeks ago, $105 billion now, so the terms are still moving.
🔨 Home Depot’s best quarter since 2022
Did the American consumer stop spending? Not at Home Depot. Sales came in at $47.9 billion for the quarter ended 2 August, up 5.7% or $2.6 billion on the same period last year. Comparable sales rose 1.7%, the strongest since the third quarter of 2022, with American comparable sales up 1.3%. Net income was $4.77 billion, or $4.79 a share, against $4.55 billion and $4.58 a year earlier. Stripping out one-off items, adjusted earnings came to $4.92 a share, ahead of the $4.73 analysts had modelled on $47.27 billion of revenue. (CNBC)
Finance chief Richard McPhail told CNBC the company is still working in what he called frozen housing market conditions, and the guidance backs him up. Full-year sales growth of 2.5% to 4.5% and comparable sales flat to up 2% were both left unchanged. Chief executive Ted Decker has been on temporary medical leave since 12 August, so McPhail ran the call. Shoppers are doing smaller jobs rather than big remodels, which is what happens when nobody moves house. July housing starts and building permits land at 1:30pm UK, which is 8:30am Eastern. Lowe’s and Target report Wednesday, Walmart Thursday. (PR Newswire)
Sensei’s Insight: 1.7% comparable sales growth is the best number this company has posted in nearly four years, and its own finance chief still calls the housing market frozen. Both things are true. Lowe’s tomorrow tells us whether that was Home Depot or the whole category.
🏛️ Crypto’s week in Wyoming and Washington
Around 500 investors, regulators and founders are in Jackson Hole this week. The Wyoming Blockchain Symposium runs to Thursday at the Four Seasons resort, hosted by SALT and the exchange Kraken, and it is invitation only. SEC chair Paul Atkins is attending, as are Senators Cynthia Lummis and Tim Scott. Ripple sponsors the event and chief executive Brad Garlinghouse is due to speak. The published themes are tokenising traditional markets, bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset, and blockchain-based AI infrastructure. XRP traded at $0.996 on Tuesday and bitcoin near $64,200. (crypto.news)
On Wednesday the same industry moves to Washington. President Trump is expected at a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with Atkins, CFTC chair Michael Selig, and executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Gemini, Polymarket and Kalshi, alongside Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and CME. The CFTC’s new Innovation Advisory Committee holds its first session the day after. The access is arriving while the legislation stalls. Galaxy Research cut the odds of the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 to 10% on 14 August, down from a peak near 75% in May, and the Senate returns on 14 September with roughly 14 scheduled session days before its October break. A procedural vote is set for 15 September. (Benzinga)
Sensei’s Insight: Two rooms in two days, the SEC chair in both, and the bill everyone wanted is at 10%. That is the trade-off on offer: regulators writing the rules directly instead of Congress. Faster, and much easier to reverse next time the White House changes hands.
Stories You Might Have Missed
📊 Reddit fell 7% on the eve of joining the index
Reddit entered the S&P 500 before Tuesday’s opening bell, replacing AvalonBay Communities, which meant every fund tracking the index had to own the shares by Monday’s close in New York. JPMorgan put the forced buying at roughly 16.7 million shares, close to $3 billion. The shares opened at $177.51, touched $178.33, and closed at $164.50, down 7.14% on the day. Form 144 filings disclosed on 14 August had already flagged planned insider sales of up to 195,000 shares. Index inclusion creates a buyer with no opinion, and that buyer arrives once. Reddit is still down about 24% this year and trades near 40 times earnings. (TradingKey)
🇨🇳 Baidu’s cloud grows while its ads shrink
Baidu reported second-quarter revenue of 31.33 billion yuan, down 4% on the year and below the 31.95 billion consensus. Earnings came in at 7.22 yuan a share against the 9.84 analysts expected. Inside that number, AI cloud infrastructure revenue rose 50% to 7.3 billion yuan, and the GPU cloud line within it grew 283% on the year, accelerating from 184% growth the previous quarter. Online marketing, the old search advertising business, fell 19% to 13.1 billion yuan. AI applications rose 3% to 2.5 billion yuan. The shares fell about 3% before the American open. Chinese retail sales grew 0.6% in July, so the advertising line has a reason behind it. (MarketScreener)
💡 Fabrinet’s record quarter got sold anyway
Fabrinet builds the optical parts that carry data between AI servers, and it just had the best quarter in its history. Revenue rose 45% on the year to $1.316 billion and non-GAAP earnings reached $4.10 a share, both above the company’s own guidance range. Guidance for the quarter ending 25 September is $1.375 billion to $1.425 billion of revenue and $4.10 to $4.25 a share. The stock fell about 9% before Tuesday’s open. Expectations for anything attached to AI demand now sit well above the published analyst estimates, so beating the printed number no longer guarantees the shares go up. Nvidia reports on 26 August. (Benzinga)
This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).