Morning Forecast: Tuesday 4 August
The Dow closes at a record, and SpaceX reports for the first time.
This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).
🚀 SpaceX Earnings Night: the Cheat Sheet
Numbers land at 9:05pm UK / 4:05pm ET. The call starts at 9:30pm UK / 4:30pm ET.
SpaceX reports for the first time tonight, and the options market is charging for a 14 to 15 percent move either way. The whole thing is in one cheat sheet: the five lines that decide the reaction, what you get in the press release against what only comes out on the call, a bullish and bearish scoreboard, and the base rate from the last 18 mega-cap first prints.
It sits in the Deep Dive at the bottom of today’s edition, with the PDF attached, and the replay of last night’s event is underneath it. Read it before the close.
👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance
📊 Palantir’s blowout quarter: Revenue grew 93 percent and American commercial sales jumped 149 percent, sending the shares up ten percent after hours.
📈 The Dow hits a record: Big Tech and cheaper oil pushed the index up 693 points to 53,178, its highest close ever.
🚀 SpaceX reports tonight: Wall Street wants up to 7 billion dollars of revenue, two days before 911 million shares come free to trade.
🏭 Factories at a four-year high: The ISM survey hit 55.6 and its employment index crossed 50 for the first time in 33 months.
🛢️ BP’s profit more than doubles: Underlying profit hit 5.73 billion dollars, its best quarter since 2022, as Trump attacked oil company earnings.
🖥️ AMD’s turn tonight: The chipmaker guided to 11.2 billion dollars of revenue, with the MI400 ramp the number investors want to see most.
₿ Strategy sells at a loss: The company offloaded 1,638 bitcoin at an average 63,957 dollars, well under its 75,419 dollar cost.
💴 The yen rally stalls: Tokyo spent 34 billion dollars last week, and the currency has already slipped back to 157.55 per dollar.
🏦 HSBC reports into a record run: The bank posted interim results with profit near 9.5 billion dollars and its shares at all-time highs.
🔍 Tonight’s SpaceX cheat sheet: The five lines that decide the print, the scoreboard, and the base rate from 18 mega-cap first reports.
🎙️ Last night’s replay is up: Two hours and 48 minutes on the playbook, the unlock maths and where this can realistically go.
📈 Chart of the Day: SpaceX bounced off the $105 target, closed up 5.68 percent, and broke a downtrend that has run all July.
🧠 One Big Thing
Palantir has answered the question this earnings season keeps circling: who actually collects the money being spent on AI. The answer arrived on the least expected line. American commercial revenue grew 149 percent to $764 million, faster than the company as a whole, which means ordinary corporates rather than defence budgets are now the growth engine. That reframes the valuation argument instead of settling it, because a 62 percent adjusted operating margin is an invitation to competitors. AMD reports tonight and tests the same question on the hardware side. Watch whether the software names reporting behind Palantir show the same commercial acceleration, because one company is a story and three is a cycle.
⚖️ Fear & Greed
📉 The Number That Matters
$63,957
Strategy’s average selling price on its latest bitcoin disposal, against a $75,419 average cost.
⚔️ Winners vs Losers
Winners
MOVE 0.00%↑ : 71.93% Corvex, an AI cloud computing company specializing in GPU accelerated infrastructure, moved sharply in premarket with no specific catalyst identified.
AMRC 0.00%↑ : 34.18% Ameresco reported second quarter revenue of $515.5 million against roughly $461 million expected and raised its full year adjusted earnings outlook. Backlog grew 32% to a record $6.73 billion on $1.8 billion of new awards, $1.2 billion of which came from data centers.
AAOI 0.00%↑ : 19.78% Applied Optoelectronics led a broad rally in US optical component makers after a Reuters report that the Trump administration is drafting a ban on imports of new models of Chinese data center optical modules. A ban would hand domestic transceiver suppliers a slice of the market currently held by Chinese rivals.
LIFE 0.00%↑ : 17.43% Ethos Technologies posted second quarter revenue of $189.6 million, up 113% year over year, with growth accelerating across both its direct to consumer and third party agency channels.
VOYG 0.00%↑ : 17.42% Voyager Technologies beat on both lines with second quarter revenue of $52.8 million and an adjusted loss of 70 cents per share, then lifted full year revenue guidance to $275 million to $305 million from $230 million to $255 million on record quarterly bookings of $113 million.
PLTR 0.00%↑ : 14.99% Palantir Technologies delivered blockbuster quarterly results and raised its full year outlook, reinforcing the AI software trade a day after the Dow closed at a record high.
CAT 0.00%↑ : 10.72% Caterpillar cleared $20 billion of quarterly revenue for the first time in its history at $20.5 billion, with adjusted earnings of $8.17 per share against the $6.20 analysts expected. Construction Industries sales jumped 35% and power generation revenue tied largely to data center projects climbed 29%.
GLW 0.00%↑ : 8.39% Corning rebounded from a punishing month that erased more than a third of its value following its own late July guidance disappointment, with the proposed US restrictions on Chinese optical modules putting its fiber and connectivity franchise back in favor.
MRVL 0.00%↑ : 7.83% Marvell Technology previewed new AI memory and storage expansion products built for agentic AI and large model inference as the FMS 2026 conference opened, driving the stock back above $200 for the first time in roughly two weeks.
Losers
AHCO 0.00%↑ : -26.78% AdaptHealth released second quarter results before the opening bell alongside the reset of its full year guidance to account for the $235 million sale of its Diabetes Health business to Cardinal Health, now reported as a discontinued operation.
CERT 0.00%↑ : -20.17% Certara grew second quarter revenue just 1% to $93.3 million as services revenue fell 3% and services bookings dropped 6%, and the company swung to a $55.3 million net loss on a $49.2 million charge from the divested medical writing unit.
SPOT 0.00%↑ : -4.39% Spotify Technology crossed 300 million premium subscribers but added 16 million monthly active users against guidance for 17 million, attributing the shortfall to ongoing product optimizations.
📊 Market Snapshot
Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $63,775 (▲ 0.50%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,868 (▲ 0.52%)
XRP: $1.08 (▲ 0.10%)
Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,653 (▲ 0.32%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,217 (▲ 1.13%)
FTSE 100: 10,900 (▲ 0.31%)
Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.67% (▼ 0.19%)
Oil (WTI): $78 (▼ 2.94%)
Gold: $4,064 (▲ 0.23%)
Silver: $59.15 (▲ 1.71%)
Data as of: UK: 13:12 BST / US: 08:12 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 21:12 JST
✅ 5 Things to Know
📊 Palantir grows 93 percent and lifts guidance again
Palantir reported after the American close last night and beat on every line that mattered. Revenue reached $1.935 billion, up 93 percent on a year earlier against consensus near $1.81 billion, with diluted earnings of 41 cents a share. Sales to American corporate customers, the segment the whole bull case rests on, rose 149 percent to $764 million. Operating income was $912 million on a reported basis, a 47 percent margin, and $1.19 billion adjusted at 62 percent. Management raised full-year revenue guidance to roughly $8.15 billion, implying 82 percent growth, from a previous $7.65 billion, and guided the current quarter to about $2.16 billion against roughly $2 billion expected (CNBC).
The shares rose 10 percent in extended trading, having been up close to 15 percent at one point. That reaction is the story as much as the numbers, because Palantir came into the print around 40 percent below its high for the year. The argument was never about whether the company could grow. It was about whether growth could justify a multiple that assumes near-perfect execution for years. Government work built this business and remains lumpy and political; commercial contracts renew and compound. If the commercial mix keeps rising, the shape of the company changes rather than just its size. The awkward base rate: Palantir has beaten both lines in every quarter for more than two years and the shares still halved from the peak (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Ninety three percent growth at this revenue base is rare enough. The number that actually reframes Palantir is the 149 percent from American companies. Defence budgets are political and lumpy. Corporate renewals compound quietly, and that is a different business to own.
📈 The Dow closes at a record as the AI trade reboots
Wall Street opened August with its strongest session in weeks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 693.38 points, or 1.32 percent, to a record close of 53,178.41. The S&P 500 added 1.48 percent to 7,600.50 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 2.1 percent to 25,913.9. Microsoft led the blue chips with a 4.3 percent gain, and Boeing and Amazon both rose around 4 percent. Two forces did the work: a turn toward diplomacy with Iran that pulled crude sharply lower, and renewed confidence that heavy AI spending is producing revenue rather than only cost (CNBC).
What makes it notable is how much it reverses. July closed with technology in retreat, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down 12.5 percent in a single week and Seoul’s market swinging 17 percent in both directions inside five sessions. The evidence that turned it was Amazon’s cloud arm growing 37 percent, and last night’s Palantir print supplied a second reading in the same direction. Asia did not follow through overnight, which is the caution: MSCI’s regional gauge fell 0.5 percent, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.3 percent to 63,585.58, and the Kospi swung between a 2.1 percent gain and a 2.8 percent fall. Crude also rebounded, with Brent adding $1.15 to $84.92 (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Oil did as much of this as Microsoft did. Brent fell five percent on the same afternoon the Dow set its record, so this was as much a relief rally as an AI one. Crude has already rebounded overnight.
🚀 SpaceX opens its books tonight, two days before the unlock
SpaceX publishes its first set of accounts as a listed company tonight. The numbers land at 9:05pm BST / 4:05pm ET and the call follows twenty five minutes later. Consensus sits at $6.7 billion to $7.0 billion of revenue, with earnings estimates spread between a loss of 12 cents and a loss of 35 cents a share, which tells you how little agreement there is. Starlink subscribers stood at 10.3 million across 164 countries at the end of March, up 105 percent in a year, and the first-quarter loss ran to $4.28 billion on $4.69 billion of revenue. The calendar sharpens all of it. On 6 August the first tranche of the staggered lock-up frees roughly 911.5 million shares against a public float of 639 million, with short interest running near a third of that float, and the options market is pricing a move of 14 to 15 percent in either direction.
Sensei’s Insight: The base rate is the part almost nobody checks. Of the last 18 mega-cap first reports after a listing, 16 fell. I have put the whole thing into a cheat sheet at the bottom of this edition, so scroll down and read it before the close.
🏭 American factories hit a four-year high, and started hiring
American manufacturing grew at its fastest rate in more than four years last month. The ISM manufacturing index rose to 55.6 in July from 53.3 in June, well ahead of the 54.0 economists expected and the highest reading since May 2022. The detail was stronger than the headline. Production jumped to 58.5 from 52.2, new orders reached 56.7, and the employment component climbed to 52.8 from 49.7, crossing above 50 for the first time in 33 months. Above 50 means expansion, so that employment line marks the end of nearly three years of factories shedding staff. The sector has now grown for seven consecutive months (Yahoo Finance).
This is awkward for the consensus view of the week. Economists expect the July jobs report at the end of this week to show unemployment rising to 4.3 percent from 4.2 percent, and the Federal Reserve held rates last month with three officials voting for a rise. A factory survey showing manufacturers hiring again cuts against the slowdown story that Friday’s forecast assumes. The next test lands at 3pm BST today with the June JOLTS report, where vacancies are seen falling to about 7.25 million from 7.594 million, a drop of more than 340,000. Two labour readings pointing in opposite directions inside 48 hours would leave the bond market to settle the argument.
Sensei’s Insight: The employment line is the one to keep. Thirty three months below 50 is a long contraction to end by accident, and if the payroll number confirms it, the market has to price a Fed that was right to sound hawkish.
🛢️ BP’s profit more than doubles, and Trump is not pleased
BP’s second-quarter underlying replacement cost profit more than doubled from a year earlier to $5.73 billion, its strongest quarter since the third quarter of 2022 and ahead of the roughly $5 billion analysts expected. Higher oil and gas prices through the Middle East conflict did most of the work, with strong refining margins supplying the rest. The company also lifted its 2026 capital spending guidance to between $13.5 billion and $14 billion, from $13 billion to $13.5 billion, after deciding to delay planned asset sales to capture better value later. The results landed as Trump publicly criticised oil companies for making too much money (CNBC).
For UK investors the read across is wider than one set of accounts. BP and Shell together carry a heavy weight in the FTSE 100, so a quarter like this supports an index with almost no exposure to the AI trade driving American records. The problem is what the quarter was built on. Brent averaged well above $90 through the fighting and now sits near $85, having dropped five percent in a single session before rebounding $1.15 overnight to $84.92 a barrel. The profit BP has just reported reflects a price the market is in the process of unwinding, and the next quarter will not have the war premium in it (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: A record quarter reported into a falling oil price is a backward-looking number. The capital spending increase says more: BP is holding on to assets it planned to sell, which is what a company does when it expects prices to be better later.
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🖥️ AMD reports tonight with expectations already high
AMD publishes second-quarter results after the American close, with the call at 5pm ET / 10pm BST. Wall Street is looking for about $11.3 billion of revenue and $1.61 a share, against company guidance of $11.2 billion give or take $300 million, which would be 46 percent growth on a year earlier and 9 percent on the quarter. Data centre is the line that decides it, after $5.8 billion in the first quarter. Beyond the number, investors want detail on the MI400 accelerators and the Helios rack system launched in July, which Microsoft has committed to running inside Azure from the second half of this year. AMD is the clearest test of whether anyone other than Nvidia collects the AI hardware money (Yahoo Finance).
₿ Strategy sells bitcoin for less than it paid
Strategy disclosed that it sold 1,638 bitcoin for about $105 million between 27 July and 2 August, its third disposal of the year, at an average price of $63,957 against an average cost basis of $75,419. Selling below cost is new territory for a company built on the promise of never selling, and it follows the framework it published in July authorising up to $1.25 billion of sales to fund dividends and buybacks. Bitcoin took it calmly, climbing back toward $64,000 in Asian hours, up around 2 percent over 24 hours and 1 percent on the week, with the wider crypto market adding 1.35 percent to $2.21 trillion. Flows remain the weak point: American spot fund flows have turned negative and CME open interest is back at 2023 levels (CoinDesk).
💴 The yen keeps most of what intervention bought
The yen held on to the bulk of its gains today after last week’s joint operation by Tokyo and Washington, the first coordinated purchase of the currency since 1998. It slipped 0.2 percent to 157.55 per dollar, having reached a three-month high of 155.20 in the previous session, and it remains well clear of the 163.99 forty-year low set in July. Japan spent about ¥5.33 trillion, roughly $34 billion, in a single session at the end of last week. Strategists now treat 155 as the level that decides whether this rally has staying power, and several see limited room beyond it. The real result so far is that speculators have not rebuilt their short positions (Bloomberg).
🏦 HSBC reports into a record share price
HSBC published interim results this morning, with pre-tax profit for the June quarter expected near $9.5 billion and the bank guiding to a return on tangible equity of 17 percent for the year, alongside further shareholder returns. The shares ran to record levels into the print, which is precisely the difficulty: a bank trading at an all-time high needs a reason to go higher, not merely the absence of a reason to fall. For UK investors HSBC is one of the heaviest weights in the FTSE 100, so its reaction matters well beyond the banking sector, and it arrives on the same morning BP reported its best quarter in nearly four years (Bloomberg).
🔍 Deep Dive SpaceX Earnings Night: the Cheat Sheet
SpaceX reports for the first time tonight. The numbers land at 9:05pm UK / 4:05pm ET and the call starts at 9:30pm UK / 4:30pm ET. Most of the move tends to arrive in the first fifteen minutes of the call rather than off the press release. Everything worth having in front of you is set out below, and the same thing is attached as a PDF to keep open alongside the print.
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