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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance
📊 The number that decides September: July inflation lands at half past one, with consensus at 3.4% annual and core easing to 2.5%.
🖥️ CoreWeave books a $104 billion backlog: shares jumped 18% before the open as the AI hardware trade cleared its biggest test of the quarter.
🛢️ Oil rises for a sixth day: Brent above $89 as the IEA cuts its 2026 demand forecast again with Hormuz still shut.
💸 Alphabet’s $205 billion bill: Google drew $115 billion of orders for a $25 billion bond sale funding the largest capital budget in its history.
₿ Bitcoin coiled at $64,000: traders bought September $70,000 calls into the print after weeks penned between $62,000 and $66,000 crushed volatility.
🎮 Tencent beats on sales, misses on profit: revenue up 11% to $30.3 billion while net profit rose less than 1% on heavy AI spending.
🛒 Sea grows 48% and jumps 15%: Shopee’s owner cleared every line, though profit rose only 11% as the lending book expanded.
💻 Cisco reports after the close: the networking giant has already lifted its AI order target for the year to $9 billion.
⚡ Fastly jumps 21% a week late: the cloud group’s results were already public, then the market decided it liked them after all.
🔍 A cool print describes a July that is gone: the CPI Day Cheat Sheet covers every outcome, the levels and the next 24 hours.
📈 I am flat on oil until it picks a side: Chart of the Day covers the $92 resistance, the trendline overhead and $78.96 below.
🧠 One Big Thing
At half past one this afternoon the government publishes what happened to American prices in July. Economists expect 3.4% on the year and 0.2% on the core monthly measure. If it lands at or below that, the Federal Reserve almost certainly leaves interest rates alone next month. If it runs hotter, a rise in September moves from a coin toss to the base case, and that touches mortgages, savings rates, share prices and crypto. Interest rate futures put the odds of a September rise near 52%, about as split as these markets get. Watch the core monthly figure, not the headline.
⚖️ Fear & Greed
📉 The Number That Matters
$640 MILLION
CoreWeave’s net interest bill hit $640 million in a single quarter, more than double a year earlier and larger than the $626 million net loss it reported alongside it.
⚔️ Winners vs Losers
Winners
HYLN 0.00%↑ : +23.21% Hyliion Holdings Corp. surged after reporting second quarter revenue of $4.9 million, more than triple the year ago figure, and raising full year revenue guidance to roughly $15 million on the back of its $41.7 million U.S. Navy contract to scale multi megawatt KARNO power modules.
CRWV 0.00%↑ : +18.52% CoreWeave, Inc. jumped after second quarter revenue more than doubled to $2.58 billion with a smaller than expected net loss, and the company lifted 2026 revenue guidance to between $12.4 billion and $13.2 billion on a revenue backlog of roughly $104 billion.
LITE 0.00%↑ : +8.24% Lumentum Holdings Inc. rallied after fiscal fourth quarter revenue doubled to $1.01 billion, up 109% year over year, with adjusted earnings of $3.23 per share beating estimates and non GAAP gross margin expanding to 50.4% on AI optics demand.
SNDK 0.00%↑ : +4.22% Sandisk Corporation climbed as strong AI infrastructure results from CoreWeave and Super Micro reinforced the demand outlook for memory used in AI systems, extending a rebound from the post earnings drawdown that followed its cautious first quarter guidance.
Losers
UAMY 0.00%↑ : -14.89% United States Antimony Corporation slumped after reporting break even second quarter earnings on a sharp revenue miss and cutting full year revenue guidance to $60 million to $75 million, overshadowing its $245 million Defense Logistics Agency award.
SVV 0.00%↑ : -11.86% Savers Value Village, Inc. dropped after announcing a secondary public offering of 15 million shares by Ares private equity and opportunistic credit funds, alongside a concurrent $10 million company share repurchase, raising supply concerns just days after its second quarter print.
📊 Market Snapshot
Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,008 (▲ 0.74%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,909 (▲ 1.49%)
XRP: $1.02 (▼ 0.12%)
Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,770 (▲ 0.29%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,840 (▲ 0.72%)
FTSE 100: 10,842 (▲ 0.23%)
Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.67% (▼ 0.55%)
Oil (WTI): $83 (▼ 0.08%)
Gold: $4,419 (▲ 1.10%)
Silver: $66.34 (▲ 2.59%)
Data as of: UK: 11:30 BST / US: 06:30 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 19:30 JST
✅ 5 Things to Know
📊 The Number That Decides September
The July consumer price index lands at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET, and more rides on it than on any inflation print this year. Economists polled by Dow Jones expect prices to have risen 0.1% on the month and 3.4% on the year, easing from 3.5%, with core inflation, which strips out food and fuel, seen at 0.2% monthly and 2.5% annually. That core figure would be the softest since January. Interest rate futures put the odds of a Federal Reserve rate rise in September near 52%, which is as close to a coin toss as these markets get, and the 10-year Treasury yield sits around 4.7% going in (CNBC).
The awkward part is that June’s headline was held down by a steep fall at the pump, and that drop does not repeat, so a soft July reading has to come from somewhere else. One bottom-up forecast has core at 0.253%, close enough to the rounding line that the same underlying inflation could print as 0.2% or 0.3% and produce two completely different afternoons. Cleveland Fed president Beth Hammack, who voted to raise rates in July and votes again in September, said this week that one quarter-point move “probably doesn’t do a whole lot”. She speaks again tomorrow morning. The Treasury also sells $42 billion of 10-year notes at 6pm BST, which is the cleanest live test of how bond buyers actually read the number (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Forget the headline rate. The core monthly figure is the line that settles September, and it may land on a rounding decision. At 0.3% or above the hike argument comes straight back; at 0.1% or below it is effectively finished by teatime.
🖥️ The AI Hardware Night That Beat Everything
CoreWeave and Super Micro Computer both reported after the closing bell, and both cleared the bar the market had spent a week worrying about. CoreWeave’s revenue rose 112% to $2.58 billion, ahead of the $2.56 billion analysts modelled, and its revenue backlog reached roughly $104 billion at the end of June, up 246% on a year earlier, before counting more than $25 billion of fresh customer commitments signed in the opening weeks of this quarter. Inside that backlog sit a $21 billion agreement to supply Meta with AI cloud capacity through 2032 and a multi-year deal to run Anthropic’s Claude models. The shares jumped about 18% before the open (CNBC).
Super Micro did the harder thing. Fourth-quarter revenue of $11.1 billion fell short of the $11.55 billion analysts wanted, but gross margin, the number that has been the entire argument on this stock for two years, recovered to 17.5% from 9.5% a year ago. Management then guided fiscal 2027 revenue to between $65 billion and $72 billion against a consensus of $54.4 billion, and reported more than $60 billion of new orders. The next line down complicates it: first-quarter margin is guided at 10.4% to 10.8%, so the recovery owes a lot to one quarter’s customer mix. The shares rose about 9% after hours (Yahoo Finance).
CoreWeave’s interest line is where this gets expensive. Net losses widened to $626 million from $290 million a year ago, and net interest expense hit $640 million in the quarter, up from $267 million. The demand is real and the backlog is contracted, but the machines are being bought with debt, and the cost of that debt is now larger than the loss itself.
Sensei’s Insight: Two companies, two different businesses, one message: the orders are real and they are signed. Super Micro guiding $11 billion above consensus is not a company seeing a slowdown. Watch whether CoreWeave’s interest bill keeps growing faster than its revenue.
🛢️ Oil Climbs a Sixth Day as the IEA Cuts Again
Brent crude pushed above $89 a barrel, a sixth straight session of gains and roughly 12% higher across five days, with West Texas Intermediate near $83. The International Energy Agency cut its 2026 demand forecast again this morning, now expecting world oil consumption to fall 1.6 million barrels a day this year, 510,000 barrels a day more than it forecast a month ago, because the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since early July. Supply is falling faster still. The agency sees global output down 4.3 million barrels a day in 2026 to 102 million, with 8.3 million barrels a day of Gulf production still shut in and global inventories down 69 million barrels in July alone (CNBC).
That is the uncomfortable backdrop to this afternoon’s inflation print. July’s data covers a month when petrol was still cheap, so the barrel now sitting near $89 lands in the August and September reports rather than this one. Pakistan’s defence minister said Washington and Tehran are close to some sort of arrangement on the strait, and Qatar has drafted a proposal, but Tehran has already said any deal would not reopen the waterway immediately. Prices have swung on those headlines for a fortnight without a single extra barrel moving, which is why the market keeps giving the rally back and then taking it again (Bloomberg).
Sensei’s Insight: The inflation number everyone is waiting for is already out of date. Petrol was falling in July and is rising now. Watch the September report rather than this one, because that is where $89 crude actually turns up in the numbers.
💸 Alphabet Borrows $25 Billion and Gets Offered $115 Billion
Alphabet has raised up to $25 billion in a ten-tranche bond sale, with maturities running from two years out to 40, to help fund a 2026 capital budget the company now puts at as much as $205 billion, more than double last year. Peak investor demand reached roughly $115 billion, more than four times the amount on offer, and the 40-year piece was marketed at about 155 basis points over comparable Treasuries. Google is not short of cash. It is choosing to borrow anyway, because the data centres, servers and chips behind its Gemini models and Google Cloud are being built faster than the cash flow arrives (Yahoo Finance).
The spending has already produced Alphabet’s first quarter of negative free cash flow since it listed in 2004, and this is now the pattern across the sector rather than the exception. Technology companies including Amazon, Meta and Oracle issued about $194 billion of bonds through July, up 79% on the same period last year, and the money is going into the same thing. For an ordinary investor that changes the shape of the risk. When the build-out was funded from spare cash, a disappointing year meant slower growth. Funded with 40-year paper, it means fixed interest payments that carry on whether the demand shows up or not.
Sensei’s Insight: A four times oversubscribed book tells you the bond market has no fear here at all. That is the part that should give you pause. Debt-funded build-outs work brilliantly until revenue slips, and Alphabet has just locked in payments running to 2066.
₿ Bitcoin Is Coiled, and the Print Is the Spring
Bitcoin is trading near $64,000, up about 0.7% over 24 hours, and it has been penned between $62,000 and $66,000 for weeks. That grind has crushed implied volatility to unusually low levels, which is what turns today's inflation number into a binary event for the whole asset class rather than just another data point. Ether and XRP have gone sideways alongside it, with XRP still hugging the $1 mark. The positioning shows what some traders expect: the dominant flow on the Deribit options exchange since yesterday has been the 25 September $70,000 bitcoin call, with buyers paying roughly $2.5 million in total premium for it (CoinDesk).
Underneath the derivatives the spot picture is calmer. Ether saw $49.7 million of net outflows from exchanges in a day and $164.6 million over a week, which is coins moving into storage rather than towards the sell button. The professionals are hedged the other way, with traders on Hyperliquid holding net short exposure of $46.8 million in bitcoin and $20.9 million in ether. And beyond this print sits the calendar: September has been bitcoin’s weakest month on average since 2013, down roughly 4% (CoinDesk).
Sensei’s Insight: Low volatility is not calm, it is stored energy. Bitcoin has been compressed for weeks and this afternoon hands it a reason to move. The inflation number decides the direction. The size of the move is already loaded.
Stories You Might Have Missed
🎮 Tencent Beats on Sales and Misses on Profit
Tencent reported second-quarter revenue of 204.8 billion yuan, about $30.3 billion, up 11% on a year earlier and ahead of the 201.8 billion yuan analysts expected. Domestic games revenue grew 17% to 47.3 billion yuan on the back of Delta Force and Valorant, a sharp acceleration from 6% growth in the first quarter, and advertising benefited from AI-driven targeting. Net profit was the miss: it rose 0.7% to 56 billion yuan against the 61.8 billion yuan expected, held down by the cost of the company’s AI build-out. Stripping out one-off and non-cash items, profit was 68.4 billion yuan, up 9% (CNBC).
🛒 Sea Grows 48% and the Market Finally Pays for It
Sea Limited, which owns the marketplace Shopee, the games studio Garena and the lender Monee, reported second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion, up 48.1% on a year earlier, and the shares closed up 14.56%. Shopee’s gross merchandise value, the total sold across the platform, grew 28% to $38.3 billion on 4.2 billion orders. The tension sits in the profit line, where net income rose only 10.6% to $458.1 million, because a growing share of that growth comes from lending, which consumes capital and carries credit risk a marketplace does not. Monee’s loan book expanded 62.5% to $11.1 billion (Yahoo Finance).
💻 Cisco Reports With $9 Billion of AI Orders Behind It
Cisco Systems reports fourth-quarter results after the US close, with analysts modelling $1.17 a share on $16.83 billion of revenue, which would be sales growth of about 15%. The AI order book is the part to watch. Cisco had banked $5.3 billion of AI infrastructure orders through the first three quarters of its financial year and lifted the full-year target to $9 billion from $5 billion. It is the least glamorous name in the AI trade and one of the largest, at roughly $480 billion of market value, and the shares have already climbed above their dot-com era high (Yahoo Finance).
⚡ Fastly Jumps 21% Almost a Week After Its Results
Fastly rose 21% to $27.69, its biggest single-day move of the year and the highest the shares have traded since early 2024, on results that had been public for almost a week. Second-quarter revenue grew 23% to $183.3 million, adjusted earnings were $0.15 a share against the $0.07 expected, and gross margin hit a record 65.8%. The company lifted full-year revenue guidance to between $732 million and $746 million, implying growth of about 18% at the midpoint. The delayed reaction came as analysts raised price targets and the wider AI-adjacent cloud group bounced (Yahoo Finance).