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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance
🛢️ Crude gives back the war premium: Brent fell below $86 as Iran and Oman drew up a Hormuz corridor.
💾 Nvidia reports and the options look calm: traders price a 5.4% move, the smallest before any Nvidia print since 2021.
📊 The Fed’s inflation gauge lands today: core is seen at 0.2% on the month, and the live argument in September is about a rise.
👟 Dick’s lost 31% in one session: the Foot Locker deal turned a guided profit into a guided loss.
🌶️ OpenAI’s chip beat Blackwell on power: the benchmark landed the day before Nvidia reports its own quarter.
💻 Intuit fell 12% on its own guide: it changed what adjusted earnings mean, so the comparison stopped being fair.
🥇 Copper set a fresh record high: London warehouse stocks have halved since May and a Congo mine is flooded.
👗 Shein’s book is covered at $27bn: it is paying earlier backers up to $3.5bn to accept the lower price.
₿ Crypto steadied after a big week: bitcoin held $78,714 and the greed gauge hit its highest since October.
🔍 The Fed targets a different number: today’s Cheat Sheet has every scenario for core PCE and the road to 16 September.
📈 I’d be more bullish on oil than bearish: Chart of the Day covers the Momentum Band at $85.37 to $82.52, and $80 support.
🧠 One Big Thing
Nvidia reports its quarter tonight, and if you hold an index fund you own a piece of it whether you chose to or not. It is worth about $5.2 trillion. That makes it the largest company in the world and the largest single holding in most American index funds. Wall Street wants $2.09 a share on about $92 billion of revenue. The options market is pricing a move of roughly 5.4% either way, the calmest setup before an Nvidia report since 2021. The average actual move across its last 12 quarters was 7.4%.
⚖️ Fear & Greed
📉 The Number That Matters
5.4%
That is the move options traders are pricing in either direction when Nvidia reports tonight, worth about $280 billion. The average move over its last 12 quarters was 7.4%.
⚔️ Winners vs Losers
Winners
PLAB 0.00%↑ : +15.14% Photronics Inc. jumped after the photomask maker released its fiscal third quarter results ahead of the open, its first report since a May guidance cut that erased more than a third of the share price. Shares had been trading near ten times earnings and roughly 30 percent below the average analyst target going into the print.
SMMT 0.00%↑ : +9.21% Summit Therapeutics Inc. rose after the company announced that primary analysis results from its global Phase III HARMONi trial were published in The Lancet Oncology, showing a statistically significant progression-free survival benefit for ivonescimab plus chemotherapy in EGFR-mutated non-small cell lung cancer. The publication lands ahead of a November 14 FDA decision date on the drug.
Losers
SYRE 0.00%↑ : -12.52% Spyre Therapeutics Inc. dropped after topline results from the rheumatoid arthritis arm of its Phase 2 SKYWAY trial showed SPY072 hitting statistical significance on primary and secondary endpoints, but the company said the data did not clear its internal bar to prioritize advancing the drug in that indication.
INTU 0.00%↑ : -11.37% Intuit Inc. fell after the TurboTax and QuickBooks parent paired a fourth quarter beat with fiscal 2027 guidance well below consensus, projecting revenue growth of 9 to 10 percent against 14 percent in the year just ended. Management attributed much of the first quarter shortfall to a revised stock-based compensation accounting method rather than weakening demand.
📊 Market Snapshot
Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $78,714 (▲ 0.26%)
Ethereum (ETH): $2,469 (▲ 1.10%)
XRP: $1.43 (▼ 0.23%)
Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,689 (▼ 0.05%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,238 (▼ 0.13%)
FTSE 100: 10,863 (▼ 0.31%)
Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.65% (▲ 0.48%)
Oil (WTI): $80 (▼ 1.07%)
Gold: $4,621 (▼ 0.80%)
Silver: $68.49 (▼ 0.33%)
Data as of: UK: 11:58 BST / US: 06:58 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 19:58 JST
✅ 5 Things to Know
🛢️ Crude gives back the war premium
$85.98. That is where Brent traded on Wednesday morning, a third straight session lower and about 7% below where it sat on Monday. The reason landed in Tehran on Tuesday. Oman’s foreign minister Badr Albusaidi flew in for talks with his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi. The 2 governments then published a joint statement setting out a framework. It covers a temporary joint navigation corridor through the Strait of Hormuz, alongside a joint project to clear the strait of mines. Albusaidi said afterwards that he hoped the countries would “soon announce” it (Al Jazeera).
The strait normally carries around a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas exports, and it has been largely shut since the war began on 28 February. Traffic ran at about 5 million barrels a day on Monday against more than 20 million before the fighting started, on Vortexa’s tracking. Donald Trump says the mines are gone. He wrote on Truth Social that all of them have been removed or detonated from within the international waters of the strait, citing the US Navy. Iranian officials say the strait will not fully reopen until Washington lifts its naval blockade, drops its oil sanctions and unfreezes Iranian assets held abroad.
Bond markets took the point straight away.
Gilt yields and German Bund yields both fell on Wednesday morning, because cheaper crude means less inflation to price in. The American 10-year sat at 4.65%, after dropping close to 10 basis points on Tuesday (Trading Economics).
Sensei’s Insight: For 6 months this market has priced the war getting worse. It is now pricing the war getting better, and it has moved about 7% in 3 sessions on a framework nobody has signed yet. Watch the announcement, then watch the tanker count.
💾 Nvidia reports tonight and the options look calm
How braced is the market for this? Barely at all. Options on Nvidia are pricing a move of about 5.4% in either direction once the numbers land, worth roughly $280 billion of market value. That is the smallest implied move before an Nvidia report since 2021. The average actual move across its last 12 quarters was 7.4%. Matt Amberson of ORATS, which supplies the options data, called the gap complacency. Nvidia reports at 4:20pm Eastern, which is 9:20pm here, with the call 40 minutes after that (Reuters via Yahoo Finance).
Consensus sits at $2.09 a share on about $92 billion of revenue, with the current quarter modelled near $104 billion. Nvidia’s own guidance back in May was $91 billion give or take 2%, and a gross margin of 75% give or take half a percentage point. The quarter just finished is close to settled. The guide for the next one carries the reaction. Nvidia has fallen after each of its last 4 reports despite beating every time. It snapped a 7-session losing run on Tuesday, closing at $213.05, up 2.19%, having given back 7.5% across the streak (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Beating is the easy part, and Nvidia has done it 4 times running while the shares fell anyway. Tonight turns on the October guide and the margin, with memory costs climbing into it. 5.4% looks light to me, and that is my read.
📊 The Fed’s own inflation gauge lands this afternoon
The inflation measure the Fed actually targets, core PCE for July, is published at 8:30am Eastern, which is 1:30pm here. It is not the CPI figure the news reports, and the 2 have come apart: core CPI was 2.6% in June against core PCE at 3.3%. Economists expect core prices to have risen 0.2% on the month, which would take the annual rate to about 3.2%. Headline is seen at 0.1% on the month. That would ease the annual rate to 3.6% from 3.7%. Nick Timiraos of the Wall Street Journal has flagged that most forecasters are at 0.22%. The second estimate of second-quarter growth lands in the same minute (Newsquawk).
Worth being clear about what is being argued over. The September debate inside the Fed is about whether to raise rates. Cutting them is not on the table. The target range sits at 3.50% to 3.75%, 3 policymakers voted for an increase in July, and markets put the odds of a hold on 16 September at roughly 60% (CoinDesk).
Susan Collins of the Boston Fed spoke on Tuesday. She said inflation is still too high, and that it would be appropriate to raise rates soon in the absence of evidence of sustained disinflation. A core reading of 0.3% or above puts those 3 dissenters back at the centre of the argument, 2 days before Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole keynote as chair. This is the last one the Fed sees. The August figure is not published until 30 September, 14 days after it votes.
Sensei’s Insight: A 0.2% core print keeps everything where it is and hands the week to Warsh on Friday. A 0.3% changes the conversation in an afternoon. Those 2 outcomes are 0.1 of a percentage point apart. I will be watching the front end of the curve.
👟 Dick’s lost 31% in a session on what it bought
Dick’s Sporting Goods closed at $124.31 on Tuesday. It had started the day at $179.33. That is a fall of 30.68%, or $55.02 a share, and the worst single session in the company’s history. Second-quarter sales came in at $5.59 billion against the $5.64 billion analysts wanted, and adjusted earnings at $3.53 a share against $3.76. Underneath, the 2 halves of the company went in opposite directions. Comparable sales at the original Dick’s stores rose 4.9%, helped by World Cup demand. Comparable sales at Foot Locker, which Dick’s bought last September, fell 3.6% (PR Newswire).
Dick’s paid close to $2.5 billion for Foot Locker in September 2025, and told investors that business would deliver between $110 million and $150 million of segment profit this year. On Tuesday it guided Foot Locker to a segment loss of $40 million to $80 million instead, a swing of about $190 million, and the division lost $31.9 million in the quarter just gone. Full-year adjusted earnings guidance came down to $11.00 to $12.00 a share from $13.50 to $14.50, roughly 18% off at the midpoint. Executive Chairman Ed Stack put the miss down to fewer sneaker launches and heavier discounting across the market. Academy Sports fell 5.4% in sympathy (Investing.com).
Sensei’s Insight: An acquisition is a bet placed with your shareholders’ money, and this one has gone against them inside a year. The original stores grew 4.9%. The market repriced the whole company on the half that did not, and full-year guidance came down 18%.
🌶️ OpenAI’s chip beat Blackwell on power, one day early
On Tuesday, at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford, OpenAI published the first performance results for Jalapeño, the inference chip it designed with Broadcom. On the InferenceX benchmark run by SemiAnalysis, it registered more tokens per user and more throughput per kilowatt than an Nvidia Blackwell system. Richard Ho, who runs OpenAI’s hardware programme, said the results show “a very, very significant performance advance over state of the art”. Inference is the part that answers your question. Training is the part that taught the model in the first place (TechCrunch).
Jalapeño went from design to manufacturing tape-out in 9 months, which OpenAI believes is the fastest development cycle ever achieved for a chip of this kind, and it is the first of a multi-generation platform. Deployment begins at the end of 2026 in very small volumes, with the serious rollout in 2027, at gigawatt scale in data centres run with Microsoft and other partners. Hock Tan, Broadcom’s chief executive, calls it the beginning of a multi-generation roadmap. Celestica builds the boards and the racks. Nvidia sells the chips that trained almost every frontier model in existence, and its largest customers are now designing their own silicon for the part that runs them (OpenAI).
Sensei’s Insight: Publishing this the day before Nvidia reports was a choice. One benchmark from an interested party is a long way from a verdict, and volume deployment is a year away. It does tell you where the biggest buyers want to end up.
Stories You Might Have Missed
💻 Intuit fell 12% on a guide that moved the goalposts
Intuit beat on its fourth quarter and the shares fell anyway. Revenue was $4.35 billion against the $4.27 billion expected, and adjusted earnings $4.03 a share against $3.58. The shares were down 12.27% in premarket trading on Wednesday morning. Guidance for the year ahead is the reason, at $23.28 billion to $23.51 billion against consensus near $23.72 billion. Part of that is an accounting change. From 1 August, Intuit stopped excluding share-based compensation from its adjusted figures, which loads $5.81 a share of costs into next year’s guidance that were never inside this year’s. The comparison is no longer like for like (Intuit).
🥇 Copper set a fresh record high
Copper reached a record high on Wednesday, trading around $6.71 a pound, up close to 6% on the month and 52% on the year. Copper is being squeezed from 2 directions. Warehouse stocks on the London Metal Exchange have fallen by almost half since the middle of May, after a run of 42 consecutive days of withdrawals. Metal is being redirected to the United States ahead of expected tariffs. Zijin Mining then warned that flooding at the Kamoa-Kakula complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo could cut its share of this year’s output by as much as 57,000 tonnes (Trading Economics).
👗 Shein is paying its backers to accept a lower price
Shein’s Hong Kong listing has its institutional order book covered, and retail investors put in HK$3.58 billion of margin orders on the first day, making the public tranche 1.6 times subscribed. The company is selling about 280 million shares at HK$47.60 to HK$49.50, raising up to roughly $1.8 billion at a valuation just above $27 billion. Private investors paid $98.2 billion for the business in 2022. Shein will hand up to $3.5 billion to selected pre-listing backers as compensation for the lower price, most of it in cash and funded from its own resources. It prices on 31 August. Trading starts on 1 September (South China Morning Post).
₿ Crypto steadied after banking a week of gains
Bitcoin was $78,714 at 11:58am UK, 6:58am Eastern, up 0.26% on the day, having given some ground in Asian hours after a week that lifted it 23%. Ether was $2,469, up 1.10%, holding a weekly gain of almost 29%. XRP sat at $1.43, down 0.23%, and it still leads the majors on the week at almost 45%. Sentiment has travelled further than price. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index reached 74 on Tuesday, its highest reading since just before October’s $19 billion liquidation event, having sat at 27 less than a fortnight ago. CryptoQuant’s Bull Score jumped from 30 to 80 across the week, its highest since 6 October 2025 (CoinDesk).
🔍 Deep Dive - All Eyes on Inflation: July PCE and Q2 GDP Day
The number lands at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am ET.
Core PCE is the inflation gauge the Fed actually targets, and it is not the CPI figure the news reports. Those 2 have come apart by 0.7 of a percentage point, with core CPI at 2.6% in June against core PCE at 3.3%. Read only the headlines and you would think inflation was close to beaten. The committee reads a different number. And it votes on 16 September without ever seeing another one.
Inside:
Every figure landing at 8:30, ranked by how much it actually moves markets
The scenario table from 0.0% to 0.4%, and what each print does to rate odds
The odds of a September rise, from 67% on 31 July to 33% this week
The gap between the 2 inflation measures, and the 4 reasons it opened
The July minutes set against June, word for word
The road to 16 September, and the number the Fed will not have
It is attached below. Open it before the print.