Morning Forecast: Wednesday 5 August
SpaceX beats on everything and falls on the bill.
This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).
👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance
🚀 SpaceX beats, then slides: Revenue nearly doubled to 7.8 billion dollars, but 18.4 billion dollars of spending sent the shares down after hours.
🖥️ AMD’s record quarter is not enough: Data centre sales doubled to 6.7 billion dollars, and the shares still fell nine percent after hours.
📈 The Dow clears 54,000: Palantir surged nearly 30 percent and Caterpillar hit record revenue, lifting the index 907 points to 54,086.
🛢️ Oil gives up its war premium: Brent dropped below 80 dollars for the first time since 13 July on Hormuz deal hopes.
💊 Novo raises guidance and drops anyway: Shares fell as much as seven percent as the Wegovy pill matched forecasts rather than beating them.
📊 Two jobs readings land today: ADP hiring is seen slowing to 75,000 and the ISM services survey lands beside it, two days before payrolls.
💾 Memory reports after the close: SanDisk is up 423 percent this year and Western Digital 222 percent, both reporting tonight into a supply shortage.
₿ Bitcoin holds 64,000 dollars: The crypto market is worth 2.27 trillion dollars, sentiment still reads fear at 27, and XRP sits near 1.06 dollars.
🌑 A rocket stage hit the moon: A discarded Falcon 9 upper stage struck near Einstein Crater this morning at 5,400 miles per hour.
🔍 The full SpaceX breakdown: What the call added, the calls that landed, and the 911.5 million shares that come free tomorrow.
📈 Chart of the Day: Three paths for SPCX after the print, all of them shifted up, with a probability-weighted year end of 113 dollars.
🧠 One Big Thing
The market has stopped paying for beats. SpaceX cleared every revenue line and fell. AMD doubled its data centre business, guided higher, and fell nine percent. Novo Nordisk raised full-year guidance and dropped seven percent. The one company that soared, Palantir, did it on a 62 percent adjusted operating margin rather than on spending. That is the dividing line right now: results that convert into margin get paid, results that require another round of capital get sold. AMD’s gross margin came in at 54 percent against 56 percent expected, and that two-point gap cost more than the beat earned. Watch the margin line before the revenue line for the rest of this season.
⚖️ Fear & Greed
📉 The Number That Matters
$18.4 billion
SpaceX spent $18.4 billion in a single quarter, $15.8 billion of it on AI computing against $2.8 billion a year earlier, and the finance chief said the next two quarters would look very similar.
⚔️ Winners vs Losers
Winners
SHOP 0.00%↑ : +28.18% Shopify Inc. surged after second quarter revenue grew 34 percent, comfortably ahead of the high twenties growth management had guided, with gross merchandise volume, gross profit and free cash flow all expanding more than 30 percent and free cash flow margins reaching 18 percent.
APPS 0.00%↑ : +26.71% Digital Turbine, Inc. jumped after fiscal first quarter revenue rose 27 percent to 166 million and adjusted net income more than tripled to 19 cents per share, led by 56 percent growth in its App Growth Platform. The company also raised full year guidance.
BLMN 0.00%↑ : +23.88% Bloomin’ Brands, Inc. soared after adjusted earnings of 39 cents per share beat the 29 cent consensus and US comparable sales rose 2.3 percent, led by an 8.1 percent gain at Bonefish Grill. Management raised full year earnings guidance to a range of 90 cents to 1.00 per share on progress in the Outback turnaround.
KODK 0.00%↑ : +14.22% Eastman Kodak Company rallied after second quarter revenue climbed 18 percent to 311 million and the company swung to 17 million of net income from a 26 million loss a year earlier, with Advanced Materials and Chemicals revenue up 40 percent.
ANET 0.00%↑ : +12.24% Arista Networks, Inc. gained after delivering its first three billion dollar quarter, with revenue of 3.04 billion and per share earnings of 1.02 both clearing consensus, then guiding third quarter revenue to 3.3 billion against expectations near 2.95 billion.
Losers
VPG 0.00%↑ : -26.73% Vishay Precision Group, Inc. tumbled after second quarter revenue of 83.9 million missed estimates and adjusted earnings collapsed to 4 cents per share from 21 cents, with the operating margin turning negative. The miss lands on a stock that had roughly tripled in three months on humanoid robotics and physical AI enthusiasm.
TYGO 0.00%↑ : -26.49% Tigo Energy, Inc. slid after second quarter revenue of 25.4 million came in well below both consensus and the company’s own guidance, as residential solar demand softened and the launch of an optimized inverter with US partner EG4 slipped.
CDW 0.00%↑ : -24.68% CDW Corporation fell hard on its second quarter earnings release, its second consecutive double digit post-earnings decline after shares dropped more than 20 percent in May on margin pressure and a guarded second half outlook.
CRTO 0.00%↑ : -24.46% Criteo S.A. plunged after chief executive Michael Komasinski described second quarter top line performance as disappointing, a message compounded by the appointment of a new chief financial officer effective August 10.
TBLA 0.00%↑ : -18.90% Taboola.com Ltd. dropped after second quarter revenue of 476.8 million grew just 2.4 percent and landed below the company’s own guidance range of 492 to 505 million, overshadowing an 11.8 percent rise in ex-TAC gross profit and a raised full year outlook on that measure.
LMAT 0.00%↑ : -16.30% LeMaitre Vascular, Inc. declined after second quarter sales of 70.4 million came in light and the company cut full year earnings guidance to a range of 2.84 to 2.94 per share from 2.93 to 3.08, with catheter sales down 11 percent.
📊 Market Snapshot
Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,033 (▼0.02%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,867 (▼0.04%)
XRP: $1.06 (▼1.17%)
Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,797 (▲0.41%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,928 (▲0.22%)
FTSE 100: 10,851 (▼0.37%)
Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.61% (▼0.09%)
Oil (WTI): $76 (▲1.38%)
Gold: $4,187 (▲2.69%)
Silver: $61.91 (▲4.09%)
Data as of: UK: 12:50pm BST / US: 7:50am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 8:50pm JST
✅ 5 Things to Know
🚀 SpaceX beats on every line, then falls on the bill
SpaceX published its first set of accounts as a listed company last night and cleared the bar on every measure the street had set. Revenue reached $7.81 billion, up 92 percent on a year earlier, against consensus of $6.7 billion to $7.0 billion. The net loss came in at $541 million where the market had braced for something nearer $1.9 billion, and adjusted EBITDA reached $3.5 billion, up 191 percent. Starlink grew revenue 66 percent and passed 12 million subscribers, double a year earlier, adding 1.7 million in its best three months yet. The AI division grew 247 percent to $2.56 billion and turned profitable at the EBITDA line for the first time. The quarter closed with $100 billion of cash and a $47.5 billion backlog (CNBC).
Then came the spending line. Capital expenditure ran to $18.4 billion in a single quarter, $15.8 billion of it on AI computing infrastructure against $2.8 billion for the comparable figure a year ago, and the finance chief told the call the next two quarters would look very similar. The shares touched $131 as the release landed, then unwound: against a prior close of $124.74 they traded near $111 in pre-market this morning. Tomorrow sharpens it further, when 911.5 million shares come free to sell from the opening bell (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: They gave forward numbers for the first time in the company’s history and confirmed the Google and Anthropic compute agreements. The full breakdown, the unlock arithmetic for tomorrow and where I stand on my own position are at the bottom of this edition.
🖥️ AMD doubles its data centre business and drops anyway
AMD reported record quarterly revenue of $11.54 billion, up 50 percent on a year earlier and 13 percent on the quarter, with adjusted earnings of $1.66 a share against the $1.62 expected. The line that mattered delivered: data centre revenue more than doubled to $6.7 billion, up 107 percent, and now makes up 58 percent of the company. Management guided the current quarter to roughly $13 billion. Alongside the numbers came the product news investors had been waiting on, with the MI400 series launched and a partnership with Anthropic to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of MI450 accelerators in AMD’s Helios racks, plus an expanded arrangement to run Helios at scale inside Microsoft Azure (CNBC).
The shares fell about 9 percent after hours regardless, having closed up 7 percent at $518.58. Two things did it. Gross margin came in at 54 percent against a 56 percent consensus, with the cost of ramping Helios the explanation, and the stock has more than doubled this year on the case that AMD is a genuine second source to Nvidia, which pushed its multiple above Nvidia’s own. That is the pattern of this earnings season rather than an AMD problem: clearing expectations has repeatedly not been enough to hold a share price, because the expectations already assumed the beat. The next read on the same question comes tonight from the memory makers (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Gross margin is where the AI hardware argument actually gets settled. AMD doubled its data centre revenue and gave back two points of margin doing it, which is the signature of a company buying share rather than harvesting it. That looks deliberate, and it is worth another quarter of watching.
📈 The Dow clears 54,000 for the first time
Wall Street put together one of its strongest sessions of the year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 907 points, or 1.71 percent, to close at 54,086, its first finish above 54,000. The S&P 500 added 1.79 percent to 7,737, its first record close in two months, and the Nasdaq Composite gained 2.59 percent to 26,585. Palantir did the heavy lifting after its results the previous evening, surging almost 30 percent in its largest single-day move in more than two years and costing short sellers roughly $3 billion. Caterpillar supplied the other half, reporting record quarterly revenue of $20.5 billion, up 24 percent, with adjusted earnings of $8.17 a share against the $6.20 expected, and its shares rose about 9 percent (CNN).
Asia followed overnight, with South Korea’s Kospi leading regional gains at 4 percent, and American futures were steady this morning with S&P 500 contracts up 0.41 percent and Nasdaq 100 contracts up 0.22 percent. Two forces did the work again: AI earnings landing better than feared, and progress toward reopening the Strait of Hormuz pulling crude sharply lower. The docket today keeps testing it, with a heavy slate before the open led by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, and the memory makers after the close, then the ADP hiring figure and the ISM services survey either side of the American open (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Look at what set the record. Caterpillar’s power generation sales rose 29 percent on data centre projects. When a century-old machinery company posts its best quarter on AI demand, the trade has moved well beyond the Nasdaq and into the industrial index.
🛢️ Brent falls below 80 dollars as a Hormuz deal takes shape
Oil has fallen hard on signs that the Strait of Hormuz could reopen. Qatar’s foreign ministry said drafts of an agreement between Washington and Tehran are circulating and in what it called very progressive stages, with Qatar, Oman and Pakistan coordinating the exchange. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a deal to open the strait could come today or tomorrow. Brent dropped more than 5 percent yesterday to $79.50 a barrel, its first close below $80 since 13 July. The slide has paused this morning, with the American benchmark back around $76 and up 1.4 percent on the day. Iran has floated a new middle corridor route through the strait to replace the existing northern and southern shipping lanes (Bloomberg).
Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil moves through that waterway, so the price is now carrying an assumption rather than a fact. Both Qatar and Bessent were explicit that nothing has been signed, and Tehran has not confirmed progress on the strait itself. For investors the read-through runs straight into the rate debate, because energy is the reason inflation stayed sticky through the summer and June’s core measure had already cooled to 0.1 percent on the month as fuel costs eased. The Federal Reserve held last month with three officials voting for a rise, using an oil price that has since fallen roughly 15 percent from its wartime level. Governor Lisa Cook speaks tonight at 9:05pm BST / 4:05pm ET, the first Fed voice since the blackout lifted (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: The oil price has already booked a deal that nobody has signed. That cuts both ways, and the asymmetry now sits on the upside: a breakdown in the talks costs more in barrels than a signature saves, because the signature is largely in the price.
💊 Novo raises its outlook and the shares fall anyway
Novo Nordisk lifted its full-year guidance and lost ground for it. The company now expects adjusted sales for 2026 to be somewhere between down 6 percent and flat at constant exchange rates, an improvement on the previous range of down 4 to 12 percent, with adjusted operating profit guided to the same band. The shares fell as much as 7.2 percent regardless. The oral version of Wegovy, the launch the whole recovery case rests on, generated 3.22 billion Danish kroner against the 3.27 billion expected, and has passed 5 million prescriptions since launch. Analysts also pointed to rebate adjustments flattering the quarter, and to another mixed clinical readout for CagriSema, the next-generation weight-loss candidate (CNBC).
The context is what makes it brutal. Eli Lilly reports on the same morning, with its call at 3pm BST / 10am ET, and comes in having guided full-year revenue to between $82 billion and $85 billion after Mounjaro sales rose 125 percent to $8.66 billion in the first quarter. Novo is worth roughly $220 billion; Lilly is valued above $1 trillion. When two companies sell into the same market and report on the same day, the smaller one is no longer graded against its own forecasts. It is graded against the gap. Novo has also brought a lawsuit against Lilly over its advertising, which tells you how the competitive position is being defended (Yahoo Finance).
Sensei’s Insight: Novo beat a forecast it had already cut, and the market refused to count that as a recovery. The number to watch in Lilly’s release is American Zepbound volume, because any share Novo has surrendered shows up there first.
Stories You Might Have Missed
📊 Two labour readings land before the payrolls report
The week’s jobs argument gets its first proper test today. The ADP count of private-sector hiring lands at 1:15pm BST / 8:15am ET and is seen slowing sharply to about 75,000 after 98,000 in June, a figure that already came in below forecast. The ISM services survey follows at 3pm BST / 10am ET, seen at 54.2 from 54.0, with its employment component last reading 51.2 and barely above the line separating hiring from cutting. Services are roughly four fifths of the American economy, so that sub-index carries more weight than the headline. It all builds toward the end of the week, when the July employment report is expected to show payrolls at 91,000 and the unemployment rate rising to 4.3 percent from 4.2 percent (CNBC).
💾 Memory night, with two of the year’s biggest winners reporting
SanDisk and Western Digital both report after the American close, and few stocks have run harder into a print. SanDisk is up more than 423 percent this year and Western Digital more than 222 percent, driven by a shortage of memory that shows no sign of clearing. SanDisk’s most recent quarter gave the scale of it, with revenue up 251 percent on a year earlier to $5.95 billion. The move accelerated after Samsung forecast that the supply shortage would worsen through 2027 and persist into 2028. NAND pricing, enterprise drive demand from AI data centres and gross margin are the three lines that decide the reaction, and the same memory costs are now showing up in the price of consumer hardware (Yahoo Finance).
₿ Bitcoin sits 49 percent below its record while shares set new ones
Bitcoin is holding just above $64,000, roughly flat on the week and about 49 percent below the record it set in October, on the same morning the S&P 500 and the Dow are printing all-time highs. Ether is the only major token lower over seven days. The wider crypto market is worth around $2.27 trillion, with sentiment still reading fear at 27 on the standard gauge, and XRP sits near $1.06 after slipping another 1.2 percent. What makes the divergence stand out is that the usual excuses do not apply: oil has come down hard, rate expectations are easing and equities are in a risk-on rally, so the drag looks internal to crypto rather than macro. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq priced in bitcoin have just cleared their 200-week averages for the first time since 2012 (CoinDesk).
🌑 A discarded SpaceX rocket stage hit the moon this morning
A spent Falcon 9 upper stage struck the lunar surface near Einstein Crater at about 07:35 BST this morning, travelling at roughly 5,400 miles per hour. The stage weighs about 8,800 pounds and measures close to 45 feet, and the impact released energy equivalent to around three tons of TNT. It has been drifting since January 2025, when it launched the Blue Ghost and Hakuto-R landers toward the moon and was left in orbital limbo, nudged onto a collision course over eighteen months by gravity and solar radiation pressure. Observatories were watching for the impact flash and the ejecta plume, partly to test methods for locating impacts ahead of future lunar seismic experiments, and partly because artificial debris hitting the moon is becoming a genuine hazard (BBC Sky at Night).
🔍 Deep Dive - SpaceX Beat On Everything That Matters. The Stock Fell Anyway!
SpaceX reported its first set of public numbers last night. Revenue beat by almost a billion dollars, the loss came in at a third of what the market feared, and the AI division made money for the first time in its life. The stock touched $131 as the release landed and traded near $111 in pre-market this morning This is the breakdown of why, and of the far larger event that arrives on Thursday.
What landed
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