US DATA: PRICES FALL, HOUSING SENDS MIXED SIGNALS Import prices fell 0.4% in July, versus +0.1% expected, while export prices dropped 1.3%, versus +0.2% forecast. Housing was mixed. Building permits rose 5% to 1.443M, beating the 1.370M estimate. However, housing starts plunged 12.4% to 1.239M, well below the 1.350M forecast.

Last wk despite WTI +10% & ylds +2-7 bps across the curve, S&P/Nas/R2K +0.1%/+0.4%/+0.1%. $NVDA acquisition of Hugging Face & $Meta release of Muse Spark 1.3 last wk make both names more attractive into year-end. My view is that LLMs increasingly bifurcate into 90%+ usage of open-source/ open-weight models in the future as companies optimize the right models for the right task. Since the focus on controlling AI expenditures, the Silicon Data token cost has fallen over 50% since late May but the weekly usage of tokens in models across OpenRouter has increased by 3.6x over this same time. In addition, enterprises are increasingly focused on making sure their own proprietary data does not leak out when they use third party closed frontier LLMs. Hugging Face is the premier central collaborative platform, repository, and toolkit for open-source and open-weight AI with over 18 million developers. Nvidia has three customers that accounted for 44% of their revenues over the past six months and their largest customers are increasingly designing their own ASICs and in some cases selling them externally. A more diversified customer base that owns their own AI compute stack instead of renting from the big cloud service providers would help Nvidia with both of these issues. With this acquisition, Nvidia is in an even better position to sell enterprises a complete alternative AI stack (from the model to chips) where the customer will own their own data. Valuation is also compelling. Nvidia trades at a 15x CY27 PE versus their own guidance for 70% revenue growth and the Big 3 public cloud service providers at 21-23x for 15-26% total revenue growth. The S&P trades at 19x for 9% revenue growth for comparison. Nvidia is also up “just”24% versus the Semiconductor Index up 66% following underperformance last year at up 39% versus 42%. As for Meta, the stock is down 7% year-to-date after being up just 13% last year driven largely by concerns that 1) they can only monetize their near doubling in AI capex spend through efficiencies in their own business and 2) they were falling behind in the AI model race. The launch of the Muse Spark 1.3 API last week, catapulted Meta back to near frontier status (Top four in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index out of 10 models) but with aggressive token pricing (Bottom four in Cost per Task.) Open-weight versions of the Muse Spark lineup are coming soon. This will give the company another way to monetize their aggressive capex plans. This follows Meta's settlement in late August with state AGs on their youth addiction trial which was another overhang on the stock. Trading at 16x CY27 PE for 20% revenue growth is compelling with the settlement and Spark 1.3 launch as catalysts. From a broader market perspective, I recommend caution between now and the US mid-terms for reasons I have fleshed out in prior posts including: 1) Don’t Fight the Fed given I believe a 9/16 hike is likely 2) September -0.5% on avg & up only 48% of the time 3) S&P drawdowns of 10% in lead-up to mid-terms 4) Bipartisan pushback against datacenter expansion 5) Iran dragging out hostilities through US mid-terms

World Currencies vs. the U.S. Dollar One-Year Change As of June 30, 2026: 🇨🇴 Colombian peso: +19.2% 🇮🇱 Israeli shekel: +13.2% 🇭🇺 Hungarian forint: +8.9% 🇿🇦 South African rand: +8.1% 🇲🇽 Mexican peso: +7.7% 🇨🇳 Chinese yuan: +5.6% 🇦🇺 Australian dollar: +5.2% 🇧🇷 Brazilian real: +5.2% 🇲🇾 Malaysian ringgit: +3.1% 🇳🇴 Norwegian krone: +1.8% 🇨🇱 Chilean peso: +1.0% 🇪🇬 Egyptian pound: +0.8% 🇭🇰 Hong Kong dollar: +0.1% 🇦🇪 UAE dirham: 0.0% 🇶🇦 Qatari riyal: 0.0% 🇸🇦 Saudi riyal: -0.2% 🇷🇺 Russian ruble: -0.4% 🇨🇿 Czech koruna: -1.1% 🇸🇬 Singapore dollar: -1.7% 🇨🇭 Swiss franc: -1.8% 🇹🇭 Thai baht: -2.3% 🇸🇪 Swedish krona: -2.4% 🇪🇺 Euro: -3.0% 🇩🇰 Danish krone: -3.1% 🇬🇧 Pound sterling: -3.4% 🇨🇦 Canadian dollar: -4.1% 🇵🇱 Polish złoty: -4.2% 🇳🇿 New Zealand dollar: -6.8% 🇹🇼 Taiwan dollar: -8.2% 🇵🇭 Philippine peso: -8.2% 🇮🇩 Indonesian rupiah: -9.3% 🇮🇳 Indian rupee: -9.4% 🇯🇵 Japanese yen: -11.3% 🇰🇷 South Korean won: -12.6% 🇹🇷 Turkish lira: -14.6% 🇦🇷 Argentine peso: -18.9% Source: Deutsche Bank, Bloomberg Finance LP.

CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER Warren Buffett vs Stanley Druckenmiller Buffett stepped down as Charman of Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B today. Druckenmiller has never had a losing year in more than 30 years. Here are their full portfolios as of Q2 2026. BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY - Apple $AAPL: 22% - American Express $AXP: 17% - Google $GOOGL: about 12.6% across both share classes - Coca-Cola $KO: 11% - Bank of America $BAC: 9.2% - Chevron $CVX: 4.7% - Occidental $OXY: 4.3% - Chubb $CB: 3.9% - Moody's $MCO: 3.7% - Kraft Heinz $KHC: 2.6% - DaVita $DVA: 2.1% - Delta $DAL: 1.8% - SiriusXM $SIRI: 1.2% - VeriSign $VRSN: 0.8% - Kroger $KR: 0.7% - Liberty Live $LLYVA: about 0.6% across both share classes - Ally $ALLY: 0.4% - Lennar $LEN: 0.4% - New York Times $NYT: 0.4% - Capital One $COF: 0.2% - Louisiana-Pacific $LPX: 0.1% - Nucor $NUE: 0.1% - Macy's $M: 0.1% - NVR $NVR - Jefferies $JEF - D.R. Horton $DHI DUQUESNE FAMILY OFFICE - Natera $NTRA: 17% - Insmed $INSM: about 5.7% in shares and calls - Taiwan Semi $TSM: 5.4% - Brazil ETF $EWZ: about 5.1% in shares and calls - Amazon $AMZN: about 4.6% in shares and calls - STMicro $STM: 4.5% - S&P 500 Equal Weight $RSP: about 3.7% in calls and shares - Fox $FOXA: about 2.8% across both share classes - YPF $REPYY: 2.7% - CDW $CDW: about 2.7% in shares and calls - BBB Foods $TBBB: 2.3% - Google $GOOGL: 2.3% - Seagate blockstack:native: 2.3% - United Airlines $UAL: 2.1% - Sea $SE: 2.0% - NewAmsterdam Pharma $NAMS: 2.0% - Russell 2000 ETF $IWM: 1.9% in calls - Sandisk $SNDK: 1.5% - Revolution Medicines $RVMD: 1.4% - S&P 500 ETF: 1.3% in calls - Bitdeer: 1.2% - CRH: 1.1% - Delta: 1.1% - Tesla $TSLA: 1.0% in calls - Fluor: 1.0% - D.R. Horton: 0.9% - Coupang: 0.9% - AMD: 0.8% - Palo Alto Networks: 0.8% - Cleveland-Cliffs: 0.8% - Hut 8: 0.7% - Caris Life Sciences: 0.6% - Argentina ETF: 0.6% - Woodward: 0.5% - Meta: 0.5% in calls - Nuvation Bio: 0.5% - Protagonist Therapeutics: 0.5% - Roku: 0.5% - Cavco: 0.5% - ADMA Biologics: 0.4% - Hyperliquid Strategies: 0.4% - Rambus: 0.4% - Rhythm Pharmaceuticals: 0.4% - Champion Homes: 0.4% - Daktronics: 0.4% - PureCycle: 0.4% - Southern Copper: 0.4% - Linde: 0.4% - Entegris: 0.4% - Teva: 0.4% - Unity: 0.4% - Aeva: 0.4% - Riot Platforms: 0.4% - Qnity Electronics: 0.4% - Equinix: 0.4% - Lam Research: 0.4% - Definium Therapeutics: 0.3% - Belite Bio: 0.3% - 10x Genomics: 0.3% - Wabtec: 0.3% - Eli Lilly: 0.3% - Xenon Pharmaceuticals: 0.3% - Olema Pharmaceuticals: 0.2% - Repligen: 0.2% - Rocket Companies: 0.2% - Baidu: 0.2% - Arm: 0.2% - Carvana: 0.2% - Reddit: 0.2% - Alcoa: 0.2% - Thermo Fisher: 0.2% - Danaher: 0.2% - F5: 0.2% - Vista Energy: 0.2% - Skeena Resources: 0.2% - JBS: 0.1% - Monte Rosa Therapeutics: 0.1% - Relay Therapeutics: 0.1% - DBV Technologies: 0.1% - CCC Intelligent Solutions: 0.1% - UWM Holdings: 0.1% - Navitas Semiconductor: 0.1% - Solstice Advanced Materials: 0.1% - FTAI Aviation: 0.1% - Beam Therapeutics: 0.1% - Aurora Innovation: 0.1% - IREN: 0.1% - Grupo Financiero Galicia: 0.1% - Wave Life Sciences: under 0.1% Both own Google, Delta and D.R. Horton. Neither owns Nvidia $NVDA.

🧩 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: A 6B-Active Preview of the Qwen4 Architecture On the same night Zhipu's GLM-5.3-Flash took over the timeline, @Alibaba_Qwen open-sourced Qwen3.8-Flash-Next — explicitly positioned as a preview of the Qwen4 architecture. Zhihu contributor Kitt在进化 argues that for people who actually run models locally, this is the more practical release of the night. The local-deployment groups he is in are, in his words, on fire. His take: the model is called 3.8, but the architecture is really Qwen4 in preview — and it borrows the best ideas from across the field. 1️⃣ Smaller, cheaper, and realistic for local deployment Flash-Next has 125B total parameters with only 6B active — far smaller than the 300B-class GLM-5.3-Flash. The API is priced at ¥1 input, ¥3 output, and ¥0.1 per cached million tokens, roughly matching DeepSeek-V4-Flash's off-peak rates. His comparison, per 1M tokens in RMB — input / output / cache hit: 🔹 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: 1.0 / 3.0 / 0.1 🔹 GLM-5.3-Flash: 0.4 / 1.4 / 0.115 (limited-time promo rate) 🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Flash (off-peak): 1.5 / 4.5 / 0.05 2️⃣ A Qwen4 preview wearing a Qwen3.8 name The author points out this is the same play Zhipu made: GLM-5.3-Flash's architecture is also completely different from GLM-5.3. Shipping the new architecture as open weights early is deliberate pathfinding. Inference frameworks like vLLM and SGLang, plus the quantization toolchain, all need lead time to adapt before Qwen4 proper arrives. 3️⃣ An architecture that borrows from everyone The author reads Flash-Next as a synthesis of the field's best recent ideas. 🔹 Attention: Qwen's in-house QSA, built to balance throughput and speed on long context. 🔹 Knowledge: it absorbs DeepSeek's Engram line of work, packing prior knowledge into 51B of N-gram side parameters — high knowledge density at minimal compute cost. 🔹 Training: the Muon optimizer, popularized by Kimi, scheduled together with AdamW. 4️⃣ Half the active parameters, still overtaking At 6B active, Flash-Next is nearly half the size of DeepSeek-V4-Flash — yet Qwen's reported benchmarks show it overtaking that model on multiple coding and agent leaderboards. The author says he is not worried about real-world experience: the recent Qwen3.8-27B already proved itself in daily use, and this sits on the same foundation. 🔗 Full Reading: #Qwen# #Alibaba# #Qwen4# #OpenWeights# #LLM# #AIInference# #MoE#

Foreign born population of each country : Jan 2001 Jan 2025 🇦🇹 8.7% 22.5% 🇧🇪 8.4% 20.2% 🇩🇰 4.8% 14.4% 🇫🇷 5.5% 14.0% 🇩🇪 8.9% 20.5% 🇬🇷 6.9% 11.0% 🇮🇸 3.1% 21.8% 🇮🇪 4.0% 23.3% 🇱🇺 37.5% 51.5% 🇳🇱 4.1% 16.8% 🇳🇴 4.1% 18.7% 🇸🇮 2.1% 15.5% 🇪🇸 3.4% 19.3% 🇸🇪 5.3% 20.8% 🇬🇧 4.3% 20.0% Now add children born to foreign parents and the situation looks even worse. We are living through the demographic annihilation of the people of Europe.

⚡️ TODAY: WARSH TAKES THE FED CHAIR. HISTORY SAYS DAY 1 STARTS RED. Every new Fed Chair since 2006 has seen markets open lower on their first day. Day 1 performance: Bernanke: -2.2% Yellen: -0.9% Powell: -4.1% One year later: Bernanke: +13.3% Yellen: +13.0% Powell: -1.3% Markets do not reject new Fed chairs. They make them earn credibility.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2184.2, down 2% (-44.22) since 4 p.m. ET on Thursday. One of 20 assets is trading higher. Leaders: $BNB (+0.4%) and $BTC (-1.3%). Laggards: $SUI (-6.8%) and $ICP (-5.9%).

ASIAN EQUITIES GAINED MODESTLY, LED BY SEMICONDUCTOR STOCKS AS THE AI TRADE REMAINED STRONG, WITH SOUTH KOREA'S KOSPI UP 0.5%, THE MSCI ASIA PACIFIC INDEX GAINING 0.4% AND JAPAN'S TOPIX ADVANCING 0.4% AFTER A 1.3% JUMP IN THE PHILADELPHIA SEMICONDUCTOR INDEX, AS SK HYNIX EDGED HIGHER AMID CONTINUED ENTHUSIASM FOR AI-RELATED CHIP DEMAND.