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.

Tesla is still dominating. In the first half of 2026, they secured over 52% of the U.S. EV market. 1. Tesla: 52.3% — 242,100 units sold 2. Chevrolet: 6.1% — 28,267 3. Hyundai: 5.8% — 26,936 4. Cadillac: 4.7% — 21,855 5. Rivian : 4.7% — 21,770 6. Toyota: 4.7% — 21,767 7. Ford: 3.6% — 16,606 8. Kia: 2.7% — 12,627 9. BMW: 2.4% — 10,790 10. Subaru: 2.2% — 10,064 11. Honda: 1.8% — 8,407 12. Lexus: 1.7% — 7,814 13. GMC: 1.4% — 6,645 14. Lucid: 1.1% — 5,208 15. Volvo: 0.9% — 3,964 16. VW: 0.8% — 3,768 17. Mercedes: 0.6% — 3,010 18. Porsche: 0.6% — 2,967 19. Other Brands: 0.6% — 2,596 20. Nissan: 0.4% — 1,774 21. Audi: 0.4% — 1,697 22. Genesis: 0.1% — 560 23. Dodge: 0.1% — 534 24. Jeep: 0.1% — 418 25. Mini: 0.1% — 307 26. Acura: 0.0% — 108 (Data Via Cox Automotive Q2 2026 EV sales)

Last wk, S&P/Nas/Mag7 +0.4%/+0.1%/-0.8%. Cooler inflation (CPI, PPI) & economic data (consumer sentiment, retail sales) but +5% oil steepened the yield curve but lowered odds of a rate hike. Looking forward, I continue to believe the impact of Agentic AI with the advent of OpenClaw on January 30th has at least a year to run: 1) Token production has gone up roughly ~7.5x from the end of January more than offsetting the nearly 50% token cost reduction seen since open-weight model usage started to take off in May. 2) Combined annualized run-rate revenues for OpenAI and Anthropic which ended last year at $29B seems to be around $100B currently with Anthropic getting profitable in Q2. 3) Capex from the Big6 hyperscalers accelerated from 84% y/y/ in CQ1 to 92% in CQ2 with forecasts for nearly 100% in Q3. But this is being supported by cloud revenue growth at the 3 Big Public cloud vendors of $AMZN $MSFT $GOOGL accelerating from 23% y/y in Q1:25 to 35% in Q1:26 to 43% in Q2:26. Arguable more important is public cloud operating margins expanded from 34% to 37% and 39% during those time periods. 4) The $500B financing deal backstopped by up to $125B from $NVDA adds even more lower cost money to fund AI capex spend for the non-hyperscaler players. Nvidia gained 0.5% last week. 5) The liquidation of Situational Awareness and retail accounts during July cleared out some of the frothiness in the AI related names In terms of negatives: 1) The cost of money (yields on government bonds) remain near the highest levels for the 30 yr tenor at 5.3% since 2007. 2) Given large scale offensive US military actions are seemingly off the tablein favor of financial sanctions, probably driven by current election polls, I now believe Iran is likely to hold the Strait of Hormuz hostage until past the US mid-terms. This would be akin to them releasing the US hostages in 1981 (they were held for 444 days) just hours after President Reagan was sworn in replacing Carter. There were severe financial sanctions then also. 3) Since 1990, which happens to be the Gulf War, from the end of July through November 9th, which covers the reaction to all mid-term results, the performance is worse than non mid-term years. For mid-term years the median S&P500 gain from 7/31-11/9 is 0.9% with gains 56% of the time but the median peak loss from 7/31 is 6.2% (intra-period median peak loss of 9.9%.) For non mid-term years the median gain is 2.7% from 7/31-11/9 with gains 59% of the time and the median peak loss from 7/31 is 3.5% (intra-period median peak loss of 5.2%.) This year with the momentum seen by the Socialists which are not big business friendly, I see more risk than normal. 4) The easy money on the AI technical rebound from oversold levels on 7/29 due to the forced sale by Situation Awareness is probably over. There were negative stock reactions to headline beat and raise earnings on both revs & EPS for AI infrastructure winners $CSCO (-8% for the week but still up +45% YTD), $AMAT (-6%/+97%) and $COHR (-14%/+77%). While negatives can always be found, their biggest crime was arguably their recent bounce from 7/29-8/7 of 8%, 24% and 71% respectively and their market beating YTD gains. In summary, I remain bullish. Even from the end of July through November 9th during mid-term years since 1990, the S&P has an additional median gain of 4.2% to its peak before giving some of that back closer to the election. Given some of the negatives, especially the reaction to solid earnings data, I would add some hedges back on further market gains and get more selective. Consumer discretionary hedges should also make sense if oil is higher for longer. I believe value should continue to accrue to the infrastructure layer which includes 1) the public cloud vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and 2) the semiconductor companies. $INTC, my favorite semi company, still gained 0.8% last week despite: 1) a $20B equity offering which causes ~5% dilution and 2) being up 178% YTD. This clears the funding overhang. All the best in the week ahead.

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.

This week's largest unlocks ↓ • Hyperliquid ($HYPE): $797M to be unlocked (4.5% of supply) • Sui ($SUI): $9.7M to be unlocked (0.3% of supply) • EigenCloud (prev. EigenLayer) ($EIGEN): $6.9M to be unlocked (4.1% of supply) • Ethena ($ENA): $6.0M to be unlocked (0.4% of supply) • GoPlus Security ($GPS): $1.6M to be unlocked (2.8% of supply) • ZetaChain ($ZETA): $1.4M to be unlocked (2.9% of supply) • IOTA ($IOTA): $492K to be unlocked (0.3% of supply) • Wormhole ($W): $473K to be unlocked (0.8% of supply) Top-3 account for 99% of the week's total. Data: Tokenomist, Aug 31–Sep 7

🧩 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#

US consumers are pulling back on spending: US retail sales dropped -0.6% in July, the largest monthly decrease since May 2025, missing expectations of a +0.1% increase. The biggest drop came from non-store retailers, including Amazon, $AMZN, where sales fell -2.2%, the 2nd-largest decline since July 2021. At the same time, motor vehicle and parts dealer sales fell -1.8%. As a result, retail sales excluding auto fell -0.3%, below the expected +0.2% increase. Meanwhile, control-group sales, which feed into the GDP calculation, plunged -0.4%, the largest monthly decline since January 2025. The measure excludes food services, auto dealers, building materials stores, and gas stations. Americans are becoming more cautious with their spending.

In 8 games in the 2026 postseason, Ajay Mitchell is averaging: ▪️ 18.8 PPG ▪️ 4.0 RPG ▪️ 4.9 APG ▪️ 47.1 FG% ▪️ 29.8 MPG What will he bring to the Western Conference Finals ⁉️ SAS/OKC Game 1: 8:30pm/et on NBC/Peacock

The World’s Biggest Mineral Fuel Producers in Million Metric Tons: 1. 🇨🇳 China: 4,812.6 2. 🇺🇸 United States: 2,277.2 3. 🇷🇺 Russia: 1,459.0 4. 🇮🇳 India: 1,142.8 5. 🇮🇩 Indonesia: 921.4 6. 🇦🇺 Australia: 614.6 7. 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia: 594.2 8. 🇨🇦 Canada: 489.9 9. 🇮🇷 Iran: 457.1 10. 🇿🇦 South Africa: 234.0 11. 🇦🇪 UAE: 228.9 12. 🇮🇶 Iraq: 225.2 13. 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan: 224.2 14. 🇶🇦 Qatar: 211.8 15. 🇧🇷 Brazil: 196.6 16. 🇳🇴 Norway: 196.0 17. 🇰🇼 Kuwait: 154.8 18. 🇩🇿 Algeria: 146.8 19. 🇲🇽 Mexico: 119.2 20. 🇳🇬 Nigeria: 114.8 21. 🇨🇴 Colombia: 107.0 22. 🇲🇳 Mongolia: 104.4 23. 🇩🇪 Germany: 97.5 24. 🇵🇱 Poland: 89.3 25. 🇲🇾 Malaysia: 89.3 Mineral fuel: Steam coal, coking coal, lignite, petroleum, gas, uranium. Source: Austrian Ministry of Finance, mineral fuel production by country in 2024

A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY. Here's a full recap: 1. Nvidia $NVDA reported Q2’27 revenue of $96.2B, beating estimates of $92.2B and up 106% YoY. Adjusted EPS came in at $2.22 versus $2.10 expected, up 120% YoY. Data Center revenue reached $89.0B, above the $85.8B estimate and up 117% YoY, while adjusted gross margin was 75.0%, in line with expectations and up 250 bps YoY. Nvidia guided Q3 revenue to $108.0B +/- 2%, ahead of the $104.2B estimate, with adjusted gross margin expected at 74.0% +/- 50 bps. The company generated $64.0B of adjusted operating income, $54.0B of adjusted net income, and $21.3B of free cash flow, while returning roughly $26.0B to shareholders in Q2 with about $99.0B remaining on its authorization. Nvidia said its outlook assumes no Data Center compute revenue from China, while Vera Rubin is ramping into full production with racks running at partners. 2. US GDP came in at 1.5% QoQ, matching estimates. PCE rose 0.2% MoM versus 0.1% expected and 3.7% YoY versus 3.6% expected, while Core PCE was in line at 0.2% MoM and 3.3% YoY. Consumer spending increased 0.2% MoM, above the 0.1% estimate, and personal income rose 0.4% MoM, ahead of the 0.2% estimate. Real personal consumption was flat at 0.0% MoM, matching expectations. 3. Meta $META agreed to an $18B youth safety commitment as part of its settlement with U.S. states, including $17B tied to broader settlement terms and $2.2B payable to California. Under the deal, Meta will spend the money over 10 years on youth online safety initiatives and implement new protections for users under 18, including limiting social media use to 2 hours per day and blocking access from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. Compliance will be monitored by an independent auditor for 5 years. Meta will accrue about $10B in legal expenses in Q3 2026, but says its July financial guidance remains unchanged. The company also said $5.3B of the settlement is tied to YouTube and TikTok implementing similar daily limits, night mode, and age assurance measures. 4. The Bank of Korea raised rates by 25 bps to 3.00%, marking its second straight hike and the first back-to-back rate increases since the COVID era. The central bank also raised its 2026 GDP growth forecast to 3.3% from 2.6%, signaling stronger confidence in the economy even as it tightens policy. 5. Nvidia $NVDA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B, according to The Information. Strategically, this would give Nvidia a much deeper foothold in the open-source AI ecosystem, where Hugging Face has become one of the main distribution layers for models, datasets, and developer workflows. The likely goal is not just owning another AI asset, but controlling more of the software layer around AI adoption: GPUs, networking, CUDA, inference infrastructure, and now a major platform where developers actually build, share, and deploy models. For Nvidia, this makes the ecosystem stickier and strengthens its position as AI shifts from training frontier models to deploying millions of inference workloads across enterprises. 6. U.S. new home sales fell 10.5% MoM in July to 607,000 units, the lowest level in 6 months and far worse than the 1.4% decline expected. Excluding January 2026, this was the weakest reading since November 2022. New home sales have now declined in 3 of the last 4 months and are down 6.3% YoY. The Midwest saw the sharpest drop, with sales plunging 42.7% MoM to 43,000, the lowest level since 2012. Sales in the South, the largest homebuying region at more than 60% of total sales, fell 13.0% to 383,000, the second-lowest level since January. The weakness comes as the 30-year mortgage rate hit 6.81%, its highest since August 2025, continuing to pressure homebuyer demand. 7. An IRGC spokesperson said the Strait of Hormuz will not reopen unless the U.S. accepts Iran’s conditions. Those conditions reportedly include foreign warships staying at least 400 km away and no vessel transiting the Strait without Iran’s permission. The IRGC also said Iran and Oman have agreed to share revenue from shipping through the Strait, adding another layer of geopolitical and energy-market risk around one of the world’s most important chokepoints. 8. CrowdStrike $CRWD reported Q2’27 revenue of $1.47B, beating estimates of $1.44B and up 26% YoY. Adjusted EPS came in at $0.31 versus $0.29 expected, up 35% YoY, while free cash flow reached $377.4M, above the $353M estimate and up 33% YoY. Net new ARR hit a record $333M, up 51% YoY, bringing total ARR to $5.84B, up 25% YoY. CrowdStrike raised FY27 guidance to $5.99B–$6.01B in revenue, $1.25–$1.26 in adjusted EPS, and $6.60B–$6.61B in ARR. Management called Q2 the best quarter in company history, citing record Falcon Flex results, record net new ARR, stronger retention, and a Mythos-driven tailwind as AI adoption increasingly needs security at scale. $CRWD was up 10% after hours. 9. The top 10 most active options today by contracts traded were $TSLA with 2.7M contracts, $NVDA with 2.5M contracts, $META with 1.7M contracts, $AAPL with 1.4M contracts, $INTC with 742K contracts, $AMZN with 695K contracts, $SPCX with 603K contracts, $MU with 595K contracts, $MSFT with 579K contracts, and $AMD with 404K contracts. 10. $NVDA Nvidia's CFO today said revenue is expected to grow approximately 70% in FY28, even with a supply-constrained outlook. The company said Vera CPU is now in full production, shipments are already underway to lead partners, and CPU revenue is expected to more than double in FY28 against roughly $20B of total server CPU demand. Nvidia also said it began production shipments of Vera Rubin earlier this month, while neocloud partners are expected to exit the year with 8 GW of installed capacity, up from roughly 3 GW at the end of 2025. The CFO said cloud industry backlog now exceeds $2T, with capex from the top five hyperscalers expected to reach nearly $800B in 2026 and $1.3T in 2027. Nvidia also addressed “circular financing,” saying it has invested nearly $50B in frontier AI labs and expects AI lab demand supported by its balance sheet to contribute roughly 25% of the business next year. 11. Google $GOOGL has reportedly hired Barret Zoph, co-founder and former CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, as VP of Research, according to WSJ. Zoph will work on Gemini, bringing expertise in reinforcement learning and post-training. Separately, SoftBank is reportedly in talks to acquire a majority stake in OpenAI-backed humanoid robot maker 1X at roughly a $6B valuation. 1X previously tried to raise $1B at a $10B valuation but raised less than half that target, while OpenAI also discussed acquiring the company last year before talks fell apart. 1X says it received more than 10,000 pre-orders for its $20,000 NEO humanoid in the first week, with deliveries planned for 2026, though none have been delivered yet. 12. AWS $AMZN and Nvidia $NVDA announced a major expansion of their strategic AI infrastructure partnership, building on 16 years of joint innovation. As part of the expanded collaboration, AWS will deploy 2 million additional Nvidia GPUs across its global infrastructure in 2027–2028. The companies said they are deepening their work across AI factories, CPUs, networking, open models, data processing, and robotics, giving customers more ways to build and deploy AI at scale. WALL STREET IS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.