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.

August @NewYorkFed Services PMI up +0.5 vs. +8.7 prior … business climate -25.7 vs. -24.0 prior; employment +2.4 vs. +4.3 prior; wages +30.7 vs. +30.7 prior; prices paid 70.1 vs.66.7 prior

🇺🇸US DATA RUNS HOT: INFLATION STICKY, DEMAND FIRM INFLATION • Headline PCE MoM: +0.2% vs +0.1% est.; prior -0.1% • Headline PCE YoY: +3.7% vs +3.6% est.; prior +3.7% • Core PCE MoM: +0.2% vs +0.2% est.; prior +0.1% • Core PCE YoY: +3.3% vs +3.3% est.; prior +3.3% GDP • Q2 GDP annualized: +1.5% vs +1.5% est.; prior +1.5% • Personal consumption: +3.4% vs +3.2% est.; prior +3.2% • GDP Price Index: +6.4% vs +6.2% est.; prior +6.2% • Core PCE QoQ: +3.6% vs +3.4% est.; prior +3.4% INCOME & SPENDING • Personal income MoM: +0.4% vs +0.2% est.; prior +0.2% • Personal spending MoM: +0.2% vs +0.1% est.; prior +0.3% • Real personal spending MoM: 0.0% vs 0.0% est.; prior +0.4% DURABLE GOODS • Durable goods orders MoM: +1.1% vs +0.5% est.; prior +0.5% • Durables ex-transportation: +0.4% vs +0.6% est.; prior +0.7% • Core capital goods orders: +0.2% vs +0.7% est.; prior revised to +1.7% • Core capital goods shipments: +1.4% vs +1.0% est.; prior revised to +2.4% BOTTOM LINE: Inflation remains sticky while consumer demand and headline durable goods beat expectations. GDP growth was in line, but stronger price pressures could keep the Fed cautious on rates.

BREAKING: US stock market futures rise after President Trump calls off strikes on Iran and says a deal is near: 1. S&P 500: +0.5% 2. Nasdaq 100: +0.8% 3. Dow Jones: +0.4% 4. WTI Crude: -7.5% 5. Brent: -10.0% 6. Gold: +0.7% Peace deal headlines are back.

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.

NEW ROBOT: Origami wall climber! Called SPARC, it is a collaboration between Shanghai Jiao Tong University's State Key Lab of Mechanical Systems and the University of Michigan's Hybrid Dynamic Robotics Lab. The robot here is a 210 g, 160 mm soft crawling/climbing robot driven by three parallel 3D-printed vacuum-powered Kresling origami actuators, with four silicone suction cups for adhesion. A Kresling origami is a fold pattern that turns a thin cylinder into a spring-like structure of twisted triangular facets. Compressing it makes it rotate and snap between stable states, so engineers use it to build lightweight actuators and robot bodies that fold, twist, and lock without motors at every joint. Each actuator contracts under vacuum, and because Kresling origami mechanically couples that contraction one-to-one with a twist angle, a magnetic angle encoder (AS5600) at each actuator reads the twist and an inverse-kinematics model recovers the shape, giving the robot proprioception. A dual closed-loop controller (onboard encoder/PID inner loop plus an external motion-capture outer loop) steers it along horizontal and vertical paths, and two modules in series can bend about 100 degrees to cross from floor to wall. The thread pairs it with a quoted post on Festo's BionicMotionRobot, a positive-pressure pneumatic-bellows soft arm. Soft robots normally cannot sense their own configuration because stretchable strain sensors are noisy and drift. SPARC sidesteps that with geometry. Kresling origami couples axial contraction one-to-one with a twist angle, so a cheap magnetic angle encoder (AS5600) reading the twist plus an inverse-kinematics model recovers the length. Proprioception becomes a geometry problem solved with a few-dollar off-the-shelf encoder, not a stretchable-materials problem, and that is what lets a soft robot hit 0.5% trajectory error, a precision usually reserved for rigid machines. The controller is a dual closed loop: the inner loop is the onboard encoder/PID (the genuine proprioception), but the outer loop is an OptiTrack Prime41 motion-capture system feeding global position. So the 0.5% horizontal / 3% vertical figures are achieved with off-board global tracking, not self-contained navigation, strip the mocap and the robot still knows its shape but not where it is. Same external-infrastructure caveat this file keeps flagging (SMASH's table AprilTags, LadderMan's bench-side GPU): the impressive number quietly depends on lab instrumentation. Vacuum actuation needs an off-board air supply through proportional electrovacuum regulators (SMC ITV209), an OptiTrack rig provides localization, and there is no onboard power (an onboard Jetson Nano and Arduino Mega only run the valves and encoders). It is a demonstrator of the sensing-plus-actuation idea, not a deployable crawler. Each Kresling actuator contracts 60% at -80 kPa with about 3 kg of actuation force, and three of them on a 210 g body is why it climbs a vertical wall carrying 500 g, roughly 2.4 times its own weight. Vacuum actuators collapse rather than burst (inherently safe) and pack high force, whereas Festo's BionicMotionRobot inflates twelve positive-pressure bellows to bend an octopus-like arm. Same "soft robotics" banner, opposite pressure sign and opposite job (mobility versus manipulation). The ground-to-wall transition currently takes two robots, not one. A single module bends about 50 degrees; two connected in series reach about 100 degrees and double the step length, which is what lets the pair round the 90-degree floor-to-wall corner. Autonomous single-module ground-to-wall transition is explicitly listed as unsolved.

GLM-5.2 is now just 0.005 away from Fable-5 in visual spec-to-app development. On VISTA’s latest C4 leaderboard: 🥇 Claude Code + Fable-5 — 0.274 🥈 Claude Code + GLM-5.2 — 0.269 🥉 Claude Code + Opus 4.8 — 0.263 　 Claude Code + Sonnet 4.6 — 0.248 　 Cursor + Composer 2.5 — 0.212 　 Codex + GPT-5.5 — 0.205 The story is no longer just “which model writes better code.” For real app-building agents, performance is increasingly shaped by the full stack: 🧠 model 🛠️ harness 🔁 tool loop 👁️ visual understanding ⚙️ reasoning setup The harness is becoming part of the model. 🔗