The biggest liars in football history: Lionel Messi: “I don’t know if I’ll play at the 2026 World Cup. It’s difficult. Age catches up with everyone, and the body doesn’t forgive.” Cristiano Ronaldo: “I’m back.”

For the first time, Uzbekistan's national team will play at the FIFA World Cup 2026 🇺🇿!! For millions of fans, that changes everything. VEON’s @beeline_uz will bring the matches to fans across the country through its digital services: Kinom, hambi and OQ. Watch on your phone, tablet, laptop or Smart TV. Beeline Uzbekistan joins Toffee in Bangladesh in bringing the World Cup to fans across VEON markets. A World Cup is more than football. It brings a country together around one dream, and we are proud to help fans live it.

The single best parenting lesson I ever received was through an interaction with my dad when I was 12. I’d tried out for this baseball all star team. The coaches called to say they were taking 16 players and I was the 17th on the list. I didn't make it. I was devastated. It was my first real experience with a failure. I went to my room crying. My dad walked into my room and sat next to me. He said: "I know you're upset. I get it. But here are the three things the coaches said you needed to work on. Let's go out every day this summer and work on them together." And we did. He took me out to the local field damn near every single day that summer. He’d get home from a long day of work and I’d be waiting with a bucket of balls, bat, and glove. We’d play until it was too dark to see. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. Now, as a parent myself, I realize the energy it required for him to come home and do that, day after day. I came back the next year a completely different player. Years later, when I got a scholarship to play at Stanford, I still thought back to that summer as the turning point. It took me having my own son to realize the parenting lesson in all of this. My dad had two options in that moment: 1. Tell me the coaches were idiots. They were wrong. They made a mistake. I was the best player. 2. Acknowledge my disappointment. Reframe it as a growth opportunity. Support me to go after it. It would have been easier to choose Option 1. I would have been happier to hear it. But it would have had a lasting negative impact on my life. There was a big difference between what I wanted to hear and what I needed to hear. My dad subtly reframed that failure as an opportunity. Then he showed up to help me capitalize on it. He handed me my agency in that moment and made sure I never let it go. I'll never forget that. Today is his 71st birthday. I couldn’t be more grateful for the life and legacy he’s created. Happy Birthday, Dad. I love you.

"We have a really good basketball team. 1-15 can really play at the highest level. ... No surprise for us, we know what we're capable of. @shaiglalex joins @Sedano after the Thunder win Game 3 🌩️

Last wk, the AI surge post Situational Awareness resolution continued. S&P/NAS/SOX was +3.6%/+5.2%/+9.2%. WTI -8% with 10Y bond ylds -9bps helped. I wrote on 7/29, “we could have seen at least a short-term bottom today with a strong rally ahead of us in the sectors most caught in the latest speedbump.” I thought forced liquidations of both retail accounts and hedge funds were creating a bottom. The next day, Situational Awareness had a forced sale of all its public equity positions. The Morgan Stanely Momentum Index is now up a whopping 14% in just 7 trading days from July 29th following the 38% drawdown from June 22nd to July 29th. The more concentrated TMT Index is up 25% from 7/29 following the 54% decline from 6/22-7/29. The S&P/Nasdaq/SOX (Semiconductor Index) is up 6.0%/9.2%/18.3% since 7/29. To end the week, the less than expected jobs report on Friday encouraged equity and bond markets that had been worrying about rate hikes. I still believe hikes are less likely than current fears given Kevin Warsh was appointed as Fed Chairman for his belief in AI being deflationary. The CPI report on Wednesday will be important for this thesis. It was encouraging to see the semiconductor sector rally 9.2% last week despite the acid test of lackluster results from $AMD and the memory names which have been the tip of the spear in the semiconductor trade. $AMD had both revs and EPS edge up low single digits for Q3 but this was disappointing compared to $INTC EPS going up ~40% for Q3. AMD’s stock was up 2% for the entire week despite declining 7% in reaction to results the next day. $SNDK was flat for the entire week despite declining 7% the next day in reaction to guiding CQ3 revenues 2% below consensus. $WDC was down 20% last week after guiding EPS just 4% above consensus for CQ3 which was disappointing relative to $STX results where CQ3 moved up 25%. In the near-term, I continue not to be a fan of the memory sector relative to other AI infrastructure names given I remain concerned about US companies like $AAPL getting approval to use Chinese memory & recent moves by $NVDA to lessen memory requirements. Nvidia is evaluating shipping the Rubin Ultra with as little as 192 GB of HBM vs the original roadmap of 1 Terabyte. But this would be good for Nvidia that reports earnings later this month given they could ship a lot more GPUs for a given amount of memory. Also Elon Musk stated last week, "Going forward, we have decided to build exclusively on Nvidia, because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture.” This is a powerful statement given the many companies trying to push the benefits of their ASIC accelerators. Nvidia is also a value and growth play at the same time with just a 25x CY26 PE for over 80% revenue growth. Revenue growth for Nvidia has also accelerated for every quarter from July 2025 at 56% y/y to expectations of 96% for July of 2026. In support of this growth, the six big hyperscalers saw capex growth accelerate from 84% y/y in the March quarter to 92% in the June qtr with forecasts of nearly 100% growth in the September quarter. Each quarter of 2026 is showing higher y/y capex growth than at any time during this AI buildout. In summary, I believe the near-term pain trade is higher in equity markets. For those funds that got punished in July and were forced to de-gross near the bottom, FOMO and performance chasing is now kicking in. None of my technical indicators are flashing overbought yet given the severe drawdowns prior to the current rally. The evolving situation in Iran is obviously the wildcard. Best of luck in the week ahead.