Two Apple-related articles in Digitimes this morning - neither of which are positive for the company. First is a report detailing durability issues with the mechanical hinge in Apple's already delayed foldable phone. Second is Apple accepting Q1 2027 memory DRAM and NAND) price hikes in the 30% to 40% range over current Q3 levels. I know the Appleholic investors are currently beyond brazen, but it sure looks to me that they may be 'cruisin for a bruisin'.

Apple down $8 on reports this morning of severe supply shortfalls for their new foldable phones due to manufacturing hiccups. HTS subs read this in the latest HTS letter released (via email) two days ago: "Apple hasn't been able to make enough of the new foldable phones - and that's a big issue." Also mentioned in the letter - Apple's hardware margin problem due to spiking memory costs, the sharp decline in Apple's (high margin) App Store revenue growth, long-time App Store executive Phil Schiller's exit from that position (not a coincidence, I believe). Most of these (margin issues, App Store problems, foldable production trouble) are not new - they've just been ignored by the Appleholic investors (and analysts) too drunk on stock bubble euphoria to notice. But now we're just days from the big product announcements and in the final month of what may be a very tough quarter (and quarters ahead) for Apple. Time to abandon ship?

Our Treasury Secretary may be able to persuade the BOJ from selling their U.S. Treasury bond holdings (for a while), but not the Chinese nor private entities such as the world's largest sovereign wealth fund or individual investors globally (who understand the enormity of our problems). All he's doing is delaying the inevitable and encouraging the incorrigible U.S. government spendthrifts to keep on piling up the debts and deficits. Good luck with your short-term market interventions, Mr. Secretary.

Headline: "U.S. payrolls rose 162,000 in August, much more than expected." What? Another massive miss to the "estimates?" And big revisions? That never happens😄. Why does anyone pay any attention? Answer: Because the gamblers on Wall Street need something to bet on every month. Reality is that the final, final jobs numbers a year from now will almost always be revised lower due to the inherent upward biases in the BLS's early numbers (such as including phantom jobs from their flawed "Birth/Death" model - see the final job revisions in the chart below). Of course, we wouldn't need this flawed government jobs "information" or the suppressed CPI/PCE numbers so quickly every month if our central planners at the Fed weren't manipulating short-term interest rates and long-term rates too (via their bond buying QE programs - using printed-up money). If the central planners weren't manipulating the price of money - maybe we wouldn't have so much real inflation? Here's an idea - why not let the free market determine what the price of money (interest rates) should be. Maybe it has better info than the BLS & Fed? Or even our market-intervening Treasury Secretary?

The AI capex boom, 2-3 years in, has brought no labor productivity or TFP boom, no product price deflation, no killer consumer apps, no household employment gains, no real GDP acceleration (it all bleeds out through imports) and massive equity price appreciation. Nice one.

Interesting that the 10-yr Treasury yield experienced a major reversal to 4.726% after an initial rally on Warsh's speech at 10AM EST to 4.66% (surely the initial rally was algo-driven). Anyone can talk tough ("hawkish") about inflation, as Fed chairmen almost always do, but it's another matter to act tough (hike rates) - especially with Trump administration pressure to do otherwise. Better test will come on Sept. 15-16 (next FOMC meeting).

Not good news for Apple when its primary competitor's (Samsung) phone business is willing to eat a lot of the margin hit from skyrocketing memory costs in order to gain market share - leading to "humongous" 2026 losses. Meanwhile, Samsung's arms-length operating semiconductor memory business reaps windfall profits. Apple doesn't make memory semiconductors - putting them in a difficult position competitively. Think AAPL's historically high $4.7 trillion market cap, 37 P/E and 10 Price/Sales ratio takes this into account? The answer is no because we're in a historic stock market bubble (for now - until it busts).

Ever notice that these days whenever it's a "Chips On!" day in the market/casino, as it is today thanks to the hype from Mr. Leather Jacket, it always seems to be an "Apple Off" day - even when there's no news? Also, other big-cap stocks such as the hyperscalers tend to fall too. MSFT, META, AMZN & GOOGL are all lower in the pre-market this AM. Fundamentally, It doesn't make much sense to me unless.... investors/speculators are running low on the fuel (money) to propel all the big-cap stocks higher at the same time?

I'm looking at a summary of an analyst report on Salesforce's numbers last night (20% stock target price upgrade, of course) and I see this explanation: "NNAOV growth was the strongest in four years and significantly outpaced AOV growth, attrition was near record lows, contract duration improved across both new business and renewals, and CRPO accelerated to 14% constant currency, a point ahead of guidance" NNAOV, AOV and CRPO?? Whatever happened to sales & earnings and balance sheet changes? Oh yeah - they don't look so good. Salesforce revenues (+10.8% Y/Y - includes price hikes/inflation). Income from operations (DOWN slightly year-over-year - the big gain in EPS was entirely due to " $2.6 billion of "gains on strategic investments." And the balance sheet: A total wreck. YTD, Debt nearly quadrupled to $39B, total assets declined, total liabilities jumped 34% and stockholders' equity plummeted 35%. I can hear the analysts' refrain on the conference call now: "Nice quarter guys!"

WSJ: "Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. To put its more than $30 trillion vision in context, the 191 technology companies in the S&P 1500 brought in $2.4 trillion in revenue last year, according to FactSet." Another way of looking at absurdity of the $30 trillion addressable market claim: annual U.S. GDP is currently $32.5 trillion. And yet this nonsense (wild proclamations and predictions) is allowed to continue so that Wall St. & Silly-con-Valley can extract as much money from unwitting "investors" as possible, before the inevitable stock market bubble collapses.

This Stan Druckenmiller opinion piece in the WSJ today is brilliantly written and 100% accurate! Everyone needs to read it - especially the Treasury Secretary and whoever in the administration and on Wall St. that might have pressured him into taking such an anti-free market approach.

Latest attempt by the Treasury Dept. to manipulate long-term bond yields lower (because all the other pronouncements haven't worked). But there's really nothing new here. Treasury almost always takes down its TGA balance in advance of elections in order to stimulate the economy.

Job cuts at Apple are relatively rare and a couple of years ago CEO Tim Cook described layoffs at Apple as a "last resort." Apple claimed that the layoffs described in the Bloomberg story are "to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users." I'm guessing it has more to do with an attempt to partially offset the building margin pressures for its hardware products (memory costs skyrocketing) and a slowdown in its high margin services business. These numbers (of cuts) won't make much of a dent, however.

The boys on Wall St. are trying their best to send investors home happy over the weekend following a rough week for stocks. But can they really pull it off if the bond market keeps sinking (yields climbing) at this rate?

At the very least, the already uncertain economics of the data center builders will worsen due to delays (costly), increased regulations, higher taxes (including lowered tax incentives and abatements), higher water & energy costs and more due to the growing backlash. Not a good development for the AI bubble.

Potentially a major test for precious metals/mining stocks with tomorrow's July CPI report. Sustained buying out of the East (Asia) kept gold above $4,000 during the recent multi-month correction. That eventually led to some encouraging bottoming action culminating in last week's explosive up surge - which is not atypical at the start of bull market moves. However, if inflation's hot - will it lead to a significant retracement of last week's gains? In just five days last week, the GDX gold miner ETF soared 21.3% - erasing the declines from the prior nine weeks. That ferocious move also made it difficult for the many investors caught on the sidelines to get back in. GLD has seen 15 tons of inflows over the last five days - but that would just be a start if we're in another big bull move. Futures traders' gold open interest is still extremely low at just under 400K contracts - so there's lots of potential buying fuel. A hot CPI could provide another chance to get back in or add to one's positions once any retracement runs out of steam. Newsletter subs. know I had added to my gold miner positions since late-June thru July after reducing them significantly late last year into early this year. Nevertheless, I still would like the opportunity to buy more before gold rallies again (as I expect). Tomorrow and the next several days will determine whether I get that chance.

Excellent article (as usual) from WSJ's James Mackintosh titled: "AI Chip Mania Sows Seeds of Its Own Destruction" However, I have one quibble with this statement: "A final risk is that supercharged profits attract new rivals to enter the market. For now, that seems unlikely in the superfast memory Micron makes, but it’s already happening with other highly profitable chips used in AI." Here's a recent headline from DigiTimes: "China's memory capacity surge led by YMTC and CXMT shifts global supply in AI cycle" From the story: "Global memory markets are entering a new restructuring cycle driven by AI demand, with China's YMTC and CXMT scaling capacity and state-backed investment to gain share in a sector long led by US, South Korean, and Japanese suppliers." The AI-driven shortages (worst I've ever seen) have driven prices to the moon (temporarily), but the shortages (and profits and help from the Chinese government) are enabling the buildup of a larger, more potent competitive Chinese supplier threat to the "Big 3" DRAM makers - Micron, Samsung and Hynix. YMTC and CXMT are making inroads into the PC end market due to the datacenter buildout-driven shortages, but in addition, both suppliers are working on higher-end HBM DRAM offerings, with CMXT reportedly planning to ramp up HBM3 production later this year. So, the problem for the legacy DRAM makers will likely be both demand and supply driven in coming years. Eventually, the market will begin to discount a much more competitive environment in the commodity memory markets than was the case before this latest upcycle began.