‘The price of one-standard-deviation out-of-the-money QQQ calls – bullish options bets with a 16% implied chance of success – increased by 42% Tuesday, the biggest single-day change in volatility pricing for those contracts in five years.’ www.cnbc.com/2026/08/05/s...

Stock bears obliterated as Nasdaq 100 logs top 10 bullish stat of past decade

"Pessimists threw in the towel and optimism was running amok today," said Nations Indexes president Scott Nations.

cnbc.com

“If you connect all those dots, this is the quintessential global macro dilemma that we knew would happen and it’s starting to bubble up to the surface.” www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/b...

What the Stock Market’s Record Rally Has to Do With Rescuing the Yen

The wide impact of the U.S. intervention into the Japanese currency shows the extent to which global markets’ revolve around investments in artificial intelligence.

nytimes.com

‘US corporate earnings are already running 60% above trend, with rapid growth still expected for years, mostly thanks to the AI boom. But the questionable economics of AI data centres could pop this bubble, sending earnings tumbling back to their long-term average.’ www.reuters.com/commentary/r...

’Washington is reluctant to see foreign central banks use their dollar reserves. This is telling us the dollar is not the attractive reserve currency it once was. When this message sinks in, other countries will redouble their search for more readily usable alternatives.’ www.ft.com/content/86db...

The real message in the yen intervention

The dollar’s status as a reserve currency is not what it used to be

ft.com

‘He went to the park with a sign inviting people to talk about their day. Six years later, they’re still talking.‘ www.wsj.com/us-news/how-...

How One Man’s Cure for Loneliness Started a Movement

He went to the park with a sign inviting people to talk about their day. Six years later, they’re still talking.

wsj.com

‘One-quarter of men aged 18-29 said they trade stocks daily, and almost two-thirds of them (64%) report feeling like failures.’ www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

MS DESK: ".. After July’s rapid de-grossing and painful MOMO unwind, August appears to show that the chase is on. Yesterday saw more than $3 trillion of SPX notional call volumes for the first ever time."

Luke Kawa@ljkawa.bsky.social · 14h ago

Record daily call volumes in $SPY yesterday This is how you get spot up vol up!

At first, I thought there was an irony/contradiction in this new breed of US policymakers - they come from a "markets background" and yet constantly want to intervene in & manipulate markets. But actually it makes sense: they just think they are smarter than the market....

Cross-posting: This is completely uncalled for. I think anyone who’s been an avid reader of Nick’s work would judge that he’s thoughtful and makes a point of presenting as many POVs of the Fed debate as possible.

'207GW of data center capacity are required to run the AI chips destined for the US over 2023-2033. Over the same period, just 144GW of data center capacity will be built. The 63GW shortfall is more than the entire capacity of data centers in the US this year.' blinks.bloomberg.com/news/stories...

SCHWAB: “.. Stagflationary trend for #ISM Services PMI continues, with prices (blue) remaining in an uptrend and employment (white) in a downtrend.”

‘Investors are aggressively chasing upside exposure, driving up call skew while depressing put skew.’ thedailyshot.com/2026/08/05/t...

Nothing calms markets like invoking the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s when explaining your attempt to prop up the yen. asia.nikkei.com/editor-s-pic...

Record daily call volumes in $SPY yesterday This is how you get spot up vol up!

The US and Japan are pulling out all the stops on Yen intervention. There's a problem with that, because - if this doesn't work - there's nothing else left to do. Markets will learn the emperor really does have no clothes. $/JPY already inching higher... robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/q-and-a-on...

‘Within three weeks it was making new lows. It took global financial turmoil accompanying the fallout from Russia’s domestic debt default on August 17 to really pull the rug — or at least the liquidity and the carry — from beneath the feet of yen carry traders.’ www.ft.com/content/5506...

'High dispersion and low correlation have historically been followed by low market returns. Realized dispersion peaked in December 1999, close to the top of the market.' www.acadian-asset.com/investment-i...

The frenzied serenity of the stock market | Acadian Asset Management

acadian-asset.com

‘Step back from the daily noise and the picture is clear: fiscal largesse, loose financial conditions, booming business investment and near-zero real interest rates are all stoking the economic ​engine.’ www.reuters.com/commentary/r...

‘U.S. Treasuries, JGBs and the yen have all undergone periods of heavy stress in recent decades, but rarely have all three been under such pressure at the same time. And this comes as market confidence in new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh and the BOJ is running dry.’ www.reuters.com/commentary/r...

US yen intervention signals perfect storm rising in FX and bond markets

The U.S. bond market has long had a dark cloud hanging over it: the threat that one of America’s biggest creditors, most likely China or Japan, might liquidate some of their enormous Treasuries holdin...

reuters.com

‘Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon and Alphabet have committed about $1.09 trillion in future payments under leases that have not yet begun and so do not yet appear as liabilities on company balance sheets.’ www.reuters.com/business/ret...

‘The web of contracts underpinning these arrangements adds up to about $200bn. A programme of such a size posed a problem: none of the companies involved wanted to carry tens of billions of dollars of AI chips on their balance sheets.‘ www.ft.com/content/549f...

Inside Google’s $200bn Wall Street finance machine for Anthropic

Private credit, chip leases and data centre guarantees underpin a vast new model for AI spending

ft.com

“Ultimately, you know this is gonna blow up. Every great Industrial Revolution in history… you end up with overinvestment… and you always end up with a bust.” www.cnbc.com/video/2026/0...

Watch CNBC’s full interview with Niles Investment Management’s Dan Niles

Dan Niles, founder and portfolio manager at Niles Investment Management, joins 'Squawk on the Street' to discuss open source models, markets, and more.

cnbc.com

Analysts estimate that 70%+ of Microsoft, Google and Amazon's present and future AI revenues are from Anthropic and OpenAI's compute spend and model sales. Outside of two unsustainable AI labs, demand barely exists, and they've massively overbuilt capacity. www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-deman...

The AI Demand Bubble

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, in...

wheresyoured.at

‘This was the beginning of what I call A.I. wishing: the belief by company leaders that A.I. is magic, that you can wave its wand toward a hard problem and skip the work of solving it. It is sincere, and that is what makes it dangerous.‘ www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...

Opinion | I Helped Run Lululemon. The A.I. Revolution Is a Hot Mess.

The A.I. revolution is stalling because companies don’t want to admit that integrating the technology is expensive and slow and requires human effort.

nytimes.com

“There’s going to be so many dead bodies and so much consolidation eventually,” Ball said. “If you’re not deeply passionate about it, when the tide turns, you’re going to get crushed.“ www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Nvidia, Dell Back AI Cloud Startup Volta at $2.4 Billion Value

Volta Infra Holdings Ltd., a new artificial intelligence cloud company, has raised $300 million in venture funding and secured an additional $5 billion worth of financing to help a wider mix of techno...

bloomberg.com

‘About $100 billion bonds in US dollar and euro investment-grade indexes are trading at wider spreads than the double-B — or junk — curve. That indicates a large amount of potential fallen angels — market parlance for investment grade companies cut to junk status.’ www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

‘Venting online may feel briefly empowering but you can’t post your way out of a war. Iran refuses to accept the military logic of overwhelming US force. The SPR is much diminished, and oil companies prioritize the bottom line, not the party line.’ www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

A Cornered Trump Just Might Turn on Big Oil

While I wouldn’t necessarily rely on Truth Social for facts, it occasionally serves as a barometer of President Donald Trump’s anxieties. On Monday, the needle pointed to pump prices:

bloomberg.com

‘Chinese institutional investors have swooped on gold in recent weeks, helping to arrest the precious metal’s decline and keep prices above the key threshold of $4,000 an ounce.‘ www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Chinese Dip-Buying Bolsters Gold as Prices Find Floor at $4,000

Chinese institutional investors have swooped on gold in recent weeks, helping to arrest the precious metal’s decline and keep prices above the key threshold of $4,000 an ounce.

bloomberg.com

‘A growing number of investors from the US to South Korea are using leveraged exchange-traded funds for long-term investing, a far cry from the day trading they were designed for.’ www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

A Quant and a Korean Dentist Push the Limits of Leveraged ETFs

A growing number of investors from the US to South Korea are using leveraged exchange-traded funds for long-term investing, a far cry from the day trading they were designed for.

bloomberg.com

"The market hiked for him". Yeah but eventually you have to validate those expectations. Otherwise inflation expectations rise and real yields fall back...