TMB EOD Wrap

QQQs -43bps the day still displaying fairly resilient action similar to the past few days bouncing back after being down 1%+ a couple times during the session. Market has done a decent job battling through what I call Hot AI Summer fatigue and some seasonal/flow factors — despite all the red the past few sessions, we’re still only 1.5% down from the high. Still price action in AI names has a different character vs earlier in the month. Two examples stood out to me: 1) CRWV -5% as they expanded agreements to supply data center capacity to OpenAI by as much as $6.5 billion to $22.4 billion and 2) CIFR -17% after signing 168 MW 10 year agreement with Fluidstack.

AI Stocks/sentiment are just at a different level now. A couple weeks ago feels like those news items would have had those two stocks up. I’m not sure investors are ready to go back into the HOT AI Summer Fall yet: if you don’t want to over-heat, sometimes you gotta come inside, grab a cool drink, recover and rest a bit before going out to play again.

The short end of the curve rose 6bps following some hot economic data (weekly claims/Q2 GDP) but long end of the cure was more subdued. Fed expects shifted in a slightly hawkish direction, now only pricing in ~40bps worth of cuts for the rest of the year. Tomorrow morning, all eyes will be on the PCE release.

BTC -3% as Quantum news didn’t help:

Megacap outperformed - feels like we were back in the 70s with IBM +5% and INTC +9% helping hold things up. AAPL +2% also helped

Let’s get to it…

INTERNET

• AMZN -1% continues to underperform as investors sit on their hands waiting for evidence of the ever elusive AWS accel. Some good back and forth in TMTB chat here:

• Tiktok: Trump Signs TikTok Order With US App’s Value Put at $14 Billion. Had to read that twice as $14B sounds v low but would be a good number for the potential acquirers. Here’s Bloomberg:

President Donald Trump advanced plans for American investors to buy TikTok’s US operations from its Chinese owner ByteDance Ltd., with officials setting a potential value of $14 billion and outlining measures to ensure security of the new venture.

With an executive order signed Thursday, Trump declared that the deal, once completed, would protect the data of US users with Oracle Corp. helping secure the algorithm on the American version of the platform. Trump also reiterated that he had won approval from his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, for the deal.Composition of the buyers group is not yet final, but Oracle, Silver Lake Management LLC, and the Abu Dhabi-based investment company MGX are in talks to invest in a US version of TikTok and receive board seats in the new venture

• GOOGL -55bps as lots of talk this morning around OAI’s ad ambitions and what they mean for GOOGL.

After the close, TheInformation had an article out around META potentially licensing Gemini: