The Nasdaq 100 has surged +9.3% in just 4 sessions since last Thursday.
The rally already ranks among Tech’s sharpest 4d rebounds around major market shocks of the past decades; from the GFC and Covid to the 2022 hiking cycle and Liberation Day. Source: HolgerZ, Goldman, Bloomberg
SpaceX's first print as a public company (Tue 4 Aug, after the close) was a clean operational beat that the market rejected on cash flow. That gap is the whole story.
The numbers Revenue $7.81bn, +92% YoY from $4.1bn, against ~$6.9bn consensus; EPS: loss of $0.09/share vs -$0.26 expected; net loss narrowed to $541m from $1.0bn; Adjusted EBITDA $3.5bn vs $2.0bn consensus. All three segments beat 🚀 And then: capex $18.37bn, more than six times year-ago levels, of which $15.83bn went to AI — against a $13.22bn FactSet estimates 🔥. Segment split: -> Connectivity $4.29bn (+66% YoY), 1.7m net adds with ARPU held flat at $66, enterprise/government revenue +108%, Starlink now at 12 million subscribers. -> AI $2.6bn (+247% YoY), first quarter of positive segment adjusted EBITDA at $1.1bn, helped by $1.6bn of incremental Colossus cloud services revenue. -> Space only $962m with a $205m EBITDA loss — Starship remains an R&D line, not a business. 🤔 Why the stock reversed Shares closed +9.43% at $125.33, then fell to ~$114.6 after hours — the entire day's rally erased. ➡️ Reuters framed it precisely: the concern is cash flow, or the absence of it, with analysts fearing the burn rate forces a return to markets for equity and/or debt; the bonds have already been weak, and 911.5 million insider and employee shares come free on Thursday. ⚠️ Management guided Q3 and Q4 capex to broadly match Q2 — so roughly $55bn of capex in a single year against a $100bn cash pile, most of which is IPO proceeds. Set against that, Johnsen's claim of a sub-one-year payback on compute deployments, $6.7bn of additional cloud contracts signed in the first weeks of Q3, a $100bn ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) target for December, and the $1trn revenue projection pulled forward from 2031 to 2030. 😎 Classic Musk: the promise lengthens as the cash burn steepens. With 34% short interest on the float, the after-hours move is also positioning, not just fundamentals. ‼️ Market drivers to carry forward - Nvidia exclusivity is the cleanest read-across. Musk committed SpaceX to Vera Rubin processors exclusively, and NVDA rose ~2% after hours. - A target of 15–20GW of power and cooling online by end-2027, deliberately built ahead of GPU supply — that is a bid for turbines, transformers and grid capacity as much as for silicon. - Memory is the bottleneck, and the tape agrees. The Kospi added 4.0% overnight led by SK Hynix and Samsung, shrugging off SpaceX and AMD. 👉 My read: SpaceX is now the purest listed proxy for the AI capex question — a business with genuine cash-generative assets (Starlink at 40%+ segment margins) funding an option on compute at a burn rate no cash flow currently supports. Thursday's lockup is the near-term technical risk; the $100bn December ARR figure is the near-term fundamental test. Anyone who owns this at 1.6trn is underwriting Starship reusability and Starlink V3 economics, not this quarter's numbers. App Economy Insights
An AI U-turn ?
JP Morgan's Mark Schilsky argues that investors are becoming increasingly convinced that hyperscalers' massive AI investments are generating returns well above their cost of capital. After reading the latest quarterly earnings transcripts from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, that view is becoming difficult to dismiss. Management teams sounded more confident than ever that today's unprecedented AI spending will translate into sustainable, long-term earnings growth. If Schilsky is correct, the valuation multiples of the Magnificent Seven may have already reached their lows. As confidence builds that AI capex is creating durable value rather than simply driving higher costs, investors could once again be willing to pay premium valuations, potentially well before free cash flow bottoms and begins to accelerate. Source: TME
Why So Many Companies Are Failing by Avoiding Risk Instead of Pursuing Opportunity
Source: Marketoonist
Prediction markets are bigger than stock trading with some brokerages.
Source: Wall Street Mav
This chart shows how the AI capex boom is fast becoming the largest investment surge in history
compared with previous economic booms such as Britain’s railway mania and America’s dotcom bubble. But the spending could still generate disappointing returns Source: The Economist
Amazon, $AMZN, becomes the fifth stock to surpass $3 trillion in market cap
Source: Hedgeye
South Korea's benchmark index has seen annualized volatility surge above 60%, nearly twice that of Japan's Nikkei 225.
The Korea Exchange has already triggered emergency circuit breakers nine times this year—compared with just 15 over the previous 26 years. The concentration of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which account for more than half the index, combined with a boom in leveraged ETFs, has amplified market swings. Assets in leveraged ETFs have jumped from $5 billion to over $40 billion in six months, with retail investors holding nearly 90% of them. In response, regulators and the central bank have introduced measures including ETF exposure limits and higher trading costs to reduce volatility. Source: Bull Theory
