S&P 500 Dividend Yield falls to 1.04%, the lowest level in history
Source: Barchart
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen to 298.7 million barrels, its lowest level since 1983.
Since the Iran war began in February, Washington has repeatedly released emergency oil whenever oil prices surged to stop fuel costs from exploding. Source: Bull Theory
Michael Burry warns Palantir could crash -99% to 1$.
The “Big Short” investor has re-entered OTM put options on Palantir, buying March 2027 puts with strikes in the low-to-mid $100s. Burry sees Palantir falling below $1 in the long run. Palantir just jumped nearly +40% after strong quarterly results. Source: Bull Theory
Wall Street is preparing to deploy $500 billion to help Nvidia’s customers buy Nvidia chips.
Jensen Huang calls compute “an investable asset.” But there’s another chart worth watching: Nvidia’s credit risk is rising. NVDA’s 5-year CDS has jumped nearly 6 basis points recently. More strikingly, the cost of insuring Nvidia’s debt has almost doubled since late May, rising from 41.6 bps to 77.5 bps—just below the July 29 record of 83.7 bps. At first glance, that seems counterintuitive. Nvidia could potentially unlock hundreds of billions of dollars of additional demand without putting that financing directly on its own balance sheet. That should be positive for Nvidia. But the CDS market may be highlighting the other side of the story: the AI boom is becoming increasingly dependent on leverage. More capital. More infrastructure. More financing. The demand is real—but so is the financial engineering supporting it. Source: Bloomberg, HolgerZ
Anthropic has struck a $9.1 billion deal with Riot Platforms, a Bitcoin miner that recently started selling AI data center capacity.
Riot shares surged +25% in after-hours trading after the news. Riot will supply 191 megawatts of computing from its Rockdale, Texas campus - enough to power roughly 143,000 homes. The contract runs 20 years, through June 2048. It can be extended twice, by five years each, pushing total sales as high as $16.1 billion. Source: Bull Theory
Microsoft $MSFT is planning a major ramp in its next-gen Maia 300 AI chips, with talks underway with TSMC to secure capacity for 300,000+ chips for 2027.
Microsoft plans to unveil Maia 300 as soon as September and ultimately wants capacity for 1M+ chips. The goal is to reduce reliance on Nvidia and win major Azure customers like Anthropic. Its current Maia 200 chips are already 30%-40% cheaper to operate than cutting-edge Nvidia chips for OpenAI and Microsoft models. Source: The Information, Wall St Engine
With 88% of companies reported, S&P 500 sales are up 15% over the last year, the highest growth rate since Q4 2021.
Source: Charlie Bilello
The market just gave us a glimpse of how sensitive gold is to the Fed pat.
What happens if the Fed doesn’t hike at all this year? Source: Katusa Research @KatusaResearch
