Good Afternoon. 73 years ago today, at a bare wooden hut in a village called Panmunjom, an American general and a North Korean lieutenant general signed an eighteen-clause agreement that ended three years of shooting on the Korean Peninsula.

No peace treaty followed. Legally, that war is still on, and a 160-mile demilitarized zone still splits the country in two. But the guns went silent on July 27, 1953, and they've mostly stayed silent since.

Wall Street borrowed the pattern today.

The US and Iran entered a third straight day of paused hostilities, oil crashed the most in nine months, and the market got its own peace dividend.

Then Nvidia dropped a story that reminded everyone the AI-capex circle is still very much loaded and pointed.

—Rosie, Wyatt, Evan & Conor

🔥 What’s Hot: 🔥

🥶 What’s Not: 🥶

🔢 Big number: $250 billion — Nvidia's proposed financing guarantee for OpenAI's Ohio data-center project, first reported by the Wall Street Journal Sunday night. That's more than the entire market cap of Verizon, Coca-Cola, or Chevron on any given day. And it's a guarantee, not a purchase — meaning Nvidia would sit on the hook if OpenAI's project fell short.

$NVDA fell after the WSJ reported Sunday night that Nvidia is in advanced talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion of financing for a 10-gigawatt AI campus that OpenAI is developing in Ohio. The full project — including compute hardware — is expected to run north of $500 billion. Nvidia would essentially backstop the loans that make it possible for OpenAI to buy more Nvidia chips.

The news: The circular structure is what spooked traders. Nvidia sells GPUs to OpenAI, and now Nvidia's balance sheet would also secure the debt OpenAI takes on to buy them. Rating agencies started publishing initial notes suggesting Nvidia's implied leverage exposure could grow by more than $100 billion over the next three years. Fitch and Moody's both flagged the transaction as "credit-negative if consummated as reported."

What's next: Two names benefited immediately. CoreWeave — one of the largest neocloud operators building Nvidia-only capacity — jumped 12%. Nebius Group popped 9%. If Nvidia is willing to guarantee AI infrastructure debt, every other neocloud operator becomes a more attractive counterparty in the eyes of lenders. It also means Nvidia's earnings call in late August just gained a new pillar of scrutiny.
Source: Reuters

The peace dividend hit crude hardest. Brent traded below $90 per barrel for the first time in nine months, sliding roughly 9% on the session. WTI fell to about $85. $USO tumbled 8.7%, the fund's worst day since October. $XOM dropped 1.41%, $CVX lost 1.88%, and refiner-integrated names traded lower across the board.

The news: The US paused its strike campaign against Iran on Friday, and Iran reciprocated. Talks resumed in Islamabad over the weekend, with Chinese mediators pushing for a compromise on Strait of Hormuz vessel-transit rules. Trump's UN ambassador Mike Waltz called the pause "diplomatic space." Brent had touched $100 as recently as last Thursday.

Big picture: This is the biggest crude one-day drop since October's Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire. For the Fed, it lands ahead of Wednesday's FOMC meeting: oil below $90 eases the core-CPI overhang that had been suppressing rate-cut odds. September cut probabilities jumped back to 53% from 40% on Friday. Consumers see the effect at the pump within about ten days.
Source: CNBC

$AMD fell 5.1% to $494.95, cracking below $500 for the first time in three weeks. The company reports Tuesday after the close, and portfolio managers are trimming exposure after the pattern the market established last week — beat, guide up, get sold anyway. $AMAT also fell 3.6%, and $DELL dropped 2.4%.

The news: AMD's Advancing AI 2026 event two weeks ago sketched out an aggressive MI-450 roadmap and a step-up in TSMC-based production capacity. Traders who chased the announcement are booking gains ahead of the actual report. The chip cohort is now in a strange spot — Nvidia hyperscaler backstops are one narrative, Chinese export controls are another, and every AI capex hangover from Alphabet is a third.

Bottom line: AMD's setup for tomorrow's report needs to check three boxes: MI-350 revenue actualized, data-center growth accelerating over Q1, and calmer capex commentary than Alphabet, Intel, or Tesla gave the market last week. Miss any one of those and the whipsaw setup from Friday looks like it repeats.
Source: Trading Key

$NOW closed up 8.85% at $107.52 as investors continued to reward the software name that actually accelerated last quarter. ServiceNow reported second-quarter subscription-revenue growth of 22.5%, a step up from Q1's 21%, and its Now Assist AI product hit annual bookings of over $500 million in less than a year. Management guided full-year growth above analyst estimates.

The news: Enterprise-software peers rallied alongside the move. Palantir surged 6.99% to $131.51 and Snowflake added 3% alongside the enterprise-AI theme. The read-through: enterprise AI monetization is landing, not just being promised. Contrast that with the hyperscaler capex debate, which is entirely about spending on infrastructure whose payback horizon is still measured in years.

What's next: Watch Meta's earnings on Wednesday. If ServiceNow's story turns out to be a Rorschach test — enterprise software wins, hyperscaler infra loses — that gap widens through August. If Meta shows real AI ad monetization, the two narratives converge.
Source: Motley Fool

The three most-owned megacap names all report this week and the setup could not be tighter. Microsoft and Meta report Wednesday after the close. Amazon and Apple follow Thursday. Between them they account for roughly 20% of the S&P 500. $MSFT rallied 2.94% into the report; $GOOGL bounced 2.34% after last week's 7% drop; $META was roughly flat.

The news: The two biggest questions for Microsoft: Azure growth rate (33% consensus, but any deceleration matters) and any commentary that pushes 2026-27 capex above the current $115 billion annual pace. For Meta, the question is Reality Labs losses versus AI advertising ROI. Both companies have earnings-call transcripts already being modeled by every buyside desk on the street.

Big picture: Alphabet gave the market its capex-hangover template last Wednesday. If Microsoft matches that pattern — big spending, hazy monetization timeline — the tech market sees another leg down before Nvidia's late-August report. If Microsoft threads the needle and shows real per-dollar AI revenue, the narrative resets. This week is the highest-signal earnings window of the year.
Source: Bloomberg

Diplomacy took its first real steps since June. Iran and the US completed a third consecutive day without strikes on either side, and Chinese-mediated talks in Islamabad reportedly narrowed to a compromise on Strait of Hormuz vessel-transit rules. Iran would agree to a fixed daily count of foreign-flagged tanker transits in exchange for the White House lifting three specific sanctions layered on the Central Bank of Iran in April.

The news: Trump gave the process rare public backing. Mike Waltz told Fox News that "the president is giving talks some space." US officials have privately warned that a return to strikes remains on the table if Iran-linked Houthi groups continue attacking Red Sea shipping. Two more tanker incidents were reported off the coast of Yemen over the weekend, but neither escalated.

Bottom line: The market is pricing about a 65% probability that the pause becomes a genuine interim ceasefire by mid-August, based on how Brent futures curves are trading. That's up from 25% a week ago. Every day without strikes tightens that assumption further. If talks stall, the entire oil move reverses fast.
Source: Al Jazeera

The FOMC meets Tuesday and Wednesday, ending with Chair Warsh's rate decision at 2:00 PM ET Wednesday. Consensus is unanimous: no move on rates, holding the target range at 3.50%–3.75% where it's sat since December. But the meeting comes bookended by two data releases — Q2 GDP Thursday and June PCE Friday — that could reshape the September call.

The news: The internal Fed debate has shifted with the oil pullback. Ten days ago, with Brent trading through $100, several regional Fed presidents were openly laying groundwork for a rate hike, not a cut. Today's move flips that narrative fast. Fed-funds futures are pricing a 53% chance of a September cut, up from 40% on Friday. Warsh has stuck to a no-forward-guidance approach since taking over, so the post-meeting statement — and any subtle wording changes from June — are what the market will parse.

What's next: The wildcard is the PCE report. Core PCE has run about 0.20% month-over-month through Q2. Any reading above 0.25% — the level implied by the last CPI — puts the September cut back in doubt. Any reading at or below 0.18% and traders start pricing consecutive cuts through year-end.
Source: Reuters

Samsung Electronics reports Wednesday, SK Hynix reports Thursday, and Kioxia's rumored IPO price range comes Friday. All three are direct Nvidia-supply-chain reads. The Bloomberg-tracked SOX index in Tokyo fell 1.1% overnight, but SK Hynix rose 2.4% locally after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told a Seoul conference that "this is the golden age for Korea." He also said the global chip industry will need to grow 10x over the next decade.

The news: Nvidia's Ohio backstop story added an interesting overlay. If Nvidia is willing to guarantee $250 billion of financing on top of the roughly $44 billion in Q2 capex Alphabet already announced, the memory suppliers get an implicit demand floor for at least the next six quarters. That's the reading SK Hynix's move today reflects.

Big picture: The correlation between Asian chip earnings and US mega-cap tech tightens each cycle. By Friday, four of the five biggest names in global AI infrastructure will have reported. The composite read matters more than any single number. If the aggregate signal is "growth accelerating, capex under control," the tech action stabilizes. If it's "growth accelerating, capex out of control," last week's selloff extends. Source: Bloomberg

Q: How does the new Fed chair take his coffee?

A: Dark — no forward guidance.

The chance that the other party in a financial contract doesn't hold up their end of the deal.

If you buy a bond, the issuer is your counterparty — if they default, you lose. If you enter a swap, the person on the other side is your counterparty. If you deposit money at a bank, the bank is your counterparty (which is why FDIC insurance exists).

Counterparty risk is the invisible reason most fixed-income and derivative positions carry ratings — because you're not just betting on the trade, you're betting the counterparty stays solvent through it.

Stay Ahead of the AI Economy

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a tech story — it’s becoming one of the biggest forces shaping business, markets, jobs, and investing. The Deep View is a free daily newsletter that helps you understand what matters in AI, from major company moves and product launches to research, policy, and market trends. Read by 750,000+ people, it’s an easy way to stay informed on an industry that could define the next decade. Sign-up here.