Good Afternoon. On July 8, 1889 — 137 years ago today — three men named Dow, Jones, and Bergstresser published the very first edition of The Wall Street Journal in a lower-Manhattan basement, selling it on the street for two cents.

That inaugural issue landed in the middle of a market wrestling with Silver Panic aftershocks and looming railroad-bond defaults — familiar chaos for anyone reading today's headlines.

This morning: US strikes on Iran knocked oil up 7% at one point, Chinese startup DeepSeek reportedly started designing its own AI chip, and the Warsh Fed dropped its most-scrutinized minutes in years.

Two pennies for that kind of copy would be a bargain.

—Rosie, Wyatt, Evan & Conor

🔥 What’s Hot: 🔥

🥶 What’s Not: 🥶

🔢 Big number: 40% — the CME FedWatch odds of a Fed rate hike by December, roughly double where they sat two weeks ago. Bank of America now models three quarter-point hikes before year-end.

1. Chips buy the double dip

The news: Tuesday brought a two-front assault on semiconductors: Samsung's record Q2 turned into a -6.9% sell-off, and Reuters reported Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is designing its own custom silicon to reduce Nvidia dependence — the second so-called "DeepSeek shock" in 18 months. Micron -4.7%, Intel -9.66%, Marvell -7.45% followed. Wednesday, buyers came right back. The VanEck Semi ETF (SMH) climbed 2.05%, Nvidia jumped 3.81%, Broadcom surged 5.16%, and Apple added 1.04%. The Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) clawed back to flat while the Dow (DIA -1.02%) took the day's damage from oil, defensives, and financials.

Big picture: This is the third dip-buy in six sessions for semis, and each rebound has been shallower than the last. That's a rotation signal, not a euphoria signal. The AI-capex bull case is intact — Broadcom's Apple-through-2031 contract and Nvidia's August 27 earnings both anchor ~$400B in forward revenue — but the market is finally testing whether customer concentration (four hyperscalers = ~60% of NVDA data-center rev) is a fat tail rather than a permanent moat. Watch how SMH behaves on days when a Chinese chip headline drops and it doesn't rebound intraday. That's when the thesis actually breaks.

Source: CNBC via Chosun / Yahoo Finance company news

2. FOMC minutes: family fight edition

The news: The June 16-17 FOMC minutes — the first minutes released under new Chair Kevin Warsh — hit at 2:00pm ET. The meeting held rates at 3.50%–3.75% by a unanimous 12-0 vote, but the June dot plot revealed a divided committee: 9 members favor at least one hike this year, 8 want to hold, 1 would prefer a cut. Warsh characterized the debate as "a good family fight" — and analysts spent all morning speculating about whether he'd let the minutes actually describe the argument or strip them down the way he already did the post-meeting statement (~130 words, no forward guidance).

What's next: Markets are pricing about 76% odds of a hold at the July 29 meeting and ~40% odds of a hike by December. Bank of America goes further — three hikes in 2026, then a long pause through 2027. That's the hawkish tail nobody is positioned for. The signals to watch over the next three weeks: June CPI on July 14 (consensus 3.2% headline, 3.5% core), followed by Q2 GDP on July 28 and the July FOMC decision on July 29. If core CPI ticks above 3.6%, the hawks get their evidence and September becomes very live.

Source: CNBC / Reuters via U.S. News

3. Rivian dilutes to keep the lights on

The news: Rivian Automotive ($RIVN, -18.1%) announced a 75-million-share secondary offering — roughly 7% dilution to existing holders — to shore up a cash position that had run to about $5.8 billion at the end of Q1 and burns roughly $1.3B per quarter. At the Tuesday close of about $16.30, the raise pencils out to about $1.2 billion in gross proceeds, or enough runway for one more year at current burn. Volume traded through the offering price by mid-morning Wednesday, telling you where the market thinks the true clearing level lives.

Bottom line: Rivian's a case study in what happens when a growth story runs into a stubborn cash-flow problem. R2 — the mass-market SUV that's supposed to fix everything — doesn't ship until 2027, and Volkswagen's $5.8B joint-venture capital is spread over five years. For EV investors, the message is clear: outside of Tesla, almost every EV name will need to raise capital before profitability. Lucid, Polestar, Rivian, Nio, Xpeng — all in the same boat. If you own any of them, model out at least 20% dilution in the next 18 months and see if you still like the math.

Source: Yahoo Finance company news

4. SpaceX drops below its IPO price

The news: SpaceX shares fell below their June 12 IPO price of $155 on Wednesday, closing near $152 — a fall of ~5% on the session and the first time the stock has traded underwater since listing. The pressure came from passive-to-active handoff selling: index funds bought roughly $4.3B worth of shares into Tuesday's Nasdaq 100 inclusion, and early pre-IPO holders whose lockups expired at inclusion started distributing into that demand. JPMorgan kept its $225 price target; Morgan Stanley kept $300.

What's next: Below-IPO is a bad optics moment for what's still a $2 trillion+ company, but the mechanical dynamics are what they are. The two catalysts that matter over the next 90 days: Starlink Q3 subscriber count (currently ~9M globally, target 12M by year-end) and any Starshield defense-contract award — Congress just approved $47B for satellite-based missile defense in the 2027 NDAA. If SpaceX captures even 25%, that's $11.75B in incremental multi-year backlog, and the stock trades a lot higher than $152.

Source: Yahoo Finance markets

5. Cognizant gets a Gemini boost

The news: Cognizant Technology Solutions ($CTSH) jumped 6.2% — its best day of 2026 — after unveiling an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to deploy Gemini AI across enterprise customer implementations. Cognizant will train 35,000 employees on Gemini and roll out industry-specific agents for banking, insurance, and healthcare over the next 18 months. It follows similar expansions from Accenture, Wipro, and Infosys — the entire $250B global IT-services industry is now essentially an AI-implementation channel.

Bottom line: The enterprise AI adoption curve is finally showing up in the numbers. Cognizant's win doesn't just help CTSH — it's confirmation that Google Cloud (with ~11% market share) is stealing meaningful mindshare from AWS and Azure for the specific use case of agentic AI deployment. If you own GOOGL through the antitrust turbulence, this is the earnings-power argument. Alphabet finished today -2.20% on separate antitrust noise, which makes it one of the more interesting risk/reward setups in mega-cap tech.

Source: Yahoo Finance company news

6. Oil pops 7% as US strikes Iran

The news: Late Tuesday, US Central Command carried out what officials called "a series of powerful strikes" against Iranian military targets in response to attacks on three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20% of global seaborne oil flows. Brent initially spiked 7% overnight before settling up 3% to $74.16; WTI closed at $70.44, up 3%. President Trump declared the earlier US-Iran ceasefire "over"; Iran claims retaliatory strikes on US bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. Energy equities were the day's clear winner in an otherwise ugly session — Chevron +3.5%, Exxon +3.9%.

Big picture: The oil-supply risk premium is back after a three-week nap. Every $10 move in Brent adds roughly 0.4 percentage points to US CPI over 6-12 months — meaning a sustained move to $85 Brent would push headline CPI back toward 4% and hand the Fed's hawks another arrow in their quiver. For a Warsh committee already leaning hike-ready, that's the worst possible macroeconomic backdrop. Watch the Iran-EU nuclear talks scheduled for July 15 in Geneva — if those collapse, oil goes higher and the Fed's job gets harder in real time.

Source: Reuters / CNBC / Al Jazeera

7. SK Hynix ADR: fully subscribed and then some

The news: SK Hynix's US ADR listing — set to open for Nasdaq trading Friday, July 10 — is multiple times oversubscribed, according to weekend reporting from Chosun and Straits Times. Total investor interest crossed $36 billion against a $28 billion target raise, with $7 billion coming from top-tier US institutional investors alone. That said, SK Hynix shares in Seoul dropped roughly 5% today on the DeepSeek chip news, so the ADR pricing conversation just got trickier.

What's next: Bankers now have a genuine dilemma: price at the top of the range ($120-125 per ADR) to reward the syndicate and lock in $36B, or pull back to the midpoint ($110-115) to leave room for a Friday-to-Monday pop that reassures Korean holders their Seoul stock isn't leaking to Wall Street at a discount. Whichever they choose, SK Hynix goes from being a Kospi curiosity to being a top-15 Nasdaq name by market cap overnight. Micron ($153B market cap) will find itself trading against a Korean cousin that's about 20% larger.

Source: Chosun ADR demand / Straits Times / Chosun listing detail

8. DeepSeek's chip pivot

The news: Multiple Reuters sources say Chinese AI startup DeepSeek — the same firm that shocked the world 18 months ago by training a GPT-4-class model for a claimed $5.6 million — is now designing its own AI accelerator chip using domestic Chinese fabs (SMIC's 5nm node), targeting Q4 2026 first silicon and production in 2027. The move follows tightening US export controls on Nvidia's H200 and B100 shipments to China and is aimed at reducing DeepSeek's reliance on both Nvidia and Huawei's Ascend silicon.

Bottom line: Don't panic about Nvidia's China revenue — it's already been de-risked (~10% of NVDA data-center revenue vs. ~25% two years ago), and DeepSeek's chip would be generations behind Blackwell and Rubin. The real story is what DeepSeek's move signals about the Chinese domestic AI stack: within five years, China wants a fully sovereign chip → model → application pipeline. That's not a Nvidia problem — it's an ASML, Applied Materials, and TSMC problem, because export-controlled equipment is what actually gates advanced-node production capacity in China.

Source: Reuters via Pakistan Today / Chosun industry

Q: What's the best way to make a small fortune with restaurants?

A: Start with a large fortune.

Coined by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz in his 1832 treatise On War — is the uncertainty and information overload leaders face during a crisis, when signals come faster than the brain can process them.

Business schools adopted the phrase in the 1980s to describe strategic decision-making under incomplete information and adversarial dynamics. Every MBA case on crisis management, M&A negotiation, or product-launch chaos eventually cites it.

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