Good Afternoon. 64 years ago today, NASA's Mariner 1 spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a mission to Venus.

293 seconds later, it was destroyed by range safety after veering off course. The cause was a single missing punctuation mark in the guidance software, a bar over one variable in a hand-written equation.

Cost: about $18 million in 1962 dollars, or roughly $180 million today.

Tonight, Wall Street gets its own version of that story. Alphabet, Tesla, IBM, ServiceNow, Texas Instruments, and AT&T all report by tomorrow morning.

A single line in a capex table can add or erase $200 billion in market cap by breakfast.

So the market spent Wednesday doing what it always does the day before a big number lands - trimming, hedging, and rotating out of the names most exposed.

—Rosie, Wyatt, Evan & Conor

🔥 What’s Hot: 🔥

🥶 What’s Not: 🥶

🔢 Big number: $60 billion — the record order backlog Super Micro disclosed late Tuesday. That's roughly four times the company's market cap heading into the update, and enough to send $SMCI rocketing 20.67% on Wednesday.

Ahead of tonight's $GOOGL and $TSLA reports, the rest of the mega-caps got the treatment. $MSFT dropped 2.21%, $META slid 2.73%, and $AMZN lost 1.38%. $AAPL fell 1.03% and $TSLA itself gave back 0.87% on the day.

The news: Every one of those names is either reporting soon or heavily exposed to AI-capex sentiment. If Alphabet raises its $180-190B full-year capex guide any higher tonight, the whole hyperscaler cohort's return-on-invested-capital math shifts.

Big picture: The Nasdaq 100 sits 0.24% lower on the day, but that headline understates the churn beneath. Chip names extended Tuesday's rebound while software and mega-cap growth got sold — the mix inside the index is doing more work than the index itself.
Source: The Wall Street Journal

The single biggest single-name move on Wall Street on Wednesday belonged to Super Micro. $SMCI surged 20.67% to $30.77 after a Tuesday-night preliminary update disclosed $60 billion in new orders during its fiscal Q4 alone, pushing the total backlog to a record.

The news: Management also guided gross margins to 15-17% for the June quarter, roughly double the prior guide of 8.2-8.4%. Loop Capital raised its target to $100, Needham to $46, Citi to $38. CEO Charles Liang confirmed Super Micro is co-building a gigawatt-scale AI datacenter for SpaceX and xAI.

What's next: Full Q4 numbers land August 11. Between now and then, every hyperscaler capex figure — starting with Alphabet tonight — is a data point on whether Super Micro's backlog is a signal of durable demand or just customer double-ordering.
Source: The Motley Fool

Ma Bell got in early. $T reported Q2 adjusted EPS of $0.65 against a $0.59 consensus — a 10% beat — with wireless subscriber additions well ahead of expectations. Revenue came in at $31.6B, a hair light of estimates but up 2.3% year over year. Service revenue climbed 2.7% to $26.0B. Shares gained 2.17% to $22.74.

The news: The bigger callout was capital return. AT&T raised its 2026 buyback target to about $10B from a prior $8B figure, on the back of fiber-margin expansion and strong wireless bundle sell-through. Consolidated operating margin hit 39.1%, the highest since the company began its transformation strategy.

Bottom line: Telecom isn't supposed to be the exciting story on Big Tech night. On Wednesday, it was. When traditional-defensive names guide better than growth names, it says something about where the earnings surprises are landing this cycle.
Source: Investing.com

Alphabet reports at roughly 4:03 PM ET after the close. Consensus sits at $2.88 EPS on $116.96B in revenue — year-over-year growth of 24.68% and 21.29% respectively. Google Cloud growth is the number after that. Q1 came in at a scorching 63% with a $462B backlog. Anything above 60% on Wednesday night keeps the AI-monetization story on the rails.

The news: The line every trader is actually watching is capex. Alphabet already raised its 2026 capital-expenditure guide to $180-190B back in Q1. Further increases would signal even more AI infrastructure investment — and delay the payback debate again.

What's next: A capex raise plus cloud above 60% growth equals a green Thursday. A capex raise with cloud decelerating equals the second AI-return debate of the summer. Either way, the mega-cap group is going to gap in one direction after 4:00 PM.
Source: Investing.com

The Dow finished essentially flat at -0.01% while the Nasdaq dropped, but the sector story was cleaner than the index. Energy caught a serious offer with $XOM climbing 1.83% and $CVX up 1.10%. $USO rallied 2.93%. Financials joined in — $JPM added 0.76%, $GS rose 1.13%, $MS picked up 0.85%. Gold hit fresh highs on safe-haven flows, with $GLD up 1.18%.

The news: Investors sold software and mega-cap growth, then reallocated into energy, industrials, financials, and precious metals. Classic pre-earnings de-risk with a Middle East-driven inflation tilt on top.

Big picture: That's the kind of rotation you'd expect to see in a defensive rebalance — money doesn't leave the market, it just changes lanes.
Source: TheStreet

Oil climbed hard again. Brent crude briefly traded above $95 per barrel — its first cross of that level in six weeks — before easing back to around $93.40. WTI ran up to about $86.31. Both benchmarks are up roughly 20% across July as US-Iran hostilities enter their eleventh consecutive night.

The news: Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Iran is "not serious" about a deal and vowed the US military would continue protecting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Two oil tankers carrying Saudi crude to Asia reversed course in the Red Sea after Houthi threats. Iran attacked US military facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq.

Bottom line: The national average gasoline price rose 4 cents to $4.06 per gallon on Wednesday, and diesel is now above $4.60 in most of the country. Every additional day at these levels tightens consumer discretionary spend into the August back-to-school window — and it starts to show up in trucking and airline cost curves, too. Watch United and Delta's Thursday commentary for the first hint of how airlines are hedging the crude spike.
Source: CNBC

Kospi did the heaviest lifting overnight, gaining 5.36% to close at 7,164 on another Samsung/SK Hynix chip surge. Nikkei added 1.95% to 67,524. But then the melt-up cooled off. By late Asian trade, chip names gave back most of their gains as the region traded down into the Big Tech earnings window.

The news: South Korea's early-July trade numbers were the initial catalyst — chip exports at record levels — but options-hedging into Wednesday's US session pulled the rug on the rally.

What's next: Asian equity direction Thursday morning depends on the tone out of Mountain View tonight. If Alphabet's cloud number holds, Kospi keeps running. If it disappoints, the losses Asia gave back today become the anchor Thursday.
Source: Ad-Hoc News

Ten-year Treasury yields settled near 4.6%, closing in on the 2026 highs from earlier this year. $IEF fell 0.20%. That's the second-order effect of the oil move — traders are pricing higher inflation into the front end and pushing back rate-cut probabilities.

The news: Wednesday's rise in yields came despite equity weakness — a combination that usually signals genuine inflation concern rather than a growth scare.

Big picture: If Brent stays above $90 through August and yields hold near 4.6%, the Fed's September meeting turns into a genuine tossup. Right now Fed Funds futures are pricing roughly a 50% chance of a September cut. That number moves as much on oil headlines as on Powell's next speech.
Source: TS2.tech

Q: What do you call a lazy kangaroo?

A: A pouch potato.

First formalized by economist Michael Spence in his 1973 job-market paper (work that later earned him the Nobel Prize), signaling describes how a party with private information (a company's future prospects, for example) can credibly communicate that information to the market through costly actions that would be irrational for a worse-off party to mimic.

AT&T raising its buyback authorization from $8B to $10B on Wednesday is a signal — the company is saying, "our cash flow is strong enough to shrink the share count materially, and we're willing to spend $2B extra to prove it."

Super Micro's $60B backlog disclosure is a signal — the company is telling the market its demand runway is real, at the cost of drawing regulatory and analyst scrutiny it doesn't need.

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