Good Afternoon. 64 years ago today — a 44-year-old small-town retailer named Sam Walton cut the ribbon on his first "Wal-Mart Discount City" in Rogers, Arkansas.

He'd spent years running variety stores in the small towns everyone else ignored, and his big idea was almost dumb in its simplicity: buy in bulk, mark it up less than the other guy, and let volume do the rest. That first store did about $1 million in year-one sales, roughly ten times what a comparable Ben Franklin franchise pulled in.

Six decades later, Walmart is a $600-billion-in-revenue empire and Bentonville is an actual city. The pattern's worth remembering on a day when the biggest, buzziest names in the market are getting a haircut and the humbler stuff — Dow blue chips — is doing just fine.

—Rosie, Wyatt, Evan & Conor

🔥 What’s Hot: 🔥

🥶 What’s Not: 🥶

🔢 Big number:

57,000 — U.S. nonfarm payroll gains for June, roughly half what economists expected and the softest reading since early 2024. May got revised down from 172K to 129K. Traders yanked the July rate-hike odds from ~45% Wednesday to <20% today.

1. Jobs jolt

The news: The June employment report landed at 8:30 a.m. ET and it wasn't pretty. The U.S. economy added just 57,000 nonfarm payrolls last month, well short of the ~110,000 consensus and the weakest number since early 2024. May was revised down from 172,000 to 129,000 — a 43,000-job haircut that suddenly makes the three-month trend look a lot cooler. The unemployment rate did slip to 4.2% from 4.3%, but only because the labor force shrank; that's not the kind of "improvement" the Fed likes to see. Leisure and hospitality shed 61,000 jobs on weaker seasonal hiring, while professional services (+36K) and social assistance (+25K) did the heavy lifting.

Why it matters: Kevin Warsh's Fed spent June signaling that inflation risks were down and one more rate hike was still on the table for July. This report just about closes that door. Fed funds futures now show <20% odds of a July move, down from roughly 45% yesterday, and about 60% for September. That's why the Dow could climb 0.63% to a fresh record on a day when the Nasdaq lost 2.16% — softer labor is a rate-cut argument, and rate cuts help boring old dividend payers more than they help crowded AI trades.

Big picture: One report doesn't make a trend, and any single monthly jobs figure has an error bar of about ±130K. But combine it with ADP clocking just 98K on Wednesday, jobless claims drifting higher for six straight weeks, and the JOLTS quits rate at a decade low, and the story writes itself: the labor market isn't cracking, it's cooling. Powell's successor now gets to figure out whether that's the "soft landing" everyone's been waiting for — or the first step to something rougher.

Source: Reuters / BLS / CNBC

2. Chip crash extends

The news: Semiconductor equipment names took a second-day beating that turned yesterday's warning shot into an outright rout. Applied Materials shed another 9.42% to $589.61, on top of its 10% drop Wednesday — a two-day -19% cratering. Lam Research dropped 12.08%, and memory maker Sandisk collapsed 15.23% to $1,722.69 after a heroic Q2 doubling. Even the AI kingpins couldn't hold up: Nvidia slipped 2.49%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is now down roughly 12% from Monday's close. The trigger is Meta's leaked plan to sell surplus AI compute — which, if real, implies the hyperscalers are building faster than they're renting.

Why it matters: The chip-equipment names had been the market's dirty little secret all year — while Mag 7 flatlined, AMAT, LRCX and KLA doubled in H1 as investors bet the AI capex cycle would last another two years minimum. Meta's cloud pivot is the first crack in that thesis. If the biggest data-center builder in the world is preemptively looking for external customers to soak up capacity, the "we can't build fast enough" narrative is officially over. Software AI (Palantir, Snowflake, ServiceNow) is running the other way today because customers just got optionality — cheaper compute is coming.

What's next: Earnings season starts in two weeks and the AI stocks with actual revenue — Nvidia in late August, but ASML on July 16, TSMC on July 17 — will have to reconcile the capex numbers with reality. Watch order books, cancelled slots, and any hyperscaler CFO who has to explain what "digestion" means. The chip-equipment names are still up roughly 60% year-to-date even after this dumpster fire; there's plenty of room for the trade to hurt more before it hurts less.

Source: Reuters / The Globe and Mail / Business Standard

3. Tesla's paradox

The news: Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles in Q2, a 25% year-on-year increase and a full quarter ahead of Wall Street's ~445K consensus. Production hit 473,000 units, energy-storage deployments jumped to 13.5 GWh (up from 9.6 a year ago), and Europe finally showed signs of life after a brutal 2025. It was, on paper, the cleanest delivery beat Tesla has posted in more than a year. The stock's reward for all that good news? A -7.91% drubbing to $391.65 — its ugliest single day in twelve months.

Why it matters: Deliveries have gradually become a vanity metric. Investors care about automotive gross margin ex-credits, which analysts are penciling in around 11% for Q2 versus ~16% last cycle — the price war Musk started in 2024 hasn't gone away, it's just gotten embedded. Tesla also confirmed 2026 capex would swell to >$25 billion (roughly triple 2024) to fund Optimus, Cybercab and AI data centers. That's an enormous cash burn for a car company whose delivery growth is coming from discounts, cheap financing, and a stripped-down Model Y — not exactly the Optimus-utopia thesis.

Bottom line: When a stock drops 8% on numbers that beat every top-line estimate, that's the market pricing in something more than one quarter. Tesla is now a capex story — investors are paying for 2028 robots and 2027 robotaxis off cash flows funded by increasingly commoditized cars. Earnings on July 23 need to answer whether margins can hold before the AI narrative gets challenged the way the chip-equipment narrative just did.

Source: CNBC / Reuters / Business Insider

4. OpenAI's gift to Uncle Sam

The news: According to a Financial Times scoop confirmed by three additional outlets, OpenAI has proposed giving the U.S. government a 5% equity stake — roughly $42.6 billion at the company's most recent $852 billion March valuation. Sam Altman has floated the idea with President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and has also raised it with Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders. The pitch: model the structure on the Alaska Permanent Fund, seed a "Public Wealth Fund" with the shares, and encourage Anthropic, Google and Meta to hand over similar 5% cuts.

Why it matters: This is a genuinely novel proposal — the U.S. hasn't taken equity in a technology company outside of wartime footings (GM 2009, AIG 2008). It's also politically shrewd. OpenAI is fighting on multiple fronts: rising congressional scrutiny of AI labor-displacement, a potentially adverse NYT copyright suit, and lingering questions about its conversion to a for-profit structure. Handing Washington a stake makes all of those problems look more like shared-interest questions and less like antagonistic ones.

What's next: Every other AI lab is now under pressure to respond. Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta Superintelligence Labs will need to say publicly whether they'd match. If any decline, they hand Altman the "OpenAI is the most patriotic AI company" talking point on a silver platter. If they all agree, Washington ends up with a $150-200 billion AI portfolio managed by nobody quite knows who. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has previously called for a 50% government stake — expect that to be the leftward anchor in every future negotiation.

Source: U.S. News / Forbes / Euronews

5. Apple back on its feet

The news: Apple shares gained 4.69% to $308.19 Thursday, one of the few large-cap tech names to catch a lift on an otherwise brutal day for the sector. The stock is now up ~15% from its late-May lows and back within striking distance of its all-time high hit in December 2024. No single catalyst drove today's move — analysts pointed to a mix of the softer jobs data helping consumer-electronics multiples, ongoing enthusiasm for the 3-day launch event teased for July 8-10, and simple rotation out of chip-equipment names into a still-cheap Mag 7 laggard trading at ~25x forward earnings.

Why it matters: Apple has been the boring "everyone hates it" trade all year while Nvidia, Meta and Broadcom drove the AI narrative. The stock is up just 6% YTD versus the Nasdaq 100's ~18%, and Wall Street's long-suffering complaint that Apple hasn't found its AI story remains the reason. But when the market decides AI capex has peaked, having no expensive AI story turns into a feature — Apple's install base of 2.4 billion devices and $100B+ services run rate keeps compounding whether the GPU cycle keeps ramping or not.

Bottom line: Today is a preview of what "AI de-rating rotation" looks like: money leaves the chip and hyperscaler names and heads toward franchises with pricing power and cash returns. Apple's the biggest, cleanest expression of that trade. Watch how the launch event lands — if the rumored $599 MacBook ships and services growth stays north of 12%, the reset from AI-panic-buying continues to help.

Source: CNBC / Stocktwits Apple

6. Kospi gets chip-slammed

The news: South Korea's KOSPI plunged 4.46% at Thursday's open and finished the session down close to 8% intraday — its worst single day since September 2011, when the eurozone crisis blew up. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix — the two poster children for the AI memory boom — dropped over 9% each. Taiwan's TAIEX slid 1.8%, Japan's Nikkei fell 0.9%, and the Bloomberg Emerging Markets Index hit a three-week low. Every chip name globally caught it.

Big picture: Asian chip names had absorbed most of the AI-capex trade this year — HBM memory, foundry capacity, everything downstream of Nvidia. Meta's cloud-business signal Wednesday reframed that as "peak capex + rising supply", and Asian markets that trade eight hours ahead of Wall Street got to price it first. Samsung is now down 18% in two sessions. Note the flip side: Korean and Japanese small-cap indices actually gained on the day. The story isn't "AI is dead"; it's "AI capex growth just paused, and everything geared to it needs a haircut."

Source: CNBC / Chosun / Bloomberg

7. Google's €4.1B Luxembourg loss

The news: The European Court of Justice — the EU's highest court — dismissed Google's appeal against its record €4.1 billion ($4.72 billion) Android antitrust fine, effectively ending an eight-year legal saga. The Commission originally fined Google €4.34 billion back in 2018 for using pre-installation agreements to lock Android phone makers into Chrome and Google Search; the General Court trimmed it to €4.1B in 2022, and today's ruling makes that final. Google now owes the fine plus roughly ~€200 million in accrued interest.

What's next: This is the third Google antitrust penalty confirmed by the EU (Shopping 2017, Android 2018, and AdTech 2025's €2.95B case is still under appeal), pushing Google's total EU antitrust bill north of €8 billion. More importantly, today's ruling locks in the legal precedent the Commission is now using against a wave of newer cases — including the Digital Markets Act enforcement actions against Apple, Meta and Amazon all working through the courts. Alphabet took the news in stride: shares slipped just 0.58% to $359.12 on a day when the whole tech sector was ugly.

Source: Bloomberg / Euronews / Channel News Asia

8. Oil slips as Doha cools off

The news: Brent crude fell 1.17% to $70.73 — its third straight down day and a -13% move from the mid-June spike above $82. WTI settled around $67.80. The catalyst was straightforward: US-Iran indirect talks in Doha concluded Wednesday without a breakthrough but without a blowup either, and Trump told reporters "denuclearization is going well." Meanwhile, OPEC+ meets Sunday and Reuters sources say the group will approve another +188,000 bpd August output hike — the fourth consecutive month of increases.

Bottom line: The oil market spent June pricing a Middle East escalation that hasn't happened. With Iranian barrels flowing, OPEC+ pushing more supply, U.S. shale steady at 13.4 million bpd, and demand growth softening on the Fed pivot, the fundamentals are dragging Brent back toward $65-70 — the pre-war range. That's a ~10% tailwind for airlines, consumer discretionary and the CPI itself, which arrives July 15. Bad for XOM and CVX, good for the June inflation readings Warsh's Fed will be staring at when they gather three weeks from now.

Source: The Star / Reuters / Business Standard

Q: What did the vet say to the cat?

A: How are you feline?

Also known as the law of diminishing marginal returns, this is the observation that after a certain point, each additional unit of input produces a smaller — and eventually zero, then negative — unit of output. Classic MBA example: put one accountant on the books, you get clean financials; put ten, you get diminishing productivity; put a hundred and they're mostly getting in each other's way. The concept dates to David Ricardo (1817) studying farmland yields and it's why every management textbook talks about "optimal scale."

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