To The Moon

On Thursday $Oracle(ORCL)$ closed 5.38 per cent lower at US$152.94, and only then reported. Its remaining performance obligations stand at US$664 billion, up from US$638 billion at the end of the previous quarter, a record. $S&P 500(.SPX)$ closed 0.58 per cent lower the same day, its fourth session in a row heading down and the longest such run since June. The order book set a record. The fall came before it. That US$664 billion is work signed, not money collected. To get the work done, Oracle's capital expenditure ran to about US$28.5 billion in the quarter against US$8.5 billion a year earlier; free cash flow came in at minus US$5.4 billion; and in the same fiscal qua

On Wednesday $S&P 500(.SPX)$ closed 0.48 per cent lower, its third session in a row heading down. $Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$ rose 6.55 per cent the same day to close at US$653.69. The whole market was backing away while one of the largest companies in it put on six and a half points, and those look like two unrelated things. They are one thing. What is holding the indexes down is rates: Brent crude moved back above US$100 for the first time in two months, the inflation print lands on Friday, the ten-year Treasury yield was pushed to 4.85 per cent and the thirty-year broke above 5.30 per cent. The Treasury stepped in that day and raised the cap on its buybacks of ten-

All three indexes closed lower on Tuesday, the Dow worst of them at 1.18 per cent, $S&P 500(.SPX)$ down 0.58 per cent and $NASDAQ(.IXIC)$ Composite down 0.32 per cent. Chips went the other way on the same day: Intel put on 9.05 per cent to close at US$104.47, back above US$100 and the biggest gain in the row. The indexes went one way and the chips went the other, and that is the split this day comes down to. What pushed the indexes down was oil. WTI moved above US$94 and Brent came close to US$99, and what pushed oil up were attacks in the Middle East. The attacks fell over the weekend, so they were not in Friday's closing prices and only arrived at Tuesday's open. The

All three indexes closed lower on Friday, $S&P 500(.SPX)$ down 0.38 per cent at 7,718.60, $Dow Jones(.DJI)$ down 0.51 per cent and $NASDAQ(.IXIC)$ Composite down 0.29 per cent. On the same day $Micron Technology(MU)$ closed 6.10 per cent higher at US$1,016.59, $SanDisk Corp.(SNDK)$ 11.90 per cent higher at US$1,740.00, $SK hynix(SKHY)$ 8.14 per cent higher at US$177.00, and $Direxion D

$S&P 500(.SPX)$ closed 1.06 per cent higher at 7,747.71 and $Dow Jones(.DJI)$ added more than 600 points, the best day for both in a month, and the reason was a sentence from Christopher Waller, a Federal Reserve governor. He said on Thursday that he is willing to support holding rates steady in September as long as inflation keeps moving towards 2 per cent. Bets on a September hike fell from above 60 per cent to a little over half, and the ten-year Treasury yield came back to around 4.75 per cent, a day after touching its highest in more than two years. Waller's reason for holding was to give disinflation a chance: "We can wait one meeting." In the same remarks he left

One batch of results, three different share prices. $Dell Technologies Inc.(DELL)$ closed 15.81 per cent higher on Wednesday at US$492.20. Credo's revenue more than doubled from the previous quarter and the stock closed down 20.04 per cent at US$165.22. $Broadcom(AVGO)$ left its answer until after the close, beat on both revenue and earnings, and saw its shares push above US$370 before being knocked back below US$350. The hardest number in Dell's results is US$95 billion — a record order backlog for AI servers. It raised full-year revenue guidance by US$25 billion to US$192 billion at the same time. At least 15 firms moved their targets that day: UBS from US$455 to US$500,

$Dow Jones(.DJI)$ fell 419 points on Tuesday, or 0.79 per cent, to 52,766.88; $S&P 500(.SPX)$ lost 0.71 per cent to 7,631.47; $Invesco QQQ(QQQ)$ fell 1.27 per cent. The selling started in the Middle East: US forces struck Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz, and Brent crude jumped about 5 per cent on the day to around US$95, a level reports call its highest since late July. When oil goes up, the inflation maths has to be redone. The ten-year Treasury yield closed at 4.78 per cent, which reports put as the highest since January 2025; the thirty-year reached 5.27 per cent. Futures at the CME now put the odds

Jensen Huang said on Monday that he is not afraid of custom chips. The same day, Nvidia put US$3.5 billion into MediaTek convertible bonds and brought MediaTek onto its own NVLink. He is not trying to keep custom chips outside the door; he wants them running across Nvidia's network. Reports say the tie-up is meant to get custom data-centre chips deployed faster. Nvidia closed 1.48 per cent higher at US$220.78. On the custom-silicon side, the tape read the opposite way. $Marvell Technology(MRVL)$ fell another 2.29 per cent to US$211.66, and its gain for the year slipped from 154.91 per cent on Friday to 149.07 per cent. The wound is the same one as last week. Revenue from the US$120 billion arrangement with

Hello. After Warsh spoke on Friday, one estimate put the odds of a September rate rise at 60 per cent. Over the weekend US forces struck Iran and Brent crude went above US$90. Dearer oil makes inflation harder to hold down. But this particular fire is burning on the supply side, where a rate rise will not put it out and will press on demand as well. In three days, September became a harder question. This was Warsh's first appearance at Jackson Hole as chair. He restated the commitment to holding inflation down, and coverage rated the speech "moderately hawkish". He made clear he was not offering forward guidance; a former Fed vice chair said he had given it anyway. The market took him at his word: the two-year Treasury yield jumped, spot gold fell from US$4,649.60 last Thursday to US$4,478

Hello. $NVIDIA(NVDA)$ closed up 8.74 per cent on Thursday at US$227.98, and one report called it the largest single-day gain in market value the company has ever made; $Invesco QQQ(QQQ)$ rose 1.37 per cent. Another headline was blunter: $S&P 500(.SPX)$ was up that day because of Nvidia and nothing else. The other side of it appeared the same day: one report's headline said Nvidia is getting too big, and that this is a problem in itself. An index leaning on a single stock looks good on the way up and works the same way in reverse. The day before, it had fallen first and turned higher only on the 70 per cent growth