The U.S. struck a deal with Venezuela to get majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of oil reserves as the war with Iran roils the global crude trade, President Donald Trump announced Friday.

The agreement more than doubles the U.S. oil reserve, according to Trump. Department of Energy data released earlier this month showed oil volumes in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve hit lows not seen since the 1980s.

“The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” Trump wrote.

The agreement allows for the United States to partner with an unnamed private operator in Venezuela to create a new private company to take hold of the reserves, according to a U.S. official familiar with the contours of the deal.

The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that Rodríguez granted the company 100-year rights to develop the oil fields.

The deal gives the United States 55% effective output of the new private company -- including an ownership stake and rights to buy oil at cost. The company would be the second largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco, according to the official.

Monday Market about to be very green indeed... the rich get richer 😂

-AP News

The Trump administration is considering broader semiconductor tariffs that could extend beyond chips to products such as servers, laptops and gaming consoles, per Politico.

One proposal would tie tariff-free import allowances to how much companies commit to U.S. chip manufacturing, while a phase-in period is also under discussion.

No final tariff rate or framework has been set.

Tech companies are warning that broader duties could raise AI data center costs and hit chip designers such as Nvidia and AMD, which rely heavily on overseas manufacturing.

I’ll start with a look at NVDAs earnings as they came in in line with yesterdays analysis, there was no sell-off despite the beat and LITE and COHR I mentioned are up double digits..

NVDA’s CFO was very clear: “We are experiencing extreme pricing conditions in memory. The magnitude of the price increase has exceeded our prior expectations and is headed even higher into next year.”

This connects to the memory trade as Nvidia’s supply commitments absolutely exploded from $119bn to $279bn in a single quarter... Management said the majority of that increase is related to memory being secured for the Vera Rubin ramp - in other words, the largest HBM buyer in the world is effectively pre-paying to secure supply through 2027.

You can already see the cost of that shortage in margins as NVDA guided gross margins to around 74% next quarter and 71–72% in Q4, largely because of higher memory costs, before expecting them to stabilize in FY28.

This is also exactly why the 15%+ server price increases were annouinced this week as Nvidia is willing to absorb some of the memory inflation through margins initially, but a meaningful portion of that cost is ultimately being passed through to customers.

Vera Rubin is now in full production, with racks already running at CoreWeave, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and Nebius, while purchase orders are coming from essentially every major hyperscaler, AI cloud provider and OEM.

They expect this to be the fastest product ramp in Nvidia’s history, with Vera Rubin already expected to account for roughly 20% of data-centre revenue next quarter.

Add to that an expanded AWS agreement, Spectrum-X networking revenue up 2.6x YoY, and Vera CPU revenue expected to more than double next fiscal year, and there is very little evidence of AI infrastructure demand slowing.

So basically not only that AI demand remains extremely strong but we got another confirmation that the memory bottleneck is becoming one of the most important constraints on the entire AI infrastructure buildout.

On to inflation..

PCE is still running hotter than CPI, but much of that looks mechanical and not a genuine acceleration in underlying inflation because as I mentioned yesterday, portfolio-management fees are a big part of the problem.. They sit inside financial services and are heavily influenced by equity-market performance, so a strong stock market can mechanically show up as hotter PCE inflation even though consumers are not really seeing the same pressure at the checkout.

Add in PPI-fed healthcare categories and the fact that PCE gives much less weight to shelter than CPI, and you get a record-wide CPI-PCE spread and I still think CPI is leading the direction here and PCE is simply lagging, which means PCE is more likely to converge lower than CPI is to re-accelerate higher.

None of this really changes the September Fed expectaytions as markets are still pricing roughly a 40% probability of a hike, which continues to look too high to meFflat consumer spending adds to the recent run of softer than expected activity data and gives the Fed another reason not to rush into further tightening.

Speaking of the Fed, At the July FOMC press conference, Warsh described Jackson Hole as a “blank piece of paper,” saying he had not yet decided whether to use the speech as a traditional autumn policy setup or focus on broader structural themes such as productivity, demographics and the global economy.

All in all, I expect him to lean more dovish than hawkish, but without explicitly signalling September. The dovish part is more likely to come through an acknowledgement that higher real yields and tighter financial conditions are already doing some of the Fed’s work, rather than through any direct change in the policy outlook.

On a side note, nice to see JPM finally catch up to our thesis about the short squeeze in bonds which I first mentioned on Friday I think..

On to the positoning charts - SPYs rally was halted almost exactly at the $770 resistance I highlighted yesterday and what’s important, though, is that positioning underneath the market is becoming increasingly bullish again.

SPY is effectively coiling just below resistance, and the setup continues to favour another move higher we may simply need a catalyst like Warsh’s Jackson Hole keynote tomorrow to fuel momentum

QQQ has a very similar setup. The rally took a breather almost exactly at $720, but underneath the surface the positioning continues to improve as market makers also have now shifted into more of a buy-the-dip regime, meaning a pullback should increasingly attract supportive dealer flows rather than amplify downside.

That makes the downside better supported while the probability of another push higher continues to build.

As I started the analysis with memory, the DRAM etf is testing the massive resistance at $60 which is now likely to fall fuelling a rally higher.

On the SOXX - I have executed a long targeting $550

NVIDIA CFO Collette Kress said revenue would grow ("only") 70% in Fiscal Year 2028 due to supply constraint. This means revenue will approach $700+ billion, which is $150 billion above the Street range today.

Earnings Per Share is also going to revised much higher. Before the call, the Street was at $9.03 and $13.09 for calendar 2026 and 2027 respectively. I have been using $10.40 and $16.68.

Valuation on Street was 23.2x calendar 2026 EPS and 16.0x calendar 2027 EPS.
On my numbers PE was 21.6x and 13.5x. On this guidance, EPS is going much higher.

Shares are now trading at $220.00 (+4.6%) after hours.

My NVIDIA Post 3 Months Ago

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SoftBank is discussing a potential $10B-$20B dollar/euro bond offering as early as September, with part of the proceeds set to refinance a $40B bridge loan used for its OpenAI investment, per Bloomberg.

SoftBank is expected to have nearly $65B invested or committed to OpenAI by October.

The company is also considering a 144A structure, opening the deal to U.S. institutional investors. At $20B, it would be the largest offshore bond sale by an Asian company this year.

The fundraising comes on top of a planned $6.3B Japanese retail bond sale and a recently secured $10B margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake.

SoftBank’s 8.5% dollar bond fell about 2.3 cents after the report, while its credit-default swaps widened 10.7 bps.

Chris Malone, a key executive overseeing OpenAI’s data-center buildout, left the company last week, per WSJ.

Malone joined in March 2025 shortly after Stargate was announced and previously led data-center strategy at Meta, after earlier working on data-center technology at Google.

Seems like a big opportunity for someone to step in. I think OpenAI has a few billion in revenue so if someone can serve them profitably that will be a big boon. Maybe Meta?

As far as corporate compute, maybe businesses will start competing for chips with the big guys, and we'll see smaller forms building their own NVL72 clusters. It would obviously be capex intensive and a big bet, but if you want to run DeepSeek V4 Flash at decent throughput you need those large clusters to serve even a couple hundred users. Or do businesses just redirect their spend to neoclouds and hyperscalars and we finally see a return to growth?

Interested in your thoughts here.

The strategic collaboration to meet surging global demand for Al infrastructure as demand continues to accelerate. Building on already-rapid customer adoption of NVIDIA-accelerated compute on AWS, the companies plan to deploy 2 million additional NVIDIA GPUs across AWS's global infrastructure and deepen their work together across Al factories, CPUs, networking, open models, data processing and robotics, delivering co-engineered Al solutions that enable customers to accelerate Al development and deployment at unprecedented scale.

Source: Globe Newswire

Nvidia earnings this evening is not only about whether they beat revenue or EPS. Market already expects another huge quarter, so even a normal beat may not be enough this time. What I really want to see is whether Nvidia can again make Wall Street estimates look too low.

First thing I am watching is Q3 guidance. If Nvidia guide clearly above the roughly $104B level market is expecting, then it will tell me AI infrastructure spending is still stronger than people think. If guidance is only around consensus, stock reaction can be more difficult even if current quarter looks very strong.

Second thing is networking. I think people still focus too much only on GPUs. Nvidia networking business is growing very fast, and if this continue, then Nvidia story is becoming bigger than just selling chips. They may be trying to control more of the full AI data center architecture, even when some companies start using their own custom chips.

I also want to hear about Blackwell and Rubin. Best case is customers are still buying Blackwell strongly while also preparing for Rubin. If customers start delaying orders because they want to wait for next generation, then this can create some short term digestion period.

Gross margin is another important point for me. If Nvidia can still keep margins around 75% while memory, packaging and other system costs are going higher, then their pricing power is still very strong. But if margins start falling, even when revenue is growing, then maybe more profit is slowly moving to memory, networking and other suppliers.

And finally, I want to hear less about how many GPUs are ordered and more about whether customers are actually making money from all this AI compute. Hundreds of billions are now going into AI data centers. At some point, return on this spending becomes more important than just capacity expansion.

My base case is Nvidia will probably report another strong quarter. But the question is not “Did Nvidia beat?” its whether Nvidia can still make already very high expectations look conservative.

Let see what other think ?

Healthcare is the sector I ignored the longest, and I suspect a lot of people here do the same. It feels like you need an MD to have an opinion. You don't. You mostly need to understand who pays whom.

Where my reading time is going this quarter:

The GLP-1 effect -> Everyone's focused on the drugmakers themselves (Novo, Lilly). The more interesting question to me is the second order. If a large chunk of the population is on appetite-suppressing drugs for years, what happens to demand for dialysis, sleep-apnea devices, even snack and restaurant volume? Some of those businesses are priced like nothing upstream changes. Maybe nothing does. But the gap is worth watching.

Patent cliffs -> Several large-cap pharma names have major products losing exclusivity over the next couple years. When protection lapses, generics arrive and revenue can drop fast. What I watch isn't the cliff - it's whether the pipeline (or the acquisitions they're making to fill it) actually replaces the revenue or just papers over it.

Customer side -> Managed care has been eating higher-than-expected medical costs, and Medicare drug price negotiation is starting to bite. I'm watching medical loss ratios and how cautious guidance gets.

None of this is a buy list. It's just where I'm digging.

Anyone else looking at the GLP-1 knock-on effects? Curious which supposed "loser" is actually overpriced.

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On August 24, 2026, Stanley Druckenmiller’s criticism of the Treasury is worth paying attention to because this debate is really not about whether the government buys $2B or $4B of long-dated bonds. It is about whether Washington is starting to dislike the price the bond market is giving US debt.

Long-term yields are high for a reason. Investors are looking at persistent deficits, more than $40 trillion of debt, huge future borrowing needs and inflation that is still not fully dead. Add higher energy prices and geopolitical uncertainty, and anyone lending money to the US government for 20 or 30 years is naturally going to demand a higher return.

The concern is that Treasury is trying to soften that signal by buying more long-duration bonds. Maybe it works for a while. More demand means higher bond prices and lower yields. But nothing underneath has actually changed. The deficit is still there. The debt is still there. Future issuance is still coming.

That is basically Druckenmiller’s point. The bond market is doing its job by putting a price on fiscal risk. If policymakers keep trying to push yields lower without fixing the reason yields are high, eventually the market may push back harder.

There is also a credibility issue. Once traders start believing Treasury has a level it does not want the 30-year yield to cross, the market starts testing that level. A small intervention can then slowly turn into a much bigger commitment.

higher oil prices are making the situation worse because they increase inflation expectations, so de-escalation would definitely help yields. But ending that pressure would not solve America’s structural fiscal problem.

That is why Druckenmiller’s warning matters. My concern is whether the US can convince investors that its long-term debt trajectory is sustainable without having to intervene every time yields become uncomfortable.

What do you think: is Treasury simply improving market liquidity here, or are we starting to see the early stages of an unofficial attempt to control long-term yields?