September 8th Market Overview

Happy Monday

Oil opened near $99 a barrel after the weekend attacks on Saudi energy sites, then drifted lower all day. The plant that got hit makes fuel for Saudi drivers, so the oil the rest of the world buys never stopped flowing.

Traders worked that out by midday, took the fear back out of the price, and stocks recovered along with it.

Let’s dig in...

Today's Big Picture

1. The War Premium Got Sold

Brent touched $99.46 at the open, a six-week high, then slid back toward $97. WTI finished near flat after being up more than a dollar in the morning. The Houthis hit the Jazan refinery, 400,000 barrels a day that serves Saudi Arabia's own market rather than the export terminals. Nothing that leaves the country was damaged, and the market worked that out by lunch.

2. The Bond Market Did Not Flinch

The 2-year yield sat flat at 4.38 all day. The 10-year moved about two basis points to 4.80 and the 30-year did the same to 5.27. That is a market saying a refinery fire does not change what happens on September 16. Traders still put the odds of a rate increase next week near six in ten.

3. The Cushion Is Thinner Than The Headlines

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is under 290 million barrels, its lowest level since 1982. That is why crude still moves hard on a single headline even when actual supply is untouched. China is doing some of the offsetting work, buying more Persian Gulf crude in August and sending refined product back out to the world. The buffer is real, it is just sitting in somebody else's tanks.

Market Overview

Index Performance

Stock spotlight

Intel $INTC ( ▲ 9.59% )  
moved to outperform at Northland with a $120 target, on a shortage of server processors and the Texas plant Intel is building with SpaceX and Tesla. DigiTimes says another PC chip price increase lands in October, aimed at margins rather than market share.

Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 0.62% )  
picked up a warrant for as many as 25 million Qualcomm shares, vesting as Amazon places chip orders. It earns equity in its supplier by spending money there.

GameStop $GME ( ▼ 1.46% )  
earned $298.7 million last quarter against $168.6 million a year ago. About $238 million of that came from gains on its eBay stake, so the retail business did less of the work than the headline suggests.

Big name updates

Blue Chips
MarketBeat lists “7 Blue-Chip Stocks to Add To Your Forever Portfolio”

Apple $AAPL ( ▼ 1.2% )  
bought Sonera, a brain-sensing startup. No terms disclosed.

Uber $UBER ( ▼ 3.6% )  
President and COO Andrew Macdonald bought 70,000 shares for about $5.31 million, near $75.65 and $76.44. That is real money from someone who reads the internal numbers.

Lockheed Martin $LMT ( ▲ 2.12% )  
went to buy at UBS, which argues the market is not paying for the earnings growth ahead.

Other notable company news

Palantir $PLTR ( ▼ 2.25% )  
customers will be able to run open models on Nebius $NBIS infrastructure while keeping their own data and compute.

Robinhood $HOOD ( ▼ 3.67% )  
signed a multiyear deal for prediction contracts from Crypto.com's OG platform and will take minority stakes in both.

Circle $CRCL ( ▼ 5.77% )  
agreed to buy Tazapay, a Singapore payments firm moving more than $25 billion a year, most of it already in stablecoins.

Illumina $ILMN ( ▼ 3.26% )  
joins the S&P 500 this month, while Nike $NKE drops out of the S&P 100.

Anthropic now plans to start marketing its IPO in mid-October at the earliest, with the listing targeted for the days before November's midterms.

Today’s Sponsor

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Sector Watch

Bond market

The Treasury sells 10-year notes tomorrow and 30-year bonds Thursday. Both price before Friday's inflation report, so buyers have to bid without the number.

The 2-year yield sits at its highest since January 2025, and that is the part of the curve that trades on what the Fed does next. The dollar barely moved.

Policy watch

Fed

The New York Fed's August survey found inflation expectations sitting right where they were in July, for the year ahead and five years out. The three-year view moved up a hair.

The labor answers were the interesting part.

• The share of people who expect higher unemployment a year from now is the highest since April 2020.

• The share who think they might personally lose their job is the lowest since February.

People are worried about the job market. They are not worried about their own job.

International

• China's exports grew by roughly a quarter from a year earlier, and automakers shipped a record 894,000 passenger vehicles overseas while domestic sales fell for an eleventh straight month.
  

• The Chinese trade surplus widened to $119.09 billion from $112.5 billion in July.
  

• US officials have started quiet talks about shrinking the American military footprint in the region if the Iran conflict ends.

What to Watch

The AI Infrastructure's Backbone
10 Stocks Powering the AI Buildout

Two Inflation Reports Before The Fed Votes

Producer prices land Thursday morning, consumer prices Friday, and the Fed decides September 16. Mark Hackett at Nationwide put it plainly, that a hot consumer number makes it very hard for them not to hike. The European Central Bank also decides Thursday.

Oracle Earnings Thursday

Oracle $ORCL is the cleanest public read on whether AI cloud spending is still accelerating. Adobe $ADBE reports the same afternoon.

Thanks for reading - you are now the more informed 🙂

- John

Today’s Sponsor

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