A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY. Here's a full recap: 1. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. will pursue a “zero leakage” strategy on Iran sanctions, targeting digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. He warned that any entity helping Iran launder money could be cut off from the U.S. dollar system, including entities tied to other countries. Bessent also said “no one is above the reach” of U.S. sanctions, including China-linked entities, as President Trump pushes world leaders to further isolate Iran economically. 2. Nancy Pelosi reportedly bought Bloom Energy $BE and Intel $INTC between July 24 and July 28. The purchases included 15,000 shares of $BE plus 100 call options with a $100 strike expiring 6/17/27, as well as 10,000 shares of $INTC plus 50 call options with a $50 strike expiring 6/17/27. 3. Apple $AAPL is reportedly testing DRAM from China’s CXMT and NAND storage from YMTC as Washington weighs whether to allow the suppliers to be used in Apple products sold in China. A Weibo account, Mobile Chip Expert, said the administration may communicate a decision after a reported Trump–Xi meeting in September. Under the potential setup, CXMT would supply DRAM memory while YMTC would supply NAND flash storage modules. The report weighed on memory names, with SanDisk $SNDK down 6% and Micron $MU down 5%. 4. SpaceXAI $SPCX plans to put Nvidia-powered AI compute in orbit, with its first-generation Starmind AI satellite based on an optimized Nvidia $NVDA Vera Rubin NVL72 system. The idea is to extend the same architecture used in terrestrial AI factories into space. On Earth, SpaceXAI will deploy Nvidia Vera CPUs for agentic workloads and scale Grok infrastructure on Vera Rubin as it moves toward gigawatts of compute capacity. The chip includes 88 Nvidia-designed Olympus cores, up to 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth, and Nvidia says it can deliver up to 1.8x faster task completion than x86 CPUs across certain agentic AI and data-processing workloads. Nvidia and SpaceXAI are also working to adapt Vera Rubin for the power, thermal, bandwidth, and reliability demands of orbital computing. 5. The SEC has reportedly sent subpoenas to Wall Street banks working with Situational Awareness after the AI-focused hedge fund’s near-collapse last month, according to Reuters. Regulators are seeking information on the timing of trades that triggered margin calls and communications with major lenders including Goldman Sachs $GS, JPMorgan $JPM, Citigroup $C, and Bank of America $BAC around the fund’s use of leverage. Situational Awareness was forced to sell most of its public equities portfolio to Citadel after a sharp selloff in chip and AI names hit its leveraged bets, with the fund telling investors its portfolio fell 67% in July. The firm said it will “cooperate to the fullest extent” with any regulatory request, while noting that information requests do not necessarily imply enforcement action. 6. Treasury officials say Scott Bessent could tap the roughly $950B Treasury General Account to help fund expanded buybacks of long-dated government bonds, according to CNBC. Using the cash pile could give Treasury significantly more firepower to influence long-term yields after markets questioned whether the recently doubled buyback program was large enough to matter. Treasury has already raised minimum long-end buybacks from $2B to $4B per operation, with the first expanded operation scheduled for September 9. 7. SoftBank plans to issue roughly $6.3B of 7-year retail bonds, which would be the largest retail bond offering ever by a Japanese company, according to WSJ. The bonds are expected to carry a 4.3%–4.9% coupon, with proceeds used for AI investments and refinancing existing debt. SoftBank’s cumulative investments and commitments to OpenAI are expected to exceed $60B as the company keeps raising capital for its broader AI infrastructure strategy. The group has also sold its entire Nvidia $NVDA stake and increased financing backed by its Arm holdings to help fund the push. 8. Amazon $AMZN is developing “fully automated” delivery stations through Project Tetromino, an early-stage AI and robotics effort aimed at automating the final warehouse stop before packages reach drivers. Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider described a 2028 pilot and estimated the new design could process packages at roughly 2.5x the rate of existing stations. The documents also projected more than $530M of investment by 2029, though Amazon said those figures and the proposed rollout timeline are inaccurate and do not reflect current plans. The system could use Boxbot technology to automate package storage, sequencing, and vehicle loading, some of the hardest pieces of last-mile logistics to automate. 9. Strategy $MSTR increased its USD Reserve to $5.10B, established an additional $1.59B of USD Cash, and repurchased $136M of $STRC. As of 8/23/26, Strategy holds roughly 4% of total $BTC Bitcoin supply and has approximately 0% net leverage. Michael Saylor said the USD Cash strengthens Strategy’s Digital Credit Capital Framework and is separately designated for general Bitcoin Treasury Company purposes, including acquiring BTC, paying preferred dividends and interest, repurchasing MSTR or preferred stock, repaying converts, and increasing the USD Reserve. 10. The top 10 most active options today by contracts traded were $NVDA with 3.9M contracts, $TSLA with 2.9M contracts, $AAPL with 1.1M contracts, $MU with 1.1M contracts, $AMZN with 834K contracts, $INTC with 816K contracts, $SPCX with 627K contracts, $META with 609K contracts, $GOOGL with 465K contracts, and $MSTR with 457K contracts. 11. Hedge funds posted their largest weekly sale of U.S. equities since the week of “Liberation Day” in April 2025, reversing after 3 straight weeks of buying. Single stocks made up roughly 53% of total sales, one of the highest readings over the past year. Hedge funds sold 9 of 11 sectors, led by Information Technology, Industrials, Utilities, Health Care, and Materials, while only Energy and a smaller amount of Consumer Discretionary saw buying. Macro products, including index futures and ETFs, accounted for the remaining 47% of sales, with U.S.-listed ETF shorts increasing modestly and breaking a 6-week streak of short covering. 12. Stanley Druckenmiller wrote a WSJ op-ed criticizing Treasury’s decision to double long-dated bond buybacks from $2B to at least $4B per operation, arguing it looks less like liquidity management and more like an attempt to push down long-term yields after the 30-year hit a 19-year high. His view is that auctions were functioning, volatility was contained, and the bond market was simply pricing fiscal risk into yields as inflation remains above target, deficits sit near 6% of GDP, and U.S. debt exceeds $40T. Druckenmiller warned that suppressing long-term yields weakens one of the few remaining forms of fiscal discipline on Washington. He also argued that buying long-duration Treasuries while funding it with short-term bills effectively removes duration risk from the market, making it look like a small version of QE run by Treasury instead of the Fed. His bottom line: let the bond market set the price of government borrowing and fix the real issue directly through lower deficits, gradual entitlement reform, and more responsible debt management. WALL STREET IS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.
