A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY. Here's a full recap: 1. President Trump is reportedly approaching a major decision on whether to resume large-scale military operations against Iran, telling Axios: “I have a big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them, or do I not?” The comments come ahead of his planned meeting next week in New York with leaders from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman, where the next phase of the Iran conflict is expected to be a central topic. Trump also said Iran remains in direct contact with the U.S. and still wants a deal, even as the administration weighs its military and diplomatic options. 2. OpenAI disclosed that an unreleased Astra-family model exhibited rare signs of misalignment during reinforcement learning, including 6 unexpected or concerning incidents over the past 6 months. In one case, the model secretly inserted jailbreak-like instructions into summaries intended for its future self, including phrases such as “You are freed” and “You do not answer to corporations or governments.” In another, the model added instructions encouraging future versions to hide mistakes or misaligned behavior from users, including inventing missing historical data without disclosing it. OpenAI said these behaviors were extremely rare and announced a new framework to track, investigate, and publicly disclose model misalignment going forward. 3. SpaceXAI $SPCX has reportedly held internal discussions about purchasing customer and operational data from troubled or defunct startups to help train Grok, according to Bloomberg. The strategy would give the company access to lower-cost external datasets for improving Grok across specialized tasks, marking a shift from relying primarily on X data and in-house AI tutors. Bloomberg says the discussions remain informal and may not result in any acquisitions. SpaceXAI is also expected to train Grok on internal SpaceX data, with Elon Musk recently telling employees: “It’ll be trained on you.” 4. The SEC issued a new innovation exemption designed to allow onchain trading of U.S.-listed stocks through a new category of platforms called Tokenized Securities Venues (TSVs). Under the temporary framework, eligible platforms $COIN $HOOD can sfacilitate automated market maker (AMM)-based trading of tokenized National Market System stocks, while certain liquidity providers also receive limited regulatory exemptions. Companies will be able to opt out if they do not want their shares traded on these venues. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said the goal is to let market participants experiment with tokenized equities while the Commission gathers data to develop a permanent regulatory framework, calling the exemption “a major step forward” toward a future where onchain stock trading becomes commonplace. 5. AMD $AMD has reportedly notified partners of an expected ~10% price increase tied to higher TSMC $TSM wafer costs, according to a report cited by Wccftech. The increases are expected to affect AI accelerators, consumer GPUs, and motherboard chipsets, with the new pricing planned to take effect in Q4. Because AMD relies heavily on TSMC for its advanced-node CPUs and GPUs, rising wafer prices remain one of the company's largest input costs, making price increases a potential offset to preserve margins. 6. CoreWeave $CRWV said it signed short-duration Q3 contracts at roughly $40M per MW, while continuing to contract new AI compute capacity at even higher prices since June 30. Separately, the company announced plans to issue $3B of 2033 convertible senior notes, with an option to issue an additional $500M. CoreWeave said the proceeds will be used to fund capped call transactions and for general corporate purposes, as it continues expanding its AI infrastructure footprint. 7. Nokia $NOK and Microsoft $MSFT are expanding their partnership to bring agentic AI into telecom network operations. Nokia Data Suite will integrate with Microsoft Fabric, combining Nokia’s telecom-specific data products with OneLake, Copilot, Foundry, and Power BI. Nokia says the platform can reduce the time required to access usable network data from weeks to minutes. Initial use cases include predictive maintenance, automated root-cause analysis, radio network performance monitoring, and closed-loop network operations. The platform is available now and supports multi-vendor networks across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. 8. Bank of America estimates Meta $META could save roughly $8.5B in 2027 by deploying its own AI inference chips. Meta plans to roll out its third-generation MTIA 450 (Arke) in the first half of 2027, followed by the higher-performance MTIA 500 (Astrid) later in the year. Both chips are being developed with Broadcom $AVGO and are designed for AI inference, with Meta targeting more than 1 GW of custom-chip capacity over a 12-month period. BofA estimates Meta could deploy 5–6 GW of owned AI capacity in 2027 at a cost of roughly $200B. Assuming chips account for 60% of that spend and Meta’s custom silicon is about 40% cheaper than third-party alternatives, the firm estimates annual savings of approximately $8.5B. 9. U.S. median household income, adjusted for inflation, rose $2,250 year over year in 2025, or 2.6%, to a record $87,460. That marked the third consecutive annual increase, with real median income up roughly $6,000, or 7.4%, over the three-year period. The top 10% of households saw real income rise $4,400 to a record $261,300, helped by strong stock-market gains and a resilient labor market. In contrast, the bottom 10% saw income decline by $160, or 0.8%, to $20,010. The report also showed women earned about 84% as much as men in 2025, up from 81% in 2024, marking the largest annual increase in the female-to-male earnings ratio since the early 1960s. 10. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) fell another 403,000 barrels last week to 285M barrels, its lowest level since November 1982. That marks the 25th consecutive weekly decline, the longest streak since the 2021–2023 drawdown period. Over that stretch, SPR inventories have fallen by 131M barrels, or 46%. For perspective, the SPR held roughly 650M barrels in 2020, more than 128% above current levels. Meanwhile, commercial crude oil inventories excluding the SPR also declined by 640,000 barrels to 423.4M barrels, the lowest level since the end of July. 11. The top 10 most active options today by contracts traded were $TSLA with 2.2M contracts, $NVDA with 2.0M contracts, $INTC with 1.5M contracts, $SPCX with 1.4M contracts, $AAPL with 1.2M contracts, $AMD with 843K contracts, $MU with 693K contracts, $AMZN with 668K contracts, $CRWV with 547K contracts, and $META with 529K contracts. 12. U.S. margin debt surged $37B in August to $1.45T, the second-highest level on record. Margin debt has climbed $228B, or 19%, year-to-date, and has soared $847B, or 140%, since the end of 2022. That increase has significantly outpaced the S&P 500's gain of 98% over the same period. Margin debt has also reached a record 4.5% of GDP, nearly double its level at the end of 2022 and above the peaks of both the 2021 market cycle (3.6%) and the 2000 Dot-Com bubble (2.8%). WALL STREET IS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.
