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Etsy - Layoffs With Better Numbers
- Etsy is cutting about 220 jobs, or 12% of its workforce.
- Management said the cuts were not primarily about cost savings or AI.
----- CEO Kruti Patel Goyal stated the restructuring aims to simplify the organization, remove management layers, and speed up decision-making to better compete against massive rivals like Amazon, Temu, and TikTok Shop
- Q2 revenue was about $668 million and core marketplace sales improved.
- Etsy also authorized another $2 billion share buyback.
- Comes after selling Depop to eBay for about $1.4 billion.

Polysilicon - Tariffs Plus Price Floors
- U.S. policy adds a 15% tariff and minimum import prices on polysilicon and solar products.
- Goal is to protect domestic production from low-cost foreign competition.
- U.S. share of global polysilicon capacity fell from about 50% in 2005 to under 2% in 2024.
- First Solar and T1 Energy jumped on the announcement.
---- The same playbook - rinse and repeat

Chipotle - Salmonella Returns
- Minnesota officials linked a salmonella outbreak to jalapenos served at Chipotle.
- Chipotle removed the affected pepper supply and switched growers.
- Shares fell roughly 8%-10% as investors remembered the company's earlier food-safety problems.
- This is on top of the lettuce situation with Sweetgreen- look at  STOCK CHART FOR SG

Michael Burry - Calling a Major Top
- Michael Burry says the market may be near a "major top."
- Warned of the possibility of a 1987-style market drop.
- He is short names including Nvidia, Palantir, Tesla and semiconductor stocks.
- Main concern is stretched valuations and crowded trades unwinding quickly.
- This may be the 100th top he has called since the GFC ----

NVIDIA TURNS GPUs INTO AN ASSET CLASS
- Nvidia signed preliminary agreements with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure.
- The Wall Street firms would create dedicated pools of capital to finance Nvidia-based data centers and compute infrastructure at what Nvidia calls attractive rates for customers.
- Jensen Huang: “This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class.” Nvidia says the compute assets now generate revenue and can increasingly be financed like infrastructure.
- Nvidia could backstop as much as 25% of individual investments on a case-by-case basis - potentially up to about $125 billion if applied across the full program.

STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE BREAKS 300 MILLION
- The Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell by 6.1 million barrels to 298.7 million barrels for the week ended Aug. 7 - below 300 million for the first time since January 1983.
- The SPR started 2026 around 415 million barrels, meaning more than 100 million barrels have already come out this year as releases were used to offset disruptions from the Iran conflict.
- The reserve's authorized storage capacity is roughly 714 million barrels, leaving current inventories at about 42% of capacity.
- Oil on the rise last week

Earnings and such

Toyota - Big Buyback, Better Outlook
- Toyota raised its annual operating-profit forecast 13%, helped by the weaker yen.
- Announced a share buyback worth up to $6.3 billion.
- Quarterly operating profit still fell 9%, hurt by China weakness and higher Middle East-related costs.

McDonald's - Value Problem
- U.S. same-store sales rose just 0.8%, below expectations and well below last year's 2.5% growth.
- Management blamed weak execution of value promotions and fewer digital deals. (and probably because everyone is taking weight loss drugs - see above)
- Lower-income customer traffic remains a major pressure point.
- McDonald's is bringing back more digital offers and loyalty promotions to drive traffic.

Eli Lilly - Weight-Loss Machine
- Lilly crushed Q2 expectations as Mounjaro and Zepbound drove most of the growth.
- Mounjaro sales hit $9.94 billion; Zepbound brought in $4.93 billion.
- Raised 2026 revenue guidance to $85-$87 billion.
- Verzenio, its major breast-cancer drug, remains one of Lilly's biggest non-obesity products.
- Lilly continues widening its lead over Novo Nordisk in the obesity-drug market.

Disney - Parks Keep Printing Money
- Quarterly adjusted EPS rose 28% to $2.06, beating the $1.86 estimate.
- Parks and experiences revenue increased 10% to nearly $10 billion.
- Global park attendance grew 4%.
- Disney is selling its 50% stake in A+E Networks to Hearst for an estimated $1.2 billion.

Oil - OPEC Adds Barrels, Maybe
- OPEC+ agreed to raise September production targets by another 188,000 barrels per day.
- The increase completes the rollback of a 1.65 million-barrel-per-day supply cut dating back to 2023. (In other words - planned so not a surprise)
- Actual supply remains constrained because several producers are already pumping below quota.
- Any normalization around the Strait of Hormuz could suddenly make OPEC+'s additional barrels much more important.

Berkshire Hathaway - Greg Abel Starts Spending
- Q2 operating earnings rose 16% to about $13 billion.
- Berkshire bought $23.5 billion of stocks and sold just $3.7 billion - its first quarter as a net stock buyer in 14 quarters.
- Bought back $4.5 billion of Berkshire shares, versus only $235 million in Q1.
- Cash dropped from roughly $380 billion to $365 billion as Abel starts putting the massive cash pile to work.
- Important shift: Buffett is still chairman, but this is one of the clearest signs yet of how Greg Abel may allocate capital differently as CEO.

Situational Awareness - Nearly Blows Up, Investors Want Back In
- The fund lost 67% in July after leveraged AI bets collapsed and forced a major stock sale to Citadel.
- Despite the blowup, Situational Awareness was still up about 80% for 2026 because of huge earlier gains.
- Bloomberg says Silicon Valley investors are already asking to put more money into the fund.
- Situational Awareness is currently telling prospective investors it is not accepting new capital.
- The fund has also continued making large private investments even after the near-collapse.
--- Most recent was a $400B
---- There is some talk that Citadel made out like a bandit on the rescue

Mercedes AMG - The Car Literally Brands You
- Two Mercedes AMG owners filed a class-action lawsuit claiming the metal AMG logo embedded in the seat becomes dangerously hot in the sun.
- One driver says he suffered first- and second-degree burns, with a dermatologist describing the injury as "AMG inscribed."
- The lawsuit wants Mercedes to cover damages and remove the metal logos from affected vehicles.
- Hard to beat this one: pay AMG money and get the logo branded into your back.

Europe's Drought - History Starts Popping Out
- Extreme drought and low river levels are exposing things that have been underwater or hidden for decades or centuries.
- In Serbia, sunken German World War II warships have reappeared in the Danube.
- In Britain, dry ground revealed outlines of medieval buildings; mammoth remains and ancient structures have also surfaced elsewhere.
- Serious drought story, but visually one of the strangest side effects of the summer.

Golden Toilet - $6 Million Flush
- The 18-carat gold toilet was ripped out of Blenheim Palace in a five-minute raid and has never been recovered - but there is a conviction.
- Prosecutors used phone data, forensic evidence and planning activity to link the gang to the theft.
- One defendant had cased the palace beforehand and photographed entry points; another man had already pleaded guilty and admitted helping move the stolen gold.
- Prosecutors believe the 98-kilo toilet was quickly cut up or melted down and sold as gold.
- So the conviction was based on evidence of the robbery and disposal - not on recovering the actual toilet.

Final Follow Up
SpaceX - Space Junk Smashes Into the Moon
- A dead SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage crashed into the moon at about 5,400 mph after drifting through space since January 2025.
- The roughly 4-ton, school-bus-size object kicked up a lunar dust plume that astronomers detected from Chile.
- The impact was accidental - solar activity and gravity gradually pushed the abandoned rocket stage onto a collision course.
- NASA and SpaceX are now discussing ways to prevent future lunar crashes as more hardware heads toward the moon.
- NEED Space garbage Trucks - something we have discussed on show for years (see next)

Space Garbage Trucks - This Is Becoming a Business
- Astroscale is building spacecraft designed to inspect, capture and remove dead satellites and other orbital debris.
- Its ADRAS-J mission demonstrated close approach and inspection of a large piece of existing space junk - a key step before actually grabbing and removing debris.
- ClearSpace is developing similar debris-removal spacecraft, including missions designed to rendezvous with and capture abandoned rocket hardware.
- The business model is basically orbital towing: governments and satellite operators pay to remove dangerous junk or service aging spacecraft.
- With tens of thousands of tracked objects already in orbit, "space sanitation" could become a real infrastructure business.

 

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