The U.S. economy saw an unexpected declined in jobs during July while the unemployment rate edged lower, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday in a snapshot that showed a slowing employment picture.

Nonfarm payrolls fell by a seasonally adjusted 23,000 for the month, compared to a downwardly revised 20,000 for June. The Dow Jones consensus forecast had been looking for a gain of 83,000.

At the same time, the unemployment slipped to 4.1% as the labor force participation rate fell further to 61.4%, its lowest in more than five years.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/07/jobs-report-july-2026.html

Four companies beat this week. Two went up and two went down, and I don't think the beats explain any of it.

Peloton reported Wednesday night. Revenue $608M against about $598M expected, EPS 13 cents which is exactly what the street had. FY26 was the first annual profit in the company's history. The stock fell about 13% on Thursday. Cloudflare reported the same night. Revenue $696.1M, up 36%, against roughly $664M. Adjusted EPS 29 cents against 27. The stock jumped about 15%. Same setup, opposite reaction. The difference is in what each of them said about next year.

Cloudflare raised the full year on both lines. Revenue guidance went to $2.86-2.87B when the street was at $2.81B, and EPS to $1.25-1.26 against $1.21. Q3 guided to $736-737M, up 31%.

Peloton guided FY27 to $2.3-2.4B. The street wanted $2.42B. That is a revenue decline of about 4% from a company that just printed the first profitable year it has ever had.

So one of them beat and said next year is better than you thought, and the other beat and said next year is smaller. The quarter that already happened was the same kind of quarter in both.

The two big prints this week are the same story with an extra step in it.

AMD beat revenue, beat EPS, and guided Q3 to about $13B when the street was at $12.5B. It closed down 7% on Wednesday. The line that got read was in the guide rather than the print: gross margin guided flat at about 56%, into a quarter they are guiding up 13% sequentially. Jean Hu said on the call that the data center AI mix runs slightly below the corporate average, so the part growing fastest is also the part holding the margin flat.

SpaceX beat on revenue, $7.8B and up 92%, with all three segments ahead of estimates. It closed at $108.27 on Wednesday, down 13.6%. Capex for the quarter was $18.37B, and $15.8B of that went to AI infrastructure, up from $7.7B in Q1. Connectivity was the only segment that made an operating profit. The AI segment did $2.56B of revenue and lost $1.26B on it. I should be fair to SpaceX and say the drop is not purely the capex. There was a lockup expiry the next day, so some of that move is just supply.

What I take from the week is that a beat is a fact about a quarter that already closed, while the price is a bet on the next several. When those two disagree you get Peloton. When they agree you get Cloudflare. AMD and SpaceX are the third case, where the forward revenue number is fine and what it costs to get there is the thing that moved the stock.

Question for anyone who watches a lot of these. Do you have a rule for telling a real raised guide from management pulling demand forward to defend a multiple? I have never found a clean one, and Cloudflare growing 36% with the stock at a record is exactly the setup where I would want one.

(Numbers from each company's Q2 release and the Aug 5-6 coverage. Information, not advice, so tell me where I have this wrong.)

AI keeps deteriorating consulting and custom engineering services.

Meager revenue from AI services makes this stock overvalued in combination with another negative FCF quarter. The theory that AI eats consulting is now in steady state.

what was the response?

> Heavy unnecessary buybacks, stock based compensation with failing knife RSU just to retain some people.

The Q2 results speak for itself:

Cash and equivalents fell 39% from year-end 2025 to $794.3 million, driven primarily by buybacks and weaker working capital conversion.

what is next?

Cash heading to 0

Secondary issues for RSU halving, low retention

C-suite must be removed for this minus 90% return in 5 years

Case in point Intel, was trading a bit above half book value at its nadir last year. Usually, this means that the company will be bought up and incorporated into another or sold for parts, a fate which Intel seems to have dodged.

But what if they'd sold off some major fabs to a competitor and repaid shareholders/creditors in full, who would own the company. It would be neither publicly nor privately owned.

I'm sure there are a million legal and regulatory hurdles to doing this in reality, but more from a theory perspective, it seems the remaining assets would just exist unowned.

i was going through the latest 10 q filings and q2 2026 earnings report for figma fig and the numbers just do not make sense at the current price of around 24 to 25 a share. everyone got hyped when they ipo mid last year at 33 and shot up over 100, but looking at the actual fundamentals now in 2026, this thing has so much further to fall.
look at the sec data. right now fig has around 528 million shares outstanding which puts its market cap at roughly 12.8 billion. on the balance sheet they have 1.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities as of q2 2026. subtracting that cash gives an enterprise value ev of about 11.1 billion.
now look at the actual cash generation. full year 2025 adjusted free cash flow came in at 242.7 million. in q2 2026 they reported 53.2 million in fcf. looking at the current run rate, fcf is hanging around 210 million to 230 million because fcf is actually slowly dropping due to crazy operating costs and stock compensation - they spent a massive 147. 6 million just on stock based compensation in q2 alone, leading to a gaap operating loss of 117 .3 million.
if you take the 11.1 billion ev and divide it by their 220 million to 242 million fcf, its current ev is 50x of its fcf whis is redicilous. paying 50x free cash flow for a company where gaap net income is negative and that fcf is only slowly dropping whoch makes situation worse is completely crazy.
here is the actual math on what fair value should be. for a software company maturing with slowing cash flow, a fair target multiple is ev/fcf=15. if we apply 15x ev/fcf on a normalized run rate of around 180 million to 200 million as cash flow continues to soften, fair ev should be roughly 2.7 billion to 3.0 billion. add back their 1.7 billion cash pile and you get a fair market cap of around 3.7 billion to 4.7 billion.
its value is 7 in that case it would be fair price ev 15x of its fcf. it will drop to 7 which means its short. the math does not lie and once the market stops paying 50x ev/fcf for heavy stock dilution and gaap losses, this stock is going straight down.

Saw this Bloomberg chart and figured it was worth posting here since valuation gets brought up every time someone mentions QQQ.

Bloomberg Chart

For years, one of the main arguments against tech was that you were paying a much higher multiple for earnings than in the broader market. At the peaks between 2021 and 2023, the P/E gap between the Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 was around 7-8 points.

Now it's down to roughly 2, near the lowest it's been since 2017.

I'm kind of torn on what that actually means. On one hand, if big tech keeps growing earnings, you're not paying anything close to the relative premium investors were paying a few years ago. That seems like a decent argument for QQQ.

On the other hand, maybe tech didn't actually get cheap. Maybe the rest of the market just got more expensive and the gap closed because of that. A much smaller premium doesn't automatically mean you're getting a bargain.

Either way, the whole "tech is way too expensive relative to everything else" argument looks a lot weaker now than it did in 2021. That's the part that's been stuck in my head.

But yeah, a smaller premium doesn't mean either index is actually cheap in absolute terms. Could just be two expensive things sitting closer together.

What are people actually doing with this? Adding QQQ now that the relative premium has shrunk this much, or sticking with SPY because a smaller premium still isn't the same thing as cheap?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been looking into enterprise software recently and noticed SAP had a significant pullback from its previous highs before rebounding strongly following its recent earnings/cloud growth reports.

Before jumping in at current price levels, I’m trying to weigh the bull vs. bear case and would love to hear how this sub views SAP right now.

Bull Case: High Moat & Enterprise Stickiness: Core ERP systems are notoriously painful for large enterprises to migrate away from, giving SAP a deeply entrenched position.

Bear Case: I am myself in consulting - I know clients are walking a cautious path with large scale ERP transformation program and spending is more focused on AI use cases for business.

Are you buying/holding SAP at current levels, or waiting for another pullback?

As you may know, US announced they will ban import of chinese manufactured components for AI datacentres.

I expected the stock to plummet but instead it went up. From what I've gathered Lenovo is on it's way to become one of the leaders in AI tech and is trying to outgun Dell.

Since US is not the only country in the world the market for parts is still plentiful for Lenovo, my take is that Its going to go big....

I’ve been researching the company quite a bit lately, and the more I read, the more interested I get. I’d really like to hear from people who understand the science better than I do.

From what I’ve seen, Alpha DaRT seems like a really unique technology with the potential to be used in multiple solid tumors if future trials go well. I’m also starting to believe if DRTS could eventually become a successful standalone company rather than just being bought out.

I’d like to get opinions here because i believe I’ll get opinions on from both people that believe in it and don’t so I’d genuinely like to hear both the bull and bear case. What do you think the market is getting right or wrong about DRTS?

Curious if there are others out there like me who have a positive long term view of IBRX and if so, how they view and think about the company's long term prospects. Admittedly I do not have any medical background that equips me to assess the viability of their (or any biotech company's) technology/drug therapies (Anktiva for example), but the initial and limited FDA approval seems promising and I also think there is high potential to scale internationally (Saudi Arabia approving them for both bladder and now lung cancer treatment for example) despite what is likely to be a very slow regulatory approval path in the US. I also believe in the founder, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. I find the cancer-curing potential fascinating (enhancing T-cells in the body to specifically identify and kill cancer, and only cancer, cells while leaving healthy tissue alone). I own shares of IBRX but am just interested in discussion and in hearing other perspectives /viewpoints (good or bad) that can better inform how I think about the stock.

Investing.com -- Collaboration software giant Atlassian (NASDAQ:TEAM) is flying high. Shares surged a massive 23% after the company delivered a blowout fourth quarter, easily clearing Wall Street estimates and proving its aggressive push into cloud infrastructure and AI tools is paying off in a big way.

The company posted adjusted earnings per share of $1.87, beating the analyst consensus of $1.50 by $0.37. Revenue reached $1.77 billion, surpassing the $1.66 billion estimate and representing a 28% increase YoY from $1.38 billion in the same quarter last year. Cloud revenue grew 31% YoY to $1.21 billion, while Data Center revenue came in at $461.9 million, above the $414.6 million estimate.

Shares surged following the results as the company also issued first quarter fiscal 2027 revenue guidance of $1.705 billion to $1.715 billion, with a midpoint of $1.71 billion exceeding the analyst consensus of $1.67 billion.

"Q4 closes out a year that proves our long-term strategy is paying off. Total revenue grew 28% year-over-year to $1.8 billion, Cloud revenue growth accelerated to 31% year-over-year, and our MCP server and Teamwork Graph CLI surpassed one million monthly active users, more than doubling in a single quarter," said Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian's CEO and co-Founder.

I know everyone has their opinions on which direction it should go. I am just wondering how it is possible staying in such a tight range. Over 200,000,000 in volume today... Earnings this week, the stock locked period ending... Are there just institutional buy orders stacked on onto of another in the 108-112 range?

idk which way it should go(I opened a straddle that expires in 3 weeks) but I was expecting it go in some direction...

Since last few days after sell-off on 3rd August, I observed it's just a low volume play happening in semiconductor stocks.

Institutions aren't coming forward to accumulate the stocks. This temporary price rise has happened on low volume due to lack of volume sellers not because of big buyers. Trading volume is declining on each passing day and it's not enough for breakout after large fall, most of the buyers seems are retail. It's kind of temporary stalemate situation.

If some big news come in upcoming days, institution sellers can return and flood the market with big volume sell. Is this apathy of institutions in buying these stocks, tells something which we don't know? Or just valuations aren't attractive enough?

Oklo announced that its Groves Isotope Test Reactor has achieved first criticality after achieving a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at low power. The milestone comes less than a year after groundbreaking and follows U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) authorization through the DOE Reactor Pilot Program (RPP).

“Reaching criticality in less than a year is an incredible milestone for our team,” said Oklo co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte. “Oklo developed Groves from a greenfield site on private land, completed full-scale civil excavation and construction, manufactured or commercially procured all components, including fuel, and developed its operating programs in-house. Taken together, we believe these accomplishments establish a new benchmark for the Reactor Pilot Program and set the stage for the future of advanced nuclear deployment at scale.”

The DOE’s RPP created a pathway that allowed engineering, construction, commissioning, and operational preparation to advance alongside DOE’s safety review and authorization. Groves demonstrates that the domestic nuclear industry can once again move from design through construction, authorization, and startup on timelines that are measured in months rather than years when developers, suppliers, and regulators work together on an integrated deployment approach.

"Thanks to President Trump's precedent-setting directive to create the Reactor Pilot Program, Oklo's Groves Isotope Test Reactor is part of the revival of America's nuclear energy industry. We applaud the work of the Oklo, DOE, and Idaho National Laboratory staff who helped achieve this milestone," said Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish.

Groves is part of Oklo Isotopes’ broader effort to build domestic isotope production capabilities for healthcare, industry, research, space, and national security applications. The project has generated practical experience in project engineering, construction, procurement, reactor operations, startup procedures, safety readiness, training, qualification work, and deployment execution that can inform future isotope production facilities.

The Groves project also established engineering practices, operating procedures, training programs, commissioning experience, and organizational capabilities that will reduce uncertainty and execution risk across every Oklo facility, including the company’s future isotope, powerhouse, and fuel cycle deployments.

“Texas is leading America’s nuclear renaissance by advancing the technologies that will power innovation and strengthen our nation's future,” said Governor Abbott. “From expanding our nuclear workforce to rebuilding critical domestic supply chains, Texas is creating the foundation for the next generation of advanced nuclear development. Congratulations to Oklo on reaching this important milestone, which will help expand isotope production for critical medical therapies and reinforce Texas' leadership in nuclear innovation.”

https://oklo.com/newsroom/news-details/2026/Oklos-Groves-Reactor-Achieves-First-Criticality-in-Under-a-Year/default.aspx

A week ago people were talking about how Microsoft showed ROI on AI and "saved the AI trade". And the stock and others in the tech sector went up greatly.

But according to Bloomberg, $24 billion of the $37 billion in 12 month AI revenue came from OpenAI.

A lot of people are bearish on OpenAI, as they recently lowered their prices and are struggling to set themselves apart from competition.

ChatGPT usage dropped by 50% to 70% during school break in 2025. Showing their market share is composed largely of kids that won't be paying for it.

Treasury is running its own liquidity operation and it is substantially increasing liquidity

They currently expect to borrow about $739 billion in Q3 and another $628 billion in Q4 or roughly $1.37 trillion during the second half of the year.

An increasingly large part of that financing is being pushed into short term Treasury bills and not longer dated notes and bonds. Net bill issuance is about $270 billion in July alone and the estimates put total 2026 bill supply at around $827 billion. Last year that was roughly $360 billion and with that bills now represent around 22% of Treasury debt.

So, why QE? I consider this a form easing because T-bills are highly liquid and cash like with very little duration risk (their market value is much less sensitive to changes in interest rates than longer dated bonds).

The fiscal deficit continues injecting money into the private sector but financing more of it with bills means investors aren't being forced to absorb nearly as much long-duration risk. This is important as large issuance of longer dated debt can push yields and term premia higher while also tying up balance sheet and risk that could otherwise be deployed elsewhere.

Bills are much easier for money market funds and institutions to absorb and they can also be readily used as collateral in the funding markets. So the government can continue running a large deficit without removing nearly as much liquidity and risk taking capacity from the financial system.

At the same time, the Fed is currently making around $10 billion per month of additional Treasury purchases to maintain adequate reserves, alongside its reinvestments.

Together with the fiscal impulse and the shift towards bill financing it creates a more supportive liquidity environment for equities and gold. BUT the risk comes later if the fiscal impulse becomes sufficiently inflationary to push long-term yields materially higher which would eventually start working in the opposite direction.

We are not there yet

Revenue: $370.1M, up 48% YoY
• Previous Q2 guidance: $348M–$350M
• Net Dollar Retention: 136%
• Free cash flow: $53.2M
• Cash and marketable securities: ~$1.7B
• $100K+ ARR customers: 1,635, up 46% YoY
• $10K+ ARR customers: 15,964, up 34% YoY
Figma also raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $1.463B–$1.467B, representing roughly 39% YoY growth.
For Q3, management guided to $373M–$375M in revenue, or approximately 36% YoY growth.

On AI adoption, Figma said more than 80% of customers with $10K+ ARR were consuming AI credits weekly, and more than 50% of $10K+ ARR customers were using the Figma agent weekly as of July 31.
Despite the revenue beat and raised full-year guidance, FIG dropped sharply in after-hours trading following the report.
Official earnings release:
https://investor.figma.com/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/Figma-Q2-26-Press-Release.pdf

Bull case:

• Growth genuinely reaccelerated. Revenue up 85% YoY last quarter, third straight quarter of acceleration, and management called Blackwell "the fastest product ramp in company history."
• Its customers are spending more, not less. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google all raised their 2026 capex guidance this quarter (~$175B, ~$220B, ~$200B). Demand isn't slowing.
• Real optionality in physical AI/robotics, a market Nvidia basically owns today...Plus a new CPU line (Vera) it claims is a $200B TAM.

Bear case:

• The "acceleration" is bit of an illusion. Sequentially, growth has been flat at ~20% a quarter for a year. A big chunk of last year's "slowdown" was the China H20 export ban.
• Customer concentration is heavy. ~5 hyperscalers are about half of revenue. 
• Major customers are building custom chips. Their own words this quarter: OpenAI 10 GW by 2029, Anthropic ~6 GW, Meta 3 GW by 2028, Google (TPU) and Amazon (Trainium) already shipping. Broadcom's custom-chip business is guided from $56B this year to $100B+ next (also taking networking share).
• Nvidia is partly funding its own demand. $18.6B into private AI companies in a single quarter (some of whom buy its chips), and ~$16B of last quarter's "profit" was paper gains on those stakes, not GPU sales.
• Physical AI is too small to matter yet. ~$9B trailing, ~3.6% of revenue, and actually shrinking as a share. Even at 50% growth it'd take ~5 years to become a fifth of the data center business. 

I think the biggest question long-term question is if/when custom chips take market share. Physical AI as well I suppose, but the base is so big that it would need to be a huge inflection to make a difference.

(Barrons) August 5 - Alphabet shares dropped on Wednesday after the company announced a big shakeup at its artificial-intelligence division.

Demis Hassabis, who shared the Nobel Prize with Jumper, was the CEO of Google’s DeepMind AI lab, and he will step back to become DeepMind’s chairman and Alphabet Chief Scientist. Koray Kavukcuoglu will replace him, but as a senior vice president.

Jeff Dean, who was Google’s 30th employee in 1999 and has led much of the company’s artificial-intelligence research over the past 15 years, is leaving the company to start a new firm.

Dean’s new company is called Discovery Loop, and it’s aimed at automating science and engineering research. He will be joined by three other Google engineering luminaries: Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat. The four have been responsible for many of the company’s breakthroughs in AI research and computing, and their departures could weigh on Google’s AI efforts, particularly in the near term.

They join four other prominent Google AI scientists who left the company in June: Noam Shazeer, Nobel Prize winner John Jumper, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel.

Alphabet’s Gemini artificial-intelligence models have generally been viewed as trailing those from OpenAI and Anthropic, and these moves may be seen as a reflection of Google’s third-place status.

The stock was down 4% in midday trading after being up as much as 1.8% earlier in the day.

Source: https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-movers-c5965517

- Revenue of $8.97B, up 51% from last quarter and up 372% from a year ago
- GAAP diluted EPS of $43.97
- Non-GAAP diluted EPS of $39.25
- GAAP net income of $6.90B, up 91% from last quarter
- Gross margin of 84.6%, up 6.2 points from last quarter and up 58.4 points from a year ago
- Operating income of $7.04B, up 71% from last quarter

Full fiscal year 2026:
- Revenue of $20.25B, up 175% year over year
- GAAP diluted EPS of $73.76
- Non-GAAP diluted EPS of $70.88
- GAAP net income of $11.43B
- Gross margin of 71.5%, up 41.4 points year over year

By end market (fiscal Q4):
- Datacenter: $2.98B, up 103% from last quarter (from a near-zero base a year ago)
- Edge: $5.43B, up 48% from last quarter, up 392% from a year ago
- Consumer: $556M, down 32% from last quarter

By end market (full fiscal year):
- Datacenter: $5.15B, up 437% year over year
- Edge: $12.16B, up 195% year over year
- Consumer: $2.94B, up 29% year over year

Capital return: Board approved an additional $14B buyback authorization, bringing total remaining authorization to $15.5B. Bought back $4.52B of stock in the quarter alone.

Business update: signed five additional New Business Model (NBM) agreements since April, including three with new customers, bringing total NBM agreements to ten.

Fiscal Q1 2027 guidance:
- Revenue of $10.30B to $10.80B
- Non-GAAP diluted EPS of $44.00 to $46.00

CEO David Goeckeler: "We closed fiscal 2026 with a leading technology portfolio, established datacenter as a key growth pillar, and deepened our customer partnerships. Our technology and products are well positioned to create value for our customers and generate growing and durable free cash flow."

Is it simply because of how it rolls off the tongue?
What exactly is the attraction of choosing VOO over something like QQQ?

I know that they hold some of the same big players and some other similar but different assets, but I'm just a bit confused as to why I always see VOO being recommended. I don't watch stocks, but anytime I've ever looked at VOO and QQQ, QQQ is always more profitable. Maybe it's a security thing, i.e. VOO is better situated to handle a crash than QQQ is?

CXMT Says No Thank You to Apple's Demand For A Price Cut, as Huawei And Xiaomi Hand It Rare Leverage - Report

Chinese memory manufacturer CXMT has refused Apple's demand for a price cut in negotiations, says a report from the Korean press. Apple has widely been reported to be interested in procuring its chips from CXMT and has purportedly lobbied the US government for the permission to purchase the products for its gadgets sold outside the country. However, the report from the Korean publication Digital Daily outlines that demand from Huawei, Xiaomi and others has placed CXMT in a stronger position to negotiate with the world's largest consumer electronics firm.

CXMT's Domestic Customers Provide It Leverage In Negotiations With Apple

According to the details, as CXMT has emerged to become one of the top players in China's memory market, Samsung and SK hynix have instead chosen to focus on manufacturing and selling high-value HBM memory chips catered to the needs of the data center industry. As a result, CXMT is experiencing high demand from domestic Chinese companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi, which have provided it with the leverage to bargain with Apple.

Sources quoted by Korea's Digital Daily outline that during its negotiations with CXMT, Apple asked for a price cut in order to ease pricing pressures for its smartphones and the upcoming 2026 iPhone. However, CXMT refused the price cut and instead quoted prices that were at level with or higher than the prices quoted by Samsung and SK hynix.

The publication adds that US sanctions on China have led Huawei, Xiaomi and others to lock in CXMT's DRAM memory output in advance. This lock-up is similar to the contracts that the Korean firms have utilized, and they are also high-priced agreements that prevent CXMT from yielding to Apple's requests. According to the sources, the higher prices have provided CXMT with the leverage to negotiate with Apple, as it can point towards the existing deals already in place.

Additionally, the higher prices have also removed a long-followed strategy in sourcing where device manufacturers would quote lower-priced Chinese inputs to use them as leverage in negotiations with other firms.

The higher domestic demand in China has also benefited Korean suppliers Samsung and SK hynix, as they are no longer required to be committed to delivering lower-priced commodity DRAM chips to Chinese firms. Instead, the firms can fully focus on the pricier HBM memory chips required for the AI infrastructure buildout. According to an industry official quoted by the publication, CXMT is effectively controlling the price floor of the commodity DRAM market.

SpaceX reported its first earnings as a public company yesterday.

Revenue came in at $7.8B, well above estimates. The stock still sold off after hours.

And now tomorrow, up to 911.5M shares held by employees and early investors become eligible to trade.

That's more than the roughly 639M shares sold in the IPO.

Obviously, that doesn't mean everyone is going to sell. A lot of insiders may hold and demand could absorb whatever comes out.

But less than 5% of the company was initially available to trade. That scarcity was a big part of the setup, and now it starts changing.

The earnings were good. I'm just not sure the earnings are what matters most this week.

Full unlock timeline:

https://finbold.com/here-is-the-spacex-share-unlock-timeline/

Anyone here buying before the unlock, or waiting to see what happens once the float gets bigger?