Fed Speaker Today
12:50 a.m.: Fed Bank of Cleveland President Hammack (Voter) speaks on the outlook and monetary policy before the National Association for Business Economics 2026 Annual Meeting, “Global Structural Reset: AI, Demographics and Geopolitics,”
Cleveland, OH (Virtual access and text available. Moderated Q&A expected)
Questions Over Trump-Russia Diesel and U.S-Iran Proposal: 8 Key Items Shaping the Stock Market Monday
IonQ scoops up a cybersecurity company, Apple and ADT rumors and other headlines moving the market this morning.
ETF Action in the A.M.
Source: TipRanks
Premarket Percent Movers
Source: TheStreet Pro
Positions: None.
Upside, Downside Movers in the Morning
Upside
– $GIXI +135.0% (autonomous robots begin delivering blood and bone marrow at a major hospital, expanding an existing chemotherapy-logistics deployment)
– $CCC +10.5% (GTCR and Elliott are reportedly in advanced acquisition talks, with a deal potentially coming this week)
– $MEDS +7.0% (Humana adds the ChemoFx gynecologic-cancer assay to a Medicaid coverage policy)
– $IREN +5.5% (Anthropic is reportedly the previously undisclosed customer behind a multiyear AI-cloud services agreement)
– $BIIB +2.5% (JPMorgan upgrades to Overweight, citing an increasingly compelling clinical-catalyst path)
– $BFLY +1.5% (Canaccord initiates coverage with a Buy rating)
Downside
– $WFF -15.5% (gives back part of Friday’s nearly 500% speculative surge, with no fresh company catalyst identified)
– $QUCY -13.5% (launches an at-the-market equity program allowing up to $100 million of share sales)
– $MU -2.5%, $MRVL -2.0%, $INTC -1.5% (chip stocks weaken as advanced-memory competition and concerns over AI spending weigh on the sector)
Charting the S&P 500: New Highs, But Was It Convincing Enough?
The S&P joined the Nasdaq in printing a new high this past week, but can it continue?
More Tales From Nvidia: Who Could Have Predicted This One? (Issue #260)
And Meta ($META) got what, about four weeks out of it, and they spent $500 billion and gave it away for free?! This is the economics of AI to a T:
Meanwhile:
And From September 23:
BY DOUG KASS · Sep 23, 2026, 7:35 AM EDT
More Tales From Nvidia: I’m Not Trying to Call the Stocks But Consider That Muse Was Offered for Free! (Issue #253)
“Muse personal AI agent is free to use with a generous weekly usage limit (such as up to 100 million tokens per week), though paid subscription tiers are available if you need higher usage capacity.”
– From AI
### Does Anyone Do Their Homework Anymore?
Not that I am or have been trying to call the stocks, because that is a fool’s errand these days, especially in these types of mania-driven markets. But it is fun to occasionally comment on the markets relative to the underlying fundamentals and business issues.
Monday and Tuesday were a combination of a gamma squeeze aided and abetted by Facebook’s Muse announcement.
For those that don’t know, Muse is Facebook’s personal assistant app, a theoretical AI agent, that made it to the top of the app stores download list, helping to inspire the gamma squeeze rip of the last two days.
Why did it make it to the top of the list? Because it is both new and FREE! (I don’t recall a single person in the business media saying this!)
Hundreds of billions of investment, and this is what they have to show for it? A free, largely non-differentiated personal assistant app that Amazon ($AMZN) has already cut off from shopping its site? And an app, that after the novelty factor wears off, will probably not be used all that much and likely never generate any economics, because it is free and of limited real utility and effectiveness. Guess what, people actually like shopping themselves, that is why they do it!
Heck, even Angry Birds costs money (and generates economics).
My guess, this thing goes the way of the Metaverse and Threads.
If any thing speaks volumes about AI, not sure if it is this, or it is OpenAI spending $22.5 million of compute to win a $1 million prize and needing to cheat along the way to even do that!
Coincidentally per prior on Muse, I just saw these.
The reference to Amazon is their theoretical no human convenience stores where AI was supposed to figure out everything you put in your basket. Turns out they had humans in India watching people on cameras. End of day, none of it ended up working, it lost too much money, and they shut all the stores anyway. Same for McDonald’s ($MCD) automated AI ordering system, where “no onions” seemed problematic for the AI to get right. I guess I was too optimistic, hundreds of billions of investment, and Meta ($META) still needs the humans too, because the AI still does not work.
Trillions of dollars of market cap added across the board due to this? And PS, Meta already paid for the junk they have in place to do this. They would have been better off buying offshore call centers for pennies on the dollar. Incidentally, that is one more thing AI was supposed to replace, but the opposite is happening, because it turns out Gen AI is multiples more expensive than cheap offshore labor.
Positions: Short NVDA S
Investors Face a Hidden Bear Market as We Head Into Earnings Season
Bank earnings and CPI this week will offer clues on how the gap between AI and everything else closes.
The Consumer Is Spent Up, Not Pent Up (Part Deux)
From Bramo in support of my consumer is spent up and not pent up thesis:
From late August:
The Consumer Is Spent Up, Not Pent Up
* The cumulative or “stacked” inflation (since 2000) is weighing on the consumer sector
* This, coupled with the shrinking savings rate, is critical to the outlook for equities given the role of consumer spending and the large swath of stocks dependent on the consumer...
Combine the flatlining in real disposable income:
With the dwindling savings rate:
And the outlook for consumer spending over the next 12 months is poor. The shares of Costco ($COST), Walmart ($WMT), Dick’s Sporting Goods ($DKS) and other consumer-related equities already “know this.”
BY Doug Kass · Aug 27, 2026, 7:10 AM EDT
Position: None