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☕️ GM Munchers! My wife asked why I seem grumpy on a Monday when the market's doing great. I said a green portfolio doesn't unload the dishwasher. She agreed, then started handing me dishes anyways.

On today’s menu:

• 📉 Bad Jobs, Record Highs, Big Week

• 💰 Warren Buffett's Company Is Finally Buying Stocks Again

• 🚀 SpaceX Ripped 16%

• 🏠 AirBnb Makes A Comeback

• 😏 Buy This Stock Tomorrow

Friday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

📉 Bad Jobs, Record Highs, Big Week

The stock market just did something strange: it hit an all-time high on bad news. The economy actually lost 23,000 jobs in July, and wage growth slowed to its weakest pace in years. Normally that sinks stocks. Instead, the S&P 500 closed Friday at a brand-new record and posted its best week since April.

Why? Because a weak job market means the Fed is far less likely to raise interest rates. Bad news for workers became good news for stocks. That's the world we're in right now.

The Big One This Week: Wednesday's Inflation Report. Here's what everything hinges on. The July inflation report comes out Wednesday. After that soft jobs number, the market now believes the Fed will hold rates steady instead of hiking. Wednesday's number either confirms that hope or blows it up.

• 📊 Cool number: The record rally likely keeps going, and rate-hike fears fade.

• 🔥 Hot number: Hike worries come roaring back, and these record highs could wobble fast.

The Iran Update: Over the weekend, Iran and Oman said they're close to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the route for 20% of the world's oil. But there's a catch: Iran is demanding concessions first, and the emerging deal actually gives Iran more control of the waterway. So watch oil Monday morning. Falling oil means traders believe it. A jump means they don't.

📅 Also This Week: Big AI names CoreWeave, Cisco, and Applied Materials report earnings, giving another read on whether the AI boom is still booming. Retail sales land Friday.

The Munch Take: This is a "let the week come to you" setup. The market is priced for a friendly Fed and a calmer Middle East, which means the risk this week isn't missing out, it's a surprise. A hot inflation print Wednesday is the one thing that could crack this record run. Don't chase the highs, don't panic-sell a rumor, just watch Wednesday's number and Monday's oil. My wife asked if we should do anything special this week. I said watch, wait, and don't touch anything until Wednesday. She said that's the same advice I give every week. It is, and it's the same advice that's kept us in this record-setting market the whole way up.

💰 Warren Buffett's Company Is Finally Buying Stocks Again

For three straight years, the smartest patient money on Earth did nothing but sell. Berkshire Hathaway ($BRK.B), the company built by Warren Buffett and now run by his successor Greg Abel, spent 14 quarters in a row selling more stocks than it bought, piling up the largest cash hoard in corporate history. That just changed, and it's worth paying attention to.

Last quarter, Berkshire flipped. It bought about $23.5 billion in stocks and sold only $3.7 billion, a net purchase of roughly $20 billion. That's the first time in over three years the company has been a net buyer. It also bought back $4.5 billion of its own stock, the most in five years. The cash pile dropped from a record $397 billion to $365 billion, still a staggering war chest, but finally moving.

The Star Buy Was Google: The headline purchase is Alphabet. Abel more than tripled Berkshire's stake, and Google cracked the top five holdings for the first time ever, joining Apple, Amex, Bank of America, and Coca-Cola. Buffett even admitted missing Google early was a "historic mistake" he's now correcting, citing its AI potential.

Here's The Contradiction: This is where it gets interesting. The "Buffett Indicator", Buffett's own favorite gauge of whether stocks are cheap or expensive, is sitting at an all-time high, flashing "extremely overvalued." So why is Abel buying into the priciest market ever? Two reasons. First, even in an expensive market, individual bargains exist, and Abel clearly thinks Google was one. Second, and this is the sober part, that mountain of leftover cash is itself a warning. Neither Buffett nor Abel would sit on $365 billion if they thought stocks broadly were a steal.

And The Stock Has Lagged: For all its legendary discipline, Berkshire is up only about 5% this year while the S&P 500 is up around 13%. Sitting in cash while momentum and AI names ran wild has cost Berkshire dearly in the short term.

The Munch Take: Here's what makes this genuinely fascinating. The most disciplined value investors alive just started buying, but they did it selectively, into one AI-adjacent bargain, while still holding a record pile of cash that screams "everything else is too expensive." That's not a "the coast is clear, buy everything" signal. It's the opposite: a reminder that even in a nosebleed market, patient investors wait for the one fat pitch and swing hard only when it comes, ignoring the rest. Berkshire lagging the S&P by 8 points this year is the price of that discipline, and it's a price Buffett has always been willing to pay, because the years cash looks dumb are the years right before it looks brilliant. The lesson isn't "buy what Berkshire bought." It's that doing nothing, then acting decisively on one great idea, beats chasing everything that's hot.

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STOCK OF THE DAY

🚀 SpaceX Ripped 16% Right When It Was Supposed To Crash

Talk about a plot twist. For weeks we've warned you about SpaceX's ($SPCX) share lockup, the August 6th event where 911.5 million insider shares became free to sell, more than doubling the tradable stock. The textbook says that flood of new supply crushes the price. Instead, the stock did the opposite. It rose 6% Thursday when the lockup hit, then surged nearly 16% Friday to close around $125.

So what happened? Simple: the feared wave of insider selling never showed up. When a lockup expires and everyone braces for a dump that doesn't come, relief kicks in and buyers pile back in. As one IPO expert put it, most of the time extra supply pushes a stock down, but not always, and this was one of the exceptions.

A couple of other things helped light the fire:

• 🏗️ A new Texas project: SpaceX announced a major new build-out that gave investors something fresh to get excited about.

• 💻 The Cursor deal: News that SpaceX's roughly $60 billion acquisition of AI coding company Cursor could close as soon as this week added fuel.

• 👀 Special Report: 70% of the Fortune 100 depend on this mystery AI stock (via Oxford Club)

Zoom out and the picture is wild. This stock hit an all-time low of $108 just last Wednesday after a brutal post-earnings drop, then rallied hard for three straight days. Same company, same business, totally different mood in 72 hours.

Any Catalysts This Week? Honestly, not really. The two big events, first-ever earnings and the lockup, are both behind it now. That means this week SpaceX likely trades on momentum and headlines rather than any scheduled news. After the whiplash of the last two weeks, boring might actually be a nice change.

The Munch Take: This is a perfect lesson in how "obvious" bad news often isn't. Everyone, us included, watched that lockup coming like a freight train, and the stock went up anyway, precisely because everyone expected it to go down. When the whole market braces for one outcome, the surprise is usually the opposite. That doesn't mean SpaceX is suddenly safe, it's still down 45% from its peak, still spending $18 billion a quarter, and still wildly volatile. But it's a reminder that trading around a scheduled scary event is a great way to get faked out. The business didn't change this week. Only the mood did.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

🥇 Free Report from Investors Alley: Ray Dalio: Buy Gold. Get Paid.

🍔 $WEN Wendy's jumped 4.06% even after pulling its full-year outlook AND cutting its dividend. That combo usually sinks a stock, but investors decided the new CEO's turnaround signs mattered more. Sometimes the market forgives the bad news if it believes the plan.

🏠 $ABNB Airbnb soared 17.43% to a four-year high on an earnings beat and strong guidance. Same story we keep seeing this season: people will slash a lot of spending before they give up their vacation.

💻 Software Had A Party After strong quarters and raised outlooks, the software names ripped. $NET Cloudflare added 5.57%, $TEAM Atlassian exploded 35.31%, and $TWLO Twilio rallied 24.89%. A reminder that "AI is coming for software" was the fear a year ago, and these companies keep proving they're selling AI, not getting eaten by it.

📉 $TTD The Trade Desk cratered 21.90% on an earnings miss and weak guidance. In a season where the market punishes any hint of a slowdown, a real miss gets you taken to the woodshed.

👟 $UAA Under Armour slipped 4.53% after cutting its annual revenue outlook on soft consumer demand. Another data point in the "shoppers are getting careful" file that keeps growing every week.

TRADING SUCCESS

🤑 Monday Motivation

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 😏 Buy this stock tomorrow (Ad)

2. 🏘️ This is a really bad sign for the housing market.

3. 🇺🇲 Jamie Dimon just sent out a warning.

4. 😬 This prop firm just filed a lawsuit.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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