The AI Boom Has a Choke Point. Three Companies Sit On It.

Everyone's buying AI stocks. Almost nobody's asking what happens when the build hits a wall.

Because it will. Not a chip shortage this time — cooling capacity, memory supply, network throughput. The unglamorous parts that decide how fast anything gets built.

That's where the real bottlenecks are forming, and where a different group of companies is quietly winning.

Our free briefing maps the infrastructure behind AI and the 3 names positioned on the choke points.

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☕️ GM Munchers! I hope your weekend was as blissful as mine. I spent Saturday in the backyard doing absolutely nothing productive, then somehow missed dinner at my in-laws on Sunday, a scheduling failure my wife assures me was "extremely convenient." May that same good luck follow us into the market this week.

On today’s menu:

• 📅 Monday Reset: Nvidia, The Fed & Iran

• 📊 Trump's Just Made Over 1,000 Trades

• 🚛 Tesla Is Releasing Something New?

• 🇨🇦 The Trade War Is Back

• 👀 Is It Time To Buy Nvidia?

Friday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

📅 Monday Reset: Nvidia, The Fed & Iran

It's Monday, so let's get you caught up before the market opens. This isn't a quiet week. Nvidia reports earnings Wednesday, the Fed's favorite inflation number drops Friday, and the Fed's own boss gives his first big speech of the year on the same day. Add in a fresh escalation with Iran over the weekend, and this is genuinely one of the busier stretches of the summer.

Start with the weekend news. Iran seized a tanker near Qeshm Island on Thursday, its first confirmed seizure since June. Weekly ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz actually stayed critically low, 73 transits last week versus 91 the week before, even as Iran granted a handful of Iraqi oil tankers narrow permission to pass through. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent holds a press conference today and will lay out Trump's promised "economic isolation" plan against Iran, so expect oil headlines all week.

• 🖥️ Nvidia reports Wednesday after the close. This is the single biggest earnings report of the summer. Chip and AI stocks have wobbled the past two weeks, and Nvidia's results and guidance will decide whether that wobble was noise or the start of something bigger.

• 📊 Core PCE lands Friday morning. This is the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, and economists expect it to show inflation still running around 3.3%, well above the Fed's 2% target.

• ⛰️ Jackson Hole runs Thursday through Saturday. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh gives his first keynote as chair Friday morning, the same day as the PCE report. Traders will parse every word for clues on September's rate decision.

The Munch Take: Having Nvidia earnings, a major inflation report, and the Fed chair's biggest speech of the year all land in the same 48 hours is either terrible scheduling or the market's way of ripping the band-aid off all at once. Toss a fresh Iran headline into that mix and you have a week that can move fast in either direction. Buckle up, because by Friday afternoon we'll actually know a lot more than we do right now.

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STOCK OF THE DAY

📊 Trump's Trading Account Made Over 1,000 Trades In One Month

Somebody's investment account had a genuinely wild June, and it belongs to the President. Trump's latest financial disclosure revealed just over 1,000 stock transactions in a single month, ranging from $78.1 million to $263.1 million in total activity.

The two names getting attention are Meta and Berkshire Hathaway. On June 18, Trump's accounts sold between $1 million and $5 million each of Meta and Motorola, while buying similar-sized stakes in Berkshire Hathaway, Cintas, Visa, and Mastercard on that exact same day. That timing lines up with a market selloff the day before, tied to uncertainty after new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's first policy meeting. Stocks bounced back June 18, and Trump's accounts bought right into that recovery.

• 🔄 The scale is the real story. Over 1,000 trades in one month is far more consistent with a systematic, computer-managed approach than a handful of personal stock picks.

• 💰 The biggest single trade was a sale. Trump's accounts sold $5 million to $25 million of the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF on June 22, then used part of that same day to buy Home Depot and Fidelity National Information Services.

• 🛡️ Defense stocks got choppy too. Trump bought and sold Palantir multiple times through the month, including a big sale on June 18, the same day the U.S. and Iran had agreed to a peace deal days earlier on June 14.

• 🏛️ The White House says hands off. A spokesman maintains the president's assets sit in a trust run by his children and that there are "no conflicts of interest," pointing to the sheer trade volume as evidence of an automated strategy rather than personal picks.

The Munch Take: Whether or not Trump personally picked a single one of these trades, a sitting president's investment account buying and selling is the kind of thing that is always going to raise eyebrows regardless of who is managing it. The trust structure and trade volume make the "hands off" explanation genuinely plausible. It doesn't make the optics any less awkward. Either way, we’ll do a deeper dive on some of these stocks and ETFs in the coming days.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

💰️ FREE Bonus Report: 3 stock symbols for Sept 21 (from Good Morning Alerts)

🚛 $TSLA Tesla popped 5.14% on news it will show off its electric semi truck in Europe next month. The reveal isn't happening yet, but investors already like what they're picturing.

🛒 $BJ BJ's Wholesale Club jumped 5.94% after topping earnings estimates and raising its outlook for the rest of the year. Members clearly kept swiping their cards.

💉 $MRNA Moderna bounced back 8.86% as investors circled back to the company's cancer vaccine trial, buying the dip after some profit-taking a day earlier cooled the initial excitement.

🪙 $CIFR Cipher Digital dropped 8.40% even while crypto broadly rallied, as investors stayed focused on the Bitcoin miner's expensive data center buildout and its $6 billion pile of debt.

💻 $MRVL Marvell slipped 5.57% as the market digested a deal giving Google the option to buy up to roughly 58.97 million shares, worth about $12 billion. A big vote of confidence from Google still came with some dilution baggage attached.

MARKET NEWS

🇨🇦 Carney Just Said The Words Nobody Wanted To Hear: Trade War

The Canada deal we told you was close just fell apart. Trade talks collapsed late Friday night, and new 50% U.S. tariffs on Canadian hockey sticks, building materials, liquor, and clothing took effect at midnight heading into Saturday. Prime Minister Mark Carney called it "a miscalculation" Saturday morning, blaming "uneconomic" and "unfair" demands from the Trump administration.

Carney didn't stop at words. He said Canada will match the new tariffs "dollar for dollar," undoing months of goodwill after Canada had dropped most of its retaliatory tariffs last year. This is now a real, mutual trade war again, not just a threat hanging over talks.

• 🏒 The list is specific: Hockey sticks, building materials, liquor, and clothing are getting hit with the new 50% U.S. duties.

• 🔁 Canada is matching, not backing down: Carney's dollar-for-dollar pledge reverses weeks of de-escalation.

• 💰 A budget response is coming: Carney pointed to this fall's Budget 2026 as Canada's answer for businesses caught in the crossfire.

For currency traders, USD/CAD had been drifting lower for two weeks, from around 1.392 on August 11 to roughly 1.379 by August 20, as markets priced in a deal. That collapse happened after Friday's close, so this week is the real test. Trade wars typically weaken the currency of the country getting hit hardest, so watch for USD/CAD to reverse and push back toward 1.39 or higher if this drags on.

The Munch Take: We were cautiously optimistic about this deal two weeks ago. Carney just proved that optimism was premature. The currency market hasn't fully repriced this yet, which makes USD/CAD one of the more interesting charts to watch this week.

TRADING SUCCESS

🤑 Monday Motivation

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 📈 A brand-new ETF guide from a genuine Wall Street rebel (Ad)

2. 👀 Is it time to buy Nvidia?

3. 🇨🇳 China is buying a lot of gold.

4. 🤯 Fun fact of the day.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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