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☕️ GM Munchers! Last day at the cottage, which means I get to return to my natural habitat: three monitors and a concerning amount of coffee. My wife is thrilled to have the deck back to herself.

On today’s menu:

• 📉 Inflation Just Refused To Die

• 🖥️ Nvidia Broke Every Record & Still Dropped

• 📹️ Snapchat, Intuit & Zoom Make Headlines

• 📱 Meta Just Paid $17 Billion

• 👟 Nike Just Hit A 12 Year Low

Yesterday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

📊 Inflation Just Refused To Die

My wife was right. Our grocery bill isn’t getting cheaper anytime soon.

The Fed's favorite inflation gauge came in hot yesterday. July PCE, the inflation measure the Fed watches most closely, hit 3.7% year over year, a touch above the 3.6% economists expected. Core PCE, which strips out food and energy, held at 3.3%, its second-highest reading since late 2024. That means inflation is still running at nearly double the Fed's 2% target.

Here's the tricky part for the Fed. Core inflation has now printed 3.3% in April, 3.4% in May, 3.3% in June, and 3.3% again in July. That's four straight months of basically no progress. At the same time, the July jobs report was weak, meaning the Fed is stuck between an economy that's cooling and prices that refuse to cool with it. That's the classic setup that makes rate decisions genuinely hard.

• 🔥 The number: Headline PCE at 3.7% and core at 3.3%, both stuck well above the Fed's 2% goal.

• 🏦 The market are torn: Traders are pricing only a 57% chance of a rate hike in 2026. That’s basically a coin flip.

• ⛰️ Warsh speaks Friday: Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech now carries even more weight, since this report gave him a real reason to sound cautious.

The Munch Take: You need to own assets or get left behind. That’s the only actionable takeaway you need from this. Cash is continuing to lose value and nobody is coming to save you. Sticky inflation is exactly the backdrop that has kept us interested in gold and Bitcoin all year. Friday's Warsh speech is now the thing to watch.

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STOCK OF THE DAY

🖥️ Nvidia Broke Every Record And The Stock Still Threw A Tantrum

Nvidia just did something almost cartoonish. The company reported $96.2 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 106% from a year ago, its highest ever. Yes, they’re now making more than $1 billion per day. Crazy. And yet, the first thing the stock did was drop 4%.

Here's why a monster beat still spooked people at first. When a stock has run up as much as Nvidia has, expectations get so high that even record numbers can feel like a letdown. Traders call this "priced for perfection," meaning the good news was already baked into the stock before the report even came out. But then the mood flipped. Once the CFO started walking through guidance on the call, the stock actually turned higher, jumping around 5%. The reason was the outlook. Nvidia guided next quarter to about $108 billion in revenue, well above what Wall Street wanted to see.

• 💰 The number: Record $96.2 billion in revenue, up 106% from last year, beating expectations across the board.

• 🏗️ Data centers are still the engine: That business alone brought in $89 billion, up 117%, powered by the AI buildout.

• 🔮 The guide is what mattered: Nvidia expects roughly $108 billion next quarter, a sign the AI spending boom is not slowing down yet.

Here's what this means for the whole market. Nvidia is the single most important stock in the AI story, so its results act like a report card for the entire boom. A strong guide like this tells investors that the giant tech companies are still pouring money into AI chips, which is good news for the whole chip sector and the broader market that has been riding the AI wave all year.

The Munch Take: CEO Jensen Huang said "AI has reached its inflection point" and that "compute is revenue," which is exactly the kind of confident line you'd expect from a guy whose company just doubled its sales. The initial drop and quick bounce tells you everything about this stock right now. The business is genuinely firing on all cylinders, but expectations are so sky-high that even perfection barely clears the bar. As long as the AI spending keeps flowing, the shovel-sellers like Nvidia keep winning. The day that spending slows is the day this whole story changes, and yesterday was not that day.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

💰️ FREE Bonus Report: Don’t buy an ETF before you read this (from Tuttle Capital)

📹 $ZM Zoom Communications dropped 7.03% after guiding third-quarter results below what Wall Street wanted to see. Turns out the market always hates Zoom meetings.

🧾 $INTU Intuit fell 3.24% after its outlook for fiscal 2027 landed short of expectations. The tax-software giant gave investors a number they weren't thrilled about, and the stock paid for it.

👻 $SNAP Snap sank 8.45% after Pennsylvania filed suit, claiming Snapchat's design hooks minors and puts kids in harm's way. With Meta settling its own child-safety case the same week, this is a theme investors are watching closely now.

🧬 $BHVN Biohaven jumped 17.87% after licensing an experimental epilepsy drug to SK Biopharmaceuticals in a global deal. One well-structured licensing agreement can move a biotech stock in a hurry.

🍇 $SJM J.M. Smucker rose 4.26% after fiscal first-quarter revenue came in ahead of estimates. Turns out jam, coffee, and pet food still add up to a solid quarter.

BIG NEWS

📱 Meta Just Paid $17 Billion & The Stock Went Up Anyway

$META Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle a massive lawsuit from 51 states and territories, accusing the company of designing Facebook and Instagram to addict kids and harm their mental health. It's the largest state consumer protection settlement in U.S. history outside of the Big Tobacco cases of the 1990s. And yet the stock actually rose about 1% on the news.

Here's why a giant fine turned into a green day. Wall Street hates uncertainty more than it hates a bill. This trial was set to run into October with Mark Zuckerberg potentially taking the stand, and a settlement wipes all of that risk off the table at once. Meta will book roughly $10 billion of the cost as a third quarter expense, a number the company can easily absorb given it generates that much in profit in a matter of weeks.

• 💰 The number: Up to $17.1 billion total, though Meta only pays the full amount if TikTok and YouTube also settle and add their own teen safeguards.

• ⏱️ The real cost is the rules: Meta must add a two-hour daily limit for users under 18, hide likes on minors' posts, and block extreme beauty filters.

• 📉 Why the stock shrugged: Removing the risk of a dramatic public trial mattered more to investors than the dollar figure itself.

The Munch Take: A $17 billion fine that makes a stock go up tells you everything about how Wall Street thinks. The market wasn't scared of the money. It was scared of Zuckerberg on a witness stand for six weeks, and that fear just evaporated. Whether these new teen safety rules actually dent Meta's engagement numbers is the real long-term question, and that one won't get answered for a while.

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 👀 The AI stocks most people aren't looking at yet (Ad)

2. 👟 Nike just hit a 12 year low.

3. 🚀 Salesforce is going on an insane run.

4. 🤔 Investing quote of the day.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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