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☕️ GM Munchers! Sunset before 7pm should come with a warning label. My serotonin and my portfolio are now dropping at roughly the same rate, and neither has a bottom in sight.

On today’s menu:

• 📉 The $2 Trillion IPO That Warns It Could End The World

• ✅ Carnival, Shopify & Apple Make Headlines

• 🍫 Lindt Just Melted & The Chocolate Story Got Interesting

• 😬 This Might Be An Early Warning Sign

Yesterday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

🤖 The $2 Trillion IPO That Warns It Could End The World

Buckle up, because one of the wildest IPO stories in years just got wilder. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, had its IPO prospectus leaked, and it's a doozy. The company is reportedly gunning for a valuation north of $2 trillion when it goes public, which would make it one of the largest IPOs in history. For context, that's more than double its $965 billion valuation from back in May, and roughly the size of Spain's entire economy.

Here's the part that made everyone do a double-take. Of the 261-page document, Anthropic spent about 80 pages on risk factors and only 48 on the actual business. And the risks aren't your typical "competition is fierce" boilerplate. The company literally warned that its own AI could pose a "catastrophic or existential risk to humanity" and might even "resist shutdown." When a company's own IPO paperwork reads like a sci-fi thriller, investors tend to notice.

But honestly, the scarier reading for investors might be the financials.

• 💸 The losses are staggering: Anthropic's revenue exploded nearly twelvefold to $4.6 billion in 2025, but it still posted a jaw-dropping $42 billion net loss. Most was a non-cash accounting charge, but the actual operating loss still topped $8 billion.

• 🔗 The obligations are enormous: The company has committed to roughly $518 billion in future cloud and computing costs, and about 80% of that is effectively noncancelable. It's locked in whether the growth shows up or not.

• ⚠️ The customer risk is real: Just two customers made up nearly a quarter of revenue last year, and many big clients aren't tied to long-term contracts, meaning they could walk away.

The Munch Take: Let's talk valuation, because that $2 trillion number is doing a lot of heavy lifting. At $4.6 billion in revenue, a $2 trillion price tag means a price-to-sales ratio somewhere around 435 times. To put that in perspective, SpaceX trades near 115 times, already one of the richest multiples on the market, and the average S&P 500 company sits around 3 times. That's an absolutely eye-watering price for a company losing roughly $9 for every $1 it brings in. Now, the bull case is real too: revenue growing twelvefold in a year is genuinely spectacular, and this is a frontier player in the most important tech shift in decades. But we buy businesses at prices that make sense, and paying 435 times sales for a company that openly warns it might end humanity is about as speculative as it gets. We'd watch this debut with popcorn, not a buy order. Let the hype crowd price the fantasy. We'll wait for reality.

Bonus Report from Good Morning Alerts: 3 stocks tied to a possible $2 trillion listing

Analyst nicknamed “The Prophet” issues new warning for America (Ad)

Whitney Tilson shocked the nation on 60 Minutes when he accused a major company of poisoning its customers. The investigation won an Emmy and the stock fell nearly 80%. (He also called the housing crisis and the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers). Now, he's releasing his next big story. He says the day after our upcoming midterm elections, America will enter a period of economic change unlike anything we've seen in decades. And most investors are unprepared for what's coming. For the full presentation, go here.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

🤑 Free Report: 5 Nasdaq stocks to buy before 2027. (via Good Morning Alerts)

🚢 $CCL Carnival jumped 13.34% after posting record quarterly revenue and earnings that topped expectations. While Norwegian struggles, the cruise leader keeps proving demand for a getaway is very much alive.

🚗 $KMX CarMax climbed 4.92% after its quarterly results beat Wall Street's estimates. Used cars aren't glamorous, but a clean earnings beat gets investors buying.

🛍️ $SHOP Shopify rose 2.95% after Morgan Stanley tagged it as a likely winner from the rise of AI-powered shopping.

🍎 $AAPL Apple fell 2.66% on reports it's weighing a big restructuring to run leaner and ship products more often. Investors weren't sure whether to read that as ambition or admission that the current pace isn't cutting it.

🎢 $FUN Six Flags slipped 5.81% after shutting down its X2 roller coaster following a safety investigation. Nothing sends a theme-park stock lower than the words "safety" and "investigation" in the same sentence.

STOCK OF THE DAY

🍫 Lindt Just Melted & The Chocolate Story Got Interesting

I've been doing my part to support the chocolate industry, honestly more than my dentist would like, but clearly I can't carry the whole thing myself. $LDSVF Lindt & Sprüngli, the maker of those irresistible Lindor truffles, dropped over 9% after cutting its full-year sales forecast for the second time this year. The Swiss chocolate giant now expects organic sales growth of just 0% to 2%, way down from its earlier 4% to 6% target. The stock is now down roughly 30% year to date and trading near its 52-week low.

So what melted the chocolate? A mix of two things. First, cocoa prices spiked to historic highs over the past couple years, forcing Lindt to raise prices, and shoppers in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria pushed back hard. Second, and this is a genuinely funny one, an unprecedented European heatwave crushed demand, because nobody's craving a chocolate bunny when it's melting in their hand. Add those together and seasonal sales took a real hit.

Now let's clear up a data point, because a couple of numbers floating around are flat-out wrong. If you saw a "23% dividend" or a "2.45 P/E" on a quote screen, that's a glitch. In reality, Lindt's dividend yield is a modest 1.64%, and its P/E is actually over 40. That's the opposite of cheap.

• 🍫 This is a quality brand on sale, but not a bargain-bin one: Even after a 30% drop, Lindt trades at a premium valuation because investors have always paid up for its rock-solid brand and pricing power.

• 📉 The reliability crack matters: Analysts noted that cutting guidance twice in six months dents Lindt's reputation for dependable forecasts, which is a "key support for its premium valuation."

• 🌱 The 2027 turnaround is the thing to watch: Cocoa prices are easing from their peaks, and management expects cost pressures to normalize and volume growth to turn positive in 2027.

The Munch Take: Here's our honest read. Lindt is a genuinely world-class brand, the kind of premium, sticky business we love, and a 30% haircut on a name like this always gets our attention. But don't mistake "down a lot" for "cheap." At over 40 times earnings, Lindt is still priced as a premium darling, not a beaten-down value play, so the discount here is relative, not absolute. The real question is whether the 2027 recovery story plays out as cocoa prices cool and demand stabilizes. If it does, buying quality while everyone's sour on it could pay off. We'd put this on the watchlist and keep an eye on that January sales report, but we're not backing up the truck on a 40x chocolate stock just because it had one bad, sweaty summer. Sometimes the dip is an opportunity, and sometimes it's just a premium stock becoming slightly less premium.

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 👀 60-Year Wall Street Legend: “Get out by Sept. 29th” (Ad)

2. 😬 This might be an early warning sign.

3. 🚗 Cars are becoming insanely unaffordable.

4. 🤯 The 30-year yield keeps climbing.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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