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Share price moves today. Last chance to lock in current pricing.

☕️ GM Munchers! Happy July. We made it through the first half of 2026, which felt less like six months and more like six years compressed into one very stressful news cycle. My doctor says my blood pressure is fine. My brokerage account tells a different story.

On today’s menu:

• 📊 The Market At Halftime. Here's The Scorecard.

• 📉 Gold's Worst Quarter In 13 Years

• 🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

• 🚘️ Michael Burry Shorts Tesla & Nvidia

•  😭 Coffee Prices Are Climbing

Yesterday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

📊 The Market At Halftime. Here's The Scorecard.

Six months into 2026 and the story is more interesting than the headline numbers suggest. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both posted their best first half since 2024. The Dow climbed 8.85%, its best start since 2021. And the Russell 2000 surged 21.1%, its best first half since 1991. On paper, a great six months. Underneath the surface, a completely different market than anyone expected.

The AI trade didn't die. It just changed addresses. The Magnificent Seven are no longer running the show. Memory chips and data storage took over completely.

The three biggest winners of the first half:

• 🏆 $SNDK SanDisk up 764% year to date. The AI storage trade in one stock. Every data center on earth is fighting over its chips and the supply doesn't exist to meet demand.

• 🥈 $MU Micron up 301%. The company that makes the memory chips sitting inside every AI processor reported one of the greatest earnings quarters in semiconductor history and the stock followed.

• 🥉 $WDC Western Digital up 278%. SanDisk's former parent company caught the same wave. When AI needs storage, these are the names that get paid.

The three biggest losers of the first half:

• 📉 $INTU Intuit down 60%. The maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks is facing a simple and terrifying question: why would anyone pay for accounting software when AI can do it for free?

• 📉 $CSGP CoStar Group down 56%. The commercial real estate data company got caught in a brutal combination of rate pressure and AI disruption fears hitting the entire data services industry.

• 📉 $ACN Accenture down 54%. The consulting giant that charges companies enormous fees to implement technology is watching AI make its entire business model look increasingly unnecessary.

Here's what the market will be watching for the rest of the year:

• 🏦 Fed policy is the only thing that matters. With traders pricing in a 65% chance of a September rate hike, every inflation print and every jobs number between now and then becomes a market-moving event. Kevin Warsh has made it clear the Fed isn't blinking. Watch the 10-Year yield every single week.

• 🕊️ Whether the Iran ceasefire holds. Oil is the inflation variable nobody can control. If the Strait of Hormuz reopens fully and stays open, inflation eases, rate hike bets drop, and the market has room to run. If it doesn't, it could be an ugly second half.

• 💰 Q2 earnings season starting in July. Goldman Sachs says the macro backdrop remains solid. JPMorgan sees the S&P 500 hitting 7,800 by year end if earnings hold up. But the bar is now extremely high after back-to-back strong quarters. One major miss from a key AI name could reprice the whole trade fast.

The Munch Take: The first half of 2026 rewarded one thing above everything else. Picks and shovels. Not the companies building AI. The companies supplying the raw materials AI needs to function. SanDisk went up 764%. Microsoft went down 22%. The market spent six months telling you exactly where the real money is being made. My wife asked me to summarize the first half of the year in one sentence. I said the memory card company beat everything. She said that can't be right. It is.

📉 Gold's Worst Quarter In 13 Years

You know who isn’t having a great 2026? Gold.

The precious metal just formed a death cross for the first time since October 2023, meaning its 50-day moving average crossed below its 200-day moving average. Gold is now headed for a 13% quarterly loss, its steepest decline in 13 years, and sits roughly 28% below the all-time high it set in January.

Here's the question everyone is asking. If inflation is running at its highest level in three years, why is gold falling? Gold is supposed to protect you from inflation. So what gives?

The answer is that gold isn't really an inflation hedge. It's an interest rate hedge. Gold pays you nothing to hold it. When bonds pay a real return, money moves out of gold and into bonds. Here's what's actually driving the pain right now:

• 📈 Rates are the real enemy. Traders are now pricing in a 65% chance of a Fed rate hike by September. Kevin Warsh signaled a decisively hawkish stance at his first meeting, telling markets that "inflation is a choice" and that the Fed would deliver price stability. That's not what gold wants to hear.

• 🔄 The inflation hedge myth is broken. Gold shines when inflation is falling and central banks are cutting rates. Right now both of those conditions are absent. Inflation going up is actually making things worse for gold because it forces the Fed to keep rates high or raise them further.

• ⚠️ The technical picture just got uglier. A death cross doesn't guarantee further losses but it confirms that medium-term momentum has completely rolled over. The last time this happened in 2023 gold bounced within weeks but the rate environment then was very different from today.

Bitcoin is telling the same story from a different angle. Bitcoin closed below its 200-week moving average for the first time since 2023, dropping below $50,500 yesterday as $320 million worth of leveraged crypto positions were liquidated in a single session. Every previous test of this level happened when the Fed was either cutting rates or holding them at zero. This time rates are at 3.5% to 3.75% and heading potentially higher. That's a different setup than anything Bitcoin has faced here before.

Here's the one number that doesn't fit the bearish narrative. The amount of Bitcoin held in long-term holder addresses just reached a new all-time high. The people who have owned Bitcoin the longest are not selling. They're holding. That's the signal that has historically mattered more than the price chart.

The Munch Take: Gold IS an inflation hedge over very long time horizons, decades, not months. Studies show that gold has preserved purchasing power over 100-year periods better than almost any other asset. But in the short to medium term, what actually drives gold is real interest rates, meaning interest rates minus inflation. So unless the government stops printing money and gets its debt under control, long-term, it’s hard to imagine a world where buying gold at these levels is a bad thing.

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MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

🪙 $MSTR Strategy shed 6.2% yesterday, continuing its slide after announcing it may sell a portion of its Bitcoin holdings. For a company whose entire identity is built around never selling Bitcoin, that's a significant statement.

✈️ $AVAV AeroVironment ripped 18.76% after the drone maker's Q4 results blew past expectations. The reason is simple. The Department of Defense is spending money on drones faster than anyone expected and AeroVironment is one of the few companies that can actually build them at scale.

💊 $MRK $ABBV Merck and AbbVie slipped 0.68% and 0.98% respectively after a US House committee opened an investigation into whether both pharma companies ran clinical trials in China that may have aided its military operations. A congressional probe into your China business is never a good Tuesday.

🧬 $ABVX Abivax surged 38.6% after announcing promising trial data for its ulcerative colitis treatment. Nobody talks about this disease enough but it affects millions of people and the market for an effective treatment is enormous. One good data readout and the stock nearly doubled in a day.

STOCK OF THE DAY

🚗 Yes, Another Michael Burry Story. But This One Is Different.

We know. We know. But stay with us because this one actually matters.

Burry just published a post on his paid Substack disclosing he shorted Tesla at $416.22 on June 30, along with Nvidia at $198.09, Caterpillar, and the iShares Semiconductor ETF, all in one sweep. This isn't a single stock bet. It's a coordinated basket of shorts against what he believes is a fully inflated AI and semiconductor bubble.

Tesla closed yesterday at $420, down roughly 17% from its all-time high of $489.88 hit in December 2025. The stock has had a rough first half, losing ground as EV competition from China intensified and the broader tech selloff hit momentum names hard.

Here's the thing about betting against Elon Musk. It has a complicated history. Burry shorted Tesla in 2021 and got squeezed badly as the stock kept climbing. He later clarified his position was never as large as reported and called it "just a trade." He walked away from that one quietly.

This time feels different. Rather than a standalone Tesla call, Burry is making a macro argument that the entire AI trade is overextended. Tesla, Nvidia, and semiconductors are all in the same basket. It's not a car company bet. It's an everything-is-too-expensive bet.

The Munch Take: Burry shorted Palantir and won big. He just went long on Microsoft. Now he's short Tesla and Nvidia simultaneously. The man is running the most interesting portfolio on Wall Street right now and he's doing it through a paid Substack. Betting against Elon has historically been one of the more dangerous trades in the market. Betting against Nvidia during an AI boom is equally uncomfortable. Whether Burry is early, right, or both is something we'll know by year end. My wife asked me if we should short Tesla too. I told her even Burry got burned on that trade once already. She said maybe the second time is different. She might be right.

The Biggest Growth Stock of All Time? (Ad)

Its CEO expected this lab to grow 10-fold in 2026. Instead, it soared 80-fold in a single quarter. Nvidia, Amazon, and Google are all profiting from its explosive growth.

Now it's your turn...

TRADING SUCCESS

🤑 Wednesday Motivation

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. ❌ The Crypto Clarity Act is falling apart.

2. 😭 Coffee prices are climbing.

3. 📉 The Mag 7 stocks are really struggling.

4. 😬 This stock just had its 2nd worst month in history.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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