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In the year 2000, Cisco was the most valuable company on Earth. Millions of Americans put their retirement savings into it. Then it crashed 86% over a year and a half.

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☕️ GM Munchers! Yesterday I said the Fed meeting would decide whether I'm eating steak or lentils. Go ahead and set the table for lentils. Indefinitely.

On today’s menu:

• 🏛️ The Fed Held Rates And Gave You Nothing To Go On

• ⚔️ The Iran War Roared Back To Life

• 📉 Meta's Earnings Landed With A Thud

• 🚗 Tesla Drops Below $300

• 🇰🇷 South Korea’s Stock Market Is Collapsing

Yesterday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

🏛️ The Fed Held Rates And Gave You Nothing To Go On

The Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged yesterday, holding the range at 3.50% to 3.75%. That's the fifth meeting in a row with no move, the longest pause since the 2008 era. On the surface, boring. Underneath, one of the messiest Fed days in years. The Dow dropped more than 1,000 points, swung back to nearly flat during the press conference, then closed ugly.

Here's the summary of what Chair Kevin Warsh actually said, straight from his statement:

• 📊 The US economy is showing "impressive resilience."

• 🔥 Inflation "remains elevated" against the Fed's 2% target.

• 🎯 There's no soft target. The only target is 2%.

• 📈 Both nominal and real yields are materially higher since the last meeting.

• 🃏 In his words, market participants are "learning to play the ball, not the referee."

• Special Report: A 96% win rate using this strange trading approach (from Brownstone Research)

The Big Shift Nobody Prepared For: For over a decade, the Fed under Jerome Powell held Wall Street's hand. Every meeting came with forward guidance, hints about the next move, and a dot plot mapping the road ahead. Warsh threw that playbook out. He's said forward guidance "is not the business we should be in." His whole philosophy is that the Fed should stop telling markets what it will do and instead let markets react to actual data.

That's what "play the ball, not the referee" means. Stop watching the Fed for signals. Watch the economy. It sounds reasonable, but after 15 years of being spoon-fed, the market is flying blind and it doesn’t like it.

The Family Fight: This wasn't a quiet hold. Three Fed presidents, Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari, and Lorie Logan, all dissented and wanted a rate hike right now. That's the most dissents pushing for the opposite of the majority's decision since 2016. Warsh, who keeps calling these debates a "family fight," said he asked for one and got it.

The Market Reaction: Long-term bond yields surged. The 30-year Treasury yield jumped to 5.21%, its highest in 19 years. That tells you traders are worried about inflation sticking around and are no longer sure when the Fed acts. Fed funds futures now price in about a 63% chance of a quarter-point hike at the September meeting.

The Munch Take: Here's the real story of the day. The Fed didn't change rates, but it changed the rules of the game, and that's bigger than any single hike. For 15 years, investors got a map. Now Warsh handed them a compass and told them to figure it out. There are going to be growing pains, and yesterday’s 1,000-point whipsaw is exactly what those look like. A market addicted to guidance just got sent to rehab. The irony is that Warsh might be right in the long run, since markets probably shouldn't hang on every word from one institution. But right and comfortable are different things, and the next few months are going to feel bumpy while everyone learns to read the economy instead of the referee.

⚔️ The Iran War Roared Back To Life

As if the Fed drama wasn't enough, the Middle East picked the same day to blow up again. Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles at a US military base in Jordan. The US Central Command said all the missiles were intercepted, but the damage to the calm was done.

President Trump responded with characteristic subtlety, telling Fox News that Iran "is going to get a beating" and "we'll be hitting them hard." Oil traders did not wait around to find out what that meant.

• 🛢️ Crude exploded higher. Brent, the global benchmark, soared 7.9% to close at $90.74 a barrel. US crude jumped 6.6% to $84.46. That’s not good news for your gas tank.

• 🕊️ This shattered a truce. The US and Iran had paused strikes last weekend to give diplomacy a chance, which sent oil tumbling earlier this week. That hope just evaporated.

• 📉 Stocks took it on the chin. Combined with the Fed, the Dow closed down around 1,000 points on a genuinely ugly day.

• Free Report: Your First Trade Playbook is expiring (from Profits Run)

Here's why this matters beyond the headlines. Higher oil feeds straight into inflation, and inflation is the exact thing the Fed just told you it's still fighting. So yesterday was a double gut punch. A central bank that won't tell you its next move, and an oil shock that pushes inflation the wrong way. That combination is why the market couldn't find its footing.

The Munch Take: We'll be honest about where we land on this. In our view, nothing fundamentally changed yesterday. This is a five-month war that has spent the entire month bouncing between "peace is close" and "here we go again," and yesterday was just the latest swing of that pendulum. So is it rocky? Absolutely. Is this the start of Armageddon? No. Is a peace deal getting signed tomorrow? Also no. It's somewhere in the frustrating middle, where oil spikes on every threat and calms on every rumor of talks. Our advice is to treat these headline-driven oil moves like weather, not climate. The day-to-day is violent, but the thing that actually matters for your money is whether this war meaningfully widens, and so far, despite all the noise, it hasn't.

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STOCK OF THE DAY

📉 Meta's Earnings Landed With A Thud

Meta ($META) reported Q2 results after the bell yesterday, and investors did not like what they saw. The stock crashed as much as 10% after hours, falling from $585 into the $540s. That extends its losing streak to 10 straight red days, the longest in the company's history.

The numbers were a split decision. Revenue actually beat, coming in at $60.8 billion, up 28% from a year ago. But earnings badly missed at $6.18 per share against the roughly $7.14 Wall Street expected which is about a 14% miss. The Q3 revenue forecast also came in soft, and that combination is what spooked everyone.

Here's the money-on-fire part. Reality Labs, Meta's virtual reality and smart glasses division, lost another $4.62 billion this quarter. Since 2020, that unit has now burned through about $87 billion. To put that in plain terms, Meta has lit roughly the entire market value of a company like Ford on fire chasing the metaverse and AI wearables, and Zuckerberg keeps feeding the flames.

🐂 The Bull Case:

• 💡 The miss was mostly one-time stuff. Strip out $2.4 billion in legal charges and $1.2 billion in severance, and Meta actually would have beaten estimates. The core business isn't broken.

• 📈 The ad machine is still roaring. Revenue grew 28%, ad prices rose 12%, and 3.5 billion people use a Meta app every day.

• 🏆 Betting against Zuck has a brutal track record. Every time critics have written Meta off, from the 2022 crash to the metaverse mockery, the stock came roaring back.

• Free Report from Stansberry Research: A better retirement stock than Berkshire?

🐻 The Bear Case:

• 🔥 The spending is staggering. Capex hit $31 billion in a single quarter, nearly double a year ago, and Reality Labs keeps bleeding with no end date.

• 💸 Free cash flow collapsed to just $784 million as all that money flowed out the door.

• ⏳ Soft guidance means the payoff keeps slipping. Investors were promised AI would boost profits. This quarter, it boosted costs instead.

The Munch Take: Here's the honest tension. History could not be clearer that betting against Mark Zuckerberg is a great way to lose money. He was mocked for buying Instagram, mocked for buying WhatsApp, mocked for the metaverse, and he's been right often enough to earn the benefit of the doubt. But benefit of the doubt is not infinite, and this report is exactly the kind that starts to test it. At some point, spending $31 billion a quarter and burning $87 billion on Reality Labs has to turn into actual profit, and tonight showed that it isn't happening yet. We're not betting against Zuck. We've seen that movie. But we'd gently point out that "trust me, it'll pay off eventually" is a lot easier to say when the losing streak isn't already 10 days long. The clock that never seemed to matter is suddenly making a ticking sound.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

⚡ $TSLA Tesla dropped almost 3% yesterday and is now trading below $300 for the first time since May 2025. The AI-and-robots story keeps getting told, but the stock keeps voting no.

🚙 $F Ford climbed 2.14% after beating profit expectations and raising its 2026 forecast, pointing to stronger pricing and cleaner operations. The old-school automaker having a better week than Tesla is a headline nobody had on their card.

🧴 $PG Procter & Gamble slipped 1.87% after missing on quarterly revenue. When the company behind Tide and Pampers comes up short, it's usually a quiet signal that shoppers are trimming the little things.

🍋 $LMND Insurnace company Lemonade got squeezed, falling 23.72%, after a sharp jump in spending dragged down its quarterly results. Growth is great until the market notices there’s a cost to it.

💊 $HIMS Hims & Hers Health tumbled 14.73% after the FTC accused it of sharing customers' medical info with advertisers. For a company built on trust and privacy, that's about the worst accusation you can catch.

🏦 $SOFI SoFi lost 9.02% despite a narrow earnings beat. Turns out barely clearing the bar isn't enough when investors were expecting a leap.

TRADING SUCCESS

🤑 Thursday Motivation

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 🇰🇷 South Korea’s stock market is collapsing.

2. 🚗 Elon was right about Volvo.

3. 🤑 Microsoft had a great earnings report.

4. 🚀 SpaceX was just awarded a major contract.

5. ☕️ Starbucks is actually making a comeback?

🍪 Munchy Memes

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