What Happens to Your Portfolio If AI Underdelivers?

Most portfolios are now a single bet with a hundred tickers on it.

Five companies that don't rely on AI and can't be replaced by it: government systems, physical commodities, financial infrastructure. Real-world demand, regulatory moats, assets an algorithm can't reproduce.

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☕️ GM Munchers! It is Friday, which my brain has decided means "coast until 4pm," and my brain rarely negotiates on this one.

On today’s menu:

• 📉 Yields Won The Rematch & Stocks Lost

• 🛒 Walmart Just Told On The American Shopper

• 🤖 The Biggest IPO of 2026 Is Coming

• 🚀 The 3 Tickers Behind Elon's Next Launch

Yesterday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

📉 Yields Won The Rematch & Stocks Lost

The government can't solve all of our problems? Shocker.

The Dow dropped almost 700 points yesterday, its worst day in weeks, as Treasury yields shot right back up just one day after the government tried to calm them down. The 10-year yield climbed to 4.704% and the 30-year jumped to 5.254%, both reversing Wednesday's brief dip. That dip had come right after the Treasury announced bigger bond buybacks. The much needed relief lasted barely 24 hours.

Here's why this actually matters beyond one bad day. Yields are basically the price of borrowing money for the entire country, and almost everything else in finance gets priced off them. Mortgages get more expensive. Corporate loans get more expensive. Stocks, especially the expensive growth names everyone loves, get less attractive to own when a boring government bond suddenly pays more with none of the risk. When yields spike this fast twice in one week, it tells investors the bond market doesn’t trust that the inflation and spending picture is under control, no matter what any one Treasury announcement says. That distrust is the real story, not just one rough afternoon for stocks.

• 📈 Yields snapped right back. Both the 10-year and 30-year erased Wednesday's relief in a single session.

• 🏦 The intervention didn't stick. One analyst called the buyback plan "more of a band-aid than a panacea."

• 💸 This is bigger than one bad day. Rising yields raise borrowing costs for everyone, from mortgages to corporate loans, which is why Wall Street watches them so closely.

• 📉 Breadth was ugly. Losers outnumbered winners by more than 1.6 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange.

• 👀 Special Report: What Wall Street does every Friday at 4 PM (Ad)

The Munch Take: The Treasury tried to calm the bond market down for one day, and the bond market went right back to yelling the next morning. My wife has tried the same move on our budget conversations, calming things down for one dinner before the credit card statement shows up again. Yields are still the story here, and until they settle down, everything else on this page is really just a symptom.

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Nine of them are in my report this month. Take a look at the list.

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STOCK OF THE DAY

🛒 Walmart Just Told On The American Shopper

Walmart is the store people run to when money gets tight, which is exactly why Wall Street treats its numbers like a mood ring for the entire economy. Yesterday that mood ring flashed a warning. U.S. same-store sales rose 2.6%, missing the 3.8% Wall Street wanted, the first miss of that size in at least five years. The stock fell more than 8%.

Here's what makes this miss different from a normal bad quarter. People still went to the store. They just spent less once they got there. Store visits grew 1.5%, half the pace of the prior quarter. Spending per trip grew just 1.1%, down sharply from 3.1% a year earlier. A new pharmacy pricing rule also knocked 1.25 points off the headline number. Strip that out and core sales still grew only 3.4%, the slowest pace since 2022. Earnings of 81 cents a share actually beat estimates, and Walmart raised its guidance for the year but the stock did not care about any of that.

📈 The Bull Case:

• Earnings beat and guidance went up. Walmart raised its full-year outlook the same day, showing management still feels confident about where this is heading.

• Shoppers are still walking in. Store traffic kept growing, which means Walmart isn't losing customers, it's just watching them spend more carefully.

• A chunk of the miss was a one-time rule. The pharmacy pricing change alone explains a real slice of today's shortfall, not the whole story.

• Bonus Report: The mistake most first-time ETF buyers make (from Tuttle Capital Management)

📉 The Bear Case:

• Spending per trip is genuinely slowing. Growth of 1.1% versus 3.1% a year ago is a real change in behaviour, not noise.

• This is the recession-proof stock missing. Walmart is the retailer built to hold up when budgets tighten, so a miss here raises real questions about the broader consumer.

• Core growth hit its slowest pace since 2022 even after removing the one-time pharmacy hit.

The Munch Take: The one store that was supposed to be recession-proof just quietly told on the customer. My wife asked if we should stop shopping there. I said that is the one place we keep going when money gets weird. She said then why did the stock fall 8%. I said because everyone else on Wall Street just figured out the same thing we already knew from our own receipts.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

₿ $MARA MARA Holdings ripped 15.48% as bitcoin miners rode the coin back above $71,000. When bitcoin runs, the miners run faster.

🧬 $TEM Tempus AI climbed 8.85% as precision oncology names rallied on the heels of Moderna and Merck's cancer vaccine trial readout, plus its own Personalis deal. Good cancer news lifted the whole neighborhood.

🚜 $DE Deere and Company rose 6.93% after an earnings beat, with construction, data center, and energy infrastructure demand carrying sales past $11 billion despite a sluggish farm economy. Tractors are optional. Data centers are not.

🔧 $AAP Advance Auto Parts sank 24.49% on a surprise decline in quarterly comparable sales driven by DIY weakness. Nobody felt like changing their own oil this quarter. Myself included.

💉 $MRNA Moderna dropped 23.55%, giving back a big chunk of the prior session's melanoma vaccine surge and flipping from top gainer to biggest loser. Easy come, easy go.

🛋️ $RH RH fell 7.99% as the rate sensitive high end furniture retailer got sold off hard when Treasury yields jumped again. Expensive couches do not like expensive borrowing.

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

MARKET NEWS

🤖 The Biggest IPO of 2026 Is Coming

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, was preparing to file publicly for its IPO as soon as the end of this month. The company was reportedly running the numbers to match or beat SpaceX's record-setting $75 billion IPO raise from earlier this year.

Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion in July, up from roughly $10 billion across all of last year. A funding round in May valued the company at $965 billion, ahead of rival OpenAI. Anthropic filed its confidential paperwork with regulators back in June, and some backers have floated a valuation as high as $2 trillion for the actual public debut.

• 📄 The filing: Anthropic could file publicly as soon as the end of August.

• 💰 The target: The company wants to match or beat SpaceX's $75 billion raise, the current record.

• 📈 The run rate: Revenue hit $65 billion annualized in July, up sharply from about $10 billion for all of last year.

The Munch Take: Going from a $10 billion year to a possible $2 trillion IPO conversation in the same twelve months is a pace that would make anyone's head spin. My wife still cannot believe how fast our grocery bill went up, and that feels slow compared to this.

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The AI boom isn't just about chips.

Every model needs cooling. Every server needs memory. Every system depends on high-speed networks.

The companies selling those aren't in the headlines — they're just in every single build, taking a cut of every dollar spent on the boom.

This briefing breaks down the infrastructure behind AI and 3 names positioned across the bottlenecks forming right now.

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TRADING SUCCESS

🤑 Friday Motivation

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 🚀 The 3 tickers behind Elon's next launch (Ad)

2. 🏰 Mark Zuckerberg just bought a 440-acre Irish castle.

3. 😂 Inverse Jim Cramer strikes again.

4. 😬 Quant hedge funds just got destroyed.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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