Five Stocks Under $5. One Is A $3 Defense-AI Name.

Five stocks cleared every filter in our free report — including a defense-focused AI decision-intelligence company trading near $3. Its $269.6 million backlog includes a $53 million sole-source classified award, and $409.8 million in cash and investments could fund roughly four years at the current burn rate. Four more sub-$5 names come with it.

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☕️ GM Munchers! Did you miss me yesterday? I'm still on the cruise, where the wifi costs roughly one human kidney per megabyte. I did the math, weighed my options, and sold the kidney. My wife doesn't know yet, so please enjoy this email like your life depends on it, because financially, mine now does.

On today’s menu:

• 🤖 The AI Bosses Said Slow Down & Wall Street Panicked

• ⛽ Your Gas Bill Is About To Get Ugly Again

• 💻 Hunter Biden's Meme Coin Went From $190 To Zero

• 🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

• 🤯 This Stock Chart Is Insane

Yesterday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

🤖 The AI Bosses Said Slow Down, And Wall Street Panicked

Here's something you don't see every day. Over the weekend, the heads of the biggest AI companies, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Elon Musk, all agreed on one thing: AI is improving too fast for safety researchers to keep up, and the industry should tap the brakes. When the people building the rocket start talking about slowing it down, the market listens.

And listen it did. Investors took "slow down AI" to mean less spending on the chips and servers that power it, so anything tied to that buildout got hammered. But the exact same fear made cybersecurity stocks soar, since a world of more dangerous AI means more demand for digital protection. Wall Street basically sold the shovels and bought the security guards.

• 📉 Chips took the hit: Micron, Intel, and Marvell each dropped more than 4%, Nvidia fell about 3%, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise cratered around 11%.

• 🛡️ Security stocks ripped: CrowdStrike jumped nearly 15% to about $237, its best day in years, with Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks rallying alongside it.

• 🇺🇸 Trump called it overblown: The President dismissed the slowdown idea as unnecessary, warning it would hand America's AI lead straight to China.

The Munch Take: One weekend of cautious talk from AI bosses does not end the AI boom. Notice what they actually said: pace it, not stop it. Nobody is canceling data centers or cutting spending yet. This looks more like a sentiment scare than a real change, and those are exactly the wobbles we like to shop during. If quality chip names get marked down on fear, we'd rather build a list than run for the hills. Long term, nothing is stopping this technology.

Move your money OUT of SpaceX (and into this stock) by Sept. 29th (Ad)

Elon Musk has gone "all in" on Texas, home of SpaceX. But Texas just froze ALL new AI data center buildouts.

The reason? Data center demand in Texas has soared from 48 gigawatts to 474 gigawatts... since 2023, according to Reuters. But according to 60-year Wall Street legend Marc Chaikin, one company has the solution. Its "micro cluster" technology will consume an estimated 99% less electricity and water. And it'll come online as soon as Sept. 29th. When it does, it'll make current data centers obsolete when it comes to major AI breakthroughs – including Elon's Grok.

Go here for the company name and ticker – and Marc’s full prediction – free. 

NEWS OF THE DAY

⛽ Your Gas Bill Is About To Get Ugly Again

Here's a story that hits your driveway before it hits your portfolio. Oil stayed stubbornly in triple-digit territory yesterday after Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline stayed shut, knocked offline by a drone attack last week. That pipeline is a big deal. It's how Saudi oil normally reaches the world without passing through the blocked-off Strait of Hormuz. With it down, one of the last escape valves for Middle East oil is basically sealed shut.

Brent crude touched nearly $110 during the day before settling around $105.68. The pain didn't stop at crude, either. U.S. diesel prices crossed $6 a gallon for the first time ever, a record, and that matters to everyone because diesel moves the trucks that carry nearly everything you buy. When diesel jumps, grocery and shipping costs quietly climb right behind it.

• 📈 Yields hit a scary milestone: The 10-year Treasury yield briefly topped 5% for the first time since 2023, driven by all this fresh inflation fear.

• 🛢️ The pipeline has no restart date: Saudi Arabia hasn't said when it'll reopen, and its backup export port only holds about a week of inventory.

• 🏦 The Fed is boxed in: With oil reigniting inflation, markets now widely expect the Fed to raise rates at Wednesday's meeting.

The Munch Take: This is the frustrating kind of inflation, the sort nobody can control. The Fed can hike rates all it wants, but it can't repair a bombed pipeline or reopen a blocked strait. Until that oil starts flowing again, expect pain at the pump and jumpy markets. Keep your shopping list ready for Wednesday, because a rate hike into $100 oil could shake things loose fast.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

💰️ Bonus Report from Wall Street Zen: 44 Years. 7 Bear Markets. One Stock a Week.

🖥️ $MSFT Microsoft rose 1.97% after releasing a proposed code of conduct laying out safety guardrails for how it builds and runs its AI models. Microsoft got ahead of the conversation at the perfect moment.

☁️ $RUM Rumble surged 11.58% on reports that Anthropic struck a $13.7 billion deal to buy computing power from the cloud company. A mega-deal with one of the biggest names in AI is exactly the kind of validation this stock needed.

💳 $AFRM Affirm climbed 2.72% after Wolfe Research upgraded it to Outperform, calling the recent 18% selloff in the last year a buying opportunity. Sometimes all it takes is one analyst willing to call the bottom.

🏦 $BAC Bank of America fell 5.12% after CEO Brian Moynihan warned that third-quarter trading revenue would come in roughly flat from a year ago. Flat is a dirty word on Wall Street when investors are paying up for growth.

🎮 $RBLX Roblox jumped 12.73% after showing off new features and AI creator tools at its annual developer conference. Giving its army of creators better toys tends to pay off, and investors clearly agree.

NEWS OF THE DAY

💻 Hunter Biden's Meme Coin Went From $190 To Basically Zero

Hunter Biden launched a crypto meme coin yesterday called $LAPTOP, a wink at the infamous laptop scandal that followed him for years. He pitched it as "reclaiming" the symbol. What actually happened was a bloodbath. The coin opened trading above $190, then face-planted more than 98% within the first hour, crashing to around $2. If you had put $1,000 in at the top, you'd be staring at roughly $10 now.

Here's the mechanics of why these things detonate. A meme coin has zero underlying business, no product, no revenue, nothing. Its price is pure hype. Early insiders and the founders load up cheap before launch, the hype pulls in retail buyers at the top, and then the insiders dump into that demand. The price collapses, and the regular people holding the bag eat the loss. It's musical chairs where most players never had a chair.

• 🪑 The founders got theirs for free: Hunter and the other founders hold 30% of the supply at zero cost, so even after the crash, anything they eventually sell is pure profit, while buyers lost real money they paid in.

• 🎭 The scam attracts more scams: At least 14 fake copycat $LAPTOP coins appeared across other networks within an hour, racking up $6.9 million in trading volume off the confusion.

• 🏛️ Politicians keep doing this: Trump and Melania launched their own meme coins in 2025 and reaped about $1 billion combined, while most investors who bought lost money.

The Munch Take: This is exactly why crypto gets a bad name, and it's frustrating for those of us who actually believe in the real stuff. Bitcoin has a fixed supply and a genuine thesis. A politician's laptop meme coin is a cash grab dressed up as a movement, and everyday buyers are the ones who get fleeced every single time. Hunter walks away holding 30% of the supply. The people who bought his story walk away with pennies. Don't confuse the casino for the asset. They just happen to share a parking lot.

WARNING: A rare market edge is about to disappear (from Millionaire Publishing)

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 👟 Nike’s stock has never done this before.

2. 🤯 Dell’s stock chart is insane.

3. 🥛 Milk prices fell to a 2 month low.

4. 😂 $10 million house in Iowa vs Palo Alto.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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