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Chris Pulver

☕️ GM Munchers! Somehow it's September already. My big summer plans were a water park and a lake day, and I accomplished neither, mostly because the market refused to take a vacation and neither did I.

On today’s menu:

•  📊 August In The Books

• 📉 A September Rate Hike Became A Coin Flip

• 🚙 Tesla Climbs Over 5%

• 🍎 Tim Cook Just Worked His Last Day At Apple

• 😬 These Investing Legends Aren’t Doing Very Well

Yesterday’s numbers:

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BREAKING NEWS

📊 August In The Books: Corporate America Had A Monster Quarter

The golden days of Wall Street aren’t over yet.

August gave us one of the strongest earnings seasons in years. S&P 500 companies grew their earnings 53% from a year earlier and revenue climbed nearly 16%. That marks the fastest earnings growth the index has posted since 2021. But like most things that look too good on the surface, the real story is in what drove it and whether any of it can last.

AI played the role of that one strong friend on moving day, hauling the fridge up three flights while everyone else claimed a pillow and called it teamwork. The Magnificent Seven grew earnings a staggering 118.5% last quarter, boosted by huge investment gains at Amazon and Alphabet. Strip out just those two companies and the group's growth drops to 43.2%. Still strong, just less jaw-dropping.

Then came the tariff refunds. After the Supreme Court overturned certain tariffs, companies got billions of dollars back, and that cash landed straight in their profit columns. Target alone received nearly $1 billion in refunds. Abercrombie got about $100 million. That's real money but it's a one-time sugar rush.

• 🛒 The consumer showed up. Dollar General posted its fifth straight quarter of rising store traffic, Best Buy saw strong electronics demand, and names from Target to Garmin raised their full-year forecasts.

• 🛢️ Energy led the pack. Higher oil prices pushed the energy sector to 42.5% revenue growth, the strongest of any S&P 500 sector last quarter.

• 📈 Optimism is spreading. Almost twice as many companies raised their profit forecasts as cut them, a sharp flip from a year ago when downgrades were the majority.

So, what’s the catch? Growth this fast almost never sticks around. The S&P 500's trailing earnings growth hit roughly 35%, a level topped in only about 8% of quarters since 1928. History says these rare bursts are usually followed by much slower stretches. And some of this quarter's biggest boosters are temporary by nature, since tariff refunds run out, giant investment gains don't repeat on schedule, and energy profits lean on oil prices staying high.

The Munch Take: None of this means profits are about to fall off a cliff. Corporate America can keep making more money even as the growth rate cools back down to earth. The smart move heading into fall is the oldest one in the book: expect a little less, and leave yourself room to be pleasantly surprised. My wife has run our whole household budget on that exact philosophy for years, always assuming the surprise bill is coming, and she has never once been caught off guard when it does.

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CHART OF THE DAY

📉 A September Rate Hike Became A Coin Flip

Stocks dropped again yesterday as Wall Street finally chewed on an idea it had been trying not to taste: the Fed might hike instead of cut. Prediction markets now price in a 55% chance of a quarter-point hike at the Fed's September 16 meeting, up from about 35% just a week ago. The shift traces straight back to new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech, where he made clear that beating inflation is his top priority and the Fed still has "work to do."

Remember, every time rate hike odds climb, stocks tend to wobble and that makes us all very sad. Expect more of this jumpiness as we get closer to September 16. Here's the key part: the closer those odds sit to a true 50/50, the more violent the actual reaction will be, because half the market will be caught leaning the wrong way no matter what the Fed does.

• 🎯 The date: The Fed's next decision lands September 16 and right now it’s a coin flip.

• 📊 The odds: Markets now see roughly a 55% chance of a hike, a big jump from a week ago.

• ⚡ The setup: The tighter the odds, the bigger the market swing when the decision actually drops.

The Munch Take: Here's our honest take. If this fear knocks stocks down, good. Rates always get cut eventually, and we all know what that does for stocks when it happens. Whether we wait 12 months or 36 months does not matter to us one bit. This is an opportunity to stack great companies at better prices and simply be patient. If Bitcoin dips below $75,000, we'll keep adding, and we'll hunt for discounted stocks the same way. Most of this hike fear will get priced in before the meeting even arrives, so we're not flinching at the headlines.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

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🚗 $CAR Avis Budget Group rallied 6.78% on what one analyst basically chalked up to good old-fashioned luck. Sometimes a stock catches a break it didn't really earn, and nobody's complaining.

🚙 $TSLA Tesla rose 5.51% ahead of expected self-driving updates, including a pothole-dodging feature Elon Musk teased. Investors will get excited about almost anything with the word "autonomous" attached.

🎮 $GME GameStop popped 2.85% after early results suggested its eBay stake should give second-quarter profit a nice lift.

📌 $PINS Pinterest fell 6.38% after news that CFO Julia Brau Donnelly plans to exit at the end of October. Based on how much time my wife spends on that website, I think they’ll be okay.

✈️ $HWM Howmet Aerospace dropped 7.51% after Elon Musk said SpaceX wants to build its own turbine blades and vanes in-house. When a big customer talks about cutting out its supplier, that supplier's stock usually hears it loud and clear.

BIG NEWS

🍎 Tim Cook Just Worked His Last Day At Apple

Yesterday marked the end of an era. Tim Cook worked his final day as Apple's CEO, closing out a 15-year run that will no doubt land him in the business hall of fame. When Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, Apple was worth about $350 billion. Under his leadership, it became the second company in history to touch a $5 trillion market cap, which it did back in July. Revenue climbed from roughly $108 billion to nearly $400 billion, and the stock gained around 2,280% during his tenure, crushing the S&P 500's 555% over the same stretch.

Here's the honest part, though. Cook was a masterful operator and capital manager, but a genuine innovator he was not. Outside of AirPods, Apple has basically released the same iPhone year after year, leaning on its ecosystem and pricing power rather than breaking new ground. That's exactly why the board picked a hardware engineer as his successor.

• 👔 The new boss: John Ternus, Apple's longtime hardware engineering chief, takes over today after 25 years at the company.

• 📱 What's next: Apple is reportedly prepping its first foldable iPhone, a real test of whether Ternus can actually innovate where Cook coasted.

• 🤖 The big question: Apple has lagged badly on AI investment, and time will tell whether that caution ages like wisdom or like a mistake.

The Munch Take: So far, the market has rewarded Apple's careful, buyback-heavy approach, sending the stock up almost 17% this year even while critics (including me) complained it wasn't innovating. Cook proved you can win by managing money brilliantly instead of inventing the future. Whether that playbook keeps working in an AI-driven world is Ternus's problem now, and I’m excited to see how it unfolds.

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

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2. 🚀 We just saw the highest monthly close in history.

3. 🤑 Michael Saylor just bought more Bitcoin.

4. 😬 These investing legends aren’t doing very well.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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