Business Summaries

50.4% — the S&P 500's year-over-year earnings growth rate this season, the strongest pace since Q2 2021, with 86% of companies beating on the bottom line and 76% beating on revenue.

Wall Street's Earnings Boom Meets the Inflation Reckoning

• JPMorgan raised its year-end S&P 500 target to 8,000 from 7,800, a 200-point bump driven by strategist Dubravko Lakos-Bujas citing a blowout Q2 earnings season that silenced AI-spending skeptics
• **Record...

• Eli Lilly (LLY): Raised 2026 revenue guidance to $85B-$87B, up from $82B-$85B, after beating Q2 forecasts, sending shares up 6.3% for the week.
• Ellington Financial (EFC): KBW raised 2026 EPS guidance to $2.12 after Q2 adjusted distributable earnings of $0.60/share beat expectations, with a 12% dividend yield.
• S&P 500: Reached a new record high, with 86% of companies beating earnings forecasts and profit growth exceeding 50%—the best since Q2...

DeepSeek is raising the stakes after its $7.4 billion funding round. The Chinese AI firm, known for undercutting rivals on price, just announced a "significant increase" in API costs—a contrarian move that signals a shift from growth-at-all-costs to sustainable unit economics. With plans for its own chips and a massive data center, DeepSeek is clearly eyeing an IPO. The real twist? It's reportedly back in the market for another $8 billion, pushing its valuation to over **$74...

3.50%-3.75% — The federal funds rate the Fed held steady at its July meeting, while Bank of America warns the bond market is already doing the tightening work for it.

Money Moves

• Bank of America flags dangerous Fed theory — BofA warns a "3D chess" scenario is emerging where the Fed deliberately lets long-term yields rise to cool demand, creating market confusion over whether tighter conditions signal confidence or uncertainty.
• **Magnificent Seven face...

AI startups are igniting a capital market supercycle, reshaping IPO pipelines and challenging incumbents with unprecedented funding.

Evidence For

• SpaceX launched a record-breaking IPO in June, proving that even pre-profit tech darlings can command massive public appetite.
• Anthropic and OpenAI have both filed to go public, signaling that the AI-focused venture pipeline is maturing into liquid assets.
• Chipmaking startup Source Foundry secured a **$400...

• Bitcoin ETFs surge: US spot Bitcoin funds pulled in roughly $1 billion in net inflows this week, their strongest showing since April and third-best since last October, per Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas. Institutional demand is roaring even as the retail-driven crypto treasury craze collapses.
• Berkshire goes buying: CEO Greg Abel reversed a 14-quarter selling streak, deploying nearly $20 billion in net equity purchases during Q2. Operating earnings climbed **16% to...

Robinhood Ventures Fund II (ticker RVII) launched this week, democratizing access to the high-risk world of seed-stage investing. Starting August 13, retail investors can buy into a portfolio of 80 Y Combinator-connected startups on the New York Stock Exchange for just $25 a share—no accreditation required. The fund aims to raise $200 million through an IPO of 8 million shares, with Goldman Sachs leading the underwriting syndicate.

This is a bold move to bring...

$100 billion — the cumulative tariff refunds the Trump administration has returned to U.S. companies since the Supreme Court struck down "Liberation Day" tariffs, and the cash is now showing up in Q2 earnings reports across corporate America.

Money Moves

• Dow Jones closed above 54,000 for the first time, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both hit all-time weekly closing highs, capping a five-day winning streak
• Amazon disclosed $600 million in...

Unitree Robotics priced its Shanghai STAR Market IPO at a valuation of approximately $9 billion, making it the world's first mainland-listed humanoid robot manufacturer. The Hangzhou-based company sold 40.45 million new shares at 150.8 yuan ($22.34) each, raising about 6.1 billion yuan ($900 million) to develop new hardware, software, and expand manufacturing capacity. This isn't just another tech listing—it's a valuation benchmark for China's booming embodied-AI sector, backed...

PokeBot, a Chinese embodied-AI startup, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in a pre-A round led by Shunwei Capital and Matrix Partners. The months-old company is developing household robots for tasks including clothes folding and cooking. A demonstration showed one of its robots autonomously cooking mapo tofu in nine minutes. This is a massive pre-A round, signaling investor confidence in embodied AI's potential to automate domestic chores and challenging the...

$7.81 billion — SpaceX's Q2 revenue in its first earnings report as a public company, up 92% year-over-year, crushing the $6.93 billion Wall Street consensus.

Money Moves

• SpaceX (SPCX) posts first earnings since $86B IPO — Loss of 9 cents per share beat the expected 26-cent loss, but shares fell 12% as AI capex soared to $23B in H1, up from $3.3B a year ago
• Palantir (PLTR) jumps 29% — Revenue surged 93% YoY to $1.94 billion, beating estimates of...