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Broadcom’s earnings report: revenue hit $29.591 billion, up 86% year over year. Profits also beat expectations—looks like they’re really going strong. Then after hours it immediately dropped more than 6%. That really throws me off. The sell-off had one main excuse: the guidance for next quarter didn’t meet market expectations.

The reversal came during the earnings call. Hock Tang? (Chen Fu-yang?)—in any case, he reiterated that the AI revenue guidance is being doubled, doubled again, and then doubled once more. For fiscal year 2028, he directly called it at $230 billion. The stock did a deep V on the spot, briefly turning green. He also added something straight to the point: actual demand is even stronger than the guidance, but capacity was secured early—so they can only deliver based on the locked-in volume.

So it seems nobody was thinking about what happens three years from now after hours. As soon as the call started, everyone shifted all the focus to 2028. This kind of market action? I’ll just watch the show. But the line he said offhand is even more interesting: Anthropic wants to surpass Google in 2027 and become Broadcom’s biggest customer for custom chips.

Well, just when the U.S. and Iran’s mutual strikes escalated, crude oil first jumped. Overnight, WTI rose 5.2%, topping $90.22 per barrel. As shipping through the Strait of Hormuz tightened, U.S. stocks directly took a hit: all three major indexes closed lower, the Nasdaq fell more than 1%, Tesla dropped just over 3%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell more than 2%.

Amid a sea of green, Apple is the lone standout: on September 1, Tim Cook was replaced as CEO by Jon Ternus, who officially took the role. Cook became Executive Chairman. Apple still rose 2.6% against the trend, adding $120.8 billion to its market value overnight—investors bought into the baton handoff. But on the other side, Japan’s 10-year government bond yield has touched 3% for the first time since 1996; money is hiding in safe havens.

This morning, the Nikkei opened down 1.5%, and South Korea’s KOSPI opened down 3%. In Asia-Pacific, the beating started right away. With a market like this, I usually only dare to watch from the sidelines. The oil price trend alone makes my palms sweat.

Woke up early this morning—last night’s US stock memory/storage plays went on an unexpected rampage against the trend. SanDisk surged 5.5% to top trading value. Micron rose nearly 3%, while SK hynix, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA all climbed across the board.

I’ve always been bullish on memory/storage, and I’ve also kept practicing the strategy of buying a little when it drops. At least in the current AI market environment, that has been right.

Why is memory/storage so tough?
First is the earnings report. SanDisk’s Q4 revenue jumped 51% quarter-over-quarter. Price hikes are the core driver. Even Goldman Sachs has directly called a target price of $1,875, forecasting that EPS will grow 5-fold over the next three years.
Second is the wave of price increases spreading through. In China, Goertek?—no, it was China Jushi Electronics—announced a price hike of 15% to 20% for September. Samsung is also working with NVIDIA to develop HBM4E. The narrative of a shortage in high-end memory has shifted from SK hynix CEO’s “by 2030” to memory module makers’ “at least 2028.” It’s a consistent theme across the entire industry.
Third is capital rotating within the chip sector. Early gainers like optical communications companies and Mwaiyer?—no, those like Maviel—were hit, and the money moved into the play with the hardest price-hike logic and business performance that has just been validated: memory/storage.

Put it more plainly: interest rates are like a blade hanging over valuations, but memory/storage is supported by real, tangible price hikes and shortages. That’s why it’s the most resilient direction in chips—and the one that can still rally even when the market is moving against the trend.

Next up is Broadcom’s earnings report relay. Will this chip rally keep differentiating further, or continue to expand? Let’s first see how it performs.$AVGOB
Personally, I still stick with it and, well, I just add a bit when I can.

Cook officially steps down as Apple CEO, starting today Timmins takes over. He was at the helm for 15 years; Apple’s stock price delivered a cumulative return of 2,200%. Yet on the very last day, it still closed down 0.89%—I took a look at the market, and it really didn’t give him any face.

Timmins has been at Apple for more than two decades, rising from a Mac engineer all the way to the head of hardware—purely a hardware man. But what Apple needs most right now is AI. Reports say its internal large language model isn’t even as good as what Google and OpenAI have. The September 9th event will be his first appearance as CEO. The first foldable iPhone is set to debut. A hardware veteran stepping in has to catch up on AI—this storyline feels a bit twisted.

Cook hasn’t gone far; he has moved on to become Executive Chairman of the board, continuing to oversee government relations. On the day the leadership changed, the stock price didn’t move up or down. People were basically waiting for the September 9th event, wondering whether the new boss can bring back a bit of that “wow” feeling.

Interesting: last week NVIDIA’s earnings report and guidance both came in far above expectations, yet on Friday the stock price dropped straight down 4.57%, with its market cap still falling to just $5.25 trillion. The entire chip sector got hit along with it: the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell more than 3%, and even Micro/“迈威尔” got hit harder—despite raising its 2027 revenue guidance, the stock still crashed more than 10%.

With earnings that strong and it still fell—I was honestly stunned. That’s when “Big Short” Michael Burry stepped in to add to his short positions in NVIDIA, and also short Oracle and Palantir. But he also quietly bought NVIDIA call options, meaning even he was worried the earnings might be too strong and could blow him up. The same night, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta all rose—only the AI compute supply chain fell. It’s brutal.

Put simply, the market has become desensitized to “better-than-expected.” No matter how pretty the numbers look, if the money wants to run, it will still run. This week Broadcom is also set to report earnings; whether the compute supply chain can recover or not will depend on it.

NVIDIA has just used a rare set of guidance—"revenue for the next fiscal year to rise another 70%"—to spark AI trading, and the baton is now being passed to Broadcom. With a market cap of $1.7 trillion, it will report earnings after the close next week, in the same week as the August Non-Farm Payrolls on September 4, as markets wait for one thing above all: whether it dares to issue such clear long-term guidance as well.

Broadcom and NVIDIA are not playing the same game. NVIDIA sells standard GPUs, while Broadcom focuses on custom work: custom AI chips for mega-clients like Google’s TPUs—most of which are its business—along with network chips as well. The difference in their approaches determines what stands out in the earnings report. NVIDIA looks at sales volume and gross margin, whereas Broadcom looks at when the capital expenditures of a few major customers will actually be realized. The numbers from Barclays add it up clearly: for every $100 that a model company earns, $35 to $40 flows into the pockets of compute infrastructure providers; Broadcom is one of the landlords collecting rent.

But this time, the earnings report hits a cooler macro backdrop. The first show at Jackson Hole from Waller was hawkish, and rate-hike expectations for September have been ratcheted up. Last Friday’s selloff in chip stocks is a reminder. Even if the earnings report blows the doors off, it can’t withstand the knife of interest rates. NVIDIA’s 70% guidance has whetted appetites to the sky—if Broadcom can’t deliver clear expectations of a similar magnitude, the AI sector’s momentum will need to pause for a bit.

It flipped. Just as Musk had spent $60 billion up front to bring the AI programming tool Cursor into SpaceX (completed the acquisition on August 14), OpenAI then immediately announced on the heels of that that it would cut off model access to Cursor on November 12, citing a lack of trust in entities controlled by Musk.

This isn’t the first time, either. After Musk’s Twitter acquisition, there were violations of contracts. And xAI using OpenAI outputs to train Grok has also been substantiated. The lawsuit in which Musk is suing OpenAI for $150 billion is still ongoing. This whole move leaves me completely baffled. On Cursor’s website, the GPT-5.6 series is still listed for paid users. After the supply cut, they’ll either switch models or switch providers. Musk’s side replied with nothing more than, “Not the slightest bit concerned.”

One side controls the model and the other holds the compute. With Cursor backed by SpaceX, it actually gained access to computing resources. Hard to say who’s hurting more. OpenAI is also preparing for an IPO, planning to list in 2027. Doing business with a rival is precisely what they’re guarding against—namely, their own model being fed into Grok by the enemy company.

Let’s talk about the pie Musk drew 😂
$SPCX
He said that by 2033, SpaceX’s annual revenue could reach $3.5 trillion. In contrast, a model from Morgan Stanley doesn’t reach that figure until 2040—basically directly implying that investment banks’ outlook is too conservative, by bringing it forward by seven years.

So what does $3.5 trillion mean? Walmart’s annual revenue is around $680 billion, which means this is over five WalMarts. SpaceX’s annual revenue right now is still in the range of a few billion dollars, so it would need to grow by 30 times in a bit more than ten years. He just announced a goal of $1 trillion for 2030, and now by 2033 he’s already jumping to $3.5 trillion. In the three years in between, it still needs to more than triple again—pretty amazing, right?

That said, this isn’t entirely just guesswork. Starlink is currently growing its user base and revenue like a snowball. And once Starship truly achieves high-frequency reuse—say, launching multiple times a day—the launch market would be absorbed completely, which really is an astronomical-sized piece of the pie. If Morgan Stanley dares to put the number at $3.5 trillion by 2040, that suggests even the most optimistic people on Wall Street recognize this direction—just believing the path will take time. Then Old Man Musk complains they’re going too slowly and starts running ahead himself.

There’s also something interesting~ Morgan Stanley’s $3.5 trillion in 2040 is already treated as an aggressive projection, yet he still thinks it’s late. That suggests that in his own mind, SpaceX’s endgame is even bigger than what the outside world imagines. When Starship really starts doing several launches a day and Starlink users grow by, say, ten times, and then you look back at his statement—whether it was boasting or conservative—will be clear naturally.

Well, wow. Overnight, the US stock indexes looked solid on the surface: the Dow only fell 0.02%, the Nasdaq also slipped by just half a point—but chip stocks were basically a bloodbath. Nvidia’s earnings report has barely finished exploding in the market, with the stock soaring for a day, and then—right after—Powell? No, Fed Chair Waller’s hawkish remarks slapped it back down. It fell 4.57%. The SOX index dropped over 3%, ARM slid more than 6%, and optical communications were hit even worse.

The most ridiculous one is MKS Instruments (MAWELL): revenue beat expectations, and it even has a Google $100 billion procurement deal in hand—yet the stock still fell more than 10%. Wall Street didn’t even give it face. Gold plunged too. COMEX gold prices lost the 4,500 mark, Bitcoin dropped more than 3%, and in the last 24 hours, 96,000 people worldwide were liquidated—just unbelievable.

In plain terms, with Waller一句 “inflation hasn’t cooled,” money all collectively shifted its bets toward more rate hikes. Even if earnings reports keep detonating, you can’t withstand this knife of interest rates.

I can’t quite make sense of it. Nvidia’s guidance came in better than expected. In theory, the biggest beneficiaries should be companies that sell memory and sell optical modules. The day before the pre-market open, Marvell even rose more than 5%, and Sandisk, Micron, and SK Hynix also rose more than 4%—it was a full-on celebration.
Then, the very next night, everything was given back. Marvell fell more than 7% after hours, while Micron, Sandisk, and Seagate each dropped more than 1%.
Marvell still has a giant order from Google worth $120 billion—the customized chip orders through 2033.
And this can still get hammered like this. What can you say? You can only say that the market’s current sentiment is “if it’s run up too much, run first.” Good news has already been treated like something you sell into, and once the good news is out, it turns into bad news. Good news gets used as an exit. Laughable.
Let it drop. Let it drop—I’ll keep lying in wait and accumulating those tangerines.$SNDK

NVIDIA really blew this one out of the water. Both its earnings report and guidance beat expectations across the board: the stock closed up 8.7%, its market cap gained an additional $442 billion overnight—about RMB 2.97 trillion—and it directly surged to $5.49 trillion. Revenue doubled, and its guidance for the next fiscal year implies a rise of roughly 70%, whereas Wall Street had only dared to guess 45%.

Even more intense: it also finalized what is reportedly the largest acquisition in history—paying $12.9 billion to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face. That platform’s annualized revenue is only $150 million, which is equivalent to an 80x valuation. At that price, in any M&A market, it would be considered rare. Over there, the FTSE—along with Anthropic—rolled out something called Claudeforce, which jumped 22% in a single day, and software stocks followed suit as they “came back to life.”

I’m stunned. Closed-source chip giants are throwing money at open-source platforms, while the ghost story of “AI will kill SaaS” on the other side gets slapped in the face by a single earnings report—compute, open source, and software are all being stirred together. It’s definitely lively. But $12.9 billion to buy a platform with $150 million in annual revenue—how does that add up? Anyway, I didn’t really get it.

NVIDIA’s earnings report left me stunned: revenue hits $96.2 billion, doubling year over year; net profit doubles too, and for the first time it even provides guidance a full year early—saying that in fiscal 2028 revenue will grow another 70%. Before the earnings, the stock had been falling for a week and the market was worried that growth might be peaking. Then, after the bell, it surged more than 4% straight away.

At the earnings call, Jensen Huang said that AI has reached an inflection point—compute power now equals revenue. It sounds like the same kind of talk from three years ago when ChatGPT first went viral. But there’s a catch for gross margin: HBM and DRAM prices have risen too aggressively, so next quarter gross margin is expected to drop to a low of 71%-72%. Capacity, power, and storage are all in tight supply. The company says shortages will last at least through the end of fiscal 2028.

The bottleneck is capacity, not demand. With growth still doubling at the same pace and guidance reaffirmed, after staring at it for a while, all I can say is this: this round of AI money—NVIDIA really knows how to make it.

Nvidia’s post-market earnings cash-out tonight (FY2027 Q2). Before the report, it took a cold shot: the head of JPMorgan downgraded it to a neutral rating. The reason? Nvidia is using its own balance sheet to pump cash into the entire AI ecosystem—coordinating financing partnerships totaling over $500 billion with six major financial giants. Guarantees, leasing, and revenue-sharing arrangements are all in play, risks that traditional metrics simply can’t capture. On Tuesday, the stock initially held steady, rising 2.19% to end a seven-day losing streak, with a market cap of $5.16 trillion.

Customers are also adding fuel. OpenAI said its in-house chip, Jalapeno, has outperformed Nvidia’s GB300 in performance tests—and then added a caveat that it won’t fully replace Nvidia, that it will still continue to place large-scale orders. The timing is right before the earnings release—this isn’t really a technical update; it’s plainly pressuring the negotiation. It left me stunned: the more aggressively the chips are sold, the more urgently customers are rushing to build their own.

The real test comes in the early hours of Thursday Beijing time: whether growth can hold up and keep the $5-trillion market valuation afloat—more important than that neutral rating from JPMorgan.

PDD’s Q2 revenue reached 112.4 billion yuan, up only 8% year over year—falling short of market expectations, and net profit even dropped 12%. In the same week, after Amazon released its earnings report, its stock price jumped 15% in a single day, and AWS growth was 37%. Two e-commerce giants: one seems like it’s put into reverse, the other like it’s pressing the accelerator.

PDD’s problem is overseas. Chen Lei himself said Temu has been tangled up by regulators and compliance requirements across different countries. As globalization hits new challenges, the company has shifted its main focus back to domestic grocery shopping; this year, revenue is aiming for around 400 billion yuan. Amazon, on the other hand, has been gorging on AI infrastructure dividends. It raised its full-year capital expenditures to $220 billion. Even Echo smart speakers had their prices increased due to higher storage chip costs—yet cost pressure continues to pass through.

One company is feasting on AI dividends, while the other is ramming into a compliance wall and finding it painful. If PDD can’t get its growth back on track, the valuation logic the market uses will need to be replaced with a new set of explanations.

Nvidia falls $208.48, down 2.91%; seven straight days of losses on the daily chart, setting the longest losing streak since 2022. The chip sector sinks across the board: the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index drops 2.7%, while SanDisk, Micron, and SK hynix all fall more than 5% together. With this setup, it looks like the AI narrative is about to be hauled in for inspection.

The inspection point is tomorrow night: after the close in U.S. Eastern time on Aug. 26, Nvidia will release its earnings report for fiscal 2027 Q2. As the bellwether for this round of AI infrastructure investment, the look of orders and guidance will directly determine whether the market still believes that compute demand hasn’t peaked. Wow—every bit of suspense built up over seven down days is being pinned on this earnings report. To be honest, I’m a little confused by it.

Outside the U.S. things aren’t much better: the Nasdaq also has seven straight down sessions, Tesla is down nearly 4%, and money is hiding in gold as the gold price breaks above $4,670. The script of a failed “AI faith” recap doesn’t look like it’s going to stop anytime soon.

Gold rises above $4,650 to a three-month high; New York COMEX gold futures intraday touched $4,700. Domestic gold futures surged 2.86%, breaking back above the 1,000-yuan mark. Four days ago, the gold price was still hovering around 4,500. This acceleration of $150 has been driven entirely by precautionary funds.

Meanwhile, Treasuries are facing growing doubts about the “risk-free” label. Last week, Bessent carried out the “U.S. Treasury-version reversal operation” to push down long-end yields, but it only worked for a day. Long-bond yields rebounded, and the 30-year rate remained stuck above 5.2%. Markets are starting to worry: administrative measures distort pricing, and in the end it is the credibility of the U.S. dollar that gets eroded. So funds “vote with their feet” — they sell Treasuries and buy gold. Even Asia has shifted from “crisis-era funds flowing back to the West” to a “local safe-haven pool.” The dollar’s old stronghold is loosening.

Gold and bonds are competing for the same “safe-haven” tag, and this time gold is fighting especially hard. Bonds are still bonds, but the definition of “safety” is being rewritten.

This earnings report from Pop Mart left me stunned. Revenue was RMB 17.173 billion, up 23.8%; net profit was RMB 5.038 billion, up 10.1%. The numbers aren’t too bad, but the market’s expectations were higher. They didn’t meet them—its stock price dropped more than 8% straight away, and it’s been cut in half from its peak. It’s really, truly miserable.

Wang Ning, on the other hand, is genuinely candid. He openly admits that last year’s surge had a luck component. LABUBU’s share is also declining. Then, he turned around and announced a share buyback plan worth RMB 2 to 5 billion. Goldman Sachs is still pouring cold water, saying demand is soft and inventory is running high. But the offline reality is totally flipped: the “Star” characters sold out in seconds, and second-hand reselling premiums are up 13 times. Even Duan Yongping says that store visits show business is doing exceptionally well. So who should you trust? I’m confused too.

The buyback is real money—at least the boss has some confidence. But growth rates and inventory are still two hurdles ahead. Whether there can be another breakout hit after LABUBU is the most urgent question for what comes next; the “Star” characters are just a sign, for now. Today it rebounded 4% to HK$155. Sentiment is recovering, but getting back in one go may be hard.

Alibaba completed the pricing of a new share placement of HK$80 billion on August 23, with the issue price set at HK$112.7 per share. A total of 710 million shares were issued, representing a discount of about 8% to the closing price of Hong Kong shares last Friday. This is the first time Alibaba has conducted a placement since its return to Hong Kong for listing in 2019. The subscription was limited to professional institutions located outside the United States. Settlement will take place on August 26.

Money is clearly going all-in on AI infrastructure. Sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East, Europe, and Asia all came to place subscriptions. My first reaction was: even with an 8% discount, they still get the allocation—cloud service providers are essentially using equity dilution to raise a whole batch of capital to buy AI firepower. The AI arms race is really willing to spend.

Coincidentally, Nvidia released its earnings report after market close on August 26. Servers have just been reported to be set to increase prices by more than 15%, with skyrocketing memory chip costs cited as the visible reason. The more expensive computing power becomes, the more big players stock up early—this money is not going to stop.

NVIDIA servers are going to get more expensive—in many cases by over 15%. The contract manufacturers that build the batch of servers for Microsoft, Google, and Oracle’s data centers have already notified their customers to prepare for price increases. The reason is simple: the cost of memory chips has skyrocketed, and NVIDIA itself hasn’t responded. Coincidentally, next Wednesday after the U.S. stock market closes (early Thursday Beijing time), it will release its Q2 earnings report, and the whole market is waiting.

Well, servers are already expensive. A 15% increase makes me wince. The price hike is basically handing a knife to the vertically integrated chips used by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. But NVIDIA’s software ecosystem moat is too deep—new data centers still can’t get around its cards. On Friday, the stock fell 0.98%, and its market cap is still $5.2 trillion, keeping it firmly seated as the world’s top stock.

In short, NVIDIA turns around and passes the hit from rising memory prices downstream. How well the gross margin in next week’s earnings report can hold up depends entirely on what Huang Renxun has to say.

Interesting—this round of pricing for large language models between the US and China has gone in opposite directions. In an official announcement on August 21, OpenAI said that the API and credit pricing for GPT-5.6 Sol will be cut by more than 20% over the next three months. Domestically, it’s the reverse: DeepSeek leads the way, followed one after another by Zhipu, Kimi, and MiniMax. Morgan Stanley’s statistics show that in the second quarter, the average API input price of homegrown models rose to 4.9 yuan per million tokens; in the first quarter of 2025 it was still 3.3 yuan. The output price, moreover, has climbed to 21.9 yuan.
My first reaction was that I must be reading it wrong—but after double-checking, it’s correct. The key is who’s driving the increase: independent model vendors are leading the charge, while big companies with their own compute capacity stand pat or effectively adjust prices in another way. In plain terms, compute costs are essentially fixed; independent firms that are relying on lower pricing to gain market share can’t hold on, so they have to move their prices. OpenAI, meanwhile, is proactively cutting prices to grab volume—both sides are thinking differently.
This round of price hikes looks like a correction at first glance, but actually it’s independent vendors being unable to withstand it first.