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Elon Musk says 90% of Earth has a financial reason to move to Spain. He made the claim on Thursday, as thousands of people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta.
It is an argument he has made many times before. Until now, he aimed it at the United States.
What Happened in Ceuta
Ceuta is a small Spanish city on the coast of North Africa. About 85,000 people live there. It sits right on the border with Morocco.
Thousands crossed over on Thursday. Most swam around the Tarajal seawall. At least nine people died.
🇪🇸 Insane footage from the Moroccan border with Spain: thousands of migrants are gathering at the borderThis is exactly what Spanish Prime Minister Sanchez was aiming for. pic.twitter.com/Fb1pEKU0jj
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 30, 2026
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Rachid Sbihi runs the union for Ceuta’s border police. He described “absolute chaos” and said the border had “totally collapsed,” according to the Associated Press.
Local leader Juan Jesús Vivas asked Madrid to declare a national emergency and send the army. The Interior Ministry said no. It sent troops and extra police anyway. Spain and Morocco then agreed to speed up returns.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Spain was mobilizing all necessary resources. In January, his government gave legal status to about half a million undocumented workers.
“The Government of Spain is fully committed to providing an immediate response to the situation in Ceuta…working with Moroccan and international authorities, and preparing the necessary measures to restore normalcy as soon as possible… This is the moment to build solutions, with responsibility and cooperation,” wrote Sanchez.
Musk attacked that plan at the time. Sánchez told him “Mars can wait.” The clash fits a pattern in Musk’s European political commentary.
Where the ‘90% of Earth’ Line Comes From
The idea is simple. Musk says a country becomes a magnet when its benefits beat what most of the world lives on. That magnet then grows big enough to break the budget.
He made the same point in April about America. Free taxpayer money can beat the living standards of 90% of Earth, he wrote. That gives 90% of Earth a reason to move there.
A 2024 version used smaller numbers. America holds 4% of the world’s people. A shift of just 1% would crush essential services, he said. For Spain, he put the number at 7 billion.
Spain’s entire budget will be destroyed by illegal migrants. It’s basic math: if Spain offers free stuff to migrants that is above 90% of the living standard of Earth, they create a forcing function for 90% of Earth to move to Spain, which is around 7 billion people!” Musk explained.
Researchers see it differently. They find that jobs, distance, language, and family already living abroad matter more than benefits. That gap is why the line spreads fast, and why it gets attacked just as fast.

Coinbase posted a $359.5 million net loss on second quarter revenue of $1.22 billion, below Wall Street’s $1.29 billion consensus. COIN shares fell 5.44% after hours to $154.68.
The selloff erased a 2.18% regular session gain that had left the stock at $163.58. Investors looked past a record trading market share and fixed on the shrinking top line.
Coinbase (COIN) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance Coinbase Revenue Miss Extends a Losing Streak
This was the third straight quarter in the red. Losses have narrowed each time.
Coinbase lost $666.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 and $394.1 million in the first. Diluted loss per share came in at $1.36, while transaction revenue reached $599.2 million.
Adjusted EBITDA stayed positive at $207.8 million, a 14th consecutive quarter above zero. That figure fell from $303.3 million three months earlier.
Restructuring costs added $52.4 million. The line had read zero for 10 straight quarters before Coinbase began cutting 700 jobs earlier this year. Citi had already cut its price target by 41% days before the report.
Record Market Share Lands in a Shrinking Market
Crypto trading volume market share climbed to 10.3% from 9.1% in the first quarter, a third consecutive record. Derivatives share also hit an all-time high for the third quarter running.
Meanwhile, the wider crypto derivatives market contracted by double digits over the same stretch.
Prediction markets did the heaviest lifting. Contracts and revenue both more than doubled, growing 106% quarter over quarter. The business crossed $100 million in annualized revenue.
Those gains landed against a weak backdrop. Bitcoin spot trading volumes fell toward multi-year lows in July. Rival Robinhood saw crypto revenue drop 38% year over year.
Stablecoins Now Carry More of the Load
Subscription and services revenue reached $555.1 million, or 48% of net revenue. That share stood at 29% in the fourth quarter of 2024.
Coinbase said 88% of net revenue came from sources other than Bitcoin spot trading. Average USDC held in Coinbase products hit a record $20 billion. That is more than 30% of the dollar-pegged stablecoin in circulation at quarter end.
Stablecoin transaction volume on Base, the company’s own layer-2 network, rose sevenfold year over year.
“Coinbase is no longer a bet just on the price of Bitcoin. All of financial services are getting updated by crypto, whether that’s trading or payments or lending, and Coinbase is the best-positioned company in the world to power this,” Brian Armstrong, Coinbase co-founder and chief executive, in the earnings release.
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What Comes Next
Coinbase reduced and narrowed its 2026 adjusted expense guidance. The company now implies GAAP technology, administrative and marketing costs of $4.34 billion to $4.6 billion this year.
“Despite market headwinds, our fundamentals remain strong as we consolidate trading share and continue to build through the cycle,” Alesia Haas, Coinbase chief financial officer, in the same release.
One question now hangs over the second half. Can a bigger slice of a smaller market lift revenue once trading volumes recover?

Apple reported its strongest June quarter on record, topping Wall Street forecasts on both revenue and earnings. Shares still fell in extended trading on Thursday as investors picked apart the composition of the beat.
Services revenue and Greater China sales landed below analyst forecasts. A one-time tariff refund also flattered profitability, leaving traders to judge how much of the quarter reflects durable demand.
Apple Q3 Earnings Rest on iPhone and Mac Strength
Revenue reached $109.42 billion for the quarter ended June 27, up 16% year over year. Diluted earnings per share rose 29% to $2.02, ahead of the $1.89 consensus.
Mac produced the quarter’s biggest upside surprise. The segment generated $10.35 billion, roughly 29% above last year and well clear of forecasts near $8.7 billion.
iPhone revenue climbed 22% to $54.25 billion. Every geographic segment grew by double digits, and the installed base of active devices set a record.
“Today, Apple is proud to report our strongest June quarter ever, with double-digit revenue growth across iPhone, Mac and Services, and in every geographic segment,” Tim Cook, Apple CEO, in the company’s earnings release.
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Tariff Refunds Cloud the Quality of the Beat
Gross margin reached 50.1%, but tariff refunds contributed about 2 percentage points of that figure and $0.11 of earnings per share. Strip those out and the beat narrows considerably.
Those refunds trace back to the Supreme Court tariff ruling in February, which struck down the White House’s global tariff regime. The benefit is unlikely to repeat at the same scale.
Services grew 12% to $30.74 billion, short of estimates near $31.2 billion. Apple pointed to foreign exchange headwinds as one factor. Greater China revenue rose 22% to $18.82 billion, though analysts had set a higher bar after recent share gains.
How Stock Traders Are Framing the Setup
Shares closed at $333.43 on Thursday, down 0.56%, then eased to roughly $317.66 after hours. Market value sits near $4.97 trillion, just under the $5 trillion market cap the stock touched earlier this week.
Apple (APPL) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
That run created the problem. Apple gained about 15% in July and closed a week of megacap earnings that had already lifted expectations beyond a routine beat.
Some analysts had already flagged the valuation risk heading into the print, including warnings on Apple’s valuation from investor Dan Niles. The soft Services line gives that argument fresh support.
The report also marks Cook’s last as chief executive. John Ternus takes the role on September 1, adding a leadership variable to a September quarter that already carries memory supply constraints and recent hardware price increases.
Guidance from the earnings call now matters more than the headline numbers. Traders will watch whether management signals that Services growth reaccelerates, or whether this quarter marks the peak of the current cycle.

MicroStrategy earnings for the second quarter carried an $8.22 billion net loss and a new metric, BTC Hurdle ARR, that Strategy’s own bitcoin yield is currently running below.
The company set that hurdle at 10.8% and reported a 4.5% bitcoin yield for the year. Chief Financial Officer Andrew Kang called the figure its effective cost of credit.
What the New Metric Is Meant to Show
Strategy published BTC Hurdle ARR and Net Bitcoin Per Share on its website this week, timed to results. Together they are meant to show whether bitcoin accretion outruns what the company pays creditors and preferred holders.
Kang set out the test himself.
“Our BTC Hurdle ARR of 10.8% represents our current effective cost of credit. If BTC ARR is above this rate, Net BTC Per Share captures a positive spread and appreciates faster than bitcoin on a go-forward basis,” Andrew Kang, Chief Financial Officer, Strategy said in the statement.
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The comparison is not perfectly clean. Strategy published no current BTC ARR figure, and BTC Yield tracks per-share accretion over a fixed window rather than an annual rate.
The Distance Between 4.5% and 10.8%
The direction is still checkable. A 4.5% yield banked between January 1 and July 26 works out near 8% annualized, leaving a shortfall of roughly three percentage points.
Strategy announces Q2 2026 results:– Increased $BTC Holdings by 11%– Reduced Convertible Debt by 18%– Increased USD Reserve by 12%– Increased BPS by 5%https://t.co/nfBSJsFjMt
— Strategy (@Strategy) July 30, 2026
On the company’s own logic, a negative spread means Net Bitcoin Per Share fails to outpace bitcoin itself. Anyone holding MSTR for leveraged exposure is currently paying more for credit than the machine returns.
Scrutiny of that machinery is not new. The debate over new metrics has trailed Strategy through 2026, as has the collapse in MSTR’s premium to its holdings.
Why the Cost of Credit Keeps Climbing
The hurdle rises with whatever Strategy pays for money. STRC issuance brought in $7.53 billion this year, growth of 254%, and management pushed the payout rate on those preferred shares to 12%.
Preferred dividends alone consumed $400.7 million during the quarter, against $49.1 million a year earlier. Roughly $218.4 million of bitcoin was sold to help cover them.
The quarter was punishing. An $8.32 billion writedown produced a net loss of $8.22 billion, or $24.45 per diluted share. With Bitcoin trading near $64,713, the 843,775 coin position sits about $8.9 billion beneath its $63.69 billion cost.
Bitcoin Price Performance, Source: BeInCrypto
Founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor reads the period as a transition rather than a strain.
“In the midst of this phase of muted bitcoin sentiment and market skepticism, we continue to evolve our business model and establish Digital Credit as a new asset class,” said Saylor.
Parts of the release support that reading. Convertible notes fell from $8.21 billion to $6.71 billion after a May buyback struck at an 8% discount to par, and software revenue grew 6.9% to $122.4 million.
A $3.75 billion reserve covers dividends and interest for 2.1 years, so nothing breaks imminently, though STRC’s durability remains contested. The sharper question is whether the spread flips positive before that cushion thins.

Amazon beat Wall Street on every headline metric in the second quarter, and Amazon Web Services grew 37% year over year, its fastest pace in 18 quarters.
Shares closed the regular session at $235.50, up 3.90%. The stock then climbed to $256.33 in after-hours trading, a further 8.85% gain, once the numbers landed Thursday.
Why the Amazon Q2 Earnings Beat Matters
Net sales reached $200.6 billion, up 20% from $167.7 billion a year earlier. Analysts had modeled roughly $197 billion.
Operating income rose 43% to $27.5 billion. That lifted the operating margin to 13.7% from 11.4%, against a consensus near 12%.
Diluted earnings landed at $5.75 per share versus estimates around $1.82. However, that comparison flatters the quarter.
Amazon booked $53.4 billion of non-operating pre-tax other income, primarily from its stake in Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude models. Strip out that revaluation and the operating result still clears the bar.
AMAZON $AMZN JUST REPORTED Q2 EARNINGS• Revenue: $200.6B, beating expectations of $196.47B 🟢• EPS: $5.75, beating expectations of $1.82 🟢• AWS revenue: $42.2BQ3 guidance:• Revenue: $197B-$202B, below expectations of $204.07B 🔴• Operating income: $22.5B-$26.5B vs… pic.twitter.com/aa9kiCoszk
— WOLF (@WOLF_Financial) July 30, 2026
Context matters here. Microsoft’s Azure business grew 43% a day earlier, while Meta watched AI spending squeeze margins to 31% from 43%. Investors wanted to know which camp Amazon fell into.
AWS Acceleration Validates the $200 Billion AI Bet
AWS sales hit $42.2 billion, a $169 billion annualized run rate. Growth of 36.7% was the segment’s strongest since 2021.
Profitability moved with it. AWS operating income jumped 64% to $16.6 billion, and the segment margin widened to 39.4% from 32.9%. Amazon therefore bought that acceleration without cutting prices.
“AWS is booming, growing 36.7% year-over-year in Q2 … and our AI and Chips businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion,” Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon, in the earnings release.
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Both businesses grew at triple-digit rates. Anthropic and OpenAI have made multi-gigawatt compute commitments to Trainium, Amazon’s in-house AI training chip.
Free Cash Flow Turns Negative as Capex Climbs
The bill is plain to see. Amazon spent $54.2 billion on property and equipment during the quarter alone.
Trailing twelve-month purchases reached $169 billion, a 64% increase. Free cash flow swung to an outflow of $7.6 billion over that period, from an $18.2 billion inflow a year earlier.
Operating cash flow still grew 33% to $161.4 billion, so the draining free cash flow reflects construction rather than weakness in the underlying business.
Guidance handed skeptics something, though. Amazon expects third-quarter sales between $197 billion and $202 billion, short of the roughly $204 billion analysts wanted. Prime Day timing explains nearly 400 basis points of the shortfall, the company said.
Investors who question AI capex returns now face a harder argument. The open question is whether AWS can defend 37% growth once the comparison base rises next year.

FTX begins its fifth creditor distribution on Friday, moving roughly $900 million to holders of allowed claims. The round is the smallest of the five the estate has paid since repayments began.
The shrinking size points to a bankruptcy in its closing phase. The harder problem now is not raising cash but reaching creditors who have never collected.
FTX Fifth Distribution Is the Smallest of Five Rounds
FTX moved more than $5 billion in its second distribution in May 2025, then about $1.6 billion that September. The fourth creditor distribution round came to roughly $2.2 billion in March 2026.
Friday’s payment is under half that. Allowed Class 5A Dotcom customer claims pick up another 9%, reaching 105% cumulatively, while Class 5B U.S. customer claims add 5% to reach the same level. General unsecured and digital asset loan claims each gain 3%, taking both to 103%.
FTX DistributionDistribution = 31st JulyRecord date = 16th JuneIf passed all requirements incl. KYC by 16th June will receive distribution Few creditors in the Bahamas are stuck on KYC for yrs despite submitting formsIdentity Verification: Verification in Progress pic.twitter.com/KL21v5mxc6
— Sunil (FTX Creditor Champion) (@sunil_trades) July 27, 2026
Convenience class holders sit at a 120% cumulative recovery, though FTX cautioned that final percentages may shift slightly on rounding. Those figures count dollars, not coins, and the real value of repayments has trailed what the same assets would fetch today.
A separate $18 million payment goes to preferred equity holders on the same date, lifting that trust’s running total to $95 million.
Some Creditors Still Cannot Be Paid
Claims that are not yet allowed stay marked as disputed. FTX lists three common reasons, including:
Proofs of claim still under reconciliation
Jurisdictions still under review, and
Customers who took partial payments through the Australian proceedings.
The Bahamas track runs on its own terms. Joint official liquidators of FTX Digital Markets set the same June 16 record date and July 31 start, but the distribution rate is still to be confirmed.
Creditors living in jurisdictions the liquidators flag as potentially restricted stay excluded while the legality of paying them is reviewed.
For everyone else, Friday starts a countdown. Holders of allowed claims who have not onboarded with BitGo, Kraken or Payoneer within six months may forfeit the right to be paid at all.
Tax forms carry a separate deadline under the plan with the same consequence. FTX said the class-by-class totals will reach the court docket shortly after July 31.

Robinhood (HOOD) stock closed at $89.84 on July 29, down 3.15%, slipping under $90 even after the company posted its best quarter ever.
Robinhood Stock Price: Yahoo Finance
The drop was not really about the numbers. HOOD has fallen about 14% in five days and roughly 20% this year, so the weakness runs deeper than one earnings report.
HOOD Earnings Beat, but the Market Sold the News
Robinhood reported record revenue of $1.31 billion, up 32% from a year earlier.
JUST IN: $HOOD posts its best quarter ever with record revenue of $1.31 billion, up 32% year-over-year, as prediction market event contracts surge 10x to $156 million and Robinhood Chain expands.
— HIT.com (@HIT) July 29, 2026
Adjusted earnings came in at $0.62 per share, far above the roughly $0.42 that analysts expected.
ROBINHOOD $HOOD JUST REPORTED EARNINGSEPS of $0.62 beating expectations of $0.41🟢Revenue of $1.31B beating expectations of $1.21B🟢 pic.twitter.com/5euq8vGrVS
— Evan (@StockMKTNewz) July 29, 2026
The mix told the real story. Prediction markets generated $156 million, overtaking both equities at $129 million and crypto at $100 million for the first time.
Robinhood $HOOD brought in more revenue during Q2 from prediction market transactions than both stock and crypto transactionsRevenue by segment:$342M – Options $156M – Prediction markets$129M – Equity$100M – Crypto$49M – Other pic.twitter.com/tjkMnxGOa8
— Evan (@StockMKTNewz) July 29, 2026
That shift matters because crypto revenue fell 38% year over year, after an even sharper crypto revenue slide in the prior quarter, yet total revenue still hit a record. However, the year-to-date stock price weakness persisted.
Robinhood Stock Price YTD: Yahoo Finance
Robinhood now runs 13 businesses above $100 million in annual revenue, far from its meme-broker image. One markets account said Robinhood “proved it’s more than a crypto stock.” And that outlook is now visible in the analysts’ calls.
$HOOD just proved it's more than a crypto stock.The biggest takeaway from Q2 wasn't the beat.It was the shift in where growth is coming from. As crypto cooled, equities, options, and prediction markets drove momentum.Robinhood is building a more diversified business and… https://t.co/xRpEVWMbYa pic.twitter.com/GmKnYnmR0U
— Eldora (@eldoraglobal) July 30, 2026
In the days before the report, the latest analyst calls stayed split but constructive. Barclays and Truist both reiterated buy ratings, with a Barclays Robinhood price target of $122, while JP. Morgan and Morgan Stanley kept hold ratings at $99 and $124.
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Each target still sat near or above the price, so Wall Street was not braced for a collapse. The company also kept buying back stock under a buyback plan it authorized earlier this year.
Robinhood Stock Analyst Calls: TipRanks
Part of the profit came from a one-time gain, which invites some caution on earnings quality. Even so, a double beat could not lift the shares.
Options Traders Are Still Hedging for Downside
Robinhood’s options market shows lingering caution. The put-call ratio, which weighs bearish put bets against bullish calls, sits near 0.66 in open interest, a high reading that favors puts.
The volume ratio has climbed toward 0.60 as well. That rise suggests desks kept adding downside hedges around the earnings date rather than betting on a pop.
HOOD Put-Call Ratio: Barchart
Hedging shows fear, however, and not always where cash is truly flowing.
Money Flow Improves as Selling Pressure Fades
Deeper data hints the selling may be cooling. Chaikin Money Flow (CMF), a gauge of whether institutional money is buying or selling, reads -0.09 and tried to cross above zero around July 24.
It failed, so institutions are likely still net sellers. Yet, CMF rose between July 27 and July 28 while the price fell, a small bullish divergence. This shows that the big institutional money is bleeding less as compared to the price. However, the CMF needs to move above zero for the HOOD stock to show price-specific positivity.
HOOD Money Flow and Volume: TradingView
Volume backs that up. Selling volume has thinned since early July even as the stock dropped, which suggests that even retail sellers are losing steam.
None of this confirms a bottom, though, so the HOOD price chart has to settle the argument.
Robinhood Stock Price Levels That Decide the Next Move
The chart still looks weak. Since June 9, Robinhood has traced a head and shoulders pattern, a topping shape where a high sits between two lower peaks, and it broke down on July 24, days before earnings. The breakdown structure still remains intact, which now explains why the options traders lean bearish.
The breakdown has stalled at $89.87, which also marks the 0.786 Fibonacci retracement. If that floor holds, the roughly 21% target near $76.53 may not fill, especially after a near 10% drop.
HOOD Price Analysis: TradingView
A hold above $89.87 and a reclaim of $93.84 would open room back toward the analyst targets. Real strength, however, only returns above $108.45, the right shoulder, which looks distant for now.
For now, $89.87 separates a possible rebound from a deeper slide toward $76.53.

Situational Awareness made 439% in six months. Then margin calls took its entire stock book in one trade. Ken Griffin’s Citadel bought it.
A quarter of that fund’s last reported stock holdings were Bitcoin miners. That was not an accident, and it is why crypto investors are reading this story closely.
Who Is Leopold Aschenbrenner?
OpenAI hired him for its Superalignment team in 2023 and let him go in April 2024. He has said he was pushed out for raising safety concerns.
Apparently this episode made Dwarkesh’s editor quit because the AI discussion stressed him out too much.Enjoy! https://t.co/lmBtXecUXq
— Leopold Aschenbrenner (@leopoldasch) June 4, 2024
In June 2024 he published an essay series called Situational Awareness. Its central claim was blunt.
“AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible,” Leopold Aschenbrenner, in his essay series Situational Awareness, June 2024.
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AGI means software that matches humans at most tasks. But the essay did more than predict it. One chapter argued the real bottleneck would be physical. Power contracts, transformers and electricity supply, not chips.
He then built a hedge fund on that idea. Its first stock disclosure, covering December 2024, listed six holdings worth $254.8 million.
Every one was a power or chip company. Not one was crypto. That changed quickly.
What Happened to Situational Awareness This Week
July went badly. The fund owned memory chip makers like SK Hynix, which fell hard in the AI memory stock selloff.
It had also bet against software firms such as Adobe. That trade pays off when a stock drops. Those shares rose instead. The wider market went the same way. The Nasdaq-100 fell 10% from its early June peak.
LEOPOLD’S SITUATIONAL AWARENESS FUND BLOWUP TIMELINEJULY 1: LEOPOLD’S HEDGE FUND SITUATIONAL AWARENESS REACHES $45 BILLION UP 450% YTDJULY 10: SK HYNIX US IPO MARKS TOP OF THE AI SECTORJULY 10-20: MAJOR SELLOFF ACROSS ALL AI STOCKS, MOST DOWN 30%+ IN 2 WEEKSJULY 10-20:…
— GURGAVIN (@gurgavin) July 30, 2026
Borrowed money turned a bad month into a forced one. The fund had used loans to hold more stock than its own cash could cover.
When prices fell, its lenders wanted more money behind those loans. That demand is a margin call.
CNBC named Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as the brokers involved. It also reported the fund had grown to $45 billion by the start of July.
Then it unwound every public stock position, CNBC said. Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund agreed to buy them. Millennium Management and Jane Street looked and passed, Bloomberg reported.
Citadel, the same fund that predicted a Fed rate hike at the July FOMC, purchased every one of Situational Awareness' disclosed holdings in a single transaction.How about them apples? https://t.co/E2MLKDksCh pic.twitter.com/ei3SpriTUj
— Sam Badawi (@Sam_Badawi) July 30, 2026
Where Do Bitcoin Miners Come In?
Crypto readers mostly missed this part. Situational Awareness became one of mining’s larger shareholders, and it happened fast.
Big US funds must list their stock holdings every three months on a form called a 13F. Five exist for this fund. Read in order, they show a bet being built.
Source: SEC 13F filings, BeInCrypto analysis
The latest filing lists 29 holdings worth $5.52 billion. Miners and their data center arms make up $1.38 billion of it.
Core Scientific was the largest at $418.7 million. IREN came next at $328.6 million, then Applied Digital at $278 million.
Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, Hut 8, WhiteFiber, Bitdeer, CleanSpark and Bitfarms made up the rest.
The whole disclosed book grew nearly 22 times in a year. The mining share went from nothing to a quarter of it.
So the AGI fund became a mining fund by design. His essay said the bottleneck was power. Miners own power, land and cooling, which is why miners became AI powerhouses.
There is a catch for shareholders. Anyone holding these stocks in July shared the trade with a fund facing margin calls. No mining company knew, so none of them said so.
Did Citadel Engineer This?
One theory spread fast. It says Citadel scared the market about rate hikes, waited for Leopold to break, then bought his stocks cheap.
🚨🚨 Did Citadel just rug pull Leopold? July 28: Citadel "predicted" a surprise Fed rate hike, which historically tanks the marketJuly 29: Market sells off. Situational Awareness gets margin called. Fed left rates unchangedJuly 30: Citadel acquires Leopold's entire… pic.twitter.com/02iCRPSoCL
— Leopold Stock Tracker (@LeopoldTracker_) July 30, 2026
The first part is true. Frank Flight, who runs macro strategy at Citadel Securities, published a note on July 27. He wrote that he now expected a rate hike at the July meeting.
Bloomberg reported the call added to market nerves. Two days later, a Griffin firm bought the stock book.
Four things break the theory.
First, there are two Citadels.
Citadel Securities buys and sells stocks for other people. Citadel is the hedge fund. They are separate firms.
Second, Flight had company.
PGIM and Wrightson ICAP also called for a hike. Bond veteran Harley Bassman wanted one twice as big.
Third, the fear came first.
Bloomberg tied it to oil prices rising after the US and Iran clashed again, plus a strong job market.
Fourth, the Fed did not hike.
It held rates steady, and three of its 12 voting members wanted a quarter-point rise.
That last detail matters. It was the first time since September 2016 that three officials dissented in the same direction. The pressure to raise rates was real, and it sat inside the Fed.
What Nobody Can Answer Yet
Did Citadel get a bargain? Nobody outside the deal knows. Neither firm will say what it paid.
Some think the forced selling mattered anyway. On CNBC, Jim Cramer argued it looked like a clearing event that could mark a bottom for the AI trade.
The tape says something simpler. Microsoft reported strong results on Wednesday night and rose about 15%.
Microsoft (MSFT) Stock Performance. Source: TradingView
Chip stocks jumped the next day. One big chip index rose 6.7% and snapped a five-day losing streak.
One block trade does not move a whole chip index. An earnings report can.
Six days before all of it, Aschenbrenner had told his investors to add money.
“PS. At times we call out opportunities that seem like a particularly good time to add funds, if you have been waiting for one,” Leopold Aschenbrenner, in the July 24 investor letter as reported by the Financial Times.
He got the direction right. He just did not own the stocks anymore.
The fund is not dead. It still holds private stakes, including Anthropic, which filed confidential IPO paperwork on June 1.
Miners spent 10 years being called a curiosity. It took one AI fund’s margin call to make them matter.

Coinbase (COIN) stock heads into second-quarter earnings today after the close under a warning from one of its biggest backers.
Citigroup still rates the stock a buy. Even so, it cut its Coinbase price target from $400 to $235 on July 24, a 41% reduction that landed days before the report.
Citi Keeps Its Buy Rating but Slashes the COIN Stock Target
The gap between that rating and that target is the real story into earnings. Citi analyst Peter Christiansen kept the buy call, yet he still cut 41% off his goal for COIN stock.
His reasoning was blunt. Christiansen expects the quarter to mark a low point for trading, with spot trading volumes near a two-year trough.
Coinbase analyst ratings and price targets: TipRanks
That caution did not appear in a vacuum. Coinbase had missed revenue estimates last quarter, and Coinbase stock has fallen about 29% this year, so the market was already braced for a softer stretch.
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Other desks, meanwhile, moved the same way. Clear Street trimmed its target to $225, while Rosenblatt held the $240 call, similar to Citi’s slashed number.
What Wall Street Expects From Coinbase’s Q2
Analysts have set a low bar for Coinbase Q2 earnings. They expect revenue near $1.3 billion, down about 13% from a year earlier and below the $1.41 billion posted last quarter.
The weakness sits in trading.
Coinbase earnings tmrw. Expect a lot of pain. You’re going to get a good look at the anemic nature of crypto trading volumes plaguing the industry. Courtesy of the second largest exchange in the world.
— Andrew (@AP_Abacus) July 30, 2026
Forecasts put transaction revenue around $640 million, and Barclays estimates Coinbase handled about $152 billion in volume, well under the Street’s $178 billion view.
Coinbase stock quote and Q2 earnings date: Yahoo Finance
Still, the picture is not all bearish. Subscription and services income, including USDC interest, gives Coinbase a steadier base when trading slows. That explains why COIN stock has surged over 5% month-on-month. USDC is the dollar-pegged stablecoin it helps run.
Wall Street is bracing for a quieter quarter from Coinbase.As spot trading volumes decline, earnings expectations have been lowered. The spotlight now shifts to pending U.S. crypto legislation that could reshape the industry’s future. pic.twitter.com/3FZPcqDx7u
— Conor Kenny (@conorfkenny) July 29, 2026
Instead, many traders are looking past the quarter toward US crypto legislation. A market-structure bill called the CLARITY Act would give exchanges clear federal rules, which could pull more institutional money and new products onto platforms like Coinbase. COIN stock has already climbed on signals the bill is near the finish line.
How the Market Is Positioned Into the Print
Positioning, however, sends a mixed message. The put-call ratio, which weighs bearish put bets against bullish calls, points two ways at once.
In standing bets, or open interest, the ratio has eased to 0.74 from about 0.86 in early June. That shift means longer-term positions have turned slightly more bullish on Coinbase stock.
Fresh activity, by contrast, looks defensive. The volume ratio has climbed to 0.75 from about 0.44, which shows traders buying puts to hedge before the results.
COIN put-call ratio: Barchart
Big money, though, has held firm. Chaikin Money Flow, a gauge of whether institutions are buying or selling, sits at 0.03 and has stayed above zero even as COIN stock drifted lower since June.
COIN Money Flow and Price: TradingView
For now, tonight’s transaction revenue and any volume guidance will decide whether Citi’s caution or those steady inflows prove right. Beyond the quarter, traders are watching Washington, where crypto legislation could reset the story for Coinbase stock.

Bitcoin (BTC) trades near $64,000, roughly 49% below its October 2025 record of $126,000. Seasonal patterns from three past cycles now point to one Bitcoin final bear leg before a cycle bottom.
However, several on-chain metrics already sit at levels that marked previous generational lows. The clash between seasonal history and holder behavior will likely define the next six months for BTC.
Seasonal Roadmap Points to $46,000, Then Perhaps $35,000
Analyst CryptoCon mapped the closing months of the 2014, 2018, and 2022 bear markets against the current cycle. August and September delivered the first leg down in each case, with losses of 54%, 28%, and 28%. His projection for 2026 assumes a 26% drop to roughly $46,000.
Comparison of 4 BTC Bear Markets / Source: X
History then adds a second, harsher leg. November through January produced declines of 56%, 52%, and 26% in past cycles. A repeat worth 30% would drag BTC near $35,000 by early 2027.
The first target aligns with earlier BeInCrypto research. A regression on shrinking final-quarter drawdowns pointed to a bottom between $44,000 and $47,000 by October. Benjamin Cowen’s recent memo reached a similar zone near $44,000.
Meanwhile, the deeper $35,000 target lands almost exactly on the 0.618 logarithmic Fibonacci level at $34,722. Even the chart’s author admits the roadmap faces resistance from on-chain data. CryptoCon wrote on X:
“It will be interesting to see how this clashes with the current building bullish divergence and some long-term metrics which are already at cycle bottom levels.”
Holder Cost Basis Compression Has Not Finished Yet
The first on-chain answer comes from the cost basis structure of Bitcoin holders. Analyst therationalroot tracks the ratio between short-term and long-term holder cost bases. Historically, every generational bottom formed when this ratio compressed to one.
The convergence points circled on the chart match the 2015 lows, the 2018 to 2019 trough, and the late 2022 capitulation. In each case, the average entry price of recent buyers fell to the level of veteran holders. Seller exhaustion followed, and accumulation phases began.
Short and Long-Term Holder Cost Basis Ration / Source: X
Today, the ratio falls quickly but remains above one. This supports the case for a few more months of downside, in line with the seasonal roadmap. The long-term holder cost basis also sits near $40,000, historically a magnet for final lows.
Furthermore, each cycle prints lower ratio peaks. The same dampening effect appears in the shrinking drawdowns, another sign of a maturing market.
Long-Term Holders Already Absorb More Than Miners’ Issue
Glassnode’s Long-Term Holder Market Inflation Rate measures annualized accumulation against daily miner issuance. Negative readings mean patient investors absorb more coins than miners create. The metric has stayed negative through most of 2026.
Similar readings appeared near every previous bear market floor. The deepest trough hit minus 0.15 in early 2019, while the 2022 lows reached about minus 0.06. In contrast, the current reading near minus 0.02 shows quieter but steady absorption.
BTC Long-Term Holder Market Inflation Rate / Source: Glassnode
Fidelity recently highlighted the same cohort, noting that long-term holder supply reached a record high. However, today’s accumulation remains milder than past capitulation troughs. A deeper buying wave into Q4 would therefore fit the historical pattern rather than break it.
Post-halving issuance is also close to zero on this scale. Holder behavior now dominates net supply, which helps explain why each bear ending grows shallower.
Price Temperature Already Reads Like a Bitcoin Final Bear Leg
The Bitcoin Price Temperature (BPT) delivers the strongest argument against $35,000. The oscillator measures how many standard deviations price sits above its four-year moving average. It currently reads near zero, with BTC hugging the long-term mean around $60,000.
Every prior cycle bottom formed in this temperature zone. The lows of 2015, 2019, March 2020, and late 2022 all printed near zero or slightly below. On this basis, Bitcoin already trades at bottom-grade valuations.
BTC Price Temperature / Source: Glassnode
A decline to $46,000 would push the temperature to about minus one. That depth matches the undershoots of March 2020 and December 2022 almost exactly. However, $35,000 would demand the deepest undershoot since 2015, a stretch for a maturing market.
Peak temperatures keep falling as well, from 10 in 2017 to seven in 2021 and 3.5 in 2024. Three separate metrics now confirm the same dampening of Bitcoin’s cycles.
Bitcoin Final Bear Leg: What to Watch Into Q4 2026
The timing signals agree, while the depth remains contested. Seasonal history, cost basis compression, and valuation bands all point to a bottom window in Q4 2026. Three methods converge between $44,000 and $47,000, and only the seasonal extension argues for $35,000.
Traders may watch three triggers from here. The holder cost basis ratio touching one, a deeper accumulation trough, and a weekly close below $44,000 would each sharpen the picture. Until then, short-lived bounces toward $65,000 deserve caution rather than chase.
This framework is an analysis, not financial advice. Historical patterns can break, and macro shocks could still push Bitcoin outside every model discussed here.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov has answered Russia’s terrorism charges, accusing Moscow of punishing him for rejecting state demands for mass surveillance and censorship on the messaging app.
Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial monitoring service, added Durov to its registry of terrorists and extremists on Thursday. The listing arrived one day after the Federal Security Service (FSB) opened a criminal case against him.
Durov Answers Moscow With a Meme
Durov did not rebut the allegations point by point. He posted a short statement to his Telegram channel, then followed it with a two-panel image.
“Russia has designated me as a “terrorist” for refusing its demands for mass surveillance and censorship on Telegram. Under Russian law, I’m banned from “publishing information on the Internet”. Russian officials have clearly got confused about who can ban whom from the Internet,” Durov wrote.
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The image placed his own photo, captioned terrorist, beside Taliban representatives greeting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, captioned respected partners. Russia’s Supreme Court removed the Taliban from that same registry in April 2025.
What the Designation Actually Changes
Russian banks must freeze the personal assets of anyone on the Rosfinmonitoring list and cut off financial services. That obligation covers Durov himself, not Telegram as a legal entity.
The FSB alleges the platform failed to delete channels, chats, and bots that Ukrainian intelligence and extremist groups used to organize attacks inside Russia. Durov, 41, now sits on the international wanted list and faces a possible life sentence. Officials had been negotiating with Telegram days earlier.
Markets shrugged. Gram (GRAM), the Telegram-linked token Durov rebranded from Toncoin in June, traded near $1.42, up 1.7% over 24 hours.
GRAM Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
Enforcement remains the open question. Durov holds French and UAE citizenship and lives in Dubai, so any arrest would need cooperation Moscow has not yet secured. French prosecutors lifted his travel restrictions in November.

The story being told about x402 right now is that it ends the subscription era and finally makes fractional-cent payments work for everyone. I want to push back on that, not because x402 is unimportant, but because the framing repeats a thirty-year-old mistake.
Micropayments have been predicted, launched, and buried repeatedly since the mid-1990s. They did not fail on technology. They failed on human psychology.
What is genuinely new about x402 is not the rail underneath it. It is that the party making the payment decision is no longer a person.
The Thirty-Year Graveyard
Digital Equipment Corporation built Millicent in the mid-1990s, a script-based system explicitly designed to support payments as small as one tenth of a cent. CyberCash and its CyberCoin product handled small online payments before the company’s assets were sold to VeriSign in 2001.
Beenz and Flooz, the two best-funded consumer digital currencies of the dot-com era, both collapsed in August 2001 within days of each other. Flooz went bankrupt after unknowingly selling around $300,000 of currency to a Russian and Filipino organised crime ring using stolen cards. These were not engineering failures.
Later attempts kept the pattern going with better technology. Brave’s Basic Attention Token, launched in 2017, tried to reward attention and let users tip creators in BAT, but it never displaced advertising as the browser’s economic model. Lightning Labs built L402 (originally LSAT) on top of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, reviving the same dormant HTTP 402 status code to meter API access per request.
The technology worked. Adoption for human-facing micropayments did not follow.
The reason was diagnosed before most of these ventures even launched.
Nick Szabo’s 1999 essay “Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs” argued that the cost of deciding whether something is worth a tiny sum would soon dominate the technical cost of the payment itself. Clay Shirky put it more bluntly in “The Case Against Micropayments” (2000) and again in “Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content” (2003): users hate them, the weakness is systemic, and so they will keep failing.
The point both men made is that there is no such thing as a no-brainer transaction. If a charge is large enough to be worth collecting, it is large enough that a human wants to think about it, and that split-second of thought, repeated across a day, costs more than the money involved. Flat-rate subscriptions and advertising win every time a human is in the loop, precisely because they remove the decision.
Why x402 Is Actually Different
Because it’s reframing.
Every prior scheme tried to lower the technical cost of a small payment. Szabo’s insight was that the technical cost was never the binding constraint. The binding constraint was cognitive, and it lived in the buyer’s head. x402 does not solve the cognitive problem. It removes the buyer’s head from the transaction entirely.
An AI agent does not have mental transaction costs. For an agent, deciding whether to spend a tenth of a cent on an API call is arithmetic under a budget constraint, not friction.
It does not feel like hassle, anxiety, or decision fatigue. It does not need reassurance that it is not being overcharged.
The one barrier that killed Millicent, Beenz, Flooz, BAT, and human-facing L402 is dissolved, and it is dissolved as a side effect of agentic commerce, not by anything clever in the protocol. This is why the stablecoin rails, while necessary, were never the missing piece. Cheap, fast, programmable settlement is a precondition. It is not the reason this moment is different.
The traction is where honesty is required: In the 30 days before the launch, x402 recorded about 75.4 million transactions moving only around $24.2 million, between roughly 94,000 buyers and 22,000 sellers, for an average payment of about 32 cents.
That average is the story. It is a couple of orders of magnitude above the sub-cent micro-economy the headlines describe.
A meaningful part of the early volume was not machine-to-machine metering at all. In October 2025, a meme coin called PING, minted by making a one-dollar x402 payment, turned the protocol into a speculative game: Dune data shows weekly transactions jumping 492% to a record in that single week, and PING’s market capitalisation briefly topped $57 million on October 25 before falling more than 40% within a day.
Chainalysis found that wallet retention cratered from around 87% to 5% once the speculative catalyst faded. The rails were being exercised by speculation, not by agents buying data.
Recommendations
From a seat running a regulated payments infrastructure, I would treat x402 as a real primitive for one specific job and resist the wider narrative. My advice is staged.
First, watch the right metric. Ignore cumulative transaction counts, which speculation inflates, and track dollar-volume concentration and repeat, non-speculative wallet activity instead.
The Chainalysis shift towards the dollar-and-above tier is the kind of signal that matters. If genuine machine-to-machine volume in that tier keeps rising while meme coin spikes fade, the thesis is holding. If not, it is noise.
Second, treat removing the human as removing judgment, not just friction. There are no native chargebacks, refunds, or dispute resolution, and on-chain settlement is irreversible.
That is a feature for a machine paying for a data call and a serious problem the moment a mistaken or compromised agent spends against a budget. The controls that used to live in a human’s hesitation have to be built into the system instead: agent spending caps, per-counterparty and per-period budgets, and allow-lists become the new control plane.
Third, do not assume compliance obligations shrink because the buyer is software. Anti-money-laundering and transaction-monitoring duties do not disappear when a payer is an agent. If anything, attributing a payment to a responsible legal entity gets harder, and irreversibility raises the cost of getting it wrong. Anyone deploying this at scale should assume the monitoring and identity questions arrive with it, not after it.
Caveats and the Measured Prediction
Subscriptions will not die wholesale. Humans remain in most consumer purchasing loops, and for them, Szabo and Shirky still hold. Expect hybrid models rather than pure per-call settlement: prepaid sessions, deferred vouchers, and batch settlement, because settling every sub-cent call on the chain does not scale economically once gas is a meaningful fraction of the payment.
The plausible near-term market is machine-to-machine API metering, agents paying for inference, data, and compute, not people paying per article.
x402 is a well-designed piece of infrastructure that finally gives the web a native payment primitive, and it arrives at the moment a buyer exists who does not mind making the decision.
That is the genuinely interesting part. It is not the death of subscriptions, and it is not, yet, a fractional-cent economy. Treated as machine plumbing rather than a consumer revolution, it is worth building for.
Disclaimer: This is a guest opinion piece. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views or position of BeInCrypto or its editorial staff. This article is provided for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) surged 28% last week before sellers rejected the rally at $0.00000548. The Shiba Inu price prediction for August 2026 now depends on the $0.00000446 support.
Delayed Shibarium upgrades give the token a rare stack of catalysts for the month ahead. Meanwhile, weekly momentum indicators have turned higher for the first time since the March 2024 peak.
Delayed Shibarium Upgrades Could Shape August
The most concrete item on the calendar is the Shibarium privacy upgrade built with cryptography firm Zama. The rollout, based on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), targeted the second quarter of 2026 and has slipped. That delay makes August a live window for delivery news.
The team has also signaled progress on the paused Shiba Eternity game and the SHIB Metaverse relaunch. A LEASH v2 upgrade with a fixed supply and DAO governance remains on the 2026 roadmap.
Network data has started to recover from July’s lows. Shibarium transactions climbed 78% in a week, from 661 to roughly 1,180 per day. The burn rate also hit a six-month high in July, though daily burns stay tiny against the 589 trillion supply.
SHIB turns six years old at the turn of the month, keeping community engagement elevated. In Japan, Rakuten added a physical SHIB collectible to its Real Coin series in mid-July, lifting brand visibility.
ETF speculation adds a slower storyline. Grayscale lists SHIB among assets eligible for spot products, and T. Rowe Price included the token in its active crypto ETF filing. On the macro side, the Jackson Hole symposium in late August is the main risk event for risk assets.
SHIB Weekly Chart Shows a Third Rejection at Resistance
On the weekly chart, SHIB has spent most of 2026 in decline. Price trades in the lower half of the VolumeGram Bands, and the indicator’s midline has rejected every recovery attempt. Rejections in early January, May, and now July all followed the same script.
Last week’s 28% candle printed the highest weekly volume in months. However, the current weekly candle has already erased 13%. Sellers defended the 0.236 Fibonacci retracement at $0.00000548, the same zone that flipped to resistance during June’s sell-off.
SHIB weekly chart / Source: Tradingview
The next barrier above sits at the 0.382 retracement near $0.00000636, which rejected the price earlier this year. The only support below remains $0.00000405, the multi-year low.
The weekly Relative Strength Index (RSI) tells a more hopeful story. The indicator had trended lower under a descending line since its March 2024 peak. That trendline rejected the RSI at least twice before the structure changed.
SHIB weekly RSI chart / Source: Tradingview
The RSI broke above the line in March 2026 and confirmed it as support twice in May. It has now printed a second higher high this year, near 45. A push above 50 would move momentum into neutral territory, with bullish ground beyond it.
Shiba Inu Price Prediction Rests on $0.00000446
The daily chart frames the near-term battle. Two strong up days in late July arrived on the largest volume spike since May. The move also flipped the Supertrend indicator from bearish to bullish.
SHIB trades at $0.00000461, down 0.7% over the past day, with a $2.71 billion market cap. Price is now testing the green Supertrend support, which coincides with the previous swing high at $0.00000446.
If that region holds, bulls could retest $0.00000506 and then $0.00000553. A break above the second level, roughly 20% higher, would open the weekly 0.382 retracement at $0.00000636, a 38% gain.
SHIB daily chart / Source: Tradingview
However, losing $0.00000446 would expose $0.00000410, about 11% below the current price. A weekly close under that floor would push SHIB into new multi-year lows.
The daily RSI has cooled from overbought readings but holds above 50, suggesting buyers still control the short-term trend. A confirmed date for the Shibarium privacy upgrade could accelerate any breakout. August will reveal whether the momentum shift extends July’s rally or joins the list of failed bounces at resistance.

Japan slashed its growth forecast for the current fiscal year to 0.9% on Thursday, blaming surging crude oil prices and a weaker yen for squeezing the import-dependent economy.
The downgrade exposes how quickly Middle East tensions can reshape the outlook for an advanced economy.
Higher Oil Prices Prompt Japan to Downgrade FY2026 Growth Forecast to 0.9%
— First Squawk (@FirstSquawk) July 30, 2026
The Oil and Currency Assumptions Behind the Downgrade
Fiscal year 2026 in Japan runs from April 2026 through March 2027, the standard period governments use for budgeting and forecasting. The Cabinet Office presented the revision alongside updated fiscal projections.
The new figure marks a sharp cut from January. Officials had projected 1.3% growth just six months ago, before global energy markets turned against the country.
Two assumptions drive the revision. The government now models crude oil at $92.5 per barrel, well above its earlier estimate of $68.
Currency expectations shifted just as dramatically. Officials assume the yen is trading at 161.4 per dollar, compared with 155.2 in the previous forecast.
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Spot Brent Crude Price Performance. Source: TradingView
Both changes hit the same pressure point. Resource-poor Japan imports nearly all of its energy, so higher prices and a weaker currency inflate costs across the entire economy. Household spending absorbs much of that initial shock. Private consumption, which drives more than half of Japanese output, is now forecast to grow just 0.9% instead of 1.3%.
Business investment faces similar pressure. Capital expenditure should rise just 2.3% this year, down from the 2.8% that officials projected back in January.
Inflation moves in the opposite direction. Consumer prices are now expected to climb 2.2%, up from the earlier 1.9% estimate, further testing household purchasing power.
#BoJ Preview: To justify status quo in July with higher probability of a hike in October due to inflation from weak #Yen"Inflationary pressure in Japan is on the rise, with raising concerns about the Bank of Japan (BoJ)’s monetary policy. On July 21st, the Takaichi government… pic.twitter.com/bgauKgfta2
— Alicia GarciaHerrero 艾西亞 (@Aligarciaherrer) July 29, 2026
Can Japan Recover Growth in Fiscal Year 2027
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s administration paired the downgrade with a more optimistic medium-term view. Growth should recover to 1.1% in fiscal 2027, according to the same projections.
That rebound depends on policy execution. The government is promoting investment in crisis management, strategic sectors, and public-private partnerships, while new budget guidelines give ministries greater flexibility for growth-oriented projects.
The fiscal arithmetic tells a mixed story. The primary balance, which excludes debt interest, should post a wider deficit of 1.2 trillion yen ($7.4 billion) this year because of supplementary budgets.
Next year looks considerably better on paper. Officials expect a surplus of 1.4 trillion yen ($8.7 billion) in fiscal 2027, driven largely by higher tax revenues.
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That projected swing carries genuine political significance. Japan holds one of the heaviest public debt burdens among developed nations, making credibility with bond markets essential.
Oil markets still remain the central variable. Brent crude has traded around the $80 range recently, while the Bank of Japan points to underlying resilience in exports and specific industrial sectors.

Veteran macro investor Jordi Visser says the easy money in artificial intelligence (AI) is gone. He thinks Bitcoin (BTC) is where the next big gains turn up.
New company filings help explain why. The biggest AI spenders are now burning cash faster than they bring it in.
Big Tech Is Burning Cash to Build AI
Google spent more cash last quarter than it collected. That has never happened since the company listed in 2004.
The measure that matters here is free cash flow. It is simply the money left over after a company pays for the data centers it is building.
All three of the biggest AI spenders saw that cushion shrink.
CompanyCash left over, April to JuneSame quarter last yearMicrosoft$19.6 billion$25.6 billionMeta$784 million$8.5 billionAlphabetNegative $5.9 billionPositive $5.3 billion
Meta’s drop is the eye-catching one. A year ago it kept $8.5 billion. This time it kept $784 million.
Its own release shows why. Sales rose 28%. Costs rose 55%. Meta then borrowed $24.91 billion to keep building. It spent $31.08 billion on new capacity in three months.
One fair caveat. Some of those costs were legal bills and layoff payments, not AI. Together they came to $3.58 billion.
Microsoft looks the healthiest of the three. Its filing shows sales up 18% and its Azure cloud business up 43%.
Even so, its spare cash fell 23%. Nobody escaped the squeeze. Only the size of it changed.
Why Jordi Visser Says the AI Trade Is Over
Visser has worked in markets for more than 30 years. He runs AI research at 22V Research and founded Visser-Labs. He used to be chief investment officer at hedge fund Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers.
“The AI trade’s over. The ability of getting seven, eight times your money in that is over,” Jordi Visser, on a podcast.
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He does not think AI is finished. He thinks the returns are shrinking.
Investors used to hope for seven or eight times their money. He now expects closer to 30% a year. That is still good. It is just no longer a windfall.
The reason is competition. Cheap open-source models keep catching up, so no company stays ahead for long. Wall Street is already split on AI chips as a result.
Goldman Says US Stocks Have No Fuel Left
Big investors have little spare money to put to work. Goldman Sachs told clients that leaves stocks stuck.
Hedge funds have already borrowed heavily to buy shares. Their borrowing sits near the top of the past five years.
“There are limited sources of ‘juice’ for rallies in the immediate term. We still need to get through rubble of the past couple weeks before we can start the conversation for any meaningful re-risking,” Bloomberg reported, citing Goldman Sachs trading desk.
Regular investors are pulling back too. Trading activity this month is more than 3% below the five-year average.
Computer-driven funds are the bigger worry. They hold about $196 billion in US shares. A further slide could force them to sell $15.7 billion inside a week.
The wider mood is nervous. The Federal Reserve held rates steady in a 9 to 3 vote. The Dow then fell 1,153 points, its worst day since April 2025.
Long-term borrowing costs jumped as well. The 30-year Treasury closed at 5.20%, its highest level since 2007.
Why Bitcoin and Ethereum Could Benefit
Visser expects AI programs to start moving money on their own. Blockchains are where that would happen.
He does not think Bitcoin leads the way, though. He expects Ethereum to do better, because investors now prefer networks that earn fees.
The past month backs him up. Ethereum (ETH) trades near $1,921 and is up 23.3% in 30 days. Bitcoin trades near $64,793 and is up 10.9%.
Bitcoin and Ethereum Price Performance. Source: TradingView
Zoom out and the picture flips. Over a year, Bitcoin is down 45% and Ethereum 49%.ETH also sits 61% below its 2025 peak. Bitcoin’s current price is 49% below its own record.
So this is a one-month shift, not proof of a new cycle. It matches three bullish Ethereum signals spotted this week, and not much more.
What to Watch Over the Next 30 Days
Visser is waiting on one law. The CLARITY Act would finally decide which US regulator watches which crypto asset.
Traders doubt it passes. Polymarket puts the odds near 30%, and seven roadblocks remain in the Senate.
Rates are the other question. Morgan Stanley economist Mike Gapen expects inflation to ease to about 3.3% by December. That would keep the Fed still. Three officials already wanted a rise.
Then there are buybacks. Goldman expects 90% of big US companies to be free to buy their own shares by mid-August.
Visser needs a law and a buyer. Whichever shows up first will tell us more than any earnings call did.

The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned two firms accused of supporting an IRGC-backed scheme that allegedly extorted commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz by requiring them to purchase maritime insurance.
Wednesday’s designations hit the Persian Gulf Marine Insurance Company and HormuzSafe Marine Services Authority, known as Hormuz Safe. Treasury says the policies extract revenue while covering risks that Iran itself creates.
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How Iran’s Hormuz Insurance Scheme Drew US Sanctions
The IRGC reportedly began collecting transit fees from tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz in April, with charges starting at approximately $1 per barrel.
The Treasury said the insurance scheme was created to offset revenue lost following Operation Epic Fury. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent linked the initiative to Iran’s worsening economic conditions.
“With its economy in freefall and inflation in the triple digits, the regime is desperate for cash,” he said.
According to the department, Iran established the “illegitimate schemes” through the Persian Gulf Marine Insurance Company (PGMIC) and HormuzSafe Marine Services Authority.
It said Iran’s Ministry of Economy developed HormuzSafe. It offers insurance, traffic control, security, and emergency response services to vessels transiting the strait.
The firm accepts payments in Bitcoin (BTC) and other digital assets as part of Iran’s efforts to circumvent Western sanctions.
The Treasury also noted that Iran’s insurance regulator created the Persian Gulf Marine Insurance Company, which issues policies approved by the Persian Gulf Strait Authority.
OFAC sanctioned the IRGC-backed authority on May 27. It has now designated both the Persian Gulf Marine Insurance Company and HormuzSafe Marine Services Authority under Executive Order 13902 for operating in Iran’s financial sector.
In addition, OFAC sanctioned eight shipping companies and identified eight oil tankers as blocked property. The operators are registered in Hong Kong, the Marshall Islands, and China. According to the Treasury, the vessels transported Iranian crude oil and petroleum products.
The agency has now sanctioned more than 100 shadow fleet vessels since January. The latest measure is part of a broader US enforcement action against Iran.
In mid-July, the Treasury sanctioned four cryptocurrency wallets linked to Iran’s central bank. At the same time, Tether froze approximately $131 million in USDT held in those addresses.
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Nokia (NOK) stock traded at $8.44 on Wednesday, down 5.54% intraday, after sellers pushed the price to the 0.786 Fibonacci retracement at $8.50. It is the last major support above the January low of $6.06.
The drop extends Tuesday’s 5.6% slide and deepens a decline that started at the June peak of $17.45. NOK has lost roughly 52% of its value in less than two months.
Why Nokia Stock Is Falling Again This Week
Part of this week’s weakness was mechanical. Tuesday, July 28, was the ex-dividend date for Nokia’s quarterly dividend of 0.04 euros per share, which will be paid on August 6.
However, the adjustment explains only about 0.5% of the move. The rest reflects profit-taking that has continued since last week’s post-earnings breakdown, when investors sold the memory shortage outlook rather than the strong quarter.
Analysts have also started trimming expectations. On July 27, Deutsche Bank lowered its Nokia price target to 11.50 euros from 13.50 euros, while keeping a Buy rating on the shares.
Meanwhile, the sector backdrop remains heavy. Intel dropped 11% after an earnings beat, and profit-taking spread across AI hardware names. Nokia now falls with the sector rather than on company-specific news alone.
NOK Price Analysis Shows Bulls Defending the $8.50 Level
On the daily chart, the Fibonacci retracement drawn from the January low of $6.06 to the June top of $17.45 still maps the decline. The June peak ended a months-long rally fueled by AI and cloud demand.
NOK lost the 0.618 golden pocket at $10.41 last week, and a large spike in volume accompanied the breakdown. Such volume signals conviction among sellers, which favors trend continuation.
NOK daily chart / Source: Tradingview
The slide has now reached the 0.786 retracement at exactly $8.50. This is the bulls’ final line of defense, and they must step in immediately to hold it.
The Visible Range Volume Profile (VRVP) adds weight to both levels. Its two largest volume nodes sit near $10.41 and $8.50, so these zones will likely act as resistance and support over the coming days or weeks.
Nokia RSI at 27 Gives Bulls No Divergence to Lean On
The daily Relative Strength Index (RSI) reads 27, below the oversold threshold at 30. Historically, such depressed readings can produce short-term bounces, as other beaten-down names showed during this earnings week.
However, there is no sign of a bullish divergence yet. The indicator keeps printing lower lows together with the price, so momentum still favors the sellers.
NOK daily RSI chart / Source: Tradingview
If NOK loses $8.50 on a daily close, the next support zone sits at the $6.06 anchor low, roughly 28% below Wednesday’s price. In contrast, a daily close back above $10.41 would invalidate the bearish outlook.
Until then, the market decides between a defended floor at $8.50 and a full retest of $6.06.
To read the latest stock market analysis from BeInCrypto, click here.

Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and Jefferies cut their Robinhood Markets (HOOD) price targets on Thursday, one evening after the Nasdaq-listed brokerage beat second-quarter revenue and profit estimates. Goldman and Jefferies had each raised their targets to $137 earlier in July.
All three firms kept bullish ratings. Their reversal is about timing, not execution. Analysts now expect Robinhood’s existing trading business, rather than its newer products, to carry growth into 2027.
Why Did Analysts Cut Robinhood Price Targets After an Earnings Beat?
Goldman Sachs moved to $118. Jefferies went to $127. Barclays cut deepest, to $105.
FirmNew targetPriorRatingChangeBarclays$105$122Overweight-14%Goldman Sachs$118$137Buy-14%Needham$120$123Buy-2%Jefferies$127$137Buy-7%
Wall Street Slashes Robinhood Targets Despite Earnings Beat
The round trip is what stands out. Jefferies lifted its target from $94 to $137 on July 8. Goldman reached $137 in mid-July. Both unwound that optimism within a month.
Not everyone retreated. Piper Sandler held $135 and BTIG reiterated $125. Bernstein’s $160, set July 20, still leads the 28 analysts covering the stock.
Why It Matters for HOOD Stock
Robinhood beat and still could not hold a bid. That pattern is established, not new.
In November 2025, Robinhood beat on both lines and fell 10.8% the next session. HOOD traded near $89.67 on Thursday morning, about 42% below its October 2025 record.
Barclays framed the ceiling plainly. It expects existing businesses to drive near-term growth, arguing newer bets need years before they move the revenue base.
Robinhood (HOOD) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
Robinhood’s HOOD stock fell almost 2% at market open, and was trading for $88.06 as of this time.
What Robinhood’s Q2 Filing Actually Shows
Revenue rose 32% to a record $1.31 billion, per the company’s filing. Diluted earnings reached $0.62 per share, up 48%. Adjusted EBITDA hit $741 million.
Earnings quality is thinner than the headline suggests. Roughly $0.14 of that EPS came from one-off gains, mostly the deconsolidation of Robinhood Ventures Fund I.
Crypto remains the soft spot. Robinhood’s crypto revenue beat consensus at $100 million, yet fell 38% from $160 million a year earlier.
That line now supplies 8% of net revenues, down from 16%. The 10-Q blames weaker market-maker rebate rates and 16% fewer users placing crypto trades.
What to Watch Over the Next 30 Days
July net new assets are tracking toward $4 billion, soft after a strong June.
Costs are the offset. Robinhood cut 10% of staff in June and lowered full-year 2026 expense guidance to a range of $2.675 billion to $2.775 billion.
Robinhood also leads tokenized stock ownership by holder count while trailing on money committed, which is the gap Barclays is pricing.
With the consensus target near $122 and the stock under $90, the question is whether prediction markets and tokenized assets scale before that spread closes on its own.

Gold demand from the electronics sector rose to 68.3 tonnes in the second quarter. This marked a 4% year-over-year increase.
The rise came as artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure spending offset a slump in consumer device shipments.
AI Infrastructure Lifts Gold Electronics Demand
The electronics sector accounts for the majority of gold used in technology. Demand there climbed from 65.8 tonnes in the same quarter of 2025, the World Gold Council reported.
Growth came from AI server mainboards, integrated circuit substrates, and printed circuit boards for low-earth orbit satellites. Memory and semiconductor use also rose, driven by the same AI memory demand surge reshaping chipmaker valuations.
Automotive lighting added more. Gold wire and gold-tin bonding remain standard in vehicle head and tail lamps, where heat and vibration demand durable materials.
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“Gold usage in the electronics space very much remained on a two-speed setting: strong AI infrastructure investment offset weakness in smartphone and laptop shipments, primarily due to surging memory costs. High gold prices also continued to accelerate thrifting and substitution in many low- and midrange applications, adding further pressure to some traditional consumer electronic applications,” the report read.
The consumer end moved in the opposite direction. IDC forecasts smartphone shipments falling 13.9% in 2026 to 1.09 billion units. That would be the steepest annual drop the market has recorded.
Other industrial and decorative gold use fell 7% to 10.1 tonnes, a ninth consecutive annual decline. Dentistry slipped 6% as ceramic alternatives gained ground.
Still, technology remains a small part of the market. It accounted for 80.4 tonnes of the total gold demand of 1,269 tonnes. Central bank gold buying supplied 289 tonnes over the same period.
The council flagged a key downside risk. Weaker AI returns or an electronics downturn could remove the support now carrying gold through the handset slump.
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The US government has not paid this much to borrow money since 2007. The 30-year Treasury yield closed at 5.20% on Wednesday, hours after the Federal Reserve left interest rates alone.
Three Fed officials wanted a rate hike instead. Bond traders sided with them.
30-Year US Treasury Yield. Source: Trading Economics Why the 30-Year Treasury Yield Jumped
A bond yield is what lenders charge to hold government debt. When it rises, borrowing gets pricier for everyone.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) kept its rate range at 3.50% to 3.75%. The vote was 9 to 3.
Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan each wanted a quarter point increase, the Fed statement shows.
Long-term bonds fell hardest. The 30-year yield rose from 5.09% to 5.20%, and the 10-year climbed to 4.67%.
TREASURY YIELDS SURGE AFTER FED HOLDU.S. 30-year Treasury yields climbed to a 19-year high of 5.24% after the Federal Reserve left rates unchanged but offered little guidance on its next move.Markets scaled back expectations for a September rate hike, while analysts warned…
— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) July 30, 2026
Short-term bonds went the other way. The two-year yield slipped to 4.22%.
That split is the signal. Traders are worried about the next 30 years, not the next 30 days. Some intraday quotes ran as high as 5.244%.
Three dissents sound dramatic. They are not that rare, and four officials broke ranks in April. The direction is what stands out. Three votes for higher rates at one meeting last happened in September 2016.
The Fed has not raised rates since July 2023. The three dissenting officials want that streak to end.
Chair Kevin Warsh took the job on May 22. He refused to call the decision a pause and defended the 2% inflation target at his press conference.
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This Looks Like 2007, But It Is Not
The last time the 30-year yield sat here, the Fed was about to cut rates. In July 2007, the yield was 5.28%. The Fed’s own rate was 5.25%. The two were basically level.
Two months later the Fed cut by half a point. Warsh, then a Fed governor, voted for it. Today the picture is flipped. The 30-year yield sits roughly 1.45 percentage points above the Fed’s rate.
In 2007, long rates were falling toward a rescue. Now they are climbing away from one. Someone pays for that. The interest bill on US debt hit $857 billion in nine months, up 13% from a year earlier.
“Outlays for net interest on the public debt rose by $98 billion (or 13 percent) because the debt was larger than it was in the first nine months of fiscal year 2025 and because of higher long-term interest rates,” the Congressional Budget Office reported.
Interest now costs more than Medicare, at $778 billion. It also beats military spending, at $677 billion.
Total US debt reached about $39.8 trillion in late July.
Oil is not helping either. West Texas Intermediate crude settled 6.6% higher at $84.46 a barrel on Wednesday.
US Central Command said Iran fired ballistic missiles at American forces on July 28. All were intercepted. The US-Iran ceasefire collapse keeps oil risk alive.
Where Bitcoin and Gold Fit In
Crypto did not follow bonds down. Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $64,730 on Thursday, up 0.48% on the day.
Bitcoin’s recent price action shows a 9.2% gain over 30 days, though it is down 45% over a year.
Gold traded near $4,078 an ounce on Thursday. It had settled at $4,036.30 the day before.
30 and 10 Year US Treasury Yields, Gold and Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: TradingView
Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, says traders only delayed the hike.
“September remains a live meeting, and the incoming inflation data between now and then will be all that matters,” Zentner said.
Thursday’s inflation data helped the doves. The Fed’s preferred gauge, personal consumption expenditures (PCE), rose 3.7% in the year to June, down from 4.1% in May.
Core PCE, which strips out food and fuel, came in at 3.3%.
*US JUNE PCE PRICE INDEX FALLS 0.1% M/M; EST. -0.1% *US JUNE PCE PRICE INDEX RISES 3.7% Y/Y; EST. +3.7% *US JUNE CORE PCE PRICE INDEX RISES 0.1% M/M; EST. +0.2% *US JUNE CORE PCE PRICE INDEX RISES 3.3% Y/Y; EST. +3.3%
— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) July 30, 2026
Even so, inflation has topped 2% every month since March 2021. Global bond yields climbed to their highest since 2008 earlier this year, and the long end never came back down.
The Fed meets again on September 15 and 16. That is when the three dissenters find out if they were right.