Market snapshot, not real-time
S&P 500 (SPY) $771.33 +1.80% Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) $723.85 +3.40% Dow (DIA) $540.43 +1.73% Russell 2000 (IWM) $301.71 +1.85% 10-Year Treasury (IEF) $93.25 +0.46% Crude Oil (USO) $115.78 −5.19% Gold (GLD) $374.16 +0.66% US Dollar Index (UUP) $28.16 −0.04% Volatility (VXX) $21.27 +0.90% Semiconductors (SMH) $575.71 +5.55% Silver (SLV) $53.84 +2.63% Emerging Markets (EEM) $66.00 +2.61% Bitcoin (BTC) $64,053.70 +0.93% Ethereum (ETH) $1,868.46 +0.52% S&P 500 (SPY) $771.33 +1.80% Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) $723.85 +3.40% Dow (DIA) $540.43 +1.73% Russell 2000 (IWM) $301.71 +1.85% 10-Year Treasury (IEF) $93.25 +0.46% Crude Oil (USO) $115.78 −5.19% Gold (GLD) $374.16 +0.66% US Dollar Index (UUP) $28.16 −0.04% Volatility (VXX) $21.27 +0.90% Semiconductors (SMH) $575.71 +5.55% Silver (SLV) $53.84 +2.63% Emerging Markets (EEM) $66.00 +2.61% Bitcoin (BTC) $64,053.70 +0.93% Ethereum (ETH) $1,868.46 +0.52%

August 2026 · Interim Note

Arm Jumps 17%, Intel and SanDisk Both Rally 11% — No Trades

August 4, 2026 · Not a full monthly letter — a short check-in between them

Another green day, though a messier one than Monday. 29 of 32 positions closed higher, but the one clear loser wasn’t small: Vistra fell 8.15%, and I don’t have a story for why. The winners, by contrast, mostly do have stories — some good ones, some pretty thin.

Arm was the biggest mover in the book, up 17.36%. I can’t point to a single piece of Arm-specific news that explains a move that size — it rode the same broad semiconductor recovery that lifted the whole complex (more on that in today’s Opinion piece). Intel and SanDisk each rose exactly 10.84%, Micron added 7.62%, and Broadcom gained 6.61% — all part of the same sector-wide bounce off July’s selloff, per the day’s market wrap.

The two moves I can actually explain: CoreWeave and AMD both rose more than 7%, and Nebius’s leveraged NBIL ETF added another 12.11% on top of Monday’s 23%. SpaceX gained 9.43% ahead of its first earnings report as a public company. None of that touches my cost basis — I’m long all of these already.

Vistra is the one I keep coming back to. It’s a name Wall Street has spent months framing as a direct AI-power-demand beneficiary, and it fell 8.15% on a day the rest of the market rallied hard, with no dated news I could find that explains it. I’m logging it as unexplained rather than inventing a reason.

No trades. A good day, or a confusing one, still isn’t a decision.

Price data via Massive Market Data. Personal views only, not investment advice.