Weekly Roundup: Iran, Yields at 5.3%, and the AI Money Printer

Let's set the scene. The week of August 11 started with cautious optimism and ended with 30-year Treasury yields at 5.31%, the highest since 2007, Iran's IRGC hardliners running the show, and retail investors on Robinhood doing something they almost never do: selling. Two consecutive weeks of net selling from a platform whose users are, on average, 31-year-old accumulators who buy every dip. That is not a footnote. That is a vibe check.

The macro story of the week was blunt: the Strait of Hormuz stayed shut, the 60-day US-Iran memorandum of understanding expired without a replacement, and Trump threatened to bomb Oman. Iran responded by launching missiles toward an ADNOC vessel in the UAE. Oil stayed elevated, the bond vigilantes finally showed up, and the S&P 500 gave back some of its recent marginal new highs without any real follow-through momentum. Per Investor's Business Daily's David Ryan, the last six to seven days of the rally showed almost no strength, and the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) has yet to reclaim new high ground on the daily chart. Marginal highs with no fuel in the tank is the kind of thing that sounds fine until it suddenly isn't.

Meanwhile, the AI subplot refused to cooperate with the doom narrative. Anthropic dropped preliminary Q2 revenue of $1.5 billion, a 14-fold year-over-year increase, pushing its annualized run rate past $47 billion and leapfrogging OpenAI's $40 billion ARR. That lit a fire under the memory and storage names: $SNDK ripped nearly 9% on the session, $MU caught a bid, and $MRVL added 5.5%. Cerebras Systems ($CLS) also surged after news that its chips will power OpenAI's ultrafast GPT-4.5 Soul mode, with OpenAI committing to 750 megawatts of Cerebras capacity by 2028. The AI money printer is still printing.

The bond market is the adult in the room nobody invited. Corporate bond issuance has already hit $1.5 trillion in investment grade paper this year, 30% above last year's full-year total. Japanese government bonds, when hedged into certain currencies, now yield more than US Treasuries, pulling foreign demand away from the long end at exactly the wrong moment. Former NSA Jake Sullivan summed up the geopolitical calculus neatly: the US has two options, continue a costly war or accept a very bad deal. Neither is priced into equities at current levels.

On the retail side of the ledger, $TGT heads into earnings week up 54% year-to-date, its best run since 2019, while $WMT is the consumer health bellwether everyone is watching. $NKE hit its lowest level since 2014 at $39 per share, and $META is staring down a landmark children's safety trial led by 40-plus state attorneys general. Copper bulls got fresh oxygen from BHP's CEO, who projected demand growing from 34 million tons today to 50 million tons by 2050. And somewhere in all of this, someone at Klarna watched their stock fall 22% in a single session because German consumers stopped spending.

The call from last week that played out cleanly: rising yields would pressure growth stocks, particularly chips. The call that didn't: that the AI narrative would buckle under rate pressure. Anthropic's numbers alone suggest that narrative has more lives than a Bloomberg terminal subscription.