Daily Briefing — Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Executive summary: crude sets the agenda into the inflation print

Monday was a quiet session with a loud subtext. The S&P 500 finished at 7,753.11, down 4.53 points or 0.06%, four and a half points below Friday’s record close of 7,757.64, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about a tenth of a percent and the Nasdaq Composite about 0.3%. The index trackers tell the same story: the S&P 500 ETF closed at $773.03, down 0.03%, the Nasdaq-100 fund at $720.87, down 0.30%, the Dow fund at $538.99, down 0.12%, and the Russell 2000 fund at $299.98, down 0.52%. Underneath, one sector did all the moving. The S&P 500 energy sector was up 4.46% at midday as crude extended its advance on a Strait of Hormuz file that keeps refusing to resolve.

Overnight the same mechanism kept working. Brent crude futures reached $88.00 a barrel and U.S. crude $82.45, both the highest since July 31, after negotiations between Washington and Tehran hit an impasse. Bonds fell on inflation concern. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.36% and South Korea’s KOSPI gained 1.3%, a fragile bid rather than a confident one, while U.S. equity futures edged higher.

The policy side sharpened at the same time. Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, one of three FOMC members who voted for a rate increase last month, said some number of hikes may be needed and that a single 25 basis point move probably does not accomplish much. That is the opposite direction from the repricing that followed Friday’s employment report, and it lands two days before the July consumer price index.

1. Monday in the numbers, and where the weakness sat

Breadth was narrow rather than broken. Fifteen Dow holdings declined, with Apple off about 2.1% and Nvidia down 2.86% to $217.55 doing most of the damage at the index level. Nvidia’s move followed reports that it is assembling a $500 billion funding package for artificial-intelligence infrastructure with Wall Street asset managers, a story that read as a positive for the equipment chain and a negative for the balance-sheet optics of the company arranging it.

Intel closed at $97.52, down 4.06%, after announcing a $15 billion underwritten common stock offering with a 30-day option on a further $2.25 billion. The company framed the raise around what it called a strong and sustainable demand environment driven by unprecedented investment in AI compute, with physical AI, purpose-built silicon, advanced packaging and external wafers named as the growth areas. The shares are up roughly 175% year to date, so the dilution arrives from a position of strength rather than distress.

The optical and interconnect complex was the day’s clearest pre-earnings positioning trade. Lumentum closed at $813.51, down 8.61%, ahead of results due after Tuesday’s close, and Coherent fell 11.6% ahead of its August 12 report. Both had run hard into the print. Elsewhere Akamai gained 7.5% on a UBS upgrade that took the price target from $125 to $143, and Datadog rose 6.8% after Citigroup moved its target from $300 to $305.

On the other side, First Solar fell 5.6% on profit-taking and questions about policy support after a tariff-driven rally, Trade Desk lost 5.8% in the aftermath of its second-quarter miss and soft guidance, Celsius fell 4.6% on a disappointing quarter, Fox dropped 9.7% on uncertainty around the pending Roku transaction, and Verisk Analytics lost 5.7% after a Delaware court ordered it to proceed with the contested $2.35 billion acquisition of AccuLynx.

2. Hormuz: an impasse rather than a delay

Iran said over the weekend that a shipping arrangement with Oman was in its final stages, then made clear that the waterway would reopen only once the United States met a separate list of conditions. By Monday President Trump said Washington was low-keying negotiations and concentrating on economic pressure; Tehran said it was not engaging in talks at all. Ali Nikzad, Iran’s deputy parliament speaker, said the United States had practically realised that opening the strait has no military solution.

The detail that changed the price was personnel rather than rhetoric. Iran’s supreme leader replaced the official who issued the reopening conditions with a regime stalwart and veteran Revolutionary Guards commander who has previously expressed scepticism about negotiating with Washington. Markets read a harder negotiator as a longer closure, and crude repriced accordingly.

3. Rates, the dollar, metals and the intervention file

Bonds fell on inflation concern in the overnight session, a move driven by crude and by the calendar rather than by new data. The long-dated Treasury fund closed Monday at $82.06, down 0.85%, giving back part of the ground taken after Friday’s employment report.

Gold rose for a third consecutive session and held above $4,400 an ounce, with futures trading around $4,470 and bullion up roughly 7% so far this month. Silver futures traded near $65 an ounce. The metals bid and the bond decline are consistent with each other: both are expressions of an inflation view rather than a growth view.

In currencies the yen stayed on the weak side of 159 per dollar, well away from last week’s high of 155.20 that followed several suspected rounds of intervention, including one conducted jointly by Japan and the United States. A joint operation is a materially different signal from a unilateral one, and the fact that the currency has already given back four figures of the move is the relevant follow-up. The euro traded at $1.1546 and sterling at $1.3512, both easing from recent highs as crude lifted the dollar.

In the energy complex away from crude, U.S. natural gas surged as hotter weather outlooks triggered short covering. The natural gas fund closed up 4.11% at $10.14.

4. Space and eVTOL: three sets of results in one evening

Read together, the three reports separate the top line from the timeline. Rocket Lab delivered on revenue and backlog and the share reaction sat with Neutron scheduling. AST SpaceMobile posted an accounting loss whose largest component is a launch incident already known to the market, and kept both its full-year revenue range and its constellation roadmap. Archer beat on a revenue base still measured in single-digit millions and missed on an earnings line dominated by one-time items, with the strategic content of the quarter sitting entirely in the Boeing transaction rather than in the accounts.

A fourth space data point came from the secondary market rather than from earnings. Retail investors sold a net $4.5 million of Space Exploration Technologies on August 7, the first net negative reading since the June 12 debut, according to Vanda Research data cited by Reuters. The IPO priced at $135 and the stock reached a record $225.64 on June 16 before reversing.

5. Biotech: two failures, two readouts and an approval financed

Monday delivered one of the widest dispersions of the year inside a single session. Sionna Therapeutics closed at $4.50, down 91.18%, after SION-719 failed to improve sweat chloride levels in a mid-stage study and the company said it would not advance the candidate as an add-on to Trikafta. Tenax Therapeutics closed at $1.38, down 89.77%, after TNX-103 missed statistical significance on six-minute walk distance against placebo.

On the other side, AbCellera closed at $9.34, up 34.78%, and was the best performer of the day among companies above $2 billion of market value, after top-line Phase 2 data for ABCL635 in moderate-to-severe vasomotor symptoms due to menopause. Silence Therapeutics closed at $15.43, up 29.12%, after the Phase 2 SANRECO trial met both its primary and secondary endpoints. Vertex Pharmaceuticals advanced 6.6% on a second-quarter earnings beat, separately from the read-through it received on the cystic fibrosis competitive file.

Replimune closed at $13.67, up 13.35%, and priced a $150 million underwritten offering of common stock and pre-funded warrants on Monday, expected to close on Tuesday with net proceeds of roughly $140.5 million. The raise follows the FDA’s accelerated approval on August 6 of RP1, branded Tudriqev, in combination with nivolumab for adults with unresectable advanced cutaneous melanoma who have progressed on an anti-PD-1 regimen. Financing a launch immediately after an approval is the standard sequence, and the market absorbed it without a discount.

6. The Fed: a voter argues the other way

Beth Hammack said some number of rate increases may be needed to bring inflation down, and that one 25 basis point move probably does not do a great deal for the economy. She said the July employment report showing job losses did not change her outlook, because the labour market sits close to her estimate of full employment, while the Fed has been missing on the inflation side for more than five years. She described inflation as broad-based and persisting because policy is not restraining it, and attributed the run-up in prices to excess demand based on conversations with businesses in her district.

The weight of the comment comes from the voting record rather than the words. Hammack was one of three FOMC members who voted in favour of a hike at last month’s meeting. A dissenting bloc of three is not a majority, but it is large enough that a hot CPI print would not need to convert many colleagues to change the tone of the September meeting.

Against that, JPMorgan strategists led by Dubravko Lakos-Bujas raised their S&P 500 target to 8,000 from 7,800, the second increase in two months, on the argument that hyperscaler capital expenditure is now being monetised through stronger cloud growth and larger backlogs at Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft. The two views are not directly contradictory, but they price different risks.

7. The macro week: three prints in three sessions

The July consumer price index is released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday, August 12, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. July producer prices and weekly jobless claims follow on Thursday, retail sales on Friday.

The sequencing matters more than any single figure. A July CPI collected before the latest crude move would understate the energy channel, which makes the core measures the more informative part of the release. PPI on Thursday gives the pass-through read at the producer level, and retail sales on Friday close the loop on whether the demand that Hammack describes as excessive is still there.

Earnings season is more than 85% complete, but the remaining names are concentrated in exactly the part of the market that has carried the index. CoreWeave, Super Micro Computer and Lumentum report after Tuesday’s close, Cisco Systems and Coherent on Wednesday, and Applied Materials on Thursday, covering AI capacity, server demand, optical interconnect and semiconductor equipment inside a single week.

8. Capital markets: the financing window stays open

Monday was heavy with issuance well beyond Intel. Cloudflare sought $2.175 billion in convertible notes, Duke Energy $1.75 billion in equity units and IBM tapped the Canadian bond market for the first time since 2012. The U.S. high-grade market saw the most issuers in a single session since January. Separately, the SEC exempted data-center bonds from key securitization rules, a technical change with direct consequences for how AI infrastructure gets financed.

Berkshire Hathaway shares reached their highest level since Greg Abel replaced Warren Buffett, supported by buybacks and a strong quarter. Trump Media reported a loss of $238 million on revenue of $1.7 million, with the shortfall driven largely by the decline in the value of its cryptocurrency holdings, while Strategy sold further bitcoin and stock to rebuild its cash position.

Two positioning data points sit underneath all of this. Bloomberg reported that investors have been abandoning hedges in order to chase the equity rally, and that emerging-market equity valuations have fallen below half of the S&P 500’s. Neither is a timing signal, but both describe a market with less protection than it had a month ago heading into a data-heavy week.

Merlintrader watchlist — prices as of the Monday, August 10, 2026 close

Quotations below are official Monday, August 10, 2026 closing prices and session changes from Finviz Elite, taken from the Merlintrader coverage list.

Bottom line

Monday looked like a pause and behaved like a rotation. The index barely moved, but energy rose 4.46% at midday, the rate-sensitive corners lagged, and the optical names that had led the AI trade gave back high single digits into their own earnings dates. Crude is now the variable through which almost every other file is being priced, and the Hormuz negotiation moved further from resolution rather than closer to it.

From Wednesday morning the argument stops being a matter of interpretation. July CPI, July PPI and retail sales arrive in three consecutive sessions, into a market that has been reducing its hedges and a committee in which three members already voted to tighten. Between now and then, CoreWeave, Super Micro Computer and Lumentum report this evening and will say more about the durability of AI capital expenditure than any strategist target.