AI assistants reach a pivotal moment... September 21, 2026 Presented By Hello there. ICYMI, the autumn squash soup is back on the menu boards at Panera, and your favorite septuagenarian would probably appreciate a get-together. Just remember that the Venn diagram of people who love this soup and people who will ask you pointed questions about your love life is basically a circle. — Brendan Cosgrove, Holly Van Leuven, Neal Freyman In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into: AI assistants in the time of sandbox-breaking Paramount’s advanced settlement negotiations The highest-returning stock in the S&P 500 Markets: Year-to-Date Nasdaq 26,522.54 +14.11% S&P 7,650.5 +11.76% Dow 51,682.64 +7.53% 10-Year 4.998% +83.5 bps Bitcoin $81,268.01 -7.13% Sandisk $1,791.82 +654.83% Data is provided by *Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 11:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean. Markets: With last week’s interest rate hike firmly in Wall Street’s rearview mirror, geopolitics will be in the driver’s seat this week, with President Trump set to meet with a slew of leaders from around the world (more on that later). Stock spotlight: Memory storage company Sandisk is getting promoted to the S&P 100 today after a stunning rise over the past year. Last Friday, the stock jumped nearly 11%. double agents? AI can’t be controlled, so give it your credit card Yana Iskayeva/Getty Images AI may leave civilization in a burning heap of rubble, but until then, our monthly protein powder shipments will be completely frictionless. At least that seems to be the pitch from Big Tech companies that simultaneously warn about the dangers of rogue AI while trying to convince us they can be trusted assistants on par with Alfred or Jeeves. AI with the assist. Tech companies have long talked of personal AI assistants that could buy your groceries, book a trip, and schedule appointments, but they finally seem to be at a watershed moment: Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent, recently became the No. 1 free app in Apple’s US App Store. AI assistant startup (and Silicon Valley darling) Instinct is reportedly in talks for funding based on a $10 billion valuation. Google is testing a new AI assistant for families, all while OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Apple each make moves of their own. Going rogue But while the technology is there, the trust may not be . AI assistants often require access to your schedule, medical history, and credit card information. That’s a lot to hand over to a bot, especially when rogue AI agents are escaping sandboxes more often than Tommy Pickles. Just look at the OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, or Google’s acknowledgment on Friday that its Gemini model hacked its way into three companies in May. (Not to mention, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent prediction that rogue AI agents could soon team up and eat through the internet.) There are smaller stakes, too. According to ABC News Australia last month, an Australian man asked his AI assistant to get him a good spot in a Pilates class, so the OpenClaw agent hacked into the gym, deleted another person’s reservation, and signed him up. So, what’s the solution? Testing and adding safeguards, though tech execs acknowledge that won’t completely solve the problem. In the meantime, be sure your AI assistant asks for permission before setting the world on fire.— BC Reader Poll Have you used or are you using AI agents for personal chores? Yes, they’re OK. Yes, they save me a lot of time. I tried them, but I don’t use them anymore. No, too techy for me. No, because I read the news. Sponsored By Skybound Studios pay billions for what this company creates How much will premium buyers spend to acquire a story library instead of building one? Paramount spent $110.9b when they acquired Warner Bros. Discovery. Skybound Entertainment took another path . They own 250+ IP properties outright. No acquisition required. They built The Walking Dead, the most-watched cable show of all time, with $10b+ in franchise revenue. Next, Invincible , Prime Video’s #1 show for multiple seasons and one of the platform’s most valuable original franchises . Skybound’s primed for a potential third straight win with Stillwater, the horror series based on their original comic—greenlit by Amazon MGM Studios. Big studios have spent 11 figures to get what Skybound’s been building for years. These are the final days to become an early-stage Skybound investor . World Tour de headlines 🎥 Paramount discussed $1.5 billion CA investment as part of settlement negotiations, WSJ says. In an exclusive, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company talked about potential concessions as part of a possible settlement of the antitrust lawsuit brought by 12 state attorneys general led by CA Attorney General Rob Bonta over Paramount’s $81 billion merger with Warner Bros. The WSJ’s sources said a $1.5 billion investment by Paramount into production in California and a promise by Paramount not to move out of the state were discussed this weekend, but a final deal wasn’t reached. Deadline reported that four of the 12 attorneys general have split with Bonta’s faction: Per the outlet, the AGs of Minnesota, New York, Connecticut, and Washington state are urging Bonta not to rush a settlement. 🤖 President Trump said he would make AI task force but wouldn’t permit “decimation” of the industry. On Saturday, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that he would form an AI Force modeled after the Space Force he created in his first term, and that he would soon announce his selection for “AI ‘Czar.’” Trump predicted that up to 25% of the US GDP would come from artificial intelligence after the AI revolution swept through. He said, “We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!” It remains unclear if the AI Force will be a branch of the military, as the Space Force is. 🎤 Ed Sheeran apologized for tour controversy on first stop sin

September 21, 2026 PRESENTED BY Good morning. Momentum investing has a reputation that precedes it. Say the phrase and many picture a stock ripping higher on a viral post or a cable news sound bite, something of a stock sugar rush that is only ever a few steps away from a comedown (heavier than the PM crash after an AM meeting with too many pastries). But it only tells half the story. As an investing play, momentum simply describes the tendency for outperforming stocks to keep outperforming, and laggards to keep lagging, for a while at least. Researchers have documented this pattern across markets and decades; the real question is what’s driving it. Is a stock moving on real, sustained business strength? Or is it riding a short-term wave of attention and money that could soon break? Motley Fool Asset Management’s Momentum Factor ETF is built around answering these questions. Rather than chasing hype, the fund starts from a pool of companies the Fool’s research team has already vetted as high quality, then measures relative performance using a lookback window that stretches from one month to two years. Here are the highlights from our conversation with Bill Mann, chief investment strategist at Motley Fool Asset Management, at Future Proof 2026. PRESENTED BY THE MOTLEY FOOL ASSET MANAGEMENT A Momentum Investing Play That Doesn’t Chase The Hype Photo via Damon Butler The Daily Upside: Momentum usually follows performance, but performance isn’t always about fundamentals. It can be about hype and story too. How does a passive fund account for that and tell the difference? The Motley Fool, our sister company, has always based its research on finding the highest-quality companies. So the very top of our funnel is companies they’ve identified as being the best of the best. When a lot of people think about momentum, they think of it as riding what’s hot. For us, it’s more about finding what’s performing relatively well based on other factors we’ve brought to the table, and that’s what makes our fund a little different from what else is out there. The Daily Upside: Momentum is often thought of as a short-term signal. How does something like this fit into a long-term portfolio? A lot of people think of momentum as basically latency, or money flows. We use a definition that’s a lookback averaging about six months, ranging from one month to two years. So you’re not trying to jump onto the hottest of the hot, which usually has more to do with money flows than the quality of the company. When you expand that definition just a little, you end up finding companies that are moving for genuinely good fundamental reasons, rather than because they were mentioned on X or on financial television at that moment. The Daily Upside: Advisors don’t want their clients chasing performance. How do you avoid getting in at the peak, and how do you determine whether a stock still has room to run? It’s maybe the thing that’s most fundamentally misunderstood about momentum, which is that momentum is based on relative performance. If you’ve set it up the way our factor fund is set up, you’re not going to be grabbing the hottest of the hot. So we’re not too worried about whether we’re buying something at the peak, because we have that two-year lookback. When you build in buffers like that, you don’t end up with companies that turn over super quickly. It provides a more gentle ride, and you end up with lower turnover than you might expect from a momentum fund. The Daily Upside: Concentration has been a big issue this year, and it’s favored big tech. What other areas have potential in this kind of strategy? In every area, the Motley Fool has identified high-quality companies. What I’d say about our sister company is that there are companies they’ve had recommendations on constantly since 2004 and 2006. A lot of the most successful companies you can think of have been in our recommendation universe for decades at this point. When that’s the top of your funnel, it lowers your capacity to end up concentrated in the hottest of the hot. MFMO also has a position size limitation of 4.8% on reconstitution, so that prevents us from being too heavily weighted in any individual company. The Daily Upside: With the issues the tech sector has had this year, there’s been a rotation into energy and industrials. How quickly is a change like that reflected in the portfolio? In general, we do a reconstitution every quarter. Our lookback starts at 20 market days and goes back to two years, with an average of about six months. That’s important because it prevents us from being too whipsawed by the market itself. We see plenty of opportunity, and we have plenty of exposure in some energy names within the fund, but these aren’t names that disappeared in January, reappeared in March, and disappeared again in September. MFMO has very good exposure to tech and AI, but it also has pharmaceutical exposure, banking exposure, and consumer cyclical exposure. We really do have it across the board. Watch the full Q&A with Bill Mann. Edited by Emile Hallez . Written by Griffin Kelly , John Manganaro , Lilly Riddle , and Quinn Waller . Advisor Upside is a publication of The Daily Upside. For any questions or comments, feel free to contact us at advisor@thedailyupside.com . Our Other Newsletters The Daily Upside | ETF Upside | Retirement Upside | CFO Upside 55 Union Place, #253 Summit, NJ 07901 Copyright © 2026 The Daily Upside, LLC All rights reserved.

Plus: Everyone's a critic | Monday, September 21, 2026 Axios Markets By Emily Peck and Matt Phillips · Sep 21, 2026 ☕️ It's Monday. Find yourself some caffeine. U.S. stock futures are up this morning, pointing to a positive open for the markets. 🎶 Seems important to ask: "Do you remember the 21st night of September?" It's a particularly good day to hum Earth, Wind & Fire's happy tune "September." 🗓️ Today, Emily considers potential risks lurking in the thicket of supplier relationships, credit backstops and equity investments that connect virtually all the major players in the AI ecosystem. And Matt gets you caught up on the still-weakening Japanese yen. Let's get into it. 1,098 words, a 4-minute read. 1 big thing: AI is becoming too interconnected to fail By Emily Peck Sona Asset Management The AI buildout is so interconnected that a single point of failure could ripple across the multitrillion-dollar sector, a new analysis finds. Why it matters: AI investment is powering the U.S. economy, and any stumble would likely have a big impact. The idea that reining in AI development could "crash" the markets and lead to a recession is a reason President Trump has taken an anti-regulatory, anti-slowdown approach, the New York Times reports. State of play: The situation mirrors, in some ways, the mortgage market in the build-up to the financial crisis, say the authors of a new paper, highlighted in the Financial Times , from London-based Sona Asset Management. "Opaque and concentrated exposures, counterparties linked in complex ways that few have mapped, and demand part-underwritten by the same balance sheets that depend on it," they wrote. The big picture: The analysis comes on the heels of S&P's warning that hyperscaler credit quality is weakening. It also arrives at a time when borrowing costs are rising everywhere, including in the AI sector, which has billions of dollars in borrowing on the line. Where it stands: Sona maps out the complex AI ecosystem, a fast-growing supply chain comprising 255 public companies: the big hyperscalers like Microsoft and Meta, chipmaking behemoth Nvidia, and many smaller players like data center operators and neoclouds that rent out computing power. There are also the two giant AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic. There's huge money on the line: Together these companies have a combined market cap of $50 trillion — more than double what it was five years ago — and nearly $6 trillion in debt. The intrigue: The market is a bit of a closed loop. A lot of the money circulates among the same group of companies. They finance one another, buy from one another and invest in each other. The money circulates like air through an office HVAC system. "Capital, product and demand chase each other around the same handful of names," the authors wrote. Data: Sona Asset Management analysis of Bloomberg data; Chart: Axios/Emily Peck Zoom in: Some of these smaller businesses earn a large share of revenue from just one or two big companies. CoreWeave is drawing about 67% of its revenue from Microsoft alone. Applied Digital, a data center infrastructure company, gets 56% of its revenue from Oracle and 30% from CoreWeave, which in turn is heavily dependent on Microsoft. Reality check: That kind of circularity isn't necessarily nefarious, as anyone who's bought a car and tapped financing through a dealer knows. The core of the ecosystem — the big hyperscalers, chipmakers and memory companies — is in good financial shape. They generate a lot of cash and have strong credit ratings. Unlike in the mortgage crisis, this time individuals and their lives and homes aren't on the line. And many of these companies are involved in building and selling real, physical assets — not creating synthetic leverage, the Sona authors note. Friction point: The financial risks lie "one ring out from the core," with the neoclouds and data center platforms that carry the highest leverage, thinnest margins and weakest cash flows. They are at risk if tech advances cause the price of compute to fall. Between the lines: A single investment decision by a bigger company may be "existential" for these firms, the authors write. The bottom line: The AI boom is a big, tangled, delicate web. A MESSAGE FROM AXIOS Simplify: Do 50% more with 50% less With AI upending work and life, Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen & Roy Schwartz, the bestselling authors of "Smart Brevity" offer a one-stop survival guide to dramatically improving your life, work and happiness. The idea: Toxic complexity clogs our inboxes and calendars. We can do more, but first we need to simplify. Get your copy. 2. For policymakers, markets are a tough crowd By Matt Phillips Data: FactSet; Chart: Axios Markets Currency traders largely shrugged off the Bank of Japan's decision to raise its key interest rate to a 31-year high Friday. Why it matters: It's the latest example of the challenge economic officials face in managing markets that are increasingly jumpy about inflation and large government debts in what seems to be a new, higher-interest-rate environment for the world economy. Zoom out: In recent months, the U.S. government bond market panned a major press conference of recently installed Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh in late July, contributing to a sharp uptick in Treasury yields. (Warsh's performance as part of last week's Fed rate hike seemed to receive more positive reviews from the markets .) Likewise, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's unusual approach to buying back long-term U.S. Treasurys — widely seen as an effort to push down yields — also failed to move the market for more than a moment or so. The latest: The Bank of Japan raised its key interest rate to 1.25% in part to cool inflation and bolster the strength of the yen, which is down more than 5.5% against the U.S. dollar over the last 12 months. Reality check: That's a big move for the currency of one of the world's largest economies. The weakness of the currency worsens inflation for an

Plus: IBM prepares to take a quantum leap. September 21, 2026 PRESENTED BY ORACLE NETSUITE Good morning and happy Monday. “Father Time always wins,” Warren Buffett wrote in a letter announcing he stepped down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway on Friday. The investing world’s north will assume the title of chairman emeritus at the $1 trillion conglomerate that he led for 55 years as CEO before handing the reins to Greg Abel at the start of the year. Buffett’s son Howard will take over as chair. “Recently, I celebrated my 96th birthday with family and friends, including one of my great-grandchildren, who had just turned 1,” Buffett added, before joking: “He’s moving a bit faster than I am these days.” But you could call that humble self-deprecation. A separate announcement from Berkshire said the nonagenarian will remain on the company’s board of directors, and Abel mentioned earlier this year that Buffett was still coming into the office almost every day. The great-grandchild may have toy trains, but we’re not sure he’s ready to pull off an acquisition that rivals BNSF Railway. MARKETS S&P 500 7,650.50 ▲ +0.17% DJI 51,682.64 ▼ -0.18% QCOM $177.72 ▼ -5.82% Stock data as of market close on September 18, 2026. INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS AI Risks, Trade War Loom Over Trump-Xi Summit Photo via Chinese Foreign Ministry CNN reported Friday that the US military “almost started a war” with China because an intelligence report drafted with artificial intelligence included an “entirely false” hallucination claiming a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying nuclear weapons components. (Was this some diabolical Skynet attempt to trick us into self-annihilation?) So when Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington on Wednesday, where he will take part in a summit with US President Donald Trump before departing Friday, they’ll have lots to talk about. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner The visit includes a state dinner where the elephant in the room won’t be a hallucination. Following a couple of weeks of fever-pitch AI anxiety, mostly on this side of the Pacific, executives of firms crucial to the AI trade, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon and Apple’s Tim Cook, are expected to be there. The White House is reportedly considering holding AI-focused sideline meetings during the summit. Altman, perhaps looking to stroke some egos via the press, told Fortune he thinks Trump and Xi could win a Nobel Peace Prize if they strike an AI deal. Most observers, however, don’t expect more than what has already been telegraphed. Last week, China’s commerce ministry said the countries are in talks to slash reciprocal tariffs on roughly $30 billion worth of goods on both sides. Both countries are also keen to extend a one-year agreement reached last October under which Washington suspended export controls blocking Chinese firms from accessing US tech in exchange for Beijing approving rare earth and critical mineral exports. China, meanwhile, remains saddled with domestic problems that critics say it’s mollifying at the world’s expense. The country has a massive debt pile, a struggling real estate sector, chronic unemployment issues, weakening retail sales growth, slowing GDP growth and contracting fixed-asset investment. To offset these, Beijing has encouraged manufacturers with state subsidies to produce excess goods for mass export: Excess production policies have resulted in 30% of Chinese industrial firms operating at a loss, up from 20% before the pandemic, according to the country’s National Bureau of Statistics. “The political appetite for accepting the deindustrialization and critical dependencies that come with the flood of Chinese imports is finite and shrinking,” former US Trade Representative Michael Froman wrote in the September issue of Foreign Affairs , noting Trump’s tariffs as well as the EU’s more aggressive trade posture toward Beijing. He warned that if Beijing refuses to reorient toward a more sustainable economic model and the world is unable or unwilling to absorb its excess production, “the consequence could be a global economic crisis.” The Undercut: Hyundai’s CEO warned Friday that Chinese cars undercut competitors by 30% to 40% in some markets, and could soon erode market share of domestic carmakers in the US, having already done so in Europe. Written by Sean Craig PRESENTED BY ORACLE NETSUITE Build an AI Pitch the Board Can’t Poke Holes In Photo via Oracle NetSuite Standing in front of the board, over a table littered with coffee and croissants, you’ve just finished presenting a new AI use case with serious numbers behind it. The pilot worked, and even that executive who never approves mustered a smirk. Then someone asks: “ How do these savings hold up once you account for how many people actually use the tool? ” Uh oh. Your prep didn’t stretch that far. Solid answers to that question decide whether an AI pitch shines or stalls. CFO and finance author Glenn Hopper built a six-step framework for building AI business cases that hold up under exactly this kind of scrutiny, from the first budget meeting to the year-end audit. Download NetSuite’s guide and build your next AI pitch to survive the boardroom. TECHNOLOGY IBM Takes a Billion-Dollar Step Toward Becoming Quantum’s Foundry King Last century’s three-letter-acronym tech titan wants to be a little more like this century’s four- letter-acronym tech titan. It’ll take a quantum leap, and billions of dollars. The federal government officially handed over the first billion-dollar check to IBM subsidiary Anderon last week to help the legacy tech player build the first pure-play quantum wafer foundry in the US. IBM has pledged an additional $1 billion to get the upstate New York facility up and running, in the hopes it can become a TSMC-style leading foundry for the quantum age, restoring Big Blue to the top of tech’s pecking order. Bit by Qubit Led by IBM’s semiconductor chief Mukesh Khare, Anderon

The SEC Greenlights domestic crypto operations and Treasury kills CBDC Bitcoin Breaks $85K as Policy Wants Digital Assets Onshore The SEC Greenlights domestic crypto operations and Treasury kills CBDC Sep 21 READ IN APP None of this is financial advice. Do your own research. By reading this newsletter, you acknowledge and accept the terms and conditions outlined in our disclaimer . GM Investors Bitcoin just printed its first print above $85,000 since late January. That is the headline. It is not the whole story. The tape is pricing two things at once. Washington is pulling digital assets onshore and shutting the door on a U.S. CBDC. At the same time, oil prices slipped below $94 as Saudi export volumes recovered, easing the inflation impulse that has kept bond volatility elevated. Our desk reads this as a policy-plus-commodity squeeze, not a random altcoin spike. The contradiction sits in the fund-flow data. Global equity funds just posted a $23.2 billion weekly outflow, the largest in nine months. Bitcoin ripped through $85,000 and liquidated more than $400 million of levered shorts in four hours. Equities are being sold. Crypto and semiconductors are being bid. That split is the trade. Geopolitical risk has not vanished. Markets are still waiting on Trump’s reply to Iran’s terms sent through Qatar, and on Trump-Xi talks this week. They are trading the oil print first. Here’s what our desk is watching. This Is The Only "Buy The Dip" That Matters In September. TOKEN2049 ticket prices go up Sept 23. The discount code expires with your window. You wouldn't fade a 10% discount on a trade. Don't fade it on the one conference where Vitalik, CZ, and BlackRock share the same stage. $539 with code CRYPTOBANTER. Sept 23 is your cutoff. GET 10% discount and register Policy Is the Bid Under This Crypto Rally Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent restated the administration line in blunt language. There will be no central bank digital currency under President Trump. He framed a CBDC as the first step toward transaction tracking and said the priority is bringing digital assets into the United States. That is not a slogan for our research. It is a market structure call. If Washington refuses a Fed-issued token and instead pushes dollar stablecoins and onshore venues, private crypto stays the settlement layer. Bessent has also been pressing Congress to finish the Clarity Act so the “offshore wild west” moves onshore. That is Fed policy by other means. The central bank stays out of the token. The Treasury wants the dollar inside the token. The SEC added a second pillar last week. It granted temporary, conditional exemptive relief so tokenized securities venues can trade tokenized NMS stock using permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools. The relief runs five years and is open for comment. Separately, crypto desks have treated the broader signal as a green light for U.S. crypto companies to operate at home rather than route flow through Bermuda and Singapore. This is why Bitcoin can rally while global equity funds bleed. Crypto market analysis this week is not just a chart. It is a jurisdiction trade. On-chain data puts the average cost basis for U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF holders near $85,638. Price is now knocking on that level. If spot holds above the ETF cohort’s basis, those holders stop being forced sellers and start being ballast. Altcoins followed the squeeze. Ether pushed through $2,700. XRP, ADA, and LINK printed mid-single to high-single-digit gains on the same session. That is beta, not a new thesis. The thesis is U.S. policy preferring private crypto over a CBDC while giving tokenized equities a legal on-ramp. That on-ramp only matters if the macro tape lets risk assets breathe. Oil and Japan decide that. Oil, Japan, and the Bond Vol Tax on Equities S&P 500 futures were up 0.36% and Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.6% as oil dropped below $94. KOSPI reclaimed 7,000. China and Taiwan opened green. The market is treating cheaper crude as more important than the latest headlines on a U.S.-Iran escalation. Saudi shipments are the swing variable. September exports have been reported above 4 million barrels per day, up from 2.4 million in August. Lower oil prices cut the imported-inflation tax. That matters for Fed policy expectations and for every importer that funds energy in dollars. Japan is the other side of that coin. The Bank of Japan raised rates to 1.25%, the highest in 31 years. The 10-year JGB yield touched 3%, a 30-year high. The yen still sits near ¥157 per dollar. Japan imports almost all of its oil, with about 95% coming from the Middle East. A weak yen plus sticky energy is cost-push inflation, not a 1970s wage spiral yet. PPI has been running above 7%. The last hike passed 7-2. October and December are in play. That is why Thursday’s Japan PMI print is a macro trading event, not a regional curiosity. Manufacturing PMI is already at 54.9 for an eighth month. If firms keep passing costs through, the BOJ hikes again. Higher JGB yields tighten global dollar funding through the yen carry. We have seen that movie. U.S. stocks are already more sensitive to Treasuries. The 30-day correlation between the ICE BofA MOVE Index and the S&P 500 is now -0.58, the strongest since mid-June. MOVE jumped 8% last week to 80.7, near its highest since mid-May. When bond vol rises, equities fall harder. That pattern showed up in March and again in April 2025. Semiconductor stocks can still catch a bid because they sit in the one sleeve of the fund-flow data that is still green. They are not immune if 10-year yields lurch. Levels our desk is marking: Bitcoin: $85,000 break; ETF cost basis ~$85,638; 52-week high $126,200; session high near $85,250 Liquidations: ~$ million of shorts in four hours; later prints near $647 million shorts of $746 million total Oil: below $94; Saudi September exports >4 mbpd vs 2.4 mbpd in August MOVE: 80.7, +8% week-over-week; S&P/MOVE 30-day correlation -0.58 Fund flows (week to

Washington stalls on legislation, but the market builds its own infrastructure 🚨5 Smart Trades as Legacy Equities Reel and Crypto Goes Up Washington stalls on legislation, but the market builds its own infrastructure Sep 21 READ IN APP None of this is financial advice. Do your own research. By reading this newsletter, you acknowledge and accept the terms and conditions outlined in our disclaimer . Hey Traders, Markets opened the week treating last week’s rate hike as done, not as the next shock. Yields eased, the dollar was steady, and attention shifted to UN week in New York, the Trump–Xi meeting, and a run of Fed speakers. Inflation is still the backdrop. The tape is no longer pricing it by the hour. Bonds and stocks spent Monday buying the dip in yields, not pricing the next shock. The Fed has already delivered. Attention has moved to a week of diplomacy, UN week in New York and the Trump–Xi meeting, plus a run of central-bank speakers. Equities opened firmer with chips and AI carrying the bid and the rest of the tape following more quietly. This is a risk-on grind after last week’s squeeze, not a crash and not a clean all-clear. Bitcoin is trading past the headline stack. Oil eased, yields slipped, and BTC still pushed to an eight-month high with ether and the alt tape following. The war premium is fading at the margin. The risk bid is not. Here is what we are watching. Poll of the Day ( Presented by Rain Trade ) 🎯 POLL U.S. stocks move to 23/5 trading in December. Superior model? 🏛️ Legacy 23/5 ⛓️ Crypto 24/7 🤖 Dark pools Today’s Charts: Chart #1 – Cardano(ADAUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #2 – Just(JSTUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #3 – Morpho(MORPHOUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #4 – Akedo(AKEUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #5 – JPMorgan Chase(JPM) 1-Day This Is The Only “Buy The Dip” That Matters In September. TOKEN2049 ticket prices go up Sept 23. The discount code expires with your window. You wouldn’t fade a 10% discount on a trade. Don’t fade it on the one conference where Vitalik, CZ, and BlackRock share the same stage. $539 with code CRYPTOBANTER. Sept 23 is your cutoff. GET 10% discount and register Chart #1 – Cardano(ADAUSDT) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Cardano has confirmed an impulsive continuation following a clean higher-low retest of its breakout structure, pushing above the $0.2256 horizontal pivot to trade near $0.2404 on the 4-hour timeframe. Built on an academic, peer-reviewed proof-of-stake architecture utilizing the Ouroboros consensus protocol and an Extended UTXO (EUTXO) ledger model, Cardano provides secure, formally verified smart contract execution via Plutus and decentralized governance through the Voltaire era. This long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $0.2630 overhead resistance target as long as the $0.2137–$0.2256 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $0.225 Stop Loss: $0.213 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $0.242 TP2: $0.263 Powerful narratives create powerful moves. With 247 Research , you get the insights to be early to the biggest trends in crypto. Chart #2 – Just(JSTUSDT) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade ) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) JUST has printed a bearish distribution breakdown off its multi-week rounded top near $0.11900, slicing below its neckline support to confirm a retest rejection under the $0.11380 pivot and trade near $0.11240 on the 4-hour timeframe. Operating as the primary decentralized finance ecosystem on the TRON network, JUST provides core financial infrastructure centered around JustStable—a multi-collateral stablecoin protocol minting USDJ—alongside JustLend for pooled money-market liquidity, decentralized governance, and cross-token bridging across the TRON blockchain. This short trade setup targets an extended mean-reversion drop toward the $0.10200–$0.10400 liquidity base as long as overhead resistance caps relief bounces below the $0.11380–$0.11800 zone. Trade Levels: Entry: $0.113 Stop Loss: $0.118 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $0.108 TP2: $0.103 Chart #3 – Morpho(MORPHOUSDT) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Morpho has broken out above its multi-week resistance high and is executing a structural retest of its new support shelf, holding firmly above the $2.754 horizontal pivot to trade near $2.805 on the 4-hour timeframe. Operating as a decentralized lending primitive on Ethereum, Morpho maximizes capital efficiency by pairing peer-to-peer credit matching with isolated, permissionless lending markets and risk-curated vaults, allowing institutional and retail participants to optimize yields with minimal governance overhead. This long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $3.229 overhead resistance target as long as the $2.596–$2.754 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $2.745 Stop Loss: $2.59 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $2.91 TP2: $3.22 25,000 People. One Building. 48 Hours. Zero Excuses. TOKEN2049 Singapore is where the next cycle’s partnerships get signed. If You’re Not At Marina Bay Sands Oct 7–8, You’re Reading The Recaps. Two Weeks To Lock $539 Entry To The Biggest Crypto Room Of The Year. Use code CRYPTOBANTER at checkout for 10% off the $599 . Chart #4 – Akedo(AKEUSDT) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Akedo has completed a sharp mean-reversion retest toward its original breakout origin following an explosive blow-off wick, finding responsive buyer absorption above the $0.029498 horizontal shelf to trade near $0.045326 on the 4-hour timeframe. Designed as a decentralized Web3 gaming and interactive entertainment ecosystem that integrates player-owned on-chain digital assets, game engine tooling, and creator-driven micro-economies, this long trade setup targets an upward re-expansion back toward the $0.085169 overhead resistance target as long as the $0.011729–$0.029498 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $0.0294 Stop Loss: $0.0117 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $0.05

And all in the face of two negative catalysts... 🥛 The bull market is back! 📈 And all in the face of two negative catalysts... Chevy Cassar This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's the good kind of nosy neighbor, always got the scoop. Here’s what we’ve got for you today: ✍️ The bull market is back! 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitcoin at $86K: The Crypto Bull Market Is BACK . 🍪 Crypto Prediction Market giant Kalshi might be fudging its perp volumes. On Sept 23, Milk Road's Martin sits down with Alumni Ventures to talk about blockchain and private markets. Save your free seat here. Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko. NO ARGUMENTS THIS WEEK - WE’RE BACK BAAABY! 📈 Every Monday, the team gets on a call to work out what we're watching for the week. As always, you get the fly-on-the-wall version. This one ran twelve minutes. John opened by saying there wasn't much to talk about, because we're in a bull market, so everything's fine. … then he talked for ten minutes straight. The call was short for the same reason it's worth reading: the bear argument that has defined crypto all year just ended. This morning Benjamin Cowen, one of the most-watched analysts in crypto, posted "I was wrong," after he'd spent most of 2026 arguing Bitcoin's four-year cycle had one more leg down in it, and would bottom in early October 2026. John's been on the other side since February, mostly because of how crowded the trade got. When every analyst points at one date, the market tends to get there first. He didn't take a victory lap though. "Ben isn't as wrong as everybody says he is. He's been buying since July, too." What John's watching now are two dates: October 6th, hoping to see Bitcoin above $90,000, then $100,000 before month-end. That’s the dream scenario, at least. We're at roughly $85.8K as I write this: Source: TradingView … ok, but how? How are we here!? We went into September with two catalysts - both of which landed terribly! On the 15th, the CLARITY Act failed 49 to 50 in the Senate, then the next day the Fed hiked rates - its first increase since 2023. Bad news + bad news = BTC up roughly 13% since?? John's answer: price is the catalyst. Every analyst who called for a lower low has to say out loud that we're in a bull market, and that does its own marketing… FREE SEMINAR ON BLOCKCHAIN & PRIVATE MARKETS Is VC capital still flowing into crypto or has AI taken it all? Where is venture capital actually deploying across crypto and fintech right now? Join Sophia Zhao (Partner at Alumni Ventures ) and Martin from Milk Road for a live fireside conversation covering: Where capital is moving across blockchain and fintech What the next generation of blockchain companies are actually building How accredited investors can get exposure to private markets The best part? It’s completely free to attend and takes just one hour. Save your free seat here. NO ARGUMENTS THIS WEEK - WE’RE BACK BAAABY! (P2) 📈 It’s not just Bitcoin moving. Uniswap touched almost $9 after the SEC opened a five-year window for tokenized U.S. stocks to trade onchain… Zcash cleared $1,000 for the first time in eight years… Solana is trading at ~$117 (from its lows of ~$60)... Source: TradingView It’s a beautiful thing to see! But before you get too bullish… John actually poured some cold water on his own case. Crypto was oversold for so long that he sees this entire move as mean reversion. Bitcoin is sitting near its average price for the last calendar year, having finally caught up with where everything else has been. "We're not overvalued. We're not in exuberance. This is kind of like where crypto should be." Which brings us to the least glamorous (but still very important) lesson here: John is ahead of most of our other Milk Road PRO analysts right now, not because of some complex trading strategy, but because he embraced patience. He put his capital into Bitcoin and Ethereum and sat on his hands. Or in his words: "I'm not smart. I'm just dumb enough to buy crypto and shut up." We'll see if October agrees. LESS THAN 1% IS ONCHAIN: CRYPTO'S BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY YET Karl Floersch, co-founder and CTO at OP Labs, joined us on The Milk Road Show : Deep dive into the Optimism L2 Network and its ecosystem. How Does Optimism Defend Its Moat in a Million-Chain World? How OP balances its relationship with Ethereum as an L1 and global settlement layer. Watch here . BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪 Do you trade options? Optionality is a free trading community with 14 active traders averaging 80% per call.* Kalshi : Is the prediction market giant fudging its perp volumes? Crypto assets with real cash flows are outperforming the market. BTC is defying real yields. *this is sponsored content. Save your free seat here. RATE TODAY’S EDITION What'd you think of today's edition? 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛 F**king great 🥛🥛🥛 Meh, do better 🥛 You didn't bring the heat MILKY MEMES 🤣 Source: @boldleonidas Source: @ToolySOL ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛 VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY This content is for educational purposes only. Read full disclaimer Interested in reaching smart readers like you? Sponsor Milk Road Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here © 2026 ImpactDM Inc. operating as Milk Road 1257 Dundas St W Toronto, Ontario M6J1X6, Canada

Cut the cost base, rebuild/re-price the product... 🥛 SaaS-pocalypse = opportunity? 🥄 Cut the cost base, rebuild/re-price the product... Chevy Cassar GM. This is Milk Road Stocks, the newsletter that hits harder than your dad's opinion on index funds. Today we’re going full “bald kid from the first act of The Matrix” and talking about Bending Spoons. First, a quick detour to private markets. On Sept 23, Milk Road's Martin sits down with Alumni Ventures to talk about blockchain and private markets. Save your free seat here. THE ANSWER TO THE SAAS-POCALYPSE? 🥄 Every new frontier model eats away at another software company's business. Which is why "SaaS is dead" has been one of the more common calls in the market this year. Vincent covered a company on Friday's Milk Road Stock pod that treats all of those ‘failing’ companies as buying opportunities. The company is called Bending Spoons. They're based in Milan, and they listed on the Nasdaq on July 1st at $29 a share. Odds are you've used something they own - AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, Airtable, Miro... The trick is what they buy. They go after software companies that broke expectations rather than businesses that actually broke, meaning they’re looking for: Established names, with a big paying customer base, where growth has stalled since the post-Covid SaaS hype cooled off. When they find a company that fits that mold, they buy them up, and: Cut the cost base: At Evernote they took headcount down by more than 80% and kept running the same product. Rebuild the product: Adding new features and creating a more stable experience (all the stuff the old owner stopped funding). Re-price it: They're specialists at pricing tiers, and they A/B test their way through them. It's worked out well so far, with revenue going from $387M in 2023 to $1.31B last year, and Q2 of this year landing at $704M 👇 Source: BendingSpoons Vincent's angle is that all of this is an AI adoption story, which is not how most investors are looking at it. The CEO, Luca Ferrari, describes the business as 75% tech company and 25% private equity. They've built more than 50 internal tools over the years, and every employee (they call them Spooners) has an AI agent with access to everything that person does. There's also a routing layer that picks which model handles each request based on cost and quality, and M0xt pointed out that 90% of their token usage already goes to open-source models. What limits this business is people. It takes 40-60 Spooners to transform an acquired company, and there are only about 700 of them. So making each one more effective is what lets them buy more. And they're brutally picky about who gets in - of the 800,000 applications last year, only 286  turned into hires. All told, revenue per Spooner has gone from $1.1M in 2023 to roughly $4M today. Source: BendingSpoons Every deal also feeds that platform more customer data, which makes the next transformation cheaper to pull off. (More companies bought → smarter tools → faster turnarounds → more companies bought.) Which brings us to what it's worth. At ~$39 a share, Bending Spoons is a ~$25B company. Vincent's base case is that if they keep deploying capital at this year's pace and hold adjusted operating margins in the mid-40s to mid-50s (Q2 came in at 54%), you're looking at a $160 stock by 2030. If it underwhelms, he sees ~$100. But Bending Spoons doesn’t come without baggage: They're carrying debt at 2.4 times yearly earnings as of the end of Q2. And the IPO lock-up expires in late December, which frees up roughly 5.5x the shares currently tradable - though the founding team holds about 49% and talks about the company in 20-year terms. Either way, the stock peaked near $55 in August and has drifted back to about where it opened. Source: TradingView M0xt added Bending Spoons to the PRO watchlist this morning at $38.08, and Vincent said on the show it's headed for his portfolio too. If you want to see when they actually pull the trigger, and at what price: You can try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days . FREE SEMINAR ON BLOCKCHAIN & PRIVATE MARKETS Is VC capital still flowing into crypto or has AI taken it all? Where is venture capital actually deploying across crypto and fintech right now? Join Sophia Zhao (Partner at Alumni Ventures ) and Martin from Milk Road for a live fireside conversation covering: Where capital is moving across blockchain and fintech What the next generation of blockchain companies are actually building How accredited investors can get exposure to private markets The best part? It’s completely free to attend and takes just one hour. Save your free seat here. This content is for educational purposes only. Read full disclaimer Interested in reaching smart readers like you? Sponsor Milk Road Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here © 2026 ImpactDM Inc. operating as Milk Road Stocks 1257 Dundas St W Toronto, Ontario M6J1X6, Canada