FIFA has called off an unpopular private investment plan related to the World Cup.

Stocks managed to eke out a win yesterday, following a week with more drama than Days of Our Lives, in which bonds hit their highest yield since 2007 after the Fed decided to keep rates steady without tipping its hand about what comes next.

When it comes to Big Tech, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet added close to $1.5 trillion in combined market value this week after reporting strong cloud growth. But Apple, Meta, and Tesla fell this week. Apple, in particular, plunged yesterday after delivering a lackluster forecast and concerns about memory shortage.

In 2005, Brian Hunter generated an estimated $1 billion in trading profits in natural gas futures for the hedge fund Amaranth. The fund paid him a bonus of $113 million for his 2005 performance, but he hoped to make more. Reportedly targeting a $500 million bonus for 2006, he bet even bigger.

By August, he was carrying $53.5 billion in natural gas derivatives against Amaranth's $3 billion in capital. At that level of leverage — 18x — the firm's capital would be wiped out with a loss of just 5.6%. In a market that sometimes moved 5% in a single day.

He had a few bad days. On Sept. 20, Hunter lost $681 million in a single day. On Sept. 21, Amaranth faced a margin call of $4.07 billion. Down $6 billion for the month, Amaranth liquidated the entire fund.

In 2020, Bill Hwang borrowed billions to make his already enormous fortune much more enormous. His family investment office, Archegos, had $20 billion of equity — all his own money. Against that, it held at least $100 billion of longs in a highly concentrated book of about eight stocks.

One of those, ViacomCBS, accounted for his firm's entire capital — a $20 billion position. The rest of the $100 billion+ portfolio was financed by a group of investment banks.

In March, a vicious cycle of margin calls and stock sales vaporized over $100 billion of Hwang's P&L in just a few days. Archegos lost all of its equity and more: The banks that financed his trades lost an additional $10 billion closing them out.

The latest member of the margin-call hall of fame is Leopold Aschenbrenner, the "Nostradamus of AI," who lost an estimated $35 billion this week. All of it was borrowed.

He had made a lot of good investments in AI-related stocks. Great ones, even. At the end of June, his fund, Situational Awareness, was up 270% on the year.

But the returns were amplified by leverage. Sure of his long-term thesis on AI, Aschenbrenner reportedly borrowed as much as $4 for every $1 of capital he had.

In the short-term, though, things went the other way: Several of his highest-conviction longs were down over 30% just this week. Several of his shorts were up.

On Thursday, to meet the ensuing margin calls, he was forced to sell.

In 1998, Long-Term Capital Management borrowed $125 billion from investment banks against $4.8 billion of its investors' capital. The debt funded relative-value arbitrage trades in the Treasury market that their models said were virtually risk-free: buying a Treasury bond trading at a small discount to a nearly identical one they shorted.

So sure of their models, they amplified their returns with 25x leverage. A marked-to-market loss of just 4% would wipe out their equity.

In August, 1998, a default in Russia scrambled global bond markets, causing the relative prices of nearly identical Treasurys to diverge further than LTCM's models suggested was possible.

By September, the fund was marked-to-market insolvent. LTCM's models accurately predicted where prices would end up, but not how far they might stray before getting there.

An astounding 85% of RIA compliance officers ranked AI as their primary concern in a recent ACA Group survey. "In 21 years of this survey, we have never seen a single topic command this kind of separation," ACA President Carlo di Florio said in a statement. Cybersecurity landed a distant second at 37%, followed by privacy, advertising and prediction markets.

Novo Nordisk's U.S.-listed shares (-8.8%) tumbled after the company reported disappointing results for a drug aimed at preventing heart attacks and strokes.

The U.S. auto industry's connections to China are becoming more problematic — financially, politically or both — prompting potentially seismic shifts in corporate strategy. Washington is applying bipartisan scrutiny to automakers that use Chinese technology or have Chinese shareholders.

Tesla is reportedly considering a sale of its China business ahead of a potential merger with SpaceX. It's unclear whether the U.S. would tolerate SpaceX, a major defense contractor, owning a significant Chinese operation — and whether China would tolerate an automaker with local operations having close ties to an American military contractor.

As a result, "Tesla advisers have discussed possible options for a separation, including a spinoff, sale or closure" of its Chinese business.

"This has never even come up in a discussion ever," Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said on X of the spinoff report. "Absurdly fake news."

Tesla has invested heavily in China, having built two major factories in Shanghai and pursuing authorization to run its self-driving vehicle technology there. But competitors like Chinese EV maker BYD have become a serious threat to the company's market share in China.

Oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron reaped massive profits in the second quarter. The Iran war cut off petroleum shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, sending prices skyward.

ExxonMobil's earnings more than doubled to $14.5 billion in the second quarter, compared with a year earlier. Chevron's profit more than quadrupled to $12.1 billion.

"There are constituencies around the world who are having a very good crisis, and the oil producers are one of them," Patrick Galey, fossil fuels lead at Global Witness, told AP.

99% of onchain agentic commerce last quarter ran on USDC. 97% of it settled through x402. 90% moved over Base.

Coinbase owns all three, and earns almost nothing from any of them yet.

Revenue of $1.22B against Street expectations near $1.3B, a GAAP net loss of $359M, and a stock that fell about 5% after hours.

Total crypto market spot volume fell 25%, total crypto market cap dropped 11%, and volatility compressed to multi-year lows. Crypto is in a rough patch, and you can't expect a crypto-native company to hit new records at a time like this - even Robinhood's crypto revenue fell 38% to $100M.

88% of net revenue now comes from something other than Bitcoin spot trading, and subscription and services alone accounts for 48% of it.

Headcount went from 4,988 to 4,321. Adjusted expenses dropped 9% quarter over quarter. The full year expense outlook came down to $4.2B to $4.45B.

All of which produced a 14th consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, at $208M, in a market like this one.