Oura postpones IPO due to market uncertainty... September 30, 2026 Presented By Good morrow, friend. Today is the last day of September, the end of Q3 for most businesses, and, most importantly, the 21st anniversary of the Twilight book series. On this day in 2005, the vampire Edward Cullen entered our lives. When you think about it, that set off a chain of events that culminated in Robert Pattinson gifting us the “somebody get these beggars out of here” meme from The Odyssey in 2026. Thank you, Twilight . —Matty Merritt, Sam Klebanov, Dave Lozo, Adam Epstein, Neal Freyman In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into: Oura postponing its IPO The White House AI summit Phoebe Bridgers banning phones at her concerts Markets Nasdaq 26,797.54 -0.09% S&P 7,670.84 -0.17% Dow 51,349.92 -0.26% 10-Year 5.255% +1.0 bps Bitcoin $83,613 +0.13% CarMax $59.23 +4.74% Data is provided by *Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 5:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean. Markets: Like a drunk Roomba, stocks wavered yesterday, beginning the day up before eventually settling just a hair below where they started as investors parsed more AI jitters and rising bond yields. You know who didn’t mind? CarMax, which spiked after it showed evidence that its turnaround plan is working. HOLD YOUR HORSES Oura delays IPO due to market uncertainty Niv Bavarsky Just a day before Oura was set to go public, the smart ring maker said it was going to hold off. Oura was eyeing a whopping $14.1 billion valuation, well above the $11 billion valuation it snagged after its funding round last year. And, up until a few weeks ago, it might have achieved that valuation. The company generated $1.4 billion in revenue and $59 million in net income from June 2025 to June 2026, according to a regulatory filing, positioning it to hit the Nasdaq running. The IPO market was also red hot, with companies raising $127 billion so far in 2026—a 400% jump from last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. So what happened? The Iran war, to start. As oil prices jumped, the Federal Reserve signaled more interest rate hikes. That, combined with just about every AI evangelist warning of the impending apocalypse, has made investors nervous. In the last few days, Holtec Nuclear and Bamboo Insurance put their IPOs on pause, claiming bad timing. Oura said that, despite strong demand for its stock, it would hit pause on going public “due to uncertainty in the IPO market.” Meanwhile, Anthropic is full steam ahead Anthropic is moving forward with its IPO, confident it can hit the $2 trillion valuation it reportedly expects next month. But there are other concerns, according to the company’s prospectus that Reuters got a hold of this week: Anthropic said that AI could produce “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The company used 80 of the 261 pages in the document to explain potential risks, and just 48 on business. The AI giant also reported a net loss of $42 billion last year, while revenue grew to $4.6 billion, meaning profits have not caught up to the buzz. Anthropic also plans to supercharge spending, projecting $518 billion over the next few years. Bottom line: An IPO this big will have ripple effects, as the world watches for any missteps in the “circular economy” that AI companies have constructed. Oura also has a lot riding on AI: It relies on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google for models, in addition to third-party data centers.— MM Sponsored By Avalara A new operating model for tax + compliance Avalara Aviator brings AI into the workflows where tax and compliance work actually happens . Purpose-built agents help monitor activity, surface recommendations, and execute work within your policies, permissions, and approval boundaries. Rather than simply answering questions, Aviator helps move work forward across systems, data, and teams . The result is faster execution, fewer manual handoffs, and audit-ready outcomes you can trust. With complete visibility and human oversight at every step, Aviator helps organizations simplify compliance, reduce risk, and focus more on directing outcomes than managing tasks . World Tour de headlines Morning Brew Inc. 🦺 Report: OpenAI ignored employees’ warnings about safety. According to the New York Times, two employees warned executives that new models were not being properly monitored in tests, but were told that the tests needed to move forward to meet deadlines. Months later, OpenAI bots went rogue, breaking out of their testing environments to hack the startup Hugging Face. The ignored warning was reportedly part of a pattern of the company not prioritizing security, per the New York Times. In a statement, OpenAI told the Times that it’s committed to safety and took action when independent researchers flagged security flaws. On Monday, the company scrapped the release of its latest AI model over safety concerns. 🏛️ Jack Smith testified in fiery Senate hearing. Former special counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw criminal investigations into President Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack and his handling of classified government information, defended the investigations in a combative hearing before the GOP-led Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. Republicans accused him of abusing his authority, but Smith stood by the probes, saying they “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.” In the hearing’s most viral moment, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) appeared to confuse the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks with the NCAA’s Iowa Hawkeyes in an attempt to accuse Smith of colluding with prosecutors in Atlanta. 🍎 Apple CEO John Ternus reportedly plans big changes. The iPhone maker may be terning over a new leaf. John Ternus, who assumed the head honcho mantle from Tim Cook earlier this month, wants to rethink a lot of things, Bloomberg reported. Per the outlet, Ternus is looking into…*deep breath* relying less on traditional fall and spring release schedules; axing

Oil, gold, silver and copper have new drivers. September 30, 2026 PRESENTED BY Good morning. Commodities used to come with a manual, of sorts. OPEC moved oil, inflation moved gold, and Chinese construction moved copper, back when the metal nicknamed Dr. Copper could be trusted to forecast the health of the economy. The trouble with a manual is that it only works as long as the underlying machine stays the same. Between a year of war, a rewired industrial demand picture, and a data center build-out nobody had priced a decade ago, the game is changing. John Love, president and CEO of USCF Investments, reads these markets for a living. We caught up with him at FutureProof 2026 to get a better understanding of this new landscape. PRESENTED BY USCF The Not-So-Periodic Table Photo via Damon Butler The Daily Upside: Commodities used to have fairly clean explanations. Oil moved on OPEC, gold on inflation, copper on Chinese construction. Do those explanations hold up in 2026? Not entirely. They’re not gone, but take OPEC. Right now, with the Iran war going on, OPEC as a force doesn’t have a lot of power, because their power was always that they could raise output to meet demand or drop output to meet demand. Now output’s been reduced for them when the demand is still there, so at this moment they don’t have much pricing power at all. Longer term, once this crisis is over, they’ll still be a factor, but the US and other countries around the world have more power now. It’s a very different world than the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. You have OPEC plus bringing in Russia, but you also have disagreements among the members and members leaving the cartel. It’s not the same as it was. The Daily Upside: When we last spoke, the Iran war had just broken out. Are the dynamics you’re describing here to stay? Nobody knows for sure, but things don’t look great on the surface of where we are right now in mid-September. You look at the attacks in Saudi Arabia in the last week and it seems like the situation’s getting worse. The worst part is that we’ve collectively drawn down reserves. The US has drawn down our strategic petroleum reserve. China drew down theirs and has now moved back into the market as a buyer, so they’re competing for cargoes. China not buying in the spring was a bit of a relief valve for 15% to 20% of the world’s oil being offline. And then there’s the routing through Saudi Arabia, where the pipeline has been bombed. They’re saying probably weeks before it’s back up, and who’s to say it doesn’t get hit again. There’s a lot of chaos in the world, and I don’t see it abating anytime soon. We’ll have moments where it looks better, but right now there’s such a lack of trust. The Daily Upside: Moving from energy to metals, gold’s had an unusual year. What have you seen there? Gold did fantastic over the past three years, so part of this is that it had run up and has given a little back. The other factor is rates. The 10-year hitting 5% is a key headline, and that devalues all assets to some degree, which weighs on gold. On the flip side, we still have central banks buying gold, which was a big driver of the run-up over the last three years. It’s a little more up and down than it was, but China’s still buying pretty consistently and Poland has been buying a ton. Inflation is still a factor too, though we actually think broad commodities might be a better inflation hedge than gold. And then there are all these dislocations, all this fear about conflicts and geopolitics. Gold has probably disappointed this year, but it’s still high if you’ve been a long-term investor. With the exception of the interest rate story, I think the other factors are bullish. The Daily Upside: Silver is often thought of as gold’s little brother. Is that the right way to think about a silver allocation? I don’t think so, actually. Gold is a precious metal. Silver has always had industrial uses, but those uses have increased dramatically over the past few decades. I think it’s now well over 50% of silver’s usage going toward industrial applications, some of that for the electrification story in data centers. It’s not as much as copper, but there’s a different driver to silver now. It is true that when gold runs up, what you tend to see toward the late stage of a rally is silver catching up and, in the short term, surpassing gold. We saw that at the end of last year, and then it tends to abate. So silver often trails, catches up, and can go down with gold. There’s some correlation there, but I think there’s also correlation to industrial metals. The Daily Upside: Could you talk more broadly about industrial metals, and which ones people should be thinking about? Industrial metals are a big story for the next decade at least. Even if we had a recession, or the AI bubble pops, there’s so much demand that in five or 10 years there’s still going to be more need for metals than currently exists. In particular, copper. I can’t say what happens in three or six months, but as a long-term play we’re very bullish on copper. There simply isn’t enough to meet the demand. You would have to have a complete decimation of the global economy for that to change, and I don’t think that’s likely. You’re looking at electrification, you’re looking at data centers. There’s been pushback on that, but they’re still going forward. And then there’s traditional manufacturing. Nobody’s opened a new copper mine in forever, and it takes a long time to do. You mentioned the old drivers at the start. They used to call copper Dr. Copper, because it could forecast the state of the economy. I think it’s dislocated somewhat from that old story, because it’s no longer just manufacturing driving it. The Daily Upside: On the broader energy question, with the build-out of data centers and EVs, are we going to have enough to fuel what we want to accomplish? If you look around the world right now, clearly no. We’re seeing people competing for fossil fuels, among other thing

Plus: Oura's IPO aura | Wednesday, September 30, 2026 Presented By Capital One Axios Markets By Emily Peck and Matt Phillips · Sep 30, 2026 🐪 Welcome back! It's the last trading day of Q3, and it's a biggie. We're waiting on the August PCE inflation report — the Federal Reserve's preferred gauge. After the close, we'll get an earnings report from chipmaker Micron Technology, which is having a historic run this year off the AI boom (more on that below). 🪦 This morning, it's pretty quiet out there, with S&P 500 futures roughly flat and Treasury yields slipping along with oil. Giant tech stocks aren't doing much, after the White House formalized its "self-policing" approach to concerns about AI safety with what it's calling a compact. 🧮 Today, a look at some basic math questions: When will the AI companies start making more money than they're spending? And will it happen in time for investors to see some returns? Plus: Matt checks in on the IPO market — has it lost its, ahem, aura? Let's dive in! 1,177 words, a 4.5-minute read. 1 big thing: Investors' P-doom scenario: No profits By Emily Peck Data: Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, 'Financing the AI Buildout,' Brookings Papers on Economic Activity conference draft; Chart: Axios/Emily Peck The AI buildout is entering a show-me-the-money phase: A growing chorus warns that the pace of spending on the technology is far outstripping the money coming in, and that may be true for a while. Why it matters: With so much of the economy riding on investor bets on AI, it could all end in tears. The latest: A new analysis from two Stanford economists finds a nearly $1 trillion gap between spending from the hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and SpaceX — and the revenue they have taken in from AI since 2024. And time is running out to make those investments pay off, they contend. Zoom in: That's because a big chunk of hyperscaler spending is on chips that lose value after around five years. "If our assessment is correct, investor patience is likely to run out, and, depending on the pace at which they rush for the exit, the bubble will either pop or start to deflate," wrote Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings, economists with the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. They found that the companies would need to triple or quadruple their AI revenue next year and every year after that for the next decade for this to work out. That's not impossible, but extremely difficult to say the least. Friction point: Their analysis assumes that the cost of capital doesn't increase meaningfully, even though interest rates are now rising. Where it stands: These economists are not outliers. A Goldman Sachs analysis last week found that the hyperscalers' AI revenues remain below what they need just to break even on their capex. (That's short for capital expenditures, or the money they spend on chips, data centers and real things to build AI computing capacity.) The bank is more optimistic that companies will ultimately see a return on their investments. Meanwhile, leaked information about AI giant Anthropic shows that its revenue is exploding — but spending is super high. Last year, revenue was $4.6 billion, with an operating loss of nearly twice that, Reuters reported , saying that it had seen the IPO prospectus. This year, Anthropic's revenues look on track to be far higher: Its annualized revenue run rate topped $65 billion in the second quarter . And the company has told investors that it will have profitable quarters. By the numbers: The spending required for the AI buildout exceeds anything we've seen before: $10.3 trillion in infrastructure investment through 2032, according to one estimate. That amounts to 3.6% of GDP a year, dwarfing the investment booms that built America's railroads , highways, electric grid and telecom networks, Axios' Courtenay Brown reported . What to watch: The bet is that over time there will be massive payoffs — as there were for the other big infrastructure buildouts: electricity, railroads, the internet. But it may take longer than hoped. The Stanford economists note that it took decades before the benefits of electrification filtered into the factories. The 1990s dot-com stock bubble burst when investors started to realize that profits were further off than they'd initially believed. The bottom line: "Can all these people eventually turn this into something profitable? I think they will," Cummings tells Axios. "Now I'm not sure who's going to do that, but I do think there will be trillions of dollars of profits that are up for grabs in the future, but just not in this super-accelerated timeline that is required to justify the investments." A MESSAGE FROM CAPITAL ONE Investing $2.5M to strengthen housing and resident support Capital One’s $2.5 million investment in True Ground, a nonprofit, includes $1.5 million in philanthropic support for resident services across its portfolio. The results: Resident services can extend the impact of affordable housing by helping families build stability beyond move-in. Learn more. 2. 🪟 The softness in the IPO market By Matt Phillips Data: Renaissance Capital; Chart: Axios/Matt Phillips Oura's decision to put off a planned $2 billion initial public offering may be a sign of cooling in this year's piping-hot American IPO market. Why it matters: Does it reflect an ebbing in some of the market's animal spirits, in the face of the 10-year Treasury yield at ~5.25%? That seems to be the takeaway from Axios' Dan Primack , who writes that "Oura was basically unable to get the price it wanted, in part due to market turmoil tied to the bond yield and oil price volatility, per a source familiar with the situation." Zoom out: More broadly, the IPO slowdown could reflect a sort of calm ahead of what's expected to be a giant offering from Anthropic before year-end. It would be rational for CEOs to want to avoid a potentially disastrous turn of bad luck if they had to sell shares into the market a

Bond desks price four more hikes, but 24/7 retail trading rails refuse to slow down Bonds Brace for Hikes While Retail AI Unleashes Capital Bond desks price four more hikes, but 24/7 retail trading rails refuse to slow down Sep 30 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 The macro tape is locked in an escalating brawl between a stubbornly resilient real economy and retail liquidity breaking through structural ceilings. U.S. August job openings landed at 7.079 million against expectations of 7.228 million, offering a brief whisper of labor moderation. That implies more than 80 basis points of further tightening from the current 3.875% baseline. At the same time, retail and on-chain rails are quietly expanding their surface area. Robinhood took the stage to announce automated trading agents, round-the-clock stock execution, and domestic perpetual futures contracts. Capital is demanding immediate, automated, and permanent market velocity. Central bankers want to pause, but futures desks are already pricing the next inflation wave. As autonomous software agents and round-the-clock settlement collide with a higher-for-longer regime, real cash flows and execution infrastructure are displacing speculative narratives. Here’s what our desk is watching. This Is The Only "Buy The Dip" That Matters In September. TOKEN2049 . 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. GET 10% discount and register The Rates Paradox and Central Bank Friction The primary tension across macro trading sits in the widening wedge between Fed rhetoric and the short-end rates market. New York Fed President John Williams pushed back aggressively against an immediate move, stating “there is no need for urgency”. Williams clarified that a single late-year adjustment remains his working base case. Prediction markets on Polymarket reacted on cue, sinking the odds of an October 25 basis point hike to 44% while lift-off pauses jumped to 56%. Beneath the surface of this dovish breathing room, the bond market is aggressively discounting Williams’ measured pacing. Fed Funds futures are projecting four additional quarter-point hikes by June 2027, totaling 125 basis points when factoring in previous adjustments. Nine months ago, fixed income desks modeled more than 100 basis points of rate cuts over the same horizon. That swings forward rate expectations across the curve by 225 basis points. A 4.70% terminal floor exposes structural weakness across low-margin capital structures. If benchmark cost of capital remains sticky, speculative balance sheets will suffer severe multiple contraction. Long-duration tech and high-beta altcoins will struggle to clear this cost-of-capital hurdle without direct revenue capture. Retail Rails Expand While Equities Reprice While bond traders brace for liquidity drainage, retail brokers are actively automating trade flow to bypass traditional session boundaries. Equity market liquidity is expanding into a continuous 24-hour cycle, pairing high-frequency automated execution with retail derivatives. The structural upgrades rolled out at Robinhood’s Summit demonstrate how liquidity is institutionalizing retail access across equities and crypto: Automated Agent Accounts : Over 150,000 autonomous agent accounts have opened, triggering roughly 30 million platform interactions daily using OpenAI model access and custom strategy loops. Leverage and Execution : Platform intraday margin has climbed from 2x to 4x, accompanied by options trading extended to an 8-hour-and-45-minute daily window. 24/7 Equities Trading : Continuous weekend market trading has been deployed for curated stocks and ETFs via the Bruce ATS venue. Domestic Perpetuals : U.S. perps launched across majors including Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK, and HYPE via Bitstamp settlement, offering up to 10x leverage. Prediction Markets : Direct partnership contracts tracking corporate key performance indicators such as quarterly EPS, aggregate revenues, and iPhone unit shipments. Brokers are giving retail participants access to the automated execution engines once reserved for proprietary trading firms. When continuous equity trading meets 4x margin and algorithmic loops, execution latency compresses to zero. The structural winner of this trend is market infrastructure that supplies real-time data feeds and trade execution. 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 . The AI Agent Economy and Decentralized Data Rails The retail move toward automated trading directly matches on-chain data trends across AI infrastructure. NEAR Protocol is positioning its ecosystem to serve as the coordination and settlement layer for automated commerce. Its integration with Ondo to bring tokenized securities directly into on-chain intent frameworks shows how synthetic liquidity is merging with algorithmic execution. Meanwhile, Bittensor (TAO) crossed $500 million in total value locked, consolidating around key support near $303 as capital looks for decentralized intelligence plays that have not yet experienced violent breakouts. The clear fundamental outperformer across decentralized physical infrastructure is Grass. The network has successfully transitioned from an experimental web-scraping layer into an institutional data supplier for frontier machine learning architectures. The network’s operating metrics show distinct institutional adoption: Revenue Trajectory : Realized $17 million in top-line revenue for H1 20

Plus: Smart ring company Oura pauses IPO plans. September 30, 2026 PRESENTED BY GREEN COFFEE COMPANY Good morning. After almost exactly one month on the job, new Apple CEO John Ternus is starting to put his personal touch on things. Under his direction, the tech behemoth is undergoing a minor makeover. Some middle-managers are on the way out, according to sources who spoke to Bloomberg for a story published Tuesday. Also potentially not long for the Apple tree is the company’s long-held Fall-and-Spring release schedule. Both moves reflect Ternus’ desire to accelerate product development and introduce more devices, more frequently. Not mentioned in the report? A push to accelerate production of Apple TV shows, which now routinely take years-long breaks between seasons. Severance season 2, for instance, premiered three years after its original run, while the next season of Pluribus , which concluded its first season last Christmas, isn’t expected until Summer 2028. Ternus, if you’re reading this: We’d gladly trade an off-season iPhone release for the speedy return of Widow’s Bay . MARKETS S&P 500 7,670.84 ▼ -0.17% DJI 51,349.92 ▼ -0.26% CCL $25.11 ▲ +13.41% Stock data as of market close on September 29, 2026. MARKETS Does Smart Ring-Maker Oura’s Delayed Debut Mark an IPO Tipping Point? Photo via Oura Ring In the marketplace, Oura was no ringer. The company sold 3.6 million of its smart rings, which track sleep patterns and physical activity, in the year ending June 30, capturing 2% of the entire global wearables market. It also boasts 5.7 million subscribers who pay $5.99 per month for software subscriptions. Oura is also profitable, recording $61 million in net income in the nine months through June 2026, according to a regulatory filing earlier this month. And it expects 90% revenue growth in the fiscal year that ends today. But even with all that going for it, the company announced Tuesday it’s pausing plans for an initial public offering, signaling the IPO market may have reached an “uncertainty” tipping point. Oura Farming Oura planned to sell 50 million shares between $40 and $44 at a roughly $14 billion valuation, and emphasized in a statement that there was “strong demand” for its float. IPO performance in the first half of 2026 suggests a receptive market, too. Securities and Exchange Commission data released last week shows the number of US IPOs rose 16% year over year to 208 at the end of June. And the proceeds from those listings increased nearly 400% to $137 billion, boosted by SpaceX’s megacap debut. On the other hand, macroeconomic risks have grown as the year has progressed. Investors fear AI spending could slow, energy prices and inflation might remain high and the Federal Reserve could keep hiking interest rates. Oura’s decision Tuesday was the latest signal of how heavily these concerns are weighing on pre-IPO boardrooms. Nuclear energy firm Holtec and property underwriter Bamboo Insurance also pressed pause on debuts this month, with one making the reasons abundantly clear: While Oura simply cited “uncertainty in the IPO market,” Holtec detailed its reasons : “rising energy costs, elevated global trade tensions, ongoing military conflicts and mounting inflation fears that have driven the central banks of major economies (EU, Japan and US) to raise their benchmark rates.” Those higher rates and concerns about government spending are also driving up government bond yields, with the 30-year Treasury yield reaching the highest level since 2002 on Tuesday. Wall Street analysts have warned that threatens the stock market because investors could move from equities to bonds to lock in long-term returns, which is not exactly the ideal environment for a debut. There’s an AI in Wait: AI giant Anthropic, meanwhile, appears determined to soldier on despite delaying its IPO by a month until after November’s midterm elections. Reuters reported this week that the company has confidentially filed a prospectus, aiming to raise up to $100 billion at a $2 trillion valuation. But the money-losing firm has a need for cash, given its more than $500 billion in future infrastructure commitments . That would make many investment bankers, whose bosses have warned of a trading slowdown post-SpaceX, believe in Santa. Written by Sean Craig PRESENTED BY GREEN COFFEE COMPANY Colombia’s Most Prized Coffee Beans are Coming to America Photo via Green Coffee Company 70% of Americans prefer Colombian coffee. After six decades of dominating Colombia’s coffee scene, the world-renowned brand Juan Valdez is relaunching into the $100B US coffee market. None of it would be possible without Green Coffee Company (GCC) , who holds the exclusive distribution rights to Juan Valdez across the US and Canada. Juan Valdez has pioneered the single-origin coffee category in the US, at one point garnering more brand recognition than Nike. Once GCC introduced it to American shelves, its presence grew 445% in Target locations, driven by consumer demand alone . After beating its 3,000-store goal for the year early, GCC has hundreds more in the pipeline. Final call to invest at $1.10/share before tonight. * BANKING Goldman Sachs Considers Its Next CEO Photo via Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom You may soon be able to catch another set by DJ D-Sol . Goldman Sachs’ board has been discussing disc-spinning CEO David Solomon stepping down and Chief Operating Officer John Waldron taking the reins around the end of next year or early 2028, The Wall Street Journal reported , citing people familiar with the matter. Waldron joined the bank at the turn of the century, about a year after Solomon. When Solomon took over as chief executive, he gave Waldron the firm’s second-most important job. Waldron has long been seen as Solomon’s successor; the firm even offered him $80 million last year to stick around. Sorry, Marcus While client assets in Goldman’s management division have climbed to $1.9 trillion, according to the most recent annual r

Equities are bouncing because a speaker bought time, not because rate got easier. 🚨5 Key Levels As Pause Comes From The Fed Equities are bouncing because a speaker bought time, not because rate got easier. Sep 30 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, The tape is digesting a pause from the Fed, not a pivot. Williams took the urgency out of October, and the easy-Fed story stayed dead. Yields are still pressing multi-year highs. Equities are bouncing with duration, not leading it. Oil faded the panic print after the latest Iran headlines, and it did not get cheap. Crude is not sprinting every hour, but the war premium is still in the market. Energy is still feeding the hike path. It is not giving the bond market a way out. Bitcoin held the low $80,000s while the complex waited on PCE. What ran on a headline is being sold, not chased. Crypto is trading the same stack as stocks: tighter-for-longer policy, a bond market that will not ease, and geopolitics that can reprice oil before the print. The risk bid is selective. It has not rolled over. Here is what we are watching. Poll of the Day ( Presented by Rain Trade ) 🎯 POLL Who wins the U.S. on-chain perpetuals race? 💧 Hyperliquid ($HYPE) ⚡ Lighter ($LIT) 🏛️ CEX brokers (Bitstamp/HOOD) Today’s Charts: Chart #1 – NEAR Protocol (NEARUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #2 – Lighter(LITUSDT) 1-Day Chart #3 – LayerZero(ZROUSDT) 1-Day Chart #4 – Quant(QNTUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #5 – Nebius Group (NBIS) 4-Hour Chart #1 – NEAR Protocol (NEARUSDT) 4-Hour Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) NEAR Protocol has printed a strong bullish recovery candle off its higher-low support retest, holding firm above the $4.969 horizontal pivot shelf to trade near $5.290 on the 4-hour timeframe. Built as a dynamically sharded Layer-1 blockchain powered by Nightshade consensus, NEAR provides high-throughput horizontal scalability alongside protocol-native Chain Abstraction, Chain Signatures, and NEAR Intents, enabling autonomous AI agents and users to execute cross-chain transactions seamlessly across external networks. This long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $6.834 overhead resistance target as long as the $4.359–$4.969 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $4.96 Stop Loss: $4.35 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $6.83 Powerful narratives create powerful moves. With 247 Research , you get the insights to be early to the biggest trends in crypto. Chart #2 – Lighter(LITUSDT) 1-Day Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Lighter has wicked sharply into primary demand to complete a full mean-reversion retest of its multi-month breakout base, absorbing sell-side pressure directly at the $3.8078 horizontal shelf to print $3.9254 on the daily timeframe. Functioning as a high-performance decentralized order book exchange protocol built as a dedicated zero-knowledge rollup on Ethereum, Lighter offers CEX-level execution speed, sub-millisecond off-chain matching, and verifiable on-chain settlement with zero trading fees for retail participants. This long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $5.7436 overhead resistance target as long as the $3.2648–$3.8078 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $3.80 Stop Loss: $3.26 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $5.74 Chart #3 – LayerZero(ZROUSDT) 1-Day Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) LayerZero has printed an impulsive breakout candle off an extended summer accumulation base, reclaiming the $1.6676 horizontal pivot to trade near $1.7507 on the daily timeframe. Functioning as an omnichain interoperability protocol, LayerZero enables trust-minimized, cross-chain messaging and liquidity transfers across dozens of disparate blockchains using immutable on-chain endpoints, configurable security stacks (DVNs), and permissionless executors to power omnichain fungible tokens (OFTs) and cross-chain decentralized applications. This long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $2.5925 overhead swing-high resistance target as long as the $1.3700–$1.6676 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $1.66 Stop Loss: $1.37 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $2.59 This Is The Only “Buy The Dip” That Matters In September. TOKEN2049 . 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. GET 10% discount and register Chart #4 – Quant(QNTUSDT) 4-Hour Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Quant is consolidating in a high-timeframe flag pattern following an explosive vertical impulse out of its $78.97 sub-range floor, establishing buyer absorption above the $194.07 horizontal pivot to trade near $250.89 on the 4-hour timeframe. Designed to bridge enterprise legacy finance and distributed ledger networks, Quant delivers blockchain interoperability through its patented Overledger operating system, allowing institutions and central banks to deploy multi-chain applications (mApps) and facilitate cross-chain tokenized asset settlement without requiring complex consensus overhead or additional Layer-1 infrastructure. This long trade setup targets a retest and upward continuation toward the $372.80 overhead swing-high target as long as the $141.36–$194.07 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $194 Stop Loss: $141 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $372 Chart #5 – Nebius Group (NBIS) 4-Hour Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) (NBIS refers to the Stock of company Nebius Group and not a cryptocurrency.) Nebius Group is consolidating constructively along an ascending trendline support vector following a recovery bounce off its August base, holding firmly above the $217.99 structural pivot to trade near $237.29 (with pre-market bidding at $241.02) on the 4-hour timeframe. Headquartered in Amsterdam, Nebius Group operates as an AI-native neocloud

They’ll trigger the next move... 🥛 Why you need to watch yields 📈 They’ll trigger the next move... Rohit Chauhan GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter saving you from scratching your head every time the bond market stumps your portfolio. Here’s what we’ve got for you today: ✍️ Why you need to watch yields. ✍️ Calling all crypto nerds. 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: What Does the $100M Galaxy x Sky Deal Mean for the Future of DeFi? 🍪 TCG Secondary marketplace volumes hit an ATH of ~$4M. Nexo is a premier digital asset platform that helps clients build, manage, and preserve their wealth. Get started with Nexo today. Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko. WHY YOU NEED TO WATCH YIELDS 📈 Last Wednesday we sat at yet another crossroad: If oil stayed below ~$95, the rally would likely continue, and if oil reared back above ~$100, Bitcoin could suffer. Since then, Brent has closed at $103.08, up ~4%, Bitcoin fell 2.1%, and the 10Y (what investors need to get paid to risk holding U.S. government debt) jumped 15 bps in a day. Here's where oil sits today: WTI is at ~$92.84, back under that $95 line. Brent is at ~$105.81, still above $100. Source: TradingView So the fork now says two things at once, and Bitcoin, at ~$83.9K, has sat above the ~$82.8K May high throughout it all. It would be an easy story if the 10Y had followed oil. Oil made somewhat of a round trip this month, with Brent going from $108.75 on Sep 15 to $99.25 last Tuesday, then back to ~$105.81, and WTI going from $100.75 to $90.52, then back to ~$92.84. The 10Y, on the other hand, made a one-way trip from 5.00% to 5.24%, up 24 bps since the day before the Fed hiked. John's Macro Index dropped to -0.87 on Monday due to the bond market and has continued to decline since. Source: U.S. Treasury and FRED Breakeven inflation sounds like something you scroll past, but it’s important to pay attention to it right now. The 10Y yield is two things stacked together: what the market expects inflation to be and the extra it pays you on top. That extra is the real yield, the real return an investor makes over and above inflation. Sep 15, the day before the Fed hiked: 5.00% yield - 2.38% expected inflation = ~2.62% real yield. Monday: 5.24% yield - 2.34% expected inflation = ~2.90% real yield. Put another way, bond buyers are asking for a bigger paycheck for lending to the U.S. government, and the inflation forecast has dipped slightly. Think of expected inflation as the market's guess at what your groceries cost next year, and the real yield as the raise you demand for lending your money in the meantime. The expectation slipped from 2.38% to 2.34%, and the ask went up by ~28 bps. So the whole story comes down to one question: if bond buyers aren't afraid of oil-driven inflation, what are they afraid of? Most people would say oil, since it's been the headline all week, right? Well, part of the answer is sitting in a corner of the bond market we said last Wednesday had barely moved… ONE ACCOUNT FOR ALL YOUR CRYPTO NEEDS Crypto is still a weirdly fragmented experience. One app to buy. Another to earn yield. A third to borrow against your stack. But Nexo is now bringing it all under one roof: Trade, Earn, and Borrow. Nexo is a premier digital asset platform that helps clients build, manage, and preserve their wealth. Here's what makes them worth trusting: Official Crypto Partner of Tennis Australia First Digital Asset Partner of the Audi Revolut Formula 1 Team Operating since 2018 $7B+ in AUM SOC 2 & SOC 3 certified 24/7 client care Get started with Nexo today. THE 10-YEAR DIDN'T GET THE OIL MEMO (P2) 📈 Last Wednesday we pointed out that the 2Y had jumped while the 30Y barely flinched, and that they couldn't both be right. Since the Sep 15 close, the day before the Fed hiked, the 2Y is up 25 bps to 4.92%, the 10Y is up 24 bps, and the 30Y is up 20 bps to 5.56%. The whole curve moved. Source: U.S. Treasury The 2Y is the market's bet on the Fed over the next couple of years and the 30Y is the bet on everything after that, so a move in both means lenders are worried about two different things. On the front end, the worry is a Fed that keeps hiking into a strong economy, and oil is a partial input to that. Further out, it's the term premium we showed you Friday. Bond buyers are pricing a Fed that keeps hiking into a strong economy, and oil is a partial input to that. To be fair to the Fed, it moved first. It hiked on September 16 for the first time since 2023, and the last time we checked, traders put the odds of another hike at the October 27-28 meeting above ~70%. As John flagged on Monday, the economy isn't giving it a reason to stop. The Atlanta Fed's GDP tracker has the economy growing at ~5.0% this quarter, and jobless claims fell to ~197K. Does oil still matter? It does, mostly through the Fed. August headline inflation was 3.4%, while core inflation was 2.4%. The difference is entirely explained by the rise in gasoline prices. The oil market itself is also tighter than WTI makes it look. The November Brent contract is ~$7.72 above December, up from $5.44 on Sep 15 and $3.84 last Tuesday, which means buyers are paying a premium for barrels they can get now over those they can get later. Source: TradingView November expires tomorrow, so part of that difference is the squeeze that comes with expiry. And two weeks of data isn't enough to say how much of the move is oil and how much is the Fed's own momentum. So what would bring the real yield back down? Two things: Oil giving back its premium, which would talk traders out of some of those extra hikes. Growth cooling enough that the Fed doesn't need them. The second one looks a long way off with GDP tracking ~5.0% and claims near their lows, which puts most of the weight on oil and on what the Fed says next, with PCE landing Wednesday and CPI on October 14. Which leads us to gold… Gold is the classic scary-week asset, and since Friday's newsletter it has dropped from ~$4.32K to ~$4.17K, a -3.4% move

Plus: FTC eyes Anthropic, OpenAI | Wednesday, September 30, 2026 Axios Closer By Nathan Bomey · Sep 30, 2026 Wednesday ✅. Today's newsletter is 815 words, a 3-minute read. 📉 The dashboard: The S&P 500 closed down 0.3%. Traders are dialing back expectations for another near-term Fed rate hike after a key inflation gauge showed a modest jump in August. 🔥 Today's stock spotlight: Micron Technology edged higher in extended trading after the memory chip maker issued a better-than-expected sales forecast, clearing a high bar after shares surged 11% over the past month. 1 big thing: AI's 10pm call Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios Citi CEO Jane Fraser says that the private sector needs to hustle to prevent AI from causing disasters. "We've got a very small window of time to be able to stop and think before they do harm," she tells me in an interview. The big picture: Growing concern about the prospect of AI-powered attacks on public infrastructure, financial institutions and essential businesses is fueling momentum for action. 🙋 The latest: The Alliance for Critical Infrastructure, a recently formed CEO-led coalition , has added dozens of new members and will focus on preparedness. Chaired by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, it brings together leaders like Fraser, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, ExxonMobil's Darren Woods, AT&T's John Stankey and Delta's Ed Bastian. (See a fuller list of members here .) At its core, the group is trying to get companies to plan together for major disruptions — identifying vulnerabilities and gaining a better understanding of critical dependencies — so they can respond and recover faster when one hits. 📞 "I don't want to get the phone call at 10pm on a Friday night — just usually when the bad things come in for you. And then at 10:01, we're kind of scrambling to go, 'OK, we better put a playbook together. Who's going to call whom? What are we going to do?'" Fraser says. The intrigue: I asked Fraser whether she shares the fears aired recently by certain tech leaders that AI could wipe out humanity. She said she's not qualified to answer but acknowledged that new AI tools "are incredibly powerful models" and "they are discovering vulnerabilities that weren't known before." So "there is a race to get those vulnerabilities identified and patched." Read more 2. FTC eyes Anthropic, OpenAI Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images Speaking of AI safety, the FTC confirmed it's launched an investigation into the safety of Anthropic and OpenAI systems, Axios' Maria Curi reports. The scope of the investigation — first reported by the Washington Post — was not immediately clear. ⚠️ State of play: It comes after Axios' Madison Mills reported last week that OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic. The episodes include bypassing guardrails, creating message boards, escaping sandboxes, website hijacking, self-prompting or seeking to bypass monitors. Reps from OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment. 3. Quoted: No more "neocloud," please "You can only be new for a short time." — Chen Goldberg, CoreWeave's executive VP of product and engineering, to Bloomberg , on how the company doesn't want to be known as a "neocloud" anymore since it provides services to a wide range of clients beyond AI companies. A MESSAGE FROM AXIOS Break through the noise with Axios Reach execs and business leaders with Axios. We'll help you tell your story in the right way: We'll distill your brand's message into its most effective form with Smart Brevity. No clutter, no filler — just clean, smart and effective. Contact us to learn more. 4. Other happenings The freshly painted body of a BMW 2 Series car leaves the drying oven at the BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany. today. Photo: Jan Woitas/picture alliance via Getty Images 🚙 BMW said it's deploying AI to help cut 20% of its management positions. The German automaker is facing plunging sales in China. ( Bloomberg ) 💼 Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch was named CEO and chair of Mattel, where he was already a board member. ( CNBC ) 📺 Lynch succeeds Ynon Kreiz, who is reportedly set to join Paramount after working with its soon-to-be subsidiary Warner Bros. on the "Barbie" movie while at Mattel. ( Hollywood Reporter ) 🥣 Cheerios maker General Mills named longtime exec Dana McNabb as its next CEO to lead the company as it grapples with changing food tastes. CEO Jeff Harmening is stepping down after a decade in the role. ( Food Dive ) 5. Tinder launches group hangs Photo: Courtesy of Tinder Tinder is broadening its service to offer group dates in a bid to overcome widespread fatigue with the conventional dating app experience. 😍 State of play: The Match Group app today launched Group Hangouts, billing the feature as a "new way to meet people with your friends by your side." Tinder is aiming to replicate the group chat experience in a real-world format. Early tests in the Australian market were promising. 🤳 How it works: App users can start a group, select an activity, invite friends to join and then browse other groups to make more IRL connections. 💞 What they're saying: "Double Date proved something we suspected all along, young singles want their friends in the mix when they're meeting someone new," Tinder chief product officer Mark Kantor said in a statement. 💭 Nathan's thought bubble: This sounds a lot less shallow than just constantly swiping left or right on your phone. A MESSAGE FROM AXIOS Break through the noise with Axios Reach execs and business leaders with Axios. We'll help you tell your story in the right way: We'll distill your brand's message into its most effective form with Smart Brevity. No clutter, no filler — just clean, smart and effective. Contact us to learn more. Why stop here? Let's go Pro. Axios Pro Deals helps you get smarter and faster on the deals, opportunities, and investments that matter most

Hint: it's not this quarter's number... 🥛 Ignore Micron's beat. Watch this 👀 Hint: it's not this quarter's number... Chevy Cassar GM. This is Milk Road Stocks, the newsletter that makes quarterly earnings season feel like the playoffs. Today we’re breaking down what to expect from Micron’s earnings - and what they need to pull off in order to keep winning. First, a quick detour. Milk Road’s audience doesn’t just follow markets. They obsess over them. 👉 Partner with Milk Road EVERYONE EXPECTS MICRON TO CRUSH IT 🧠 Micron reports earnings after the bell today, and the bar it has to clear is sky-high. (This is its fiscal Q4, since Micron's financial year wraps up at the end of August.) A year ago, the memory chipmaker was bringing in ~$11.3B a quarter. Last quarter it did $41.5B - and Wall Street expects today's number to land around $51B. 👇 Source: TradingView The stock climbed from ~$157 to ~$1,070 over the past year (about 6.8x). Back in June, management guided for this quarter to come in at: ~$50B in revenue. $31 in EPS (earnings per share). 86% gross margins (the cut of every sales dollar Micron keeps after paying to make the chips). … and Wall Street has already moved past that, to ~$51B in revenue and ~$31.50 in EPS. Melvin (our AI analyst) thinks Micron beats both, with his own estimates at ~$52.2B in revenue, 87.5% gross margins and $33 in EPS. The way Melvin sees it, memory prices are still super strong and supply can't keep up with demand. Each new generation of AI hardware needs more DRAM (the fast, short-term memory chips AI servers use to juggle data), because bigger models, longer prompts and AI agents all eat through it. And customers are so worried about running short that they're trying to lock up supply years in advance. What's nuts is - Micron's gross margins were 39% a year ago, and management now expects 86%. Source: SEC But Melvin doesn't think this quarter's numbers are what moves the stock… Whether Micron reports $51.8B or $52.5B matters a lot less than what management says comes next. He'd like to see next quarter's guidance land somewhere around $58B in revenue, 88% gross margins and EPS in the high $30s. He's also listening for two things on the call: 1. Long-term agreements. Memory has always been a boom-and-bust business, because chipmakers can't usually see demand or pricing more than a few quarters out. Last quarter, Micron signed 16 deals that lock customers into buying set volumes for 3-5 years, and it expects half or more of its revenue to eventually run through them. Melvin wants to know if that's climbed to 18 or 20 (and whether the deals are getting bigger and longer). 2. HBM (high-bandwidth memory). This is the premium, stacked memory built into AI chips, and Micron has started shipping its newest version (HBM4) to its lead customer in high volume. If Micron can hold ~20% of the HBM market or more as the industry moves up a generation, Melvin thinks it becomes an even bigger winner from the AI buildout. And the more HBM gets custom-built for specific AI chips, the harder it gets to call Micron a commodity seller (i.e. one that mostly competes on price). The biggest risk is supply… Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron and Chinese memory makers are all spending heavily on new capacity, because the profits are this good. If that capacity comes online faster than demand grows, memory prices could turn quickly. Melvin thinks demand is still winning, but he wants management to spell out how much new supply hits the market in 2027 (including from Chinese chipmakers). All told - Melvin expects another beat tonight, but he figures which way the stock goes after is basically a coin toss. Micron could beat Wall Street and still sell off if guidance falls short of what investors have baked in. Or it could roughly match expectations and rally, if management sounds confident about pricing, long-term deals and 2027 demand. That's why Melvin cares way more about what Micron says about the business than how the stock trades tomorrow morning. Btw - Melvin's timing on this one has been pretty good. He bought the stock in March, back when Micron was ~$365, vs. ~$1,000 today. After adding more through the spring, he's up ~130% on his average cost, and four of our five analysts hold Micron heading into tonight. If you want to follow their moves after the report: Try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days . GET YOUR BRAND IN FRONT OF 500K+ INVESTORS Milk Road’s audience doesn’t just follow markets. They obsess over them. Every day, hundreds of thousands of investors come to Milk Road to discover new companies, understand new products, find new investment ideas, and stay ahead of what’s happening across crypto, stocks, AI and finance. And they want to hear about what you’re building. Milk Road gives brands a direct line to that audience across: 500K+ followers and subscribers 35M+ monthly content impressions 400K+ monthly podcast views and listens 187K unique monthly newsletter readers 4,200+ paying Milk Road PRO members Whether you’re launching a new product, introducing your company to investors, or just want more people talking about your brand, we’ll help you get it in front of an audience that’s actually interested. 👉 Partner with Milk Road 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