Boom, roasted…

Well ladies and “degen”tlemen, after three years of being told that semiconductors would power the future…

The market’s most powerful chip currently comes covered in chocolate and sits inside a glass case guarded by a blue-haired barista with $80,000 in student loans (read: Starbucks).  

Coffee beans, a commodity harvested by hand and transported inside burlap sacks, have gained 13% over the past three months. For those of you who can’t math… that’s nearly six times the return of the VanEck Semiconductor ETF. I guess one could argue the superior AI infrastructure was whatever keeps the engineers awake. 

Ordinarily, record production is supposed to push commodity prices lower. Coffee clearly skipped that chapter of Economics for Dummies. 

Data shows that arabica prices have risen 30% since June, while an earthquake in Colombia disrupted a road responsible for carrying a significant portion of the country’s coffee exports.

Combine that with the severe droughts and extreme heat that have already been screwing with coffee harvests for years… and you’ve got a supply and demand problem.

Luckily for our grandkids, America doesn’t have a supply problem when it comes to government debt.

We’re now within weeks of crossing $40 trillion.

It took the United States 192 years, 39 presidents, two world wars, and the Great Depression to accumulate its first $1 trillion.

The latest trillion took (wait for it) all but five months.

When the debt first crossed $1 trillion in 1981, Ronald Reagan tried helping Americans visualize it by explaining that a trillion dollars in $1,000 bills would create a stack 67 miles high.

Today’s stack would stretch 2,700 miles… or almost the entire distance from New York City to Los Angeles. (On the bright side, Congress finally built something coast-to-coast.) 

Obviously, our nation’s richest responded to America approaching a mathematically incomprehensible debt milestone by buying more stocks.

The S&P 500 marched 0.6% higher, while the Nasdaq gained 0.7% behind rallies in Meta, Micron, and Netflix. The Dow, meanwhile, spent most of the session doing a whole lot of nothing (what’s new).

But the biggest story of the day (other than Ackman resubscribing to Netflix, which you can read below) was Workday… which went tits-up in reverse (+21%) after Reuters reported that Silver Lake has discussed acquiring the software company. 

Shares moved so violently that trading was halted while stonk traders beat their meat at the thought of Workday becoming Silver Lake’s problem.

The talks could still collapse, but the rumor erased every dollar Workday had lost this year. Private equity hasn’t even bought the company yet and is already improving employee morale.

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.

Market Gossip

>Selena Gomez Accused of Fraud by Mental-Health Startup Investors (Yahoo Finance): When she sang “The heart wants what it wants” I don’t think this is what she meant. 

>‘Big Short’ investor Steve Eisman sees an Achilles’ heel in the AI boom (CNBC): Generational run in 2008. Generational aura loss in 2026.

>US Set to Pay Most for 30-Year Debt in Quarter of a Century (Bloomberg): Andrew Jackson’s rolling over in his grave right now.

>Zuckerberg brings back the floating battle barge to spar with UFC fighter Merab Dvalishvili (Business Insider): This is what happens when nobody in the company is brave enough to call the CEO a nerd.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Starbucks, Netflix, and Meta as mentioned in the article.