Everybody: “I’m tired of this grandpa.”

Trump (probably): “That’s too d*mn bad…”

It’s kind of a strange thing when crude climbs back above $77 a barrel while… *checks notes*... a peace deal is supposedly "in the works." WTI gained nearly 3%, Brent jumped almost 4% to clear $82, and equities did not love the god awful stench of it as the the S&P 500 slipped 0.2%, the Nasdaq eased 0.1%, and the Dow got kneecapped for 464 points (five-day win streak be d*mned). 

So what’s the deal… literally? Well the problem is what it actually says. The version Iran and Oman are drafting is a 60-day temporary arrangement where inbound tankers take a northern lane through Iranian waters, outbound traffic takes a southern lane through Oman's side, nobody pays tolls, and everyone gets 30 days to fish the mines out of the middle lane (yes, the middle lane is the one with the mines, for those of you keeping score at home).

Tehran also says Washington still has conditions to meet before ships move freely. Trump wanted the strait open. However, what's on the table is the strait on a learner's permit. So the war premium, which spent the front half of the week going out to get milk (read: walking out of crude), let itself right back in.

Obviously, not everyone hated it. ExxonMobil added 2% and Chevron tacked on more than 1%, the only two Dow names openly rooting for the carpool-lane era to drag on. Salesforce went the other direction, dropping 3% and doing a disproportionate share of the Dow's damage after Marc Benioff put the org chart on shuffle again. Translation: Engineering chief Srini Tallapragada, fourteen years in, is now a "special advisor", (a.k.a., tell me you’re losing your job without telling me) and sales lifer Miguel Milano got the operating chief chair.

Elsewhere in the earnings meat grinder, Datadog grew revenue 36%, beat on earnings, raised its full-year outlook... and got treated like it sh*t on the rug. The stock plummeted 19% because its third-quarter revenue guide of $1.135 billion to $1.145 billion only narrowly cleared the Street's $1.11 billion, and its biggest AI customer is dialing back usage. AppLovin missed revenue by roughly $16 million and got billed about $40 billion in market cap for the inconvenience, a 20% faceplant (quick math: that's about $2,500 of punishment per missing dollar). Western Digital beat its quarter, guided soft, and shed 13% while Sandisk cleared its numbers too and still gave up 6%. Sandisk is up fivefold this year and Western Digital has tripled, and at those altitudes "solid"signals the guillotine.

Meanwhile, “Honeywell, I shrunk the guidance” (I had to). Honeywell Aerospace, a public company for roughly six weeks since the spinoff, used its first earnings call as a standalone to cut 2026 organic sales growth to 4% to 5% from an earlier 7% to 9%, miss the quarter sharply, and guide profits below the Street. Shares got straight up mugged for -23% due to the parts shortage… meaning, the castings it does have are going to Boeing and Airbus deliveries instead of the higher-margin aftermarket business (read: the profitable part waits). Woof. 

Oh, and Mat from State Farm (read: UWM CEO Mat Ishbia) just filed the most expensive insurance claim in the industry's memory. The country's biggest mortgage lender lost $452 million in the quarter, paused its dividend for the first time ever, and watched the stock get its cheeks clapped for more than 33%. The engine of the loss was a $603 million hit on a hedge Ishbia built around his failed pursuit of Two Harbors... insurance on a deal that never happened.

He's calling it lighting $603 million on fire "a transaction-specific mistake" the company won't repeat. For scale, the Ishbia family has pulled more than $6.2 billion in dividends out of this company, the checks stopped the first quarter the pain ran the other direction, and the patch is a $2.05 billion capital raise from Oaktree and a vehicle owned by… wait for it… the Ishbia family. The man also owns the Phoenix Suns, so he has years of practice paying premium prices for assets that don't pay out. #roasted. 

That said, the day’s one green shoot was JPMorgan deciding to hike its SharkNinja target to $207 from $170 after the blender-and-vacuum people beat on both lines, with analyst Andrea Teixeira pounding the table for about 14% more upside. *golf clap*

In the end, today was another helluva day. We had five whole days of gain and the market got re-taught that "a deal is in the works" and "the boats can move" are two very different sentences. If the strait actually opens on Trump's timeline, crude hands this back and the streak starts over. If it doesn't, $77 is going to look like the early-bird price. Top off the tank on the way home, friends. Until next time…

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

> Ford’s new ‘Fathom’ electric pickup truck will start at $28,000 (CNBC): I can’t “fathom” the obsession with EV trucks… 

> Trump Made Calls to Warsh in Latest Sign of Bid to Influence Fed (Bloomberg): “Cut rates or else” “Totally your call, bro.” 

> Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger gets boost after UK approval (NY Post): We’re still talking about this? 

> SpaceX ramps up Tesla Megapack purchases in Q2 to power its AI data centers (CNBC): Elon giving Uncle Sam the J. Paul Getty treatment… 

“WTF” Meme of the Day

Are you not entertained? 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in ExxonMobil as mentioned in the article.