Dear Trader,
Mark's got Tim Colby with him at 10 AM ET, and they're working through the three stories below plus the 10 names the team put on the board.
Two picks each from Mark, Tim, Andrew, Licia, and Hans.
Mark loves a stock the index funds got forced to buy last week and hates one that's sitting in half the retirement accounts in America.
Tim loves a fund tracking an asset he's spent years calling a joke and hates a basket of banks that only works if the long end behaves itself.
Andrew loves a power company getting paid by the AI buildout and hates a booze name whose customers are aging out without anyone replacing them.
Licia loves calls on a car company that keeps insisting it's a robotics company and hates a money center bank enough to buy puts against it.
Hans loves a miner that pulls up the one metal every data center runs on and hates an AI cloud name that has to spend billions up front renting out somebody else's chips.
Mark runs all 10 live with Tim. And the ticker that turns into the option trade of the week is announced at 10:30 AM ET live on the Ticker Highlight Premium show.
This link adds State of the Market to your calendar.
The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: Scott Bessent might fund his bond buybacks straight out of the government's checking account. Two senior Treasury officials told CNBC the Treasury General Account, sitting near $950 billion, is a live funding source for the expanded buyback program. Everyone had assumed he'd pay with new bill sales.
The 10-year yield fell four basis points to 4.7% on the report, and the 30-year backed off to 5.23% from last week's highest reading since 2007. Officials say a partial drawdown causes no near-term cash trouble, because the next debt ceiling squeeze doesn't hit until winter. So the plan is to spend down the war chest on long bonds nobody wanted at auction, starting Sept. 9.
SNEAKER: Alibaba (BABA) raised $10.2 billion selling new stock at a discount, and shareholders paid for it by lunch. It placed 710 million shares in Hong Kong at HK$112.70, 8.4% below Friday's close, with all net proceeds going to AI infrastructure. The stock opened down more than 10% and spent the morning under the placement price, ending the half day at HK$111.
It's the biggest primary follow-on ever from a Hong Kong-listed company, third biggest anywhere this year. It also lands a week after Alibaba told investors it had already spent nearly half of a three-year capex plan. Chairman Joe Tsai and CEO Eddie Wu bought a combined HK$120 million on the dip, roughly 0.15% of the shares just issued.
SIGN: Scott Bessent takes the podium today to announce what he's calling an "economic D-Day" for Iran. He previewed it in the Financial Times, describing the coming sanctions as the largest financial assault the U.S. has ever aimed at an enemy. He also asked Iran's allies to cut ties in exchange for easier access to global capital.
Tehran answered Saturday that any country joining the sanctions counts as an enemy, and noted it hasn't hit American economic interests yet. Iran and Oman are still negotiating who runs traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, with transit fees and assigned shipping lanes on the table, and those talks resume Tuesday. The June memorandum of understanding is dead, and the planet's most important oil chokepoint is still up for negotiation.