Dear Trader,
Gold ripped for a fourth straight session, Google reshuffled the exact division its valuation rests on, and the guy running the biggest bank in America spent Wednesday explaining where the leverage hides.
Slow news day.
Mark and Licia are live at 10 AM ET and they're taking all of it.
Dimon's margin debt warning, the Hormuz deal that keeps almost happening, and Lisa Cook telling you which direction the Fed's next move points. Gold's run and the Alphabet AI shakeup are on the list too.
Then stick around: After the show, Licia's running a presentation on the boomin 0DTE and 1DTE market and the Tilt strategy she uses to trade them.
She was a market maker before she was on your screen, so you're getting the mechanics, not a highlight reel.
This link adds State of the Market to your calendar.
The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: The Strait of Hormuz might reopen this week, and everyone involved is telling a slightly different version of it. Iran says Washington is ready to return to its commitments, while also denying it's negotiating with Washington. Tehran and Oman are in final drafting on a shipping route.
Trump keeps teasing a deal that's a day or two out, and Bessent told CNBC the same thing Tuesday. CENTCOM insists the southern route never closed. The UK's maritime trade desk logged reports of explosions near tankers off Yemen and Oman on Wednesday.
Oil has whipped around on every one of these headlines for five months now. That's the trade: not the war, the podium.
SNEAKER: Jamie Dimon says margin debt has never been higher, and the part he can actually see isn't the part that worries him. The JPMorgan CEO told CNBC's Leslie Picker that plenty of borrowing never gets filed under margin debt at all. It hides in prime brokerage lines, hedge fund books, leveraged ETFs and Treasury basis trades.
Some hidden, some public, as he put it. He stopped short of calling it systemic, which is the clause every headline dropped. He also cited Situational Awareness, the AI fund JPMorgan brokered until margin calls gutted it, as proof the plumbing holds.
So the takeaway is either relax or watch your size, depending on how you read a banker hedging in public.
SIGN: Fed governor Lisa Cook says she's prepared to act if inflation doesn't cool soon, and she doesn't mean cut. She ranks inflation risk above employment risk right now, with June PCE at 3.7 percent and core at 3.3 percent. That's still nearly double the Fed's target after five straight years of overshooting.
Her actual worry: the longer it runs hot, the more it gets baked into how businesses price and how workers bargain. Cook thinks tariff effects and oil are fading, which is why she waited last week.
Three regional presidents already dissented for a hike at that meeting. Kashkari and Schmid have since said it out loud. When a governor starts sounding like the dissenters, a hike stops being a fringe position.