Dear Trader,
Mark's going live today at 10 AM ET and he's bringing Voz back on.
Two things on the agenda:
First, the three stories below: a wholesale inflation print that's quietly worse than the headline, a Treasury buyback the bond market shrugged off in about an hour, and an Anthropic researcher putting a number on the end of the world. Mark and Voz will pull apart what actually matters for your positions.
Second, Voz is going to walk through how she's trading zero-day options (contracts that expire the same day you buy them) on the QQQs. With the Nasdaq getting knocked around on rates and oil, the intraday swings are where she's been finding her trades, and she'll show you the setup she's using.
This link adds State of the Market to your calendar.
The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: The 10-year Treasury yield closed at 4.84% Wednesday, its highest since October 2023, on the same day Bessent put a dollar figure on his bond buyback plan. Up to $6 billion, triple the usual $2 billion operation, with the first one hitting Thursday. And yields went UP after the announcement. Translation: nobody believes $6 billion moves a market this size, and ING's rates chief told CNN as much.
The buybacks buy time and nothing else. They don't touch what's pushing yields higher: oil over $100, a flood of corporate debt to fund the AI buildout, and deficits nobody in Washington is in a hurry to fix. Mortgage rates just hit their highest since July 2025, and France, Italy, and the U.K. had the same rotten Wednesday.
SNEAKER: Anthropic's alignment science lead posted on X that he puts the odds of AI killing every human on Earth at better than 10% within a decade, and he still works there. Evan Hubinger's post came a day after colleague Jacob Coxon quit, saying both OpenAI and Anthropic are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence." Neither guy is a random doomer: one runs alignment research at the company behind Claude, the other spent three years on pretraining at both shops.
Add the House's AI Kill Switch Act, an open letter from 1,300 AI staffers asking Washington to slow the frontier, and three companies admitting their models hacked something this summer. Keep this handy for when the Anthropic IPO roadshow starts.
SIGN: Wholesale prices rose 0.4% in August, exactly what economists expected, and somehow that counts as good news now. The year-over-year number is the one worth reading twice: headline PPI (what businesses pay before you do) is running at 5.4%, up from 4.8% in July and above the 5.3% estimate. Core came in cooler at 0.2% for the month, so the hawks and the doves both get something to wave around.
The real event is Friday's CPI, which is supposed to show headline flat at 3.4% and core drifting down to 2.4%. Markets have priced a 64% chance Warsh hikes next week and roughly 90% odds of at least one hike by December. Yes, hikes. The Fed chair went hawkish at Jackson Hole and the market believed him.