This Week in Barrons: 8.10.2025

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•  Is anyone worth a salary of $1B?  If you thought that Juan Soto’s contract with the N.Y. Mets for $765m over a 15-year period was astonishing, consider Meta spending $250m (over 4 years) to hire a 24-year-old AI researcher: Matt Deitke.  Or Meta’s recent attempt to lure away Andrew Tulloch from an AI start-up – for a cool +$1B.

• Your Personal Index vs. Table-of-Contents…. Your index is a search bar to your brain that delivers facts that your brain remembers.  But, your table-of-contents is a point-of-view.  It’s a milestone map on how to understand a complicated idea.  Per Seth Godin: We’re all at risk of becoming just an Index; however the world would benefit from our collective Table-of-Contents.

• Gimme One Big Idea… (a) Warren Buffett’s BIG IDEA was to buy companies and assets for less than they were worth.  (b) Carl Icahn’s was to use activism to influence company operations so as to improve financial performance.  (c) Masayoshi Son was known for betting big and early on transformative technologies.  And (d) Anthony Pompliano’s BIG IDEA is that governments will never stop printing money.  Factually: if our government does NOT stop printing money, bitcoin is going +$1m and gold will be +$10,000/ounce.  Cash and bonds will be a losing trade because any dollar-denominated asset (from real estate to art to sports cards) will be worth more in the future.  The key is to find the assets that are most sensitive to global liquidity and/or the assets that benefit most from currency debasement – like crypto and precious metals.

• Big Tech’s combined 2024 capex was $230B… 2025’s figure of $344B will be a 60% increase.  FOMO has officially gone hyper-scale in Big Tech, as tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet are funneling truckloads of money into AI – simply to avoid being left behind. The fear of falling behind in the AI computational arms race is real. Companies are betting that whoever controls AI’s infrastructure will control the future. This will either lay the foundation for a new industrial era, or inflate the next tech bubble.

• Anthropic has terminated OpenAI’s partnership with Claude… citing concerns that OpenAI was using Claude to train competing AI systems. The move underscores rising tensions between major AI labs as they increasingly guard their models, data, relationships, and commercial advantages.

• Trump fired the Commissioner of Labor Statistics… because he didn’t like the weak jobs report numbers. Now, we all know that tariffs cause higher-prices / more inflation – which causes higher unemployment. The irony is: Trump wanted our FED to lower interest rates, but it was the bad Jobs Report that rallied the bonds and pushed interest rates lower. Sadly, if the Jobs Report were better – interest rates would have moved higher. [FYI: So Trump probably would have fired them either way.]

• OOPS my bad – Sorry you got fired… Two days after our FED defended our “still robust labor market”, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a damning Jobs Report that not only lowered our faith in the FED – but cut the 10-Yr interest rate by 25 bps. The BLS also revised the May and June jobs data lower by 258k more jobs == the largest 2-month downward revision in +50yrs.

• xAI rolled out Grok Imagine…  its new AI image and video generator - officially entering a space dominated by Google, OpenAI, Runway, and China.  While Grok Imagine doesn’t outperform all of the video generators on the market, Musk did confirm plans to introduce advertising directly into Grok’s responses. [FYI: Advertising could crack open a lucrative new revenue stream for the industry ==  monetization beyond subscription plans.]

• Google released Gemini 2.5 Deep Think… a multi-agent model that does “parallel thinking” to help researchers and academics tackle complex problems. While Meta is vying for ‘personal answers / superintelligence’, Google is taking a ‘parallel-thinking AI path’ that allows a team of expert minds to tackle problems from multiple angles before converging on a solution.

• GPT-5 is here…  and is the first ‘unified’ AI model that packs deep reasoning into faster responses, creates entire apps from single prompts, and generates research briefs - all while making fewer errors than previous versions. 

• Palantir’s Q2 revenue +48% and net income +142%...  both benefitted from a Government / AI focus.

• Tesla granted Elon $23.7B in stock… to make sure that Elon “Keeps his eyes on the road.”

• Berkshire Hathaway shares fell 3% on Monday…  after they revealed a multibillion-dollar write-down on their investment in Kraft Heinz.  Berkshire’s stock has slipped more than 13% since Buffett announced his end-of-year retirement.

•  Iran is increasing gold imports…  to protect its economy from sanctions and currency issues.  This fits into the expanding global trend of countries favoring gold over fiat currency.

• $26B has exited healthcare ETFs since early 2023…  making it one of the few sectors facing sustained outflows in this rising market.  Next week Trump plans to impose levies of up to 250% on imported pharmaceuticals.

• Apple has committed more ($600B) to US manufacturing…  that’s more than any other company this year – but it’s the worst-performing Mag-7 stock.

• Moving from SEO (search-engine optimization) to GEO (generative-engine optimization) …  will be nothing short of apocalyptic.  Your new goal is to get your website, content, and/or product mentioned by AI chatbots.

• Citibank Gets Bullish on Gold…  but Silver ($38) has the $50+ target.

• Cloudflare called out Perplexity in a blog post… for disguising its bots to scrape websites that explicitly blocked them, reigniting scrutiny over how AI firms obtain data from the open web to feed their models.  This is further highlighting a fight over whether AI agents that browse the internet: Are they humans or bots?

• Trump signed an order to allow crypto, private equity, real estate… and other alternative assets into 401(k)s.  Per Anthony Pompliano: “This is a massive development for the crypto industry.  There is ~$43T in all U.S. retirement accounts, including about $9T in 401(k)s.  The market cap of the entire crypto industry is less than $4T.  Therefore, this executive order will open up a significant pool of capital ready to flood into bitcoin and crypto assets.”

• Did the Bitcoin ETFs eliminate Bitcoin’s volatility? 

  o Mitchell Askew believes: “Bitcoin looks like two entirely different assets before and after their ETF date.  The days of parabolic bull markets and devastating bear markets are over.  BTC is going to $1m over the next 10 years through a consistent oscillation between “pump” and “consolidate."  The journey will bore investors to death, and shake many tourists out of their positions.  It’s the New Normal.”

  o Eric Balchunas writes: “Since BlackRock’s IBIT filing, Bitcoin is up 250% with much less volatility and no vomit-induced drawdowns.  This has helped it attract even bigger fish, and gives it a fighting chance to be adopted as currency.  The downside is – no more God Candles.”

  o Joe Burnett thinks: “With crypto, it feels like we're at another inflection point.  Governments, the S&P 500, institutions in general, and the typical retail investment portfolio = all own very little bitcoin.  If crypto volatility keeps falling, then bitcoin will continue its slow and steady grind upward.  But if we’re still in the early stages of global adoption, we could be on the edge of a breakout that looks more like the 2017 parabolic bull run.”

   

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• Monday…   July’s jobs report came in less than expected, and the previous months' tallies were also revised sharply lower.  Also, the updated tariff list is set to go into full effect this week – ranging from 10% to 41% on a wide range of trading partners.  Trump's battle with FED Chair Powell has remained in focus, but after the weak jobs data, 90% of all bets are on a rate cut in September.

• Wednesday… U.S. stocks slipped on Tuesday after mixed economic data.  Data showed that our ISM services unexpectedly flatlined in July with little change in orders and a further weakening in employment. The U.S. trade deficit narrowed in June on a sharp drop in consumer goods imports, while the trade gap with China shrank to its lowest level in over 21 years due to the tariff impact.  AI related stock plays continue to lead the gains in the overall stock market.  It’s reported that OpenAI is in early talks about a potential secondary sale of stock for current and former employees at a valuation of about $500B.

• Friday:  December gold futures surged to a record $3,534 after reports the U.S. imposed tariffs on imports of 1 kg bullion bars, further widening the spread between New York futures and spot prices.  In trade news, India paused plans to buy U.S. arms and India’s defense minister canceled his planned U.S. visit – while they await tariff clarity.  India is open to reducing oil imports from Russia as part of any tariff settlement.  Also, the U.S. ended the stacking of tariffs on Japan, and reduced automobile levies.

• Bkg:  Per S. Forbes… While using the store’s check-out system, a young cashier suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags – because plastic bags are not good for the environment.  This quickly dovetailed into the young cashier explaining that: “Our world’s biggest problem today is that your generation did not care or do enough ‘green things’ to save this environment for future generations."  To that, the ‘much older lady’ said the following:

  - “You’re right.  Back then we didn’t have that ‘green thing’, but back then:

  - We returned milk, soda, and beer bottles to the store to be washed, sterilized, and refilled – so they were truly recycled.

  - We bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for book covers on our school books – ensuring that public property / books provided by the school were not defaced or abused.

  - We walked everywhere – up-the-stairs because we didn't have escalators, and even to this grocery store.

  - We used wind and solar power to dry our clothes on a clothes line, and not some energy-gobbling drying machine.

  - When we packaged fragile items to send in the mail, we used wadded-up old newspapers to cushion them, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. 

  - We exercised by working – so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on a treadmill that runs on electricity.  We even used push-mowers to cut our lawns.

  - People took streetcars or buses to work, and kids walked or rode their bikes to school. 

  - We didn’t need computerized gadgets to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space – in order to find the nearest burger joint.

  - Yep, we old folks sure were wasteful back then without those ‘green things’.”

• TIPS: “Got anything stronger:”

  o #1 Combine the weakening dollar with rate-cut hysteria and you get emotional traders fueling aggressive moves in stocks, commodities, and currencies.

  o #2 With semiconductors pressing against key levels, one break and we’re off on a multi-day run higher or lower.

  o #3 With Intel sitting on a political powder keg, any shift in sentiment could flip it into a fast reversion trade.

  o #4 The Gold / Silver ratio is flashing an unusual divergence, and this is often a signal of a sector-wide money flow rotation.

• Factually:

  o It’s Time to Raise some Cash…  when UTILITIES become the best performing sector (like they just did).  It’s a warning sign.

  o We ended the week at the upper edge of the Expected Move… after having the 6250 support-level on the /ES hold firm.

• This Concentration of Market Risk is real:  41% of the S&P 500 is concentrated in just 10 stocks… and 8 of those are in technology.  That means if one of those stocks stumbles, you’re not just hitting that one stock – you’re hitting the entire market.  Which means any hope of buying an index for diversification purposes is dead.  Right now, that concentration risk is colliding with 3 consecutive weeks of expected move breaches – producing a market that is running on FOMO and hopium. 

• AAPL broke every math rule in the book… when it moved (a statistically impossible) 4.6 Standard Deviations higher last week.

• SPX Expected Move:

  o Last Week’s EM = $133, and we exceeded it … again.

  o Next Week’s EM = $88 … BUT last week’s EM was $130 and we exceeded it.  On days like Friday, we moved more than next week’s Expected Move – in one day.  With unprecedented levels of concentrated market risk, I’ll take the OVER on that $88 move in next week’s SPX.

   

• Factually: (a) Companies are no longer concerned about a recession.  (b) Q2 earnings saw a large surge in big beats.  (c) Tech stock earnings are going vertical, non-tech stocks == horizontal earnings.  (d) Tech sector profit margins are at a cyclical and secular high.  And (e) If Tech used to be expensive, it’s now insanely priced.

  Per Callum Thomas: The market continues in its lane - unbothered.  The tendency for higher volatility around Aug-Sept-Oct, and the constant geo-political surprises warns against complacency.  And even as the clearly good earnings data says maybe expensive valuations are justified, there is an important assumption embedded in that, as I will explain…

   

• HODL’s: (Hold-On for Dear Life)

  -  (+) IBIT – Blackrock’s Spot Bitcoin ETF ($66.1 / in at $24)

  - (+) ETHA – Ethereum ETF ($30.7 / in at $13.5)

  - (+) Physical Commodities = Gold @ $3,456/oz. & Silver @ $38.5/oz.

  - Bitcoin (BTC = $118,000 / in at $4,310)

  - Ethereum (ETH = 4,170 / in at $310)

  - (+) GLD – Gold ETF ($313 / in at $212)

   

• Options for Income:  De-Risking a Portfolio… (using IBIT as an example)

  - BUY-n-HOLD the IBIT ETF

  - BUY PUTs: 1 Std. Dev. Lower, Expiring in 3-weeks.

  - SELL Covered CALLs: 0.75 to 1 Std. Dev. Higher, Expiring in 2-weeks.

   

• ‘De-Gen’ Economy:

  - SLV: Silver… ($34.8 / in at $31.2)

  - VIX: Volatility Index … ($20.3 / in at $16)

  - ASPI: ASP Isotopes … ($9.3 / in at $5.88)

  - GLD: Gold ETF … BOT the Sept 5, $308 / $313 Call Spread for $2

  - UDN Dollar Bearish Index 1X … BOT the $18 Sept Calls for 75 cents.

   

  Please be safe out there!

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