Tag: stock market

Radiant Wins First-Ever DOE OK For Full-Power Microreactor As Nuclear Stocks Crash To Multi-Year Lows

For the first time ever, Washington has signed off on a commercial nuclear microreactor running at full power. On Wall Street, nobody seems to care.

On Thursday, the Department of Energy approved the Documented Safety Analysis (DSA) for LA-based Radiant’s Kaleidos, a 1-megawatt, truck-transportable reactor that is now sitting inside the DOME test bed at Idaho National Laboratory. According to the company, it is the only microreactor design to secure DOE safety approval covering operation at power, as opposed to the zero-power criticality tests that every other entrant in the DOE pilot program has run so far.

And yet the stocks most levered to the small modular reactor story are trading like the industry is going out of business: Oklo (OKLO) closed Friday at $25.25, down 86% from its October 2025 peak and at its lowest since April 2025, while NuScale (SMR) is down 89% and sitting at a price last seen in April 2024.

Regular readers know we have been tracking the microreactor buildout since well before it was a meme (and long before it stopped being one), so let’s take a closer look at what Radiant actually got, where the rest of the pack stands, and why the market has decided none of it matters, at least for now.

What Radiant Actually Won

The DSA approval is the step that comes after DOE signed off on Radiant’s preliminary safety analysis back in February. With it in hand, Radiant moves into DOE’s Readiness Review, which will check whether the reactor and the crew operating it are ready to go nuclear. Once that is done, Radiant fuels Kaleidos and kicks off a five-phase test campaign at the National Reactor Innovation Center’s DOME facility.

The campaign goes from first criticality through progressively higher power, and ends with at least 150 hours of continuous full-power operation with no operator intervention. Radiant also plans to run the same unit for 60 effective full-power days over several months, using essentially the same design and custom fuel that customers will get. DOE’s acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactors Chimi Zacot called it “another important step forward in President Trump’s vision for an American nuclear renaissance.”

Which, to be fair, is a meaningful upgrade from what we have seen so far. As we covered in “The Rebirth Of America’s Nuclear Industry” (Jun 5) and then in “Four By The Fourth“, Antares, Valar Atomics, Deployable Energy and Aalo all hit criticality at INL ahead of Trump’s July 4 deadline, and Oklo’s Groves test reactor in Texas followed on August 5. But those were zero-power demonstrations: proof the physics works, with nothing plugged into the other end. Kaleidos is being cleared to actually make power, for weeks at a time.

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Google Plunges After Ugly Top And Bottom Line Miss, As AI Cannibalizes Search And Ads

Today, ahead of the doubleheader of Mag 7 reports when both Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet report, we wrote in our preview that Microsoft has become the consensus long, while Alphabet “still feels like the consensus funding short across megacaps.” And both have to convince a market that, as Goldman’s Rich Privorotsky put it this morning, now has “eye watering expectations”:

“These really matter. Eye watering expectations… buyside probably closer to Azure growth around high 40s%, Google Cloud around mid 90s%. The question isn’t whether those are good numbers, but whether they can surpass already high expectations… Azure probably needs a guidance raise to be properly supportive. The nuance is capacity… if they miss elevated expectations simply because they cannot bring enough compute online. That’s disappointing for near term revenue but potentially even more bullish for the scarcity premium and future spending. Watch customer concentration, how broad the demand really is and, crucially, the relationship between revenue growth, capex and margins. The market wants evidence that the incremental economics work.“

In other words, a cloud beat is just the price of admission, and the debate tonight is what all that cloud costs, and who pays for it.

Within the Mag 7, Microsoft and Alphabet sit at opposite ends. Goldman’s derivatives desk has Microsoft at 8/10 on its positioning score (the same score Meta carried into its print last week, and we all know how that went). Alphabet, meanwhile, keeps getting sold to pay for everything else. JPMorgan’s TMT trader Brian Heavey wrote this morning that “we continue to see GOOG being used as a source of funds (note there was another negative 3P check ahead of earnings – all pointing to a Search miss).” The stock dropped 10% from its October 13 high into Monday.

There are some signs of a thaw. Goldman’s US desk saw “a buyer of 50k GOOGL 15Jan 360 calls” on Tuesday, and Privorotsky notes that “people have barely begun to re-risk. What we’ve really seen so far is the abatement of supply, rather than meaningful fresh demand.”

Away from Goldman, and focusing on Alphabet, the whole debate fits in one line from JPMorgan’s Mark Schilsky, whose Tech Sketch “Earnings Preview Bonanza” (available to pro subs) frames it as “Street (Consensus) Fighter II: Search vs. Cloud”:

“On the one hand, Google Cloud Revenues are likely to crush this quarter, thanks to TPU sales. On the other hand, Search Revenue growth is expected to miss the Street because the alt data (which is always right!) suggests so… GOOGL is also on a path to where Google Cloud Revenues could be equal to Search Revenues by late 2028. That’s massive! Who thought that was possible 1 year ago? And now we’re debating whether or not Search is going to miss by like -50 bps this quarter. Who cares?!?”

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Elon Musk Announces Plan to Give Every Child in America One Share of SpaceX Stock in 2027

Elon Musk just dropped a bombshell that will put a real ownership stake in the hands of tens of millions of American kids.

On Monday, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO posted on X: “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.”

The announcement comes roughly four months after SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker $SPCX in one of the largest IPOs in history.

Shares recently traded near $146, and with roughly 72–73 million children under 18 in the United States, the gift is valued in the neighborhood of $10.5 billion based on recent prices.

Musk did not spell out the exact mechanism, eligibility rules, or timeline beyond “next year,” but the scale is unmistakable. He is transferring ownership from his own holdings directly to the next generation.

This builds on earlier action from SpaceX itself. Earlier this year, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and her husband personally gifted one SpaceX share each to more than two million American children ages 11–17 in lower-income areas (with extra emphasis near their central Texas home) through the Trump Accounts program. That pledge was valued at roughly $325 million at the time.

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Wall Street Expected To Have Its Best Year Ever As Americans Drown In Debt

Money is flooding Wall Street as Americans thirst for financial relief amid war-fueled inflation and soaring household debt.

New York’s securities industry is on pace to blow past last year’s record profits, according to a new report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Wall Street firms made $45.9 billion in just the first half of 2026, already eclipsing what New York City expected them to make for the entire year. (RELATED: Wall Street Banks Finance Both Sides Of America’s AI Race With China)

The money has poured in as companies race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure, businesses return to the dealmaking table and investors trade through a year marked by war, tariffs and market swings, the Comptroller’s report found. Virtually every major Wall Street revenue stream grew during the first half of the year, with underwriting seeing particularly strong gains.

Wall Street’s boom looks much different from the economy many Americans are living in. Families have rationed showers and hauled water from creeks as water bills climb into the hundreds of dollars, while gasoline prices have risen sharply and record diesel costs threaten to make already expensive grocery bills even worse due to the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

Many Americans are leaning increasingly on borrowed money. Household debt has continued to climb, with consumers carrying growing credit card and auto loan balances as high interest rates make that debt more expensive to service, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Credit cards have become a particularly costly pressure point. Americans now owe more than $1 trillion on their cards, Fed data show, while credit card delinquencies have climbed to levels not seen since the aftermath of the Great Recession. Total household debt had climbed to a record $18.8 trillion in the first quarter of 2026.

Meanwhile, billions continue pouring into AI and Wall Street is preparing for another potentially record-breaking payday.

Venture capital investment in AI companies reached $407 billion during the first half of the year, already dwarfing the amount invested throughout 2025, the report found. The spending has helped buoy markets even as investors question whether companies can eventually make enough money to justify the enormous sums flowing into the technology.

Big Tech companies are increasingly borrowing to finance the data centers, chips and power infrastructure behind the AI boom. Amazon, Google, Meta and other tech giants are now competing with governments for investors’ cash as they flood debt markets with new borrowing.

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Turkey’s Fix For Its $20 Billion Hedge Fund Meltdown: Kindly Ask The Winners To Give The Money Back

Two weeks after a cluster of Istanbul asset managers stopped honoring redemptions, triggering a market-wide circuit breaker and the liquidation of 131 funds held by some 455,758 Turkish retail investors, Ankara has unveiled its plan to make everyone whole. Or at least, to make everyone a little bit less un-whole.

As Bloomberg reports, Turkey will start payments to investors caught in the fund crisis. The Capital Markets Board (SPK) approved interim payments of up to 1 million lira (about $20,400) per eligible investor in funds run by Tera, Pusula, Atlas and Hedef, calculated on each investor’s “net investment” as determined by the Central Securities Depository (MKK). Below a million lira, you get your money back; above it, you get a million and a place in the queue. Money market funds get paid first, the rest in descending order of investor count, with A1 Capital, Bulls and Pardus funds slotted in afterward. The interim payments are advances against whatever the liquidation ultimately recovers, which is a polite way of saying nobody knows yet.

Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, meanwhile, insists that “we are not talking about a systemic problem,” pointing out that public debt is just 22% of GDP and the budget deficit is “roughly half the developing country average.” All true, and also not much consolation to the investor who, as Turkish Minute recounts, sold her Istanbul home before moving to Portugal, parked the proceeds in stock funds as an inflation hedge, and has watched her account fall ~90% while being unable to withdraw even that. “It is melting away before my eyes, and I can’t do anything about it.”

The “please give it back” account

The payouts are the boring part. The truly bizarre part is how Turkey – long the biggest banana in crowded bus of capital markets banana republics – plans to refill the pot.

Alongside the interim payments, the regulator announced the creation of “Voluntary Return Accounts” at Birlesik Fon Bankasi “for individuals seeking to return excessive profits obtained from pre-liquidation share sales.” Proceeds will be funneled to the fund liquidation estates and on to Ziraat and Isbank for distribution to investors. A separate “General Share Refund Account” has been opened for anyone who would like to hand back profits from speculative trading in listed stocks, and a new fund inside the deposit insurer TMSF will receive assets later determined to be proceeds of crime (details here).

To summarize: Turkey’s plan to compensate 455,000 losers is, in part, to ask the winners nicely.

Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas summed it up best: “Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b.”

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Senate Democrats Block Congressional Stock Trading Ban

Senate Democrats blocked a House-passed congressional stock trading ban that had a voter ID requirement attached to it on Wednesday.

The “Stop Insider Trading Act,” which needed 60 votes to advance, failed in a 53-47 vote.

Every single Democrats voted to block the bill.

The bill would block members of Congress, their spouses and children from purchasing new stocks.

The Hill reported:

Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked a bill sponsored by vulnerable GOP incumbent Pete Ricketts (Neb.) to restrict members of Congress from buying new stocks of publicly traded companies, arguing the legislation didn’t go far enough to crack down on possible corruption.

The Stop Insider Trading Act failed by a vote of 53-47. No Democrat voted in support of the measure.

It needed 60 votes to advance on the Senate floor.

Schumer called the voter ID bill a “poison pill” on Tuesday after Senate Majority Leader Thune announced the vote.

“The poison pill that will gut mail voting that has failed six times…” Schumer said.

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The Easy Money Fairy Tale Is About To End…Violently

For the better part of the last couple years, I have wondered whether financial markets are permanently broken. Not simply overvalued or temporarily irrational, but actually broken at the mechanical level and permanently distorted. I’ve written about it.

The basic process that is supposed to make capitalism work goes like this. Capital flows toward good ole’ fashioned productive uses (like the George Foreman Grill™) and away from flashy hot-shit stupid ones (like the Apple Vision Pro). Good businesses eventually outperform bad ones. Fraud eventually gets exposed. Making money is the point of a business. Price is a rationing mechanism and is determined by free markets. This system appears to have been dead for the last 10 years, at least.

Nowadays, we function under a derivative of capitalism (hereinafter referred to as “crony capitalism snorting bath salts, operating under policies so disorganized they’d make a Jackson Pollock painting look like the blueprints for a nuclear reactor”) where trillions of dollars can be created overnight, governments and central banks focus obsessively on a handful of key numbers, and preserving the nominal value of stocks and other financial assets has become the priority.

Everything else in the economy is then forced to adjust accordingly, and if you don’t like it, or it causes the price of your Whopper Jr.™ to go to $57, f*ck you…that’s just how money works nowadays.

We’ve spent most of the last 20 years systematically removing consequences from the financial system. Rates went to zero and stayed there for years. The Fed expanded its balance sheet by trillions. Every major crisis was met with an intervention, liquidity facility, bailout or assurance that policymakers stood ready to keep the machine running. Capital was forced to become extraordinarily cheap, and investors eventually became conditioned to believe it would remain that way. We laughed off our country’s credit downgrades. Economists and analysts turned into total pussies and cowards, crumbling into bits every time the market sold off 5%. Financial projections have turned into Hunter Thompson-esque 3AM drug induced astral projections.

And we turned into the real life version of Idiocracy for markets.

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Regulators Find Their Situational Awareness: Fed, BoE Probe Bank Exposure To Jane Street After AI Fund Meltdown

Better late than never…

Nearly two months after Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness went from a $45 billion AI juggernaut to a Citadel block trade after it dumped its entire public book on Ken Griffen’s doorstep at a 10% discount and six weeks after we learned that Jane Street lost $15 billion in July, its first down month in a decade, central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic have noticed that something may have happened.

According to the FT, the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority and the Federal Reserve have “stepped up scrutiny” of banks’ exposure to large trading firms and market makers. They are asking global lenders how much they have lent to Jane Street and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities, and presumably also to such HFT money makers as Susquehanna and Hudson River Trading.

Regulators want to know three things: the firms’ risk appetite, how banks’ exposure to them “evolved during the day,” and how risk controls held up. That’s a polite way of asking whether anyone at the prime brokers was actually watching intraday margin as the AI trade fell apart in July.

While the PRA, the Fed and Jane Street all declined to comment, Jane’s silence is the least surprising. Its last public word on the subject came from partner Turner Batty, who told investors, in the understatement of the year, that “July was a bad month.”

A brief history of a very bad month

For anyone who missed it (i.e., all the regulators), here’s the recap.

Situational Awareness is the fund Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher, launched in 2024 under the name of his viral essay. It had eight employees and ran long AI infrastructure / short software, with about 4x leverage through Goldman total return swaps. We described that leverage as “batshit insane”, but it was also extremely profitable, if only to Goldman. In a separate piece, the FT today reported that Goldman earned more than $200 million in fees this year from lending to Situational Awareness, the most of any client in its prime brokerage business financing hedge funds. 

As long as the market was going, up it was a party: the extremely levered momentum-chasing fund was was up 439% net through June, reached $45 billion in AUM, and counted Jane Street among its investors.

Then July happened. AI stocks rolled over, software rallied, and both legs of the pair trade lost money at once. Nebius, Sandisk and SharonAI each fell roughly half, and SK Hynix dropped nearly 50%. As the margin calls came in, the fund went looking for fresh capital. It failed to find willing “widows and orphans” and so within days it had exited all of its public equity trades. Citadel bought the whole book in under 24 hours at about a 10% discount, beating Millennium and, fittingly, Jane Street. The fund ended the month down about 78%, with roughly $10 billion of private holdings left, including a large stake in Anthropic.

Griffin did well out of it. Citadel’s Wellington fund rose 5.94% in July, its best month since 2022, and about half of its year-to-date gains came from the Situational Awareness trade. Over the next three weeks, Citadel flipped more than 80% of Leopold’s portfolio to dumb money through roughly 100 block trades worth more than $4 billion. When Griffin later described the unwind, he thanked “the trading and prime brokerage teams at the banks serving both firms” for their “extraordinary cooperation.”

Regulators are now asking those same prime brokerage teams some questions of their own.

Jane Street was the collateral damage: on top of its direct stake in Situational Awareness, its own book, which tends to, cough, be just ahead of whale and retail orders, leaned into the same momentum names: Sandisk, Micron, CoreWeave, Broadcom, SMCI, Dell and Bloom Energy, all the names that defined the momentum trade trough July. And when the AI trade reversed, it lost $15 billion in a month. Most firms wouldn’t survive a hit like that. At Jane Street it barely dented the year: by early August the firm had generated $40 billion in net trading revenue, already more than its record $39.6 billion for all of 2025.

That is also what worries regulators. As the FT puts it, the size of the loss “indicated that Jane Street… appeared to take far more risk than a typical market maker.”

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Since 2025, Trump Made More Stock Trades Than All 535 Congress Members Combined

President Donald Trump made nearly 30,000 stock trades since his return to office, marking a far higher volume of trades than all 535 members of Congress combined, a new Bloomberg analysis finds.

Between his inauguration in January 2025 and the end of June, Trump and his team made nearly 28,700 trades, his financial disclosures show. That amounts to roughly 80 trades per market day for nearly a year and a half.

In that period, House lawmakers reported making 19,400 stock trades, while senators reported 2,900, for a total of 22,300 transactions. A few lawmakers were responsible for a large portion of the trades, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who reported 8,000 transactions in that time.

Trump’s trades have been a major boon for him, as the only modern president who’s ever disclosed trading individual stocks. Previous reports have found that Trump’s 2025 trades alone were worth as much as $1.8 billion, and his trades in the first three months of 2026 were worth as much as $750 million.

These trades have come as he’s driven policy for and outright publicized companies that he has bought stock in; a recent report by Democrats on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee found that Trump has made up to $15.5 million in profits on his oil and gas holdings as the companies’ stocks have risen due to his war on Iran.

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Nancy Pelosi Disclosed a Multi-Million Dollar AI Investment Just Weeks Before the Stock Blew Up

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disclosed a multimillion-dollar investment last month in an artificial intelligence company whose stocks exploded in value soon after.

Pelosi’s husband Paul invested in Bloom Energy, a California-based company that provides fuel-cell technology and power systems aimed at meeting the enormous electricity demands of AI data centers.

According to a financial transaction report Pelosi signed Aug. 21, her household made several Bloom Energy purchases in late July.

The transactions included 10,000 shares purchased July 24, along with 100 call options, according to reporting from the New York Post. Another 5,000 shares and 100 additional call options were purchased July 28.

The disclosed value ranges put the combined transactions at a minimum of roughly $3 million, although the actual amount could have been as much as $12 million, because congressional financial disclosure forms use broad dollar ranges.

The July 24 purchases came after Bloom Energy’s stock had suffered a significant decline.

Then came July 28.

That was the same day Bloom Energy reported extremely strong earnings, with annual revenue growth of 165 percent, according to the Post.

Bloom Energy’s stock subsequently took off.

Then, on Sept. 4, another major development arrived: Bloom Energy was announced as a new addition to the S&P 500.

The company is scheduled to join the benchmark index Sept. 21, alongside Everpure and Illumina.

Bloom Energy shares surged following the announcement, with the stock gaining nearly 40 percent over a five-day period, according to the Post.

By Tuesday, Bloom Energy shares were trading around $282.50, compared with $184.89 on July 24, the day of the first Pelosi household purchase.

That’s a striking move in a matter of weeks.

And it makes the timing of the disclosure noteworthy.

Pelosi’s office has said the former speaker does not own stocks and had no knowledge of or subsequent involvement in the transactions.

The trades were made by her husband and reported through the congressional disclosure system as transactions involving a spouse.

In an article about the transactions, financial writer Rich Duprey of 24/7 Wall Street  dubbed Pelosi “the queen of capital gains.”

“Pelosi’s trading record in Congress has consistently outpaced the S&P 500 and even Warren Buffett over comparable stretches, fueling suspicion that lawmakers with committee-level oversight enjoy an informational edge,” Duprey observed.

The New York Post said Pelosi “has faced heated blowback for her family’s trading activity — racking up a 65% return on her portfolio in 2023 while her venture capitalist husband made $38 million worth of stock trades in the weeks leading up to President Trump’s inauguration.”

Duprey noted that multiple bills to ban stock trading by members of Congress have been introduced, but they’ve all stalled.

The Democratic former House Speaker’s trades have been so notable that in 2023, GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced one such bill that he dubbed the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act – or the PELOSI Act.

Hawley later met with Democrats and agreed to change the name of the bill to the HONEST Act — Halting Ownership and Non-Ethical Stock Transactions — which allowed enough Democratic support to advance the bill out of committee in July 2025.

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