Breakfast | August 12, 2026

US stocks closed lower, with the Nasdaq dropping 0.6%, as the market awaited the US CPI data scheduled for release on Wednesday; the stalemate in the Middle East further supported oil prices, with WTI crude oil futures rising for the fourth consecutive day; gold prices retreated from their two-month high. Pakistan stated that the US and Iran were close to reaching an agreement on the Strait of Hormuz issue, but Iran indicated it would continue to close the strait until its demands were met. Will Wednesday's US CPI deliver a "dovish surprise"? Goldman Sachs suggested inflation might be lower than widely expected, while HSBC bet on "moderate" data. The yen approached the 160 level against the US dollar, raising intervention risks. The Hang Seng TECH Index is set for a major revision: expanding from 30 to 50 constituents, elevating AI to an independent theme, adding a revenue growth group, and opening doors to high-growth small and mid-cap companies. Demand for AI servers continues to release, with FII's first-half net profit increasing 96% year-over-year. US Senator Sanders wrote to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta: Halt AI development, or Congress will intervene. Nemotron 3.5 has just landed and is already aiming for trillion-parameter scale! NVIDIA was reported to be developing the world's top-tier open-source model. Strong demand for AI optical communications drove Lumentum's revenue to double last quarter, with this quarter's guidance exceeding expectations even further, though debt restructuring led to a massive loss of over $7 billion. CoreWeave surged 16% in after-hours trading! Q2 revenue doubled, beating expectations, with backlog orders reaching $104 billion. Concerns about a peak in the memory sector intensified, with several South Korean brokerages downgrading price targets for Samsung and SK Hynix, with some cuts exceeding 30%. Reminder: Tencent will report earnings on Wednesday; keep an eye on WorkBuddy-related data.