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In today’s post:
🔴 Trump Just Got A Big Button
💸 1,700 Missiles. Gone.
🍟 Golden Arches Are Tired
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Congress just handed Trump the power to slap 100% tariffs on anyone buying Russian oil.
That "anyone" is mostly two countries: China and India. Roughly 2.8 billion people between them.
The House passed the bill this week. The Senate cleared it last month. Next stop is Trump's desk.
It's called the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, and the mechanism is brutally simple: keep buying Russian crude, and your exports to the US get taxed into the sea.
🛢️ Why China And India Are Sweating
China is the single biggest buyer of Russian crude. India is second.
So this is a Russia bill with Russia's name on it that lands almost entirely on two other economies.
Beijing's response was about as warm as you'd expect. China's foreign ministry said it opposes unilateral sanctions with no basis in international law.
India went with the humanitarian angle, saying it has 1.4 billion people to keep the lights on for and will source energy wherever the market makes sense.
New Delhi also flagged that it's been raising this with US officials for months, which is diplomat-speak for "we saw this coming and we're not thrilled.”
Xi Jinping meets Trump next week.
India, meanwhile, is still mid-negotiation on its own US trade deal.
So the US just loaded a 100% tariff gun and set it on the table right before two of its biggest trade conversations of the year. Subtle.
The bill also lands days after the BRICS Summit, where members condemned secondary sanctions and coercive economic measures. They didn't name the US. They didn't have to.
🧠 Will It Actually Get Used?
Here's the part the headlines skip: passing a bill and firing it are two very different things.
The law gives Trump the option of up to 100%. It doesn't force him to use it.
Martin Chorzempa at the Peterson Institute reckons escalation with China right before Xi's visit is unlikely, partly because Beijing retaliates hard and that caps how far the tariffs realistically go.
India has less cover. Michael Kugelman at the Atlantic Council points out India has built some insulation through trade deals with the EU and others, but a 100% tariff from a critical export destination is "real bad news" regardless of the hedging.
In a sentence? China has leverage. India has hope.
💰 What This Means For You
The market question isn't whether the bill passed. It's whether Trump pulls the trigger.
Watch three things:
Oil. If buyers of Russian crude get squeezed out, that barrel supply has to come from somewhere else. Somewhere else is usually more expensive.
Indian exporters and the US companies that buy from them. Pharma, textiles, IT services. A 100% tariff rewires those cost structures overnight.
The Xi meeting next week. It's now the single most informative event on the calendar for anyone holding China-exposed anything.
A law that exists but sits unused is a negotiating chip. A law that gets used is a supply shock. Markets will price the difference, probably loudly.
Does Trump actually pull the trigger?
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It beat. It raised guidance. The stock fell 7% anyway.
The market wanted more, so it shrugged. We went through the numbers instead.
Revenue up 25% to $178.07m. Operating profit up 43%. $145.2m in cash and no meaningful debt. Full-year guidance raised to 20% growth at the midpoint.
The engine behind it is simple. Users who engage with the company's AI features spend more time in the product and run more searches. More searches feed one revenue line, and more time feeds the other.
That's how revenue per user climbed 25% without needing a flood of new users.
The kicker: in its highest-paying market, the US, brand awareness sits at just 44%.
Management says monetisation is accelerating. The next print resets expectations either way.
Inside today's Premium+ deep dive:
Whether that 7% drop was the market being right, or just impatient
The fair value our model lands on, and how much room that leaves
The risk that guidance conveniently doesn't mention
What we're doing with our own position, and what would make us walk away
💸 1,700 Missiles. Gone.
Iran just shot down at least two American drones.
CBS reported it Thursday, citing US officials. Central Command declined to comment, which in Pentagon language is rarely the same thing as a denial.
The bill for those two aircraft lands somewhere between $8 million and "tens of millions." That's a wide range because nobody will say exactly which drones they were.
Both were MQ-1s. The US flies two versions:
The Predator, the older Air Force model, mostly retired
The Gray Eagle, the Army's current one, very much in service
A pair of old Predators costs about $8M. A pair of Gray Eagles costs multiples of that. So the “which ones?” question is kind of a big deal.
Location of the downings? Also unknown.
These things normally do the boring but essential work: tracking Iranian military movements, watching the Strait of Hormuz. Both models can carry Hellfire missiles when the mission stops being about watching.
💸 The Drones Are The Cheap Part
Here's the number that should actually make you sit up.
By mid-July, the US had burned through roughly 1,700 Patriot interceptors and more than 200 THAAD interceptors swatting down Iranian attacks.
That's not a stockpile being used. That's a stockpile being vaporised.
The Congressional Budget Office reckons replacing everything fired through Aug 1 could cost $13.1 billion. Just the restock. Nothing else included.
For context, the wider equipment tally from this conflict has been running toward $38B. The two drones are a rounding error on a rounding error.
🧠 Why This Matters For Your Money
Interceptors are not Amazon Prime. You can't two-day-ship a Patriot.
Each one takes months to build, and the production lines were sized for a world where you fire a handful a year, not 1,700 in a summer. Which means $13.1B of replacement orders is a multi-year backlog, not a quarterly one.
That backlog has to go somewhere. Defence primes with interceptor and drone programmes are sitting on demand that policy can't easily switch off, because a depleted magazine is a national security problem that gets funded regardless of who's in office.
The other half is the Strait of Hormuz. The drones that got shot down were partly there to watch the waterway that carries roughly a fifth of the world's oil. Less visibility over that stretch of water tends to show up as a risk premium in crude, and crude shows up in everything from your energy bill to inflation prints.
Two drones falling out of the sky is a headline. The restock invoice is the story.
🍟 Golden Arches Are Tired
McDonald's just grew sales at established restaurants by 0.8%.
That's the slowest pace since Q1 2025. For the company that sells roughly 1% of the world's beef, that's less "growth" and more "a pulse."
Management knows. A fix is being assembled. Here's what's coming
🍟 The Value Offensive
McDonald's is building a new value push alongside a group of franchisees.
The framing: cheap food is what gets bodies through the door and keeps the base of the business solid.
The target is Burger King, which has spent the last stretch winning the value war while McDonald's argued with itself.
But here's the awkward part. McDonald's sets the menu and recommends the prices. Franchisees can ignore the prices entirely.
And they have. Which is how you end up with a value meal that costs one thing in one town and noticeably more three junctions down the motorway.
That inconsistency has bled straight into the parent company's numbers.
The reported fix: make pricing compliance a factor in franchise renewals. Nothing sharpens cooperation like putting someone's licence on the table.
📅 September 23 is the real event
Investor Day. Five days out.
Expected on the agenda: value, beverages, chicken, and GLP-1 resilience. That last one is corporate for "how do we keep selling burgers to people on weight-loss drugs."
Citi's Jon Tower isn't buying it yet. He wrote that it's "a tall task to sell investors that McDonald's has the right recipe" for US same-store sales over the next twelve months.
He also noted that getting franchisees to play along with value offers has historically been a hard sell.
So Tower trimmed his numbers. 2026 EPS down 3 cents to $12.84. 2027 down 2 cents to $14.26. Price target cut 10%.
🧠 What It Actually Means For You
Look at the gap between those two cuts. Three cents on a $12.84 estimate is a rounding error. A 10% price target cut is not.
The earnings aren't the story. The multiple is. Tower is saying the market should pay less for each dollar McDonald's earns, because the growth behind those dollars looks tired.
That's the thing to watch on the 23rd. Not whether a value menu appears, because it will. Whether it comes with timelines and costs attached.
Discounting is a lever that always works and never works for free. Someone absorbs the margin hit, and franchisees have already shown they'll resist when that someone is them.
A plan without a number next to it is a press release with a logo on it.
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