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In today’s post:
⏰ Trump's Toll Lasted 24 Hours
💣 One Warning. Sector Nuked.
💸 Buffett Is Giving It ALL Away
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⏰ Trump's Toll Lasted 24 Hours
The 20% Hormuz toll lasted exactly one day.
Trump scrapped it Tuesday. In its place: "MASSIVE" Gulf investments into the US, announced via Truth Social with the caps lock working overtime.
That's a policy reversal speedrun.
🛢️ What just happened
Monday: Trump announces a 20% reimbursement fee on all cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz, to cover the cost of US military protection.
Tuesday: fee gone, replaced by trade and investment agreements after what Trump called "highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership."
What it really sounds like? The Gulf states made a better offer.
Trump says the investments will fund factories, plants and equipment built in America, creating "millions of High Paying AMERICAN Jobs." No numbers, no timeline, no signed deals yet. Just vibes and capital letters.
⚓ The strait is open. Mostly.
Here's the part markets actually care about: the waterway is now open to all commercial traffic.
One giant exception. Anything travelling to or from Iranian ports, or carrying Iranian cargo, is blocked. Trump called it a "full blockade" on Iranian shipping while everyone else sails through.
Why it matters: roughly 20% of the world's oil squeezes through that narrow strip of water every day. When Hormuz sneezes, your petrol price catches a cold.
💥 This was not a quiet Tuesday
Before the investment announcement, US forces launched targeted airstrikes.
Iran hit back with attacks on Bahrain, Jordan, and two UAE-linked tankers in the strait. One mariner was killed, eight wounded.
So the sequence was: airstrikes, retaliation, dead mariner, then a Truth Social post about job creation. Modern geopolitics moves at the speed of a phone screen.
Trump praised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, and CENTCOM chief Admiral Brad Cooper for keeping the lane open. He also repeated that Iran will "never have a nuclear weapon" and called its leadership "lying, violent, and malicious."
🧠 What it means for you
The fee is dead, which removes a straight-up tax on 20% of global oil flows. That's the bullish bit for energy costs.
The bearish bit: an active shooting conflict in the world's most important oil chokepoint doesn't disappear because of one post. Tankers are still getting hit. Insurance premiums on Gulf shipping don't care about press releases.
Watch crude prices, shipping stocks, and defence names. And treat "massive investments" as a headline until there's paper behind it. Announced deals and closed deals are very different animals.
The market's real question isn't the fee. It's whether ships keep getting shot at.
Trump scrapped the Hormuz toll in 24 hours. What's your read?
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One boring bank just printed $9.1 billion in a single quarter.
That's 27% more than last year. And the market still hasn't fully repriced it.
Here's the part most investors are missing: inflation just came in at 3.5%, energy prices are climbing on the back of the US-Iran conflict, and the Fed is boxed in. Rate cuts are basically off the table for 2026.
For most companies, that's bad news. For this bank, it's rocket fuel.
Its lending machine is compounding at 8% a year, its trading desk just grew revenue 70%, and defaults are actually falling. The setup is so clean it almost feels unfair.
Our analysis puts fair value at… and the stock isn't there yet.
But here's the thing: this window exists because the market is distracted. Once the repricing starts, the easy money is gone.
In today's Premium+ deep dive, we break down:
Why this bank wins whether the Fed holds or hikes
The exact price target math (and the two numbers that would kill the thesis)
The hidden $2.2 billion risk buried in the bank's own filings
The one metric to watch before you buy a single share
💣 One Warning. Sector Nuked.
IBM $IBM ( ▼ 25.21% ) just lost a quarter of its value in a single day.
Shares crashed 24% on Tuesday after the company pre-announced Q2 numbers that CEO Arvind Krishna himself called "disappointing."
When the CEO uses that word before the analysts do, you know it's bad.
📉 The Damage
Preliminary revenue came in at $17.2B against the $17.85B Wall Street expected. That's growth of just 1%.
EPS is expected at $2.93 versus a $3.02 consensus.
Infrastructure revenue fell 7%. Consulting was flat. Gross margin slipped too.
The one bright spot? Red Hat, which accelerated to 11% growth, with new acquisitions HashiCorp and Confluent pulling their weight.
🧨 What actually went wrong
Krishna's explanation boils down to three things:
Big deals slipped. Numerous large contracts failed to close on time, driving most of the shortfall.
Clients raided their own budgets. In late June, customers suddenly shifted capex toward servers, storage, and memory to lock in supply-constrained hardware before prices rise. IBM's software spend got cannibalised in the process.
Cybersecurity chaos. Clients were distracted by rapidly evolving, industry-wide cyber concerns and procurement cycles dragged.
In Krishna's own words: "our teams" needed "to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered."
That's about as close to a public apology as a Fortune 500 CEO gets.
🌊 The contagion
Here's why this matters beyond IBM. One warning nuked the entire software and consulting sector.
ServiceNow $NOW ( ▼ 5.76% ) fell nearly 7%
Salesforce $CRM ( ▼ 2.14% ) dropped 5%
Adobe, Workday, Hubspot, Datadog, and Microsoft all lost 3% or more
Accenture and Cognizant sank 8% and 7%
If clients are pausing software deals to panic-buy hardware, that's not an IBM problem. Every enterprise software name is exposed.
🧠 What the pros think
Analysts are split three ways:
Citi kept its Buy and $375 target, but warned the results feed the "AI-Loser" narrative keeping IBM in the penalty box.
BofA stayed at Buy but slashed its target from $330 to $280, admitting it's unclear when the capex distortion resolves.
HSBC went full breakup letter. Downgraded to Reduce, target cut to $191, and built a "synthetic IBM" out of IonQ, SAP, Accenture, and HP shares that it reckons delivers 40% more 2030 earnings for the same money.
HSBC also noted IonQ has pulled in nearly $600M of new quantum orders over five quarters. IBM? About $100M.
💰 What it means for you
If you hold software or consulting names, watch the July 22 IBM earnings call. That's when we find out if this is one company fumbling execution or the start of an enterprise spending shift.
Wells Fargo flagged the flip side: the hardware panic-buying is near-term great for server, storage, and memory stocks. But demand pulled forward now is demand missing later, which makes 2H26 a tougher setup.
One quarter. One pre-announcement. Half of enterprise tech repriced. Markets are efficient like that.
IBM just torched $50B+ in market cap overnight. What's your move?
💸 Buffett Is Giving It ALL Away
Warren Buffett just put a sell-by date on his entire fortune: December 31, 2034.
The greatest investor of all time has spent 60 years compounding money. Now he's speedrunning the opposite.
Here's the plan 👇
💸 The great unwinding
Today, Buffett is converting 8,000 Class A shares into 12 million Class B shares of Berkshire Hathaway. All of it heading straight out the door to charity.
The split:
9M shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (named after his late wife)
1M shares each to the Sherwood Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and Novo Foundation. All run by his kids.
After today, Buffett keeps 188,290 Class A shares and a rounding error of 1,162 Class B shares.
Still a colossal pile. But the countdown clock is officially running.
⏳ Why the deadline?
In Buffett's own words: "my children are unfortunately growing older."
His three kids are the ones tasked with giving it all away. And Buffett wants the job finished within about eight years, while they're still around to do it properly.
The man planned his compounding decades in advance. Of course he planned the decompounding too.
He also wants the grants to grow every single year. The three foundations run by his children get bigger cheques annually, and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation's cheques grow "at a somewhat greater rate."
Even his charity has a dividend growth strategy.
🧠 What it means for you
If you hold Berkshire, don't panic. This is a donation, not a dump.
The shares go to foundations, which sell gradually over years to fund their giving. That's a slow, steady drip of supply, not a market-moving flood.
The bigger signal is about succession. Buffett is methodically removing himself from the Berkshire equation, piece by piece, on a public timetable.
The Oracle of Omaha is writing his own ending. And like everything else he's done, it's annoyingly well thought out.