In partnership with
In today’s post:
👀 What Trump Bought In August
🫧 It's A Bubble. Buy Anyway?
🐻 Burry's Beef With Microsoft
Take the prompts our creative team actually uses
The key to maintaining brand quality at scale? Mastering how to communicate with AI models and embedding them into your creative strategy.
Join our honest discussion with Ari Murray, Chief Digital Officer at Salt and Stone, and get 5 tips for expert LLM prompting with ready to run prompts.
👀 What Trump Bought In August
Trump made 517 stock trades in August.
That's roughly 17 trades a day. Most day traders would call that a busy month.
A new financial disclosure released Thursday puts the total value somewhere between $74.3M and $273M. Disclosures only report brackets, so that range is wide enough to lose $199M down the back of the sofa.
And here's the shocker: August was the quiet month. June and July each saw over 1,000 disclosures.
So where did the money go?
📈 The Aug. 21 Shopping Spree
The biggest buy of the month: $5M to $25M in Meta.
On the same day, $1M to $5M each went into:
Netflix
AT&T
ConocoPhillips
Abbott Laboratories
Chevron
Then came a second wave of $500K to $1M buys: Nvidia, AMD, Datadog, Dell, Palo Alto Networks, T-Mobile, Boeing, Home Depot and Church & Dwight.
Streaming, oil, chips, phones, planes and baking soda. One afternoon, one guided tour of the S&P 500.
🚀 The SpaceX Bond
On Aug. 18, Trump bought $1M to $5M of SpaceX senior unsecured notes. They yield 5.35% and mature in July 2031.
A couple of days later, he signed a policy directive to expand commercial space transportation.
The filing records the sequence and nothing more. Still, buying the rocket company's debt and then signing the rocket policy is the kind of timing that makes ethics watchdogs reach for the highlighter.
🛒 The Rest Of The Basket
On Aug. 10, he added $1M to $5M each in Microsoft, McDonald's and Comcast. Earlier in the month he bought Nvidia ($250K to $500K) and IBM.
Late August brought a growth and AI binge: Super Micro Computer, Joby Aviation, Oklo, CoreWeave, Uber, Oracle, Tesla and Palantir.
AI servers, flying taxis, nuclear reactors. If it sounds like the future, it made the list.
Sales were small change by comparison:
$100K to $250K out of TJX and Intuitive Surgical (Aug. 28)
$50K to $100K trimmed from Walmart and Lowe's
Retail got a polite tap on the shoulder. Big Tech got the red carpet.
🧠 What It Means For You
Tempted to copy the President's portfolio? A few reality checks first.
The numbers are fuzzy. The Meta buy could be $5M or $25M. That's a 5x gap on a single trade.
The data is stale. These are August trades published in October. By the time you read about them, they're two months old.
The tilt is telling, though. Heavy money into mega-cap tech and AI infrastructure, light selling in retail. Those mega-caps are the same names already sitting at the top of most index funds.
Treat it as a window into where one very large portfolio is leaning. A trading signal it is not.
Should a sitting President be allowed to trade stocks?
If you want to sound smarter without doing more…
Read Morning Brew. 5-minute daily email. Day's most important news. Explained in simplest terms. Really, it’s a news experience you’ll actually enjoy.
At this point, it's not about trying Morning Brew's daily newsletter—It's about missing out.
Click below to join 4,000,000+ daily readers.
Wall Street expects this airline's Q4 profit to shrink. Its own booking data tells a very different story.
On its last call, management said Q4 yield was tracking up 19% year-over-year.
At the same point, Q3 was up just 5%.
That's fares rising fast enough to chew through a $6 billion fuel bill.
Then its biggest rival handed it a gift.
The rival went for a cheaper satellite WiFi deal that won't be ready until 2028. Its most loyal frequent flyers have noticed.
Our airline already has 450 planes on Starlink, 1,000+ by year-end, and a status-match offer waiting for the defectors.
None of this is in the reported numbers yet. Earnings land October 20.
In today's Premium+ deep dive:
Whether the defections can actually show up in earnings on planes this full
The earnings level we think the market is mispricing
The one risk that could unravel the whole thesis
What we're doing with it, and what would change our mind
🫧 It's A Bubble. Buy Anyway?
That's the pitch from Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz, who just called AI "the biggest bubble of our lifetime."
Then he told traders to ride the wave.
Picture a fire inspector walking into a burning building and asking where the marshmallows are.
🫧 Why He Thinks The Party's Still Going
Speaking at the Greenwich Economic Forum, Novogratz said this doesn't look like the end of a bubble.
His words: "I know how bubbles end, and they end spectacularly, and this isn't spectacular enough."
In other words, we haven't reached the dancing-on-tables stage yet.
He also argued AI stocks still look cheap on a price-to-earnings basis. That's how many years of profit you're paying for when you buy a share.
And for anyone sitting on the sidelines? If you're not in AI, he said, you might as well "go home and put your head in a bucket of ice."
Harsh. But this is the guy who was early on bitcoin, so he's seen a mania or two up close.
🧓 Billionaire vs Billionaire
Novogratz isn't the only rich guy using the B-word.
So we've got two billionaires looking at the same chart. One sees a cliff edge. The other sees a runway.
Same word. Very different moods.
BofA strategists offered a third option on Tuesday for people who want the upside but fear the crash.
Their idea: use equity derivatives to ride the rally while hedging bubble risk.
Specifically, they like QQQ call spreads, which they called a "risk-limited upside expression."
Translation from Wall Street speak:
QQQ tracks the Nasdaq-100, which is stuffed with the tech megacaps driving the AI trade
A call spread means buying one call option and selling another at a higher price
Your maximum loss is capped at what you paid. So is your maximum gain
Think of it as a bet on AI with a seatbelt on. You won't fly through the windscreen, but you won't hit top speed either.
🧠 What It Means For You
Here's the funny bit: everyone now agrees AI is a bubble. The fight is entirely about timing.
That matters for your money because:
Bubbles can run far longer than sceptics expect and fall harder than believers expect
If you own a broad index fund, you probably already have serious AI exposure through the megacaps
Nobody rings a bell at the top, including billionaires with very confident panel takes
The real question isn't "bubble or not?" anymore. It's how much of your portfolio you'd be comfortable watching wobble if the music stops.
🐻 Burry's Beef With Microsoft
Michael Burry thinks Microsoft's spending might be a power move.
He's questioning whether the company's massive spending spree is driven by necessity at all.
His theory: Microsoft may be using its financial figures "as a lever to get what it wants."
And the analysts? They've largely failed to challenge the numbers. The homework got marked without anyone checking the working.
Here's his logic.
🏰 Why Is A Monopoly Panic-Spending?
Burry's point is simple. Monopolies shouldn't need to spend wildly "as if their lives depended on it."
Yet that's exactly what the tech giants are doing. All of them except Apple, which he singles out as the exception.
So why the frenzy? Burry says the CEOs assume they'll be granted an oligopoly that's too big to fail.
In other words: build enough data centers and you become the plumbing. Nobody lets the plumbing go bust.
🤖 OK, But What About The Non-Monopolies?
Burry raises the obvious follow-up himself. Why are OpenAI, Anthropic and Oracle spending just as hard?
"Surely they are not monopolies?!?" he asks. Three question marks. The man is not calm.
His answer: no, but they intend to be part of the oligopoly.
None of them can picture breaking the grip of Microsoft, Amazon, Google or Meta in their respective silos. So the plan is to join the club.
And the AI boom gives them the perfect excuse. Burry says they're grabbing a slice of that dominance "under cover of a new paradigm."
"New paradigm" is finance's oldest excuse wearing a fresh hoodie.
🧠 What It Means For Your Money
If you own big tech directly or through an index fund, this spending is your money at work.
Huge data center bills only make sense if the returns eventually show up. If Burry's right, part of this is a land grab, and land grabs rarely come with a clear payback date.
The thing to watch: whether analysts start pushing back on the numbers. Right now, according to Burry, hardly anyone is.
Built for the unstoppable.
The Dell Pro powered by Intel® Core™ Ultra with Intel vPro® adjusts power usage based on how you work, so your battery life never slows you down.