U.S. stocks fell Wednesday as fighting with Iran pushed oil above $100 and revived inflation fears. Oil climbed after Iran sent more than two dozen missiles hurtling towards a U.S. Air Force base in Jordan, revenge after the U.S. bombed five Iranian tanker ships Tuesday. According to Al Jazeera, Tehran’s top negotiator Mohammad Ghalibaf said the time of eye-for-an-eye bombings is over, and Iran will ramp up attacks in the region.

Energy was the only sector to finish green. August payrolls rose by 162,000, and unemployment held at 4.1%. Producer inflation arrives Thursday morning.

GameStop climbed on strong earnings and a $1M insider purchase. AeroVironment, Apple, American Eagle, and SK Hynix also drew heavy Stocktwits attention.

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Meta, the social media and advertising giant, surged Wednesday after launching Muse, an AI agent that can send emails, shop online, and complete tasks through its app or WhatsApp.

The RIP: $META jumped +6.6% to $653.69 on twice its recent volume. Mizuho kept an Outperform rating and $750 target, while KeyBanc maintained an Overweight rating and $780 target.

Muse has free, $20, and $100 subscription tiers, giving Meta a direct way to make money from its AI spending. Analysts called it the start of a new product cycle that investors have yet to price in. Shares are still down roughly 1% this year.

The rally held even after Meta AI researcher Andrew Tulloch announced his departure Wednesday, adding another high-profile exit to the industry’s talent shuffle.

Greenland Mines (Nasdaq: GRML) closed its acquisition of the Sarfartoq rare earth Nd-Pr Project on Sept. 1, 2026, following Greenland government approval and an Initial Assessment showing a high-case pre-tax NPV of $2.05 billion and 118.6% IRR. At 2025 consumption levels, planned annual NdPr oxide production from ST1 alone would equal ~34% of all NdPr oxide refined outside China. ST1 occupies well under 1% of Sarfartoq’s 191-km² license, with five additional known rare earth occurrences along a 32-km ring structure largely untested. Nd and Pr are key inputs for high-strength permanent magnets used in EVs, wind turbines, robotics and defense. Sarfartoq’s rare earths occur in conventional minerals already processed commercially elsewhere, while Neo Performance Materials holds offtake rights for up to 60% of future ore or concentrate for processing at its Silmet facility in Estonia.

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Apple used John Ternus’ first product launch as CEO to unveil the iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro, AirPods 5, and Apple Watch Series 12. The Duo is Apple’s biggest iPhone redesign in nearly a decade.

The RIP: $AAPL slipped 0.3% to $315.34 during Wednesday’s event, then recovered 0.5% after hours. The Duo starts at $1,999 and hits stores Oct. 23. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199, up $100 from last year.

Foldables account for just 2.2% of smartphone shipments, and Huawei controls nearly 80% of the category in China. Apple priced the Duo below the $2,500 some analysts expected, but it still costs more than plenty of MacBooks. This is a premium halo product before it is a volume machine.

The hardware also cuts another supplier cord. Apple’s C2 modem is 50% faster and uses 15% less energy than its predecessor, further reducing the company’s reliance on Qualcomm. The iPhone 18 Pro’s A20 chip uses Taiwan Semiconductor’s 2-nanometer process and adds 50% more memory bandwidth for on-device AI.

The Community Read: The $AAPL room is split on Duo pricing, watch the support fight ->

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, lost a researcher Tuesday after he accused his employer and OpenAI of “gambling with our lives.” Jacob Coxon said he was leaving after three years researching how to train AI models across the two companies. He warned that their race toward self-improving AI could produce systems humans cannot control. The story blew up Wednesday.

The RIP: Anthropic alignment researcher Evan Hubinger backed him up, putting his personal probability of AI killing all humans at more than 10% within the next decade. He said Anthropic does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence, meaning how to keep those systems behaving as intended.

Coxon argued that Anthropic understands the danger but believes it must get there before someone less responsible does. He called for coordination between labs and potentially a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.

Ed Zitron mocked the convenient relationship between apocalypse warnings and fundraising:

Then came the counter-conspiracy. Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the conservative Capital Research Center, alleged that the resignation looked like a funded PR operation to help impose sweeping AI restrictions.

I’m not so sure it is a conspiracy, more of a sign of the times. Lab leaks and hacking campaigns have turned into fundraising rounds and buyouts at the largest startups. It’s like everything is a call for more money, even if it says ‘more money will end the world’ right on the side of the can.

Based on how annoying it was to use ChatGPT Astra to put together this research for this article, I feel like we have dozens of years left, and thousands more AI doomer posts, before a chatbot can hurt us. 🤖

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told currency traders “I am the house now” at Southern Methodist University Tuesday, boasting of "asymmetric information" about Japanese policy. Basically, he said he is the boss, take it or leave it because he knows more than anyone else to manipulate bond and currency markets.

“And you can bet against me if you want,” Bessent said.

The RIP: Treasury announced up to $6B in buybacks of 10- to 20-year debt for Thursday, triple its previous operation. The 10-year yield still touched 4.86%, its highest since 2023, before strong demand at a separate Treasury auction pulled it lower. Some traders had expected a bigger buyback.

CNBC reported that the U.S. bought yen so Japan would not have to sell part of its $1.1T Treasury portfolio to defend the currency. Those sales would lower bond prices and push yields higher, worsening the borrowing-cost problem Bessent is trying to contain with the long-end buybacks.

Fintwitter was pissed off at the increasingly ‘I know everything’ attitude Bessent trots around with while bullying the bond market. My favorite critics are the résumé checks.

See, Scott Bessent made his name helping George Soros break the Bank of England in 1992. Bessent in 2000 launched Bessent Capital with $200M in seed money from Soros. A former colleague told Forbes that “a good percentage” of the fund was gone by 2002. Bessent later returned to Soros as chief investment officer, but left again to launch Key Square with another $2B from Soros.

Key Square peaked at $5.1B in assets under management in 2017. By the end of 2023, it managed $577M, while its institutional investor count had fallen from 180 to 20.

Now Bessent is bullying markets for Trump. Bond traders called him out anyway, and are not going in the direction he wants. The 10-year yield touched 4.86%, its highest since 2023, after the buyback came in smaller than some investors expected. The house made its Blackjack bet, and the bond market said, ‘hit me!’ 🃏

7.7K WATCHERS · 78% BULLISH · HIGH ACTIVITY

American Eagle fell after hours after comparable sales grew 6%, missing the 6.7% estimate. EPS hit $0.79 against $0.22 expected, but a $196M tariff refund padded the quarter and its new $540M-$550M operating-income outlook. Aerie comps rose 19%, slower than the prior two quarters.

307.5K WATCHERS · 78% BULLISH · HIGH ACTIVITY

GameStop climbed after director Lawrence Cheng bought 55,000 shares for roughly $1.03M following earnings. Quarterly sales fell 19% to $790.2M, but net income rose to $298.7M. Collectibles generated 45% of sales, officially passing video games. That is one way to reinvent a game store.

186.2K WATCHERS · 56% BULLISH · NORMAL ACTIVITY

Ford fell after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy urged the automaker to cut ties with Chinese battery and manufacturing partners, citing national-security concerns. Republican lawmakers piled on Wednesday, putting Ford’s CATL licensing deal and Geely partnership under a brighter political spotlight.

Bearish 🐻 | Bullish 🐮 | It’s Complicated 😵‍💫

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Macro: Producer Price Index (PPI) (8:30 AM ET), Weekly jobless claims (8:30 AM ET), Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report (9:00 AM ET), GDPNow (9:00 AM ET), Producer Price Index (9:00 AM ET), +5 more. 📊
Pre-Market Earnings: $M Macy`s Inc, $KNDI Kandi Technologies Group Inc, $IMPP Imperial Petroleum Inc, $LOVE Lovesac Company, $YRD Yiren Digital Ltd - ADR, +3 more. ☀️
After-Market Earnings: $ORCL Oracle Corp., $ADBE Adobe Inc, $CBAT CBAK Energy Technology Ltd., $RH RH - Ordinary Shares - Class A, $LPTH Lightpath Technologies, Inc. - Ordinary Shares - Class A, +4 more. 🌙

P.S. You can listen to all of these earnings calls on Stocktwits.

Want to see some change? Email me, Kevin Travers, with feedback, and follow me on Stocktwits. Send me charts and ideas! Refer a friend for this quarter’s edition of The RIP Forecast 😎

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