U.S. stocks fell Wednesday, snapping a four-session winning streak. Prices retreated from Tuesday’s records as Treasury yields pressed into territory last seen in 2002. The FOMC minutes landed at 2:00 p.m. ET, and stocks lost ground as traders repriced the path for rates.

All 19 members unanimously raised rates in Sept. and many believed that rates would need to come up again this year, but no one seems convinced on when that should happen.

Microsoft kept the AI hardware train going with a $2,5k laptop drop the uses a Nvidia chip and 128GB of unified memory to run local models. Speaking of models, Claude said its new Haiku 5.5 was cheap and fast, but the jury is still out if anyone cares.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq each slipped 0.2%, the Dow fell 0.7%, and the Russell 2000 dropped 1.3%. The 10-year yield hit 5.365% before a solid $39B auction pulled rates off their highs, but Fed minutes kept another 2026 hike on the table.

Breadth stayed ugly: one sector rose and ten fell. Health care gained 1.0%, while industrials sank 2.2%. WTI lost 1.3% to $88.28, and Bitcoin fell 2.5%. Stocktwits heat ran outside the megacaps, with Applied Digital, Webull, BlackBerry, and Capricor leading the chatter. Jobless claims arrive Thursday morning.

Today’s Briefing:

Applied Digital, the builder and operator of AI-focused data centers, reported fiscal first-quarter results Wednesday as new rental operations and customer fit-out work pushed revenue sharply higher.

The RIP: $APLD fell 6.0% to $23.81 before earnings, then rebounded 2.1% after hours. Revenue jumped 322% to $341.9M, adjusted revenue reached $300.4M, and the adjusted loss narrowed to $0.01 per share. The firm posted a smaller loss with nearly 3X the revenue expected for the quarter.

The GAAP result was rougher. The company lost $221M from continuing operations attributable to common shareholders, or $0.76 per share, as interest expense climbed to $77.4M and stock-based compensation reached $66.5M.

Applied Digital now has 250 MW operating at Polaris Forge 1 and expects its North Dakota campuses to reach 300 MW by year-end. Building that capacity consumed $2.1B in quarterly capital spending, leaving the company with $6.4B of debt against $3.7B of cash and restricted cash.

The AI factories are real. So is the bill. 🏗️

Wolfspeed, which makes silicon carbide materials and power chips, said Wednesday that the Pentagon had offered a conditional 30-year financing commitment to expand U.S. production. Thirty years is generous. The fine print is doing plenty of work.

The RIP: $WOLF ( ▼ 1.45% ) closed -1.4% at $31.37, then jumped +25.1% to $39.23 after hours. The facility could reach $1.5B, starting with a $600M tranche and leaving another $900M available over a 36-month draw period.

Wolfspeed plans to refinance first-lien notes due 2030 and fund silicon-carbide and gallium-nitride capacity. But no cash is guaranteed. The company still needs final agreements, government approvals, due diligence, and at least $750M from qualifying outside sources. The Pentagon could also receive warrants for up to 7.5% of fully diluted equity. Washington may be offering time. Existing shareholders may help pay for it. 🏭

Reported short interest stood at 49.3% of the float as of Sept. 15. That made the 25% jump land in a crowded trade. It does not prove shorts covered.

$WOLF ticker talk is extremely bullish on financing that still has conditions →

Webull, the retail brokerage platform, plunged Wednesday after Reuters reported that a bipartisan House panel called the company’s structural ties to China a national-security risk. The committee first raised concerns about Webull’s ownership, technology, and handling of American user data in December 2024.

The RIP: $BULL ( ▼ 19.09% ) fell 19.1% to $5.89 on 80.7M shares, nine times its recent pace. The stock hit a near four-month low and finished 19% above the bottom of its 52-week range. It was the worst single day for the stock in a year.

Webull called the report inaccurate and said U.S. customer data remains stored domestically, with access controlled by American personnel. The report did not impose an operating ban or accuse Webull of losing customer assets.

It did put regulators on notice. Scotiabank said the findings could prompt broader government reviews, while Siebert Financial suspended its buy rating and price target because the potential regulatory fallout could not be modeled. One user posted on Stocktwits something to the tune of ‘Wow, a Chinese company is Chinese? now way!!’ 🏛️

$BULL chatter stayed 85% bullish despite the 19% hit →

Federal Reserve officials expect another rate increase before year-end, according to minutes from the September meeting released Wednesday. The central bank sees persistent inflation, a firm labor market, and surprisingly strong AI investment keeping the economy hot.

The RIP: The Fed voted 12-0 to raise rates 25 basis points to 3.75%-4.00%. Staff estimated August PCE inflation at 3.8%, core PCE at 3.4%, and unemployment at 4.1%. Most officials said another hike would likely be appropriate in 2026. Futures are pricing in a low, <20% chance for a rate hike at the next meeting in October, according to FedWatch.

“With regard to the outlook for monetary policy beyond the current meeting, most participants assessed that another increase in the target range for the federal funds rate would likely be appropriate by year end,” the meeting summary reads. 🏦

Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 Wednesday, calling it its fastest model at standard speeds. The small model targets high-volume jobs like classification, summarization, routing, browser use, and subagent work.

The RIP: $AMZN gained 1.4%, $GOOGL rose 0.8%, and $MSFT added 0.1%. All three cloud platforms carry Haiku 5.5. For prompts under 100,000 tokens, Anthropic charges $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens.

That is 90% cheaper than Haiku 4.5 after accounting for differences in token usage. Most importantly, it is more cost effective than the newly showcased DeepSeek 4.1 flash model. It costs around $1.8/100k tokens, compared to just $0.60 with Haiku. Unfortunately, that's just comparing tokens to tokens, DeepSeeks 4.1 and 4 Pro argued for similar performance results to old versions of Sonnet, while Haiku 5.5 beat GPT6 Luna and Sonnet 5.5 for computer use, it is unclear where Haiku sizes up.

The goal is smaller Al, cheaper intelligence, though the arms race has turned tokens into an undercutting competition, with no end in sight. 🤖

83.4K WATCHERS · BULLISH · NORMAL ACTIVITY

Strategy fell as Bitcoin dropped below $84,000 during a broad crypto selloff, dragging the market’s largest listed Bitcoin treasury toward its September lows.

36.0K WATCHERS · BULLISH · NORMAL ACTIVITY

Caterpillar led Dow decliners after the FTC and USDA opened a public inquiry into potential anticompetitive conduct across agricultural-equipment manufacturing and distribution.

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

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🚜 Washington puts the farm-equipment giants’ playbook under a microscope

👖 Levi’s tariff refund lifts guidance, but sales tell another story

🤖 Lisa Su’s Korea trip points AMD toward two memory giants

🚗 Used-car prices cool as buyers make one big trade-off

💊 Boots gets a new owner in an $8.9B family deal

🐧 Pudgy Penguins’ Ethereum network is heading for shutdown

☀️ Deutsche Bank puts a short-term sell clock on SolarEdge

💾 Dan Ives names five stocks for the AI buildout’s next leg

💱 The FX newsletter keeping score on the calls everyone else forgets

Macro: Weekly jobless claims (8:30 AM ET), Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report (9:00 AM ET), GDPNow (9:00 AM ET), Monthly Wholesale Trade: Sales and Inventories (9:00 AM ET), University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (preliminary) (10:00 AM ET). 📊
Pre-Market Earnings: $TLRY Tilray Brands Inc, $PEP PepsiCo Inc. ☀️
After-Market Earnings: $NRIX Nurix Therapeutics Inc, $PKE Park Aerospace Corp, $ODC Oil-Dri Corp. Of America. 🌙

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

Want to see some change? Respond to this email and reach me, Kevin Travers, with feedback. 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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