Meta just walked into the cloud business, and the two companies renting AI compute to Meta found out the hard way that your best customer can become your most dangerous competitor.

Meanwhile, Shutterstock’s $3.7 billion Getty merger collapsed after UK regulators demanded the one thing neither company was willing to hand over.

Today’s edition also has Bending Spoons’ first-day pop, Alcoa’s ill-received acquisition, and everything else that mattered on the third quarter’s opening session.

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Warsh spoke in Portugal at the ECB Forum and told markets inflation had improved since June’s meeting, but declined to say whether a July rate hike was on the table — sending Treasury yields briefly higher before they pulled back on the ambiguity.

Brent crude slipped below $72 after Trump signaled he’s willing to let Iran negotiations run past August 18, officially converting the war premium into something closer to a peace discount.

The yen hit a fresh 40-year low against the dollar, putting Japanese authorities on intervention watch as early as this Friday.

Tech equity fundraising hit $302 billion in the first half of 2026 — the only other times that number crossed $100 billion at the year midpoint were 2000 and 2021, and Mergermarket noted that “neither period augured well” for near-term equity markets.

Robinhood announced it is launching its own blockchain and expanding crypto perpetual futures in Europe at a London product event.

Meta is developing a new business segment to sell its excess AI computing capacity to outside customers. The company could host AI models in its data centers and charge developers to access them, or sell raw compute power the way Neoclouds do. Meta jumped 10% on the news. CoreWeave fell 13%, and Nebius dropped nearly 14%, as investors worried a major buyer of AI compute was about to become a competitor.

Guggenheim upgraded both Salesforce and ServiceNow to Buy, arguing that fears that AI will displace enterprise software are a hallucination and that the Armageddon scenario for the sector is misaligned with reality. Salesforce rose nearly 5%, and ServiceNow gained close to 4% on the call.

Global equity fundraising hit $729.4 billion in the first half of 2026, with tech alone accounting for around $302 billion, according to Mergermarket data. It is only the third time tech has crossed the $100 billion mark at the year's midpoint. The other two were 2000 and 2021. The dot-com bubble peaked shortly after the first, and the 2021 IPO boom preceded a Nasdaq crash in early 2022.

Italian tech company Bending Spoons went public at an $18 billion valuation, owning brands including AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo. Lime, the Uber-backed scooter company, raised $167 million at $25 per share and opened at $27. Two very different companies pricing in the same week signals the IPO window is open, and investors are not being particularly selective right now.

Iran's foreign ministry said its delegates would not meet with Trump's team in Qatar, complicating hopes for a lasting ceasefire. Oil barely reacted. Brent fell below $72, and WTI slipped under $69, suggesting markets have already priced most of the war premium back out. BMO Global Asset Management noted there is little room for a positive surprise even if negotiations do go well.

Shell revised its full-year LNG forecast lower in its annual market report, now projecting flat global cargo volumes versus the significant growth it had expected before the war. Before the conflict, Shell had expected global LNG sales to increase significantly this year. If Strait of Hormuz disruptions drag through year-end, the company warns the world could see a rare annual LNG supply contraction.

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Micron fell, Sandisk dropped, and Applied Materials slid nearly 5% as investors took profits after semis surged more than 80% in Q2. The money did not go to cash. The Dow hit a fresh intraday record above 52,700, the Russell 2000 hit an all-time high for its fifth straight record close, and the equal-weight S&P 500 outperformed the cap-weighted benchmark — the clearest sign the rally is broadening rather than breaking.

The S&P 500 financials sector rose 2.3%, leading the market as money rotated out of tech.  IBM gained 3.4%, Salesforce rose nearly 5%, and Nike added 2.6% despite posting a 12% sales decline in Greater China. KKM Financial's Jeff Kilburg described the dynamic as the Great Rotation trade continuing into Q3, with blue-chip names absorbing inflows directly from tech profit-taking.

The Trump administration announced it will not renew the USMCA in its current long-term form, shifting instead to annual reviews after the agreement's 10-year term expires. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the administration is not prepared to rubber-stamp the deal. The USMCA currently governs $1.6 trillion in annual goods trade between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, up from $1 trillion when the agreement took effect in 2020.

Kroger agreed to acquire the Pittsburgh-based family-owned grocery chain, adding nearly 200 stores across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Maryland, and West Virginia. The deal pushes Kroger into territory dominated by Ahold Delhaize, with Publix also pressing northward and Walmart holding the top spot in U.S. grocery nationwide. Kroger shares fell about 1.3% on the announcement.

Sadot Group [SDOT] $72.00 (+105.19%)

Sadot is a food commodities trading company that has doubled in two weeks. It is running at a thin float with a $26 million market cap. This is momentum chasing momentum — the kind of move that looks incredible from the outside and is nearly impossible to time from the inside. Flag it, don’t chase it.

Bending Spoons [BSP] $40.50 (+39.66%)

Bending Spoons, the Italian acquirer that owns AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and Evernote, priced at $27 per share and opened Wednesday as the year’s cleanest IPO day-one story.

Revenue more than doubled to $601 million in Q1. The model — acquire legacy digital brands, apply AI and subscription optimization, generate cash — is boring in the best possible way, and the market rewarded it.

Regencell Bioscience [RGC] $8.03 (+31.86%)

Regencell announced a definitive financing agreement with investors on Tuesday, injecting fresh capital into a near-zero-revenue traditional Chinese medicine company that had been winding down from a securities class action and DOJ subpoena.

New capital in a distressed small-cap with a $4 billion market cap is the kind of news that moves a stock fast, regardless of what the underlying business looks like.

Shutterstock [SSTK] $9.90 (-29.03%)

Getty Images’ board unanimously voted to terminate the $3.7 billion merger with Shutterstock after UK regulators demanded that Shutterstock’s editorial business be sold off as a condition for approval.

Getty’s board decided that wasn’t worth it, officially walking away before the July 6 deadline.

Shutterstock now faces generative AI competition as a standalone company with Q1 revenue already down 18% year-over-year. The valuation floor that the merger provided is gone.

Nebius Group [NBIS] $229.18 (-17.01%)

Nebius has a $27 billion deal with Meta and just watched Meta announce it plans to enter the cloud business it’s been paid to provide.

The concern is straightforward: if Meta starts selling GPU capacity to others, Nebius loses pricing leverage, market position, and potentially a portion of the demand that justified its valuation.

Bernstein’s note on margin and financing pressures across the neocloud sector landed on the same day, adding a second hit.

CoreWeave [CRWV] $85.68 (-13.86%)

CoreWeave has a $21 billion agreement with Meta and the same structural problem as Nebius: the Bloomberg report about Meta Compute turns their most important customer into a potential competitor.

CoreWeave’s revenue backlog is nearly $100 billion, but when the entity funding that backlog is also building competing infrastructure, the market reprices the risk in one session.

There’s an Elon Musk story most investors are missing.

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That's it for today! Please, write us back, and let us know what you think of the Closing Bell Roundup. We're always eager to hear feedback!

Thanks for reading. I'll see you at the next open! 

Best Regards,
— Adam G.
Elite Trade Club

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