One group profiting from all the Liberation Day market chaos? Trading desks across Wall Street.

Citigroup’s equity traders, for example, just reported their best quarter in five years, generating $1.61 billion over the last three months. Then there’s Goldman Sachs, which posted the best quarter of trading in Wall Street history: Its equity trading division brought in $4.3 billion for Q2, roughly $600 million above what analysts expected.

Over at JPMorgan Chase, traders enjoyed their best Q2 ever, raking in $3.25 billion. They helped give the company the most impressive flex of all this earnings season: JPMorgan’s market cap is now larger than its next three biggest competitors—Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo—combined.

Trading keeps winning

Wall Street trading divisions, which make money from fees by facilitating the buying and selling of stocks, have been wiping the floor with other parts of big banks’ businesses for a while now.

The slowdown in both IPOs and M&A activity has put a serious damper on the investment banking business, leaving traders to generate roughly 75% of big banks’ total revenue for the last three years, according to the FT. Geopolitical chaos, high interest rates, and volatile trade policies have all pushed companies to wait longer to go public—at the exact same time that those forces have boosted activity on trading desks.

These days, banks are more optimistic about dealmaking coming back, too, with Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick saying on a call with analysts that the investment banking industry is still in the “early stages” of recovery. But maybe he should put an emphasis on the “early”: Morgan Stanley investment banking revenue fell 5% year over year.

What’s next for the Street?

It wasn’t all raining money and popping champagne Wolf of Wall Street style, though. Shares of Wells Fargo, for example, dropped yesterday after the bank cut its 2025 guidance for net interest income—which is calculated by measuring the difference between cash earned on loans and what it pays out in deposits—noting that the figure will remain flat.

But overall, many analysts see more moneymaking in Wall Street’s future, especially as the dealmaking pipeline gains momentum and the White House pushes for deregulation.—LB

🟢 What’s up

• VC powerhouse and diehard Tolkien fan Peter Thiel revealed he’s taken a 9% stake in bitcoin miner BitMine Immersion Technologies. Shares popped 12.11%, while fellow miners that have also recently invested in ether soared in tandem: SharpLink Gaming added 29.03%, and Bit Digital gained 19.45%.
• In fact, most crypto stocks had a good day thanks to renewed optimism that Crypto Week isn’t over in Congress. MicroStrategy climbed 3.07% and MARA Holdings jumped 3.62%.
• Johnson & Johnson rose 6.19% after the consumer goods giant reported impressive earnings last quarter and raised its forward guidance.
• BrightHouse Financial popped 6.23% on reports that the insurer may be bought by private equity firm Aquarian Holdings.
• Tesla gained 3.50% after the EV maker revealed the new six-seat Model Y it will begin selling in China this fall.

What’s down

• ASML dropped 8.33% after the chipmaker warned that growth might be completely flat next year.
• Ford fell 2.85% on the news that the automaker is recalling nearly 700,000 crossover SUVs due to fuel leaks.
• GrabAGun Digital Holdings, the online gun seller backed by Donald Trump, Jr., made its market debut today. Investor reception was scathing, and the stock slid 24.19%.

Plenty of people have made their millions trading cryptocurrencies, we just didn’t expect the president of the United States to be one of them.

A massive batch of $TRUMP memecoins will be unlocked tomorrow, according to Bloomberg, meaning early investors who were previously restricted from selling the token will be free to take profits. One of the people who stands to make the most from the unlock is none other than President Trump himself.

With 90 million tokens worth a combined $930 million hitting the market, Trump’s share of that hoard should net him roughly $93 million. While that’s not a bad day’s work, the president has reportedly already earned about $150 million trading his own memecoin. And it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the $620 million the entire Trump family has made from crypto across investment vehicles like World Liberty Financial.

Much like death and taxes, Labubus are impossible to avoid—lurking on bags, briefcases, and dog leashes, leering at you with their snaggle-toothed grins when you least expect them. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, these popular plushies have pushed shares of the Chinese toymaker Pop Mart 169.87% higher in 2025 alone.

Labubus also propelled Pop Mart’s revenue 200% higher in the first half of 2025, the company reported late yesterday, and profits soared 350%. Numbers like that should make shareholders pleased, but they don’t seem dazzled at all: The stock sank 4.89% today.

This sudden drop suggests that investors are worried that the Labubu fad may finally be fading.

The Labubu hullabaloo

Labubus were introduced as part of the “Monsters” book franchise back in 2015. The toys really only took off in 2019 thanks to a collaboration with Beijing-based variety shop Pop Mart, which started trading publicly in Hong Kong a year later with a valuation of $6.9 billion—on par with big-league toymakers Mattel and Hasbro.

Today, the toy comes in over 300 styles priced from $15 for a three-inch figurine to $170,000 for a four-foot statue. A large part of the obsession is fueled by the “blind box” packaging, where you never know what you’re going to get: Rare, “secret” versions spur buying frenzies with 1-in-72 odds that, in a randomized Monte Carlo simulation, cost an average of $2,000 to land.

Although Pop Mart now boasts over 500 stores worldwide and 90 retail locations in the US (including vending machines), $1.1 billion of the $1.8 billion in revenue the company reported in fiscal 2024 comes from mainland China. There, the craze is still crazy: Revenue from China soared 112% year over year in 2024.

La-boo-boo

But while the doll’s popularity in its core market hasn’t waned just yet, Pop Mart’s shareholders are focused on the future.

“At AI-tech-level price equity ratios, some Pop Mart investors are popping out of the stock and taking profits while they can before the fad turns south as so many fads do,” Running Point Capital CIO Michael Ashley Schulman told Brew Markets. “Yes, management guided to a 350% profit pop for the first half of ’25, but after a 170% year-to-date rocket ride, the stock was already priced like a rare Labubu chase figure—about 6 times sales versus Mattel’s 1.5, and a nosebleed $47 billion market cap.”

Labubu sales accounted for about 23.5% of Pop Mart’s overall revenue in 2024, and while the first half of 2025 was clearly a strong one for the company, any hint of weakness in sales of its most popular product could spell disaster for the stock.

“Investors opened the blind box and found…valuation risk. Collectible frenzies can turn into landfill faster than you can say Beanie Babies,” Sculman continued.

Labubu, it was nice knowing you.—JD

• Diageo CEO Debra Crew has stepped down from her role at the head of the struggling alcoholic beverage maker.
• Apollo Global Management is reportedly considering buying a stake in Spanish soccer team Atlético Madrid.
• GameStop doesn’t miss: The video game retailer auctioned off a damaged Nintendo Switch 2 console for $250,000.
• President Trump says he is planning to send tariff letters to 150 countries in the coming days.
• The EU is planning to raise its defense spending to 131 billion euros beginning in 2028.
• The Fed’s Beige Book revealed a slight increase in economic activity across the country this summer.

We’ve got a big day ahead: Thursday is packed with initial jobless claims, US retail sales, the import price index, and the homebuilder’s confidence index.

As for earnings, while big banks are in the books, there are plenty of names that you should be watching for tomorrow, including TSMC, PepsiCo, Abbott Laboratories, Cintas, US Bancorp, Travelers, Citizens Bank, Fifth Third Bancorp, and Interactive Brokers.

But there’s one household name that will likely catch most investors’ attention:

After the close

• Netflix has a problem of scale: It’s so globally popular that it mathematically can’t continue growing as quickly as it has in the past. That’s why the company has pivoted its focus from subscriber additions to maximizing subscriber engagement, and which is why it’s undertaking new endeavors like live sports programming. But buying the rights to broadcast pro games costs big bucks, and shareholders will want to see if those price tags have burdened the bottom line, or proven to be smart investments. Consensus: $7.05 EPS, and revenue of $11.04 billion.