• Commodities: Oil prices popped today after President Trump rejected Iran’s peace proposal over the weekend, though crude retreated from its highs on reports that a key Saudi Arabian pipeline has been repaired.
• Bonds: Treasury yields jumped first thing this morning, and may remain elevated, as a volatile week featuring the August PCE reading on Wednesday and the September jobs report on Friday keeps traders on their toes.
• Stocks: Rising bond yields and oil prices sent all three major indexes tumbling today, but the Dow continues to be the biggest loser. In fact, at the rate things are going this will be the Dow’s worst September since 2023.

SPACE

Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Elon Musk is a lot of things, but a quitter is certainly not one of them. After 13 increasingly ambitious test flights, SpaceX’s Starship finally reached orbit this morning after its 14th launch.

Fourteenth time’s the charm

Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation rocket system, designed to become a much larger and fully reusable successor to Falcon 9—the workhorse that currently carries satellites and other cargo into orbit.

It’s a pretty big upgrade:

• Size: Starship has a payload capacity roughly four times that of Falcon 9.
• Reusability: Falcon 9 reuses only its first-stage booster, while Starship is designed for both major stages to be recovered and reused.
• Cost: SpaceX says Starship could eventually reduce the cost of reaching orbit by 99% or more compared with historical launch costs.
• Starlink: Falcon 9 currently carries Starlink’s V2 satellites, while Starship is designed for the larger V3 generation. A full load of 60 V3s could add more than 20 times as much Starlink bandwidth per launch, and Musk said all 26 satellites carried on today’s flight were “deployed and operating nominally.”

Starship isn’t just a cool rocket, it’s central to SpaceX’s larger ambitions. Musk says the company could grow from $18.7 billion in revenue last year to $1 trillion by 2030, a target that will require putting far more payload—the satellites and other cargo a rocket carries—into orbit at far lower cost.

Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite-internet business, has become a major revenue engine for the company—and brings in more than half of its income. SpaceX’s Connectivity segment, where Starlink sits, generated $4.29 billion in Q2 revenue and $1.66 billion in operating income, while its traditional Space segment brought in just $962 million in revenue and lost $542 million.

The service also had 12 million subscribers at the end of June, double a year earlier, but average revenue per subscriber fell 22% as SpaceX expanded internationally and added cheaper plans. As Starlink brings on more lower-paying customers, keeping launch costs down becomes increasingly important to protecting margins.

More to prove

While today’s flight was a significant milestone for the company, the stock fell 2.16% this afternoon thanks to some blips along the way: One of Starship’s six upper-stage engines shut down during ascent.

While successfully reaching orbit removes one major technical hurdle, SpaceX has yet to show that it can reliably recover and reuse both stages—a key step toward bringing down costs and potentially opening the door to larger commercial payloads, government missions, and other launches that Falcon 9 can’t handle as efficiently.

Today’s flight moved Starship closer to that goal. But for a company already carrying enormous expectations in its valuation, investors were left wanting more.—SY

      

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Stocks

🟢 What’s up

• Kodiak Sciences surged 177.96% after two experimental eye treatments succeeded in a late-stage trial.
• Palo Alto Networks popped 4.63% and CrowdStrike rallied 2.82% as reports that OpenAI’s models accessed US government websites fueled concerns about AI security.
• Chipotle gained 1.72% as the restaurant chain brought back its classic margaritas for a limited time.

🔴 What’s down

• MongoDB fell 18.46% after CEO Chirantan Desai abruptly stepped down to take a senior role at Meta.
• Roblox dropped 9.82% on a Jefferies downgrade that warned improving growth in the US and Canada could take longer and cost more than expected.
• Getty Images sank 40.95% on reports that the company is seeking rescue financing from lenders.
• Boeing slipped 6.91% after identifying a software glitch that could disrupt an automated landing feature on its 737 MAX.
• Newmont declined 4.43% alongside falling gold prices.

Stock of the day

The buys are back in town

Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images

Nvidia pushed its chips all-in today, betting everything on...chips.

The AI giant launched the largest stock buyback in US market history, increasing its share-repurchase authorization by $150 billion and bringing its total buyback program to $235 billion. The announcement eclipses the previous record of $110 billion set by Apple in 2024—and for those reading the tea leaves, it signals how CEO Jensen Huang and his company see the state of the AI market for years to come.

Nvidia wants more, more, more

Beyond being the biggest publicly traded company by market cap—currently valued at $5.4 trillion—Nvidia is also the AI industry’s heftiest investor. Its portfolio includes 13 public companies like SpaceX and Intel, and 229 private companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

If IPOs and profits deliver as promised, Nvidia’s portfolio is set to supersize in the coming years. With the buyback, Nvidia doesn’t just assert confidence in its own revenue potential, but in the industry at large. “Our cash generation gives us the capacity to invest in the technologies that advance this transformation and return capital to shareholders,” Huang said in a release.

Translation: Nvidia “sees the current AI buildout as durable rather than a short-term spike,” David Wagner, head of equity at Aptus Capital Advisors, told MarketWatch.

That’s a direct rejoinder to concerns about an AI bubble. “The real signal isn’t the buyback itself. It’s what the scale of the commitment says about how much cash Nvidia expects to keep generating through 2028,” Wagner added.—GR

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MARKETS

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Adobe Stock

If you’re torn about how to navigate markets these days, you’re not alone: Even Wall Street pros are divided about what happens next.

The bulls

Analysts at JPMorgan Chase’s trading desk see the glass half full. The group, led by Global Head of Market Intelligence Andrew Tyler, just shifted their market outlook from tactically neutral to outright bullish, raising the end-of-year target for the S&P 500 from 7,800 to 8,000.

“We now see a more favorable setup for markets as bond yields find a level and oil prices are likely to trend lower, albeit in a choppy fashion,” Tyler wrote. It’s worth listening to him: Tyler & Co. turned cautious back in June just ahead of a volatile summer for markets, accurately forecasting a selloff in AI stocks.

Here’s why JPMorgan’s feeling optimistic:

• In the near term, catalysts like the jobs report on Friday, plus the next CPI report and Fed decision in October, could juice stocks heading into the final quarter of the year.
• Looking ahead, strong earnings growth combined with lower macroeconomic volatility will boost markets across the board.
• As for specifics, Tyler says the AI trade has regained momentum and he loves owning tech, particularly semiconductor stocks. He also likes banks, which will profit from a steeper yield curve.

The bears

But just down Wall Street, Morgan Stanley isn’t so positive: Chief Investment Officer Mike Wilson recently warned that a market correction could be right around the corner. He noted that ongoing volatility due to rising oil prices and bond yields, coupled with election-season volatility, could send the S&P 500 tumbling to 7,100 in the near term. The firm’s caution comes right as we head into October, the most volatile month for the market.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however: Wilson made it clear that he isn’t saying investors should sell out of fear. “We’re rotating as opposed to reducing our overall equity exposure,” he told Bloomberg Television earlier this month. “I don’t think people should be reducing their equity exposure.”

For now, Wilson recommends investors focus on quality stocks with strong free cash flows. And he still believes that near-term volatility will eventually recede, while strong earnings growth will propel markets higher toward the end of the year.

So, what now?

Wall Street’s consensus calls for the S&P 500 to rise to 7,870 before the year ends, or about 2% higher from today’s close. If you ask JPMorgan, that seems like a tantalizingly easy target—but, as Morgan Stanley warned, the path to reaching it may be a bumpy one.—MR

      

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News

• In a major handshake deal after their state dinner, the US and China have agreed to cut tariffs on $60 billion of goods.
• It may not even be Halloween yet, but analysts at Adobe predict this year’s holiday shopping season will see record digital sales.
• A new report finds that retail investors have purchased just $1 billion of single stocks in the last 20 days—the lowest rate in at least two years.
• China is reportedly considering allowing domestic tech companies to buy Nvidia’s newest chips.
• Nvidia is building new defenses to prevent AI agents going rogue.
• Good news for gas guzzlers: The US has finalized new fuel economy standards that should make cars cheaper but raise fuel consumption.

Calendar

This week will see plenty of labor market data come in, starting with tomorrow’s JOLTS reading, and we’ll get a look at the US September Conference Board consumer confidence index. Plus, earnings continue to trickle in with Carnival Corp., CarMax, and Uranium Energy.

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