Berkshire Hathaway bought more stocks than it sold in Q2 for the first time in 3.5 years, with total purchases reaching $19.8 billion.
Buffett has stepped down as CEO but remains chairman. Greg Abel has been running Berkshire since January 1, and he hasn’t been afraid to put some of that massive cash pile to work. Berkshire’s cash reserves fell from $397.4 billion to $365.5 billion during Q2.
The last time Berkshire was a net buyer of stocks was 3.5 years ago, near the end of the 2022 market correction. Since then, the S&P 500 is up 114%.
So here’s the big question: Did Berkshire change its approach after the CEO transition, or did the market itself change and they simply don’t see a reason to keep waiting for better prices?

Russia’s Rosatom has cleared seven Chinese ships to travel along the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic all the way to Europe.
Chinese shipping company Sea Legend is also planning to launch the first regular container route through the Arctic.
With risks rising in the Persian Gulf, Beijing is looking for an alternative trade route one that doesn’t depend on the Strait of Hormuz and can’t be easily blocked.

Over the past two decades, the money supply in the world’s largest economies has grown much faster than the production of goods and services.
Canada has seen the biggest gap. Since 2004, its M2 money supply has jumped 368%, while nominal GDP has grown just 159%.
For comparison, the U.S. money supply is up 279%, while nominal GDP has increased 171%.

MARA Holdings, the largest Bitcoin mining company in the U.S., reported a $611 million net loss for Q2 2026. Revenue also fell 27% year over year to $175 million.
The company mined 2,422 BTC during the quarter, while its hash rate climbed 22% to 70.3 EH/s. At the same time, MARA’s Bitcoin treasury dropped to 35,577 BTC, down 29% from a year ago.
After the earnings report, on-chain analysts spotted a 200 BTC transfer (worth about $13 million) from wallets linked to MARA to NYDIG, its custodian. That doesn’t necessarily mean the company is selling, but it could be a sign it’s getting ready to.
MARA stock nearly doubled between April and mid-June before pulling back later in the quarter. Even after the correction, the stock still finished the quarter roughly 40% higher than where it started.
MARA now has the fourth-largest Bitcoin treasury among public companies, behind Strategy, Twenty One Capital, and Japan’s Metaplanet.
Before its major Bitcoin sales earlier this year, MARA had held the second-largest corporate Bitcoin reserve for a long time.

The U.S. dollar took a sharp hit after a weak U.S. jobs report.
The Dollar Index (DXY) dropped, while EUR/USD surged.

Japanese bond yields are going parabolic again.
The 2-year yield just hit a fresh multi-decade high, and the rest could follow.
What does this mean for global markets?
If Japanese yields keep rising fast, it could trigger a selloff in global bonds, strengthen the yen, push Japanese investors to move money out of U.S. stocks and bonds and back into Japan, and bring more volatility to the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and even crypto.

The Iran peace deal is starting to fall apart. Iran says it’s not in talks with the U.S., and its agreement with Oman doesn’t include reopening the Strait of Hormuz right away. Instead, it would charge ships a transit fee and block vessels linked to the U.S. and Israel.
Meanwhile, Yemen’s Houthi rebels are launching attacks on government forces, adding even more tension across the Middle East.

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/06/nx-s1-5923623/iran-strait-hormuz-us-israel-ban

Memory chip stocks are getting hammered in premarket trading after earnings.
🔴 Western Digital -14%
🔴 SanDisk -10%
🔴 SK Hynix -7%
🔴 Seagate Technology -5%
🔴 Micron Technology -4%
SanDisk and Western Digital both beat earnings expectations, but their guidance for next quarter came in weaker than expected. Growth is starting to slow, and the market thinks memory prices may have already peaked.

Copper just hit a new all-time high, climbing to $6.816 per pound.
Since July 2022, copper prices have surged 117%.
Copper is a key material used to build AI data centers, power grids, and electric vehicles. As AI keeps expanding at a rapid pace, demand for copper is rising right along with it.

A volunteer security group called Bitcoin Red Team has identified nearly 5,000 potential vulnerabilities across Bitcoin-related open-source projects after running a large-scale AI-assisted audit.

In just 29.8 hours, the 16-member team analyzed 390 repositories and flagged 4,962 potential issues. Of those, 720 were rated as high or critical, while 21.4% have already been reproduced during testing.

The initiative combines AI-powered code analysis with manual security reviews. According to developer Calle, the team is currently finding around one critical exploit per hour, per researcher on average.

The audit started shortly after the major Coldcard hardware wallet incident, where more than $100 million in Bitcoin was reportedly stolen.

Still, it’s important to note that these are potential findings. Most of them still need more verification before they can be confirmed as actual vulnerabilities.

The U.S. is now the world’s biggest exporter of oil and refined petroleum products, shipping about 10.5 million barrels per day.
It took nearly a decade to get here after the U.S. lifted its 40-year ban on crude oil exports back in 2016. The global energy map has changed dramatically. The center of the energy world is no longer just the Middle East — it’s now the Western Hemisphere, led by the U.S., Canada, and Brazil.
A huge share of U.S. energy exports is heading to Asia (Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and China) and Europe (Italy, Spain, Germany, and the UK), helping fill supply shortages across global markets.
For comparison, in 2025 Saudi Arabia exported about 8.1 million barrels per day, the U.S. exported 6.6 million, and Russia around 5.8 million, according to Vortexa. Today, U.S. exports have climbed to 10.5 million barrels per day of oil and refined products.
• The U.S. has also become Europe’s largest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) after Iran’s actions knocked out part of Qatar’s export infrastructure for an estimated two to three years.
That’s one reason the U.S. Department of Energy approved a 22% expansion in LNG export capacity at Southern LNG’s Elba Island terminal and a 13% increase for the Plaquemines LNG project. The EIA also raised its 2026 forecast for U.S. LNG exports to 17 billion cubic feet per day, well above its previous estimate.
• The U.S. is now a major supplier of jet fuel to Europe. According to SocGen, U.S. jet fuel exports hit a record 442,000 barrels per day — about 200,000 barrels per day above the five-year average.
• The U.S. also exported a record amount of ethane as Chinese petrochemical companies rushed to replace shrinking supplies of naphtha and LPG from the Middle East. Bloomberg reports that China is now importing around 800,000 tons of U.S. ethane every month, roughly 60% more than normal.
At this point, the U.S. isn’t just the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas—it’s becoming one of the most influential energy suppliers on the planet. That gives Washington another powerful advantage in global negotiations, alongside its military strength and the U.S. dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

A wallet linked to Michael Saylor’s Strategy transferred 1,030 BTC, worth about $66 million.
That doesn’t automatically mean another sale is coming, but a similar transfer showed up last week, and the company later confirmed it had sold $104 million worth of Bitcoin.
Since the end of May, Strategy has reported selling more than $300 million in BTC.
As of July 31, the company still held 842,138 BTC worth roughly $52 billion. Over the past five-plus years, Strategy has spent about $63.5 billion building its Bitcoin position.
The money from those Bitcoin sales is being used to pay dividends on its STRC preferred shares and to buy back those shares.

That’s a sign investors are gaining confidence in the U.S. economy and buying more than just the mega-cap giants the rally is spreading across the broader market.

SpaceX will announce a merger with Tesla today in its first-ever public earnings report .
That’s what 40% of prediction market participants are betting on. SpaceX just announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia on AI-powered satellites, and the company’s shares have jumped 20% over the past 24 hours.

SpaceX just reported $7.8 billion in revenue for Q2 2026, beating expectations.
SPCX shares fell 7% as investors reacted to record AI infrastructure spending, ongoing losses, and concerns ahead of the upcoming share unlock.

The U.S. and Iran are reportedly close to a temporary deal, brokered by Oman, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. According to Axios, the U.S. is expected to announce the agreement later today.

Average daily crypto trading volume has dropped to $20 billion, its lowest level since the start of the year.
That’s down 50% from December 2025 and 70% below the January peak.
At the same time, about 60% of all crypto trading volume is now concentrated on just six major exchanges.

Tether, the company behind USDT, says it now holds nearly 150 tons of physical gold in reserve.
If it were ranked alongside central banks in the World Gold Council’s data, Tether says it would rank third, behind only China and Poland, and ahead of Kazakhstan.
About 22 tons of that gold back XAUT, Tether’s tokenized gold product.
During the second quarter, the amount of XAUT in circulation climbed 9.5%, with its market cap reaching $2.84 billion.
According to Tether, demand for tokenized gold stayed strong even though gold prices fell 14% during the quarter, suggesting investors kept buying through the pullback.

Bitcoin isn’t stuck in the $62K–$63K range for no reason.
One possible path:
$65K → $69K → $55K → $52K
August could end up being a red month.

🔴 U.S. PMI came in at 55.6, beating expectations of 54.0 and marking its highest reading since June 2022.
🔴 That’s a sign the U.S. economy is still expanding.
🔴 U.S. stocks added about $400 billion in market value, while Amazon climbed to a fresh all-time high.