You gotta raise it to spend it

S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 futures reversed early gains to turn negative after September’s core CPI inflation came in hotter than expected.

This jolt may upend what’s been a low-energy tape lately: the last three sessions have been the lowest three days of dollar volume for SPY in 2026!

Robinhood traders are still constructively adding to single stocks, with five-session net purchases running at 90% of their all-time high. However, overall trading activity in the most-active securities has fallen off meaningfully. On Tuesday, nine of the 15 most-active securities had volumes at least 20% below their prior one-month average, with only Meta and Apple enjoying above-average activity.

As a subsidiary of Robinhood, Sherwood Media is restricted from writing about any company in which Robinhood is or was a selling group member of the IPO during the regulatory "quiet period" for that company.

You gotta raise it to spend it

Wednesday’s two marquee events are the continued reaction to this morning’s CPI report and the numbers coming out of Anthropic’s analyst day.

Typically, you’d argue that CPI is the “macro” event — an aggregated snapshot of prices — and that Anthropic’s financials are the “micro” company-specific figures. Today could be more of a role reversal for those who take a longer viewl. Anthropic offers a lens into the intensity and longevity of the AI capex boom, as well as how large its downstream effects could be. Conversely, September’s inflation report probably won’t even influence the US central bank very much in the near term, with Fed officials seemingly teeing up a pause in October after their rate hike in September.

I’d also argue these two events are about opposite things: for CPI, it’s about how fast prices are rising. For Anthropic, it’s about whether falling token prices undermine the company’s ability to continue posting white-hot sales growth. 

These two dynamics are related! 

One reason why price pressures remain elevated is because of AI-induced shortages. And necessity is the mother of invention: intense demand and limited supply across the AI supply chain has helped force efficiency in token provision and lower costs (along with more competition, including from open models). All the promised AI productivity hasn’t made its way downstream yet, but it sure is visible in token generation.

It’s interesting that two of the best Anthropic proxy companies available in public markets — SK Telecom and Zoom, both of which have a stake in the frontier lab — posted 52-week highs on June 2. Both extended losses during the subsequent momentum breakdown in Q3 and have yet to fully recover.

Any figures that are released or leaked today will certainly influence the valuation of the Claude developer, which in turn will shape perception on how much money frontier labs can pour into the pursuit of more powerful models. 

Make no mistake about it: Anthropic is going public to raise money to spend money so it can raise even more money to spend even more money.

If you don’t believe me, well, just know that this is the norm. A couple snippets from a recently published working paper on the investment behavior and access to capital for newly IPO’d companies: “even firms with access to private equity [ed’s note: i.e. VC] capital go public when their external capital needs are high” and “firms raise additional capital and increase investment after going public,” generally on improved terms.

“My understanding is that Anthropic previously 'guided' to c. $90 billion in ARR by year-end, though that seems to have increased to $100 billion,” writes Viresh Kanabar, strategist at Macro Hive. “Based on this, c. $75-$80 billion is required to be on track for their Dec ARR guide. This implies Q3 revenues of around $18 billion. Materially less than this would be disappointing despite increased competition from OpenAI in Q3.”

Reading the tea leaves from Nvidia’s most recent earnings call, Jensen Huang expects purchases from Anthropic and OpenAI to account for about a quarter of sales next year (while also indicating that the chip designer remains supply-constrained).

AI bulls are looking to see an Anthropic revenue trajectory that confirms a clear runway for picks and shovels stocks. 

If the two options are…

• Anthropic is going public because they need money and now is a good time to raise it, or

• Anthropic is going public because they need money badly

…then as long as it’s the former, you’d think they have some good news to share.

Even with massive efficiency gains and potentially-profitable inference ex training margins, offering more and more tokens at a falling cost may be a difficult way to earn and grow a multi-trillion valuation. For that, frontier labs need to offer functionalities and applications that meaningfully eat into the market share of established industries, companies, or humans.

To this end, Anthropic shared news about Scion — its coding system of record optimized for agents rather than human software development — on Tuesday. This could, in theory, be a threat to GitLab down the road.

GitLab cratered late in the trading day, while semiconductors finished at their highs of the day (albeit still in the red).

Ask questions later

The semi space has been rattled in recent days by confusion over OpenAI’s revenues and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan allegedly throwing shade on AI bulls (remarks which appear to have been misinterpreted in the initial media report).

In light of this, I think it’s illuminating to highlight this exchange between Atreides Management CIO Gavin Baker and the @P_Remarks account on X:

The message from @P_Remarks encapsulates the general market mood very well right now, especially when one looks at how Korean stocks have been clobbered amid fears of Chinese competition.

We can add this to the litany of things we’ve detailed in this newsletter that show how the character of the AI trade has changed: the second derivative for semiconductor earnings has turned negative (i.e. growth is no longer expected to accelerate), the group has been fully booted from shorter-term price momentum baskets, and demand for far out-of-the-money upside in options markets has diminished significantly.

I’d also look to clarify or expand Gavin’s premise here (while acknowledging that yes, context around these events could have probably been reported better, and I am no stranger to erring in this regard).

Volatility on all newsflow, whether reported perfectly or not, is a hallmark of the AI era. Acting first and asking questions later is almost (almost!) a rational response when you’re trying to wrap your head around how an emergent technology may or may not reshape trillion-dollar industries over a period of many years.

For a long time, we’d have AI-related press releases where every company involved got a lift, whether it was a buyer or seller of compute. Buy first, ask questions later. Afterwards, we started to maybe not like all the answers to the questions — I’m thinking specifically of the negative reaction when investors learned that OpenAI was the dominant source of Oracle’s massive revenue backlog. 2026 brought a narrower focus on the bottleneck beneficiaries of AI spend, with punishment doled out to the companies making these outlays.

And, of course, Q1 was a period of shooting software stocks first and asking questions later any time Anthropic announced a new Claude functionality. Lately, all that’s changed is who’s being shot first — which makes GitLab’s Tuesday tumble a notable exception to this nascent rule.

The only real constant has been “ask questions later” — and that’s a dynamic that’s served up fertile trading and investing opportunities.

Seen on Socials

Via JC Parets on X:

What to watch

Wednesday:

• Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Fastenal, and Progressive Corp. release earnings premarket.

• September CPI inflation report scheduled for 8:30 a.m. ET.

• Anthropic scheduled to host an analyst day.

Thursday:

• TSMC slated to report results overnight.

• Earnings from BNY Mellon, Charles Schwab, and Interactive Brokersslated for release ahead of the open.

• September retail sales and PPI inflation scheduled for 8:30 a.m. ET.

• American Airlinesand JB Hunt results due out postmarket.