PROBABLY NOTHING
Separating the signal from the noise
IN THIS ISSUE (11) - 10 August 2026
🤖 AI capex just picked winners and losers
🔓 Coldcard hack triggers Bitcoin's busiest day since 2024
🧈 New ZARU Pairs are now available on Luno
THE WEEK IN MARKETS
A week after the Fed's hawkish hold had everyone bracing for a September hike, oil quietly dismantled the thesis. Brent fell almost 12% to around $79 after President Trump held off on fresh Iran strikes as a deal took shape, with OPEC+ adding a September supply bump for good measure. Cheaper energy took the edge off the inflation panic, and the September hike, priced in the low 80s a fortnight ago, is now closer to a coin toss at roughly 62%.
Gold had a loud week, up almost 7% to around $4,320 as a softer dollar and fading rate fears did the work geopolitics could not. Central banks are still hoovering it up, a record 289 tonnes last quarter, which tends to outlast any single headline.
Bitcoin firmed about 3% to just under $65,000 and Ether added 2.6%, while the real action sat in the mid-caps, Cardano up 12% and Polkadot 10% as the altcoin-rotation crowd found its voice again. Flows told the more grown-up story: July closed out two straight months of Bitcoin ETF outflows, roughly $7 billion gone across May and June, with a thin net positive, and Bitcoin funds snapped a seven-day outflow streak in early August.
🔥 WHAT’S UP: Cardano | +12% | 1 week
💧 WHAT’S DOWN: AMD | -7% (±$60 B) | 1 day
Data correct as at 06 August 2026.
THE BIG READ
Four AI bets, two report cards
Four of the biggest AI spenders on the planet reported earnings inside eight days, and the market split them cleanly in half. Amazon and Microsoft rallied. Alphabet (Google) and Meta fell. All four beat revenue estimates. All four are spending more on data centres than they were guiding to back in April. The only thing that actually moved the share price was whether each company could point to demand that already exists, or was still asking investors to take its word for it.
What split the line
Contracted backlog versus vague promises. Amazon and Microsoft could both show demand that had already been signed for. Meta and Google could only offer bigger spending commitments and a story about the future, and Google's cloud business is arguably stronger than either winner's, it just came bundled with negative cash flow at the worst possible moment to ask for more money.
All four are on track to spend north of $700bn combined this year, up sharply from 2025. Nobody on either side spent less. Nobody is planning to. The market isn't punishing AI capex, it's punishing capex without a customer already attached to it.
What the money’s actually buying
Strip away the earnings-day theatre and the four are shopping from the same list, just in different proportions. The common core: data centre land, buildings, and the servers and networking gear that go inside them, GPUs and CPUs chief among them. Memory prices have been the single biggest driver of guidance increases all year, with memory now projected to eat up roughly 30% of hyperscaler data centre spend in 2026.
Amazon: the above, plus custom silicon (Trainium chips), robotics, and its low-Earth-orbit satellite project, the broadest remit of the four.
Microsoft: Azure data centres and networking, sold onward to outside customers.
Alphabet: Google Cloud and DeepMind infrastructure, also sold onward, alongside capacity for Gemini and AI features across Search and YouTube.
Meta: data centres and custom chips built with Broadcom and AMD, almost entirely inward-facing to feed its own AI labs and ad engine rather than resold to anyone else.
The only question that matters now
Every number in this piece, the backlog, the growth rate, the guidance, is still a bet that today's spending turns into tomorrow's revenue. But it's a bet the market is already placing, in real time, every earnings season, and this particular week showed how fast the payout arrives once a company proves its case. Amazon's backlog and Azure's growth rate aren't just talking points anymore, they're the clearest evidence so far of which side of that bet is actually collecting for now.
That's the more interesting story here than picking a winner and waiting years to find out. The market is now handing out 7-9% moves within a day of an earnings call, which means the next print, not the next decade, is the next data point. Whether Amazon and Microsoft extend their lead or Alphabet and Meta close the gap, that verdict lands again next quarter.
Luno gives you tokenised exposure to all four.
Explore now
New ZARU Pairs: Now available on Luno
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QUICK TAKES
🚀 XRP finally gets a job in DeFi
Flare's wrapped XRP, FXRP, has been approved as collateral in a $280 million RLUSD lending vault run by Sentora on Ethereum's Morpho Blue, the first time an XRP-linked asset has qualified for an institutionally curated lending market. Holders can now borrow Ripple's stablecoin against their XRP without selling it, the same trick wrapped Bitcoin has used elsewhere in DeFi for years. A small step toward giving the fourth-largest crypto by market cap an actual job beyond sitting in wallets. Read more
💰 Bitcoin’s most active day since 2024
A firmware flaw in Coldcard hardware wallets, tracing back to a 2021 bug in how the device generated seed phrases, has drained upwards of $100 million in Bitcoin across four separate attack waves since 30 July. The panic triggered Bitcoin's busiest day on-chain since December 2024, as spooked holders rushed to sweep funds into fresh wallets rather than sell, a reflex that kept the price steady near $60,000 even as the theft total kept climbing through the week. Read more
🏦 Buffett's shopping list still says "nothing here"
Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on $397.4bn in cash, enough to buy all but two dozen S&P 500 companies outright, and new CEO Greg Abel is doing exactly what Buffett did: nothing much. Berkshire has now been a net seller of stocks for 14 straight quarters, unloading $24.1bn against $15.9bn in purchases last quarter alone. The excuse is the one value investors have leaned on all year: everything is expensive, and expensive doesn't get cheaper just because you're tired of waiting. Read more
PROBABLY SOMETHING
Raoul Pal thinks humans are about to disappear from most transactions, with AI agents settling on crypto because banks simply can't move at machine speed. The "two years" framing will make some people roll their eyes. But the core point, that autonomous agents need programmable and permissionless money to function at all, is the part actually worth engaging with. Read More.
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Investing in cryptocurrency may result in the loss of capital as the value can fluctuate.
