iRobot: the “centerpiece” for Apple’s new AI strategy is… a tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion. This new Siri is slated to have a lifelike visual personality, an approach the company code-named “Bubbles” — let’s hope it’s closer to a talking Wall-E than Microsoft’s loathed Clippy. Hopefully Bubbles will at least be able to tell us what month it is. 

A hotter-than-expected reading of July’s producer price index put stocks, and particularly small-caps, on the back foot to start the day. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 managed to bounce back, with the former closing marginally higher and the latter fractionally lower, while the Russell 2000 fell more than 1% on the day.

🧠 Trivia time: See how closely you’ve been paying attention to the news with our weekly Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s a sample question:

Retail traders are rewriting the rules of the market. While their influence on “meme” stocks like GME and AMC, and more recently the DORK stocks, have forced institutions to take them more seriously, their impact isn’t strictly limited to what’s trending on r/WallStreetBets. Retail now accounts for about 20% of total trading volume, compared with less than 15% for hedge funds.

In the original GameStop frenzy, traders sought out a stock that was heavily shorted by hedge funds, but in an about-face, now they’re forcing institutional investors into trading their favorite stocks. This week, for example, Goldman Sachs strategist John Marshall told clients to buy large-cap stocks with elevated retail activity, like Palantir Technologies and Advanced Micro Devices. 

Retail traders are also playing a key role in fueling a stock’s price movement at a time when every investor’s eyes are on them: quarterly earnings.

As institutional investors shift their strategies in response to retail traders and retail traders drive off-the-charts volatility with their earnings moves, it’s become less clear who is a sheep and who is the shepherd in traders’ herd mentality. Retail traders are now such a market-moving force that institutional investors are chasing their trades, flipping the narrative. 

The Guild is a fictional property of Activision. This is not an offer to invest. Trademark & Copyright 2025.

Wall Street tracks earnings. But the world tracks threats. And they’re accelerating. The Guild is a new class of defense company: born in classified ops, and now going public with its mission and its ownership.

The Guild’s IPO opens up decades of classified defense tech to the public. It’s not about betting on growth. It’s betting against collapse. Because in a world built on code and chaos, peace of mind might be the ultimate dividend.

While others scale, we secure. While others mine your data, we defend it. 

Safety for you and your loved ones is just a subscription away.

Look, we’ve spent a lot of time in Las Vegas, and summer’s over 100-degree-in-the-shade days don’t make it our favorite time to visit, but something more than a summer slump is happening. Data shows the number of visitors has dropped every single month in 2025, relative to 2024, with June seeing 11% fewer tourists compared to the same time a year before.

Vegas has never seen this level of slowdown, with the exception of the pandemic. There are a few reasons some people are putting their money on, such as:

But we’re betting all our chips on a third option: why go to Sin City when you can gamble while sitting on your couch?

Indeed, the massive rise of online sports betting, which we’ve charted here, shows Americans’ appetite for gambling hasn’t dampened one bit, with a peak of $16.8 billion bet in a single month this year. 

And if you’re a fan of unlikely parlays and prop bets, well, prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket let you wager on who will be the next pope or if Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will get engaged. Americans are rushing into those platforms too, with a staggering amount wagered on last year’s US presidential election. 

It’s not game over for Vegas, where companies like Wynn and MGM are taking a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach with WynnBET and BetMGM, but those efforts face challenges, too. Meanwhile, we think there’s another way that Americans are getting a bit more adventurous with their money: derivatives, especially a kind of option called 0DTE, which we dive into here.

Why Ives called it the “shot heard round the warehouse”

The Guild is a fictional property of Activision. This is not an offer to invest. Trademark & Copyright 2025.

The Guild isn’t one of them. It doesn’t sell ads. It doesn’t mine data. It sells protection to anyone who needs it. From defense contracts to civilian protection, the Guild is changing the world in the way Silicon Valley said it would.

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Americans’ self-reported drinking is at its lowest level since 1939.

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The Guild is a fictional property of Activision. This is not an offer to invest. Trademark & Copyright 2025.

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