Power Lunch - SpaceX Stock Slumps, Compass Datacenter CEO, Record-High Investing Playbook 8/5/26

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

The Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Russell 2000 each hit fresh record-highs in intraday trading as stocks try to maintain the recent market rally.  Dominic Chu and Kelly Evans speak with Baird Strategas Chief ETF Strategist, Todd Sohn, about how investors should be navigating the recent momentum and whether traders should be chasing the new highs. Meanwhile, Craig Moffett, MoffettNathanson Telecom Analyst, breaks down SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings as a public company and explains how the company’s Starlink business may pose a problem to traditional wireless service providers like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T. Later on, the anchors are also joined by Compass Datacenter CEO, Chris Crosby, to discuss the recent rise in data center demand and how developers can approach building campuses to work with local communities in ways that benefit everyone involved. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The rally rolls on, although losing a little bit of steam. Welcome to Power Lunch alongside Dominic Chu. I'm Kelly Evans. Brian is off today. The indices are off their highs of the day, but we still hit some records for the Dow and the S&P once again, with the Russell 2000 joining the party this time. It's been a remarkable rebound, I should say, for stocks. The S&P has rallied 1,500 points from the March lows. All right, plus we're looking at some of the key movers today.

SpaceX and AMD, of course, both are falling following earnings reports and in A&M. executive shakeup at Alphabet, another one to watch. Plus, a stock that's up more than 3,000 percent in the last year. Sandisk reports after the closing bell. We're going to tackle all of that and much more coming up on this show. We begin with the rally on Wall Street. Despite losing some steam today, the S&P is still on track for its best week since April, but not everyone believes this record run can last. Famed investor Michael Burry is once again betting against the market. In a post on substack, he warned, it is possible we are near a major top and possibly a 1987-type fall. Burry argues the rally is feeding on itself with falling market

volatility, encouraging big institutional investors to buy even more stocks. So is he right? Let's ask Todd Sown. He's the chief ETF strategist at Baird Stratigis. This, you know, Todd, every time that this warning comes, my phone lights up and people want to know. And I, I can be quite vulnerable to these guys. And I go, he's right. And I, we got to, no. I'm like, I need to tie myself to the mask with a blindfold and not listen to this. I mean, with a long enough time horizon than anything other than being an institutional money manager or having to send your kid to college in two weeks time, who should move to the sidelines?

Boring is better in this type of environment, especially depending on what kind of investor you are, right? If you're more tactical, there are some stuff out there that still is a head scratcher, right? money continues to pour into technology and semiconductor type ETFs. I think that's a little bit concerning. The behavior there is very aggressive. But for most folks, just ignore it, right? Stay the course, stay diversified, and understand how much exposure you have in tech. You're not saying it's not going to happen.

Right. 1987 happened. It could happen. Guess what? There was no recession. Like these things, these market corrections happen. Nobody's saying a correction is not going to happen. Yourself, including no one's saying that a bare market.

No one's saying that a bare market. No one's saying something like that couldn't happen. The point is, again, other than if you're running money or think you can time it perfectly, there's nothing you can. What are you supposed to do about it? But here's the thing, though. I think the reason why people are saying this is because we have not had a true bona fide recession, like a traditional recession since the great financial crisis back in 2008, 2009.

You can argue that COVID was one, but that was a man-made. We did it to ourselves. We shut down the economy. did it to ourselves. We haven't had a true recession in like 20 years at this point. There's been more rolling recessions, right, maybe not official ones. And we even just went through a rolling correction to some extent, among the most popular corners of the market, right? Semiconductors went down 20 to 30 percent in July. So does it think it's possible? It's, yes, it's extremely rare. And I think investors should just understand how my position

across my whole portfolio, do I have the right ballast to help? I think, again, to restate the stakes, if someone listens to this and gets out of equities, when are they supposed to get back in? I'm speaking from experience. They'll never get back in. I've done things like this in the past, even a couple of years ago. Jobless claims are rising. You know, it looks like this is going to, the economy could be rolling over.

You get out of the market and then you chase it back higher at some point, unless we're saying that it's going to be a lost decade. Yeah. And I think that's why you cannot take what some, as much as they are famous investors. They have had great calls at some point. You cannot listen to every single word that goes out. The timeframes are completely different for some of these substacks that are out there versus a... Let me feed the Beast a little bit.

You know, the Wall Street Journal was writing about this yesterday. The Buffett indicator, right? The size of... This is your reaction, but people will say, like, what about these signs that this is all too big and a correction is coming? Corrections happen all the time. A 20% correction happens, whatever. four or five years, 10% correction. The S&P on average averages a 14% correction. In midterm election years, it's a 19% correction. It's part of the process. But to sit there and call for

a massive top every single day, you're basically destroying wealth to anyone who's listening to that and getting into cash immediately. It's just a colossal missed opportunity and a lot of opportunity costs. But there are reasons why we should be cautious, though, right? We talk about things like how much the semiconductors make up of the S&P 500 right now. Even, even, even, even more so, maybe than we were talking about how much the Mag 7 was responsible for kind of the returns in the broader S&P. There are reasons why people should be more cautious, but not invested. So how do you navigate, how do you thread that needle, how do you kind of move tactically and strategically at the same time, so that you can put yourself up for the best possible chance of wealth creation?

So semiconductors are about 18% of the SMP 500. They are among a very short list of industry groups that have exceeded 15% historically. Usually, they does not very end well, right? Now I'm sounding like Michael Burry. It doesn't end well. So what do you have to do? You need to look at the 5,500 ETF universe out there and say, how do I diversify? Is it equal aid SMP?

Is it ex-tech S&P? Is it managed futures for alternatives? I think you look at big banks. They're great. They act strong. I think you look at energy because it's anti-Beta now. And who knows what's going to happen overseas. We're one tweet away from oil going back up another 10%.

And then you look at health care because if it's a defensive properties and it's frankly been off the field for ages and I think is starting to get a little bit of more revival, especially in a very high beta semi-driven environment. Here's another plank of the worry wall. Okay. Situational awareness, you saw what happened last week with that blow up. It shook the AI trade. Now some top bank executives are saying that should be a warning about some excessive risk appetite we're seeing.

These are all warning shots of, as Joe was talking about, valuations get out, leverage and system gets there. You have to be careful. I think it's a good example of heavy risk appetite. tight, you know, getting maybe a little bit too far. It's a good lesson for all of us. I think it's a bit of a wake-up call for all of us. Right. I mean, you know, don't run a hedge fund. But I'm just saying, like, as a sign of the times,

these would be many people, we're seeing the analogies to long-term cap. Not because of the size and scale, but just the kinds of things that happen as you're nearing kind of like a market peaked. Is that how you would read this? What's your take? So we get, we had Barrett Stratius, get to travel around a lot. A lot of ton of great clients, myself, Jason, Trennert, Dan Clifton, Chris Verone, etc. Every single meaning I've done is talked about levered ETFs recently. And it's the first topic. They trade $50 billion per day on average. It's up tenfold since earlier in the decade.

Prior to this situational awareness decline, they were about 200 billion assets, half a trillion dollars and notional. A lot of counterparties are getting very uncomfortable with their exposure to the space. I'm seeing in the levered single stock space, Donnie mentioned Sandus before, 2X Sandus, ETFs have to buy options now because they can't get more swap exposure. So I don't think this is systemic, but if we continue to rebound, especially in the semiconductor space, we're going to be back to where we were at the beginning of June and July, and very uncomfortable again. It may not be a hedge fund unwinding, but it could be more retail who get burned by this instead. So you have to be extremely careful. And I do think the leverage space is kind of this new sentiment barometer instead

of measuring investor surveys. Look at how much enthusiasm is in leverage right now, because it's easy to access. I guess if I could maybe flip it over and be a little bit more positive, right? Because These are issues for sure. Is it maybe surprising at all that the markets have not reacted in a more volatile fashion than they have? I mean, there's been volatility, but nothing like we saw during peak periods in the pandemic, during the great financial crisis, when leverage was a real issue and markets got roiled. Market structure has evolved a lot in the past 20, 30 years. And even with the plethora of leveraged ETF products out there, the markets seem to still behave relatively normally, except maybe the market on clothes where things can get a little dicey, right?

But that should be something that we should feel slightly more comfortable about, right? Totally. So, ETFs are 16 trillion assets, levered ETFs are only about 1% of that. But they do about 20% of the volumes. That's why they get so much attention. And yeah, in market on clothes, they can drive up a lot of the volatility. The key part is, and you mention why is it only isolated here, why isn't that more widespread, is that majority of those assets are tied to semis and technology.

Nobody cares about 2xxon, right? That's not sexy enough. It's not high beta enough. So the rest of the market is very isolated, and that's why you're seeing such a highly rotational tape into these ignore corners while the center of the storm is AI and semi-acodactors in memory. This is not what you do, but do you have a take

kind of on market structure, market health broadly? I mean, is there anything that you think, if you're the Fed, you might just want to, like, prick a little ear here? I think they should be aware of how much leverage on exchanges and, frankly, off exchanges are on counter-referferferferferferes are on counterparties balance sheets. And is it just banks, or are we getting into kind of odder corners of who's providing the leverage out there? That's what I would just be where it would be in those odd corners.

Could be the market maker type folks, right? I'm not sure if I can name names or not. No, no, it's fine. But just give us a- They are offering the financing for swaps that go into levered ETFs. And then I may not just be levered ETFs. We're talking about all-callable ETFs are now becoming a thing. And this is all sorts of risk that was not on exchanges 10, 20 years ago.

And now it's proliferating. Yeah, to find out. come and all of these. Anyone can buy them. You, me, grandpa, mom and dad, these are not for high net worth anymore. Democratization is helpful for investing, but it can be very dangerous, too. It's a really great point. Todd, thank you. So glad you were here. Really appreciate the conversation. Todd Stone of Baird's Stigis. All right, a major shakeup at Google is sending shares of Alphabet much lower here down by 3.5%. McKenzie Segalos has the details on what executive moves are triggering this downside. Mac. So, Dom, Google's reshuffling the leadership of

its central AI operation really at a very critical point in the race with one long-time executive leaving and another stepping back from day-to-day management. Now, Jeff Dean is one of Google's most important technical leaders. He is a 27-year veteran who helped build its early search infrastructure and the neural network systems that helped usher in the modern AI era. He's now departing with three other Google colleagues to launch an AI startup called Discovery Loop. Google says the split is amicable and that it will invest in Dean's new venture. and serve as a cloud partner. Now, separately, after 12 years leading DeepMind inside of Google,

founder Demis Sassabas is stepping back from day-to-day management, one of AI's defining figures. He will become chairman of Google DeepMind and Alphabet's chief scientists, while CTO Kari Kabukoglu takes over operations and Gemini 4. Now, Alphabet shares falling as much as 5% earlier today on news of this shakeup. It, of course, follows other prominent and recent defections

to rivals, including Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic and Gemini Co-lead Noam Shazir to Open A. Chairs are down, McKenzie. So presumably investors see this is somewhat of a worrying sign. How should we be interpreting it? Well, it's coming at a time that you have Google no longer leading the leaderboard with respect to Gemini 3.5 Flash, which is its latest model. They also had a couple of models that were rushed out the door the day before they reported earnings last week, or I guess two weeks ago at this point. And the concern is that we're seeing another reshuffle at a time when they're falling behind in the model race.

And what I will say, though, is I talked to Kavakoglu at their annual developer conference, I-O and Mountain View at the start of the summer. And I specifically asked him, why are we not seeing this step change higher to Gemini 4? And he really talked about wanting to prioritize 3.5 flash that it was still operating at the frontier level, but it was four times faster and four times more efficient than comparable models, which really tells me that DeepMind under his leadership is, likely to optimize for building models that Google can afford to deploy at enormous scale. So this might ultimately play out well for Google. But at the moment, it's being seen as more, like, you know, a lack of clarity in terms of their overall direction. All right.

Big moves and big in the stock and the C-suite and executive suite over there. Thank you very much, Mack, for that. We're just getting started here on Power Lunch. The AI boom is meeting some local static. As states and local governments push back on new data center projects, we're going to speak with Chris Crosby. He's the CEO of Compass Data Centers about the industry's response to those particular moves. Plus, SpaceX is dialing up its mobile ambitions, outlining plans that could put Starlink in competition with major wireless carriers.

But is it a real disruption or just perhaps noise for the business? We'll debate that coming up next. SpaceX selling off today as the company's AI spend spooks investors. And that wasn't the only big headline from their first quarterly results. During the call, SpaceX President Gwen Shotwell made some ambitious. ambitious claims about taking on America's wireless giants. The big three in the United States, AT&T, Verizon and Timo, roughly between them, $600 billion a year. And I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better.

Those comments, as you might imagine, rattling the telecom stocks today, but only to the tune of two or two and a half percent. Our next guest might know why. Craig Moffat is senior telecom analyst at Moffat and Aethanson. Craig, it's great to see you and you're not, you think they shouldn't have that much to worry about. I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to look. I look at what's happening with Comcast and those stocks, they say it's because of Starlink competition and that's much less proven, I would think, than the cellular network. So anyway, you don't think this is a real threat? Yeah, hey, Kelly, no, actually the other way around, I think the threat that Starlink poses in broadband, while it's at least better understood,

is probably more real than the threat that they pose in mobility. Why is that? Simply technology, right? I mean, I don't want to get too deep in the weeds, right? But if this is a little taste of the physics, remember, that signal loss degrades with the square of the distance. So if you're talking about connecting to a satellite that's 220 miles away compared to, say, aurora, tower that's a mile away, it's a 50,000-fold decrease in the power level, which you can try to address that with a powerful downlink signal, but your phone is going to run out of battery

by breakfast time trying to maintain a signal from the ground, and it's not going to pass through ceilings and rooftops and things like that to get back to a satellite. So you have to have a terrestrial network. There's really no ambiguity about that. The problem with a terrestrial network and what Gwen Chottwell and Starlink set on the call last night, or SpaceX said on the call last night, was, well, they'll try to do it with Starlink broadband terminals and use them as sort of a mesh network of femto cells on rooftops. We've heard about femtosell mesh networks now for 20 years in telecom. They've never quite worked all that well. The propagation distances are a problem. And you remember, people are pretty demanding of their cell phone service. And they're not going to

stick around if, well, it works great in this when I'm in the park, but there are these 90 different times of day when I can't get a signal. That's not going to be good enough to keep customers around. So remember, Verizon AT&T and T-Mobile, in addition to having something like each having 50 times more spectrum than SpaceX has, have spent $600 billion over the last decade plus 30 years of network tuning and fill in and densification in order to make their networks really work in real-world circumstances. It's one thing to say I can blanket the country with a peanut butter spread of coverage because I've got satellites. But in the real world of saying, okay, but doesn't work when I'm in the airport, when I'm in the train station, when I'm in the concert hall, when I'm in a hotel, when I'm in a convention center, all those use cases take decades to densify and harden networks so that they actually work when customer demand hits them. And I suspect that people are getting way out over their skis in thinking that there is a near-term threat to the telcos. Because ultimately, the threat has to come from customers.

Listen, I was driving around Connecticut. Fairfield County, northern part of it the other day. I couldn't even get Verizon to work. Let me just put that to the side. I think you said this in passing, but can you just say it one more time, Craig? I understand what that means about trying to get to that cell, you know, that satellite signal. It's just not reliable enough. But then how are they able to make such a threat to video?

business, which you would think would be even more difficult? Well, so completely different, right? It's a different constellation, different satellites, and different spectrum. And there you're trying to connect to a satellite dish that is either on a rooftop or mounted on a terrace or something like that that has direct line of sight to the sky. And, importantly, it's powered by the home's power system, right? So it's not relying on a couple of 100 kilowatts of power from a battery and a cell phone. So you have a much stronger uplink signal.

And once you've tuned and set the antenna in an appropriate place, you can at least count on it to work. But I would point out, though, while on the call last night, Elon Musk said they expect that Starlink will carry more than half of all the internet traffic in the world in relatively short order. even there you have real path loss problems that while a speed test might tell you your speeds are pretty good, your experience of speed tends to be relatively low because there's a lot of packet loss. And so there's a lot of essentially fixing broken and lost packets that slow down the experience. And so the speeds that they're offering are not close to the speeds that you would get from a cable operator or from a fiber operator. So even there, I think you have to be at least a little bit skeptical about, just how large that threat is.

Hey, Craig, it's Dom. The one thing that these major teleco providers and internet service providers have is existing infrastructure that allows for a propagation of Wi-Fi, right, across different areas. We talk about cellular and coverage, but is there a world in which there are enough Wi-Fi hotspots everywhere to cover everything that we want to cover from a population standpoint, but then augmented with hybridization alongside satellite? so that you have like two working together. How far are we off from something like that?

Don, we're a long way, right? I get the idea, and in fact, that's kind of the concept behind what the cable operators offer today, which is they have the Verizon MV&O agreement or wholesale agreement that gives them coverage essentially everywhere, but they offload as much of it as they possibly can onto Wi-Fi and increasingly to their own 5G networks, using what are called strand-mounted small cells. That's fine and great, but without the coverage of the MV&O agreement, it just wouldn't be good enough to serve customers. As it is, it's a great offering,

but they have the underlying MV&O layer that comes on Verizon's network. Starlink doesn't have that, and so you can offload a lot of traffic onto Wi-Fi. Today, the average Verizon customer does 80% of their traffic from their cell phone over Wi-Fi in the home or in the office. But that other 20% is not trivial, right? And you'd never sign up for a service that didn't give you a high-quality experience for that other 20% of the time. And that's really the problem is, sure, you can use Wi-Fi in the home. And with a femto-cell mesh network that they described, you can probably use it in certain locations

if you happen to be close to somebody who's a subscriber. And if you put up the, the, the, the, radio towers and that sort of thing or on rooftops. But trying to replicate what you've built in 30 years and hundreds of billions of dollars of CAPEX with towers is simply not a realistic expectation to think that you're going to have a service that's going to be competitive with what the terrestrial wireless operators have built. I thought that was fascinating. I think everyone should get like two credits of continuing ed in physics or like an honorary AP3 score. I thought that was so fascinating. Craig, thank you. Really appreciate you breaking it down. that. It really does help to illustrate, you know, what they're up against. Craig Moffitt,

joining us there. All right. Still ahead here is the AI buildout hitting some roadblocks. We're going to speak with the CEO of one of America's biggest data center developers about what's happening next and what's going to happen after in the coming months. Keep it right here. Welcome back to Power Lunch. Data centers are coming under growing scrutiny from state and local governments. This very week, Texas hit the pause button on new data center grid approvals. Governor Greg Abbott ordered an audit of every new data center project seeking to connect to Texas's main power grid. And then last month, of course, New York became the first state to impose a moratorium on new large-scale data centers. For more on the future of the AI buildout, let's bring in Chris Crosby, the CEO of Compass Data Centers,

one of the largest data center developers in America. Chris, thank you very much for joining us here. Let's start with the latest headlines here about just why these state and local governments are tapping the breaks on data center development when just maybe six to nine months ago, we couldn't build these things fast enough. There's been a good amount of public outcry. What exactly does a data center developer do in response to these state and local governments? You raise the bar. You continue to raise the bar. We are trying to become partners in the cities that we work within, the communities that we work within. And, you know, there is a way to do that the right way. How you bring development to the table is of great import. Now, Texas is where your home is, your headquartered there, and Governor Abbott

has just put this kind of pause button on data center development because of the power concerns there. How much does a data center developer have to scrutinize the kinds of resources that it uses, and just how much can that data center footprint really impact local communities there? Will they run out of water? Will they run out of power? And how exactly do you respond? to the people who say that you will be a drain on resources? So we agree that we should not be a drain on resources. We've not used water since 2011 since we founded the company. So we agree that we should pay our own way for electricity.

We agree that there shouldn't be noise pollution or light pollution. So from a Class A development perspective, those are not a big deal. I think as you look at Governor Abbott and what happened in Texas, I think it was great because there was a ton of speculators that were in the queue that were going to get power. And those folks getting power was a problem because their whole intent is to sell. I think we had over 15 gigawatts that was presented to us from people who had no intention at all of putting a shovel on the ground, but simply getting a windfall akin to what happened

with Spectrum when the federal government auctioned off spectrum and it got a lot of speculative type of work that's happening on the cues in the power community. Chris, what's your message to other states who want to impose data center moratoria? I see don't ban. Raise the bar. Ask for more. We can do all kinds of things. Workforce development, the types of things we're doing, investment in that community. We have so much infrastructure investment on the utilities. We can rebuild as an industry. We can rebuild the grid, which is so necessary. There's been such deferred mesh. Let us help as an industry and ask for more. That's what I would say. So in other words, when they get up and say moratorium, no new hookups for a year, no new data centers for a year or two,

you would say, no, turn around and ask us for anything you need. I mean, is it a blank check? How far are you willing to go? I mean, it's like anything else. It does stop at some number, right? But when we look at the analysis of what we can do and the scale of the investment in billions and billions of dollars, to take $100 million in a community and be able to redo water, put a school up, put by fire trucks, do the types of things that are necessary for that community, that's something we can do. and then we pay the property taxes that then maintain that. And hopefully, like in most of the communities we work with, actually lower or could potentially eliminate the property taxes for the residents.

So ask for more from our industry. That's what I would say. Hey, Chris, you alluded to some of the utility usage, power usage. From a CEO standpoint that builds data centers, power usage and consumption will be a key, key hurdle and a key throttling point for this industry going forward. What exactly are you planning for contingency-wise? We've talked about things like expanding the grid, bringing nuclear online.

Maybe even oil and gas plays a big role in that in a transition-type phase. How exactly does power or the generation of it become something that you have to strategize over? And what exactly are you planning for? What kinds of sources will be available in the coming years? So we're big believers in abundance. We're working closely with many of these utilities. You take Mississippi power. We worked out a creative curtailment program where we would come off the grid when it's

necessary. We did a microgrid with a couple hundred megawatt microgrid with APS and the Phoenix area. We want abundance. So more for things, let us help to upgrade things. If you look at where renewable PPAs and VPPAs have come from, it's mostly come from our industry. And so we've been driving that movement towards more. Electrification is hitting us in so many ways, automotive and heat pumps and the like. Data centers are a component of that. We're the ones. We're the ones with the funding that can help that world. And speaking of funding, one last point before we let you go, Chris, you're privately owned. It's a consortium, Ontario teachers, KKR, Brookfield, are all owners of your particular company. How much is the private market going to have to be a part of

this as opposed to the public market, or is it some kind of a true hybridization of that capital that's going to be needed for all of these data centers? We're driving everything from minerals to materials to construction to semiconductor. You look across the economy, and we're we're driving a lot of that. So we need every form of capital, whether that be in the equity categories or in the debt categories. It is heavy investment, and every community should benefit from that. Everyone should get a piece of this pie as our philosophy, and that's the reality when you do it well as a Class A developer. All right. Chris, great to have you on today. Thanks. I think everyone should make a list, by the way, $100 million, school, firehouse. I mean,

this sounds great. Anyway, we'll check back soon. We really appreciate your time. Thanks. Let's get over to Sima Modi now for the CNBC News Update. Seema. Hey, Kelly, New Mexico's Attorney General suing the Justice Department to force the government to share unredacted documents from the Epstein files. The AG Rall-Terez argues the administration is obstructing the state's investigation into potential crimes at Epstein's desert ranch outside Santa Fe. The DOJ spokesperson telling the New York Times that New Mexico hasn't provided a lawful basis to justify such sweeping disclosures. A federal appeals court ruled today that a New Yorker, City law requiring food delivery companies to share customer info with restaurants, including

names, addresses and phone numbers is unconstitutional. The city adopted the law as part of an effort to help restaurants recover from the pandemic. The court says the law violates the First Amendment. And the future of the Qatari-gifted Air Force, one appears to be in doubt. President Trump originally said it would be displayed at his new presidential library, but his son, Eric, tells NBC News in a text message, that's not the plan. He previously told the Palm Beach Post that a retired Air Force one jet would be used instead. Kelly, back to you. All right, Seema, thank you, Sima Modi.

Coming up, major hedge funds are reportedly in hackers' crosshairs. We'll break down who could be behind these attacks, what's at stake, and how Wall Street is responding right after this. All right, welcome back. A lot of focus has been on the dollar yen this week, but there's another currency pair that caught Rick's attention. It's a dollar you want. Rick Santelli joins us now with the Rehn.

reasons why, Rick? Yes, you know, the two largest export economies on the planet, the Japanese and the Chinese, and the dollar? Well, in one case, it's been weakening because of the Chinese, and the other case, it's been weakening because of intervention. Let's look at a chart starting at the beginning of the Iran War for the dollar versus yuan. You can see it's been going down, but it's been going down for a while.

Open the chart up, and today we are now trading at the lowest level on the greenback versus the yuan. in three and a half years, going all the way back to the beginning of 2020. And if you look at right around April, that's from Jan to April of 25, when Trump gone in office, you can see that it was elevated at levels that go back and let's do the next chart. 19 years, Liberation Day highs in April for that currency, go all the way back to 2007 since the greenback was that strong. But it's been weakening, and why would they weaken it? Because when tariff talk came around, they were very nervous about capital flight and also their inputs.

You need to buy stuff when you're an export economy. So to monitor these is very important, especially at a time where Trump is so key on lowering trade deficits. Kelly, Dom, back to you. Lowering them indeed or trying to. Rick, thank you very much. A wave of cyber attacks has reportedly targeted some of Wall Street's biggest names. Bloomberg reports that hackers have gone after two sigma, Citadel and Point 72 in recent days.

The campaign used AI-enhanced voice fishing to try to trick employees into granting access to sensitive systems. Two Sigma says it thwarted the attempt and found no impact to its data or systems. 0.72 declined a comment. Citadel did not reply to request for comment. Amon Javers is here now, Amin.

And the timing of this makes us all immediately think of, oh, wait, AI, bots are escaping and hacking. But this appears to be a case of malicious actors, using AI voice technology to try to get into these systems? Yeah, I mean, first we should say that Bloomberg has done a really good job here on this story, and they are citing people familiar with the matter here. And that's sort of journalistic code. That's the phrase we put in when we don't want you to know who our sources are. So one of my questions is, who are the sources on this? Because my understanding from talking to cybersecurity experts and financial institutions over the

years is this kind of thing is happening a lot, right? So why is this particular one bubbling up into public view. That's a real question that I have about this story. Somebody wants this to be publicly known for some reason, and we don't quite know exactly why. But you're right. AI is not only, you know, sort of roiling the entire economy, but it's also roiling the cyber attack world, and particularly because it's giving more tools to more people to do more things. And so what you're seeing is more sophisticated attacks by a broader group of attackers hitting at a lot of the same target. So all of these big hedge funds have pretty sophisticated cybersecurity. They're dealing with attacks on a minute-by-minute basis every day. But now they're seeing attacks up more frequently

of a higher level of sophistication because AI puts the tools in people's hands to do that. You know, it's a good point that these kinds of things do happen. We must imagine somewhat routinely. So perhaps this one was more successful than most? I don't know. Yeah, or somebody wanted to thump their chest a little bit about stopping it. True. We don't know. But look, you know, this idea of conning people inside a company goes back decades, right?

I mean, there are cases in the 80s of people using the old-fashioned telephone to call up and say, I'm the vice president of finance, I need you to cut a check for thus and so and do it right away because it's an emergency. And employees in the company would hang up the phone and do that. Right? And that was just an old-fashioned con

and send the check out the door. Now they're using AI to to impersonate the actual voice of your actual boss, who they might have gotten off of a video interview of him. If he was on CNBC, they can record the sound of his voice. They can use AI to then filter that voice and to make it say what they want. So when the employee picks up the phone, it really sounds like the boss, the vice president of finance.

And so you can see why people are falling for this and issuing that check and sending it out the door. And the AI technology being so widely available now just makes it possible for a much bigger crew of bad guys to do this kind of thing than it used to be back in the 80s. Yeah, I mean, every employee should be unnoticed. Again, the families, every way that people can come up with safeguards. If this is that rampant and sophisticated, it's important to know.

Amen, thanks. You bet. Amen Jabbers. Coming up, chip check, AMD slips, Nvidia rallies, and all eyes are on Sandisks report after its monster rally. Is now the time to chase the leaders or move to the sidelines. We'll talk about that next. All right, welcome back.

trading lower despite posting a record quarter, and investors are turning their attention to Sandisk this afternoon with earnings on deck after the closing bell. That stock surged more than 3,200 percent just over the past 12 months. Jeff Kilberg is the founder and ETF portfolio manager at KKM Financial. Let's talk a little bit about this chip story and just how important Sandisk is to the narrative right now. Dom, I think it is pretty important. And what's 3,000 percent amongst friends? It's been sensational to see when Sandis got spun out of Western digital started trading around $48 and it just went up to $2,300, over $2,300. So we've seen about 40% pullback, Dom.

So I'm really interested to see what this move. Implied volatility has about a 16% move, meaning about $200 move up or down. And it seems like this whole move going back to March, it was trading $5.50, three or four months ago. So this is a high beta rocket chip that you have to be careful for and somewhat patient. All right. Speaking of being careful and being patient, let's talk about in the chip complex, where you think the buys are relative to others.

Well, it's fascinating. I know a lot of people use Sox. Some people use SMH. I think Sox is a more diversified approach because SMH has about a 22% exposure to Nvidia. But we've been trying to dance between the raindrops, owning some of the semiconductors. If you think about the KLA, the applied materials,

some of the non-popular names. But of course, Nvidia is something we have to own here. So we're being considered, but we're also trying to trim to be active in our Mango growth ETF gear. We've been very active in taking profits. We actually sold out of Micron. It's talking about memory.

We sold out of Micron last quarter, which hurt when we sold it around $7,800. But at any of the day, Dom, you're not going to go broke, taking profits. All right. And then for, say, the tech complex overall, chips aren't the only game in town. Where exactly are you finding some value that makes you want to buy at this point? We jumped into kind of the dumpster fire of software in Q2 in our Gary ETF. So Palantir was a purchase, service now. We're also looking at cyber.

So I think you have to have an expansive view of what you're owning. But you have to be really critical on where the momentum is, Dom, because you're seeing pounds here right around 160. If it stays above there, it could be a breakout kicking some of the shorts and the teeth. But I think you have to look at some of the beat-up sectors. However, we are seeing the S&P 500 at all-time highs. So high-tie lifts all boats. It makes everyone look smart, genius.

Kind of. Kind of. Yeah. Jeff, thanks. Good to see you. Jeff Kilberg there of KKM. Manchal. And still ahead, we'll get a pulse check on biotech as Amgen and Lilly are trading higher following results. Amgen helping the Dowelot today. Who's leading the sector and who's next? Bemos, Evan Seagerman, joins us next. All right, J.P. Morgan's CEO, Jamie Diamond rolling into Los Angeles in style. Here he is walking off a bus. As you can see there with some major athletes, including NBA legend Dwayne Wade. Diamond is, of course, in town to promote a new partnership with the LA 28 Olympians.

and the Paralympics as well. Our own Leslie Picker will sit down exclusively with Diamond, live from Los Angeles during the firm's annual bus tour. Don't miss that conversation coming up on closing bell overtime in a little over an hour from now, Kel. Did you see that stadium and how many people were in it? Who also attracts this kind of attention? And a nice bus. Yes.

On another programming note, don't miss our exclusive interview tomorrow with Richard Jackson. He's the new president and CEO of Occidental Petroleum, big Berkshire name there as well, a whole backstory. We're really looking forward to hearing from him at 2 p.m. Eastern, especially with all the pressure that's been from the president on the energy space lately. Richard Jackson will join us. All right. So from banking to energy to golf, live golf may have been thrown a bit of a lifeline. The league says it has lined up a new investor to keep operations going. However, it did not identify the backer or disclose the size of the investment. Liv's future has been in doubt since Saudi Arabia's public investment fund,

or PIF pulled its financial support in April after spending billions of dollars to build the Breakaway League. This is an interesting story only because this does kind of further the story that there's a future for Liv. Right. Didn't look that way. No, they're focusing their Kelly this week at Trump Bedminster right here in New Jersey. That is their next tour stop, so to speak. So a lot of folks will be figuring out whether or not they want to kind of understand more about what Liv is doing to keep its operations going.

The one place I ever saw it was there. Was in Bedminster. Yeah, brought the kids. It was kind of kid-friendly. I don't know. By the way, speaking of Gulf Callaway, stock is up 112% over the past year. Still $19.

Let's not get carried away. But incredible performance. I mean, year-to-date, it's up 63%. It's giving back some of it today, despite an earnings beat for its quarter. But Calloway, remember, it's kind of finding its footing now that it doesn't have the top golf kind of at least overhang. I guess we'll call it that.

I do like. I like golf. I do like golf. Now we just got to watch for a cushion it and see what happens there. Anyway, thanks for watching Power Lunch. Closing Bell starts right now.