| |
|
Intelligence for the Considered Investor
The Clarmond Daily
Wednesday, 5 August 2026 · Morning Edition · Est. MMXIV
|
|
Records again, on a Hormuz deal only Washington says exists. Beneath the euphoria, one tell: Palantir soared 27% while Bezos filed to sell $4bn.
|
On This Day |
| |
5 August 1858 — 168 Years Ago Today
On this day in 1858, the first Atlantic telegraph cable was finished; Queen Victoria and President Buchanan swapped greetings that took sixteen hours to cross. The wonder lasted barely a month before the cable failed. The age of instant connection began, and promptly broke.
|
|
Markets — Two Moves That Mattered |
|
Equities & Oil — Records, On A Deal Iran Denies
New highs as oil sinks
The rally has become a melt-up. The S&P 500, the Dow and the Nasdaq all closed at records on Tuesday, the Dow up more than 900 points. The spur was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz could be struck “today or tomorrow.” Oil, which trades on that strait, fell almost 6% to below $76. There is one flaw in the story: Iran says it is not in direct negotiations at all, and the terms floated so far would leave Tehran with its hand still on the traffic through the strait. Markets have chosen to believe the hopeful side of a contradiction. They usually do — right up until the day the other side turns out to have been right.
|
|
|
Corporate — The Froth And The Exit
Palantir soars 27%; Bezos heads for the door
Two corporate snapshots caught the mood better than any index. Palantir, the data-and-defence company beloved of the AI faithful, jumped 27% in a single day — its best since early 2024 — after its chief executive called the quarter “otherworldly.” On the same tape, Jeff Bezos filed to sell around $4bn of Amazon stock. This is what a giddy market looks like from both ends: the believers paying almost any price to get in, and the man who built the thing quietly heading for the exit. Neither is proof of a top. Together, they are the kind of thing you tend to see near one.
|
|
Risk Markets — Two Stories in Focus |
|
I
The peace deal was signed; the bombing did not stop
Less than a week after President Trump announced a “monumental” agreement to disarm Hamas and wind down the war, Israeli forces killed at least nineteen Palestinians across Gaza in a single day, with strikes hitting medicine stores beside a hospital. A deal exists on paper in Washington; on the ground, the war it is meant to end goes on killing. This is the recurring cruelty of the conflict: the announcement and the artillery run in parallel, and for the people beneath them the paper changes nothing until the firing stops. Both sides keep fighting to strengthen their hand in a deal neither believes in. The dead accumulate in the gap between the signature and the ceasefire.
|
|
|
II
A city loses a quarter of itself to fire
In Spokane, Washington, three wildfires have destroyed hundreds of homes and driven out close to a quarter of the city’s people, one of the largest urban evacuations of the American fire season. Police have arrested a suspect in connection with one of the blazes, which, if arson is confirmed, would make part of this a crime rather than a catastrophe. The distinction matters less to the displaced than the outcome, which is the same either way: a neighbourhood gone, an insurance claim, a summer of rebuilding. The American West now has a fire season the way it once had a summer. This is what a changed climate looks like at the door — not a graph, but a queue at an evacuation centre.
|
Political Diary — Two Stories in Focus |
|
This Week · La Paz
Bolivia’s capital is being strangled, and its new president blamed
For four weeks the roads into La Paz, Bolivia’s administrative capital, have been blockaded, and food and fuel are running short. On Friday, talks between the government of President Rodrigo Paz and the country’s powerful trade-union federation collapsed, and the crowds now openly demand his resignation — less than a year after he took office ending two decades of socialist rule. It is a brutally quick fall from grace, and a familiar Latin American pattern: a leader elected on promises the economy cannot keep, then blockaded by the very movements that once cheered him. Bolivia sits on some of the world’s largest lithium reserves, the metal that powers the electric age, and yet cannot keep bread and diesel moving to its own capital. The gap between what a country owns and what it can deliver is where its politics goes to break.
|
|
|
This Week · Kigali
America funds Rwanda’s drones and cuts its aid
Over Rwanda, a fleet of drones ferries blood and medicine to clinics too remote for roads, one of the developing world’s genuine success stories, and one Washington has just chosen to back with a fresh grant. At the same time, the United States is cutting its broader aid to the country. Set side by side, the two decisions capture the new shape of Western assistance: not open-handed development but a menu of branded projects — the photogenic ones kept, the unglamorous baseline quietly withdrawn. A drone dropping medicine makes a better headline than a vaccine budget. The help that survives is increasingly the help that can be seen.
|
|
|
The Clarmond Take
|
|
The Consensus
The path is clear for shares: a Middle East deal brings oil down, inflation follows, the Fed cuts, and the party goes on.
|
|
|
The Clarmond View
That story forgets why rates are high in the first place. The very earnings season lifting the market showed an economy running hot: Caterpillar, the bellwether of the real, dig-it-and-build-it economy, booked its first-ever $20bn sales quarter. An economy strong enough to make heavy machinery fly off the lot is an economy still generating the inflation that keeps money dear. That is the contradiction beneath the melt-up: investors are betting at once on booming profits and on falling interest rates, when a genuine boom is precisely what stops rates from falling. Cheaper oil would help at the margin. But you cannot have both the roaring economy and the rate cuts it forbids. One of those two hopes is going to be disappointed — and the market is priced for both.
|
|
Popcorn News — The Absurd, The Unusual, The Human |
|
A new beetle, named for a cartoon pirate
Taxonomy, the sober business of naming life, had a moment of joy this week: researchers christened a newly discovered genus of beetle “Luffy,” after the elastic, straw-hatted hero of the Japanese comic One Piece, on account of a certain stretchiness that reminded them of him. There is something cheering in the discovery that the people cataloguing the planet’s beetles, of which there are more kinds than almost anything, also read manga on their lunch breaks. Science is done by human beings, and human beings have favourite cartoons.
|
|
|
The goblin shark, filmed alive at last
For the first time, scientists have filmed a living goblin shark in its own deep-sea darkness. The pink, long-snouted creature — its jaws shoot forward to seize prey — is so strange it looks invented, and so elusive it had only ever been seen dead in nets. To watch it move, a mile down, is a reminder of how much of our own planet remains genuinely unknown. We map Mars and mislay the ocean floor. The goblin shark has been down there the whole time, minding its business, waiting for the cameras to arrive.
|
|
|
Please tell us what is working and what is not — just reply. |
| |
|
The Clarmond Daily is published by Clarmond Wealth Limited, 118a Kensington Church Street, London W8 4BH. Clarmond Wealth Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The Clarmond Daily is provided for information and general interest purposes only and therefore does not constitute regulated activity. Nothing in this publication constitutes investment advice, a personal recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security, investment or financial instrument. The views expressed are those of the authors at the time of writing and are subject to change without notice. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. The value of investments and the income from them may fall as well as rise and you may not get back the amount originally invested. Clarmond Wealth Limited makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained herein and accepts no liability for any loss arising from its use. Produced and distributed in the United Kingdom and subject to English law.
You are receiving this communication because you are a contact of Clarmond Wealth Limited. If you no longer wish to receive it, please use the unsubscribe link below.
© Clarmond Wealth Limited. All rights reserved. Reproduction or distribution of this publication, in whole or in part, without prior written consent is prohibited.
|
|
