Turkey’s Capital Markets Board spent Wednesday and Thursday doing two jobs at once. It filed criminal complaints against dozens of people over alleged share-price manipulation, handed two-year trading bans to fund managers at Pusula Portfoy and Tera Portfoy, and then watched police detain four senior figures, among them Pusula chairman Muhammed Yariz and Destek Holding chairman Altunc Kumova. At the same time it tried to talk the market down off a ledge. Those jobs pull against each other. The second is harder than it looks because the first one caused it.

The Federal Reserve raised the federal funds target range by 25 basis points to 3.75%-4.00% on Wednesday, its first increase since July 2023, and the bond market answered by buying duration. The 10-year Treasury yield fell about 5 basis points to roughly 4.95%, one session after touching 5.04%, its highest level since 2007. In the first stretch after the statement the Nasdaq Composite traded up about 0.8%, the S&P 500 about 0.3%, and the Dow sat just under flat. A rate hike pulled the long end lower. That reaction is the story.

The stated cause of today’s move is clean enough. Dario Amodei argued for a slower pace of frontier development, Sam Altman backed the idea of pacing, and AI-linked semiconductors sold off through Asia, Europe and the US premarket: Nvidia, AMD, Micron, Intel, ASML, the rest of the complex. What the tape is pricing is harder to defend than the headline suggests.

Pacing the frontier and slowing AI spending are two different propositions, and Altman said plainly that pacing does not mean stopping. The question worth asking is who would have to change behaviour for the second thing to follow from the first. Not the labs, whose compute budgets are already committed years out. The hyperscalers. And the hyperscalers have announced nothing of the kind.

Mohammed bin Salman called Donald Trump twice on Thursday and asked for American strikes on Houthi positions. He was refused. Washington offered intelligence sharing and targeting support, and sent the CENTCOM commander to the kingdom for coordination talks rather than a strike package.

By Friday the request was academic. The Houthis took Mokha, pushed south through Dhubab, and put fighters on Mayyun, the volcanic island sitting in the channel that carries traffic through the strait. Yemeni government forces withdrew. Saudi aircraft bombed the airport at Mokha after the city had already fallen, which says most of what needs saying about the sequencing.

Micron slipped on Thursday because a private company that has run about 2,000 wafers in its whole life said it can help end the memory shortage. That’s the trade. Kepler Computing came out of stealth this week with a ferroelectric composite material, a 3D scheme that stacks memory on top of logic, and GlobalFoundries as its manufacturing partner. The headlines called it Intel-backed. It is. It’s also AMD-backed and Gates-backed, and GlobalFoundries has money in it too. Intel Capital is one line on a cap table that has raised $468 million.

Palantir closed Thursday at $179.01, up $7.97 or 4.66%. The close understates how the session opened and overstates what it settled into. The stock printed as high as $185.76 and was running 9.1% higher by 10:10 in the morning, then spent the balance of the day returning the gain. It eased again after the bell to $177.80. Volume came in at 22.23 million shares against a ten-day average near 30.8 million, so the bid that produced the best price of the week was thinner than an ordinary day’s trade.

DFEN closed Tuesday near $61, down from roughly $92 on August 6. That is a third of the fund gone in eighteen trading sessions, and a number that size invites the assumption that something broke. Nothing broke. The fund did precisely what its prospectus says it does, and the entire result is available from one line of arithmetic.

DFEN targets three times the daily return of the Dow Jones U.S. Select Aerospace & Defense Index. That index fell somewhere in the region of 11% across the same stretch. Spread evenly over eighteen sessions, an 11% decline works out to about 0.65% a day. Triple it and the fund loses 1.94% a day. Compound 1.94% eighteen times and the result is 29.7%. The realised loss was 33%. So of the thirty-three points, close to thirty are leverage applied to direction, and roughly three are everything else.

Kioxia and Sandisk said Thursday they intend to spend roughly ¥5 trillion, more than $31 billion, in Japan through 2032 to expand flash memory production at the Yokkaichi and Kitakami plants. Kioxia said separately that it has begun site preparation for a third fabrication building at Kitakami. Hiroo Ota carried the plan to Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s office in person. The wires ran it as a capacity announcement. The two qualifiers attached to it are more informative than the headline number: the spending is contingent on support from the Japanese government, and Fab3 is not expected to begin operations until fiscal 2029.

Nvidia’s quarter was not the problem. Revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, earnings of $2.22 per share against $1.05, gross margin at 75.0% versus 72.7%, and a third-quarter guide of $108 billion plus or minus 2% against $57.01 billion a year ago. Colette Kress then told analysts to expect fiscal 2028 revenue growth of 70% while the street was carrying 44%, and added that customer forecasts point to demand roughly doubling, with the guidance reflecting supply constraints rather than orders. The stock rose about 6%. Marvell, Micron, SanDisk and Western Digital did not.

A small British power plant was taken offline for four days in July by hackers assessed to be affiliated with the Islamic Republic. The incident was reported to the National Cyber Security Centre. Officials have declined to name the site. Ministers have been quick to point out that the plant was a minor generator, that the outage never touched the wider grid, and that national electricity supply was unaffected. All of that is true. None of it is the interesting part.