Expectations of easing US-Iran tensions drive a rebound in global risk assets: Brent crude falls below $90, US stock futures rise.

Beating AI News Flash: Fidelity Digital Assets’ latest research indicates AI agents are evolving from assisting financial tasks to directly engaging in financial markets. In the future, these agents may autonomously execute trades, arrange loans, manage investment portfolios, and process payments with limited human intervention. Fidelity identifies trading, lending, and asset management as the sectors likely to be impacted first. While payments boast massive transaction volumes, their low profit margins may not translate into equivalent economic value for infrastructure providers. The research also warns that the surge in AI-driven trading activity does not guarantee sustained value for all financial platforms. As AI agents independently seek lower costs and better execution across platforms, the truly competitive players will likely be those with deep liquidity, reliable data, clearing capabilities, and robust user networks. Fidelity further points out that as AI cuts the cost of financial software development, code itself may gradually become commoditized, while network effects—including liquidity, user base, trust, and regulatory compliance—will grow in importance. Additionally, large-scale autonomous trading by AI agents will spawn new inter-machine financial activities, such as purchasing computing power, data, and digital services, which will raise higher requirements for identity authentication, asset permissions, payment settlement, and auditable execution. Industry insiders believe that in the future, financial institutions will not only use AI as an internal efficiency tool, but also treat AI agents as new financial clients. Infrastructure that can deliver secure identities, real-time data, deep liquidity, and verifiable execution capabilities may emerge as a critical value-capturing layer in the AI-powered financial era.

The Canadian government will unveil its countermeasures against the latest U.S. tariff measures on local time Tuesday. Canadian Finance Minister and other senior officials will hold a press conference in Ottawa. Earlier, the U.S. imposed a 50% tariff on a large number of Canadian goods starting Saturday, following the breakdown of bilateral trade negotiations. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had previously said Canada was prepared to take "tit-for-tat" countermeasures, but on Monday noted that given the U.S. economy is far larger than Canada's, the final plan may adopt more targeted measures rather than full reciprocal tariff hikes. Carney stated that the conditions the U.S. side put forward in the final stage of negotiations were "unfair and not in the economic interest". Meanwhile, rhetoric between the U.S. and Canada has continued to escalate. Ontario Premier Doug Ford publicly criticized Trump, who warned that Canada would face "even worse consequences" if it did not "comply". Trump further escalated his rhetoric on Tuesday, even threatening to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America". Markets are closely watching the specific scope of Canada's countermeasures, especially in core trade sectors such as automobiles, steel, aluminum and others. If the two sides continue to expand the coverage of tariffs, U.S.-Canada trade relations may further deteriorate, adding pressure to North American supply chains and inflation.

Despite the S&P 500 index falling 0.92% over the past five trading days, the Vanguard VOO ETF, which tracks the S&P 500 index, still drew around $4.3 billion in inflows. Year-to-date, VOO has accumulated approximately $69 billion in cumulative net inflows, ranking as the world’s top ETF by capital inflows, and on June 2, it became the first ETF to surpass $1 trillion in net asset value. Currently, VOO’s top 10 holdings account for roughly 37.6% of the fund’s assets, with NVIDIA and Apple making up about 7.55% and 7.05% respectively, giving the fund high exposure to large-cap tech stocks. NVIDIA is set to release its fiscal 2027 second-quarter results on August 26; market projections put its revenue at around $91.85 billion, while the company’s guidance is $91 billion ±2%. Apple will see a CEO handover on September 1, with John Ternus succeeding Tim Cook. The report notes that VOO’s sustained inflows this year reflect investors’ "buy the dip, hold long-term" strategy, though NVIDIA’s AI demand and Apple’s management transition could be key factors affecting VOO’s short-term performance. If NVIDIA’s earnings signal a slowdown in AI spending, or Apple’s CEO transition sparks concerns over its AI strategy, services business and capital allocation, VOO’s highly concentrated structure may amplify related volatility.

Beating AI News Insight: Alibaba has unveiled the next-generation architecture for Qwen4 ahead of schedule. ModelScope has launched a preview page for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a multimodal Mixture of Experts (MoE) model that activates only a subset of parameters per inference, built on the Qwen4 architecture. It is scheduled for public release at 23:00 on August 26. Alibaba stated that releasing the architecture early is to let the community prepare for the upcoming full Qwen4 model family. Strictly speaking, what will launch tomorrow night is not the official Qwen4 version, but rather a "Qwen4 technical preview" – a practice Alibaba has used before. In 2025, Qwen3-Next first introduced a mixed architecture combining Gated DeltaNet and standard attention, a design later adopted by the Qwen3.5 series. Alibaba released the 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max earlier this month, and is now unveiling its next-generation architecture less than a month later, reflecting a very fast pace.

According to Trump’s financial disclosure documents, his portfolio manager purchased SpaceX stock worth between $15,001 and $50,000 on June 23, shortly after SpaceX went public. The transaction was among more than 1,000 trades made by Trump’s portfolio in June, the documents show. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle responded that the third-party firm managing Trump’s portfolio primarily tracks well-known indices including the Schwab 1000, and neither Trump nor his family can direct, influence, or participate in the portfolio’s trading decisions. The disclosure shows the stock was bought at around $156.11, while SpaceX closed at $135 on Monday, matching its IPO price, meaning the investment is currently sitting on an unrealized loss of roughly 13.5%. Given that SpaceX is a U.S. government contractor and Trump recently called for an increase in U.S. commercial space launches, Democratic lawmakers have raised questions about the transaction and Trump’s investment management arrangements. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Robert Garcia previously sent a letter to Trump, demanding he disclose the third-party firm managing his investments and the rationale for the trades, and questioning whether his numerous stock transactions during his term could create conflicts of interest with his government duties.

According to a report by The Associated Press, the U.S. Secret Service has confirmed it is aware of a video aired by Iranian state media that appears to threaten the life of Barron Trump, the youngest son of U.S. President Donald Trump. Secret Service spokesperson Nate Herring stated that the agency is aware of the video and will investigate any potential threats to protected individuals, but will not disclose specific protective details due to operational security concerns. The report notes that since the U.S. killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the outbreak of hostilities with Iran, Iranian media has repeatedly spread threatening content targeting Trump and his family. CNN previously reported that the U.S. Secret Service had already obtained information about threats directed at Barron Trump.