Iran threatens to offer a $10 million reward; Trump’s youngest son has been living a reclusive life.

Amid sharp swings in AI-related stocks and intensifying short covering, Wall Street’s long-popular "buy strong, sell weak" momentum strategy is facing a sharp reversal. Data shows that since July 1, the S&P 500 Momentum Index has fallen more than 9%, while the S&P 500 Index has risen about 2.8% over the same period, pushing the momentum index toward its worst quarterly performance in 25 years. In the second quarter of this year, the S&P 500 Momentum Index surged 44%, marking its best quarterly performance on record, with a cumulative gain of 133% over the past five years, and was once one of the most crowded trading strategies among institutional investors. But entering the second half of the year, some stocks that had been heavily shorted suddenly rebounded, triggering large-scale liquidation by quantitative funds and short covering. Data from Bank of America shows that momentum trading in July this year posted the second-worst performance in nearly 40 years, second only to the 2009 financial crisis period. Goldman Sachs data shows that August 19 was one of the worst trading days for systematic long-short funds in nearly two years, with about half of losses stemming from the failure of momentum strategies. Meanwhile, net short positions held by Nasdaq 100 futures speculators have risen to near 20-year highs. Market analysts warn that while the broader U.S. stock market is still rising, AI overvaluation, surging capital expenditures by tech giants, and crowded momentum trades are exposing the market to a higher risk of sudden reversals.

Beating AI News Brief (Dongcha): AI inference platform fal engineer Rehan Sheikh has integrated H3 Max directly with Twitch. Since the model generates videos faster than viewers can stream them, the live broadcast can run while generating subsequent frames in the background, enabling theoretically endless streams. Sheikh dubbed this "Infinite Cross-Dimensional TV". MiniMax’s official account reposted the experiment, and fal later launched the H3 Max Live experiment. The live content is not pre-generated: viewers can input !prompt directly in Twitch chat. fal stated new requests appear on screen in seconds, with every scene shaped by chat input. There is no fixed script or runtime; as long as generation continues, the show runs indefinitely. The biggest hurdle for this use case was generation speed: if a 15-second video required minutes of wait time for the next segment, true live streaming was impossible. H3 Max has cut that wait time to under playback time, letting the AI prepare the next segment while viewers watch the current one. This marks the first time a video model has shifted from "waiting for output" to delivering continuous real-time content. H3 Max is a version trained by fal Research based on MiniMax’s open-source H3, optimized for fal’s inference system. Official metrics show it generates a 5-second video in under 3 seconds, with throughput ~35 times that of MiniMax’s official H3 API. Currently, in Artificial Analysis’s audio-inclusive leaderboard, its image-to-video model ranks first with 1202 Elo, while its text-to-video model ranks third with 1235 Elo, trailing only Wan 3.0 and Gemini Omni Flash.

Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee recently told the Milk Road Show in an interview that asset tokenization and AI agent finance will be the core narratives driving the crypto market over the next five years. Ethereum is poised to become the underlying settlement layer of the global financial system, and ETH remains severely undervalued relative to BTC. Lee projects ETH could be boosted by four key catalysts in the remainder of 2026: the U.S. Clarity Act is expected to pass in September, over-the-counter short positions and sidelined funds returning to the market, Asian funds reallocating to crypto assets, and global institutional fund managers chasing top-performing crypto assets amid quarterly performance pressures. He forecasts the ETH/BTC exchange rate will retest its historical high of 0.08. Even a conservative recovery to 0.04 would put ETH at $6,000 if BTC hits $150,000. Lee also stressed Bitcoin still has long-term upside, but the crypto industry’s bigger overarching trends over the next five years will be the "full asset tokenization super cycle" and "AI agent finance".

According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, as the broader crypto market corrects, Wintermute’s large short positions previously established on Hyperliquid have returned to profitability. Currently, the firm holds roughly $149.2 million in short positions, with only about $5.01 million in long positions, translating to an overall unrealized profit and loss (PnL) of approximately $1.73 million. Specifically, Wintermute’s short positions include around $58.36 million in ETH, $26.11 million in SOL, and $19.16 million in BTC. Data shows its current portfolio remains highly skewed toward a bearish structure.

Beating AI Express: Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England and Chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), warned G20 finance ministers and central bank governors that cybersecurity risks from frontier AI models could resonate with existing vulnerabilities including high inflation, elevated interest rates, and financial market leverage, further raising the risk of severe shocks to the global financial system. Bailey noted that if multiple financial institutions or shared technology providers suffer simultaneous systemic disruptions, the existing financial defense framework could face severe strain. Meanwhile, AI-powered cyberattacks, deepfake identity deception, and other capabilities are rapidly expanding, while some countries have yet to establish mature regulatory frameworks for the development, release, and deployment of frontier AI models. Bailey also cautioned that high valuations fueled by the AI boom, debt pressures in sovereign and private credit sectors, and accumulated market leverage could all act as potential triggers for "disorderly adjustments" in financial markets. He recommended that financial institutions deploy "bare-metal" backup systems physically isolated from their main networks to improve recovery capabilities following catastrophic cyberattacks.

On August 30, the U.S. military destroyed two rocket launchers on Iran’s Larak Island, ending the roughly month-long “truce period” in direct military clashes between the U.S. and Iran. Iran subsequently fired eight missiles at two air bases in Jordan, all of which were intercepted. Following that, Trump threatened to destroy Kharg Island, Iran’s key oil export hub. Analysts believe this round of military escalation reflects the U.S.’ growing impatience with the progress of pressuring Iran solely through sanctions. U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent previously stated that the U.S. plans to roll out new sanctions on Iran every week, focusing on the banking system, and aims to completely exclude institutions linked to Tehran from the U.S. dollar system. However, experts expect Trump’s threat against Kharg Island is more likely to remain just rhetoric. Directly destroying the island’s oil infrastructure would not only likely cause a major environmental disaster but also significantly escalate the conflict. Iran may in the future rely more on asymmetric responses, such as pressure through proxies, shipping, and energy transport. With two key shipping lanes—the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—both facing risks, markets are concerned about further disruptions to global energy transport. Analysts noted that last week, crude oil volumes transiting the Strait of Hormuz via the Oman Channel under U.S. military escort stood at around 7 million barrels per day, but the escalation of clashes around Larak Island could lead to a drop in volumes in the coming days and further push up oil prices.