The Shooting Started Again. Gold Went Down Anyway.

Month-end tally: QQQ finished August up 4.18%, SPY up 2.68%, the Dow up 1.38% and small caps up 0.94%. August paid you in direct proportion to how much Nvidia you owned, a rule that has held so long it barely qualifies as information.

Over the weekend and into Monday, the US struck Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island, and Iran fired missiles at the King Hussein and Al Azraq bases in Jordan, both used by US forces. A tanker crossing the Strait of Hormuz was hit by three projectiles. Nobody was killed, and nobody claimed it. President Trump then posted an AI-generated video of explosions at Kharg Island, Iran's main oil export terminal, and told Fox News, "We're going to hit them hard." Six days earlier, the same administration announced that the mines had been cleared.

The tape took it seriously where you would expect. Oil ran 3.08%; energy stocks went with it, up 2.04%; the 10-year rose 3.9 basis points to 4.756%; and the Dow gave up 0.65% because industrials do not enjoy paying more for fuel and money in the same afternoon.

Then there is gold, which exists for precisely this headline and closed down 0.11%. Gold fell 3.24% on Friday and is 4.59% below its August 25 peak. A thousand dollars of GLD bought on July 31 was worth $1,137 last Thursday and $1,099 last night, and the thirty-eight dollars went missing during the week a shooting war restarted.

The FTC and 22 states sued Amazon on Monday, alleging it spent 7 years rigging the auctions that set ad prices on its own platform. The mechanism named in the complaint is a hidden "soft reserve price," a secret floor quietly slipped into the bidding so that advertisers pay more than the competition would have. The complaint says this began in 2018, was deliberately concealed, touched 1.2 million advertising customers and extracted more than $20 billion. California's Rob Bonta, who has had a busy summer, said Amazon "has rigged billions of ad auctions." Texas filed its own case the same day.

Amazon called the suit "misguided" and "flawed" and said regulators cherry-picked old internal documents. The stock closed down 2.50%, the worst performer in our megacap ten, which is the market doing arithmetic rather than jurisprudence. Advertising brought in more than $68 billion in 2025 at margins the retail business can only dream about.

Tesla closed up 5.51% at 367.95, its best session since July 6, on close to double Friday's volume, while the rest of megacap tech sagged. The stated reason was robotaxi chatter.

The chatter has a date attached. Tesla holds its Cybercab launch event in Austin on Thursday, invite-only with a livestream, a two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals. Worth keeping straight before Thursday: this is a product unveiling, not regulatory approval, and the Austin robotaxi fleet running today is made up of Model Ys.

While equities were reading war headlines, the front end was doing something more decisive. Monday's three-month bill auction cleared at 3.770%, up from 3.715% last time, and the six-month bill cleared at 3.885%, up from 3.790%. A bill auction is the government borrowing for under a year and letting buyers name the yield, so it is about the cleanest opinion poll on Fed policy that exists. That six-month print sits above the top of the Fed's current 3.50% to 3.75% target range, which is the market saying, in numbers rather than adjectives, that it expects rates to be higher before the paper matures.

The data is not helping the doves either. The Dallas Fed's August manufacturing index came in at 11.6 against 0.7 expected and 1.3 in July, an economy declining to slow down on request. As of Friday's close, the CME FedWatch tool put the odds of a September hike at 57%, up from 39.9% on August 21.

Apple gets a new chief executive this morning: John Ternus takes over from Tim Cook, who becomes executive chairman, ending a 15-year run and ushering in a foldable iPhone autumn.

The week ends with August payrolls on Friday, with consensus at +58,000, against a prior month that lost 23,000 jobs.

The one thing that could ruin everyone's day: ISM prices paid running hot on a morning when crude is already extending Monday's gains. A hawkish Fed and a war premium in oil are survivable one at a time. Arriving together at nine o'clock, on a market carrying a VIX of 14.92, is a different conversation.

Monday had missiles, an antitrust suit against the most profitable ad business in retail, and a car company rallying for a car that does not have a steering wheel. Gold looked at all of it and went back to sleep, because the only story that has mattered since Friday is what a 25 basis point hike does to the cost of owning something that pays you nothing.

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Disclaimer: Tracking the Trade is financial entertainment and education, not financial advice. We are not your advisor, your therapist, or the person who has to explain this to your spouse. Prices are closing values from the 2026-08-31 session. Do your own homework before you do anything expensive.