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Every Wednesday we publish “The Mid-Week Wrap-Up” — your ticket to being well informed and staying ahead in the investment game!

This report is designed to help investors of all skill levels break down important stories/topics within the stock market. And best of all, we cut through all of the BS and give you exactly what you need to know in easy to digest, bite sized pieces of content.

This article is designed to truly give you that EDGE in the day ahead!

Grab your afternoon pick me up and let’s dive in.

The major indexes are making all-time highs on the heels on the US-Japan trade deal.

These are some of the biggest stories so far this week that are having an influence on market action.

President Trump announced a wide-ranging trade agreement with Japan that includes a 15% reciprocal tariff and a reduction of U.S. auto duties from 25% to 15%. Japan pledged to invest $550 billion in the U.S., with Trump claiming America will “receive 90% of the profits.” The deal also covers cars, agriculture, and LNG.

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👀 What You Need to Know

Trump secured a headline win with tariff relief and a giant investment number, but the substance remains unverified. No formal documents confirm the $550B figure, and Japan’s leadership instability raises risk around execution. The export crash likely forced Tokyo’s hand, but whether this deal has staying power is still unclear. Japanese markets rallied fast, especially in autos, but any stall in implementation or Ishiba’s resignation could trigger a reversal.

Meta’s $META ( ▼ 1.19% ) AI ambitions have taken a sharp turn from internal scaling to external acquisition of talent. Over the last few months, Zuckerberg’s “Superintelligence” Lab has quietly hired dozens of elite researchers from rivals like Apple, DeepMind, and OpenAI. Many of these hires come with $100M+ pay packages and leadership roles. Meta’s new AI team now includes key minds behind Gemini, GPT-4, and Apple’s foundational model work, and it's clear the company is betting its next decade on AI.

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👀 What You Need to Know

Meta’s latest hires represent a real shift in where top-tier model talent wants to work. Apple’s foundation model efforts could stall as key architects leave, and OpenAI risks losing internal continuity on GPT-scale research. Meta now has a concentration of researchers with rare build-and-train experience. For investors, this deepens its AI moat not through product, but through people. Retention and execution now matter more than launch demos.

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OpenAI confirmed it will add 4.5 gigawatts of new data center capacity through Oracle as part of the $500B Stargate initiative. The deal stems from a previously undisclosed cloud contract that Oracle revealed in June, now confirmed to be with OpenAI and estimated at $30B in annual value. The partnership expands an already aggressive infrastructure push tied to AI and is expected to exceed Stargate’s original targets.

🔑 Key Points

👀 What You Need to Know

This confirms OpenAI is going all-in on Oracle infrastructure, massively outspending its current revenue base to secure future compute power. For Oracle, it’s a reputational and financial win, catapulting its cloud ambitions and fueling a CapEx cycle now topping $25B/year. But the scale of this Stargate deployment, two Hoover Dams’ worth of power, underscores the intensity and risk of the AI arms race.

In this section we'll be curating a selection of news headlines we think you'll find interesting. If a topic catches your eye, click the provided links to read more about it.

It’s been a quiet week so far but the next few days have a chance to shake things up and bring some volatility.

There are a number of major earnings remaining this week, including Alphabet and Tesla today after the bell. Here are the stocks we’ll be watching:

Here is the calendar of earnings releases scheduled for the rest of the week:

Initial jobless claims, composite PMI and new home sales are scheduled to be released tomorrow morning.

Here is the full calendar of events scheduled for the remainder of the week:

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Thank you for reading this edition of the Mid-Week Wrap-Up.

Until next time investors!

Mark & Chris

The Investor’s Edge

This is not investing advice. It is very important that you do your own research and make investments based on your own personal circumstances, preferences, goals and risk tolerance.