Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk.
Chewy is making a serious structural bet on its future, moving beyond the online pet supply model by integrating physical veterinary clinics and professional health services into its platform. That pivot matters because it deepens customer retention and opens recurring revenue streams that pure e-commerce simply cannot replicate, making the Walmart comparison far more nuanced heading into two thousand twenty six.
Shifting to the commodity pits, live cattle futures took a meaningful hit Friday, with losses ranging from ninety-seven cents to two dollars and sixty-seven cents across most contracts. August was the hardest struck, down ten dollars and seventy-seven cents on the week. Cash trade in the north settled between two hundred thirty-eight and two hundred forty dollars, reflecting genuine softness in both demand and beef prices at the wholesale level.
And in the AI cost wars, businesses are quietly rotating toward cheaper Chinese open-source models as American providers like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic continue raising token prices. The Trump administration frames AI as a two-player race, but on the ground, CFOs are making pragmatic calls, and right now the math is increasingly pointing east for cost-conscious consumer-facing companies.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
