Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk.
Big Oil is printing money again. Chevron posted its largest quarterly net profit ever, twelve point one billion dollars, while ExxonMobil cleared fourteen point five billion and Shell hit ten point eight billion. The catalyst is the Iran war, which has tightened global oil supply and sent prices surging in ways that closely mirror the Russia shock of twenty twenty two.
Meanwhile AbbVie fell sharply after its second-quarter earnings report raised concerns among investors. The pharmaceutical giant, which depends heavily on its immunology franchise, delivered results that fell short of expectations in key segments, rattling confidence in its near-term revenue trajectory and sending shares lower on heavy volume.
And in a story that underscores just how brutal leveraged AI bets have been this cycle, Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness plunged sixty-seven percent in July alone. The former OpenAI researcher, who built a following around his AI forecasting work, told investors he would learn from what he called very expensive scars and vowed to fight another day.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
