Good morning, investors. Wall Street just turned in one of its best earnings weeks ever.

But the numbers say more about the people trading than the banks collecting.

Morgan Stanley trading desk has never made this much money and it says more about the current market than the bank.

The company pulled in a record $6.3 billion in stock trading revenue in the second quarter, up 69% from a year ago. Its equity underwriting business made $851 million, a 70% jump and the best quarter since 2021.

It’s no accident firms across Wall Street reported similar numbers.

Retail participation is at all-time highs and so are options volumes, while prediction markets and crypto are pulling more fresh speculative capital into markets by the day.

Goldman Sachs’s equities desk, similarly, reported $7.42 billion in stock-trading revenue, marking the third quarter in a row it broke its own record.

Add in the macro cocktail of cooling inflation and falling rate-hike odds and investors have every reason to keep piling into markets.

To be clear, the last time markets had this set up was during the meme-stock frenzy of 2021.

What followed that period was a hard policy pivot from the Federal Reserve.

As it happens, Warren Buffett gave an interview to CNBC Wednesday commenting on just this. 

“It’s tough to find values when everybody is preferring gambling,” he said, echoing his comments from May when he likened the stock market to “a church with a casino attached.” 

Pair that with Jamie Dimon’s earnings call Tuesday when he said the banking environment was “getting close to as good as it gets.” 

"We're in a very healthy, active, exuberant market with very high prices and very high volumes,” Dimon said. “We benefit from that. We just don't know how long it will continue.”

The fundamentals underpinning the largest companies in the world remain sound and demand for equities couldn’t be higher.

That points to higher asset prices from here.

And yet, when the house is winning like this, and when the house itself acknowledges that conditions can’t get much better, investors should pay attention. 

SK Hynix makes the high-bandwidth memory that sits alongside chipmakers's accelerators, which ties its results to the pace of the AI buildout.

The Direxion Daily SK Hynix Bull 2X ETF (SKHL) seeks 200% of the daily performance of SK hynix through swaps referenced to its Nasdaq ADR.

*See partner disclosures below.

🤖 The cheapest AI chip stocks keep getting cheaper. GPU rental prices and server-memory spot prices have ramped up this year, yet the names leading the industry are trading at historically low valuations. (ProCap Insights)

📊 Wholesale inflation barely moved in June. Headline PPI fell to 0.2% while goods prices dipped 1.4% on the month, the biggest single-month drop since July 2022. (CNBC)

🚀 BlackRock's assets under management hit a record $15.34 trillion. Larry Fink's firm pulled in $192 billion of net client inflows in the quarter and posted its highest operating margin in five years. (Investing.com)

🤖 ASML raised its full-year sales forecast for the second time this year. Europe's largest company plans to boost chip-tool production capacity 30%, citing a boom in AI demand as the driver. (CNBC)

Steve Hou is a veteran quant researcher with Silicon Data.

He joined me on Full Signal unpack GPU rental prices and compute data, how investors should think about token economics, the pricing power of Anthropic and Nvidia, and his favorite stocks right now.

Tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube.

🗓 July 16, 1997: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 8,000 for the first time ever, just five months after the index first cracked 7,000. It marked the fastest 1,000-point climb in its history at the time.

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SKHL is non-diversified and concentrated in a single company. Investing in the Fund is not equivalent to investing directly in SK hynix. An investor should carefully consider a Fund's investment objective, risks, charges, and expenses before investing. A Fund's prospectus and summary prospectus contain this and other information about Direxion ETFs.

To obtain a Fund's prospectus and summary prospectus call 866-476-7523 or visit direxion.com. Significant risk involved. ALPS Distributors, Inc.