Nasdaq · QQQ
$698.95
-1.48% pre-mkt
US Central Command said forces struck more than 80 targets in Iran overnight — air defense systems, command-and-control networks, coastal radar, anti-ship missile sites, and over 60 IRGC small boats — in retaliation for Iranian attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Washington also reimposed oil sanctions it had lifted 60 days earlier under the ceasefire. Iran's IRGC said it hit 85 US military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait in response, and Tehran has warned of a "crushing response" still to come. Trump approved the strike plan while at the NATO summit in Ankara.12
Day two of the 36th NATO summit closes in Ankara with allies pledging €70 billion in Ukraine military aid for 2026 and "at least equivalent" support in 2027, alongside tens of billions in new defense-industry contracts. Trump said the US is lifting sanctions on Turkey and could restore its access to the F-35 program. The approved summit declaration is short and unity-focused — European allies and Canada say they're already near 4% of GDP on defense, undercutting the storyline that Trump's spending push would fracture the alliance.34
The funeral convoy carrying Ayatollah Khamenei's coffin crossed into Iraq Wednesday, with Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi and senior officials receiving it at Najaf International Airport ahead of ceremonies in Najaf and Karbala. Reporting has now converged on a firm date: final burial at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, his hometown, is set for Thursday, July 9 — resolving the date uncertainty carried in recent editions.56
The Democratic Republic of Congo's Bundibugyo-strain Ebola outbreak has now infected more than 1,500 people and killed over 500 across three eastern provinces, centered in Ituri. Frontline health workers there issued a 24-hour strike notice, citing unpaid benefits, inadequate supplies, and more than 70 medics infected since the outbreak began. There's no approved vaccine for this Ebola strain; a trial of a monoclonal antibody and remdesivir began last week.78
A French appeals court on Tuesday cut Marine Le Pen's embezzlement sentence to three years (two suspended) plus a court-ordered electronic monitor and a €100 million fine, after finding her party guilty of systematically embezzling €4.1 million in EU funds over a decade. The same ruling shortened an office-seeking ban that had blocked her candidacy, clearing her to run in 2027 — she says she'll appeal to France's highest court, which would suspend the monitor requirement, and campaign "without an electronic bracelet."910
OpenAI continues to hold GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna to a small group of government-vetted partners at the White House's request, over concerns the model's capabilities are "on par" with a prior system that raised cybersecurity flags. OpenAI has said it doesn't want this kind of pre-release government review to become the long-term default, but a formal security-evaluation framework from the National Cyber Director's office and OSTP still hasn't been published. No fresh developments since Monday's edition — the model sits in preview.11
Analysts expect PepsiCo to report EPS of $2.21 (+4.2% y/y) on revenue of roughly $24 billion (+5.7% y/y) ahead of Thursday's open — the first notable print of a season FactSet expects to show S&P 500 earnings growth above 20% for a second straight quarter. Union Pacific follows later this month (July 23).12
Global M&A value is on pace for its strongest year since 2021, with megadeals over $5 billion now accounting for nearly half of total value. AI, healthcare, and energy remain the largest sub-sectors by deal value, following late-June megadeals including Qualcomm's ~$4 billion purchase of Modular and Adobe's acquisition of Topaz Labs.13
Asia and Europe are shrugging off the Iran escalation and rallying — Nikkei +2.1%, Hang Seng +3%, Stoxx 50 +1.6% — but that looks more like catch-up to Tuesday's chip-led US strength than a read on overnight events, since the Iran strikes broke well after those sessions priced in. The real tell is in commodities and the US pre-market: WTI jumped nearly 3% Tuesday to $70+ and gold pushed toward $4,180 on safe-haven flow, while QQQ is down close to 1.5% pre-market — a genuinely fresh reaction to the strikes, not carryover chop. Treasury yields are still Monday's (7/6) print; today's real catalyst is 2:00 PM's FOMC minutes. Gap notes: futures snapshot endpoint (NQ/ES outrights) 403'd on this data plan — QQQ level used for the Nasdaq read instead; BTC is Tuesday's prev-day close, spot feed gated.14
New, and it's the big one: the "contained" chapter of this theme is over. What had been five straight days of a funeral procession moving through Iran with no fresh Hormuz risk premium broke overnight — Iran attacked commercial shipping, the US struck 80+ targets in response, sanctions snapped back on, and both WTI (+2.9%) and gold are now pricing real escalation risk for the first time since this theme started. The open question from Tuesday's edition — "does crude reprice once the funeral peaks?" — is effectively answered, just not by the funeral: it repriced on a shooting exchange instead. Burial in Mashhad is now confirmed for Thursday.
Today is the payoff: 2:00 PM's FOMC minutes (from the June 16-17 meeting) are the first substantive record of the Warsh-era committee, which split 9-9 on a 2026 rate hike with core PCE revised up to 3.3% (from 2.7% in March) against GDP growth revised down to 2.2%. Warsh himself declined to submit a dot to the projection — the first chair ever to abstain — making these minutes markets' only real on-record read on where a Warsh Fed actually stands, rather than a gloss on what he's already said.
Nothing new since Tuesday — no fresh capex or utility M&A headline, and OpenAI's gpt-realtime-2.1 ships stand as the only recent product news while GPT-5.6's broader release stays gated behind the still-unpublished White House framework. Genuinely quiet; carried forward rather than padded.
This is a real trend-down open, not digestion — the Iran strikes are a genuine exogenous shock landing on a market that had otherwise been grinding through a contained geopolitical backdrop for five straight days. QQQ's cockpit read (negative gamma, below VWAP, high-confidence trend-down) means dealer positioning is set up to amplify moves rather than dampen them today, so headline risk from Iran's promised retaliation carries more punch than it would in a positive-gamma tape. The transmission channel from the world page is now unusually direct: crude and gold are already moving, and any Hormuz shipping disruption would show up fast in both. Layered on top, 2:00 PM's FOMC minutes are a second, independent catalyst — a genuinely new data point on a Warsh Fed that has so far told markets almost nothing. Net: today has two real catalysts stacked on one session, geopolitical and monetary, and the setup (negative gamma, already-elevated realized vol) argues for respecting both rather than fading either.
Researchers at TU Wien used a quantum-information technique called quantum Fisher information to detect a high degree of entanglement inside a centimeter-sized "strange metal" crystal — not a speck under a microscope, an actual object you could pick up. At least nine quantum-entangled entities were shown acting collectively inside it, measurable through the crystal's unusually strong magnetic response. It's the first time entanglement has been directly measured at that scale, and it opens a new bridge between quantum information science and ordinary solid-state materials — proof that the weirdness doesn't stop being weird just because the object is big enough to lose in your desk drawer.15
Security footage from a hotel in Nagqu, Tibet shows a brown bear wandering in through the front door, ransacking the front desk for water bottles, then padding upstairs and forcing open a locked door into an occupied room. The two guests inside reported staring at it for a few seconds before it wandered back out on its own, unbothered, having apparently decided the room had nothing better than what it already found downstairs. The hotel owner chased it off with a flashlight; management says it's now "adding additional security measures to keep bears out," which feels like an understatement of a business problem nobody plans for.16