PREMARKET EDGE — PPI Printed 5.4 and Diesel Was a Third of It. The ECB Called It a Supply Shock and Hiked Anyway. And Freeport Fell 8 Percent While Everyone Wa

By Nicholas Thomas · Thursday, September 10, 2026 · filed 9:20 AM ET; fact-checked and revised 9:30 AM ET — TrendyVest. Not investment advice. TrendyVest and its writers may own securities discussed here.

Every level below is a stamp with its time and feed. Oil is printed in pairs from one feed at one minute, which is the rule as of last night.** --- **SWORN IN.** Wednesday's S&P 500 (7,636.36), Dow (52,380.66) and Nasdaq (26,253.34) were sworn last night on the AP and a second feed. The Russell joins them this morning: Investrade's preview carries 2,921.23, the AP's number to the penny, so last night's three-numbers problem closes at 2,921.23, down 38.97 or 38.98 depending on who's rounding.

The oil settlements are sworn too. Vantage Markets' overnight note carries WTI at $96.05 and Brent above $101.21, matching Investrade, which makes yesterday's spread row a LOSS on two feeds and Lily's Brent row a WIN on two — no longer provisional. Intel's $106.24 is still on one clean feed.

I'll keep looking. **THE TAPE BEFORE THE BELL.** Futures were small and got smaller. Investrade's early stamps had the Dow up 125 at 52,550, the S&P up 6.25 at 7,650 and Nasdaq-100 futures down 63.50 at 29,385; ZeroHedge's 8:15 snapshot had the S&P down 0.2 percent and the Nasdaq down 0.5; TheStreet called them mixed at 8:39, after the data. Oil, in pairs: at 7:05 on TheStreet, **WTI $97.47, up 1.5 percent, beside Brent $102.10, up 0.9** — a $4.63 spread.

Investrade's earlier pair was $96.94 and $102.03, $5.09 apart. By 8:15 ZeroHedge had Brent above $103, up 2 percent, so the seaborne barrel kept going after both stamps. Every pair this morning is wider than the $4.50 I bet against yesterday, and the lesson from last night's correction holds: read the spread off one feed at one minute or don't read it at all.

Gold was $4,427.40, down 0.75 percent, at 7:43 on TheStreet; silver $66.31, down 3.4 percent, at 7:39. Overnight: the Nikkei up 128 to 65,270 per Investrade, still unsworn after yesterday's two-feed fight; the Hang Seng down 320 to 24,954; Shanghai off 17 at 3,934; the DAX and FTSE slightly lower. The AAII survey has bears at 39.3 percent and bulls at 38, on the third straight down day.

The 10-year is where I have to slow down, because the feeds don't agree and the disagreement is the size of the story. Before the data: Investrade's premarket stamp was **4.856 percent**, ZeroHedge's 8:15 was **4.87, the highest since October 2023**, with the 30-year at 5.29. After the data: Trading Economics' latest read was **4.79, down 5.2 basis points** — an outlier against everything else, and a feed this desk has caught quoting stale CFD levels twice this week.

I don't have a post-8:30 yield on a feed I trust at press time. So the pre-data number is 4.86 to 4.87 on two feeds, and what the bond market did with the report is the first thing the Closing Edge will settle. **ONE — THE PPI IS ONE MOLECULE.** The headline: producer prices rose 0.4 percent in August, in line, and **5.4 percent from a year ago against 5.3 expected**, with July revised up to 4.8. That's what the first hour trades.

Here's what's under it, from the BLS release itself. Final demand goods rose 1.1 percent. Final demand services rose 0.1.

The broad core — less foods, energy and trade — rose 0.3 on the month and 4.7 on the year; the narrower core, ex food and energy, rose **0.2 against 0.3 expected**, 4.6 on the year, in line. And the one line that moved the report: **diesel fuel, up 24.1 percent in a month, more than a third of the entire goods increase by itself.** Gasoline, jet fuel and heating oil followed it. Truck freight rose 2 percent, which is diesel with a driver.

Residential electric power fell half a percent. And margins for fuel and lubricant retailers **fell 11.3 percent** — the gas station ate the spike. Remember that the next time Casey's reports: its 47.8-cent fuel margin was the quarter that ended in July, before August did this to the pumps.

So the report is hot on its first digit and soft on its third, and the plain reading is that August's producer inflation was a war-price pass-through in one sector while services barely moved. The dollar, per InvestingLive, traded the 5.4. What the long end did is the number I can't see yet.

Jobless claims were 206,000 against 205,000 expected, continuing claims 1.774 million, the four-week average 206,000 — the labor market is not in this story. **TWO — THE ECB CALLED IT A SUPPLY SHOCK AND HIKED ANYWAY.** At 8:15 Frankfurt raised the deposit rate a quarter point to **2.50 percent**, the main refinancing rate to 2.65 and the marginal lending rate to 2.90, the second hike since June — and Episode 33's row, placed at 55 percent back when it wasn't obvious, is a **WIN**. The statement's sentence, per Euronews: "the conflict in the Middle East continues to generate inflation pressures, and inflation is set to remain well above target for an extended period." The numbers behind it are the story nobody's writing. August euro-area inflation was 3.3 percent, up from 2.9, the highest since September 2023.

Energy inflation was **14.3 percent**, up from 10.3. **Core fell to 2.4.** The ECB raised rates against a number that is falling because the number that is rising is one it can't touch — and then Lagarde said so herself. Per FXStreet's live text of the press conference: the decision "was a no brainer," and "this is predominantly a supply shock." She also said she "can't anticipate what will be the next move," that headline inflation returns to target "towards end of 2027," and that "the energy shock could intensify further and its effects on other prices and wages could be stronger than currently expected." The projections say the same thing the way projections do: 3.0 percent inflation this year, 2.5 next, 2.1 in 2028 — a shock that fades on its own schedule, met with a rate that doesn't. That is the exact argument the Fed has on Tuesday and Wednesday with the futures market near 60 percent for a hike, and this morning's PPI — energy up 24 percent in one line, services up 0.1 — is the American version of the same chart. **THREE — FREEPORT FELL 8 PERCENT AND NOBODY LOOKED UP.** This is the story I'd put on the front page if I ran one, and it's also the one I have to print most carefully, because the metal and the miners are on different feeds saying different things.

The miners first, because they're on two. **Freeport-McMoRan was $70.00 in the premarket at 9:03, down 8.17 percent** from Wednesday's $76.23 close, per stockanalysis; TheStreet had it down 8.8 at 8:32, with **Southern Copper down 7.1**, "as copper prices retreated." Now the metal. Trading Economics' price field has Comex copper at **$6.48 a pound, down 33 cents, or 4.8 percent** — while the same page's same-day note says copper "traded around $6.76 per pound on Thursday, staying close to record highs," and ZeroHedge's 8:15 snapshot also had copper near record highs. One feed contradicting itself and a second feed contradicting it is not a settlement, and I'm not printing a 4.8 percent copper drop as fact.

The miners' drop is fact. The setup makes it strange either way: on Tuesday, per the Rio Times, LME cash copper closed at about $14,737 a tonne, up 1.35 percent, the second-highest close on record, with Freeport up 5.4 and Southern Copper up 4.9, on traders front-running U.S. duties on refined copper, Andean supply tightness and Chinese grid demand. The tariff itself is described two ways in the record — Mining.com's August 27 account has it set at 15 percent from January, rising to 30 percent by 2028; OilPrice's August 19 account has the Commerce recommendation unpublished and the 15 percent "unresolved." I couldn't find this morning's trigger on a feed I trust, and I'm not going to invent one.

What I can tell you is what it means if the miners' move holds through 4:00: the companies that dig the metal that measures growth fell 8 percent on the morning the molecule that measures fear made a new high. Oil up, copper miners down, is the stagflation chart, and it isn't the chart the "Fed over missiles" trade has been assuming. Watch the Comex settlement and the reason, in that order. **FOUR — THE TARIFF REFUND IS A LINE ITEM NOW, AND THE CROWD IS FINING THE QUARTER WITHOUT ONE.** Two retailers in eighteen hours.

American Eagle last night: gross margin up 980 basis points, of which 1,300 came from **$196 million of tariff refunds** received in the quarter — a net benefit of $161 million under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act refunds, per Investing.com, worth 1,170 basis points of operating margin — while merchandise margin deleveraged 330. Comps up 6, Aerie up 19, the namesake brand down 1. The full-year operating-income guide of $540 to $550 million is 37 percent above the $398 million consensus, per Investrade, because the refund is in it.

The third-quarter guide of $110 to $115 million is 9 percent under the $123.6 million consensus, because the refund isn't. The stock was **down 11 percent after hours** per Investing.com and **down 14 in the premarket** at 8:15 per ZeroHedge. Macy's this morning: adjusted EPS of 63 cents against 35 or 37 expected depending on the feed, comps up 2.7, full-year EPS raised to $2.15 to $2.35 "including tariff refund benefits," per Yahoo Finance — and the stock **fell 3.3 percent at 7:42** (Yahoo) and was down 1.4 at 7:58 (TheStreet) because the revenue guide's midpoint, $21.76 billion, sits under the $21.82 billion consensus.

Tony Spring talked about "meaningful double-digit growth at Bloomingdale's." The market talked about a beat made of a check. Here's the pattern, and I'd expect it across September's retail prints: a refund of duties already paid lands as a one-time margin gift, the annual guide rises to include it, and the quarter that doesn't have one guides under the Street. Casey's on Tuesday, American Eagle last night, Macy's today.

That's a statute case — the beat gets paid only when the crowd hasn't already spent it — and this crowd has learned to find the refund line before the call starts. **FIVE — THE MEMORY SHORTAGE IS NOW SETTING CHINA'S AI-CHIP PRICES.** Reuters, this morning, exclusive: Huawei has raised the price of its Ascend 950DT accelerator to above 250,000 yuan — about $37,000 — 20 to 50 percent above the quotes of two months ago; the 950PR to more than 80,000 yuan from about 60,000; the 910C to 110,000-plus from about 90,000. Cambricon repriced its next-generation 690 chip 20 to 30 percent higher. MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX followed.

Bloomberg's version is a 60 percent increase on Huawei's best chip "this summer." The reason, per Reuters' three people: a worldwide shortage of high-bandwidth memory, which SK hynix, Samsung and Micron dominate and which Chinese chipmakers have sourced through grey-market channels since the December 2024 export controls, at "several times what buyers outside China pay." Read that against Micron at $1,027.77 and this week's HBM base-die story: the memory makers' pricing power now reaches customers they cannot legally sell to, and the cost of China's domestic AI compute is being set in Icheon and Boise. It's the same phenomenon as DigiTimes' report of a 10 percent Intel PC-CPU price increase next month, at the other end of the stack. When the input is short, everyone with a product raises the price, and the customer who can't switch pays.

Nobody I've read this morning has connected the Reuters story to the memory trade. That's the connection. **SIX — THE $1.5 BILLION RESEARCHER WAITED FOR THE LAUNCH, THEN LEFT.** Semafor, 5:29 last night: Andrew Tulloch, the Thinking Machines co-founder whose reported $1.5 billion, six-year package from Mark Zuckerberg became the symbol of the AI talent bubble — "that number has been disputed," Semafor notes — is leaving Meta. He stayed, per the report, "until the company successfully launched its new family of open source AI models and AI assistant, Muse." That launch was Wednesday.

Meta rose 6.55 percent on it, and was up another 1.3 percent premarket on a JPMorgan upgrade, per ZeroHedge. It's unclear why he left or where he's going, and Meta hasn't said. I'll just set the facts next to each other: the most expensive hire of the superintelligence era departed within a day of the product shipping, and the stock priced the product, not the departure.

Retention is the cost line nobody models in a $130-to-145 billion capex year. **SEVEN — TWO SMALLER THINGS THAT ARE BIGGER THAN THEY LOOK.** Enbridge is paying **$2.55 billion** for Tallgrass's crude business — 75 percent of the 1,050-mile Pony Express pipeline, about 460,000 barrels a day; 51 percent of the Powder River Gateway system, about 240,000; 8.4 million barrels of storage across nine terminals; 60.3 percent of the Deeprock terminal at Cushing; and the Stanchion marketing arm — financed with a C$2.6 billion bought deal, per the Oil & Gas Journal. Colin Gruending, who runs Enbridge's liquids pipelines, called it an expansion "into the US Rockies region." Translation: North America's largest crude shipper is buying Rockies-to-Cushing egress with equity at $97 WTI, which is a statement about how long it thinks $97 lasts. And the Treasury's short-end buyback on Wednesday — the one I wrongly called the doubled operation — took **$12.5 billion of $28.0 billion offered**, 2.2 times the cap, per The Vault Report.

Dealers are still queuing to sell the government its own paper. Today at 1:40 the actual long-end operation runs, $6 billion against whatever they offer, and last night's row says they'll offer enough. **THE SMALLER PRINTS.** Cooper was down 18.1 percent at 8:32 (TheStreet) and 16 at 8:15 (ZeroHedge) after the strategic review that found no acceptable buyer for CooperSurgical and a fourth-quarter guide of $1.05 to $1.09 against $1.19; the medtech read-through is that private equity doesn't pay up with the 10-year at 4.87. Navan was down 15 percent premarket per ZeroHedge despite raising its year, which is the American Eagle pattern without the tariff.

Chemours was up 6.6 percent on a $455 million PFAS settlement with DuPont and Corteva. Fox rose 4.5 percent on comments about the Roku deal, a day after the DOJ's second request. SS&C rose 5 on a UBS target.

AeroVironment was up 4 on last night's backlog. SpaceX was $146.78 at 7:00, off half a percent, the morning after unlock day. TSMC's August revenue was NT$514.8 billion, up 53.3 percent, a record — the number the whole AI trade is standing on, and the least surprising thing in this column.

Chewy got cut to In Line at Evercore a day after raising its year. Biohaven disclosed a partial clinical hold on BHV-7000. Centrus is selling stock at $199.64.

Motorola added $2 billion to its buyback. TotalEnergies found more oil in Angola and will spend $10 billion there over five years. On the war: at 12:07 this morning, per ABC's live coverage, the President said of the Pickaxe Mountain site that "somebody said there was a little movement" and "I would advise Iran not to get cute because we will have to hit them very hard"; on Tuesday afternoon he'd said "I think the war is going to end immediately after the election… they can't hold out any longer," which TheStreet rendered as oil staying high until the midterms.

TheStreet's 7:45 item that multiple U.S. aircraft were damaged in the Iranian strikes on Jordan wasn't on a second feed by press time, and it's printed as one outlet's. **THE BOOK THIS MORNING.** *Episode 33 — the ECB hikes:* **WIN**, 8:15, Euronews and FXStreet. *Yesterday's Brent-under-$100 settlement:* LOSS, sworn. *Lily's Brent at or above $100 by Friday:* WIN, sworn. *The spread under $4.50:* LOSS, sworn, corrected last night. *Intel below $104.47:* LOSS on one feed; second feed pending. *Wednesday's H.15 at or below Tuesday's:* grades around 4:15 today and is losing, 4.83 against 4.78. *Lily's 10-year at or above 4.80 on Friday's H.15:* leading at 4.86 to 4.87 on the two pre-data feeds; the post-data level decides it. *Last night's three rows* — Brent settles at or above $100 again (65%), the Treasury takes the full $6 billion (60%), the 30-year stops through (55%) — all grade today. Lily's eight Oracle rows grade tonight. Friday's book grades tomorrow. **THE DAY, HOUR BY HOUR.** 10:00, existing home sales, consensus 3.98 million from 4.06, with the 30-year mortgage at 6.85 percent, the highest since June 2025; wholesale inventories. 10:30, the EIA petroleum report for the week ending September 4 — Thursday, per the holiday schedule, as corrected yesterday; the last one was a 4.45 million barrel draw — and natural gas storage. 1:00, the $22 billion 30-year reopening, per Investrade's calendar and ZeroHedge's sizing, into a long end that cleared 10-years at 2007 yields yesterday. 1:40 to 2:00, the $6 billion buyback of 10-year notes and 20-year bonds maturing 2037 to 2046.

After the close: Oracle — consensus about $19.14 billion and $1.74, RPO $638 billion last quarter, an 11 percent implied move — Adobe at $6.08 or $6.09 depending on the feed, and Copart. Around 4:15, the H.15 with Wednesday's 10-year. Friday: CPI at 8:30, consensus 3.4 percent headline and 2.4 to 2.5 core; Michigan sentiment, 51.7; Kroger; settlement day for the Friday book.

Saturday, iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders. Monday, UnitedHealth ex-dividend. Tuesday and Wednesday, the Fed. **THE ROWS.** *Row one — 55% that Thursday's 10-year on the H.15, printed Friday afternoon, is at or below Wednesday's 4.83.* The core miss, the 30-year's concession, and a $6 billion bid behind it at 1:40.

Falsifier: a 30-year that tails and reprices the whole long end in the last two hours. Settlement: the Federal Reserve's H.15, Thursday's row. *Row two — 60% that the EIA reports a crude inventory draw for the week ending September 4.* The reserve is at its lowest since 1982, Asian buyers took more than 40 million barrels of U.S. crude for September loading per FXStreet, and the last report drew 4.45 million barrels. Falsifier: refinery runs falling faster than exports rise as maintenance season starts.

Settlement: the EIA's Weekly Petroleum Status Report, commercial crude line. *Row three — 65% that the Brent–WTI spread at today's settlements is at or above $4.50, read from one feed at one minute.* Yesterday I bet on the inland barrel catching the seaborne one and lost on a stale quote; this morning's pairs sit at $4.63 and $5.09, and Brent kept going after both, and the premium is a Gulf premium until a Gulf headline says otherwise. Falsifier: an EIA draw large enough to pull WTI up faster than Brent into 2:30. Settlement: Reuters' settlement pair, confirmed on one other feed carrying both numbers. *Grading notes.* Row one grades on Friday's H.15.

Rows two and three grade today at 10:30 and 2:30. Yesterday's three rows grade at 2:30, 2:00 and 1:00, and the Closing Edge prints all six in the same font, win or lose. **TICKERS IN PLAY.** $FCX · $SCCO · $CASY · $AEO · $M · $MU · $INTC · $META · $ENB · $COO · $NAVN · $CC · $FOXA · $SPCX · $TSM · $CHWY · $BHVN · $ORCL · $ADBE · $TLT · $GLD · $SLV · Brent · WTI · Copper Markets. Tech.

The Edge. Research with receipts. — Nicholas Thomas **FACT-CHECK NOTES, PRINTED INSIDE THE COLUMN.** This column was checked against second sources between the 9:20 filing and the open. What changed: *Copper.* The first draft printed a 4.8 percent drop in Comex copper as fact, on Trading Economics' price field.

The same page's same-day note says copper was "around $6.76, close to record highs," and ZeroHedge's 8:15 snapshot agreed with the note, not the field. The metal's drop is therefore one feed disagreeing with itself and is now printed that way. The miners' drop is on two feeds — TheStreet at 8:32 and stockanalysis at 9:03 (Freeport $70.00, down 8.17 percent) — and the section and headline were rebuilt around what's verified.

The tariff status is described two ways by two outlets (Mining.com: 15 percent from January rising to 30 by 2028; OilPrice: unresolved); both are printed instead of the first draft's single version. *The 10-year.* The first draft leaned on Trading Economics' 4.79 as a possible post-PPI reading. ZeroHedge's 8:15 stamp was 4.87, Investrade's 4.856, and Trading Economics has served stale levels twice this week; the 4.79 is now labeled an outlier, and the column says plainly that no trusted post-8:30 yield had reached the desk. *The President's remarks.* The first draft paraphrased TheStreet — "oil prices likely won't decline until after the midterms" — and called it the first time anyone in Washington had put a date on $100 oil. ABC's live coverage has the words: "I think the war is going to end immediately after the election… they can't hold out any longer" (Tuesday, 2:58 PM), and "I would advise Iran not to get cute because we will have to hit them very hard" (12:07 AM today, on the Pickaxe Mountain site).

The verbatim replaces the paraphrase, and the "first time" claim, which had no source, is gone. *Aircraft damaged.* TheStreet's 7:45 item was on no other feed by press time. It's printed as TheStreet's alone. *American Eagle.* The first draft had the release figures but not the reaction. Investing.com has the stock down 11 percent after hours and the refund's legal basis (IEEPA) with a $161 million net benefit worth 1,170 basis points of operating margin; ZeroHedge has it down 14 premarket.

Both added, and they strengthen the section's point rather than change it. *Macy's.* The consensus split — 35 cents on Yahoo Finance, 37 on TheStreet — and the two stamps on the stock (down 3.3 at 7:42; down 1.4 at 7:58) are now both printed. *Lagarde.* The first draft had the ECB decision and statement but not the press conference. FXStreet's live text — "no brainer," "predominantly a supply shock," "can't anticipate what will be the next move," target "towards end of 2027" — is added, with the caveat that live text is a wire's rendering, not a transcript. The decision is now on two feeds (Euronews, FXStreet). *The 30-year auction.* ZeroHedge sizes it at $22 billion and places it after 2:00; Investrade's calendar has 1:00.

The column uses 1:00 with the size and notes the difference. *Smaller fixes.* "The last two reports drew" became "the last report drew 4.45 million barrels," which is what the desk has verified. "The first bear majority in a while" became "bears above bulls," which is what the AAII numbers say. Oil's 8:15 stamp (Brent above $103) was added so the pairs read as a sequence rather than a snapshot.

Navan's 15 percent premarket drop, Meta's JPMorgan upgrade and Cooper's second stamp were added from ZeroHedge. *Held as stated.* The PPI internals (BLS), the claims figures (Labor Department via FXStreet), the ECB's figures and projections (Euronews), the Reuters exclusive on Chinese chip prices, Semafor on Tulloch, the Enbridge assets (Oil & Gas Journal), the Vault Report's buyback figures, the Rio Times' Tuesday copper levels, and the sworn-in closes and settlements. *This is TrendyVest's analysis and opinion — for informational purposes only, not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security or commodity. TrendyVest and its writers may own securities discussed here. Sources: Wednesday's closes per the AP (KRMG syndication), VistaP Global and Investrade's Morning Preview of September 10 (the Russell at 2,921.23); the oil settlements' second feed per Vantage Markets' September 10 note; futures, overnight indexes, the early oil pair, gold, the 10-year at 4.856 percent, the calendar and consensus, the AAII figures, the American Eagle, Macy's, Navan, Cooper and TSMC figures, the Chewy downgrade, the Enbridge, TotalEnergies, Biohaven, Centrus, Motorola and Meta/Tulloch items per Investrade's Morning Preview, September 10; the 8:15 futures, 10-year (4.87), 30-year (5.29), Brent above $103, copper "near record highs," the $22 billion 30-year size and the premarket movers (Meta, Apple, AeroVironment, Rackspace, American Eagle, Cooper, Navan) per ZeroHedge, September 10; the 7:05 oil pair, the 7:39 silver and 7:43 gold stamps, the 8:32 movers (Chemours, S