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Margaret Lea won last week’s world-famous-news-haiku-competition™ with this beauty about how too many goals at the World Cup is forcing gambling websites to pay out record amounts:

Congratulations, Margaret! Here’s what she emailed in response to la victoire, as they say en France, when they’re talking about La Cup Du Monde:

“Thanks Matt! My haiku speaks for itself, so I’ll just say thanks for the fun contest, Cheddar!”

You’re welcome! Here’s your celebratory gif, Margaret!

And here’s how Margaret’s efforts stacked up against the competition:

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 1. They said bet, I did, But didn't want me to win, Surprise, I did, GOOOOOAL! ~Wendy Dobbins (65)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 2. Place your bets on kicks, Bookies paying through their teeth, Unexpectedly ~Janine (4)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 3. Scots drank Boston dry, While Norway rowed in Times Square, Their goals killed bookies ~Susan Weinstein (22)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 4. Lionel Messi, Scores another. Gooooooooaaaaaal! crowd cheers. Sportsbook cries big tears ~Megan Stewart (31)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 5. Best you remember, Regardless of the goal count, The house always wins ~Richard Brown (32)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 6. Feet are gonna kick. Goal count through the roof. Ole! Bookies gotta pay ~Erika Ettin (13)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 7. Taking bets has risks, Lots of goals, happy bettors, Don't pity bookies! ~Tim Olsen (10)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 8. World Cup gives bookies, taste of their own medicine. Karma is a bitch ~Margaret Lea (93)
270 votes via Beehiiv polls.

This week’s world-famous-news-haiku-competition™ is all about how Walmart is transforming ordinary store visits into VIP experiences for World Cup tourists. Don’t worry, the World Cup is over this coming weekend, then we can talk about…baseball…or something. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers. (Don’t worry if you get a bounceback email. The mailbox is working, it’s just been inundated with haikus lately, thank goodness!)

And now, news!

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

Table of Contents

• What's Ahead for Your 401(k) in 2026?

• Walmart Giving World Cup Tourists VIP Tours

• Meta Decides to Try Making AI Chips

• OpenAI, Google Sell AI to Blacklisted China Groups

• How Charles Schwab Turbocharged Trump's Trading

• Poll of the Day: Standard & Rich?

What’s the Stock Market Up To, Eh?

$SPX ( ▲ 0.42% )  $DJI ( ▲ 0.29% )  $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies Mentioned in Today’s Newsletter

$PLYRZZX ( ▲ 0.09% )  $WMT ( ▲ 1.51% )  $META ( ▲ 5.98% )  $AMD ( ▲ 2.04% )  $NVDA ( ▲ 4.03% )  $OPEAZZX ( ▲ 0.44% )  $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.48% )  $BABA ( ▲ 1.07% )  

What's Ahead for Your 401(k) in 2026?

If your retirement plan for 2026 is "stare at your portfolio, cry silently, and pray," you are in good company. Between tech giants blowing through cash like teenagers at a mall and political headlines driving the market, your nest egg is in for a delightfully chaotic ride. That said, investors are increasingly optimistic that the latter half of 2026 will be positive for markets as a whole. 28% of Polymarket $PLYRZZX ( ▲ 0.09% )  gamblers predictors think the S&P500 $SPX ( ▲ 0.42% ) will break 8,000 by the end of the year, up another 6% on its 8% gains in the first half of the year for a tidy return of 14%, even in a rollercoaster year for markets more generally. 🎢

According to Jess Inskip, Director of Investor Research at StockBrokers.com, the secret to surviving this market is "open-mindedness." Yes, she warns us, "I'm gonna say this word too many times, but... we must be open-minded to these changes." In other words, be open-minded enough to watch your life savings fuel corporate "creativity."

Normally, when big tech has cash, they buy back stock to make investors happy. Not anymore! Now, they’re "getting creative with liquidity," Inskip notes. "We stopped stock buybacks... Ultimately, I want companies to deploy their cash and invest it. So we saw the increased capex bend. We've exhausted a little bit of free cash flow, then we started issuing bonds, and now we're issuing equities." Translating from Wall Street jargon: They spent all their pocket money on massive AI infrastructure, and now they are coming to you for cash.

Speaking of AI, Inskip points out, "I believe we put AI on a pedestal and that concerns me." But even if we don't know "what the end goal is with artificial intelligence," we can always count on short memories. Inskip observes, "Memory fades out... So there's this rotation that's very headline-driven."

And what about Washington? Inskip admits, "I've never paid more attention to Truth Social than I've ever had in my entire career, but we must…" to spot patterns.

Mustn’t we all. Thanks for coming into the studio, Jess!

Quote of the Day

Walmart Giving World Cup Tourists VIP Tours

Move over, Statue of Liberty. Step aside, Hollywood sign. The true pinnacle of American tourism is a Walmart $WMT ( ▲ 1.51% ) in New Jersey. The retail giant is capitalizing on World Cup fever by offering exclusive, guided "VIP tours" for international travelers.

Foreign visitors are losing their minds. Irish tourist Mick “No Relation to Glen” Madeiros took to TikTok to marvel that Walmart sells Fruity Pebbles cereal in great big, weighty bags usually reserved for "dog kibble." Meanwhile, Englishman Harry “My Name Is Real” Gunns told CNN that the vivid kaleidoscope of the chip aisle to be "absolute insanity in all the best ways." To help these bewildered foreigners navigate our towering walls of sodium, Walmart associates are on hand to show off colossal peanut butter jars.

As a seasoned connoisseur of the big-box experience, I completely understand the appeal. In fact, I often go there to rub shoulders with the real people of America, particularly the ones with behavioral health problems. There is truly no better place to experience raw, unfiltered American humanity than at a Walmart parking lot at 2:00 a.m.

Meta Decides to Try Making AI Chips

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg struck gold in his dorm room back in the early 2000s, he has spent over two decades frantically searching for a second good idea. After the multi-billion-dollar virtual ghost town of the Metaverse failed to excite, Zuck has pivoted to his newest savior: AI silicon.

Yes, Meta $META ( ▲ 5.98% ) plans to start manufacturing its own AI chip, code-named "Iris," this September. This is part of an in-house effort that has embarrassingly floundered since its launch more than half a decade ago. Turns out, relying entirely on Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 4.03% ) and AMD $AMD ( ▲ 2.04% ) is a bit of a buzzkill. According to an internal memo, trying to adopt their latest GPUs "has been a heavy lift, and it has cost us time."

So, Meta is building its own. As Mike Gualtieri, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, told Reuters, "You can't become an AI titan if you are dependent on another company for chips.”

Meanwhile, South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix $SKHYV ( ▲ 12.76% ) shot up more than 15% on its NASDAQ debut on Friday. So there’s stiff competition out there from companies who aren’t distracted by running social media platforms and making Ray Bans that record video. Still, good luck, Mark. I’m sure this is the one!

Song of the Day: Mk.Gee, ‘Rockman’

Mk.gee's "ROCKMAN" is an electrifying, upbeat indie pop track that beautifully blends '80s rock nostalgia with futuristic production.

OpenAI, Google Sell AI to Blacklisted China Groups

We all know Washington is deeply committed to winning the AI arms race. "We must beat China!" politicians scream from every podium.

But as the Financial Times just delightfully exposed, America’s premier AI gatekeepers, OpenAI $OPEAZZX ( ▲ 0.44% ) and Google $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.48% ) , have been happily supplying their advanced models to blacklisted Chinese tech giants accused of working with the military. It’s a corporate masterstroke: Preach national security in public, and cash the checks from Singapore-based subsidiaries of Tencent, Baidu $BIDU ( ▲ 0.02% ) , and Alibaba $BABA ( ▲ 1.07% ) in private.

As Chris McGuire, a technology and security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the FT, “The [Trump] administration says we need to beat China on AI all the time, but the problem is they haven’t done anything on export control which is the actual tool we have to slow China down.” 

Exactly. Who needs actual regulation when we can rely on corporate honor? Alibaba defended itself by calling its Pentagon blacklist designation "arbitrary and capricious." OpenAI’s justification for the behavior is also a masterpiece of corporate moral gymnastics. The company claimed to the FT, “We would rather see more of the world using AI shaped by democratic values than AI controlled by autocratic governments.” 

That’s because nothing spreads the sweet taste of liberty quite like letting military-linked contractors use your frontier AI models. Meanwhile, Google threw up its hands, noting that geographic restrictions could be "easily circumvented by sophisticated attackers" anyway. Why lock the door when the burglars are just going to pick the lock?

All this lets Chinese labs systematically extract frontier AI capabilities from America without bearing the compute, engineering, and safety costs. But why worry about eroding the economic foundation of America’s AI leadership when there are monthly subscription fees to collect?

How Charles Schwab Turbocharged Trump's Trading

Ever worry your stock portfolio isn’t active enough? Meet President Trump’s Charles Schwab $SCHW ( ▲ 1.19% )  "account no. 7," an automated trading beast that puts your meager mutual funds to absolute shame, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The magic began when a New York appeals court threw out a $500 million civil fraud penalty against the Trumps. Suddenly, a massive pile of collateral cash was freed up. Schwab's computers immediately did what any rational algorithm would do: They went on a wild, 21,000-trade automated shopping spree.

A White House spokeswoman assures us, “There are no conflicts of interest.” To prove it, Eric Trump clarified on X that “These institutions have sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions, including asset allocation, trading, rebalancing, and portfolio management.”

It's just a friendly computer program called "direct indexing,” whose real beauty is how it handles market volatility. When Trump announced sweeping tariffs in April 2025, sending the stock market into a tailspin, his Schwab account was ready, embarking on a massive “buy the dip” binge. As Joe Smith, investment chief at Parti Pris, told the Journal, “For the year we’ve had, direct-indexing advisers found good opportunities.”

Especially when the beneficiary is the one creating the market-shaking opportunities.

As Trump himself has said, “I’ve made a tremendous amount of money, more than I would have ever thought I would have made, and I let people invest it I don’t even speak to.”

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Should You Check Your 401(k) Today?

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Poll of the Day: Standard & Rich?

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P.S. So, you remember the cheese puns that used to open this newsletter? Suffice to say, they were divisive. Now, thanks to a thing called “dynamic content options,” I can offer you the option to see cheese puns again, if you’re one of the thousands who got in touch bemoaning their departure six months ago. All you need to do is answer “true” on this survey, and submit it. If you never want to see cheese puns in this newsletter again, don’t click that link, don’t fill out the survey, don’t submit it. Just keep reading and pretend this conversation never happened. Mmmkay? Thank you.