Tim Cook's $4 trillion goodbye 🍎

Welcome back to the Day Trading newsletter 📈

Stocks slipped Monday as the U.S. and Iran traded fire for the first time in a month and oil surged back above $90 — but all three major indexes still closed out a winning August.

And this morning, Apple wakes up with a new CEO for the first time in 15 years.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

🛢️ Oil spiked after the U.S. and Iran exchanged strikes for the first time in a month. Brent settled up 2.7% at $90.49 a barrel after U.S. forces hit Iranian rocket launchers and Iran attacked two U.S. bases in Jordan. Energy was the S&P 500's best sector Monday, with Chevron and Halliburton rallying.

🚘️ Tesla jumped 5.5% to $367.95 ahead of Thursday's invite-only Cybercab event in Austin. Investors are betting the steering-wheel-free robotaxi reveal comes with a real production timeline, after Tesla's driver-assistance software won approval for a limited robotaxi rollout in Nevada in mid-August.

📸 GoPro rocketed 46% Monday — and kept ripping after hours — after YouTube star Markiplier disclosed an 8.5% stake, making him the company's largest shareholder. Mark Fischbach's filing lit a short squeeze under the 88-cent stock, even though GoPro's revenue fell 31% last quarter. Meme-stock season isn't dead.

🔌 PG&E sank 18% and Edison International tumbled 23% after California lawmakers blocked a proposal to cap how much wildfire victims can seek from utilities. The amended bill leaves utilities exposed to uncapped wildfire claims. Without a liability shield, one bad fire season can swallow years of profits — a risk investors repriced in a single session.

💰️ Aon is buying insurance broker USI Insurance Services from KKR for $17 billion in cash. USI is the tenth-largest U.S. broker with about $3 billion in annual revenue, and the deal — Aon's biggest move since its $13 billion NFP purchase in 2024 — deepens its push into middle-market insurance. It's expected to close in the fourth quarter.

🔻 Bitcoin enters September — historically its worst month — coming off a 25% August, its best month since November 2024. The token hovered near $78,000 Tuesday morning as rising September rate-hike odds pressured risk assets. Since 2013, September has averaged a roughly 3% loss for bitcoin, though the last three have been green.

🚀 Howmet Aerospace tumbled more than 8% after Elon Musk said SpaceX will cast turbine blades and vanes in-house. Howmet makes exactly those parts, and Musk's push to speed up natural gas turbines for power-hungry data centers reads as a threat to bring a key customer's business inside SpaceX. (CNBC)

🎮️ Take-Two slid more than 6% to $219.70 as Grand Theft Auto VI leaks circulated. GTA VI is by far the most important title in the publisher's pipeline, so anything that muddies the launch narrative hits the stock hard — and Monday's rate-hike jitters gave growth names an extra shove lower.

Monday was Tim Cook's last day as Apple CEO.

As of today, September 1, hardware chief John Ternus is Apple's CEO (the company's first new boss in 15 years) with Cook moving up to executive chairman of the board. It’s the culmination of a planned handoff Apple announced back in April.

The scoreboard on Cook's 15-year run is staggering: Apple's market cap grew from about $350 billion when he took over in 2011 to more than $4 trillion today, annual revenue nearly quadrupled from $108 billion to $416 billion, and the stock returned more than 2,000% (roughly four times the S&P 500's gain over the same stretch).

Ternus is a very different CEO.

Cook was a supply-chain operator; Ternus is a product engineer — a 25-year Apple veteran who has led hardware engineering since 2021 and shipped every recent iPhone, iPad and Mac.

He inherits Apple's biggest strategic problem in years: the company fell behind Microsoft and Google in AI, and its answer (a rebuilt Siri reportedly powered by Google's Gemini models) isn't expected until next June.

How the market values Apple now depends on whether a builder can reignite growth where an operator couldn't.

What to watch: 

• Ternus barely gets a honeymoon. Apple's fall event is September 9 (his first as CEO) with a new iPhone lineup expected and, if the reports are right, the long-awaited foldable iPhone.

• A strong debut would give the new era instant momentum; a sleepy one feeds the "Apple has stopped innovating" narrative he was hired to kill.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: Not financial advice. Do your research before making any trades.