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The Coast Guard searched more than 1,700 square miles of ocean for 41 hours before suspending the search for the 56-year-old Redlands father of three.

The "RHOSLC" star squeezed the surgery into the middle of her DJ tour.

The "RHOSLC" star squeezed the surgery into the middle of her DJ tour.

The beginning of a new academic year is accompanied by a lot of emotions. Some additional help is sure to be appreciated by families and teachers. For many, the back-to-school season is a period of great excitement and stress at the same time. In fact, one poll showed that 87% of parents with children under...

Gym rats are breaking a sweat over a new beauty panic: Could exercise be melting away their Botox? 

McDonald's Sinks To Four-Year Low As Deutsche Bank Sours On Turnaround Hopes

McDonald's shares tumbled as much as 5.9% on Wednesday, the sharpest intraday decline since the early-2020 Covid selloff, before closing down 4.8% at their lowest level since 2022. 

The Big Mac quick-service restaurant chain's investor day heightened Wall Street concerns that softening US sales, coupled with plans for massive investments across restaurant locations, could pressure cash flow and shareholder returns, weighing on the stock for the foreseeable future.

McDonald's held its investor day at its Chicago headquarters on Wednesday. CFO Ian Borden said the burger chain expects its US business to be "slightly negative" in the third quarter, leaving Wall Street analysts at the event fretting over the cost of a multibillion-dollar, multiyear overhaul against a darkening demand outlook that shows no signs of a promising near-term turnaround. 

McDonald's unveiled an $8.5 billion support package for franchisees over a decade as its NEXT overhaul will be costly. Management is forecasting higher productivity and corporate operating margins in the low-to-mid-50% range by 2030.

Shares have tumbled into a bear market this year, down 22% and nearing a four-year low. 

The chain missed second-quarter US sales growth estimates last month, citing execution missteps that hampered efforts to bring back working-class consumers. Newly appointed US business head Skye Anderson admitted at investor day that restaurant operations still needed improvement.

"We expect industry traffic growth in our wholly owned markets will be flat while inflation remains elevated," CEO Chris Kempczinski told the analysts. "The winners will be the companies that create more demand and deliver it more efficiently."

Deutsche Bank's Lauren Silberman told clients on Thursday morning that McDonald's turnaround is still unproven: "We believe the event likely does little to settle the debate on a US SSS inflection (which is key to the bull case)."

Silberman's key quotes from her initial takeaways from investor day:

• US sales remain weak: "US SSS were slightly negative in July and August, and while September should be positive, 3Q SSS are expected to be slightly negative given the slow start to the quarter."
• Fourth quarter caution: "We suspect 4Q US SSS will likely remain sluggish, in part due to a tough comparison."
• Forecast cuts: "We are lowering our 3Q/4Q US SSS to -0.5%/-1% (from flat)."
• The capex bill: "We estimate the total system investment for NEXT will cost ~$19BN, implying MCD will contribute ~45%."
• AI and productivity upside: "We walk away with increased conviction in the company's ability to improve unit economics by unlocking productivity through the implementation of its ArchIQ technology platform."

However, she defended the stock: "We think yesterday's reaction was overblown (our 2027/2028 EPS comes down just 1-2%) given the stock is already trading at trough levels."

Separately, UBS equity trader Mark Paski recently warned in a note that Wall Street has turned its backs on consumer stocks. 

"While part of the recent weakness can be attributed to higher crude prices and rates, the sharp selloff across apparel, retail and restaurant names suggests investors are looking beyond those factors. Feedback from the conference circuit pointed to a common theme: persistent macro uncertainty, ongoing cost pressures and little evidence of a near-term demand inflection. Management teams broadly flagged pressure from inflation, transportation costs, fuel prices and cautious consumer behavior, reinforcing the view that earnings recovery may take longer than previously expected," Paski said.

Paski noted that consumer companies' share of S&P market capitalization has tumbled to just 13.5%, a record low, from about 31% in 1992. That decline shows the sector is becoming less relevant to investors.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 10:40

Is this Max Scherzer's swan song?

The other two spots are going to come down to the questions of what role Pete DeBoer wants his fourth line to play and how comfortable the Islanders are sitting certain players.

A former UPenn classmate of Hannah Gann, who was exposed as a white woman pretending to be Black and Palestinian, says she sought personal gain.

California's iconic coastal cities are bracing for another damaging hurricane this weekend as Hurricane Polo approaches, forcing at least one of them to declare an emergency.

We love an at-home salon moment.

Several significant others of Yankees teammates were quick to toast the couple in the comments section.

What T. Boone Pickens Would Ask About AI CapEx

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

I keep waiting for someone in the AI discussion to talk like an owner. What we get instead is a week of model releases, token counts, and model-lab valuations that look like oil majors, while the harder questions about turbines, interconnect queues, and who answers for the spend sit offstage. That imbalance would have driven T. Boone Pickens up a wall.

Boone passed away in Dallas on September 11, 2019. He was 91. He grew up in Holdenville, Oklahoma, worked as a geologist at Phillips Petroleum, quit, and built Mesa Petroleum from a shoestring into a company that could force Gulf Oil into Chevron's arms. Later he ran an energy hedge fund out of Dallas and spent a decade trying to shove the country onto wind and natural gas before the transmission system could carry either. Two things always set him off. Soft managements that treated shareholders as a nuisance. And a national energy policy that treated imported oil as something America just had to live with.

If he were still in the room this week, he would not be picking sides in a chatbot fight. He would start with the physical bill of materials that decides who can actually build AI.

Power first. Every incremental megawatt of AI load is an order for firm generation. New combined-cycle gas capacity for the post-2027 cohort is now running near $2,000 a kilowatt, roughly double the cost of earlier plants, with turbines on multi-year backorder. Existing, grid-connected gas plants have been changing hands near $1 million a megawatt, about half the cost of building new. In Boone's language, it is getting cheaper to find megawatts on the floor of the exchange than in a turbine queue.

Then metal. Copper goes into the transformers, busbars, and switchgear that move that power to the rack. Tin goes into the solder on every board and optical module. Fastmarkets' AI-chain work puts solder-related tin exposure on track for roughly a tenth of global solder-tin demand by 2030. Gallium and germanium go into power electronics and high-speed optics. The United States is 100 percent import-reliant for gallium, more than 50 percent for germanium, about 77 percent for refined tin, and about 57 percent for refined copper. China accounts for the overwhelming share of primary gallium refining. None of that stack turns on a two-year Capex slide.

Only then would he get to the denominator. What does each new dollar of Capex earn, and what did that dollar cost to fund? Underneath the math sits the question he put to every oil company he ever owned. Who works for whom?

The Mesa Years

Most readers remember the shareholder campaigns. Fewer remember how improbable the man behind them was. Boone was born in 1928 and went to Texas A&M on a basketball scholarship. After an injury he transferred to Oklahoma A&M, where he took a degree in petroleum geology in 1951. He had not yet found his footing, and his father delivered a line Boone would repeat for the rest of his life. A fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan. His parents, his father added, were worried their son was a fool with no plan. Get a plan. Boone took the point. Every campaign he ran afterward began with a written plan and a number, and he had little patience for executives who could offer neither.

He spent a few years as a Phillips geologist, went out on his own, and in 1956 formed Petroleum Exploration, Inc. with two backers in Amarillo. It went public in 1964 as Mesa Petroleum, named for the flat-topped land of the Texas Panhandle. Four years later Mesa made a hostile tender for Hugoton Production, a Kansas gas company larger than itself, and won. That deal set the pattern. By 1981 Mesa was one of the largest independent oil companies in the world, with more than $2 billion of assets, and still small next to the companies Boone would go after next. Cities Service. Gulf. Phillips. Unocal.

The method was consistent. He looked for oil companies whose reserves were worth more than the equity market would credit under the people running them. He bought stock, pressed for a restructuring, a sale, or cash returned to owners, and moved on. Critics called it greenmail. Boone called it accountability.

Gulf was the campaign that defined him. In 1983 Mesa and its partners accumulated a large position in Gulf Oil, one of the Seven Sisters and many times Mesa's size. With the stock around $44, Boone argued publicly that Gulf's reserves supported something closer to $114 a share, and that management had depleted more than half the company's reserves in a decade. His remedy was not to shut anything down. It was to place a quarter of Gulf's cash flow, roughly $750 million a year, into a royalty trust paid directly to shareholders. The board refused, and in 1984 Chevron acquired Gulf for $13.2 billion, then the largest merger in American corporate history. Measured against the size of the U.S. economy, that is the equivalent of a transaction of more than $100 billion today, or roughly half of what Alphabet expects to spend on capital this year. The Pickens group realized a pretax gain of approximately $760 million.

The size of the gain was not the lasting significance. The lasting significance was that a small independent from the Texas Panhandle had shown the market something it preferred not to see. As Boone put it, it had become cheaper to look for oil on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange than in the ground, and the boards sitting on that discount could be made to answer for it.

Unocal showed the limits of the approach, and its most durable result. In 1985 Fred Hartley answered Mesa with a self-tender that excluded Mesa by design, and the Delaware Supreme Court allowed it. Boone lost money on the campaign. But within about a year the SEC adopted its all-holders rule, and a tender offer that treated one class of owner differently from another was no longer available to a board. Every American board still operates under that rule. The following year Boone founded the United Shareholders Association and reduced his philosophy to two sentences. Stockholders are owners. Management are employees. That is still the cleanest description of what is missing from most AI board presentations, which are full of pilots and roadmaps and almost never say who will answer for the roadmap if it is still a slide in 2028.

The Second Act

Most people with Boone's first career would have stopped. Mesa moved from Amarillo to Dallas in 1989, and by 1996 Boone had left the company that made his name. He was nearly seventy. The following year he founded BP Capital and went back to work on the same idea that had powered the raids, which is that physical reality eventually overrules the consensus story. In the years before the 2008 oil peak, when many analysts treated high prices as an aberration, he argued publicly and with his own capital that supply could not keep pace with demand. He was early more than once and said so cheerfully. He was right on direction often enough that those who dismissed him looked careless in hindsight.

His favorite story was about a geologist who falls from a tall building and, passing the fifth floor, thinks so far, so good. He meant the optimism. He also meant that you still had to land. The Pickens Plan of 2008 was that temperament applied to the whole country. Build wind across the Great Plains, build the transmission to carry it, move natural gas out of power generation and into heavy trucks, and cut the import bill. He committed real capital, including an order for 667 GE turbines for a Texas Panhandle project that foundered when transmission could not reach the load, credit markets seized, and cheap shale gas undercut the wind economics. He spent years finding homes for those turbines. It was, in effect, a dry hole with a purchase order.

The critics were right that the plan was harder than the advertisements. But the lesson has aged well. The binding constraint then was wires. Today it is wires, interconnection, turbines, and metal. Artificial intelligence did not create the problem of moving power from where it is cheap to where it is needed. It made the load arrive all at once.

The Same Signal, Forty Years Later

The idea underneath Boone's campaigns is the one worth borrowing this year. It was about what happens when an industry is flooded with cash and keeps pouring it back into the ground.

Crude prices rose roughly tenfold during the 1970s, and the majors emerged with more cash than they had sensible uses for. Michael Jensen later put the 1984 cash flow of the ten largest oil companies at $48.5 billion. Very little went back to owners. The industry kept spending heavily on exploration and development even where average returns sat below the cost of capital. The market noticed before the boards did. John McConnell and Chris Muscarella found that while higher capital-spending announcements generally helped industrial stocks, higher exploration budgets pushed oil stocks down. Owners were saying, in the only language available to them, that the next dollar sunk into the ground was worth less than a dollar left in their hands.

Set this year's numbers beside that history. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are on track for combined 2026 capital spending on the order of $700 billion to $745 billion, most of it tied to AI infrastructure. On July 22, 2026, Alphabet beat on revenue, raised full-year Capex guidance to $195 billion to $205 billion, reported free cash flow of about negative $5.9 billion for the quarter, and sold off hard after hours. The market was sending the same signal McConnell and Muscarella recorded four decades ago.

The fair caveat matters, and Boone would have offered it himself. The oil majors of the early 1980s were often reinvesting into flatter demand. The hyperscalers are reinvesting into demand that is still compounding, and cloud backlogs are real. But the question Boone asked never depended on whether demand was growing. It depended on whether the marginal dollar earns more than it costs, and whether anyone outside management is allowed to check.

The second half of his insight applies well below the hyperscalers. Proven reserves already in the ground, owned by someone else, were cheaper than new ones, and the same arithmetic now runs through the power market. Existing gas plants have been trading near half the cost of new combined-cycle capacity. The largest buyers have drawn the obvious conclusion. Rather than wait years for a grid connection, they are pulling generation toward the load. Entergy is building gas plants to serve Meta's Hyperion data-center campus in Louisiana. In Texas, ERCOT has fielded large-load interconnection requests on a scale that would have seemed implausible five years ago, and the Legislature has moved to set terms for how those loads connect.

In Boone's language, it has become cheaper to find megawatts on the floor of the exchange than in a turbine queue. An energized site with an interconnection agreement is the proven reserve of this cycle, and the companies that hold one are not always valued for it.

Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim

Boone had a phrase for corporate delay. Ready, aim, aim, aim. He used it on oil executives who preferred another study to a decision, and it describes the enterprise AI economy with uncomfortable precision. MIT's Project NANDA work on generative AI in business, widely covered in 2025, reported that the vast majority of organizations studied were showing no measurable P&L return despite tens of billions in enterprise spend. Treat that finding as directional, not scripture. Even well-run companies are not immune to slow kill decisions. McDonald's tested AI voice ordering with IBM at more than 100 drive-thrus beginning in 2021 and ended the test in 2024 without a rollout. Ending a pilot that does not work is the right decision. The question an owner asks is why it took three years to reach it.

The tools are no longer the main problem. For a great many ordinary operating uses they are good enough. Ownership is the problem. If no executive's compensation depends on turning the spending into cash, the spending becomes theater.

Consider what Boone would do if he were thirty-five today with capital behind him. He would not start with the hyperscalers. He would start where he started with Hugoton, with a company larger than his own whose assets were worth more than its management was delivering. Today that is often a small or mid cap industrial, distributor, or services business that has announced an AI program, committed a meaningful share of its free cash flow to it, and still reports no metric tied to the result. He would read two years of filings and earnings calls and total the committed spend, including the parts buried in IT budgets and consulting contracts. He would buy enough stock to be taken seriously. Then he would pick up the telephone, because he always preferred a voice to an email, ask for the plan in writing, and give management a date. If the plan never arrived, he would take the same questions to the other shareholders and, if necessary, to the public. That was Hugoton, and Gulf, and every campaign in between. It was never about hostility. It was about a calendar.

Five Questions T. Boone Pickens Would Ask AI Companies Today

None of these are exotic. They are the questions a well-run family office puts to the operating businesses it owns, and most public boards have not yet put them to their own AI programs.

1. What is the total committed AI spend, including the pieces buried in IT, consulting, and cloud contracts?
2. Which line on the income statement is supposed to improve, by how much, and by when?
3. Whose compensation depends on that result?
4. What happens to the program if the target is missed by half?
5. How does the return compare with the simplest alternative, which is returning the capital to the owners?

The last question is the Gulf royalty trust in modern form. Managements with good answers generally welcome an engaged shareholder. Managements without them are running a science project on someone else's balance sheet. The difference is rarely the model. It is almost always the plan.

Boone would have been a handful in any boardroom this year, and he would have enjoyed every minute of it. Yet the lesson of his career is an optimistic one. The oil industry he pressed in the 1980s emerged leaner, better capitalized, and more attentive to its owners, and the shareholders who stayed the course were well rewarded. The AI buildout can follow the same path. The demand is real, the technology works, and the physical constraints of power and metal are problems that capital and discipline know how to solve. What the moment requires is owners willing to ask for the plan and managements confident enough to produce one. Boone spent sixty years insisting that a fool with a plan beats a genius without one. The companies that take that advice in this cycle will set the standard for the rest, and their owners will be glad they asked.

Sources

• Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings release - Capex guidance $195-205B; Q2 P&E purchases $44.9B; Q2 free cash flow about -$5.9B link
• Alphabet after-hours selloff on the Capex raise, July 22, 2026 link
• Hyperscaler 2026 Capex context (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft combined on the order of ~$700B-$745B depending on definition) link
• Enverus - existing gas-plant M&A near ~$1.0M/MW vs new CCGT replacement cost near ~$2.0M/MW for the post-2027 cohort (July 15, 2026) link
• Fastmarkets - AI-chain solder tin exposure rising toward ~10.6% of global solder-tin demand by 2030 link
• USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 - U.S. net import reliance: gallium 100%; germanium >50%; refined tin ~77%; refined copper ~57% link
• Chevron acquires Gulf Oil, 1984 (~$13.2B); Pickens group pretax gain (~$760M) link 1 link 2
• SEC all-holders / best-price tender offer amendments after Unocal (1986) link
• Pickens launches United Shareholders Association, 1986 link
• Mesa Power orders 667 GE wind turbines for the Texas Panhandle project, 2008 link
• Michael C. Jensen, "The Agency Costs of Free Cash Flow, Corporate Finance, and Takeovers" link
• John J. McConnell and Chris J. Muscarella, "Corporate Capital Expenditure Decisions and the Market Value of the Firm," Journal of Financial Economics (1985) link
• Entergy gas generation approved to serve Meta's Hyperion load in Louisiana link
• MIT NANDA / State of AI in Business 2025 - directional on weak P&L conversion of enterprise genAI spend; not peer-reviewed link
• McDonald's ends IBM AI drive-thru test, 2024 link

This note is for research and discussion only. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation to buy, any security. Sargasso Capital Management may hold positions discussed or related instruments and may change those positions without notice.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 10:20

Xi At WH: We Should Strengthen Communication, The Thucydides Trap Can Be Overcome

Arrival Ceremony and initial Trump-Xi remarks:

Xi: "We Should Strengthen Communication... the Thucydides Trap can be overcome."

The moment of President Xi's arrival at the White House:

NOW: Trump welcomes Xi Jinping to the White House. pic.twitter.com/zvXVkxqaGj

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 24, 2026

For more of our analysis and what to expect:

Read: Mr. Xi Comes To Washington: What Wall Street Banks Are Expecting

*  *  *

Chinese stocks slipped overnight as the two-month extension of the US-China trade truce fell short of some Wall Street expectations (some desks were hoping for +6 months), offering limited reassurance that today's talks would deliver a long-lasting trade deal, stabilize bilateral ties, and ease uncertainty over global trade.

The mainland CSI 300 Index dropped 1.7%, while the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index pared losses and closed flat. Broader Asian equities also came under pressure after a global bond selloff gathered pace as investors responded to stronger-than-expected US economic data on Wednesday and weak Treasury auction demand amid increasing fears of further Federal Reserve tightening

The two-month truce extension through Jan. 10 removes an immediate source of uncertainty but falls short of the three-to-six-month extension some Wall Street desks were hoping for. 

As we detailed in an overnight note titled "Mr. Xi Comes To Washington: What Wall Street Banks Are Expecting," President Trump rolled out the red carpet for President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday.

President Xi Jinping just arrived in Washington, D.C. for a state visit to the U.S.

President Trump and Mrs. Trump warmly received President Xi and his wife Madame Peng Liyuan at the airport. pic.twitter.com/MkXecYvx2Z

— Mao Ning 毛宁 (@SpoxCHN_MaoNing) September 24, 2026

B-1 Lancer flies over as President Trump welcomes Chinese President Xi to the United States.

Looks like an episode from The Office the way the camera zoomed in on Xi’s face. pic.twitter.com/cqOYgKwnsQ

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 23, 2026

Xi's first White House visit since September 2015 includes bilateral talks, a South Lawn ceremony and a black-tie dinner later today with technology executives including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Tesla/SpaceX's Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman. Private tea with the Trumps and a National Archives visit are also on the books. 

The high-level diplomatic visit comes as unresolved disputes mount. Trade talks center on the duration of the tariff truce, a proposed "Board of Trade" arrangement covering roughly $30 billion in goods on each side, and potential Chinese purchases of soybeans, Boeing aircraft and LNG. Rare earth supplies, technology restrictions, Iran and Taiwan also loom over the summit.

On the AI front, low-cost Chinese open-weight models are pressuring US frontier labs and eroding moats. Restrictions on advanced chips, allegations that Chinese companies distilled US models, and a proposed AI hotline add another layer to negotiations.

The broad expectation across JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, TD Cowen and Raymond James is that the summit will produce limited breakthroughs. Wall Street's focus now shifts to how long the truce lasts and whether either side makes concrete concessions.

Earlier this morning, former acting deputy US Trade Representative Wendy Cutler told Bloomberg TV that the temporary US-China trade truce extension signals Trump's dissatisfaction with Beijing's rare earth exports and agricultural purchases.

It's a "way, way shorter time than China had hoped for; China wanted to extend that truce until the end of Trump's term," Cutler told Bloomberg's Heidi Stroud-Watts.

She continued, "We're at a point in our relationship with China where big deliverables are just no longer possible, and we're talking about managing the relationship and keeping it stable, but not improving and strengthening it."

Matt Maley, a veteran Wall Street strategist and chief market strategist at Miller Tabak + Co., wrote in a note that the two-month extension may disappoint investors who were hoping for a longer-term deal and may not bode well for equities. "A lot of investors that I have been speaking to were hoping for a six-month extension," he said.

Read what JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, TD Cowen and Raymond James have to say here.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 10:15

She passed away two days after the birth of their daughter, Sofia.

Tropical Storm Nolo is among multiple other storms churning in the Pacific, including Hurricane Polo and Odalys, which are barreling toward Mexico.

Brian Serven's bunt attempt Wednesday resulted in him taking a ball of the face.

New Home Sales Soared In August, Prices Plunged As Mortgage Rates Spiked

With homebuilder confidence plumbing new depths (and Housing Starts and Permits plunging), expectations were surprisingly for a small bounce back in new home sales in August (after collapsing in July).

Analyst consensus was correct, with a 6.4% MoM jump (+1.3% MoM exp) with July's 10.5% MoM plunged revised dramatically higher to just 4.3% MoM decline. August was the biggest surge in sales since February, but still left sales down 2.0% YoY...

Total new home sales SAAR jumped to 864k - its highest level of 2026...

Median new home prices tumbled, down 5.8% from a year ago to $393,700....

Additionally, average new home sales price plunged almost $50K to $478,700, lowest since since August 2024...

This was the biggest monthly drop in average new home prices on record!

Interestingly, the supply of new homes for sales continues to tread water along with homes under construction. A trend that has been clear all year...

And finally, here's a weird one - as mortgage rates have soared (now back above 7.00%), so sales have also soared?

So did homebuilders finally slash prices as the final 'incentive' to restart sales? Or was this a last minute rush into homes ahead of rate-hikes and soaring mortgage rates?

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 10:11

The retired actress debuted her weight loss transformation last month during another rare outing.

The retired actress debuted her weight loss transformation last month during another rare outing.