Today’s Market Recap: SoftBank and Oracle Retreat on OpenAI Misses Amid NVIDIA’s ‘Nano’ Efficiency Breakthrough

U.S. media outlets report that Iran may submit a revised proposal to Washington through Pakistani mediators in the coming days, following Donald Trump’s dissatisfaction with Tehran's previous negotiation framework. Trump recently claimed that Iranian officials informed the U.S. that their country is "in a state of collapse" while grappling with internal leadership challenges. Meanwhile, the Iranian military has emphasized that the conflict is far from over, asserting "absolute control" over the Strait of Hormuz and mandating that all foreign vessels adhere to Iranian regulations and pay transit fees. In response, the U.S. has sanctioned 35 individuals and entities tied to Iran’s financial network. U.S. military officials stated that their maritime blockade has already forced 39 vessels to reroute, including a commercial ship intercepted in the Arabian Sea on Tuesday for allegedly violating the blockade.

In a significant development since the onset of hostilities, a Japanese-linked supertanker, the Idemitsu Maru, reportedly successfully transited the Strait of Hormuz. Carrying 2 million barrels of Saudi crude, the vessel followed a Tehran-approved northern route on Tuesday, marking one of the largest successful passages since the U.S. blockade began. While other Japanese ships have made the transit recently, those voyages were limited to non-oil commodities.

In the financial sector, "Fed Whisperer" Nick Timiraos writes that the Federal Reserve is expected to maintain current interest rates at its meeting this week. He notes that the specter of 1970s-style stagflation no longer seems distant, as the Fed faces a deep debate over whether to signal that rate cuts have been taken off the table entirely or merely postponed.

The Bank of Japan (BoJ) kept its benchmark interest rate steady at 0.75% in a divided 6–3 vote. The central bank significantly raised its inflation outlook while lowering its growth forecast for the 2026 fiscal year. Governor Kazuo Ueda maintained a hawkish tone, stating that the BoJ would continue to raise rates if economic conditions warrant, noting that the risk of price increases currently outweighs the risk of an economic downturn.

SoftBank’s stock suffered its largest single-day drop in six months after reports surfaced that OpenAI missed its 2025 revenue and user targets. The news reignited skepticism regarding AI investment returns, dragging down other "OpenAI proxy" stocks including Oracle, AMD, and CoreWeave. SoftBank fell nearly 10% as the market grappled with the dilemma of AI capital expenditure: while slowing down is viewed as a negative, accelerating investment now triggers concerns over long-term profitability.

NVIDIA (NVDA) has introduced its new Nemotron-3 Nano Omni model, which aims to boost efficiency by nine times for AI agent applications by integrating speech, vision, and reasoning. Despite its expanded multimodal capabilities, the model remains focused on cost-effective inference with 30 billion total parameters and 3 billion active parameters. It supports an ultra-long context window of up to one million tokens. While companies like Foxconn and Palantir have already adopted the model, others like Dell and Oracle are currently evaluating its integration.

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