🚀 Walmart and Google Partnership

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Market Overview
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Year To Date Performances:

1. In a landmark move toward "agentic commerce," Walmart and Google announced a strategic partnership on Sunday to integrate the retail giant’s massive inventory directly into the Gemini AI assistant. Unveiled at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and incoming Walmart CEO John Furner, the collaboration allows U.S. shoppers to discover, personalize, and purchase products from Walmart and Sam’s Club through a seamless conversational interface. By linking accounts, users receive tailored recommendations based on past purchase history, while a new "Instant Checkout" feature enables transactions without ever leaving the chatbot. This deal follows a similar October agreement with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, signaling Walmart's aggressive strategy to dominate the next evolution of retail where AI "super agents" replace the traditional search bar. As John Furner prepares to officially take the helm on February 1, this partnership underscores a pivot toward a tech-powered future where the gap between consumer inspiration and home delivery is virtually erased.

2. President Donald Trump is weighing a spectrum of aggressive "interventionist" options against Iran, ranging from precision military strikes to offensive cyber operations, as the clerical regime’s crackdown on nationwide protests enters a third, increasingly lethal week. Spurred by a sharp economic collapse and the recent U.S. military operation that deposed Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, the unrest has seen over 500 demonstrators killed and 10,000 detained, with Tehran now labeling protesters "terrorists" to justify the use of live ammunition. While Trump has signaled that mass state violence is a "red line" that would trigger a hard-hitting U.S. response, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf retaliated on Sunday by declaring all American military bases, ships, and Israel as "legitimate targets" for a potential pre-emptive strike. Despite calls from hawks like Senator Lindsey Graham to "scare the hell out of the regime," a bipartisan group of skeptics warns that U.S. kinetic action risks repeating the historical blowback of the 1953 coup by inadvertently uniting a fractured Iranian public behind their government.

3. In a decisive bid to end years of "regulation by enforcement," the U.S. Senate is moving to finalize the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (the "Clarity Act"), a watershed bill that would officially split oversight of the multitrillion-dollar crypto market between the SEC and CFTC. With key markups scheduled for this Thursday across the Agriculture and Banking Committees, lawmakers are racing to reconcile a bipartisan framework that defines "digital commodities" and establishes clear registration pathways for exchanges and brokers. The stakes have reached a fever pitch as the industry pushes for passage before the 2026 midterms, grappling with thorny "last-mile" issues including a banking-sector-led effort to ban yield-bearing stablecoin rewards and a Democratic push to prevent elected officials—including President Trump—from profiting off personal crypto ventures. By shifting the regulatory focus from ambiguous legal battles to a structured, pro-innovation rulebook, the Clarity Act aims to cement the United States as the "crypto capital of the world" while simultaneously imposing the first federal guardrails on decentralized finance (DeFi) and self-custody.

   Headlines

   1. Trump is aiming to cap credit card interest rates at 10%.

   2. The US will prevent Venezuela from selling oil to Cuba.