U.S. Conference Board lagging index rose 0.2% MoM in July, versus 0.0% in June.

Meta Platforms spends several hundred million dollars a year on Microsoft Azure for AI model access and consumes trillions of tokens on the platform each week, making it one of Microsoft’s largest AI clients, a person familiar said. Microsoft and Meta declined to comment. Microsoft’s Foundry marketplace, a core part of its AI strategy offering multi-vendor models, had about 100,000 customers by July. While Microsoft often highlights industrial clients in its marketing, its biggest AI customers remain other tech firms, including ByteDance, Adobe, Perplexity and startup Sierra. Meta is buying model access across multiple platforms based on availability and cost to accelerate software development; its developers have used OpenAI technology via Foundry to help evaluate Meta’s own model outputs.

South Korea's finance minister said trading volume in single-stock leveraged ETFs has shrunk to one-tenth.