10-Year Treasury Yield Tops 5% as Insiders Cash Out Across Snowflake, CrowdStrike and ChargePoint

The most consequential move of today's session was in bonds, not stocks. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury note rose above 5% after a Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI, a monthly survey of business activity that signals whether the economy is expanding or contracting) report came in stronger than expected. Stronger growth data cuts against the case for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, so traders added to bets that rates could rise again or stay elevated for longer, and technology stocks, which are most sensitive to the cost of future borrowing, retreated as a result. With the 5% level now cleared, traders said the next line in the sand is 6%, the threshold now being watched as the marker of a deeper shift in rate expectations. A cluster of insider stock sales reinforced the cautious mood around technology names. Snowflake director Frank Slootman sold $100.3 million in stock, in the same week that insiders at satellite-imaging firm BlackSky also sold heavily. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike saw three senior executives sell in short succession: chief executive George Kurtz disposed of more than $19.5 million in shares, chief financial officer Burt Podbere sold $8.07 million, and chief accounting officer Anurag Saha sold $1.63 million. Four executives at charging-network operator ChargePoint also sold stock in quick succession. None of these disclosures points to a specific problem at any one company, but the clustering of large sales across several unrelated firms in a single week is the kind of pattern some investors treat as a caution signal on richly valued technology stocks. Elsewhere, oil prices slid and gold gained as traders increased bets that diplomacy with Iran would ease Middle East tension, which would reduce the risk of a supply disruption that had been priced into crude. In currencies, the pound slipped as traders priced in a more hawkish Fed, the same rate-expectations shift that drove Treasury yields higher: a central bank expected to hold rates higher for longer tends to pull money into the dollar and away from currencies seen as offering lower relative returns. Among individual companies, Fastly shares jumped after Meta's Muse AI agent drove a surge of traffic to its content-delivery network, a direct example of AI-agent adoption creating an immediate revenue tailwind for infrastructure providers. Royal Caribbean agreed to buy half of Sandals Resorts for $3 billion, extending the cruise operator into land-based all-inclusive resorts. Adyen shares slipped after the payments company named a new chief financial officer alongside a tie-up with Flatpay, suggesting the market is more focused on management transition risk than on the new partnership. Singapore-listed Tuas reported profit up 328% but its stock sank near a 52-week low, a reminder that a strong headline earnings number does not protect a stock when investors have separate worries about guidance or valuation. Clover posted a record second half, with margins widening to 35.5%. In bitcoin markets, the coin held above $82,000 as Coinbase added fixed-rate borrowing against it, and UBS initiated buy ratings on three bitcoin miners it said were pivoting into AI data-centre operations, giving those miners a second source of demand beyond the bitcoin price itself. The Buy List 2026 model portfolio, run with an initial €120,000, illustrated the split verdict of the session. It closed at €127,522, a total return of +6.27% against a price-only return of +5.71%, the gap reflecting dividend income collected on top of price gains. The spread between individual holdings was wide: MicroStrategy (MSTR), a company whose balance sheet is built around bitcoin holdings, was up 69.38%, and GameStop (GME) was up 30.25%, while Vonovia (VNA.DE) was down 27.95%, Novo Nordisk (NOVO-B.CO) was down 17.10%, and Tesla (TSLA) was down 15.28%. That dispersion shows how a single blended return figure can conceal sharply different outcomes across a portfolio's individual positions. What remains unresolved heading into the next session is whether the PMI-driven rate-hike bet survives the next round of economic data, and whether Iran diplomacy advances far enough to justify the drop already seen in oil prices. Also unresolved is whether the week's run of insider selling across Snowflake, BlackSky, CrowdStrike and ChargePoint reflects routine, pre-scheduled disposals or an early signal about how insiders view current valuations. The next PMI release and any formal statement from Iran talks would go a long way toward settling both questions.