Hello there.

What a Wednesday! I don’t know about you, but it’s been a week for me so far. I could go for a quick bite. Let’s hit up a Wendy’s. We can do brunch.

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Be honest, did you know Wendy’s had a breakfast menu? What do they even sell, baked potato pancakes? Let’s dig in. 👇

In partnership with RushTheStreet…

Remember when Wendy's breakfast rollout was supposed to change everything? No? Yeah, that’s kinda the problem. After six whole years of being America's second-favorite burger chain (behind McDonald's, obviously), Wendy's just got passed by Burger King. And honestly, the numbers are pretty brutal.

Wendy's US same-store sales dropped 7% last quarter while Burger King's jumped 8.5%. The chain's new CEO Bob Wright basically admitted they're fumbling the bag: "Our traffic, our value proposition, and franchisee economics are not meeting our expectations." Simply put, fewer people are showing up, the deals aren't good enough, and the people who own Wendy's restaurants aren't making money.

Wendy's has closed 289 locations in the first half of 2026 alone (that's about 5% of all their U.S. stores), and breakfast, which was lauded as their comeback play, now only makes up 5% of total sales. It was 8% just a few years ago. Some franchisees straight-up stopped serving breakfast because it wasn't worth it, and that decision alone tanked traffic by another 12.5%. Burger King, meanwhile, is thriving after spending the last few years upgrading restaurants and improving their Whopper recipe. They're even guaranteeing quality now; mess up your order and you get another Whopper free.

The macro takeaway is that turnarounds in fast food are real, but they take years of actually fixing the fundamentals. Wendy's is scrambling to figure out its strategy while Burger King already executed theirs. If you're holding restaurant stocks, pay attention to who's actually bringing customers back versus who's just hoping things get better or betting on a new gimmick.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, everyone’s favorite final boss of banking, just said something that should make everyone a little nervous. He warned that margin debt is at the highest level ever, and a lot of it is hiding in places people don't even realize. This matters way more than it sounds.

Margin debt is when investors borrow money to buy stocks, kind of like putting a down payment on a house but for your portfolio. When things are going well, you make way more money because you're playing with borrowed cash. But when things go badly, you can lose everything fast, and you might have to sell your stocks at the worst possible time just to pay back what you borrowed. Dimon's basically saying there's a ridiculous amount of this debt floating around right now, and it's not all obvious. Some of it's in hedge funds, some in ETFs, some in Treasury trades. "There's a lot of margin debt you don't see because it's not called margin debt. It's called other things," as he put it.

Why does this matter? Well, when someone gets forced to sell a ton of stocks to cover their debt (called a "margin call"), it can trigger other people to sell, which makes prices drop more, which forces even more selling. It's like a domino effect. We literally just saw this happen with a hedge fund called Situational Awareness (that one run by a 25-year-old AI investor) that had to dump a bunch of AI stocks at a massive loss because of margin calls during the recent market chaos.

Dimon isn't saying the sky is falling tomorrow, but he's definitely saying the market is more fragile than it looks. If you're using margin or investing in leveraged funds, now's probably a good time to make sure you understand what happens if things drop 20% or 30%. And even if you're not using leverage yourself, just know that when the market gets rocky, it might get rockier than usual because of all this hidden debt waiting to blow up.

A lot can happen in a week!

Let’s take a quick look at who struck gold and who struck out since our last issue:

Space Exploration Mfg. Company (SPCX): +16.43%
NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA): +5.22%
Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM): +3.64%
Microsoft Corporation (MSFT): +3.22%
Meta Platforms, Inc. (META): +1.89%

Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL): -7.93%
Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN): -3.79%
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD): -2.33%
SK Hynix Inc. (SKHY): -1.30%
Visa Inc. (V): -0.85%

That’s all for today. Write us and let us know your thoughts on the market, the newsletter, or the weather—we’d just love to hear from you.

Till next time,
— Brandon and Blake of Invested Inc.