The stock market dropped on Tuesday as rising oil prices revived inflation worries. Brent crude approached $100/barrel, reviving fears that persistent inflation could prompt the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates higher for longer.
Investors are also closely watching this week’s inflation data ahead of the central bank’s September meeting.
Overall, S&P 500 fell 0.6% to 7,674, while Nasdaq went down 0.3% to 26,421.
Chart of the Day
Here is the one-year chart of Cloudflare (NET) as of August 31, 2026, when the stock was at $305.
More than 50% of the traffic on Cloudflare’s network was already coming from non-human sources such as AI agents, showing that the shift from human-driven to machine-driven Internet traffic was already underway. This shift was also driving adoption of Cloudflare’s developer Workers platform, with the company adding nearly 2 million developers last quarter and Workers becoming a meaningful contributor to revenue.
More than 80% of major AI companies were already Cloudflare customers, giving the company a broad base as AI usage grows. Cloudflare was also building new ways to make money from this traffic, including Monetization Gateway, wallets and Cloudflare Pay, which are designed to let AI agents buy and sell online services.
NET is part of the Growth Portfolio. It’s a buy-and-hold stock for me.
