Commodities are the raw stuff: the beans, the grain, the sugar that ends up in your breakfast. This year they have got dearer. Soybeans are up a quarter, helped by China buying a million tons from American farmers this month; wheat, which becomes your bagel, is up 41%; sugar is up 16%. Coffee's price is not on the tape, but the tape watches the weather over the farms that grow it: Brazil's main coffee region is flowering right now with plenty of rain and no heat, which is good news for next year's beans. Matcha, the green tea powder the shop sells, is not on the tape at all yet. Michelle, new to the channel, is not impressed by the hour.

Apple showed its new phones this month. The headline product is its first folding iPhone, the Duo, which costs more than $2,000, the most Apple has ever asked for a phone, and the rest of the range got pricier too. Investors liked it: Apple's shares rose about 5% over the two days after the event and are now close to their all-time high, up about a quarter this year. The part to watch is not the phone but the chip inside it, made by TSMC in Taiwan on the most advanced process in the world. TSMC's shares are up 36% this year, and the memory-chip makers that supply every phone have done even better.

The Grain of Salt is a free weekly email. Each Saturday it puts together a version of the market that never makes the news, built from the same record these videos come from: prices, company filings, what insiders bought, what betting markets believe, satellite passes over factories and fires, ships through the world's chokepoints, the Fed, the FDA, the box office. Nothing arrives unmarked: every section carries a score from 0 to 100 for how much to believe it, so a price and a rumour never look the same. Subscribe at thegrainofsalt.online. Leave whenever you like.

WallStreetBets is a huge online forum where people post about the stocks they are betting on, loudly and often as a joke. AirPort reads it, but files every post as an opinion with a trust score of 50 out of 100, half-trusted at best, while a company's audited filing scores 92. That score travels with the fact, so a model or a reader always knows which is which. This week the forum's favourite is Micron, the memory-chip maker, with posts calling for $1,500. What is actually on the record is that Micron has more than tripled this year and closed at about $1,015. Dave's point: enjoy the rumour, trade the record.

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow exit from the Persian Gulf that about a fifth of the world's oil passes through. Since the fighting began, ships going through it have been attacked by both sides, and far fewer are trying: the tape's count of ships calling through the strait is down to about four a day from nearly eleven in June, and tankers to about one a day from nearly five. Fewer tankers willing to sail means the ones that do can charge much more, which is why the shipping companies that own tankers have more than doubled in value this year. Jessica explains it from a yoga mat, in tree pose, because balance is the whole game.

The United States and Iran have been fighting since the start of September, mostly around the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow sea lane that carries a fifth of the world's oil. This week the Pentagon put a price on it: $33.4 billion spent so far, with some weapons stocks running low. Oil has been above $100 a barrel since Iran attacked ten ships on 10 September, which is why petrol and heating cost more. Jessica tells it from behind a bar while making a whisky on the rocks the proper way: one large clear cube, a two-ounce pour, thirty seconds, no stirring. The whisky is hers; the numbers are the tape's.

The White House decides which journalists are allowed into its briefings and grounds. On Thursday the President said three news organisations, CNN, MS NOW (the network formerly called MSNBC) and Politico, would no longer be allowed in, and on Friday their reporters were turned away. The three outlets objected publicly. The criticism was not limited to those three: The Hill reported that contributors on Fox News also spoke against the ban. This page records what happened and how it was received, and takes no side.

Natural gas heats homes, runs factories and makes electricity. America produces its own, so a unit of gas costs about three dollars here. Europe has to import most of its gas by pipeline or by ship, and this year the price there has nearly tripled to about nine times the American price. Oil is expensive everywhere because of the fighting around the Strait of Hormuz, but oil is the same price for everyone; gas is where Europe pays more. The gas Europe is buying increasingly comes from American export terminals, which is why the American exporters are among the year's best-performing shares while Germany's market is flat.

The Federal Reserve sets the interest rate that every other rate in America follows. Yesterday it raised that rate for the first time in three years, by a quarter of a percentage point, because prices are still rising at 3.4% a year and oil costs more than $100 a barrel. Higher rates make borrowing dearer: the 10-year government bond now pays 5%, and a 30-year mortgage costs about 6.8%. That is why a rate rise matters to you even if you never buy a share.

Nike, the biggest sportswear brand in the world, is worth a fifth of what it was at its 2021 peak, and this week it lost its place in the S&P 100, the index of America's hundred biggest companies. Lululemon, the yoga-wear brand, has halved this year. The fashion name that is going up is e.l.f. Beauty, which sells make-up at drugstore prices: up 23% this year. Shoppers are trading down.

On Monday three of the best-known people in AI, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk, said the industry should slow down building its most powerful models. The companies that make the chips and hardware for AI fell hardest, because slower AI means fewer chips sold. Netflix rose, because it spends its money on shows, not on AI hardware.

Even as the models were told to slow down, investors kept pouring money in. Anthropic is reported to be preparing a stock-market listing valuing it at $2 trillion. OpenAI's boss says his company will not list this year. Nvidia gave a record $26 billion back to its shareholders, and CoreWeave, which rents out AI computers, says it cannot keep up with demand.

Target, the retailer, has been a better stock than Nvidia this year, up nearly 60% against Nvidia's 17%. A new chief executive is retraining staff, redesigning stores and using AI behind the scenes. The lesson people are drawing: the winners of the AI year are not only the companies that make AI.

SpaceX floated on the stock market in June. After a volatile summer the shares are back at about $150, the price they opened at on the first day. Analysts' guesses for where it goes next range from $75 to $800, which is a polite way of saying nobody knows.

Micron makes memory chips, the part of a computer that holds what the processor is working on. AI systems need enormous amounts of it, so Micron's shares have almost tripled this year, from about $315 to about $924. They were higher still in June. Everyone watches Nvidia; the memory makers have quietly done as well or better.