Asian stocks opened lower as oil edged higher, with investors continuing to watch developments in US-Iran peace talks.

MSCI Inc.’s gauge of regional shares fell as much as 0.2% in early trading. S&P 500 futures also edged lower after a slide in megacap tech stocks and rising bond yields dragged the benchmark down 0.4% Monday. SpaceX shares slipped for a third straight day, shedding hundreds of billions of dollars in value. Brent crude prices rose slightly to trade above $78 a barrel.

The US issued a 60-day license allowing Iran to sell oil on the international market, giving Tehran an economic lifeline as the two adversaries are poised to continue discussions to reach a permanent peace deal.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance described the first round of negotiations with Iran as “very, very good” and said Tehran had agreed to allow nuclear inspectors back into the country. But officials from the Islamic Republic, who also cited progress, challenged that claim, saying Vance’s assertion was “false and does not reflect reality.”

While geopolitical developments are likely to remain a key source of volatility in the near term, shifts in investor confidence regarding the durability of the AI rally may also lead to bouts of market swings, according to Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi at UBS Chief Investment Office.

Expectations that an agreement will be reached, as well as the revival of the AI trade and solid corporate earnings, have fueled a 14% advance in the S&P 500 Index this quarter. However, that trails the 26% surge in the MSCI Asia Pacific Index.
Treasuries fell on Monday as trading resumed following a US public holiday, even as oil prices turned lower Iran said there had been “major progress” in all-night discussions with the US. Strategists cited Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh’s hawkish messaging last week as one of the reasons for the selling pressure.In currency markets, the Japanese yen lingered near its lowest level since 1986 as investors weighed the prospects for a lasting US-Iran peace deal and the risk of intervention by Japanese authorities. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed after rising 0.2% on Monday.

SpaceX plunged 16% after saying it’s selling investment-grade bonds in what’s expected to be a massive borrowing spree. Its bond sale is the latest in a wave of deals from companies driving the AI boom. Alphabet, Amazon.com Inc. and others have raised more than $300 billion of debt tied to AI since November across multiple credit markets. The rocket firm is seeking to raise at least $20 billion, Bloomberg reported.

“The issue that stands out the most is the idea that the hyperscalers continue to receive an extremely low return on investment on their colossal level of spending on AI,” said Matt Maley at Miller Tabak. “Another big concern surrounds the issue of ‘circular investments,’ where companies invest in each other, while also committing to buying each other’s products.”

Elsewhere, Andy Burnham appears set to become the UK’s seventh prime minister in a decade after Keir Starmer laid out a timeline for his own departure and potential rivals backed a quick transition to the popular Manchester politician. While markets showed little reaction to the resignation, they were buoyed by reduced odds of a leadership contest that could have prolonged uncertainty.

SpaceX shares slipped for a third straight day, shedding hundreds of billions of dollars in market value, after the Elon Musk-led company said it is selling investment-grade bonds for the first time, part of what’s expected to be a massive borrowing spree to fund its artificial-intelligence ambitions.

The stock fell 16% Monday to close at $154.60, the lowest level since the company’s first day of trading, pushing its three-day loss to 23% and erasing over $600 billion in value over that period. The company’s market capitalization now sits just above $2 trillion.

“Sellers are back in control. Anyone in the world who wanted to buy this has bought it already,” said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading.

SpaceX’s first days of trading following its record $75 billion initial public offering were met with the type of volatility generally associated with new IPOs that have a low float — 4.2% of total shares outstanding were available to trade on day one — and high interest from retail investors. Still, even with Monday’s losses, SpaceX is the sixth-largest company in the world with shares about 15% higher than their $135 IPO price.

The rocket, satellite and AI conglomerate is seeking to raise at least $20 billion from the first bond offering, Bloomberg reported last week. SpaceX also inked a multibillion-dollar agreement to provide computing resources to Reflection AI, an AI startup, the company said Monday.

SpaceX’s embrace of artificial intelligence with the acquisition of Musk’s xAI in February meant investors closely watched the listing ahead of IPO prospects of competitors Anthropic PBC and OpenAI, both of which plan to go public as soon as this year with valuations expected to be around $1 trillion.
Retail trading in SpaceX, officially named Space Exploration Technologies Corp., was the strongest of any IPO in recent history, with the cohort buying net $405 million in the first five sessions according to Vanda Research. Retail investors bought more SpaceX last week than buying across all Magnificent Seven stocks combined, the data showed. On Monday, retail traders were still net buyers of SpaceX, but inflows were below last week’s levels, Vanda data showed. The stock was initiated with a recommendation of sector weight at KeyBanc Capital Markets, the first hold-equivalent rating according to data tracked by Bloomberg. Analysts led by Michael Leshock wrote that SpaceX is set to remain the leader in space-launch and adjacent verticals, but much of the long-term value is already captured in the stock price.

SpaceX “possesses significant disruptive growth avenues, though we believe this is reflected in current valuation and risk/reward appears balanced, in our view,” he wrote.

His company is one of several that makes sweat-analysing devices. In Epicore Biosystems’ case, that includes single-use sticky patches and sleeve-like wearables, which track the flow rate of sweat as it emerges from your skin, the sweat’s sodium (salt) content, and skin temperature, among other metrics.

From 1 October 2026, e-liquid carries an excise duty for the first time in British history. It is called the Vaping Products Duty, it is set at a flat £2.20 per 10ml, and once VAT stacks on top, the real number landing on shelves is closer to £2.64 per 10ml.

For a category that has spent a decade as the loosely regulated younger sibling of tobacco, this is the most significant change since the TPD rules of 2016.

If your business touches vaping anywhere in the chain, as a manufacturer, importer, distributor, specialist retailer, convenience operator or forecourt, the headline rate is the least interesting part of this story. The structure of the duty is where the money is won and lost, and most operators are not modelling it properly yet.

A flat tax on volume, not on risk

The duty was originally drafted as a tiered system, with higher nicotine liquids taxed more heavily. That plan was scrapped. What replaced it is a flat rate charged purely on liquid volume, applied identically whether a bottle contains 20mg of nicotine or none at all. Zero-nicotine e-liquid is taxed exactly the same as the strongest legal nic salt.

That single design decision produces a genuinely strange outcome. The duty falls hardest on the formats the public health lobby tends to prefer, and barely touches the ones it worries about.

• Prefilled pods, the disposable-style format most associated with younger users, rise by roughly 7%. The liquid volume per pack is tiny, so the duty per pack is tiny.
• Shortfills, the larger-format bottles favoured by committed adult vapers, get hammered. A 100ml shortfill carries £22 in duty before VAT, and once you add the nicotine shots that go with it, a single bottle that once sold for under £20 can clear £40. That is an increase of up to 147%.

The most sustainable, highest-volume, least youth-appealing product on the shelf takes the biggest hit, while the convenience-led format takes the smallest. Whatever you think of the policy intent, the commercial consequence is unavoidable: product mix is now the single biggest variable in a vape business’s margin.

This is an operational problem, not a price sticker

The instinct is to treat the duty as a price rise to be passed on. It is more awkward than that, for three reasons.

First, the duty is charged at manufacture or import, not at the till. By the time stock reaches a retailer, the cost is already baked in. No compliant business can opt out, and no online seller can undercut the duty, because everyone is buying from the same post-duty cost base. The competitive advantage that some retailers have leaned on, being a few pence cheaper than the shop down the road, largely evaporates on liquid.

Second, there is a registration and compliance burden. The Tobacco and Vapes Act became law in April 2026, registrations for the Vaping Products Duty opened on 1 April 2026, and any business producing, importing or warehousing affected products needs to be inside that system. There is a transitional window for selling through pre-duty stock, which makes the autumn stockholding decision a real one. Buy too little and you miss the last cheap weeks. Buy too much of the wrong format and you are sitting on inventory the market has already moved past.

Third, the cash flow shape changes. A flat per-millilitre duty on volume rewards businesses that can forecast demand by format with some precision, and punishes those that cannot. Tying up working capital in shortfill stock that will need a 147% markup to break even is a very different bet from stocking pods that move 7%.

The market is already reformatting

Smart operators are not waiting until October to react. The category is visibly shifting towards formats that deliver the same nicotine for less taxed volume.

Longfills are the obvious winner. These are concentrated flavour bases sold in larger bottles with headroom left for the user to top up with unflavoured base, so a small taxed volume produces a much larger finished product. Subscription models for plain VG and PG base suddenly make sense, because that base is taxed too and recurring delivery smooths the cost. Even home mixing, long a niche hobby, becomes a mainstream value play once the duty makes premixed juice meaningfully more expensive per millilitre.

For any business in this space, the strategic question is no longer “how much do we add to the price”. It is “which formats do we lean into, and how fast”. The retailers who treat October as a pricing event will lose share to the ones who treat it as a product-strategy event.

Model your exposure before you commit stock

The reason the duty is so easy to underestimate is that the impact varies wildly by what you sell. A forecourt shifting prefilled pods has a very different October to a specialist shifting 100ml shortfills, and a single blended margin number hides that completely.

This is worth running properly rather than estimating on a fag packet. A free Vape Tax Calculator will show the post-duty cost of any format, so you can see the per-product impact, work out where your basket is most exposed, and plan stockholding and pricing around the formats that actually survive the change well. It takes the abstract £2.20 figure and turns it into the numbers your spreadsheet needs.

The category is not dying, it is changing shape

None of this is an extinction event. The government raised tobacco duty in lockstep with the vape duty, deliberately, to preserve the price gap that makes switching off cigarettes worthwhile. Even after October, a refillable setup remains dramatically cheaper than a smoking habit, and the demand underneath the category is not going anywhere.

What changes is which businesses are positioned to serve it. The duty rewards operators who understand format economics, hold the right stock, and communicate the change to customers with confidence rather than apology. It punishes those who assumed a flat tax would land flat across the shelf.

It will not. It lands hardest on the products that built the modern vape market, and lightest on the ones regulators are most nervous about. That is the paradox at the centre of the 2026 vape duty, and the businesses that model it early are the ones that will come out the other side with their margins intact.

The Vaping Products Duty figures cited here reflect HMRC guidance current at the time of writing. Final shelf prices will vary by brand and supplier as some manufacturers absorb part of the duty.