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Pizza Hut in a $2.7B breakup. (0:15) Rackspace-AMD deal. (1:28) Walmart takes on early Prime Day. (1:50)

This is an abridged transcript of the podcast:

Our top story so far, Yum! Brands (YUM) is selling Pizza Hut for $2.7B, shedding a once-dominant pizza chain that has steadily lost market share to rivals.

Pizza Hut's operations outside Mainland China will be sold to private-equity firm LongRange Capital for about $1.5B, while Pizza Hut China will be acquired by Yum China (YUMC) for roughly $1.2B.

Yum! CEO Chris Turner said the transactions will allow the company to focus on accelerating growth across its remaining brands.

Pizza Hut traces its roots to Wichita, Kansas, where brothers Dan and Frank Carney borrowed $600 from their mother to open the first location in 1958.

By 1971, it had become the world's largest pizza chain, and PepsiCo (PEP) acquired the company in 1977 before later spinning it off alongside Taco Bell and KFC into what became Yum! Brands.

Pizza Hut's peak came in the late 1980s, when systemwide sales reached $4B and products such as Personal Pan Pizza and Stuffed Crust Pizza helped define a generation of fast-food dining.

Among other active stocks, Dave & Buster's (PLAY) is tumbling after first-quarter results missed Wall Street expectations as comparable-store sales remained under pressure.

The company, however, reaffirmed its full-year outlook and said it still expects to generate more than $100M in free cash flow this year.

AI infrastructure provider Rackspace Technology (RXT) is soaring after signing an agreement with AMD (AMD) for the phased deployment of an initial 30 megawatts of AI compute capacity.

And SpaceX (SPCX) has exercised its option to acquire Anysphere, the developer of the popular AI coding assistant Cursor, in a $60B stock deal aimed at expanding its enterprise AI business.

In other news of note, does back-to-school season now begin a week after schools let out?

Walmart (WMT) is a week away from launching its Walmart Deals summer sales event, a move that follows Amazon's (AMZN) decision to shift Prime Day into June this year.

The weeklong promotion will run from June 22 through June 28 across Walmart's website, mobile app and stores nationwide.

Walmart+ members will receive 24 hours of early access to select online deals.

For shoppers, the event is being pitched as a broad summer and back-to-school savings campaign.

For investors, the promotion could pull some sales activity forward from July into June, though both months fall within Walmart's fiscal second quarter.

And in the Wall Street Research Corner, macro strategist Lyn Alden notes that U.S. GDP measured in gold has fallen to one of its lowest levels in more than a century.

Alden described the decline in the amount of gold equivalent to U.S. economic output as "wild."

Her chart, which tracks GDP denominated in ounces of gold from 1913 through 2025, shows the measure falling to roughly 7B ounces, well below peaks reached in the early 1970s and around the turn of the millennium.

The metric climbed to nearly 30B ounces in the early 1970s and almost 39B ounces around 2000 before entering a prolonged decline.

You can check out the chart in our story on Seeking Alpha.