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Good Afternoon. Wall Street came back from the Juneteenth holiday looking to sell. The S&P 500 drifted lower, the Nasdaq lagged hard as Alphabet shed roughly 5% on yet another high-profile AI defection, and the Dow eked out a small gain on strength in Caterpillar & Amgen. While SpaceX kept sliding post-IPO.
—Rosie, Wyatt, Evan & Conor
💰 Markets
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🔍 Section Focus
🔥 What’s Hot: 🔥
Old-Economy Cyclicals: With AI mega-caps flucuating, money rotated into the boring stuff that lifts and digs. Caterpillar and Amgen paced the Dow's modest gain, and industrial names outperformed tech for the first time in weeks. When the narrative stocks crack, balance sheets and dividends suddenly look fashionable again.
🥶 What’s Not: 🥶
Recent IPOs: SpaceX dropped more than 16% to ~$155, a third straight loss and now down significantly from its $225 high after the company filed a senior unsecured note offering and traders eyed the lockup cliff in September. The honeymoon ends fast when a debt deal and unlock supply hit the same week.
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🇺🇸 U.S. News
1. Google's Brain Drain Just Got Worse — Alphabet Shares Tumble
The News: Alphabet shares slid roughly 5% Monday, on track for the stock's worst day in about a year, after DeepMind vice president and 2024 Nobel chemistry laureate John Jumper announced he is leaving for Anthropic after nearly nine years. The move follows Noam Shazeer, the original Transformer co-author and Gemini engineering lead, departing for OpenAI last week. Jumper co-created AlphaFold, which has mapped more than 200 million protein structures.
Why It Matters: Two top researchers walking out the door in a week is not a coincidence — it is a signal. DeepMind has long been Google's crown jewel, and rival labs poaching its most visible names suggests Anthropic and OpenAI are winning the recruiting war that ultimately decides who ships the next frontier model. With a $2T market cap, every basis point of doubt about Google's AI roadmap translates to real money. Watch whether equity refresh grants and retention bonuses start showing up in the next 10-Q.
What to Watch: Anthropic hosts a science event June 30 that could showcase Jumper's first work. Any further departures from DeepMind's protein, robotics, or Gemini teams will accelerate the narrative.
Source: CNBC / Bloomberg / Morningstar
2. Alan Greenspan, the Maestro, Dies at 100
The News: Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan died at his home in Washington on Monday at 100, due to complications from Parkinson's disease. Greenspan led the Fed from August 1987 through January 2006 — an 18-and-a-half-year run that saw the 1987 crash, the dot-com boom and bust, and the lead-up to the global financial crisis. The Board of Governors issued a formal statement of condolence.
Why It Matters: Greenspan's legacy is uniquely double-edged: he was the architect of the "Greenspan put" that gave a generation of investors faith the Fed would always backstop markets, and he was also the supervisor who waved through the deregulation and derivatives buildup that detonated in 2008. His passing closes the book on the era when one Fed chair's word — or one ambiguous adverb — could move every asset on the planet. It is also a useful reminder that today's hawkish Warsh Fed is operating in a very different world.
What to Watch: Expect Greenspan-era policy retrospectives from former colleagues, and Powell- and Yellen-era voices to weigh in on what the Fed should and should not learn from his long tenure.
Source: NPR / Federal Reserve / Guardian
3. Oil Whipsaws on Lucerne Talks and Trump Threats
The News: Brent crude swung from an early $82.30 high to roughly $78.60 by midday after US-Iran negotiators emerged from peace talks at the Bürgenstock resort in Switzerland saying they had agreed on a roadmap for a final deal within 60 days. West Texas Intermediate also slid back below $76. The reversal came even after President Trump renewed threats of further strikes on Iran and Tehran briefly signaled it had again shut the Strait of Hormuz.
Why It Matters: The oil market is essentially trading the headlines minute-by-minute, and that tells you something important: the geopolitical risk premium that drove Brent above $90 earlier this month is being unwound in real time. If the Lucerne framework holds, energy could continue to fade as an inflation worry, which would take pressure off the Fed and the consumer. If it cracks, every dollar above $80 comes right back.
What to Watch: Final-deal language is expected within 60 days. Any shipping or insurance announcements about Hormuz traffic resuming normal volumes are the cleanest real-time signal.
Source: CNBC / Reuters via Marketscreener / Al-Monitor
4. SpaceX Falls Below $160 — Bonds, Lockup, and Profit-Taking
The News: SpaceX shares dropped more than 15% Monday to around $155, a third straight session of declines. The selloff followed news of a senior unsecured note offering and reports that up to 44% of shares could become eligible for trading by early September, a major increase from the current ~4.2% public float.
Why It Matters: The euphoria around the largest IPO in history was always going to meet the realities of supply and balance sheet. Elon Musk's space and AI conglomerate is profitable on Starlink but absorbing heavy losses elsewhere, and the looming xAI-related debt issuance plus the lockup overhang are now in the price. The bigger lesson for IPO season: the gap between launch-day enthusiasm and the first earnings cycle keeps getting narrower.
What to Watch: Terms and pricing of the bond deal, any Starlink ARPU disclosures, and whether early insiders signal they intend to sell when the lockup eases.
Source: Yahoo Finance / Bloomberg / Investopedia
5. Micron Signs Anthropic — Stock Pops Ahead of Q3 Earnings
The News: Micron Technology shares jumped roughly 5% to flirt with an all-time high after the memory maker announced a multi-year supply partnership with Anthropic ahead of its fiscal Q3 earnings on Wednesday, June 24. Needham raised its price target, and Micron now joins the S&P 500 lineup of AI hardware bellwethers as the index quarterly rebalance added Marvell and Flex to replace Pool and Campbell's Company.
Why It Matters: Memory has become the most leveraged way to play AI infrastructure. Every large language model needs HBM stacks, and Micron is the only US-based supplier with scale. The Anthropic deal effectively locks in capacity well into 2027 and gives Wall Street one more reason to mark up memory ASPs into the release. The index addition is gravy — passive inflows on top of fundamentals.
What to Watch: Wednesday's earnings call — specifically HBM volume guidance, FY27 capex, and any commentary on supply-demand into 2027.
Source: Yahoo Finance / Stock Titan
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🌎 World News
1. Starmer Steps Down — UK Gets Its Seventh PM in a Decade
The News: UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced from 10 Downing Street that he will resign as Labour Party leader and prime minister, just under two years after his 2024 landslide. Labour nominations open July 9 and close July 16; Starmer remains caretaker PM through Parliament's September return. Former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham — fresh off a by-election win — is the early frontrunner. The pound fell as much as 0.4% to roughly $1.318, near its 2026 low.
Why It Matters: UK political instability is back as a global macro variable. A change at the top, plus the possibility of a more leftward Labour platform under Burnham, raises questions about gilt issuance, capital-gains policy, and the UK's stance toward the EU. Sterling weakness here is mostly a fiscal-credibility tax, not a growth story. The FTSE 100 wobbled but held in, while domestic-facing mid-caps did the worst.
What to Watch: July 9-16 nominations, gilt auctions over the next two weeks, and any Burnham policy signals on borrowing, taxes, and EU alignment.
Source: NY Times / NPR / Yahoo Finance
2. Nikkei Sets a Sixth Straight Record — AI Mania Goes Global
The News: Japan's Nikkei 225 jumped 1.6% to close at a fresh all-time high of 72,353.96, marking its sixth consecutive record, powered by AI-linked names. SoftBank Group rose 1.9%, Tokyo Electron added 3.2%, and Advantest extended a multi-week run. South Korea's Kospi also closed at a record 9,114.55 with SK Hynix surging 5.6%. Hong Kong lagged on geopolitical worries, while the Shanghai Composite climbed 1.8%.
Why It Matters: Despite the AI talent drama in the US, Asian tech is having its best moment in years. The Nikkei is up roughly 40% in six months and Kospi 120%, reflecting both AI capex flow-through to memory and chip-equipment names and a weaker yen that turbocharges Japanese exporter earnings. For global investors, Asia ex-China has become the cleanest beneficiary of the AI infrastructure cycle.
What to Watch: Yen levels — USDJPY remains near 40-year lows and any verbal or actual intervention from MoF/Katayama could whipsaw Japanese equities sharply.
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette / AP / Saxo Markets
3. Index Reshuffle Goes Live — CoreWeave and Marvell Join Big Leagues
The News: Before Monday's open, the Nasdaq-100 added Astera Labs, CoreWeave, Nebius Group, Rocket Lab, and Teradyne while dropping Charter Communications, Cognizant, Insmed, Verisk Analytics, and Zscaler. In its quarterly rebalance, the S&P 500 added Marvell Technology and Flex, replacing Pool Corp and Campbell's Company. The Nasdaq changes were the first to use a new membership process the exchange unveiled in May.
Why It Matters: Index changes look mechanical but trigger billions in forced flows. The new additions are uniformly AI-infrastructure names — silicon, GPUs, robotics, and AI cloud — while the removals are legacy services and consumer staples. The composition shift quietly accelerates the index-level concentration in AI compute, which is already historically extreme. If you own a Nasdaq-100 ETF, you now own more CoreWeave and Astera and less Cognizant and Charter, whether you knew it or not.
What to Watch: Closing prices for the added names this week, and whether the reshuffle adds to the Nasdaq's rare divergence below the S&P 500 on days when AI mega-caps sell off.
Source: Stock Titan
🥸 Dad Joke of the Day
Q: Why did the innocent picture go to prison?
A: Because it was framed.
📖 Vocab Word of the Day
Brain Drain:
The exit of an organization's or country's most skilled talent — typically researchers, scientists, or specialists — to a competitor that offers a more attractive opportunity.
"After two Nobel-caliber AI researchers left in a week, the market priced in a real Google brain drain, sending Alphabet shares to their worst day in a year."
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