Good Afternoon. When Armstrong and Aldrin fired up the Eagle's ascent engine and lifted off from the lunar surface. It was a single-shot rocket burn with no backup, if it had failed, they were stranded.

It didn't fail, and 3.5 hours later they were docking with the command module.

Wall Street's chip stocks looked stranded last week too. On Tuesday, they fired their own ascent engine — $MU surged ~12%, $INTC jumped ~8.5%, $AMD added ~8%, and the whole semiconductor group logged its biggest single-day comeback since spring.

—Rosie, Wyatt, Evan & Conor

🔥 What’s Hot: 🔥

🥶 What’s Not: 🥶

🔢 Big number: 12% — Micron's Tuesday move. That's not a rebound, that's a comeback tour. The stock was down more than 15% last week and has now taken back the whole loss in two sessions.

Two sessions ago big chip names were left for dead. Now they're leading again.

The news: No single catalyst — just the collision of oversold conditions, aggressive short-covering, and a wave of AI-demand headlines out of Asia. South Korea's early-July exports hit a record on chip strength, and Nikkei-listed semi names surged alongside the group. Zacks published a note late morning arguing that AI demand is still leading to blowout results for chip suppliers, which added fuel to an already twitchy session.

What's next: $INTC reports Thursday after the close with analysts modeling $0.21 EPS on $14.4B in revenue. If Intel confirms AI-server demand is broadening beyond Nvidia's customer list, this rally has room to run. If it whiffs, Monday's calm returns fast — and the shorts who covered today will be back tomorrow.
Source: TheStreet

General Motors dropped a beat-and-raise before the bell that would've made the whole market rally on any normal Tuesday. Q2 adjusted EPS came in at $3.57 versus $3.19 expected — a 12% beat — on revenue of $48.03B versus a $47.01B consensus. North American margin improved to 8.6% from 6.1% a year ago, driven by truck and SUV pricing. Management raised the full-year EPS range to $12-$14 from the prior guide.

The news: Core operating profit rose 30% year over year even after a $2.3B hit from EV factory restructuring. Tariff drag was held at $2.5-$3.5B for the year, unchanged from the last update.

Bottom line: GM's still guiding to a tariff hit, still restructuring EVs, and still beat by nearly a dollar per share. That's the definition of a well-run legacy automaker doing the hard work slowly while everyone else stares at chip charts.
Source: Reuters

Slow-and-steady turnaround story of the year. $MMM reported Q2 adjusted EPS of $2.40 against a $2.25 consensus and lifted its full-year outlook, now guiding to adjusted sales growth above 4.5%. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of upside on both the report and the guide.

The news: Segments broadly cooperated — Safety and Industrial led on volume, Transportation and Electronics benefited from customer mix, and pricing held even against a soft demand backdrop.

Big picture: Two years ago 3M was a legal-liability story with a broken narrative. Today it's a boring compounder that keeps beating and raising. Investors love that arc — buy the ugly turnaround, hold through the doubt, collect the reversion.
Source: Bloomberg

Tomorrow after the close is going to be a lot. Alphabet reports Q2 with the Street modeling roughly $116.9B in revenue and $2.89 EPS. Tesla reports the same afternoon, with expectations around $25.7B revenue and $0.50 EPS. And Texas Instruments joins them, with $5.3B and $1.93 on the model. So how did traders position ahead of it? By selling. $MSFT fell 0.96%, $GOOGL slipped 0.92%, and $AMZN dropped 0.98% while the rest of the market rallied.

The news: Options desks are pricing near record straddles for Wednesday's names. That's earnings-cycle math — more uncertainty means more premium on both puts and calls, which is exactly what implied volatility is supposed to reflect.

What's next: The Google Cloud growth rate is the number that moves the whole $GOOGL session after close. Q1 came in at 63% year over year with a $462B backlog. Anything above 60% keeps the AI-monetization story intact. Below that and the AI capex debate returns with a vengeance.
Source: TheStreet

Oilfield services put in a slowly encouraging report. $HAL reported Q2 adjusted EPS of $0.55 versus $0.54 consensus on $5.71B in revenue, ahead of the $5.50B estimate. Adjusted operating income was $683M, down about 6% year over year but ahead of the analyst average.

The news: The bigger tell was on the call. Halliburton said North American drilling and fracking activity is picking up through the second half, with incremental completions demand improving. That's a real change from the sober tone in prior quarters.

Bottom line: Oil above $85 for weeks in a row plus a Middle East supply scare is exactly the setup that revives US shale spending. Halliburton just told you the customer conversations are already changing.
Source: Reuters

Japan's Nikkei 225 jumped 3.26% to close at 66,232 — its biggest one-day since February and enough to reclaim most of last week's brutal sell-off in a single session. Investors returned from Marine Day and immediately went shopping for chip names. South Korea's Kospi rallied 3.56% to 6,747 with Samsung and SK Hynix leading. Shanghai added 1.8% while Hong Kong's Hang Seng slipped 0.16%.

The news: South Korea's early-July exports hit a record thanks to AI-driven demand for HBM (high-bandwidth memory) chips, which SK Hynix and Samsung dominate globally.

Big picture: The AI hardware supply chain runs through Asia. When Seoul and Tokyo say demand is fine, Wall Street eventually agrees. When they say it's not, well, that's what last week looked like. Tuesday's session was Seoul and Tokyo casting their votes — and the American market immediately followed. Source: Trading Economics

Brent crude settled near $88.44 a barrel on Tuesday after briefly touching $91 overnight. WTI dropped to about $82.50. Both benchmarks slipped roughly 1% on reports of renewed US-Iran mediation efforts even as US strikes on Iranian targets entered a tenth consecutive night, with fresh Iranian claims of attacks on US military positions in Bahrain and Kuwait.

The news: Between July 17 and 19, only 30 vessels completed a Hormuz passage — a fraction of the usual traffic. Shippers are still avoiding the strait even as diplomatic signals flicker in and out of the news cycle.

What's next: Halliburton and other US oil-services names are treating $85+ Brent as their planning assumption. Every day mediation drags on with strikes continuing, that number holds. Only a genuine ceasefire cracks it. Source: CNBC

Japan's Ministry of Finance and BOJ officials spent the day walking back and forward on yen intervention language while the currency remained near four-decade lows against the dollar. Traders aren't buying the jawboning — without an actual intervention or a rate signal, verbal warnings only work so many times before the market stops flinching.

The news: Nikkei-listed exporters actually love a weaker yen, which is one reason the index surged so hard even as the currency slid. But a weak yen plus $88 Brent widens Japan's import bill by billions every week.

Bottom line: Tokyo is stuck. Raise rates and the Nikkei rally sputters. Don't raise rates and the yen keeps sliding. Watch the 160 level against the dollar — that's roughly where past interventions have kicked in.
Source: LiteFinance

Q: Why are mountains so funny?

A: Because they're hill areas.

The market's forward-looking estimate of how much a stock is going to move, extracted directly from the prices of its options.

Higher expected moves mean pricier options, and vice versa.

The VIX itself is nothing more than the implied volatility of S&P 500 options over the next 30 days.

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