Good Afternoon. Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn, proof that even the most overconfident position can get unwound in a single afternoon. Just ask anyone who was short Micron yesterday.

—Rosie, Wyatt, Evan & Conor

🔥 What’s Hot: 🔥

🥶 What’s Not: 🥶

1. Micron Crushes It

The News: Micron Technology reported fiscal Q3 results that smashed expectations: adjusted EPS of $25.11 versus $20.98 expected, revenue of $41.46 billion versus $35.91 billion estimated — a year-on-year jump of about 346%. Gross margins came in at 84.9% versus 81.7% expected. The Q4 guide was the real shock: revenue of roughly $50 billion against a $43 billion consensus, EPS of $30 to $32 against $25.43, and capex of $10 billion in the quarter alone. Micron disclosed 16 long-term customer agreements totaling $22 billion in committed financial obligations. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said memory tightness should persist through FY27 and supply may not catch up until 2028. The stock rose about 17% to $1,223, taking its 12-month gain past 700%.

Why It Matters: This is the strongest signal yet that the AI capex cycle is supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. Long-term contracts with $22 billion of committed volume essentially convert Micron from a cyclical commodity name into something closer to a contracted utility on the front edge of every hyperscaler buildout. Sell-side reacted in kind — Argus jumped its target to $1,500, Stifel to $1,500, and Dan Ives went to $1,401. The implication for the broader market is that AI infrastructure earnings growth has another year of runway, and that the buy-side is going to keep getting forced to chase chip exposure on dips.

What to Watch: Hyperscaler capex commentary next earnings season, Samsung and SK Hynix HBM pricing announcements, and whether Q4 EPS lands closer to $30 or $32 — which signals how much further margins can run.

Source: CNBC / WSJ / Globe and Mail

2. Apple Raises Mac and iPad Prices

The News: Apple officially raised prices on its Mac and iPad lineup, citing higher memory chip costs — confirming a warning Tim Cook telegraphed earlier this month on the company's last call. Shares fell about 5% to $279, single-handedly erasing the Nasdaq's early 2% gain and pulling several Magnificent Seven names lower with it. Magnitude of the increase varies by model but appears largest on higher-RAM configurations where DRAM and HBM bills are most painful. Apple did not change pricing on iPhone or Apple Watch lines.

Why It Matters: This is the first major piece of evidence that the AI memory shortage is now a real consumer pricing event. For Apple, the price hike defends margin but risks unit demand — Macs and iPads were just starting to benefit from the Apple Intelligence refresh cycle. For the broader market, it raises an uncomfortable question for the Fed: if the AI capex boom is now inflating goods prices in the largest tech consumer category, can a hot PCE be dismissed as just services-driven? The implications run from semiconductor suppliers to PC OEMs to the consumer discretionary basket as a whole.

What to Watch: July quarter Mac and iPad unit sell-through, Dell and HP reactions, and whether Best Buy and Costco flag elasticity issues on next-month earnings calls.

Source: Business Insider / WSJ

3. May PCE Hits 4.1% — Fed Hike Odds Climb Again

The News: The Commerce Department's headline PCE price index rose 4.1% year-on-year in May, above the 3.9% consensus and the hottest reading in over a year. Core PCE, which strips out food and energy, also accelerated. Consumer spending remained strong despite the inflation tick. Treasury yields slipped after the release as traders dissected the goods-versus-services split, but Fed-funds futures continued to price in modestly higher odds of another rate hike by September — about a 60% probability per CME's FedWatch. Regional Fed presidents have already been talking up the case for one more move this year.

Why It Matters: PCE is the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, and 4.1% is twice the 2% target. The May reading captures pre-tariff and pre-memory-hike pricing — meaning the inflation arithmetic only gets harder from here. Combined with Apple's price increases, today's data points toward a scenario where the Fed has very little room to ease and may need to tighten further into a market that is already long-duration tech. The asymmetric risk for portfolios: rates are not coming down on the timeline most allocators assumed in February.

What to Watch: Friday's University of Michigan inflation expectations, July CPI in mid-August, and any push-back from FOMC doves at the next round of speeches.

Source: Reuters / CNBC / CNN

4. Qualcomm Raises FY29 Targets — Data Center Becomes a Real Line Item

The News:* Qualcomm raised its FY29 non-handset revenue target to $40 billion, with automotive at $10 billion, IoT above $14 billion, and data center above $15 billion. The company also announced an expanded strategic relationship with Hugging Face to bring developer-driven AI from edge devices through to cloud infrastructure. The stock added about 5% to $208, and after-hours pricing had it up roughly 12% earlier in the session. The data-center number is the headline — Qualcomm has been quiet on the inference opportunity, and a $15 billion target by 2029 reshapes how the Street models the long-tail of AI silicon competition.

Why It Matters: For years Qualcomm has been treated as a handset stock with a side hustle in automotive. Today's reset says management thinks the inference-chip TAM is large enough to support a real data-center business — which, combined with the OpenAI–Broadcom Jalapeño chip announcement on Wednesday, makes the inference-silicon competitive landscape look a lot more crowded than it did a week ago. Nvidia still owns the training side, but the long-term margin pool in inference is now contested by Broadcom, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple internally.

What to Watch: Qualcomm's Investor Day for granular data-center timelines, Hugging Face product roadmap, and any read-through to AMD on whether its MI400 ramp can absorb the inference share it has been pricing in.

Source: Newsquawk / MarketScreener

5. WTI Under $70

The News: WTI crude settled near $68.95, below the $70 threshold and a fresh four-month low. Brent fell to about $72.42, also a four-month low. Both benchmarks have now retraced the entire move higher tied to the spring Iran conflict, with traders citing normalizing tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and President Trump's announcement that Iran has communicated it has no interest in collecting tolls on the waterway. EIA inventory data showed US commercial crude stockpiles fell 1.61 million barrels last week, smaller than the 8.3 million drop the prior week. Energy stocks underperformed broadly — Exxon and Chevron each lost about 2%.

Why It Matters: A full wartime round-trip in crude prices removes a meaningful pillar of the cyclical-inflation argument that some Fed hawks have used to justify further tightening. But it has a flip side: two-year Treasury yields remain about 75 basis points above pre-conflict levels, meaning the rates market is not buying the disinflation framework. Lower oil is good for transport, airlines, and downstream consumers, and bad for upstream producer free cash flow models. Watch the credit market — high-yield energy spreads were notably wider this week.

What to Watch: OPEC+ messaging into next week's monitoring meeting, any change in US strategic petroleum reserve refill cadence, and refined product margins in the back half of summer driving season.

Source: Yahoo Finance / Saxo

1. Nikkei and Kospi Roar Back

The News: Japan's Nikkei 225 jumped 4.4% to reclaim 72,000, and Korea's Kospi gained 5.2%, recovering most of Tuesday's 10% rout. Samsung Electronics rose 6.2% and SK Hynix gained as much as 11.6% as the company confirmed plans for a $29.4 billion US listing. Tokyo Electron and SoftBank also outperformed. Hong Kong's Hang Seng slipped 1.4% as Alibaba was dragged lower by a separate Anthropic-related story. Australia's ASX 200 fell 0.7%, weighed down by a 40% collapse in Judo Capital after a profit warning. China's CSI 300 added 0.4%.

Why It Matters: Tuesday's Korea-led selloff felt like a regime change — today's snap-back says it was more of a positioning flush than a fundamental break. SK Hynix at +11.6% on the same day it confirms a US listing tells you Western institutional demand for Asian AI exposure is real and immediate, and Samsung's 6% recovery validates the read-through from Micron. The risk is that this is a one-day reflexive move tied entirely to Micron's guide. If Friday's Asia session holds the gains, the AI memory bull case widens to a multi-region structural trade.

What to Watch: SK Hynix's actual US listing timeline, Samsung's HBM4 product roadmap update, and BoJ commentary after hawk Naoki Tamura called for hiking rates every few months.

Source: Newsquawk / Saxo

2. Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Stealing AI Models

The News: Anthropic sent a letter to US officials accusing Alibaba of illicitly accessing its proprietary AI models, according to reports. The accusation specifically names model weights and behavioral fingerprints that Anthropic says appear in Alibaba's Qwen-family releases. Alibaba ($BABA) shares fell roughly 3% in Hong Kong, dragging the Hang Seng's tech subindex lower. Anthropic has not made the underlying technical evidence public, and Alibaba has not yet issued a detailed response. The matter is now in the hands of US regulators including the Commerce Department.

Why It Matters: This is the first time a major Western AI lab has formally accused a Chinese hyperscaler of model theft in writing, and it lands at a moment when US-China tech policy is already in flux. If validated, it strengthens the case for tighter export controls and model-weight protection requirements, which would have read-through to every open-source release strategy in the industry. For allocators, it signals that the China-AI investment thesis is now subject to a new kind of regulatory and reputational risk, on top of the existing chip-export overhang.

What to Watch: US Commerce Department response, any formal Alibaba rebuttal, and whether other Western AI labs publicly back Anthropic's claims.

Source: Newsquawk

3. Judo Capital Collapses 40% — Australian Bank Sector Cracks Open

The News: Judo Capital fell 40.3% in Sydney trade after slashing its FY26 pre-tax profit guidance to A$163-A$169 million from A$180-A$190 million and raising bad-debt provisions to A$116-A$122 million. Roughly A$660 million of market value evaporated in a single session, taking the bank's market cap from A$1.6 billion to A$940 million. Commonwealth Bank and NAB also slipped 1-3%. The ASX 200 closed down 0.7% at 8,748. Australian jobs data came in slightly better than expected on the headline, but was driven almost entirely by part-time positions.

Why It Matters: Judo is small in the global scheme of things, but the credit story underneath the drop is not. A nearly 40% jump in expected bad debts inside three months suggests that Australia's SME borrower base is weakening faster than the RBA's macro assumptions implied. With Australian CPI back at 4% and the RBA still talking about further hikes, the bank-credit-quality canary just sang. Read-through to other regional and emerging-market lenders is now in play.

What to Watch: Commonwealth Bank and NAB credit-quality commentary at their next updates, RBA July meeting language, and AUD/USD reaction if the pair tests 0.68 again.

Source: ABC News

Q: What do you call a sleeping dinosaur?

A: A dino-snore.

An annual increase applied to Social Security benefits, pensions, and certain retirement accounts to help payments keep pace with inflation. COLA is calculated using changes in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners (CPI-W) from one year to the next, and it gets announced each October for the following calendar year. For retirees living on fixed income, the COLA is the single biggest annual variable separating real purchasing power from a slow erosion.

"With May PCE clocking in at 4.1% and headline CPI still running hot, the 2027 Social Security COLA is shaping up to be one of the largest in over a decade — a real number for retirees, and a fiscal headache for Washington."

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