Good morning,
Let's do this... 1st coffee.. there's lots to cover, even with the summer trade.
Where Futures Sit
Futures are mixed and leaning defensive. Dow futures are up roughly 0.2%, S&P 500 futures are close to flat, and Nasdaq-100 futures are down about 0.5% as semiconductors give back ground.
Overseas, the US-Iran conflict remains the wildcard under everything.
Crude oil has firmed, with WTI near $80 and Brent in the mid-$80s, while gold near $4,034.
Tickers To Watch
UnitedHealth topped estimates and is trading up about 4% ahead of the bell.
Here's my scan of UNH, using my personal (free) Analyzer
Semiconductors are the story under the story this week.
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index ran up roughly 130% over the past year, a move that pushed chips to nearly 20% of the entire S&P 500... a level of concentration we have not seen since the market of 2000.
Meta signaled it would sell surplus AI computing capacity, which rewrote the supply-and-demand math for every chipmaker.
SK Hynix delayed its next-generation memory expansion.
New York ordered a temporary halt on large data-center construction.
Then this morning Taiwan Semiconductor posted record results... and the chip complex sold off anyway, with SK Hynix down more than 11% overnight and semis dragging Nasdaq futures lower.
The AI build-out is real. The prices paid for it simply got ahead of themselves, and we are now finding out where fair value sits.
IBM
On Tuesday the stock fell 25% in a single session... its worst day on record, steeper even than the crash of October 1987.
Management said clients are diverting spending away from IBM software and toward their own AI hardware and memory... the very chips at the center of this week's volatility.
This is a company still generating billions in free cash flow, still paying its dividend, now trading at a beaten-down valuation with a deeply oversold chart.
But make no mistake... a 25% day is the market telling you the growth story it believed in has a crack in it.
Best
- Greg
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