This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

🚀 Today is SpaceX day.

We have spent eight hours digging into SpaceX so you don't have to, and the full Playbook, with every question answered, sits further down in this edition.

One thing to know before you scroll: today's newsletter is for premium members only. If you are not signed up yet, you will not be able to read any of it, so head over and join to unlock the lot.

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Welcome to everyone who joined this week. This is the report you signed up for.

In a few hours, SpaceX becomes the largest IPO in history. $75 billion raised at a $1.77 trillion valuation, with Elon Musk personally setting the $135 price. No banker range, no bookbuild. The financial media will spend today telling you what already happened. This playbook tells you what’s likely to happen next.

We built it the hard way: the S-1 filings, 45 years of IPO data, and a day-by-day autopsy of every comparable listing from Saudi Aramco to Cerebras four weeks ago. Then we mapped it against the one thing most coverage ignores entirely, which is the published schedule of when insider stock is actually allowed to hit the market.

Inside, you’ll find straight answers to the questions that matter:

How high it opens today, and why buying the first print has been consistently the worst entry across comparable IPOs.

Who is allowed to sell on you, starting with a friends-and-family tranche that has no lockup at all.

The exact calendar of the $660 billion insider unlock wave coming between August and December.

Whether Tesla ends up inside SpaceX: what Musk has said, what he’s done three times before, and the clause in his pay package that makes it worth watching.

And the three paths from here, bull, base and bear, each with real numbers and honest probabilities attached.

One thing this report is not: a prediction dressed up as certainty. Where the evidence is strong, we say so plainly. Where we’re judging, we tell you the odds we’d put on it. And where we simply don’t know, there’s a section called the Honesty Box that says exactly that.

The full playbook is below. Read Section 1 first if you only have five minutes. It answers everything in one page.

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THIS MORNING:

JUST NOW:

In a Truth Social post, Trump said discussions have been “brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved,” that he has cancelled this evening’s scheduled strikes, and that a time and place for signing a deal will be announced shortly. The deal has reportedly been approved by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Egypt.

Notice who is missing from that list. Iran. Tehran has not commented, let alone confirmed. And the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz stays in full force until the “Transaction is finalized.”

How markets reacted

Oil: Brent dumped nearly 4% on the announcement and is now trading around $87, roughly 5% below today’s highs and a long way from the $125 peak in late April. The war premium is being priced out in real time.

Stocks: Equities caught a bid immediately. Tech, which sold off on this morning’s escalation headlines, led the bounce.

Crypto: Bitcoin reclaimed ground after dipping below $60k on the strikes earlier this week. Crypto has been the fastest asset to price every twist in this war because it never closes, so treat BTC as your overnight signal while the rest of the market sleeps.

Sensei’s take

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This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

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This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🚨 Iran Hits Back After US Strikes: Missiles fired at three US bases overnight; markets fade it as another contained round, for now.

• 🏗️ Oracle’s $50 Billion Question Tonight: Options price a 12% swing as the AI capex debate condenses into one earnings call.

• ⚠️ Wall Street Starts Hedging AI: Wells Fargo tells clients to keep their AI stocks but sell calls against them.

• 📈 OpenAI Files for September Listing: Third AI giant in a $3.6 trillion IPO queue, with $207 billion still to fund.

• 💳 Swipe Fee Truce Wins Approval: Judge clears the $38 billion Visa and Mastercard deal; merchants get small cuts, slowly.

• 🇨🇦 Loonie Limps Into Rate Hold: Bank of Canada expected to hold at 2.25% with the currency at 2026 lows.

• 🍎 Siri Promises, Apple Shares Slide: Stock drops another 3% as analysts punish an AI reveal with no shipping date.

• 🧪 Activist Targets Ashland for Sale: Ancora pushes the chemicals maker toward a sale it says could lift shares 30%.

• 🔍 Deep Dive: CPI Cheat Sheet: The first 4% print in three years lands today; full scenario playbook below.

🧠 One Big Thing

Everything else in today's edition is downstream of one number landing at 1:30 PM UK time. Oracle's 12% implied swing, Wall Street's shift to hedge-everything, Bitcoin stuck near $61,500 in extreme fear: all of it is positioning ahead of the first 4% CPI headline in three years. The setup is unusual: a market priced for hikes, a new Fed chair on record as opposed to hiking on oil, and crude already $19 off its peak, meaning the data may describe a problem that is reversing. If core comes in tame, the relief trade could move fast precisely because everyone is braced the other way. The full breakdown, scenario table and the shelter tiebreaker are in today's Deep Dive cheat sheet below.

🔴 Sensei is LIVE for CPI Report

The first 4% print in three years lands today. I'll be live ahead of the release, walking through the cheat sheet scenarios in real time.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

Options traders are pricing a 12% move in Oracle shares tonight, and a 12% swing on one earnings call shows how much of the AI capex debate now rests on a single company.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

No major winners today

Losers

: Super Micro Computer dropped after filing to raise roughly $7 billion through at-the-market equity programs to fund components for its $39 billion AI server backlog, with dilution concerns compounding a broader sell-off in AI hardware names.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $61,211 (▼0.80%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,621 (▼1.10%)
XRP: $1.11 (▼2.66%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,331 (▼0.84%)
NASDAQ 100: 28,742 (▼1.29%)
FTSE 100: 10,180 (▼1.10%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.53% (▲0.22%)
Oil (WTI): $88 (▼0.54%)
Gold: $4,163 (▼2.27%)
Silver: $64.05 (▼1.92%)

Data as of: UK: 11:27 BST / US: 06:27 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 19:27 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🚨 US Strikes Iran Overnight, Tehran Fires Back at Three Bases

The US military struck Iranian military sites near the Strait of Hormuz overnight, with explosions reported around 2:35 a.m. local time at Bandar Abbas, home to a key naval and air base, Qeshm Island and the port of Jask. Central Command called the strikes a response to the downing of a US Army Apache helicopter off Oman a day earlier, which President Trump blamed on an Iranian drone. Iran answered within hours, firing at least four ballistic missiles and several drones at US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. Initial US assessments, reported by Reuters, say nearly all were intercepted. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed hits on 21 US targets, including the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. (CNBC)

Markets are treating it as another contained exchange, for now. S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures slipped about 0.3% overnight, South Korea’s Kospi fell more than 2% and Japan’s Nikkei lost around 1%. The cruel timing: Brent crude settled near $91 yesterday, down 3.4%, after a White House official said nuclear talks were making progress. The strikes landed hours later, the third time since the April ceasefire that deal optimism and live fire have shared a 24-hour news cycle. Japan reported wholesale inflation of 6.3% this morning, well above forecasts and driven by energy, a reminder that this war is already inside the world’s inflation data. Watch whether Iran calls its retaliation complete, as it has after previous rounds, or keeps firing.

🏗️ Oracle Reports Tonight With a 12% Swing Priced In

Oracle reports fiscal fourth-quarter results after today’s close, with the call at 5 p.m. Eastern, and the stakes are unusually high: options markets are pricing a move of roughly 12% in either direction. Wall Street expects earnings of $1.96 a share on revenue near $19.1 billion, up about 20% from a year ago. Last quarter, cloud infrastructure revenue grew 84% and Oracle raised its fiscal 2027 revenue target to $90 billion, backed by a $553 billion backlog of contracted future revenue from customers including OpenAI, Meta and Nvidia. The shares trade near $212, up 9.5% this year but down nearly 13% over the past week in the chip-led selloff. (Yahoo Finance)

This print is the AI spending debate condensed into one company. Oracle is on track to spend about $50 billion on data centers this fiscal year, more than seven times its 2024 level, and BNP Paribas analysts expect the 2027 spending guide could land between $80 billion and $100 billion. The backlog proves the demand is real; the open question is whether building ahead of revenue, funded with rising debt and lease commitments, produces cash before the market loses patience. With Wells Fargo and others questioning debt-fueled AI buildouts this same week, tonight is the first hard test of that thesis from a company at the center of it. (Yahoo Finance)

⚠️ Wells Fargo Calls the AI Selloff a Wake-Up Call

Wells Fargo’s chief equity strategist Ohsung Kwon told clients the technology rout that erased roughly $1 trillion from chip stocks on Friday was a wake-up call about piling into the artificial intelligence trade, and that the rally’s “sugar rush” phase is over. His prescription is the revealing part: keep AI holdings but sell call options against them, collecting income while capping the upside. Kwon views the selloff as positioning-driven rather than a verdict on AI fundamentals, and expects the narrow buy-semiconductors trade to return as big tech keeps raising money for data centers. His top worry among five bear cases: surging AI usage costs that could strain enterprise budgets. (Bloomberg)

The market stress-tested the note immediately. The Nasdaq fell as much as 2.5% yesterday as Micron, Qualcomm and AMD slid again, hit session lows on the Iran headlines, then clawed most of it back to close down 0.97% at 25,678.82, with the S&P 500 off just 0.26% at 7,386.65. That two-way violence is the new regime. The bigger picture: the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is up 61% this quarter against 13% for the S&P 500, so most index-fund investors own this concentration whether they chose it or not. With JPMorgan tactically cautious and Bank of America counting top signals, the Street has downshifted from buy-everything to hedge-everything without anyone calling the top. Today’s CPI and next week’s Fed meeting are the catalysts that settle it. (CNBC)

📈 OpenAI Joins a $3.6 Trillion Race to Go Public

OpenAI confirmed it has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, becoming the third major AI player in the pipeline after SpaceX filed in April and Anthropic on June 1, a queue of listings worth a combined $3.6 trillion. A confidential S-1 lets a company submit its financials privately to regulators and reveal them publicly later, so this is a starting gun, not a launch: reports point to a September debut. OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in a March funding round that raised $122 billion, and said it was generating $2 billion in revenue per month. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are among the banks on the deal. (Bloomberg)

The first test of public appetite comes Friday, when SpaceX starts trading in what is set to be the biggest IPO ever, at a reported valuation near $1.75 trillion, with bid interest reportedly topping $250 billion for a $75 billion raise. For OpenAI the listing is less a victory lap than a funding necessity: HSBC estimates the company may need more than $207 billion in additional capital by 2030 to cover its computing bills, and the Wall Street Journal has reported it recently missed its own user and revenue targets. The public filing will expose OpenAI’s real margins for the first time, a direct confrontation between disclosed numbers and a valuation built in private rooms. (CNBC)

💳 Judge Approves $38 Billion Visa, Mastercard Fee Deal

A fedral judge granted preliminary approval to Visa and Mastercard’s revised $38 billion settlement with merchants, a major step toward ending an antitrust fight that began in 2005 over swipe fees, the roughly 2% to 2.5% charge merchants pay on every card transaction. The deal covers about 12 million US businesses. Its core terms: a 0.1 percentage point fee cut for five years, an eight-year cap of 1.25% on standard consumer cards, the right to surcharge customers up to 3%, and, for the first time, the ability to refuse whole categories of cards, such as premium rewards cards. Judge Brian Cogan’s ruling comes two years after a different judge rejected a $30 billion version as too small. (Reuters)

This is preliminary, not final: a formal objection period and fairness hearing come next, and Walmart and major retail trade groups are still fighting, arguing merchants remain forced to accept expensive rewards cards from every issuing bank in a network. Worth knowing before celebrating either side: the $38 billion is not a payment, it is the estimated value of fee reductions through 2031. US swipe fees hit $111.2 billion in 2024, up from $100.8 billion the year before and roughly four times 2009 levels, so the deal slows the growth of the fee pool rather than shrinking it. For shoppers, expect more card surcharges at checkout and a possible squeeze on rewards programs as merchants gain the right to refuse the priciest cards. (Yahoo Finance)

Stories You Might Have Missed

🇨🇦 Bank of Canada Set to Hold as Loonie Sits at 2026 Low

The Bank of Canada announces its rate decision at 9:45 a.m. Eastern today, with economists near-unanimous on a fifth straight hold at 2.25%. The Canadian dollar touched 1.3969 per US dollar yesterday, its weakest of the year, weighed down by the gap against the Fed’s 3.50% to 3.75% range and a soft domestic economy. The twist in yesterday’s data: Canada posted a C$2.72 billion April trade surplus, its largest in 15 months, on record exports of C$75.2 billion, driven almost entirely by war-inflated oil prices. The thing to watch today is the statement’s language: any hint of worry about oil-driven inflation could revive hike bets and snap the loonie off its lows. (Bloomberg)

🍎 Apple’s AI Reveal Keeps Selling Off

Apple’s developer-conference unveiling of a next-generation Siri and its Apple Intelligence platform is now a two-day sell-the-news event. The stock touched a record near $317 during the keynote at the start of the week, reversed to close down 1.9% at $301.54 on volume 68% above average, then fell more than 3% further yesterday. The complaint from analysts is simple: no timeline for the new Siri, an AI story Apple first teased two years ago and has delayed repeatedly. The presentation also confirmed Apple’s most advanced AI model runs on Nvidia chips through Google’s cloud, an awkward dependency for a company that prides itself on owning its stack. It was Tim Cook’s final keynote as chief executive, and the AI credibility question now passes to his successor.

🧪 Activist Ancora Pushes Chemical Maker Ashland to Sell Itself

Hedge fund Ancora Alternatives disclosed a significant stake in Ashland, the roughly $2.7 billion specialty chemicals maker whose customers include L’Oreal, and is urging the board to start a sale process it says could lift the shares more than 30%, to around $76. Ashland stock jumped about 6% to $61.12 on the news. Ancora plans to launch the campaign publicly at an activist conference and says it is prepared for a proxy fight if no deal materializes by September. One wrinkle that makes this live: Standard Investments, a private group, already holds roughly 10% of the company and could itself emerge as a buyer, giving the activist case a ready-made bidder.

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🔍Deep Dive: CPI Cheat Sheet: The First 4% Print in Three Years

The May CPI report lands today at 1:30 PM UK time (8:30 AM ET), one week before Kevin Warsh chairs his first Fed meeting. It is likely to be the first 4 percent inflation print in three years. Consensus says 4.2% headline, up from 3.8%, which would be the highest since April 2023 (FactSet). Markets that started the year asking when the Fed would cut now price better than 50/50 odds of a hike in 2026, up from 10% in January (24/7 Wall St). That repricing took five months. Today's print decides whether it sticks.

THE NUMBER YOU SHOULD IGNORE

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This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🚩 BofA Warns of Market Top: Seven of ten top-signal indicators have triggered, and the bank’s strategist is telling clients to take profits.

• 📈 Citi Raises Target to 8,100: Citi lifted its S&P 500 target to 8,100 on a one-time AI spending boom.

• 💥 Intel Lands Google Chip Order: Intel shares jumped 13% on a Google order for over 3 million custom chips, due 2028.

• 🎯 Marvell Earns S&P 500 Spot: Marvell shares jumped 14% on confirmation it joins the S&P 500 on June 22, forcing index buying.

• 🤖 OpenAI Files to Go Public: OpenAI filed a confidential listing form but signals it may stay private a while longer.

• 💊 Side Effects Sink Zealand Pharma: Shares fell as much as 25% after its weight-loss drug showed high dropout rates from gastrointestinal problems.

• 💵 Money Funds Top $8 Trillion: US money-market fund assets passed $8 trillion for the first time, paying around 3.3% near risk-free.

• 🛢️ China Keeps Oil Under $100: A sharp drop in Chinese crude buying has absorbed the supply shock keeping oil below $100.

🧠 One Big Thing

Three stories in today's edition point at the same risk from different angles: concentration. Citi notes the fastest-growing names now produce about 45% of S&P 500 earnings, Bank of America warns the cap-weighted index has become the crowded trade, and Marvell's forced inclusion on June 22 mechanically adds more AI weight to a benchmark most investors treat as diversified. The thread the body left separate: every passive S&P 500 holder is quietly getting longer a handful of AI names whether they intend to or not. The trade is knowing your real exposure. Equal-weight or selective single names may offer similar upside with less crowding risk.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

Citi and Bank of America set year-end S&P 500 targets 1,000 points apart in the same week, 8,100 against 7,100, the widest split between two major banks and the cleanest read on the bull-versus-bear divide.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : Autozi Internet Technology (Global) Ltd. ripped higher in a low-float squeeze, the latest in a string of triple-digit pre-market gaps this year as thin trading volume drove an outsized move in the volatile Chinese microcap.

• : Nuvalent, Inc. shares soared after GSK agreed to acquire the Boston oncology company for $10.6 billion, gaining two late-stage lung cancer therapies now under FDA review.

• : Micron Technology, Inc. extended its rebound as the memory and AI-chip trade recovered from last week’s sharp semiconductor selloff, helped by recent analyst price target hikes ahead of fiscal Q3 earnings on June 24.

• : Rocket Lab Corporation rose alongside the broader space sector as Musk’s pitch for AI satellites and orbital data centers lifted names across the group ahead of the SpaceX IPO.

Losers

: % Solidion Technology, Inc. pulled back hard after a parabolic multi-day rally on its space-battery announcements, with a newly disclosed $35 million private placement adding dilution and an outstanding going-concern warning weighing on shares.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $62,610 (▼ 0.72%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,671 (▼ 1.12%)
XRP: $1.15 (▼ 1.15%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,447 (▲ 0.42%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,709 (▲ 0.86%)
FTSE 100: 10,353 (0.00%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.55% (▼ 0.48%)
Oil (WTI): $90 (▼ 1.88%)
Gold: $4,342 (▲ 0.29%)
Silver: $68.57 (▲ 0.66%)

Data as of: UK: 12:57 BST / US: 07:57 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 20:57 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🚩 BofA Says Take Profits as Warning Signs Pile Up

Bank of America’s most-followed stock strategist, Savita Subramanian, told clients to take profits, citing “too many red flags” across US shares. Seven of the 10 indicators the bank uses to spot market tops have now triggered, up from five in April and four in March, putting roughly 70% of its warning signals at levels last seen near past peaks. The firm kept its year-end S&P 500 target at 7,100, about 4% below where the index closed yesterday at 7,405.73. The two newest flags: a record-wide gap between the best and worst tech stocks, the widest since February 2020, and growth expectations running well above their five-year average. (CNBC)

The nuance matters for anyone holding an index fund, because Subramanian is not saying sell everything. Her point is that the cap-weighted S&P 500, where a handful of megacap technology names dominate, has become the crowded and vulnerable trade, while individual stocks still offer room to hide. She drew the comparison to early 2020 and noted that defensive stocks such as consumer staples have tended to outperform after setups like this one. The near-term test is tomorrow’s May inflation report and the Federal Reserve’s meeting next week, where markets see almost no chance of a rate cut and growing odds of a hike by year-end. (Bloomberg)

📈 Citi Lifts S&P Target to 8,100 on AI Earnings

Citigroup went the other way the same week. Its equity strategist, Scott Chronert, raised the firm’s year-end S&P 500 target to 8,100 from 7,700, about 9% above where the index closed yesterday, and lifted his 2026 earnings estimate for the index to $350 a share, with $400 pencilled in for 2027. The driver is what Citi calls a one-time spending boom on AI infrastructure that is lifting company profits rather than just inflating valuations. Chronert pointed to unusually large first-quarter earnings beats, about 13.4% above expectations, a margin normally seen only in the early recovery out of a recession. (CNBC)

For retail investors, the split is the story. Citi at 8,100 and BofA at 7,100 in the same week frames the central question of 2026: whether AI is a durable earnings engine or a crowded bubble. Citi’s case rests on profits holding up, and the firm flags its own risk. It notes that the market’s fastest-growing companies now generate about 45% of all S&P 500 earnings, up from roughly 15% three decades ago, so a stumble by a few names would ripple through the whole index. Citi also expects valuations to cool from here, which puts more weight on earnings actually landing. The next read comes with second-quarter results in July. (Kitco)

💥 Intel Jumps 13% as Google Taps It for Chips

Intel shares jumped more than 13% in premarket trading yesterday and held a double-digit gain after a report that Alphabet’s Google ordered it to build more than 3 million of Google’s custom AI chips, called tensor processing units (TPUs), for 2028 production. The order, first reported by The Information and confirmed by Bloomberg, came after months of Google testing Intel’s factories. Separately, chip designers including Nvidia are weighing Intel as a backup manufacturer, though no Nvidia order has been placed. For Intel, whose contract-manufacturing arm builds chips for outside customers, a high-volume win from a name like Google is the validation it has chased for years. (Bloomberg)

The bigger picture is a chip supply chain that has leaned almost entirely on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, whose factories cannot keep pace with AI demand. That crunch is pushing the giant cloud companies to find a second source, and Intel is positioning to be it. The limit for investors is timing: this order is for 2028, so the revenue is years away, and Nvidia has not committed. Intel has poured tens of billions into new plants in Ohio, Arizona, and Ireland on a bet exactly like this one. What to watch next is whether another big buyer follows Google, and whether Intel’s newest manufacturing process holds up at scale. (TheStreet)

🎯 Marvell Jumps 14% on Its S&P 500 Ticket

Marvell Technology jumped nearly 14% yesterday after confirmation it will join the S&P 500 before trading opens on June 22, replacing pool-supplies distributor PoolCorp. The AI chipmaker cleared the bar for inclusion by posting a full-year accounting profit, and its addition forces every index fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking the benchmark to buy the shares, creating built-in demand. Contract manufacturer Flex is joining the index the same day. Marvell has more than tripled in 2026, helped by a $2 billion investment from Nvidia in March and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang calling it the “next trillion-dollar company.” Its market value is now around $230 billion. (CNBC)

For anyone who owns an S&P 500 fund, the change quietly bakes more AI exposure into a holding most people treat as safe and diversified, a sign of how thoroughly chip and data-center names have taken over the benchmark. The forward question is valuation. Marvell trades at roughly 85 to 99 times earnings, well above its five-year average near 30, and at least one widely used model pegs fair value far below the current price. The built-in buying from index funds runs only through June 22. After that, the stock has to justify the price on results, and the next test is the coming earnings report, where Marvell has guided to about $2.7 billion in revenue, up roughly 35% from a year earlier. (Reuters)

🤖 OpenAI Files for IPO, in No Rush to List

OpenAI confirmed yesterday that it has filed a confidential S-1, the registration form a company submits to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) before going public, its first formal step toward a listing. The company announced the move itself, saying it expected the news to leak. OpenAI carries an $852 billion valuation from a $122 billion funding round in March backed by SoftBank, Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft, and pulls in around $2 billion a month in revenue, more than $20 billion a year. It is still losing heavily, with internal forecasts pointing to a roughly $14 billion loss this year and no profit expected until about 2029. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are running the process. (CNBC)

For retail investors the filing reads like a chance to finally own a piece of OpenAI, but it is a long way from that. A confidential filing only lets the SEC review the books privately, the company says it may stay private a while longer, and a real listing is months off at the earliest. The track record here is not subtle: shares sold in initial public offerings have as a group trailed the wider market for years after listing, and the most hyped technology debuts tend to spike on day one before fading. The guaranteed winners are the banks running the deal, who earn their fee whether the stock performs or not, and insiders, who are lining up a tender offer to sell some of their holdings before any public buyer can. The nearer read on appetite comes this week from SpaceX, which prices its own record listing and starts trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. For now the most direct way to own a slice of OpenAI stays Microsoft, which holds roughly a quarter of it. (NBC News)

Stories You Might Have Missed

💊 Zealand Pharma Sinks 25% on Obesity-Drug Side Effects

Shares of Danish drugmaker Zealand Pharma fell as much as 25% yesterday after full late-stage data on its weight-loss drug survodutide raised side-effect concerns. The drug hit its weight-loss targets, with up to 16.6% loss at 76 weeks, but 19% of patients quit the trial because of gastrointestinal problems, against 2.9% on placebo, and more than 40% reported vomiting. That tolerability gap matters in a market ruled by Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, where rivals saw far fewer dropouts, and it could cap how many patients ever take the drug. The contrast was stark: at the same diabetes conference, Eli Lilly shares rose after its next-generation obesity drug, retatrutide, was shown to ease sleep apnea and knee pain on top of weight loss. (CNBC)

💵 Cash in Money Funds Tops $8 Trillion

US money-market fund assets have topped $8 trillion for the first time, with Crane Data putting the pile at $8.29 trillion after more than $1 trillion flowed in last year. The pull is simple. These funds, which hold short-term debt such as Treasury bills, are paying around 3.3% with almost no risk, and investors keep parking cash there even as stocks, gold, and bitcoin set records. The backdrop is uncertainty over interest rates, war, and energy, with markets now pricing a real chance the Federal Reserve’s next move is a hike rather than a cut. That near-risk-free yield raises the bar for every riskier asset, and the cash heap is also potential fuel for stocks if it ever rotates back in. (Bloomberg)

🛢️ China Is the Reason Oil’s Still Under $100

Oil has stayed under $100 a barrel despite a Middle East war and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, and a sharp drop in Chinese buying is the main reason. China’s crude imports fell from 11.7 million barrels a day in February to under 9 million by late May, which JPMorgan reckons accounts for about 74% of the drop in global crude imports, absorbing a supply shock that some feared could push oil past $200. Brent crude still jumped 4.9% yesterday to $97.67 after fresh Israel-Iran strikes. Societe Generale’s warning: as global inventories drain, prices have to climb, and if China returns as a buyer, some see Brent heading toward $120 to $130. That feeds straight into inflation and Fed policy, with May inflation data due tomorrow. (CNBC)

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📈 Chart of the Day: XRP/USD

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This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 📉 Strong Jobs Data Hits Hedges: A hot jobs report lifted rate-hike bets, sinking gold and bitcoin together as yield-free assets lost appeal.

• 🚀 SpaceX Launches Record IPO: SpaceX prices the largest debut ever at $135 a share, valuing it near $1.77 trillion.

• 🍎 Apple Bets Comeback on Siri: Apple unveils a rebuilt Siri today, running on a licensed Google model, to rescue its AI credibility.

• 🛢️ Oil’s Safety Net Runs Thin: Oil sits near $95 despite Hormuz blocked, but the buffers holding it down are nearly spent.

• 🚪 Blackstone Caps Fund Withdrawals: Blackstone limited redemptions on its $79 billion credit fund as investors rushed to pull cash.

• 🪖 US Iran War Hits 100 Days: The US Iran war reached day 100 with no deal, and the heaviest fighting since April.

• 💉 Incyte Eyes $2 Billion Biotech Deal: Incyte nears a $2 billion buyout of Star Therapeutics to plug a looming patent cliff.

• 🇨🇭 Switzerland Fights US Tariff Threat: Switzerland rejected US forced-labour claims as Washington weighs lifting tariffs on Swiss goods to 12.5%.

• 🛢️ Arctic Drilling Auction Flops: An Arctic drilling auction drew just $3.74 million as major oil firms stayed away entirely.

• 📈 Chart of the Day: SMR: NuScale Power sits on strong support near $10, with upside targets stacked above if it holds.

🧠 One Big Thing

Two stories in today's edition point the same way. Rates are heading higher, and Blackstone just capped withdrawals as fresh money into private credit dries up, with fund sales down 63% from a year ago. Higher-for-longer rates are the squeeze: they pull cash toward bonds paying real yield and away from illiquid credit funds that lock money up. That is why the Blackstone cap matters well beyond one fund. If rates climb and inflows keep shrinking, the whole $2 trillion private-credit pile faces redemption math that gets harder each quarter. Watch fund flows, not headlines, for the next crack.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

No major winners or losers today.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $63,129 (▼ -0.27%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,665 (▼ -1.48%)
XRP: $1.14 (▼ -0.96%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,420 (▲ 0.26%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,198 (▲ 0.59%)
FTSE 100: 10,375 (▲ 0.40%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.56% (▲ 0.62%)
Oil (WTI): $94 (▲ 4.71%)
Gold: $4,294 (▼ -0.80%)
Silver: $67.01 (▼ -1.28%)

Data as of: UK: 11:30 BST / US: 06:30 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 19:30 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

📉 Hot Jobs Report Sinks Gold and Bitcoin Together

Friday’s May jobs report came in more than twice as strong as forecast, and it broke two trades a lot of retail investors thought were safe. US employers added 172,000 jobs against expectations near 80,000, unemployment held at 4.3%, and wages kept climbing. Bond traders responded by pricing in a Federal Reserve rate hike this year, a full reversal from the cuts the market expected a few months ago. Gold fell 3.3% to about $4,340 an ounce, its lowest of 2026 and enough to wipe out the metal’s entire gain for the year. Bitcoin capped its worst week since the FTX collapse in late 2022, dropping below $60,000 intraday for the first time since October 2024. (CNBC)

The lesson for anyone holding both is that gold and bitcoin, each sold as a hedge, fell at the same moment because the thing moving them was interest rates, not fear. When cash and bonds pay more, assets that pay nothing lose their appeal, and a stronger dollar piles on. Bitcoin clawed back to around $62,000 by this morning, but the crypto fear gauge is still pinned at extreme fear, and a tiny $2.5 million sale by Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, was enough to set off more than $1.7 billion in forced liquidations in a single day. The next tests are Wednesday’s May inflation report and the Fed’s June 16 to 17 meeting, the first chaired by Kevin Warsh. (Bloomberg)

🚀 SpaceX Debuts Friday in the Biggest IPO Ever

SpaceX prices the largest stock-market debut in history on Thursday and starts trading Friday on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. Elon Musk’s company set a fixed price of $135 a share, an unusual move that skips the normal back-and-forth with investors, and plans to sell about 555.6 million shares to raise roughly $75 billion. That values SpaceX near $1.77 trillion, more than double the record Saudi Aramco set in 2019 and above Tesla’s roughly $1.6 trillion, arriving as the seventh-largest US company. Retail investors have been promised about 30% of the offering, around three times the usual slice, while Musk keeps more than 82% of the voting power. (CNBC)

What buyers are getting is a bet on the next decade, not this year’s numbers. SpaceX booked $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 but lost $4.94 billion, and only Starlink, its satellite-internet arm, turns a steady profit; the company folded Musk’s AI startup xAI into the business in February. Because the $135 price is fixed, the real value gets decided in Friday’s first trades, and pre-listing markets have changed hands both above and below that level. SpaceX also won’t qualify for the S&P 500 until at least June 2027, so index funds won’t be forced buyers for a year. Anthropic and OpenAI are lining up their own listings right behind it. (Yahoo Finance)

🍎 Apple Stakes Its AI Comeback on Siri Today

Apple opens its developer conference today at 1 p.m. Eastern with its most closely watched keynote in years, under the theme “All Systems Glow.” The centerpiece is a rebuilt Siri, a feature Apple promised in 2024 and then failed to ship, now running on a custom Google Gemini model with about 1.2 trillion parameters that Apple reportedly pays around $1 billion a year to license. Expect a standalone Siri chatbot app and developer versions of iOS 27, billed as a stability-focused release. It is also Tim Cook’s final keynote as chief executive before he hands the job to John Ternus on September 1. Apple shares closed Friday at $307.34, near a record, with the company worth about $4.5 trillion. (CNBC)

This matters because Apple’s AI credibility is on the line after the botched 2024 rollout, and leaning on Google’s model is an admission it couldn’t catch up alone, which puts real weight on Alphabet too. Wall Street is split: Wedbush’s Dan Ives expects fireworks and sees a $400 stock, Morgan Stanley sits at $330, while UBS is neutral at $296 and warns the event may not move the shares without a real surprise. With the stock already near an all-time high, plenty of optimism is priced in. One thing to watch is whether Apple demos the new Siri live or plays a recording, a quick read on how sure the company is that it actually works.

🛢️ Oil Dodged $200, but the Cushion Is Thinning

The Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint that carried about a fifth of the world’s oil before the war, has been largely blocked for more than three months, pulling over 10 million barrels a day off the market in what the International Energy Agency calls the largest supply disruption in the history of oil. For decades the warning was that this would send crude to $200 or higher. Instead Brent sits around $95 a barrel and the US benchmark near $92, up roughly 20% this year but far below past crisis spikes. The gap got filled by record US exports, China cutting its crude imports about 40% in May, a 172-million-barrel release from America’s emergency stockpile, and rerouted Russian and Iranian cargoes. (Bloomberg)

Contained oil is the main reason the global economy has dodged a recession despite the worst supply shock on record, and cheaper-than-feared fuel has kept inflation from running away. The catch is that the buffers doing the work are nearly spent. US oil inventories are at two-decade lows, the emergency reserve has little left, and fuel stockpiles are thin heading into peak summer driving; one Pimco manager estimates the system tightens by 70 to 80 million barrels every week. With the safety net almost gone, even a small new outage could move prices the way the old forecasts warned. Iran-backed Hezbollah just rejected a US ceasefire plan for Lebanon, so the war that started all this is still live.

🚪 Blackstone Caps Withdrawals as Investors Rush the Exit

Blackstone capped withdrawals from its flagship private-credit fund for the first time on Thursday, after investors asked to pull about 10% of the $79 billion fund in the second quarter, up from 7.9% in the first. The Blackstone Private Credit Fund, known as BCRED, limited redemptions to its standard 5% quarterly ceiling, leaving some investors unable to cash out fully. The move came a day after Swiss manager Partners Group capped a fund of its own, sending its stock down 18%. Blackstone called the limits a deliberate design rather than a sign of trouble, and said the fund still holds more than $15 billion in available cash. (CNBC)

Private credit, lending done by firms rather than banks, has swelled to roughly $2 trillion and was marketed hard to wealthy individuals, so this is a live lesson that the money in these funds is not always there on demand. Oddly, Blackstone’s stock rose about 8% on the news, because the 10% exit request came in below what analysts feared. The bigger worry is what comes next: new money is drying up, with credit fund sales down 63% from a year earlier in April, and rivals including Blue Owl, Apollo and Cliffwater are facing the same pressure. Regulators in the US and UK have begun stress-testing the sector. (Reuters)

Stories You Might Have Missed

🪖 US and Iran Reach Day 100 With No Deal

The US-Iran war passed its 100th day yesterday with the two sides still far from a lasting agreement, and the past week brought the heaviest fighting since a fragile April ceasefire. US forces shot down two Iranian drones near the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, after intercepting six ballistic missiles aimed at Bahrain and Kuwait on Friday. Talks remain stuck on tens of billions in frozen Iranian funds, which President Trump won’t release in an early deal, and on Lebanon, where Iran-backed Hezbollah just rejected a US ceasefire plan. The market read runs through oil: Brent is about 36% above its pre-war price, energy is the best-performing S&P 500 sector this year at roughly 31%, and airlines and cruise lines are squeezed by costlier fuel. (CNBC)

💉 Incyte Nears a $2 Billion Bet on Bleeding Disorders

Incyte is close to buying Star Therapeutics, a private biotech focused on bleeding disorders, in a deal worth up to $2 billion, the Financial Times reported yesterday, with $1.25 billion in cash upfront and up to $750 million tied to hitting targets. Reuters said it couldn’t confirm the report and neither company has commented. Star’s lead drug is a once-a-month antibody for von Willebrand disease, the most common inherited bleeding disorder, and it’s in late-stage trials. The logic for Incyte, worth about $19 billion, is a looming patent cliff on its top-selling drug Jakafi around 2028; its new chief executive, a known dealmaker, has said acquisitions are central to filling that gap. The news broke Sunday, so the shares haven’t reacted yet. (Reuters)

🇨🇭 Switzerland Rejects US Forced-Labour Claim Amid Tariff Talks

Switzerland on Friday rejected US findings that it failed to block imports made with forced labour, even as Washington weighs raising tariffs on Swiss goods to 12.5% from 10%. Bern said it strongly disputes the allegation and will keep negotiating; its current 10% duties expire July 24. Swiss officials and business groups see the forced-labour claim as a pretext to keep tariffs in place after the US Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s emergency duties in February. It matters for Swiss heavyweights such as Roche, Novartis, Nestlé and watchmakers Swatch and Richemont, though the 2.5-point gap versus the European Union is viewed as manageable. The bigger swing factor for Swiss pharma is a separate drug tariff, capped at 15%. (Reuters)

🛢️ Arctic Drilling Auction Flops as Big Oil Stays Away

A federal auction of drilling rights in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drew almost no interest on Friday, pulling in just $3.74 million from two bidders for five of the 58 tracts on offer. The only takers were a state-owned Alaska authority and a small Anchorage gas producer; no major oil company bid. For comparison, a March sale in a nearby Alaska petroleum reserve drew about $163 million from majors like ConocoPhillips. The flop shows that even with federal backing and oil prices lifted by the war, the industry sees Arctic drilling as too costly and risky, with no roads, decades to first production and banks refusing to fund it. It won’t move oil or gasoline prices any time soon. (Reuters)

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📈 Chart of the Day: SMR (NuScale Power)

Read more

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 📊 Jobs Report Decides Fed Path: May payrolls land today and could reset rate-cut bets ahead of the Fed meeting.

• 🔒 CrowdStrike Beats, Splits, Still Falls: Revenue rose 26% and a four-for-one split was announced, yet slowing billings sank shares.

• ⚡ Innio Surges in Nasdaq Debut: The gas-engine maker closed up 23% as investors chased AI power infrastructure beyond chips.

• 🪨 Trump Funds Coal Revival: Roughly $700 million in federal money targets coal as backup power for AI data centers.

• 🛢️ Hezbollah Rejection Keeps Oil Risk: Hezbollah refused the US-brokered ceasefire, dimming odds the Strait of Hormuz reopens soon.

• ⚛️ Quantinuum Debuts, Closes Flat: The quantum firm popped 13% then gave it back as early excitement met profit-taking.

• ⚖️ Blanche Tapped for Attorney General: Trump nominated his former lawyer to lead Justice, with antitrust enforcement hanging on confirmation.

• 🔍 Jobs Report Deep Dive: How to trade today’s payrolls live, why wages matter more than the headline, and what each outcome signals.

🧠 One Big Thing

Today the usual logic is inverted, but only halfway. Hot jobs is risk-off, full stop, because the market's whole question is whether the Fed can cut, and a strong print answers no. The weak side is where people get caught: soft jobs only helps risk if wages cool too. A weak headline paired with hot wages near 0.4%, against oil near triple digits, is not the dovish dream. It is stagflation, and that reads risk-off as well. The wage line is the tiebreaker, so read it before celebrating any soft number. The deep dive below breaks down each scenario and what it signals.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

The Crypto Fear and Greed Index fell to 11 this week, its lowest reading of 2026, leaving sentiment so bearish that a soft jobs print today could spark a violent short-covering rally.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : Merlin, Inc. surged after announcing it completed the Critical Design Review for its C-130J autonomy program with US Special Operations Command, advancing the program from design into aircraft integration. The news broke after Thursday’s close, which explains the gap against the flat regular session.

• : Concrete Pumping Holdings, Inc. jumped after Q2 fiscal 2026 revenue rose 14% to $106.8 million and earnings of $0.04 beat the $0.01 estimate, prompting the company to raise its full-year outlook.

• : ServiceTitan, Inc. rose after fiscal Q1 2027 revenue climbed 25% to $268.8 million and the company lifted full-year revenue and operating income guidance on accelerating adoption of its Max and AI agent products.

• : Argan, Inc. climbed after posting record fiscal Q1 2027 revenue of $291 million with diluted EPS doubling to $3.24 and backlog reaching $2.8 billion.

Losers

• : Cypherpunk Technologies Inc. plunged as its Zcash treasury was hit by a roughly 45% crash in ZEC after Shielded Labs disclosed a critical counterfeiting vulnerability in Zcash’s Orchard shielded pool.

• : Guidewire Software, Inc. fell after fiscal Q3 results beat on revenue and earnings but annual recurring revenue guidance came in slightly below Wall Street targets, overshadowing the beat.

• : lululemon athletica inc. dropped after cutting its full-year sales and earnings guidance and issuing a weak current-quarter outlook, with management blaming negative media commentary and underwhelming product launches.

• : Arm Holdings plc declined in sympathy with a broad semiconductor sell-off sparked by Broadcom’s disappointing AI chip outlook, with no fresh company-specific catalyst.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $62,832 (▼ -1.52%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,681 (▼ -4.94%)
XRP: $1.13 (▼ -2.85%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,565 (▼ -0.47%)
NASDAQ 100: 30,187 (▼ -0.99%)
FTSE 100: 10,400 (▲ 0.06%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.67% (▼ -0.13%)
Oil (WTI): $93 (▼ -0.20%)
Gold: $4,465 (▼ -0.24%)
Silver: $72.75 (▼ -1.56%)

Data as of: UK (BST) 10:55 / US (EDT): 05:55 / Asia (Tokyo): 18:55

✅ 5 Things to Know

📊 May Jobs Number Could Reset Rate-Cut Bets

The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the May employment report at 8:30 a.m. Eastern this morning, the single biggest scheduled event of the day. Economists expect roughly 80,000 to 85,000 jobs added, with forecasts spanning a wide 65,000 to 125,000, and the unemployment rate holding at 4.3%. The bar is low for a reason: April surprised with 115,000 jobs, nearly double the 62,000 expected, and hiring this year has averaged about 76,000 a month. The lead-up data leaned soft. Weekly jobless claims rose to 225,000, above the 213,000 forecast, and first-quarter productivity was revised down to 0.3%. (Kiplinger)

That count feeds straight into the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate path ahead of its June meeting, which is why every market is positioned around it. A soft number could revive hopes for rate cuts, a tailwind for rate-sensitive corners like real estate, utilities and small caps, and fuel for the rotation into value stocks that drove markets yesterday. A hot wage figure could push cuts further out and pressure the high-priced tech names already wobbling. Because the report lands at 8:30, pre-market futures and bond yields will give the first read. Watch the unemployment rate and wage growth as closely as the headline jobs figure.

🔒 CrowdStrike Beats and Splits, but Shares Still Slide

CrowdStrike (CRWD) reported quarterly results this week that beat across the board, and the stock fell anyway, dropping about 9% after hours and another 4% in yesterday’s session. Revenue rose 26% from a year earlier to $1.39 billion, ahead of the $1.36 billion expected. The company swung to a $27.8 million profit from a year-earlier loss, posted record free cash flow of about $468 million, raised its full-year outlook, and announced its first-ever stock split, four-for-one. The trigger for the selloff was billings, a measure of new business booked, which grew just 18% to $1.35 billion, below hopes and a hint that deal momentum may be cooling. (SEC filing)

This was a strong quarter from a stock priced for perfection: shares had run more than 70% in three months and traded above 100 times earnings, so anything short of flawless invited heavy selling. For retail investors, the four-for-one split is the directly useful part. Each share becomes four and the price drops in proportion, so a roughly $748 share becomes about $187. It doesn’t change what the company is worth or what a holder owns, but it lowers the entry price for buyers who don’t use fractional shares and tends to widen retail ownership. The split takes effect for trading on July 2, after a June 25 record date. What to watch: whether the billings slowdown is a one-off or a trend next quarter. (The Globe and Mail)

⚡ Innio Jumps 23% in $2.4 Billion Nasdaq Debut

Innio, a maker of large gas engines that generate electricity on-site, surged on its Nasdaq debut yesterday under the ticker INIO. Its initial public offering, or IPO, was upsized to 90 million shares priced at $27, the top of the range, raising $2.43 billion. The stock opened about 15% above the offer price and climbed from there, closing up roughly 23% near $33 and valuing the company around $25 billion. Every share sold was “secondary,” meaning it came from existing owners, private equity firm Advent International and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, so Innio itself raised no new money from the deal. (Bloomberg)

Innio is an AI “picks and shovels” play: it doesn’t make the chips, it makes the engines that power the data centers driving the AI boom, which increasingly need electricity the grid can’t reliably supply. That demand has exploded, with Innio’s annual data-center order intake jumping from $27 million in 2023 to $2.28 billion in 2025. The strong open is a read on investor appetite for AI-infrastructure names beyond semiconductors, and it lands in a reopening IPO market: quantum firm Quantinuum listed the same day, and chipmaker Cerebras popped about 70% last month. What to watch: whether one-time equipment orders convert into the steady, long-term service revenue that justifies the price. (Reuters)

🪨 Trump Bets $700 Million on Reviving US Coal

President Trump approved roughly $700 million yesterday to revive the US coal industry, invoking the 1950 Defense Production Act, a Cold War law that lets a president steer money to industries deemed vital to national security. The breakdown: about $425 million to keep 13 existing plants running across 10 states, $75 million for a long-delayed coal export terminal in Oakland, and close to $200 million to build two new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia, the first new US coal plants since 2013. The White House says the package supports more than 14,000 jobs across coal, rail and construction. (Bloomberg)

The pitch is energy security: coal as backup power for the AI data centers straining the grid. For investors it’s a rare boost for a sector in long decline. Coal supplied about 17% of US electricity last year, down from 45% in 2010, pushed aside by cheaper natural gas and renewables. The names with the most exposure are coal producers Peabody (BTU), Core Natural Resources (CNR) and Alliance Resource Partners (ARLP), rail haulers CSX and Norfolk Southern that move the freight, and the Range Global Coal exchange-traded fund (COAL). The policy lift hadn’t shown up in those shares by the time of the announcement. What to watch: whether the funding turns into earnings, and whether more emergency orders to keep plants running follow.

🛢️ Hezbollah Rejects Truce, Keeping Oil Risk Alive

Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem rejected a US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon’s government yesterday, calling the terms “absurd, humiliating and insulting” and demanding a full Israeli withdrawal. The problem for the deal: Hezbollah, the most powerful armed group in Lebanon, was never part of the talks that produced it, so its refusal hollows out the framework. The fighting is one front in the wider US-Israel war on Iran that began in late February and has kept the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that normally carries about 20% of the world’s oil, effectively shut. Israeli strikes killed at least four people in Lebanon yesterday, and a UN peacekeeper was killed in the crossfire. (AP)

For investors this is an oil and inflation story. Iran has tied any lasting truce to a Lebanon ceasefire, so Hezbollah’s rejection dims the odds of reopening Hormuz and easing energy prices. Brent crude had fallen from a near-$120 peak earlier in the war on ceasefire optimism, and a failed Lebanon track raises the risk that oil stays high. Pricier crude for longer feeds inflation, which feeds the Federal Reserve’s rate decisions, landing right on top of this morning’s jobs report. What to watch: oil’s move at the open, and whether energy producers gain while airlines and shippers absorb higher fuel costs.

Stories You Might Have Missed

⚛️ Quantinuum Pops 13% but Closes Flat on Debut

Quantinuum, the quantum-computing firm majority-owned by Honeywell, debuted on the Nasdaq yesterday under the ticker QNT. Its upsized offering raised $1.68 billion at $60 a share, above the marketed range, with demand reportedly topping 20 times the shares available. The stock opened at $68, up 13%, touched $71.35, then closed flat, a sign early excitement met profit-taking. The enthusiasm is about the future, not the present: revenue actually fell 73% last quarter to $5.24 million and the company lost $136.5 million, with a single Japanese research institute accounting for about 60% of last year’s sales. As the most prominent quantum pure-play to list, Quantinuum is expected to set the tone for smaller peers like IonQ and Rigetti. (CNBC)

⚖️ Trump Taps Loyalist Blanche for Attorney General

President Trump said he will nominate acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former personal defense lawyer, to run the Justice Department permanently. The pick heads to a Senate where Republicans hold a thin 53-47 majority, and a few defections could sink it: Senator Thom Tillis has signaled he could vote no over Blanche’s equivocation on January 6, and Majority Leader John Thune called confirmation “hard to say.” Blanche drew fire over a proposed $1.776 billion fund to compensate people claiming unjust prosecution, which he says is dead but Trump has since muddied. The market angle is indirect but real: the attorney general shapes antitrust enforcement and merger reviews, so a drawn-out confirmation fight prolongs uncertainty over how hard Washington polices corporate dealmaking. (CNN)

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🔍Deep Dive: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Why a strong number slams the door on cuts, and why a weak one is only bullish if the wage line agrees

The big one lands today. The May jobs report hits the wire at 1:30pm UK time, 8:30am ET, and it is the cleanest read we have on whether the Federal Reserve has any room left to cut rates this year. Under two weeks out from Kevin Warsh's first meeting as Chair, this one number shapes the whole second half of 2026. Here is what to watch, why it matters, and what each outcome means for the tape.

Read more

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 📉 Broadcom Falls Despite Doubling AI: AI revenue jumped 143%, but a held long-term target sparked a 14% drop.

• 🚀 SpaceX Opens IPO to Retail: The $75 billion debut carves out 30% for ordinary buyers, but the float is tiny.

• 💼 Jobs Data Pushes Fed Hawkish: Strong hiring and sticky prices have all but killed this year’s rate-cut case.

• 👟 Lululemon Reports Near Seven-Year Low: Shares down 38% this year face a 10% swing on tonight’s guidance.

• 🛢️ Oil Near $100 Snaps Rally: Renewed Iran war fears pushed crude higher and ended the S&P 500’s win streak.

• 🛡️ CrowdStrike Splits but Still Drops: A billings miss sent shares down 13% despite a beat and four-for-one split.

• 🤖 Anthropic Files for AI IPO: The Claude maker kicked off a race of trillion-dollar listings near a $965 billion value.

• ⚡ Navitas Jumps on Nvidia Deal: A power-delivery win for Nvidia’s AI servers lifted shares 20% and extended a 346% run.

• 🚗 Car Tariffs Threaten EU Deal: A July 4 deadline could revive a 25% levy hitting $70 billion in trade.

• 🛍️ Macy’s Lifts Outlook on Luxury: A 3% comparable-sales rise and Bloomingdale’s strength prompted a raised full-year forecast.

🧠 One Big Thing

A wave of trillion-dollar listings is forming, and it changes the supply picture more than any single deal. SpaceX prices around June 11 at $1.75 trillion, Anthropic has filed near a $965 billion value, and OpenAI is expected within weeks. That much new mega-cap stock arriving at once could pull liquidity from existing leaders as investors rotate into the fresh names. The wrinkle is the Nasdaq-100 fast-entry rule, which may force index funds to buy SPCX about 15 days after listing regardless of price. Passive money becomes a forced buyer, and that signals distortion in where capital flows next.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

SpaceX is freeing just 3% to 4% of its stock to trade, against the usual 10% to 20%, a thin float that could spike big at the open and collapse just as fast.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

No major winners today.

Losers

• : ADC Therapeutics SA cratered after its LOTIS-5 trial in second-line diffuse large B-cell lymphoma met its progression-free survival endpoint but showed only modest benefit with no clear overall survival trend, prompting RBC Capital to downgrade the stock and slash its price target to $2 from $6.

• : PVH Corp. fell despite beating on first-quarter revenue and adjusted EPS, as full-year adjusted EPS guidance of roughly $11.95 at the midpoint came in below Wall Street expectations and overshadowed the quarterly beat.

• : Netskope Inc. dropped after its fiscal first-quarter results showed a narrow revenue miss against estimates and continued heavy losses, disappointing investors in the cybersecurity name following a volatile post-IPO stretch.

• : Broadcom Inc. sank even after a record quarter, because its third-quarter AI chip guidance of $16 billion fell short of the roughly $17.2 billion analysts expected and CEO Hock Tan declined to raise the full-year $100 billion AI revenue target, triggering a broad selloff that also dragged down Arm, Micron, and Coherent in sympathy.

• : 3D Systems Corporation declined after pricing a $50 million upsized public stock offering at $3.05 per share, a discount to the prior close that diluted shareholders following the stock’s triple-digit year-to-date rally.

• : CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. fell despite beating estimates, raising full-year guidance, and announcing a four-for-one stock split, as a billings shortfall gave investors a reason to take profits after a steep run higher.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $62,364 (▼ 2.64%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,736 (▼ 4.14%)
XRP: $1.14 (▼ 4.59%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,532 (▼ 0.53%)
NASDAQ 100: 30,233 (▼ 1.31%)
FTSE 100: 10,254 (▼ 0.50%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.48% (▼ 0.40%)
Oil (WTI): $95 (▼ 1.48%)
Gold: $4,476 (▲ 0.96%)
Silver: $73.48 (▲ 1.08%)

Data as of: UK (BST): 12:09 / US (EDT): 07:09 / Asia (Tokyo): 20:09

✅ 5 Things to Know

📉 Broadcom Doubles AI Revenue, Stock Drops Anyway

Broadcom delivered the kind of quarter that usually sends a stock flying and got the opposite. After yesterday’s close, the chipmaker posted fiscal second-quarter revenue of $22.19 billion, up 48% from a year earlier, with adjusted earnings of $2.44 a share, both roughly in line. The standout was artificial intelligence: AI chip revenue hit $10.8 billion, up 143%, and the company guided current-quarter AI sales to around $16 billion. Yet the stock, which had closed at a record $481.57 the day before, up about 40% this year, tumbled as much as 14% in after-hours trading. The trigger: chief executive Hock Tan reiterated, but did not raise, his target of more than $100 billion in AI chip sales for fiscal 2027. (CNBC)

Broadcom is the clearest read on custom AI chips, the made-to-order silicon that Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic use instead of buying everything from Nvidia, so its guidance moves the whole AI-spending trade. The sell-off says something simple: at about 87 times earnings, doubling AI revenue no longer clears the bar, and investors wanted the long-term target lifted. The same anxiety hit Oracle yesterday, which fell more than 5% on worries about how much cash the cloud giants must burn to chase AI, even after Alphabet lined up $80 billion for computing infrastructure, including a $10 billion investment from Berkshire Hathaway. Oracle reports next, on June 10, facing the same scrutiny. (Yahoo Finance)

🚀 SpaceX’s Record IPO Reaches Retail, Strings Attached

SpaceX has set the terms for what will be the largest stock market debut in history, and it has built in an unusual amount of room for ordinary investors. Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company plans to sell shares at a fixed $135 each, raising roughly $75 billion at a valuation of at least $1.75 trillion. That is more than double the previous record, Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion listing in 2019. The company has carved out up to 30% of the deal for retail buyers, roughly triple the usual slice. Formal marketing is underway this week, with pricing due around June 11 and trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX expected June 12. (CNBC)

Getting in at the $135 offer price is the hard part. In the US, platforms including Robinhood, Fidelity, Schwab, SoFi and E*TRADE can request shares at that price through their IPO access tools, though Schwab requires a $100,000 balance and demand is expected to swamp supply, so most applicants may get partial fills or nothing and end up buying at the open instead. UK readers are not locked out the way they normally would be for a US listing. SpaceX is running a UK retail offer through Marex, the firm that owns Winterflood, which acts as the go-between letting UK platforms and brokers pass client orders into the deal. Separately, brokers such as Trading 212 will offer SPCX from the first day of Nasdaq trading with fractional shares, though at the open market price rather than the $135 offer level. (City AM)

Day one is where the small float matters. The float is the share of the company actually free to trade, and SpaceX is releasing only about 3% to 4% of itself, against the 10% to 20% a typical listing puts out. A small float and heavy demand is a recipe for a fast move up at the open, because too much money is chasing too few shares. The same thinness works in reverse: with so little stock about, it takes only modest selling to drag the price down hard once early buyers take profits, which is why Morningstar has flagged swings of 20% to 30% in the opening days. The prospectus also sets aside up to 5% of the Class A shares for employees and the friends and family of executives, run by Morgan Stanley, with no lock-up, the rule that normally stops insiders selling right after a listing. Musk and more than 60% of pre-IPO stock stay locked for 366 days, so a select group can sell into a first-day pop while everyone else waits, and the larger block of stock only comes free a year out. (Bloomberg)

The price is the catch. At $135, SpaceX is valued at more than 100 times its annual sales, with revenue of $18.67 billion in 2025 against a net loss near $4.9 billion. Starlink, the satellite-internet arm, is the only profitable piece, earning about $1.19 billion last quarter, while the rockets and the xAI artificial-intelligence unit lose billions. Buyers get almost no say either, with Musk keeping more than 85% of the voting power. History is not flattering to deals like this: companies listing with sales above $100 million and a price more than 40 times revenue have fallen an average of 45% over the following three years. One thing to watch is the Nasdaq-100 fast-entry rule, under which index funds may be forced to buy SPCX about 15 trading days after listing, whatever the price by then. (Yahoo Finance)

💼 Strong Jobs Data Tilts the Fed Toward Hiking

The case for Federal Reserve rate cuts this year is quietly disappearing, and this week’s labor data is why. Private employers added 122,000 jobs in May according to the ADP payrolls report, beating forecasts and marking the strongest month since January 2025. The day before, the government’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) showed 7.62 million open positions in April, the most in two years and well above expectations. On top of that, the services-sector survey from the Institute for Supply Management showed companies paying the highest input prices since 2022. A firmer job market and stickier prices point the same direction: no cuts coming. (CNBC)

For investors, this resets the calendar. New Fed chair Kevin Warsh holds his first rate meeting on June 16 and 17, and markets now treat a cut as off the table, with a small but rising chance he raises rates later this year as inflation runs near 3.8%. The immediate test is tomorrow’s official jobs report for May, where economists expect around 90,000 new positions, down from April’s 115,000. A strong number could harden hike worries and pressure rate-sensitive corners of the market, from housing and utilities to high-priced tech; a weak one could revive cut hopes and calm bond yields. (CNBC)

👟 Lululemon Reports Tonight Near a Seven-Year Low

Lululemon heads into its earnings report after today’s close in rough shape, and traders are braced for a big move. The athletic-apparel maker’s stock sits near a seven-year low around $125, down about 38% this year and roughly 60% over the past 12 months, dragged down by soft North American sales, margin pressure from tariffs, and stiff competition from cheaper rivals. Wall Street expects first-quarter earnings of about $1.68 a share, down 35% from a year ago, on revenue near $2.4 billion. Options pricing implies a swing of around 10% in either direction once the results land. Most analysts have moved to the sidelines, with several cutting their price targets in recent weeks. (Yahoo Finance)

For retail investors, tonight’s report is less about the quarter just gone and more about whether the bleeding stops. The swing factor is guidance: management already warned that North American sales could fall this year, and a fresh cut, or any deeper hit from tariffs it pegs at roughly $380 million in gross costs in 2026, could harden the bear case. A steadier outlook, helped by fast growth in China, could spark a relief bounce given how beaten-down the shares are. The setup also frames a split in the consumer, with higher-end shoppers still spending while aspirational brands like Lululemon feel the squeeze. New chief executive Heidi O’Neill, a former Nike executive, takes the helm later this year. (Yahoo Finance)

🛢️ Oil Nears $100 as Iran War Halts the Rally

The Iran war is back at the centre of the market, and it broke Wall Street’s run. The S&P 500’s nine-session winning streak snapped yesterday as crude climbed back toward $100 a barrel, with Brent around $96, on fears the fragile ceasefire is failing. The escalation came in waves: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNBC that Israel and the United States were ready to resume military action against Iran if needed, an Iranian drone struck Kuwait’s main airport and killed one person, and the two sides traded fresh strikes in the Persian Gulf. Traders looked past the few calming signals, a separate ceasefire agreed between Israel and Lebanon and a comment from President Trump that Iran had agreed not to build nuclear weapons, and fixed on the oil price. (Bloomberg)

For investors, the war now runs straight through the rate story. Oil back near $100 feeds directly into inflation running near 3.8% and is the main reason the case for Federal Reserve cuts this year has all but vanished ahead of the June 16 and 17 meeting. That makes the path of crude the variable that matters, and the only thing that brings it down is a durable ceasefire. Yesterday the House of Representatives passed a war powers resolution directing an end to US involvement, 215 to 208, the first time such a measure has cleared either chamber since the conflict began in late February. It is symbolic and still needs the Senate, but it is the first real sign political pressure to end the war is building, driven by constituents paying around $5 a gallon for petrol. The next reads come fast: whether the ceasefire holds after the Kuwait strike, the Senate’s response, and tomorrow’s official jobs report. (CNN)

Stories You Might Have Missed

🛡️ CrowdStrike Beats and Splits but Still Falls

CrowdStrike delivered a strong quarter and the stock fell anyway, echoing the reaction to Broadcom the same evening. After yesterday’s close the cybersecurity firm reported revenue of $1.39 billion, up 26% from a year earlier and ahead of estimates, with adjusted earnings of $1.10 a share. It raised full-year guidance, posted record annual recurring revenue of $5.51 billion, and announced a four-for-one stock split that takes effect in early July. Shares still dropped as much as 13% in extended trading from a $747.61 close. The problem was billings, which grew 18% against 26% revenue growth and missed forecasts, and second-quarter guidance that merely matched expectations after a steep rally had left the stock priced for more. (Bloomberg)

🤖 Anthropic Files to Join the AI IPO Race

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI assistant, confidentially filed paperwork for an initial public offering (IPO) earlier this week, kicking off a race among the biggest artificial-intelligence companies to go public. The filing followed a $65 billion funding round that valued Anthropic near $965 billion, edging past rival OpenAI’s $852 billion mark, with revenue running at an annualized $47 billion in May, up from about $10 billion a year earlier. OpenAI is expected to file its own paperwork within weeks. For retail investors, it sets up a wave of trillion-dollar AI listings alongside SpaceX, and a potential new way to invest directly in the AI boom. (CNBC)

⚡ Navitas Jumps on Nvidia AI Power Deal

Navitas Semiconductor jumped about 20% yesterday after the chipmaker said it would supply power-delivery technology for Nvidia’s next-generation AI server systems, showcased at the COMPUTEX trade show in Taipei. The product helps feed electricity efficiently to power-hungry AI chips, a growing bottleneck as data centers scale up. The endorsement from the world’s biggest AI hardware company extends an extraordinary run: Navitas is up roughly 346% this year. The flipside is the price tag. The rally leaves the company worth about $7.5 billion, near 176 times this year’s expected sales, and Wall Street’s average rating sits at hold. (Yahoo Finance)

🚗 Car Tariffs Loom Over Stalled US-EU Deal

A fresh dispute is testing the trade truce between the United States and European Union as a hard deadline nears. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said both sides remain committed to last year’s agreement, under which the EU scraps industrial tariffs and opens farm markets in return for the US cutting car tariffs from 25% to 15%. The reassurance followed a US proposal to tax goods from 60 countries it accuses of tolerating forced labour, including a 10% levy on some EU products, which Brussels called baseless. Trump has given the EU until July 4 to enact its side of the deal or face the return of a 25% car tariff, which would hit roughly $70 billion in trade and squeeze BMW, Volkswagen, and Ford. The European Parliament has yet to vote. (Reuters)

🛍️ Macy’s Lifts Forecast as Bloomingdale’s Shines

Macy’s gave a rare upbeat read on the US shopper yesterday, beating estimates and raising its full-year outlook. First-quarter comparable sales rose 3%, the chain’s strongest start in four years, with luxury arm Bloomingdale’s up 10.2%, helped partly by the bankruptcy of rival Saks. Revenue came in at $4.68 billion, ahead of the $4.61 billion expected, and the company lifted its full-year earnings forecast to between $2.00 and $2.20 a share. Shares ticked higher. After a long stretch of store closures and turnaround plans, the results suggest higher-income consumers are still spending, a hopeful sign for the broader retail sector. (CNBC)

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📈 Chart of the Day:

Read more

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 📉 Markets Bet on Fed Hike: Hot jobs data flipped the bet, with December hike odds now near 51%.

• 🚀 Huang Comment Adds $70 Billion: Marvell rose 32.5% to a record after Nvidia’s chief called it the next trillion-dollar company.

• 🛍️ Victoria’s Secret Soars to Record: A blowout quarter and short squeeze drove a 47% jump to an all-time high.

• 🖥️ HPE Jumps on AI Quarter: Revenue rose 40% as AI demand spread beyond chipmakers into hardware and networking.

• ₿ Bitcoin Slides Below $66,000: ETF outflows hit a record 11-day run as crypto decoupled from soaring stocks.

• ⚖️ Short-Seller Andrew Left Convicted: A jury found the Citron founder guilty of fraud on 13 of 17 counts.

• 🪐 Virgin Galactic Crashes on Dilution: Shares fell 38% after a filing revealed plans to issue new stock.

• 🌏 Blackstone Closes Record Asia Fund: The manager raised $13.1 billion for Asia, beating its target as rivals scale up.

• 📊 XRP and Enphase Analysis Inside: Both member-requested technical breakdowns are posted in Sensei’s Chat on Discord.

🧠 One Big Thing

The day's biggest stories pull in opposite directions, and that gap is the real signal. Rates traders just flipped to pricing a Fed hike by December, which makes cash above 4% a genuine rival to stocks and pressures anything rate-sensitive. Yet the same session saw Marvell add $70 billion on one comment, Victoria's Secret jump 47% on a squeeze, and Virgin Galactic round-trip a 200% run. Those moves are sentiment and forced buying, not fundamentals, and a hike regime is exactly the backdrop that punishes them. The tension to watch is whether the next jobs report hardens the hike case while the speculative trade keeps running on fumes.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

The federal funds futures market now puts the odds of a Fed rate hike by December at 51%, flipping the year's defining bet from a cut to a hike after a run of hot data.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : Laser Photonics Corporation soared after its Laser Shield Anti-Drone system was selected by the U.S. Department of War under the MEIA Vulcan Call for Solutions, though the company clarified the pick is a technical evaluation rather than a booked procurement order.

• : Marvell Technology, Inc. extended its rally after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the chipmaker the next trillion-dollar company at Computex 2026, spotlighting its role in AI data center connectivity.

• : Intel Corporation rose as it rolled out new Xeon 6+ processors and rackscale AI systems with SambaNova and Foxconn at Computex 2026, helping shares rebound alongside a broader AI chip rally.

Losers

• : NRX Pharmaceuticals, Inc. dropped after announcing an underwritten public offering of common stock, a dilutive raise that pressured the shares.

• : Yext, Inc. fell after first-quarter revenue of $107.9 million missed estimates and slipped from a year earlier, overshadowing an earnings beat.

• : Gorilla Technology Group Inc. moved sharply lower in pre-market with no specific catalyst identified, pulling back after a steep multi-month run.

• : Cognyte Software Ltd. slid after reporting first-quarter results that showed double-digit revenue growth but only a reiterated full-year outlook, prompting a sell-the-news reaction.

• : Blackstone Inc. moved sharply lower in pre-market with no specific catalyst identified.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $66,985 (▲ 0.47%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,876 (▲ 0.98%)
XRP: $1.23 (▲ 1.98%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,617 (▼ 0.08%)
NASDAQ 100: 30,771 (▲ 0.19%)
FTSE 100: 10,344 (▼ 0.37%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.48% (▲ 0.63%)
Oil (WTI): $96 (▲ 2.50%)
Gold: $4,462 (▼ 0.56%)
Silver: $74.48 (▼ 0.78%)

Data as of: UK (BST) 12:57 / US (EDT): 07:57 / Asia (Tokyo): 20:57

✅ 5 Things to Know

📉 Traders Now Price a Fed Hike, Not a Cut

The bet that defined 2026, that the Federal Reserve’s next move would be a rate cut, has flipped. After a run of hot data, traders in the federal funds futures market now put the odds of a rate hike by December at about 51%, with a move higher more likely than not by early 2027, according to CME Group’s FedWatch tool. The trigger was yesterday’s job-openings report, which showed US openings jumped by 731,000 in April to 7.62 million, the most in two years. That came on top of a manufacturing gauge at a four-year high and eurozone inflation re-accelerating to 3.2%, its fastest since 2023. Behind it all sits the oil shock from the Iran war, with Brent crude still near $96 a barrel. (Yahoo Finance)

This is the single biggest shift in the market backdrop right now, because the rally that carried stocks to records ran on the assumption that cheaper money was coming. A hike regime is the opposite. It pressures rate-sensitive stocks, supports the dollar, and makes cash paying above 4% a real competitor to equities again. The near-term Fed meeting on June 17 is still a near-certain hold; the live debate is about December and into 2027. The next swing factor lands Friday with the May jobs report, where economists expect about 85,000 jobs added and unemployment holding at 4.3%. A hot number hardens the hike case; a soft one buys the rally time. The European Central Bank decides on June 11, and markets see it delivering the first hike of this turn. (CNBC)

🚀 One Sentence From Huang Adds $70 Billion to Marvell

Marvell Technology had its biggest day on record yesterday, climbing 32.5% to about $291, after Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang called it “the next trillion-dollar company” during a keynote at the Computex trade show in Taipei. The remark added roughly $70 billion in market value in a single session to a company worth about $192 billion the day before. Huang was praising Marvell’s role in connectivity, the networking and interconnect chips that move data between the thousands of processors packed into an AI data center, an unglamorous layer of the build-out that sits beneath the headline graphics chips. Nvidia took a $2 billion stake in Marvell earlier this year. (CNBC)

For retail investors the lesson is in how the move happened. Tens of billions in value swung on one person’s words, not on new numbers, and CNBC’s Jim Cramer called the rally concerning precisely because it was not based on fundamentals. That is the shape of the AI trade right now: narrow, concentrated in a handful of names, and quick to move on sentiment. The comment also pushed money toward the interconnect and custom-silicon makers, lifting peers like Lam Research and Qualcomm. The next read on whether the spending story still has fundamental support comes after today’s close, when Broadcom reports earnings, with analysts looking for AI chip revenue up around 140% from a year earlier. (CNBC)

🛍️ Victoria’s Secret Soars 47% to a Record

Victoria’s Secret had the best day in its history yesterday, closing up about 47% at a record high after a quarter that beat across the board and a raised full-year forecast. First-quarter net sales rose 15% to $1.56 billion, comparable sales (a measure that strips out store openings and closings to show true underlying demand) grew 13%, and adjusted earnings of $0.60 a share nearly doubled the $0.32 analysts expected. The company lifted its full-year sales outlook to between $7.03 billion and $7.13 billion and its adjusted operating profit target to $550 million to $580 million, well above the prior $430 million to $460 million. It also switched its ticker to VSXY from VSCO. (CNBC)

The turnaround under chief executive Hillary Super looks real: growth came with fewer discounts, more customers paying full price, and gains among 18-to-24-year-olds, with management saying it is still in “early innings.” But the scale of yesterday’s jump owes a lot to mechanics. About 19% of the stock’s tradable shares were sold short going into the report, so when the numbers landed, those bearish bettors had to buy shares back to cap their losses, a short squeeze that piles buying on buying and tends to overshoot. The stock has now nearly tripled in a year. The quarter also showed a split consumer, with spending strongest among shoppers earning under $50,000 and over $200,000, and the middle squeezed.

🖥️ HPE Jumps 19% on a Blowout AI Quarter

Hewlett Packard Enterprise jumped about 19% yesterday after quarterly results that ran well past expectations and a sharp guidance raise. Revenue rose 40% from a year earlier to roughly $10.7 billion, helped by networking sales that more than doubled after its acquisition of Juniper Networks, and adjusted earnings of $0.79 a share beat the $0.53 analysts expected. New artificial-intelligence systems orders ran at $1.8 billion to $2.1 billion, and the company lifted its full-year earnings forecast to between $3.35 and $3.45 a share, up from $2.30 to $2.50. It also sold its remaining stake in China’s H3C for about $1.36 billion and added the activist investor Elliott Management to its board. (Yahoo Finance)

This matters because it widens the AI trade. For most of the past two years that spending showed up cleanly only in chipmakers like Nvidia. Now it is landing in the companies that build and wire the data centers, with HPE following a similar blowout from Dell a week earlier. For retail investors the read is that enterprise AI demand is turning into real revenue across the hardware chain, from servers to networking gear, not just order backlogs. The risk sits in that same chain: management flagged rising memory-chip costs as a headwind into 2027, the component squeeze that has been pushing up prices across electronics. Elliott’s arrival on the board also points to pressure for tighter spending discipline as the Juniper deal beds in.

₿ Bitcoin Breaks $68,000 as ETF Money Flees

Bitcoin dropped below $68,000 yesterday and kept sliding overnight to under $66,000, its lowest since April and more than 45% below its October record near $126,000. The fall wiped out more than $1.2 billion in leveraged crypto bets in a day as forced selling fed on itself. Two things drove it. Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, the funds that let ordinary investors hold Bitcoin through a normal brokerage account, have now posted 11 straight days of net withdrawals, a record run totaling about $3.4 billion, with BlackRock’s fund alone losing $440 million in a single day. And Strategy, the software company that is the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, disclosed its first sale of the asset in over three years, a small amount that carried an outsized signal. (Yahoo Finance)

What makes this notable is the break from stocks. The same week Bitcoin slid, US equity indexes closed at records on the AI trade, snapping the old habit of crypto and tech moving in step. The driver now is fund flows: the ETFs that pushed Bitcoin up by soaking up demand are pulling it down as investors cash out. For retail investors the read is that crypto is trading on its own logic again, and that the corporate treasury holders who bought heavily, led by Strategy, are a pressure point if more of them start selling. Traders are watching the $60,000 area as the next major support level.

Stories You Might Have Missed

⚖️ Short-Seller Andrew Left Convicted of Fraud

A Los Angeles federal jury convicted Andrew Left, founder of the activist short-selling firm Citron Research, of securities fraud earlier this week, finding him guilty on 13 of 17 counts after a three-week trial. Prosecutors said Left, 55, made at least $20 million by using his platform and television appearances on networks like CNBC and Fox Business to move stocks, including Nvidia and Tesla, while quietly trading the other way and exiting positions he publicly claimed to still hold. He faces up to 25 years on the lead count, with sentencing set for August 31, and says he will appeal. The case is the most significant criminal test yet of where market commentary ends and manipulation begins, and it lands squarely on the influencer and short-seller calls that retail investors often trade around. (CNBC)

🪐 Virgin Galactic Crashes 38% as Dilution Hits

Virgin Galactic fell about 38% yesterday, its worst day on record, ending a seven-session run that had more than tripled the stock. The space-tourism company had rocketed from around $3 to above $7 on momentum buying, a short squeeze, and excitement spilling over from the coming SpaceX listing. The reversal came from a regulatory filing showing the company plans to redeem up to $30.5 million of debt by issuing new shares, which dilutes existing holders. For a business that burns cash and reported just $227,000 in quarterly revenue against about $125 million on hand, the move was a reminder that a thin, heavily-shorted stock can give back a 200% gain in a single session. It is a cleaner cautionary tale on momentum and dilution than most textbooks manage. (Bloomberg)

🌏 Blackstone Raises a Record $13 Billion for Asia

Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative-asset manager, closed its biggest-ever Asia private-equity fund at $13.1 billion yesterday, beating its $10 billion target and more than doubling its previous Asia fund. The timing stands out, because industry-wide fundraising for the region fell last year to its lowest in more than a decade, squeezed by higher interest rates and slower payouts back to investors. Blackstone cleared its goal anyway and is aiming the money at India, Japan and Australia. It joins a wave of Asia mega-funds, with EQT recently closing $15.6 billion and KKR and Bain Capital each raising toward $10 billion to $15 billion. For retail investors it is a read on Blackstone’s (NYSE: BX) fee-earning growth and a sign that big institutions are rotating money toward Asia’s growth markets even with the Iran war rattling sentiment. (CNBC)

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📈 Chart of the Day:

Today’s chart section is slightly different.

Last night, I posted two technical analysis videos inside Discord covering XRP and Enphase Energy. These were both member-requested breakdowns, and they walk through the key levels, trend structure, support zones, resistance areas, and what I’m watching next.

As a premium newsletter member, you get free access to my sections of the Martyn Lucas Investor Discord. That means you would have been able to see both chart analyses as they were posted yesterday.

Read more

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

Read more

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🏠 Berkshire Buys a Homebuilder: Abel spends $8.5 billion on Taylor Morrison, his first major deal at the helm.

• 🛑 Washington Tightens Nvidia China Sales: Commerce closes the loophole that let advanced AI chips reach Chinese firms operating abroad.

• 🪖 Israel Pushes Deeper Into Lebanon: Troops cross the Litani and seize Beaufort Castle, threatening the fragile oil-calming truce.

• 🛢️ Europe Eyes Frozen Russian Oil Cap: Brussels may lock the price cap near $44 and target the crypto rails Russia uses.

• 📈 Records Set, Payrolls Loom: Stocks open June at highs on a narrow AI rally, with this week’s payrolls the next test.

• 🤖 Google Chips Crowd Nvidia: Rubin slips behind schedule as Google’s in-house training and inference chips gain ground.

• 🇫🇷 SoftBank’s €75 Billion French Bet: Son commits up to 75 billion euros to build French AI data centers despite heavy debt.

• 🏦 More UBS Jobs Vanish: Another few hundred roles go as integrating Credit Suisse heads into harder Swiss cuts ahead.

• 🚀 What Is Virgin Galactic Worth?: Three valuation methods on the tripled SPCE keep landing near $10 a share.

🧠 One Big Thing

Three stories today point at the same crack forming under Nvidia. Washington is tightening China access again, Google's in-house chips are eating into demand, and Rubin is slipping behind on memory supply. Yet the indexes sit at records on an AI trade still led by that one stock. The quieter read is that value is migrating down the stack: Micron's memory and Arm's architecture capture upside even when Nvidia's narrative wobbles. If leadership rotates toward that picks-and-shovels layer, the AI trade can survive a Nvidia stumble. Watch whether memory and Arm hold up the days Nvidia slips.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : Taylor Morrison Home Corp. soared after Berkshire Hathaway agreed to acquire the homebuilder for $72.50 per share in an all-cash deal worth about $8.5 billion including debt, a 24% premium to Friday’s close.

• : Hyperliquid Strategies Inc. rallied on its projected addition to the Russell 2000 and 3000 indexes effective June 26, alongside a widely circulated analyst thesis calling for a GameStop-style gamma squeeze in the low-float crypto-treasury stock.

• : Arm Holdings plc jumped after Nvidia used its GTC Taipei keynote to unveil the N1X, its first Arm-based laptop processor, putting Arm’s architecture at the center of Nvidia’s push into Windows AI PCs.

• : Virgin Galactic Holdings extended its rally on momentum across space stocks ahead of the expected SpaceX IPO, following its resumption of glide-flight testing and reaffirmed Q4 2026 commercial launch timeline.

• : International Business Machines continued its surge after securing a $1 billion federal grant to build a domestic quantum-chip foundry and laying out a $10 billion five-year quantum investment plan plus its Project Lightwell open-source security initiative.

• : Micron Technology climbed as analysts raised memory price targets across the board on surging DRAM and NAND pricing, with Nvidia’s newly detailed Vera Rubin platform carrying triple the memory content of its predecessor.

Losers

• : Oculis Holding AG collapsed after its two Phase 3 DIAMOND trials of OCS-01 eye drops for diabetic macular edema missed their primary vision-improvement endpoint, prompting the company to drop plans for a US filing in that indication.

• : QUALCOMM Incorporated dropped after unveiling its new Dragonfly AI data-center brand at Computex, as investor attention shifted to Nvidia’s competing N1X PC chip and Qualcomm deferred concrete data-center details to its June 24 investor day.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $72,517 (▼ 1.44%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,980 (▼ 1.23%)
XRP: $1.30 (▼ 2.28%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: $7,615 (▲ 0.25%)
NASDAQ 100: $30,488 (▲ 0.27%)
FTSE 100: £10,396 (▲ 0.27%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.47% (▲ 0.63%)
Oil (WTI): $91 (▲ 3.33%)
Gold: $4,504 (▼ 0.76%)
Silver: $75.82 (▲ 0.70%)

Data as of: UK (GMT/BST) 11:30 BST / US (EDT): 06:30 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 19:30

✅ 5 Things to Know

🏠 Buffett’s Heir Spends $8.5 Billion on a Homebuilder

Berkshire Hathaway agreed yesterday to buy Taylor Morrison Home Corporation, one of the largest US homebuilders, for $72.50 a share in cash. The deal values Taylor Morrison at about $6.8 billion in equity and $8.5 billion including debt, a 24% premium to Friday’s close of $58.50. The builder runs more than 350 communities across 21 markets and 12 states, closed roughly 13,000 homes last year, and will go private while keeping Chairman and Chief Executive Sheryl Palmer and her team. It is the first major purchase by Greg Abel since he took over from Warren Buffett at the start of the year. (PR Newswire)

The signal matters more than the size. Investors have waited months to see how Abel would deploy Berkshire’s record cash pile, and an $8.5 billion check into housing, at a moment of high mortgage rates and stretched affordability, says a famously cautious buyer thinks the sector is cheaper than it looks. Abel framed it as building a single homebuilding platform alongside Berkshire’s existing Clayton Homes and building-products units. Taylor Morrison stock should open today near the $72.50 offer. Watch whether the deal lifts rival builders D.R. Horton, Lennar, PulteGroup and Toll Brothers on takeover speculation, since one credible buyer stepping in often changes how the market values the rest.

🛑 Washington Moves to Close Nvidia’s China Chip Loophole

The US Commerce Department posted guidance yesterday closing a loophole that for nearly a year let companies ship the most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips, including Nvidia’s Blackwell and Rubin processors and AMD’s MI350x, to Chinese-headquartered firms operating outside China through subsidiaries in places like Malaysia. Those sales now need an export license again, which effectively makes them illegal without one. One industry source estimated the leakage ran into the hundreds of thousands of chips. The guidance stops short of forcing data centers to rip out or stop servicing chips they already bought, which limits its immediate bite. (Yahoo)

Nvidia is the most valuable company on the market and the bellwether for the entire AI trade, so any change to its China access ripples through chipmakers and tech indexes that retail investors hold heavily. The stock had already slipped about 10% over the prior two weeks from its mid-May record near $236. The real risk is the pattern: Washington scrapped the old export rule in 2025, reopened chip sales to approved Chinese buyers under a revenue-sharing deal in December, and is now tightening again. That back-and-forth keeps an uncertainty discount hanging over the whole sector. Watch Nvidia, AMD and suppliers TSMC and Broadcom at today’s open.

🪖 Israel’s Deeper Lebanon Push Keeps Oil on Edge

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered troops to push deeper into southern Lebanon yesterday, and the military seized the 900-year-old Beaufort Castle, the first time Israel has held the site since it withdrew in 2000. The advance crosses the Litani River, the deepest incursion in 26 years, despite a ceasefire agreed in April and extended last month. Defence Minister Israel Katz said soldiers will stay as part of a security zone. France called an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting for today. More than 3,370 people have been killed in Lebanon and over 1.2 million displaced since the fighting began in March. (Yahoo)

For markets the story is oil. The Lebanon front is part of the wider Iran war that shut much of the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carried about a fifth of the world’s oil. Brent crude fell almost 19% in May, its worst month since the pandemic, to about $92, on hopes that a US-Iran ceasefire would reopen the strait. Israel pushing deeper while Washington negotiates that truce is the kind of move that could unravel it. The next flashpoints are today’s Security Council meeting and whether Hezbollah answers the loss of Beaufort with a heavier barrage. (CNBC)

🛢️ Europe Weighs Freezing Its Cap on Russian Oil

The European Union is considering freezing its price cap on Russian oil instead of letting it rise automatically, according to Bloomberg, as the Iran war keeps global crude elevated. The cap, a sanction that bars Western firms from insuring or shipping Russian oil sold above a set price, currently sits at $44.10 a barrel and resets every six months to stay 15% below the market rate for Russia’s main export grade. A review due in July would otherwise lift it to at least $65. Freezing it would lock in tighter pressure on Moscow. The measure is part of a 21st sanctions package the bloc aims to propose this month. (Yahoo Finance)

A lower frozen cap widens the discount on Russian oil, which mostly benefits the big buyers, China and India, who take the bulk of it. For investors the read-through runs through energy names, tanker and marine-insurance firms, and Indian refiners like Reliance that profit from cheap Russian barrels. The package also targets crypto, after reports that Russian firms use Bitcoin and the dollar-pegged token Tether to settle oil trades and dodge sanctions. This is still a deliberation, not law, and a full ban on shipping services looks unlikely this round given opposition from shipping-heavy states like Greece. Watch for the formal proposal in the coming days.

📈 Stocks Start June at Records, Jobs Test Looms

US stocks closed May at record highs and futures pushed higher again today, with the rally still riding almost entirely on the artificial intelligence (AI) trade. The momentum carried into Asia overnight, where Japan’s Nikkei sits at an all-time high after climbing close to 5% last week, South Korea’s Kospi jumped 8% over the same stretch, and Taiwan’s main index rose almost 6%. The Nasdaq Composite is now up more than 8% since the end of April. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang opens the Computex tech show in Taiwan today, the next live read on whether AI demand is still accelerating. (Yahoo Finance)

The question for retail investors is whether a market this narrow can keep climbing. The next test comes Friday, when the May employment report lands and economists expect the unemployment rate to hold around 4.3%. A soft number could revive bets on Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts; a hot one could push them further out. Two risks sit underneath. June is historically the weakest month for stocks in a midterm election year, and any actual US-Iran ceasefire announcement could trigger a sell-the-news drop after months of the market pricing one in. Oil rose today as those talks stalled. (CNBC)

Stories You Might Have Missed

🤖 Google’s Chips Start Crowding Nvidia

Nvidia’s grip on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is loosening at the edges. Its next-generation Rubin platform is reportedly running about a quarter behind schedule on memory-supply problems, and forecaster TrendForce has cut Rubin’s expected share of Nvidia’s high-end shipments this year from 29% to 22%. Filling the gap is Google, whose newest in-house chips now split into one processor built for training AI models and another for running them, the cheaper, higher-volume work where custom silicon competes hardest. Nvidia still dominates the market, but as big customers like Google build their own chips to cut costs, the open question for investors is how much of that booming demand it holds onto. (TechCrunch)

🇫🇷 SoftBank Bets Up to €75 Billion on French AI

SoftBank plans to invest up to 75 billion euros, about $87 billion, to build as much as 5 gigawatts of artificial intelligence data center capacity in France, its largest AI infrastructure push in Europe. The first phase commits 45 billion euros to deliver 3.1 gigawatts in the country’s north by 2031, with state nuclear utility EDF supplying low-carbon power and Schneider Electric building components at Dunkirk. The plan, tied to personal diplomacy between French President Emmanuel Macron and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, extends Son’s global buildout alongside the $500 billion Stargate program in the US. The open question is financing: SoftBank already carries more than $130 billion in debt and has stacked up commitments faster than it has funded them. (Fortune)

🏦 UBS Cuts Hundreds More After the Credit Suisse Deal

UBS cut several hundred jobs across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the latest reductions tied to its 2023 rescue of Credit Suisse. The cuts mainly hit back-office and support roles, though some client-facing bankers were included, with some staff offered other internal positions. UBS’s headcount has fallen by roughly 17,500 since the takeover, to about 101,600 at the end of March, and the bank has flagged around 3,000 more cuts in Switzerland, mostly in the second half of this year and into 2027. The next phase shifts from removing duplicate roles to shutting down Credit Suisse’s old technology systems, which Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti has warned will trigger further reductions. Each round trims costs and supports earnings, but the hardest, most politically sensitive cuts in Switzerland are still ahead. (Bloomberg)

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What Is Virgin Galactic Actually Worth?

SPCE has roughly tripled off its lows in a matter of weeks. We ran three different ways of valuing it, and they keep landing in the same place.

We have been covering Virgin Galactic for a long time, and our stance has tracked the price. When the stock was high and the story was running on hype, we were warning about it. When it fell to around $2.40 earlier this year, near its 52-week low, the maths started to look interesting, so we began accumulating and shared the chart setups. Now it is back near $7 and popular again, which makes this a good moment to ask the question properly: what is this company actually worth?

This is a piece about how to think about that number, not a tip. Let me show you the workings.

The one-line version of the business

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This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

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This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🤖 Marvell raises, lifts AI trade: Record quarter and a bigger guide point to chip capex accelerating into 2027.

• 🛢️ Brent swings on Iran strikes: A second round of US strikes lifts crude even as a ceasefire framework circulates.

• ✈️ Boeing wins 47-jet clearance: Regulators sign off on a higher MAX rate, the cleanest production upgrade in two years.

• 💰 Dimon flags trading boom, exuberance: JPMorgan eyes its second-best trading quarter, then warns the backdrop echoes past tops.

• 🍽️ One in ten short on food: New York Fed research shows food insecurity has doubled, signalling the lower consumer is cracking.

• 🧑‍💻 OpenAI commits $250M to workers: The non-profit’s first big spend targets retraining and wage support for displaced workers.

• ⛽ Gas tax holiday gains traction: Two competing bills aim to suspend the federal levy as pump prices hit four-year highs.

• 📊 PCE print lands today: The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge could front-run hike risk if core runs hot.

• 📈 Bitcoin drifts toward flag support: Trading near 73,000 in a downtrend, a break below 70,000 could open 60,000.

🧠 One Big Thing

The market is leaning on one engine. The index is at records, but it is standing on a single leg. Marvell's raise and the hyperscalers' roughly $725 billion capex guide are doing the work rate cuts normally would, holding stocks up while the rest of the picture weakens. The New York Fed's food data, the 44.8 sentiment print and Dimon's exuberance warning all point the other way. So the rally rests on AI spending while the broad consumer cracks underneath. Broadcom on June 3 is the next test, and a soft guide could knock the one leg out from under a tiring tape.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

Some 10% of US households said they lacked enough food in February, up from 4% in mid-2020, a doubling that signals the lower-income consumer is cracking even with unemployment near record lows.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : Snowflake Inc. soared after reporting fiscal Q1 product revenue of $1.33 billion, up 34% and its strongest sequential dollar growth ever, and raising full-year product revenue guidance to roughly $5.84 billion, lifting expected growth from 27% to 31%. The report also featured surging AI demand, the Natoma acquisition, and an expanded AWS deal.

• : Unusual Machines, Inc. jumped after its partner Powerus was selected for Phase II of the Pentagon’s $1 billion Drone Dominance Program, with the rally amplified by reports that the Trump administration is in talks to fund domestic drone makers through a mix of debt and equity.

• : Corsair Gaming, Inc. extended a multi-day rally on enthusiasm for its new CORSAIR PRO line of AI workstations and servers built on Nvidia Grace Blackwell technology, building on a strong Q1 earnings beat and elevated short interest that has added fuel to the move.

• : Phreesia, Inc. climbed after fiscal Q1 revenue rose 13% to $130.9 million and management reaffirmed full-year revenue guidance of $510 million to $520 million, pointing to momentum in its AccessOne business and new provider marketing offerings.

• : Red Cat Holdings, Inc. rose after H.C. Wainwright initiated coverage with a Buy rating and a $20 price target, with sentiment further boosted by a contract to supply 173 Black Widow drones to Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force and its acquisition of wireless-power firm Quaze Technologies.

• : nCino, Inc. gained after fiscal Q1 revenue of $159.4 million beat estimates and grew 11%, with adjusted operating margin expanding sharply, prompting the company to lift its full-year revenue outlook.

• : Dollar Tree, Inc. rallied after reporting Q1 results with net sales up 7.2%, comparable store sales up 3.5%, and adjusted EPS up 38% to $1.74, well ahead of expectations, while raising its full-year adjusted EPS outlook to $6.70 to $7.10.

• : Nebius Group N.V. advanced after Situational Awareness LP disclosed a 5.6% stake of more than 12.4 million shares, a passive position with no activist intentions that the market read as a vote of confidence in the AI infrastructure firm.

• : ServiceNow, Inc. moved higher with no specific overnight catalyst identified, appearing to ride a software sector rally sparked by Snowflake’s blowout results alongside continued optimism from its Knowledge 2026 AI announcements and recently raised guidance.

Losers

: Everpure, Inc., the data storage company formerly known as Pure Storage, fell despite beating on fiscal Q1 revenue and earnings and raising full-year guidance, a sell the news reaction after shares had run up sharply into the report and as the next-quarter outlook implied a steep sequential revenue decline.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $73,456 (▼ -1.20%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,992 (▼ -1.52%)
XRP: $1.29 (▼ -1.12%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: $7,526 (▼ -0.19%)
NASDAQ 100: $29,921 (▼ -0.42%)
FTSE 100: £10,394 (▼ -0.92%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.50% (▲ 0.38%)
Oil (WTI): $91 (▲ 1.60%)
Gold: $4,386 (▼ -1.57%)
Silver: $72.95 (▼ -2.26%)

Data as of: UK (BST) 11:47 BST / US (EDT): 06:47 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 19:47

✅ 5 Things to Know

🤖 Marvell Beats and Raises, AI Trade Catches a Bid

Marvell Technology reported record fiscal first-quarter results after the close yesterday and lifted its full-year outlook for both fiscal 2027 and 2028, giving the AI infrastructure trade fresh ammunition for today’s open. Revenue came in at $2.418 billion, up 28% year on year and just ahead of the $2.40 billion analysts expected. Adjusted earnings per share landed at $0.80 against $0.75 estimated. The bigger move was the guide: Marvell sees second-quarter revenue around $2.70 billion, well above the $2.60 billion consensus and pointing to 35% year-on-year growth. The stock gained roughly 5% to 7% in extended trading after a 145% run year to date. (Bloomberg)

Marvell sits at the centre of the picks-and-shovels trade powering this year’s chip rally. It sells the custom silicon and optical interconnects that move data between processors inside hyperscaler data centres, and CEO Matt Murphy pointed to “exceptional AI-related bookings” as the reason for the raise. Data centre revenue hit a record $1.83 billion last quarter, three-quarters of the business, and the company is shipping 800G and 1.6 terabit optical modules into Nvidia, Amazon and reported Google projects. The next read on the AI capex cycle is Broadcom on June 3, the largest direct comparable and the bigger market-mover. (Yahoo Finance)

🛢️ US Strikes Iran Again Even as a Deal Nears

The United States struck targets in southern Iran again overnight, the second round of strikes this week, even as President Trump insists a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is close. US Central Command said the strikes hit a military site and that it shot down Iranian drones it said threatened American forces and shipping near the strait, the chokepoint that carried about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil before the war. Crude swung on the news. Brent, the global benchmark, rose about 2% to around $96 a barrel today, clawing back part of a steep drop earlier in the week when Trump said talks were “proceeding nicely.” (CNBC)

The whipsaw captures the bind traders are in: a framework is on the table, but the fighting has not stopped. The outline under discussion runs to a 60-day ceasefire that would reopen Hormuz with no tolls, see Iran clear the mines it laid, and lift the US blockade in stages while nuclear talks continue. Iranian state media floated a version of it this week, and the White House dismissed that account as a fabrication. The hard items left unresolved are Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile and billions in frozen Iranian assets. Brent is down roughly 13% over the past month on deal hopes but still sits far above pre-war levels, and Trump’s cabinet met at Camp David to weigh next steps. (Axios)

✈️ Boeing Cleared to Build 47 MAX Jets a Month

Boeing has the green light from the Federal Aviation Administration to lift 737 MAX production from 42 jets a month to 47, the strongest sign yet that the company’s two-year quality overhaul is translating into output. CEO Kelly Ortberg told the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference yesterday that Boeing has “passed the capstone review” for the higher rate and is “off and rolling” on the new pace, with the line expected to stabilise over the next couple of months. He reiterated a target of 52 jets a month early next year through a fourth assembly line in Everett, Washington, and an aspirational rate of 63 longer term. Boeing shares climbed about 3.6% intraday on the comments. (CNBC)

The certification of the smaller MAX 7 and longer MAX 10 is the other shoe still to drop, and both look on track for this year. More than 80% of certification flight testing is complete, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford has said publicly he sees no obstacle to approval by year-end, and Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan expects the MAX 7 cleared by August. Together those two models cover more than 1,700 aircraft on order, with Southwest holding around 90% of the MAX 7 book. Each extra jet a month is roughly $50 to $60 million of revenue, and a higher rate flows directly into Spirit AeroSystems, RTX, GE Aerospace and Howmet. (Yahoo Finance)

💰 Dimon Sees Trading Up 11%, Then Warns of “Exuberance”

The two most-watched US bank CEOs took the stage at Bernstein’s conference yesterday and delivered the same message: trading desks are having an extraordinary quarter. Jamie Dimon said JPMorgan’s markets revenue could rise about 11% in the second quarter, which would make it the second-best trading quarter in the bank’s history. An hour later, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said BofA expects sales and trading up roughly 15% year on year with investment banking fees up “strong.” Dimon also raised JPMorgan’s 2026 expense guidance by about $1 billion to roughly $106 billion, citing higher variable compensation tied to the trading boom. JPMorgan shares slipped nearly 3% intraday on the expense raise before paring losses. (Yahoo Finance)

The volatility driving these numbers is the same set of stories making everyone else nervous: the Iran war, Hormuz, tariff shifts and AI infrastructure financing. Corporate clients are hedging more, banks earn fees on the volume, and the result is a near-record quarter. Dimon was blunt about what comes next: “There’s a lot of exuberance out there, so yeah, right now, it’s good, but it was in ‘72, ‘86, 2000, 2007. That doesn’t give me comfort.” The read-through is positive for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citi, all of which run capital-markets businesses tied to the same volume surge. (Bloomberg)

🍽️ One in Ten Americans Now Short on Food

The New York Federal Reserve published research yesterday showing food insecurity among US households has more than doubled since the start of the pandemic. Drawing on its Survey of Consumer Expectations, the bank found that 10% of households said they did not have enough food in February 2026, up from 4% in June 2020. Among non-white households the figure climbed to 19.1% from 4.5%. The share on SNAP food stamps rose to 17.9% from 10.6%, and 36.8% of households reported dipping into savings to cover everyday expenses, against 21.8% in 2020. Fed researchers called the increase “remarkable” and concentrated in lower-income and lower-educated households with young children. (CNBC)

The Fed tied the jump explicitly to a “K-shaped” economy, where wealthier households are gaining from stock and house prices while lower-income ones are running down savings and turning to food aid. The data was collected before US strikes on Iran pushed retail gasoline to $4.45 a gallon, which means the actual squeeze is likely worse than the survey shows. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index hit 44.8 last week, the lowest reading since the survey began in 1952. For retail investors, the trade-down runs through staples and dollar-store names like Walmart, Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Kroger, with the pain felt by discretionary mid-tier (Target, Starbucks) and subprime credit (Affirm, Bread Financial). (CNN)

Stories You Might Have Missed

🧑‍💻 OpenAI Pledges $250M for Workers AI Displaces

The OpenAI Foundation, the non-profit that controls OpenAI, said yesterday it will commit $250 million in grants, partnerships and direct programs to help workers and economies disrupted by artificial intelligence. The pledge is the first specific spend from the foundation since its restructuring closed last October and is structured around three priorities: studying how AI is reshaping the economy, supporting workers through near-term disruption (including wage-loss insurance and retraining), and exploring longer-term ideas, including shifting taxation from labour toward capital and sovereign-wealth-fund-style distribution models. The foundation owns 26% of OpenAI Group, valued at around $130 billion, implying an OpenAI valuation near $500 billion. The political question now is whether other AI labs match the commitment or push back on the tax direction OpenAI is floating, particularly as Block and Standard Chartered cite AI efficiency for recent layoffs. (Yahoo Finance)

⛽ Gas Tax Holiday Push Picks Up in Washington

With US retail gasoline at a four-year high of $4.45 a gallon, two competing bills to suspend the federal gas tax are now live in Congress: Senator Josh Hawley’s 90-day Republican version with a Highway Trust Fund bailout, and the Gas Prices Relief Act from Senators Mark Kelly and Richard Blumenthal that runs the holiday until October 1. President Trump said yesterday he supports a suspension but wants states to move first. The economics are settled, even if the politics are not. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents a gallon, unchanged since 1993; the best peer-reviewed work puts the consumer pass-through at 79%, meaning roughly a fifth of any cut goes to refiners. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates pump savings of 10 to 16 cents a gallon, or about $8.90 a month for the average driver, against a fiscal cost of around $21 billion for a six-month holiday. Refiners (Valero, Marathon Petroleum, Phillips 66) tend to capture a portion of the pass-through; aggregates names (Vulcan, Martin Marietta) face a small headwind if Trust Fund capacity erodes. (Bloomberg)

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📊 PCE Day: The Cheat Sheet

At 1:30pm UK the Bureau of Economic Analysis drops April PCE, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, at the same minute as the second estimate of Q1 GDP and a batch of activity data. Fifteen US lines hit the wire together, so the first move can be noisy. The market walks in from record highs and an eight-week win streak, the longest since December 2023, with the VIX near 16. PCE sets the tone, so we start there, then work through the rest of the slate.

The main event: PCE

PCE is the number the Fed actually targets, and three things make this one heavier than a routine data day. First, the target is 2% headline PCE over the long run, and a 2% trend is only about 0.17% a month. A 0.3% core reading compounds to roughly 3.7% annualised, so the 0.3% consensus is not cool, it is just not worse than feared. Second, the committee has turned hawkish: the Fed held at 3.50 to 3.75% in April on an 11 to 1 vote, with four total dissents, the most since 1992 [CNBC], and the minutes showed many members saying hikes could become appropriate if inflation stayed hot. Third, Kevin Warsh took over as Chair in May, and early messaging from Jefferson and Cook has leaned toward inflation risk, not rescue. CME’s FedWatch now puts June at around 94% hold, and a Reuters poll found most economists no longer expect a cut this year, with rate futures at one point pricing a hike rather than a cut as the next move [Reuters]. So a hot print does not just delay cuts, it pulls hike risk forward.

Core strips out food and energy and is the cleaner trend read. At 0.2% month-on-month or below the market can call it progress, 0.3% is survivable, 0.4% or higher becomes a policy problem.

Headline includes energy, and this cycle the inflation scare is an energy story, so it carries more weight than usual. Headline and core are best read together, which is what the matrix table below shows.

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This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

Read more

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🛢️ Iran threats jolt oil higher: Tehran vows retaliation after fresh US strikes near Hormuz; Brent rebounds 3.4% to $99.

• 🤖 Huawei plots 2031 chip workaround: New “Tau Scaling Law” design method targets 1.4-nanometer density without advanced lithography access.

• 🛍️ Mexico exports hit record $72B: April shipments jump 32.6% despite Washington’s sixfold tariff hike, strengthening Sheinbaum’s hand into USMCA review.

• 🤝 Trump links Iran deal to Abraham Accords: Saudi Arabia repeats Palestinian-state condition; Pakistan rejects bundling outright.

• 🛒 US consumer mood hits record low: Michigan sentiment slides to 44.8; long-run inflation expectations climb to 3.9%.

• 🇪🇺 EU readies major Google fine: Digital Markets Act penalty in high hundreds of millions of euros expected before summer break.

• 💰 AMD commits $10B to Taiwan: Advanced packaging push plants flag on Nvidia’s home turf as Helios system nears launch.

• 🌐 Mexico-EU trade deal signed: Modernized pact scraps most duties, hands Sheinbaum a second large market beyond the US.

🧠 One Big Thing

Momentus (MNTS) keeps running, and the move is less about company fundamentals than about where retail capital lands when it cannot reach the headline trade. SpaceX is targeting a $1.75T to $2T valuation with most of the deal allocated to anchor investors like BlackRock, leaving retail to chase the next-best public proxies; the Tema Space Innovators ETF is up over 55% since 31 March 2026. MNTS adds operational linkage on top of theme, plus low float and 15.6% short interest to amplify moves. Below in the Chart of the Day, the full Momentus deep dive lays out the past, the turnaround, and what to watch next.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

$10B

AMD)is committing more than $10B across Taiwan's chip ecosystem to scale advanced packaging, planting the $10B bet on Nvidia's home manufacturing turf just as both race for priority at TSMC.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : Harmonic Inc. extended Friday’s rally after raising its 2026 broadband revenue target to $475M to $495M and announcing the sale of its Video business, leaving a pure-play broadband story with Q1 rest-of-market revenue up 78% YoY.

• : Redwire Corp. continued its multi-week run after reporting Q1 revenue of $97M (up 57.9% YoY) and a record $498.1M backlog, with recent contract wins including a multi-year NATO Penguin Mk3 UAS deal through the Edge Autonomy acquisition, a $15M US Army Stalker follow-on, and a slot on the Space Force’s $1.8B Andromeda IDIQ.

• : Micron Technology Inc. rallied as a read-through to Dell’s $43B AI server backlog and broader AI infrastructure strength rather than any company-specific catalyst.

• : Dell Technologies Inc. extended Friday’s 16.77% surge ahead of Thursday’s Q1 FY27 earnings, with Wells Fargo lifting its price target to $270 from $180 following Dell Technologies World and the company guiding to roughly $50B in AI server revenue for FY27 against a $43B backlog.

Losers

• : AutoZone Inc. fell after Q3 fiscal 2026 net sales of $4.84B came in just shy of the $4.86B consensus and same-store sales rose only 3.9% (4.1% domestic), overshadowing an EPS beat of $38.07 versus $36.17 expected.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $77,211 (▼ -0.01%)
Ethereum (ETH): $2,122 (▲ 0.57%)
XRP: $1.35 (▲ 0.28%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: $7,543 (▲ 0.69%)
NASDAQ 100: $29,855 (▲ 1.00%)
FTSE 100: £10,532 (▲ 0.91%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.49% (▼ -1.56%)
Oil (WTI): $92 (▼ -4.71%)
Gold: $4,532 (▲ 0.52%)
Silver: $76.12 (▲ 0.97%)

Data as of: UK (BST) 12:17pm / US (EDT): 7:17am / Asia (Tokyo): 8:17pm

✅ 5 Things to Know

🛢️ Iran Vows Retaliation as Wall Street Reopens

US markets reopen today to renewed uncertainty over the Iran ceasefire. President Trump said on Truth Social over the weekend that an agreement has been “largely negotiated” between the US, Iran and other countries, helping push Brent crude down about 6% on Monday while US cash markets were shut for the Memorial Day holiday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 closed above 65,000 for the first time, the dollar slipped and gold rose. Then overnight, US Central Command said it carried out fresh strikes on Iranian missile launch sites and boats laying mines near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard responded this morning, vowing to “respond decisively to any violation of the ceasefire,” and Brent has bounced 3.4% to about $99 a barrel. (NBC News)

For retail investors, oil remains the chain link to everything else in 2026: cheaper crude eases the inflation that pushed the 30-year Treasury yield above 5%, its highest since 2007, and forced the Federal Reserve to shelve rate cuts. The framework under discussion would extend the ceasefire 60 days and give Iran roughly 30 days to clear the mines before traffic flows freely, so supply would not return overnight even on a signed deal. Saudi Aramco’s chief executive has said the market could take months to rebalance. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told television viewers today the deal is hung up on disputes over wording, and Tehran said yesterday no agreement is imminent. (CNBC)

Both sides are testing the ceasefire. The US is treating its overnight strikes as defensive, while Iran has warned it reserves the right to escalate. Every fresh exchange of fire would push back the day actual barrels of oil return to the market and pump prices ease, and that is what determines whether the long-end bond yields shadowing equity gains all year finally roll over.

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🤖 Huawei Claims a Chip Breakthrough Around US Sanctions

Huawei unveiled what it called a major chip-design breakthrough in Shanghai yesterday, saying it can match the transistor density of 1.4-nanometer chips by 2031, a level of miniaturization it cannot reach through the ultra-advanced manufacturing that US export controls have cut off. Rather than racing to shrink transistors, the company introduced a design method it named the “Tau Scaling Law,” meant to speed data movement and cut delays across a whole system. Huawei said its chip unit has mass-produced 381 chips in six years, and the company booked about $130 billion in revenue in 2025. (Reuters)

For retail investors, the real question is how durable US chip controls are, because that assumption sits under every megacap AI valuation. Huawei is not closing its manufacturing gap with TSMC or Nvidia overnight; it is trying to compete on architecture and system design instead of raw process technology, which over several years could make Chinese AI hardware credible enough to keep Nvidia partly shut out of China. That cuts against Nvidia’s message last week that China remains inside its long-term market, even as Beijing steers buyers toward Huawei’s Ascend chips and not one approved H200, Nvidia’s second-most-powerful AI processor, has shipped. Analysts expect the claim to draw tighter US scrutiny next.

🛍️ Mexico’s Exports Hit a Record Despite Trump’s Tariffs

Mexican exports jumped 32.6% from a year earlier to $72.04 billion in April, the highest monthly total since records began in 1980, the national statistics agency INEGI reported yesterday. The trade surplus widened to $4.52 billion, nearly ten times the $476 million economists had penciled in, and the country has swung to a $3.51 billion surplus over the first four months of the year from a small deficit a year ago. Manufacturing did the heavy lifting at $65.69 billion, up 34%, with auto sector exports rising 8.2%. More than 83% of non-oil exports went to the United States. (Bloomberg)

The figure cuts against the claim that tariffs are pulling factory work back to the United States. Even with Washington’s effective tariff on Mexican goods up to about 10.6% from 1.6% in 2024, roughly three-quarters of Mexican exports still cross the border duty-free under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, and manufacturers have used that opening to ship more, not less. That sets up the pact’s formal review, due this summer, where a record export run strengthens President Claudia Sheinbaum’s hand. For US investors, the exposure runs through carmakers like General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, appliance maker Whirlpool, the Mexico ETF that trades as EWW, and the peso, which has firmed to about 17.30 per dollar.

🤝 Trump Ties Israel Recognition to an Iran Deal

President Trump said yesterday that any final deal with Iran should require Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan to “simultaneously” join the Abraham Accords, the framework that normalizes relations with Israel, first signed in 2020 by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The demand followed a weekend call in which those leaders backed the Iran deal but, by one US account, fell silent when Trump raised Israel. The early answer was no. Pakistan rejected linking the two, and a Saudi source said Riyadh will not normalize without an “irreversible pathway” to a Palestinian state, a condition its foreign ministry called non-negotiable.

Trump is trying to turn a narrow ceasefire-and-shipping deal into a regional realignment that isolates Iran, and bundling the two raises both the reward and the risk. Success could unlock Saudi money into US technology, a possible US-Saudi defense pact and civilian nuclear cooperation. Failure could make the Iran framework itself shakier by attaching a demand the Gulf is not ready to meet while anger over Gaza stays high. Markets are treating broader normalization as a low-odds bonus rather than a base case, so there was no separate stock reaction yesterday. The names that would move on real progress are defense contractors and Israeli technology firms. (Bloomberg)

🛒 US Consumer Mood Sinks to a Record Low

Americans’ view of the economy fell to the worst level on record in the University of Michigan’s final May reading, with the sentiment index dropping to 44.8, below the 48.2 economists expected and a third straight monthly decline. Price fears climbed alongside it: consumers now expect 4.8% inflation over the next year and 3.9% over the next five to ten years, both multi-month highs against the Fed’s 2% goal. The driver is energy. Gasoline has topped $6 a gallon in parts of the country as the Iran war keeps crude elevated, and 57% of respondents said high prices are hurting their finances.

Sentiment tends to lead spending, so a record-low reading warns that the energy shock is starting to change behavior, not just mood. The harder problem for the Federal Reserve is the long-run expectations: once households expect higher inflation five to ten years out, that view is tough to unwind, which complicates rate cuts even if an Iran deal pulls gas prices down. The pain is uneven. A New York Fed study found households earning under $40,000 cut gasoline use about 7% during the spring price spike, while those above $125,000 trimmed just 1%, a squeeze that lands first on discretionary retailers, restaurants and car dealers. Conference Board’s separate confidence reading drops today at 10am ET, the first test of whether the Michigan collapse was a one-off or a trend. (CNBC)

Stories You Might Have Missed

🇪🇺 EU Prepares a Major Google Antitrust Fine

The European Union is readying a fine in the high hundreds of millions of euros against Google under the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, the bloc’s rulebook for big-tech “gatekeepers,” according to a Handelsblatt report carried by Reuters. The case, opened last year, centers on whether Google favors its own services in search results, and a decision is expected before Europe’s summer break. It would be the biggest penalty yet under the DMA, and the larger stakes are structural: if Brussels forces changes to how Google ranks and bundles its products, the long-run earnings hit could outweigh any one-off fine. The read-through runs to Alphabet and the other designated gatekeepers, including Apple, Amazon and Meta.

💰 AMD Bets $10 Billion on Taiwan to Chase Nvidia

AMD said it will invest more than $10 billion across Taiwan’s chip ecosystem to scale the advanced packaging that links processors together for next-generation AI systems, planting its flag on Nvidia’s home manufacturing turf just as the two race for priority at TSMC. The move landed days after Nvidia’s blockbuster results, with CEO Lisa Su pushing AMD as the strongest challenger in AI. AMD posted first-quarter revenue of $10.25 billion, up 38%, with data-center sales up 57% to $5.78 billion, and its Helios rack-scale system is due to start shipping in the second half of this year against Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform. AMD shares have more than doubled in 2026.

🌐 Mexico and the EU Sign a Long-Stalled Trade Deal

Mexico and the European Union signed a long-delayed trade agreement before the weekend, with both sides looking to cut their dependence on the United States as tariffs reshape global commerce. The deal modernizes a pact first struck in 2000 and scraps most remaining duties between the two, opening Europe to more Mexican farm and industrial goods and handing Mexican manufacturers a second large market beyond their northern neighbor. For investors, it strengthens the case that Mexico’s factory base can keep expanding even if US trade terms tighten, and it gives President Sheinbaum another card ahead of this summer’s USMCA review.

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🔍 Deep Dive: Meet Momentus (MNTS): The Small-Cap Space Stock Riding the SpaceX Wave

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This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🛢️ Iran Uranium Demand Blocks Oil Deal: New Supreme Leader orders enriched stockpile stays inside Iran, keeping war premium pinned into Brent.

• 💸 $149 Billion Tariff Refund Looms: Supreme Court ruling forces Washington to return import duties, handing retailers and automakers one-time cash.

• 💻 Workday Beat Cheers Software Bulls: Subscription backlog growing faster than revenue gives Salesforce and ServiceNow a cleaner read into next week.

• 🔧 Amkor Lands AMD, Stock Still Slips: AI packaging deal expands Arizona customer list, but soft 2028 revenue target undercuts the win.

• ⛏️ Rare-Earth Stocks Ride Pentagon Cash: MP Materials and peers rally as Deal Team Six deploys equity stakes, though conflict questions mount.

• ⚖️ Meta Settles First School Mental-Health Suit: Kentucky bellwether terms undisclosed, with over 1,500 similar cases from districts and states still pending.

• 🚀 Lockheed Doubles Alabama Missile Output: New 87,000 square-foot plant lifts THAAD and Patriot production as Washington underwrites factory build-out.

• 🚀 SpaceX Files for Record IPO: Filing targets $1.75 to $2 trillion valuation at roughly 100 times sales, with Nasdaq-100 fast entry looming.

🧠 One Big Thing

The biggest story today isn’t in the usual five. SpaceX filed its S-1, targeting a $1.75 to $2 trillion valuation, a raise of up to $75 billion, and a Nasdaq debut as early as 12 June. That is roughly 100 times sales on a company losing $4 billion a quarter, with Musk holding 85.1% of voting power and mandatory Nasdaq-100 inclusion forcing index buyers in within 15 trading days.

Scroll down. Today’s deep dive has everything retail needs before this prices: the valuation math, the xAI problem, the Tesla read-through, the lockup calendar, and how the 2025 crypto IPO cohort may rhyme. Read it before you decide.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

SpaceX is being priced at roughly 100 times sales at the $2 trillion valuation target, against Apple near 11 times and Nvidia near 25 times. That 100 times multiple sits on a company that lost $4.9 billion in 2025 and $4.3 billion in Q1 2026 alone.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : Ross Stores Inc. rallied after reporting Q1 EPS of $2.02 versus the $1.70 consensus on revenue of $6.01 billion, with comparable store sales up a robust 17% and full-year guidance raised meaningfully.

• : Bloom Energy Corporation continued its rally after Wednesday’s announcement of a $2.6 billion, 10-year fuel cell capacity agreement with Nebius Group to power AI data center infrastructure.

• : Merck & Company Inc. firmed after Monday’s announcement that the Phase 3 TroFuse-005 trial of sac-TMT met both overall survival and progression-free survival endpoints in advanced endometrial cancer, ahead of further oncology data presentations at ASCO starting May 29.

• : Vertiv Holdings LLC extended gains after its May 19-20 investor day, where management unveiled 2030 targets including 20-22% organic revenue CAGR and over $17 in EPS, triggering price target raises from RBC to $435, Citi to $414, TD Cowen to $387 and Mizuho to $380.

Losers

• : Futu Holdings Limited collapsed after China’s Securities Regulatory Commission opened formal administrative penalty cases against the firm for operating brokerage services in mainland China without a license, with regulators planning to confiscate all “illegal gains” from both domestic and overseas entities.

• : UP Fintech Holding Limited (Tiger Brokers) was caught in the same CSRC enforcement action targeting unlicensed cross-border brokerages, with the regulator pledging severe penalties and a two-year grace period for existing investors to wind down positions.

• : NervGen Pharma Corp. tumbled after pricing a $60 million underwritten public offering at $2.50 per share, a steep discount to Thursday’s close, with proceeds earmarked for the Phase 3 RESTORE trial of NVG-291 in chronic tetraplegia.

• : Alibaba Group Holding Limited slid in sympathy with the China ADR selloff, with its Hong Kong shares closing down roughly 4.5% as investors continued digesting last week’s near-collapse in quarterly adjusted profit tied to its quick-commerce price war.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $77,351 (▼ -0.24%)
Ethereum (ETH): $2,128 (▼ -0.15%)
XRP: $1.36 (▼ -0.92%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,464 (▲ 0.24%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,509 (▲ 0.21%)
FTSE 100: £10,466 (▼ -0.27%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.48% (▼ -0.52%)
Oil (WTI): $98 (▼ -0.47%)
Gold: $4,521 (▼ -0.48%)
Silver: $75.78 (▼ -1.17%)

Data as of: UK (BST) 1:00pm BST / US (EDT): 8:00am EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 9:00pm

✅ 5 Things to Know

🛢️ Iran’s Uranium Red Line Keeps Oil’s War Premium Alive

Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has ordered that the country’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% must stay inside Iran, two senior Iranian officials said yesterday, hardening Tehran’s position on a central US demand in talks to end the US-Israeli war. The order collides directly with a commitment Trump made to Israel that the material, which sits only a short technical step from the roughly 90% purity needed for a weapon, would be shipped out. Both sides have narrowed some gaps but remain split on the stockpile and Iran’s demand to keep enriching. (Reuters)

For retail investors this is the single biggest swing factor for oil, and the standoff is keeping a war premium in the price. Brent crude traded near $104.52 this morning, up about 1.9% and still roughly 50% above pre-war levels, after whipsawing all week on conflicting signals. Secretary of State Marco Rubio struck a more hopeful tone, saying Pakistani mediators will travel to Iran while Tehran reviews Washington’s latest proposal, and Trump said he could wait a few days for the right answers. A confirmed deal could knock $10 to $20 off Brent fast; a collapse points back toward the March peak near $120. (CNBC)

💸 $149 Billion Tariff Refund Hands Importers a Windfall

Trump said the US will likely have to refund about $149 billion in tariff revenue, comments from a Fortune interview that ran through yesterday’s news cycle. The refunds stem from a 6-to-3 Supreme Court ruling in February that struck down roughly half of the “Liberation Day” tariffs he imposed last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law the court said did not authorize them. Tariffs are paid by the US company importing the goods, not the foreign exporter, so those importers can now claim the money back. The administration is already paying out $35.5 billion. (Fortune)

This cuts two ways for the market. It worsens an already-strained federal deficit, with roughly $300 billion in annual tariff revenue now gone and a one-time bill on top, which has weakened the dollar and pushed long-term bond yields higher. It also drops cash onto the books of import-heavy companies that absorbed the tariff costs: big-box retailers like Walmart, Target and Home Depot, parts seller AutoZone, and auto importers such as Toyota and Honda, all of which can file claims. Expect the payouts to land as one-time gains in coming quarters, even as the administration rebuilds tariffs under other legal authorities. (Reuters)

💻 Workday Beat Lifts Hopes for the Software Group

Workday beat Wall Street after the close yesterday, sending the stock up about 7% in late trading. Revenue rose 13.5% from a year earlier to $2.54 billion, ahead of the $2.52 billion analysts expected, while subscription revenue, the recurring sales software investors watch most closely, climbed 14.3% to $2.35 billion. Adjusted earnings of $2.66 a share also cleared the $2.52 consensus. It was the first full quarter under returning co-founder and chief executive Aneel Bhusri, who took back the top job earlier this year, and the company held its full-year subscription forecast. (Reuters)

Workday matters beyond its own print because it is one of the first big enterprise-software names to report, and it sells the human-resources and finance systems companies rarely rip out. The cleaner signal sits in the backlog: subscription revenue already booked for the next 12 months reached $8.81 billion, up 15.5% and growing faster than current sales. That points to a pipeline still building, not stalling. The read-through lands just before Salesforce reports next week, and supports peers like ServiceNow heading into a season that opened with high expectations.

🔧 Amkor Wins AMD, but Soft Forecast Sinks Shares

Amkor Technology said it is working with AMD on advanced chip packaging at its $7 billion campus in Peoria, Arizona, a disclosure that landed at the company’s investor day yesterday and added AMD to a customer list that already included Apple and Nvidia. Days earlier Amkor bought another 67 acres next door, taking the site to 171 acres, with production due to start in 2028. The stock still fell 2.6%, because Amkor’s new revenue target for 2028 of $8.5 billion to $9.5 billion, a $9 billion midpoint, came in just below the roughly $9.1 billion analysts wanted. (Reuters)

The strategic point is bigger than one customer. Advanced packaging, the step that bonds separate “chiplets” into a single high-performance processor, has become the real bottleneck in making AI chips, and almost all of that capacity sits in Taiwan and South Korea. Amkor’s plant is set to be the first high-volume advanced-packaging site in the US, filling a gap the new TSMC fabs in Arizona cannot close on their own, backed by up to $600 million in CHIPS Act funding. The complication for traders is timing: that revenue does not arrive until 2028, which is why a soft long-range forecast outweighed the AMD news.

⛏️ Federal Cash Lifts Rare-Earth Stocks, but Conflict Questions Grow

Federal money is pouring into rare-earth companies, and the stocks moved with it yesterday, as MP Materials, USA Rare Earth and Critical Metals all rose. The Pentagon unit driving the push, nicknamed “Deal Team Six,” has about $200 billion in financing capacity over three years and has already taken equity stakes in MP Materials ($400 million), USA Rare Earth (part of a $1.6 billion package) and others. Rare earths are 17 elements used to make the high-strength magnets inside fighter jets, electric-vehicle motors and missiles, and China refines roughly 91% of the world’s supply. (Bloomberg)

The reason this now carries political risk is the program’s largest loan: $620 million to Vulcan Elements, a roughly 30-person North Carolina startup whose backers include 1789 Capital, a venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a named partner. That has drawn conflict-of-interest questions and scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties over the legal basis for the government taking equity stakes at all. China, meanwhile, tightened enforcement of its export controls this week. The hard part for investors is the clock: a Pentagon rule taking effect in January 2027 bans Chinese-origin rare earths from US weapons, but domestic output will not scale meaningfully until late this decade. (Reuters)

Stories You Might Have Missed

⚖️ Meta Settles First School Mental-Health Case

Meta settled the first US case in which a school district sought to recover the cost of dealing with student mental-health problems tied to social media, according to a court filing yesterday. Breathitt County, Kentucky, a 1,600-student district, was a bellwether whose outcome tends to set the value for similar claims; terms were not disclosed, and the trial had been set for next month. More than 1,500 suits from schools, cities and states are pending. By settling rather than testing a jury, Meta appears keen to avoid creating a precedent that larger districts, some seeking billions, could follow. (Reuters)

🚀 Lockheed Breaks Ground on Alabama Missile Plant

Lockheed Martin broke ground yesterday on an 87,000-square-foot munitions plant in Troy, Alabama, built to roughly double its missile output there for THAAD interceptors, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, and the new Next Generation Interceptor. It is part of framework deals with the Pentagon meant to lift THAAD production from 96 to 400 interceptors a year and Patriot PAC-3 missiles from about 600 to 2,000. The signal for investors is that Washington is now underwriting the factory build-out itself, not just ordering more weapons, with defense stocks already trading at multi-year highs. (Reuters)

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The SpaceX IPO: Everything Retail Investors Need to Know

SpaceX is going public, and it is set to be the largest stock market debut in history. Here is what is happening, what analysts are saying, and what institutional desks already know that most retail traders do not.

The Basics

SpaceX filed its S-1 with the SEC on 20 May 2026. The plan: list on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, run the roadshow around 4 June, price the offering around 11 June, and begin trading as early as 12 June. Targeted valuation is $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion, with a raise of up to $75 billion (Morningstar). Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the lead underwriters, with 23 banks involved.

The Scale

If priced at $75 billion, SpaceX would more than double the previous IPO record (Saudi Aramco, $29.4 billion in 2019) and dwarf Alibaba’s $25 billion in 2014. At a $2 trillion valuation, it would list at roughly what Aramco is worth today while generating under 15% of Aramco’s revenue, immediately becoming the eighth-largest public company in the world, ahead of Tesla.

The Business

SpaceX operates three segments: Connectivity (Starlink), Space (rockets, Dragon, Starship, launch), and AI (xAI, folded in via an all-stock merger in February 2026). Total revenue was $18.7 billion in 2025, up 33% year over year. The company lost $4.9 billion that year, swinging from a $791 million profit in 2024. Q1 2026 was worse: a $4.3 billion loss on $4.7 billion of revenue (Fortune). At $2 trillion, that prices SpaceX at roughly 100 times sales. Apple trades around 11 times revenue. Nvidia trades around 25 times.

Starlink and the Future Revenue Streams

Read more

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🎯 NVIDIA Beats, Stock Yawns: Blowout numbers and a twenty-five-fold dividend hike still couldn’t lift the stock.

• 🛢️ Oil Cracks as Iran Talks Near: Brent fell six dollars on diplomacy signals; Iran’s Hormuz tollbooth keeps the risk premium elevated.

• 🤖 OpenAI Files for Trillion-Dollar Listing: Confidential filing imminent; September debut could value the ChatGPT maker at $1 trillion.

• 🚀 SpaceX Targets Record $80 Billion Debut: $1.7 trillion valuation, June 12 trading start; Starlink profits cover rocket and AI losses.

• 🦅 Hawks Hidden in Federal Reserve Minutes: April vote was eight to four, but the majority quietly backed firming if inflation persists.

• ⚛️ Quantum Names Rip on Federal Grants: $2 billion package with government equity stakes; International Business Machines (IBM) leads with $1 billion.

• 🏦 Trump Opens Fed Rails to Fintech: Executive order pushes regulators to review direct payment access for crypto and fintech firms.

• 🥩 Cargill Locks Out Colorado Beef Workers: 1,700 Teamsters shut out after 90% contract rejection; beef prices already set to rise 10%.

• 🏭 Drones Hit Russian Refining Capacity: Strikes shut 83 million tonnes of capacity; Russian petrol export ban extended through July.

• 🇹🇼 Trump Eyes Taiwan Call, Arms Package: First leader-to-leader contact since 1979 looms; $14 billion weapons deal still pending Congress.

🧠 One Big Thing

Two trillion-dollar listings filing within roughly a week of each other is the real story. SpaceX prices at $1.7 trillion with Starlink carrying loss-making rockets and an AI unit. OpenAI follows at up to $1 trillion despite projecting a $14 billion loss in 2026. Both depend on profitable subsidiaries covering frontier bets and both put founders in effective control. The signal is that the AI capital cycle has moved from private rounds to public markets, forcing index funds into the trade. Retail exposure becomes structural before unit economics get tested.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : D-Wave Quantum Inc. surged after a Wall Street Journal report that the company is set to receive a $100 million grant under the Trump administration’s $2 billion quantum computing package, with the federal government taking a minority equity stake in return.

• : Rigetti Computing Inc. jumped on confirmation that it is one of the named recipients of the $2 billion federal quantum funding package, with $100 million earmarked for the company in exchange for a US government equity stake.

• : GlobalFoundries Inc. gained after being named the second-largest recipient of the federal quantum grant package, set to receive $375 million from the Commerce Department in exchange for a government equity stake.

• : Applied Digital Corporation rose after announcing a second 300 MW lease with the same US-based investment-grade hyperscaler behind its Delta Forge 1 site, deepening one of the company’s largest data center partnerships.

• : Advance Auto Parts Inc. spiked after Q1 adjusted EPS of $0.77 came in well above the $0.46 consensus on revenue of $2.61 billion, with comparable sales growing 3.5%.

• : International Business Machines led the named beneficiaries of the federal quantum push, with the Commerce Department agreeing to award the company $1 billion of the $2 billion grant package in exchange for a minority equity stake.

Losers

: Intuit Inc. tumbled after announcing a 17% workforce reduction affecting over 3,000 employees alongside its fiscal Q3 results, with $300 million to $340 million in restructuring charges and weakness at Mailchimp overshadowing an EPS beat and raised full-year guidance.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $77,244 (▼ -0.31%)
Ethereum (ETH): $2,115 (▼ -0.58%)
XRP: $1.37 (▲ 0.07%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: $7,412 (▼ -0.01%)
NASDAQ 100: $29,234 (▼ -0.54%)
FTSE 100: £10,386 (▼ -0.50%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.61% (▲ 0.48%)
Oil (WTI): $101 (▲ 1.73%)
Gold: $4,517 (▼ -0.57%)
Silver: $74.98 (▼ -1.20%)

Data as of: UK (BST) 12:18pm BST / US (EDT): 7:18am / Asia (Tokyo): 8:18pm

✅ 5 Things to Know ( + 1 Bonus Story)

🎯 NVIDIA Cleared the Blowout Bar, Stock Didn’t Care

NVIDIA delivered the blowout scenario yesterday on every line that mattered and the market still couldn’t get excited. First-quarter revenue landed at $81.6 billion, up 85% year on year and above the $80 billion mark that had been the bull camp’s clean-blowout threshold. Data Center revenue hit a record $75.2 billion, more than $2 billion ahead of consensus. The Q2 guide came in at $91 billion, well clear of the roughly $87 billion published Wall Street expectation. Non-GAAP gross margin held at 75%. Free cash flow for the quarter alone was $48.6 billion. Shares slipped roughly 1.5% in extended trading and drifted lower again today between $216 and $227, still six points below last week’s $236.54 all-time high. (CNBC)

The gap between the numbers and the price action is the real story. Published consensus was $87 billion for the Q2 guide. The buy-side whisper, the figure the funds were actually positioned for, sat closer to $89 to $90 billion. NVIDIA’s $91 billion beat the consensus comfortably but only edged past the number already in the price. NVIDIA also stacked the deck on capital returns, authorizing an additional $80 billion in share buybacks and lifting the quarterly dividend twenty-five fold from one cent to twenty-five cents per share. For a company that has historically reinvested almost everything into chip development and supply chain, that dividend hike is a signal of regime change, not just a cash-return gesture. (Yahoo Finance)

The reveal most of the market has under-priced came late on the call. Chief financial officer Colette Kress disclosed that NVIDIA has visibility to roughly $20 billion in standalone CPU revenue this year, opening what Jensen Huang called a “brand new” $200 billion total addressable market. The Vera CPU, paired with the upcoming Rubin graphics chip, is being positioned as a purpose-built processor for agentic artificial intelligence, the autonomous software agents companies are now deploying at scale. If those numbers hold, NVIDIA enters its first full year of standalone CPU sales as one of the world’s largest CPU suppliers, a lane long dominated by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. With Vera Rubin not ramping until the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027 and China data center revenue still sitting at zero, that CPU story may be the cleaner forward catalyst than the next quarterly print. (Yahoo Finance)

🛢️ Oil Drops 6% as Trump Says Iran Deal Is Close

Brent crude settled down $6.26 at $105.02 yesterday and US West Texas Intermediate fell $5.89 to $98.26, its first close below $100 in weeks, after President Trump told reporters that negotiations with Iran were in the “final stages.” Trump also said he had canceled a planned wave of strikes on Tuesday to give diplomacy room. Three supertankers carrying about 6 million barrels of Middle East crude finally crossed the Strait of Hormuz, the first significant tanker movement in over two months. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps simultaneously warned of “crushing blows in places you do not expect” if US strikes resume. (Reuters)

The drop is the war-premium coming out, not normalization. Oil at $105 is still roughly 50% above pre-conflict levels, and US commercial crude stocks fell 7.9 million barrels last week against a 2.9 million consensus draw. ADNOC’s chief executive said yesterday it will take at least four months to restore Middle East flows to 80% of pre-conflict levels even with a deal. A Reuters investigation published yesterday detailed how Iran has built a working transit-fee system at Hormuz, with state-to-state deals required and fees reportedly running up to $150,000 per ship. Wood Mackenzie’s bull case puts Brent at $200 if Hormuz stays largely shut through year-end; the bear case is $80 by end-2026 if a deal sticks and traffic resumes. (CNBC)

🤖 OpenAI Lines Up the Next Trillion-Dollar IPO

OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file its initial public offering paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission as soon as tomorrow, putting the ChatGPT maker on a path to a September listing that could value the company at up to $1 trillion. The filing arrives within days of SpaceX going public with its own prospectus and follows a federal jury’s dismissal earlier this week of Elon Musk’s lawsuit challenging OpenAI’s for-profit restructuring. That ruling removed the last meaningful legal obstacle to a listing. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the underwriter selection, with OpenAI reportedly targeting at least $60 billion in primary capital at the low end of preliminary discussions. (CNBC)

The financial backdrop tells two stories at once. OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in its March funding round, a $122 billion raise that pulled in $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from NVIDIA, and $30 billion from Microsoft. The company now generates around $2 billion in revenue every month, with ChatGPT crossing 900 million weekly users and 50 million paid subscribers. Rival Anthropic is closing the race fast, posting more than $30 billion in annualized revenue and reportedly raising fresh capital at a $900 billion valuation. Sam Altman has been pushing to list ahead of Anthropic, while chief financial officer Sarah Friar has favored a longer runway. (Yahoo Finance)

The cost picture is where retail investors need to focus. Internal projections suggest OpenAI may lose $14 billion in 2026 alone, with no path to profitability expected until 2030. HSBC analysts estimate the company will need more than $207 billion in additional capital between now and the end of the decade to fund its compute commitments, which Altman has put at roughly $1.4 trillion over five years. Microsoft holds a 27% stake in the restructured public benefit corporation. Sam Altman, despite running the company, owns no equity. The S-1 prospectus, when it eventually goes public, will be the first time the audited numbers behind the brand are visible to outside investors. (Yahoo Finance)

🚀 SpaceX Files for the Biggest IPO in History

SpaceX filed its public prospectus yesterday, putting an official countdown on what is set to be the largest initial public offering ever to hit Wall Street. The company is seeking to raise around $80 billion at a roughly $1.7 trillion valuation, which would crush the previous record set by Saudi Aramco’s $26 billion debut in 2019. Shares will list on the Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker SPCX, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America leading a syndicate of more than twenty underwriters. The roadshow begins June 4, pricing is expected June 11, and the stock is targeting its first day of trading on June 12. (Bloomberg)

The financial picture inside the S-1 confirms what private-market investors had long suspected. SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, but only one of its three operating segments actually turned a profit. Starlink, the satellite internet division, ended the most recent quarter with $1.19 billion in operating income and crossed 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries. Everything else loses money. The space segment that builds and launches rockets lost $619 million in the same quarter. The AI unit, built on the absorbed xAI business, lost $2.5 billion, with research and development costs above $5 billion last year as the company stocks up on GPUs. (CNBC)

The governance structure is where retail investors need to pay the closest attention. Elon Musk will hold 85.1% of the voting power after the listing through a dual-class share structure that gives his Class B holdings ten votes each, and the total rises to 86% including senior executives. Outside shareholders effectively have no path to influence the company. Musk’s compensation plan reads more like science fiction than corporate targets. The full one billion performance shares only vest if SpaceX hits a $7.5 trillion market capitalization and establishes a permanent Mars colony of at least one million inhabitants, with separate tranches tied to space-based data centers generating 100 terawatts of compute. Roughly twenty percent of 2025 revenue came from federal government contracts, listed among the 36 pages of risk factors. (Yahoo Finance)

🦅 The Hawkish Camp Was Bigger Than Four Dissents

The April Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes hit the wire yesterday evening and the headline was the most lopsided Fed vote in 33 years. Beneath the 8-4 split, the room was more hawkish still. A majority of participants said some policy firming would likely become appropriate if inflation continues to run above the 2% target. “Many” indicated they would have preferred removing the easing bias language from the statement entirely. The vast majority noted an increased risk that inflation takes longer than expected to return to target. The Fed uses these words carefully. “A majority” means ten or more of the nineteen participants, the strongest hawkish signal in any minutes release this cycle. The three regional presidents who voted against the easing bias (Beth Hammack at Cleveland, Neel Kashkari at Minneapolis, and Lorie Logan at Dallas) were not isolated voices. Their concerns were shared widely enough that another seven or so participants quietly sympathised without dissenting publicly. (CNBC)

What kept markets from punishing the print was Iran. President Trump said US-Iran negotiations were in their “final stages” mid-morning yesterday, sending West Texas Intermediate crude down 5.66% to below $100 a barrel. With the energy leg of the inflation story softening in real time, stocks pushed to fresh highs even as the 30-year Treasury yield touched 5.197% intraday, the highest since July 2007. The real test now is the April Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) print on 28 May and Kevin Warsh’s debut meeting on 16 and 17 June. If oil stays sub-$100 and the Middle East de-escalation holds, the path back to cuts stays open. If energy reaccelerates, the hawkish majority on the Committee now has a written mandate to act on it. (Continuum Economics)

⚛️ Trump’s $2 Billion Bet on Quantum Sends Stocks Flying

Quantum computing stocks ripped higher in early trading today after the Trump administration confirmed it is awarding $2 billion in grants to nine quantum-computing companies while taking minority equity stakes in each. IBM is the headline beneficiary, set to receive $1 billion to accelerate the development of specialized quantum chips, sending the stock up roughly 6.5% in premarket trading. GlobalFoundries is in line for $375 million, with shares surging toward a four-year high. D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and Infleqtion are each receiving $100 million, with startup Diraq getting $38 million. The pure-play quantum names exploded: Infleqtion gained as much as 23% ahead of the open, D-Wave ran up 16%, and Rigetti jumped nearly 14%. (MarketWatch)

The deal extends a strategy Washington has now used multiple times in less than a year. The Commerce Department took a 10% stake in Intel last August in exchange for $8.9 billion in chip funding, and the government has since taken equity in rare-earth miners MP Materials and USA Rare Earth. IBM is pairing its $1 billion in federal funding with $1 billion of its own investment to build a new quantum chip foundry called Anderon, a joint structure that mirrors how the Intel deal was packaged. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick framed the announcement in national security terms, with the explicit goal of countering China’s aggressive spending on next-generation computing. (CNBC)

The market reaction tells you everything about how retail has been positioned. Quantum stocks have largely been speculative trades, with no path to meaningful revenue and a dependence on long-duration research narratives. A direct federal investment changes that profile overnight. The companies on the list now have a Washington backer with credibility and capital, while sympathy buying lifted names across the sector before all nine recipients were even confirmed: IonQ jumped 13%, Quantum Computing Inc. gained another 13%. The flip side is dilution. Minority equity stakes for the government mean fewer shares for existing holders, and a federal stakeholder brings new political and strategic constraints. (Yahoo Finance)

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🏦 Trump Tells Fed to Open Payment Rails to Crypto and Fintech

President Trump signed an executive order Monday directing federal financial regulators to review barriers to fintech access to Federal Reserve payment rails, building on the Fed’s December prototype for a “skinny master account” with no interest paid, no discount-window access, and a balance cap of the lesser of $500 million or 10% of assets. The order asks the Fed to report back in 120 days and decide complete applications within 90 days if direct access is legally permissible. Structurally positive for Coinbase, Circle, PayPal, Block, and Robinhood, which could potentially settle payments more directly without sponsor banks. Competitive headwind for sponsor banks like Cross River and Customers Bancorp. The Independent Community Bankers of America has already pushed back, asking the Fed to retain discretion to deny applications from crypto-linked firms. (Reuters)

🥩 Cargill Locks Out 1,700 Beef Workers in Colorado

Cargill locked out roughly 1,700 Teamsters at its Fort Morgan, Colorado beef plant earlier this week after workers rejected the company’s “last, best and final” offer by close to 90%. The plant has not been processing cattle since April 23. Cargill offered a five-year deal with a 70-cent first-year wage rise falling to 30 cents by year five; the union wanted a dollar in year one and a three-year contract. Live cattle futures fell nearly 1% on the news. The US cattle herd sits at 86.2 million head, the smallest in 75 years, with the US Department of Agriculture forecasting beef prices up 10.1% in 2026. Cargill is one of four packers controlling about 85% of US slaughter, so a drawn-out shutdown could squeeze Tyson, Kroger, Walmart, and McDonald’s at the meat counter. (Reuters)

🏭 Ukrainian Drones Knock Out a Quarter of Russian Refining

Ukrainian drone strikes have forced almost every major refinery in central Russia to halt or sharply cut output. The damage list runs across Kirishi (offline since May 5), Ryazan, Moscow, Yaroslavl, and Lukoil’s NORSI plant at Kstovo, struck again yesterday. Combined annual capacity affected: more than 83 million tonnes, about a quarter of Russia’s total. Those plants supply over 30% of Russian petrol and roughly 25% of diesel. Ukraine’s drone command said six of ten refineries it has hit this month are fully shut, and Moscow extended its petrol export ban through the end of July to protect domestic supply. The squeeze pushes more Russian crude onto export markets while tightening global product supply, supporting refining margins at Valero, Marathon Petroleum, Phillips 66, and HF Sinclair. Oil and gas taxes still fund roughly a quarter of Russia’s federal budget. (Reuters via Moscow Times)

🇹🇼 Trump Says He'll Call Taiwan's President, $14B Arms Package Pending

Trump said yesterday that he will speak with Taiwan President Lai Ching-te while still weighing whether to formally send Congress a roughly $14 billion arms package authorised in January. No call has been scheduled, but a direct Trump-Lai conversation would be the first leader-to-leader contact since Washington switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1979. Lai used his second-anniversary address yesterday to say Taiwan's future "must be determined together by our 23 million people." The move lands one week after Trump's summit with Xi, where Taiwan was explicitly raised, and puts Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company back in focus given its 92% share of leading-edge chip production for customers including Nvidia and Apple. (Bloomberg)

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📈 Chart of the Day: Enphase Energy (ENPH)

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I’ll be live on the channel covering the release in real time. Join me to react to the print together as the wire scrolls.

The April FOMC minutes hit the wire at 7pm UK tonight / 2:00pm ET. They cover the 28-29 April meeting, which was Powell’s last as Chair and the most divided FOMC vote in 33 years. We already know the headline. Rates held at 3.50 to 3.75% on an 8 to 4 split. What we don’t know yet is the texture under that vote. How many non-dissenters quietly sympathised with the hawks. How participants now frame tariff and Iran inflation pass through. Whether the easing bias language survived by a comfortable majority or a knife edge.

The tape is fragile heading into the print. Third straight down day on the S&P, 30 year yields at 18 year highs, and NVIDIA earnings dropping post close the same day. This is not a quiet macro window.

State of the economy

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This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).

👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

• 🤖 Nvidia’s $355 Billion Earnings Test: Options price a 6.5% swing on tonight’s print, roughly $355 billion of market value.

• 🛢️ Britain Opens Russian Fuel Loophole: Open-ended licence permits Russian-derived diesel and jet fuel from third-country refineries, with no expiry.

• 🍼 Nestlé and Danone Face Cover-Up Claims: European broadcasters allege silent withdrawals and held-back stock during the cereulide contamination episode.

• 💴 Tokyo Issues Fresh Yen Warning: Yen near 159 against the dollar after sixth straight session of losses, edging toward intervention zone.

• ⚛️ Nuclear’s Bottleneck Sits in Fuel: Uranium contract prices reached $90 a pound while Russia still controls roughly 40% of global enrichment.

• 🏦 Lloyds Eyes Data-Centre Lending: British lender plans push into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure financing market dominated by Wall Street.

• 📊 AI Reshapes Investment-Grade Bond Market: Hyperscaler issuance approached $121 billion in 2025, with AI debt nearing 15% of the investment-grade market.

• 🛢️ Iran Threatens Retaliation Beyond Region: Revolutionary Guard warns any renewed American or Israeli strikes would trigger response well outside the Middle East.

🧠 One Big Thing

The bond market is now the constraint on the artificial intelligence (AI) trade, not the catalyst. The 30-year Treasury yield closed at 5.17%, the highest since the early 2000s, just as Nvidia heads into a print options price as a $355 billion event. Long-duration equity multiples and long-duration bond yields are no longer moving in opposite directions; the same hyperscaler capital expenditure cycle driving Nvidia revenue has fed $121 billion of new debt issuance in 2025. That feedback loop matters for positioning. A clean Nvidia guide with rates still climbing could narrow the AI rally to revenue winners rather than re-rate the broader sector.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

• : Immunovant, Inc. jumped after reporting positive preliminary results from its IMVT-1402 trial in difficult-to-treat rheumatoid arthritis, released alongside its Q4 and fiscal year 2026 earnings and business update this morning.

• : Intel Corporation led a semiconductor sector bounce, with chip names extending gains for a second day as investors positioned ahead of Nvidia’s closely watched first-quarter earnings after the bell.

• : Cerebras Systems Inc. extended its post-IPO rally after S&P Global confirmed the AI chipmaker qualifies for Fast Track IPO Entry, with inclusion in eligible S&P Dow Jones Indices taking effect May 25.

Losers

• : Target Corporation slid despite a Q1 beat with EPS of $1.71 versus $1.35 expected and a raised full-year outlook, as new CEO Michael Fiddelke struck a cautious tone on the macro environment and the work still ahead.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $77,584 (▲ 1.04%)
Ethereum (ETH): $2,134 (▲ 1.10%)
XRP: $1.37 (▲ 0.90%)

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: $7,385 (▲ 0.46%)
NASDAQ 100: $29,142 (▲ 0.75%)
FTSE 100: £10,349 (▲ 0.56%)

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.65% (▼ -0.34%)
Oil (WTI): $102 (▼ -2.24%)
Gold: $4,495 (▲ 0.26%)
Silver: $75.49 (▲ 2.52%)

Data as of: UK (BST) 1:58pm GMT / US (EDT): 7:58am EST / Asia (Tokyo): 9:58pm

✅ 5 Things to Know

🤖 Nvidia Reports Tonight With $355 Billion on the Line

Nvidia delivers fiscal Q1 2027 results after the US market close today at roughly 4:20 to 4:30 p.m. Eastern, with the call at 5:00 p.m. Options markets are pricing a move of about 6.5% in either direction tomorrow, equivalent to roughly $355 billion of market value given Nvidia’s $5.4 trillion size. Wall Street consensus sits at about $78.8 billion in revenue and $1.77 in non-GAAP earnings per share, with Visible Alpha pointing to $72.8 billion of that from the data-centre segment. Last quarter’s data-centre revenue rose 75% year over year, and gross margins recovered to 75.2% after the H20 China inventory charge. (Reuters)

The bar is high and the read-through is wider than one stock. The S&P 500 closed Tuesday at 7,353.61, down 0.67% for a third straight decline, with the 30-year Treasury yield finishing at a near-20-year high of 5.17%. The market needs a clean Nvidia print to give it a reason to stop bleeding. Beyond the headline numbers, the contested ground is inference: AMD, Alphabet’s TPUs, Amazon’s Trainium and custom silicon are all pushing harder on the workload that is supposed to be the next leg of demand. Jensen Huang said at GTC in March that Blackwell plus the Rubin platform could generate roughly $1 trillion of revenue across 2026 and 2027, up from a $500 billion estimate last fall. Investors will want that number reaffirmed. (S&P Global)

🛢️ UK Quietly Carves Out Russian Diesel and Jet Fuel

Britain late Tuesday issued an open-ended general trade licence that permits the import of diesel and jet fuel refined in third countries from Russian crude. The licence takes effect today, has no expiry date, and is subject only to record-keeping requirements rather than supply-chain evidence at the border. It exempts those two fuels from the wider third-country processed-oil ban that Whitehall introduced on the same day. Diesel imports under HS codes 2710 19 42 and 2710 19 44 and jet fuel under 2710 19 21 are covered. (Reuters)

This is the energy-security side of the Iran war showing up in sanctions policy. Brent traded around $110 a barrel yesterday, the Strait of Hormuz remains contested, and IEA chief Fatih Birol warned in mid-April that European stockpiles of aviation fuel had roughly six weeks of cover. UK refiners met only 54.9% of road-diesel demand and 28.8% of jet-fuel demand in 2024, and the country relies heavily on imports from India and the Gulf. The US extended its own Russian-oil waiver on Monday for similar reasons. The combined message from London and Washington this week is that sanctions architecture will tighten on paper, but fuel will keep moving while the Middle East crisis runs. For investors, the carve-out reduces the near-term risk of a UK-driven jet fuel squeeze that would have hit IAG, easyJet and Ryanair fuel bills hardest. (Bloomberg)

🍼 Nestlé and Danone Hit With Fresh Cover-Up Claims

A joint investigation by Radio France, Belgium’s RTBF and Switzerland’s RTS published yesterday accused Nestlé and Danone of delays in alerting European authorities about cereulide contamination in infant formula, including what the broadcasters called silent withdrawals in Austria and Germany from 24 December and 838,000 cans held back at a Nestlé factory in northern France from 26 December. Nestlé called the reports “inaccurate and misleading” and said it acted with full transparency from day one. Danone did not respond. French prosecutors in Bordeaux and Angers have ruled out a link between the recalled product and two infant deaths, with a third still under investigation. (RTÉ)

The story has shifted from a contamination problem to a credibility problem, and that matters for both stocks because brand trust in baby formula does not bend back easily. The toxin was traced to arachidonic acid oil supplied by China’s CABIO Biotech and used across Nestlé, Danone and Lactalis production, exposing how concentrated the upstream ingredient chain had become. Bernstein puts infant formula at roughly 21% of Danone group revenue and about 5% for Nestlé, with Danone’s exposure heaviest in China. Recalls have reached more than 60 countries. Paris prosecutors opened criminal investigations into five companies in February. The next pressure points are the EU’s tighter ARA oil import controls already in place and any new findings from the Paris investigation. Competitors like HiPP and Hochdorf have been picking up shelf share through the disruption. (Reuters)

💴 Katayama Renews Yen Warning After G7 in Paris

Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama told reporters in Paris on Tuesday that her G7 counterparts understand Japan’s position on the yen and that Tokyo will take bold action as needed. The G7 communique reaffirmed the long-held commitment not to target exchange rates and acknowledged that excess currency volatility can harm economies, language Japanese officials read as cover for further action. The yen has weakened toward 159 against the dollar this week, its sixth consecutive session of losses, and is near the 160 level that triggered actual market intervention in late April. Japan’s official reserves stood at roughly $1.37 trillion at the end of December 2025. (Bloomberg)

The yen is the cheapest funding leg of the global carry trade, so any meaningful rally on intervention forces traders to unwind positions worldwide. That is the channel through which a Tokyo policy story becomes a cross-asset story. The Bank of Japan’s policy rate sits at 0.75% against US fed funds at 3.50% to 3.75%, and that gap is keeping pressure on the currency despite verbal escalation. BoJ board member Kazuyuki Masu said this week that rates should be raised as soon as possible, citing inflation risks from the Iran war. In 2024 Japan spent roughly $100 billion across four interventions, with a single July session hitting $36.8 billion. For investors, the relevant exposures are Japanese exporters like Toyota and Sony if the yen rallies, importers and utilities on the other side, and currency-hedged Japan ETFs versus unhedged peers. (The Japan Times)

⚛️ Nuclear’s Real Bottleneck Is Fuel, Not Reactors

The nuclear revival has shifted from a policy story to a fuel-chain story. The IEA says more than three-quarters of mined uranium comes from just four countries and that Russia controls roughly 40% of global enrichment capacity. With 78 gigawatts of new reactor capacity under construction across 15 countries and 38 nations pledged at the Paris Nuclear Energy Summit to triple global capacity by 2050, the front end of the fuel cycle is now the gating issue. Long-term U3O8 contract prices reached $90 a pound by the end of the first quarter, the highest since 2008, with spot prices holding at $85 to $87. (IEA)

The investment shift this implies is upstream. Reactor builders make headlines, but uranium miners, converters and enrichers control the actual scarcity. The Trump executive orders target quadrupling US nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050, and Orano USA estimates that doing it with domestic fuel would need a twelve-fold expansion of US enrichment capacity. The Department of Energy awarded $900 million each to Centrus Energy, American Centrifuge Operating and Orano Federal Services in January for HALEU production, but new capacity is not expected to be fully operational until the early 2030s. The Russian uranium import ban kicks in in 2028, which is what is putting pressure on the system now. NexGen Energy received final federal approvals for its Rook I project in Saskatchewan last month and Uranium Energy Corp started production at Burke Hollow in South Texas, the first new US in-situ recovery mine in over a decade. (Bloomberg)

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🏦 Lloyds Pushes Into US Data-Centre Lending

The Financial Times reported yesterday that Lloyds Banking Group is planning a push into US infrastructure lending with a specific focus on the data-centre market. The strategic point is that a large UK domestic retail lender is trying to diversify away from pure home-market rate exposure into the capital-intensive AI-linked asset class that has been the preserve of Wall Street banks and private credit. Meta’s $13 billion El Paso financing, Oracle’s $14 to $16 billion Michigan packages and the new $25 billion Google-Blackstone joint venture announced on Monday are the kind of deals UK lenders have so far been on the edges of. For Lloyds, this is about earning fee income and lending spreads in a higher-growth segment while UK retail banking flatlines. The broader read is that the AI infrastructure build-out is now reshaping bank strategy globally, not just hyperscaler capex plans. (Financial Times)

📊 AI Debt Now Accounts for 15% of the US Corporate Bond Market

Hyperscalers issued roughly $121 billion in bonds in 2025, more than four times the prior five-year average, and AI-related companies tapped debt markets for at least $200 billion across the year. Morgan Stanley projects $250 billion to $300 billion of issuance in 2026 from hyperscalers and related joint ventures, with JPMorgan forecasting $300 billion in annual AI deals across the next five years. CreditSights projects $602 billion in big-tech AI infrastructure capex in 2026, a 36% rise. The relevance for retail investors is that the AI trade is now showing up in fixed-income portfolios through investment-grade bond funds, with AI debt approaching 15% of the US investment-grade corporate market. A Quinn Emanuel analysis put 2025 AI industry revenue at roughly $60 billion against $400 billion of capex, which is the concentration risk regulators and Democratic senators have begun asking about. (Bloomberg)|

🛢️ Iran vows global retaliation if war resumes

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned today that any renewed US or Israeli strikes would trigger retaliation well beyond the Middle East, escalating a standoff that has kept Brent crude trading around $110 a barrel, up roughly 80% this year. President Donald Trump told reporters yesterday he could order fresh attacks within days as he pushes Tehran into concessions over its nuclear programme and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to oil and gas tankers. The threats have already rippled into markets, helping fuel a global government bond selloff as traders price in stickier inflation. NATO is separately weighing a mission to escort vessels through Hormuz by early July if the waterway stays blocked.

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🔍 NVIDIA Q1 FY27 Earnings: The Cheat Sheet

Everything you need to know before tonight’s print, in one place.

The most-watched print of the quarter lands today. The press release crosses around 4:20 PM Eastern, and the conference call kicks off at 5:00 PM Eastern. NVIDIA closed last week at an all-time high of $236.54 before slipping back to roughly $222 heading in. About 6% of last week’s gains are already gone before management has spoken a word.

The company right now

NVIDIA designs and sells the chips that train and run modern artificial intelligence systems. Its current platform, Blackwell, is in full volume production. The next one, Vera Rubin, started sampling earlier this year and ramps in the second half of 2026.

Four reporting segments exist, but only one really matters. Data Center revenue made up 91% of the total last quarter at $62.3 billion, up 75% year-on-year. Gaming, Professional Visualization, and Automotive together account for less than 10%. The four largest hyperscalers (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft) make up just over half of Data Center revenue, and their combined 2026 capital expenditure is on track to approach $700 billion (CNBC).

The biggest development since the last report: the US cleared roughly ten Chinese firms to buy the H200 chip under a licensing structure that routes 25% of revenue to the US Treasury. No chips have actually shipped yet (CNBC).

What Wall Street expects

NVIDIA’s own Q1 guide of $78 billion was already $5 billion above consensus when it was issued, one of the widest guide-above-Street gaps in mega-cap history (Indmoney).

Why this print is different

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