Morning Forecast: Monday 20 July
Chip stocks bounce back from a bear market as Alphabet and Tesla earnings loom.
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
🖥️ Chips lead a rebound: Semiconductors bounce to start the week after the chip index fell into a bear market and the Nasdaq lost 2.9%.
🔎 Big Tech faces its test: Alphabet and Tesla report on the same evening this week, the first megacap double-header with the Fed silent.
🛢️ Oil holds near a one-month high: Brent stays elevated on a ninth night of US strikes on Iran, with only faint signs of diplomacy.
🚀 Starship launch slips again: SpaceX pushes Flight 13 to later this week after a scrubbed attempt, with its newly public stock at record lows.
🥇 Gold clings to $4,000: Bullion recaptured the line despite a widening war, pinned by an 82% market-implied chance of a Fed hike by December.
₿ Crypto drifts on gridlock: Bitcoin sits just above $64,000 as a new crypto market-structure bill stalls and passage odds hit a record low.
🏦 ECB is the lone rate call: Europe’s central bank is expected to hold this week, though oil’s climb revives some hike talk.
🚗 Earnings season revs up: General Motors and Lockheed Martin open a heavy reporting week tomorrow, spanning the car and defense trades.
🔍 Deep Dive on XRP: The new XRP Weekly is out; XRP has broken its year-long bear market trendline, check it out.
📈 Chart of the Day: The XRP chart is above its year-long bear market trendline, the full read is in this week’s XRP Weekly.
🗓️ The Week Ahead: The full calendar is out; Alphabet and Tesla, the ECB and the July flash PMIs headline a quiet-on-paper week.
🧠 One Big Thing
The chips that fell into a bear market on fears the big cloud buyers would trim their AI budgets now bounce in the days right before those very buyers report. The rebound is a bet the fear was overdone, and Alphabet is the swing vote. Its capital-spending guide, last set at 180 to 190 billion dollars for this year, matters more than its earnings: a raise validates the demand behind Nvidia and the chip names, while any trim hands the bears their proof. Watch the capex line first, the profit second.
⚖️ Fear & Greed
📉 The Number That Matters
$462 billion
Alphabet’s cloud order backlog, which has nearly doubled, is the demand the market weighs this week against the record capital spending it is funding, and against the chip selloff that spending helped trigger.
⚔️ Winners vs Losers
Winners
AMC 0.00%↑: +16.24% AMC Entertainment Holdings surged after reporting second quarter results that delivered the highest quarterly revenue and adjusted EBITDA in the company’s 106 year history, with non-GAAP EPS of 14 cents against a consensus loss of 2 cents.
HUT 0.00%↑: +14.16% Hut 8 Corp. jumped after signing a second 15 year, 352 MW AI data center lease worth $9.8 billion, fully commercializing its 1 gigawatt Beacon Point campus in Texas and lifting total contracted base term value to $26.6 billion.
SKHY 0.00%↑: +5.92% SK hynix led a broad rebound across memory and storage names, with Micron (MU, +5.07%), Sandisk (SNDK, +5.03%), Western Digital (WDC, +4.72%) and Seagate (STX, +4.11%) all higher as traders rotated back into semiconductors following the group’s slide into bear market territory earlier this month.
Losers
No major losers today
📊 Market Snapshot
Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,796 (▲0.18%)
Ethereum (ETH): $1,882 (▲0.61%)
XRP: $1.10 (▲0.56%)
Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,536 (▲0.51%)
NASDAQ 100: 29,075 (▲1.05%)
FTSE 100: 10,557 (▼0.06%)
Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.57% (▲0.37%)
Oil (WTI): $81 (▼0.50%)
Gold: $4,015 (▼0.09%)
Silver: $56.79 (▲1.57%)
Data as of: UK: 1:00 PM BST / US: 8:00 AM EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 9:00 PM JST
✅ 5 Things to Know
🖥️ Chips bounce back as Wall Street steadies
Semiconductors are leading a rebound to open the week after the worst stretch for tech in months. Last week the Nasdaq shed 2.9% and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index slid into a bear market, down more than 20% from its high, as traders bet the big cloud companies would rein in their spending on artificial intelligence. The fear was sharpened by a fresh wave of cheaper Chinese AI models, including Moonshot’s Kimi release, which raised the question of whether all that hardware is still needed. This morning the mood has flipped, with US futures higher and the chip names recovering some ground (Yahoo Finance).
The bounce amounts to a bet that last week’s panic went too far, but the proof does not come from the chipmakers. It comes from their customers. The hyperscalers that actually write the cheques report over the coming days, starting with Alphabet, and their capital-spending plans will confirm or deny the whole capex-cut thesis in one line of a press release. A market that fell on a guess now waits for the receipts, which is why a rebound built on positioning can reverse just as fast if the numbers disappoint (CNBC).
Sensei’s Insight: What matters this week is not whether chips can rally, it is whether the companies buying the chips keep spending. A bounce ahead of Alphabet is the market pre-paying for good news. If the capex guide holds, it earns the move. If it slips, the bear case gets its receipt.
🔎 Alphabet and Tesla report into a jittery market
Two of the market’s biggest names report on the same evening this week, the first time that has happened this cycle, and they arrive with the Fed locked in its pre-meeting quiet period. Alphabet is the clearest read on whether the enormous outlay on AI is turning into cloud and search growth. Its cloud backlog has nearly doubled to 462 billion dollars, cloud revenue is seen up about 67% to 22.8 billion, and its 2026 capital-spending guide of 180 to 190 billion sets the tone for the entire chip and data-centre chain (Yahoo Finance).
Tesla is the market’s favourite battleground stock, where deliveries, margins, and Elon Musk’s commentary on robotaxis can swing the whole growth complex. Analysts expect roughly 26.4 billion dollars in revenue, earnings near 54 cents a share, and automotive margins excluding credits a little above 18%, with its own capital budget lifted past 25 billion for AI infrastructure. With no economic data of note and the Fed silent, these two prints carry more weight than usual, and after last week’s chip scare they are the market’s first hard test of the AI trade (CNBC).
Sensei’s Insight: Alphabet and Tesla are two different bets wearing the same AI label. Alphabet is judged on whether its spending pays; Tesla on whether its promises do. The setup favours Alphabet, which has real cloud growth to show, while Tesla still trades on a robotaxi story it has yet to prove at scale.
🛢️ Oil holds near a one-month high as strikes reach a ninth night
Oil is holding near its highest in a month, with US crude around 82 dollars a barrel and Brent a few dollars above it, after US Central Command completed a ninth consecutive night of strikes on Iranian targets and President Trump warned that American forces would hit Iran’s infrastructure next week without a diplomatic breakthrough. Crude climbed more than 14% last week, when Kuwait said Iran had attacked a power and desalination plant, and it is clinging to those gains today. The one flicker of de-escalation is Iran’s release of a US citizen, which points to a narrow path away from all-out war (CNBC).
For retail investors the oil price is now doing the Fed’s arguing for it. Every dollar on crude feeds into petrol, shipping, and the inflation numbers the central bank watches, which is why a widening conflict lands as a rate story as much as a geopolitical one. The consultancy Rystad still sees a limited agreement as the most likely outcome, though it says its confidence has weakened. With the next Fed meeting at the end of the month, oil stuck near a one-month high makes it far harder for policymakers to signal anything but higher for longer.
Sensei’s Insight: Oil near a one-month high is not just a Gulf story, it is a Fed story. Cooling inflation was the market’s best case for patient rates, and crude holding firm into a tenth night quietly erases it. The single American released this weekend matters more than the ninth night of strikes, because only diplomacy takes the premium out.
🚀 SpaceX pushes its Starship launch back again
SpaceX has delayed the thirteenth test flight of its Starship rocket to later this week, its next attempt after a last-second abort on 16 July when several of the booster’s engines failed to ignite. The mission, when it flies, will deploy twenty of its next-generation Starlink V3 satellites for the first time, six of them fitted with cameras to watch the vehicle’s heat shield on re-entry. The company said it would swap two Raptor engines before the next try, and the abort wiped roughly 100 billion dollars off its market value in a single session (Yahoo Finance).
The delay matters more now that the rocket has a stock ticker attached. SpaceX shares have fallen about 38% from their post-listing high, slid to a record low last week during a six-session losing streak, and dropped below their 135 dollar float price, as repeated slips test patience with the most hyped debut of the year. Rivals Rocket Lab and AST SpaceMobile climbed as SpaceX fell. A clean flight later this week would be the operational proof the newly public shares need, while another scrub would sharpen questions about the timeline behind the valuation.
Sensei’s Insight: Before the listing a scrubbed launch was an engineering footnote. Now it is a share-price event: the stock has fallen six sessions straight on delays alone. That is the trade SpaceX made by going public, and the rocket must fly before the shares recover their story.
🥇 Gold clings to $4,000 as the Fed talks tough
Gold recaptured the 4,000 dollar mark this morning after spending the weekend just below it, a strikingly muted response given oil is breaking higher and Middle East strikes have run into a ninth night. In a normal risk scare bullion would be flying. Instead it is being held down by the same force weighing on everything else: the market now prices an 82% chance of a Fed rate hike by December, and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack has joined the officials arguing rates may need to go higher to tame inflation (Yahoo Finance).
The mechanism is simple and worth holding onto. Gold pays no interest, so when the yield on cash and bonds rises its appeal fades, and the 30-year Treasury yield is back above 5%. The oil spike that would normally send investors into gold is instead fuelling the rate-hike bets that punish it. That leaves bullion caught between two of its usual drivers pulling in opposite directions, and for now the rates side is winning. A decisive break of 4,000 either way would signal which story the market has decided to believe.
Sensei’s Insight: Gold flat during a widening war is the loudest signal in the market. It is telling you the Fed, not the Gulf, is in charge of prices right now. Watch the 4,000 line: hold it and the haven bid is alive, lose it and rates have won the argument outright.
Stories You Might Have Missed
₿ Crypto drifts as Washington stalls
Bitcoin is sitting just above 64,000 dollars and Ethereum near 1,870 as the crypto market waits on a Congress that keeps missing its own deadlines. A merged Senate version of the crypto market-structure bill, which would split oversight between the SEC and the CFTC, was tipped to appear around now but keeps slipping, with a bipartisan ethics provision emerging as the biggest sticking point. Traders have noticed: prediction-market odds of the bill passing this year have fallen to a record low. One firmly dated event does sit on the calendar this week, the token launch from the derivatives exchange GRVT, one of the few catalysts crypto traders have pencilled in (CoinDesk).
🏦 The ECB is the week’s only major rate call
With the Fed silenced by its blackout, the European Central Bank makes the week’s sole big central-bank decision, and it is widely expected to keep rates on hold after moving in June. The twist is oil: crude near a one-month high has revived a little talk of a hike, though the market still puts the odds near 20% and analysts suggest it would take Brent past 100 dollars to force the ECB’s hand. The real signal comes from President Lagarde’s press conference, where any shift in tone on growth or inflation can move the euro and, by extension, global rate expectations (Yahoo Finance).
🚗 Earnings season revs up with GM and Lockheed
The heavy reporting week begins tomorrow with two very different reads on the economy. General Motors reports before the open, where the focus falls on pricing, the electric-vehicle ramp, and any commentary on tariffs and costs, with consensus near 3.13 dollars a share on roughly 46 billion in revenue. Lockheed Martin follows, watched for its defence-order backlog and full-year guidance as governments keep spending on hardware, with consensus around 6.63 dollars on about 18.6 billion. Together they open a stretch that builds toward the megacap prints later in the week and offers the first broad look at how corporate America fared last quarter (CNBC).
🔍 Deep Dive: XRP breaks its year-long trendline
This week the deep dive goes to XRP, and the latest XRP Weekly is out now. XRP held near 1.09 dollars while the wider market fell about 4%, and yet the chart quietly did something it had not managed in a year: it closed above the bear market trendline that has capped it since last summer. The full read covers the four stories that actually moved XRP, the CLARITY Act now in a straight race against the August recess, the numbers, and the chart. Check it out:
📈 Chart of the Day
The chart to watch is XRP. This week’s Chart Watch tracks XRP closing above the year-long bear market trendline that has held it down since last summer, and the momentum it now needs to confirm the break. The full breakdown and the levels I am watching are in this week’s XRP Weekly.
🗓️ The Week Ahead
The full calendar for the week is out. It is one of the quietest data weeks of the summer with the Fed in its blackout, so the noise comes from earnings and the ECB. Alphabet and Tesla report on the same evening, the European Central Bank makes the week’s only major rate call, and the flash business surveys give the first real-time read on the July economy. Every dated event, graded and timed in UK and ET, is in this week’s Week Ahead:
The Week Ahead - July 20–25
This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).
This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).