Morning Forecast: Thursday 16 July

SpaceX drops below its IPO price for the first time as TSMC’s AI numbers break records and Apple breaks out.

Jul 16, 2026

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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance

🖥️ Record chips, nervous market: TSMC’s profit jumped 77% to a record on AI demand, yet chip stocks slid and its own shares dipped.
🍎 Apple breaks its record: an approval to launch iPhone AI in China lifted Apple to an all-time high, up 4% to $327.50.
🚀 SpaceX cracks its floor: the stock fell below its $135 IPO price for the first time, erasing the whole post-listing pop.
📉 Prices cool, Fed won’t budge: wholesale prices fell 0.3% in June, the second cool read this week, yet Warsh signalled no rush to cut.
🎬 Netflix reports in a hole: the streamer reports after the bell tonight with its stock down 43% from last summer’s high.
🏦 Morgan Stanley caps the record run: record revenue of $21.3bn and a 15% dividend hike closed a blowout quarter for the big banks.
🛢️ Oil holds a one-month high: Brent sat near $85 and WTI near $80, steady after fresh US strikes and the Iran port blockade.
₿ Bitcoin waits on Washington: BTC held near $63,000 as the CLARITY Act’s odds slipped to 43% before tomorrow’s New York hearing.
🏥 UnitedHealth faces its test: the insurer reports before the open, with Wall Street looking for earnings up 19% after a rough stretch.

🧠 One Big Thing

The AI trade is running on a split screen. TSMC just grew profit 77% to a record and raised its full-year guidance, Apple hit an all-time high on its China AI approval, and ASML lifted its outlook a day earlier. The demand is not the problem. Yet chips sold off, South Korea’s Kospi fell 7%, and SpaceX dropped below its IPO price. What is cracking is the willingness to pay any multiple for that growth while the Fed stays on hold. Fundamentals up, valuations down. Watch whether TSMC’s raised guidance steadies the group, and Netflix tonight as the next test of whether beats still get paid.

⚖️ Fear & Greed

📉 The Number That Matters

77%

TSMC’s second-quarter net profit jumped 77% to a record on surging AI demand, and still its shares slipped in premarket trade as the wider chip complex sold off.

⚔️ Winners vs Losers

Winners

ATAI 0.00%↑: +34.14% AtaiBeckley shares surged on a report that Eli Lilly is in advanced talks to acquire the psychedelic drug developer, with a deal potentially announced within days.
GHRS 0.00%↑: +15.16% GH Research climbed on read-through from the reported Lilly interest in AtaiBeckley and newly finalized FDA guidance for psychedelic drug trials, both of which lifted sentiment across psychedelic depression developers.
UNH 0.00%↑: +6.65% UnitedHealth Group jumped after reporting better than expected second quarter results and raising its full-year earnings guidance, easing concerns about the medical cost pressures that had weighed on the managed care sector.

Losers

ARI 0.00%↑ -35.63% Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance fell in a mechanical move as the stock traded ex-dividend for a $3.75 per share distribution, largely a return of capital, that the company is paying as part of its board-approved plan to liquidate and wind down the business.
ASTS 0.00%↑ 9.97% AST SpaceMobile dropped after announcing a $1 billion convertible senior notes offering, reviving investor concerns about shareholder dilution.
SNDK 0.00%↑ 6.89% Sandisk led a broad memory and storage selloff alongside Western Digital and SK hynix, as a Korean brokerage estimate pointing to slower HBM4 shipments at SK hynix triggered profit-taking across a sector that had run up sharply this year.

📊 Market Snapshot

Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $64,226 ▼0.74%
Ethereum (ETH): $1,885 ▼1.62%
XRP: $1.11 ▼0.40%

Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,598 ▼0.22%
NASDAQ 100: 29,465 ▼0.77%
FTSE 100: 10,469 ▼0.05%

Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.57% ▲0.48%
Oil (WTI): $79 ▼1.08%
Gold: $4,039 ▼0.54%
Silver: $56.71 ▼1.95%

Data as of: UK: 12:45 BST / US: 07:45 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 20:45 JST

✅ 5 Things to Know

🖥️ TSMC posts a record, but the chip trade still slips

TSMC, the Taiwan company that makes the most advanced chips for Nvidia, Apple and much of the industry, reported record second-quarter results before the open. Revenue reached $40.2 billion, up 33.7% on a year earlier and at the top of its own guidance, while net profit surged 77% to a record as high-performance computing, the AI category, grew to 66% of sales. Gross margin held at a rich 67.7%. Management raised its 2026 revenue-growth forecast to above 40% and guided third-quarter sales as high as $45.8 billion, roughly 37% more than a year ago (Yahoo Finance).

The report is the clearest read yet that AI hardware demand is still accelerating rather than cooling, and it follows ASML’s raised guidance a day earlier. Yet the shares dipped in premarket trade and the wider chip complex fell, with Nvidia, AMD, Micron and Broadcom all lower and South Korea’s Kospi sliding 7% in a chip-led rout (CNBC). The distance between spectacular numbers and a nervous tape is the whole story: after a long run, investors are questioning the price of the AI trade even as its fundamentals keep beating.

Sensei’s Insight: When a company grows profit 77% and the stock still falls, the market has stopped arguing about demand and started arguing about what that demand is worth with the Fed on hold. That is a valuation question, and one earnings beat will not settle it.

🍎 Apple hits a record high on its China AI breakthrough

Apple closed at an all-time high of $327.50, up about 4%, after China’s cyberspace regulator cleared Apple Intelligence, its on-device AI service, for the mainland. Alibaba’s Qwen model will power the features, with Baidu also involved, ending a gap that had left Apple Intelligence unavailable in Apple’s second-biggest market since the 2024 launch. The approval landed alongside a reported 24% jump in Apple’s China shipments last quarter, a sign the local slump that has dogged it may be turning (CNBC). Regulators set no launch date.

China has been Apple’s problem child for two years, with buyers drifting to Huawei and Xiaomi partly because the iPhone could not match the AI features rivals were already selling. Clearing that block matters more for the story than for any single quarter: it removes an overhang ahead of Apple’s own earnings, and it hands Alibaba a marquee AI customer, which is why Chinese tech names moved on the news too. The next catalyst is Apple’s results and any firm date for the China rollout.

Sensei’s Insight: The record was not really about one quarter of shipments. It was about removing the one thing the bears kept pointing at, a China business with no AI answer. That box is now ticked, and the question turns to how fast Apple can convert approval into sales.

🚀 SpaceX slips below its IPO price for the first time

SpaceX fell below its $135 listing price for the first time since last month’s record float, dropping as much as 2.9% to $132.15 before closing at $135.27, a whisker above the line. The debut raised a record $86 billion and briefly made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, and the stock surged nearly 50% in its first three days. It has since handed back close to a quarter of its value, and its market capitalisation has fallen to about $1.75 trillion from a post-listing peak near $2.6 trillion (CNBC).

The unwind is partly profit-taking after an overheated debut, but it also tracks the same nerves showing up in chips: worry about debt-funded AI spending and what a Fed that will not cut does to richly priced growth stocks. SpaceX has a Starship launch ahead, which could steady sentiment, but the round trip back toward the offer price is a reminder that even the most hyped listing of the year answers to the same discount rate as everything else. The IPO line is now the level the market is watching.

Sensei’s Insight: An IPO price is a psychological line, and the first close below it tends to shake out the momentum buyers who only ever wanted the pop. Whether $135 now acts as support or as a ceiling will say more about the mood than any single session does.

📉 Wholesale prices fall, but the new Fed chair won’t call it

Wholesale prices fell 0.3% in June, the first monthly drop since August 2025 and a sharp miss against forecasts for no change, as energy sank 6.4% and petrol prices tumbled 12%. The producer price index is the wholesale read that feeds into what shoppers eventually pay, and its cooling follows the soft consumer prices reported earlier in the week, so both of the week’s big inflation gauges came in below expectations. Core wholesale prices, which strip out food and energy, rose a mild 0.2% (CNBC).

On paper that is exactly the disinflation markets wanted before the Fed meets on 28 to 29 July. Yet Kevin Warsh used his first Senate testimony as chair to say the improvement is “not mission accomplished” and gave no hint of a cut, keeping the door open to holding rates high (CNBC). The tension between cooling data and an unmoved Fed is why good news is not lifting the most stretched stocks. Today’s June retail sales and weekly jobless claims, both due at 1:30pm BST / 8:30am ET, are the next test of whether the consumer forces the Fed’s hand.

Sensei’s Insight: Two cool inflation prints in one week would normally be a green light. It is not, because Warsh has made clear the bar is a trend, not a pair of readings flattered by falling energy. Watch the core, not the headline, and watch whether he softens in two weeks.

🎬 Netflix reports tonight with its stock deep in a hole

Netflix reports second-quarter results after the US close tonight (9:01pm BST / 4:01pm ET), and it does so with the shares down about 43% from last summer’s high and roughly 19% lower this year. Wall Street expects revenue of $12.58 billion, up nearly 14% on a year earlier, with earnings near $0.79 a share. The debate is less about the top line than about engagement and advertising: investors want to see the ad business scaling toward $3 billion and membership pushing past 325 million (Yahoo Finance).

The bar is awkward. Netflix has warned that this quarter carries the year’s biggest jump in content costs, pushing its operating margin down to about 32.6% from 34.1% a year earlier before it recovers later in 2026. After a long slide, the stock needs the numbers to reset the narrative from an engagement worry into an advertising growth story. A clean beat with firm ad guidance could end the selloff; a soft subscriber or margin print would confirm the bears. It is the first big consumer-tech read of the season.

Sensei’s Insight: A stock down 43% into its own earnings has priced in plenty of disappointment already, which cuts both ways. The reaction will hinge on advertising and margins, not subscriber headlines, because that is where the growth story now has to prove itself.

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