Financial Market News | Saturday Review

Last Saturday closed with the AI buildout sending bills to every category that matters. This week took those bills and stress-tested them at every layer of the market.

The chip correction deepened before it recovered. Iran broke the ceasefire in the middle of the week. The Fed released split minutes. SK Hynix priced the second-largest foreign U.S. listing ever. Software cracked on a single downgrade. And China's memory champion filed a $4.3 billion IPO that reshapes the incumbent oligopoly.

The market did not reject the AI trade. It began pricing each layer differently.

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The week opened with chips already under pressure. By Wednesday, 69 percent of S&P 500 tech stocks were down over 20 percent from 52-week highs. Micron (MU) down 25 percent. Broadcom (AVGO) down 21 percent. Marvell (MRVL) down 30 percent. Two-thirds of tech was in bear market territory by strict definition.

Then Thursday brought the reversal. The Nasdaq gained 1.3 percent. The PHLX Semiconductor Index surged over 3 percent. SK Hynix priced its ADR seven times oversubscribed at nearly $25 billion. Total demand hit $350 billion per Bloomberg. Sovereign wealth funds and dedicated AI funds anchored the book.

Friday's debut set the mark. SK Hynix became the second-largest foreign U.S. listing ever, behind only Alibaba's 2014 debut.

The Takeaway

The offering showed that institutional demand remained deep despite the correction. It did not settle every valuation question. But it demonstrated that large pools of capital still viewed weakness as an entry point. Hardware demand passed the test.

Iran hit three ships in Hormuz on Tuesday. The U.S. revoked Iran's oil sales waiver the same day. Trump launched strikes on Iranian coastal sites Tuesday evening. Then at the NATO summit Wednesday he declared the ceasefire "over."

WTI surged over 5 percent. The Dow dropped nearly 600 points. Then Trump said Iran called seeking a deal. WTI eased back near $72 by Friday.

Qatar paused its Ras Laffan LNG ramp-up after the Al Rekayyat tanker attack. Eleven empty LNG vessels sit outside the facility. Qatar supplied 20 percent of world LNG last year. European gas crossed 50 euros per megawatt-hour for the first time since the June ceasefire.

The Takeaway

The oil and gas market repriced the geopolitical premium in 48 hours in both directions. Every inflation print through September will now be read through an Iran risk premium that was largely absent a week ago. Energy stability did not pass the test.

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The FOMC minutes dropped Wednesday and revealed a divided committee. Some officials saw room for lower rates if inflation cools. Others expected higher rates if pressures persist. A few members made the case for a June hike. The dot plot narrowly tilts to one hike this year.

Fed hike odds jumped from 27 percent Tuesday to nearly 36 percent Wednesday. The 10-year Treasury closed at 4.567 percent, the highest since May 22.

Then Warsh released his task force membership Thursday. Marc Andreessen on productivity and jobs. Doug McMillon leading the data task force with Harvard's Raj Chetty. Mervyn King on communications. Raghuram Rajan on balance sheet policy. Greg Mankiw on inflation frameworks.

The Takeaway

The minutes exposed the current division. The task force showed how Warsh intends to resolve it. The review will not change the July decision. But it could reshape the data, communication, and productivity assumptions behind every decision in 2027. The Fed framework remains unresolved.

KeyBanc downgraded Salesforce (CRM) Thursday to Sector Weight from Overweight and removed the price target. Analyst Jackson Ader cited weak Agentforce customer feedback. His note said customer data is "not in order to do meaningful AI work" and that Agentforce "just isn't there" as a product.

Salesforce fell 2.6 percent to $162.29. IBM (IBM) and Palantir (PLTR) dropped with it. The stock is down 37 percent this year.

The equal-weight S&P 500 pulled ahead of the cap-weight version year-to-date. That is the rotation story in one number. Health care, financials, and industrials are leading the S&P 500 gainers since the June 2 peak. Big Tech is lagging.

The Takeaway

The rotation is not simply defensive. Investors are rewarding sectors whose earnings are visible now over software companies still waiting for AI adoption to catch up with valuations. That question extends to every enterprise software company reporting Q2 earnings in the next four weeks. Software adoption disappointed.

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AI-related bond issuance hit $250 billion year to date. That compares to $92 billion for all of 2025. Amazon (AMZN) alone raised $25 billion in a single package Tuesday. Meta (META), Nvidia (NVDA), Oracle (ORCL), and SpaceX (SPCX) each raised $25 billion since January.

The secondary market started flashing warnings. SpaceX 30-year bonds traded above T+200 after pricing at T+175. That is a 5 percent loss in two weeks for buyers at issuance. Meta 2056 bonds are 13 basis points wide of April pricing. Core Scientific (CORZ), Meridian Arc, and Tract Capital traded below par this week.

TeraWulf (WULF) is preparing $3.5 billion in debt for its Anthropic-leased Kentucky data center. A year ago TeraWulf was a bitcoin miner. Now it is issuing project debt anchored by Anthropic's 20-year lease.

The Takeaway

The two-tier credit market is now visible in secondary trading. Credit markets are no longer treating all AI infrastructure as one trade. Hyperscaler balance sheets still clear. Project-level and neocloud risk is beginning to price separately. That is the first real capital-stack distinction of the cycle. Credit began discriminating.

ChangXin Memory Technologies filed for the largest China IPO of 2026 next week as CXMT Corp. Revenue grew sevenfold in the first half. The company plans to double output this year using refurbished ASML machines to work around U.S. export controls.

CXMT is now the fourth-largest global memory chip supplier. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron began mass-producing HBM3E two years ago. CXMT targets HBM3E production by the end of this year. Apple (AAPL) has considered buying CXMT chips despite the Pentagon blacklist.

The framework matters more than the timing. Chinese domestic AI demand from Alibaba (BABA), Baidu (BIDU), and ByteDance can now be met with domestic supply.

The Takeaway

SK Hynix priced its historic listing the same week China's memory champion filed for its own IPO. The two events are connected. That forces investors to begin pricing a domestic Chinese supply path into an industry previously modeled as a durable three-company oligopoly. Memory competition widened.

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The AI trade survived the week. It no longer trades as a single idea.

Chips found buyers at record scale. Software lost confidence on a single downgrade. Credit began drawing lines between hyperscalers and project debt. Energy risk returned in 48 hours. The Fed exposed its division and named its review team. And China challenged one of the industry's most protected profit pools.

The infrastructure absorbed the stress. The economics underneath it became more selective.

CXMT prices its IPO next week. Q2 earnings season begins with the big banks Tuesday. The Fed meets July 28-29. Every layer gets tested again.