“Solving the last 2%.” That’s the line AT&T’s CEO keeps reaching for whenever satellite phone service comes up, the idea being it’s a nice-to-have for people who lose signal on a hiking trail, not a real threat to the business. His stock didn’t get the memo this week. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile shed a combined $36 billion in market value after SpaceX agreed to spend $8 billion on spectrum that could let Starlink compete directly for your phone plan, not just your backup coverage. That was the headline-grabber, but it wasn’t the only thing moving markets.

The Fed released minutes showing officials still lean toward one more rate hike this year, Delta missed earnings and slashed its profit outlook on fuel costs, and an AI revenue scare hit stocks Thursday before fading by Friday. Through all of it, the big indexes still finished the week higher. Small caps didn’t.

📊 What’s happening

SpaceX is buying nationwide low-band spectrum, the 800 MHz band, from an investment firm called Grain Management, in a deal first reported by the Wall Street Journal and still waiting on FCC sign-off. The number that matters here is $8 billion in cash. Low-band spectrum travels farther and gets through walls better than the frequencies Starlink currently uses for satellite internet, which is exactly the gap SpaceX needs to close before satellite-to-phone service works indoors, not just in open fields. SpaceX says most existing phones should work with the new band without any hardware changes, though it’s unclear whether recent iPhones make the cut.

The market reaction was blunt. AT&T fell more than 6%, Verizon dropped over 7%, and T-Mobile slid nearly 7% as investors priced in a real competitive threat to the subscription business that funds those companies’ dividends. SpaceX stock rose on the news. The carriers’ CEOs pushed back hard: Verizon’s chief argued that physics will keep satellite from matching ground-based networks in cities and suburbs, while AT&T’s Stankey kept circling back to that “last 2%” line. Maybe they’re right. Satellite-to-phone is still a young technology, and SpaceX’s pitch has a habit of arriving a little ahead of what it can actually deliver at scale.

Away from telecom, the bigger macro story was the Fed. Minutes from the September meeting, where the Fed raised rates to 3.75%–4.00% in its first hike since 2023, showed most officials still expect to hike again before year-end to fight inflation that’s been running hot on tariffs and the oil shock from the Iran conflict. Futures markets now put the odds of a hike at the late-October meeting around 17%, but close to 70% for December. The 10-year Treasury yield sits near 5.25%, a 24-year high.

Delta kicked off earnings season Friday with a miss: adjusted profit of $1.72 a share against an expected $1.82, and full-year guidance cut from $6.50–$7.50 to $5.10–$5.60. The culprit was fuel, up 62% year-over-year and roughly $500 million above what Delta had guided to back in July.

Fuel keeps being the villain of this earnings season.

The one bright spot: Delta’s CFO said fare increases from earlier this year are sticking and demand hasn’t cracked.

AI had its own mini-scare. A Financial Times report Thursday pegged OpenAI’s actual annualized revenue run rate at around $50 billion in September, well below the $70 billion figure that had been circulating, and chip and AI infrastructure stocks wobbled on it. Bloomberg reported Friday that OpenAI still expects to hit $70 billion by year-end, and tech stocks mostly recovered the ground they lost.

For the week: the Dow gained 1.15%, the S&P 500 rose 0.95%, and the Nasdaq eked out 0.19%. The Russell 2000, loaded with smaller, more debt-dependent companies, fell 0.91% — the only major index in the red. Consumer sentiment slipped to a five-month low of 46.3 on cost-of-living complaints tied to gas prices and tariffs, gold pushed to a fresh record above $4,200 an ounce, and oil stayed elevated on both the Iran standoff and a hurricane that knocked out more than 60% of Gulf of America oil output for a few days.

🧩 Why it matters

Here’s the part that doesn’t add up at first glance: stocks near record highs, and borrowing costs at a 24-year high, at the same time. Usually one of those backs off. What’s actually happening is a split market. Large-cap indexes are being carried by a handful of companies with enough cash and pricing power that a 5.25% Treasury yield barely touches them, while smaller, more leveraged companies in the Russell 2000 are getting squeezed by exactly the financing costs the big names can shrug off. That gap is worth watching, because it tends to widen before it narrows.

The telecom story is a reminder that “safe,” dividend-paying utility-style stocks aren’t immune to disruption just because they’ve been boring for twenty years. I’ll say the quiet part out loud: I don’t think satellite phones replace cell towers anytime soon, but I also don’t love that three CEOs reached for nearly identical reassurances on the same day. That’s the kind of unanimous confidence that sometimes ages fine, and sometimes ages like Blockbuster’s.

And the Fed’s bind is the same one it’s been in for weeks: inflation from tariffs and oil hasn’t gone away, but the labor market has softened enough that another hike right now risks overcorrecting. December is when that tension gets resolved one way or the other.

💡 Opportunity

If you already hold AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile for the dividend, this week’s drop doesn’t change the underlying business overnight. The carriers’ argument about physics and indoor coverage is a real one, not just spin, and satellite-to-phone at true nationwide scale is still probably years away. That said, a genuine new competitor with $8 billion to spend and a direct line to launch its own satellites is not nothing, so this isn’t a moment to add to the position purely because it’s cheaper than it was Wednesday.

Airlines are trickier. Delta’s CFO insisting demand “hasn’t cracked” despite higher fares is a genuinely useful data point if you’re deciding between airline stocks: carriers with pricing power (premium cabins, loyalty programs, co-branded credit cards) are better positioned to pass fuel costs through than carriers competing purely on the cheapest seat.

Gold at a record high isn’t a new idea at this point, but if you’ve been holding some as a hedge against exactly this kind of environment, rates uncertain, inflation sticky, geopolitics ugly, this is the week it earned its place in the portfolio. And with December hike odds sitting near 70%, there’s less urgency to lock in today’s savings-account and CD rates than there was a few months ago, since the Fed clearly isn’t finished yet.

🎯 Bottom line

Three phone companies lost $36 billion in market value this week to a satellite company that didn’t exist as a publicly traded stock a year ago. That’s the kind of shift that’s supposed to take years, not forty-eight hours.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Twenty-nine thousand. That’s how many jobs the US economy added in September, against forecasts for something closer to 90,000. By almost any normal reading, that’s a bad number. It also happened to be exactly what Wall Street wanted to hear this week. The S&P 500 climbed, the Nasdaq hit a fresh intraday record, and Nvidia crossed a market cap that still sounds made up. Tesla jumped on blowout delivery figures, Nike slid on a weak quarter and more layoffs, and bond traders spent the week tearing up their bets on an October rate hike. None of it makes much sense until you remember one thing: right now, bad economic news is good news for stocks, because it makes the Fed less likely to raise rates. That was apparently all anyone needed to hear.

📉 What’s happening

The Labor Department’s September jobs report was the week’s main event, even though it landed quietly on a Friday morning. Employers added just 29,000 jobs, badly missing forecasts for roughly 90,000, and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1%. Wage growth held up okay — private-sector base pay rose 3.2% over the past year — which is a small silver lining next to a headline number this weak.

Economist Mohamed El-Erian put it plainly: labor demand is weak across the board, with the demand side “flashing yellow.” Worth knowing: economists reckon the US now needs to add something close to zero jobs a month just to keep the unemployment rate flat, down from roughly 200,000 a decade ago, mostly because of slower population growth and tighter immigration policy. So 29,000 is weak, just not quite as catastrophic as the same number would’ve been ten years ago.

Markets didn’t dwell on the nuance. Bond traders took one look at the report and slashed the odds of an October rate hike from 64% the week before to somewhere around 16% to 20%. The 10-year Treasury yield dropped to 5.18%. The S&P 500 finished the week up 0.73%, the Nasdaq gained 1.19% and touched a fresh intraday record, and the Dow eked out a 0.49% weekly gain after a strong Friday bounce papered over losses earlier in the week.

Nvidia did a lot of the heavy lifting. Shares hit an intraday high of $237.87, pushing the company’s market cap to about $5.72 trillion. That’s a level that would’ve sounded made up a couple of years ago. Tesla had a good week too: third-quarter deliveries of 486,532 vehicles beat estimates, helped along by buyers rushing to lock in the $7,500 federal EV tax credit before it expired. The stock rose roughly 4% on the news, though a few analysts are already warning that pulling forward a quarter’s worth of demand usually means a quieter quarter to follow.

Not everyone had a good week. Nike fell about 6% after hours on weak numbers and a fresh round of layoffs, 1,400 jobs this time, the company’s fourth straight year of cuts. The stock is down more than 70% from its 2021 peak. The honest explanation has less to do with culture-war headlines, which get most of the attention, than with Nike spending years over-indexing on direct-to-consumer sales and letting wholesale partners like Foot Locker drift, just as competitors such as On, Hoka and New Balance picked up the slack. Lululemon, On and Deckers all slipped in sympathy.

🧠 Why it matters

A weak jobs report sending stocks higher only makes sense within the specific logic markets have settled into over the past year: slower hiring gives the Fed room to leave rates alone, and no new hikes make future profits worth more today. That trade has worked for a while now, and it worked again this week.

It’s worth sitting with the uncomfortable part, though. A labor market that’s genuinely cooling isn’t something to cheer, even if your portfolio likes it. Breakeven job growth, the bare minimum needed just to keep the unemployment rate from rising, has fallen close to zero because fewer people are entering the workforce. That’s partly demographics and partly policy, and it means a “soft” number doesn’t automatically mean “fine.” If hiring keeps sliding and the Fed keeps holding off because the data looks murky rather than because the economy looks healthy, the gap between what Wall Street is celebrating and what workers are feeling could widen before it closes.

There’s a valuation angle too. Nvidia at $5.7 trillion and a record Nasdaq aren’t cheap by any measure, and a market pricing in close to zero rate hikes has very little room for error if inflation data firms up in the next few months.

💰 Opportunity

If you’ve been waiting for a sign that rate hikes are done for the year, this week gave you one, though “done” is doing some work there, since the Fed could still change its mind if inflation surprises to the upside. For anyone carrying a variable-rate loan, that’s modestly good news. For savers, it’s a nudge that the window on 4%-plus savings accounts and CDs may start closing, so it’s worth locking in a rate if you’ve been putting it off.

The Tesla delivery pop is a good reminder to read earnings-season wins skeptically. A quarter boosted by a tax credit deadline is borrowed demand, not new demand, and the next quarter’s numbers will tell you how much of this was pulled forward versus genuinely new.

Nike is the more interesting long-term question. The stock’s cheap relative to its own history after a 70% drawdown, and retail turnarounds do happen. But four years of consecutive layoffs is a long time to wait for “Win Now” to actually start working, and this isn’t a stock to buy just because it’s already down a lot.

🧭 Bottom line

Stocks had a genuinely good week off the back of a genuinely bad jobs number, and that’s not really a contradiction anymore. It’s just how this market works right now. Twenty-nine thousand new jobs is a number that should probably worry anyone outside the stock market more than it worried anyone inside it this week.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

October’s picks for both SG Dividends and US Growth are live. Here’s how September performed.

• US Growth: 9.4%

• SG Dividends: -1.7%

US Growth

SG Dividends

See the Sep picks

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

The 10-year Treasury yield spent this week climbing to levels we haven’t seen since 2007, and the 30-year hit a mark last touched back in 2004. That’s the kind of move that usually sends stocks running for cover. Instead, the S&P 500 just notched its first winning week in three and sits close to the record high it set last month.

Meta had one of its best weeks in years thanks to an AI assistant that’s apparently more popular than ChatGPT right now. Costco pulled in nearly $94 billion in quarterly sales. Oil prices actually fell. It was a strange, split-personality week: bond investors are nervous, stock investors are not, and somehow both of them are looking at the same headlines. Here’s what actually happened, and why the bond market might be telling you something the stock market isn’t ready to hear yet.

📊 What’s happening

Let’s start with the thing that mattered most this week: bonds got hammered, and yields went up hard. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed to roughly 5.2%, its highest level since 2007. The 30-year went even further, touching 5.44%, a mark it hasn’t hit since 2004. That’s the government’s own borrowing cost, and when it rises this fast, it drags almost every other interest rate up with it.

Why the sudden spike? A few things piled up at once. Business activity surveys showed the economy running hot in September, which sounds like good news until you realize it also gives inflation more fuel. A University of Michigan survey found consumers now expect inflation to run at 4.6% over the next year, up from 4% just a month earlier. A recent Treasury auction also came in weak, meaning the government had to offer higher yields just to find buyers. Add it up, and traders are now pricing in better-than-even odds the Fed hikes rates again at both its October and December meetings, on the heels of the increase it just delivered last week.

Here’s the part that should’ve spooked the stock market and mostly didn’t. The S&P 500 gained roughly 2% this week, its best stretch in almost a month, and it’s still hovering near the all-time high it hit in August. The Nasdaq did even better, up around 2.3%, and the Dow rallied hard on Friday, jumping more than 470 points in a single session. Chipmakers led the charge, with Nvidia, Broadcom, and Micron all climbing as the semiconductor ETFs SMH and SOXX each rose about 1.4%.

A big piece of that strength has a name: Muse. Meta launched its new AI assistant on September 8th, and it’s since racked up 2.5 million downloads and briefly knocked ChatGPT off the top of the app store charts. Meta’s stock jumped as much as 11% in a single day on the news and is up something like 36% since launch. The app books tickets, handles shopping, and answers messages, but the real prize for Meta isn’t the subscription fee. It’s the data. Every time you tell Muse what you want to buy, Meta learns something it can sell to advertisers, and against $227 billion in annual ad revenue, even a tiny improvement there adds up to billions.

Costco also reported earnings this week, and the headline numbers looked great: $93.9 billion in quarterly revenue, up 11.2%, and earnings per share of $6.75, beating estimates. Dig one layer down, though, and about $0.15 of that per-share number came from a one-time tariff refund, so the underlying growth was closer to 12% than the 15% the headline suggested. The stock barely moved on the news. Investors also noticed the company’s membership renewal rate slipped slightly to 89.8%, which matters because membership fees make up roughly two-thirds of Costco’s profit.

Elsewhere, oil prices actually eased this week, with U.S. crude falling to around $92 a barrel, after Iran floated a proposal aimed at de-escalating tensions that have kept the region on edge. Chinese President Xi Jinping made a state visit to the White House, with a dinner that reportedly included Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Elon Musk among the guests, a small but symbolic sign that trade tensions might be cooling a notch.

🤔 Why it matters

The bond story is the one to actually pay attention to, even if stocks aren’t panicking about it yet. When long-term yields rise this fast, borrowing gets more expensive for everyone, not just the government. Average 30-year mortgage rates have already pushed back above 7%, and business loans are getting pricier too. That’s a slow-moving squeeze, but it’s a real one.

It also puts the Fed in an awkward spot. It just raised rates last week to fight inflation, and the bond market is essentially saying that wasn’t enough. Rising inflation expectations are tricky because they can become self-fulfilling: if people believe prices are going up, they buy sooner rather than later, which pushes prices up faster, which confirms the fear. That’s the loop the Fed is trying to break, and this week’s data suggests it hasn’t yet.

So why are stocks fine with all this? Mostly because earnings are still strong enough to offset the higher-rate pain, at least for now. As one analyst put it this week, corporate profits are holding up the market’s floor, while policy and geopolitical noise are building its ceiling. Meta’s Muse launch is a genuine, fresh growth story in a market that’s been hunting for one beyond the usual AI infrastructure names. Costco’s numbers, tariff refund aside, still show a consumer that’s spending. Chipmakers rallying tells you the AI trade isn’t dead. But valuations for a lot of these names are stretched, and higher yields make expensive stocks more vulnerable, since investors can now get a safer 5%-plus return just from holding a Treasury bond.

💡 Opportunity

If you’re carrying a variable-rate loan or eyeing a big purchase on credit, this week’s yield spike is a nudge to act rather than wait. Rates aren’t dropping anytime soon if the bond market’s current mood holds, and every month you wait for “lower rates” is a month you’re paying today’s higher ones.

If you’re a saver, though, this is actually a decent moment. With short-term yields still elevated and some savings accounts and CDs paying north of 4%, parking cash you don’t need right away isn’t the worst move while everyone else argues over where rates go next.

Watch how AI-adjacent stocks handle higher yields from here. Meta’s Muse story is a reminder that real product traction, not just spending announcements, can still move a stock double digits in a day. But richly valued names, Costco at roughly 40 times forward earnings is a good example, need more than a decent quarter to justify the price tag. A beat that’s partly a one-time item won’t cut it.

Keep an eye on oil and diesel if you’re exposed to transportation, shipping, or retail margins. This week’s dip on Iran diplomacy news was welcome, but that story has swung both ways all year, and a reversal would hit everyday costs before you’d notice it in the headlines.

🎯 Bottom line

The real story this week wasn’t the stock market’s gains, it was the bond market’s warning. Treasury yields at levels last seen in 2007 and 2004 are the market’s way of saying it’s not convinced last week’s rate hike solved the inflation problem, and it’s pricing in more hikes to come. Stocks found a way to shrug that off this week, helped by a genuinely exciting product launch at Meta, solid if slightly padded numbers from Costco, and a welcome break in oil prices. That combination can hold for a while. It can’t hold forever if yields keep climbing at this pace. Keep your eyes on the 10-year more than the S&P 500 over the next few weeks. It’s telling you more about where things are headed.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Remember last week, when we told you the Fed’s next move was basically a coin flip? Well, we have an answer, and it’s not the one most people were betting on back in August. On Wednesday, the Fed raised interest rates for the first time in three years. Two days earlier, some of the biggest names in AI stood up and said, essentially, “maybe we should slow down,” and chip stocks got hammered for it.

Oil stayed parked above $100 a barrel. The 10-year Treasury yield brushed up against 5%, a level it hasn’t touched in years. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Warren Buffett quietly handed over the keys to Berkshire Hathaway for good. It was a weird week to be an investor. A lot happened, and yet the S&P 500 ended up basically flat. Here’s what actually moved the needle, and why the calm on the surface is hiding more turbulence underneath.

📊 What’s happening

Let’s start with the main event. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point, pushing the target range to 3.75%-4.00%. It’s the first hike since 2023, and it flips the script on a debate that had dominated markets since late summer. Every member of the committee voted for it. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh didn’t sugarcoat why: “The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long,” he said, adding that this summer’s price data “do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved.” The Fed’s own projections now show most officials expecting one more hike before the year is out.

The timing was almost cruel. That same morning, August retail sales came in hot, up 1.2%, easily beating what economists expected. Strong spending is normally good news. But paired with a hawkish Fed and inflation that won’t cooperate, it read instead as evidence that the economy has too much momentum for rates to come down anytime soon. Markets wobbled on the news, found their footing Thursday, then slipped again Friday as bond yields kept climbing. By the end of the week, the 10-year Treasury yield was sitting right around 5%, its highest point in years, and the 2-year and 3-year both hit fresh 52-week highs. The average 30-year mortgage rate now sits at 6.76%. None of that shows up on a stock ticker, but it shows up on everyone’s monthly bill.

Then there’s the AI story, which started even before the Fed met. On Monday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay called “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing that AI labs should deliberately slow down how fast they build more powerful models. OpenAI’s Sam Altman backed him, and Elon Musk chimed in too, saying flatly that “Dario is right.” That’s not regulators or skeptics talking. It’s the people actually building the technology, and that’s what spooked a market that’s spent two years pricing in endless AI spending. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell nearly 6% that Monday alone, with Nvidia down about 3.4%, Intel down 5.6%, and Micron off 7%. Chip stocks clawed back some of that ground by Friday, but the week left investors wondering whether the AI capex machine actually has a ceiling.

Put it all together and the week’s headline numbers look almost boring next to what drove them. The S&P 500 finished basically flat, down just 0.1%. Under the hood, though, it was messier: the Dow fell 1.7%, its worst week since March, dragged down by cyclical and small-cap names that have now declined for five straight weeks, while the Nasdaq gained 0.7% on that late-week bounce in tech and semiconductors. Oil held above $100 a barrel most of the week on the still-unresolved Middle East standoff we covered last week, and diesel hit a fresh record of $6.29 a gallon, up a staggering 68% from a year ago.

A few other things worth knowing: Netflix got downgraded on worries about its content lineup. Volkswagen slashed its profit forecast, blaming a tough Chinese market and restructuring costs. Apple’s new iPhone 18 hit stores with what early surveys call strong upgrade demand. Crypto-linked stocks jumped after the SEC offered more clarity on trading tokenized securities. And on a quieter note, drugmaker Xenon Pharmaceuticals lost 29% after pausing a late-stage epilepsy trial. Oh, and Warren Buffett, 96, officially stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman, becoming chairman emeritus. His son Howard now holds the title, while Greg Abel continues running the company day to day.

🤔 Why it matters

A rate hike after years of cut talk is a bigger deal than the market’s muted reaction suggests. Higher rates mean higher borrowing costs everywhere: mortgages, car loans, business credit lines. Those costs usually take months to fully bite. The fact that the Fed felt it had to hike at all, even with growth cooling in other parts of the economy, tells you inflation has become the priority over everything else. That’s a real shift from the “cuts are coming” narrative that dominated most of this year.

The retail sales beat makes the Fed’s job harder, not easier. A resilient consumer is great for corporate earnings, but it also gives the Fed less cover to ease up, since strong spending can keep prices elevated. That’s the uncomfortable trade-off at the center of this whole cycle: good economic news and good market news aren’t always the same thing right now.

The AI slowdown call matters for a different reason. Much of this year’s market strength has rested on the assumption that AI infrastructure spending, chips, data centers, power, would keep growing without limit. When the people running the most influential AI labs start talking publicly about pumping the brakes, even for safety reasons rather than financial ones, investors have to ask whether that spending assumption still holds. Chip stocks bouncing back by Friday suggests most investors aren’t ready to abandon the trade yet, but the reflex sell-off shows how sensitive valuations have become to any hint of a ceiling.

💡 Opportunity

Keep watching the AI infrastructure trade, but treat this week as a stress test, not a verdict. The Monday selloff and Friday recovery both happened fast, which tells you sentiment here is jumpy. If you own chip or data center names, the next earnings season will matter more than any CEO essay.

Diesel at $6.29 a gallon is a cost that eventually shows up somewhere, trucking, shipping, groceries. Companies with thin margins and heavy logistics exposure are worth watching closely if oil stays elevated much longer.

Don’t read too much into one calm-looking index number. The S&P finishing flat hid a Dow that dropped sharply and a Nasdaq that climbed nicely. That kind of split is usually where the real opportunities, and the real risks, are hiding.

🎯 Bottom line

The Fed hiked rates for the first time since 2023, and the market’s muted response says more about how much uncertainty had already been priced in than about how comfortable anyone really is with where things stand. Between a hawkish Fed, a red-hot retail sales report, an AI industry publicly debating its own brakes, oil still stuck above $100, and Treasury yields brushing 5%, this was one of the more consequential weeks of the year dressed up as a quiet one. Watch how bond yields behave over the next few weeks. They’re doing more to shape markets right now than any single stock story, the AI one included.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

A few weeks ago, the big question on Wall Street was simple: will the Fed cut rates in September, or just hold steady? Nobody was seriously talking about a hike. This week, that conversation basically got hijacked. Oil blew past $100 a barrel for the first time since July, gas prices jumped overnight, and diesel hit a record high. By Thursday, traders had priced in a real chance the Fed goes the other way entirely and raises rates instead. Then Friday’s inflation report landed almost exactly as expected, oil cooled off a touch, and stocks had their best day in weeks. It was a lot to pack into five trading days. Here’s what actually happened, and why an oil story turned into a Fed story so fast.

📊 What’s happening

The week’s real trigger wasn’t in a spreadsheet. It was in the Middle East. The US and Iran have been locked in an escalating standoff for months now, mostly playing out as attacks on tankers and energy infrastructure rather than open war. This week it got worse: Iran-backed Houthi forces struck Saudi energy facilities, and US forces hit several Iranian tankers in response to an attempted missile attack on a Navy warship. Brent crude jumped from under $98 a barrel on Tuesday to above $106 by Thursday, its highest level since July. West Texas Intermediate followed it up. At the pump, that showed up fast: gasoline rose to an average of $4.22 a gallon, more than a dollar higher than a year ago, and diesel hit an all-time high near $6. Airlines started trimming routes and raising fares as jet fuel costs climbed too.

Stocks didn’t love any of this. The S&P 500 fell for four straight days through Thursday as oil kept climbing and a hotter-than-expected producer price index added to the unease. Rate-hike odds for next week’s Fed meeting, which sat at roughly 50-50 just a week earlier, surged into the 70-90% range by the end of the week. That’s a wild swing for five trading days, and it flips a script that’s been running since late August, when the new Fed chair first spooked markets by leaning hawkish at Jackson Hole.

Then Friday arrived, and the mood shifted again, even if the underlying worry didn’t fully go away. August’s CPI report came in almost exactly as forecast: prices rose 0.4% for the month and 3.4% over the past year, matching expectations. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, ran a shade hotter than hoped at 0.3% monthly, but not hot enough to spook anyone further. Oil eased back from its Thursday peak, and traders who’d already braced for a bad print seemed relieved it wasn’t worse. The S&P 500 gained 1.06%, the Dow jumped 1.15%, and the Nasdaq rose 0.88%, snapping the losing streak in one go. Even with the rally, the week as a whole still ended lower: the S&P finished down about 0.8%, the Dow fell 1.6%, and the Nasdaq slipped 0.7%.

Oracle helped Friday’s mood too. The company’s quarterly cloud sales jumped 121% to $7.4 billion, beating estimates, and it reignited enthusiasm for anything touching AI infrastructure. Hewlett Packard Enterprise jumped 11.6% on Friday alone, Dell rose 10% on an analyst upgrade, and networking and optical suppliers Lumentum and Ciena both had strong weeks riding the same wave. Not everyone got to join the party. CooperCompanies cratered nearly 23% after cutting its full-year outlook, Casey’s General Stores fell over 16% on weak same-store sales, FactSet dropped 14% amid worries that AI tools could eat into its research business, and Amgen lost more than 12% after a rival’s failed cardiovascular drug trial raised doubts about the whole category. Meta also launched Muse, a personal AI agent that can browse and act on your behalf, with free, $20, and $100 monthly tiers.

🤔 Why it matters

Here’s the thing about an oil-driven inflation scare: it’s a different animal from the wage-driven kind. When inflation comes from a hot labor market, the Fed can watch and wait, because it usually cools on its own as job growth slows. An oil shock doesn’t work that way. It raises the cost of almost everything at once, transportation, manufacturing, food delivery, because energy touches every supply chain. That’s exactly why gas and diesel prices jumping in a single week can move Fed odds so much faster than a slow grind in wages ever could.

It also matters that this isn’t a one-week blip. The conflict is centered partly on control of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that normally carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil. Analysts quoted this week don’t think a resolution is likely before the US midterm elections, which means the market may need to live with this uncertainty for a while, not just trade around one headline.

Put those two things together and you get why the calculus flipped so hard. A few weeks back, the debate was about whether a cooling labor market gave the Fed room to cut. Now the debate is whether a fresh supply shock, on top of already-sticky core inflation, gives the Fed a reason to hike instead. Both stories can’t be true at once, which is exactly why next week’s meeting is a coin flip.

There’s a second thread worth pulling on too. Oracle’s cloud beat and the rally in HPE, Dell, Lumentum, and Ciena show that the AI infrastructure buildout theme we flagged a couple of weeks ago, with memory chips getting squeezed by AI data center demand, hasn’t slowed down. But it’s playing out against a backdrop where consumer-facing names like Casey’s and CooperCompanies are getting punished hard for any sign of softness. That’s a different kind of squeeze showing up on the demand side, not the supply side.

💡 Opportunity

The September 16 Fed meeting is the single most important date on your calendar right now, and it’s a coin flip. Whichever way it goes, expect a bigger market reaction than usual. A hike after months of cut talk, or a hold that disappoints the hawks who’ve been piling into rate bets all week, would both force some repricing.

If you hold anything sensitive to fuel costs, airlines, trucking, logistics, or retailers with thin margins, keep an eye on where oil settles over the next few weeks, not just this week’s headline. A brief spike that fades in a month is a very different story than $100-plus oil becoming the new normal.

The AI infrastructure trade (servers, networking gear, optical components) is still working, but it’s turning into more of a stock-picker’s game than a rising tide. Oracle’s results were solid on their own merits, and the follow-through into HPE and Dell looks like actual demand, not just sentiment. See if the next round of earnings keeps backing that up before you assume it’s a given.

And don’t overcorrect based on one Friday rally. The underlying tension, oil-driven inflation risk versus a Fed that was leaning toward cuts just weeks ago, is still unresolved. Treat this week as a reason to stay alert through the FOMC decision, not a signal to make big moves on a Friday afternoon.

🎯 Bottom line

An oil shock did what months of jobs data and inflation reports couldn’t: it put a Fed rate hike back on the table, just weeks after cuts looked like the safer bet. Despite Friday’s sharp rebound, all three major indices still finished the week lower, a reminder that one good day doesn’t erase four rough ones. The Strait of Hormuz standoff shows no sign of resolving soon, Oracle’s cloud numbers say the AI buildout is still very much alive, and a handful of consumer-facing companies just got a rough reminder that guidance cuts get punished fast in this market. Next Wednesday’s Fed decision will tell you which force wins for now, but don’t expect the oil story to wrap up neatly either way.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Here’s a sentence that shouldn’t make sense: the economy added way more jobs than expected, and stocks fell. That’s exactly what happened Friday, and if it feels backwards, that’s because it is, at least by the normal rules. For most of this week, things were actually going pretty well. Stocks climbed Tuesday through Thursday on decent earnings and a surprisingly calm word from the Fed. Then Friday’s jobs report landed like a plot twist nobody asked for, and by the afternoon investors were also digesting a disappointing robot-taxi launch from Tesla and a brutal guidance cut from Lululemon. Let’s untangle why “good” news turned the mood sour, and what else moved underneath it while nobody was looking.

📊 What’s happening

Start with the mid-week calm, because it matters for understanding Friday’s reversal. On Wednesday and Thursday, stocks climbed nicely: the S&P 500 gained 1.1% Thursday alone, the Dow added 624 points, and the Nasdaq rose 1.4%. Part of the reason was earnings. Snowflake jumped 16.6% after crushing estimates, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise rose 5% on a solid quarter of its own. Part of it was the Fed. Governor Christopher Waller said he’d like to hold rates steady at the September meeting “unless upcoming inflation data shows any major surprise,” which is about as close to a green light as markets get these days. Treasury yields eased on that comment, and the VIX, Wall Street’s fear gauge, dropped nearly 6% to its lowest level in weeks. Everyone exhaled a little.

Then Friday happened. The August jobs report showed the economy added 162,000 jobs, nearly triple the 53,000 economists expected, with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.1%. On its own, that’s a strong number, the best monthly gain since March. But wage growth came in at 3.1% year-over-year, and a hot labor market plus sticky wage growth is exactly the combination that makes a central bank nervous about inflation. Rate-hike odds for the Fed’s September 15-16 meeting jumped from roughly 50-50 before the report to somewhere around 58-60% after it. Treasury yields spiked across the board, with the two-year note hitting a fresh 52-week high. Stocks gave back most of Thursday’s gains: the S&P slipped 0.4%, the Dow fell 0.5%, and the Nasdaq dropped 0.3%.

Two individual stocks made the day messier. Tesla fell about 6% after Thursday’s long-teased Cybercab robotaxi launch in Austin turned out to be a closed-door event with no livestream and, according to Wells Fargo, plenty of rider complaints about wrong routes and long wait times. Federal regulators piled on with an audit query into whether the vehicle, which has no steering wheel or pedals, was properly certified as road-safe. Lululemon cratered 17% after cutting its revenue and profit guidance, a sign that even a well-loved brand can’t shrug off a pickier shopper. Guidewire Software dropped 22% and credit-score company Fair Isaac fell 16% after the Federal Housing Finance Agency publicly criticized its pricing.

There was a fourth story too, and it got less attention than it deserved: memory chips. Apple has reportedly been trimming its 2026 hardware plans because DRAM and other memory chips are in short supply, with manufacturers routing production toward the far more lucrative business of building AI data centers instead. That’s already pushed up prices on Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Air, and it means the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro and the foldable iPhone are likely to sell out fast and cost more. Meanwhile, the companies that actually make that memory had a great week: Micron and SanDisk both climbed after Micron said it plans to double production of the high-bandwidth memory chips that AI servers depend on.

🤔 Why it matters

The awkward truth about “good news is bad news” days is that they’re not really about the news itself. They’re about what the news implies for the Fed’s next move. A hot jobs report tells the Fed it has room to keep interest rates higher for longer, since it doesn’t need to worry about propping up a weak labor market. And higher rates for longer are bad for stocks, especially the expensive, growth-heavy ones that dominate today’s market, because their valuations lean hard on the assumption that borrowing costs will keep falling. When that assumption gets shakier, the math behind those valuations gets shakier too, even though nothing about the underlying economy actually got worse.

This is also, in a smaller way, the same tension we flagged last week, just wearing a different outfit. Two weeks ago it was a hawkish Fed speech clashing with blowout AI earnings. This week it’s a strong jobs number clashing with the market’s hope for a September rate cut. The specific headline changes, but the underlying push and pull between “the economy looks fine” and “the Fed might not cut rates” hasn’t gone anywhere, and it’s probably not going anywhere before the September 15-16 meeting either.

The memory chip story deserves attention too, because it’s a preview of something bigger than one earnings season. AI’s hunger for computing power isn’t just a chipmaker story anymore. It’s starting to show up as higher prices and tighter supply for ordinary consumer electronics, which is a quieter but very real way that the AI boom touches everyday budgets. When Apple, one of the most powerful buyers on the planet, has to ration its own product plans around chip supply, that tells you the AI capacity crunch is real and not just a talking point.

💡 Opportunity

So what do you actually do with a week like this? A few things are worth watching over the next two weeks, and none of them require overhauling your portfolio on a Friday afternoon.

Watch the inflation data more than the headlines about it. The Fed’s own comments make clear that the September decision hinges on what the next inflation reports show, not on any single jobs number. The August CPI report, due before the meeting, is probably the single most important data point standing between here and September 16. If it comes in hot, expect the rate-hike chatter to get louder. If it’s tame, Friday’s selloff may end up looking like an overreaction.

If you’re holding growth stocks with rich valuations, know that they’re the most exposed to this rate uncertainty. Companies with strong free cash flow and less reliance on cheap borrowing tend to hold up better when the “rates might stay higher” story gains steam, the same lesson value-oriented retailers taught us a couple of weeks ago.

The memory chip squeeze is worth watching as its own theme, separate from any single stock pick. If AI data centers keep eating up DRAM and NAND supply, the companies making that memory, and the companies that have to pay up for it, are on opposite sides of a trend that isn’t ending soon.

And on Tesla specifically: a disappointing product launch and a regulatory inquiry are two different kinds of risk, one about execution and one about approval. Both are worth watching, but neither one tells you much on its own about whether Tesla’s robotaxi bet eventually pays off. You’ll need a few more product cycles for that answer, not one Thursday night in Austin.

🎯 Bottom line

Friday’s jobs report was good for the economy and bad for the stock market’s mood, which is a reminder that “good” and “bad” mean different things depending on who’s reading the number. A 162,000-job gain is a healthy number in any normal year. This year, it’s also a reason the Fed might not cut rates as fast as investors were hoping. Layer in a rocky robotaxi debut for Tesla, a guidance cut from Lululemon, and a memory chip shortage that’s reshaping who wins and loses in consumer electronics, and you’ve got a week that looked calm on Wednesday and Thursday, then got complicated fast. The next real test comes with the August CPI report, ahead of the Fed’s September 15-16 meeting. That’s the number that will actually decide which story wins.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

September’s picks for both SG Dividends and US Growth are live. Here’s how August performed.

The August portfolio closed positive:

• US Growth: 5.24%

• SG Dividends: 3.2%

US Growth

SG Dividends

See the Sep picks

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Picture the week as a party that got shut down right as it was getting good. Nvidia, Salesforce, and CrowdStrike all reported earnings Wednesday night, and the numbers were the kind that make traders spill their coffee. Thursday, stocks partied like it was 2021. Then Friday morning, the new Fed chair walked up to a podium in Wyoming and quietly turned the lights on. Nothing got canceled, exactly. But the mood in the room changed fast, and by the end of the day investors were betting on something almost nobody expected two weeks ago: a rate hike instead of a rate cut. Here’s how a genuinely great week for corporate America collided with a genuinely uncomfortable one for the Fed, and what to make of it.

📊 What’s happening

Let’s start where the week started: chip stocks getting sold. On Monday and Tuesday, Intel dropped 5%, AMD fell 4%, and Taiwan Semiconductor slipped 3%, even though nothing had actually gone wrong yet. Traders were just nervous ahead of Nvidia’s earnings, trimming positions the way you’d tidy up before guests arrive. Intel, up a wild 144% for the year, became the easiest source of cash to raise when funds needed to lighten up.

Wednesday brought the Fed’s favorite inflation gauge, and it came in a touch hotter than hoped. Core PCE held at 3.3% annually, headline PCE at 3.7%, both slightly above forecasts and both still unchanged from June. Not a disaster, but not the cooling investors were hoping to see either.

Then came the main event. After the closing bell Wednesday, Nvidia posted $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue, blowing past the $92 billion Wall Street expected, with data center sales alone hitting $89 billion. CEO Jensen Huang told analysts to expect roughly 70% revenue growth next fiscal year, well above what anyone had modeled.

Salesforce delivered its own blowout, with adjusted earnings of $5.90 a share against expectations of $3.27, and CrowdStrike posted a record $333 million in new recurring revenue and raised its full-year guidance. Thursday, the market did what markets do when three heavyweights all deliver at once: it ripped higher. Nvidia jumped 8%. Salesforce soared 22%, its best day since 2020, with CEO Marc Benioff declaring “this is not the SaaSpocalypse.” CrowdStrike gained 18%. Okta, riding the same wave, climbed 28%.

Friday, the tone flipped again. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh gave his first Jackson Hole speech since taking over in May, and instead of the market-friendly reassurance some were hoping for, he leaned hawkish. “Inflation is running above our 2% target,” he said. “So the Fed’s predominant focus right now should be on prices.” He also declined to offer any real guidance on what comes next, arguing that too much forward guidance ties the Fed’s hands. Traders didn’t love the ambiguity.

Odds of a September rate hike jumped from roughly one-in-three before the speech to just above 50-50 after it, a sharp reversal from earlier in the month, when futures markets had priced in an 83% chance of a rate cut. Stocks gave back a little ground Friday, with the S&P 500 dipping 0.12% and the Nasdaq slipping 0.34%, while bond yields moved in a “bear flattener” pattern, with short-term rates rising faster than long-term ones. For the week overall, the S&P 500 gained about 0.5%, the Nasdaq added roughly 0.9%, and the Dow rose around 0.5%, a modest headline number that hides just how much happened underneath it.

🤔 Why it matters

Here’s the tension worth sitting with. Corporate earnings and Fed policy just sent two different signals, and they can’t both be right forever. Nvidia, Salesforce, and CrowdStrike all told you that demand for AI software and infrastructure is still accelerating, not slowing down. That’s a real, fundamental story about real revenue and real customers, not hype. But that same AI enthusiasm has pushed a lot of tech valuations to levels that assume interest rates stay low or keep falling. If the Fed pivots toward hiking instead of cutting, the math that justifies those high multiples gets a lot less forgiving, even for companies that are genuinely growing fast.

There’s also a smaller but important lesson buried in Salesforce’s headline number. Of that $5.90 in earnings per share, $2.53 came not from selling software but from an unrealized gain on its stake in the AI company Anthropic, which was recently valued at $965 billion in a funding round. Strip that out, and Salesforce’s actual operating earnings grew a still-solid but far less dramatic 16%. It’s a good reminder that when a headline earnings number looks almost too good, it’s worth checking what’s actually driving it before you assume the core business is on fire.

And Warsh’s approach matters beyond just this one speech. A Fed chair who deliberately withholds forward guidance creates more uncertainty, not less, at least in the short run. Markets generally prefer clarity, even bad news, over ambiguity. That’s part of why odds swung so hard on so little actual new information.

💡 Opportunity

None of this means it’s time to bail on AI stocks or brace for a crash. It does argue for being a bit more selective about where you’re taking risk.

Separate the earnings from the excitement. Nvidia’s data center growth and Salesforce’s Agentforce revenue, which crossed $1.5 billion and grew more than 240% year over year, are genuine business results worth paying attention to. A one-day stock pop driven partly by relief, or in Salesforce’s case partly by an investment gain, is a different thing entirely. If you’re evaluating a position, look past the headline number to what the underlying business actually did.

If rate-hike odds keep climbing into the September 16-17 Fed meeting, the most rate-sensitive corners of the market, think smaller growth companies leaning on cheap financing, or richly valued names with little current profit, are the ones likely to feel it first. Companies with strong free cash flow and less debt tend to hold up better when borrowing costs move against them.

It’s also worth remembering that a hawkish speech is not the same as an actual rate hike. The Fed still has three weeks of data to digest before its next meeting, including another jobs report and more inflation figures. Markets have a habit of overreacting to a single speech and then walking it back once more evidence comes in, so treat Friday’s move as a signal to stay alert, not a reason to make big portfolio changes on a Friday afternoon.

🎯 Bottom line

This was a week where the fundamentals and the Fed disagreed with each other, and that disagreement is worth more attention than the headline index numbers suggest. Nvidia, Salesforce, and CrowdStrike proved that AI-driven demand is still real and still growing. Kevin Warsh proved that the new Fed isn’t going to make investors’ lives easy by handing out clear guidance, and that inflation still running near 3.7% is enough to put rate hikes back on the table just weeks after cuts looked like a lock. Keep watching the data between now and September 16, because the next print, whichever way it breaks, could settle which story wins.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Markets did something a bit contradictory this week: stocks closed out a third straight winning week and touched fresh record highs, and yet Friday still felt jumpy. The S&P 500 punched above 7,800 for the first time on Thursday. The Russell 2000, home to smaller companies, hit its own all-time high the next day. But look past the headlines and there’s real tension underneath: cooling inflation on one side, a wobble in how Big Tech is actually paying for its AI buildout on the other. Here’s what happened, and what it means for your money.

Our August US picks have been strong, returning 17% month-till-date. Check it out here.

📊 What’s happening

Let’s start with the good news. July’s inflation report came in cooler than feared. Headline CPI rose just 0.1% for the month, pulling the annual rate down to 3.4% from June’s 3.5%. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, held at 2.5% year-over-year. That’s still above the Fed’s 2% target, but it was calm enough to ease worries that the central bank would need to stay tough for longer. Traders are now leaning toward the Fed holding steady rather than tightening again next month.

That relief helped push the S&P 500 to its record close above 7,800 on Thursday. The index still finished the week roughly 0.65% higher overall, even after slipping back on Friday. Small-cap stocks actually had the better week: the Russell 2000 hit an all-time high, a sign investors think this rally has room to broaden out beyond the usual handful of tech giants.

Then came Friday’s reality check. Retail sales fell 0.6% in July, a sharp miss against expectations for a small gain, and consumer confidence slipped too. That’s the kind of number that makes you wonder whether households are starting to pull back on spending.

And the week’s real flashpoint came from Broadcom, which dropped nearly 6% after Bank of America flagged that the company’s AI chip financing arrangement could balloon to $370 billion in debt by 2029. Broadcom doesn’t carry that debt directly. It sits in a separate financing vehicle that leases AI chips to customers, with Broadcom on the hook as a backstop if those customers can’t pay. It’s the kind of structure that sounds fine right up until it doesn’t. AMD had a much better week by comparison, climbing on an analyst’s Street-high price target for its AI chip business.

A few other things worth knowing: Reddit jumped double digits after news it’s joining the S&P 500 next week. Nu Holdings, the Brazilian digital bank, popped after posting its first-ever $1 billion quarterly profit. And oil prices, which spiked earlier in the week on tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, kept energy stocks as the week’s best-performing sector.

🤔 Why it matters

Here’s the tension worth sitting with. The market is pricing in a fairly rosy outcome: inflation cooling gently, the Fed staying patient, and AI spending continuing to drive earnings higher. But two things this week hint at cracks in that story.

First, the Broadcom news is a reminder that the AI boom isn’t just being funded out of company cash piles anymore. It’s increasingly built on complex, leveraged financing arrangements that sit just off the main balance sheet. That’s not automatically a crisis. It does mean the AI trade now carries a financing-risk layer that barely existed a year or two ago, and investors are only just starting to price it in.

Second, weak retail sales paired with a shaky consumer is exactly the kind of thing that can turn a smooth “soft landing” story into something bumpier. Add to that the 30-year Treasury yield hitting its highest level in 25 years this week, and you’ve got pressure from two directions at once: less spending power for shoppers, and pricier long-term borrowing for companies trying to fund growth. Neither is an emergency by itself. Together, they’re worth watching.

💡 Opportunity

None of this means it’s time to go defensive or sit out the rally. Records happen because earnings and macro data have actually been decent, not because the market is broken. Still, this week’s news points to a few sensible moves.

If you own AI-adjacent stocks, it’s worth understanding how their AI spending is actually financed, not just how big the revenue number looks. Companies funding their buildout through vendor financing and off-balance-sheet vehicles, like Broadcom’s arrangement, carry a different risk profile than ones paying with straightforward free cash flow. That doesn’t mean avoid them. It means know what you actually own.

The small-cap rally deserves a look too. Russell 2000 companies tend to be more domestically focused and more sensitive to rate expectations, so a fresh record there suggests investors really do think rate relief is on the way, not just that a few AI giants are propping up the index on their own. If your portfolio has been entirely parked in mega-cap tech, this could be a decent moment to think about diversifying into that broader move, rather than chasing it after it’s already run.

And if the consumer story has you nervous, lean toward companies with pricing power and steady demand over discretionary, big-ticket names. Weak retail sales don’t hit every sector the same way. Staples and healthcare tend to hold up better than travel or big discretionary purchases when shoppers get cautious.

🎯 Bottom line

Stocks are at records, inflation is cooling, and that’s genuinely good news. But this was also the week the AI trade’s financing plumbing started making headlines, and the consumer showed its first real signs of fatigue in a while. You don’t need to overreact to either one. You do need to keep both in view, because a market this calm on the surface can turn quickly once the story underneath it stops matching the price on the screen.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Here’s a sentence that shouldn’t work, but somehow did this week: the US economy lost jobs, wage growth slowed, and stocks threw their biggest party since April. The S&P 500 closed at a record. The Nasdaq had its best week in months. Oil slid. Gold jumped. If you’re new to investing and think “bad news, good market” sounds backwards, you’re right to be suspicious. It usually is. This week, though, there’s a real reason behind the madness, and it’s worth five minutes of your Saturday to understand it.

📊 What’s Happening

Friday’s jobs report kicked things off, and it wasn’t pretty on the surface. The US economy shed 23,000 jobs in July. Economists had expected a gain of about 80,000. On top of that, the government quietly cut its estimates for May and June by a combined 103,000 jobs. Wage growth slowed to 3.2%. The unemployment rate actually dipped to 4.1%, but that’s the trap: it fell because almost 1.4 million people simply stopped looking for work, not because more people found jobs.

Weirdly, that was the best news the market had heard in weeks. The S&P 500 climbed 3.6% for the week and closed above 7,700 for the first time ever, ending at a record 7,757.64. The Nasdaq did even better, up 5.2% to 26,690.62. The Dow added nearly 3%. It was the strongest week for US stocks since April.

Then there’s Palantir. The data and AI software company reported Monday evening, and the numbers were, frankly, ridiculous: revenue up 93% year-on-year to $1.94 billion, its US commercial business up 149%, and management raised full-year guidance to around $8.15 billion. The stock jumped 30% the next day, its biggest single-session gain in over two years, and wiped out close to $3 billion in paper profits for traders who’d bet against it. That one earnings report dragged the whole chip sector along for the ride: Intel jumped 11% on its own strong AI datacentre numbers, and the semiconductor ETF SOXX finished the week up more than 7%.

Oil, meanwhile, went the other way. Brent crude dropped below $80 a barrel for the first time in nearly a month as talks between the US and Iran showed signs of progress, easing fears about supply disruptions in the Middle East. WTI crude ended the week near $77, down more than 9%. Gold did the opposite, jumping over 7% as falling bond yields made the shiny stuff more appealing.

And it’s not just Palantir carrying the season. Of the roughly 300 S&P 500 companies that have reported second-quarter results so far, 85% have beaten expectations, with aggregate profit growth tracking above 47%.

🤔 Why It Matters

Normally, weak jobs data means the Fed is more likely to cut interest rates, which is straightforwardly good for stocks. This year has been different. Inflation’s been running hotter than the Fed would like, sitting around 3.5% back in June, and the central bank has actually been debating whether it needs to raise rates again. At its July meeting, three Fed officials voted for a hike. Markets had been pricing in something close to a 30% chance of one happening in September.

That’s what makes Friday’s report so important. A weakening labour market takes pressure off the Fed to hike. It doesn’t guarantee a cut, and some economists, Bank of America among them, still think a hike is coming by year-end regardless. But for now, the odds of the Fed standing pat jumped to 56% from 45% in a single day, and that was enough to send bond yields lower and risk assets higher across the board.

Palantir’s rally matters for a different reason. AI-adjacent stocks have spent much of the past few months under a cloud, with investors worried that hyperscaler spending on chips and data centres was running ahead of actual demand. Palantir’s numbers, especially that 149% jump in US commercial revenue, gave the bulls something concrete to point to: companies are paying real money for this stuff, not just running pilot projects. Which is why the rally spread so fast to Intel, AMD, and the rest of the chip complex. One earnings report doesn’t settle the debate, but it bought the AI trade some breathing room.

💡 The Opportunity

None of this means it’s time to chase what just happened. A stock jumping 30% in a single session, the way Palantir did, is a sign of a short squeeze as much as it is a vote of confidence, and the stock still trades at somewhere around 45 to 50 times forward sales. It’s an expensive bet on a company continuing to grow at a pace almost nobody else in the market can match.

What’s more interesting is the breadth of the move. Intel’s rally wasn’t about a short squeeze; it came from 59% growth in its data centre and AI business, its strongest revenue growth in over fifteen years by the CEO’s own account. If you want exposure to the AI infrastructure buildout without betting everything on one name at a rich valuation, broad semiconductor exposure, through an ETF like SOXX rather than a single stock, spreads that bet across a sector that’s clearly still growing.

Gold’s move is also worth a second look. It’s up more than 7% in a week and sitting at a record above $4,400 an ounce, largely because falling yields make it more attractive relative to bonds. If you’re worried this rally in stocks is running a little hot, a small allocation to gold is a fairly boring, time-tested way to hedge that without predicting exactly when or how a pullback happens.

The next real test comes fast. July’s inflation report lands on August 12, forecast to show prices rising at an annual pace of around 3.4%. If that number comes in hot, this whole “no hike coming” narrative gets a lot shakier. Given how much of this week’s rally was built on rate-hike relief, that’s the one date worth circling before you make any big moves.

🎯 Bottom Line

This was a genuinely odd week: stocks celebrated a shrinking labour force, oil fell because diplomacy might actually be working for once, and a single earnings report from a controversial AI stock dragged an entire sector higher. None of that is necessarily bad. Record highs are still record highs. But a market that’s rallying because bad news makes a rate hike less likely is a market standing on a fairly narrow ledge. One hot inflation print on August 12 could change the story completely. Enjoy the highs this week. Just don’t mistake relief for certainty.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

🟠 US Growth

S&P 500 vs. US Growth

US large-cap stocks are screened for strong growth, solid fundamentals, momentum, and relative strength — names showing up across all four at once, not just riding one hot chart.

🟢 SG Dividends

Singapore dividend payers are screened for consistent dividends, solid fundamentals, and momentum — so income calls are backed by the numbers, not just a high headline yield.

🔴 ETFs Tactical

ETF exposure is adjusted tactically based on macro trend and relative strength across core ETFs — shifting weight toward what’s working rather than holding a static mix.

A systematic approach, no guessing or emotional involved

🟠 US Growth

1. Screen. Start from S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 component stocks, large-caps above $10B market cap.

2. Scoring. Rank that stocks based on growth potential, fundamental, momentum, trend, and relative strength versus the market.

3. 5 stocks. Build a concentrated portfolio of 10 stocks, each held at equal weight.

4. Rebalance. Rebalance monthly, carrying the winners, rotating out names whose strength has weakened.

Access all contents here

One membership - Less than $0.50 per day

One membership. All three strategies included.

• Monthly US Growth pick

• Monthly SG Dividends

• Monthly ETFs Tactical allocation update

  

Get 7 day free trial

FAQ

How are the picks selected?

Each strategy runs its own systematic screen — growth, fundamentals, momentum, and relative strength for US Growth; consistent dividends, fundamentals, and momentum for SG Dividends; macro trend and rotation signals for ETFs Tactical. No discretionary overrides.

How often do I get updates?

All strategies are reviewed monthly.

Is this financial advice?

No. Wealth Insights is informational and educational only, not personalized investment advice. Always do your own due diligence before acting on any call.

Ready?

Join paid members getting data-driven calls across US Growth, SG Dividends, and Tactical ETFs.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

July was another challenging month for the growth side of the portfolio. US Growth fell -10.9%, its second straight double-digit decline after June’s -14.1%, while Tactical ETFs slipped -2.0% for a second consecutive negative month. SG Dividend was the lone bright spot, rebounding +4.1% — its best month since April — and once again the only strategy in positive territory.

Despite back-to-back rough months, US Growth remains the year’s top performer at +28.0% YTD, though that lead has narrowed sharply. Back in June, US Growth’s H1 return of 38.9% was nearly 18 points ahead of SG Dividend’s 21.0%. That gap is now under 3 points, with SG Dividend at +25.1% YTD. Tactical ETFs trails at +6.3% YTD.

Macro And Markets

July’s macro backdrop stayed noisy. The Fed’s July 29 meeting ended in a 9-3 vote to hold rates at 3.5%–3.75%, with three regional presidents dissenting in favor of a hike — a sign that inflation, still running above the Fed’s 2% target, is keeping the committee split under new Chair Kevin Warsh. Markets briefly sold off around the decision before recovering into month-end.

Oil price volatility, driven by ongoing US-Iran military tensions, added another layer of uncertainty and kept crude prices elevated for the month. On the other hand, big tech earnings gave the market real support — strong Azure numbers from Microsoft and a standout Amazon report both helped power a late-month rally, and Apple briefly touched a $5 trillion market cap, overtaking Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company. Semiconductor names were far more turbulent, selling off hard in the back half of the month even as the broader index closed near its highs. Long-end rates were also in focus, with the 30-year Treasury yield pushing to its highest level since 2007 — a reminder that duration risk hasn’t gone away even as equities have mostly shrugged it off.

It’s the kind of environment that rewards selectivity over broad beta, which is part of why we’re leaning further into a more concentrated approach for US Growth (more on that below).

A Change Coming To US Growth

Off the back of extensive backtesting, we’re making a change to how US Growth is run. Starting in August, we’re moving from a broader momentum basket down to a concentrated portfolio of just 5 stocks, rebalanced monthly. This isn’t a reaction to July’s drawdown — it comes out of a longer data-driven research process comparing concentrated versus diversified momentum approaches, and the data consistently pointed to better risk-adjusted results from holding fewer, higher-conviction names rather than spreading capital thinly across a wider basket. We’ll share more on the mechanics and the backtest behind this shift in an upcoming post.

Closing Paragraph

July was a reminder that growth investing rarely moves in a straight line — and that diversification across strategies is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Two rough months for US Growth haven’t dented the YTD picture, and SG Dividend continues to prove its worth as the portfolio’s ballast. With a more concentrated approach coming to US Growth in August, we’re looking forward to sharing how that plays out.

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Five of the Magnificent Seven reported earnings this week, and the results read like a report card the market has been waiting all year to hand out. The S&P 500 closed Friday at 7,489.72, up roughly 1% for the week and enough to cap a fourth straight winning month for the Dow. But that calm headline number hides a genuinely wild few days underneath it. Microsoft jumped, Meta got hammered, Amazon soared, Apple slid, and Alphabet spent the week clawing back a chunk of the 15% it lost the week before. Add a divided Fed and oil finally cooling off from $100 a barrel, and you’ve got a week that did more to clarify where markets stand on AI than the previous three months combined.

📰 What’s Happening

The theme of the week was simple, even if the stock moves weren’t: investors stopped accepting “we’re spending big on AI” as an answer on its own. They wanted to know whether that spending is actually being met by demand.

Microsoft delivered the clearest case. Azure capex hit $41 billion for the quarter, and management said flatly that “Azure demand is greater than supply.” The stock jumped 8.13% to $422.30, crossing its 200-day average for the first time since May. Amazon told a similar story. AWS grew 37%, its fastest pace since 2021, and total revenue hit a record $200.6 billion. The stock rose 8% to 10%, even though a chunk of the reported earnings came from a paper gain on Amazon’s Anthropic stake rather than actual operating profit.

Then there’s the other half of the ledger. Meta beat on revenue ($60.8 billion, up 28%) but missed earnings by 14% after eating $2.4 billion in legal costs and $1.2 billion in severance from 8,000 layoffs. Free cash flow collapsed from $8.5 billion to just $784 million, since capital spending swallowed almost every dollar coming in. The stock fell 9.64% to $529. Alphabet set the pattern a week earlier: strong headline numbers (cloud revenue up 82%) but a chunk of its EPS beat came from unrealized gains on its Anthropic and SpaceX stakes, not the underlying business. That stock dropped 15% over two days before recovering some ground to close near $335.

Apple landed in between. Revenue hit a June-quarter record of $109.4 billion, but Services and China both came in light, and a global memory chip shortage is about to push up Mac and iPad prices. Shares slipped 3% to 4%.

Away from earnings, two other things moved markets. The Federal Reserve held rates at 3.50%–3.75% on a 9-3 vote, and unusually, the three dissenters wanted to raise rates, not cut them, since inflation has now sat above the Fed’s 2% target for five straight years. And oil, which spiked above $100 a barrel earlier in July on fears of a blocked Strait of Hormuz, drifted back down to around $82 to $86 as shipping traffic through the strait picked back up.

🤔 Why It Matters

This week drew a line that’s going to matter for the rest of earnings season. It used to be enough for a tech giant to say “we’re investing in AI” and get a pass on the spending. Not anymore. The market now wants receipts. Microsoft and Amazon got rewarded because they could point to actual bottlenecks: not enough servers, not enough capacity, real customers waiting in line. Meta and Alphabet got punished because their capex increases looked less tied to a specific, provable payoff, and because some of their reported profits leaned on paper gains from startup stakes rather than the core ad or cloud business.

That’s a healthier dynamic than blind enthusiasm, but it also means bigger swings. A 15% two-day drop in a company as large as Alphabet, or a 9.64% single-day fall for Meta, isn’t normal behavior for mega-cap stocks. Expect more of that kind of volatility as each earnings season becomes a test of whether the spending is paying for itself.

Then there’s the Fed. Three officials pushing for a rate hike, in the middle of a year when tariffs and a Middle East-driven oil spike are both still working through the economy, tells you inflation risk hasn’t gone away just because it stopped making daily headlines. And the chip shortage that sent South Korea’s stock market to its best single day ever (KOSPI up 17.9%) is a reminder that underneath all the software talk, the physical hardware, memory chips especially, is still scarce and still in high demand.

🎯 The Opportunity

Stop treating “Big Tech” or “AI stocks” as one basket. This week showed five companies in the same sector moving in five different directions off the same underlying trend. The winners could show usage catching up to capacity, not just plans to build more of it. Before buying into any AI-adjacent name off a headline, check whether the spending is chasing a backlog of paying customers or just chasing a story.

There’s also a quieter play in the chip shortage itself. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron here in the US are benefiting from an actual supply crunch, not a narrative. That’s arguably a steadier way to get AI exposure than guessing which cloud company’s capex story the market believes next quarter.

For anyone who thinks the market overreacted: Alphabet and Meta are both still growing revenue at 24% to 28% a year. A sharp selloff on a still-growing business isn’t automatically a red flag. It might just be a reset of expectations, and how both stocks trade over the next few weeks should show which one it was.

📌 Bottom Line

Markets just recalibrated how they judge AI spending, rewarding companies that can prove demand and punishing the ones that can’t. The Fed stayed cautious and split, oil backed off its highs, and a chip shortage sent Korean stocks to their best day on record. None of that says the AI trade is over. It says the easy phase, where any capex number impressed investors, is done. From here, the companies that keep winning will be the ones that keep showing their work.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Here’s a plot twist for you: this week, some of the world’s biggest companies smashed their earnings targets — and got punished for it anyway. Intel posted its best growth in almost 15 years. Alphabet’s cloud business grew 82%. Both stocks fell hard regardless. Throw in oil crossing $100 a barrel, a fresh wave of tariffs hitting 99% of US imports, and the Nasdaq notching its worst week in over a month, and you’ve got a market telling a much more interesting story than the headline numbers suggest. Grab a coffee — let’s unpack why “good news” wasn’t good enough this week.

📊 What’s Happening

It was peak earnings season, and the results were mostly strong:

• Intel blew past expectations — earnings of $0.42 a share versus the $0.21 analysts expected, revenue of $16.1 billion against a $14.4 billion forecast, and 25% year-on-year growth, its fastest pace in nearly 15 years. The stock still dropped almost 8% the next day.

• Alphabet beat on both revenue (+24%) and cloud growth (+82%), yet shares fell roughly 7% in a single session.

• Tesla missed on earnings by about 39%, watched auto margins slide from 19% to 16%, and reported negative free cash flow. The stock sank more than 14%.

Geopolitics piled on too — literally, in oil’s case. Continued US strikes on Iran and attacks on Saudi shipping pushed Brent crude above $100 a barrel for the first time since May. Then on Friday, Washington rolled out new tariffs of 10–12.5% on 60 trading partners, covering roughly 99% of US imports, replacing the tariff regime the Supreme Court had struck down earlier this year.

By Friday’s close, the Nasdaq had shed about 2% on the week, while the S&P 500 and Dow held up much better, finishing nearly flat.

🤔 Why It Matters

Normally, beating earnings estimates sends a stock higher. This week flipped that logic — and the reason comes down to one word: capex (short for capital expenditure — how much a company plans to spend building stuff).

Investors aren’t just grading last quarter anymore. They’re trying to work out whether the hundreds of billions being poured into AI data centers and chips will actually pay off. When Intel said it’s lifting its 2026 spending plan from $18 billion to over $20 billion — and warned 2027 will be “significantly higher” still — the market didn’t hear “we’re growing.” It heard “profits stay squeezed even longer before this bet pays off.” Alphabet hit the same nerve: brilliant cloud numbers, paired with a reminder of just how much cash keeps going out the door for AI infrastructure.

Layer on real-world cost pressure — pricier oil raises expenses for nearly every business, and tariffs on almost all US imports add fresh uncertainty to supply chains — and you get a market that’s suddenly hard to please. Even with roughly 88% of S&P 500 companies beating estimates so far this season, “good” clearly isn’t enough when expectations were already priced for perfection.

💡 The Opportunity

A few things worth keeping on your radar:

• Sharp pullbacks in strong businesses can be worth a second look. Intel is still up roughly 170% over the past year despite this month’s slide, and Alphabet’s underlying growth didn’t disappoint — the selloff was about future spending, not today’s business. That’s a very different situation from a company missing because demand actually dried up.

• Next week could set the tone for the rest of summer. Microsoft and Meta report Wednesday, with Apple and Amazon following Thursday. Combined, the four biggest cloud players are now expected to spend north of $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year — so how the market reacts to that number may matter more than the profit headlines.

• Diversification earns its keep in weeks like this. A portfolio concentrated in AI-adjacent megacaps feels this kind of single-week whiplash much harder. Spreading exposure across sectors — and sticking to a regular investing schedule rather than reacting to any one earnings call — smooths out the noise considerably.

✅ Bottom Line

This week’s real lesson: strong earnings don’t guarantee a stock pop when the market’s real question has shifted from “how did you do?” to “how much are you going to spend, and will it actually pay off?” With oil above $100, new tariffs now in effect, and Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon all reporting next week, expect more tug-of-war between solid fundamentals and AI-spending nerves. Stay diversified, keep your time horizon long, and don’t mistake one red day for a red flag.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Every month, we will update a list of US Growth Stocks with Strong Momentum that we are watching closely. We spend many hours to screen and curate the information.

The screener uses an quantitative framework that designed to identify sustainable growth, companies with strong moats, decent valuations and strong price momentum.

We see few movements this month, with 2 new stock move to the top 10:

Read more

Well, that escalated quickly. What started as a fairly upbeat week — banks kicking off earnings season with a bang — ended with Wall Street’s worst weekly showing in over a month, after a Chinese AI startup nobody outside the industry had heard of dropped a model that spooked the entire chip sector. Throw in a fresh flare-up between the US and Iran, and you’ve got a week that reminded everyone the AI trade can go down just as fast as it goes up. Grab a coffee — here’s what actually matters.

📰 What’s Happening

The headline number first: the S&P 500 fell 1.6% this week, the Nasdaq dropped 2.9%, and the Dow slipped 0.9% — the worst week for tech in a while. The culprit was a Beijing-based startup called Moonshot AI, backed by Alibaba, which on Thursday unveiled its newest AI model, Kimi K3. The company claims it performs competitively with the best Western AI models — at a fraction of the cost to build.

Sound familiar? It should. Traders immediately compared it to the “DeepSeek moment” of early 2025, when another Chinese lab released a cut-price model that rattled the assumption that world-beating AI requires eye-watering amounts of spending on chips.

The reaction was swift and brutal. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped around 10%, erasing more than $1 trillion in combined market value. Micron lost roughly $38 billion in market cap in a single session, and Intel fell 21% over the week. Even Taiwan Semiconductor — which just reported a 77% jump in quarterly profit — still fell 7% on Friday. Nvidia and Micron each dropped over 2%, while Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA and Arm all fell roughly 4%.

There was a genuinely wild side-effect too: Apple briefly overtook Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company on Friday, before Nvidia clawed the title back. Apple is up about 22% for the year versus Nvidia’s 7%, helped along by a fresh price-target upgrade from HSBC.

Away from chips, it wasn’t all bad news. Bank earnings season opened strong — Bank of America and JPMorgan both beat expectations, with BofA posting $1.21 per share against estimates of $1.13. Oil jumped around 4% as the US and Iran traded fresh attacks near the Strait of Hormuz, and retail stocks quietly outperformed, with auto retailer Group 1 gaining more than 9% — its best week since 2024.

🧠 Why It Matters

Here’s the plain-English version of why a single Chinese model release can knock a trillion dollars off global markets in a day: the entire AI trade has been priced for a future where building the smartest model requires enormous, ever-growing amounts of computing power — which means enormous, ever-growing orders for Nvidia chips and the equipment that makes them.

If a startup can get close to that performance for a fraction of the cost, the whole spending story gets called into question. That’s not the same as saying AI itself is less valuable — it might mean the opposite, that AI gets cheaper and spreads faster. But it does threaten the profit margins of the companies that were counting on customers needing to spend more, not less, each year.

It’s also worth noting Nvidia isn’t just facing cheaper software competition — it’s facing cheaper hardware competition too. Amazon, OpenAI (via a new partnership with chip-designer Cerebras), and others are all building their own custom AI chips instead of only buying Nvidia’s. None of this dethrones Nvidia overnight, but it chips away — pun intended — at the idea that Nvidia can charge whatever it wants indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the oil spike and China’s economic growth coming in a touch below forecast (4.3% versus the 4.5% expected) are reminders that the macro backdrop hasn’t gone away just because AI has been the main story of 2026. Encouragingly, the odds of a Federal Reserve rate hike this month have fallen sharply — from 33% to just 10% — which gave investors at least one thing to feel calm about.

💡 The Opportunity

For everyday investors, the temptation after a week like this is to either panic-sell chip stocks or panic-buy the “dip.” Neither is a great plan. A few more useful takeaways:

• Diversification did its job this week. While chip stocks were in freefall, banks, retail names and defensive stocks like Berkshire Hathaway held up fine or even gained. If your portfolio is spread across sectors rather than concentrated in one AI trade, weeks like this sting a lot less.

• Cheaper AI isn’t automatically bad news for everyone. Companies that use AI to run their businesses — rather than sell the chips that power it — could actually benefit if computing costs fall. Worth keeping an eye on which side of that divide a company sits on.

• Earnings season is where the real evidence shows up, not headlines. With Alphabet, AMD, Intel, Arm and Meta all reporting over the next fortnight — and each expected to give updates on AI spending plans — we’ll get a much clearer read on whether this week’s fear was justified or overdone.

As always, this isn’t a recommendation to buy or sell anything specific — just context to help you make sense of your own decisions.

📌 Bottom Line

One product launch from a little-known Chinese startup was enough to erase $1 trillion from chip stocks in a single week — a sharp reminder of just how much of the market’s recent gains have been riding on the assumption that AI spending only ever goes up. Banks had a strong start to earnings season, oil ticked higher on Middle East tensions, and the Fed looks unlikely to hike rates anytime soon. None of that changes the bigger picture overnight, but it’s exactly the kind of week that separates diversified portfolios from concentrated bets. The next two weeks of tech earnings will tell us a lot more.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Every month, we will update a list of SG top dividends stocks that we are watching closely. We spend many hours to screen and curate the information.

The screener uses 6-component framework. Each component has specific scoring criteria designed to identify sustainable, high-quality dividend stocks.

The top 10 stocks yielded a total return (including dividends) of 21% in YTD.

We see some movements this month, with 1 new stock move to the top 10:

Get 7 day free trial

Read more

It’s been a choppy but ultimately winning week for Wall Street. Despite a tense backdrop — think Middle East jitters and oil price swings — investors decided to look past the noise and buy the dip. All three major US indexes closed the week higher, with the S&P 500 nudging back toward record territory. The headline act, though, wasn’t the indexes at all — it was Meta Platforms, which just had its best week in over two years. Grab a coffee, this one’s got a lot going on.

📰 What’s Happening

Let’s start with the big mover: Meta Platforms jumped nearly 15% this week, its strongest weekly performance since early 2024, and climbed 22% in just the past ten trading days. The trigger? A leaked internal memo, reported by Reuters, suggesting Meta is building its own custom AI chip as part of a plan to add 14 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2027. Bank of America ran the numbers and reckons this could mean Meta’s cost per gigawatt of AI infrastructure is roughly half of what analysts had assumed. In plain terms: Meta may be finding a cheaper way to build its AI empire, and that has investors excited.

Meanwhile, the market got a fresh face this week. SK Hynix, the South Korean memory-chip giant behind much of the world’s AI hardware, made its Nasdaq debut on Friday. Its shares opened at $170, a pop of more than 14% above the IPO price of $149. This is a genuinely big deal — SK Hynix is the world’s largest maker of the high-bandwidth memory chips that power AI processors from Nvidia and AMD, and this listing ranks among the largest foreign IPOs on record. The debut did come with a side effect though: rival chipmaker Micron Technology slipped, as investors worried the new listing could pull demand and attention away from existing memory stocks.

On the index scoreboard: the Dow Jones rose about 0.3% on the week, the S&P 500 added roughly 0.4%, and the Nasdaq Composite gained around 1%. Breadth also looked healthy — about 63% of S&P 500 stocks are now trading above their 50-day moving average, up sharply from just 50% a month ago, which suggests the rally isn’t only being carried by a handful of giant tech names.

Elsewhere, oil prices stayed relatively calm even as tensions flared around the Strait of Hormuz, after former President Trump suggested the Iran ceasefire might be over before signaling talks would continue. The International Energy Agency now expects global oil demand to fall in 2026 for the first time since the pandemic year of 2020 — a notable shift for energy markets to watch.

🤔 Why It Matters

Here’s the thing about this week: it’s a story about the AI trade evolving, not ending. For much of the past two years, “AI stock” basically meant one thing — buy Nvidia and its closest peers. Now we’re seeing the trade branch out in two directions.

First, the chip supply chain is going global and public. SK Hynix’s blockbuster debut shows that international suppliers powering the AI boom are just as investable as the US names everyone already knows. That’s a bigger, more diversified opportunity set — but also more competition for the same pool of investor money.

Second, the “picks and shovels” story is shifting toward efficiency. Meta’s rally wasn’t about spending more on AI — it was about spending smarter. Building custom chips instead of relying entirely on Nvidia’s hardware could meaningfully lower the cost of running AI at scale. If that pattern holds across other tech giants, it changes the profit math for the entire sector, and could pressure the very same chipmakers that have driven markets higher all year.

There’s also a quieter signal worth noting: insider buying at tech companies has hit a record high over the past six months, even as everyday investors grow more cautious about how much money is being poured into AI data centers and infrastructure. When the people running these companies are buying more of their own stock while outsiders get nervous, that gap in sentiment is usually worth watching.

💡 The Opportunity

For everyday investors, a few threads are worth pulling on here:

• Diversification within AI is getting easier. New listings like SK Hynix mean you’re no longer limited to the same handful of US mega-cap names to get exposure to the AI infrastructure boom. Broad semiconductor or global tech ETFs may increasingly capture names you couldn’t easily access before.

• Don’t chase IPO pops blindly. History offers a useful caution here: major IPOs have historically been followed by a bit of softness in the broader market in the weeks around the listing, before typically rebounding within a month as things settle. Big, exciting debuts can create short-term noise even when nothing fundamental has changed.

• Watch efficiency, not just spending. As the AI story matures, companies that can do more with less — like Meta’s custom chip bet — may start outperforming those simply spending the most. It’s a shift worth tracking as this earnings season kicks off.

• Big week ahead: June’s inflation data (CPI) lands Tuesday alongside Fed Chair testimony, and major banks like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs kick off earnings season. That combination could set the tone for markets through the rest of the summer.

🎯 Bottom Line

Markets shrugged off geopolitical noise this week to notch modest gains, but the real story is beneath the surface: the AI trade is maturing from a “buy the obvious names” phase into something more nuanced, with new global players entering the stage and established giants racing to cut costs rather than just spend more. With inflation data, Fed commentary, and a wave of major earnings all landing next week, things are about to get busier — not calmer.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

June was a softer month for the portfolio, as both Tactical ETFs and US Growth pulled back after a strong run earlier in the year. SG Dividend provided some stability and remained the only strategy in positive territory for the month.

Despite the June pullback, H1 remained a strong period overall. US Growth led the way with a 38.9% return, followed by SG Dividend at 21.0% and Tactical ETFs at 8.3%. The portfolio continues to benefit from a balanced mix of growth and dividend exposure, even as monthly volatility remains part of the journey.

Macro And Markets

From a macro standpoint, June was still dominated by inflation and central bank uncertainty. Reuters highlighted that investors were closely watching policy direction as inflation stayed elevated and rate expectations kept moving around. At the same time, geopolitical shocks and energy-price concerns continued to feed a more cautious tone in risk assets.

Markets themselves were split rather than uniformly weak. AI-linked names continued to support parts of global equities, especially in Asia, while some rate-sensitive and lower-quality risk assets remained under pressure. That kind of backdrop tends to favour selective positioning over broad beta, which is one reason a mixed portfolio structure still makes sense.

Closing Paragraph

Overall, June was a reminder that markets do not move in a straight line. The portfolio saw some giveback during the month, but the first half still ended with positive returns across all three sleeves, led by US Growth and supported by SG Dividend’s consistency.

Get 7 day free trial

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any form. Please do your own research and seek advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, I have positions in all or some of the mentioned stocks when publishing this article. This is a disclosure - not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.