Greenbull Investments Sarl
Greenbull Investments Sarl
Switzerland
2mo
A week ago I told you June's beautiful CPI print was made of cheap oil, and that the next one mechanically puts the war back in. Half of that aged badly, and fast. Brent pushed toward $100, then fell four sessions in a row ($97 Friday, $88 Monday, $84.09 yesterday) as the US and Iran paused the strikes and the Strait kept quietly moving crude the whole time. Down 13% in three days. The war premium the market spent two weeks pricing is already gone. So the boat got untied from the headline that had been steering it since June. It found a new one inside 48 hours. Wednesday night Alphabet reported a quarter that was, by any normal standard, excellent: $119.8bn of revenue against $117bn expected, cloud up 82%, earnings comfortably ahead. Then it guided 2026 capex to $195–205bn, and the stock lost 7%. Tesla lost 14.5%. A few hundred billion of market value gone in a day for the crime of spending money on AI. Then Monday a state-backed Shanghai firm was reported to have started mass-producing immersion DUV lithography machines, the tool ASML has effectively owned for a decade. Tuesday Asia opened and Samsung had its worst day in nearly twenty years, down 13%. SK Hynix down 14.5. The Kospi fell almost 11% and halted trading. ASML down 7, Nvidia 5, AMD 8, Micron 6 Monday and 9 more Tuesday, still moving double digits, just facing the other way this time. Here's the part worth keeping: through all of that, the S&P closed Tuesday up 0.21%. The Dow rose 537 points. The VIX reads 18.7, which is the market's way of saying "mild." Check the index at the close and you'd conclude nothing happened. Nothing happened at the index level because the two halves of the market ran in opposite directions at the same speed: money left chips and walked straight into industrials and banks. That's the dispersion I flagged three weeks ago, now visible in daylight: a flat surface produced by violent, cancelling motion underneath. Calm index, not calm market. Net of a capex revolt, a lithography shock, a 13% oil collapse and Samsung's worst session in two decades, the S&P sits 80 points below where it was in my last post. All that adrenaline, one percent of distance. Tonight both variables get their say two hours apart. At 2pm New York the Fed decides, with hike odds that went from 11% on July 15 to 38% by Friday and a chair on the record that there is "no tolerance for persistently elevated inflation." Then at 4pm Microsoft and Meta report, Apple and Amazon tomorrow, the four companies underwriting a combined $725bn of capex this year, up 77%, all handed the same question inside 24 hours: show the return. Alphabet already sat that exam and got marked down for passing. Which is why you're not getting a call out of me six hours before both of them land. I've promised outlooks in this series before and watched the tape expire them mid-sentence; doing it on purpose, ahead of a rate decision and the two largest capex bills in the market, would just be volunteering. Here's the frame instead. For two months the rudder was wired to a headline: first the war, then the barrel. This week the market cut that line and tied itself to a new one: not the price of money, the price of building AI. Whatever Warsh says at 2, the number that moves your portfolio lands at 4. I'll write the outlook when both are on the table. Charting a boat mid-wave helps nobody.
Not investment advice. The author may have financial interests in the mentioned instruments.
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