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Market Snapshot

📉 Banana Bits

• U.S. stocks retreat as the S&P 500’s nine-day winning streak comes to an end.

• Oil prices rise after Iran launches missile and drone attacks targeting Kuwait and Bahrain.

• CrowdStrike falls after earnings despite beating expectations, raising guidance, and announcing a stock split.

• SpaceX is reportedly preparing to launch its IPO roadshow ahead of a record-breaking capital raise.

• U.S. crude inventories declined for a sixth consecutive week, providing further support for oil prices.

MARKET NEWS

Oil Spike Knocks Stocks Off the Record Books

The rally took a gap year. Less than 24 hours after the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all printed fresh all-time highs, markets got a blunt reminder that geopolitics doesn't check your portfolio first.

Iran launched ballistic missiles at Kuwait and Bahrain, killing one person in Kuwait, while U.S. forces struck Qeshm Island and intercepted incoming missiles aimed at American troops. The human cost is real, and the market's reaction was equally unambiguous: sell first, ask the State Department later.

The damage was orderly but broad. The S&P 500 slid 0.74% to 7,553.68, the Nasdaq fell 0.89% to 26,853.98, and the Dow shed a chunky 620 points (−1.21%) to 50,687.07. Small caps slipped about 1% too, so there was nowhere small to hide. Breadth was ugly across the rate-sensitive corners of the tape; financials (Goldman Sachs −2.18%), tech, and communications all led the slide lower.

The bigger story on Wednesday was oil. WTI crude moved back above $95, while Brent rose 1.8% to nearly $97.72. It was the third straight session of gains, bringing oil prices closer to the $100 level that investors have been watching closely.

That matters more than any single headline, because crude is effectively an inflation tax with extra steps: pricier oil flows straight into gas pumps, shipping costs, and ultimately CPI.

Here’s the tell that this wasn’t a classic panic:

• Gold actually fell about 1.1% to roughly $4,440.

• The 10-year yield ticked up toward 4.48%.

• In a true flight-to-safety, bonds and bullion rally together.

Instead, the oil-driven jump in inflation expectations lifted yields and the dollar, dinged gold, and quietly trimmed the odds of near-term Fed rate cuts. But not everything bled red, though:

• Meta bucked the entire tape, jumping 4.3% on the launch of a new enterprise AI product (more below).

• Alphabet slipped 0.8% after upsizing its AI-infrastructure equity raise to $84.75 billion and spooking investors about dilution.

Semis split down the middle:

• Navitas ripped ~23%.

• Nvidia sold off 3.6%.

• The “Magnificent Seven” looked more like the Magnificent Mixed Bag.

Peel Take: The bull market didn’t break Wednesday but just got mugged by a barrel of oil on its way to the all-time-high party. The fact that the VIX barely budged (still hovering around 16) and gold fell suggests traders are pricing this as a temporary energy tantrum, not a regime change. The number that actually matters isn't Wednesday's 0.7% dip; it's whether $100 crude shows up in the next CPI print and quietly mugs the Fed's rate-cut timeline too. Watch the pump price, not the panic.

What's Ripe

Navitas Semiconductor (NVTS) 19.3%

• Nvidia put Navitas’s 800V-to-6V DC-DC power delivery board on the big screen at Computex 2026 in Taipei, the corporate equivalent of getting tagged by the most popular kid at school.

• The gallium-nitride power-chip maker is now up a deranged 340%+ year-to-date, with a market cap that has gone from "rounding error" to "actually a thing." It rallied 20%+ while the Nasdaq fell, proof that "AI picks-and-shovels" is still the only trade with a pulse on a risk-off day.

• Peel Take: Power delivery is the unglamorous plumbing of the AI data center, and Navitas just got anointed by the one company everyone copies. But let’s keep our bananas peeled: a 340% YTD moonshot on a feature placement is priced for absolute perfection. One soft capex guide and this thing retraces faster than you can say “GaN.” Great company, terrifying entry point.

Meta Platforms (META) 4.2%

• Meta launched an enterprise-grade AI “business agent” across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, automating lead qualification, appointment booking, sales closing, and the handoff to a real human.

• It picked up an analyst upgrade and finished as the only Magnificent Seven name solidly in the green on a brutal day. Crucially, it ships to billions of existing users, no new sales channel required, and stakes a direct claim against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in enterprise AI.

• Peel Take: While Alphabet got spanked for spending $84.75 billion, Meta showed the other half of the AI trade: shipping product to ~3 billion users with basically free distribution. Zuck’s glow-up from “metaverse cash incinerator” to “AI agents that actually invoice your clients” might be the corporate redemption arc of the year. The ad machine finally has a sequel.

What's Rotten

Nvidia (NVDA) 3.6%

• Ncidia shed $7.97 a share, lopping a small country’s GDP-sized chunk off the market cap in a single session. Higher oil + rising yields = a rough day for richly valued mega-cap tech, as soft-landing bulls got a geopolitics-shaped reality check.

• Awkward timing department: CEO Jensen Huang spent the week on stage hyping Marvell as the “next trillion-dollar company,” and traders happily rotated.

• Peel Take: Nothing fundamentally changed at Nvidia. The pullback looked more like a pause after a strong run, especially as higher oil prices complicated expectations for future rate cuts. The broader message is that even the market’s biggest winners are not immune to macro pressures. When a stock becomes as influential as Nvidia's, its performance is shaped not only by company-specific news but also by the broader economic environment.

Microsoft (MSFT) 3.2%

• Microsoft dropped $13.97, becoming one of the biggest drags on the Dow. It got swept up in a broad sell-off in software, communications, and financials as yields ticked higher and risk-off rolled through rate-sensitive names. The “safe” mega-cap turned out to be… not especially safe on Wednesday.

• Peel Take: Higher Treasury yields force investors to rethink tech valuations, and even companies like Microsoft are not immune. A 3% drop is hardly a crisis for a company of its size; it looks more like a normal pullback than a change in the long-term vision. The fundamentals remain intact, but investors may be a little less eager to buy every dip.

🧠 Technical Trip

Interview Q&A from Deutsche Bank

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📚 Lesson from the Library

🎥 Venture Capital Course: Backing Ideas That Scale

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🦈 Deal Dispatch

M&A, IPOs, And Other Notable Transactions

• SpaceX prices its IPO at $135 per share, targeting a record-breaking raise ahead of its Nasdaq debut.

• Quantinuum prices its IPO and prepares to begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker QNT.

• Kone shareholders approve the company’s planned takeover of TK Elevator, clearing a major hurdle for the deal.

• TransAlta agrees to acquire two Blackstone-backed Colorado gas-fired power plants.

• Rheinmetall agrees to sell its automotive unit to Aequita as it sharpens its focus on defense.

📊The Daily Poll

Previous Poll:

Trump is calling for a physical audit of Fort Knox. Do you think governments should regularly verify major national assets?

Yes, absolutely: 72.9% // Sometimes: 16.7% // Only when concerns arise: 6.2% // Not necessary: 4.2%

Student Success Corner

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Banana Brain Teaser

Previous

Of the 150 houses in a certain development, 60 percent have air-conditioning, 50 percent have a sunporch, and 30 percent have a swimming pool. If 5 of the houses have all three of these amenities and 5 have none of them, how many of the houses have exactly two of these amenities?

Answer: 55

Today

Xavier, Yvonne, and Zelda each try independently to solve a problem. If their individual probabilities for success are 1/4, 1/2, and 5/8, respectively, what is the probability that Xavier and Yvonne, but not Zelda, will solve the problem?

How Would You Rate Today's Peel?

Happy Investing,
Chris, Vyom, Ankit, Mitchell, Fernanda, Nick, & Patrick

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