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Market Snapshot

📉 Banana Bits

• The S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Dow all close at fresh record highs, with the Nasdaq topping 27,000 for the first time.

• Nvidia rallies after Jensen Huang unveils the RTX Spark platform at Computex.

• Oil prices swing on developments in Iran before easing after Trump reports a productive call with Netanyahu.

• Technology and energy lead the market as gains remain concentrated in a handful of sectors.

• U.S. Bancorp completes its acquisition of BTIG as the IPO pipeline continues to build.

Market News

Two Stocks Pretending to be a Rally

Here’s the thing about Monday: the indexes printed all-time highs, and almost nobody was invited. All three indexes hit new all-time intraday highs and closed at records, which sounds like a party until you check the guest list.

Beyond tech, energy was the only other S&P 500 sector in the green on Monday. So if you owned semiconductors or oil, congratulations. Everyone else essentially watched paint dry while being told the paint was historic.

The engine, predictably, was Nvidia. Its RTX Spark reveal lit up the AI-PC trade, pulled Dell and HP higher with it, and made the broader index rally look a lot healthier than the average stock actually felt.

The concentration story isn’t subtle anymore… It's the whole plot. Evercore’s Julian Emanuel laid it out bluntly, noting that record concentration in a handful of AI names is spurring index strength and masking the side effects of a challenging geopolitical and consumer backdrop.

He went further, pointing out that MU, NVDA, and GOOGL alone account for 40%+ of the YTD revision in S&P 2026 EPS. Three tickers are carrying the earnings story for five hundred companies.

Looming over all of it is the macro backdrop nobody can ignore: the war in Iran and what it's doing to oil and, by extension, the Fed. Stocks actually opened lower Monday, while oil surged after Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency reported that Iran halted talks with the U.S. amid Israel's fighting in Lebanon.

Then the mood flipped on a dime as oil trimmed sharp gains after President Trump posted that he had a “very productive call” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said no troops would be heading into Beirut.

The Fed angle is where it gets spicy for anyone with a mortgage or a margin account. The Iran-driven oil spike has torched the clean rate-cut story investors expected from new Chair Kevin Warsh. Instead of asking how fast cuts arrive, traders are now repricing for higher-for-longer and even flirting with hikes into 2027.

Inflation has now run above the Fed’s 2% target for the fifth straight year, crude is suddenly a policy problem again, and the market is climbing a wall of worry built out of geopolitics, oil, and about six stocks.

Peel Take: We’re not here to tell you records are bad… green is green, and we’ll cash the check. But a melt-up where energy and mega-cap tech are the only things working is the market equivalent of a bodybuilder who skips leg day. Looks jacked from one angle, tips over in a stiff breeze. The Nvidia story is legit, but when three names drive 40% of earnings revisions, your "diversified" index fund is quietly a concentrated AI bet wearing a disguise. Enjoy the highs, but maybe don't remortgage the house on them.

What's Ripe

Dell (DELL) 10.7%

• Dell surged double digits as a confirmed RTX Spark launch partner, positioning it front-and-center for the fall AI-PC refresh.

• Classic picks-and-shovels play… when Nvidia announces a new socket, the box-makers who ship it get paid.

• Peel Take: Dell has quietly become the “if you can’t beat the AI trade, ship the AI trade” stock. It doesn’t need to invent the chip… it just needs to slap it in a chassis and mark it up. A 10.70% pop on a partner announcement tells you how starved investors are for any clean way to play on-device AI. We like the logic, but remember: shovel sellers live and die on volumes they don't control. If the AI-PC upgrade cycle is more of a polite shrug than a stampede, that double-digit day gives a lot back.

Nvidia (NVDA) 6.3%

• Nvidia unveiled the new RTX Spark superchip at Computex, its first dedicated Windows PC superchip, pairing a Blackwell GPU with an Arm-based 20-core NVIDIA Grace CPU; MediaTek collaborated on the CPU design, and Microsoft is partnering on the Windows agent platform.

• Consumer machines are expected this fall from major PC partners including Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, and ASUS. Shares ripped to $224.36, well above Friday's $211.14 close, dragging the entire Nasdaq to its first-ever close above 27K.

• Peel Take: Jensen Huang looked at a $5.5 trillion-ish valuation, the data-center crown, and the gaming-GPU throne, and decided he also wanted Intel's lunch, lunchbox, and the table they ate it on. The RTX Spark is a genuine shot at the last big silicon market Nvidia didn't own. The skeptic's question isn't "is this cool" (it is)... It's whether buyers will pay a premium for on-device AI agents this holiday season, or whether this is a 2027 revenue line dressed up as a 2026 catalyst. Either way, the leather jacket remains undefeated.

What's Rotten

Qualcomm (QCOM) 8.9%

• QCOM fell hard as the RTX Spark targets the same AI-PC lane Qualcomm has been chasing with its Snapdragon X franchise. Shares closed at $228.99 on fears that Nvidia just turned Qualcomm's clearest growth lane into a knife fight.

• Bright spot buried in the rubble: Qualcomm's automotive segment grew 38% year-over-year to $1.33 billion, with custom-silicon shipments for a leading hyperscaler due later this calendar year.

• Peel Take: Qualcomm spent years convincing Wall Street it could pivot from “the modem company” to “the AI-PC company,” and Nvidia just showed up to that narrative uninvited with a bigger GPU. Brutal timing. That said, an 8.78% haircut on a competitive threat (not a guidance cut, not a miss) can be where overreactions live… the automotive and custom-silicon businesses are quietly compounding. We're not catching this falling knife today, but we're writing the ticker down for the watchlist.

Intel (INTC) 4.7%

• Intel dropped on the RTX Spark news as Nvidia attacks the x86 PC empire Intel has anchored since the late 1970s. The Arm-vs-x86 framing is existential… This is the same architecture shift that let Apple dump Intel for its own silicon.

• Already the perennial "show me" story in semis, the last thing it needed was a new, richer, faster competitor in its core market.

• Peel Take: There’s a grim poetry to Intel getting squeezed by Arm-based chips after watching Apple walk out the door for the same reason. The PC duopoly, Intel and AMD, ran for four decades, is suddenly a three-body problem, and Intel is the one with the least margin for error. We've heard the turnaround pitch enough times to be allergic to it. Until there's a product roadmap that actually scares Nvidia back, "cheap" is just a price, not a thesis.

🧠 Technical Trip

Interview Q&A from JPMorgan

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📚 Lesson from the Library

🎥 Hedge Fund Interview Course: Think Like the Buy Side

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🌟 Student Spotlight

A+ Equity Research Report

Looking for a stellar example of what makes an equity research report stand out?

One of our WSO Academy students, Thomas Broome, put together an impressive deep dive on Adobe, Inc. (ADBE) covering valuatio₹n, catalysts, and key risks with the kind of insight that turns good pitches into great ones.

Check out the report here

🦈 Deal Dispatch

M&A, IPOs, And Other Notable Transactions

• U.S. Bancorp ($USB) officially closed its acquisition of broker-dealer BTIG, LLC, effective June 1.

• SpaceX filed its IPO paperwork, with its filing made public in May, and is targeting a June 11 pricing / ~June 12 Nasdaq debut under the ticker “SPCX”.

• Quantinuum ($QNT), the Honeywell/Cambridge Quantum lovechild, is expected to list on Nasdaq under the ticker QNT on Thursday.

• Anthropic has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, while OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file in the coming weeks.

📊The Daily Poll

Previous Poll:

China’s factory activity slowed again. What do you think is the biggest sign of a healthy economy?

More jobs: 41.7% // More spending: 22.9% // More manufacturing: 10.4% // Stable prices: 25.0%

Student Success Corner

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Banana Brain Teaser

Previous

An investor purchased 100 shares of Stock X at (109/18) dollars per share and sold them all a year later at 24 dollars per share. If the investor paid a 2 percent brokerage fee on both the total purchase price and the total selling price, which of the following is closest to the investor’s percent gain on this investment?

Answer: 280%

Today

From a group of 8 volunteers, including Andrew and Karen, 4 people are to be selected at random to organize a charity event. What is the probability that Andrew will be among the 4 volunteers selected and Karen will not?

How Would You Rate Today's Peel?

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

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