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Market Snapshot

📉 Banana Bits

• Investors await Wednesday’s CPI report for the next major read on U.S. inflation.

• Chip stocks rebound sharply as buyers return after last week’s semiconductor selloff.

• Marvell jumps after securing a spot in the S&P 500 index.

• Apple unveils new AI-powered Siri features at WWDC, but shares finish lower.

• Oil prices swing as Iran and Israel exchange fire before both sides signal a halt to attacks.

Market News

Chips Stage a Monday Comeback

After Friday’s semiconductor selloff, a Broadcom revenue miss, and a strong jobs report that pushed rate-cut hopes further out, Wall Street entered Monday on shaky footing. Instead, dip-buyers rushed back into chip stocks, with semiconductor names leading the rebound just days after being at the center of the market’s biggest decline.

The Nasdaq Composite led the rebound with a 0.9% gain, while the S&P 500 rose 0.3% to 7,405.73. The Dow, meanwhile, slipped 0.2%. But beneath the surface, the rally was far from broad, with gains concentrated in a relatively small group of stocks. 

Semiconductors did basically all the heavy lifting: the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index jumped roughly 6%, while six of the S&P 500’s 11 sectors fell and utilities brought up the rear.

The good vibes had real fuel behind them:

• Nvidia rose on a fresh multiyear memory-and-data-center partnership with SK Hynix.

• Intel ripped after The Information reported that Google placed an order for Intel to manufacture 3 million-plus custom TPUs in 2028, while Nvidia is evaluating Intel as a potential backup chipmaker, not a signed Nvidia order yet.

• Corning jumped after Amazon unveiled a multiyear, multibillion-dollar fiber deal.

• Marvell jumped on its S&P 500 promotion.

Translation: every layer of the AI infrastructure cake… compute, memory, and the glass connecting it all got bid on the same day.

Overseas, the weekend got spicy. Israel and Iran traded strikes, sending oil back above $90 and triggering the usual “is-this-the-big-one” panic. Then both sides said they’d stopped, crude surrendered most of its intraday pop, and equities exhaled. Markets, as ever, have the attention span of a goldfish.

The bigger story, though, sits on Wednesday's calendar. May CPI prints at 8:30 a.m. ET, the first inflation test for new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, who took the job facing near-4% headline inflation and a market betting on essentially no cuts this year.

The 10-year Treasury yield crept up to roughly 4.55%, a two-week high, as traders braced. Citigroup, undeterred by any of it, lifted its year-end S&P 500 target to 8,100 from 7,700, citing relentless AI-driven earnings.

Peel Take: The chip rebound was impressive, and the “AI spending” supporting names like Nvidia, Intel, Corning, and Marvell remains very much intact. But when a handful of semiconductor stocks are doing most of the heavy lifting, it is hard to call the rally broadly healthy. With CPI data due Wednesday and the Fed still facing inflation concerns, this feels more like a market that warrants caution than one inviting investors to go all in.

What's Ripe

Intel (INTC) 11.2%

• Intel popped roughly 11% after The Information reported that Alphabet's Google placed an order for Intel to manufacture 3 million-plus of its custom TPUs, slated for 2028, with Nvidia separately evaluating Intel as a backup chipmaker.

• It's a credibility stamp for Intel Foundry's long, painfully expensive crusade to challenge TSMC's chokehold on leading-edge manufacturing.

• Two of the biggest AI chip designers fighting over your factory space in a single afternoon is the corporate equivalent of getting texted back by both crushes at once.

• Peel Take: Intel has burned shareholders more times than a cheap stovetop, so the skepticism is earned. But a reported Google foundry order and a maybe from Nvidia are exactly the validation the turnaround thesis has been begging for. One report isn’t a signed Nvidia mega-contract, so keep the champagne on ice, but after years of “trust me,” the foundry dream finally has a pulse.

Corning (GLW) 5.6%

• Corning rallied after Amazon unveiled a multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal for its optical fiber and connectivity gear to wire up AI data centers. The pact adds 1,000 manufacturing jobs in North Carolina, plus a community college fiber-tech training program, politically photogenic and AI-levered.

• The 175-year-old glassmaker has quietly morphed into an AI infrastructure play: every GPU cluster needs miles of fiber to talk to itself.

• Peel Take: The least glamorous shovel in the AI gold rush might just be glass. While everyone elbows for GPUs, somebody has to connect them, and Corning just landed a hyperscaler-sized purchase order to do exactly that. Boring? Sure. But “boring company with a multiyear Amazon contract” is a phrase that tends to age extremely well.

What's Rotten

FuelCell Energy (FCEL) 10.6%

• FCEL ended down roughly 10.6% after Q2 revenue fell 5% YoY to $35.6M, below the roughly $41M analysts expected. GAAP loss was $1.45/share, while adjusted loss came in at $0.53/share.

• Net loss attributable to common stockholders widened to $78.7M, stung by a $42.6M non-cash impairment, while total backlog shrank about 10% to roughly $1.14B.

• Management deployed the magic words, "AI data center pipeline," with the opportunity set up 267% sequentially to 4 GW, which softened the blow but didn't blot out the red ink.

• Peel Take: “We lost a lot more money, but check out our pipeline” is the entire clean-energy pitch in one sentence. The data-center angle is legit, and the stock has had a monster run, so bulls have a narrative. Still, at some point, a company has to convert a sexy pipeline into actual, you know, profit. Until then, FCEL stays parked in the “thesis, not a business” garage.

Apple (AAPL) 1.9%

• Apple opened WWDC with its big AI redemption pitch: a rebuilt, Gemini-powered Siri (standalone app, chat mode, "personal context"), plus a Liquid Glass redesign, iOS 27 and macOS 27. Shares popped 3%+ intraday… then round-tripped to close down ~1.9%, turning red just after 2 p.m. ET.

• The tell: Apple gave no launch timeline for the new Siri (Gene Munster flagged exactly that), and analysts shrugged that a Gemini-powered Siri looks barely distinguishable from Gemini on an Android. UBS stayed Neutral at a $296 target.

• The deeper worry is that Apple is effectively renting its AI brain from Google – one headline warned that Gemini may be "the ceiling on Apple's AI ambitions."

• Peel Take: WWDC was supposed to be Apple’s AI comeback. Instead, the stock went from up 3% to finishing lower in a classic “sell the news” move. Partnering with Google may be the practical choice, but it also highlights that Apple is still playing catch-up in AI. Until it delivers compelling AI products with clear timelines, “buy the rumor, sell the keynote” remains the play.

🧠 Technical Trip

Interview Q&A from Morgan Stanley

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📚 Lesson from the Library

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🦈 Deal Dispatch

M&A, IPOs, And Other Notable Transactions

• Roche agrees to a multibillion-dollar deal for rights to Nurix’s blood cancer treatment.

• Amazon signs a multiyear fiber-optic agreement with Corning to support its AI data center expansion.

• Nvidia and SK Hynix deepen their partnership to support next-generation AI infrastructure.

• Tilman Fertitta agrees to take Caesars private in a multibillion-dollar buyout.

📊The Daily Poll

Previous Poll:

Zelenskyy's latest peace proposal was rejected. What would help global markets the most right now?

A peace agreement: 47.2% // Lower inflation: 25.0% // Lower interest rates: 13.9% // Stronger economic growth: 13.9%

Student Success Corner

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Banana Brain Teaser

Previous

The letters D, G, I, I, and T can be used to form 5-letter strings such as DIGIT or DGIIT. Using these letters, how many 5-letter strings can be formed in which the two occurrences of the letter I are separated by at least one other letter?

Answer: 36

Today

Seven pieces of rope have an average (arithmetic mean) length of 68 centimeters and a median length of 84 centimeters. If the length of the longest piece of rope is 14 centimeters more than 4 times the length of the shortest piece of rope, what is the maximum possible length, in centimeters, of the longest piece of rope?

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

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