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Market Report for Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Stocks perfected their dead-fish routine Wednesday, flopping aimlessly before settling into a glassy-eyed stare. Without a dominant headline—just wars, rates, and megatech melodrama—Wall Street did what it does best: very little.

Level Change 6/18/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
-0.1 Dow
+0.1 Nasdaq
+0.0 Nasdaq 100
-0.0 S&P 500
+0.3 S&P 400
+0.4 S&P 600

The main show remains the Middle East, where Israel’s preemptive strike on Iranian nuclear infrastructure set off alarms, but not oil shocks. WTI rose a sleepy 0.3%, more shrug than spike. Energy-conscious China condemned Israel’s action, not out of principle, of course, but because it might mess with the fuel bill. Translation: let’s all cool it; Beijing has barrels to fill.

Bigger picture: Removing the Iranian regime and its terror tentacles could work wonders on regional stability.

Ask any Iranian citizen and you’re sure to hear eagerness for change, to say nothing of Israeli citizens. This latest flare-up might look like a crisis, but could be the kind that clears the air. A little short-term pain for a lot of long-term gain. And let’s not forget: Iran accounts for just 3% of global oil production. Not exactly irreplaceable—and not exactly at risk of needing replacement.

As for President Trump’s follow-up to Tuesday’s saber-rattling, it offered no new intel. Markets remained glued to the wait-and-see channel.

Trade news sounded off like a dull cymbal. The G7 delivered no deal momentum, and the White House has returned to framing tariffs as a budget-friendly revenue strategy. The IRS may want a word. For now, the tariff-as-tax experiment continues.

At the Fed, policy stayed on hold, with dot plots dotting all the right notes for a stand-pat summer and two rate cuts this fall.

Chair Powell acknowledged tariff fog and brushed aside inflation fears, even as 2026 and 2027 rate projections drifted hawkish. But when no one knows what happens in the next two days, forecasts for the next two years feel like stand-up comedy. Gone from the statement: concerns about unemployment. Added: vibes-based uncertainty, now apparently lower, though still elevated. Most reassuring.

In megatech intrigue, Meta’s (META -0.2%) Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly dangling $100M signing bonuses at OpenAI employees like golden fishing lures. OpenAI boss Sam Altman, exuding the calm of a man holding the AGI ace, said no one’s bitten. He also lobbed a grenade at Meta’s track record, saying on the Uncapped podcast: “I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation,” the verbal equivalent of tweaking Zuck’s nose and walking away.

On the other coast, Marvell (MRVL +7.1%) radiated AI ambition at its Custom AI Investor Day. No longer just a chip shop, it now wants to be the Intel Inside of AI infrastructure. With custom computing and interconnect revenue up 30% and 37% respectively, the future looks like cloud factories churning out superintelligence one XPU at a time.

The company bumped its 2028 data center total addressable market (TAM) forecast to $94B from last year’s $75B. It’s betting big that general-purpose GPUs are the MySpace of machine learning. If your bumper’s big enough, here’s your new sticker: Highly Customized System-Level Collaboration.

And that was the day: Mideast tension, Fed indecision, tariff revisionism, and $100M job offers for people whose names don’t even autocomplete.

— Jason Kelly

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Market Report for Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Stocks tripped Tuesday as the US edged closer to a Middle East entanglement nobody ordered. The S&P shed less than 1%, but the headlines dropped harder, like they’d been written by a bunker-busting algorithm with FOMO.

Level Change 6/17/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
-0.7 Dow
-0.9 Nasdaq
-1.0 Nasdaq 100
-0.8 S&P 500
-0.8 S&P 400
-1.0 S&P 600

It was another day in that dependable genre of geopolitical cliffhangers, now streaming near the Strait of Hormuz. This one stars Trump, Netanyahu, and the Ayatollah, with a supporting cast of bunker busters and aerial bravado.

The White House toggled from “not in a mood to negotiate” to “we control the skies over Iran,” the snuck-in “we” suggesting US help to lower the boom on uranium enrichment. Israel, lacking the planes or payloads to reach Iran’s deep Fordo nuclear site, lobbied for the US to drop a few of its larger calling cards.

Drama-loving oil spiked 4.3%, with WTI brushing recent highs as traders priced in disruption — even though no tankers or pipelines have noticed a thing. That’s the slipperiness of geopolitics: nothing has to happen, it just has to make someone important say it might.

Under the green eyeshades, retail sales flopped. May’s headline number fell 0.9%, a steeper drop than expected. Blame it on auto sales falling back to earth after their March joyride, fueled by tariff jitters and fear of future sticker shock. But the control group — the slice of spending that feeds into GDP — rose 0.4%, offering a calmer view of consumer behavior. Americans haven’t shut their wallets, they’re just thinking harder before opening them.

From the Oval Office own goal file: trade talks with Japan went about as well as a frat-house tea ceremony. Prime Minister Ishiba and President Trump met at the G7 summit in Alberta and emerged with smiles and stalemates. Tariffs on Japanese cars remain, talks will drag on, and economists warn the standoff could cost Japan a percentage point of GDP — and the US one of its vital friendships.

Megatech didn’t help. Microsoft (MSFT -0.2%) and OpenAI are squabbling like neural-network co-parents in a custody dispute. OpenAI is trying to loosen the exclusivity Microsoft enjoys over hosting its models, while Microsoft would like some concessions in return — like, say, not getting stabbed in the back. With Google Cloud (GOOG -0.4%) stepping in to help on the hosting front, this AI drama is starting to resemble GPU polyamory with performance clauses.

All told, it was a down day, not a disaster. Investors are bracing, not bolting.

Those were Tuesday’s tremors: a whiff of war, weak sales, tariff stalemates, and tech tension.

— Jason Kelly

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Market Report for Monday, June 16, 2025

The Middle East stayed hot, but markets cooled off, with oil down and stocks up. Monday offered a rare moment of clarity: as long as nobody blocks the Strait of Hormuz, traders don’t care who’s launching what at whom…

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Market Report for Friday, June 13, 2025

Stocks fell Friday as geopolitics barged back onstage. Oil spiked on fears Israel might torch Iran’s gas tank, but settled down once it became clear the targets were missiles and madmen, not pipelines and pumps…

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Market Report for Thursday, June 12, 2025

Wall Street caught a whiff of optimism Thursday from Oracle’s booming AI guidance and a calm Treasury auction. But the air still carried a hint of smoldering tariffs. Stocks fluttered around UNCH, nudging north.

Level Change 6/12/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
+0.2 Dow
+0.2 Nasdaq
+0.2 Nasdaq 100
+0.4 S&P 500
+0.1 S&P 400
-0.4 S&P 600

While the administration polishes its own-goal credentials in the circular sport of trade futzing, the main event plays elsewhere: a civilizational inflection point powered by AI.

First, the sideshow. Then the show.

Trade remains the main migraine. Thursday’s update on the US-China detente was less peace accord, more snooze button. If the handshake holds, it’ll merely rewind the clock to pre-April hostilities, undoing damage rather than advancing the plot.

Even that’s a big “if.” Talks set the tone; talks may un-set it. Meanwhile, talks with Japan, India, and the EU resemble couples therapy: tense, repetitive, and unlikely to end in dinner plans.

Never one to let a de-escalation go un-escalated, President Trump waved around fresh auto tariffs and reiterated his affection for unilateral moves. Raising the 25% levy is now on the table, like a bad centerpiece.

At least tariff damage is on an installment plan.

May’s PPI rose just 0.1% month-over-month, headline and core. But machinery and vehicles are getting pricier, with tariffs quietly working their way through the metals supply chain like minibar fees on a hotel bill.

Nationwide’s Ben Ayers called it a slow drip, not a sticker shock. Good news for May. Bad omen for September.

Speaking of slow drips, the labor market’s feeling more Eeyore than Tigger.

Initial jobless claims landed near expectations at 248K, but continuing claims climbed to their highest since November 2021: 1,956K vs 1,910K expected. Employers aren’t slashing jobs, but they’re not refilling them either. And once out, workers are staying out. It’s a softening, not a slump—unless tariffs blow a hole in demand and turn it into one.

Bond buyers, however, showed up and saluted for the second day in a row.

A $22B auction of 30-year Treasuries drew solid demand, especially from foreign investors. Yields dipped across the curve. Apparently, America’s reputation as a safe haven persists, even when its policy path resembles a GPS recalculating in mid-U-turn.

But all of this may soon read like a quaint historical footnote once AI takes over governance and finance, which it’s likely to do, faster than the distracted world can refresh its tariff trackers.

The latest evidence comes from Oracle (ORCL +13.3%), which stole the show last night. The firm projected growth rates that could make Nvidia blush: 40% in cloud infrastructure, 70% in cloud apps, and over 100% in remaining performance obligations.

“I’ve never seen anything remotely like this,” said co-founder Larry Ellison, as Wall Street nodded, drooled, and penciled in a few more zeroes.

Capital expenditures jumped from $7B to $21B in fiscal 2025 and are on track to top $25B this year. Cost control isn’t the problem, demand is. “Almost insatiable,” said Ellison. Oracle recently received a request from a mystery client for every bit of available cloud capacity. “We never got an order like that before,” Ellison said. “We had to move things around. We did the best we could to give them the capacity they needed.”

Also humming: CoreWeave (CRWV -0.5%), the AI server wrangler, which inked a deal to supply compute muscle to Google, which will in turn resell it to OpenAI. It’s a daisy chain of silicon dependency, now with more cross-brand entanglement than a Marvel crossover.

And that was the day: tariff talks going in circles, slowly tugging at the data, while AI gears up for its turn to run the place.

— Jason Kelly

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