TMTB EOD Wrap

Good afternoon. QQQs finished slightly green on the day. Oil +2%. BTC -2%. Yields rose 2-3bps across the curve.

In Tech land, semis broke their 18-day win streak although plenty of names were green on my screen. The early morning semi swoon was catalyzed by a POET -50% blow up early morning, one of retail’s favorite “undiscovered” optical plays after MRVL pulled a purchase order. That caused ome froth to out of some other names which have rallied significantly MTD, but didn’t stop memory (SNDK +8% / MU +5%) from ripping ahead of SNDK’s earnings this week. NVDA 4%, one of the last AI semi names not to be hitting 52wk highs, finally broke through today. It’s been a long 6 months of range-bound purgatory for NVDA longs, but they’re finally being rewarded.

From a factor perspective, Megacap led the way higher, helped by GOOGL/NVDA outperforming.

Somewhat of a slow news day today ahead of the big earnings vortex we are about to head into the next 3 days. Should be a fun week.

Let’s dive in…

AI/SEMIS

• NVDA +4% the name everyone’s eyes were on today. Why the rip today? When it’s time, it’s time, as we’ve been writing for a couple weeks now. Being helped by more positive OpenAI sentiment following Chatgpt 5.5. NVDA is also playing catchup after rest of the space has ripped last month and finally hit 52wk highs. Lastly, the POET blow up probably helped on the margins as there was a bid to larger cap names in semis. News out of Asia that TSM’s 3nm capacity now seen at 180k wpm vs 160k previously, which bodes well for NVDA to meet demand. BofA was also out saying a shift towards higher dividends and buybacks can drive a re-rating higher (we agree). Funda.ai was out with a good piece saying Deepseek’s V4 is starting to co-optimize with non-NVDA AI hardware which means they’re moving away from models running on Chinese chips to models redesigned for Chinese chips, and this could weaken CUDA lock-in over time….from a chart perspective, this move targeting 235-240 here. 3 weeks ago we wrote we thought it was NVDA’s time to finally shine and break out to new highs — the stock is up 18% since then. The SOX Is up 22% in that same time period as well, but we’ll take it as a win nonetheless.