TMTB EOD Wrap

Good afternoon. Can’t say things are boring that’s for sure. QQQs +1.3% rallying from down close to 3% at one point overnight. The first piece of news was G-7 considering to release reserves causing stocks to rally early, then in the late afternoon, CBS news reported that Trump said “the war is very complete” and he’s considering taking over Strait of Hormuz….”If you look, they have nothing left. There's nothing left in a military sense…we’re very far ahead of schedule.” By that time Oil had already sold off to flat and QQQs had rallied back to slightly up so this added fuel to both sides of that trade with Oil actually finished down 4%, just a tiny 30%+ intra-day sell off:

Source: Bloomberg

TACO Tuesday came early as it’s clear market action causing Trump to seek an off-ramp (easy to declare “victory” and leave given objectives are vague.) I think most important read-through from commentary/actions today is Trump will trigger-happy take his foot off the pedal is the market forces him too.

Outside of macro, AI semis caught a strong bid with SOX +4% vs internet/software flat, reversing some of the underperformance last week. AI infrastructure led the tape: Memory Exposed +7%, Optical +6.6%, Google AI Infra +6.2% with a strong bid across AI names and several like LITE, BE, SNDK, VRT up double digits. Software lagged and the perceived “safe havens” like SPOT -3.5% underperformed.

Let’s get to it…

INTERNET

• GOOGL +3% with a nice bid outperforming other large-caps today. Didn’t see much on the name, but chatter in my chats at good risk/reward: <20x $15 ‘27 EPS number under $300. Good interview from Alex Heath here with Liz Reid, head of search at GOOGL. Search tracking 1-2bps ahead of street so far this q as GCP checks continue to be on fire. Upcoming catalyst is Cloud Next on April 22nd.

• SHOP +2.5% following through on the news last week that OAI checkout was rolling back - jefferies was out raising PT arguing OpenAI’s decision to roll back plans to enable checkout within ChatGPT reinforces Shopify’s competitive positioning in the emerging agentic commerce ecosystem. CFO Jeff Hoffmeister had some good comments on Agentic shopping last week at MS: