Good afternoon. QQQs -70bps never saw green on a low volume holiday , hiding another degross out of anything with AI-capex or AI-financing beta while megacaps held in (META +3.4%; AAPL +1.3%; MSFT +1%).
Let’s start with the good news first before talking about the sea of red that was semis today. The day’s big launch landed at 12:55pm when META released Muse Wonder (aka Watermelon), reaching the frontier and only behind Claude Opus 5.5 on AA’s Intelligence Index.
Muse Wonder claims 57.5% on SWE-Marathon vs 46.3% for Opus 5.5, and it’s priced at $4/$20 per million input/output tokens, similar to Opus 5.5. Zuck told the FT META is “already working on the next step up” and will sell the best versions of Wonder directly to businesses while also signaling more spending and rejecting slowdown calls. Wang and Zuck were on the podcast circuit today. We covered them in TMTB Podcast Intel brief from today - the cheeky pint pod with Wang and Zuck worth a full listen if you have the time. FT also had an interview with Zuck. Some key quotes from both: