July 9th Pre-Market Brief

Good Morning

We hit 90 targets in Iran overnight, the ceasefire's dead, and the market shrugged it off. Nasdaq futures green, oil barely moved, VIX actually lower. Yesterdays Fed minutes showed some officials want to hike, and this morning's low jobless claims just gave them more reason too.

SK Hynix IPO’ing tomorrow, war headlines, and talks about hikes again are the big catalysts I’m paying attention too.

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

1. Wall Street Is Ignoring The War

Two nights of strikes, ceasefire declared dead, and Iran hitting US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain overnight. Stocks are green anyway and the VIX is down near 16.8. Oil is the only thing still pricing the war, holding its Wednesday spike while equities shrug. The tell to trust is Hormuz traffic, which fell to 25 transits yesterday against a normal 30 to 50. Ships are voting war, stocks are voting peace, and the ships have less reason to lie.

2. A Trillion Dollar Chipmaker Prices Today

SK Hynix makes the high-bandwidth memory that goes inside Nvidia's AI chips, and it prices its US listing tonight before trading Friday under SKHY. Here's the tension: its home market just fell into bear territory on this exact trade, yet the book is running seven times oversubscribed. So the Korean market is selling the memory story while global buyers line up for a piece of it.

3. Fed Hike

The minutes showed some officials wanted to hike in June, and what they pointed to was the AI build-out driving persistent inflation. Sit with that. The thing the market is buying this morning is the same thing the Fed thinks keeps rates high. Jobless claims just came in at 215K against 218K expected, a firm labor read that gives the hike camp its first data point.

Market Overview

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Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

PepsiCo $PEP ( ▼ 1.7% )  

Missed on earnings as North American beverage volumes shrank and food went flat, with management blaming tighter household budgets. International is doing all the work, and the U.S. recovery just got pushed further out.

Levi Strauss $LEVI ( ▼ 1.18% )  

Beat the quarter, raised guidance and the dividend, and the stock is still lower premarket. The third quarter earnings guide came in under estimates, and a stock priced for perfection got punished for good but not great.

AstraZeneca $AZN ( ▼ 1.99% )  

Down hard after its heart drug Wainua failed a late stage trial. Partner Ionis $IONS ( ▼ 2.17% )  is getting hit alongside it, and the miss erases a pipeline story bulls had already penciled in.

Salesforce $CRM ( ▼ 1.73% )  

Caught a downgrade at KeyBanc, which said its channel checks can't find evidence of upside from here. Software sentiment is fragile enough that a "we looked and found nothing" call moves the stock.

IBM $IBM ( ▼ 1.33% )  

Lower on a report that Starbucks is using AI to cut its reliance on IBM and Microsoft. It's the first named example of the fear stalking software all year, that AI replaces enterprise vendors instead of feeding them.

What to Watch

IPO’s

MarketBeat did an excellent job on this free IPO guide on IPO’s happening this year.

Housing Bill Becomes Law (Friday)
The ROAD to Housing Act becomes law tomorrow without Trump's signature unless he vetoes it first. It restricts corporate buyers of single family homes and pushes zoning reform.

Fed's Williams Speaks (Later Today)
First Fed voice on tape since the minutes revealed a hike camp exists. If he validates it, September odds harden. If he downplays it, watch the front end of the curve rally.

Sam Altman On CNBC (10 AM ET)
OpenAI publicly releases its GPT-5.6 models today after the government lifted rollout limits. Anything Altman says about compute demand hits memory and chip names within minutes, one day before SK Hynix trades.

- John

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