June 23rd Pre-Market Brief

Good Morning

Nasdaq's down 3% in premarket. But the "AI trade is dead" crowd is getting ahead of itself.

Korea has its own mess driving this last night, a proposed tax on unrealized gains, all with way too much leverage, and SK Hynix passing Samsung in market cap, which always gets read as a top. None of that says the AI trade broke. Micron reports tomorrow after the close which will will likely be a blow out. Numbers aside it’s about how the market reacts always.

Let's dig in...

Today's Big Picture

Red From Seoul To London
Everyone's calling it a chip selloff. This hit every market overnight, not just the semis. Korea's Kospi led the way down ten percent, one of its worst days in years, and the reason had nothing to do with AI. Korean lawmakers floated a tax on unrealized stock gains, traders were leveraged to the hilt, and SK Hynix passing Samsung in market value spooked people who read that as a top. A market that nearly doubled this year cracked on its own local problems. That's positioning unwinding, not just demand breaking.

A One-Year-High Dollar Is The Real Seller
In about a week, traders went from pricing a September hike at under one in three to better than two in three, after half the Fed said they expect to raise rates this year. The dollar took off on it and just hit a one-year high. A strong dollar hits the priciest stocks first, every time. So it's the AI names getting hit, not the cheap ones. The selling blamed on AI is partly just a dollar squeeze.

SpaceX Gave Back The Whole IPO Pop
SpaceX went public two weeks ago and is already back at the debt market for more than twenty billion dollars. Two weeks. It'll probably slip under a two trillion market cap today. That's what's spooking people about Big Tech right now: borrow huge to build AI, hope it pays off later.

Market Overview

Today’s Sponsor

The ones showing up in LLMs convert 3× better than Google

They optimized for LLMs, not just Google.

FAQs. Comparison pages. Transparent pricing. LinkedIn presence. These aren't vanity plays. They're what gets you cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude when your buyers are researching, your investors are looking, and your future hires are deciding where to work.

Download the free AEO Playbook for Startups from HubSpot and get the exact checklist. Five minutes to read.

Unlock the playbook

Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

Target $TGT ( ▼ 0.77% )  
got named Wolfe Research's top pick into year-end with an upgrade to outperform and a 162 target, the analyst pointing to store resets and a new leadership team finally moving the needle. Same morning, Wolfe cut Home Depot $HD to peer perform.

IBM $IBM ( ▲ 1.25% )  

Green in a red market after JPMorgan moved it to overweight on steady, recurring software revenue. When the AI high flyers wobble, money has to go somewhere, and boring cash generative software is where it hides. IBM is the tell on that rotation.

Qualcomm $QCOM ( ▼ 1.86% )  

Lower after Bloomberg reported it's in advanced talks to buy AI software firm Modular for around four billion. Buying into a shaky chip tape reads as paying up at the wrong moment, and now Qualcomm has to convince holders this is strategy, not a stretch.

Oracle $ORCL ( ▼ 5.0% )  

Fell after disclosing it cut about twenty one thousand jobs, roughly an eighth of its staff, with its restructuring bill jumping to nearly two billion from under four hundred million a year ago. Layoffs usually lift a stock. Here they show how hard Oracle is spending to chase AI, which puts the pressure back on management to show that spend turns into returns.

Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 1.14% )  

Down with the rest of tech even though European sales more than doubled last month on the refreshed Model Y and lower prices. The fundamentals improved and the stock fell anyway, which tells you the tape is trading the macro, not the company. Good news, wrong day.

What to Watch

IPO’s

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

Micron Earnings (Wednesday, After The Close)
Beat or miss won't matter. The guide is the whole game. If Micron sounds confident, memory rips and Apple, Sony, and Nintendo wear higher costs straight into the holidays. If they pump the brakes, today's selloff gets a second leg.

The Iran Oil Window (License Expires August 21)
The U.S. just handed Iran a sixty day pass to sell oil in dollars, and crude barely moved. Now watch whether Chinese refiners actually buy, because that's the only thing that confirms the thaw is real. A quiet tape into next week says the market still doesn't believe it, and oil snaps back the first time Hormuz gets a headline.

- John

Today’s Sponsor

Physical AI is coming to agriculture.

Everyone talks about AI software. Few are paying attention to AI machines operating in the real world. Greenfield Robotics is building autonomous machines that remove weeds at commercial scale, targeting one of agriculture's largest recurring costs.

Reserve Early Shares

_{Greenfield Robotics is Testing The Waters under tier 2 of Regulation A. No money or other consideration is being solicited, and if sent in response will not be accepted. No offer to buy the securities can be accepted and no part of the purchase price can be received until the offering statement filed by the company with the SEC has been qualified by the SEC. Any such offer may be withdrawn or revoked, without obligation or commitment of any kind, at any time before notice of acceptance given after the date of qualification. An indication of interest involves no obligation or commitment of any kind. “Reserving” shares is simply an indication of interest. There is no binding commitment for investors that reserve shares in this manner to ultimately invest and purchase the shares reserved of the company, or to purchase any shares of the company whatsoever.}