June 25th Pre-Market Brief

Nasdaq futures point to positive open, oil prices continue to fall

Author

J.L. Bernstein
June 25, 2026

Good Morning

One earnings report and the whole mood flips green. After almost a week of everyone bracing for “the top of ai”, Micron walked in with a monster quarter and market bought it up.

This morning's inflation read came in right where everyone expected, which is honestly the best the bulls could've hoped for. The economy looks too strong to give the Fed any reason to ease up.

Let’s dig in…

Today's Big Picture

Micron Resets The AI Trade
Micron guided to about fifty billion next quarter, but the bigger news is the sixteen deals it signed to lock in roughly a hundred billion in sales through 2030. They come with price floors, so even if memory prices crash like they always have, Micron still gets paid. Management thinks half its revenue eventually runs through deals like these. That's why a stock that always traded like a commodity might finally earn a higher price, though it's worth remembering one report flipped the whole mood in two days.

The Economy Is Too Strong For The Fed To Relax
The Fed's favorite inflation gauge came in this morning, and prices are still rising faster than the Fed wants. Core inflation ran 3.4 percent over the past year, the most since late 2023, though it matched what economists expected. The rest of the data was strong across the board: the economy grew 2.1 percent last quarter, people earned and spent more, and fewer filed for unemployment. Even oil cuts the wrong way now, since cheaper gas leaves more money in people's pockets to spend, which as Apollo's Torsten Slok points out keeps prices up rather than cooling them. Add it up and a rate hike stays on the table this year.

SK Hynix Brings The Memory Boom To Wall Street
The world's second-biggest memory maker is raising up to twenty-nine billion on the Nasdaq, the largest US listing since SpaceX, with trading set for July 10. This is new stock paying for new factories, not insiders cashing out, and the company said straight up it wants US investors to value it like Micron instead of at a discount. Here's why it matters: SK Hynix makes about sixty percent of the special memory that AI servers can't run without.

P.S. The Market does’’t reward yesterday's winners forever.

As the Magnificent 7 mature, the next generation of leaders begins to emerge - often quietly, before the crowd catches on.

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Stock Spotlight (pre-market)

Qualcomm $QCOM ( ▼ 3.29% )  

Doubled its 2029 forecast for non phone revenue to forty billion dollars and lined up Meta for its new server chip. That drags Qualcomm onto Nvidia's turf, and now every data center buyer gets a second name to play the AI chip suppliers against each other on price.

Sandisk $SNDK ( ▼ 2.5% )  

Riding the same memory demand that lifted Micron overnight. With the shortage story confirmed, buyers locking in supply have to chase the smaller memory names too, which is why this one moves harder than the giant that started it.

Unveiled what it calls the first chip technology built below one nanometer. The roadmap matters more than today's revenue, and it puts the foundry leaders, TSMC and Samsung, on notice to answer who actually owns the next node.

Up by roughly a third this week on pure retail enthusiasm with short interest stacked against it. The shorts are the ones forced to act, buying stock back at any price, while Nelson Peltz watches the buyout he was mulling get more expensive by the day.

Only modestly higher while the rest of the chip group runs, and that gap is the tell. OpenAI's new custom chip and Qualcomm's fresh server deals put the burden back on Nvidia to prove it holds market share before the bulls re-commit.

At its weakest level in more than a year after Anthropic accused it of illicitly tapping its AI model. The ones forced to act are investors in every Chinese AI name, now repricing the odds that Washington tightens access and locks them out.

What to Watch

IPO’s

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

The Print Came In Hot Everywhere But Inflation
Core inflation matched at three tenths on the month, so the scare the bears wanted didn't show. But growth got revised up past two percent, jobless claims fell to two hundred fifteen thousand, and income and spending both beat. That keeps this year's rate hike bet alive through the back door, no hot inflation number required. The next domino is whether the rate market presses harder on hikes today.

Fed Speakers: Williams And Goolsbee
Now they're talking right after a print that showed a hot economy with tame core inflation. If either sounds more open to a hike on that strength, that's the afternoon's second shoe for tech.

Yen Near A 40-Year Low
The yen sits close to its weakest against the dollar since 1986, and a strong economy print only feeds the dollar that's pinning it. A break past that line could trigger intervention from Tokyo, and that ripples into US futures fast. Most equity readers will miss it.


- John

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Note: This newsletter is intended for informational purposes only. This edition is in partnership with MarketBeat.