Good evening, and happy Monday. The market closed lower, as the world came back from a massive Spain win to close out the World Cup. Sorry Messi fans.

Oil prices climbed as bombing runs hit all sides of the Iran conflict. Three service members died this weekend after an Iranian drone hit a U.S. base in Jordan.

The U.S. Marines boarded tankers that were skirting a new blockade, and launched the ninth day of attacks. Ships are again barely passing through the Strait, at the same low levels as March and April.

It's a pivotal week for big tech earnings. Tesla, Alphabet, Intel, and IBM are all reporting this week, alongside other giants. It has been a roaring start to the season, according to FactSet, 47 S&P 500 names reported an avg 52% gain in earnings, nearly double what the street expected.

A Fed judge paused the PSky Warner Bros. merger, and the Taylor Farms lettuce parasite poisoning was a red herring, the FDA said. The real source of the spread is still under investigation.On Stocktwits, $IREN jumped 21%, $ACHR gained 20%, and $PHOE ripped 27%, while their streams ranged from extremely bullish to outright bearish.

Today’s Briefing:

Not to be left out, Alibaba previewed its new Qwen3.8-Max model on Sunday, placing its cloud business back in the frontier-model race. The launch followed Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 release on Thursday, giving investors two Chinese challengers to Anthropic and OpenAI. Alibaba claims Qwen trails only Anthropic’s Fable 5, but it provided little evidence.

The RIP: $BABA climbed 4.7% on 14.7M shares. Qwen3.8-Max has 2.4T parameters and is available through Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork. Kimi K3 has 2.8T parameters and a 1M-token context window. Moonshot plans to release its weights July 27. 🤖

The $BABA room is 55% bearish on Qwen’s pop, catch the pushback ->

SK hynix's ADR began trading on July 10, 2026 joining the ranks of Nvidia, AMD, and TSMC as the AI trade's newest headline. The company makes high-bandwidth memory chips that sit alongside AI accelerators central to the AI data center supply chain.

The Direxion Daily SK Hynix Bull 2X ETF (SKHL) seeks 200% of SK hynix's daily performance through swaps referenced to its Nasdaq ADR. No overseas account, no currency conversion, just 2X exposure to the Korean chipmaker from the same screen you already trade on.

Bullish on the AI memory trade? SKHL lets you express your conviction.

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AMD turned Helios from a roadmap into a hyperscaler product Monday, July 20, when Microsoft agreed to deploy the rack-scale AI system in Azure. Instead of selling individual accelerators, AMD is challenging Nvidia with a complete platform spanning GPUs, CPUs, networking, and software.

The RIP: $AMD ( ▲ 1.58% ) rose 1.6%, fading from a 5.4% intraday gain, on 23.2M shares. Each Helios rack contains 72 MI455X GPUs alongside EPYC CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software. Shipments begin later this year; Microsoft disclosed neither capacity nor financial terms.

Microsoft joins Meta, OpenAI, and Oracle as early Helios customers, giving AMD credible distribution against Nvidia’s dominant rack systems. AMD expects tens of billions in annual data-center AI revenue beginning in 2027, mostly from Helios. The test is whether its open platform and lower cost per token can overcome Nvidia’s CUDA software advantage. ☀️

The $AMD room is 59% bullish on Helios, track the Nvidia challenge ->

IREN said Monday it signed $2.8B of new multiyear AI cloud contracts since June 1, formalizing demand from AI developers including Microsoft, Nvidia, Perplexity, Figure AI, Together AI, Fluidstack, Fireworks AI, Fal AI, and Hume AI. The contracts average roughly four years, though IREN did not disclose individual signing dates or contract values.

The agreements lift IREN’s year-end AI cloud ARR target from $3.7B to more than $4B, with approximately 85% already contracted. The firm said customers are prepaying about 45% of the associated GPU capex, reducing the amount IREN must fund while building capacity.

The RIP: $IREN jumped 21% intraday on 61.7M shares, roughly 2.2x normal volume. June 30 short interest stood at 76M shares, about 22% of float and up 18% from the prior report. IREN pulls in nearly 2/3rds of revenue through Bitcoin mining, still.

This is the Bitcoin miner’s transformation becoming contracted business. Short positioning likely magnified the reaction, but Monday’s contracts were the actual catalyst. Now comes execution: installing GPUs, passing customer acceptance, and converting contracted ARR into revenue. ☁️

The $IREN room is 78% bullish. Does the AI math work? →

July broke the AI monopoly as money left crowded tech winners and spread across the rest of the market.

$XLK Technology -5.5%: The PHLX Semiconductor Index fell roughly 20% from its late-June high, brushing bear-market territory after its best quarter on record. The trigger was valuation, not collapsing demand. Investors questioned whether hyperscalers could earn enough from nearly $1.5T in projected AI infrastructure spending to justify the hardware boom.

The unwind accelerated when Taiwan Semiconductor’s strong results and higher spending failed to lift the group. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model raised another uncomfortable question: What if cheaper, more efficient models need less premium compute? Profit-taking finished the job after $11B left semiconductor funds in one week. $MU and $INTC fell roughly 30% and 33% from their June peaks.

The Magnificent Seven didn’t provide much shelter. The group gained only about 5.5% this year through July 13, while performance splintered across the seven names. $NVDA held up better than the broader chip group, but delays surrounding Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro added to doubts about how quickly AI spending becomes AI revenue.

It wasn't all bad news. Retail investors were buying smaller names more than the big boys, according to data from Vanda Research. Vanda wrote in a note inflows from retail traders spiked toward Intel this month, at $194M, compared to just $52M in Microsoft. IREN, the Bitcoin miner turned AI data center provider, pulled in $56M so far, with likely more after today’s news.

“Retail aren’t buying the Mag 7 anymore. They’re picking winners,” Vanda analysts wrote in a note recorded by WSJ. “They’re buying the stories they have the highest conviction in.”

$XLE Energy +4.7%: Crude surged as the U.S.-Iran ceasefire broke down, sending money toward $XOM and other inflation beneficiaries.

$XLF Financials +1.0%: Strong bank earnings and record trading revenue rewarded $JPM as investors looked for cheaper, economically sensitive leadership.

Watch this week: Alphabet reports Wednesday and Intel follows Thursday. Their earnings reactions will show whether July was a crowded-trade reset or the start of a deeper AI repricing.

$PHOE ( ▲ 16.54% ) Phoenix Asia ⚡: ripped +27% after its $1B ACEA Pharma acquisition fueled speculation
$ACHR ( ▲ 19.6% ) Archer ⚡: soared +20% after unveiling Thunder with defense-tech firm Anduril
$ELF ( ▲ 8.09% ) e.l.f. Beauty ⚡: jumped +8% after analysts raised targets on Rhode momentum
$GPN ( ▲ 5.85% ) Global Payments: climbed +6% after Morgan Stanley upgraded shares on Worldpay optimism
$LITE ( ▲ 4.47% ) Lumentum: popped +4% after Barclays upgraded the AI optics supplier
$WBD ( ▼ 3.76% ) Warner Bros. Discovery ⚡: slid -4% after a federal judge paused Paramount’s merger
$CMG ( ▼ 3.8% ) Chipotle: fell -4% after traders braced for Q2 margin pressure
$KKR ( ▼ 3.93% ) KKR: fell -4% after private-credit redemption fears resurfaced across alternatives
$CRMD ( ▼ 7.6% ) CorMedix ⚡: tumbled -7% after DefenCath reimbursement transition risks rattled investors

😨 FDA says it’s still investigating Taylor Farms in cyclosporiasis outbreak

🏠 BlackRock seeks over $12 billion in bonds for Texas data center

📺 PSKY Stock Set To End At Record Lows After Federal Judge Halts $110B Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger

👀 Man with airsoft rifles caused fireworks explosion outside NYC immigration court: MS NOW

Pre-Market Earnings: $GM General Motors Company, $MMM 3M Co., $HAL Halliburton Co., $SCHW Charles Schwab Corp., $NOC Northrop Grumman Corp., +8 more. ☀️
After-Market Earnings: $NLY Annaly Capital Management Inc, $ALK Alaska Air Group Inc., $COF Capital One Financial Corp., $EQT EQT Corp, $IBKR Interactive Brokers Group Inc - Ordinary Shares - Class A, +3 more. 🌙

P.S. You can listen to all of these earnings calls on Stocktwits.

Want to see some change? Email me, Kevin Travers with feedback, and follow me on Stocktwits. Refer a friend for this quarter’s edition of The RIP Forecast 😎

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