The market fell slightly Friday, but the tech world held strong. Zooming out a little, it ws a roaring green week in the lead-up to and aftermath of the two-week Iran ceasefire announcement. The S&P 500 and Dow are up about 3% for the past five sessions, the Nasdaq and Russell 2000 climbed 4%.

Talks start tomorrow, starring the devoutly anti-foreign war VP JD Vance in Pakistan.

Inflation numbers Friday showed a massive spike in the Consumer Price Index in March, up nearly 1% month over month. While PCE on Thursday showed February prices staying high, Friday’s CPI from March shows what we all knew: gas prices are up big time.

Fuel prices, tied to the sudden war with Iran, sent overall inflation up to 3.3% YoY, up from a level nearly at the Fed’s 2% goal. The White House, of course said no big deal things are going great, Vance is going to bring home the bacon and inflation will be gone in no time.

Without gas prices, inflation was up 2.6%, just a little above the rate of the month before.

Consumer sentiment measured by U of Michigan hit all-time lows according to Friday’s numbers. The feelings about the economy out there in the country are worse than they were during the height of the pandemic.

The crowd that made a killing buying Liberation Day lows just flipped the script on the ceasefire rally, with JPMorgan flagging retail flows as a "major departure" from the pattern that defined the last year of trading.

The RIP: Retail sold into Wednesday's 2%+ surge across all three indexes. Broad-market ETF purchases hit their lowest level in a year. $SOXL and oil short $SCO both saw retail selling. VIX broke below 20 and oil posted its largest single-day decline since 2020.

By Thursday the skepticism was proving justified, with Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf citing three ceasefire violations and oil crawling back toward $100 a barrel. $SOXL holders are sitting on the sector most exposed to Middle East supply chain disruption. If the truce unravels, the retail bid that skipped the rally won't show up on the way down either. 🎯

The world's largest contract chipmaker proved Friday that AI infrastructure spending isn't slowing down, with $TSM ( ▲ 1.4% ) climbed +1.40% after first-quarter revenue smashed estimates and set a new all-time record.

The RIP: Q1 revenue hit NT$1.134T ($35.6B) vs. NT$1.125T expected, up 35% year-over-year. March alone posted a 45.2% YoY gain at NT$415.2B. Analyst Sravan Kundojjala at SemiAnalysis told CNBC he's forecasting 64% gross margins for the quarter.

Holders of $TSM need to watch the April 16 full earnings call closely, where profitability numbers and full-year guidance will either justify or stress-test the stock's 29% YTD run. The real margin story is pricing power: TSMC reportedly hiked prices on advanced nodes, which SemiAnalysis called a "big factor" in the beat. If that pricing holds, competitors $INTC and Samsung fall further behind. 🤖

Clear Street just initiated a Buy rating on REalloys Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOY), setting a price target of $35.00—over a 300% jump from its current trading price.

While the stock has already surged 206% over the past year, Clear Street and other analysts seem to believe the real growth is just beginning. REalloys is building the largest rare earths processing facility outside of China, aiming to become North America’s leading supplier of purified heavy rare earth metals in early 2027.

They expect to be a large-scale magnet manufacturer by 2029, targeting a 7% global market share by 2030. With a $50M stock offering recently closed, REalloys is looking to position itself as a critical player in the U.S. defense and tech supply chains. As the world is moving from energy geopolitics to materials geopolitics,

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell called an emergency Tuesday meeting with the heads of $JPM, $BAC, $C, $GS, $MS, and $WFC to brief them on Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview, a model now capable of autonomously finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities across every major OS and browser. None of the exploits found were related to financial markets, but beter safe then sorry.

The RIP: Mythos Preview produced 181 working Firefox exploits vs. 2 for Opus 4.6 on the same benchmark. It fully autonomously exploited CVE-2026-4747, a 17-year-old FreeBSD RCE granting root access to unauthenticated internet users. Anthropic found dozens of OpenBSD vulnerabilities for under $20,000, per the company's security team.

"The dangers of getting this wrong are obvious, but if we get it right, there is a real opportunity to create a fundamentally more secure internet and world than we had before the advent of AI-powered cyber capabilities," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on X.

The meeting confirms regulators view Mythos-class AI as a systemic financial risk. The heads of banks were already in town for a conference, but the threat is there and the Fed is taking it seriously. $JPM ( ▼ 0.15% ) and giants like it have a head start to test the new tech, one of the launch partners of ‘Project Glasswing’ alongside $AAPL, $GOOGL, $MSFT, and $NVDA, while $BAC, $C, $GS, $MS, and $WFC left Tuesday without the same defensive advantage. 🔐

Speaking of Anthropic: The neocloud provider saw $CRWV ( ▲ 10.87% ) climb 11% on Friday after securing a multi-year agreement to power Anthropic’s Claude models, further cementing its position as the primary alternative to traditional hyperscalers. The rally follows a massive week for the company, which is aggressively leveraging its balance sheet to monopolize the supply of high-end compute needed for foundational AI.

The RIP: $CRWV counts nine of the ten leading AI model providers as customers. The Anthropic deal follows a $21B expansion of its Meta agreement announced Thursday. To fund this growth, the company added $8.5B in debt in March and is raising another $3B in fresh debt. CoreWeave held $21B in debt at the end of 2025, according to CNBC.

Investors must weigh CoreWeave’s rapid revenue scaling against its staggering debt load, which is being used to front-run Nvidia GPU acquisitions. The risk remains a potential "compute glut" if AI demand cools before these multi-year contracts can service the interest on the company's billions in leverage. While $CRWV is the direct play, this expansion signals continued massive capital expenditure that benefits $NVDA, while potentially squeezing margins for legacy providers like $MSFT that are competing for the same hardware. 🏗️

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We're offering a limited number of fully comped tickets for members who want to show up, represent, and help make this night as special as it should be.

Want to celebrate with us on May 4th?

🤑 Trump promised mass pardons for his top aides before he leaves office: report

😨 20-year-old arrested after throwing Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's San Francisco home, OpenAI says

🏠 Trump team dismisses hot inflation print, promising energy shocks will 'very, very quickly go away'

📺 Jeffrey Epstein victims will get House committee hearing, James Comer says

👀 Snap unit to use Qualcomm chips for upcoming AI smart glasses

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