A huge Apple + Intel chip deal 🍎

Welcome back to the Day Trading newsletter 📈

Intel ripped to a fresh all-time high on a stunning deal to make chips for Apple, the April jobs report came in nearly twice as hot as feared, and crude shed more than 6% on the week as a US-Iran peace memorandum quietly inched closer to the finish line.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

📆 Monday 5/11 — Senate cloture vote on Kevin Warsh (5:30pm ET): The full Senate begins moving on Trump's Fed chair pick. Republicans hold a 53-seat majority, and Sen. John Fetterman has signaled support, so confirmation is widely expected. The margin and timing matter — Warsh has to be sworn in before Powell's chair term expires Friday.

📆 Tuesday 5/12 — April CPI (8:30am ET): The first inflation print of the post-Iran-shock era. Consensus is around 3.7% YoY headline and 2.7% YoY core, with energy expected to do most of the heavy lifting. A hot print complicates Warsh's debut and pushes rate-cut bets further into 2027.

📆 Wednesday 5/13 — April PPI (8:30am ET) + Cisco earnings (after close): Producer prices give the second read on tariff and energy pass-through. Cisco's results are the cleanest read on AI-networking demand and enterprise capex into the back half.

📆 Thursday 5/14 — Walmart Q1 earnings (premarket) + Applied Materials Q2 (after close): Walmart is the bellwether on the consumer at a moment when gas prices are still elevated. Applied Materials reads the demand pulse on the equipment side of the AI build-out. An interesting test of whether the foundry rally has gotten ahead of fundamentals.

📆 Friday 5/15 — Powell's Fed chair term ends + April retail sales (8:30am ET): An institutional inflection point at the Fed runs into the consumer-spending tape on the same morning. Even a small surprise on retail sales — in either direction — could whiplash the rates curve heading into the weekend.

💼 The US economy added 115,000 jobs in April, easily topping the 65,000 consensus and keeping the unemployment rate steady at 4.3%. Average hourly earnings rose 0.2% on the month and 3.6% year over year (slightly cooler than expected). Health care (+37K), transportation and warehousing (+30K), and retail (+22K) led; federal government employment shed another 9K. The print pushes back against soft-landing-broken fears just as the Fed transitions chairs.

🔼 Akamai shares ripped 26.58% Friday to a record close of $147.71, the company's biggest single-day move in years, after disclosing a $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud-infrastructure contract with a "leading frontier model provider." Bloomberg later identified the customer as Anthropic. CEO Tom Leighton called it the largest deal in Akamai's history; at full ramp it would represent close to 6% of annual revenue versus the company's $4.5 billion 2026 guide.

💵 Coinbase posted a surprise Q1 loss of $1.49 a share on revenue of $1.41 billion, missing the $1.52 billion consensus, after disclosing earlier in the week that it would cut roughly 14% of its workforce — about 700 jobs. The miss was driven by $482 million in unrealized losses on crypto held for investment as BTC fell 22% in Q1. Derivatives volume of $4.2 billion jumped 169% year over year. Shares slipped about 4% in after-hours trading Thursday.

🚗 Lyft delivered Q1 gross bookings of $4.9 billion (+19% YoY) and revenue of $1.7 billion (+14%), but adjusted EPS of $0.04 missed the $0.06 consensus. Active riders climbed 17% to 28.3 million. Q2 guidance called for gross bookings of $5.30–$5.43 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $160–$180 million, both broadly in line. The stock slipped after the print as investors flagged margin compression versus Uber's premium-priced beat.

🚢 Iran is reviewing a one-page US peace memorandum that would formally end the war, lift sanctions in stages, ship Iran's enriched uranium stockpile out of the country, and reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic. More than 1,550 commercial vessels and roughly 22,500 mariners remain stuck inside the strait, per the Joint Chiefs. Trump has paused "Project Freedom" — the US naval-escort program — but the blockade of Iranian ports stays in place. He continues to threaten renewed bombing if talks collapse.

🛢️ WTI crude settled the week at $95.42 a barrel and Brent at $101.29, both down more than 6% on the week as traders priced in a higher probability of an Iran deal and a Hormuz reopening. The slide came despite a fresh exchange of fire in the strait Thursday and a UAE missile attack Friday, underscoring how thoroughly the market has shifted to discounting peace optionality over flare-up risk.

💰️ Bitcoin opened the week near $77,000, ripped to roughly $82,000 by Wednesday on Iran-deal optimism, then gave most of it back to trade near $79,300 by Friday. Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw inflows on the rip and outflows on the fade. The weekly close became a tape-read on whether the $80,000 line holds as support or whether crypto needs another leg of risk-on — like a Warsh confirmation or a soft CPI — to push the next leg.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Apple and Intel reached a preliminary agreement for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices, capping more than a year of talks brokered in part by the Trump administration.

Intel shares ripped 13.96% Friday to close at a record $124.92 (up to an intraday high of $130.57), while Apple added 2.05% to $293.32.

Intel is now up more than 200% year to date as the foundry trade has gone from punchline to one of the best-performing stories in the entire market.

Which Apple products would be made at Intel and on what process node weren't disclosed, and the deal still has to be finalized.

The US chip-reshoring push is starting to translate into actual revenue, not just press releases. Apple currently relies solely on Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) for the advanced silicon inside iPhones, Macs, iPads, AirPods, and the Vision Pro — a single-source supply chain that has gotten more uncomfortable as TSMC's wafer capacity gets eaten by Nvidia and the AI-server build-out.

Landing Apple (the most demanding logic customer on the planet) would give Intel Foundry both a credibility stamp and a recurring volume anchor it has spent years trying to manufacture.

It also marks a payoff on the US government's INTC stake: Treasury's position has roughly tripled in market value since last summer.

What to watch: 

• Apple's WWDC keynote on June 8, where any change to silicon roadmap or new product hardware would be the first read on which chips might actually move to Intel.

• Intel's next earnings report and any commentary about additional foundry customers (Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Broadcom have all reportedly been in early conversations).

• And TSMC's reaction: shares trade in Taipei Monday, and any hint of margin pressure or US-allocation pushback will tell you whether this is incremental volume for Intel or a redistribution of the global advanced-node pie.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: Not financial advice. Do your research before making any trades.