Amazon takes aim at Nvidia 🎯

Welcome back to the Day Trading newsletter 📈

What a week of whiplash.

Stocks hit fresh records to start the week, got jolted Wednesday when the Fed's first meeting under new chair Kevin Warsh delivered a hawkish surprise, then clawed most of it back Thursday (before the U.S.–Iran peace deal hit a snag heading into the weekend).

Through it all, the biggest story may be a quieter one: Amazon making its most direct move yet against Nvidia.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

📆 Monday 6/22 — Markets reopen after Juneteenth: The first U.S. session since the Fed's hawkish dot plot and the weekend snag in the U.S.–Iran deal. Watch whether Thursday's rebound holds and how oil opens after Friday's bounce.

📆 Wednesday 6/24 — Micron (MU) earnings (after the close): A bellwether for AI-memory demand after a monster run in the stock. Guidance on high-bandwidth memory is the tell for the whole AI-hardware trade.

📆 Thursday 6/25 — Q1 GDP, third estimate, and weekly jobless claims (8:30am ET): Final read on first-quarter growth (consensus around 1.6%) plus claims (consensus near 225K). Any cracks in the labor market would revive the cut-versus-hike debate.

📆 Thursday 6/25 — Core PCE, the Fed's preferred inflation gauge (8:30am ET): The first inflation print since the dot plot flipped hawkish. A hot number cements the new hike narrative; a soft one challenges it.

📆 Friday 6/26 — Quarter-end and the annual Russell index reconstitution (after the close): FTSE Russell's yearly rebalance makes this one of the highest-volume sessions of the year, often whipping prices into the close.

📈 The Federal Reserve held its benchmark rate at 3.50%–3.75% on Wednesday, but its updated "dot plot" flipped hawkish — now penciling in a rate increase before year-end. Nine of 18 officials see at least one 2026 hike (six see two), lifting the median year-end rate to 3.8% from 3.4% in March. It was Warsh's first meeting as chair.

🔻 Stocks sank on the Fed's hawkish surprise Wednesday, then clawed most of it back Thursday. The S&P 500 fell 1.21% and the Nasdaq 1.34% Wednesday in a sharp reaction to Warsh's debut press conference, before Thursday's rebound lifted the S&P to 7,500.58 (+1.08%), the Nasdaq 1.91%, and the small-cap Russell 2000 a leading 2.12%.

🔼 Treasury yields spiked after the Fed signaled that rate hikes are back on the table. The rate-sensitive 2-year yield jumped 14 basis points to 4.19% Wednesday — its biggest Fed-day move since March 2008 — while the 10-year climbed to about 4.49%. Traders now fully price in a hike by October.

🤝 Intel shares leapt about 10% Thursday after President Trump said Apple had agreed to build chips with Intel in the U.S. The stock rose to roughly $133.82, though neither company confirmed a deal. Apple still leans heavily on Taiwan's TSMC for its processors, so an actual shift would reshape the chip supply chain. 

🛢️ Oil's post-ceasefire slide stalled Friday after the U.S.–Iran treaty signing in Switzerland was abruptly postponed. Crude had fallen about 9% since the June 14 deal to roughly $77 a barrel (WTI) — a three-month low — but bounced Friday as Vice President JD Vance scrapped his Geneva trip, reviving doubts about the 60-day framework and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

🛒 U.S. retail sales jumped 0.9% in May to $763.7 billion, beating expectations and underscoring a resilient consumer. Spending was broad-based, with online sales up 1.5%, helped by warm weather, cooling gas prices, and lingering tax refunds. The strength complicates the case for the rate cuts the Fed just walked back.

🥇 Gold slipped to about $4,283 an ounce, nursing a "Fed hangover" even with the Middle East truce in place. A hawkish Fed raises the opportunity cost of holding an asset that pays no interest, and easing war risk drained some safe-haven demand. The metal is still up sharply on the year. 

⬇️ Bitcoin slid toward $63,000, trading near $63,900 Thursday as the Fed's hawkish turn hammered risk assets. The token fell about 3% from its pre-Fed level near $66,300, and spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs shed a combined $111 million Wednesday as rate-cut hopes faded. 

Amazon is in talks to sell its custom Trainium AI chips directly to outside data centers.

This would be the first time it would offer the silicon to anyone beyond its own AWS cloud. Amazon's AI chief Peter DeSantis confirmed the discussions and declined to name potential buyers, but the shift would push Amazon directly into Nvidia's core business of selling AI hardware to outside customers.

Amazon's broader custom-silicon division (Trainium accelerators plus its Graviton and Nitro chips) crossed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate in the first quarter, growing at triple-digit rates.

This is the first credible challenge to Nvidia's grip on the AI-chip market, where it controls the vast majority of sales.

Trainium is designed to do the heavy lifting of training AI models at roughly half the cost of conventional GPUs, and demand is already outstripping supply. Current capacity is sold out, and so is the next generation.

Anthropic and OpenAI are anchor customers. CEO Andy Jassy told shareholders in April that if Amazon's chip business were a standalone company selling to AWS and outside buyers, it would be running at a roughly $50 billion annual rate.

For Nvidia investors, the worry is that one of the cloud giants buying its chips is now positioning to sell against it.

What to watch:

• Whether named buyers emerge, and how fast.

• The biggest constraint is manufacturing. Taiwan's TSMC builds these chips, and Nvidia is its largest customer, so capacity is tight.

• Watch Nvidia's stock for any sign the market is pricing in real competition,

• Keep an eye on whether Microsoft and Google accelerate their own in-house chip plans in response.

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