AMD joins the $1 trillion club 💰️

Welcome back to the Day Trading newsletter 📈

The AI trade came roaring back Monday: the Nasdaq jumped 2.3% to its first record close since June, oil tumbled back below $100, and the chipmakers did the heavy lifting.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

🔼 Intel jumped 12% on Monday to $121.78, its highest close since early July. CEO Lip-Bu Tan said last week that CPU demand is so strong Intel "can only supply 50% of customers," and Monday the market decided AI agents will make that shortfall worse. Arm rose 10% on the same logic.

🥇 Meta climbed 11% to $741.25 after its Muse AI assistant hit No. 1 on Apple's U.S. App Store, passing ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Apptopia estimates 1.8 million U.S. and Canadian iOS downloads in Muse's first 12 days, versus 1.3 million for ChatGPT over a comparable stretch. Meta is up roughly 25% in September.

🇨🇳 Alibaba unveiled the Zhenwu V900 on Tuesday, calling it China's most powerful AI chip, and its U.S.-listed shares rose in early trading. The chip promises triple the compute of Alibaba's current M890 and enters production in early 2027. The company also plans to expand global data center capacity to more than 20 gigawatts by 2032.

🎬️ Paramount settled with 12 state attorneys general on Monday, clearing the last major obstacle to its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Concessions include an extra $300 million a year on U.S. film production and keeping both studio lots for at least five years. The settlement dodges a $7 million-a-day "ticking fee" that would have kicked in Oct. 1.

🛢️ U.S. crude tumbled 4.5% on Monday to settle at $95.78, with Brent closing at $100.34, after President Trump reportedly chose diplomacy with Iran over striking the Houthis. Trump said he would probably be open to meeting Iran's president at the UN this week, and Saudi crude exports are partially recovering from the pipeline attack.

📈 Bitcoin surged to $85,134 on Monday, its highest level in eight months. The drivers: falling oil prices, a strong weekly close and a squeeze on short sellers — bitcoin was hovering around $76,000 just after the Fed's Sept. 16 hike. Ethereum climbed too, and is up nearly 14% over the past month.

🔻 The 10-year Treasury yield slipped to 4.951% on Monday, retreating from last week's 19-year high of 5.041%. Yields eased worldwide as oil fell, taking some inflation pressure off the table days after the Fed's first hike since 2023. Cheaper borrowing costs gave the tech rally extra fuel.

🖥️ HP warned in an SEC filing Monday that global PC volumes will shrink by mid-single digits in 2027, and the stock fell about 3%. The company said the outlook matches third-party industry forecasts and declined to give fiscal 2027 guidance. It's a sour note for the PC market just as AI spending booms everywhere else.

AMD surged 9.95% on Monday to close at a record $615.52 (touching $616.69 intraday) pushing its market value above $1 trillion for the first time.

That makes it the fourth U.S. chipmaker to reach the milestone, after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron.

The move caps a five-day winning streak worth roughly 25%, and AMD is now up more than 180% in 2026.

The spark was Meta's Muse AI assistant hitting No. 1 on Apple's U.S. App Store. Meta is a key AMD customer, and Muse's breakout convinced investors that consumer AI agents have arrived (and that the demand for the chips that run them is about to get much bigger).

The AI rally is broadening. For most of the past two years the trade was essentially one stock: Nvidia, now worth about $5.4 trillion.

Monday looked different: AMD hit $1 trillion, Intel jumped 12%, Arm rose 10%, and the S&P 500 posted its best day since early August, up 1.49%.

The narrative shift is from training (building the models, Nvidia's stronghold) to inference (the everyday computing that happens each time an AI agent books a flight or writes an email).

Inference demand scales with usage, and the Muse download numbers gave the market its first mass-consumer proof point.

What to watch:

• Whether the story survives contact with actual earnings. Micron reports Sept. 30, the first hard data point for the chip rally — after a 180% run, the bar is high.

• Thursday's Trump-Xi summit is the other swing factor: AI and tariffs are on the agenda, and any change in China policy moves AMD's addressable market. A rally built on one app's download charts can reverse just as fast as it started.

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