SK Hynix Just Made History 🚀

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Samsung's blowout earnings somehow cratered chip stocks Tuesday, the Iran ceasefire fell apart Wednesday, and then the AI trade roared back, capped Friday by the biggest US listing ever by a foreign company.

All three major indexes rose Friday to close out the choppy week.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

📆 Tuesday 7/14 — June CPI (8:30am ET): The single biggest data point of the week for rate expectations. After the Fed's "family fight" over rates in June, a hot print strengthens the hike camp; a cool one keeps cuts on the table.

📆 Tuesday 7/14 — Big bank earnings (before open): JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo all report. Watch commentary on credit quality and how the consumer is holding up against $4+ gas.

📆 Tuesday–Wednesday 7/14–7/15 — Fed Chair Warsh testifies (10am ET both days): House Financial Services Tuesday, Senate Banking Wednesday. His first extended public grilling since the divided June minutes — any hint on the rate path will move markets.

📆 Wednesday 7/15 — June PPI (8:30am ET): The wholesale inflation read, plus a second earnings wave: Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and Johnson & Johnson. PPI surprises often front-run consumer prices.

📆 Thursday 7/16 — June Retail Sales (8:30am ET): The first hard read on whether high gas prices are denting broader spending — PepsiCo says they already are. Netflix reports after the close.

💰️ Micron will invest more than $250 billion in US chip manufacturing through 2035, a roughly $50 billion increase from its previous commitment. The announcement came as the first concrete was poured at its Clay, New York megafab — planned as the largest chipmaking site in US history. The stock jumped 4.5% Thursday.

🤖 Meta will put its in-house "Iris" AI chip into production in September as part of a plan to double computing capacity to 14 gigawatts in 2027, per an internal memo reported by Reuters. Designed with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC, the chip is Meta's bid to shrink its Nvidia bill. Meta shares climbed 15% this week.

✈️ Delta beat expectations Friday with adjusted EPS of $1.56 vs. $1.48 expected — while absorbing the highest quarterly fuel expense in its history. Adjusted revenue of $17.67 billion also topped estimates, and the airline reaffirmed its full-year forecast of $6.50–$7.50 per share. With the Iran conflict keeping jet fuel elevated, that guidance is the number to watch.

🔻 AstraZeneca dropped as much as 9% Thursday — erasing roughly $27 billion in market value — after its heart drug Wainua failed a late-stage trial. The drug missed its goal of reducing deaths and heart-related emergencies in patients with a rare heart condition. Jefferies analysts called it a hit to the company's trial-design credibility.

🥤 PepsiCo's revenue beat Thursday, but core EPS of $2.20 missed by a penny — and the CEO pointed at the gas pump. With gas averaging a four-year high of $4.56 a gallon in late May, CEO Ramon Laguarta said "the consumer is worse than what we had anticipated." February's snack price cuts of up to 15% haven't lifted volumes yet.

🔼 Bitcoin climbed back above $64,000 Friday morning, up nearly 3% on the week, as it recovers from its worst month in four years. ETF flows have turned positive and sentiment is improving around the pending CLARITY Act, crypto's long-awaited market-structure bill. Bitcoin still trades roughly $51,700 below where it was a year ago.

🛢️ Oil posted a weekly gain of about 5%, with Brent settling at $76.01 Friday, after the US launched new airstrikes on Iran Thursday and Strait of Hormuz shipping slowed to a near-standstill. Prices eased off midweek highs as technical talks between Washington and Tehran continued despite the renewed hostilities.

📊 Nvidia rose about 4% Friday, helping power the S&P 500 to a weekly gain as the AI trade found its footing after Tuesday's Samsung-triggered rout. The rebound builds on Beijing's decision to let Alibaba, ByteDance, and DeepSeek buy its H200 chips. The stock remains well below its mid-May high. 

SK Hynix, the South Korean memory-chip giant, raised $26.5 billion in its Nasdaq debut Friday — the largest US share sale ever completed by a foreign company, topping the $25 billion record Alibaba set back in 2014.

The deal priced Thursday at $149 per ADR, with investor orders reportedly covering about seven times the shares on offer the ADRs opened at $170 and closed their first session at $168.01, up 13% from the offer price.

The shares trade under the ticker SKHYV, switching to SKHY on Tuesday.

This was the cleanest real-time test of investor appetite for AI (and it passed). Just three days earlier, Samsung's record profit had triggered a global chip selloff, raising fears that the AI trade was "priced for perfection." Then investors lined up seven-deep for the year's biggest listing.

SK Hynix is the leader in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) (the specialized chips that feed data to AI processors) with a 56.4% market share per its SEC filing, ahead of Samsung and Micron, and it's a key Nvidia supplier.

For US investors, the listing is the first direct, US-traded way to own the AI memory boom's front-runner.

What to watch:

• Whether the pop survives this week's gauntlet: June CPI and the biggest wave of bank earnings both land Tuesday.

• Also watch for other Asian chipmakers to follow with US listings of their own

• Samsung's full second-quarter results later this month, which will show whether the memory boom is as strong as SK Hynix's order book suggests.

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