Trump Rings In Dow 53,000 🔔

Welcome back to the Day Trading newsletter 📈

Markets came back from the long weekend in a buying mood: the Dow notched its first-ever close above 53,000, chip stocks snapped back from their late-June slump, and the president rang the opening bell… from the Oval Office.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

^{SPONSORED BY BTQ TECHNOLOGIES}

The encryption protecting your bank account, your messages, and pretty much everything else online could eventually be cracked by quantum computers.

Governments are taking it seriously. U.S. agencies are under orders to switch to "quantum-proof" security over the next decade.

That's the problem BTQ Technologies (Nasdaq: BTQ) is working on, and this week it completed the acquisition of QPerfect, a French quantum software company specializing in high-performance quantum simulation, emulation, and software tools for designing and testing quantum systems.

With QPerfect, BTQ adds a practical way to help banks, telecoms, enterprises, and governments explore, test, and validate quantum software and security architectures before quantum machines are fully mature.

The deal (worth up to about $28 million) also gives BTQ a research base in Strasbourg, France, at one of Europe's top quantum science hubs. The founding team is sticking around to keep building.

Most of the quantum industry is racing to build the computers. BTQ is working on what has to come first: quantum-resistant encryption and chips designed to run it at practical speeds.

With QPerfect, they have a way to prove it all works before banks, telecoms, and defense networks bet on it.

💰️ Samsung forecast record second-quarter operating profit of roughly 89.4 trillion won (up more than 1,800% from a year ago) and the stock still fell nearly 7%. The AI memory boom drove the blowout, but investors are getting nervous that record chip profits invite record spending. When perfection is priced in, even historic numbers can disappoint.

🧠 SK Hynix kicked off a $28 billion U.S. listing on the Nasdaq, set to be the second-biggest share sale in history, behind only SpaceX's $85.7 billion IPO last month. The memory maker has already drawn up to $7 billion in investor interest, with pricing Thursday and trading Friday. Proceeds fund new Korean chip fabs.

💼 Microsoft is cutting 4,800 jobs (about 2.1% of its workforce) with roughly 3,200 of the cuts hitting its Xbox division. Xbox also plans to spin off four gaming studios in its biggest restructuring ever, as Microsoft redirects billions toward AI infrastructure. Shares slipped 1.7% Monday on the news.

🍏 Broadcom closed 3.7% higher after extending its custom-chip supply deal with Apple through 2031. Apple is estimated to account for roughly 20% of Broadcom's annual revenue, so locking in five more years takes the company's biggest customer risk off the table after a rough month for the stock.

🤖 AMD closed 6.6% higher after Japanese self-driving startup Turing said it now runs roughly 10% of its AI training workloads on AMD GPUs. It's a small customer but a big signal: real AI training work shifting away from Nvidia's near-monopoly. The news helped lead the whole chip sector's Monday rebound. 

🔼 Nvidia supplier Foxconn posted record second-quarter revenue of NT$2.51 trillion, up nearly 40% year over year on booming AI server demand. The Taiwanese giant (which holds an estimated 40% of the global AI server market) expects growth to continue in Q3. A reassuring data point after June's chip-stock jitters.

📊 Bitcoin's rebound stalled Monday, opening near $63,600 before sliding back toward $61,700. The crypto is still up sharply from last Wednesday's low under $58,300, as the weak June jobs report pushed traders to price out the risk of a Fed rate hike, a tailwind for assets that pay no yield.

👷 The U.S. services sector kept growing in June, with the ISM Services PMI coming in at 54.0, its 24th straight month in expansion. The details mattered more: employment grew for the first time in four months, and prices paid fell below 70 for the first time since February. It’s an encouraging sign for inflation watchers.

Monday's session opened with a first: President Trump rang the opening bells of both the NYSE and the Nasdaq from the Oval Office, the first-ever joint bell ceremony, and only the second time a sitting president has rung the NYSE bell (Reagan did it on the exchange floor in 1985).

The occasion was the launch of Trump Accounts, the government-seeded investment accounts for kids created by last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The Dow rose 155.84 points, or 0.29%, to close at a record 53,055.91 (its first finish above 53,000) while the S&P 500 gained 0.72% and the Nasdaq added 1.12%.

Trump also plugged Dell's computers during the ceremony, and the stock surged 7.7%.

Beyond the spectacle, there's real money here.

The Treasury says more than 6 million children were signed up heading into launch, and about 1.4 million of them (kids born between 2025 and 2028) qualify for the $1,000 federal seed deposit, roughly $1.4 billion in government money.

The accounts can only hold low-cost funds tracking the S&P 500 or similar broad U.S. equity indexes, with fees capped at 0.1%, and families can add up to $5,000 a year.

That's a small but structural new stream of buyers for U.S. index funds. It’s money that arrives on autopilot, in good markets and bad.

Monday was also a reminder of a newer market force: a presidential product plug moved Dell nearly 8% in a single session.

What to watch: 

• Wednesday's FOMC minutes (the first from a meeting chaired by new Fed chief Kevin Warsh) land with traders still repricing rate expectations after June's weak 57,000-job payrolls report.

• Also watch whether Dell holds its plug-driven pop, and how fast brokerages onboard the millions of accounts that haven't been funded yet.

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