u/FailOk1528

Memory stocks got absolutely smoked today and then I saw this.

SK Hynix is planning to buy back and cancel almost $29B worth of its own shares.

$29 billion.

They’re also saying more than half of cumulative FCF from 2025-27 is going back to shareholders.

I knew they were printing money from the memory boom but I didn’t expect a buyback anywhere near this big lol.

Especially after the stock just got whacked almost 10% in a day.

Whatever you think about memory being in a bubble or not, management clearly isn’t acting like they’re worried about running out of cash anytime soon.

I saw this Reuters number today and had to read it twice.

Anthropic was at about a $47B revenue run rate in May. Now they’re projecting $190–200B for 2028, and apparently those numbers are already part of the IPO valuation discussion.

That’s basically 4x the May run rate in two years.

Maybe they pull it off. AI growth has made a lot of crazy numbers look normal lately.

But $200B is a ridiculous number to be underwriting for a company that isn’t even public yet.

The July jobs report looked pretty bad at first glance.

Payrolls fell by 23,000, versus expectations for an 80,000 gain, and June was revised down to just 20,000.

Yet unemployment fell to 4.1%, largely because the labor force got smaller. And the S&P 500 still finished at a record high.

I can understand weaker jobs pushing rate expectations down. What feels strange is that the market seems perfectly happy with weaker employment as long as earnings haven’t cracked yet.

Maybe that window can stay open for a while. I’m just not sure how much weaker the labor data can get before investors start reading it as weakness instead of relief.

Productivity rose again in Q2, but labor’s share of GDP just fell to the lowest level in the data going back to 1947.

That seems pretty good for corporate profits in the short term. Companies are getting more output without labor costs taking the same share.

What I’m less sure about is how far that can go. If workers keep getting a smaller piece of the economy, eventually somebody has to buy all the stuff companies are producing.

Is this actually helping explain how margins have stayed so strong?

The S&P 500 is back at a record, but the valuation story looks a little different this time.

Forward P/E is around 20.4, while Q2 earnings are tracking roughly 31% above last year. Tech earnings are up around 72%.

I’ve been pretty skeptical of this rally because 20x earnings with the 10-year near 4.6% still isn’t cheap. But it’s also hard to call this pure multiple expansion when profits are rising this quickly.

The bear case seems to be that these earnings comparisons fade and today’s valuation starts looking expensive again.

Are people calling this a bubble because of the price level, or because they expect earnings to roll over?

AMD grew revenue 50%. SpaceX grew 92%. I expected at least one of them to get rewarded for numbers like that, but both stocks fell.

What stood out wasn’t weak demand. AMD’s margin outlook barely moved, while SpaceX spent nearly $16B on AI infrastructure and still lost money.

Maybe the market isn’t turning bearish on AI demand. Maybe it’s just becoming less willing to reward growth at any cost.

Was this just an expectations problem, or are investors finally changing what they want to see from AI companies?

Apple said tariff refunds added about two percentage points to gross margin and $0.11 to EPS. Amazon received another $600M.

Obviously the cash is real, but it didn’t come from higher sales or better operations, and it won’t repeat forever.

I haven’t seen much discussion about this when people compare the latest results with previous quarters. Are you stripping the refunds out, or just treating them as part of earnings for now?

PLTR just reported 93% revenue growth, with US commercial revenue up 149% and free cash flow reaching $1.22B.

I don’t own the stock because the valuation has always looked ridiculous to me. But after another quarter like this, I’m not sure valuation alone is a complete bear case anymore.

I still wouldn’t call it cheap. What are bears expecting to break first: growth, margins, or the multiple?

The U.S. and Japan just confirmed a coordinated intervention after the yen fell to around a 40-year low.

The yen has already moved from above 163 per dollar to roughly 155–156, and officials are saying they may intervene again.

The part I’m interested in isn’t just Japan. A stronger yen makes yen-funded carry trades more expensive. If the move continues, investors who borrowed cheap yen to buy higher-return assets elsewhere may have to reduce those positions.

I don’t think one intervention automatically causes a global selloff, especially while the interest-rate gap remains wide. But coordinated U.S.–Japan action seems more meaningful than Japan intervening alone.

Would you treat this as a temporary currency move, or something worth watching for U.S. tech, Treasuries and Japanese exporters?

Amazon’s latest quarter was a strange combination.

AWS growth accelerated to 37%, Amazon raised its 2026 capex plan to around $220B, and free cash flow turned negative.

Despite that, the stock jumped roughly 9% after hours.

It makes me think investors don’t necessarily hate massive AI spending. They hate spending that isn’t producing visible growth. Amazon showed enough AWS acceleration for the market to overlook the cash burn, at least for now.

How long would you be comfortable with negative free cash flow if AWS keeps growing at this rate?

I keep seeing two pieces of advice that seem to contradict each other.

Don’t abandon a strategy just because of a losing streak, but also don’t keep trading it blindly when market conditions change.

How do experienced traders tell the difference?

Do you compare the current drawdown with the worst drawdown in your backtest, track rolling expectancy, reduce size for a while, or look for a clear change in volatility and market structure?

At what point do you decide the strategy is temporarily out of sync rather than actually dead?

The Fed held rates yesterday, but the 30-year Treasury still moved to around 5.23%, the highest level since 2007.

Most of the discussion I’m seeing is still about whether the Fed hikes another 25bp in September. I’m starting to wonder how much that actually matters if long-term borrowing costs are already above 5%.

That seems like a bigger issue for mortgages, REITs and heavily indebted companies than one more small Fed move.

Banks are the part I’m less sure about. A steeper curve should help in theory, but higher funding costs and weaker borrowers could offset that.

Am I putting too much weight on the 30-year yield here? What parts of the market would be hit hardest if it stayed above 5% for another year?

The Dow gained 537 points and the S&P 500 finished slightly higher, while the Nasdaq fell. Coca-Cola, Sherwin-Williams and Illinois Tool Works all had strong days, but Micron, AMD and Applied Materials dropped around 8–9%.

For years, one of the biggest complaints about the market was that too much of the index depended on AI and a small number of tech companies.

Now money appears to be moving into industrials, consumer names and other less-loved parts of the market while semiconductors sell off.

Is this healthy market broadening, or are investors simply hiding in safer sectors before the Fed decision and Big Tech earnings?

I’ve been reading about how much debt large tech companies are issuing to fund AI, and I’m starting to wonder if the bond market is becoming more cautious before the stock market does.

Stock investors still seem willing to accept huge AI spending as long as revenue keeps growing. Bond investors, however, care more about whether these projects will generate enough cash to cover interest and refinancing costs.

I’m not saying companies like Microsoft or Google are at risk of failing. My concern is that higher borrowing costs could make some less profitable data-center projects no longer worth building. That could eventually hurt GPU, memory, networking and power suppliers.

Maybe wider credit spreads are simply caused by the large amount of new bonds entering the market. But could they also be an early warning that returns on AI spending are lower than investors expect?