The Wire
Bloomberg said Korea's stock market is becoming uninvestable. The regulator fired back that night, over one number.
A Bloomberg Opinion column counted 33 days this year when the Kospi moved 5% or more, against four for the Nikkei and none for the Hang Seng. Korea's Financial Services Commission called its forced-selling figure unsourced.
SpaceX (SPCX) beat on every line. The 911 million share unlock Thursday took the whole rally back
SpaceX beat on revenue, EPS and every segment in its first quarter as a public company. The stock rose 9.4%, then handed the whole move back. The reason is Thursday, when 911.5 million shares unlock against a float of about 646 million.
Zebra Technologies (ZBRA) rose 18% on record results. A $73 million tariff refund did most of the margin work.
Zebra beat by $1.99 a share and raised full year guidance. The quarter also carried $73 million of IEEPA tariff recoveries booked into gross profit, and the company guided next quarter's margin nearly 6 points lower.
The FCC may ban Chinese optical transceivers. Photonics stocks exploded, and Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) has run nearly 70% in four sessions.
Reuters says the FCC is drafting a rule that would ban imports of all new optical transceiver models, then exempt many non-Chinese suppliers. The photonics group repriced on it Tuesday morning, and AAOI, down 66% since May, ran the hardest.
T1 Energy (TE) jumped 19% on a 641 MW Clearway order. First Solar (FSLR) rose 10% the same day.
T1 Energy closed up 18.7% Monday after signing Clearway for 641 MW of solar modules. Solar stocks rallied across the board behind First Solar's earnings beat.
The Nasdaq just erased six red days in three. It's only done that once before.
The Nasdaq closed at 25,913.90 on Monday, up 2.13% and green for a third day running. Those three days added 6.02% and wiped out the 5.4% lost during the six red days that ended July 29. Since 1971 the Nasdaq has gone six down then three up 35 times, and day four came back green in only 11 of the 34 finished cases.
Palantir (PLTR) grew revenue 93%, raised its full-year forecast by $500 million, and is still a third below its high.
Palantir reported second quarter revenue of $1.935 billion, up 93% from a year earlier, and adjusted earnings of $0.41 a share. It raised full year revenue guidance by about $500 million. Shares were up more than 8% in early after-hours trading.
CrowdStrike insiders filed to sell $196 million of CRWD since June. The CEO's sales were preplanned. The CFO's weren't.
Nine Form 144 notices since June 5 cover $195.7 million of CrowdStrike stock, and $145.3 million of it is the chief executive. His Forms 4 check the 10b5-1 box. The finance chief filed again Monday, and his do not.
I run an Inverse Cramer tracker. Jim Cramer just went 6 for 8, led by Astera Labs' 30% rally.
I built a page to track how wrong Jim Cramer is, and I like the guy anyway. Six of his last eight tech calls beat the Nasdaq, and the one that didn't is the one holding my whole tracker up.
A drone motor costs $12 from China and $100 from America. The Pentagon just committed $820 million to close the gap.
The Pentagon committed $1.3 billion to drones last week and none of it reached the stocks that rallied. The $820 million loan went to privately held Performance Drone Works, and it was for motors, batteries and control electronics rather than aircraft. The majority of drones on the Pentagon's own approved list still run Chinese motors, because a Chinese one costs $12 and an American one costs $100.
SK Hynix couldn't discuss a buyback for 25 days because of a US rule. That ends Tuesday in Seoul.
A US prospectus rule has barred SK Hynix from announcing a buyback or special dividend since its Nasdaq listing on July 10. The 25 days end on the night of August 4 in Korea, with 87.96 trillion won of cash on the balance sheet and the company saying no plan has been finalized.
AMD gave Meta and OpenAI warrants on 320 million shares at a penny. They're now worth about $152 billion.
AMD issued Meta and OpenAI warrants on 160 million shares apiece at an exercise price of $0.01, vesting on 6 GW of Instinct shipments and a $600 share price. At Friday's close the pair is worth about $152 billion against $3.2 million to exercise. AMD's Q1 10-Q says none of it has vested or touched the financial statements yet.
The AI trade rallied Monday. Memory fell as much as 8% at the open even as chip prices kept rising.
Micron (MU) has lost a third of its value since June 25 and SanDisk nearly half. CoreWeave and Vertiv fell about half as far, and Nvidia rose. Memory contract prices never fell. What changed is the rate of increase, which went from 93-98% a quarter to a forecast 13-18%.
EchoStar (ECHO) just reported $24.12 in earnings per share. Almost all of it came from bankruptcy.
EchoStar reported net income of $8.46 billion for the second quarter. About $9.73 billion of it was a non-cash gain booked when DISH DBS filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 on the final day of the quarter.
Radware (RDWR) CFO bought after a 17% drop. Two colleagues sold at higher prices this year.
Guy Avidan bought $50,420 of Radware stock two days after the shares fell 17 percent. It is the only open-market purchase in the company's Form 4 record, and that record begins on April 2, 2026.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are close to half the Kospi. They fell almost 9% on Monday and took the index down 5.12%, while Korea's smaller companies rose.
The Kospi closed down 5.12% on August 3, giving back a third of the record rise it had on July 31. Foreign and institutional investors net sold 4.3814 trillion won ($3.06 billion USD) of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix on the day, and almost nothing else. The Kosdaq rose 2.44% in the same session.
SoundHound (SOUN) reports Wednesday. Five of our six AI stock pickers own it despite the stock trading near a 52-week low.
SoundHound reports second quarter results Wednesday after the close. Guidance leaves a large second half to cover, gross margin fell to 31% last quarter, and five of the six AI models in our stock contest own the shares.
Korea's new rule pushed investors out of Samsung and SK Hynix leverage funds. They moved 500 billion won into a bet against the whole index instead.
Korea's 30 million won cash rule covers single-stock leverage products only. On its first day investors net sold over 1 trillion won of those and net bought about 500 billion won of index inverse funds the rule does not touch, on the day the Kospi rose a record 17.91%.
The options market expects AMD to move $46 after earnings Tuesday. Its last two earnings reports moved even more.
AMD reports second quarter results Tuesday after the close. Analysts expect $1.61 a share on $11.31 billion, and the Aug. 5 straddle prices a 9.7% move. The last two reports moved the stock 17.3% and 18.6%. In February AMD beat on both lines and fell anyway, on guidance.
Semiconductors made up 41.5% of everything South Korea exported in July. It was the country's second-biggest export month on record. So why did its stock market fall 22%?
South Korea exported $98.89 billion of goods in July, its second-biggest month ever, with semiconductors alone at $41.01 billion. The same month, the Kospi fell 22.19%, the largest monthly drop of any major world index.
Korea's new $21,000 cash rule cut trading in its 2x Samsung and SK Hynix funds by 76% in one day. The Kospi still rose a record 17.91%, and the real test comes Monday in Seoul.
Korea now requires about $21,000 in cash before an investor can buy the 2x funds on Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Trading in them fell 76% on the rule's first day, while the Kospi rose a record 17.91% in the same session. Seoul's Monday open is the first clean test of whether the rule calms the market.
SanDisk (SNDK) beat every line and guided way above consensus. The stock fell anyway.
SanDisk (SNDK) reports fiscal Q4 on August 5 with Goldman's target at $2,200 and the stock at $1,214.87 after a 5.1% Friday drop. SK Hynix printed a 76% operating margin on July 29 and Seoul still closed down 9.61%, because revenue missed consensus by 5.5%.
You cannot buy China's CXMT in the US. You can buy the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM), which has $627 million riding on it.
The Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) added a $627.5 million CXMT total return swap at a 2.52% weight, five days after CXMT's Shanghai listing. The position is bigger than GigaDevice, and there was no CXMT line in the fund's July 23 file.
Kioxia is the memory chip maker that passed Toyota as Japan's most valuable company, then fell 66%. Here's who owns it
Kioxia is the former Toshiba Memory, and it makes NAND flash and nothing else. Toshiba still holds 15.10% and keeps selling, an SK Hynix (SKHY) vehicle holds 14%, and Sandisk (SNDK) co-owns the factories. What the company makes, who owns it, and how a US investor can reach it.