DHUnplugged #808: Bulls in a Bubble Shop

Happy 250th!

The bulls are bubbling up!

Yentervention - it is a thing.

Labor market predictions.

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Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter Follow Andrew Horowitz on Twitter Warm-Up - 250 Years! - We have the scorecard - Bulls are on the loose! - Kevin Hassett - what a putz - RAM JOB!

Markets - Google's first day in the DJIA - a good one - SpaceX bonds already losing -Yen slips to 1986 levels - Yentervention?

WHAT A PUTZ! - Trump Accounts launch July 4, with the NYSE and Nasdaq set to ring the opening bell from the Oval Office. - Program gives a $1,000 Treasury-funded investment account to U.S. children born from January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2028. - Kids under 18 can have accounts, but only newborns in that four-year window get the federal seed money. - Parents, family, employers, nonprofits, and governments can add money, with a general $5,000 annual contribution cap. - Money is invested in index funds and generally locked up until the child reaches adulthood. - Kevin Hassett pitched it as a way to teach kids about markets, ownership, saving, and compounding. His argument is that the more young people get exposed to investing early, and market ownership becomes less of an upper-income club. - However - > the government is handing out taxpayer-funded brokerage seed money while selling it as capitalism. - Also odd: the benefit may skew toward families who already know how to file forms, open accounts, and add more money. - So basically it is a forced financial-literacy experiment wrapped in a political brand name, with a socialist starter check to teach capitalism.

First-Half Winners and Losers - S&P 500 finished the first half up roughly 7% to 8%, with the rally led by AI hardware, chips, memory, and data-center infrastructure. - Biggest winners were the shovel sellers: Sandisk up about 780%, Micron up about 296%, Western Digital up about 240%, Seagate up about 226%. - Overseas AI hardware ripped too: South Korea's Kospi up 123%, helped by Samsung up 169% and SK Hynix up 303%. - Semiconductor ETFs had a monster Q2: iShares Semiconductor ETF up 86.8%, VanEck Semiconductor ETF up 64.8%. - Japan's Nikkei rose about 38%; FTSE 100 gained about 5.8%. - Losers were the software/platform names that could not prove immediate AI payoff. - Microsoft was down about 24% despite being one of the biggest AI spenders. - Momentum stocks had one of their worst stretches in two decades as the Magnificent Seven slipped on capex worries. - Crypto and gold also lagged the AI-infrastructure trade. - Equity BULLS are running like it was San Fermin, Spain...

MORE.... - Gold biggest quarterly loss since 2013 - Japan best quarter ever - Oil starts and ends - Kospi best quarter in 30 years - Stoxx 600 best Q in 5 years

Something is going to break! - When Micro announced earnings, and we see that companies are panicking (News about existential threat to smaller tech players).. We said something is going to break - MU shares lifted to ATH on the news - big big beat - Micron’s latest quarter showed a dramatic acceleration from the year-ago period, with revenue rising from $9,301 to $41,460 and EPS increasing from $1.91 to $25.11. - HUGE uptick in guidance - Apple increased pricing, Dell is increasing prices next week (17%), Microsoft raised price on XBox, HP across the board increase, Lenovo/Xiaomi increases, - NOW: Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from China's ChangXin Memory Technologies

Korea Goes All-In On AI