Japan's Ministry of Finance appears to be intervening in currency markets repeatedly:
The Japanese yen surged +1.8% in under 30 minutes during Asian trading on Wednesday, briefly touching 155.04 per US Dollar, the latest in a series of sharp moves consistent with official intervention. This comes after Japan's first intervention since 2024 on April 30, when Bank of Japan account analysis indicated authorities spent ~$34.5 billion to defend the yen. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs estimates Japan still has enough reserves to intervene ~30 more times at this scale. The 157 level is emerging as the new line in the sand for Japanese authorities, with the Ministry of Finance warning speculators last week that "the timing for taking bold steps is nearing." Japan is desperate to prevent the Yen from weakening past 160 per US Dollar. Source: Bloomberg, Global Markets Investor
Yesterday, Gold put in its biggest up day in quite some time during yesterday’s session.
The shiny metal broke above the short-term downtrend line and also pushed out of a dynamic wedge-like formation. The key for a more sustained squeeze is a close above the $4800 area, right where the 50-day moving average comes in. More on gold. Source: TME
The bond market’s inflation outlook just collapsed from over 5.3% to 3.0% over the next twelve months.
Source: Hedgeye, Bloomberg
AI Memory Stocks Are Crushing the Market
The bottleneck is spreading across DRAM, NAND, SSD controllers, HDDs, advanced packaging, process control, server racks, and wafer fab equipment. Every layer of the stack is being repriced as AI workloads demand more bandwidth, more capacity, and faster data movement. Source: Sergey
The semiconductors ETF $SMH is up roughly +153% over the past year, the strongest 1-year performance on record going back to 2001 and roughly 4 standard deviations above the long-run average.
As DataTrek notes, staying bullish from here increasingly requires confidence that the semiconductor cycle and AI-driven backlog can remain durable for much longer. Source: The Market Ear
World Cup in one chart
Source: Zerohedge, BofA
The S&P500 has rallied 16% since the March 30 lows.
10 stocks have been responsible for almost 70% of this rally, with Alphabet $GOOG and Nvidia $NVDA alone accounting for 25% of the whole index’s returns. Source: Negligible Capital
The Chinese central bank remains the most unwavering “buy-the-dip” force in gold.
Source: Shanghai Macro Strategist
