Nasdaq 100 Index hits all time high. Micron earnings tonight key.
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Welcome to the Saxo Market Call. Before we get started, it's important we emphasize that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests and do not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All information provided is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is Wednesday, 25th of June, 2025. Welcome to the Saxo Market Call.

Strong risk sentiment across the board for sure yesterday with the NASDAQ cash index hitting that all-time high. S&P 500 not quite there yet, but not that far away either. And while the prior day it was perhaps Tesla that was getting a lot of the attention as one of the main gainers, it dropped back a little bit yesterday, by the way, in an otherwise very positive day. Some of those May delivery numbers in Europe looking very awful still.

But of course, everyone's looking forward to the autonomous driving and other services there. But this time, if you look at what was performing best, I mean, the best performing the S&P 500 was Coinbase. There is so much noise in the whole stablecoin space.

area and all this legislation that is incoming. The Senate having approved its version of the stable coin bill, I think it was called the Genius Act, and I'm forgetting the House version, what it's called, and they'll have to agree on some version of one of those bills, and then it'll be signed by President Trump. And we have, yeah, all kinds of signs of people scrambling. We mentioned, I believe it was last week, with MasterCard and Visa suffering so badly on

What was it? A Coinbase promised to work with somebody to look at using stable coins for basically for all kinds of financial services, including for payments and even credit. And yesterday we get this news of – I believe it was MasterCard if it wasn't Visa, but pretty sure it was MasterCard with aligning with Fiserv.

on some kind of stablecoin infrastructure there. So it's just all over the place, the stablecoin business, even though in the speculative space, we still are a few thousand dollars below the all-time high in Bitcoin. That one's certainly one worth watching as a better confirming indicator. It has been pretty decent in terms of being a little bit forward of where the more speculative areas in the market have been.

It would be better to see that confirming with new highs as well as the NASDAQ hitting these high levels too. But other strong performers industry-wise, certainly in the chips and AI space, we're seeing AMD getting upgrades. One observer is saying that they're closing the competitive gap with NVIDIA with their chips. They announced some partnership as well.

And really topical for today, and I think really key for the whole AI space, is one of the key AI hardware infrastructure components is memory. And Micron is reporting today after the close in the U.S. in an otherwise very quiet part of the earnings season. It could be really critical. I mean, we have NVIDIA approaching that key 150 level, which is, well, not the all-time high. It was basically not really ever closed above that level, and it was touched twice intraday.

And Micron could be the determinant on whether this rally in this space continues. They do sell memory chips across the board, but as well, they've announced previously that their HBM, which is the kind of memory that is key in associating with NVIDIA chip demand, they said it was sold out well into 2025. We're really curious to get an update and a guidance there. And I think people will read a lot of that into NVIDIA, which is interesting.

Of course, the number one key name in the AI space. Other specific equity news we had, just worth noting, I didn't see any proximate story, but Apple closing lower on a day in which the broader market was very strong. That kind of sticks out a bit like a sore thumb. There's a lot of talk about their insufficient AI offering, and there were a couple of news stories I saw associating them with Apple.

or arguing whether they should or should not buy Perplexity, the very good sort of chat GPT competitor. Interesting story worth following, and I'm sure that would cost them a pretty penny if they were to try to acquire any type of AI name. This is some deep pocket stuff when you're talking about a name with that profile. And then after they close, the two most high-profile companies reporting were Carnival Cruise. Again, if we're supposed to be seeing a U.S. consumer that is increasingly on its knees,

No signs from this company. Another stellar report and outlook there. The shares are up strongly. And actually, I think they were up strongly before the close, if I'm not mistaken. It doesn't matter. Their results were strong and they're up. What was down after the close was FedEx reporting. This is a company that's plagued by some, I think a lot of these are company-specific issues. But they did note the tariff impact on their business. They were off 5% after the close.

And then on the note of U.S. consumer and where they are, home prices, we've talked about these as a strong risk going forward for just the wealth effect and sentiment around home price as a source of comfort on your personal portfolio and personal assets. Interesting to note that April –

home price index, the key one, S&P Global and whatever it's called, down minus 0.31%, a lot more than expected. We're still up year on year on U.S. house prices, but it's interesting seeing that strong negative surprise there and would suspect we have more to come. And of course, the bigger risk for home prices is only in association with a weakening labor market as people are forced to sell their homes.

Conference, the Conference Board U.S. Consumer Confidence reading was also out yesterday, this one for June, of course, and it was not so great. We saw the very ugly dip in April, obviously prompted by all the furor around the Liberation Day tariffs in the sense that things were going crazy at the time. We rebounded very strongly in May, and then we dipped again here in June, down to 69 on the expectations. Maybe a little more interesting is to see a little bit of confirmation in the present situation, also dipping to a local low today.

I don't have the reading here, but it's directionally not good for the U.S. consumer confidence. All right, I think that pretty much covers the U.S. face except for, very importantly, Fed Chair Powell was out with his first day of a two-day testimony yesterday before a House Financial Services Committee. Today will be in front of a Senate committee on the defensive.

about, you know, defending his stance, of course, on wanting to exercise patience, but sort of forced to admit if the data comes out right, or right, if the incoming data is sufficiently proving the point on inflation, yada, yada, that a rate reduction could be necessary in July. This was worth about three or four basis points of where we are by the end of the year. And it was worth a bit of selling of the US dollar, which is what we got yesterday as

extended very briefly above the cycle highs previously, 116.31, but that really didn't sustain, and we found ourselves back towards 116. It's been a pretty sharp comeback. Arguably, 116 is important. We've seen it holding intraday after a little dip below, at least as of my coming in here to record this.

More important locally is I would say 115.50 if we're working back below there. It's putting things into neutral and we're wondering what the heck is going on here if this dollar is going to follow through to the downside. Dalian, again, a very big move. We were 148 plus very, very, very briefly before the recent events with Devis officials in China.

Dovish Fed officials from Waller to especially Bowman and now a little bit on Powell back all the way down to 144.50 almost yesterday at the lows. And we backed up to around 145.50 today. Looks pretty small relative to the size of that move. Where are the retracements? 145.90 is the 38.2 retracement. You would like it to sort of not go back above 146, I think, to prove the point that the dollar is weak here.

Hard for the yen to get a strong and consistent bid unless we get both, I think, a little bit more risk aversion coming back in. Absolutely no signs of that. Keeps the carry trades happy when we don't see risk aversion. And then lower U.S. long yields. We're seeing those yields lower. We have the two-year trend.

and the 10-year now at the lowest levels since early May. But more wood to chop there, I think, to get a proper test lower of 142, and then the 140 is a massive level on the dollar-yen chart. For whatever reason, and we talked about the difficulty of reading the gold market and its drivers, gold is on the defensive. If you didn't know what instrument you were looking at and you just looked at a chart, it looks bearish after yesterday's candlestick, unless that gets erased very quickly today or tomorrow.

And having to look at next support levels and if this 3300 area gives way, there's also a very well-marked 3250 chart point. But the massive one is 3132. That was the almost perfectly test 38.2% retracement of the rally from the November lows. So that's a very, very technical level and will be closely watched if this sell-off continues.

And then if we look a bit over towards Europe, and I actually totally neglected to mention the Iran-Israel situation, which obviously given where crude oil has reverted to and resentment has completely ignored, there's not a lot to concern ourselves with. I just find it interesting that it continues to smolder out there. Yes, Iran and Israel after Trump dropped a few F-bombs in the wake of their apparently –

breaking at some points this ceasefire arrangement. It seemed to be in a shaky ceasefire, but a little bit more interesting was the Pentagon reporting that the damage may have been minimal to the, under these enrichment facilities in that Iranian mountain that was bombed with the bunker buster bombs.

Trump, of course, denying that and saying everything was totally smashed and destroyed. I would lean on the Pentagon in terms of the information. So it just keeps that tension out there. What are the next steps here? Is Israel really accepting the lay of the land as it is, or does something resume further out? It doesn't necessarily have to mean anything. Again, it's all about whether oil prices for global financial markets, of course, whether oil prices and oil supply out of Iran get disrupted.

And then a little bit on the European front news-wise, France, further dysfunction in the government there. These pension talks, pension reform talks have collapsed. They are looking towards potentially having to have a new government put in place. Just, you know, the dysfunction continues without end there. So no strong fiscal certainly coming from France. On the other hand, it is coming from Germany where we're getting –

news that they will issue 19 billion more than expected previously in German sovereign paper issuance for the third quarter, suggesting that the fiscal impulse is picking up. And we did see the IFO survey for June hitting a new high since early 2023. The present situation is still very moribund, so we do need to see those sort of coincident things picking up as well for Europe, but interesting signs there on the fiscal front.

I think I'm going to keep it at that for today. Again, I think very interesting with this, of course, the attempt on the all-time highs. Where are we headed next with the U.S. incoming data? There's not really much to look at here in the very near term.

But I think a bit more interesting in the speculative space is that Micron earnings report after hours, and what is the quality of this latest sprint higher in risk sentiment? I think that's what's on the plate for the next 24-hour cycle in any case. So have a wonderful day out there, and stay careful. We'll be back soon with the next Saxo Market Call.