Monday, July 13, 2026. What happened on Friday, what's about to happen to you this week?
The Scoreboard
Index/Asset | Friday Close | % Move | Mood |
|---|---|---|---|
S&P 500 (SPY) | 754.95 | +0.43% | Smug |
Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) | 725.51 | +0.31% | Fine, whatever |
Dow (DIA) | 525.78 | +0.30% | Along for the ride |
Russell 2000 (IWM) | 295.99 | -0.42% | Sulking |
VIX | 15.03 | -5.11% | Comatose |
Gold (GLD) | 377.01 | -0.31% | Shrug |
Oil (USO) | 108.70 | -0.28% | Meh |
10-Year Yield | 4.562% | +0.4bp | Frozen |
Bitcoin | $64,127 | +1.48% | Vibing |
What Happened Friday
Meta had a garage sale and Wall Street bought everything. Shares ripped +5.97% to $669.21, the stock's highest level since April, on double its normal volume. The pitch: Meta is going to rent out its excess AI computing capacity to other companies instead of letting it sit there burning cash. A day earlier the company dropped Muse Spark 1.1, its first paid AI coding model, a direct shot at Anthropic and OpenAI.
Translation: Meta spent all year getting roasted for torching $145 billion on AI infrastructure with nothing to show for it. Now it's telling investors "actually, we can rent the extra rack space." That is not a growth story. That is a landlord story. The market cheered anyway.
Even Zuckerberg couldn't fully sell it straight-faced. Leaked town hall comments last week had him admitting the AI agent rollout "hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected." Cathie Wood bought $22.8 million of the stock on Thursday regardless. Sound familiar? Buy the dip, then buy the rip, then write the thinkpiece either way.
Chips ripped, then thought better of it. Nvidia +4.03% Friday. AMD +2.04%. The AI trade got another jolt of oxygen from the DRAM shortage story: memory prices are melting up as HBM demand outstrips supply, and SK Hynix's CEO is out there predicting the worst memory shortage ever, extending past 2030. Micron and Broadcom, oddly, didn't get the memo Friday, both closing down slightly even after monster mid-week runs.
Translation: the chips story isn't one story anymore. It's a GPU story (Nvidia, still printing), a memory story (Micron, wildly cyclical, now maybe less cyclical thanks to long-term supply contracts), and a "everything AI" story that occasionally forgets to check which ticker it's buying.
Small caps did not get invited to the party. IWM was the only major index in the red Friday, down 0.42% while its megacap cousins partied. The Magnificent Seven-vs-everyone-else gap is back, and it's worth watching because a market this narrow is a market one bad CPI print away from a bad week.
Volatility basically flatlined. VIX cratered another 5% to 15.03, deep into "nobody is worried about anything" territory. That's either healthy complacency or the market pricing in a soft CPI print two days early. We find out Tuesday which one it was.
What to Watch This Week
Tuesday, July 14: June CPI, 8:30am ET. This is the one that matters. Consensus is looking for headline CPI -0.1% month over month, a sharp deceleration from May's hot +0.5% print. Core CPI is expected to hold at 2.9% year over year, unchanged from last month.
Translation: the market has already decided inflation is cooling, hence the sleepy VIX. If Tuesday's number comes in anywhere near May's +0.5% instead of the expected -0.1%, that complacency evaporates fast, and a market sitting at highs on razor-thin breadth won't enjoy the correction.
Monday, July 13: SK Hynix begins regular trading on the Nasdaq. First real U.S. session for a company that's basically the memory supercycle's second-largest supplier. Worth a glance given the DRAM shortage chatter above.
Wednesday, July 15: June PPI, plus the Fed's Beige Book. Producer prices lead consumer prices by a beat, so this is the appetizer for Tuesday's main course, in reverse order, because the calendar hates you.
Thursday, July 16: June Retail Sales and another wall of jobless claims data. Consumer spending holding up is the load-bearing wall under this entire "soft landing" narrative.
All week: a parade of Fed speakers: Waller, Bowman, Cook, Goolsbee, Barr, Williams, Musalem, Logan, Schmid, Jefferson. Nine separate Fed officials get microphones this week. Someone is going to say something that moves markets by accident.
The one thing that could ruin everyone's day: hyperscaler earnings season is bearing down (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon all report within the next few weeks), and Meta just spent Friday convincing everyone its AI spending is finally about to pay off. That's a promise now. Promises get graded.
Vol is asleep, breadth is narrow, and the whole market is betting CPI plays nice Tuesday morning. Place your bets accordingly, or don't, because apparently nobody else is worried either.
This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Do your own research, or at least pretend to before you tell people at a dinner party why you bought the dip.