If last week were a movie, it would open on a peace deal, peak on a Fed plot twist nobody saw coming, and close with computer chips rallying so hard they needed their own ambulance.

Monday (June 15) was supposed to be the easy part. Lower oil, a shiny new SpaceX stock, sunshine. For about 36 hours, it was.

Then Wednesday happened. New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh stepped to the microphone for the first time and basically told traders, "Rate cuts? In this economy? Adorable." Stocks dropped, bounced, then ripped higher into Thursday, closing the week with the S&P up 0.9%, the Nasdaq up 2.4%, and the Dow up 0.7%. Call that result on Tuesday afternoon, and your friends stage an intervention.

The final score sounds polite. The trip there was a knife fight in a phone booth.

By Thursday's close (Friday was Juneteenth, markets shut), chips had booked a 7.3% weekly gain. The S&P sits up 9.6% on the year, the Nasdaq up 14.1%. The losers were anything boring and safe: healthcare –3.0%, consumer staples –2.9%, real estate –3.5%.

Sunday night, President Trump posted that the Iran deal was done: ships of the world, start your engines, let the oil flow. By Monday, crude had dropped nearly $4 a barrel and stocks threw a party. The S&P gapped up 1.7%. Energy fell 3.6% as the "war premium" baked into oil prices quietly evaporated.

Clean. Decisive. Also more complicated than a tweet, because oil doesn't move at the speed of social media. Three problems showed up fast:

Rystad's Claudio Galimberti put it plainly: sentiment is not the same as supply. The market eventually agreed, and crude fell roughly 11% on the week. But $60 oil by next month because somebody signed paperwork is about as realistic as your gym membership delivering abs by January.

SpaceX went public on June 12 at $135 a share and instantly traded at $150, making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire on day one. Most people celebrate an IPO with a bell and a selfie. By Monday, the stock was up another 19.6% to $192.50.

Then it did something unhinged. Two days after the biggest IPO in history, SpaceX bought Cursor, an AI coding tool, for $60 billion in stock. For scale: more than Meta paid for Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus combined.

The message is blunt. AI isn't part of SpaceX's plan. AI is the plan. Of the company's $28.47 trillion estimated total market opportunity (Translation: the entire pie of money it dreams of one day chasing), about $26.5 trillion, roughly 93%, is pinned on artificial intelligence. The rockets are now the side hustle. The stock closed up 14.9% for the week anyway.

Not just a SpaceX thing. NVIDIA announced its first corporate bond sale since 2021, borrowing $20B. Not because it's broke (it is the photo-negative of broke), but because building AI now costs so much that even the most profitable company on Earth is taking out a loan to keep up with the neighbors. Amazon is spending nearly all the cash its business throws off on AI gear. Alphabet is reportedly planning an $80 billion stock sale, the largest ever.

On Wednesday, the new Fed Chair held rates exactly where everyone expected, 3.50%–3.75%, and then handed the market a forecast that rewired the whole year in an afternoon.

Quick translation. The "dot plot" is a chart where each Fed official anonymously marks where they think rates should go. Picture an office betting pool, except the people placing bets also rig the game. That dot plot now shows that 9 of 18 officials expect at least one hike in 2026, and 6 expect multiple hikes. Sixty days ago, the group's middle guess was a rate cut. Warsh deleted the soft reassuring language, promised "price stability" out loud, and floated scrapping the dot plot entirely so markets stop reading the Fed's diary.

Rate-sensitive stocks got knifed first. Carvana fell 10.3%. Homebuilders sank. Real estate dropped 2.5% on the day. By Thursday, the market had caught the twist: a tougher Fed doesn't mean the economy broke. It means the economy is healthy enough to have the cheap money taken away, like car keys at a good party.

Fox bought Roku for $22 billion. Roku now devours 48% of all U.S. TV viewing time, up from 25% in 2020. Wall Street gagged: Fox had its worst single trading day ever, falling 15%. The bet is that the future of TV is owning the screen, not the show. Not crazy. But paying $22 billion while doubling your debt either looks like genius in five years or becomes a business-school cautionary tale with your name in the title.

Polymarket is a site where people bet real money on real-world outcomes. Right now, the crowd is screaming one thing: the Fed is done cutting, and might be hiking.

For the record, the same bettors have NVIDIA staying the world's most valuable company at 98% odds. Conviction, or a crowded elevator.

Gold had a confused week. Not lazy drift. Genuine whiplash from too many things at once, like a dog at a four-way intersection.

On the one hand, the war-fear premium propping up gold started to deflate as the Iran deal came together. When fear leaves the room, gold grabs its coat too. On the other side, the Fed's tough Wednesday shoved the 2-year Treasury yield up 11 basis points (Translation: a basis point is one-hundredth of a percent, so about 0.11%) to 4.16%. Higher yields punish gold, because gold pays you exactly nothing to hold it, while bonds suddenly pay more.

Caught between a collapsing fear trade and rising yields, gold took two buses to the face from opposite directions. Sentiment weakened, though buyers still showed up, nervous about U.S. inflation amid May CPI reportedly breaching 4% for the first time in three years.

Homebuilders rode the same rollercoaster as everyone: giddy Monday, gut-punched Wednesday, cautiously relieved Thursday.

Builders like PulteGroup and Lennar rallied early as oil and rates eased. Then the Fed swung, and Carvana dropped 10.3%, proof that anything living on cheap loans dies on the yield curve. The data piled on: May housing starts (Translation: new homes that actually broke ground) came in at 1.177 million, a fat miss versus the 1.440 million expected, dragged by a brutal 40.2% monthly collapse in apartment construction. The silver lining: May pending home sales (signed contracts not yet closed) jumped 3.8% against an expected 0.9%. Demand isn't dead; it's pacing the parking lot, waiting for prices to stop being a joke. Thursday brought relief as oil and long yields dipped, letting homebuilders rally 3.6%.

Retail investors split into three camps last week:

The pros pivoted hard after Wednesday, flipping from "soft landing plus a few cuts" to "no cuts, maybe a hike, and pain for anything rate-sensitive." Real estate and utilities took the beating.

This week poured like a bold red: gorgeous on Monday (dark fruit, geopolitical relief, chips on the rise), then sharp and austere by Wednesday, when the Fed's new sommelier swirled the glass once and announced he preferred "more structure, considerably less sweetness." By Thursday, you'd breathed through the shock and found a Barolo: powerful, complicated, age-worthy, and not for the faint of heart. Pairs well with conviction, patience, and a healthy distance from anything that runs on cheap loans.

This was the week the market's cozy "rate cuts are coming" bedtime story got walked out the back door. Kevin Warsh didn't show up to read his predecessor's script. He showed up with matches. The good news buried in the smoke: an economy that takes a hawkish punch this well (stocks up, breadth widening, chips parabolic) is flexing real muscle.

The oil story is messier than "Iran deal equals cheap gas forever," but lower energy costs trickling into your gas tank is real money. And the SpaceX-plus-Cursor one-two punch told you where the capital is marching: AI stopped being a theme. It's the organizing principle for every trillion-dollar balance sheet.

The biggest open question for the rest of the year is whether Warsh actually hikes. Polymarket gives 25% odds to July and 38% to September. The CME FedWatch tool, a different gauge, runs hotter at 40.6% for July. Either way, the answer reshapes everything from your mortgage to your portfolio. Until then, expect the market to stay volatile, fascinating, and absolutely no country for the squeamish. You're welcome.

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