Closes are on Friday, July 17, rather than Thursday, July 16. SPY and QQQ both traded roughly 1.35x Thursday's volume.

Friday morning delivered the exact data this market has spent three months begging for, and it landed with all the impact of a fart in a hurricane.

Michigan consumer sentiment: 54.4 against 51 expected, up from 49.5. Current conditions, which is just the survey asking people how things feel right now rather than how they might feel later, jumped 15% in a single month from 47.7 to 54.9.

One-year inflation expectations fell to 4.2% from 4.6%, beating the 4.3% estimate. That was the number sitting in Thursday's "things that could ruin everyone's day" column, and it came in cool enough to make the whole worry look silly.

Housing starts hit 1.427M, up 19% month over month against a 1.31M estimate, after May's 15.2% faceplant. Homebuilders went from hiding under the desk to pouring foundations in thirty days.

The Nasdaq 100 closed down 1.50%.

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on Friday. It carries 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the largest open-weight model on earth, and on benchmarks it reportedly trails only Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6.

Open-weight means Moonshot is handing out the finished model itself, free, for anyone to run on their own hardware. The full weights go public on July 27.

The reaction was not subtle. Z.ai dropped as much as 30% in Hong Kong, its worst day since its January listing. SoftBank, which trades as the market's OpenAI proxy, fell 9%. The semis complex, already two days into a slide, just kept going.

Traders have seen this movie. It is the DeepSeek shock of 2025 with a bigger budget and better reviews.

NVIDIA fell 2.21% to $202.81 on 144 million shares, its heaviest tape of the week. Somewhere in that session, it lost the title of world's most valuable company to Apple.

Apple closed up 0.14%. Third straight up day. The only green megacap on the board.

Sit with the irony. Apple spent three years getting mocked for losing the AI race, then quietly decided to skip the spending contest and let other people's models run on its devices. On the day a Chinese lab proved that frontier models are becoming a commodity you can download, the company that refused to bet the balance sheet on owning one was the only large-cap tech name to go up.

Micron gets an honorable mention for the strangest chart of the day: as low as $804, as high as $903.96, closed at $848.95, down half a percent. A 12% round trip to end exactly nowhere.

Netflix fell 7.26% to $68.95 on 142 million shares, nearly double its prior session.

The crime? Q2 revenue missed consensus by a hair, and guidance was left unchanged. Meanwhile, viewing hours grew 2% in the first half, compared with 1.5% for all of 2025, even as the Winter Olympics and the World Cup competed for eyeballs. Ad revenue is tracking to $3 billion this year, double 2025's level.

That is a business doing fine, getting treated like a business on fire. The stock is down 26% year to date and headed for its worst year since 2022.

The $1,000 test: a grand in Netflix at Thursday's close was worth $927 by Friday's bell. Seventy-three dollars, gone, because revenue came in slightly under a number some analysts had made up in April.

USO closed up 3.91% at $123.96 while Iran struck US bases across five Gulf states, and crossings through the Strait of Hormuz ran down more than half from the prior week. The Baker Hughes rig count rose to 452, beating expectations of 446, which is the oil patch quietly voting with its drill bits.

Gold bounced 0.95% after Thursday's beating. The 10-year sat still at 4.55%. Bitcoin went nowhere.

Today is thin. Leading Index at 9:00 AM CT, three and six-month bill auctions at 10:30 AM CT. Nothing here moves a tape.

The calendar (all times CT)

Earnings, and this is the actual week:

The one thing that could ruin everyone's day: Alphabet, Wednesday night.

Look at the box it is walking into. TSMC reported record profit last week, confirmed another $100 billion for Arizona, and still got sold two days running, down 5% across Thursday and Friday, for one reason: it raised capital spending to $60-64 billion. Capital spending is the money a company lays out for buildings and machines, and it leaves the bank account years before those buildings produce anything worth selling.

Alphabet is one of the largest AI spenders alive. It is down 6.5% in two sessions as its best model is running months late. And it now has to stand on a call and say how much more it intends to spend, four days after a Chinese lab handed out something comparable for free.

Guide spending up, and it learns what TSMC learned. Guide spending down, and it confirms the story that Google is falling behind. Sound familiar? It should. Every AI name has been trading inside that box since Wednesday, and Alphabet is the one that has to open it on stage with the lights on.

One more to keep in the corner of your eye: the FOMC meets July 28 and 29. Markets were pricing a 10% chance of a rate hike before Friday's cool inflation print, and that number is the quiet one to watch as the data resumes.

The market spent all spring begging for a happy consumer and cooler inflation. It got both on Friday, then watched a company most readers have never heard of give away a frontier AI model, and sold the Nasdaq for the third day running. Turns out nobody was ever worried about the consumer.

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