It is hard to overstate what the last four trading sessions did to the year-to-date picture. The Dow set a fresh all-time high on Wednesday, then squeezed out another marginal record Friday. The S&P 500 added 0.58% Thursday and 0.6% Friday to close at 7,563.63 — the highest close in history. The Nasdaq, dragged higher by Anthropic’s funding round, Dell’s 29% after-hours rip on AI server orders, and a continuing chip rally, finished at 26,917.47, also a record. All three benchmarks ended May with the kind of textbook bullish-trifecta close that does not usually precede a meaningful drawdown.
The bond market quietly agreed. The 10-year Treasury yield fell to 4.454%, down from 4.49% earlier in the week, as oil dropped on the U.S.-Iran negotiations Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed Thursday. The 2-year is at 4.024%. The curve, while still very narrow, is no longer pricing the kind of Q3 hike risk that had crept into rates futures only nine days ago.
Day-by-day · what actually moved
Tuesday, May 26 · The AI cluster
Records on the Nasdaq and S&P. Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical called AI a threat to human dignity — the market filed it under “noise”. Qualcomm (QCOM) ripped 12% on a Stellantis automotive-AI partnership. Huawei announced its “LogicFolding” chip workaround. We added QCOM, LRCX, MU, SNDK and AMD across the tactical and fundamentals tiers. Companion read: the 1920s playbook for AI.
Wednesday, May 27 · The chip rally widens
PHLX semiconductor index broke higher again. Kospi closed at a record on Samsung and SK Hynix. The Tuesday cluster extended into Wednesday with Nvidia (NVDA), Broadcom (AVGO) and Taiwan Semi (TSM) all green. The chip cycle has legs.
Thursday, May 28 · Auto slump confirmed, drone strikes, GDP miss telegraphed
The WSJ’s page-one story Thursday was the new-car sales slump — about one million prospective buyers have defected from the U.S. new-car market since the start of the decade, with average transaction prices around $50,000. Annual U.S. sales running at 16 million versus 17 million pre-pandemic. The Iran-strait closure has kept gas elevated. The Dow added 0.36% anyway; Tesla’s European sales grew strongly in April even as overall EV demand softened, which is the divergence we wanted to see before adding to the position.
The U.S. struck Iran’s drone-control station near Bandar Abbas after Tehran launched four attack drones at commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. F/A-18s shot them down. The market again filed the headline under “noise.” Oil fell anyway, as the U.S. and Iran moved closer to a 60-day framework that would reopen Hormuz in the first 30 days.
Friday, May 29 · GDP revised down, Anthropic crowned
Three things mattered Friday:
1) GDP was revised down to 1.6% from the initial 2% estimate for Q1, driven by lower inventory investment and softer healthcare-services spending. The market shrugged because the revision is backward-looking and the soft inventory print improves Q2 setup. We agree.
2) Anthropic closed a funding round at $965 billion, leapfrogging OpenAI’s $852 billion private mark. The round was led by Altimeter, Dragoneer and Sequoia and totaled $65 billion — the largest fundraising round in Silicon Valley history. Anthropic’s “annualized revenue” passed $50 billion in May; the company projects $10.9 billion of true Q2 revenue, up roughly 80x year over year. The read-through is enormous and clean: the AI-services build-out is real, it is accelerating, and the public-equity beneficiaries (Dell (DELL) which ripped +28.75% after-hours Thursday on $4.2B of AI server orders, CoreWeave, NBIS, Goldman & Morgan as underwriters, NVDA / AVGO / TSM / MU / LRCX as the silicon stack) are correctly priced as engines of compounding growth. We added Dell to the book Friday.
3) Fertitta Entertainment took Caesars private at $5.7 billion, assuming $11.9 billion of debt. Tyson Foods named Jeff Schomburger CEO. Blue Origin’s rocket exploded on the launch pad. A divided 5–4 Supreme Court ruled for a Mississippi death-row inmate on racial jury selection. The GOP’s House Transportation bill quietly tucked a new federal fee on EVs and hybrids into a $600B reauthorization — one to track if you own Tesla or Rivian.
What the book did this week
| Day | Action | Ticker | Thesis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tue 5/26 | 🆕 ADD | QCOM, LRCX, MU, SNDK, AMD | Chip cluster: Stellantis deal +12% (QCOM); HBM cycle (MU); Western-fab tooling (LRCX) as Huawei pressure rises; NAND (SNDK); AI/CPU (AMD) |
| Wed 5/27 | ⬆️ REINFORCE | NVDA, AVGO, TSM | Chip-cycle widening across mega-cap silicon; Kospi record confirms the Samsung / SK Hynix tape |
| Thu 5/28 | 👀 WATCH | F, GM | New-car slump real; we are NOT buyers here. Watchlist only. Auto cycle remains soft until rate cuts begin. |
| Fri 5/29 | 🆕 ADD | TSLA | EU sales rebound confirms Tesla is decoupling from the broader auto slump; Stellantis-Qualcomm deal validates the auto-AI thesis; 2% position tactical Tier A |
| Fri 5/29 | 🆕 ADD | DELL | DELL ripped +28.75% after-hours Thursday on $4.2B of AI server orders — the cleanest read-through to Anthropic / OpenAI / xAI capex. AI-server backlog at all-time highs. 1.8% position tactical Tier A; 1.5% tactical Tier B |
| Fri 5/29 | ⬆️ REINFORCE | CEG, GEV, VRT, NEE | Anthropic $965B valuation + $10.9B Q2 revenue trajectory = the AI-power complex is structurally underweight in most institutional books. We are over-weight here and adding. |
| Fri 5/29 | 🎯 THESIS | CRWD, PANW, PLTR | Anthropic / OpenAI / SpaceX scale = enterprise AI agent attack surface explodes. Cybersecurity is the “shatter-proof windshield” of this build-out. Position weights unchanged, conviction rising. |
| Fri 5/29 | 📋 WATCH | ANTH (pre-IPO), OPENAI (pre-IPO) | Both filing this year. We will not chase the open at rumored valuations. The spillover trade does not require us to hold the issuer. |
The week’s two specialty deep-dives
Two pieces published with this edition that are worth more than a headline scroll:
1) The Auto Industry’s AI Collision — What The 1M Lost Buyers Actually Mean. The WSJ’s Thursday A1 reported a million U.S. buyers gone from the new-car market. Read alongside Qualcomm’s Stellantis deal, Pope Leo’s AI encyclical, and the Beijing court case forcing a Chinese tech company to pay damages for AI-driven firing — you get a single picture of an industry being rewritten in real time. The piece walks through how Capital Wealth is positioned around it: add Tesla (TSLA), reinforce Qualcomm (QCOM), watch Ford (F) & General Motors (GM), sit on the AI-power and cyber complex.
2) Schadenfreude At The Sausalito Yacht Club — Why The Hamptons-Of-The-Bay Is Eating Itself. The WSJ Friday A1 feud piece is the funniest thing in this week’s paper and also a case study in how social capital, like investment capital, is destroyed by leverage and pride. We pulled it forward because the same forces are at work in every closed institutional system — from family offices to private clubs to congressional caucuses. We laughed, then we filed it under risk management.
What we are watching next week
Monday June 1: ISM Manufacturing PMI for May. Last print was contracting; consensus expects mild recovery. Watch the prices-paid sub-index.
Tuesday June 2: JOLTS for April. The labor story is the wild card for the June FOMC. We are tracking the openings-to-unemployed ratio.
Wednesday June 3: ISM Services. ADP jobs print. Same labor question.
Thursday June 4: Continuing claims, Challenger layoffs, and the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) / Legend Biotech (LEGN) CAR-T data drop at the ASCO hematology meeting. Watch for the in-vivo CAR-T data point that could re-price the entire category.
Friday June 5: Nonfarm payrolls. The number that matters most for the rate trajectory.
And one float-the-IPO date: SpaceX’s F-1 is still expected sometime in mid-June. Goldman (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) are the lead underwriters. FTSE Russell’s rule change this week — making large-cap entry easier — was timed for exactly this issuance. Passive-fund inflows on the first ten trading days will be the most-watched flow event of Q2.
Bottom line
The market closed at three new records on a week that included an Iran strike, a GDP revision, a $965B private-AI valuation, a major railroad merger getting questioned, a casino LBO, and a death-row Supreme Court split. None of it stopped the tape. That is what a structurally bid market looks like, and it is why we keep adding to the AI-power, AI-silicon and AI-cybersecurity layers even as the headline gets noisier.
Have a good weekend. We are heads-down on the June book reweighting, the SpaceX IPO prep, and the June-end client review cycle. Book a 15-minute portfolio review →