Dow Hits An All-Time High. Eight Weeks Of Gains. The Fed Is Now Talking Hikes.

The week that started with bonds breaking ended with stocks at all-time highs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished Friday at 50,579.70, up 0.58% on the day and the first all-time high since February. The S&P 500 rose 0.37% to 7,473.47, capping an eighth consecutive week of gains — its longest such streak since December 2023. The Nasdaq Composite added 0.19% to 26,343.97.

Underneath the headlines, the rotation tells the real story. Holdings of so-called cyclical stocks — the kind that benefit from a reacceleration in economic growth — now exceed holdings of defensive shares by the largest amount since 2018. That’s confirmation that the soft-landing thesis is being priced in, not just discussed.

And then there’s the Warsh story. Kevin Warsh, sworn in this week as Fed chair-designate, said little about specific policy. But the read on the bond desk was unambiguous. BNP Paribas chief U.S. economist James Egelhof told The Journal that “there was earlier a perception among many of my clients that the White House would strongly oppose rate hikes, and that the Fed would therefore be dissuaded from doing them. The president’s comment this week supported the repricing of bond markets towards hikes.”

This is the cleanest validation we’ve gotten yet for the book’s positioning: overweight financials (JPMorgan / JPM, Bank of America / BAC, Morgan Stanley / MS, Goldman Sachs / GS), gold at 12% (IAU), short-duration bonds only. We expect the Fed’s next decision to lean hawkish, and the equity market is already telegraphing that the rotation into cyclicals is the trade to be in.

Three Weeks To The Largest IPO In American History

The Saturday paper’s B1 feature lays out what the next 21 days look like inside the SpaceX IPO machine: 23 investment banks making phone calls, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley running the book, and a closed-door allocation meeting where the actual buyers get picked the afternoon before the float. Expected launch date: June 12. Expected total: $80 billion in shares allocated. The Saturday paper notes Nasdaq is doing mock opening tests to make sure its platform handles the volume.

Three numbers from the prospectus matter for the public-market book. First, Starlink is now 60%+ of SpaceX revenue ($11B last year) and the only profitable segment. Second, SpaceX posted a $4.9B net loss in 2025 and losses are accelerating. Third, the company claims a $29 trillion total addressable market — ambitious, but it tells you how the bankers are framing the story to long-only buyers.

We can’t buy SpaceX yet, but the read-through is bullish for the picks-and-shovels names we already hold: Nvidia (NVDA), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), Arm Holdings (ARM), Vertiv (VRT), Bloom Energy (BE), Goldman Sachs (GS). Goldman closed at $999.50 Thursday on the back of the IPO advisory pipeline refilling. With OpenAI and Anthropic both filing confidentially within weeks, the financials sleeve sees a multi-quarter tailwind.

Your Cookout Costs 28% More. Here’s What That Tells Us About The Inflation Trade.

If you’re hosting a Memorial Day BBQ this weekend, you’ve probably already noticed: tomatoes are up 31%, hot dogs +24%, beef +14%, beer at home +5%, lettuce +6%. The Saturday paper led with the burger-bill story for a reason — this is the inflation that actually shows up in retiree budgets, not the abstract CPI number.

It also tells us why the Fed pivot story has legs. Headline inflation prints 3.8% year-over-year, but the categories most Americans buy weekly — food, gas, energy — are running 6–30% higher than a year ago. That spread is what makes a hike-cycle restart politically defensible, and it’s why our energy sleeve (XOM, CVX, LNG, BE), our gold sleeve at 12% (IAU), and our financials overweight (JPM, BAC, MS, GS) all benefit from the same underlying setup.

Saturday-paper reads for the weekend, all worth a click: the AI vibe-slop crisis piece on B2 (Anthropic insiders trashing their own Claude Code), the groom economy Off-Duty feature on D1 ($15K wedding wardrobes), the summer-camp parent vacation guide on D7, and the handedness evolution Science Short on C5. We pulled deep-dives on each into the Intelligence hub.