Market · No. 4

Tue, Oct 6, 2026

Highlights

Bullish

QQQ +55bps in early trading, hitting another record; yields fell 3-6bps across the curve (Le Pen's fiscal consolidation plan sparked a French-led European bond rally; Bessent said the US could reverse its debt trajectory 'very quickly'); crude -2% (normalizing exports; Saudi East-West Pipeline flows at 5.8 million barrels/day)
Semiconductors and software both +1%; SHOP +3% (positive JPM report); cybersecurity stocks rose on reports of Korean hackers; MRVL and ZS held investor days
Bloomberg: Seagate and Toshiba are bidding for TDK's HDD head business, potentially worth billions of dollars; HDD stocks -2~3% (WDC and STX fell); Toshiba denied the report
Evercore sees HDD bottlenecks shifting upstream to heads, HAMR photonics, media/glass and testing, favoring vertically integrated STX/WDC; expects component-driven shortages in 2027-28
Reuters: AMD's Lisa Su plans a substantial supply increase in 2027; Asia was mixed overnight (Nikkei +1.05%, Hang Seng +1%, KOSPI -0.89%)

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Mixed

QQQ +61bp in afternoon trading; the S&P and Nasdaq pulled back after setting morning records; IWM -62bp; software +1.2% outperformed semiconductors +67bp, led by cybersecurity (ZS +3.6%, PANW +3%, FTNT +3%, CRWD +2.5%; ZS investor day)
Rotation within AI infrastructure: CIEN +12.4%, GLW +6.8%, NOK +6.9%, ALAB +7.4%; power names VST +11.2%, GEV +5.4%, BE +4.3% (GOOGL signed a 3.6GW deal with CEG); MRVL closed up 5.5% (as high as +11.1% intraday, on long-term investor-day targets)
Memory/equipment under pressure: STX -9.4%, WDC -7.2% (Bloomberg reported STX and Toshiba are bidding for TDK's HDD head business), SKHY -4.2%, LRCX -3.6%, TER -3.1%; SKHY's third-quarter operating profit may miss expectations
Rates: 10-year ~5.28%, 2-year ~4.81%, 30-year ~5.65%; odds of a 10/28 rate hike fell to ~20% (>70% early last week); WTI ~$89.5
Bernstein: 3Q DRAM contract prices about +20% QoQ, with another 10-15% increase in 4Q; TrendForce expects 4Q NAND prices to rise 15-20%
The author sees the widest divergence among AI semiconductor stocks in years and maintains a 'choppy uptrend' outlook, while noting improving semiconductor breadth; favors catalyst-driven CPU and optics names

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Bullish

Citi (Atif Malik) raised its 2030 CPU TAM estimate to $300B ($29B in 2025, 60% CAGR), citing always-on personal AI agents such as Muse, Dots, Instinct, GrokBot and GeminiSpark
AMD price target $575→$800 (Buy, share price $631.75); Meta is one of AMD's largest server customers; AMD is the primary beneficiary, with Intel a secondary beneficiary
Reiterated NVDA Buy/PT $315: at ~0.0020 GB200-class GPUs per user, 100 million daily active users would require 200,000-390,000 Blackwell GPUs, generating ~$7-19B in one-time NVDA revenue
Always-on agents substantially increase demand for inference, memory (LP/DDR/SSD) and networking (DPU, Spectrum-X); Micron says CPUs are becoming a greater constraint on DRAM

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