When perfect numbers meet a higher bill, the bill wins the morning.

TSMC didn’t sell off because demand weakened. The July 16, 2026 report raised expected 2026 revenue growth to slightly above 40% in dollar terms, from more than 30% before, delivered record margins, and guided Q3 to another sequential increase. The stock fell because the same update paired that growth with a larger capital program, another major US commitment, and a more visible margin cost of expanding outside Taiwan.

That makes this a valuation and return-on-capital debate, not a broken-demand story, and the 2 sides of it are the whole article. Prices below are based on the July 15, 2026 close of $419.48; the ADR trades near $402 in the premarket as I write, down about 4%. 3 numbers frame the rest: the 396 to 408 zone the gap is landing in, the 376 level that would invalidate the setup, and roughly 30x, the trailing multiple including the new quarter.

Key Takeaways

• The print: revenue of $40.20B (NT$1.27 trillion) hit the top of guidance, up 36% in NT$ terms and 33.7% in US dollars. Gross margin of 67.7% and operating margin of 60.3% both exceeded guidance.

• The raise that matters: management now expects 2026 dollar revenue growth slightly above 40%, up from more than 30%. Q3 guidance of $44.6B to $45.8B implies 11% to 14% sequential growth.

• The asterisk: net income of NT$706.56B rose 77%, flattered by NT$95.8B of non-operating items including a NT$63.2B gain tied to Vanguard International shares. Operating income, up 65.4%, is the cleaner read.

• The bill: 2026 capex moved to $60B to $64B, about 15% higher at the midpoint, plus a separate multi-year $100B US commitment. Overseas fabs are guided to dilute gross margin 2% to 3% early, 3% to 4% later.

• The map: the gap lands in the 396 to 408 support cluster. A close below 396 suspends new entries, 376 invalidates the setup, and repair begins above 440.

What Changed

The quarter needs little defense. Revenue reached the top of the company’s own guidance at $40.20B, gross margin printed 67.7% against a 65.5% to 67.5% guide, and operating margin came in at 60.3%, well above the guided range. Net income rose 77% to NT$706.56B, though that headline deserves its asterisk: non-operating items contributed NT$95.8B, more than triple the prior quarter, including a NT$63.2B disposal and revaluation gain on Vanguard International shares. Operating income, up 65.4% from a year ago, is the number that describes the business. Demand commentary centered on AI accelerators, with management noting CPUs are becoming a second engine of data-center silicon alongside them.

The guidance is the bigger event, on both sides of the ledger. The bullish side: full-year 2026 revenue growth is now seen slightly above 40% in dollar terms, a large upward revision from the prior “more than 30%,” and Q3’s $44.6B to $45.8B range implies another 11% to 14% of sequential growth at a 65% to 67% gross margin. The costly side: 2026 capex guidance moved from $52B to $56B up to $60B to $64B, roughly 15% higher at the midpoint, and a further $100B of US investment was announced, a multi-year commitment whose timing depends partly on market conditions rather than money spent this year.

Management repeated its arithmetic on what expansion costs: overseas fabs dilute gross margin 2% to 3% in their early stages, widening to 3% to 4% later. Add a tape that had sprinted 10% in 2 sessions into its June 30 record and a chip sector selling off around the report, and the likeliest reading is that the market repriced the cost and returns of growth, not the growth itself. That’s a smaller problem than a demand miss, but it isn’t nothing: at these margins, every point of dilution is real money.

One nuance keeps the selloff honest. A 67.7% gross margin is itself the evidence that past spending earned its keep; the dilution guide says a larger share of future capacity may carry lower early-stage margins as the overseas facilities ramp. The bet hasn’t changed. Its unit economics have, modestly, and at a $2T valuation “modestly” moves billions.

The Fundamentals and the Price

Housekeeping: TSMC reports in New Taiwan dollars while the ADR trades in US dollars, so statement figures are NT$ and price levels are ADR dollars. Over the 12 months through March, before this print, TSMC produced NT$4.10T of revenue at a 61.9% gross margin and a 46.5% net margin, converted NT$2.35T of operating cash flow into NT$1.05T of free cash flow while funding the capex wave, and earned a 36.7% return on equity with debt to equity of 0.19.

TSMC has never run margins like these at this scale, and the dashboard below reflects the window before this report improved them.

Fold in the new quarter and the multiple compresses, with one adjustment worth making. On reported earnings, trailing net income becomes about NT$2.22T, roughly $13.5 of EPS per ADR at the quarter’s NT$31.6 exchange rate, so the $402 premarket price is near 30x trailing earnings. Strip the one-time Vanguard gain and core trailing EPS is closer to $13.1, call it 31x.

Either way the direction matters more than the decimal: run it a step forward, labeled as the rough scenario it is, and if Q3 lands mid-guide at margins near the guided range, trailing earnings approach $15 per ADR by October and today’s price is paying about 27x. For a business now guiding to 40% dollar growth at record margins, that’s a full price but not a euphoric one. The Street’s mean target of $498 (set before the report, 19% above the July 15 close) will get revisited in both directions: higher revenue, but a fatter cost line.

The Risk Ledger

The risks are specific, so name them separately. Geography first: most leading-edge capacity sits on Taiwan, and that risk arrives by headline, on no schedule, which is part of why this stock has long traded below the multiple its numbers would justify elsewhere. Margins second: the overseas dilution is now quantified, and the enlarged capex plan deepens the depreciation wave that follows every spending cycle. Concentration third: a handful of AI customers drive the marginal wafer, and their plans can shift faster than a fab gets built. Cycle fourth: foundry demand has always been cyclical, and 36% growth invites the question of what the comparison quarter looks like in 2027. None of these is new. All of them got a little heavier this week.

The Technical Map

• Trend: ADX near 40 on the weekly timeframe, a gauge of trend strength only, confirms the prevailing trend is powerful; direction comes from the price structure and buying-versus-selling pressure, and both still point up. The ADR is up about 80% from its 52-week low of $223.70.

• Structure: the June 29 to 30 sprint added 10% in 2 sessions to the $479.00 record, and the 10 sessions since gave back 12% to the July 15 close. So far that’s a pullback digesting a vertical move rather than a broken trend.

• Support: the premarket price is landing in it. The 396 to 408 band stacks the 100-day average ($397), the halfway retracement of the March-to-June rally ($396), the 20-week average ($399), round-number 400, and the lower volatility band ($408).

• Momentum: the daily fast stochastic reads 0, extremely oversold on this setting, though oversold can persist when downside momentum is strong. Daily RSI, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge, sat at 45 before the gap; weekly RSI at 61 is elevated but short of prior extremes.

• Resistance: the July 15 close and the 50-day average make 416 to 422 the first overhead test, then 434 to 442 (the 20-day average and the July shelf), then the 455 to 479 supply from the record week.

• Failure: a daily close below 376 takes out the 61.8% retracement of the spring rally and turns a routine pullback into a trend question. Below that, the April base near 364 is the last shelf of the run.

Net read: a record quarter is gapping the stock into the thickest support cluster in its structure, inside a weekly uptrend that hasn’t broken, on a complaint about the cost of growth rather than the existence of demand. Even justified gaps digest for a few sessions.

One possible framework, not a promise.

The Trade Plan

• Thesis zone (illustrative): 396 to 408. The gap is opening inside this cluster; a hold here is the highest-information entry available. Between the zone and 440 is chop the framework has no opinion on.

• Repair trigger: a daily close above 440 reclaims the 20-day average and the July shelf, the first evidence the spending complaint has been absorbed. 455 to 479 is the proving ground after it.

• Below 396: no new entries, and the probability of a test of 376 rises. This is a suspension rule, and it stays suspended until the zone is reclaimed on a daily close.

• Structural failure: a daily close below 376. The 61.8% retracement is gone, the pullback has become a downtrend question, and the framework above stops applying.

• Objectives on repair, in order: 455 (the record week’s supply), then the 479 record. The 520 extension objective is only in play once 479 is reclaimed.

• Catalysts: TSMC publishes revenue monthly, so evidence arrives every few weeks, and the next full report lands in mid-October 2026.

On sizing, an illustrative example rather than advice: a $402 reference entry against the $376 failure level risks about 6.5%. A reader budgeting 0.5% of a portfolio to that risk would arrive at a position near 7.5%; a 1% budget implies about 15%. One honesty note belongs here: 6.5% is a closing-price framework, not a guaranteed maximum loss, because this name can gap through levels on headlines. The average daily range is about 4.5%. Let the level come to you.

Bottom Line

TSMC raised both sides of the equation: expected 2026 growth moved above 40% while the cost of delivering it, capex now and margin dilution later, rose alongside. The selloff is the market charging for the second half of that sentence, and it’s a rational charge, not a verdict on demand. What would vindicate the bearish reading sits in next year’s numbers: overseas dilution running hotter than guided, or AI customers pausing while a $60B-plus capex year turns into depreciation.

Until then, this looks like a routine repricing inside a strong trend, delivered at prices sitting on the thickest support of the run. The zone is 396 to 408, the line that changes the story is 376, and a close above 440 says the argument is over. Monthly revenue prints referee from here.

This is research and commentary, not personal investment advice. Levels and trade plans are illustrative; size positions to your own risk tolerance and time horizon. The author may hold positions in names discussed.

The market just repriced the story. The question is what you’re actually buying at $69.

Here’s the question on the table: ASTS fell from $133.86 to $68.82 in 7 weeks. Cheap? Cheap can’t mean multiples here. Trailing revenue is $84.9M. The market value is $26.7B. That’s 315x sales, with no earnings to anchor anything. For a venture bet, and that’s what this is, cheap can only mean one thing: the same story at a lower price with better odds. By that test, something real changed. Japan was won.

The price was cut nearly in half. And the market sold the best news of the year anyway. All prices below are based on the July 14, 2026 close of $68.82. 3 numbers carry everything: the 63.5 to 67 floor that has now been defended twice, the 58 level where the structure fails, and that 315x.

Key Takeaways

• The round trip: a record $133.86 on May 28, 2026, a 49% slide, a 21% single-day jump on the Japan award on June 29, and then a full retrace. The stock now trades below its pre-announcement price.

• The win was real: Japan selected the Rakuten and AST alliance for its direct-to-cell program, with reported government support of about $926M. A jointly owned venture is planned for 2026, with Rakuten leading management.

• The numbers are still venture-stage: $14.7M of revenue in the March quarter, $84.9M over the trailing year, a $487M trailing net loss, and free cash flow near negative $1.37B on satellite capex.

• Liquidity is real but not restful: just over $3B of cash against nearly $3B of debt, a Q1 burn around $310M, and a spending rate likelier to rise than fall as deployment accelerates.

• Positioning is split and crowded: 2 buys, 7 holds, 2 strong sells, a mean target of $81.47, and 21.7% of the float sold short. The floor is 63.5 to 67, structural failure sits at 58, repair starts above 80.

What the Selloff Actually Said

Rewind 3 weeks, because the sequence is the story. In late June ASTS was sliding toward the low $60s, breaking the shelf our June note flagged as the caution line. Then Japan landed: the country picked the Rakuten and AST alliance for its direct-to-cell network over a SpaceX-linked bid, with reported subsidies near $926M and Rakuten’s CEO calling the project critical for Japan’s economic security.

The stock jumped 21% on June 29, 2026 to $86.77, its best day in nearly 2 years, and touched $89.87 the next morning. 10 sessions later the entire move was gone: $67.58 by July 13, below where the stock closed before the announcement, with a sector-wide selloff in space names hitting at the same time.

Read that plainly. The company won a government-backed contract in a G7 country, its most important external validation of the year, and the market’s lasting response was to mark the equity down. Some of that is the sector, some is likely positioning after a big 12-month run, and some is the honest arithmetic of a $26.7B valuation meeting a $926M subsidy. Meaningful proof, small money. A stock that can’t hold its best news is telling you how much expectation was already in the price.

The revenue line explains why proof matters so much. ASTS booked $14.7M in the March quarter, $54.3M the quarter before, and about $71M for all of 2025, lumpy amounts driven by gateway equipment and early contracts rather than recurring service revenue, because the commercial network isn’t switched on at scale yet.

Why It Still Isn’t Cheap

Nobody buying ASTS is underwriting the trailing revenue, so run the valuation forward instead. For today’s $26.7B market value to be reasonable at 20x sales, a rich multiple even for scarce infrastructure, revenue needs to reach about $1.3B. At 15x, about $1.8B. At 10x, about $2.7B. Management’s goal for this year is $150M to $200M. The current price therefore assumes revenue scaling roughly 7x to 15x beyond this year’s goal, and it assumes the money to get there arrives on tolerable terms: the burn is above $1.3B a year, satellite programs spend unevenly, and new capital has historically come partly as equity, which shrinks what each of today’s shares can claim of that future. That’s the full test, and the stock fails the “cheap” part of it even while the opportunity remains real.

Against its own history the answer is the same. Half the May record, yes, but still up 32% over 12 months and multiples of its pre-2025 levels. Cheap versus the euphoric top is the weakest form of cheap there is.

What has genuinely improved is the story. Japan is a named, government-backed anchor for a second major market. The carrier roster, roughly 60 operators covering about 3B subscribers, includes AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, and now a formal Rakuten venture. There’s a $175M prepayment from stc, over $1B of contracted commitments, and the next BlueBird launch is described as imminent. If you believed the story at $130, you can now buy a stronger version at half the price. That’s a real improvement in odds. It just isn’t the same thing as value.

On the balance sheet, keep the framing honest: just over $3B of cash is meaningful gross liquidity, but it sits against nearly $3B of debt with its own maturities and terms, so the 2 piles don’t simply cancel. At Q1’s roughly $310M burn the cash covers a couple of years on paper; in practice the spend rises with deployment, so treat the runway as measured in quarters of proof, with refinancing and dilution risk attached. The Street reads as unconvinced (2 buys, 7 holds, 2 strong sells, mean target $81.47), and 21.7% of the float is short. Treat both as sentiment, not evidence.

The Risk Ledger

The failure modes are different bets, so name them separately. Execution: satellites must launch, unfold, pass checkout, and hand off traffic reliably, and the constellation needed for continuous US coverage is still being built. Financing: dilution or new debt is a matter of when and at what price, and a falling stock worsens the price. Competition: SpaceX’s direct-to-cell effort aims at the same dead zones with a launch cadence nobody matches. Regulation and spectrum: wholesale carrier deals depend on approvals that arrive country by country. And the meta-risk containing the others: at 315x sales, the valuation already assumes most of this goes right.

The Technical Map

· Trend: the 2-year uptrend is damaged but not dead. Price sits below the 20-week and 50-week averages, and below all its daily moving averages including the 200-day near $78.50, which it lost in late June.

· Structure: the floor is the feature. The $63.40 to $63.70 area was defended in early May and again on June 25, and the July 13 probe to $66.73 held above it. Price at $68.82 sits within one average day’s range of that zone.

· Momentum: soft but near washed-out. Daily RSI, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge, reads 40; the weekly stochastic, a faster oscillator, sits in the low teens, a level where selling pressure has historically been closer to exhausted than fresh. Volume has dried to about half its average, which reads as sellers losing urgency rather than buyers arriving.

· Resistance: 73 to 75 first (the July consolidation), then 78.5 to 80 (the lost 200-day average and the mid-June shelf), then 86 to 90 (the Japan-pop highs).

· Failure: a daily close below 63 says the twice-defended floor is breaking. A daily close below 58 undercuts the rising weekly structure entirely and opens the low $50s.

Net read: a broken parabola resting within one average day’s move of a floor that has held twice, with momentum washed out and volume fading. That’s the profile of a base that could form, not one that has formed. The stock moves about 11% on an average day; the framework below is illustrative, not a prescription.

One possible framework, not a promise.

Levels I’m Watching

Read more

The most important bottleneck in advanced chipmaking just raised its forecast again.

Most leading-edge AI chips depend on manufacturing processes that run on ASML’s lithography systems, which makes the company the closest thing the AI buildout has to a tollbooth. The toll just went up. Q2 sales of €9.3B and a 54.0% gross margin both came in above the company’s own guidance, and the full-year outlook moved to €43B to €45B, a second raise this year that implies 32% to 38% growth over 2025.

Here’s the tension that governs everything below: ASML just increased the growth investors can reasonably expect, and it increased the execution investors must pay for in advance by exactly as much. The ADR trades in the mid-$1,800s premarket as I write, about 8% below the June record. 3 numbers matter more than the rest of this article: the 1800 to 1830 entry band, the 1712 invalidation, and the roughly €26B of H2 revenue the new guide now requires.

Key Takeaways

• Q2 sales of €9.3B grew about 21% year over year and beat the €8.4B to €9.0B guide, with the upside coming mostly from Installed Base Management, the service and upgrade line, at €2.762B.

• The new full-year guide of €43B to €45B at a 54% to 56% gross margin makes H2 the story: H1 delivered €18.1B, so the back half must produce about €26B. The Q3 guide alone implies 46% to 60% growth.

• ASML is expanding EUV and DUV immersion capacity about 30% for 2027 and studying another 30% for 2028, funded from roughly €5.3B of net cash and a 52% return on equity.

• In the mid-$1,800s the ADR trades near 61x trailing earnings. At 40x, an $1,850 price needs about $46 of ADR EPS; trailing EPS is $30.36. The growth is being paid for up front.

• The trade: entries at 1800 to 1830 on a fade, warning on a close below 1750, invalidation below 1712, targets at 1945, 2005, and 2285.

What Changed

The print itself was clean: €9.3B of sales against an €8.4B to €9.0B guide, gross margin of 54.0% against 51% to 52%, net income of €2.9B, EPS of €7.59. Composition matters as much as the beat, though. The upside came primarily from Installed Base Management, the service and upgrade revenue ASML earns on machines already in customer fabs. That’s the most durable line in the model, so it’s a high-quality source of a beat, but it’s also not the same thing as customers pulling forward new system orders.

The guide is the real event, and the arithmetic deserves to sit in the open. Full-year guidance moved to €43B to €45B at a 54% to 56% gross margin, from €36B to €40B, and that prior range was itself a raise. H1 came in at €18.1B, so the new midpoint requires roughly €26B in H2; the Q3 range of €11.0B to €12.0B alone would be up 46% to 60% year over year. Management attributes the demand to AI-related spending across a customer set that now includes Intel running High-NA EUV in production, and it’s backing the words with capacity: system output up about 30% for 2027, with another 30% under study for 2028.

One structural caveat: ASML stopped disclosing quarterly bookings this year and now describes order intake only qualitatively. That removes the number investors used to lean on to check demand between reports, so the guide has become the main forward-looking disclosure, each print carries more weight, and drawdowns between prints will be harder to argue against with data. Priced-for-execution stocks feel that asymmetry.

The Fundamentals and the Price

Housekeeping first: ASML reports in euros while the ADR trades in dollars, so statement figures are euros and price levels are ADR dollars. The business generates cash at a rate that funds the whole expansion internally: over the 12 months through March, €33.7B of revenue produced €11.1B of operating cash flow and €8.9B of free cash flow, with a 52% return on equity, €8.0B of cash against €2.7B of debt, plus €1.1B of Q2 buybacks and a €1.88 interim dividend. Margins are the moat made visible: 52.6% trailing gross margin, 36% operating margin, and a guide that says gross margin rises further as volume ramps.

Now the price of it. Near $1,850 the ADR trades around 61x trailing earnings, and a simple bridge shows what has to be true for that to be reasonable: at 35x, $1,850 requires about $53 of annual ADR EPS; at 40x, about $46; at 45x, about $41. Trailing EPS is $30.36.

Run the new guide through last year’s cost structure and 2026 ADR EPS lands somewhere in the mid-$40s (a rough estimate, not a forecast), which would put the stock a bit above 40x this year’s guided earnings. That’s a premium multiple on numbers that still have to be delivered.

Analyst positioning tells the same story from another angle: 39 of 44 ratings are buy or strong buy, yet the mean target ($1,903 on Yahoo’s pre-report consensus) sits only about 3% above the premarket price. Targets will likely be revised up after the raise, but that’s an expectation, not evidence.

The Risk Ledger

The bear case is broader than one bad quarter, so it’s worth naming the pieces separately.

Execution and timing first: with the year this back-loaded, revenue can slip between quarters for reasons that have nothing to do with demand, like fab readiness, installation schedules, and acceptance timing, and a stock at 61x trailing doesn’t distinguish gracefully between “pushed out” and “lost.”

Regulation second: export controls on China can affect system sales, servicing, and upgrades independently of AI demand, and that risk arrives by headline, not by earnings calendar.

Concentration third: a handful of logic and memory customers drive the cycle, and any one of them rescheduling capex moves ASML’s numbers. High-NA fourth: strategically decisive for the next node, but adoption speed and throughput economics still have to be proven at production scale.

And running through all of it, the visibility problem above: with bookings undisclosed, the October report is the next scheduled test, but this stock can be repriced any week in between.

The Technical Map

• Trend: the weekly structure is firmly bullish. The ADR is up roughly 110% in 12 months, and the weekly trend-strength gauge (ADX 40, with buying pressure dominant) reads like an established uptrend rather than an aging one.

• Momentum: weekly RSI, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge, sits at 65, elevated but short of the extremes that have marked prior tops. Daily momentum had fully reset to neutral before the report.

• Structure: from the June 30 record at $1,999.96, the stock corrected 14% and found buyers 4 times at the 1715 to 1750 shelf, a correction that may now have established a durable floor.

• Support: 1820 to 1830, where the 20-day average ($1,826) and the 23.6% retracement of the spring rally ($1,823) overlap, then the gap down to yesterday’s $1,776 close, then the shelf.

• Resistance: 1930 to 2000 threw price back twice in late June on heavy weekly reversals; that band is the proving ground. Above the record there is no historical resistance to map.

• Failure: a daily close below 1712 undercuts the shelf and ends the setup.

Net read: a strong weekly uptrend, a correction that may be complete, and a fundamental catalyst gapping price back into the June congestion. Even strong earnings gaps often spend a few sessions digesting, so the plan below doesn’t assume a straight line to the record.

The Trade Plan

• Starter entry: 1800 to 1830. The gap-top band: the 20-day average, the 23.6% retracement, and the round 1800 level. A post-earnings fade into this zone is normal digestion, not a failed reaction.

• Add zone: 1750 to 1780. A full gap fill to yesterday’s close and the top of the July shelf. Better price, tighter distance to invalidation.

• Breakout alternative: a daily close above 2000. Clears the record with the June supply behind it. If it triggers, the stop is a close back under 1930, not 1712.

• Warning level: a daily close below 1750. By then the gap has fully filled and price is pressing the July shelf from above, the market’s way of saying the raise was already priced in. Stop adding and let the shelf give its verdict.

• Invalidation: a daily close below 1712. That undercuts the shelf that held 4 times in July; the post-earnings reaction has failed, and the exit applies to both buy zones.

• Targets: 1945 first (the heart of the June rejection zone), then 2005 (the record zone), then 2285 (the July range height projected above the record).

• Rolling stop: at 1945, lift the stop to your entry zone. Through 2005, trail under each higher weekly low.

On sizing: from an $1,815 entry with the stop at $1,712, trade risk is about 5.7%, and that’s position risk, not portfolio risk. Divide your portfolio risk budget by the trade risk: a 0.5% budget caps the position near 9% of the portfolio, a 1% budget near 18%. This stock moves about 5% a day right now, so err small. The October report is the next scheduled catalyst, but as the risk ledger says, unscheduled ones exist.

Bottom Line

The report raised what investors can reasonably expect from ASML, and the market responded by raising what investors must pay for it. Both moves are rational; together they leave less margin for error than either alone. The fundamental test is now concrete: a Q3 print inside the €11B to €12B range keeps the €26B H2 on track, and a miss turns the year’s story into a pushed-out promise.

The price discipline is just as concrete. Buy fades into 1800 to 1830, add only on a full gap fill near 1750 to 1780, stop adding on a close below 1750, and exit below 1712. While the July shelf holds and the H2 ramp stays on track, pullbacks are more likely consolidation than trend break. If either condition fails, so does the setup, and no quality argument should keep you in a broken one.

This is research and commentary, not personal investment advice. Levels and trade plans are illustrative; size positions to your own risk tolerance and time horizon. The author may hold positions in names discussed.

The market’s biggest cash machine just got marked down. The question is whether the markdown is done.

2 months ago Alphabet was a momentum story pressing $404. Then late June happened: a washout week that dropped the stock to $334 on capitulation volume, a next-session reclaim, and now a quiet drift near $351 into the July 22 report.

Here’s the thesis in one breath: operating growth has caught up with the valuation, the multiple is reasonable rather than cheap, and the return on Alphabet’s enormous AI capex is the central risk that every earnings report has to keep answering. The stock is up 94% over the past 12 months yet trades at 24 times forward earnings, because profits grew into the price. And the June flush added the piece the rally never provided: a well-defined level to trade against.

Key Takeaways

• The March quarter delivered Alphabet’s fastest year-over-year revenue growth in at least 3 years: $109.9B, up 21.8%, with operating income up 30% to $39.7B and operating margin at 36.1%.

• Headline net income jumped 81%, but a large slice of that came from investment gains below the operating line. Judge the quarter on the 30% operating growth, not the 81%.

• The multiple: 26.8x trailing (flattered by those gains), 24.0x forward, 10.1x sales. Fiscal-2025 EPS grew 34.5%, and the 3-year revenue trend runs about 12.5% a year.

• AI capex is enormous and still climbing: $35.7B in the March quarter alone, $109.9B over the trailing year, compressing trailing free cash flow to $64.4B, a 1.5% yield.

• The June flush to $334 was bought back the very next session. Support stacks at 336 to 346, hard invalidation sits below 328, and earnings land on Wednesday, July 22.

The Quarter, the Capex, and the June Air Pocket

Start with the trajectory, because it’s the reason this stock nearly doubled. Quarterly revenue has climbed from $74.6B 3 years ago to $109.9B in the March quarter, a 47% expansion, with growth accelerating from around 12% in early 2025 to 21.8% in the latest print. Operating income rose 30% year over year to $39.7B, faster than revenue, so the core business is still gaining leverage even while funding the heaviest investment cycle in its history. Calendar-2025 revenue came in around $403B, up 15% on the year.

The investment cycle is the other half of the story. Alphabet spent $35.7B on property and equipment in the March quarter, more than double the $17.2B it spent a year earlier, and $109.9B over the trailing year. Nearly all of it is AI infrastructure: data centers, custom silicon, networking, power.

The whole hyperscaler group is in the same arms race (Meta just took a single Louisiana data center’s budget from $27B to $50B). Capex anxiety, a tech-wide selloff, and a 10-year Treasury at 4.6% likely all fed the late-June air pocket: on June 26 the stock closed at $334.69 on about 82M shares, nearly 4 times its average volume. The very next session it closed back at $351, then ground to $365 in early July before drifting back.

That immediate reclaim suggests larger buyers were willing to absorb supply near $334. One successful defense doesn’t establish a permanent floor, but it marks the level everyone is now watching.

The Fundamentals

Over the trailing 12 months Alphabet produced $422.5B of revenue at a 60.4% gross margin, generated $174.4B of operating cash flow, and earned a 39% return on equity while carrying almost no leverage (debt to equity of 0.20, current ratio of 1.9). The March quarter’s 36.1% operating margin was the best of the last 5 quarters.

One asterisk belongs on the profit line. Reported net income of $62.6B in the March quarter exceeded operating income of $39.7B, which tells you more than a third of the headline profit came from below the line, mostly gains on equity investments getting marked up.

That’s real value, but it isn’t repeatable operating profit, and it flatters both the 81% net income growth and the trailing P/E of 26.8. The forward multiple of 24.0, built on estimates that ignore those marks, is the honest anchor for the valuation debate.

So, is it cheap? Cheap is the wrong word; reasonable is. The honest comparison is forward against forward: 24 times next year’s earnings for a company whose revenue has compounded at about 12.5% a year over the past 3 years and just accelerated to 21.8%. If the acceleration holds, the multiple is undemanding.

If growth settles back toward trend, it’s full but fair. Street positioning is heavily bullish, with 58 of 65 ratings at buy or strong buy and a mean target of $428. That supports the quality narrative, but it cuts both ways: it leaves limited room for incremental upgrades, and it says bullish expectations are already embedded in the price.

The real bear case runs through cash flow. Free cash flow of $64.4B over the trailing year is a 1.5% yield on the market cap, compressed by capex that has roughly doubled in 2 years. How worrying that is depends on a split you can’t see from outside: how much of the $110B is required to defend the existing business, and how much is discretionary investment in future revenue.

The more it’s the second, the more today’s yield understates the underlying economics; the more it’s the first, the more the old cash machine is simply gone. Either way the math only works while revenue keeps accelerating, and that’s the question every print has to answer, including the one 8 days from now.

The Technical Picture

The weekly trend is doing fine. Price sits at $350.67, still above the 20-week average near $346 and far above the 50-week near $307, and weekly RSI, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge, reads 54: cooled from the May highs but still bullish. Weekly MACD has slipped below its signal line, meaning the rally’s pace is fading, while ADX 27, a measure of trend strength, still points up: the larger trend hasn’t broken.

The most telling stretch of the tape is the late-June pair: a huge-volume plunge week to $334, answered by a recovery week that took back nearly the whole drop. That pattern usually reads as absorption rather than distribution, though one episode doesn’t settle the question.

The daily timeframe is where the indecision lives. GOOG has spent 2 months inside a 334-to-404 range. The 20-day and 50-day averages have gone flat and converged right on top of each other near $357, price closed just below both, daily RSI is a soft-neutral 44, and the trend-strength gauge is at 13, a reading that says there’s no daily trend, just range. The daily MACD histogram has ticked positive, meaning the downward momentum from the May top is fading, but the line itself is still below zero.

The short-term dip looks stretched. On the 4-hour timeframe sellers have had the recent edge, the fast StochRSI oscillator is pinned near 10, deeply oversold, the kind of reading that usually precedes a bounce, and price is sliding into a shelf of support: the 100-day average at $344.6 and the 20-week average at $346.1 sit between 344 and 346, with the June flush zone at 336 to 340 and the June low at 334 underneath. Overhead, the flat daily averages at 356 to 360 are the first hurdle, the July recovery high near 365 and the weekly ceiling at 368 are the second, and beyond that the road opens toward 385 and the 404 record.

Net read: the long-term uptrend is intact, the medium term is a wide range with a defended low, and the short term is stretched into layered support with a binary catalyst 8 days out. That’s a buy-weakness-at-levels setup, not a chase.

How to act on it.

The Trade Plan

GOOG

• Starter entry: 344 to 346. The 100-day and 20-week averages both live here, and price is only about 5 points above it. First touch gets a starter position, not a full one.

• Add zone: 336 to 340. The shelf where the June flush was absorbed. A retest that holds is the better-priced entry with the tightest distance to invalidation.

• Breakout alternative: a daily close above 368. That clears the July recovery high and the weekly ceiling, for those who’d rather pay for confirmation than catch a dip in front of earnings. If it triggers, the stop is a close back under 356, not 328.

• Warning level: 334, the June low. A daily close below it isn’t the stop, but it means the defense is failing: stop adding and tighten up.

• Invalidation: a daily close below 328. That takes out the June low and the April shelf at 330 with room for an undercut, and it’s the exit for both buy zones.

• Targets: 385 first (the late-May supply shelf), then 405 (the record high), then 440 (the range height added to the 368 trigger, just past the Street’s $433 median target).

• Rolling stop: when 385 trades, lift the stop to your entry zone. If 405 breaks, trail the stop under each higher weekly low. Every target reached builds structure the stop can lean on.

The calendar is part of the plan. Alphabet reports the June quarter on Wednesday, July 22, 8 days from now, and with a daily trading range that has averaged about 10 points, the print will move the stock more than any level will. Half-size entries before the report or waiting for the zones to be retested after it are both defensible. Oversizing in front of a binary print is not.

On sizing: the roughly 5% between a $345 entry and the $328 stop is position risk, not portfolio risk, and the difference matters. Decide first how much of your portfolio a failed trade is allowed to cost, then divide that by the trade’s risk to get the position size. A 0.5% portfolio budget against 4.9% trade risk caps the position near 10% of the portfolio; a 1% budget allows about 20%. Wider stop, smaller position.

Bottom Line

The premise that Alphabet looks cheap is half right, and the half that’s right matters more. It isn’t cheap in absolute terms, and the trailing multiple is flattered by investment gains. But 24 times forward earnings for this growth, margin structure, and balance sheet is a reasonable price for one of the best businesses in the AI buildout. What would prove the thesis wrong isn’t only a price level: a July 22 report that shows revenue decelerating while capex guides higher still would be margin compression without the growth to pay for it, and the multiple would deserve to shrink.

Until then, while 334 holds, weakness remains technically constructive; a decisive break below it would materially weaken the setup, and a close below 328 ends it. Keep the first bite small and let the report speak.

This is research and commentary, not personal investment advice. Levels and trade plans are illustrative; size positions to your own risk tolerance and time horizon. The author may hold positions in names discussed.

Ondas Holdings does two things: it builds wireless networks for railroads and critical infrastructure, and it builds autonomous drones and counter-drone systems, the business that has turned it into a defense story.

For most of its life ONDS was a tiny company whose stock traded on speculation more than fundamentals.

That has changed.

Revenue is scaling fast, the order flow is real, and the balance sheet holds more than $1 billion in cash after a run that took the stock from $1.71 to $15.28 inside a year.

Then, the stock lost roughly half its value. It last closed at $7.52, down about 51% from that high, sitting on top of major support.

The question is not whether Ondas has momentum. It clearly does. The question is what you are paying for it, and whether current price is an entry or a warning.

Key Takeaways

• Revenue reached $50.1M in the quarter ending March 2026, up roughly 1,065% from a year earlier, capping four straight quarters of sequential growth off a $4.2M base.

• The company is not profitable. That quarter’s $361.2M net income is a non-cash gain from a $389.5M swing in warrant value, not earnings. The operating line lost $42.7M, on negative $51.3M of operating cash flow.

• The balance sheet is the safety net: over $1 billion in cash, about $1.48B including restricted cash and short-term investments, and almost no long-term debt. Ondas can fund years of losses without returning to the market.

• Ondas raised its 2026 revenue target to $525M, up from $390M, after agreeing to acquire DZYNE Technologies in an $875.8M cash-and-stock deal. Against a $3.9B market value that is near 40 times trailing sales but closer to 7 times the forward guide. Expensive either way, and dependent on hitting a number now built partly on acquisitions.

• 32% of the float is sold short and 8 analysts carry an average target above $20. This is a contested stock, and the $7 area is where the disagreement gets resolved.

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The Business and the Latest Print

runs two segments:

1. Ondas Networks sells wireless systems to rail and industrial customers, a slow, standards-driven business.

2. Ondas Autonomous Systems is the engine of the story, combining American Robotics, Airobotics, and counter-drone technology into a franchise aimed at defense and homeland-security buyers.

Recent headlines show where the demand and the ambition sit: an early-July agreement to acquire DZYNE Technologies, an autonomous military aircraft maker, in an $875.8M cash-and-stock deal, more than $40M in new orders for autonomous defense systems at the end of June, a $125M acquisition of Cyberhawk to expand AI drone inspection, and a collaboration with Lockheed Martin on counter-drone technology. Loitering munitions and counter-UAS gear (systems that detect and neutralize hostile drones) are pulling revenue forward.

The revenue trajectory is the part to focus on. The last five quarters read $4.2M, $6.3M, $10.1M, $30.1M, then $50.1M. That is a step-change, not a smooth ramp, and the March quarter alone produced more revenue than the prior three combined. Gross profit came in at $24.7M, a gross margin near 49%, which says the incremental business carries real product economics rather than pass-through hardware.

Management has leaned into the ramp, and acquisitions are now doing much of the lifting. With DZYNE and the Omnisys deal completed in May, Ondas raised its 2026 revenue target to $525M, up from $390M, with DZYNE alone expected to contribute $191M this year and $300M in 2027.

Those are targets, not results, and a young company assembling a platform through acquisitions can miss them or overpay building it. But they reframe the valuation: against a $525M goal, the $3.9B market value sits closer to 7 times forward sales than the 40 times the trailing figure implies. The caution is that the number is increasingly bought rather than grown, so the quality of the underlying, organic demand matters more than the headline guide.

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The DZYNE Acquisition

The DZYNE deal is the most important item on the tape and deserves its own read. In early July, Ondas agreed to acquire DZYNE Technologies, a maker of autonomous military aircraft used for surveillance and reconnaissance, in an $875.8M cash-and-stock transaction. DZYNE investors receive $200M in cash and roughly $675M in stock, with more than half of those shares locked up for six months. The target is backed by private equity firm Highlander Partners and is expected to generate $191M of revenue this year and $300M in 2027. That contribution, combined with the Omnisys deal closed in May, is what took the 2026 target to $525M from $390M.

The strategic logic is coherent. DZYNE turns Ondas from a drone-and-counter-drone specialist into something closer to a broad autonomous defense platform, adding fixed-wing military aircraft to the loitering munitions and counter-UAS lines it already sells. The timing rides a strong tape: U.S. defense-tech startups raised $19.2 billion in the first half of the year, already above the $16.6 billion raised across all of 2025. A company with a $1 billion cash balance and a rich equity currency is well positioned to consolidate that landscape.

The caution is the flip side of the same fact. A revenue target that jumps 35% on a single acquisition is bought, not earned, and roll-ups carry their own risks: integration, the reliability of acquired-company projections, and the dilution that funds the stock portion. Highlander is a motivated seller, DZYNE’s forward numbers are the seller’s estimates, and is paying a full price in a hot market. None of that makes the deal wrong. It does mean the $525M guide should be read as a target assembled through M&A rather than proof the organic business has inflected, and the burden of proof shifts to execution: closing the deal, integrating it, and converting the combined backlog into cash.

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The base case is that the sell-off overcorrected. You are paying under 10 times earnings for a business with elite margins, a fortress balance sheet, and more than $1 billion of annual free cash flow. If the brand simply stabilizes, the stock is too cheap to sit here.

That case is not automatic: growth has genuinely slowed and North America has cooled.

The second part is optionality. At this valuation, with the founder pushing for change, is also the kind of cash-rich, high-margin brand that strategic buyers and private equity circle.

The base case stands on its own. The takeover angle is what you are not paying for.

Key Takeaways

• Lululemon trades near $115 today, down roughly 50% over the past year while the S&P 500 rose about 20%. It peaked above $500 in 2024 and briefly bounced to $220 in January before sliding to a low near $104.

• It is cheap in a way large-cap brands rarely are: under 10 times trailing earnings, about 1.2 times sales, and an enterprise value of just 5.5 times EBITDA, less than half what commands and well under .

• The business is still elite. Gross margin is 55.7%, net margin 13%, return on equity 32%, and it produces more than $1 billion of free cash flow a year against modest debt.

• The reason it is cheap: growth stalled. Revenue rose just 4.3% last quarter and profit fell 38% from a year earlier as North America went cold and tariffs pressured margins.

• The variable is control. The founder just won board seats in a proxy settlement. With 82% institutional ownership and no family control block, is the kind of high-margin brand a buyer could take private.

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The Repricing

Few brands have fallen as far, as fast. For a decade Lululemon was the model premium growth story: a yoga-pants maker that turned athletic wear into a lifestyle, grew revenue in the mid-teens to 20% a year, and earned the valuation that reputation buys.

At its 2024 peak the stock traded above $500. Then the story cracked. North American sales, the engine of the whole company, stopped growing, and newer brands began taking share Lululemon used to own.

Over the past year the stock lost half its value, sliding from the low $200s at the start of 2026 to a spring low near $104. It now sits around $115, much closer to that low than to its highs, and the sell side has largely stepped back. Roughly 30 of the covering analysts rate it a hold, and the average price target near $132 sits about 15% above the current price.

That is the setup: a great brand, a broken price, and a market that has stopped believing. The question is whether the selling went too far.

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Still a Great Business

Strip away the stock and look at the operation, Lululemon remains one of the best operators in apparel.

Gross margin sits at 55.7%, a level closer to luxury houses than to Nike’s 43%. It converts 13% of every sales dollar into net profit.

Return on equity is 32%, elite for any business and rare in retail. It does all of this carrying very little debt: a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.44 and more than two dollars of current assets for every dollar of near-term obligations.

The cash flow is the tell.

Over the past 12 months Lululemon generated more than $1 billion of free cash flow on $11.2 billion of revenue.

Against a market value of about $13 billion, that is a FCF yield near 9%, unusually high for a brand this good. Businesses in permanent decline do not usually produce that. The market is pricing Lululemon as if the cash flows are set to erode. The numbers do not yet support that view.

Put the valuation next to its peers and the gap is stark. Lululemon trades under 10 times earnings and, on an enterprise-value basis, just 5.5 times EBITDA.

Nike, growing no faster, trades at 21x earnings and nearly 15x EBITDA. Deckers, the closest match on quality, sits at 15 and roughly 10. On Holding , the newer running brand taking share on Lululemon’s turf, trades above 25 on the same EBITDA measure.

Lululemon is the cheapest name in its group on almost every measure, and it earns the highest return on equity of any of them. Best-in-class economics at the lowest multiple is what value investors look for and rarely find in a brand this well known.

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The Takeover Option

Treat this as upside, not as the reason to own.

The traits that make Lululemon a good business, high margins, heavy cash generation, and low debt, are the same traits a private-equity buyer needs to fund a leveraged buyout: the cash flow services the borrowing while the buyer addresses what the public market gave up on. A globally recognized brand this cheap is a strong candidate, and that possibility is not reflected in the price.

Recent news moves this from a screen to a live situation. Founder Chip Wilson, long a public critic of how the company has been run, just won board representation in a proxy settlement, adding two of his picks. The stock rose 5% on the news. A founder pressuring a cheap, cash-rich company puts the status quo in play, and that pressure often precedes a larger move: a management change, a sale, or a take-private.

None of this is guaranteed. With no controlling family block and 82% of the shares held by institutions, there is no founder veto to block a deal, though at $13 billion it is a large one to finance. The point is not that a takeover is coming. It is that the price makes Lululemon interesting to buyers of whole companies, not just of shares, and that interest tends to put a floor under the stock.

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The Catch

The reason Lululemon is cheap is real, and it shows up in the most recent quarter. Revenue grew just 4.3% from a year earlier, well short of the double-digit growth that built the legend.

Profit went the wrong way: net income fell 38% and operating margin compressed to 11% from 18.5% a year earlier, squeezed by tariffs on imported goods and heavier markdowns to move product. Full-year earnings per share slipped to $13.26 from $14.64.

Profits are shrinking, not merely decelerating, and that is the bear case in a sentence.

The deeper concern is domestic.

Lululemon’s home market, long its growth engine, has gone flat as shoppers cool on the brand and rivals like Alo and Vuori pull attention away. International, and China in particular, is still growing well, but it cannot yet carry the whole company.

So the question underneath the cheap valuation is genuine: is this a temporary stumble in a great brand, or the start of a slow fade as the brand loses its heat?

At under 10 times earnings you are well compensated to take that view, but it remains a view, not a certainty.

The Technical Picture

If the fundamentals say is cheap enough to investigate, the price says patience is still required.

The panic is fading, but the trend has not turned.

On the weekly timeframe, Lululemon remains in a clear multi-year downtrend: price sits below every major moving average, and all of them point downwards. The weekly RSI, sits around 36 still near oversold territory. Weak but no longer collapsing.

The daily timeframe is softer. After bottoming near $104 in the spring, the stock has recovered toward $115 and has just passed its 20-day average near $117, an early sign the bleeding has stopped. Momentum has moved from washed-out to neutral: the daily strength gauge has recovered from the mid-20s to about 49, and MACD has crept back toward positive.

The stock still trades below its 50-day average near $127 and far below its 200-day around $167, the levels that would signal a real trend change rather than a bounce.

The read: buyers have shown up to defend the lows, but they have not yet proven they can take the stock back.

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Levels To Watch

These are levels to watch, not instructions.

This is a volatile name where position size matters more than the exact entry.

• Pullback support: $108 to $114, the base the stock has built just above its recent low, and a lower-risk area to start a position.

• Reclaim to watch: a push above $127, the 50-day average, would confirm the base and open the way toward $142.

• Caution line: a close back below $103 breaks the low and says the downtrend has resumed. That is the level that proves the bull case wrong.

• Targets on a recovery: $132, the average analyst target, then $142 at the 100-day average, with room toward $167, the 200-day, if the turn is real.

• Next catalyst: fiscal second-quarter earnings on September 3, plus any move by the reshaped board.

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Bottom Line

Lululemon is a high-quality business trading at a low-quality price, and both halves of that sentence hold.

You are not paying up for the brand’s elite margins and cash generation; you are getting them at under 10 times earnings, roughly half the multiple of slower-growing Nike.

What you take on, and what the market fears, is a growth story that has stalled and an American shopper who has cooled. That risk is real, and the falling profit proves it is not imaginary. But near $115, down 50%, with a founder forcing change and a valuation that makes the whole company a target, the risk and reward have tilted.

This is not a stock to chase, and the trend has not turned, so patience around the $108 to $114 zone is the disciplined play.

Below $103 the thesis is broken and you step aside. Above $127 the base is confirmed.

Own it here if you believe the brand still has its edge, but size it like the volatile, show-me name it has become.

All content provided is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. The trade plans, levels, and scenarios discussed are illustrative frameworks based on market structure and are not guarantees of performance. Markets involve risk, and losses are possible. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Each reader is responsible for their own investment decisions, position sizing, and risk management.

Market Conditions

The broad tape steadied this week. The S&P 500 (SPY) closed at 744.78, Trend-Hold and up 2.2% on the week, while the Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) at 712.60 is Transitional and roughly flat on the week.

Beneath the surface, regime breadth improved: Breakdowns went from 26 to 16, Repairs from 5 to 10, and Trend-Holds from 17 to 14. Regime upgrades outnumbered downgrades 17 to 8, a recovery week rather than fresh liquidation.

The rebound was led by the highest-beta growth and AI names: ASTS +19%, RBRK +16%, PLTR +14%, PANW +14% to the upside, against CRWV -15%, NBIS -10%, SMSN.L -8%, LRCX -7% on the downside. Fresh damage showed up in AVGO, dropping to Breakdown.

The cleanest signal was a full reclaim of Trend-Hold in AAPL, NVO, SPY, XOVR. This reads as a relief rally in beaten-down leadership, not broad, confirmed strength. The framework still requires price to confirm at defined levels: a reclaim is an invitation to engage on a pullback, not a reason to chase the bounce.

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What Changed From Last Week

• Reclaimed Trend-Hold: AAPL, NVO, SPY, XOVR. The strongest signal of the week, structure fully repaired.

• Lifted out of Breakdown into Transitional: AMZN, ASTS, FTI, GOOG, LMT. Early bounces that still need to prove themselves.

• First repair off the lows: ADBE, META, MSFT, NFLX, NKE, NOC, NVDA, PLTR. Damaged names showing the first sign of basing.

• Cooled out of Trend-Hold into Transitional: AMD, ASML, INTC, LRCX, SMSN.L, TGT, TSM. Leaders that lost their trend and now need to re-prove it.

• Broke down: AVGO. Fresh damage, the framework moves these to the avoid list.

• Biggest movers: ASTS +19%, RBRK +16%, PLTR +14%, PANW +14% to the upside; CRWV -15%, NBIS -10%, SMSN.L -8%, LRCX -7% to the downside.

How Our Trade Plans Work

Our framework is rules-based and level-driven. We classify each name into a regime (Trend-Hold, Transitional, Repair, or Breakdown) using the 1D EMA stack, cross-checked against the 1W chart. Every entry, target, and invalidation traces back to a specific indicator level. T1 is the first profit-take layer, T2 is the structural objective, T3 is the stretch target on full continuation. Sizing follows the regime: Trend-Hold names take normal size but only on a pullback to support or a confirmed breakout; Transitional names take half size or wait; Repair names take a starter only after a reclaim; Breakdown names are avoided until a reclaim confirms.

Two stops, two jobs. The trade stop protects the position; the regime invalidation changes the thesis. The trade stop is the tactical level where a single trade is wrong and you cut it. The regime invalidation is the deeper level where the entire classification flips to a lower regime and the reason to own the name is gone. They differ on purpose: one manages risk, the other manages conviction.

Cash is a position, and waiting is part of the plan. This update ranks 60 stocks and ETFs: the highest-conviction, near-entry names get a full setup, and the rest are tracked in the watchlist table so nothing in the universe goes uncovered.

This Week’s Playbook

Start here. The detailed setups follow for the top names, and the full watchlist table covers the rest.

• Best risk/reward this week: SPY, AMAT, FFIV, BRK.B. Price is already at a defined entry on the 1D EMA20, so the trigger is near and the risk is tight; these are the names that reclaimed or held their trend, the cleanest longs to engage as leadership rotates.

• Best leaders to buy only on weakness: OSCR, UNH, LLY, ITA, RBRK, AAPL (+1 more in the table). Clean trends with room to run, but buy the pullback, do not pay up here.

• Most dangerous chase setups: PANW, NVO. Overbought leaders; the trend is real but the entry is not, wait for a reset.

• Avoid until a reclaim confirms: AVGO, BABA, BIDU, COST, CRWV, ETHA, GLD, INTU, ORCL, PALL, RDW, SLV, WMT, XOM, XRH0.L, XRPI. No long exposure; not every dip is a setup, and cash is the position.

This update covers the following 60 stocks and ETFs across consumer, technology, healthcare, industrials, and commodities.

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Top 5 Actionable Setups

The highest-conviction names sitting closest to a defined entry, with full detail, levels, and both stops for each. The next tier follows in the Also Actionable table, and the rest of the universe in the full watchlist below it.

SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), Last close: 744.78

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A cheap stock is only cheap if the cash behind it holds.

Pfizer splits a room.

To income investors, a 7% yield from a large, investment-grade drugmaker looks like a gift.

To growth investors, a stock down over the last year while the S&P 500 rose about 20% looks like dead money with a warning label.

Same company, opposite conclusions, which is usually a sign the setup is worth slowing down for.

The honest framing: isn’t a growth story, and pretending otherwise sets you up to be disappointed. It’s a cash-return story wrapped around a business still shrinking off its pandemic peak while it rebuilds through oncology.

Whether it pays depends on 2 things: the dividend’s durability, and where you buy the stock.

Key Takeaways

• The dividend yields about 7% (7.07% trailing). On forward earnings of $2.83 the payout runs near 61%, which looks safe, but the trailing GAAP payout is 131% and the roughly $9.8B annual cost runs just above free cash flow, leaning on operating cash flow and cost cuts.

• Forward P/E is 8.6x, close to half the large-cap pharma average. The market is pricing years of patent expirations and post-pandemic revenue erosion, not a recovery. You’re buying pessimism, not optimism.

• Latest quarter revenue was $14.45B, up 5.4% as reported (roughly 2% on Pfizer’s operational measure), the first clean sign of top-line stabilization. But net income fell 9.4% as pandemic-era margins normalize lower.

• The balance sheet carries $61.6B of long-term debt after the $43B Seagen deal. Debt to equity of 0.72 is workable, but it caps buybacks and keeps the payout under a spotlight.

• Price sits at the 52-week low near $23.11 in a downtrend on every timeframe. This isn’t a bottom yet. It’s a falling stock at long-term support, which is a different thing.

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The Business and the Latest Print

Pfizer’s problem is a high-class one that turned into a hangover. At the pandemic peak the company booked around $100B of revenue in 2022, with Comirnaty and Paxlovid doing the heavy lifting. That demand evaporated, and trailing 12-month revenue has settled near $63.3B, a compound decline of roughly 15% a year over 3 years. Investors aren’t punishing a healthy company. They’re repricing one that got structurally smaller.

The most recent quarter is where the tone shifts, if only a little. Revenue of $14.45B grew 5.4% year over year as reported, or roughly 2% on Pfizer’s operational measure, the first quarter in a while with clean growth as the COVID comparisons finally shrink. Net income of $2.69B and diluted EPS of $0.47 tell the other half: the top line is steadying, but profitability is still drifting down (net income fell 9.4%) as high-margin COVID revenue gives way to lower-margin base products. The next report lands Tuesday, August 4, 2026, and it’s the real test of whether stabilization is a trend or a single data point.

Underneath the headline, Pfizer is running 2 plays at once. It’s cutting costs hard to defend margins, and it’s spending heavily to rebuild a growth engine in oncology after the $43B Seagen purchase. The CEO keeps signaling appetite for more deals, a tell that management sees the pipeline gap. Rational, but not free, given the debt load.

Now the part that decides everything for a 7% yielder: can it pay?

Fundamental Analysis

The valuation is genuinely low, and low for reasons you can name.

Trailing P/E is 18.6x, but that’s distorted by depressed earnings. The number that matters is the forward P/E of 8.6x, roughly half the multiple of the large-cap pharma group. Price to sales of 2.2x says the same.

This is a market pricing erosion, not expansion.

The quality of the business is better than the price suggests, which is what makes it interesting:

• Margins are strong at the top, thinner at the bottom. Gross margin of 74.8% is elite, the mark of branded drugs while patents last. The erosion shows lower down: net margin has compressed to 11.8% and return on equity is just 8.3%, low for a franchise this profitable at the top.

• The balance sheet is the real constraint. Long-term debt climbed to $61.6B in 2025 from around $33B in 2022, almost entirely from Seagen. Debt to equity of 0.72 and a current ratio of 1.25 are investment-grade fine, but they explain why buybacks are muted and every new deal raises a funding question.

The overhang everyone is pricing is the patent cliff. A cluster of major products, including Eliquis, faces loss of exclusivity across 2026 to 2030, and Pfizer has to replace that revenue through Seagen oncology, internal launches, and deals, all while a tougher US drug-pricing backdrop pressures the sector. Analysts reflect the ambivalence: of 27 covering the stock, most sit at hold, with a consensus target near $29 (about 20% upside), a high of $36, and a low of $24 near today’s price. The base case is modest recovery, with real disagreement about the tail risks.

Net read on the fundamentals: a cheap, cash-generative, slow-declining franchise with a defensible but not untouchable dividend and a debt-limited path back to growth.

It’s a value stock, priced like one, that needs the base business to keep stabilizing. The 5.4% growth last quarter is the first brick. It isn’t yet a wall.

But the dividend is why most readers are here.

The Dividend Question

A 7% yield from an investment-grade drugmaker is either a bargain or a warning, depending entirely on which coverage number you look at.

• On forward earnings of $2.83, the payout is about 61%. Comfortable.

• On trailing operating cash flow near $12B, the roughly $9.8B dividend is covered with room to spare.

• On free cash flow after capex, around $9.5B, coverage is thin. The payout edges just above what the business actually throws off.

• On trailing GAAP earnings, the payout ratio is an ugly 131%, distorted by restructuring and depressed post-pandemic profit.

Honestly, the dividend is safe on the forward-earnings and operating-cash measures institutions underwrite to, thin on free cash flow, and alarming only on the GAAP figure that overstates the strain. It isn’t in obvious danger, but it has little margin for a bad year, and a cut would shatter the income base that owns this stock. A 7% yield is the market pricing that risk, not a free coupon.

The fundamentals say patient. The price says wait a little longer.

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Technical Analysis

Every timeframe points down, and the read is simpler than the indicator list suggests: price is below every moving average that matters, and sellers still hold the trend.

On the weekly view, price sits under the 20, 50, 100, and 200-week averages, stacked in the bearish order of a mature downtrend. Weekly RSI, a momentum gauge where sub-40 readings signal persistent selling, is at 38.9, and Bollinger %B, which shows where price sits inside its volatility bands, is near zero, meaning the stock is pinned to the bottom of its weekly range.

The daily picture agrees: price at $24.32 is below its 20, 50, and 200-day lines, the trend-strength reading (ADX at 25) says sellers are in control rather than drifting, and MACD, the momentum measure that tracks 2 moving averages, is still negative.

The one flicker of life is intraday, where 4-hour momentum has ticked toward neutral and price is trying to base near $24.

That’s a bounce attempt, not a reversal.

The levels are what matter. $23.11 is the 52-week low, and $23.00 down to $22.70 lines up with multi-year lows, the floor the whole thesis rests on.

Lose it on a weekly close and there’s little beneath until the low $20s. Nothing improves until price reclaims $25 and holds, with $26.40 and the $28.75 high above.

Net read: a confirmed downtrend at long-term support. The 7% yield pays you to be early, but the tape says don’t rush. Let $23 prove itself before calling it a bottom.

Here is how to act on it without guessing:

Trade Plan

This is a name to accumulate into weakness and confirmation, not to chase.

• Accumulation zone: $23.00 to $23.60. The 52-week low and multi-year support. Buying here pays the full 7% yield against a well-defined level, the best risk-adjusted entry on the board.

• Breakout confirmation: a reclaim of $25.00. Price back above the moving-average cluster is the first evidence the downtrend is loosening. Adding above $25 trades a worse price for a better backdrop.

• Stop: a weekly close below $22.50. This sits under multi-year support. Close a week beneath it and the long-term floor has failed. That needs a rethink, not more capital.

• Targets: $26.40 first (the weekly midline), then $28.00 (the analyst median and old resistance), then $30.00 (the falling long-term average, and the round number that would mark a real trend change). Depending on the fill, the first target offers roughly 2.5 to 6 times reward against the risk to the $22.50 stop, the higher multiples near the low of the zone.

• Rolling stop: once price clears $26.40 and holds, lift the stop toward $24. Once $28 trades, raise it under the most recent higher low. Let a genuine recovery run while refusing to give back the gains a bounce hands you.

When it comes to sizing, keep it simple. Let the distance between entry and stop define your risk per share, and let that set position size, not a fixed dollar figure. With a 7% yield doing part of the work, there’s no need to force the trade.

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Bottom Line

Pfizer is cheap for real reasons and pays you to be patient, but it isn’t a buy-at-market name just because the yield is loud. The business is stabilizing at the top line, the dividend is covered on forward earnings if not GAAP, and the valuation already reflects a lot of bad news. A reasonable bull case for an income-oriented, multi-year holder.

The catch is that price hasn’t confirmed any of it. The stock is in a clean downtrend at long-term support, and the disciplined move is to accumulate in the $23 area or wait for a reclaim of $25, rather than average into a falling knife on conviction alone. The technical line that decides the thesis is $22.50 on a weekly closing basis. The fundamental line is quieter but just as real: if free cash flow stays below the dividend while debt stays high and the base business fails to grow, the yield stops paying you for patience and starts paying you for decline.

Pfizer isn’t a screaming buy because the yield is loud. It’s a watchlist name where the market already prices the pessimism, and the buyer still needs proof that $23 is a floor, not just another pause in the downtrend. Get paid to wait, yes. Just make the market show you the floor first.

This content is for informational and educational purposes only and reflects our views at the time of writing. It is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Markets involve risk, prices can move against you, and outcomes are never guaranteed. Always do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before making investment decisions.

Key Takeaways

• Palo Alto just hit an all-time high near $332, jumping about 9% on Monday alone. It’s now up more than 60% over the past year and has more than doubled off its 52-week low.

• The move wasn’t company news. It was a sector-wide rally after a UBS note pegged the global security market at almost $1 trillion this year, rising toward $1.2 trillion by 2029. CrowdStrike and Okta jumped with it.

• Fiscal Q3 (the quarter ended April 30, reported June 2) more than backs the business: revenue up 31% to $3 billion, contracted backlog up 36% to $18.4 billion, and $3.58 billion of free cash flow over the past year.

• But the price has caught the story. At a low-to-mid-20s sales multiple, Palo Alto now trades above the average analyst target of roughly $310 to $315, the spot where last week’s “cheaper than CrowdStrike” edge quietly disappeared.

• The setup is stretched: a momentum reading near 77, with the price poking above its upper volatility band. This is the priced-for-perfection trap we pinned on CrowdStrike last week, now wearing Palo Alto’s name.

What Changed

When we looked at both cybersecurity flagships on June 20, the story was “both beat, both fell.” After running more than 70% into earnings, Palo Alto and CrowdStrike each reported strong quarters in early June and then sold off, the classic stretched-setup fade. Palo Alto was the calmer of the pair, near its record around $303, and we said a clean push above that high would confirm the next leg up.

It came fast. Over the past 10 days Palo Alto didn’t drift higher, it surged, capped by a roughly 9% jump on Monday to an all-time high near $332. The trigger wasn’t earnings or a new contract. It was a research note: UBS told clients the global market for security would approach $1 trillion this year and grow toward $1.2 trillion by 2029, with cybersecurity the biggest engine, and framed security spending as one of the more durable, recession-resistant corners of tech. The whole group caught a bid. CrowdStrike rose 7%, Okta 5%, and the cybersecurity names collectively outran the chipmakers that had led the market all year. Palo Alto, already climbing after its quarter, went vertical.

The Business Still Earns It

None of this is a knock on the company. Palo Alto’s fiscal Q3 results, for the quarter that ended April 30 and was reported on June 2, were genuinely strong, and the run since has a real foundation. Revenue grew 31% to $3 billion, helped by its newly closed CyberArk and Chronosphere acquisitions. The cleaner growth signal, next-generation security annual recurring revenue, the run-rate value of its subscription business, reached $8.1 billion, up 28% even after stripping out the deals. Contracted backlog, the revenue already booked for future quarters, climbed 36% to $18.4 billion. Adjusted profit came in at $0.85 a share, ahead of the $0.72 the Street expected, and management raised guidance across the board.

And the cash engine keeps humming: more than $3.5 billion of free cash flow over the past year, with management targeting a 40% free-cash-flow margin by fiscal 2028. Reported earnings are messy, the quarter was a small accounting loss on CyberArk deal costs, but the underlying machine is real. This is a genuine leader executing a genuine strategy, getting big enterprises to drop a dozen separate security vendors for its single suite. What stands out isn’t the acquisition-boosted headline, it’s that organic growth, the 28% in recurring revenue without the deals, is still this fast at this size, which is rare and hard to fake. The business deserves a premium.

But the Price Caught the Story

Here’s the rub, and it’s the same one that tripped CrowdStrike last week. A great business and a great stock are not the same thing at every price. Last week Palo Alto was the relative bargain of the pair, near 22 times trailing sales against CrowdStrike’s 34. After the run it sits in the low-to-mid 20s on sales, around 25 times trailing revenue or 23 times this year’s guided sales, and the “cheaper” label has quietly slipped off. On the adjusted earnings the company and the Street actually use, Palo Alto now trades near 88 times trailing and 80 times forward profit; the reported GAAP multiple is distorted by CyberArk charges and isn’t worth anchoring to. Either way you cut it, the stock is richly valued.

The clearest tell is the price target. Depending on the data provider, the average analyst target sits around $310 to $315, and the stock closed Monday at $332, already above it. Put plainly, after a 9% pop, the price has run past where the people who cover it think it should trade over the next year. That doesn’t make it a short, the most bullish targets reach up near $430, and momentum like this can overshoot for a while. But it does mean the easy part, the gap between a good company and a fair price, has been spent. You’re now paying up, at an all-time high, for a story the whole market already agrees with.

There’s more than valuation to watch, too. Palo Alto is still digesting CyberArk, a roughly $25 billion acquisition that has to be absorbed without bruising the core business, and a good chunk of this month’s gain came from sentiment, a single broker’s market-size note, rather than anything the company actually did. Sentiment-driven moves in high-multiple stocks tend to give back fast when the mood shifts. None of that breaks the thesis. It just means the cushion is thinner at $332 than it was at $288, and the next disappointment, whenever it shows up, will sting more.

The Technical Picture

The tape says the same thing the valuation does: extended. At $332, Palo Alto trades far above every major moving average, with the 50-day down near $250 and the 200-day near $206, a measure of how fast and far this has run. Its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge where over 70 is overbought, sits around 77, and the weekly reading is hotter still near 80. The stock has even pushed above the top of its Bollinger band, the upper edge of its normal volatility range, which often marks moves that are due for a rest. None of that means the top is in, strong stocks stay overbought longer than skeptics expect, but it does mean the odds of buying right here and immediately sitting through a pullback are high.

Here’s how I’m watching the levels.

Levels I’m Watching

These are levels to watch, not instructions, and at an all-time high with momentum this hot, patience beats chasing.

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ServiceNow isn’t what AI replaces. It’s where companies put AI to work. A drop of more than 50% priced the opposite, and that gap is the opportunity.

Key Takeaways

• ServiceNow trades around $98 (after a 5-for-1 split in December), down more than 50% from its high near $211. It just jumped almost 10% in a day as software stocks rebounded and the “AI will kill software” fear faded.

• The selloff had a story: investors feared AI agents would replace the human workflows ServiceNow automates, shrinking the number of paid seats. The whole software group fell into a bear market on that fear.

• The story has it backwards. ServiceNow is the system big companies use to deploy AI, and its AI product, Now Assist, is its fastest-growing line. Management just raised its 2026 AI ACV target (signed annual contract value) by 50%, from $1 billion to $1.5 billion.

• The business keeps compounding: revenue up 22% last quarter, subscription gross margins near 77%, and free cash flow of around $5 billion, roughly a third of every sales dollar.

• After the drop, you pay about 7 times sales for a 22% grower throwing off that kind of cash, against nearly triple that at the peak. The average analyst target sits 44% higher, at $141.

What Happened

For most of its life, ServiceNow was the stock you couldn’t afford to buy. The quiet giant of enterprise software, it runs the digital plumbing inside thousands of large companies, the systems that route IT tickets, onboard employees, and handle customer-service requests. It compounded for years and rarely went on sale. Then 2026 happened.

Starting in late January, a fear swept enterprise software: that generative AI, and the autonomous “agents” built on top of it, would make traditional business software obsolete. The logic went like this. ServiceNow charges roughly by the seat, per worker using its software. If AI agents do the work instead of people, companies need fewer seats, and a per-seat business slowly bleeds. Investors didn’t wait around to test the idea: ServiceNow dropped 11% in a single session in late January as the whole software group sold off. The pressure came back with the next earnings report, when the stock fell roughly 18% in a day. By the lows it had been cut in half, down more than 50% from its high, and a whole group of software names had entered a bear market. The fear even earned a nickname: the SaaSpocalypse.

Then, over the past few weeks, it snapped. As evidence piled up that the disruption was overblown, money rotated back into the names that had been left for dead. ServiceNow put together one of its sharpest rallies in years, including an almost 10% jump on Friday. The mood flipped from “AI kills software” to “wait, maybe software sells AI” in a handful of sessions.

The Bet the Market Got Backwards

Here’s the heart of it. The bear case treats ServiceNow as a victim of AI. The reality is closer to the opposite: ServiceNow is one of the main ways big companies actually put AI to work.

Think about what an AI agent needs to be useful inside a corporation. It can’t just be clever in a chat window. It has to reach into the company’s messy tangle of systems, see what’s happening, and take action: open the ticket, approve the request, update the record, alert the right person. That layer, the connective tissue between the AI and the real systems a business runs on, is exactly what ServiceNow has spent 20 years building. An AI agent without that layer is a brilliant intern with no hands. ServiceNow gives it hands.

That’s why the fear gets cause and effect exactly wrong. AI doesn’t make ServiceNow’s software less necessary. It makes it more necessary, because every company that wants to turn AI agents loose needs somewhere for them to operate safely. And ServiceNow is monetizing exactly that, shifting from pure per-seat pricing toward charging for AI usage and results, which is how revenue can keep climbing even if the human seat count flattens.

The numbers already show it. Now Assist, ServiceNow’s AI product, crossed $600 million in annual contract value last year, the run-rate value of signed deals, more than doubling from the year before. The company entered 2026 around $750 million and raised its full-year AI ACV target by 50%, from $1 billion to $1.5 billion. Management now projects $30 billion in subscription revenue by 2030, with roughly a third of new business coming from AI. The number that decides this from here is whether Now Assist attach rates and usage-based pricing can grow fast enough to outrun any softness in seat counts. So far, they have.

What the Business Is Actually Doing

Strip out the narrative and look at the engine. Revenue grew 22% last quarter, to $3.77 billion, the kind of pace most companies its size can only envy. Subscription gross margins sit near 77%. And the cash flow is the real story: ServiceNow produced around $5 billion in free cash flow over the past year, the actual cash left after running the business, which works out to roughly a third of every dollar of revenue. That’s elite for software, and it’s why reported earnings, held down by stock compensation and heavy reinvestment, understate how profitable this company truly is.

The balance sheet is sturdy, with modest debt, and the customer base is the stickiest kind. Once a company wires its operations into ServiceNow, ripping it out is a multi-year project nobody wants to lead. Growth this durable, at this scale, with this much cash conversion, is rare. It isn’t the profile of a business being disrupted into decline.

What You’re Paying

This is what makes the setup interesting rather than just reassuring. At the top, investors were paying close to 18 to 20 times annual sales for perfection. After the drop, you pay around 7 times sales for a business still growing above 20%, with management guiding a 35% free-cash-flow margin this year. That’s the real point: same elite growth-plus-cash profile, at less than half the multiple. It’s no longer a nosebleed valuation. It’s a premium business at a far more grown-up price.

Wall Street largely agrees the selling overshot. Of 45 analysts covering it, the consensus rates ServiceNow a strong buy, with an average target around $141, roughly 44% above today’s price. Targets don’t call bottoms, and they aren’t the thesis, but they’re one more vote that the disruption trade went too far.

None of this makes ServiceNow a sure thing, and the bear case deserves a fair hearing. The disruption fear isn’t dead: if AI agents shrink seat counts faster than ServiceNow can replace that revenue with AI usage, the bears will have been early, not wrong. The stock isn’t cheap on earnings either, at about 58 times, so any real stumble in growth, which has already cooled from the high-20s to 22%, would sting. And the pricing shift, from charging per person to charging per outcome, is still young and unproven at full scale. The argument here isn’t that there’s no risk. It’s that the market priced ServiceNow for the bad outcome and is paying almost nothing for the good one.

The Technical Picture

The tape is starting to heal, but it hasn’t fully turned. At $98, ServiceNow still sits just below its 20-day and 50-day moving averages, both around $100 to $102, with the 200-day average way up near $127, a measure of how far the stock has to climb to repair the damage. Its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge where under 30 is oversold, has recovered to around 47, squarely neutral, after Friday’s surge lifted it off the lows. The read: the freefall has stopped and buyers have shown up, but the stock still needs to reclaim those shorter-term averages to confirm a bottom rather than just a bounce.

Levels I’m Watching

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Key Takeaways

• Palantir trades around $113, down about 46% from its all-time high near $207. It just bounced 5% off a fresh 52-week low, snapping a 7-day losing streak.

• The business is accelerating, not breaking. Revenue grew 85% from a year earlier last quarter, the company is now solidly profitable, and it just won the data backbone of the US Army’s next-generation battlefield network.

• The selloff is a valuation reset. Even after halving, Palantir trades at roughly 52 to 56 times sales and about 125 times trailing earnings, among the richest multiples of any large company in the market.

• The bull-bear gap is enormous. Analyst targets run from $70 to $255, and famous investors sit on both sides: Michael Burry halved a big short against it while Cathie Wood’s ARK flipped to buying the dip.

• The lesson: a 46% drop didn’t make Palantir cheap. It made it less expensive. There’s a difference, and it matters.

What Happened

Palantir was one of the great trades of the AI era, riding the boom from single digits to a peak near $207 and a nearly $500 billion market value. In the months since, it has given back almost half of that, bottoming for now at a 52-week low around $106 before a sharp 5% bounce last week snapped a brutal 7-day losing streak.

So what went wrong? Mostly nothing, at least not with the company. 3 things pressured the stock, and only one of them is about Palantir itself. First and biggest: valuation. Palantir got so expensive at the top, trading near 100 times its annual sales, that even spectacular results couldn’t grow into the price, and the market started letting the air out. Second: a hostile backdrop for pricey software. Rising interest rates make far-off profits worth less today, and that hits the most expensive, longest-duration stocks hardest. Third: a few company-specific worries, including softness in some European contracts and political noise around a large UK government deal. None of it changed the core story. All of it changed the multiple.

The Business Didn’t Break

Here’s the part that makes the drawdown so interesting: the fundamentals went the opposite direction of the stock. Last quarter Palantir’s revenue grew 85% from a year earlier, an extraordinary rate at this size, and management raised full-year 2026 guidance to 71% growth. It runs gross margins above 84%, is now reliably profitable, and carries essentially no debt against billions in cash. It’s also intensely cash-generative: it produced more than $1.7 billion of free cash flow over the past year and lifted its adjusted free cash flow target for this year to between $4.2 billion and $4.4 billion. This isn’t a wobbling business.

The demand is real and broadening. On the government side, Palantir just won a central role in the US Army’s NGC2 program, the military’s effort to modernize how it commands and connects forces on the battlefield, with its Foundry software chosen as the core data layer. On the commercial side, AIP, the AI software it sells to companies, keeps signing new customers at a fast clip. The growth engine that justified the original enthusiasm is, if anything, running hotter than before.

And the mix matters. The fastest growth comes from US commercial customers, where management guides revenue to grow 120% this year, the part of Palantir that skeptics insisted would never scale beyond government work. Its customer count keeps climbing, individual deals are getting larger, and the contracts are the sticky kind that compound once a client wires its daily operations into the software and stops wanting to rip it out. That’s the profile of a company widening its lead, not defending it, which is exactly why the stock’s collapse looks so strange sitting next to the numbers.

What Greatness Is Worth

So if the business is this good, why isn’t the stock a screaming buy after a 46% discount? Because of the one number that has always defined Palantir: price-to-sales, what you pay for each dollar of revenue. Even now, beaten down, Palantir trades at roughly 52 to 56 times sales and about 125 times trailing earnings, depending on the source. For perspective, a typical high-quality software company trades in the high single digits to low teens on sales. Palantir is several times that, after the crash. Even on forward earnings, a friendlier yardstick, the stock still carries a steep premium. The discount from the top is real, but here “cheaper” just means less extreme.

That’s the math the market is working through. At the top, near 100 times sales, the multiple had borrowed years of future growth and pulled it into the present, so a 46% decline sounds like capitulation but mostly took Palantir from absurdly expensive to merely very expensive. The growth is real, and so is the price you pay for it.

Put the expectation in plain terms. To grow into 52 times sales, Palantir has to keep compounding revenue at a blistering pace for years, hold its fat margins, keep competitors at bay, and then still command a premium once it gets there. That can happen, and a handful of companies have pulled it off. But far more former high-fliers spent years moving sideways while their growth slowly caught up to a price that had sprinted too far ahead, a perfectly good business bolted to a flat stock. So the real danger here isn’t that Palantir stumbles. It’s that Palantir delivers, and the shares still go nowhere for a long stretch, because the starting price already banked the win.

This is why the smartest investors can’t agree. Analyst price targets run from $70 on the low end to $255 on the high end, a spread so wide it tells you the disagreement isn’t about the facts, it’s about the valuation. Michael Burry, who built a large bet against Palantir, recently cut it in half, though he’s still holding bearish options. At the same time, Cathie Wood’s ARK funds flipped from selling to buying the dip. Both can look right for a while. That’s what happens when a great company trades at a price that needs the future to arrive on schedule.

Valuation isn’t the only risk worth naming, either. Competition for enterprise AI is intensifying, and a meaningful slice of Palantir’s growth leans on government budgets and contracts that draw political scrutiny, as the recent friction in Europe and the UK shows. None of that is breaking the business today, but at this price the market has little patience for any of it.

The Technical Picture

The tape is still in a downtrend, and it isn’t subtle. At $113, Palantir sits below its 20-day, 50-day, 100-day, and 200-day moving averages, the full stack of trend lines, with the 200-day zone overhead, roughly $145 to $160 depending on the measure. When price is below every major average, the path of least resistance stays lower until that changes. Its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge where under 30 is oversold, sits around 35, weak but not yet at panic lows, and last week’s 5% bounce came right off the 52-week low near $106. The read: this is a stock trying to carve a bottom after a hard fall, not one that has clearly turned. The first real sign of a turn would be reclaiming the shorter-term averages overhead.

Levels I’m Watching

These are levels to watch, not instructions.

• Support: $104 to $110, the 52-week low and the lower edge of the stock’s volatility range, where last week’s bounce began.

• Reclaim to watch: $127 to $128, the 20-day average and the first lower high. Above that, the falling 200-day zone, roughly $145 to $160 depending on the measure, is the bigger test.

• Caution line: a decisive close below $103, under the 52-week low, would say the floor gave way and open the door toward the $90s.

• Targets on a recovery: $145 first, then the $183 to $200 analyst-target zone, with the old high near $207 the long-term marker.

• The real catalyst is fundamental: Palantir’s next earnings report, expected in early August, and whether 80%-plus growth can hold.

Bottom Line

Palantir is the rare case where almost everything you hear about it is true at once. It’s a phenomenal business, growing faster than almost any company its size, winning the contracts that matter, throwing off real cash. And it’s still one of the most expensive stocks in the market, even down 46%. Here’s where I come down. The drop didn’t make Palantir cheap. It made it less expensive, and those aren’t the same thing. If you believe Palantir becomes one of the defining software companies of the decade, this price is a far better entry than the top was, with the caveat that more than 50 times sales still leaves no room for a stumble. If you don’t, a falling knife at more than 100 times earnings is exactly the kind of thing that keeps falling. The company was never the question. The price always was.

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This is research and commentary, not personal investment advice. Levels are illustrative; size positions to your own risk tolerance and time horizon. The author may hold positions in names discussed.

For most of the past year, Broadcom was the second name investors reached for in the AI trade, right after Nvidia. The pitch is different, and that difference is the point. Nvidia sells powerful general-purpose graphics chips that any company can buy off the shelf.

Broadcom doesn’t compete with that head-on. Instead it sits next to the largest AI companies and helps them design their own custom chips, tuned for exactly one job, then does the hard engineering to turn those designs into real silicon. On June 24, that strategy produced its most visible result yet: a chip called Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first piece of custom silicon, built with Broadcom.

Key Takeaways

• On June 24, Broadcom and OpenAI unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first custom AI chip. It’s an ASIC, a chip hard-wired for a single job (running large language models), which makes it cheaper and far more power-efficient than a general-purpose chip for that one task.

• It’s the first product of a 10-gigawatt custom-accelerator partnership the pair announced in October 2025, with deployment targeted to begin in the second half of 2026 and run through 2029. Broadcom now counts OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic among 6 core custom-chip customers.

• The business is booming. AI revenue hit $10.8 billion last quarter, up 143% from a year earlier, and management has indicated full fiscal 2026 AI sales could reach roughly $56 billion, close to triple the prior year.

• Yet the stock is down about 26% from its $495 high, to $365. The June quarter showed soft software sales and a full-year AI forecast that held steady instead of rising, and the market wanted more.

• It’s priced for perfection: about 60 times earnings and 23 times sales, a $1.74 trillion company. The story is excellent; the multiple leaves little room for error.

Start with the product, because it’s the part that actually matters for the next decade.

What Jalapeño Is, and Why It Matters

Jalapeño is what the industry calls an ASIC, an application-specific chip, meaning it’s built from scratch to do one job extremely well rather than many jobs adequately. Here the job is inference: running an already-trained AI model so it can answer your questions, the part of AI that happens millions of times a day once a model goes live.

OpenAI designed the chip around its own software, and Broadcom did the heavy silicon engineering to turn that design into something real and manufacturable. The companies say it went from concept to finished design in 9 months, which is quick for a chip this complex.

Here’s why this matters for Broadcom specifically. Training the giant models gets the headlines, and that’s Nvidia’s stronghold. But inference is the recurring cost, the bill that grows every single day as more people use AI. The hyperscalers, the handful of companies spending hundreds of billions building AI data centers, badly want to lower that bill and stop leaning on a single supplier.

A custom chip does both: it strips out everything the model doesn’t need, so the workload runs cheaper and on less power. Broadcom is the company they call to make that happen. Jalapeño isn’t a one-off, either. It’s the first chip in a 10-gigawatt rollout of OpenAI-designed accelerators, a staggering amount of computing power the companies committed to last October, with deployment targeted to begin in the second half of 2026 and run through 2029.

The Business Behind the Headline

This is where Broadcom stops being a story and starts being numbers. AI revenue last quarter came in at $10.8 billion, up 143% from a year earlier, and Broadcom guided the current quarter’s AI sales to $16 billion. Management has indicated full fiscal 2026 AI semiconductor revenue could reach roughly $56 billion, up from around $20 billion the prior year, close to a tripling in 12 months. And it has guided to more than $100 billion of AI chip revenue in 2027, backed by a reported $73 billion order backlog from its 6 committed custom-chip customers. Those customers reportedly include Google, Meta, Anthropic, and now OpenAI, the short list of names actually building frontier AI.

Step back to the whole company and the quality is just as clear. Total revenue last quarter was $22.19 billion, up 48% from a year earlier. Over the past 12 months Broadcom earned a net margin near 39%, generated nearly $34 billion in operating cash flow with the bulk of it free, and produced a return on equity around 37%.

It does carry more debt than most chipmakers, a legacy of its $69 billion takeover of software maker VMware, but its short-term assets are more than double its short-term bills, so the balance sheet isn’t the worry here. This is a genuinely elite business, one of the few selling exactly what the entire technology industry is desperate to buy.

So Why Is the Stock Down?

Fair question, and the answer is the most useful lesson in this whole market. When a stock has run as far as Broadcom did, climbing past $2 trillion at its peak on the AI trade, the results don’t just have to be good. They have to beat what’s already priced in. The June quarter, reported in early June, didn’t clear that bar on every line.

The AI numbers were strong, but management held its full-year AI forecast steady rather than raising it, and after a year of beat-and-raise quarters, a merely-steady outlook reads as a letdown. Worse, the non-AI side disappointed: sales from the software business, the VMware piece, came in soft. The stock fell hard on the report, and it’s kept sliding with the broader tech tape since, including a rough session on June 26 when weakness rippled across the chip names.

So you get this strange split-screen. The long-term story got better. Jalapeño is real, the OpenAI relationship is real, the backlog is real. But the short-term expectations got reset, because perfection was already in the price. That’s not really a Broadcom problem, it’s a valuation problem, and it’s worth understanding before you act on either the fear or the excitement.

What You’re Paying

At $365, Broadcom trades around 60 times its trailing earnings and 23 times its sales. Those are rich numbers, the kind you only justify if growth stays explosive for years. One fair pushback on that 60: Broadcom’s reported profit is held down by heavy accounting charges from the VMware deal, so on next year’s expected earnings the multiple drops well into the 20s to 30s. Still rich, but not as alarming as the trailing figure looks for a company growing this fast.

The bull case leans on exactly that: AI inference is just getting started, Broadcom has its customers locked into multi-year deals, and $100 billion of AI revenue in 2027 would make today’s price look cheap in hindsight. The bear case is simpler. At this valuation, almost everything has to go right, and the June quarter was a reminder that not every quarter does.

And the risk here isn’t that demand dries up. It’s timing, margins, and customer concentration: whether a deployment slips, whether custom-chip pricing stays rich, and whether the handful of giant customers eventually dual-source or bring more work in-house. A single soft data point on any of those, and a stock at 60 times earnings has a long way to fall before it looks like a bargain.

Both cases can be true at once. The business can be one of the best in the world and the stock can still be expensive. That’s the needle Broadcom investors have to thread today.

The Technical Picture

The tape tells the same story as the numbers. After topping out near $495, Broadcom has slid to $365, around 26% off its high and down close to 4% on the day. It’s now trading below its 20-day, 50-day, and 100-day moving averages, the lines that track its short and medium-term trend, which means momentum has clearly rolled over.

The one line still holding is the 200-day average, near $355, the marker that separates a normal pullback from something more serious. Its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge where under 30 signals oversold, sits around 40, weak but not yet washed out. The read: this is a real correction, not a blip, but the longer-term uptrend is still intact as long as that 200-day holds. Lose it, and the next supports sit well below.

Here’s how I’m watching the levels from here.

Levels I’m Watching

These are levels to watch, not instructions.

• Support: $352 to $368, the zone around the 200-day average where the stock is trying to find its feet.

• Reclaim to watch: a move back above $396 recovers the 50-day and 20-day averages and would say the dip-buyers have stepped back in.

• Caution line: a close below $344, a few dollars under the 200-day, would confirm a real break rather than a one-day wick, and open the door toward $333, the lower edge of the stock’s recent volatility range, and below.

• Targets on a recovery: $424, then $460, then $524, the average analyst target. The Street high sits all the way up at $650.

• The real catalyst is fundamental: Broadcom’s next earnings report on September 3, and any sign of whether the AI forecast finally moves higher.

Bottom Line

Broadcom just did something rare: it helped the most famous name in AI design and build its very first chip, and that chip is the leading edge of a business already throwing off tens of billions and growing fast. If you believe custom silicon is how the AI build-out gets cheaper, and the spending says it is, Broadcom is sitting in the best seat in the house that isn’t Nvidia’s. Here’s where I come down.

The company isn’t the question. The price is. At 60 times earnings, the market has already penciled in years of flawless execution, and the June quarter showed that even great isn’t always good enough at this multiple. I’d rather own this story on a real pullback, with the 200-day holding beneath it, than chase it at the highs. Broadcom built OpenAI’s chip. Now the stock has to grow into its own expectations.

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This is research and commentary, not personal investment advice. Levels are illustrative; size positions to your own risk tolerance and time horizon. The author may hold positions in names discussed.

The memory boom is a windfall for chipmakers and a tax on everyone who buys their chips.

Apple doesn’t usually get punished for charging more. It’s the most powerful pricing machine in consumer technology, the company that taught the world to pay $1,000 for a phone and feel good about it. So when Apple raised prices on its Macs and iPads by 15% to 25% on Thursday and the stock fell more than 5%, to about $275, that was the market saying something has changed.

The reason for the hikes wasn’t confidence. It was cost: a severe shortage of memory chips, the same AI-driven crunch that just handed Micron record revenue and an 85% gross margin, is now landing on Apple’s bill of materials. For once, Apple isn’t setting the price. It’s paying it.

Key Takeaways

• Apple raised Mac prices 15-20% and iPad prices 15-25% (iPhone untouched), blaming an AI-driven memory-chip shortage. The stock fell more than 5%, to about $275.

• It’s a cost story, not a confidence one. A price hike to cover a shortage, the same one minting record profits at Micron, signals margin pressure, not pricing power.

• The iPhone is the real worry. It was spared this round, but there’s memory in every one, and Apple hinted more increases could come.

• The fundamentals are still elite: a 48% gross margin, a 27% net margin, $100 billion-plus in free cash flow, and a return on equity above 140%.

• But it’s priced like it: about 33 times earnings and 9 times sales, on under-2% revenue growth over the past 3 years. Little cushion if those famous margins slip.

Start with what Apple actually did.

What Happened

On Thursday morning, Apple quietly raised prices across much of its hardware lineup: Macs up 15% to 20%, iPads up 15% to 25%, plus increases on its home devices and the Vision Pro headset. It pointedly left the iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods untouched, but signaled more adjustments could follow. The culprit, Apple said, is a shortage of memory chips so severe it’s reshaping the cost of building electronics.

That shortage isn’t random. It’s the direct result of the AI boom: every AI data center devours enormous quantities of memory, and with chipmakers funneling capacity toward high-margin AI memory, there’s less left for everyone else, and what remains costs far more. Apple, the world’s largest buyer of components, isn’t immune. Investors read the hikes as a warning rather than a flex, and sent the stock down more than 5%.

Why a Price Increase Hurt the Stock

Normally, a company raising prices is good news. It means pricing power, and pricing power flows straight to profit. This was different, for a few reasons. First, the why: Apple isn’t raising prices because customers are clamoring for more, it’s raising them to cover a cost it can’t control. That’s the posture of a price-taker, not a price-maker, and it’s an unfamiliar look for Apple.

Second, the math: a 15% to 25% increase either gets absorbed, squeezing Apple’s prized margins, or passed to consumers, risking weaker unit sales in an already-cautious spending climate. Neither outcome is good, and the market doesn’t yet know the mix. Third, and most important, the shadow it casts: if memory costs keep climbing, and Micron just guided them higher, the iPhone is the obvious next domino.

The iPhone is roughly half of Apple’s revenue and the product that anchors the entire ecosystem, and there’s memory in every single one. Thursday’s Mac and iPad hikes may be the canary, not the whole story.

What the Numbers Say

Step back and the tension is clear: an extraordinary business at a price that assumes it stays extraordinary. Apple still runs a 48% gross margin and a 32% operating margin, earns a 27% net margin, and throws off more than $100 billion in free cash flow a year, with a return on equity north of 140%. There’s no financial weakness here; these are the numbers of a fortress.

And not all of Apple sits in the blast radius. Its Services business, the App Store, iCloud, payments, advertising, and the rest, is now roughly a quarter of revenue, runs at gross margins near 70%, and consumes no memory chips at all. That high-margin, recurring engine is what has let Apple keep growing profits while hardware sales flatlined, and it’s the cushion the bulls are counting on to absorb a hardware-cost shock. The caveat: Services still ride on the hardware installed base, so if higher prices dent device sales, the flywheel eventually feels it too.

The catch is what you pay for them, and what’s underneath. At about 33 times trailing earnings and 9 times sales, Apple trades at a clear premium to the market, the price of quality and durability. But strip out the recent reacceleration and the underlying growth is slow: revenue has compounded at under 2% a year over the past 3 years, and the business still leans heavily on a maturing iPhone.

A premium multiple on a slow-growing giant works as long as the margins are bulletproof. The memory shortage is the first real test of that armor in years, and on Apple’s scale the math is unforgiving: a single percentage point off the gross margin, on more than $450 billion of revenue, is billions of dollars of gross profit gone.

If Apple passes the costs through without losing units, the margins hold and this is a blip. If it can’t, the most important number on the page, that 48% gross margin, starts to drift lower, and 33 times earnings suddenly looks expensive.

The Technical Picture

The drop did real technical damage. At $275, Apple has fallen through both its 20-day and 50-day averages (around $295 and $290) and now sits just above its 200-day average near $268, the last line of defense for the longer uptrend. Its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge where under 30 is oversold, dropped to 32, close to washed-out, after the news.

The stock is now about 13% below its 52-week high. As long as it holds the 200-day, this reads as a sharp but normal pullback; lose it, and the correction has more room to run. The tape is saying the same thing the fundamentals are: Apple isn’t broken, but the margin of safety just got thinner, and at 33 times earnings a premium multiple has little room to absorb a margin miss.

Levels I’m Watching

These are levels to watch, not instructions.

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The print was perfect. Memory has never stayed perfect.

Micron (MU) just delivered one of the most spectacular quarters in semiconductor history: record revenue of $41.5 billion, up roughly 346% from a year ago, a non-GAAP gross margin of 84.9%, a level almost unheard of for a maker of memory chips, and guidance for $50 billion next quarter. The stock, already up more than tenfold from its 52-week low, rose roughly 15% in extended trading, to near $1,200. It’s the cleanest evidence yet that the AI spending boom isn’t just real, it’s accelerating. And yet, on a near-term forward earnings run-rate, Micron still screens below 10 times earnings. That gap, a perfect print and a skeptic’s multiple, is the whole story.

Key Takeaways

• A record quarter. Micron reported $41.5 billion in revenue (up about 346% year-over-year), adjusted earnings of $25.11 a share, and a non-GAAP gross margin of 84.9%, all company records, then guided the current quarter to $50 billion in revenue at roughly 86% margins.

• The AI read-through is loud. Hyperscalers have earmarked more than $725 billion for AI data centers this year, and Micron’s high-bandwidth memory (HBM, the specialized chips stacked beside AI accelerators) is sold out into next year. This print says that spending is accelerating, not cooling.

• The stock rose roughly 15% in extended trading, to near $1,200, up more than tenfold from its 52-week low of $103, and back near its all-time high. With a beta above 2, it’s one of the most volatile mega-caps in the market.

• Here’s the paradox: after that run, Micron still screens below 10 times a near-term forward earnings run-rate. For a company that just grew revenue 346%, that’s not a bargain, it’s the market pricing an eventual down-cycle. Memory always cycles.

• The debate isn’t whether the quarter was good. It was extraordinary. It’s whether HBM has made this cycle structurally different, Micron just locked in roughly $100 billion of multi-year contracts with take-or-pay terms and pricing floors, or whether you’re still buying peak earnings at peak margins.

The Print

By any measure, this was a blowout. Revenue of $41.5 billion crushed estimates and set a record, up about 346% from the $9.3 billion Micron did in the same quarter a year ago, a reminder of how violently memory revenue can swing. Adjusted earnings came in at $25.11 a share, well ahead of expectations. Most striking was the non-GAAP gross margin: 84.9% (84.6% on a GAAP basis), a number that belongs to a software company, not a chipmaker that has historically watched margins swing between outright losses and the low 50s.

Management then guided the current quarter higher still, to $50 billion in revenue, around 86% margins, and roughly $31 a share. It also said high-bandwidth memory is sold out well into next year, much of it locked up under 16 strategic customer agreements worth roughly $100 billion in minimum contracted revenue, and declared a dividend. The market’s verdict was instant: the stock rose roughly 15% in extended trading, to near $1,200, after finishing the regular session around $1,047. Analysts, already overwhelmingly bullish into the quarter, lined up to raise their targets.

The ramp is the whole story in one frame: revenue from $9.3 billion to a guided $50 billion in 6 quarters, and gross margin from 38% to the mid-80s. That isn’t a normal upturn; it’s the steepest stretch in memory’s history.

The Thesis: The Cleanest Read on AI

Micron matters far beyond Micron. It’s the purest public proxy for one question: is the AI buildout real, and is it still accelerating? When Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google collectively commit more than $725 billion to AI data centers in a single year, that money buys accelerators, and every AI accelerator needs enormous amounts of high-bandwidth memory stacked beside it.

Micron, along with SK Hynix and Samsung, is one of only a handful of companies on earth that can make it. So when Micron reports HBM sold out into next year and guides revenue from $41.5 billion to $50 billion in one quarter, it isn’t just a good result, it’s a live signal that the most important spending cycle in technology is still ramping, not rolling over.

That’s the bull case in a sentence: Micron isn’t selling the AI dream, it’s selling the memory bottleneck behind the dream, and the bottleneck is getting tighter.

But Memory Always Cycles

Here’s what keeps the multiple low. Memory is the most cyclical business in technology, full stop. The chips Micron makes are, at bottom, commodities: when demand booms, prices and margins soar; when supply catches up, they collapse, often violently. Micron has lost money at the bottom of past cycles and minted it at the top.

Not long ago, in the last memory downturn, it was posting operating losses and burning cash; today it earns more in a single quarter than it used to make in good years. That whiplash is the business, not an aberration. An 84.9% gross margin isn’t a new normal; it’s what a cycle peak looks like. The market knows this, which is exactly why a stock that just grew revenue 346% trades at under 10 times forward earnings instead of 30 or 40.

That low multiple isn’t the market calling Micron cheap. It’s the market saying these earnings won’t last. The only questions that matter from here are how long the top lasts, and whether HBM has changed the rules. Micron is betting it has: this quarter it locked in 16 strategic customer agreements worth roughly $100 billion in minimum contracted revenue, built with take-or-pay terms, customer deposits, and pricing floors, a deliberate attempt to engineer the old cyclicality out of the business. If those contracts hold, the next down-cycle is shallower than history says. If demand cracks anyway, a contract is only as good as the customer behind it.

How It Could Play Out

There are a handful of paths from here, and the gap between them is wide.

The bull case: this cycle is different. HBM isn’t commodity memory. It’s harder to make, sold out under multi-year contracts, and tied directly to a secular AI buildout that’s still early. If supply stays tight and hyperscaler spending keeps climbing, the up-cycle runs longer and higher than any before it, earnings keep compounding, and that single-digit multiple re-rates upward. In this world, $1,200 is a waypoint, not a peak.

The base case: great, but priced. The boom is real and runs hot through this year, roughly as guided, but the market refuses to pay up for peak earnings, just as it’s doing now. The stock grinds higher with the earnings while the multiple stays compressed, so the gains lag the fundamentals, and the ride stays violent. You make money, but less than the headline growth suggests.

The bear case: this is the top. Memory does what memory always does. Samsung and SK Hynix pour capacity into HBM, the AI capex wave hits a digestion phase, and pricing and margins roll over. Peak earnings meet a falling multiple, the textbook way memory stocks round-trip, and a name that went up tenfold gives a painful chunk of it back. The 52-week range, $103 to $1,214, is a reminder of how far this can travel in both directions.

The Setup

None of this is subtle on the tape. Micron has gone up more than tenfold in a year, and into last night’s print it was already extended, its weekly momentum gauge, the relative strength index, where over 70 is overbought, up at 75, with the price more than double its own 200-day average.

The after-hours pop pushed it back to the edge of its all-time high near $1,214. This is a powerful uptrend, but a stretched one, in one of the most volatile large stocks in the market, its average daily move runs above 8%. For once, valuation isn’t the brake: the forward multiple is low. The brake is the calendar, how many more quarters the cycle has left.

Bottom Line

Micron gave the market exactly what it wanted: record revenue, record margins, and a guide that says the AI memory boom is still accelerating, and this time the long-term contracts make the bull case more than a hope. As a read on AI demand, it could hardly have been better. But the stock’s own multiple still tells you the catch: the market has seen this movie before, and peak memory earnings have never been permanent. So here’s where I come down. The quarter validates the thesis. It doesn’t erase the cycle. The easy money in memory is usually made early, not after a tenfold move. Micron is a magnificent trade, but a dangerous one. The print was perfect. Memory has never stayed perfect.

This is research and commentary, not personal investment advice. The author may hold positions in names discussed.

Higher-for-longer is the metals’ kryptonite.

Gold and silver are supposed to be the assets you hide in when things get scary. Lately they’ve been the trade you flee. Gold has fallen back to about $4,115 an ounce, dragging the big gold fund, GLD, to roughly $377, while silver has dropped to near $62, taking the silver fund, SLV, down to about $56. The trigger isn’t a collapse in the case for metals, it’s the Federal Reserve.

A blowout jobs report killed hopes for rate cuts, the Fed’s own projections now point to higher rates later this year, and the dollar has surged to a 13-month high. That’s a brutal mix for assets that pay no income. Both funds are stretched to the downside and approaching oversold, where bounces start, but the force that broke them hasn’t turned.

Key Takeaways

• Gold has fallen to about $4,115 an ounce (GLD near $377), and silver to about $62 (SLV near $56). Gold has given back its 2026 gains; silver is down nearly 50% from its 52-week high.

• It’s a rate story, not a gold story. A strong jobs report killed rate-cut hopes; the Fed’s own projections now point to higher rates this year, and futures put the odds of a hike by year-end near 70%. Rising real yields, the return on bonds after inflation, are the main enemy of assets that pay no income.

• Silver fell harder, as it usually does. It’s part industrial metal and far more volatile: SLV is off about 49% from its high while GLD is down about 26%.

• The gold-silver ratio has jumped to about 66 from 55 in May, meaning silver has cheapened relative to gold, a level that has often come before silver catching up once metals recover.

• Both funds are stretched to the downside, with daily momentum near oversold, and sit below every major moving average. That sets up a bounce, but stretched-in-a-downtrend isn’t a bottom; the Fed is still the swing factor.

Start with what these funds actually are.

What GLD and SLV Are

GLD, the SPDR Gold Shares fund, is the simplest way to own gold without storing bars yourself. It holds physical gold in a vault, and each share represents a slice, currently just under a tenth of an ounce, so the share price runs near a tenth of the gold price. With gold near $4,115, GLD trades near $377. SLV, the iShares Silver Trust, does the same for silver: each share tracks just under a full ounce, so with silver near $62, SLV trades near $56.

Both charge a small annual fee (0.40% for GLD, 0.50% for SLV) and pay no dividend, because metal generates no income. One practical wrinkle for US investors: in a taxable account, long-term gains on these funds may fall under “collectibles” rules, taxed at a maximum federal rate of 28%, higher than the rate on stocks, worth knowing before you hold them.

Why They’re Falling: The Rate Story

The metals didn’t break on their own merits, they broke on rates. A much stronger-than-expected jobs report, with payrolls roughly double what economists penciled in, convinced markets the Fed is done cutting and may even hike again. The Fed held its benchmark at 3.50% to 3.75% in June, but its own projections now point to higher rates this year, and futures put the odds of a hike by year-end near 70%. Here’s the mechanism in plain terms.

Gold and silver pay no interest, so when “real” yields, what bonds pay after subtracting inflation, rise, the opportunity cost of holding a lump of metal climbs, and money rotates into bonds and the dollar instead. The dollar just hit a 13-month high, another headwind, because metals are priced in dollars and a stronger dollar makes them costlier everywhere else. Inflation alone doesn’t save gold if real yields are rising. And with the crisis bid fading at the margin, easing US-Iran tensions have stripped away one of the few supports left, rates have taken back control of the trade.

Why Silver Fell Harder

Gold and silver rhyme, but they aren’t the same trade. Gold is mostly a monetary asset, a store of value. Silver is a hybrid, part safe haven and part industrial input, with roughly half its demand coming from solar panels, electronics, and manufacturing. That industrial side makes silver more economically sensitive and far more volatile: it tends to move like gold with the volume turned up, rising more in rallies and falling more in selloffs.

This was the falling-more kind. SLV is down about 49% from its 52-week high, while GLD has fallen about 26%. The gauge that captures the relationship is the gold-silver ratio, the gold price divided by the silver price, or how many ounces of silver it takes to buy one ounce of gold. It’s jumped to about 66, from 55 in May. That doesn’t guarantee silver rebounds first, but it does show silver has gotten cheap relative to gold, and when the complex stabilizes, silver has historically had more catch-up room.

The Technical Picture

Both funds are stretched to the downside. GLD, near $377 (gold about $4,115), sits below its 20-day, 50-day, and 200-day averages, with its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge where under 30 is oversold, down to 33, just shy of that line.

SLV, near $56 (silver about $62), tells the same story, below all its major averages with a momentum reading of 32, also near oversold. Readings this low often precede a bounce, but oversold is a condition, not a catalyst, and a bounce inside a downtrend isn’t the same as a bottom. Until these funds reclaim their falling averages, rallies are for trading, not investing.

Levels I’m Watching

These are levels to watch, in both share and ounce terms, not instructions, based on prices as of the June 23 close. Be clear about what this is: a watchlist for a bounce inside a downtrend, not a breakout setup, with both funds below their major averages and the Fed still the swing factor.

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A great brand on sale, or a value trap?

Few brands have fallen as far, as fast. The athleisure pioneer that spent a decade as a Wall Street favorite, maker of the premium leggings that built a cult following, now trades at $105, a 5-year low, down about 55% over the past year after a June 4 guidance cut. Here’s the twist: it’s no longer priced like the growth story it was. At roughly 8 times earnings, with a double-digit free-cash-flow yield and a 32% return on equity, the market has re-rated it to a value stock. The only question that matters is whether the earnings base is durable, or still falling. Cheap, or cheap for a reason?

Key Takeaways

• The fall is brutal. Lululemon is down about 55% over the past year, sitting at a 5-year low near $105 after cutting its full-year guidance on June 4.

• The business is softening, not collapsing. Revenue still grew 4% over the past year and the company earns a 13% net margin, but comparable sales in the Americas fell 5% last quarter (the fifth straight decline), gross margin is under tariff pressure, and earnings are falling for a second year.

• It’s genuinely cheap. The stock trades at about 8 times trailing earnings, 1 times sales, and roughly 5 times debt-adjusted profits, with a near-10% free-cash-flow yield on trailing numbers, a value-stock price tag on what was a premium-growth name.

• The damage is geographic. The Americas, its biggest market, is shrinking (comps down 5%), while China still grew 23% last quarter, so the problem is the mature home market, not the brand everywhere. Whether that Americas weakness is cyclical or the start of brand fatigue is the whole debate.

• The overhangs are clearing. The proxy fight with founder Chip Wilson was settled in May, and a 26-year Nike veteran, Heidi O’Neill, takes over as chief executive in September. Analysts rate it a hold, with an average target near $132, about 25% above the price.

Start with how a darling became a discard.

From Growth Darling to Value Stock

For years, Lululemon was the rare retailer that could do no wrong. It built a cult brand around premium yoga and athletic wear, charged full price, almost never discounted, and grew revenue at a 19% clip as recently as a couple of years ago. That growth is gone. Revenue rose about 19% in the year to early 2024, then 10%, then just under 5% this past year, and management now guides to roughly flat sales for the year ahead.

Earnings have followed: diluted earnings per share peaked near $14.64, slipped to $13.26 last year, and are guided down again to about $11 this year. When a market darling stops growing, the stock doesn’t drift, it re-rates violently. A name that once commanded 35 or 40 times earnings now trades at 8.

What Went Wrong

Several things hit at once. First, the Americas, by far its biggest market, went into reverse: comparable sales, the standard retail gauge of how existing stores are doing, fell 5% last quarter, the fifth straight quarterly decline, and management expects Americas revenue to drop high-single-digits for the year.

Management argues some of that softness was transitory, the proxy fight and questions about a few products’ materials, and says the worst of that noise has faded, though it concedes trends haven’t recovered. Either way, the home market is shrinking.

Second, margins. Gross margin fell 410 basis points last quarter, to 54.2%, and management warned that tariffs and stepped-up investment will keep weighing on profitability, the very thing that justified the premium multiple in the first place.

Third, the boardroom. The company spent much of the year in a public proxy fight with founder Chip Wilson, a vocal critic of its current direction; the board fired back, branding his perspectives “misguided” and “outdated.”

It’s now settled: Wilson placed a pair of nominees on the board in late May, and a permanent chief executive, 26-year Nike veteran Heidi O’Neill, takes over in September, replacing an interim team. The leadership cloud is lifting, even if the business hasn’t yet turned.

What Didn’t Break

For all that, the franchise isn’t broken everywhere. China, now about 19% of sales, grew 23% last quarter and remains a genuine growth engine, and the international business as a whole is still expanding, even if a backlash against Western brands and tougher local competition make that growth harder to bank on.

The damage is concentrated in the mature Americas, not spread across the brand, which is the difference between a company in structural decline and one with a big-market problem. And the financials underneath are still those of a premium franchise: a 55.7% gross margin, a 32% return on equity, more than $1.1 billion of free cash flow, and modest debt.

What the Numbers Say

Here’s the contradiction in one frame. Those franchise-quality financials now come at a distressed price: the stock trades at about 8 times trailing earnings, 9 times forward, barely 1 times sales, and roughly 5 times enterprise value to EBITDA (a debt-adjusted earnings multiple), with a free-cash-flow yield near 10% on trailing numbers.

The catch is the trajectory. Revenue growth has slowed to about 4%, and earnings per share are heading lower for a second straight year, from $14.64 to $13.26 to a guided $11. A cheap multiple on falling earnings is the textbook setup for a value trap, and it’s why the stock keeps making new lows even as it “looks cheap.”

The point isn’t that the market thinks Lululemon is a bad business; it’s that the old earnings base may no longer deserve the old multiple. The bull case is that the brand is still elite and a double-digit cash yield pays you to wait for the turn. The bear case is that the multiple is cheap because earnings are still falling, and nobody knows where they stop. Both can be true for a while.

What the Tape Says About Timing

The fundamentals are the thesis; the tape is just the timing, and it offers no comfort yet. At $105, Lululemon sits below every major moving average; it trades roughly 39% below its 200-day, which is up near $172, a measure of how relentless the downtrend has been. Its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge where under 30 signals oversold, is at 27, with the weekly reading at 30, so the stock is stretched to the downside and due for a bounce.

But oversold in a strong downtrend isn’t the same as a bottom. Until Lululemon can reclaim some of those falling averages, every rally is suspect, and the path of least resistance stays lower.

Here’s how I’m reading the levels.

Levels We’re Watching

This is a falling knife with a cheap valuation, the kind of setup where patience beats heroics. These are levels to watch, not instructions.

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Same theme, same beat-and-fade, very different price tags.

Cybersecurity has been the trade of the spring: between April and late May, Palo Alto Networks (PANW) and CrowdStrike (CRWD) each jumped more than 70%, helped along by “Mythos,” an AI model so good at finding software flaws that its maker held it back. Then both reported in early June, both beat and raised guidance, and both stocks fell anyway, CrowdStrike about 8%, Palo Alto about 3%. That’s what a stretched setup does.

The question the selloff left behind is the good one: why does the market pay so much more for CrowdStrike than for the bigger, cheaper, cash-richer Palo Alto?

Key Takeaways

• Both are winning. Palo Alto’s revenue rose 31% to $3 billion last quarter (helped by acquisitions), and CrowdStrike’s recurring revenue base grew 24% to a record $5.5 billion. Demand for security keeps compounding.

• The prices aren’t the same. CrowdStrike trades near 34 times sales and 110 times forward earnings; Palo Alto near 22 times sales and 70 times forward, roughly a third cheaper on both.

• Both are cash machines, but reported profits are noisy. Palo Alto generated $3.58 billion in free cash flow yet posted a small GAAP loss last quarter on acquisition costs; CrowdStrike threw off $1.93 billion in cash and just swung back to a small GAAP profit, though it’s still around breakeven over the trailing year.

• Both beat and both fell. After a 70% run, even a record quarter wasn’t enough: CrowdStrike’s beat was thinner than usual, and that’s all a stock priced for perfection needed to drop 8%.

• Wall Street still likes both, rating each a buy. But Palo Alto’s setup is calmer (a 0.94 beta, near record highs) while CrowdStrike (1.24 beta) has pulled back about 13% from its high.

Start with the bigger, cheaper one.

Palo Alto Networks (PANW): The Cash Machine

Palo Alto is the elephant of cybersecurity, a $235 billion company built by bundling a sprawling set of security products, network firewalls, cloud security, and AI-driven security operations, into one suite it sells to big enterprises as a single vendor. The strategy is consolidation: get customers to replace a dozen point products from a dozen suppliers with Palo Alto’s all-in-one offering.

The latest quarter showed it’s working, with a caveat. Revenue grew 31% to $3 billion, but about $388 million of that came from its recent CyberArk and Chronosphere acquisitions, so ex-deals the top line grew only in the low-to-mid teens. The stronger organic signal is next-generation security annual recurring revenue (the run-rate of its subscription sales), which reached $8.1 billion, up 60% with the deals and a still-healthy 28% without them.

The contracted backlog, what the company calls remaining performance obligations, grew 36% to $18.4 billion, demand locked in for future quarters. Palo Alto raised its full-year guidance across the board.

Here’s what sets it apart: cash. Palo Alto generated $3.58 billion in free cash flow over the past year, earned $0.85 of adjusted (non-GAAP) profit per share last quarter, and carries almost no debt, with management targeting a 40% free-cash-flow margin by fiscal 2028.

The reported numbers are messier, the latest quarter was actually a small GAAP loss, about $0.22 a share, on roughly $200 million of CyberArk-related costs and heavy stock-based compensation, but the underlying cash engine is real and growing. The stock isn’t cheap, near 70 times forward earnings and 22 times sales, but you’re paying for a cash-generative leader, not a promise.

Wall Street is on board: 50 analysts rate it a buy, and after the quarter Goldman Sachs lifted its target to $330 and Citi to $340, both above today’s $288. The bigger caveat is the CyberArk deal itself, a roughly $25 billion acquisition that has to be digested without tripping up the core business.

Net read: the blue-chip way to own cybersecurity. Cash-rich, diversified, lower-beta, and growing, but priced for it, and now leaning on a giant acquisition to keep the top line moving.

CrowdStrike (CRWD): Priced for Perfection

CrowdStrike is the purebred. Where Palo Alto sells everything, CrowdStrike built its name on one thing done exceptionally well: cloud-native endpoint protection, the software that guards the laptops, servers, and cloud workloads where attacks actually land. It’s widely seen as best-in-class, with elite customer retention and rich margins, a company-wide gross margin around 75% and subscription margins near 80%, and it has expanded outward into a broad security suite of its own.

The latest quarter was, by most measures, excellent: its recurring revenue base reached a record $5.5 billion, up 24%, revenue grew 26%, and it generated record cash flow. It even raised its growth outlook and announced a 4-for-1 stock split, effective in early July, a cosmetic move that doesn’t touch the valuation but tends to stoke retail interest.

So why did the stock drop 8%? Because “excellent” wasn’t enough. CrowdStrike’s net new subscriptions beat expectations by only a hair, a far cry from the blowout beats investors had grown used to, and for a stock trading at 34 times sales and 110 times forward earnings, merely good reads as a disappointment.

On a trailing-year basis it’s still around breakeven, a hangover from the July 2024 software update that crashed millions of computers worldwide, though it swung back to a small GAAP profit, about $28 million, in the latest quarter, and gushes cash underneath ($1.93 billion of free cash flow over the past year). The valuation leaves no room for error, which is exactly why a strong-but-not-spectacular quarter knocked it down.

Net read: the best-in-class pure play, and priced like it. The business is superb; the stock assumes it stays superb forever. After pulling back about 13% from its high, it’s cheaper than it was, but still the most expensive name in the group.

The Valuation Gap

Put the pair side by side and the real debate comes into focus. It isn’t which company is better, it’s which model deserves the premium. CrowdStrike is the smaller company, growing at a similar organic pace and only barely profitable on a trailing basis, yet it commands a higher multiple on every measure, 34 times sales against 22, and 110 times forward earnings against 70.

The market is paying up for its focus and its reputation as the gold standard, betting that a clean, high-margin pure play with the best retention compounds more reliably than a broader suite stitched together partly by acquisition. That’s a defensible bet: CrowdStrike’s land-and-expand model, where existing customers keep buying more modules, is genuinely powerful.

But the same gap is the risk. Palo Alto gives you a $3.58 billion cash engine, a lower beta, broader reach, and a cheaper price, in exchange for messier, acquisition-assisted growth and noisier reported earnings. CrowdStrike gives you the cleaner, higher-margin pure-play story at a price that assumes execution risk doesn’t exist, as the 8% drop on a good quarter just showed.

The interesting trades usually live where the market’s certainty is highest, and right now the market is very certain CrowdStrike deserves its premium.

The Technical Picture

Both look strong on the tape, but at different points in the move. Palo Alto sits near its record high around $303, above every major moving average, in a textbook uptrend that’s also a little stretched. Its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 reading where over 70 is overbought, is at 66, with the weekly hotter at 75.

CrowdStrike is the one that’s already exhaled. After topping near $786, it has slid about 13% to $685 on the earnings reaction, but it stays well above its rising 50-day and 200-day averages, so the longer uptrend is intact. Its momentum has cooled to a neutral 58, which, after a 70% run, looks more like a healthy reset than a breakdown.

How to Position

These are levels to watch, not instructions, based on prices as of the June 18 close, and both are high-multiple names where position size matters more than precision.

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The catch is the math. ASTS carries a market value in the tens of billions of dollars on under $100 million of sales, hundreds of times over. This isn’t a normal stock you value on earnings. It’s a venture bet that happens to trade on a public exchange.

Key Takeaways

• What it is: ASTS is building a constellation of satellites that connect directly to ordinary, unmodified smartphones, sold wholesale through carriers. It says it has agreements with close to 60 operators covering more than 3 billion subscribers, including AT&T, Verizon, and Vodafone.

• The catalyst: it just launched BlueBird satellites 8, 9, and 10 on a SpaceX rocket, and a roughly $1 billion Japanese direct-to-cell award, with an ASTS-Rakuten alliance seen by investors as a credible contender, is expected to be decided by month-end.

• The catch: investors are paying hundreds of times trailing sales for a business whose commercial service has barely begun, and it’s burning above $1 billion a year in cash. Even hitting this year’s $150 to $200 million revenue goal would leave the stock well over 100 times sales.

• The setup: after running to $134 and crashing to the low $80s, the stock sits right on its 200-day average, with analysts split, mostly holds, and an average target near $81, almost exactly where it trades.

Start with what the company is actually building.

The Moonshot

The pitch is audacious. Most satellite phone services need a bulky special device and a clear view of the sky. ASTS wants to skip all that and talk directly to the handset you already own, filling the dead zones where cell towers don’t reach, on land, at sea, in the middle of nowhere. Think of each satellite as a cell tower in space, big enough to connect to a standard phone hundreds of miles below.

It doesn’t sell to you, though. ASTS runs a wholesale business: it builds and operates the satellites, and your existing carrier rents the capacity to extend its own coverage. That’s why the partner list reads like a who’s-who of telecom, AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Rakuten, Google, and Saudi Arabia’s stc among them, with agreements spanning close to 60 operators and more than 3 billion subscribers worldwide.

The satellites are called BlueBirds, and the entire thesis comes down to a single question: can ASTS get enough of them into orbit, working, to deliver steady coverage before it runs out of money? Management says it needs roughly 45 to 60 satellites for continuous service across the United States, a milestone management is targeting this year.

Why Now: A Launch and a Japan Decision

A pair of developments put ASTS back in the headlines this month. First, the launches. A SpaceX Falcon 9 carried the next trio of BlueBird satellites, numbers 8, 9, and 10, into orbit, and management says these are more capable craft that should nearly double the network’s peak data speeds. Every successful launch is a piece of proof that the plan is real and roughly on schedule, which is why the stock jumped on the news. But a clean launch is a milestone, not commercial proof. The next test is whether those satellites unfold, pass their checkouts, slot into the network, and start turning into recurring carrier revenue.

Second, a decision out of Japan. The country is picking a partner for a roughly $1 billion program to build a domestic direct-to-cell satellite network, and an alliance between ASTS and Rakuten is seen by investors as a credible contender, up against a consortium built around SpaceX. A win would be a marquee validation and a real, named revenue source; a loss would sting. A decision is expected by the end of June, which is part of why the stock has been so jumpy.

What the Numbers Say

Here’s where ASTS stops behaving like a normal stock. It took in only about $85 million of revenue over the past year, roughly $71 million of that in 2025, a mix of gateway-equipment sales and government contracts rather than a steady stream of paying users, because the commercial network barely exists yet.

Against that, the company is worth somewhere between $23 billion on its quoted market cap and about $31 billion counting all its share classes. Either way, investors are paying hundreds of times trailing sales, where an expensive software company might trade at 15 or 20 times.

Management guides to $150 to $200 million in revenue this year, which would more than double 2025, but even the top of that range leaves the stock well over 100 times sales. And there are no profits to value: ASTS is deeply unprofitable, with free cash flow running to around negative $1.4 billion over the past year, driven largely by the capital cost of building and launching its fleet.

So you can’t analyze this the way you’d analyze a bank or a retailer. The figures that matter aren’t margins or multiples; they’re the ones that decide whether ASTS reaches the finish line before the cash runs out. It holds more than $3 billion in cash against a similar pile of debt, enough to fund a couple of years at the current pace, and management has said its capital should carry it toward that 45-to-60-satellite coverage threshold. But more satellites mean more rockets, and more rockets usually mean more share sales, so dilution is a steady tax on anyone who owns it.

On the other side of the ledger, the commercial traction is real, not vapor: a formal agreement with Verizon to carry the service this year, and a 10-year deal with stc that came with a $175 million upfront prepayment, on top of more than a billion dollars of commitments already signed. The bull case is that those contracts turn into billions in high-margin wholesale revenue once the network is live.

The bear case is that “once the network is live” is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. Wall Street is openly split: the average price target sits near $81, almost exactly where the stock trades, and most analysts rate it a hold, with a few outright sells. For a name this beloved by retail investors, that’s a cool reception from the professionals.

Give the bulls their due: this isn’t a consumer-subscriber ramp from zero. ASTS already has the carrier relationships, the signed commitments, the upfront cash, and a wholesale model that could scale fast if the constellation comes together. That’s a real foundation, and it’s why the believers tolerate the price. The problem is that “if” still carries most of the valuation.

The Technical Picture

The tape is a parabola that broke. ASTS ran to nearly $134 in late May, then fell hard, and at $80.66 it’s about 40% off that peak, below its 20-day and 50-day averages (both around $91) and sitting right on its 200-day near $79. That 200-day is the line that matters: hold it and the longer uptrend is intact; lose it and the next real support is far below. Momentum is soft but not yet washed out.

And the swings are violent: the stock moves more than 13% on an average day. With a name like this, position size matters far more than entry precision.

Here’s how I’m reading the levels.

Levels We’re Watching

This is a binary, milestone-driven stock, not a value one. Treat any position as a venture bet and size it for violent swings. These are levels to watch, not instructions.

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SoFi Technologies has quietly pulled off one of the harder turns in finance: it stopped being a money-losing student-loan refinancer and became a profitable, fast-growing digital bank. The latest quarter was a record, with net revenue up 43% and profit more than doubling. It just launched the first stablecoin issued by a US national bank, and it handed everyday investors a way into the SpaceX listing, the largest IPO ever. And yet the stock, at $17.91, still sits about 45% below its high near $33 and below its own 200-day average. The market clearly likes the story. It just can’t decide what to pay for it.

Key Takeaways

• SoFi is now a profitable bank growing fast. The March quarter set records: net revenue of $1.1 billion, up 43%, net income of $167 million, more than double a year earlier, and membership up 35% to 14.7 million.

• The buzz is in the new businesses. SoFiUSD is the first stablecoin from a US national bank to live inside a consumer banking app, and SoFi was one of only a handful of brokerages to give retail investors allocation in the record SpaceX IPO.

• The catch is valuation, not the business. Reported per-share earnings were flat last fiscal year, skewed by a one-time tax benefit in the prior-year base, and at 40 times earnings the stock already prices in a lot of future growth.

• At $17.91 the stock trades near 40 times trailing earnings and almost 6 times sales, below the $20.90 average analyst target but rated only a hold, with one firm just cutting to $17.

Start with the company that exists today.

From Refinancer to Bank

SoFi began as a way to refinance student loans and spent years losing money chasing growth. The turn came when it bought a small bank and won a national bank charter, which let it hold customer deposits instead of borrowing expensively to fund its loans. Cheap deposits changed the math. SoFi now operates across lending (personal, student, and home loans), financial services (checking, savings, brokerage, a credit card), and Galileo, the business-to-business engine that quietly powers other companies’ banking apps.

The most recent quarter showed how far the turn has come. Net revenue hit a record $1.1 billion, up 43% from a year earlier and ahead of what Wall Street expected. Net income reached $167 million, more than double the year before. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, a rough cash-profit gauge, rose 62% to a record $340 million. Loan originations hit a record $12.2 billion, members grew 35% to 14.7 million, and the products those members use climbed 39% to 22.2 million. SoFi also raised its outlook for the year. This isn’t a company hoping to work. It’s one that’s working.

The New Story: Crypto Rails and IPO Access

What’s been pushing the stock around lately isn’t the lending bank, though. It’s the new stuff. In late May, SoFi launched SoFiUSD, a stablecoin, which is a digital token pegged 1-to-1 to the US dollar and redeemable for real dollars through SoFi Bank.

It’s the first stablecoin issued by a US national bank to live directly inside a consumer banking app, available to nearly 15 million members and running on the Ethereum and Solana networks.

The pitch is that SoFi can move money faster and cheaper than the old rails, earn a spread on the reserves backing the token, and eventually sell that infrastructure to other banks and companies. It’s early, though, and worth being clear-eyed about: a SoFiUSD balance is a regulated crypto product, not an insured bank deposit, so it doesn’t carry the FDIC protection that sits behind SoFi’s savings accounts.

Then, in mid-June, SoFi was one of only a handful of brokerages chosen to hand retail investors actual allocation in the SpaceX listing, the largest IPO on record at more than $75 billion raised, letting members buy at the offering price instead of chasing the stock after it opened.

For a generation of users locked out of hot offerings, that’s a real draw, and it leans into SoFi’s pitch of being the one app for your whole financial life. None of these are big revenue lines yet. They’re option value, a wager that SoFi becomes a fintech that does everything, not just a bank that lends. The chief executive seems to believe it: he’s bought his own stock several times this year.

There’s a hole in that story, though, and it widened this quarter. Galileo, the technology business meant to prove SoFi is more than a lender, saw its revenue drop 27% from a year earlier, with segment profit down even harder, after it lost Chime, a big client that moved off its rails.

SoFi has signed new customers to fill the gap, but the timing stings: the premium on the stock leans on the idea that technology and infrastructure become a second engine, and right now lending is doing the heavy lifting while that engine sputters.

What the Numbers Say

Set the growth next to the price and the tension jumps out. Revenue is compounding fast, up 42% over the past year, 38% last fiscal year, and roughly 32% a year over 3 years. The bank is genuinely profitable, with a 15% net margin and an 18% operating margin, and debt is low for a lender.

Reported earnings per share look flat, near $0.39, the same as a year earlier, but that flat line hides real progress. The 2024 figure was padded by a one-time $258 million tax benefit, so on an adjusted basis SoFi earned just $0.15 that year. Strip the windfall out and underlying per-share profit rose sharply in 2025. The growth is real; the reported headline just masks it.

That’s why the valuation is the whole debate. At $17.91 the stock trades near 40 times trailing earnings and almost 6 times sales, rich for a bank, even a fast-growing one. The forward multiple drops to about 22 times, which tells you the market expects earnings to jump as the loan book matures and the new businesses scale. If that lands, today’s price looks reasonable. If growth cools or credit costs rise, 40 times earnings is a long way to fall. Return on equity is still under 7%, a reminder that for all the growth, SoFi isn’t yet the profit machine its multiple implies.

What’s Moving the Stock

There’s no single event behind the recent action. It’s a tug-of-war. On one side, the stablecoin launch and the SpaceX access have pulled traders back to the name, and the chief executive’s repeated buying adds a vote of confidence. On the other, the analysts who cover it aren’t convinced: the average rating is a hold, and Truist just trimmed its target to $17, below today’s price, on softer near-term expectations for the lending and technology businesses. Buyers and sellers have fought it to a standstill below $20.

The Technical Picture

The tape says recovery, not breakout. After bottoming near $15, SoFi has climbed back to $17.91, now above its 20-day and 50-day averages, both near $17, but still below its 200-day average at $19.62, the level bulls need to reclaim. Its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge where over 70 is overbought, sits at a neutral 58, with room before it runs hot.

The trend-strength reading (ADX) is low, near 19, which says this is choppy, range-bound trade rather than a powerful move. In plain terms, SoFi has stabilized and is grinding higher, but it hasn’t proven much yet. The $20 area, where the 200-day, the round number, and the average analyst target all cluster, is the line that matters.

Here’s how I’m reading the levels.

Levels I’m Watching

This is a high-beta, story-driven stock: a 2.15 beta means it swings more than twice as hard as the market, so size any position for the volatility. These are levels to watch, not instructions.

• Pullback support: $16 to $17, the 20-day and 50-day averages and the base this rally was built on.

• Breakout: a close above $20 reclaims the 200-day average and clears the round number, opening the path toward the $21 analyst target and beyond.

• Caution line: $15 is the line in the sand. Lose it while credit metrics weaken, and the setup flips from base-building to failed recovery.

• Targets on a breakout: $21, then $26 and $31, the last back near the Street-high target and the old high near $33.

• The real test is the next earnings report, and whether the new businesses start showing up in revenue while the loan book keeps growing without credit cracking.

Bottom Line

SoFi has earned its re-rating: it’s profitable, growing fast, and building real optionality in crypto rails and capital markets. But at 40 times earnings, with return on equity in single digits and its technology engine stalling just as the story needs it to fire, the price assumes execution it hasn’t delivered yet. Here’s where I come down. At $18, below the 200-day and below where analysts value it, this isn’t a chase. The better setup is patience: add on a clean reclaim of $20, or down near the $15 base, and watch one number above the rest, whether the technology business turns back up. Get that, and the premium is earned. Miss it, and SoFi is a fast-growing lender wearing a fintech multiple.

This is research and commentary, not personal investment advice. Levels are illustrative; size positions to your own risk tolerance and time horizon. The author may hold positions in names discussed.

Key Takeaways

• HIMS closed at $35.47 after Barclays raised its target to $39, the top of the analyst range. The stock has more than doubled off its 52-week low of $13.74, though it’s still about half its $70.43 high.

• The comeback rests on weight-loss drugs. After regulators forced Hims off cheap copycat versions of Ozempic, it struck a deal with Novo Nordisk to sell the branded drugs directly, and early demand has been strong.

• Growth went sideways in the meantime. Revenue rose just 4% in the March quarter against 59% for all of 2025, and the company is guiding to a sharp re-acceleration in the back half of this year.

• The price has run ahead of the analysts. At $35.47 the stock sits above the $27.32 average target and trades near 40 times forward earnings, with a market value around $8 billion and a beta of 2.4, more than twice as volatile as the market.

Start with how a $70 stock became a $14 stock.

The Comeback

Hims & Hers is an online health company. You sign up through its app, get a consult, and have prescriptions and products shipped to your door, originally for hair loss, skin, and men’s health, and more recently for mental health and weight loss. The model is sticky and high-margin: most of it is recurring subscriptions, and for years the gross margin ran above 70%.

Then the weight-loss craze arrived, and Hims rode it harder than anyone. The blockbuster drugs, Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy, were in such short supply that pharmacies were able to sell compounded semaglutide products tied to the same active ingredient, often at far lower prices than the branded drugs. Hims sold those compounded versions at scale. Revenue rose 59% in 2025 to $2.35 billion, the company turned a profit, and the stock ran to about $70 as investors treated it as the cheap on-ramp to the biggest drug story in a decade.

The unwind was just as fast. Regulators declared the shortage over, which removed the legal basis for mass-compounding the drug. Hims had to wind down its compounded weight-loss line, the very thing that had powered the run. Growth fell off a cliff, the bears called the whole weight-loss engine a mirage, and the stock collapsed to $13.74. What the rules gave, the rules took away.

The current bounce is the second act. In March, Hims signed a deal with Novo Nordisk to offer branded Wegovy through an authorized channel, swapping the compounded versions for the genuine article. The early traction has been quick: within 6 weeks of switching it on, the company says it fulfilled more than 125,000 Wegovy shipments. It raised full-year revenue guidance to a range of $2.8 billion to $3 billion, which would be growth of 19% to 28% over 2025. And there’s more in the pipeline, a separate brand opening pre-orders for Novo’s Wegovy pill in Britain, and a regulatory hearing next month on whether to add 7 peptides to an approved list, which could open another product line if it goes Hims’ way.

That’s the story Barclays bought yesterday. The trouble is that buying the story now means paying for the part that hasn’t happened yet.

What the Numbers Say

Strip out the narrative and the recent results are a study in transition. Over the trailing year revenue is about $2.37 billion, but the company is now barely breakeven on the bottom line, a slight net loss, after being solidly profitable a year ago. The March quarter is where you see the cost of the pivot most clearly: revenue of $608 million, up just 4% from a year earlier, with a net loss of about $92 million against a $49.5 million profit in the same quarter last year. Gross margin fell to 65% from 73%. That drop isn’t an accident. Reselling someone else’s branded drug is a far lower-margin business than mixing your own copy or selling your own subscriptions, so the comeback is being bought partly with profitability.

That’s the central tension. The bull case needs the guided second-half re-acceleration, full-year growth climbing from last quarter’s 4% back toward 20% or more, without margins eroding further as branded drugs take a bigger share of the mix. More Wegovy sales mean more revenue and thinner margins at once.

On valuation, the stock isn’t cheap on any normal measure. There are no trailing earnings to speak of, so the price-to-earnings ratio is meaningless on a backward look. On forward estimates it trades near 40 times earnings, and at roughly 3.5 times trailing sales, under 3 times next year’s guided sales. For a company guiding to 20%-plus growth with strong gross margins, that’s defensible, not absurd, but it’s a growth price that assumes the growth shows up. And the people paid to value it aren’t there yet: the average analyst target sits at $27.32, well below yesterday’s $35.47 close, and Barclays’ new $39 is the high end of the range, not the consensus. When a stock trades above the average target, the market is betting the analysts are about to chase it higher. Sometimes they do. Sometimes the stock comes back to them.

One more number frames its personality. The beta is 2.4, and the daily range averages more than 6% of the price. This is a stock that can move 10% on a headline in either direction, which cuts both ways: it’s why it more than doubled off the low, and it’s why it fell 80% before that.

What Happened Yesterday

There was no earnings report and no company announcement behind the move. It was an analyst re-rating: Barclays lifted its target to $39 from $29 and reiterated “overweight,” arguing that strong weight-loss demand plus the Novo deal will drive a sharp acceleration in revenue and in EBITDA, a rough proxy for cash profit, in the second half. The firm pointed to its own read on the data, website traffic up 12% year-over-year in April and 35% in May, and card transactions up 16% month-over-month, and called the Novo partnership a “clear inflection.” A steady-rates backdrop from the Fed helped the mood, but read the day for what it was: not a new fact about the business, just a credible voice raising its hand on a stock that was already running. Momentum like that can keep working, but it’s sentiment confirming a trend, not proof the trend will hold.

The Technical Picture

The tape says the same thing the valuation does: powerful, and stretched. At $35.47, HIMS sits far above all its major moving averages, its 20-day near $28.60, its 50-day near $26.73, and its 200-day near $30.59, which puts the price roughly 24% above its own 20-day line. That’s the signature of a vertical move, not a steady climb. Its daily relative strength index, a 0-to-100 momentum gauge where over 70 is overbought, has pushed to 71, and the shorter intraday readings are hotter still, in the high 70s. The trend-strength reading (ADX) sits at 23, which says a real trend is building but isn’t yet extreme.

There’s one encouraging wrinkle. On the weekly view the same momentum gauge is only at 59, not overbought, which leaves room on the bigger picture if the stock can consolidate rather than reverse. The clean read: HIMS has broken out above the $30 area that capped it for weeks, but it’s done so in a hurry and is overbought short-term. Breakouts like this usually need to digest, and the most common way to do that is a pullback toward the breakout level before the next attempt.

Here’s how I’m reading the levels.

Levels We’re Watching

This is a high-beta, story-and-regulation stock, not a value one. Treat any position as a bet on the weight-loss re-acceleration landing, and size it for the swings. These are levels to watch, not instructions.

• Pullback support: $29 to $32, the breakout area around the old $30 ceiling and the rising 20-day average, where a stretched move tends to find its footing.

• Breakout: a push above $36, just over yesterday’s close, would say the momentum has more to give and open the path toward $39, the Barclays target and the top of the analyst range.

• Caution line: a close back below $27, the 50-day average and the top of the prior range, would say the breakout failed and the stock is back where it started.

• Targets on continuation: $39, then $44 and $50. Size for the volatility, because a name with a 2.4 beta can hand back a week of gains in a single session.

• The real test isn’t a level. It’s the regulatory hearing next month and the next earnings report, where the promised back-half acceleration has to actually show up in the revenue line.

Bottom Line

Hims & Hers has earned its second act. The Novo deal gives the weight-loss business a cleaner foundation, the early demand looks real, and Barclays may be right that the second half inflects. But at $35, investors aren’t being paid for disbelief anymore. They’re paying for execution: faster growth, margins that hold, and no fresh regulatory surprise. The comeback is believable. The question is whether the easy part of the trade has already happened.

This is research and commentary, not personal investment advice. Levels are illustrative; size positions to your own risk tolerance and time horizon. The author may hold positions in names discussed.