Quick note before we get started. This was a very tough week personally. Some hard news on the medical front along with some other challenges. It will never compare to the bad week, weeks, months and years when Isabella passed but it was not awesome. I am going to (try) to keep this week shorter than usual and stay focused on a few things that mattered in the market. For me, moving forward and working is the path I choose. Let’s get into it.
1. The chip selloff lands, and the price hikes start to spread
On Thursday, Apple raised prices on Macs, iPads, HomePod, and Vision Pro by $100 to $400 across the board. Hours later, Microsoft followed with price increases on Xbox consoles — $100 on 512GB models, $150 on 1TB models. Both companies cited the same reason: memory and storage costs have surged because AI data center builders are buying up everything the memory makers can produce. The industry has started calling it RAMageddon. You know something is real once it gets a name 😊
The Nasdaq Composite closed Friday at 25,297, the fifth straight losing session for the index. From last Thursday’s close at 26,517 to Friday’s, the Nasdaq dropped about 1,220 points, or roughly 4.6 percent. The Dow finished essentially flat for the week. The Russell 2000 was up slightly. The selling was very much concentrated in tech, especially in chip stocks. This is where diversification can save the day or, at least, lessen the blow. My own portfolio took a hit on all the tech but being diversified allowed me to do better than the Nasdaq on the week.
Chip stocks fell hard not because any individual company reported bad news, but because the market is pricing in what comes next. If memory costs are squeezing Apple’s margins and Microsoft is selling Xbox consoles at a loss, every other electronics maker is facing the same math. Demand may soften as prices rise. Margins will compress. The companies that supply the memory — Micron in particular, which reported incredible earnings Wednesday — are doing extraordinarily well right now. But the companies that have to buy the memory and build products with it are not. A note on the Apple price increase. I was talking with a friend about it because the stock dropped a lot on the news. I mentioned if Apple, with unbelievable brand loyalty, is increasing the cost of their products, they have set the bar and others will follow. An hour later, Microsoft announced their increase and I am sure others are to follow. I spent this week picking out a laptop for my daughter who is off to LSU in the fall. There is a big price jump on PCs with 2026 chipsets versus those using older chips. This means there are price increases, just perhaps they were not announced yet.
That is one layer of what was happening this week. There is also a second layer worth naming honestly. Part of the chip selloff is probably the ever flowing fear that stocks have run too high, and that at some point the AI rally — just like the internet boom of long ago — will unravel. I could be wrong about how much of the selling that fear accounts for. But anyone who has been around markets for any length of time has lived through this pattern before. Every major technology buildout in history has eventually had a reckoning between the price action and the earnings action. Railroads in the 1870s. Radio in the 1920s. The internet in 2000. The pattern is not “AI is a bubble.” The pattern is that the reckoning usually arrives sooner than the believers expect and later than the skeptics predict. Calling the top of a long buildout is one of the hardest things in investing.
I have a good friend who is one of the smartest business people I know, which shows up in his net worth. Years ago, with the Dow at around 35,000, he was calling for the Dow to drop to 30,000 before it went higher. Thankfully he trusted me and the simple fact that over the long term you cannot time the market. The Dow never went to 30,000. It kept climbing. People have been calling for the end of Nvidia for the last 100 points the stock has added. Eventually, someone will be right. The honest question is not who will eventually be right. The honest question is whether you have rules in place that protect you from being wrong about when.
That is why I write so often about discipline. Rules built around long-term holding survive being wrong about timing. Rules built on timing the top rarely do. Take some profit off the table along the way when a position has gotten large. Rebalance. Stay diversified. Do not go all-in. Do not go all-out. The discipline absorbs the cost of being wrong about when.
On Friday, I listened to Jim Cramer interview Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The takeaway from Huang was that AI compute demand is going to keep accelerating and that current valuations may eventually look reasonable in hindsight. Cramer went out on a limb during the interview and said Nvidia at current prices is no problem, that the stock is going much higher. That is one of the stronger Cramer endorsements I have heard. Whether he is right is a separate question. But when I hear that level of conviction from someone whose hit rate I respect, I pay attention. I do not act on it. I pay attention.
The honest read on this week is that we do not know whether the chip selloff is the start of something bigger or noise inside a continuing rally. Smart people see both sides. My friend saw the bear case at Dow 35,000 and was wrong. Cramer sees the bull case at Nvidia’s current prices and may turn out to be right. The discipline does not change either way. Diversify. Take some profits along the way. Stay in the game. The Federal Reserve, which removed its easing bias from the policy statement two weeks ago, will be watching how the RAMageddon dynamic shows up in inflation data over the next several months. The market arc keeps connecting back to itself.
2. SpaceX joins the Nasdaq 100, and what that actually means for you
I have been chatting about SpaceX since it went public. It is truly interesting to me. On Friday afternoon, the Nasdaq announced that SpaceX will be added to the Nasdaq 100 index on July 7, just 15 trading days after going public on June 12. That is one of the fastest index inclusions on record. This may sound like routine financial news but I believe there are some teaching moments here. I am already proving to not be brief with this post I will try to walk you through these teaching points…..briefly.
Here is what “added to the index” actually means in practice. Every fund and ETF that tracks the Nasdaq 100 — including the popular Invesco QQQ Trust, which manages around $300 billion in assets — is required by its own rules to own the stocks the index owns. When the index adds SpaceX, those funds have to buy SpaceX. Not because the fund manager necessarily thinks it is a good investment. Because the rules of the fund require it to mirror the index. Estimates put this ‘forced buying’ at around $4.3 billion in the days around the inclusion.
If you own any Nasdaq 100 ETF or fund, you are about to be a SpaceX shareholder on July 7 whether you ever decided to buy SpaceX or not. The same is true for many target-date retirement funds, many growth ETFs, and many actively managed funds that benchmark themselves against the Nasdaq 100. The companies that go into your retirement account were not chosen by you. They were chosen by the rules of the indexes your funds track.
Even more interesting, those rules can change. The Nasdaq specifically introduced a new “Fast Entry” rule in May 2026, just six weeks before the SpaceX IPO. The old rule required a longer period of time before a new IPO could be added. The new rule lets a company qualify after just 15 trading days if it ranks among the top 40 Nasdaq 100 constituents by market cap. SpaceX qualified easily. The S&P 500 declined to make a similar fast-track change. That is why SpaceX cannot enter the S&P 500 yet — the S&P’s separate profitability and seasoning requirements apply, and SpaceX lost about five billion dollars last year. Same company. Same financial profile. Two indexes. Two completely different inclusion timelines.
Here is the practical lesson. If you are someone who has been thinking about buying SpaceX directly, the first question is not “should I buy SpaceX.” The first question is “how much do I already own through my existing funds.” For most diversified investors with substantial retirement holdings, the answer on July 7 is going to be more than they realized. Add Russell 1000 inclusion shortly after that, eventual S&P 500 inclusion in 2027 or later, and the passive exposure across a typical retirement portfolio grows over time without the investor doing anything.
A 5 percent speculative allocation to SPCX shares on top of meaningful passive exposure is a much more concentrated bet on SpaceX than 5 percent in isolation. Check what you already own before adding more. That is true for any stock the market is hyping right now, not just this one. Understanding what is already inside your funds is part of understanding what you actually own.
None of this means index funds are bad. They are a fine investment for most people, and I absolutely have funds in multiple ETFs and mutual funds. The lesson is that even passive investing involves decisions someone else made about what counts as the market. Knowing the mechanics matters.
3. The Iran “deal” that never made it to implementation
Two weeks ago I wrote about the U.S. and Iran appearing to be days away from a peace deal that drove the Dow to a record close on Monday June 15. Last week I wrote about the Memorandum of Understanding actually getting signed Thursday June 18 in France, with implementation talks scheduled for Switzerland on June 19. Those Switzerland talks were canceled before they happened.
This week, the U.S. struck Iranian targets after Iran reportedly struck first. The ceasefire is now in serious doubt. The MoU exists as a signed document. The implementation that was supposed to operationalize the document never happened. Whatever the market priced in two weeks ago around the deal looking imminent has turned out to be premature.
This is what I keep coming back to about how markets read political news. Signing a deal is one event. Implementing a deal is many smaller events spread over time. The market often rallies on the signing and assumes the implementation is automatic. It almost never is. The disciplined investor watches for the implementation milestones, not just the headline announcement, before changing what they own. So far across three weeks of this Iran story, the headlines have moved markets meaningfully and the implementation has moved nothing. Trades made on the headlines were trades made on assumptions that never materialized.
None of this changes the fundamental value of a single American company. Defense stocks moved, oil moved, the broader market moved, and the actual businesses producing actual goods and services did the same things they would have done either way. The geopolitics is real. The geopolitics affecting your portfolio mostly is not.
See you next Saturday.
Nothing here is personalized financial advice — just one person’s notes. The companies named are examples, not recommendations. Always do your own homework before you invest.
Weekly Notes — July 11, 2026