Sharp Snapback, SpaceX Debuts, Export Controls Hit the AI Trade
Weekly Outlook 06/15/26
Market Recap
We closed last week on a near 4% Nasdaq flush, the kind of severe down day that usually sets up a bounce trade into the new week. We never got the clean entry on Monday as we gapped up, taking away the easier oversold bounce reversal.
Then on Tuesday $QQQ dropped roughly 5% intraday from the open, a rare occurence. I posted a study here:
A drop that violent isn’t normal price discovery. It’s forced selling, large deleveraging and profit taking hitting at once, the kind of positioning reset that wrings the froth out fast. Counterintuitively, that extreme type of a selloff is often where tradeable lows get formed.
The geopolitics didn’t settle any nerves midweek. Trump talked tough on Iran and floated a hard strike, and that overhang kept fear bid. Then Thursday afternoon the script flipped. He said an Iran deal was close, and the market ripped on the relief, turning the whole week around.
By Friday the tape had retraced much of Tuesday’s selloff and closed the week green. A week that opened looking like the backside of a breakdown ended up looking a lot more like a reset inside an intact uptrend.
The headline event landed Friday: the $SPCX debut. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 and closed at $160.95, up 19% from the IPO pricing, and 7.3% from the opening printm, the largest IPO in history at a valuation north of $2 trillion.
The market just absorbed a trillion-dollar market cap listing and $75B raise that closed higher on day one. That may be a sign that the bull market still has some appetite and could bode well for Anthropic’s IPO later in the year.
Catalysts Over the Last Week
As always, the activity feed inside the Valhalla Portal has been logging every major catalyst I’ve flagged throughout the week. Some notable ones this week:
$MRVL / $FLEX | Both added to the S&P 500 after Friday’s close, bumping $POOL and $CPB.
$GLW / $AMZN | Amazon signed a multibillion-dollar agreement with Corning for optical fiber, cable, and connectivity.
$APLD | Signed its third 15-year take-or-pay lease at the Delta Forge 2 AI campus with the same investment-grade hyperscaler, roughly $5.2B in contracted revenue and a backlog now near $36B across five campuses.
$SMCI | Announced a $7B equity offering, then priced equity and equity-linked financing to fund AI orders, on the back of a rumoured $5.2B deal tied to xAI.
$ORCL | Beat on earnings and revenue and added $20B to its planned capital raise.
$ALAB $CRWV $NBIS $RKLB $TER | All join the Nasdaq-100 in the June rebalance.
Watchlist
Another macro-driven open to the week, and a shortened one. Markets are closed Friday for Juneteenth.
A key event is the FOMC on Wednesday, Warsh’s first meeting and presser as chair. No move expected, they hold at 3.50 to 3.75%. This is about the dot plot and the tone he sets in his debut. How he frames the path matters more than the decision.
The other swing factor is Iran. Over the weekend Trump pushed for an imminent peace deal, even floating his birthday Sunday as the date, with the reported framework having Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz as the US lifts its blockade. At the time of writing, Trump has just tweeted that the peace deal is now complete. Expect further downside on oil, especially as the futures have started to break the uptrend and 50SMA over the last few weeks.
Perhaps the bigger story for the AI trade landed Friday night. The government issued an export-control directive forcing Anthropic to suspend its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security. Anthropic calls it a misunderstanding and is working to restore access. But the precedent is what matters. If the government can switch off a frontier model on national security grounds, that is a new variable in the trade. Does it push enterprises toward open source they actually control? Does regulatory risk start getting priced into the complex? Worth watching how it ripples through AI and tech this week.
Fairly sparse individual setups going into the week as most names took a hit in the pullback, so the read right now is relative strength: who held up, who rebounded hardest, and who already clawed back to new highs. That is the tell for where the next leadership comes from. More setups are likely to develop as the week progresses.
Semis
$SNDK | One of the very few names to already print a fresh all-time high. After the last two days though, I wouldn’t chase it here without some digestion first.
$ARM | Rebounded well off the lows, holding up better than most of the complex.
$INTC | Six weeks of digestion now, one of the first semis to lead off the prior rally. Coiling, and could be setting up to break this multi-week consolidation soon.
Data Centers
$NBIS | Fresh Nasdaq-100 addition. Broke its streak of descending daily bars and took out prior day highs. Looking for continuation from here.
Space
$SPCX | On watch after the record IPO. A break of the day-one highs is the trigger, and from there I’m looking for momentum to carry.
$SPCE | Watching for further downside as the hype fades. It ran purely on ticker confusion with $SPCX, nothing more, and that unwinds.
Software / Big Tech
$MSFT | Hasn’t taken out a prior day high in a while, 10 red bars in a row. A simple prior day high break should be enough to trigger a bounce.
$IGV | Same look as $MSFT, no prior day high break in multiple bars. Watch for that break to spark the bounce.
Closing Thoughts
I think we have a tradeable higher low here. The rally off Tuesday’s flush was sharp and that kind of snapback off the lows is usually the tell that the worst of the selling is behind us. I laid out the fuller read here:
Keeping in mind that the $QQQ pulled back roughly 8% from the highs, which is meaningful and the kind of flush that clears out weak hands and resets positioning. The 2000 and 2020 analogs are still the framework I’m working from. Small sample, but both were sharp pullbacks inside very strong uptrends that resolved higher once they had time to digest. If we chop sideways for a couple of weeks instead of ripping straight back, that is healthy too.
The wildcard is the Anthropic news. The export-control story is the one thing that could spook the AI trade this week, so it will be telling to see how the market handles it before leaning too hard in either direction.
As for levels, Tuesday’s low is the line in the sand. Hold above it and the higher-low thesis stays intact. Until then the job is simple: watch relative strength while the market digests. The names that hold up and rebound hardest through the chop are the ones that lead when this resolves.
If you enjoyed this read, please consider leaving a like on the post, and let me know in the comments if I missed anything or what you’re watching for this week!
P.S.
If you haven’t checked out the Valhalla Portal yet, it’s where I track catalysts, setups, and market activity in real time - a live feed of everything that moves the tape, built for the community. I’ll be doing a dedicated post soon walking through all the features in detail, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, you can check it out here: