JPMorgan's top equity strategist Dubravko Lakos-Bujas raised his year-end 2026 S&P 500 target to 7,800 on Wednesday - up from 7,200 - implying roughly 5.9% additional upside from current levels. The upgrade was tied directly to what the strategist called a "Blue Sky scenario" as the U.S.-Iran war appears to be nearing a resolution. President Trump announced Tuesday that Iran has assured the U.S. there will be no tolls on the Strait of Hormuz, removing a major geopolitical overhang that had been pressuring oil prices and equity sentiment for months.The earnings backdrop supports the bullish...

OpenAI and Broadcom have jointly unveiled "Jalapeno," the first custom AI chip to emerge from their eight-month partnership - and it signals a major strategic shift in how the world's most powerful AI company plans to power its future. The chip, which OpenAI is calling an "Intelligence Processor," is designed specifically for inference: the compute-intensive task of serving AI model outputs to hundreds of millions of users across ChatGPT and other platforms. A physical sample was delivered to OpenAI on Wednesday, June 24, with initial deployment targeted for late 2026 and broader rollout plann...

Qualcomm (QCOM) shares surged as much as 20% — settling around 16% higher at $180.97 — after the chipmaker revealed during its latest earnings call that it has secured a custom silicon contract with an unnamed major hyperscaler. The news overshadowed an otherwise mixed quarter in which guidance came in slightly below analyst estimates. For investors who've watched Qualcomm primarily as a smartphone chip play, this development signals a potentially major expansion of the company's addressable market into AI data center infrastructure — one of the fastest-growing areas in all of tech. CFO Akash...

Two of the most influential voices in global finance are offering opposite reads on today's AI-driven market — and for retail investors trying to decide whether to stay in, trim, or add, the contrast matters. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told CNBC this week that the market is likely "earlier in the cycle than later," pointing to strong liquidity, healthy corporate earnings, and a self-reinforcing profit cycle as AI companies generate real revenue. Meanwhile, legendary investor Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater — the world's largest hedge fund — has called the AI boom "the early stages of a ...

Broadcom (AVGO) delivered what should have been a blowout earnings report — AI semiconductor revenues surging 143% year over year, quarterly guidance of $29.4 billion, and expectations of AI chip revenue tripling to $16 billion next quarter. Yet the stock fell 13% after the announcement, dragging the broader AI trade down with it. If you owned AVGO or any AI-adjacent chip stock and found yourself confused, you weren't alone. The selloff came down to one thing: expectations. CEO Hock Tan held the full-year AI chip guidance steady rather than raising it, which spooked investors who had priced i...

Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang doesn't usually sound like an energy analyst. But standing in Sherman, Texas at the groundbreaking of a $2 billion Nvidia manufacturing expansion, Huang delivered what may be the most bullish statement yet for power and energy infrastructure stocks. "AI factories will become the infrastructure of the new industrial revolution," Huang told the crowd. "Ten years from now, I think we'll look back and realize AI is what made it possible to invest in sustainable energy, upgrade our energy grid, and reconstitute a workforce." Translation: America's power grid wasn't bu...

A small medical imaging company almost nobody was watching just delivered one of the market's most explosive single-day moves of 2026. Butterfly Network (BFLY), a maker of ultrasound-on-chip technology, surged more than 56% in a single session after AI image generation giant Midjourney announced the launch of Midjourney Medical — a new healthcare division that chose Butterfly's proprietary chips as the core hardware for its revolutionary 60-second full-body ultrasound scanner. For investors who have been searching for ways to play the AI boom beyond the usual mega-cap names, this move illustra...

While investors pour billions into Nvidia chips and cloud computing giants, a quieter AI revolution is unfolding thousands of feet underground. Across the world's most demanding drilling environments — from Alaska's Arctic tundra to Guyana's deepwater fields and the Permian Basin's vast shale plays — artificial intelligence is reshaping how oil and gas companies find and extract hydrocarbons. The result: fewer rigs, more production, and a compelling investment case that most retail investors haven't yet recognized. The numbers tell a striking story. From late 2022 through late 2024, the activ...

Alphabet (GOOGL) shed roughly $254 billion in market capitalization on Monday — a single-session wipeout — after the company disclosed that Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering and co-lead of Google's Gemini AI models, is leaving to join OpenAI. The stock fell approximately 6%, hitting around $347, in what the market read as a significant blow to Google's competitiveness in the AI race. Shazeer is not just any engineer. He joined Google's DeepMind division in 2024 when the company acquired his startup, Character.AI, for $2.7 billion. Losing him to the company building ChatGPT is a direc...

Kroger (KR) just had its worst single-day drop in nearly five years — falling 8% last Thursday after its first-quarter earnings landed one penny below Wall Street's estimate. One cent per share. The stock is now trading at a 52-week low around $56, down from highs above $76 earlier this year. For patient investors, that kind of fear-driven overreaction to an otherwise solid quarter deserves a closer look — because the underlying business tells a very different story than the stock price right now. Strip away the penny miss and what you find is a company that posted $46.12 billion in quarterly...