Morning News: The US-Iran conflict has escalated dramatically! Oil prices jumped; tech giants topped the list this week, with Bank of America warning to focus on capital spending; 'ghost stories stored again'? US claims right to share Korean profits
The conflict between the United States and Iran has escalated sharply! Oil prices jumped; technology giants released their rankings this week, and Bank of America warned to pay attention to capital expenditures; "Storage ghost story again"? The United States claims it has the right to share the profits of South Korean companies.
European and American stock markets: The S&P 500 closed down 1.01% at 7457.69 points, down 1.55% for the week; the Dow closed down 0.77% at 52146.42 points, down 0.93% for the week; the Nasdaq closed down 1.40% at 25520.244 points, down 2.90% for the week. The European STOXX 600 Index closed down 0.34% at 641.53 points, rising 0.07% for the whole week. A-shares: The Shanghai Composite Index closed down 3.05% at 3764.15 points. The Shenzhen Component Index closed down 5.40% to 13706.88 points. The GEM index closed down 7.15% at 3428.63 points. Bond market: At the end of the bond market, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note was about 4.55%, which remained unchanged on Wednesday, and fell by about 1 basis point for the whole week. The yield on the two-year U.S. Treasury note was about 4.18%, rising by 4 basis points during the day, and falling by about 3 basis points for the whole week. Commodities: WTI August crude oil futures closed up 4.48% at $82.49 per barrel, up 15.52% for the whole week. Brent September crude oil futures closed up 4.59% at US$88.10 per barrel, rising 15.91% for the whole week. COMEX July gold futures closed up 0.68% at $4,012.7 per ounce, down 2.23% for the week. COMEX July silver futures closed up 0.25% at $56.038 per ounce, down 6.31% for the week. COMEX July copper futures closed down 1.2% at $6.22/lb, down 0.22% for the week. The U.S.-Iran conflict escalated sharply, the number of U.S. military casualties rose to 17, and oil prices jumped The military confrontation between the United States and Iran suddenly escalated over the weekend. According to Bloomberg, the United States and Iran have carried out a series of rapid tit-for-tat attacks in the past 48 hours. The U.S. Central Command announced that another U.S. soldier was killed in Iran's attack on Jordan, bringing the number of U.S. military deaths to 3 in the past two days. According to CNBC, the US military subsequently attacked Iran’s coastal surveillance facilities and air defense facilities. There are reports that Iran also tried to disrupt the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz and attacked a key oil facility. As of the latest statistics, the number of US military casualties in this round of conflicts has risen to 17. The sharp deterioration of the situation in the Middle East has a direct impact on the energy market. Brent crude oil jumped in early trading on concerns about wider disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important oil shipping channel. In addition, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC)’s oil loading terminal on the Russian Black Sea coast suspended loading operations due to drone attacks, and the Kazakhstan government called for an immediate end to such attacks. The superposition of multiple supply risks has put the crude oil market under continued upward pressure. President Trump has yet to make a clear stance on the follow-up direction of the war in Iraq, and the market is paying close attention to the White House's next decision. Another Fed official is "hawkish": Now he is more worried about inflation The hawkish voices within the Fed are becoming increasingly louder. Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack recently hinted that the Fed may need to raise interest rates to curb persistently high inflation. This paves the way for a fierce debate at the interest rate meeting in July. Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh may face opposition votes at the second interest rate meeting chaired by him since taking office. "For the first time in my tenure, I'm hearing from businesses that they think we need to take action to curb inflation, and for the first time in my tenure, I'm hearing from consumers who are struggling to make ends meet, expressing growing desperation," Hammack wrote in a LinkedIn post on Friday. Bank of America warns: If Mag7 capital spending is cut, a wider correction may be inevitable
Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America, once again raised a red flag. After successfully predicting the market bottom in March this year, he pointed out that the current extremely crowded positions and frothy sentiments have pushed the market to a new round of high-risk areas, and it may be best to evacuate risky assets in the summer. In Hartnett’s view, the biggest tail risk in this round is: once very large technology companies announce cuts in AI capital expenditures, and this fails to push Mag7 to new highs, “the resulting substantial negative impact on growth and asset prices will catalyze large-scale short selling by banks, brokers, and industrial stocks.” This week, Google-C (GOOG.US) and Tesla (TSLA.US) released their financial reports on the same day (early morning of the 23rd, Beijing time). Storage’s “new ghost story”: Is the U.S. going for a money grab? The China Securities Regulatory Commission held a special meeting on stabilizing the market, and two major central enterprises announced an increase in their holdings of A-share assets. The China Securities Regulatory Commission held a special meeting on stabilizing the market. It is reported that many market institutions have received notices from regulatory authorities and will participate in the China Securities Regulatory Commission symposium. In this forum, the China Securities Regulatory Commission aims to listen to opinions and suggestions from all parties on promoting the stable and healthy development of the market. On the evening of July 19, China Guoxin announced that it had used stock buybacks to increase holdings, special re-loans and supporting funds exceeding 50 billion yuan to maintain market stability. On the same day, China Chengtong announced that it had recently purchased nearly 10 billion yuan in Chinese stock assets. China Guoxin and China Chengtong both stated that they will make every effort to maintain the smooth operation of the capital market in the future. The two major central enterprises took action and used real money to express their confidence in the resilience and value center of China's assets. The full version of DeepSeek V4 will be launched as soon as today and will adopt a peak and valley billing mechanism. China’s open source large model DeepSeek V4 “full health version” (official version) will be unveiled as soon as July 20. Currently, some developers have obtained grayscale testing permissions. The new version is available in two models: V4-Pro and V4-Flash. Test results show that V4's overall performance is close to the level of Claude Opus 4.8, and its encoding capabilities are comparable to GPT-5.6 Sol. In addition, the official version also introduces a peak and valley billing mechanism: during peak hours, the cost of API usage will be twice that of usual times. At the end of last month, DeepSeek sent an email to all API users, saying that the official version of V4 will be launched in mid-July. Goldman Sachs comments on Kimi K3: Competition among high-end models is fierce Goldman Sachs said that Kimi K3 was born with 2.8 trillion parameters, raising the API pricing to US$2.3 per million tokens, setting a new high in Chinese model pricing, marking the official shift of domestic AI companies from "price war" to "pricing power" competition. However, on the other side of the coin, Zhipu (02513.HK) plummeted 28% in a single day, and MINIMAX-W (00100.HK) fell 16%, revealing the market's deep anxiety about the sustainability of the moat of AI model companies amid the fierce competition in the high-end programming track. NVIDIA: From "one-time training" large models to "post-training improvement" Agents, computing power requirements are changing NVIDIA (NVDA.US) explained in its official blog that with the rise of Agent AI (Agentic AI), post-model training has evolved from a one-time finishing step to a continuous cycle of core workloads. Unlike traditional generative models, agent models need to plan, call tools, and autonomously correct errors during operation. The environment they are in may change every week, which causes the computing power requirements of post-training to continue to accumulate. Nvidia said that the Vera Rubin platform is specifically designed for this workload and can train the largest models with only a quarter of the number of GPUs of the previous generation Blackwell platform. SK Choi Tae-won: Semiconductor demand will increase by at least 50% next year and is planning to build a factory in the United States
Choi Tae-won, chairman of SK Group and chairman of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said at a media symposium held during the Jeju Forum that global semiconductor demand will increase significantly next year, with demand in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) expected to increase by 60% to 100% compared with this year, and overall semiconductor product demand will also increase by at least 50% to 60%. However, new supply next year will be almost zero, and the gap between supply and demand may further expand. Given that demand for memory chips far exceeds supply, SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won said that SK Hynix (SKHY.US) is looking for locations for chip factories in the United States to increase supply capacity and suppress prices. As a major player in the industry, he believes that current price levels are too high and an "abnormality". Choi Taiyuan said: "I think we need to build (chip factories) not only in Gwangju and Jeolla Province, but also in the United States." "If conditions permit, I think it should be built. This involves trade pressure and other factors that need to be weighed, so we are considering this." TSMC invests additional US$100 billion in Arizona factory, CFO says driven by strong demand TSMC (TSM.US) CFO Huang Renzhao said in an exclusive interview with CNBC that the company is accelerating the construction of the Arizona factory to seize the opportunities brought by the "megatrend" of AI. According to Bloomberg, TSMC’s total investment in the United States has increased to US$265 billion, of which an additional US$100 billion is invested to meet strong demand from US customers while fending off ambitious competitors. Despite this, TSMC still closed down 2.77% on Friday, and the market's overall selling sentiment on technology stocks overshadowed the positive fundamentals. Meta plans to rent AI computing power to Anthropic, spending hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditure to seek commercial returns According to reports, Meta Platforms (META.US) is considering leasing its AI computing resources to AI company Anthropic. Against the background that Meta has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure capital expenditures, leasing idle computing power to external AI companies is seen as one of its ways to seek commercial returns. Meta closed down 2.79% on Friday and continued to fall 0.89% after the market closed. The market still has doubts about whether its huge AI spending can be converted into actual revenue. SpaceX plans to provide AI computing power to the Pentagon, the contract size may reach billions of dollars According to media reports on Friday, SpaceX (SPCX.US) is negotiating with the U.S. Department of Defense to provide data center computing power, and plans to provide the department with data center computing power worth billions of dollars for running AI models. The move will further deepen the partnership between Musk's companies and the Pentagon. According to people familiar with the matter, the two parties are discussing an agreement: SpaceX will provide computing power to the Department of Defense, and the contract value may reach up to billions of dollars. However, negotiations are still ongoing and there is a possibility that the final agreement will fall apart. It is reported that SpaceX has signed similar computing power supply agreements with Anthropic and Google in recent months, and the company is currently planning to significantly expand its cloud computing business. Southbound Fund Tracking｜A cumulative net purchase of approximately HK$37 billion last week increased positions by Alibaba and NetEase and sold off Kingboard Laminated Boards The cumulative net purchases of southbound funds last week were HK$36.982 billion, about HK$2.1 billion less than the previous week, and continued to remain at a staged high level. In terms of trend, southbound funds were still mainly inflows last week, with only a small outflow on Friday affected by the market drop. The Hang Seng Index rose 1.60% last week, with three consecutive positive weeks. In terms of individual stocks, exchange data shows that southbound funds in the past seven days: Substantial net purchases: Zhipu (02513.HK) HK$19.001 billion; Alibaba-W (09988.HK) HK$6.825 billion; NetEase (09999.HK) HK$4.398 billion; GigaDevice (03986.HK) HK$3.447 billion; Kuaishou-W (01024.HK) HK$2.109 billion. Substantial net sales: Kingboard Laminated Board (01888.HK) HK$6.322 billion; Huahong Grace (01347.HK) HK$2.979 billion; Tencent Holdings (0700.HK) HK$1.686 billion.
Zhipu fell 32.50% last week, with funds adding 8.95 million shares in the first 5 days, maintaining a short-term inflow trend. Alibaba-W rose 2.18% last week, with funds adding 29.52 million shares in the first five days, and continued to flow back in the short term. NetEase fell 1.93% last week, with funds adding 22.02 million shares in the first five days, accelerating short-term inflows. GigaDevice fell 28.15% last week, with funds adding 3.61 million shares in the first five days, and short-term inflows were still the main focus. Kuaishou-W rose 0.56% last week, with funds adding 43.24 million shares in the first five days, accelerating the short-term return. Kingboard Laminated Board fell 33.15% last week, and funds reduced their holdings by 68.19 million shares in the first five days, accelerating outflows in the short term. Huahong Grace fell 25.23% last week. Funds reduced their holdings by 4.38 million shares in the first five days, and short-term outflows were the main reason. Tencent Holdings rose by 0.30% last week. Funds reduced their holdings by 9.5 million shares in the first five days, and short-term outflows were the main focus. Note: Due to the T+2 settlement of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the actual positions are the data of the last 5 trading days as of two trading days ago. SF Holdings (06936.HK): The total revenue of express logistics business, supply chain and international business in June was RMB 27.88 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6.19%. Among them, supply chain and international business revenue increased by 24.97% year-on-year. Chinalco International (02068.HK): The total amount of new contracts signed by the company in the first half of the year was RMB 18.187 billion, a year-on-year increase of 10.89%. China Resources Power (00836.HK): The cumulative electricity sales in the first six months reached 120 million megawatt hours, a year-on-year increase of 12.8%. Among them, the cumulative electricity sales of wind farms decreased by 3.2% year-on-year, and the cumulative electricity sales of photovoltaic power plants increased by 42.8%. Hopson Development Group (00754.HK): Total contracted sales in the first half of the year were approximately 3.426 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of approximately 56.79%. ANTA Sports (02020.HK): In the first half of the year, the retail sales of ANTA brand products achieved mid-single-digit positive growth, and the retail sales of FILA brand products achieved mid-single-digit positive growth. Chow Sang Sang (00116.HK): Retail sales increased by 16% year-on-year in the second quarter. Air China (00753.HK): The company and its subsidiary Shenzhen Airlines plan to purchase 55 aircraft with a total catalog price of US$12.44 billion. China Shenhua (01088.HK): Coal sales volume in the first half of the year was 300.2 million tons, a year-on-year increase of 1.8%.
Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America, once again raised a red flag. After successfully predicting the market bottom in March this year, he pointed out that the current extremely crowded positions and frothy sentiments have pushed the market to a new round of high-risk areas, and it may be best to evacuate risky assets in the summer. In Hartnett’s view, the biggest tail risk in this round is: once very large technology companies announce cuts in AI capital expenditures, and this fails to push Mag7 to new highs, “the resulting substantial negative impact on growth and asset prices will catalyze large-scale short selling by banks, brokers, and industrial stocks.” This week, Google-C (GOOG.US) and Tesla (TSLA.US) released their financial reports on the same day (early morning of the 23rd, Beijing time). Storage’s “new ghost story”: Is the U.S. going for a money grab? The China Securities Regulatory Commission held a special meeting on stabilizing the market, and two major central enterprises announced an increase in their holdings of A-share assets. The China Securities Regulatory Commission held a special meeting on stabilizing the market. It is reported that many market institutions have received notices from regulatory authorities and will participate in the China Securities Regulatory Commission symposium. In this forum, the China Securities Regulatory Commission aims to listen to opinions and suggestions from all parties on promoting the stable and healthy development of the market. On the evening of July 19, China Guoxin announced that it had used stock buybacks to increase holdings, special re-loans and supporting funds exceeding 50 billion yuan to maintain market stability. On the same day, China Chengtong announced that it had recently purchased nearly 10 billion yuan in Chinese stock assets. China Guoxin and China Chengtong both stated that they will make every effort to maintain the smooth operation of the capital market in the future. The two major central enterprises took action and used real money to express their confidence in the resilience and value center of China's assets. The full version of DeepSeek V4 will be launched as soon as today and will adopt a peak and valley billing mechanism. China’s open source large model DeepSeek V4 “full health version” (official version) will be unveiled as soon as July 20. Currently, some developers have obtained grayscale testing permissions. The new version is available in two models: V4-Pro and V4-Flash. Test results show that V4's overall performance is close to the level of Claude Opus 4.8, and its encoding capabilities are comparable to GPT-5.6 Sol. In addition, the official version also introduces a peak and valley billing mechanism: during peak hours, the cost of API usage will be twice that of usual times. At the end of last month, DeepSeek sent an email to all API users, saying that the official version of V4 will be launched in mid-July. Goldman Sachs comments on Kimi K3: Competition among high-end models is fierce Goldman Sachs said that Kimi K3 was born with 2.8 trillion parameters, raising the API pricing to US$2.3 per million tokens, setting a new high in Chinese model pricing, marking the official shift of domestic AI companies from "price war" to "pricing power" competition. However, on the other side of the coin, Zhipu (02513.HK) plummeted 28% in a single day, and MINIMAX-W (00100.HK) fell 16%, revealing the market's deep anxiety about the sustainability of the moat of AI model companies amid the fierce competition in the high-end programming track. NVIDIA: From "one-time training" large models to "post-training improvement" Agents, computing power requirements are changing NVIDIA (NVDA.US) explained in its official blog that with the rise of Agent AI (Agentic AI), post-model training has evolved from a one-time finishing step to a continuous cycle of core workloads. Unlike traditional generative models, agent models need to plan, call tools, and autonomously correct errors during operation. The environment they are in may change every week, which causes the computing power requirements of post-training to continue to accumulate. Nvidia said that the Vera Rubin platform is specifically designed for this workload and can train the largest models with only a quarter of the number of GPUs of the previous generation Blackwell platform. SK Choi Tae-won: Semiconductor demand will increase by at least 50% next year and is planning to build a factory in the United States
Choi Tae-won, chairman of SK Group and chairman of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said at a media symposium held during the Jeju Forum that global semiconductor demand will increase significantly next year, with demand in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) expected to increase by 60% to 100% compared with this year, and overall semiconductor product demand will also increase by at least 50% to 60%. However, new supply next year will be almost zero, and the gap between supply and demand may further expand. Given that demand for memory chips far exceeds supply, SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won said that SK Hynix (SKHY.US) is looking for locations for chip factories in the United States to increase supply capacity and suppress prices. As a major player in the industry, he believes that current price levels are too high and an "abnormality". Choi Taiyuan said: "I think we need to build (chip factories) not only in Gwangju and Jeolla Province, but also in the United States." "If conditions permit, I think it should be built. This involves trade pressure and other factors that need to be weighed, so we are considering this." TSMC invests additional US$100 billion in Arizona factory, CFO says driven by strong demand TSMC (TSM.US) CFO Huang Renzhao said in an exclusive interview with CNBC that the company is accelerating the construction of the Arizona factory to seize the opportunities brought by the "megatrend" of AI. According to Bloomberg, TSMC’s total investment in the United States has increased to US$265 billion, of which an additional US$100 billion is invested to meet strong demand from US customers while fending off ambitious competitors. Despite this, TSMC still closed down 2.77% on Friday, and the market's overall selling sentiment on technology stocks overshadowed the positive fundamentals. Meta plans to rent AI computing power to Anthropic, spending hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditure to seek commercial returns According to reports, Meta Platforms (META.US) is considering leasing its AI computing resources to AI company Anthropic. Against the background that Meta has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure capital expenditures, leasing idle computing power to external AI companies is seen as one of its ways to seek commercial returns. Meta closed down 2.79% on Friday and continued to fall 0.89% after the market closed. The market still has doubts about whether its huge AI spending can be converted into actual revenue. SpaceX plans to provide AI computing power to the Pentagon, the contract size may reach billions of dollars According to media reports on Friday, SpaceX (SPCX.US) is negotiating with the U.S. Department of Defense to provide data center computing power, and plans to provide the department with data center computing power worth billions of dollars for running AI models. The move will further deepen the partnership between Musk's companies and the Pentagon. According to people familiar with the matter, the two parties are discussing an agreement: SpaceX will provide computing power to the Department of Defense, and the contract value may reach up to billions of dollars. However, negotiations are still ongoing and there is a possibility that the final agreement will fall apart. It is reported that SpaceX has signed similar computing power supply agreements with Anthropic and Google in recent months, and the company is currently planning to significantly expand its cloud computing business. Southbound Fund Tracking｜A cumulative net purchase of approximately HK$37 billion last week increased positions by Alibaba and NetEase and sold off Kingboard Laminated Boards The cumulative net purchases of southbound funds last week were HK$36.982 billion, about HK$2.1 billion less than the previous week, and continued to remain at a staged high level. In terms of trend, southbound funds were still mainly inflows last week, with only a small outflow on Friday affected by the market drop. The Hang Seng Index rose 1.60% last week, with three consecutive positive weeks. In terms of individual stocks, exchange data shows that southbound funds in the past seven days: Substantial net purchases: Zhipu (02513.HK) HK$19.001 billion; Alibaba-W (09988.HK) HK$6.825 billion; NetEase (09999.HK) HK$4.398 billion; GigaDevice (03986.HK) HK$3.447 billion; Kuaishou-W (01024.HK) HK$2.109 billion. Substantial net sales: Kingboard Laminated Board (01888.HK) HK$6.322 billion; Huahong Grace (01347.HK) HK$2.979 billion; Tencent Holdings (0700.HK) HK$1.686 billion.
Zhipu fell 32.50% last week, with funds adding 8.95 million shares in the first 5 days, maintaining a short-term inflow trend. Alibaba-W rose 2.18% last week, with funds adding 29.52 million shares in the first five days, and continued to flow back in the short term. NetEase fell 1.93% last week, with funds adding 22.02 million shares in the first five days, accelerating short-term inflows. GigaDevice fell 28.15% last week, with funds adding 3.61 million shares in the first five days, and short-term inflows were still the main focus. Kuaishou-W rose 0.56% last week, with funds adding 43.24 million shares in the first five days, accelerating the short-term return. Kingboard Laminated Board fell 33.15% last week, and funds reduced their holdings by 68.19 million shares in the first five days, accelerating outflows in the short term. Huahong Grace fell 25.23% last week. Funds reduced their holdings by 4.38 million shares in the first five days, and short-term outflows were the main reason. Tencent Holdings rose by 0.30% last week. Funds reduced their holdings by 9.5 million shares in the first five days, and short-term outflows were the main focus. Note: Due to the T+2 settlement of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the actual positions are the data of the last 5 trading days as of two trading days ago. SF Holdings (06936.HK): The total revenue of express logistics business, supply chain and international business in June was RMB 27.88 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6.19%. Among them, supply chain and international business revenue increased by 24.97% year-on-year. Chinalco International (02068.HK): The total amount of new contracts signed by the company in the first half of the year was RMB 18.187 billion, a year-on-year increase of 10.89%. China Resources Power (00836.HK): The cumulative electricity sales in the first six months reached 120 million megawatt hours, a year-on-year increase of 12.8%. Among them, the cumulative electricity sales of wind farms decreased by 3.2% year-on-year, and the cumulative electricity sales of photovoltaic power plants increased by 42.8%. Hopson Development Group (00754.HK): Total contracted sales in the first half of the year were approximately 3.426 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of approximately 56.79%. ANTA Sports (02020.HK): In the first half of the year, the retail sales of ANTA brand products achieved mid-single-digit positive growth, and the retail sales of FILA brand products achieved mid-single-digit positive growth. Chow Sang Sang (00116.HK): Retail sales increased by 16% year-on-year in the second quarter. Air China (00753.HK): The company and its subsidiary Shenzhen Airlines plan to purchase 55 aircraft with a total catalog price of US$12.44 billion. China Shenhua (01088.HK): Coal sales volume in the first half of the year was 300.2 million tons, a year-on-year increase of 1.8%.