Market Memo

The week of July 6, 2026, was basically Wall Street switching up on all of us every single day. The S&P 500 climbed 1.2% to finish at 7,575.39, the Nasdaq stole the show with a 1.7% gain to 26,281.61, and the Dow was the one dude who forgot to show up, slipping 0.5% for the week. The biggest headline came on Friday when South Korean chip giant SK Hynix made its historic Nasdaq debut, listing at $149 per share and immediately hitting a mind-blowing $1 trillion market cap, making it the largest U.S. public listing ever by a foreign company and sending investors scrambling to reshuffle their semiconductor portfolios. I don’t even think investors know what they are doing with semi conductors. Meanwhile, tensions in the Middle East cooled slightly after reports of diplomatic progress between the U.S. and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, giving oil prices a break(hopefully this lasts long). The AI race(which has no winner and probably will never ever get one) kept on going, with Meta climbing after showing off new AI features and revealing plans to roll out its own AI chip by September(they gotta fix IG first). Crypto also had a solid week, with Bitcoin cruising back above $64k, helped by Circle Internet Group jumping 13% after getting approval to launch the first crypto-focused national bank in the U.S., giving its USDC stablecoin an even stronger foundation. Safe to say, Wall Street definitely wasn’t lacking entertainment this week.