Hormuz, AI Booms, and a Record Quarter: The Market Is Living in Five Movies at Once

The S&P 500 came into July riding a 14.9% Q1 gain — its best quarter in six years — with chip stocks posting their best quarter ever (the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index up 88% on AI demand). Then the Strait of Hormuz decided to have opinions, and here we are opening H2 with a risk-off hangover and oil traders stress-eating at their desks.

The macro story is genuinely split-screen chaos: $META is up 5.5% pre-market after announcing it's entering the cloud infrastructure business to compete directly with $AMZN, $MSFT, and $GOOGL. Goldman Sachs says a CapEx supercycle is powering the bull market. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Fed is warning that AI data center buildouts are themselves inflationary, which is the most 2026 sentence ever written. $PLTR and $NVDA just announced a major partnership. $LULU is down 47% year-to-date and somehow still not cheap enough for a full upgrade.

Morgan Stanley expects oil markets to swing into a 3 million barrel/day surplus once Hormuz normalizes — but 'once Hormuz normalizes' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence right now.