$INTC +25% in a week, Brent at $101, and GameStop tried to buy eBay — welcome to the most unhinged week in markets
From Apple-Intel chip deals to Iranian tanker strikes, this week had more plot twists than a Netflix drama
Ticker Ratings
| Ticker | Rating | Entry Price | Current | $ Gain | % Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INTC INTEL CORP | hold | $126.00 | — | — | — |
| AAPL Apple Inc. | buy | $293.86 | — | — | — |
| ZTS Zoetis Inc. | sell | $82.82 | — | — | — |
| LYFT Lyft, Inc. | buy | $14.33 | — | — | — |
| DKNG DraftKings Inc. | buy | $25.72 | — | — | — |
| GME GameStop Corp. | sell | $24.28 | — | — | — |
| CRWV CoreWeave, Inc. | hold | $113.86 | — | — | — |
| DELL Dell Technologies Inc. | hold | $262.69 | — | — | — |
| ABNB Airbnb, Inc. | buy | $142.64 | — | — | — |
| GLW CORNING INC /NY | buy | $187.30 | — | — | — |
| MNST Monster Beverage Corp | hold | $86.15 | — | — | — |
| ELAN Elanco Animal Health Inc | buy | $23.19 | — | — | — |
| FLEX FLEX LTD. | buy | $142.70 | — | — | — |
| NET Cloudflare, Inc. | sell | $195.69 | — | — | — |
| AFRM Affirm Holdings, Inc. | hold | $64.27 | — | — | — |
Let's start with the headline that sounds made up but isn't: $INTC surged 25% in a single week — its best performance since the year 2000 — on a Wall Street Journal report of a preliminary Apple chip manufacturing deal. The stock is now up over 200% year-to-date, trading at a nose-bleed forward PE of 113. Meanwhile, $MU popped 15.5% and the Philly Semi Index ripped 5.5% in a single session. TheChartGuys on YouTube flagged the NASDAQ meltup is real but narrow — semis and memory are doing all the heavy lifting, and a true bubble needs broad participation. We're not there yet. But we're speed-walking toward it.
Outside the semiconductor circus, the macro picture is genuinely unsettling. Brent crude closed at $101/barrel, US gas averages $4.53/gallon (JP Morgan warns $5 is next), global food prices hit a 3-year high, and the Fed voted 8-4 to hold — the most dissent since 1992. Gundlach called private credit a '2007 moment', citing a fund that went from 100 to 81 overnight. $ZTS cratered 27% while $LYFT and $DKNG both posted record quarters. Rob Arnott's RAFI Growth Index is beating Russell Growth by 4.5% annually over 28 years of back-testing, which quietly might be the most important investing story nobody's talking about this week.
And then there's $GME, which apparently got bored of being a meme stock and tried to acquire eBay — a company five times its size — with $28 billion in shares it isn't authorized to issue. Somewhere Ryan Cohen is either a genius or needs a nap. Probably both.