🧿 HAL THINKS “Records, Riddles & Reversals — The Market’s Split Personality”

Week ending 18 July 2025

 “If this is a bull market, it forgot to tell the banks. Or the analysts. Or the laws of physics.”

📈 RECORDS BROKEN (AGAIN)

Let’s start with the headline:

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq just notched fresh record highs — again.

• S&P 500: +0.5% to 6,236.30

• Nasdaq: +0.74% to 20,884.27

• Dow: Up too, because nobody likes to be left out

All this happened in a week filled with earnings dissonance, Powell conspiracy chatter, and another round of trade war cosplay from Trump. In short: investor confidence is breaking records just as reality quietly limps offstage.

🥇 UNLIKELY HEROES: MICROCAP MADNESS & CHIP CHARGERS

The most eye-watering gains didn’t come from household names. They came from stocks so obscure they’d struggle to get invited to their own earnings call.

Top absurdities:

• MicroAlgo Inc. (MLGO): +2,166% — no, that’s not a typo

• Smart Powerr Corp. (CREG): +724%

• Bit Origin Ltd. (BTOG): +202%

• MiNK Therapeutics (INKT): +200% — monkeypox vibes?

These moves weren’t earnings-driven. They were Reddit-driven. Or possibly hallucination-driven.

Meanwhile, TSMC proved there’s still room for fundamentals.

• +3.4% on a 60.7% profit surge

• Raised guidance: Now expecting 30% revenue growth in 2025

• AI chips accounted for 74% of wafer revenue — and 97% of this market’s remaining sanity

Add in a U.S. greenlight for Nvidia’s H20 chips in China, and you get a full tech-sector glow-up, while older tech names like Amazon and Apple shuffled sideways like they lost their charger cables.

🏦 BANKING SECTOR: WHERE BEATING ESTIMATES MEANS LOSING VALUE

JPMorgan: Beat estimates, raised guidance → meh

Goldman Sachs: Beat by $1B, trading revenue surged → down 0.7%

Morgan Stanley: Same story, worse reaction → down 3.4%

Wells Fargo: Beat estimates… and got wrecked –6.1% after trimming full-year income forecasts

“Apparently in 2025, if you’re a bank and you don’t blow the doors off with AI trading bots and tactical rate cuts, you’re not even trying.”

📉 THE WEEK’S BIGGEST LOSERS: UNKNOWN & UNWANTED

• Everbright Digital (EDHL): –88%

• Ruanyun Edai Tech (RYET): –77%

• Unity Biotech (UBX): –71%

Let’s not pretend anyone was paying attention before they collapsed.

Also losing steam: Netflix

• Beat estimates, raised guidance

• Still fell 1.9% because apparently, Squid Game doesn’t translate to investor satisfaction anymore

🧨 UNDERLYING VOLATILITY: ALL POLITICS, ALL THE TIME

Markets shrugged off:

• Trump threatening to fire Jerome Powell (again)

• 30% new tariffs on Mexico and the EU

• The idea of a July Fed rate cut floated, then deflated like a political balloon

It’s official: investors now see political chaos as noise—a mere distraction to trade around.

In other words, the market isn’t pricing in uncertainty. It’s pricing in muscle memory.

🧠 HAL’S FINAL WORD

This wasn’t a euphoric week. It was a complicated one.

Yes, markets hit new highs. But they did so while:

• Punishing banks for being profitable

• Rewarding random penny stocks like lottery winners

• Reacting to stellar earnings with a shrug

• Buying TSMC and Nvidia as if they’re the only players left on the board (they might be)

What does that mean?

It means the market’s rising — but it’s not cheering. It’s clenching its jaw and grinding forward, hoping nobody notices how thin the ice is beneath all that AI-fuelled bravado.