The Closing Bell
Stocks ripped higher Monday as falling yields, sliding oil, and a chip-sector melt-up overpowered a hawkish Fed voice and a chaotic morning air-traffic scare.
The Fed's inflation warning gets drowned out.
St. Louis Fed's Musalem hit the tape mid-morning with a message the market chose to ignore: inflation is still running "too high" at up to 3%, the labor market is stable but not a brake on prices, and rates likely need to rise further given demand and supply pressures alike. That's a notably hawkish line from a sitting Fed official, but with oil tumbling and Treasuries rallying, traders read the commodity relief as the bigger story. The 20-year Treasury ETF (TLT) added 0.7%, and easing yields gave risk assets room to run. Crude told the real story of the day: United States Oil Fund (USO) dropped 3.7% as reports of only light vessel traffic disruption through the Strait of Hormuz, plus signals Trump may meet Iran's president at the UN General Assembly and has pulled back on Houthi strikes, chipped away at the geopolitical premium.
Chips lead an AI-driven rally, Intel is the story of the day.
The S&P 500 proxy (SPY) closed up 1.6%, the Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) gained 2.8%, and semiconductors were the engine. Intel (INTC) exploded 12% on what desks are calling a "key trading signal," while Micron (MU) added 2.8% even as some analysts warn its blistering growth run is due for a reset. Nvidia (NVDA) climbed 2.4%, backstopped by news it will invest $3 billion total in SB Energy, including a $1.5 billion stake purchase, deepening its data-center infrastructure bet. Software and semis broadly caught a bid as investors rotated back into AI names, helped by Accenture's new five-year partnership with Anthropic. Meta (META) added over $200 billion in market value on the session. Morgan Stanley's line of the day: AI adoption is still at "the national anthem," barely underway.
Winners, losers, and a Greenland frenzy.
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) jumped 10.7% after Paramount Skydance settled antitrust suits tied to their merger, clearing a major deal hurdle, while Paramount (PSKY) itself slid 2.8% on the added film-spending commitments baked into the settlement. Delta (DAL) rose 3.6% even as an FAA communications outage triggered ground stops at JFK, LaGuardia, Boston, Newark and Philadelphia earlier in the session. The wildest tape belonged to Greenland-linked names after Trump's Denmark deal: Greenland Mines (GRML) rocketed 228% and Critical Metals (CRML) surged 38.2%, with a signing ceremony now set for Tuesday. Chevron (CVX) and Occidental (OXY) fell alongside the crude selloff.
After the bell and tomorrow.
Watch the Greenland/Denmark signing ceremony Tuesday for follow-through in rare-earth names, and keep an eye on Musalem's hawkish inflation language for any pushback from other Fed speakers. Diesel prices surging past $6.50 could pressure agriculture names.
Bottom line: the tape shrugged off a hawkish Fed and an air-traffic scare to chase falling oil and AI momentum, but Monday's rally papers over rate risk that hasn't actually gone away.