11AM Hour: Former NEC Director Gary Cohn, Apple Shares Jump & Morgan Stanley Earnings 7/15/26

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**Mike Santoli** (0:28)
Starting that seat on the committee, we're promoting.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:30)
To boost quarterly earnings.

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**Carl Quintanilla** (0:57)
I'm watching some of these markets. Stocks mostly higher, but some pronounced weakness in semiconductors. The SMH down almost 3% this morning. Dell's down a number of chip names like Sandisk, Western Ditch, Micron. Our senior markets commentator Mike Santoli is here to maybe take a crack at the spread between what the SMH is doing and the overall mass.

**Kate Rooney** (1:16)
Yeah.

**Mike Santoli** (1:17)
I mean, I think the the riptide warnings are out on the beach again, and you have a three and a half percent drop in the S&P 500 with the majority of stocks higher. There's been this unprecedented run of days when either the headline indexes or semis are up and the majority of stocks are down and vice versa. So, what it does tell you is treacherous rotation, day by day kind of confidence check on the AI hardware food chain, it's all down today.
I do think that the market continues to tell us in different ways that the bar is punitively high on AI hardware earnings reactions. From going back to Micron, Micron's 300 bucks below where it was right before the earnings at its highs, through to Taiwan Semi and then today to ASML. ASML's not down much but it was indicated higher earlier and the rest of the SemiCap equipment makers are down. Now, you have Mag 7 up so there's always something to rotate into in this market. Dispersion continues to make new highs which means stocks going their own way, keeps the VIX in line which tells systematic funds they can take on more risk. This cycle has been working to keep the S&P 500 near the old highs. I still think there's a little bit of risk for slippage in there in that process but we haven't really seen it hit yet.

**Sara Eisen** (2:34)
What's working today also is consumer discretionary up sharply. Some of these, Royal Caribbean, Tapestry, Amazon, Ralph Lauren, the cruise lines, the retailers. I guess, you know, oil prices are lower which is just interesting because we're still bombing Iran.

**Mike Santoli** (2:49)
Well, sure. I mean, absolutely. You're giving back some of the recent little bump in oil prices but also the two-year note yields down like 14 basis points from yesterday morning's high before we got CPI and PPI. I think that's essentially saying, okay, we thought maybe July was a live Fed meeting. That's no longer the case. We can push out the concern on that. And again, it's when the leading group of this bull market, which is Semi's, sells off, the lagging groups get a bid.
It sounds really reductionist and mechanical to keep talking that way that this is why things are happening. But it kind of is on an intraday basis, the way the flow is working.

**Carl Quintanilla** (3:26)
Yeah, there's a couple of think pieces out today about how financials are AI stocks. And we have seen days where there's a Goldman Caterpillar trade around.

**Mike Santoli** (3:34)
At least the capital markets based financials are absolutely. And Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, for as much as they kind of completely hate each other, they're kind of the Yankees Red Sox. And as much as they want to eat each other's lunch, the two stocks on a one-year basis are the same exact chart. I mean, basically, they're the two ways that you want to just leverage all of this capital raising and deployment in the AI.

**Sara Eisen** (3:59)
Why does Magnificent 7, why does Microsoft and Amazon and Google go in opposite direction as Dell and Micron and Sandus?