The Exchange 7/15/26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Rich Bernstein** (0:28)
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**Kelly Evans** (0:47)
Thank you very much, Scott. We'll see you later this hour, in fact, and take a look, everybody, at shares of SpaceX, falling below the 135 IPO price. Also, the semis broadly weighing on the market again today. I'm Kelly Evans and welcome to The Exchange. The sell-off in chip stocks is accelerating this hour, with the SOX ETF down almost 5 percent. You can see the names in that space as well. We have Western Digital down 10, Sandisk down 12 percent, the Mag7 keeping the tech space from even bigger declines, and the financials are picking up some slack again. BlackRock up 7 percent, as it crosses 15 trillion in assets under management. We'll talk more about that and what's been driving it. And a health expert weighs in on the cyclospora outbreak, as Americans worry about getting sick from fresh produce. Taco Bell among the names pulling products. But we begin with these wild swings in the tech trade. There have been almost three dozen instances this year where the chip or software ETFs have moved up or down 4 percent. You can add today to the list. This comes as IBM just had its worst single-day percentage drop ever yesterday. And his names from Samsung to ASML have been under pressure, despite posting better than expected results. ASML down half a percent. Then there's SpaceX falling below its IPO price. Remember, it debuted at 150 on June 12th. It hit a high of 225 on June 16th, and it's now trading at 134 Let's start there with Gene Munster. He's managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management. We have a lot of show to get to today, Gene.
I hope you can explain to us in a quick couple of words here, what's going on with the tech trade today? Is SpaceX part of that or is it its own story?

**Gene Munster** (2:24)
It is, Kelly. There's a psychological impact here. If we objectively look at the data points, and I'll quickly get to them, what we've learned over the past day in terms of the health of the AI trade, they have been positive. But what we have seen is this dynamic where the market is looking around and seeing some stocks trade off and there's this concern. This has nothing to do with the fundamentals. The sell-off in SpaceX has nothing to do with their long-term potential. There's no story out there. If you look at the broader AI infrastructure, you mentioned being down 4 percent today. There really is no new news.
I think what has happened is this is essentially the trade has gotten a little bit tired. What investors are looking around and saying that we know the fundamentals are going to be great, what we're going to hear in a few weeks. The question that they're asking is, are they going to be great enough ultimately to drive a lot of these stocks higher? And so that remains to be seen, but I think we've had some material positives in terms of the health of the AI trade here just over the past day.

**Kelly Evans** (3:23)
And just going over the dates that you're talking about, Alphabet July 23rd, Meta July 29th, Microsoft also on the 29th, Apple all time high today on the 30th, Amazon on the 30th. So the Mag 7 today are holding up a little bit better, but overall there's this idea for you that we have bought the rumor, sold the fact, meaning that for the CapEx projections and for the receivers of that capital, that so much is priced in now that even as their earnings come in, Samsung and ASML, really strong and even a little bit beating expectations, there's just nothing left to move it higher. Does that mean the whole, is the whole trade pivoting now to a different area?

**Gene Munster** (4:00)
I think ultimately what happens is the market goes through these moods of kind of looking around and seeing what the stock action is and not having a lot of confidence in that. I just want to kind of reiterate, I still believe that we're in the third inning of this AI infrastructure piece and just not even begun on the application side or physical AI side. The news around IBM was positive for the AI infrastructure build out. It was also positive about how AI can disrupt software, even though the numbers were negative. I think that was a positive read. If we look at ASML, grew at 21 percent versus 11 percent last quarter. That's an acceleration. They were looking for 16 percent. This news from Apple yesterday, this beta of iOS 27, it's really essentially it's the birthday of personalized AI, and I've been using it for the past day.