The Mega-Cap Bounce Back: How to Trade it 7/15/26

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**Scott Wapner** (1:00)
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Carl, thanks so much. Welcome to the Halftime Report. I'm Scott Wapner. Front and center this hour, money into the mega caps. Just as Carl was saying, it's Apple. All of the hyperscalers ramping as we come on the air. We're trading the markets with the Investment Committee. Joining us for the hour today, Joe Terranova, Steve Weiss, Bill Baruch, Rob Sechin. Let's go to the scorecard here. I'll tell you what we're seeing today. And yes, the NASDAQ's only up by one quarter of 1% in what is a green across the board tape. But let's look at some of the mega caps. Take a look at Apple. Look at Microsoft Meta, Amazon Alphabet.
3%, thereabouts, for everything in that group. We weren't going to start here today, and then we saw this big move in all these names and said, well, let's start at this place in the market.

**Joe Terranova** (2:00)
What do you think? This seems to be the pattern for the month of July. We have these rotations that's allowing the overall market to inch its way higher. But every time the momentum factor maybe takes a couple of steps backward, we see capital coming out of memory, semis, semiconductor equipment, they're finding value opportunities in the mega caps. And it's interesting because three weeks ago, we were hearing people suggesting that the Mag-7 was the Lag-7.
They've certainly defeated that description. And right now, they are fighting for leadership once again. You could never count out these trillion dollar corporations with staggering revenue growth. They're breaking out, Apple's breaking out. And I said yesterday, I think Nvidia is going to follow. It's down today.
It had a strong afternoon yesterday. It's going to participate as well here in the coming weeks.

**Scott Wapner** (2:48)
Steve, yeah, I mean, they're breaking out now. Let's see if it's durable, because there have been some headfakes in this group of late. But week to date, they're all looking good.
Meta's up 15% over the last month. And it's really a story across the board led by this run that Apple's had.

**Steve Weiss** (3:07)
And I also think that Meta's been positively complicit in it. When they came out and said, we're loading up on all this extra compute, these data centers have got 33 now, or when the one in Canada will be finished, that will be 33
So now the market's saying, hey, let's go from the providers of the AI solutions, because we're talking about price cuts coming from China in terms of their AI models versus the tokens here, they're very expensive. So let's see now who we can take advantage of. And they're taking that Meta's announcements, or what we've heard about Meta, as positive that they're going to generate a return. Now, to me, this is like Groundhog Day. One day the market's up, and yesterday the headlines were all, semis are back, semis are back. And then we're taking a look today and guess what? Semis are gone again. So you see a series of lower highs when this is happening. And to me, that once again signals, and the reason I exited Micron, is that we're closer to the end of the AI trade, not AI fundamentals, but AI trade. So I think it's going to be difficult.

**Scott Wapner** (4:17)
Closer to the end of the AI trade?

**Steve Weiss** (4:19)
Not in terms of the outperformance of the stocks. The fundamentals and the revenues for those companies will continue to grow. That spending is far from over. But I think the market's earlier than anybody expected.

**Joe Terranova** (4:32)