The Parabolic Tech Mania Continues: Your Next Move 6/3/26

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**Scott Wapner** (1:00)
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Carl, thank you very much. Welcome to the Halftime Report. I'm Scott Wapner, front and center. This hour, Parabolic Tech, another chip name joins the club. We discuss and debate the markets, which as you know, are under some pressure. Oil and bond yields are both moving higher. We're discussing all of it with the committee. Joe Terranova, Shannon Sikosha, Steve Weiss and Bryn Talkington.
So we do have that move in oil. We do have the move in yields. A deal in the Middle East, much talked about appears to be elusive, at least so far. There's just no deal. And until you get that, oil is going to be doing what it's doing and bond yields are going to be doing what they're doing. And the market is going to react in kind, at least for a moment or two, because the market's been really fixated on things beyond what's been happening in the Middle East. But this is just a reminder today, again, despite the tweets and this and that, there's no deal yet.

**Joe Terranova** (2:08)
No, there's no deal yet. But over the last several days, the market is clearly focused on coming off of remarkable earnings growth over the last several weeks.
And more importantly, the parabolic nature in which the AI technology stocks and the momentum factor itself is trading. Now, I don't like the narrowness that we are currently trading in the market. If you look today, Nasdaq down, S&P down, S&P equal weight down, Russell down. We're hanging by the thread of momentum. Momentum is still higher.
While we're speaking, Micron has turned lower, Corning has turned lower, but you're still seeing the semi-equipment names that are higher right now. So I think for the viewers, what do you do with that? If you don't own these names, you're not reaching out and buying them here. They are very well extended. If you do own them, understand they no longer are trading like equities. They are trading like commodity futures contracts, and that requires you put on a stop, that requires you understand that the astronomical gains you have benefited from over the last 60 days, is probably not where you're ultimately going to be ringing the register. Doesn't change the fundamentals, just understand the nature of how we're trading right now is very technically oriented, and the word you began with parabolic is how you define all of it.

**Scott Wapner** (3:27)
Well, there's many stocks within that orbit, which we'll get to in a minute, but how do you see this, right?
We've had these kinds of days before, where you get some more uncertainty out of the Middle East, a negative headline or whatever, or even the flare up of hostilities yet again, and it's proven to be sort of fleeting in terms of the impact it's had on the stock market. We'll see if this is another one of those moments, because the greater story is still very much intact.

**Shannon Sikosha** (3:55)
Right, and I think that the challenge is, is that this is a reminder for investors in terms of the nature of the rally that we have seen, that they need to take a step back and look at their portfolios and define whether they want to take some of that risk off the table. If you look at, again, the lack of breath in this market is quite concerning. And while we believe that the AI tailwind is exciting and real, it's also creating a significant amount of risk into an event that is likely to move capital around. And so when we look at the geopolitical situation, there's two things that I think we have to pay attention to. One, what is it doing in terms of real rate expectations? How does that affect the yields curve? We have seen historically over the last few years, the one thing that does derail some of this tech tailwind is the potential for higher yields. And if we're looking at an environment where so much capex has been put into AI, that implies, Scott, that we're going to have an expectation of a higher growth rate. You couple that with higher energy prices. The likelihood is now we're in June.