The State of the Tech Trade as SK Hynix Opens for Trading 7/10/26

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**Jenny Harrington** (0:30)
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**Julia Borsten** (0:33)
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**Julia Borsten** (0:43)
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**Scott Wapner** (0:46)
Carl, thank you very much. We are moments away from that interview. Elon Musk, joining our Julia Borsten, will take you there live as soon as that is ready to go.
I'll welcome you to the Halftime Report. In the meantime, I'm Scott Wapner. We're going to focus today on the state of the tech trade, Apple, and that new intraday high it is approaching. SK Hynix is now open for business at the Nasdaq. A lot of focus on what's been happening in tech. I've got Steve Weiss, Jenny Harrington, Bill Baruch and Kevin Simpson alongside today. We do have a mixed market picture. How do you see things? Again, I'm going to break away at any moment here for this interview that we're waiting for, but you want to just give me your opinion on the markets while we wait for this?

**Steve Weiss** (1:29)
Yeah, I think, look, at this point, it's got to be catalyst driven in terms of the tech stocks, in terms of the AI stocks, because there seems to be a propensity to take some profits and that goes back to MU. Now we see Nvidia finally breaking out above, not breaking out, but above 200, and that again is news driven. Apple trading lower, that's news driven. So I think that's where you are, that it's tough finding the marginal buyer to come in at these levels to drive these meaningfully higher. So it doesn't mean the story's over, it means that the market's nervous about when the story ends and particularly nervous about anybody who comes, any of those companies that are the big spenders in AI, coming on their call and saying, we're slowing down. I think it'll be okay for Meta to say that, because they've found another use for the compute that they're buying and they're building another business as well. But the others, that could really take the trade down quite a bit.

**Scott Wapner** (2:24)
Kev, tech is the top sector this week.
So the dip buyers, they showed up. You figured they would. You didn't know exactly when, but you figured they would and they did. Michael Hartnett at Bank of America says the MAG-7 is still the key to this overall rally. He says, so long as the MAGs, that is the MAG-7 ETF, let's show it to you because he needs it to hold the 200-day moving average, 65, okay? As long as it holds 65 Can we see that, please? Can we see the MAGs ETF? Investors will likely reload longs or bullishly rotate rather than retreat from risk assets. So there it is, 6753 Needs to hold 65
How do you see this?

**Kevin Simpson** (3:07)
It's the right place to be because these are the companies. They're gravitating towards the companies that will deliver earnings. And I agree with everything Steve said about the setup because it's not just about whether or not companies beat, whether they beat by a penny, whether they beat the whisper number. I think everything comes down to guidance, what the expectations are. And if you don't deliver, we saw this with Samsung already this week, you're gonna get slammed. So it'll be interesting to see which of the MAG 7 embrace the earnings reports and flourish and which ones suffer. But we know we'll get a little bit of both.

**Bill Baruch** (3:41)
I agree totally with what Hardin is saying. We've been saying it for a couple of weeks. In fact, right after that Nvidia earnings, I mean Micron's earnings report, you remember the day after, you saw all the spenders, they were getting tagged as Micron was up and memory was running. For us, I looked at that as capitulation on the fear of CapEx. Not saying that CapEx in the next earnings report is higher than expected, it's not gonna derail a name. Meta was our biggest concern out of the MAG 7 We've seen really that capitulation on the CapEx story has made a U-turn and we've seen the MAG 7 really outperform since then.