Memory chips, Hormuz and a widening market: the day in review

<p>Two threads ran through today's news, and neither was about the level of the index.</p><p>The first was memory. Apple has begun testing DRAM from China's ChangXin Memory Technologies for iPhones and MacBooks, after months of lobbying Washington for clearance. That is a striking admission of how tight the memory market has become: Apple does not casually qualify a new Chinese supplier. The same squeeze showed up on the other side of the trade, with Sandisk sliding on a soft outlook and Micron pulling back as investors questioned how long AI capital spending can keep running. Micron is still up 207% year to date, which tells you how much good news is already in the price and why a wobble in the AI narrative hits memory names hardest.</p><p>The second was risk that has nothing to do with earnings. Iran said an Oman-brokered deal on the Strait of Hormuz is in its "final stages" but put the burden on Washington to act, so the waterway stays shut for now. At the other end of the map, Turkey started restricting commercial traffic into the Black Sea after a spike in drone attacks on merchant ships. Two of the world's more sensitive shipping corridors are impaired at the same time, and Turkey separately compared its new pact with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to NATO's Article 5. Freight and insurance costs are the transmission mechanism here, not headlines.</p><p>Underneath all that, the market's internal machinery is changing. The share of stocks beating the S&amp;P 500 has hit a four-year high — a rotation away from the handful of megacaps that carried the index. S&amp;P 500 revenue growth is running at a near five-year high, led by energy at 42.5%. And the dispersion is brutal: Atlassian rose more than 30% after guiding growth <em>down</em> to 18%, because margins are improving, while AppLovin fell about 20% despite 53% revenue growth. UBS put a number on the mood, saying AI-linked tech volatility now matches dot-com-era extremes. Wednesday's CPI print is the next test, with indexes at records and the Fed debate genuinely three-way — cut, hold or hike.</p><p>Elsewhere: Berkshire ended a 14-quarter run as a net seller, buying $23.5 billion of equities including roughly $10 billion into a single privately negotiated stake, ahead of results and questions for Greg Abel about the cash pile. Bitcoin is heading for a ~2% weekly gain as hike bets cool, helped by $853 million of spot ETF inflows, the strongest since mid-April.</p><p><strong>Buy List 2026</strong> closed at €60,450 on €60,000 invested, a total return of +0.75%. The utilities are still doing the work: Iberdrola +11.11% and Ørsted +10.60%. Maersk sits at -0.13% and is the position to watch on the shipping stories above — Black Sea restrictions and a still-closed Hormuz cut both ways for a container carrier, tightening capacity while raising cost and risk. Vonovia remains the drag at -12.51%. ASML, Kemira, Uniqa and Olé are flat, freshly opened.</p>