EU: Micron Earnings Lift Tech

**Notes/Observations** - Micron's post-close results were the clear overnight catalyst, beating even elevated expectations and triggering a broad relief rally across the AI/semiconductor complex.

Q3 EPS came in at $25.11 (vs $20.98e) on revenue of $41.5B (vs $36.5Be), with non-GAAP gross margin jumping to 84.9% from 39% a year ago, operating margin at 81.2% ( more than doubled y/y! ), and adjusted free cash flow of $18.3B versus just $1.95B y/y.

The story was as much about guidance as the print: Q4 EPS guided to $30.00–32.00 (vs $24.91e) and revenue to $49.0–51.0B (vs $42.6Be), with gross margin seen near 86%, alongside a Capex step-up to $7.1B.

The AI memory crunch is doing the heavy lifting on pricing.

Shares ran ~16% after-hours and were last quoted up 18–19% pre-market.

Read-through dominated Asia: the Nikkei hit a record high (+4.3%), Kospi rose as much as +6%, with SK Hynix +10%, Samsung +6%, Tokyo Electron +12% and Kioxia +9%; Nasdaq futures were up sharply (~+2%).

For European cash, this is the supportive backdrop into the open for semis and AI-adjacent names. - Big US banks aced the Fed’s stress tests exactly as scripted: capital barely dipped 1.6% despite a nasty recession scenario with crashing CRE, housing, and soaring unemployment, thanks to fat net interest income shielding them from $708 billion in projected loan losses.

With scenarios and models now pre-released, the test has become theater rather than a real audit, freeing JPMorgan to announce $50 billion in buybacks, Morgan Stanley $20 billion, plus dividend hikes across the board while the Trump deregulatory wave loosens capital rules further.

This green-lights the next leg — more lending, bigger acquisitions, and aggressive shareholder returns — as Jamie Dimon and peers shift from hoarding buffers to putting record profits to work in a deliberately deregulated environment. - A major 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck the Moron region of Venezuela, causing collapsed buildings and significant damage extending to the capital, Caracas.

USGS fatality modelling skews severe - roughly 39% probability of a death toll in the ~10,000 range, 37% for 1,000-10,000, and 13% for the 100,000 range - meaning this could become the deadliest land earthquake since Mexico City in 1985 (estimated 30,000-45,000 deaths).

Pres Trump has instructed all US government agencies to assist.

Market impact is limited for now given Venezuela's diminished role in global crude flows, but it's worth flagging for any energy/commodity exposure and as a developing humanitarian situation. - Geopolitical risk premium continues to drain out of oil despite ongoing Iranian sabre-rattling.

The IRGC Navy declared that safe Hormuz transit is only possible via Iranian-designated routes and that non-compliant vessels would "face action," but the market shrugged it off - front WTI touched fresh multi-month lows around $69/bbl.

US Energy Sec Wright said a full return to normal flows is delayed a few weeks because of Iranian mines in the Strait, while stressing Iran will not be able to block Hormuz going forward.

Sec of State Rubio struck a firm line: no deal "at any price," the Strait is an international waterway, and any tolling would set an unacceptable precedent - though he expressed hope for a positive outcome.

Importantly, Maersk signalled a cautious restart of Hormuz movements (the Maersk Baltimore and another chartered vessel exited the Gulf and will pursue an additional transit), reinforcing the normalisation narrative.

For European energy names this is a clear headwind: the sector slipped at the open as crude returned to pre-war levels amid near-term oversupply concerns.

ECB's Schnabel cautioned that the US-Iran ceasefire is no reason for policymakers to relax -US consumers continue to spend at a very strong clip despite falling gasoline prices and the fading tailwind from tariff refunds.

BofA Institute data shows total card spending rose +6.8% for the week ending June 21st (vs +5.9% prior week), with ex-gas spending holding rock-solid at +6.1%.

Father’s Day timing (boosted by Juneteenth falling on the Friday before in 2026) provided some lift, but the underlying resilience is clear — even as gas spending slowed on lower prices, core consumption remains very robust June-to-date. - UK politics turned market-relevant - reports that Chancellor Reeves is backing Andy Burnham as next PM, with reassurance he's committed to the fiscal rules, helped sterling firm and gilt yields steady on reduced political risk, though analysts flag a new PM could eventually face pressure to revisit the fiscal framework - As traders circulating unverified social chatters with mobile screenshots from Claude's coding interface showing Fable 5 as again selectable model labeled "For your toughest challenges.", Sakana’s Fugu flips the script: it trains orchestration as the core intelligence layer and claims to reach Fable-level performance on hard agentic tasks by letting a GRPO-trained Conductor autonomously discover dynamic roles, recursive self-calls, and brutal verification loops that actually deliver.

It effectively kills the spoilage problem head-on by making negative capability the premium feature — cheap agents triage and murder bad premises early, quarantine risky paths, and only escalate what deserves premium silicon, turning the flood of cheap tokens from a liability into disciplined output under real budget and cleanup constraints.

In a world where GPUs are softening and enterprises are hitting rationing walls, Fugu’s learned routing becomes the economic moat: it hides the proprietary topologies and model-selection logic behind a clean endpoint while giving you antifragile mixing across frontier, open, and local silicon without vendor lock-in. -China said to be ramping up July refined fuel export quotas to 800Kt from ~600Kt in June and scrapping destination restrictions — a sharp reversal from March when Beijing was actively telling refiners to curb or halt exports amid Middle Eas