Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we review the market with data and seize opportunities based on trends, covering macroeconomics, U.S. stocks, precious metals, crude oil and crypto assets, providing insight into key global market shifts. Brought to you by PANews.

Macro Market

The U.S. May PCE price index rose to 4.1% year-over-year, core PCE touched 3.4%, a three-year high, with core month-over-month at 0.3%; coupled with Q1 GDP revised up to 2.1%, personal income and spending both accelerating 0.7%, while the saving rate fell to 3.0%, the lowest since 2022, hinting at underlying concerns about consumption resilience amid high prices. New York Fed President John Williams bluntly said inflation is “undoubtedly high,” pushing back the timeline for achieving the 2% target to 2028, and expects inflation to still be at 3.5% at end-2026 and the unemployment rate to drop to 4% only in 2028.

Crude oil retreats to pre-war levels, WTI crude falls below $70. Iran plans to impose transit fees on the Strait of Hormuz, expecting annual revenue of $40 billion. However, the strait’s navigation safety faces serious challenges. Despite a previously signed 60-day temporary transit agreement between the U.S. and Iran, a drone attack on a Singapore-flagged cargo vessel on Thursday heightened tensions again, prompting the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to suspend merchant vessel evacuation operations in the Persian Gulf. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is now aggressively enforcing its designated route control, plunging the waterway’s geopolitical situation back into high uncertainty.

Safe-haven assets also failed to attract capital. Spot gold touched below $4,000 for three consecutive days, and is still hovering around $4,000. Silver has also been below $60 for three straight days, retreating more than 50% from its yearly high. OCBC and trader Guy Adami both warn of short-term downside risks in a high interest rate environment, but Invesco believes gold has largely priced in the Fed’s tightening risk.

U.S. Stock Market

The Nasdaq fell for four straight days, down 0.46%, the S&P 500 closed nearly flat, and the Dow edged up 0.14%. Meanwhile, the SOX Semiconductor Index surged 3.6%. Goldman Sachs’ trading desk noted that the market is now showing typical “rotation trade” characteristics, with capital flowing from mega-cap tech stocks to semiconductor and memory chip companies. The market previously focused on explosive AI demand growth, but the spotlight has now shifted to “who can actually make money.”

The biggest winner was Micron Technology, surging as much as 19% intraday after strong earnings, with its market cap briefly surpassing Meta. Memory-related stocks broadly rallied : SanDisk soared 21%, Applied Materials gained over 13%, Western Digital rose 4.9%. ** The market is beginning to realize that AI supply chain profits are concentrating in upstream storage, HBM, and optical communications, while cloud providers face margin erosion risks.**

On the flip side, Apple announced a historic chip strategy shift, skipping its high-end M6 Pro/Max line and pivoting to the AI-centric M7 architecture. The base M6 chip’s memory bandwidth increased to 200GB/s, and GPU cores rose to 12. The company announced across-the-board price hikes for Mac, iPad, and Vision Pro, with some products rising by $300. CEO Tim Cook blamed the price increases on rising upstream memory costs, and “Macflation” officially became a new Wall Street term. Apple shares tumbled 6.1%, leading losses among the “Magnificent Seven,” while Microsoft and Amazon also fell more than 3%, dragging on the Nasdaq. At the same time, Microsoft, due to component shortages, announced it will raise the Xbox Series S price by $100 to $150 starting August 1, and the Series X starting price will rise to $750.

SpaceX’s stock pulled back from $209 to $153 after listing. OpenAI, due to market turmoil and U.S. government requirements to release GPT 5.6 in phases, plans to postpone its IPO to 2027 in order to maintain a $1 trillion valuation. Space stocks SPCE, RDW, LUNR, MNTS and others have fallen over 50% since June, RKLB has dropped 44%, and ETFs UFO and SPCI have plunged 30% and 47% respectively. Fabien Yip commented that Apple’s inability to absorb cost increases and OpenAI’s delayed IPO both point to the same issue: the market is starting to question whether AI investments truly offer unlimited returns.

Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin has moved from “testing $60,000” to “reclaiming $60,000.” In the early hours, the price briefly fell below $59,000, touching a low of $58,188, and is currently hovering around $60,000, hitting fresh multi-day lows. Market sentiment has turned extremely cautious, with capital outflows becoming the biggest source of pressure. U.S. spot ETFs saw six consecutive weeks of net outflows during this correction, totaling $6 billion.

The market is facing the quarter’s largest options expiry event (notional value around $10.6 billion). Analyst Murphy noted that the market has now entered short gamma territory. If the price falls further to $55,000–$58,000, market makers’ hedging mechanisms will shift from “dampening volatility” to “amplifying volatility.” Standard Chartered reiterated its $100,000 target and sees $59,000 as a cycle bottom. Multiple analysts see support at $55,000–$56,000 and resistance at $62,000–$65,000.

It is worth noting that some traders are wary of a weekend pump that lures longs up to $62,000, followed by a sell-off on Monday, while others predict a spike to $62,500 and then a potential drop to $50,000: Historical data shows Bitcoin often sees a technical bounce over the weekend, but tends to fall again on Monday under the influence of macro data and institutional repositioning. The market has repeatedly confirmed this rhythm in the current cycle, and traders should beware of weekend low-level pumps followed by Monday selling pressure.

Today’s Highlights:

• Binance Wallet exclusive TGE 47th round lists Cap (CAP)
• BSTR under Adam Back’s umbrella sets SPAC merger listing vote for June 26
• Bitmine says it meets Russell 1000 index inclusion criteria, expected to take effect June 26
• Binance Futures will list USDT-margined and coin-margined next-quarter 1225 delivery contracts on June 26
• Base will activate the Beryl hard fork upgrade on mainnet on June 26, introducing the B20 native token standard
• Binance will support planned upgrade for stock trading services on June 27
• Plasma (XPL) will unlock approximately 88.89 million tokens on June 26, worth about $10.4 million
• Humanity (H) will unlock approximately 266 million tokens on June 26, worth about $68.56 million
• Sahara AI (SAHARA) will unlock 1.025 billion tokens on June 27, worth about $35.58 million
• Upbit 24h volume rankings: BTC, XRP, SLX, ETH, WLD
• Bitcoin spot ETF: -$696 million, net outflows for six consecutive days
• Ethereum spot ETF: -$81.8651 million, net outflows for six consecutive days

Top gainers among the top 100 coins by market cap today: BEAT up 30.4%, M up 27.5%, JTO up 14.8%, BDX up 6%, LAB up 5.5%.

Asia-Pacific Markets

Asia-Pacific stock markets plunged across the board on Friday, with South Korea and Japan leading the decline. Affected by the global tech stock retreat and domestic tightening expectations, the Nikkei 225 Index tumbled 4.15% in a single day. Tokyo’s June core CPI rebounded to 1.6% for the first time in eight months, while the core indicator excluding fresh food and energy rose to 1.9%. Bank of Japan Governor Ueda and hawkish board member Naoki Tamura indicated that “rate hikes would occur once every few months,” and Bloomberg’s Taro Kimura confirmed that the inflation logic has already shifted to being driven by domestic demand. On individual stocks, SoftBank Group plummeted over 13% on rumors of OpenAI delaying its IPO, becoming the biggest drag on the Nikkei. Meanwhile, core Apple supply chain names such as TDK (-8.52%) and Murata Manufacturing (-9%) suffered cliff-like sell-offs amid demand concerns triggered by Apple’s price hikes.

Meanwhile, the South Korean stock market saw an extreme capital divergence, with foreign capital fleeing and retail leverage sparking a stampede. The KOSPI index plunged more than 5.8% on Friday. Foreign investors sold off 2.7 trillion won (approx. $170 million) in early trading, Samsung Electronics fell 5.3%, and SK Hynix dropped 8.36%. Retail investors have net bought $80 billion this year to counter foreign selling, and Samsung unveiled a 1,000 trillion won (approx. $650 billion) decade-long blueprint for cutting-edge industry investment. JPMorgan noted that leveraged ETFs totaling $50 billion have made the Korean stock market highly volatile, but still maintains a bullish target of 15,000 points.

A-shares and Hong Kong stocks could not escape the overall decline in Asia-Pacific markets, as month-end position adjustment pressure led to indiscriminate selling.

• On the A-share side, the ChiNext index tumbled over 4%, the STAR 50 index dropped over 4%, the Shenzhen Component Index fell 3.44%, and the Shanghai Composite Index declined 2.26%.
• On the Hong Kong side, the Hang Seng Index fell over 1.9%, and the Hang Seng Tech Index dropped more than 3%. Julia Hermann from New York Life and Bloomberg strategist Mark Cranfield pointed out that capital expenditure concerns for hyperscale cloud companies exacerbated the urgency of month-end reduction. Affected by Apple hardware price increases, Cowell e Holdings dropped nearly 8%, Luxshare Precision plummeted nearly 9%, and Sunny Optical fell over 20% in two days.