Youth Finance First
Tell me about the past two weeks.
22nd-31st July
Markets closed the week in the green, but it took a last-minute rescue from Big Tech earnings to get there — for most of the week, red was the dominant color.
Monday through Wednesday was a grind. The Fed held rates steady on Wednesday, but three officials dissented in favor of a hike, and that split rattled the bond market. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed toward 4.7%, its highest mark since January 2025, while the 30-year touched levels not seen since 2007, north of 5.2%. Higher yields make growth stocks less attractive on paper, and tech felt it — the Dow shed over 800 points on Fed day alone. Oil didn't help, climbing from the low $80s to the low $90s a barrel as tensions with Iran flared back up and the U.S. launched fresh strikes on Iranian targets.
Tariffs were the other overhang. A new round of duties — 10% to 12.5% on roughly 60 trading partners, including Canada, Mexico, the UK, the EU and China — kicked in last Friday, replacing the temporary blanket tariff that had just expired. The market's reaction was fairly muted compared to last year's "Liberation Day" shock, mostly because it was already priced in. The bigger worry is durability: this round is built on different legal footing than the one the Supreme Court struck down, so traders are starting to treat tariffs less like a negotiating tactic and more like a permanent fixture
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Tell me about the past two weeks.
22nd-31st July
Then Thursday hit, and the story flipped. Amazon posted AWS revenue of $42.2 billion, up 37% year-over-year — its fastest cloud growth since 2021 — and total company revenue crossed $200 billion in a single quarter for the first time ever. Its AI and custom-chip businesses each topped a $25 billion annualized run rate. The stock jumped as much as 13% on Friday and dragged the rest of the AI trade up with it. Chip stocks, which had just wrapped their worst stretch in years, caught a serious bid too — Micron, SanDisk, Intel and AMD all rallied hard, and South Korea's Kospi logged its biggest single-day gain in history after SK Hynix hit its daily limit up. Nvidia, meanwhile, stayed oddly calm through the whole swing, basically flat on the week while everyone around it swung wildly up and down.
Tech finished green for the week and is now up more than 16% year-to-date, leaning heavily on that Friday pop. Energy had its own choppy stretch — Chevron beat estimates on record production, but the sector swung with the oil headlines almost hour by hour. Materials were the weak link, sliding as tariff-driven input costs weighed on names like Huntsman, even with LyondellBasell managing to beat.
Tell me about the past two weeks.
22nd-31st July
The rough one: Apple. Records across the board — $109.4 billion in revenue, EPS of $2.02, both ahead of estimates — and the stock still got hit, falling as much as 9% on weak guidance and a Services miss, with memory-chip costs eating into the margin story.
The standout: Amazon, easily. A "prove it" quarter that actually proved it, and the market rewarded it accordingly.
Next week: all eyes on the bond market. Yields are sitting near multi-year highs, and Friday's jobs report (Aug 7) is the next real test — a soft print reopens the door to rate-cut hopes and could give tech room to keep running, while a hot one sends yields right back up and puts the AI trade back under pressure.