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Equities started the week with a familiar combination: cooler inflation and strong earnings. June CPI slowed to 3.5% year over year from 4.2% in May, while producer prices declined 0.3% for the month. Strong bank results added to the optimism, helping the S&P 500 $SPY ( ▼ 0.32% ) and the Nasdaq $QQQ ( ▼ 0.34% ) advance Tuesday and Wednesday with the Russell 2000 $IWM ( ▲ 0.34% ) not far behind.

The tone changed Thursday as another semiconductor selloff put pressure on QQQ. Selling broadened Friday, leaving all three major indexes lower and pushing the semiconductor index to its steepest weekly decline in more than a year. Even encouraging results from $TSM ( ▲ 0.86% ) and $ASML ( ▲ 3.8% ) were not enough to calm concerns about AI valuations, elevated spending expectations, and growing competition from China.

Oil remained another complication. Continued U.S.-Iran tensions pushed WTI crude into the mid $80s, while the 10-year Treasury yield hovered around 4.6%. Together, they limited the market’s enthusiasm over cooling inflation. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s semiannual testimony also reinforced that inflation remains above target, tempering hopes for near-term rate cuts.

Monday’s early semiconductor rebound faded into the close. SPY finished the session down 0.2%, QQQ was nearly flat, and IWM lost 0.6%. Across the full Tuesday-through-Monday window, SPY declined about 0.9%, QQQ fell 2.2%, and IWM slipped 0.4%.

This week’s economic calendar is lighter, but peak earnings season puts the focus on Alphabet, Tesla, Intel, and IBM. Flash manufacturing and services PMIs arrive Friday, followed by durable goods orders Monday. Oil headlines remain the wildcard.

Key market moves this past week:

Not an exhaustive list — just a few I’m watching closely for potential market impact.

Intel ran nearly 480% off its 52-week low before peaking above $140 in late June. It has since fallen more than 30%, closing Monday at $97.06. That kind of round trip in a few weeks tends to mean one of two things: the story got ahead of itself, or the market is offering a discount on a name it has not finished believing in.

The selloff was not entirely about Intel. It began as concerns grew around AI chip valuations, then deepened as reports suggested Intel’s 18A manufacturing node, its most advanced process and the first developed and manufactured entirely in the United States, may not become profitable until late 2026 or 2027.

The underlying business didn’t change overnight. What changed was how much patience the market was willing to extend to a timeline that may have slipped.

Q2 earnings land Thursday after the close, and options are pricing a roughly 12% to 15% move. That represents a wide range of outcomes for one print.

Analysts are also split in a way I do not see often. HSBC has a $200 target built partly on server CPU growth and the formal inclusion of Intel Foundry in his valuation model. JPMorgan has called the broader semiconductor selloff a buying opportunity. Other analysts remain much more cautious about how much of Intel’s turnaround is already reflected in the stock.

With such a large expected move, I’m not trying to guess which camp is right before the print. I’ll wait until Friday for any trade setup.

A close back above $98.33, the June 5 swing low, followed by additional strength would suggest the market is treating this as a sector-wide overreaction to an Intel-specific delay. A break below $90, especially on heavy volume, would suggest the 18A timeline matters more than the bulls want to admit. With little obvious support between there and the price gap around $68, things could get interesting quickly.

Double-digit expected moves don’t leave much room for being wrong. I’d rather watch Thursday’s earnings reaction than predict it.

Over the weekend, we had a small get-together with a few families for a street festival in our neighborhood. The kids played, drinks were had, and conversations were shared. One conversation was particularly interesting to me because it related to what I do day to day.

A few people were talking about AI and whether or not adoption was broad and significant at their respective companies. Both work at companies where technology is heavily leveraged. Both were wondering whether they would fall behind while they were out because their colleagues were getting better at using LLMs.

It was a reasonable concern. AI tools are changing quickly, and a few months can feel like a long time when everyone else is still working, experimenting, and learning.

While it's likely that adoption is being pushed broadly, the possibility of falling behind was not the part I kept thinking about.

What stuck with me was how easily standing still can get confused with losing ground.

In trading, being flat means having no position. No exposure. No active bet.

It doesn't mean I’m losing money. It doesn't mean my thesis was wrong. It doesn't even mean I missed an opportunity. It simply means I wasn’t participating.

That distinction matters because I actively have to reorient my brain when certain situations arise. When a stock runs without me, staying flat can feel like a loss even though nothing was taken from my account. I compare my result with the best outcome I can imagine and mark the difference against what I actually did: nothing.

But an unrealized alternative is not an actual loss.

I have to practice this outside trading too.

I’ve been building HOA Basecamp, and at the moment, it has exactly one user: me. Meanwhile, every week brings another story about someone launching an AI product, growing it to thousands of users, and apparently finding time to post a 17-part thread explaining how easy it was.

Technically, I’m flat. Maybe slightly down because of all the effort I’m putting into it. But emotionally, it can feel like I’m down 40%.

Those are not the same thing.

Any forced pause can create that feeling. An extended leave of absence. An injury. A sabbatical. A slow season in a business. Time away does not only create concern about what we are missing. It creates a more uncomfortable thought: I’m standing still while everyone else is compounding.

Sometimes they are. Skills improve. Tools change. Relationships develop. The world does not pause because one person stepped away.

But that still does not make the absence itself a loss.

To me, the bigger risk begins at re-entry. And as you probably know by now, being intentional about it is always a core focus of mine.

The real risk was never being flat. It’s forgetting how to re-enter. It’s getting back to the desk and assuming the board looks the same as when you left instead of taking the time to check what changed. Flat traders don’t get hurt by being flat. They get hurt by jumping back in without looking first.

So what does looking first actually mean?

When I return to a chart after being away, the accumulated noise can create a false sense of urgency. I see all the candles I missed, read every headline at once, and feel pressure to act before I’ve rebuilt the necessary context.

But the useful first step is much less exciting: check the actual levels.

Where is price now? Are there new swing points or price gaps? What changed in the company or the market regime? Is the setup I remember still there, or am I reacting to everything that happened between then and now?

The same applies outside trading.

Before assuming I’m months behind on AI, I can look at the facts. Which tools changed? Which ones are my colleagues actually using? What can I learn in a focused afternoon?

A vague fear of being behind often becomes much smaller once it is translated into a specific gap.

The second check is whether the old playbook still makes sense.

If I return to a trade, I can’t assume the original thesis remains valid just because it was valid when I left. I have to confirm the reasoning again.

Old routines deserve the same scrutiny. Someone returning from leave might resume every meeting, report, and workflow exactly as before. But the time away may have revealed that some of them became necessary. Maybe the team stopped producing a report and nobody missed it. Maybe a recurring meeting disappeared and decisions still got made.

Absence can expose what busy work was hiding.

The discipline is not about keeping up with every change while you’re away. It’s taking stock of what changed before jumping back in.

The way I see it, being away is not the loss. Jumping back in without looking is.

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Hitting the Bid content is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The information contained is not, nor is it intended to be, trading or investment advice or a recommendation of any security, futures contract, digital asset or alike. I may hold a position in the trading vehicles discussed. Trading and investing contains risk. All investors should evaluate their own risk tolerance, financial situation, and investment duration before entering any trade or investment.