1. Some profit taking before the payroll numbers.

The S&P 500 ended lower on Thursday, with Intel and other chip stocks retreating after a recent rally, while uncertainty around U.S.-Iran peace talks weighed on the wider market.
U.S.-listed shares of Arm Holdings tumbled as worries about the company's ability to secure sufficient supplies for its new AI chip overshadowed a strong earnings forecast.
"You can have a string of days like this, and that's not going to take away from the fact that this has been a rip-roaring quarter of recovery, driven by fundamentals," said Mike Dickson, head of portfolio management at Horizon Investments in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Nvidia and Microsoft both climbed, underscoring investor confidence in Wall Street's heavyweight AI companies.

2. No stopping AI frenzy in Asia.

Japan's Nikkei returned from holiday and jumped onto the scorching AI rally, joining South Korea and Taiwan equities at record peaks.
The Nikkei is now up 25% this year but lags Seoul's KOSPI's eye-watering 75% surge in 2026, the world's best-performing major stock market which held that crown last year too. Taiwan stocks have risen 45% this year.
In contrast, the tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 11% in 2026 while the S&P 500 is up nearly 8%. In some ways, Asia is where the AI boom is showing up this year.
Just this week Samsung Electronics joined Taiwan's TSMC at the trillion-dollar club. SK Hynix is not far off.

3. We are moving from AI that answers questions to AI that takes action.

AI is no longer just about making models bigger. It is now about building AI systems that operate continuously, making them smarter, more independent, and capable of operating at scale.
Today's AI computing is limited less by raw compute (GPU), and more by memory bandwidth, data movement, interconnect latency, and system coordination.
Why does memory matter more in agentic AI?
Agentic AI doesn’t just do. It remembers, reasons, and improves. In agentic AI systems, memory is not about remembering a chat, but it is the mechanism that makes behavior
consistent, enforceable, and economically scalable.
The fundamental solution is persistent memory and sophistication of memory systems will define the competitiveness of AI agents.

Below: just 3 companies dominate the memory production. Nomura’s analysis is explicit: “meaningful supply increases will not occur until 2028 at the earliest.”

4. Asia accounts for almost 50% of the world’s industrial sector’s value added.

Asia is a key node in the AI supply chain as well as for the energy transition and defense sectors. Asia is also a producer of intermediate products as well as capital goods
that are needed to manufacture exports of key AI hardware, AI infrastructure, energy-transition inputs, and defense exports. Finally, its spending on AI and AIrelated, energy and energy transition-related, and defense is also rising.

In other words, Asia’s industrial cycle will benefit from increased global capex as well as be a beneficiary of its own increased capex.

5. Gold is expensive but the medium-term setup remains compelling.

The gold price may be reflecting higher risk: The US fiscal position is deteriorating, the “de-dollarisation” is accelerating among the world's largest reserve managers and there are questions over Fed independence.
So, gold is an expensive insurance, but the premium may be rational if US government bonds are no longer viewed as reliable portfolio protection.
The bull move to $4600/5600 was driven by Asian physical demand, emerging-market central banks (China) and momentum.
The next catalyst could be stagflation. The Middle East conflict points to higher inflation and lower growth, historically one of gold’s best environments. Investors have not yet clearly positioned for that trade.
To put scale on this: Global pension and insurance assets total approximately US$80 trillion. Moving the average gold allocation from 2% to 3% would require roughly 5,000 tonnes of incremental demand against an annual market of approximately 4,500 tonnes – more than a full year of total global gold supply, just to fund a 1ppt reallocation.

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