Tech Rout Overshadows Solid Retail Sales as Dollar Climbs
Chips got crushed, gold broke $4,000, and the dollar kept grinding higher despite on-target retail data.
Thursday's session had a split personality. Retail sales came in exactly at the +0.2% forecast, jobless claims printed a surprisingly tight 208K against a 217K estimate, and United Airlines talked up a healthy affluent consumer. On paper, that's a green light. Markets didn't care — tech dragged everything into the red.
Chipmakers took the hardest hit. Micron shed nearly 6% to its lowest level since late May, while Sandisk cratered more than 12%. Google got its own gut punch after a report surfaced that its next Gemini model missed internal targets. The Nasdaq closed down 1.5%, though breadth wasn't a disaster — more S&P 500 names ended up than down, and bank stocks actually looked healthy. A late-session bounce off the lows softened the headline damage.
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The dollar ran the FX table. USD/JPY pushed higher again, erasing most of the relief bounce the yen got from this week's CPI print. Fed speakers Logan and Schmid kept the hawkish tone alive — Logan flagged AI investment as a real near-term inflation driver — but both are known hawks, so don't read too much into it as a policy signal.
Gold broke down hard, dropping $83 to $3,976 after $4,000 gave way and sellers piled on. Bulls need the dollar to soften and geopolitical tensions to ease — neither is happening. Vague reports of strikes on Iranian infrastructure, including a bridge in Bandar Khamir, did nothing to reverse the slide. Philly Fed for July did surprise big at +41.4 versus a +13.0 estimate, but that optimism never translated into broad buying pressure.
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