Markets Play Dead Fish
Market Report for Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Markets Play Dead Fish
Stocks perfected their dead-fish routine Wednesday, flopping aimlessly before settling into a glassy-eyed stare. Without a dominant headline—just wars, rates, and megatech melodrama—Wall Street did what it does best: very little.
Level Change 6/18/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
-0.1 Dow
+0.1 Nasdaq
+0.0 Nasdaq 100
-0.0 S&P 500
+0.3 S&P 400
+0.4 S&P 600
The main show remains the Middle East, where Israel’s preemptive strike on Iranian nuclear infrastructure set off alarms, but not oil shocks. WTI rose a sleepy 0.3%, more shrug than spike. Energy-conscious China condemned Israel’s action, not out of principle, of course, but because it might mess with the fuel bill. Translation: let’s all cool it; Beijing has barrels to fill.
Bigger picture: Removing the Iranian regime and its terror tentacles could work wonders on regional stability.
Ask any Iranian citizen and you’re sure to hear eagerness for change, to say nothing of Israeli citizens. This latest flare-up might look like a crisis, but could be the kind that clears the air. A little short-term pain for a lot of long-term gain. And let’s not forget: Iran accounts for just 3% of global oil production. Not exactly irreplaceable—and not exactly at risk of needing replacement.
As for President Trump’s follow-up to Tuesday’s saber-rattling, it offered no new intel. Markets remained glued to the wait-and-see channel.
Trade news sounded off like a dull cymbal. The G7 delivered no deal momentum, and the White House has returned to framing tariffs as a budget-friendly revenue strategy. The IRS may want a word. For now, the tariff-as-tax experiment continues.
At the Fed, policy stayed on hold, with dot plots dotting all the right notes for a stand-pat summer and two rate cuts this fall.
Chair Powell acknowledged tariff fog and brushed aside inflation fears, even as 2026 and 2027 rate projections drifted hawkish. But when no one knows what happens in the next two days, forecasts for the next two years feel like stand-up comedy. Gone from the statement: concerns about unemployment. Added: vibes-based uncertainty, now apparently lower, though still elevated. Most reassuring.
In megatech intrigue, Meta’s (META -0.2%) Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly dangling $100M signing bonuses at OpenAI employees like golden fishing lures. OpenAI boss Sam Altman, exuding the calm of a man holding the AGI ace, said no one’s bitten. He also lobbed a grenade at Meta’s track record, saying on the Uncapped podcast: “I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation,” the verbal equivalent of tweaking Zuck’s nose and walking away.
On the other coast, Marvell (MRVL +7.1%) radiated AI ambition at its Custom AI Investor Day. No longer just a chip shop, it now wants to be the Intel Inside of AI infrastructure. With custom computing and interconnect revenue up 30% and 37% respectively, the future looks like cloud factories churning out superintelligence one XPU at a time.
The company bumped its 2028 data center total addressable market (TAM) forecast to $94B from last year’s $75B. It’s betting big that general-purpose GPUs are the MySpace of machine learning. If your bumper’s big enough, here’s your new sticker: Highly Customized System-Level Collaboration.
And that was the day: Mideast tension, Fed indecision, tariff revisionism, and $100M job offers for people whose names don’t even autocomplete.
— Jason Kelly