Monopoly Money
Market Report for Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Monopoly Money
AI stocks soared, the Fed hedged, and the market took a well-earned breather after laughing off last weekend’s $100 oil prophecy. Nvidia hit a new high. Powell reminded Washington that tariffs raise prices. One of those surprised investors.
Level Change 6/25/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
-0.3 Dow
+0.3 Nasdaq
+0.2 Nasdaq 100
-0.0 S&P 500
-0.8 S&P 400
-1.0 S&P 600
The day belonged to tech, especially its AI high priests: Nvidia in the pulpit, Super Micro swinging incense.
Nvidia (NVDA +4.3%) notched another all-time high after Loop Capital raised its price target to $250, enough to make it a $6.1T company. In today’s currency, that’s one Blackwell chip for every 40 adults on Earth, which feels about right for managing them. Super Micro Computer (SMCI +8.8%) went even bigger, offering Wall Street its favorite pairing: server racks and exponential adjectives.
By Loop’s reckoning, Nvidia holds a monopoly on essential AI hardware, and the AI boom is—you guessed it—just getting started. Never mind last year’s “just getting started,” or the year before that. The line keeps landing because a new day keeps dawning on the server farms.
Spending on AI accelerators could climb at a pace so steep it needs pitons and a rope team, to $2T by 2028, making CPUs look like floppy disks and convincing governments to build data centers instead of bridges. GPU share of compute could swell from 15% to 50%, turning the central processing unit into the not-so-central one.
The rest of the market waited in the green room for a call that never came.
Small- and mid-cap stocks napped shoulder to shoulder, seeing little AI in their near future. Maybe some automated pink slips in HR. The equal-weight S&P lagged its cap-weighted cousin by 70 basis points, which is just another way of saying Nvidia now outweighs 229 other companies combined.
On the macro front, Fed Chair Jerome Powell wrapped day two of testimony by confirming what everyone’s been yelling since February: tariffs are inflationary.
“There isn’t a lot of modern learning here,” he deadpanned, as if describing someone else’s central bank. “The tariffs during President Trump’s first term were one-sixth of the size they are now.”
At least he hinted that future trade deals might open the door to rate cuts. That depends on data and—in this administration’s case—politics. A certain central figure likes his rates like he likes his taxes: low, preferably invisible.
And that was the day: megatech marched, Powell testified, and the rest of the market curled up with a blanket and waited for someone to tweet something.
— Jason Kelly