🔹 Stocks at Records, Sentiment at Lows.

Good afternoon,

Wall Street closed last week throwing confetti. The University of Michigan's consumer survey closed it scraping the floor at the lowest sentiment reading on record. Somewhere between those two moods sits the actual economy, and this week we will get a much better look at which one is closer to the truth.

Intel's blowout quarter, four of the Magnificent Seven on deck, an FOMC meeting, and oil back above $107 — all in five trading days. For long-term savers, the noise is loud but the question is quiet: how much of this rally is built on earnings, and how much on hope?

The Pulse

Markets

• The S&P 500 is up nearly 10% since the end of March, on pace for its best monthly advance since late 2020.
• The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose 4.32% Friday, extending its winning streak to 18 sessions.
• Two-year Treasury yields fell as the DOJ closed its Fed probe, clearing the path for Kevin Warsh's confirmation as the next Fed chair.
• Brent crude climbed 2.2% to $107.64 early Monday after Iran's Revolutionary Guard reportedly boarded two cargo ships near the Strait of Hormuz.

The setup is unusual. Stocks are pricing in a friendlier Fed and durable AI earnings, while oil and consumer sentiment are flashing the opposite signal. With four of the Magnificent Seven reporting this week and the FOMC meeting on Wednesday, this stretch is likely to set the tone for the rest of the spring.

Earnings

• Intel was the headline. The chipmaker crushed expectations on both earnings and revenue, sending shares up 23.6% on Friday — its best day since October 1987. The rally pulled AMD up roughly 14% and pushed Nvidia back above a $5 trillion market cap.
• Tesla edged past earnings estimates but missed on revenue; the bright spots were FSD subscriptions and a near doubling of paid Robotaxi miles.
• Procter & Gamble beat on both lines, with all 10 product categories posting organic sales growth.
• ServiceNow lifted its 2026 AI revenue forecast by roughly half, but shares still slid sharply after-hours as the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative reasserted itself.
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Earnings season is delivering. S&P 500 companies are tracking 12.6% year-over-year profit growth, the sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit gains.

This week's lineup:

• Today: Verizon, Domino's
• Tuesday: Visa, Spotify, Coca-Cola, Ford, Hilton
• Wednesday: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Qualcomm, Chipotle 
• Thursday: Apple, Reddit, Mastercard, Sandisk
• Friday: ExxonMobil, Chevron

Gold & Silver Moves

Gold 

Spot gold finished Friday near $4,700 an ounce, holding modestly higher on the day after touching a fresh 10-day low below $4,660 earlier in the session, but down roughly 3% on the week.

The pullback has a clear cause. Energy prices are still elevated, which keeps near-term inflation expectations sticky, which in turn keeps real yields and the dollar firmer than gold bulls would like. Gold is now down about 10% from its early-2026 peak.

The longer story has not changed. Central bank buying remains heavy, J.P. Morgan still sees gold averaging around $5,055 in the fourth quarter, and the metal's role as a debasement hedge is intact. The recent weakness looks more like a crowded trade exhaling than a regime shift.

Speaking of debasement hedges and the legal levers governments hold over them, one piece of research crossing my desk this week deserves a flag.

Silver traded at $74.82 an ounce Friday, down 0.82% on the day but still up 5.26% year to date.

Silver is doing two jobs at once. It tracks gold as a monetary hedge, and it answers to industrial demand from solar, EVs, and AI infrastructure. That dual identity is why silver has fallen further than gold during this risk-off stretch, and also why it tends to lead on the way back up.

The Gold / Silver ratio sits at roughly 62.10, a touch lower than late last week. That is a meaningful place to be standing.

Historically, the modern ratio has oscillated between 50 and 80. It hit nearly 100 during the 2020 stress, climbed even higher in earlier shocks, and fell to about 20 during the 1980 metals peak. By that yardstick, today's reading is squarely in the neutral zone, but well off the elevated levels of a few years ago. Quietly, the recent drift lower in the ratio is silver outperforming gold on the margins, even on a down day for both metals.

What it suggests, taken in pieces:

• Relative valuation: Silver has done much of its catching up. It is no longer cheap against gold the way it was at 90+, but it is not richly priced either.
• Risk sentiment: A stable low-60s ratio reflects a market that is hedged but not panicked. When fear spikes, this number usually climbs.
• Inflation expectations: Gold's pullback alongside high oil tells you the market sees current inflation as a near-term issue, not an open-ended one.
• Industrial vs monetary demand: The Silver Institute's projection of a sixth straight year of global supply deficit, combined with structural AI and solar demand, gives silver an industrial floor that gold does not have.

The takeaway: For investors thinking in decades rather than days, both metals continue to do the job they are bought for, which is preserving purchasing power when the rest of the portfolio is moving fast in either direction.

The Deal Room

M&A / Investments

• Alphabet committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic, with $10 billion now at a $350 billion valuation and another $30 billion tied to performance milestones.
• Intertek rejected EQT's revised £54-per-share offer, an £8.3 billion / $11.2 billion bid, calling it a fundamental undervaluation.
• iHeartMedia is reportedly in early merger talks with Sirius XM, a deal that would combine 860+ broadcast stations with SiriusXM's podcast network.

IPO / Listings

• X-energy raised about $1.02 billion at $23 a share, the largest nuclear public offering on record, and closed up 27% at $29.20 on its first day.
• The $0.72 Pre-IPO Opportunity ^partner
• Lincoln International filed for a US IPO, a rare investment-bank flotation, after reporting 2025 net income of $214.1 million on $783.8 million in revenue.

Speaking of companies eyeing the public market, one private name with a reserved NASDAQ ticker has been circulating among investors lately.

Retirement Lens

Today's data tells a familiar story for this cycle. The economy is resilient, earnings are growing, and equity markets are near record highs. But underneath, the risks that matter most to retirement portfolios remain unresolved. Oil is still elevated. Inflation is sticky. The Fed leadership is in transition. And the largest energy supply shock in history has not been unwound.

Here is the number worth sitting with: the 2.8% Social Security COLA was set when inflation looked like it was cooling. Now CPI is running at 3.3%. That gap is real, and it is felt most by people living on fixed income. Add the 9.7% jump in Medicare Part B premiums, and the net benefit increase gets even thinner. It is a quiet erosion, the kind that does not make headlines but shapes how a retirement actually feels.

None of this requires action. It requires attention. Historically, long-term portfolios have benefited from consistent allocation and diversification, especially in periods that feel uncertain. Strength in earnings is real. So is the inflation risk. Both can be true at the same time.

And in times like these, it is worth knowing exactly where your savings sit and how well they are protected.

Headline Hunt

• Sen. Thom Tillis dropped his block on Kevin Warsh after DOJ ended its Powell probe, putting confirmation within reach by May 15.
• The University of Michigan's final April consumer sentiment reading came in at 49.8, the lowest on record.
• US retail gasoline averaged $4.10 a gallon Sunday, up roughly 27% since the start of the Iran war.
• TSMC jumped 6% to a record on Monday, lifting an Asian tech gauge to an all-time high.
• Charles Schwab is tightening account-level rules as demand for tax-aware investing strategies among wealthier clients grows.
• Investors are returning to frontier markets after April's rebound, looking past the war-driven selloff.
• JPMorgan strategists raised their S&P 500 target as the AI rally regained momentum.