Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk, your mid-session read on the stories moving capital and conversation.
A UN-coordinated ship evacuation plan in the Strait of Hormuz is now on ice after a container vessel was struck near the coast of Oman. A US official has pointed the finger directly at Iran, and that's the kind of geopolitical friction that puts an immediate premium on oil and rattles shipping insurance markets globally. The Hormuz corridor handles roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne crude, so any escalation here carries real macro weight.
Shifting to semiconductors, Micron's blowout earnings quarter is reshaping how Wall Street thinks about memory pricing. The results didn't just beat estimates — they made the case that AI infrastructure demand is structurally repricing the entire memory segment. Analysts are now revisiting valuation frameworks across the chip space, and that conversation is pulling Nvidia back into focus, a stock that's up just four percent this year despite being the face of the AI trade.
And speaking of Nvidia, its relative underperformance against both the S&P five hundred and semiconductor peers has the Street asking a pointed question — is the world's most prominent AI chipmaker actually cheap right now? The argument gaining traction is that forward earnings multiples no longer reflect the scale of its competitive moat, and patient money may be starting to agree.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
