Nasdaq · QQQ
$721.88
+1.31% pre-mkt
China's navy launched a long-range ballistic missile carrying a dummy warhead from a nuclear submarine into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone on Monday — only the second such test since a 2024 ICBM launch into the same waters. New Zealand said it was given hours' notice; Australia, Japan and New Zealand all lodged protests.12
An estimated 15–20 million people joined a 12-hour funeral procession Monday carrying the coffins of Ayatollah Khamenei and family members killed in February's opening strikes, en route to Mehrabad International Airport. Ceremonies continue through the week across Tehran, Qom, Mashhad, Najaf and Karbala, with burial set for Thursday, July 9, at the Imam Reza shrine.34
Heads of state from NATO's 32 members meet in Ankara July 7–8 — the alliance's 36th summit and Turkey's second time hosting. Trump arrives having already won spending pledges last year and now wants them enforced ("I just want loyalty," he said); allies are set to announce a $75B Ukraine aid package easing pressure on Washington to shoulder it alone. Turkey is separately pushing for F-110 engine approval and reinstatement to the F-35 program.56
Trump has reportedly told Netanyahu to stop Israel's ongoing strikes in Lebanon, with a White House visit expected in coming days amid the friction. Separately, a pastor detained in China landed in Los Angeles after Trump raised the case directly with Xi Jinping — Beijing called the release a goodwill gesture around the July 4 holiday.7
Super Typhoon Bavi brought intense winds and flood risk to Guam and the remote Northern Mariana Islands over the weekend, forcing residents of the US Pacific territories to shelter in place.8
OpenAI unveiled three new GPT-5.6 models — Sol, Terra and Luna — but is complying with a US government request to restrict initial access to roughly 20 vetted partner organizations rather than a public launch. General availability is expected by mid-July. The pattern now repeats across labs: ship the model, let the government gate the rollout.910
Alongside Claude Science — a research workbench with 60+ preconfigured tools — Anthropic announced an internal drug-discovery program targeting diseases the commercial pipeline neglects. It's a new front for a company whose last week was mostly about gigawatts and government stakes; this one is about what the compute is actually for.11
Z.ai's GLM-5.2 (MIT license, released mid-June) now leads open-weight coding models at 62.1% on SWE-bench Pro, with a 1M-token context window, fully self-hostable or available via API at $1.40/$4.40 per million tokens — a reminder that the "compute moat" story has a counter-narrative in cheap, capable open weights.12
Qualcomm confirmed a deal to acquire AI infrastructure software firm Modular for close to $4 billion, the latest large-cap chip name buying its way into AI tooling rather than building it from scratch.13
onsemi announced plans to acquire Synaptics, aiming to combine sensing and intelligence for next-generation "physical AI" — the industrial/robotics end of the AI capex story, distinct from the datacenter buildout dominating headlines.13
NextEra Energy's proposed $67 billion combination with Dominion Energy would create the largest regulated utility in the US — explicitly framed around a "platform for rising power demand," i.e., the AI-datacenter electricity story now showing up in utility M&A.14
The chip-led sell-off that dragged QQQ to $712.60 Thursday is unwinding into Monday's open — QQQ pre-market +1.31%, Nasdaq futures (NQU6) up about 1.2% off the session open, gamma sitting positive (dealer pin near $725 max pain, VIX a sleepy 15.8) which argues for a mean-reverting, range-bound day rather than a trend day. Asia was split — Nikkei firm (+0.59%) while Kospi and the ASX gave back ground, likely lagging the same chip unwind a session late. WTI stays glued to the $68–69 band despite the funeral-week backdrop, and the 2Y/10Y prints are still Wednesday's (7/1) — no Treasury data over the holiday break. Gap notes: DXY not entitled on this data plan; Europe's Monday cash open not yet reflected, Friday's 52-week-high close carried forward and labeled.15
New: the procession itself happened Monday, drawing an estimated 15–20 million — bigger and more visible than Sunday's edition anticipated. What hasn't changed: crude remains contained at $68.67, and the burial is still Thursday (7/9) in Mashhad. Open question carried: does crude reprice as the funeral peaks, or does it stay boring all the way through Thursday?
Fully carried — still no fresh Treasury print since 7/1 (2Y 4.17%, 10Y 4.48%); markets still price close to zero 2026 cuts. New context: today's chip bounce is being read as reassurance, not a growth-scare escalation, so the "bad-data-kills-hikes" framing holds for one more day. Next real test: July CPI, then FOMC July 28–29.
New: the story keeps widening past compute deals into actual product — GPT-5.6's gated rollout, Anthropic's Claude Science drug-discovery push, GLM-5.2's open-weight benchmark lead, and now utility/semi M&A (NextEra-Dominion, onsemi-Synaptics) explicitly framed around AI power demand. What started as a compute-deal story is now touching drug discovery, utilities and open-source competition simultaneously.
Risk tone opens constructive: chips are bouncing, VIX sits at a sleepy 15.8, and dealer gamma is positive — the cockpit's "grind-up, pinned" read (max pain $716, walls $700–$725) argues for a contained, orderly session rather than a trend day. The transmission channel from the world page into the tape is still the front end: as long as soft data reads as "no hike," not "no growth," dips get bought. The exogenous risk sits two days out — Thursday's Mashhad burial as the funeral peaks — but with WTI glued to $68–69 there's no reason to price it in yet. NATO's Ankara summit (starts tomorrow) is a geopolitical headline risk more than a market one, unless Trump's "loyalty" push produces a genuine rift. Net: no reason to fight the bounce today, but keep half an eye on Hormuz headlines into midweek.
NASA's aging Swift Observatory — about to lose its fight with atmospheric drag — got a lifeline Friday: LINK, a robotic servicing satellite built by Katalyst Space, launched on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket and will spend the coming months rendezvousing with, grappling, and slowly boosting Swift's orbit so it doesn't burn up on reentry later this year. First-of-its-kind commercial satellite rescue, on a NASA telescope that's been hunting gamma-ray bursts since 2004.16
A roughly 2,200-pound elephant seal is a few days into his annual visit to Tasmania, and — as always — he does not care whose property he's currently occupying. Locals are documenting the damage with the weary affection of people who know this happens every year and there is nothing to be done about it.17