A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY

A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY.

Here's a full recap:

1. The Nasdaq $QQQ fell as much as 5.3% intraday, marking one of the sharpest intraday drawdowns we’ve seen in years. The last time we came close to that kind of move was just last Friday, and before that, you had to go back to April 2025. Goldman noted that today’s NDX intraday move was the largest in the last three years. However, buyers stepped in aggressively off the lows, and $QQQ finished down 1%. This is the second trading session within 3 days of historic intra-day drawdowns across tech.

2. President Trump today said Iran shot down a U.S. Apache helicopter while it was patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz, with two pilots involved and both reportedly safe and uninjured. He framed the incident as a direct attack on the United States and said the U.S. must respond, raising the risk of escalation in one of the world’s most important oil-shipping corridors.

3. China is preparing a roughly $295B, five-year plan to build a nationwide AI data center network, with much of the infrastructure expected to be operated by state-backed firms. Beijing is also aiming to source 80%+ of key technology domestically, leaning on local suppliers like Huawei, which could further limit opportunities for U.S. chipmakers like $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) and $AMD(AMD.US) in China’s AI infrastructure buildout.

4. The top 10 most active options today by contracts traded were $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) with 3.4M contracts, $Tesla(TSLA.US) with 2.7M contracts, $Apple(AAPL.US) with 1.7M contracts, $Micron Tech(MU.US) with 731K contracts, $Amazon(AMZN.US) with 721K contracts, $Microsoft(MSFT.US) with 716K contracts, $Intel(INTC.US) with 629K contracts, $Marvell Tech(MRVL.US) with 524K contracts, $Nokia Oyj(NOK.US) with 494K contracts, and $Palantir Tech(PLTR.US) with 493K contracts. Nvidia led options activity with more than 3.4M contracts traded, followed by Tesla at 2.7M and Apple at 1.7M.

5. Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, its first broadly available Mythos-class model and its most capable general-use Claude model to date. The company also introduced Claude Mythos 5, which runs on the same underlying model but offers fewer restrictions for trusted-access users. Anthropic said Mythos-class traffic will now be retained for 30 days to support safety monitoring.

6. U.S. tech dispersion is getting extreme. Over the past three months, the top 20% of tech stocks have beaten the bottom 20% by roughly 120 percentage points, the second-largest gap on record. The only higher reading came during the Dot-Com Bubble, when the spread peaked around 135 percentage points. This gap has quadrupled over the last year, widening even faster than the 1999–2000 surge. The strongest tech names are up about 110% over the last three months, close to February 2000 levels, while the weakest 20% are down roughly 10%.

7. Robinhood $Robinhood(HOOD.US) reported strong May 2026 monthly metrics, with growth across customers, assets, trading volumes, and interest-earning assets. Funded customers rose to 27.7M, up 110K M/M and 1.76M Y/Y. Total platform assets hit $377B, up 9% M/M and 48% Y/Y. On activity, equity notional volume was $315B, up 27% M/M and 75% Y/Y, while options contracts traded reached 231M, up 3% M/M and 29% Y/Y. Crypto notional volume was $12.2B, up 3% M/M and 4% Y/Y, and event contracts traded surged to 3.9B, up 22% M/M, showing continued momentum in Robinhood’s newer prediction/event contract business.

8. The Social Security retirement trust fund in the US is now projected to run out in 2032, just six years from now, according to the latest trustees report from the Social Security Administration. If Congress does not act before then, only about 78% of scheduled retirement benefits will be payable, meaning roughly one in every four dollars of promised benefits would effectively disappear. Social Security has never missed a payment in its history, but the funding timeline has not improved, putting more pressure on lawmakers to address the shortfall before 2032.

9. Baird reiterated an Outperform rating on $Palantir Tech(PLTR.US) Palantir with a $200 price target after attending AIPCon 10, saying investors still underappreciate several parts of the story. The firm highlighted Palantir’s expanding partner ecosystem, especially with Accenture, Deloitte, Bain, and Nvidia, which could broaden its reach across major enterprise and regulated-industry customers. Baird also pointed to AI Forward Deployed Engineers as a major productivity unlock, arguing they could help Palantir scale with limited headcount growth. The report emphasized that Palantir’s moat is more than just its codebase, citing nearly two decades of field experience, customer feedback loops, and deep deployment expertise. Baird also said Palantir’s outcome-focused approach is fundamentally different from AI labs and traditional consulting firms, and flagged AI-powered security as a growing opportunity.

10. SpaceX $Space Exploration Tech(SPCX.US) told investors it is targeting its first orbital AI compute demonstrations by late 2027, ahead of the “as early as 2028” timeline referenced in its IPO filing, per Reuters. Executives said the early deployments would be demonstrator systems designed to prove the concept before a broader commercial rollout. The first AI satellites are expected to use Nvidia $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) chips, with compute power comparable to an Nvidia GB300 rack. SpaceX has also requested approval to launch up to 1 million space-based data-center satellites. Its IPO priced at $135/share, targeting a $1.75T valuation, with trading expected to begin Friday on Nasdaq under $Space Exploration Tech(SPCX.US).

11. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC the company still plans to go public in 2028, regardless of how other major AI IPOs like Anthropic, OpenAI, or SpaceX perform in the market. He described SpaceX as a potential “leading indicator” for the coming wave of AI mega-IPOs, while also saying AI spending is starting to shift away from “mindless spending” and toward more cost-efficient models that can deliver the same results at lower prices.

12. In May, 43.6% of Americans said they were financially worse off than a year ago, the highest reading since January 2023. It was also the third straight monthly increase, marking the longest streak of worsening financial sentiment since 2022. For context, this measure peaked at 51.3% in June 2022, while before the pandemic it never topped 20% during the 2017–2019 period. Looking ahead, 36% of U.S. consumers expect to be financially worse off over the next year, the second-highest reading since October 2022 and roughly double the average seen from 2015 to 2019.

WALL STREET IS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.

Source: amit