U.S. stocks bounced back on Monday morning, with chip and tech shares leading the recovery after Friday’s bruising sell-off. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.3%, the S&P 500 gained roughly 1% and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.6% as buyers moved back into the market.
The rebound matters because Friday had done real damage: the Nasdaq fell 4%, and the S&P 500 snapped its nine-week winning streak. On Monday, Micron climbed 9% at the opening bell and Nvidia added 2%, a sign that investors were willing to step back into the AI trade after a sharp pullback. Jensen Huang said the tech rout could be an opportunity to buy into that trade, a view that helped frame the morning’s shift in sentiment.
The move also landed at a time when the market had been rotating away from high-flying semiconductor names and toward more defensive corners after a blowout May jobs report strengthened the case for the Federal Reserve to keep rates higher later this year. Investors were also reassessing how much upside was left in artificial intelligence names after months of outsized gains, so Monday’s bounce was as much about nerves easing as it was about fresh conviction.
But the rally did not arrive in calm conditions. Iran fired missiles at Israel for the first time since April, Israel struck back despite President Trump's calls for both sides to stop fighting, and Brent futures climbed as much as 4% to almost $98 a barrel before cooling off. West Texas Intermediate futures neared $95 a barrel, reminding traders that the stock rebound was happening alongside a separate shock in energy markets rather than in spite of one.
Bitcoin joined the risk rebound too, rising nearly 3% to hover above $63,000 after falling below $60,000 last week. Even so, the cryptocurrency remains more than 50% below its October all-time high, down roughly 20% over the past month and more than 27% year to date. That weakness has come with significant weekly ETF outflows in recent weeks, even as Bernstein said bitcoin inflows from treasury companies and ETFs were around $12 billion this year versus $60 billion last year.
For now, the market is trying to decide whether Monday is the start of a durable recovery or just a pause after a hard week. Wednesday’s consumer price report is the next major check on interest-rate expectations, Oracle is due to report earnings that same day, and Friday is expected to bring a likely SpaceX IPO. Intel also surged more than 11% after a report that Google asked it to manufacture 3 million of its in-house Tensor Processing Unit chips, a reminder that the semiconductor trade still has pockets of momentum even when the broader mood turns shaky.
