727 FinanceTrump's speech at the UN General Assembly pushed crude oil for five consecutive declines, and Bloomberg strategists still have 5% upside for the dollar. The AI agent Muse triggered a sell-off in the financial sector, and storage and chip stocks rebounded. Goldman Sachs sees the AI wave of the future as billions of decentralized agents.
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Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly and secret talks between the United States and Iran. Crude oil has fallen for five consecutive years. Does the dollar still have 5% room to rise?
The Nasdaq Composite Index closed up 0.45%, rising for four consecutive days and hitting another record high; the Nasdaq 100 Index rose about 0.8%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.36%, and the S&P 500 ended basically flat at 7764.64 points. The continued strength of chip and storage stocks provided support, with the financial sector becoming the biggest drag.
Trump said during the United Nations General Assembly that U.S. and Iranian officials had had about three hours of "very productive" talks, which were going well, and that the next round of contacts would be arranged soon. He also stressed that he would never allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons and that he faced a "major decision" - to reach an agreement to allow Iran to rebuild or to take further military action, and hinted that the agreement may have to wait until after the mid-term elections in November. Iran reportedly proposed conditions such as lifting the maritime blockade and releasing frozen assets. Once the conditions are met, the Strait of Hormuz can be reopened within seven days.
Crude oil has fallen for five consecutive days, with Brent crude falling below $95 and WTI crude falling below $89. Trump also said that if the conflict ends, oil prices will fall sharply or even below pre-conflict levels, and promote the evaluation of a diesel export ban. Finance Minister Bessant confirmed that he is studying the feasibility of full or partial restrictions. Ryan McKay, a strategist at TD Securities, pointed out that the increase in Hormuz transit traffic shows that Iran has reduced its leverage and may be more open to the agreement, but it may also increase the risk of escalation.
The U.S. dollar index rose to 100.70 during the session, hitting its highest level since July 30. Options data from Morgan Stanley also showed that investors have recently increased their long positions on the U.S. dollar index and expanded their short positions on the euro. Bloomberg strategist Tatiane Darie said that based on the forward interest rate model, the reasonable valuation of the US dollar still has room for about 5% upside, but the linkage with interest rate expectations has weakened. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield closed at around 4.96% after fluctuating widely.
After the Federal Reserve raised interest rates last week, Richmond Fed President Barkin warned that the inflation shock may take longer to subside, saying that inflation risks are higher than employment and demand resilience makes prices more durable; Boston Fed President Collins supported the decision to raise interest rates. Sheng Privorotsky pointed out that the decline in energy prices has lowered inflation expectations, but the market still requires short- and mid-range interest rates to maintain high real returns. If front-end and mid-range interest rates continue to deviate from oil prices, it will mean that the market believes that the economy is overheating.
AI narrative shifts to consumer-grade intelligence, Meta’s Muse triggers market shock
The commercialization narrative of large AI models is shifting from the early "pure computing power arms race" to the "implementation of consumer-grade intelligence". Meta's consumer-grade AI agent Muse topped the app store with phenomenal downloads, successfully bringing AI applications into the public eye and triggering Wall Street's strong expectations for an explosion in demand for large-scale inference.
With a large number of low-cost models running online, AI is completing shopping, payment, ticket booking, customer service, wealth management and even software maintenance for consumers and businesses. Those traditional industries (such as banks, insurance, securities dealers, telecommunications, online travel, etc.) that rely on "users being too lazy to switch" to earn switching costs have been sold off by investors. The S&P financial sector fell nearly 2% in a single day, hitting a new low since July; Goldman Sachs' "consumer inertia" risk basket (including AT&T, Netflix, Expedia, etc.) fell by more than 7% in six days.
On the contrary, funds are pouring into the underlying infrastructure that supports the operation of these agents, such as CPU, storage, network and e-commerce infrastructure. Goldman Sachs strategist Rich Privorotsky pointed out that the future wave of AI will no longer be just a few laboratories burning money to train very large models, but billions of distributed and deployed agents, which will make the needs of AI infrastructure more diverse. Despite the high market sentiment, the Goldman Sachs trading desk pointed out that this was more like a "FOMO market", with actual trading activity being only 3 points out of 10. Both long-term institutions and hedge funds were net sellers, long-term institutions reduced their positions in macro products and semiconductors, and hedge funds significantly increased their short positions in software stocks.
On the model side, OpenAI and Anthropic started a price war on the same day. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, and the API price was 50% lower than the GPT-5.6 promotional price; Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, which charges $4 and $20 per million input/output tokens respectively. The cost is about 40% lower than Opus 5, and the output speed is increased by more than 30%. It also announced the launch of Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 in the next few weeks. In addition, Grok Bot, a subsidiary of SpaceXAI, has been online for about a month, with weekly activity exceeding 418,000. In terms of hardware, Qualcomm released two 2nm Snapdragon flagship chips. The Extreme version supports device-side running of over 30 billion parameter MoE models; Alibaba Cloud released a new generation of CPFS storage, saying that AI storage costs have been reduced by 69%.
Bloomberg strategist Michael Ball believes that the current leading gains in the semiconductor and cloud computing sectors can indeed support the market's upward trend, but to form a more robust rally, more industry participation is needed. The Goldman Sachs trading desk reminded that the subversion risks brought by intelligent agents, the pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, and potential mid-term election factors together constitute the core gaming point of the current market.
Specific project actions and stock price fluctuations:
Storage led the gains: SanDisk rose 6.82% and Micron rose 5%. Rosenblatt covered SanDisk for the first time and gave it a buy rating and a target price of $2,400, believing that AI has upgraded NAND from ordinary storage to critical infrastructure. In the same sector, Seagate rose 4.85%, Western Digital rose 3.67%, and SK Hynix rose 3.45%.
CPU and supporting chips relay: AMD rose 1.34%, rising to a new high for six consecutive years. Smart body demand drives the market to be optimistic about CPU usage; Arm rose 3.19%, Qualcomm rose 2.08%, Intel rose 1.71%, and TSMC rose 1.54%. Power supply chip company Xinyuan Systems rose 8.06%, Astera Labs rose 6.67%, and Teradyne rose 4.49%.
Shopify rose 7.12%, accumulating nearly 15% in two days. Access to Muse shopping and checkout functions strengthens its expectation of competing for AI transaction entrances. Innodata is reported to have risen by about 15%. Hunterbrook believes that Muse may be good for its business, but the institution holds a long position and its customer judgment has not yet been confirmed by the company.
Financial stocks suffered concentrated selling: JPMorgan Chase fell 3.42%, the largest single-day decline since July. The dimensionality reduction impact of intelligent AI on wealth management and labor-intensive financial intermediary businesses has triggered a large-scale short selling by hedge funds. Wells Fargo fell 3.92%, Bank of America fell 3.04%, Morgan Stanley fell 2.88%, and Charles Schwab fell 6.11%. In related service industries, Allstate fell 5.50%, Booking fell 2.55%, and Planet Fitness fell about 9.5%.
Independent event quotes: Lennar Construction rose 6.38%. Berkshire has increased its holdings of approximately 2.6 million Class A shares, with a shareholding ratio of more than 10%. The market regards it as a contrarian value investment under high interest rates. Viking rose nearly 36%, driven by the fact that the weight loss drug maintained most of its weight loss results even after reducing the frequency of dosing.
Mag 7: Nvidia rose 0.66%, benefiting from inferred demand; Apple rose 0.23%, supported by news of new Mac sales and screenless bracelet development; Tesla rose 0.96%, with the market paying attention to the release of Roadster. Meta fell 0.63%, testing an "artificial concierge" phone service for Muse, triggering privacy concerns; Google A fell about 1.05%, as advertising technology antitrust rectification still attracted attention; Microsoft fell 0.72%, and Amazon fell 1.34%.
Watch IonQ after the market: It rose more than 12% after the market. The company announced progress in real-time quantum error correction decoding, but the results come from simulation benchmark tests and still need to be verified before commercial scale implementation.
Next things to pay attention to:
September 23 (Wednesday)
Iranian President Pezhichiyan plans to speak at the UN General Assembly: pay attention to the negotiation conditions, ceasefire guarantees and arrangements for the opening of the strait, and judge whether the diplomatic window has the basis for implementation.
Meta Connect will be held on the 23rd and 24th: focus on smart glasses, XR equipment and AI functions, focusing on selling prices, shipment plans and service revenue, which will affect consumer electronics and device-side AI expectations.
Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit will be held from 23rd to 25th Beijing time: focus on new 2nm Snapdragon products, power consumption improvements and customer introduction. The rumored performance, power consumption and first model all need to be officially released and verified.
September 24 (Thursday)
The Korean stock market will be closed from the 24th to the 25th: If there is major news in the storage sector, the price reaction may be more reflected in other markets, and there is a risk of compensating for increases and losses after the market resumes.
Domestic refined oil price adjustment window: Pay attention to the transmission of international energy price increases to domestic transportation, logistics and manufacturing costs.