Hyperscalers — five days, normalized
GOOG +9.0% / AMZN +1.2% / MSFT −3.9% / META −7.6%. Cloud-segment surprises decided the dispersion.
USD/JPY traded $160.72 at Powell’s hawkish stand Wednesday and $156.46 in the Thursday afternoon — 426 pips lower in 24 hours. Four hyperscalers committed $345 billion of 2026 capex overnight. The market printed all-time highs through both.
GOOG +9.0% / AMZN +1.2% / MSFT −3.9% / META −7.6%. Cloud-segment surprises decided the dispersion.
$345 billion. Meta hiked its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to a $125–$145 billion range Wednesday after the close, a $10 billion increase at both ends of the prior $115–$135 billion guide. Amazon’s 2026 capex is sized at $200 billion. Microsoft and Alphabet have not yet sized 2026 explicitly, but Microsoft Azure cloud revenue grew 40 percent and Alphabet Cloud grew 63 percent — both segments are now self-funding the AI infrastructure build. Four hyperscalers reporting on the same Wednesday-after-close represents $15.9 trillion of equity by combined market cap.
$77.7B / +63% / +40% / +28%. Microsoft revenue printed $77.7 billion, up 18 percent. Alphabet Cloud $20.0 billion, +63 percent year over year, beating the $18.05 billion analyst estimate by $2 billion. Microsoft Azure +40 percent in constant currency, beating the 37–38 percent guide. Amazon AWS $37.6 billion, +28 percent, the fastest growth in three years. The cash-market dispersion was 17 percentage points wide: Alphabet rewarded the cloud beat at +9 percent, Meta punished the capex hike at −7.6 percent, Microsoft sold on OpenAI investment losses dragging earnings, Amazon held up on AWS reaccelerating.
$159.50 (BoJ Tuesday) → $160.72 (Powell hawkish) → $156.46 (Thursday). 426 pips lower in 24 hours.
$159.50 → $160.72 → $156.46. USD/JPY traded $159.50 at the Bank of Japan’s Tuesday hawkish-hold, ripped to $160.72 at Powell’s hawkish-stand press conference Wednesday at 18:30 UTC, and prints $156.46 in the Thursday afternoon — 426 pips below the cycle peak in 24 hours. The yen-carry-unwind sequence ran in three back-to-back negative-one-hundred-pip windows between 10:46 UTC and 11:46 UTC. The strong-dollar war trade is decisively unwound.
189,000. Initial jobless claims for the week ended April 25 printed 189,000 — the lowest level since 1969. First-quarter advance GDP came in at +2.0 percent versus +2.3 percent expected. Core PCE printed +0.3 percent month over month and +3.2 percent year over year, in line with consensus. Despite the Iran war entering its third month, despite Brent settling at $118 on Wednesday, despite the Federal Reserve’s 8–4 split that traders called the most contested vote since October 1992 — the labor-growth-inflation triangle is benign.
$500M / 75% / 567K bpd. The White House disclosed Wednesday that Iran is losing $500 million per day under the U.S. naval blockade. Oil and condensate loadings at Iranian ports collapsed from 2.1 million barrels per day pre-blockade to 567,000 — a 75 percent drop in export capacity. Brent settled at $118 on Wednesday, the highest since June 2022; Brent prints $110.59 in the Thursday afternoon, an $8 retracement that moved overnight on Trump’s reported willingness to end the standoff without full Hormuz restoration. The blockade pressure is real and quantified; the timeline of resolution is what the price action is now arguing about.
SPY +1.0% / Gold +1.9% / DXY −0.8% / Brent −5% / BTC +0.9%. The “fine despite the war” mix.
$719 / $497 / $277 / $2,803. SPY printed $719 in the afternoon, DIA at $497, IWM at $277, and small-cap futures RTY broke past $2,800 to $2,803 — fresh sub-cycle highs across the cap spectrum. VIX printed $17.14, a fresh cycle low. The Dow added more than 800 points across the week. Caterpillar’s morning beat powered the cyclical rotation; KRE printed $70.27 fresh sub-cycle high after spending Wednesday at $69.13 on the FOMC-dissent damage; FCX, XLU, and XLV all printed fresh highs.
21:00 UTC. Apple reports its fiscal Q2 results in 90 minutes — the JP Morgan estimate is $112.7 billion in revenue and $2.05 EPS, with iPhone at $59.5 billion and Services at ~$30 billion. The print is unusual: a strong China iPhone quarter (China sales +23 percent in the first nine weeks of 2026 against a market down 4 percent), Services running at >70 percent gross margin, and Tim Cook’s last earnings call before stepping down to Executive Chairman on September 1, with John Ternus succeeding him. Apple traded $273.92 going into the print, +1.4 percent on the day.