The Fed Knocked Everything Down. Only Stocks Got Back Up.

Stock Market Edge

The recovery that checked IDs at the door Equities bounced; the assets that fell hardest were not on the list.

Premarket snapshot:
Nasdaq 100 futures sat up about 1.34% around 09:56 ET, S&P futures up 0.85%, Dow up 0.52%, Russell up 1.18%. Generous, given the same contracts fell between 1.70% and 2.40% on Wednesday. The VIX, having spiked 17.6% to 18.84, gave back 10.4%, the fear unwinding faster than it arrived.

Sector rotation: Chips led the bid, which is bold of them. Intel rose about 7% on the Apple domestic-chip pact, while Micron, Western Digital and SanDisk gained 4% to 6% after Tim Cook warned your next Mac costs more. The rally’s catalyst, in other words, was a price increase. SpaceX bounced 1.7%.

Earnings or guidance:
Accenture and Kroger report today. SpaceX stays in focus after a 5% slide and an analyst gently wondering aloud whether a firm losing billions reaches $1tn in revenue by 2030 on enthusiasm alone.

Cross-asset nuance:
Here is the tell. Gold fell 3.77% Wednesday and another 1.88% today, oil sits near $74.58, and neither bounced with stocks. The 2-year held 4.216%, the 10-year 4.487%, the dollar tagged 100. The bond market is not celebrating, and the curve flattened into the move, which reads as tightening.

📊 There’s a level on SPX I’m watching closely this morning. My full analysis briefing has it – plus what happens if we hold it, and what happens if we don’t. [Read it here →]

Crypto Market Edge

Bitcoin is still on the floor with the grown-up assets Crypto fell with gold and oil, and unlike stocks it has not been invited back up.

Price snapshot:
Bitcoin sat near $64,127 around 09:56 ET, down 0.49% today on top of Wednesday’s 3.82% drop, while equity screens glowed green without it. Ether held $1,745, down 2% but above the $1,700 line it defended through the selloff. Total crypto cap near $2.25tn.

Flows and positioning:
Fear and Greed dropped to 15, extreme fear, from 22, the lowest since May, on a morning macro keeps insisting is bullish. About $440m got liquidated in 24 hours. Volume rose as price fell, which is selling, not a nap.

Leadership and rotation:
Ether quietly led the rubble and is the only top-10 coin green this year. Strategy, the firm whose chairman swore he would never sell and then did, fell about 5% as its 846,842-coin pile got marked straight to the dot plot. Bitmine fell 3%, because leverage cuts the same both ways.

Catalysts and roadmap:
The dollar at 100 is the weight, and prediction markets now lean toward a July hike over a cut. The formal Iran signing is Friday in Switzerland, on a US holiday, so the tape cannot vote on it until Monday. Watch $64,000, with $61,000 the next trapdoor below.

TL;DR – The Bottom Line

• Wednesday the Fed moved its 2026 dot to 3.8% from 3.4%, a cut rewritten as a hike, and knocked everything down at once: stocks, gold down 3.77%, oil down 6.43%, bitcoin down 3.82%, the VIX up 17.6%.
• This was a stampede, not a split. The 2-year jumped 16bp to 4.216% and the dollar tagged 100 before anyone finished reading the statement.
• This morning the recovery got selective: stocks ripped over 1% on a signed Iran deal and the VIX fell 10.4%, but gold, oil and bitcoin all stayed red.
• The open question is whether that trio is stuck because the higher-for-longer regime is still squeezing, or because each has its own problem, and only the equity desk is sure Wednesday is over.
• Strategy fell 5% as a leveraged proxy for the move it can’t escape, ETF outflows hit a record near $4.4bn, and the strait that started all this reopens Friday on a shut market.

📌 Fun Fact

The most divided confirmation in Fed history. Warsh got the job 54-45, then declined to say where rates go.

Kevin Warsh was confirmed as the 17th Fed chair on a 54-45 Senate vote, the most partisan confirmation of a chair on record, and opened his tenure by leaving his own dot off the plot entirely.