Good afternoon,

The week ended on a high note, then the weekend tried to take it back. Friday brought record closes for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, lifted by a stronger-than-expected jobs report and a fresh chip-deal headline.

By Sunday evening, the White House had rejected Iran's latest peace proposal, oil futures perked up, and equity futures slipped. Underneath, the picture is more nuanced: a labor market that refuses to crack, consumer sentiment at a record low, and Treasury yields settling into a higher post-war range. For retirement-focused investors, the message is patience, not pursuit.

The Pulse

Source: Koyfin

Markets

  • The S&P 500 rose 0.84% and the Nasdaq added 1.71% Friday, both notching record closes and a sixth straight weekly gain.

  • Intel surged roughly 14% after the WSJ reported a preliminary deal for Intel to manufacture chips for Apple, its foundry's most significant external customer to date.

  • Treasury yields slipped on a soft wage print: 10-year at 4.38%, 2-year at 3.90%, 30-year at 4.95%.

  • US futures opened lower Sunday after President Trump publicly rejected Iran's counterproposal, sending oil higher overnight.

The rally has narrowed into a chip-led phase, with semiconductors providing the bulk of Friday's gains. For long-horizon savers, the steadier signal lives in the bond market. Yields are not collapsing. The curve is no longer inverted. Rates look set to camp where they are for a while.

Earnings

  • Akamai jumped 20% after disclosing a seven-year, $1.8 billion cloud infrastructure commitment from a leading frontier-model provider, identified by Bloomberg as Anthropic. It is the largest customer contract in the company's history.

  • CoreWeave beat on Q1 revenue at $2.08 billion but guided Q2 to $2.45–$2.6 billion, below the $2.69 billion consensus, and lifted 2026 capex guidance to $31–$35 billion.

  • Coinbase missed on both lines with a $394 million net loss on $1.41 billion in revenue as quarterly crypto volumes fell 28%.

  • AMD beat estimates and rallied 18.6% on a confident Q2 outlook, lifting the broader chip complex.

AI demand keeps showing up in real contracts, but cost discipline is starting to count. CoreWeave's spending plan, not its top line, is now the variable to watch.

Source: Nasdaq

This week's lineup:

  • Today: Circle

  • Tuesday: JD.com

  • Wednesday: Cisco, Alibaba

  • Thursday: Brookfield, Klarna, Figma

Gold & Silver Moves

Gold closed Friday near $4,740 an ounce, off the January peak above $5,400 but still sharply higher on the year. Central bank buying remains the structural support. The World Gold Council estimates official-sector purchases at 244 tonnes in Q1, with China adding for an 18th consecutive month in April.

The near-term tug-of-war is between two forces. Real yields, anchored by a 10-year above 4%, raise the opportunity cost of holding a non-yielding asset. On the other side, central banks keep buying, and any softening in oil that brings rate-cut pricing back would lift gold quickly. TD Securities sees a path back to $5,200 if Hormuz reopens cleanly.

Silver finished Friday near $81.55 an ounce, up more than 6% on the day. It remains below its January high of $121.64 but is recovering from the Hormuz-shock drawdown. Silver carries a heavier industrial load than gold, and solar and AI-data-center demand are pulling on the same physical supply investors want.

Source: JM Bullion

The Gold / Silver ratio sits around 58 ($4,740 ÷ $81.55). That is meaningful compression from the 80-plus readings of 2024 and early 2025, and a touch tighter than the 62 level at the start of May. The long-run historical average is closer to 47. The "geological" abundance ratio is roughly 15.

A falling ratio usually signals two things, and both apply here. The first is risk-on rotation: when investors believe a crisis is being defused, capital flows from gold's monetary role into silver's industrial story. The second is inflation expectations migrating from fear toward growth. Soft April wage data and a possible Hormuz reopening reinforce both. The composition of demand matters too. Silver is being consumed in solar arrays and high-efficiency electronics at a pace producing six straight years of supply deficits. Gold is, by contrast, almost entirely a monetary and central-bank story. So a compressing ratio is partly silver catching up on its industrial fundamentals, and partly investors signaling they expect a softer macro shock, not a harder one.

Both metals continue doing what they are meant to do for a retirement portfolio, preserving purchasing power across a year in which the dollar's real return has been uneven.

The Deal Room

M&A / Investments

  • GameStop made an unsolicited $55.5 billion bid for eBay at $125 per share, a 46% premium, though Moody's called the structure "credit negative" and the TD financing letter is conditional on the combined company maintaining investment-grade status.

  • Roche agreed to acquire Boston-based digital-pathology firm PathAI for up to $1.05 billion, expanding its position in AI-driven diagnostics.

  • Anthropic signed a seven-year, $1.8 billion cloud-infrastructure commitment with Akamai, the largest customer contract in Akamai's history.

  • Apple and Intel reached a preliminary chip-making agreement, reportedly brokered with US government support, marking a major external win for Intel's foundry business.

IPO / Listings

  • Cerebras Systems is set to price a $3.36 billion IPO this week, the largest in a five-deal slate expected to raise roughly $7.43 billion.

  • Fervo Energy filed for a 55.6 million share IPO at $21–$24, aiming to raise about $1.25 billion for geothermal projects.

Retirement Lens

Days like today are easy to misread. Records feel like progress, but the bond market and gold's behavior suggest the foundation underneath is shifting. For retirement portfolios, the lesson is not to chase the rally or flee from it, but to check whether your mix still reflects what you need: income that holds up against $4.48 gasoline, principal that survives a 5% long bond, and equity exposure broad enough not to depend on any single AI chip. Resilience beats prediction, especially in markets that change their mind every Tuesday.

Headline Hunt

  • April nonfarm payrolls printed 115,000 versus a 55,000 consensus, unemployment steady at 4.3%

  • University of Michigan consumer sentiment fell to 48.2, the lowest reading since the survey began in 1952.

  • The US average gasoline price reached $4.54 a gallon, up 44% year over year.

  • Brent crude is hovering near $100 a barrel after a 7% weekly decline tied to peace-talk hopes.

  • Whirlpool fell nearly 12% after its CFO described appliance demand as "recession-level lows".

  • Cloudflare dropped about 14% after announcing 1,100 layoffs tied to internal AI automation.

  • The Trade Desk fell 13% on a weak Q2 ad-tech outlook, drawing multiple downgrades.

  • The Financial Stability Board called for tighter scrutiny of the roughly $2 trillion private credit sector.

  • Michael Burry compared the AI-driven rally to the late stages of the 1999–2000 dot-com bubble.

  • Micron rose nearly 38% on the week, finishing at a fresh all-time high.

  • Trump announced a three-day Russia–Ukraine ceasefire covering May 9–11.

  • The IEA estimates roughly 14 million barrels per day of global supply remain disrupted by the Iran conflict.

Keep Reading