- On Wednesday morning Eastern Time, major Wall Street stock index futures collectively rose, with Nasdaq 100 mini futures leading significantly by 0.82%, while S&P 500 and Dow futures increased by 0.3% and 0.12% respectively. The strong cash flow expectations in the artificial intelligence sector and the marginal easing of US-Iran Doha geopolitical contacts jointly formed a bullish defense line at the opening.
- Micron Technology, a storage chip giant, crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold for the first time, with pre-market stock prices soaring again by 8.5%, driving up related sectors like SanDisk and Western Digital, offsetting the 25% valuation pullback pressure faced by cloud security company Zscaler due to weak guidance.
- Goldman Sachs raised its target for the S&P 500 index by the end of 2026 from 7600 points to 8000 points, reflecting a strong growth of about 29% in year-over-year earnings for US companies in the first quarter. The market's core pricing logic is shifting comprehensively from denominator-side valuation recovery to numerator-side earnings realization.
Comprehensive Revaluation Triggered by Core AI Sector
Catalyzed by Micron Technology's historic milestone of surpassing a $1 trillion market cap, the global semiconductor supply chain experienced a systemic bullish resonance in pre-market trading. Micron's pre-market surge of 8.5% directly activated the storage chip industry chain, which had long been at the bottom of the inventory cycle. The gains for peer assets like SanDisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology ranged from 4.1% to 6.6%. This hardware demand, driven by the expansion of capital expenditure in ultra-large-scale data centers, is proving to the entire industry that the AI dividend has entered a definitive profit realization phase. Expectations of supply-demand gaps for high-performance components by sovereign wealth funds and private capital have temporarily outweighed market concerns about systemic liquidity withdrawal.
Geopolitical Premium Changes and Options Market Hedging
Despite frequent sporadic conflicts in the Middle East, the market has shown a strong desensitization to the fragile balance of US-Iran Doha contacts. Edward Jones Company investment strategy analyst Brock Weixin pointed out that current Wall Street pricing models have largely neutralized the local stagnation in peace talks progress. Even if there is a brief exchange of fire between the armed forces of the two countries around the Strait of Hormuz, bullish positions still expect the probability of eventual institutional easing to be higher than the tail risk of full escalation. This geopolitical defense cushion allows global allocation funds to remain within risk assets, and the skewness in the options market indicates that the cost of hedging against downside volatility is oscillating downward, providing relatively stable micro-fund support for the spot market's high opening.
Earnings Forecast Upgrades and Policy Rate Endpoint Pricing
The approximately 29% year-over-year high growth recorded by US blue-chip companies in the first quarter is the main reason Goldman Sachs raised its year-end target for the S&P 500 index to 8000 points. However, the strong performance of the real economy has also led to a systemic revision of the Federal Reserve's future policy path. As the release of the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index approaches on Thursday, the market is pressure-testing the long-term inflation center under the policy framework led by new chairman Kevin Walsh. Although the money market maintains a baseline scenario of unchanged rates for the year, swap pricing for a potential 25 basis point hike in December has begun to emerge. This means that if core inflation shows unexpectedly high stickiness, the valuation multiples of long-term assets may face a phase of structural revaluation, with investors balancing positions asymmetrically through long tech stocks and defensive retail stocks.
