Falcon’s View – Week ending 8 May 2026
Performance
NASDAQ 100: +5.50%
S&P 500: +2.33%
My portfolio: +7.56%
Market pulse
Between the May 1 and May 8 closes, U.S. equities advanced primarily on a technology-led earnings rally rather than a broad-based improvement in every part of the market. The NASDAQ-100 outperformed the S&P 500 sharply, reflecting heavy buying in AI, semiconductor, and mega-cap technology names, helped by strong chip demand, AMD’s upbeat data-center outlook, major moves in Nvidia, Micron, SanDisk, and Intel, and continued optimism around AI infrastructure spending. The broader S&P 500 was supported by an unusually strong Q1 earnings season, with a high share of companies beating profit expectations and earnings growth running at its strongest pace since 2021. A better-than-expected April jobs report on May 8 reinforced the soft-landing narrative and helped push the S&P 500 and Nasdaq to record closes. The main counterweight was the U.S.–Iran conflict and Strait of Hormuz oil volatility, which pressured stocks early in the week but became less damaging as oil prices retreated from their highs. Overall, the week’s gains were real but concentrated: AI and earnings did the heavy lifting, while geopolitics, oil, and Fed-rate uncertainty remained the main risks under the surface.
Crowd vs. price
The broad market regime has shifted bullish this week. Relative investor interest is still showing robust recovery.
Holdings & Watchlist Notes
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD): +26.25%
AMD’s more than 26% rise between the May 1 and May 8 closes was driven primarily by a sharp post-earnings re-rating of its AI and data-center growth outlook. The decisive catalyst was AMD’s Q2 revenue guidance of roughly $11.2bn, ahead of Wall Street expectations, alongside stronger-than-expected Q1 results and a 57% year-over-year jump in Data Center revenue to $5.8bn. Investors responded not just to the earnings beat, but to the broader thesis that AMD is becoming a more important AI-infrastructure supplier across both GPUs and server CPUs, particularly as inference and agentic AI workloads expand demand beyond Nvidia-style training accelerators. Large hyperscaler relationships with Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, AWS and others gave the market more confidence that future demand is visible rather than speculative. Analyst price-target increases and a broader semiconductor rally then amplified the move, while falling oil prices and improved macro risk appetite helped the stock-specific catalyst translate into a very large weekly gain.