👀 Intel Breaks Its Dot-Com High, Tim Cook Exits, and a Semiconductor Exec Buys $4.3M

Good afternoon and happy Sunday! Here is a quick market rundown and an 'inside' peek behind the curtains of what C-Level Execs, Wall St. Hedge Fund Gurus, and politicians are trading right now…!

📊 Market Recap — Week Ending April 24, 2026

Another record-setting week for the bulls, powered almost entirely by one sector that simply will not stop. The S&P 500 closed Friday at 7,165.08, up roughly 0.5% for the week and notching its fourth consecutive weekly gain — its longest winning streak since October 2024. The Nasdaq Composite settled at 24,836.60, up approximately 1.5% on the week, also a fresh all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished at 49,230, sliding about 0.4% and sitting out the celebration for the second week running.

The story under the numbers: the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index closed Friday with its 18th consecutive positive session — the longest winning streak in SOX history. Semiconductors have accounted for roughly 40% of the S&P's gains since March 30. On Friday, Intel alone was doing the heavy lifting: up 23% on the day, pulling AMD up 13%, Qualcomm 10%, and pushing Nvidia back above $5 trillion in market cap. That's not a broad market — that's one trade running very, very hot. The State Street Semiconductor ETF's RSI hit 85 on Thursday, well into overbought territory. Markets can stay overbought longer than anyone expects. They can also correct faster. Worth knowing which side of that you're on.

One notable divergence: the Dow's underperformance is now a pattern. Old economy, industrials, and names tied to energy costs — Honeywell dropped 5% on Middle East-driven guidance cuts this week — are paying a tax that the Nasdaq simply isn't. Meanwhile, consumer sentiment closed April at a record low of 49.8 on the University of Michigan index. The stock market and Main Street have never been further apart on record.

🔑 Key Drivers

💡 Intel's Best Day Since 1987 — The CPU Is Back Intel reported Q1 revenue of $13.6 billion after Thursday's bell, beating the $12.4 billion consensus by more than $1 billion, with adjusted EPS of $0.29 against near-zero expectations. Q2 guidance of $13.8–$14.8 billion was again well ahead of Wall Street. CEO Lip-Bu Tan told investors the CPU is "reasserting itself as the orchestration layer for AI inference and agentic workloads" — and the market believed every word. INTC closed up 23.94% Friday, its best single-day gain since 1987, surpassing its dot-com era record in the process. The stock is now up over 100% year-to-date. The Intel CFO had been buying shares in the low $40s back in January. That purchase, at the time, looked like a vote of confidence. In hindsight, it was a signal. We'll come back to that.

🛢️ The Strait Is Still Shut — Oil Holds Above $95 The Strait of Hormuz remained functionally closed for a fifth week, with WTI crude ending the week around $95–$97 per barrel after brief dips on ceasefire extension headlines. Trump extended the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire by three weeks on Thursday and announced Iran's FM was heading to Islamabad — both of which gave oil a modest Friday haircut. But the naval blockade is still active, Iran is still seizing vessels, and no formal peace framework exists. The EIA's short-term outlook pegs Brent peaking at $115 in Q2 if this drags. United Airlines jumped 9% on the ceasefire extension; Honeywell dropped 5% citing the same war in its guidance. The energy discount is not evenly distributed.

🏛️ DOJ Drops Powell Probe — Warsh Clock Starts Late Friday, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced the DOJ is closing its criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell, handing the matter to the Fed's inspector general. Powell's term ends May 15. Kevin Warsh's Senate Banking Committee confirmation had been held by Sen. Tillis pending this resolution. That hold just dissolved. Rate futures immediately repriced, moving the probability of at least one cut by year-end to 34% from 23% in a single session. Warsh has signaled he wants fewer press conferences, less forward guidance, and structural reform at the Fed. What that looks like in practice is the market's next big unanswered question. The long end of the curve will start pricing it this week.

📱 Tim Cook Steps Down — John Ternus Takes Apple Sept. 1 In what would have been the week's biggest story in any other news cycle, Apple announced Monday that Tim Cook will transition to Executive Chairman on September 1, handing the CEO role to John Ternus — SVP of Hardware Engineering and the man behind Apple Silicon. Cook has run Apple for 15 years, since succeeding Steve Jobs. Ternus, 50, is the youngest member of Apple's executive team and a pure product engineer. The board calls it a "thoughtful, long-term succession plan." Apple fell less than 1% on the news and recovered quickly — which tells you the market views Ternus as a credible operator, not a wild card. The real question is whether an engineer-CEO doubles down on Apple Silicon and in-house chip development, and what that means for the supply chain.

🤖 Amazon Drops $25 Billion on Anthropic — AWS Locks In Claude Monday brought one of the largest AI infrastructure commitments of the year: Amazon announced an investment of up to $25 billion in Anthropic, on top of the $8 billion already in the ground. The $5 billion initial tranche came in at Anthropic's $380 billion valuation; up to $20 billion more is tied to commercial milestones. In return, Anthropic committed to spending $100 billion on AWS technology over the next decade. Over 100,000 AWS customers now get native Claude access through their existing accounts. Two months ago Amazon put $50 billion into OpenAI. They're now the largest infrastructure backer of both of the world's top AI labs simultaneously. That's not an AI bet — that's an AWS bet. Every frontier model that scales has to compute somewhere.

✅ Key Takeaways

• 🎯 S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed at all-time highs Friday — four straight weeks of gains, longest streak since October 2024

• 💡 Intel up 100% YTD and just had its best single day since 1987 — the CPU-as-AI-inference narrative is no longer a thesis, it's a print

• 🛢️ WTI near $97 with the Strait still shut is a supply shock with no clear end date — the EIA models $115 Brent at the Q2 peak

• 📱 Tim Cook exits September 1 — John Ternus inherits a $3 trillion company and an unfinished AI hardware story; market shrugged, for now

• 🤖 Amazon is now the primary infrastructure backer of both Anthropic and OpenAI — the AI race runs on AWS whether one lab wins or both do

• 🔍 Entegris Executive Chair Loy Bertrand bought $4.3M in ENTG shares at $98 — in a semiconductor cycle that just proved it has legs, that's the insider signal of the week

🔭 What We're Watching Next Week

💻 April 29–30 — Meta, Microsoft, Amazon Report: The AI Capex Verdict The hyperscaler earnings wave lands this week and it is the most consequential event on the calendar. Meta reports April 29, Microsoft April 30, Amazon May 1. These three names collectively determine whether the semiconductor rally gets a second leg or runs into its first real test. ServiceNow dropped 18% this week after citing the Iran war as a direct hit on enterprise software revenue — a warning shot that cloud spending is not immune to geopolitical drag. If any hyperscaler cuts AI capex guidance or signals cloud softness, the 18-day SOX streak ends fast. If they hold or raise, the bull market gets a new gear heading into May.

🏛️ Kevin Warsh Senate Confirmation — Week of April 28 The DOJ probe is closed. Tillis's hold is gone. The Senate Banking Committee now has a clean path to a formal confirmation vote before Powell's May 15 term expires. Watch whether leadership schedules the vote this week or lets the clock run out. A gap — where the Fed operates without a confirmed chair for the first time since the 1970s — would be the kind of institutional uncertainty that moves the 10-year faster than any data point. Whatever you think of Warsh's policy preferences, the transition itself is the risk right now.

🕊️ U.S.-Iran Negotiations in Islamabad — Weekend Watch Iran's FM Araghchi arrived in Pakistan over the weekend for what the White House is calling a "framework discussion." Trump gave Tehran a 3–5 day window earlier this week to engage meaningfully before he'd consider resuming strike options. A credible peace framework would send WTI down $10–15 immediately and add a meaningful macro tailwind to the Fed's inflation math. A breakdown sends crude back toward $110 and tests the consumer further. Watch Sunday night futures — they're the first read on how the talks landed.

📊 Wednesday, April 30 — Q1 GDP Advance Estimate The first official look at Q1 GDP arrives mid-week. Consensus is tracking roughly 1.5–2.0% annualized growth. The Iran war's energy cost hit mostly the back half of Q1, so the full inflation pass-through won't show up here — but a miss below 1% would land at a terrible moment: record-low consumer sentiment, a leaderless Fed, and a market at all-time highs. A solid print adds fuel to the "stocks are right" camp. Whatever it says, Powell won't get a press conference to respond to it. That chapter closes May 15.

🌟 Insider Spotlight: Entegris Executive Chair Loy Bertrand — $4.3M Buy at $98

The insider signal of the week didn't come from a headline name. It came from a $22.7 billion semiconductor materials company that most retail investors have never heard of. Entegris Executive Chair Loy Bertrand purchased 44,138 shares of ENTG at $98.11 per share on April 17, for a total of approximately $4.3 million. The filing hit the SEC on April 20, the same week Intel surged to all-time highs and Texas Instruments had its best day since 2000.

Entegris is not a chip designer or a GPU company. It's the company that makes the specialty chemicals and materials that advanced semiconductor manufacturing can't happen without. When demand for chips goes up — especially cutting-edge AI chips at the 2nm and below node — Entegris is the picks-and-shovels play that benefits regardless of which chip designer wins. The Executive Chair putting $4.3 million of personal capital into the stock at $98 — during a semiconductor cycle that just proved it's accelerating — is not an accident. He's not buying the AI hype. He's buying what the AI hype requires downstream.

After this purchase, Bertrand now holds 271,665 total shares. That's meaningful skin in the game from the person with the best seat in the house.

Insider spotlight of the week…#ENTG

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