The market spent the week braced for the May inflation report. It came in hot. The Federal Reserve's preferred price gauge ran at its fastest annual pace in three years, and the tape barely blinked. The monthly figures landed close to what forecasters expected, so an already-elevated number arrived without a fresh shock. Bond yields actually eased and the dollar slipped, the opposite of the re-pricing a hot print is supposed to set off.
The day's real action happened inside tech, and it split. Memory chipmaker Micron held a large gain on a record quarter and led the chip complex higher. The megacaps went the other way, with Apple and Microsoft falling after both said they would raise consumer prices on hardware. Leadership narrowed to memory, not tech broadly. Meanwhile the Iran story re-fired: a cargo ship was struck in the Strait of Hormuz, and crude reversed three days of losses.
One honest flag. A calm reaction to a hot print is not a dovish all-clear. The number removed the worst-case tail and little else, and the inflation regime behind it has not yet changed. Narrow leadership and a single unresolved Hormuz incident are the two threads to pull from here.
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