Futures
Pre‑Market Briefing
Day After CPI — In‑Line Headline (4.2%) + Soft Core (+0.2%) But the Relief Failed: SPX −1.62% / Nasdaq −1.98% / Dow −953 — VIX Closed 22.22 / VVIX +12.9% to 108.16 = Panic‑Hedging Territory — 14:30 ET Margin‑Call Wave Sold BTC, Gold & Bonds for Liquidity — Trump: “Hit Iran Very Hard” / “Pay the Price” / CENTCOM Strikes Completed 9:04 PM ET Wed — Overnight Rebound: ES +0.5% to 7,306 / NQ +0.7% / RTY +0.5% — ORCL Double‑Beat + RPO $638B (+363%) But −10% AH to $180.88 on $55.7B Capex Overshoot + $20B Cap‑Raise Add — JPM: “AI Bills Are Out of Control” — DataTrek: XLK 6‑Sigma Move = “Once Every 4 Million Years” — CNN F&G Slips to 28 FEAR / AAII Bears Spike +10.7pp to 47.7% (Near March Panic) / VX Curve REGIME REPRICED M1 16.24 → 20.45 — ZERO Desks Turned More Bullish: DB Reid Escalates to “Century Template” / BofA Econ Goes Hawkish / 22V Calls Soft Core a “Head Fake” — PPI + Claims 8:30 AM ET / 30Y Auction 1 PM / ECB Decides This Morning / ADBE AMC / SPCX Prices Tonight at $1.77T
Three Things Every Desk Agrees On — Thursday, June 11
May CPI delivered the textbook setup — in-line 4.2% YoY headline (highest since April 2023, energy +23.5% YoY did 60% of the gain) plus a soft +0.2% m/m core that undershot the +0.3% consensus — and Wednesday’s relief rally died inside the same session. NDX reversed up on the soft core, then rolled into a −1.98% Nasdaq close. SPX −1.62% to 7,266.99. The 14:30 ET margin-call wave sold BTC, gold and bonds for liquidity — that is positioning de-grossing, not rotation. VIX closed 22.22; VVIX ripped +12.9% to 108.16, vol-of-vol territory dealers pay up for VIX upside in. The VX futures strip repriced +4 vol points across the curve (M1 16.24 → 20.45) — the “event-spike, not regime change” call from Wednesday’s brief formally flipped.
Does the 8:30 AM ET PPI confirm the SuperCore acceleration or break it? Consensus is +0.7% m/m versus April’s scorching +1.4% — an in-line softening rescues the soft-core narrative and lets Warsh argue this is a supply-driven shock. A second 1%+ m/m print pairs with the +3.49% YoY SuperCore CPI (highest since Aug 2025), the 22V “head-fake” thesis, and DB Reid’s overnight escalation to a “century template” inflation-regime claim — and the 30Y auction at 1:00 PM ET (prior 5.046% high yield with a soft 2.30 b/c) becomes the duration test for the entire week. Claims at 220K consensus carries the soft-landing crack on the other side.
Across the CPI binary not a single desk moved more bullish. DB’s Jim Reid escalated from “feels like 1999” to a structural “century template” claim — the >4% world is now a regime, not a blip. BofA’s economics chief Stephen Juneau revised core PCE tracking up to 0.27% m/m and called for “risks skewed toward higher front-end rates.” 22V’s Peter Williams called the soft core a “head fake,” flagging core services ex-housing at 3.7%. Goldman’s complex held its bull lean with an explicit Iran-conflict-prolongation tripwire. Then ORCL printed a clean double-beat with an RPO of $638 billion (+363% YoY), 47% cloud growth, 93% OCI growth and $75 billion of customer GPU prepays — and the stock fell 10% after-hours to $180.88 because FY26 capex came in at $55.7 billion (a $5.7B overshoot) and the company added another $20 billion to its capital-raise plans. JPM’s overnight desk note: “AI Bills Are Out of Control.” DataTrek now calls XLK’s run a 6-sigma event — “once every 4 million years.” AI demand is intact; AI funding has become the question.
May CPI printed in line on the headline (4.2% YoY, highest since April 2023) with a soft +0.2% core, but the Wednesday relief rally died inside the same session — SPX −1.62%, Nasdaq −1.98%, VIX closed 22.22, VVIX +12.9% to 108 — and the VX futures curve repriced +4 vol points across the strip from M1 16.24 to 20.45 as the “event-spike not regime change” call formally flipped, while ORCL delivered a clean double-beat with a $638 billion RPO (+363% YoY) and still fell 10% after-hours to $180.88 because capex overshot $5.7B and the company added another $20 billion to its capital-raise plans — the AI trade has decisively pivoted from a demand question to a funding question.
The 8:30 AM ET print Wednesday delivered exactly what the desks had set up for. Headline CPI rose +0.5% m/m and +4.2% YoY (BLS USDL-26-0824), in line with the FactSet consensus and the highest annual print since April 2023’s 4.9%. Energy did 60% of the monthly move (+3.9% m/m, +23.5% YoY; gasoline +7.0% m/m, +40.5% YoY) on the Hormuz war premium. Core surprised to the dovish side at +0.2% m/m (versus +0.3% expected and +0.4% in April) and 2.9% YoY in line. Goods deflated for the first time in a year (transport commodities −0.49%, medical commodities −0.54%, vehicle insurance −1.7%, new vehicles −0.3%). But the bear’s detail was inside: SuperCore (core services ex-shelter) rose +0.26% m/m to 3.49% YoY — the highest reading since August 2025. ZeroHedge: Americans’ real wages are now shrinking YoY for the first time since April 2023.
Intraday Nasdaq 100 reversed up on the soft core and led the tape briefly — then the whole reversal unwound. Wednesday SPX closed −1.62% at 7,266.99, Nasdaq −1.98% at 25,169.50, Dow −953 (−1.87%). Russell 2000 outperformed at −1.10%. ZeroHedge’s post-close wrap mapped the flow anatomy: relief pop into 10:30 ET, then a second consecutive day of SOXS (3x semi short) flow slamming the tape mid-morning, then a 14:30 ET margin-call wave that took bitcoin, gold and bonds with it. Gold −0.57% to $4,109 on a day the US restruck Iran is the cleanest single liquidity-driven datapoint. SMCI lost −27.98% — worst name in the index. The only green pocket was energy: Devon +5.74%, APA +3.80%, JM Smucker (defensive) +4.15%.
Vol broke up, not down. VIX closed 22.22, up +11.83% on the day — the first close above 22 since the March correction. VVIX printed 108.16 (+12.9%), through the 105 line dealers tend to pay up for VIX upside above. The VX futures strip repriced +4 vol points across the curve — M1 16.24 → 20.45, October at 22.70, January 2027 at 22.80. Wednesday’s brief explicitly flagged the tripwire: “if M1 jumps after CPI, the regime call changes.” M1 jumped. The futures market no longer treats this as a single-event shock; the curve now prices elevated vol through Warsh’s first three meetings. CBOE equity put/call ticked up to 0.66 but is still call-tilted — the single-stock options crowd has not capitulated even as AAII retail did (bears +10.7 percentage points to 47.7%, within 4.3pp of the March panic high; bulls −5.9pp to 30.4%; bull-bear spread −17.3). CNN Fear & Greed slipped to 28 FEAR with 6 of 7 sub-components FEAR or worse.
The desk fracture from Tuesday survived the print intact — and hardened. Zero strategists turned more bullish across the CPI binary. Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid moved from Tuesday’s “feels like 1999” bubble analog to an explicit regime claim Wednesday night: over the full century the >4% world covers more than a quarter of all monthly observations and arrives in waves; the disinflationary post-1992 era depended on “largely non-repeatable global forces”; “the template from the last century rather than the last few decades will probably be the better guide.” That is a structural escalation, quiet but meaningful. BofA’s economics chief Stephen Juneau revised core PCE tracking up to 0.27% m/m on portfolio-management-fee passthrough and said the Fed is firmly on hold with “risks skewed toward higher front-end rates.” 22V’s Peter Williams called the soft topline core a “head fake,” pointing to core services ex-housing accelerating to 3.7%. On the bull side, Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Tim Urbanowicz retained a constructive view — explicitly with a tripwire: “If the Iran conflict drags on and inflationary pressures continue to build, there could come a point where that balance shifts, but we don’t see that today.” Pasquariello’s flow desk said nothing new. MS Wilson, Citi, Evercore ISI, Bernstein, Piper Sandler, Jefferies, Wells Fargo II all dark across three sessions.
Overnight the tape bounced. Trump publicly said Wednesday afternoon that Iran “has taken too long to negotiate — now they will have to pay the price” and that the US would “hit Iran very hard today.” CENTCOM declared its strike wave completed at 9:04 PM ET; targets were Iranian military surveillance, communications and air-defense sites. The market read “completed” as de-escalation-adjacent. ES is +0.5% to 7,306, NQ +0.7% to 28,754, YM +110, RTY +0.5%. WTI bid near $91; Brent caught a bid as fresh disruption fears reignited; CNBC’s morning headline: “Oil jumps as U.S. fresh strikes on Iran raise worries of extended disruption to energy flows.” The 10Y sits 4.544% after a constructive 10Y auction Wednesday at 1:00 PM (4.538% high yield, 78% indirect bid, weak directs). DXY back at 99.99; USD/JPY 160.57 sits in the intervention zone. Asia stabilized but did not chase — Nikkei +0.02% at 64,190, KOSPI +0.14% at 7,741.88 after Wednesday’s −4.52% crash, Hang Seng −1.10% for a sixth straight session. ECB decides this morning with a hike expected on Iran-driven energy inflation. Today’s 8:30 ET PPI (consensus +0.7% m/m vs +1.4% April; 6.4% YoY) plus Initial Jobless Claims (220K consensus vs prior 225K) plus the 1:00 PM 30Y bond auction (prior 5.046% with a weak 2.30 b/c) are the live tests of Wednesday’s reset. ADBE reports AMC into a tape that just punished ORCL’s beat — if a $638B AI backlog can’t buy a rally because of a $5.7B capex overshoot, ADBE’s buyback pace and AI-monetization commentary matter more than the quarter. SpaceX prices tonight at $1.77 trillion (above TSLA) and trades Friday under SPCX. OpenAI told Bloomberg it plans to list within a year. The IPO supply pipeline is loading at the same moment retail capitulated. Charlie Bilello and BTIG’s Krinsky and ZeroHedge’s dispersion frame and DataTrek’s new 6-sigma stat on XLK (“once every 4 million years”) are now five independent voices saying the same thing — and the JPM desk note overnight, “AI Bills Are Out of Control,” has put the funding side of the AI trade on the table for the first time this cycle.
Where the Tape Sits at 7:30 AM ET
Sources: CNBC / BLS / FactSet / CBOE / VIXCentral / Polymarket / TreasuryDirect / StockAnalysis — 7:30 AM ET, Thu Jun 11
Today’s Calendar — Thursday, June 11
Cannon Trading — Daily Levels for Thursday, June 11
Cannon Trading Company’s desk levels chart for the major US index, energy, and metals futures — the levels Cannon’s desk is watching pre-open.
Cannon Trading Company — Daily Futures Levels
Cannon Trading Company — Daily Futures Levels
Institutional Positioning
Hartnett’s framework moved from preview to live status with Wednesday’s print. Per ZeroHedge’s carry of the BofA Flow Show post-CPI: “In the past 100 years once CPI crosses 4% on average, the S&P is down 4% in the next 3 months, and down 7% next 6 months.” Hartnett had also flagged a May print above +0.4% m/m as the tripwire that puts CPI “on course for 5% by US midterms, and risk assets get twitchy.” May printed +0.5% m/m. There was no walk-back. Tape behaved on-script Wednesday: SPX is now −4% from last week’s 7,620 record close.
Reid’s post-CPI note (ZeroHedge republish Jun 10 evening) escalates the desk view from Tuesday’s bubble analog to a structural regime claim. Over the full century, CPI >4% covers “over a quarter of monthly observations,” arriving in waves (WWII, 1970s, post-Covid). But since 1992, 83% of observations sat in 1–4% and only 10% above 4%. Reid: “The disinflationary environment of the past few decades benefited from a set of unusually supportive, and largely non-repeatable, global forces… the template from the last century rather than the last few decades will probably be the better guide.” That is the quietest, sharpest desk escalation of the week.
New post-CPI entrant on the bear side from BofA’s own economics chief (via Benzinga’s CPI-reactions roundup, Jun 10 15:44 ET). Juneau revised BofA’s core PCE tracking UP to +0.27% m/m after factoring in “a likely jump in portfolio management fees tied to equity gains.” Sees the Fed “firmly on hold, with risks skewed toward higher front-end rates.” BofA’s house view is now internally coherent on the bear side: Subramanian (take profits, signposts 70%) + Hartnett (4% framework live) + Juneau (higher-front-end-rates risk).
Independent research entrant on the bear side (Benzinga roundup, Jun 10 PM). Williams called the soft topline core a “head fake,” noting core services ex-housing accelerated to 3.7% on his calc. Expects the Fed’s 2026 core PCE forecast to be revised up to ~3.1%; “little underlying comfort in the report.” The institutional read that won Wednesday’s tape: the relief rally on soft core was faded precisely because the services detail was hawkish.
The clearest post-CPI bull-retention statement from the Goldman complex (via CNBC CPI coverage). Inflation spike is “meaningful and a headwind for the economy and more cyclical sectors,” but AI-investment tailwinds still support. Critically: “If the Iran conflict drags on and inflationary pressures continue to build, there could come a point where that balance shifts, but we don’t see that today.” Pairs with Pasquariello’s pre-CPI “not yet but getting closer.” Bull lean retained, named tripwire attached.
Market Ear’s Jun 10 14:33 note (ZeroHedge republish): “The ETF Casino Is Running The AI Trade. SOX earnings expectations need a bigger chart soon. The AI boom has triggered one of the sharpest upward revisions cycles in recent memory, helping fuel one of the most crowded trades in the market.” Third Market Ear fragility note in three sessions (Jun 8 vol-skew break, Jun 10 “Nobody In Control,” Jun 10 ETF Casino). Confirms the 10:30 ET SOXS-surge pattern in both Tuesday and Wednesday tapes — leveraged/inverse ETF flow is now the marginal price-setter in semis.
JPMorgan’s 03:02 AM ET note (ZeroHedge republish): “AI Bills Are Out of Control. Investment analysts, particularly at HFs, are using a ton of AI… I’ve run into numerous analysts whose personal token budgets reach tens of thousands of dollars with some even exceeding $100K. If you’re not using AI in your investment process today, you are falling behind.” Cuts both ways: AI spend is exploding (bull: revenue durability for compute vendors, agrees with ORCL’s $638B RPO) and cost discipline is gone (bear: 1999-style spend euphoria). The funding-question framing is now on the JPM desk note, not just sell-side strategy.
Sonders’ X thread Jun 10 PM: “Core goods inflation continued to ease a bit in May but remains positive y/y.” “Not surprisingly, energy’s contribution to CPI has soared since the start of the Iran war; May’s percentage point contribution of 1.5 is the highest in years.” Schwab’s Kevin Gordon added: “The drawdown we’ve seen in the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the past 4 weeks is the most extreme in history.” Implicit lean: this is a supply shock the Fed can look through — mildly dovish counter to the head-fake camp. The SPR-drawdown chart is a new escalation-risk datapoint.
ZH’s overnight US wrap (Jun 11 05:15 ET, premium-gated tl;dr): “A somewhat cooler than expected Core CPI supported a rebound in stocks… but just like yesterday we saw SOXS surge around 10:30 ET and down went stocks… 14:30 ET — Margin call time… saw bitcoin, bonds, and bullion sold (liquidity) and stocks leg lower…” Gold “clubbed like a baby seal (liquidity needs?).” Flow anatomy of CPI day: relief pop → SOXS leveraged-short flow slams tape mid-morning for the second consecutive day → 14:30 forced-liquidation wave hitting ALL collateral assets. This is the positioning unwind Goldman trader Lucas flagged Tuesday — now visibly running.
Buy/Sell-Side Desk Shifts — Tue Jun 9 → Wed Jun 10 → Thu Jun 11
An explicit scoreboard of where every sell-side strategy desk and named buy-side voice sits across the May CPI binary. Zero desks turned more bullish across the print — the only post-CPI movers moved bearish, while the bull camp retained its view with explicit tripwires attached.
| Desk | Strategist | Tue Jun 9 view | Wed Jun 10 view | Thu Jun 11 view | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BofA | Subramanian | Take profits; bear signposts 70% = prior peaks avg | Same; lead bear via ZH republish | No new note; print validated thesis — no walk-back | BEAR (held) |
| BofA | Hartnett (Flow Show) | CPI >4% = SPX −4%/3M, −7%/6M framework (preview) | Same, pre-print; flagged +0.4% m/m tripwire | Framework TRIGGERED (4.2% y/y, +0.5% m/m); restated post-print, no softening | BEAR (now live) |
| BofA | Juneau (Econ) | — | — | Core PCE tracking revised UP to 0.27%; Fed firmly on hold, risks to higher front-end rates | NEW BEAR |
| JPM | TPS team | Flipped CAUTIOUS from Apr-8 tactical-bull: “Defensive stance makes sense until bond vol dissipates and tech selling stabilizes” | Cautious carry | No fresh print; bond vol + tech selling conditions NOT met (VVIX 108, SOXS waves) — stance logically still defensive | CAUTIOUS (held) |
| JPM | Desk color | ~$21B futures selling absorbed by ETF inflows (constructive flow note) | Hormuz cost-curve note (commodities) | “AI bills are out of control” — HF AI spend euphoria datapoint | MIXED |
| Goldman | Pasquariello (flows) | “Balance of risks still favoring bulls”; warns crowding “dangerously synchronized” | Desk family: Lucas SOXS note (“sheer trading power of SOXS… astounding”) | No fresh personal note; his “materially more violent moves” warning describes Wed’s tape | BULL-lean fading |
| Goldman | Kostin (Chief US Strategist) | Rally “too far, too fast”? — “not yet” but “getting closer” | Tariff-passthrough playbook: core CPI 2.0% by YE, cuts path intact (bull-counter) | No fresh note | NEUTRAL-BULL |
| Goldman | GSAM — Urbanowicz | — | — | Inflation “meaningful headwind” but AI + Fed tailwinds hold; balance shifts only if Iran drags on — “we don’t see that today” | NEW BULL (with tripwire) |
| Morgan Stanley | Wilson | No fresh note | No fresh note | No fresh note — dark across 3 sessions | DARK |
| Citi | Strategy desk | Positioning improved post-selloff, constructive w/ risks (via @DeItaone); YE SPX target 8,100 | No fresh note | No fresh note (stale) | NEUTRAL-BULL (stale) |
| Deutsche Bank | Reid | “Whether we ultimately hit 2000 or not, this still feels like 1999 for now” | IPO-wave note: issuance coincides with, doesn’t cause, peaks | Post-CPI: >4% inflation comes in WAVES; “template from the last century… will probably be the better guide” — regime claim | BEAR (escalated) |
| BTIG | Krinsky | (Jun 8–9 syndication) Seven warning signs; 30-yr breadth divergence | Dispersion unwind “more to go” | No fresh note; thesis tracking exactly | BEAR (held) |
| 22V Research | Williams | — | — | Soft core a “head fake”; services ex-housing 3.7%; Fed core PCE forecast to ~3.1% | NEW BEAR |
Across the CPI binary, three desks shifted more bearish (DB Reid regime escalation; new entries from BofA Juneau and 22V Williams). One new bull entry (GSAM Urbanowicz) explicitly attached an Iran-conflict tripwire. The bull camp held but didn’t add. The bear camp added three voices and lost none. Meanwhile the vol market repriced (VX curve +4 vol points) and retail capitulated (AAII bears +10.7pp to 47.7%), leaving the GS-flows bull lean and the CBOE equity P/C 0.66 call-tilt as the last crowded-long holdouts.
Macro Pressure Map
BLS USDL-26-0824 (Wed 8:30 ET) confirmed headline +0.5% m/m / +4.2% y/y — in line with consensus, highest YoY since April 2023. Energy +3.9% m/m / +23.5% y/y did more than 60% of the monthly all-items rise; gasoline +7.0% m/m / +40.5% y/y. Core +0.2% m/m beat the +0.3% consensus; core 2.9% y/y in line. The bear’s detail: SuperCore (core services ex-shelter) rose +0.26% m/m to 3.49% y/y, the highest since August 2025. The bull’s detail: core commodities −0.1% m/m — first month of goods deflation in a year — with motor vehicle insurance −1.7%, household furnishings down, new vehicles −0.3%. Shelter +0.3% (half April’s pace), +3.4% y/y. The Sonders decomposition: 1.5 percentage points of the 4.2% headline is energy.
Consensus +0.7% m/m versus April’s scorching +1.4% (which more than doubled the prior estimate); 6.4% y/y vs 6.0% prior; core PPI y/y 5.4% vs 5.2%. A second straight 1%+ m/m print breaks the soft-core relief narrative and entrenches the “regime shift” framing 22V Williams articulated overnight. An in-line +0.7% softening keeps the Fed-hold-forever trade intact into Warsh’s Wednesday debut and supports the soft-core thesis Liz Ann Sonders is running.
Consensus 220K versus 225K prior (highest since early February, +13K w/w). Quiet upcreep in claims is the only soft-landing crack on the labor side. A 230K+ print alongside hot PPI is the stagflation cocktail; sub-215K buries the story for another week. Bear in mind Friday’s NFP was +172k vs ~125k consensus — the labor data has been noisier than usual and the curve has already repriced.
Per CNBC Daily Open: “ECB heads for a hike amid Iran energy price pressures” — first ECB hike of the cycle into Iran-driven energy inflation. Bund 10Y at 3.084% (+1.6 bp overnight, new YTD high). If the ECB delivers and signals a hawkish path, the Bund-UST spread compresses, EUR/USD lifts (currently 1.154) and the global rates impulse adds to the post-CPI repricing. ECB presser around 08:45 AM ET will land 15 minutes after PPI/claims.
$39B 10Y reopening Wed at 1:00 PM ET (CUSIP 91282CQQ7) stopped at 4.538% high yield (median 4.480%), bid-to-cover 2.57; indirects took 78.0% of competitive, directs 12.3%, dealers left with just 9.4%. Strong foreign / real-money demand absorbed a 4.2% headline CPI day. Sets a constructive baseline for today’s tougher test — the 30Y at 1:00 PM with a prior of 5.046% and a soft 2.30 b/c. A tail at the 30Y today would hit equity duration (NDX) harder than this morning’s PPI.
From the Kobeissi Letter X post (Jun 11 06:03 ET, freshest read of the morning): “Fertilizer prices are normalizing… urea down to $453.5/short ton, lowest since February 6th… −36% decline from the mid-April peak, when prices surged to the highest since 2022 as the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz effectively halted fertilizer shipments from the Middle East. According to the Fertilizer Institute, countries directly affected by the Iran War account for almost half of all global urea exports… The fertilizer shock is easing.” A rare disinflationary commodity datapoint the morning after a 4.2% CPI — read-through to ag/fertilizer names (MOS, NTR, CF) on the soft side and a forward-rolloff signal vs the 23.5% y/y energy print.
Trend Structure & Key Levels
VIXCentral printed M1 20.45 / M2 21.55 / M3 21.95 / Oct 22.70 / Jan’27 22.80 this morning, after Wednesday’s post-CPI session. M1 jumped +4.2 vol points from 16.24 the prior day; the entire strip repriced from 16s into 20–22s. Wednesday’s brief explicitly flagged the tripwire: “if M1 jumps after CPI, the regime call changes.” The futures market no longer treats this move as a single-event spike — October at 22.70 prices elevated vol through Warsh’s first three meetings. Spot VIX 22.22 still sits 1.77 above M1 (versus 5.20 above on Wednesday) and VIX9D 25.67 sits 3.45 above spot — the near-term stress premium is now on FOMC June 17 and SpaceX IPO supply, not the rolled-off CPI binary.
Via TipRanks Wednesday: DataTrek calls XLK’s recent outperformance versus SPY a 6-sigma event — statistically, a once-in-roughly-four-million-years move. New voice on the same theme four desks have been calling: Bilello’s mania pack (XLK +47% in 9 weeks > 1999), BTIG’s Krinsky breadth divergence (30-year first), ZeroHedge’s dispersion-rivals-dot-com frame, and now DataTrek’s 6-sigma stat. XLK closed Wed −1.81% at $177.49 (range $176.97–$182.41). Top weights: NVDA 13.40%, AAPL 11.70%, MSFT 8.08%, MU 6.88%, AMD 5.15%, AVGO 4.97% — MU’s 6.88% weighting explains why the memory leg of the AI unwind hits the sector ETF disproportionately.
Sentiment, Fear & Flow Gauges
The cleanest behavioral split of the week sits inside the sentiment grid. AAII retail printed Bears 47.7% (+10.7pp in one week, near March panic high) and Bulls 30.4% (−5.9pp) — outright capitulation in retail-survey terms. But the CBOE equity put/call rose only 0.04 to 0.66, still well below the 0.70 neutral line and still call-tilted at the single-stock level. The options-using equity crowd has not bought protection at the single-stock layer even as it says it is bearish. Two reads: either (a) the next leg lower is a forced-options-flow event and the equity P/C will spike, or (b) the retail bearishness is a contrarian washout signal. Either way, the gap closes.
VVIX printed 108.16 (+12.9%) at Wednesday’s close. Above 105, dealers are visibly paying up for VIX upside — the structural sign that vol-of-vol pricing has moved from complacency into panic-hedging territory. Compare to Tuesday’s 95.81 print (+3.41 single-day move there) and Monday’s 92 reading. Two straight days of double-digit VVIX percent moves into a regime-repriced VX strip is the trigger Goldman trader Lucas’s SOXS notes were front-running.
Portfolio Positioning Insights
Oracle’s Q4 FY26 (released Wednesday 4:05 PM ET) was a clean double-beat: non-GAAP EPS $2.11 vs $1.96 consensus (+24% y/y), revenue $19.2B vs $19.1B (+21% y/y). Cloud revenue $9.9B (+47% y/y). OCI (IaaS) $5.8B (+93% y/y), slightly above the 91% consensus. RPO printed a record $638 billion, +363% YoY, +$85B QoQ; “almost all of the incremental growth in RPO for the third and fourth quarters of fiscal 2026 came from large-scale AI contracts.” Customers prepaid for GPU purchases or supplied their own GPUs to Oracle; cumulative AI-customer prepay/supply now reaches $75 billion, materially reducing external financing need. FY27 revenue target of $90 billion reaffirmed; non-GAAP EPS guidance raised to $8.05.
And the stock fell 10% after-hours to $180.88 (TheFly Closing Bell Movers: “beat-and-raise, stock slides 8–10%”). The reason was on the call: FY26 capex came in at $55.7 billion versus $50 billion guided — a $5.7 billion overshoot — and Oracle added another $20 billion to its planned 2026 debt/equity capital raise, now expecting to raise $40 billion in FY27. CNBC’s headline: “Oracle beats on earnings and revenue, adds $20 billion to planned capital raise.” Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst, on Bloomberg, called it “Bloom Is Off the Rose.” The AI demand signal is intact — a $638B backlog up 363% is not a demand problem — but the market is now pricing AI infrastructure as a funding question. Read-through: same model as Crusoe (paused 1.8 GW Wyoming) and CRWV (debt-funded GPU buildout); positive for compute suppliers (NVDA, AMD chips inside), mixed for capex beneficiaries (VRT, ETN) so long as money keeps flowing.
Adobe reports Q2 FY26 after the close today, call 5:00–6:00 PM ET. Street consensus $5.81 EPS (range $5.57–$5.99) on revenue $6.45B (range $6.38B–$6.52B); Adobe’s own April guide was $6.43B–$6.48B / $5.80–$5.85. Adobe has topped EPS expectations for eight consecutive quarters. Wednesday close $238.50; market cap ~$99B (only the ~#162 US company); stock down ~30% YTD. The April $25B buyback authorization (through April 2030) has $3.89B used; the Semrush acquisition closed April 28. After ORCL’s reception last night, the bar is asymmetric — guidance and buyback pace matter more than the quarter. TechTimes framing: “a market test of whether AI eats or feeds creative software.”
SpaceX prices its IPO tonight at $135 per share for a $1.77 trillion implied valuation (above TSLA at ~$1.6T), trades Friday on Nasdaq under SPCX. First named institutional pass on valuation grounds landed Wednesday: North Carolina State Treasurer Brad Briner explicitly said the state pension will NOT use funds for a direct purchase, citing limited upside at the sticker price. TradingKey notes Bybit and Coinbase are both running tokenized/perp pre-IPO SpaceX products — retail plumbing is fully built before the stock even trades. Pairs with OpenAI’s announcement Wednesday that it plans to list within a year: the IPO supply pipeline is loading at exactly the moment retail capitulated (AAII bears 47.7%).
Per LatestLY Thursday AM IST: “Bitcoin is stable… slightly above its recent monthly lows,” trading near $61,996 with traders sidelined ahead of the June 17 Fed decision. Effectively flat to Wednesday’s $61,458. Yahoo Wednesday: “BTC, ETH open lower and falling further.” Even on a session where US equity futures bounce +0.5% overnight, BTC won’t follow — the divergence Bilello flagged on Monday (24 SPX ATHs YTD while BTC suffers its longest/deepest drawdown since 2022) widens. COIN closed Wed $153.97 near its 52-week low ($139.36); Baird cut COIN to $142 from $160 on June 5 with a “Bearish Fresh Pick” tag. Barron’s technical: “Bitcoin Weakness Is Hitting Strategy and Coinbase… both stocks showing deteriorating chart patterns and growing downside risk.”
ZeroHedge’s Wednesday wrap singled out the 14:30 ET cross-asset move: bitcoin, bonds and bullion all sold simultaneously, gold “clubbed like a baby seal (liquidity needs?).” Gold −0.57% to $4,109 on a day the US restruck Iran is the cleanest single liquidity-driven datapoint — war-bid plus liquidity-sell, with liquidity winning. Pattern matches Goldman trader Lucas’s Tuesday note on the speculative-short leverage piling into SOXS. The de-grossing event everyone was watching for is actively running — not just a positioning warning anymore.
Catalyst Watch
The morning’s binary stacks two prints on the same minute. May PPI consensus +0.7% m/m (vs +1.4% April scorcher), +6.4% y/y, core +5.4% y/y. Initial Claims consensus 220K (prior 225K, highest since early Feb). Combinations matter: hot PPI + 230K+ claims = stagflation cocktail; in-line PPI + sub-215K claims keeps the soft-core relief alive into FOMC. Watch core PPI and the trade-services line for tariff passthrough; pipeline inflation running at 6%+ on war energy is what 22V Williams used to call the soft core a head fake.
First ECB hike of the cycle expected on Iran-driven energy inflation. Bund 10Y at 3.084% (+1.6 bp overnight, new YTD high). The ECB presser lands 15 minutes after the US PPI and Claims data — the back-to-back is the actual macro vol event of the morning, not either print individually.
Prior $25B new issue May 13 stopped at 5.046% high yield (median 4.990%) with a soft 2.30 bid-to-cover and indirects at 66.6% (dealers stuck with 11.7%); May 20Y stopped 5.122% with 2.55 b/c. Today’s 30Y reopening follows Wednesday’s constructive 10Y (4.538%, 78% indirects). Long bond at ~5% with headline CPI at 4.2% = a barely positive real yield on inflation-pessimist math. A tail and weak b/c this afternoon would hit equity duration (NDX) harder than the morning PPI.
Blackout June 6–18; no Fed speakers today, tomorrow, or through the weekend. FOMC meets Tue Jun 16 – Wed Jun 17, presser June 17 with new dot plot. Kevin Warsh has argued AI productivity gains are disinflationary and rates can fall — while futures have repriced the next move to a December HIKE and Polymarket prices “any 2026 hike” at 52% (now a coin flip). The CPI internals (soft core, hot SuperCore) put both the new chair’s framework and the committee’s reaction function in the dot plot.
$5.81 EPS / $6.45B revenue consensus; call 5:00 PM ET. $3.89B remaining on $25B buyback; Semrush acquisition closed April 28. Stock down ~30% YTD. After ORCL’s sell-the-beat, ADBE’s number to watch is the AI-monetization commentary, not the quarter.
SpaceX prices after the close tonight; trades Friday June 12 under ticker SPCX. At $135/share the implied valuation is $1.77T (above TSLA); $75B fundraise; 555.6M shares plus 83.33M over-allotment ($11.2B); 7% float. The biggest single supply event of the cycle — the IPO wave thesis from DB Reid and Lance Roberts gets a hard-tape test. NC Treasurer Briner’s pass is the first institutional valuation skepticism in print.
Per CNBC live updates: “Stock futures rose early Thursday as the U.S. announced it had completed its strikes against Iran.” Per Newsquawk wrap: “US launched fresh strikes on Iran in response to Monday’s downing of an Apache helicopter; the mission was a ‘proportional response’… while President Trump called it ‘very strong and powerful’.” Trump Wednesday: Iran “has taken too long to negotiate… now they will have to pay the price.” Targets: Iranian military surveillance, communications and air-defense sites. Kuwait closed airspace; Israel warned of launches from Lebanon. Trump also said Wednesday a deal is “largely negotiated” with Hormuz reopening as a term. Strait still effectively closed: crude flows −95% / LNG −99% since late Feb; UAE’s ADNOC estimates full Hormuz flows won’t resume until 2027 even with a quick deal.
Per TradingKey overnight wrap: OpenAI told Bloomberg it plans to file for an IPO within a year. Stacks onto the SPCX mega-IPO this week, the Apollo/Blackstone $35B Anthropic SPV (carried Tuesday), and Lance Roberts’s issuance-wave warning from Monday. The supply of paper is arriving at the top of the sentiment cycle — precisely the structural set-up DB Reid and RIA were calling out before the print.
Information Edge
Wednesday after the close, ORCL initially dropped 8% on the headline numbers, then pared the drop to just −1% at $199 at 16:20 ET when the beat detail crossed (per TheFly). Then through the conference call the stock sank to $180.88 (−10.13%). The market accepted the beat. The market rejected the funding plan. That is the cleanest narrative datapoint for what the AI trade has become — bookings (RPO $638B, +363% YoY) and bookings quality (47% cloud growth, 93% OCI growth, $75B of customer GPU prepay) are not the constraint. The capital structure required to deliver on the bookings is. Ellison’s Oracle now needs $40 billion of fresh debt and equity in FY27. CRWV runs the same model. Crusoe paused its 1.8 GW Wyoming build. The chain has bent.
Per TipRanks Wednesday: “Nvidia Stock Secures a Massive Victory with Apple Tie-Up as iPhone-Maker Finally Admits Defeat in the Siri AI Race.” NVDA was the AI-compute beneficiary of Apple’s WWDC Siri-on-Gemini admission — with Apple now publicly outsourcing flagship-consumer-AI to Google, the inference compute will run on NVIDIA silicon. Single-name positive buried inside a sector-wide unwind. AAPL closed Wed $291.58 (+0.35%) and held at $290.83 after-hours; Maxim raised the price target to $350 from $310 post-WWDC; TD Cowen to $350 from $335. MarketWatch: “Apple’s AI could usher in a historic upgrade cycle that investors are overlooking.” Morgan Stanley counter: aging iPhones can’t run the new AI features.
Per TradingKey: “OpenAI and Visa (V) jointly announced on Wednesday the integration of Visa payment services into the OpenAI platform, enabling AI agents to autonomously complete online purchases and payments upon user authorization… users can instruct AI agents to perform tasks such as bill payments and grocery shopping, while online retailers will support transaction requests initiated by AI agents.” V is the obvious single-name beneficiary; MA is racing the same agentic-payments lane via the Stripe/Visa/Mastercard stablecoin platform reported last week. First public AI-agent payments rails integration in the megacap space.
Super Micro printed the worst single-day move in the S&P 500 Wednesday at −27.98%. Pairs with KOSPI −4.52% (Samsung/SK Hynix-led) Tuesday, MU −4% Tuesday, and AVGO’s soft Q3 AI guide that started the chip unwind on Tuesday. The chip-tape unwind is now three consecutive sessions deep and concentrated in the names with the highest concentration risk — the same names that, per Bilello’s Monday Week-in-Charts, drive over half of MSCI EM 2026 earnings growth between TSM, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. CRWV (debt-funded GPU buildout) and VRT/ETN (capex beneficiaries) are the obvious power-infrastructure follow-on names to watch today as ORCL pre-market trades.
Per TechCrunch (Jun 10 evening): “The notorious cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed to have hacked Oracle PeopleSoft servers at more than 100 organizations, many of them universities.” Secondary headline overhang the same night ORCL reported. Likely subsumed by the capex/funding story today, but worth flagging as a tail-risk newscycle item. Mild positive offset elsewhere: ORCL announced a $396M federal HR-systems contract win (TipRanks).
Per ZeroHedge Wed wrap and CNBC trending: Devon Energy +5.74%, APA +3.80% led the S&P winners list Wednesday on the WTI/Brent bid into Iran strikes. Crude stocks drew for a seventh consecutive week (EIA). Per TradingKey: “Brent crude futures briefly broke above $93 before paring some gains… market concerns are growing that prospects for negotiations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz have further dimmed.” XOM/CVX (39% of XLE between them) ride this into today. Energy is the one sector where the mania framing remains bullish-confirming rather than warning — pairs with Kobeissi’s “20 ATHs in 2026” framework carried Tuesday.
Per CNBC trending Wednesday afternoon, after the 4.2% CPI headline: “Trump says ‘I love the inflation’.” Earlier Wednesday Trump also said publicly that he is “not looking to renew USMCA” (per ZH overnight wrap) — a new trade-policy headline alongside the Iran strikes. The CPI political reaction function and the trade-policy posture are now both in play heading into Warsh’s debut June 17.
Additional Macro & Economic Research
The Cleveland Fed’s inflation nowcasting page has the June read tracking +0.12% headline / +0.23% core m/m — suggesting the energy passthrough is already starting to roll off in real time. The May print just delivered: +0.46% headline / +0.23% core m/m. If June’s nowcast holds, the YoY trajectory peaks in May and rolls off through Q3. That is the bull’s peak-CPI thesis — one Liz Ann Sonders is implicitly running. The bear’s counter: PPI and core services ex-housing are doing the opposite trajectory.
Polymarket prices Fed Decision in June at 99% no-change ($81M volume); July 93% no-change; “How many cuts in 2026” at 79% on ZERO; Fed Rate HIKE in 2026 at 52% YES (now a coin flip); “hike by October meeting” at 43%; End-2026 rate at 4.00% at 34% (modal); Warsh cuts at his first meeting at 1%; zero dissents at next meeting 72%; “Pause-Pause-Pause” March–June 99%. The crowd has buried 2026 cuts and made a HIKE the more-likely 2026 move — extraordinary repricing for a chair branded a dove-by-appointment. Today’s PPI is the next direct input into that hike line.
JGB 10Y 2.684% — Japan May PPI again hot (ZH wrap: “hotter than expected”), with USD/JPY at 160.57 sitting in intervention zone. Bund 10Y 3.084% (+1.6 bp), new YTD high into the ECB decision later this morning. UK 10Y 4.922%. Global synchronized rate impulse pricing through the Iran-driven energy passthrough — the same template Reid’s “century” note describes.
June preliminary sentiment Friday at 10:00 AM ET. May FINAL was 44.8 — record low for the series, third straight monthly decline, revised down from 48.2 prelim, driven by Hormuz-related gasoline price spike. The 5–10-year inflation expectations subcomponent matters more than the headline for Warsh’s first SEP — the Fed is acutely sensitive to longer-run expectation un-anchoring with a new chair on the chair.
Per Kevin Gordon (Schwab) via Sonders: “US effective tariff rate fell to 6.7% in April.” May CPI core commodities −0.1% m/m (first goods deflation in a year) is consistent — tariff drag is fading from the goods complex even as energy spikes. Goldman’s playbook (carried Tuesday): 72% of tariff costs have passed through after 12 months, adding 0.8 percentage points to current YoY core PCE; year-end forecast core PCE 2.1% YoY, core CPI 2.0%. The clean bull case rests on tariff drag rolling off through Q3 even as Iran energy spikes.
Per Schwab’s Kevin Gordon (via Sonders): “The drawdown we’ve seen in the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the past 4 weeks is the most extreme in history.” A new escalation-risk datapoint that pairs with the EIA crude-stocks-draw-for-seven-weeks print. The SPR optionality on a prolonged Iran conflict is being burned through faster than at any prior point — including the 2022 Russia shock. That is the macro tail Goldman’s Urbanowicz attached his Iran tripwire to.
Federal Reserve — Officials & Research
FOMC blackout window June 6–18 in effect — no Fed speakers today, tomorrow, or through next week. Next FOMC Tue–Wed June 16–17 with the presser on the 17th — Kevin Warsh’s debut meeting and first press conference. SEP + new dot plot at the same meeting. Senate confirmed Warsh 54–45 on May 13, sworn in May 22 as 17th Fed Chair. Market watching for (1) whether the dot plot explicitly removes 2026 cuts and signals a hike tail; (2) whether Warsh signals a shift from easing bias toward neutral or hawkish; (3) any change to the long-run neutral rate. Warsh has historically been hawkish on inflation but has argued AI-productivity gains are disinflationary and rates can fall — tension between framework and data is exactly what this CPI internals (soft core / hot SuperCore) sets up.
Per CNBC trending Wednesday afternoon, after the 4.2% CPI headline: “Trump says ‘I love the inflation’.” Political reaction function now intersecting with the Warsh Fed in a way that did not exist under Powell. Trump publicly favored cuts during Warsh’s confirmation cycle; the curve has repriced to a December HIKE; Warsh’s own framework argues for cuts. The June 17 dot plot is therefore the first read on whether the new chair signals independence on policy.
Per Timiraos’ X note (carried via TradingKey’s aggregator) on the May FOMC minutes: “The Fed’s staff put a decidedly stagflationary forecast together at the May meeting, and that’s important because it could become the foundation for what officials submit in their SEPs next month.” Wednesday’s CPI internals only reinforced that staff projection — soft headline core gives the doves cover, hot SuperCore arms the hawks. The committee will write the dot plot around the staff projection.
$39B 10Y reopening Wed at 1:00 PM ET (CUSIP 91282CQQ7) cleared with 78.0% indirect takedown, 12.3% direct, 9.4% dealer — strong indirect bid hours after a 4.2% CPI headline. Foreign/real-money demand intact at these yields. The 30Y at 1:00 PM today is the harder test — prior 5.046% with a soft 2.30 b/c.
Polymarket: zero cuts in 2026 at 79%; ANY 2026 hike at 52%; Warsh cuts at first meeting at 1%. CME FedWatch feed dark for this run; ZeroHedge frames the futures curve as “fully pricing in a 25 bp hike by the December meeting.” The two reconcile (no cuts + a hike), but Warsh’s own dovish framework is the structural anomaly — the June 17 dot plot tells you which side of the trade he’s on.
What the Consensus Is Missing — Thursday June 11 Edition
Eli G Levy
eli@cannontrading.com
Senior Market Analyst — Cannon Intelligence Desk ◆ Thursday, June 11
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