July 8 US stock market review

Last night's market showed extreme divergence! Tech stocks bucked the trend, while Chinese stocks surged.
US equities were completely driven by geopolitical news, resulting in a sharply split session: the Dow fell 1.1%, the S&P 500 dropped 0.3%, but the Nasdaq managed to eke out a 0.2% gain, propped up by tech stocks.

Core logic breakdown:
1. **Inflation fears reignited**: The US-Iran ceasefire talks collapsed completely, with oil tankers virtually halted in the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices jumped, with WTI rising 4.4% to $73.5 and Brent briefly hitting $80 intraday. Combined with the hawkish tone of the Fed's June minutes — where a few officials already cited reasons for rate hikes — the market began to increase rate hike bets, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield to 4.57%.
2. **Semiconductors see historic bottom-fishing**: Money flooded en masse into AI tech plays that are macro-insulated. The semiconductor ETF saw a single-day inflow of $5.4 billion, shattering the previous daily record by roughly 4x. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index closed up 2.23%, with Nvidia rising 3.65% to lead the tech giants.
3. **Chinese stocks exploded across the board**: The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index closed up 2.05%. Alibaba surged over 11%, Kingsoft Cloud rose 11.7%, Baidu and Xiaomi gained over 5%, with popular names broadly in the green.

Other major assets: Gold came under pressure, falling to $4,090; Bitcoin dropped 2.2% to $62,900.