Reading · The David Lin Report

MARKET RECAP: June 22, 2026 - June 26, 2026

Technology stocks led a broad retreat. The Nasdaq Composite fell 4.6% on the week and posted a fifth straight losing session Friday, closing at 25,297.62, while the S&P 500 slid nearly 2% to 7,354.02 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.6% to 51,876.11. Investors rotated out of high-valuation technology names and into more defensive areas of the market.

Several catalysts fed the decline. The New York Times reported that OpenAI had weighed delaying its public offering until next year, and chip stocks slid alongside SpaceX, which extended losses following its June 12 debut. Micron posted record quarterly revenue of $41.46 billion on Wednesday, yet technology shares remained under pressure amid rising memory and data-center costs. Alphabet had dropped 5% Monday on concerns over AI talent departures.

The Federal Reserve set the macro tone. Under new Chair Kevin Warsh, the central bank held its policy rate at 3.50%-3.75% on June 17 and sharply raised its inflation forecasts. Traders priced in three rate hikes this year, with roughly a 62% chance of the first move in September. The dollar index climbed toward a 13-month high near 102 before easing Friday, ending higher for a second straight week.

Inflation data offered some relief. Thursday’s report showed headline PCE at 4.1% for May, with personal income and spending each up 0.7% on the month. The print eased fears of a sharper acceleration and led investors to scale back some tightening bets.

Crude oil collapsed. West Texas Intermediate fell nearly 4% Friday toward $69 per barrel, its lowest since February 27, and recorded a weekly drop of more than 10%. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz accelerated as US-Iran peace talks advanced and Saudi Arabia resumed loadings at Ras Tanura, restoring Persian Gulf exports toward prewar levels. Trump said Friday that Iran had violated the ceasefire by firing drones at ships in the strait.

Gold had a volatile week. Spot prices reached a high near $4,221 per oz on Monday, then set a weekly low near $3,959 on Wednesday as a firmer dollar and rate-hike bets drove selling, marking the first move below $4,000 since November. A Friday rebound lifted gold back to about $4,090 per oz, though the metal still logged a fourth straight weekly decline.

Silver fell harder. The metal dropped from around $65 per oz early in the week to a close near $57.83 on Tuesday, its weakest since December 2025, before recovering to about $59.50 per oz on Friday amid a softer dollar and ceasefire headlines. Silver traded at roughly half its January record near $121.62 per oz.

Bitcoin tracked the risk-off mood. It traded near $59,000 on Friday, down big again on the week and roughly 20% for the month, with sentiment gauges at extreme fear levels. Abroad, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigned Monday, and South Korea’s Kospi triggered a circuit breaker Friday before closing down 5.8%

Market Movements

The following assets experienced dramatic swings in price this past week. Data are up-to-date as of June 26 at approximately 4pm EST.

(Data from StockAnalysis.com)

Merck & Co. - 12.47%

Johnson & Johnson - 10.10%

AbbVie - up 9.39%

DOWN

Western Digital Corporation - down 21.61%

Oracle - down 15.13%

Palantir - down 12.25%

DXY - up .49%

Bitcoin - down 5.93%

Gold - down 2.44%

Silver - down 10.50%

Platinum - down 2.42%

10-year Treasury Yield - down 14 basis points

(10-year data from https://www.cnbc.com)

S&P 500 - down 1.95%

Russell 2000 - up .59%

Chris Vermeulen, chief market strategist at The Technical Traders, said the rallies in stocks, gold, and Bitcoin had all rolled over. The S&P 500 topped in early June. Gold peaked in late January, and Bitcoin peaked late last year. The question now, he argued, was whether to be in markets at all.

Market internals had turned. Vermeulen explained that money-flow signals on the S&P 500 had shifted from buying to a search for safety. Utilities had started outperforming, a red flag he reads as a warning that money is leaving stocks. The dollar had also begun to break out.

He had trimmed accordingly. Vermeulen said he closed his QQQ position near the high and held only a sliver of S&P 500 exposure. His system, he explained, lightens up when a trend stalls rather than betting on a coin toss.

On the downside, he was specific. The S&P 500 could fall 18% to 24% on the monthly chart, toward 5,500-6,000. Gold faced a pullback toward $3,300-$3,600, roughly 17%. Bitcoin looked weakest of all.

Vermeulen predicted Bitcoin would drop toward $44,000 next, with the monthly chart pointing to $16,000, a level he had flagged years earlier. He said crypto had fallen completely out of favor as money rotated first into precious metals and then into AI and technology names.

He took a longer view on gold. Vermeulen argued the metal was in a shakeout phase, echoing the long consolidations after the 1980 and 2011 peaks. He predicted a sharp correction, then possible stability, then a potential surge toward $8,500/oz if something in the economy broke. He cautioned that such a move would mean real pain elsewhere.

For now, Vermeulen favored only the dollar. He noted the dollar index had built a base before prior 20% legs higher. He said the currency tends to rally during economic stress, as it did in 2022, and that a dollar breakout would likely coincide with a stock selloff. He framed cash at 4% as a smart temporary hold while waiting for metals to bottom.

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Doomberg, head writer of the Doomberg Substack, said the oil market stayed calm through the Iran war because traders read it correctly. WTI traded near $72- $ 73 per barrel, barely above prewar levels. That price, he explained, signaled to the market that the Strait of Hormuz was effectively open.

Three forces kept the supply flowing. China stockpiled heavily under the radar. China also leaned on hydrocarbon fungibility, switching toward coal, ethane, and other feedstocks at a scale few expected. And more oil slipped out of the strait than anyone admitted. The true disruption ran near 5 to 6 million barrels a day, Doomberg said, not the 15 million the market first feared. China absorbed roughly four million barrels, and reserves covered the rest.

On the fear of empty tanks, he was blunt. North America was never at risk. Canada produces 5.5 million barrels a day that can only flow to the US, he explained, and the combined region runs a vast surplus of crude and refined products. He dismissed forecasts of US shortages by July 4. Parts of California and the Northeast faced strain, but the Jones Act could be suspended to ease it, which the administration did early.

Doomberg argued Trump’s claim that reserves would run dry in four weeks was narrative management around the Iran memorandum, not a reading of physical inventory. He said the real leverage Iran held was never Hormuz. It was the proven ability to destroy Saudi oil infrastructure with missiles and drones, a threat he likened to an economic nuclear weapon.

He saw oil drifting lower into year-end, with Lebanon the milestone to watch. A major escalation could spike prices. Absent that, his base case is prices easing back toward prewar levels. He noted European gas traded near 42 euros per megawatt-hour, with Asian buyers outbidding European buyers for cargoes.

Doomberg closed on China. He said coal supplies more than half its primary energy, and its all-of-the-above buildout across coal, nuclear, solar, batteries, and the largest EV fleet ever assembled gave it flex no rival could easily copy.

Peter Schiff, host of The Peter Schiff Show, argued the market had melted up and would eventually melt down. He said valuations had reached extremes never seen before. He pointed to the SpaceX listing, a company he said traded at more than 100 times revenue after selling only about 4% of its shares.

Schiff argued crypto offered the clearest signal. He said Bitcoin had fallen from a peak near $126,000 to around $64,000, a drop of about 50%, leaving it lower than in April 2021.

He took particular aim at Strategy and Michael Saylor. Schiff explained that the firm had sold common stock for three consecutive weeks to buy Bitcoin, even as its shares traded at a 25% to 30% discount relative to its Bitcoin holdings. He argued that the move destroyed Bitcoin per share and would eventually cause the company to collapse.

On the dollar, Schiff said recent strength reflected yen weakness rather than confidence in the currency. He noted the yen had broken down near 162. He explained Japan held over $1 trillion in Treasuries and could become a forced seller, pushing US yields higher.

Schiff said Japan faced its own debt strain, with a deficit near 4.5% of GDP and debt at 250% of GDP. He argued the US could not safely reach that level, since it was the world’s largest debtor, ran a trillion-dollar trade deficit, and depended on services rather than manufacturing.

He predicted the Federal Reserve under Kevin Warsh would keep expanding its balance sheet and monetizing debt. He argued real interest rates had already collapsed as inflation accelerated. Schiff said inflation was a policy choice that every chair since Alan Greenspan, who died that day, had made.

On energy, Schiff said oil companies would benefit from higher prices tied to the conflict in Iran, though most Americans would pay more. He argued that the US lost that war by granting Iran sanctions relief and the return of frozen assets.

Schiff predicted gold would climb once the Fed began raising rates, as markets judged the moves insufficient. He said weak data could pull hikes off the table and send gold sharply higher. He argued that tokenized gold, not Bitcoin, represented the future of blockchain.

Lyn Alden, founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, pointed to two developments shaping the rest of the year: the partial resolution with Iran and the new Fed chair’s hawkish signaling. She cautioned that the Iran deal was only a memorandum of understanding, so headlines would keep coming.

Her central theme was fiscal dominance. Alden explained that once federal debt passes 100% of GDP, interest rate policy loses its punch. Raising rates curbs bank lending, but it also widens the deficit by lifting interest expense, which now exceeds defense spending. The Fed’s tools, she argued, were built for an era of monetary dominance that no longer applies.

This produces a two-speed economy. A young family seeking a first mortgage faces near-impossible affordability, while deficit spending flows to Social Security, Medicare, and defense, and wealthy asset holders prosper.

On inflation, Alden was measured. She said energy had been the largest driver of the recent spike. If the ceasefire holds and oil stops climbing, year-over-year readings should cool in the back half of the year. She added that there were no signs of a 2021-style breakaway, since M2 growth had returned to normal rather than the 40% surges of that period.

Markets had priced a 90% chance of at least one rate hike by December. Alden found that aggressive, leaning closer to neutral herself. For most investors, she argued, 25 basis points hardly matter in the larger picture.

She walked through her allocation asset by asset. High-quality equities form the core, favoring companies outside bubble territory. Gold she treats as a permanent strategic holding, but after a powerful two-year run, she wants to build a base before adding. Bitcoin sits in low-sentiment territory, weighed down by a stagnating broader crypto space and by capital rotating into AI.

On AI, Alden drew the same parallel as gold: real technology that arrived too fast for comfort. She predicted parts of the trade would crack from a high base, then recover. SpaceX at 100 times revenue struck her as excessive, and she favored chip stocks over free-cash-flow-negative hyperscalers.

Michael Howell, founder and managing director of GL Indexes and author of Capital Wars, traced the year’s weakness to liquidity, which he said peaked in late 2025 and has been slowing ever since.

He stressed it was not falling in absolute terms but decelerating, and that the cause was not the Fed stamping on the brake but a real economy so strong it crowds money out of financial markets. Even absent the Iran war, he argued, stocks, gold, and Bitcoin would have fallen as much as they did.

On Warsh, Howell approved of the trimming of the Fed’s remit and questioned whether the funds rate means much anymore. With AI firms earning gross margins above 50% and a government paying a large interest bill to the private sector, he argued that a 25-basis-point change changes little, and a rate rise can even act as stimulus. Warsh, he said, is standing back and letting the markets tighten for him through a stronger dollar and rising yields.

He walked through his liquidity machinery. A disguised QE program he called the RMP had refilled markets after repo tensions threatened a coronary at the end of 2025, while the Treasury suppressed bond volatility through buybacks, swapping illiquid off-the-run bonds for fresh ones. Either you trust these authorities are guarding your back, he said, or you worry the cracks are widening. He ruled out near-term balance-sheet shrinkage, noting the last attempt in late 2025 broke the repo market.

Howell explained the dollar’s strength through buoyant capital flows, post-GFC bank and insurance regulation, and enthusiasm for US tech, all of which are reinforced by the coming Fed tightening.

The yield curve, expected to steepen this year, had instead flattened, signaling tighter liquidity, and he matched nominal GDP growth of 6%-7% against a 10-year target near 6%. The danger above 4.5%, he argued, falls on the leveraged financial sector rather than the economy, which he thought could endure until roughly 5.5%.

On gold, Howell offered a contrarian read centered on China. The People’s Bank had been internally devaluing the yuan since early 2023 to escape its debt problem, and gold priced in yuan tracks PBOC liquidity nearly one-for-one, making Shanghai the marginal pricer.

China abruptly turned off the tap around March 2nd, he said, probably to cool the economy and curb oil demand amid tensions with Iran. Still, the latest data showed relief had resumed. This was a selective debasement, he argued, with the great Western debasement still to come.

Bitcoin, he called a clean barometer of Fed liquidity, suffering as that liquidity slows. He warned Wall Street would not remain immune, recalling that the 2021-22 tightening cut stocks by 25% and Bitcoin by 75%, though he expected a range-bound 2026, with tightening intensifying into year-end or 2027.

On oil, Howell leaned on the gold-oil ratio, historically near 20 and now around 45. With gold elevated at a minimum of $4,000, simple arithmetic implies $200 oil, though he framed it as triangulation rather than a forecast.

The ratio tracks the liquidity cycle, falling late as the real economy’s appetite for commodities crowds out finance, so he would not discount higher oil and commodity prices in the medium term, especially given deglobalization and duplicated supply chains.

His closing themes were structural. Deficits are exploding worldwide, he said, because aging demographics drive welfare costs above mainstream inflation while neither party will cut spending or raise taxes.

Governments increasingly fund themselves at the front end through bills bought by banks, a form of monetization that Milton Friedman would lament. He urged defensive positioning, commodity protection, and shorter-duration government debt or TIPS, and he summarized his worldview simply: economics is downstream of liquidity, and geopolitics is downstream of economics.

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