Good morning, investors. We are right at the mid-way point of the year. It’s time to take stock of the best and worst investments of 2026, and what the trajectory means for what comes next.

All year investors have piled into the machines powering the AI trade and dumped anything the technology could replace.

The top-performing S&P 500 stocks are almost all related to silicon and storage, while the ten worst look like a basket of software and consulting names that Wall Street expects to be disrupted.

Sandisk leads the way, like it did last year, followed by Micron and Western Digital.

Flex — the most “modest” of the winners — has secured a 145% return year-to-date.

The only non-chip name in the top 10 is the 175-year-old business, Corning, and even that is an AI bet for its glass and fiber production to be deployed for data centers.

Intuit is the worst-performing stock of the S&P 500 this year, down 58%, and it’s the biggest loser on a list of names that have almost all been cut in half the last six months. 

Honorable mentions are the SaaSpocalypse victims Adobe, Salesforce, and Workday, each of which are nearing 40% losses in the same period. 

The divergence of the charts illustrate the market’s bet on companies that will help build AI and against companies that look most vulnerable to technological displacement. 

The same story is clear at a thematic level.

Semiconductors this year, as measured by the VanEck Semidoncutor ETF (SMH) are up 65% while software (IGV) is down roughly 12%, a 77 point gap inside the same sector. 

Underscoring the point — as Opening Bell Daily covered Monday — the equal-weight S&P 500 is outperforming the market-cap-weighted index by more than 2% because the mega-cap Magnificent 7 that led the last leg of the bull market have become drags.

Investors in recent months have stopped paying for the promise of AI being touted by the hyperscalers and instead are buying into the plumbing, picks and shovels.

If we assume the simple story beats complex, the bulls have the upper hand as the second half of the year begins.

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🤖 South Korea's 2 chip giants laid out a 10-year investment plan for $1.3 trillion. Samsung and SK Hynix will pour roughly 800 trillion won into four new fabs plus HBM4 memory and processing-in-memory plants, with more earmarked for AI data centers by 2029. (CNBC)

🏦 The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook. They ruled in a 5-4 decision that Cook can continue serving on the Fed Board of Governors after last August the president claimed she committed mortgage fraud. (Yahoo Finance)

📉 Super Micro Computer stock fell 7% after Taiwan officials raided the offices. It was part of an investigation into alleged smuggling of Nvidia chips to China using the company’s servers, according to reports. (Investing.com)

📈 Comcast rallied 9% on plans to split into two separate public companies. The deal carves NBCUniversal and Sky off from the telecom business with co-CEO Mike Cavanagh moving to lead the media spinoff. (CNBC)

🗓 June 30, 2015: Greece became the first developed country in history to default on an International Monetary Fund loan after failing to make a $1.7 billion payment.

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