Monday’s session delivered one of the cleanest market splits in recent weeks — energy surging, semiconductors cratering, and the major indexes going their separate ways as Wall Street entered a holiday-shortened trading week with no shortage of unresolved questions.
The Dow Jones added roughly 0.3% while the S&P 500 slipped 0.7% and the Nasdaq dropped nearly 1.1% by afternoon trading. Both the Dow and Nasdaq are now in correction territory following last week’s close. The divergence wasn’t noise — it reflected two very real and competing forces battling for the market’s direction.
The Chip Selloff Has a New Villain
Micron led semiconductor stocks sharply lower on Monday, falling more than 10% in afternoon trading. Sandisk shed 8%, Intel dropped 4%, AMD fell close to 3%, and Nvidia gave back roughly 1%. The across-the-board weakness extended a sell-off that began last week and found fresh fuel over the weekend.
The catalyst is a Google algorithm called TurboQuant, announced last week, which allows AI models to run more efficiently by cutting the amount of memory required. The implications for memory chip demand — and pricing — are exactly what the market is now attempting to price in. If AI workloads require meaningfully less memory bandwidth to operate, the demand thesis underpinning names like Micron gets complicated fast.
The debate is far from settled. Experts argue that memory chip pricing could stay firm through 2027, pointing to continued strength in AI data center demand with no signs of a slowdown and supply conditions tight enough to drive price inflation in several chip categories. That’s a reasonable counter — but on a Monday in a correction, the market is choosing the bearish read first and asking questions later.
Oil Doesn’t Care About Algorithms
On the other side of the ledger, crude had another strong session. Brent held above $107 per barrel and WTI crossed $103 as the Iran conflict continued to dominate commodity markets. President Trump added fresh fuel Monday, telling the Financial Times that his preference is for the U.S. to control Iran’s oil industry indefinitely — language that signals the conflict’s resolution is not imminent and that supply disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz and now the Bab el-Mandeb Strait could persist for weeks or months.
Energy was the one sector that didn’t need to rationalize its rally today. The math is straightforward: supply is constrained, no deal is in sight, and $100+ oil is becoming the baseline assumption rather than the shock scenario.
Eyes on the Week Ahead
With Friday’s session closed for Good Friday, this is a compressed week with outsized data. JOLTS, ADP private payrolls, and the March jobs report all land before the long weekend — and after the January-February whipsaw in employment numbers, each print carries extra weight. Nike’s earnings will offer a read on consumer health that the macro data alone can’t provide.
The setup: a market digesting a genuine technology disruption narrative while simultaneously pricing in the worst energy crisis in a generation. That’s not a market that moves in one direction.
