Iran Is Bluffing. Here's Proof 😲

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The market was getting excited. Maybe a little too excited.

Trump poured cold water on hopes for a quick U.S.-Iran deal Wednesday, telling a White House cabinet meeting that talks haven't produced anything Washington is willing to sign.

"They want very much to make a deal," Trump said. But added that the U.S. is "not satisfied" with where things stand.

He also dropped a line that sounded more like a boxing commentator than a diplomat: Iran is "negotiating on fumes."

Translation? Tehran needs this deal more than Washington does. And Trump knows it.

Iranian state TV tried to get ahead of the story, reporting that a draft interim agreement could reopen the Strait of Hormuz within a month of signing.

The White House called it "a complete fabrication" and told everyone to stop trusting Iranian state media. (Bold strategy, given the source.)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio played the classic diplomat card — acknowledging "some progress" while saying more work is needed in the "coming days."

So: talks are alive, but no deal is close.

What this means for markets: Any rally priced around a Hormuz resolution just lost its legs. Oil risk stays elevated. Watch for Trump to either turn up the pressure. Or use a deal as a headline win when he's ready.

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Jensen Huang isn't just bullish on AI. He's bullish on the island that makes it all possible.

Nvidia's CEO announced the company will spend $150 billion a year in Taiwan — up from $10-15 billion just five years ago.

"Taiwan is the epicenter of the AI revolution," Huang said at the event. Chips, packaging, supercomputers — it all flows through this island.

And Nvidia is planting its flag there permanently.

The company unveiled a brand new campus called Constellation — designed for 4,000 employees, spanning nearly four hectares in northern Taipei's Beitou-Shilin Technology Park.

Think of it as Nvidia's Santa Clara HQ... but with better dumplings.

Construction kicks off in the next couple of months, and the site is set to become one of the largest AI R&D hubs in the Asia-Pacific region.

Huang also flagged what comes after the current AI wave: physical AI.

"It's going to transform manufacturing."

Taiwan's partners, he said, will be front and center when that shift happens.

Oh, and for good measure — TSMC's CEO C.C. Wei joined Huang for dinner in Taipei on Tuesday. Just two of the most powerful men in semiconductors, casually breaking bread.

Meanwhile, AMD said last week it plans to invest $10B in Taiwan for AI chip partnerships and advanced packaging. Respectable number. Also exactly 1/15th of what Nvidia just committed.

Huang is also set to deliver a keynote at COMPUTEX on Monday. Expect fireworks.

1. Ride the Nvidia Supply Chain
Taiwan isn't just where Nvidia builds its campus — it's where the entire AI stack gets made. Jensen's $150B commitment is a rising tide that lifts every boat in that harbour.

📌 Action: Add or increase exposure to $NVDA ( ▼ 1.05% ) and $TSM ( ▲ 2.53% ). Both are directly part of this story. If you want broader coverage, $SOXX ( ▼ 1.07% ) (semiconductor ETF) captures the whole ecosystem.

2. Back the AI Infrastructure Buildout
Nvidia is pouring money into R&D, campuses, and physical AI. That spending has to land somewhere — data centres, power, cooling, construction. The picks-and-shovels play is very much alive.

📌 Action: Look at infrastructure-adjacent ETFs like $GRID ( ▼ 1.43% ) or $IFRA ( ▲ 0.23% ), or individual names like Eaton $ETN ( ▲ 0.8% ) and Vertiv $VRT ( ▼ 1.28% ) that service the AI buildout directly.

3. Don't Sleep on AMD
AMD's $10B Taiwan pledge got completely overshadowed by Nvidia's $150B. But that's the point — AMD is quietly scaling its AI chip partnerships while nobody's watching.

📌 Action: $AMD ( ▼ 1.66% ) is still trading at a significant discount to Nvidia on a valuation basis. If you believe AI chip demand is a multi-winner race, AMD could be the undervalued seat at the table.

Micron $MU ( ▲ 3.63% ) closed Tuesday up 19.29% at $895.88. Then kept going. Post-market pushed it past $914. Premarket Wednesday? Another 10% on top.

This isn't just a good earnings reaction. This is a full-blown gamma squeeze. And the options chain is the crime scene.

Goldman Sachs is calling it: markets are in the middle of a historic gamma squeeze.

Here's the stat that puts it in context. SPX call notional as a share of S&P 500 market cap currently sits at 2.81x. The long-run average since 2005? 0.64x. Earlier this month it briefly touched above 4.0x.

The options market has literally never been this large relative to the stocks it's supposed to be pricing.

As OptionsTrading.org put it after the May 7 session: "$2.6 trillion notional in calls in a single day. We're all options traders now whether we know it or not."

Micron's chain is what that looks like up close.

The single most active strike in Micron's entire chain? The $1,000 call.

53,632 contracts traded against open interest of just 5,340.

To profit, buyers needed Micron to close 12.5% above an already-elevated price by Friday. And over 53,000 contracts changed hands there anyway.

The rest of the upper chain looked the same:

Those aren't random bets. Those are fingerprints of a feedback loop.

When you buy call options in size, the dealers who sold them have to buy the underlying stock to hedge. That's delta hedging.

As the stock rises, they need more shares. Which pushes the price higher. Which triggers more call buying. Which forces more hedging.

It's a loop that feeds itself — until it doesn't.

Micron's chain makes this visible. Tens of thousands of contracts clustered at $900, $950, $1,000 means dealers are massively short gamma at every one of those levels.

As the stock approaches each strike, hedging pressure doesn't increase steadily. It accelerates. Monday's 19% move was both the cause and the result.

If the call side is a party, the put side is what you find the morning after.

These were real positions — hedges and bearish bets placed when Micron was trading at prices that now feel like ancient history. One session wiped them out.

The $420 and $430 puts — sitting on 14,810 and 13,958 open interest respectively — are the most dramatic illustration of just how much was destroyed in a single day.

The at-the-money $900 straddle is pricing in a further move of ±8.4% by Friday's expiry. That's for a stock that already moved 19% in one session.

Whether this squeeze has more fuel depends on one thing: does fresh call buying keep forcing dealers to hedge at $950 and $1,000?

Right now, the chain says those levels are absolutely in play.