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SOXX breaks its floor on FOMC day — the sell-off spares only the testers

The Midday 10 Wed, Jul 29, 2026 ~60 seconds 12:30 ET

The third leg of the chip sell-off arrived in US hours and broke the line: SOXX through Tuesday's 480.50 flush-low with the Fed decision still ahead at 14:00 ET. But this is not Korea's block-sale — inside the wreckage the tape is sorting with unusual precision: the testing duopoly is green, software is bid, the Nasdaq without its tech is the week's best fund, and the non-AI names are being paid for beats the AI complex gets punished for.

US midday, ~12:30–12:40 ET, intraday quotes

  1. The board: the handoff, priced at ETF level
  2. SOXX 468 — through the floor
  3. Memory and equipment carry the third leg
  4. Vertiv: the power layer's Corning moment
  5. The testers are the exception — again
  6. The non-AI tape still pays beats
  7. The week in one spread: ex-tech +3.4, top-30 −7.8
  8. The index tape under the hood
  9. FOMC at 14:00 ET, then the after-dark stack
  10. Pulse follow-up: the rule confirmed within hours

The ten lines

  1. 1

    BOARD The board: the handoff, priced at ETF level

    Semis −4% across the complex — SMH −4.1%, XSD −4.4%, SMHX (fabless) −3.2% — with the physical build sold alongside: data centres (DTCR) −2.8%, grid (GRID) −3.1%, nuclear (NLR) −3.1%. Against that, the layer that rents the build is green: CLOU +2.3%, IGV +0.6%, FDN +0.1%. One board, both sides of the capex→opex handoff.

  2. 2

    LEVEL SOXX 468 — through the floor

    SOXX

    SOXX trades 468, down 4.7%, through the 480.50 flush-low that held Monday's crash — the line this morning's edition called the whole floor. A break printed hours before an FOMC decision is provisional by construction: the only score that counts is the close against 480.50, after the presser, before the prints.

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  4. 3

    DOWN Memory and equipment carry the third leg

    MU

    MU −6.1%, Lam Research −6.3% into its own print tonight, NVDA −2.8%, Broadcom −1.9% — Korea's second crash crossed the Pacific into memory and equipment, exactly where the Hynix print said the repricing lives. Nebius −10.2% extends it to the neocloud financing layer — a funding-side name selling harder than the chipmakers.

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C · line 11 · members

In line 11: what an intraday floor break on a Fed day does and does not change for the book, why the tester bid inside a −4.7% tape keeps the bottom case alive, where Vertiv's punished beat lands in the two-class map from today's study — and the one close that decides whether tonight's prints are heard from above or below the line.

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Ten lines on the US midday tape, not advice — an investment diary. Published every trading day at 12:30 ET. See The Morning 10 and the Daily Pulse.