Closelook@Hypergrowth
Paid — the Testers, the Packagers and the Optics. Tiring — the Builders' Flow
The three AI indices this week, index by index, sector by sector and stock by stock, with the flow tables laid over them. The builder rose 5.9% and is up 111% on the year, but 110 of its 126 members lost momentum while it rose; the runner made a record; the applications index fell again, and 33 of its 40 members turned stronger. The money went to the companies that test, package and connect the chips. Five winners and five losers of the week, with the catalyst behind each — and TSMC's September sales next week as the first number of the fourth quarter.
Current edition · 2026-10-04
1 · This Week's Action
The week in one line: the price said build, the flow said tired. Capex (Rubin Build-Out) +5.87% to 2,172.09, +111.3% on the year; opex (Agentic Ecosystem) +3.25% to a record 1,738.49, +76.2%; applications (Agentic Winners 40) −1.06%, −8.1%. That is the price. The flow — the house Directional Flow score, which measures whether each stock's trend is gaining or losing force — says something else: in the builder, 110 of 126 members are losing strength and only 9 are gaining; in the applications index, 33 of 40 are getting stronger. The builder rose on tiring legs; the applications index fell on legs that are turning.
The ten best of the week, across all three indices — the testers, the materials and the optics. GlobalWafers +25.3%, ams-OSRAM +23.5%, Axcelis +20.0%, Soitec +19.3%, LPKF Laser +18.9%, Furukawa Electric +15.8%, Resonac +15.5%, Lumentum +15.3%, SUMCO +15.1%, Synopsys +15.1%. Three wafer and materials makers (GlobalWafers, Soitec, SUMCO, with Resonac's chemicals), an ion-implant maker (Axcelis), a laser tool maker (LPKF), two optics companies (ams-OSRAM, Lumentum) and a fibre maker (Furukawa), and the design-software leader (Synopsys). Not one of the ten is a chip designer or a cloud operator. The catalyst was the same for most of them: Micron's record quarter on Wednesday night — a memory maker that sells more needs more wafers, more implant, more test — and Tokyo's 3.3% Thursday, led by the equipment names.
The ten worst — the software that sells seats, and the storage that met a rival. AppLovin −13.7%, MongoDB −12.8%, Modine −10.0%, Tempus AI −9.9%, Western Digital −9.1%, Sangfor −9.1%, Qualcomm −8.5%, Spotify −7.3%, Kingsoft Cloud −6.8%, AAON −6.5%. MongoDB fell 18% on Monday after Meta hired its chief executive to run a new unit selling Meta's AI stack to companies; Western Digital fell 10% on Friday on a report that Toshiba will double its hard-drive output for AI data centers; Modine and AAON, two cooling suppliers, fell as the thermal layer rested.
