News & Insight • Weekly Newsletters

05 June 2026 | William Buckhurst

That Was The Week That Was

MACRO NEWS

US Non-Farm Payrolls increased by 172,000 in May, outperforming market forecasts of 85,000. ADP private payrolls were also up to a 16-month high of 122,000 versus 120,000 expected, leading to increased expectations of a rate rise due to the resilience of the economy. The ISM Manufacturing figure also came in slightly higher than expected (54 v 53), adding to the rate rise argument.

The US Trade Representative (USTR), suggested more tariffs, but this time against goods from its main trading partners. 10% was proposed against Canada, Mexico, EU, Taiwan and the UK with a higher 12.5% figure for China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and the Swiss.

Oil prices drifted back slightly as the US announced that Israel and Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire. Trump has suggested that negotiations could also complete over the weekend – but at the time of writing there is no sign of progress.

Chinese Services PMI data came in at 54.4 from 52.6 as Chinese data continues to recover. China also announced a rule on the extraction of capital from the country which impacted western listed banks and insurance companies such as Standard Chartered and Prudential.

COMPANY NEWS

Broadcom was the largest company to report last week and is in the all-important semiconductor sector. Earnings beat estimates but unfortunately the shares fell over 13% as guidance of AI revenue of $16bn was underwhelming. This led to further worries about the future of AI with Nasdaq falling 4.7% on Friday.

Nvidia did not report results but they did suggest that their next generation of semiconductor systems (called Vera) may use far less DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) than expected, leading SK Hynix and Samsung – which we mentioned last week – lower.

The volatility in the tech sector has been very meaningful which can be good and bad. Take Palo Alto Networks, the cyber security business, which announced good results and initially rose 13%. However by the end of after hours trading the shares were down 3%, probably due to the guidance wasn’t as high as the market wanted. Sector rival CrowdStrike also fell over 10% even after beating most metrics.

Anthropic submitted its draft IPO filling, following hot on the heels of the Space X listing (mentioned later). They also published a report which suggested that AI infrastructure spend would slow down, leading a number of share prices in that sub sector to fall.

Chinese tech company, Tencent, rose by 10.5% as reports suggested they have had a major AI breakthrough with the development an agent designed to orchestrate WeChat’s 3.8m mini-programs.

Siemens Energy announced the acquisition of Camlin Group, a Northern Irish grid monitoring specialist.

Bluefield Solar Income Fund was approached by Drax for takeover, boosting the former by 16%.

ONE SMALL STEP FOR…

With Space X due to IPO in June at a $1.75trillion (!) market capitalisation we probably have to talk about it.

Space X has cornered the launch market with its own reusable rockets (which someone jokingly described as being caught by chop sticks), runs Starlink which provides access to the internet from hundreds of satellites, X (previously known as Twitter) and Grok (the AI search engine). The listing document has made waves on the desk, with the use of ‘interplanetary’ vocabulary and the figure for Total Addressable Market coming in at $28trn.

Further to this is that the listing and index rules which look to be being bent due to the sheer quantum of the size of the new company. This looks to be a another small, albeit very valuable, step for its owner Elon Musk.

BIG BOY BOOTS

IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) are when private companies come to market and then tend to do so when the market is fully valued. When the market is richly valued one can also get companies already listed, tapping the market for more money.

This week we saw Alphabet (Google) raise $85bn as part of an equity raise and interestingly Berkshire Hathaway also decided to take part and put in $10bn. Alphabet has been increasing its capital expenditure (Capex) plans and the vast majority coming through its free cash flow. However, it marks a big investment from new Berkshire CEO, Greg Abel, as it now climbs to a position around $30bn.

On the back of this Meta Platforms (Facebook/Instagram) was also exploring raising tens of billions to fund its rapidly expanding AI infrastructure which it increased to around $135bn recently. The shares fell in expectation.

THE WEEK AHEAD

The week starts with Japanese GDP figures and ends with the UK’s. In amongst global trade data we get US inflation data which will be interesting post the blow out Non-Farm Payroll figures we just received. The World Cup also kicks off which can boost trade at various establishments!

On a company basis, there are figures from Molten Ventures but the main news will come on Accenture and how they are dealing with the consultancy threat from AI and the retailers Kroger and Tesco.

THE WEEK IN HISTORY

2002: The Czech Republic approved the world's first law aimed at limiting light pollution. The so-called “dark-sky law” required outdoor lighting to be more efficient, with fixtures directed downward to prevent light from traveling up.

1989: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, passed away