Stocks once again finished higher last week, although it was not a broad, euphoric up-only rally that has defined price action most of the last month.

The tape spent most of the week trapped in the Iran/oil/Fed box, with investors trying to figure out whether a prolonged Hormuz scare would keep crude elevated, harden the inflation narrative, and push rate-cut hopes further out.

The indexes were roughly all flat as of midday Thursday.

The moment pressure eased, aided by Intel’s strong earnings on Thursday, the market told you exactly what it preferred to own.

On Friday, the S&P 500 closed up 0.80% at 7,165.08 and the Nasdaq rose 1.63% to 24,836.60, while the SOX (semiconductor ETF) jumped 4.32% for its 18th straight gain.

Oil fell 1.99% on the session to 94.88, the dollar slipped 0.32%, and the 10-year finished around 4.31%. At the same time, December Fed cut odds moved up to roughly 39% from about 23% in the prior session. That is the sequence that matters. Lower oil and strong forward guidance from Intel loosened the macro vise just enough for the market to reload risk.

But the breadth matters here, because this was not some monster broad-based melt-up. Reuters’ market breadth data showed a choppy week, with weak internals on Tuesday and Thursday, stronger breadth on Wednesday, and only moderately positive breadth by Friday, when advancers beat decliners by 1.47-to-1 on the NYSE and 1.38-to-1 on the Nasdaq.

So the better read is not that everything suddenly broke higher. It is that this was a selective rally, and the clearest leadership still came from semis, hardware, and AI-linked capex names.

Intel was the cleanest expression of that leadership. The stock surged 23.65% to a record close after an upbeat Q2 forecast, but the significance was bigger than one earnings beat.

Reuters reported demand for Intel’s server CPUs from firms offering AI services was strong enough that the company even sold chips it had previously written off, while the stronger guide reinforced the view that AI-linked compute demand is not rolling over. Intel mattered less as an isolated company story than as proof that the market still wants a hard-news reason to own the build-out trade.

That is also why I do not fear the stagflation narrative. If this were really a 1970s-style inflation regime, you would not be seeing semis extend an 18-session streak and investors violently reward compute exposure the second oil pressure backs off.

Reuters also noted investors were putting money to work in technology, industrials, and financials, which fits the idea that this was a selective relief rally rather than a one-sector squeeze. But the most forceful expression of that relief still came through semis and infrastructure.

That said, the weekend news flow is a reminder not to get cute. Trump’s cancellation of the planned Pakistan envoy trip undercut the idea that Friday’s diplomatic optimism had already hardened into a real breakthrough, even as Oman and Pakistan stay in the mix as back channels.

So the oil valve is still the switch. If crude cools, the market will keep reaching for risk. If it re-breaks higher, the hawkish macro read comes roaring back fast. But as of now, the market’s preference is obvious: when geopolitical pressure loosened, leadership snapped right back to the AI build-out trade.

Separately, Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh appeared in front of Congress last week. He largely toed the line as a Trump loyalist and creatively justified a dovish forward-looking posturing for the path of interest rates and the optimal path for Federal Reserve’s actions in the coming months and years.

Warsh believes we’re at the precipice of a productivity boom - led by AI - that will lead to dramatic price deflation and broad surplus. He concludes that the Fed will need to combat downward pressure of wages and employment with a supportive monetary backdrop.

The most important AI signal this week was not just that chip stocks went up. It was that the market finally got hard-news evidence that the infrastructure stack is still absorbing real demand, and that the demand is broadening beyond the most obvious GPU narrative. Intel was the cleanest proof point. First-quarter revenue came in at $13.6 billion, up 7% year over year, while Data Center and AI revenue rose 22% to $5.1 billion.

More important, Reuters reported demand from firms offering AI services was strong enough that Intel sold server CPUs it had previously written off. That matters because it says the next leg of AI infrastructure demand is showing up in the less glamorous but still essential parts of the compute stack, especially around inference, enterprise deployment, and the hardware that actually keeps these systems running.

That is why Intel’s guide mattered so much. The company forecast second-quarter revenue of $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion, above expectations, and the stock exploded 23.65% to a record close.

The read-through was bigger than one earnings beat. It told the market that AI demand is not rolling over, and that the buildout is still creating room for names beyond the usual suspects. If Nvidia remains the obvious face of the trade, Intel’s quarter was a reminder that the rest of the system still has to be provisioned, packaged, powered, and connected. That is where things start to get more interesting.

CRDO (our April pick for stock most likely to 5x) is one of the better ways to think about that next layer. If the AI capex cycle keeps scaling, the constraint is not just compute. It is the network fabric connecting all of it. Bigger clusters, denser racks, and more inference traffic all raise the value of high-speed, lower-power interconnect.

That is the logic behind CRDO’s push this month. The company used the TSMC symposium to highlight its OmniConnect Weaver platform and 224G PAM4 SerDes capabilities, while also moving on the proposed DustPhotonics acquisition. The strategic point is not that CRDO had a flashy headline. It is that the company is trying to build a more vertically integrated AI connectivity stack spanning electrical and optical links. If the market is right that AI clusters keep getting bigger and faster, the companies selling the plumbing can wind up capturing more of the economics than people expect.

AEHR (our #4 ranked-stock most likely 5x) is the even deeper picks-and-shovels version of the same idea. It sits in a part of the stack that most people do not care about until demand gets real enough that the bottleneck starts showing up in orders. On April 7, Aehr reported $37.2 million in quarterly bookings with book-to-bill above 3.5x, driven by strong AI and data center infrastructure demand.

Then on April 16 it announced a record $41 million follow-on production order from its lead hyperscale customer for package-level burn-in of custom AI processor ASICs, pushing second-half bookings above $92 million. That is not a story about retail hype or multiple expansion. It is a story about what happens when AI chips get hotter, more complex, and more expensive, and hyperscalers need more test, burn-in, and production qualification capacity to ship them at scale.

That is the bigger takeaway from the week. The market is starting to separate generic AI excitement from the names actually getting paid at different layers of the buildout. Intel validated demand at the compute layer. CRDO gives you the networking and interconnect layer.

AEHR gives you the reliability and production bottleneck layer. The more this cycle matures, the more I think that distinction matters. The easy trade was buying the obvious AI winners.

The better trade now may be finding the second-order infrastructure names where the market still has not fully priced how many bottlenecks this buildout has to work through.

That’s 5 sales in 4 months. 28 all time. And the performance?

14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%, net annualized returns on sold works held longer than one year (See all 28 at Masterworks.com).

It’s not from stocks, private equity, or real estate… it’s from contemporary and post war art. Crazy, right?

With Masterworks, you don’t need to be a BILLIONAIRE to invest in multi-million dollar art anymore.

Historically, the segment overall has had attractive appreciation and low correlation to stocks.*

Masterworks targets works featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso, identifying what they believe to have significant long-term appreciation potential, not just at the artist level but at the level of individual artworks.

As one of the largest players in the art market, with $1.3 billion invested over 500 artworks, they pass critical advantages through to their 70,000+ members to add art to their portfolios strategically.

Looking to diversify your investments in 2026?

Click here to skip the waitlist

^{*According to Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.}

Got feedback? Follow the writer on Twitter @frank_locascio and send a message.

The BRRR is meant for informational purposes only. It is not investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions.