With a rate cut now all but certain, the market’s bull run seems unstoppable.

But it may look a little different.

Last week, Apple was slapped with two critical downgrades, suggesting that the Cupertino, California-based iPhone-maker is proving there may be a limit to just how high a megacap tech company can climb. But is the rest of the Magnificent Seven bumping up against a similar ceiling?

Defense Is the Worst Offense

Apple’s “Awe Dropping” event last Tuesday included the debut of its Air model of iPhones, an attempt to broaden the market for its marquee product and compete more aggressively with ascendant Samsung’s rival models. The anticipated foldable iPhone was a no-show, adding fuel to the criticism that Apple has been too slow to innovate across both hardware and, particularly, AI software. By the end of the week, awe gave way to meh. DA Davidson downgraded Apple’s stock from “buy” to “neutral,” while Phillip Securities downgraded it to “reduce” from “neutral.”

The gloomy reaction left Apple on the sidelines of another stellar week on the stock market; its share price fell roughly 2.2% over the course of last week, counter to a five-day streak of closing highs and a 1.5% gain for the tech-heavy Nasdaq and a 1.3% increase for the broader S&P 500, which closed at a record on Thursday. Among the Mag 7, only Amazon joined Apple in the losers’ club, with investors focused on its growing competition in the AI space, particularly from Oracle.

Last week’s big winner? Tesla, this year’s biggest Mag 7 loser, which will benefit from rate cuts more than the other six:

• Tesla stock climbed nearly 12% last week, which means it has clawed back all its losses for the year after plummeting more than 40% through April (it’s tough being a global auto company amid a global trade war — especially when you’re on a friends-to-enemies arc with the US president).
• So what explains the rise? Auto companies tend to do well, naturally, in times of lower interest rates, given that most consumers still finance their car purchases. Stellantis also rose about 3.4% last week, while GM rose about 0.5% (Ford, down 0.6% last week, is stuck dealing with a nasty spate of recalls; it’s responsible for roughly 60% of all major US auto recalls this year, Barron’s recently found).

Print the Legend: Not everyone is feeling the Fed cut hike. In a note last week, JPMorgan’s Andrew Tyler wrote that the bank is maintaining its “lower conviction Tactical Bullish” market outlook. That’s a fancy — or at least very masculine — way of saying “yes, rate cuts could be good for the market, but they’re still happening for a reason.” Tyler flagged resurgent inflation, a weak labor market, and ongoing trade risks as headwinds moving forward, saying the rate cut could turn into a “Sell the News” event.

Conventional wisdom has it that the tobacco industry is shrinking faster than a lit menthol cigarette, but that’s entirely wrong: Big Tobacco is having a banner year.

Last week, the sector scored a big win after the FDA agreed to fast-track the approval process for ultra-popular nicotine pouches amid pressure from the White House. The victory comes amid what has been a rather strong sales year, especially among non-cigarette products.

Zyn Vogue

Historically, the FDA takes a long time to grant its stamp of approval to new forms of delivering a nicotine fix. In January, the agency finally approved 20 different flavors of Zyn, the industry-leading nicotine pouch brand owned by Philip Morris International, after five years of review.

According to documents seen by Reuters, the agency is now fast-tracking the process for pouch products from four industry leaders to completion by December. That means a legal launch may be right around the corner. (Note: The industry is increasingly taking a “bring to market first, ask for legal approval later” approach to its products, especially those featuring “synthetic” nicotine).

Big Tobacco has also largely evaded scrutiny from the Make America Healthy Again movement, and its product tends to do well amid periods of economic uncertainty anyhow:

• So far this year, a basket of six global tobacco stocks has produced an average total return of 43%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis published last week.
• Zyn drove shipments of oral smoke-free products above 200 million cans in the Americas in PMI’s most recent quarter, up 32% year-over-year; the company’s stock is up more than 37% year-to-date as of Friday. Meanwhile, Altria reported 26% year-over-year growth in shipments of its Zyn competitor on! in its most recent quarter; its share price is up 27% year-to-date.

Altria-uism: Scratch the bit about tobacco stocks doing well in periods of economic uncertainty; they tend to do well in any period. A Credit Suisse study, also cited by the WSJ, found that the industry outperformed all other sectors in the US between 1900 and 2015. That has been a boon, believe it or not, for many US municipalities. That’s because way back in the late 1990s, major US tobacco companies agreed to pay 52 US municipalities and states $206 billion over the next 25 years (in exchange, those jurisdictions gave up their right to legal claims against the tobacco firms). Roughly half of those municipalities securitized the payments into municipal bonds, and the WSJ found those bonds — tied to actual cigarette sales — have gained 2.5x more than the S&P municipal bond index. Which means, somehow, the cigarette industry has become good for public health. Or, at least, public financial health.

In the world of metals, gold has all the fun these days. The precious element has soared to record-high prices in 2025, thanks to economic uncertainty transforming it into a safe-haven darling.

But the price of gold’s especially conductive cousin, copper, has been shocked up and down by the chaotic trade environment. New research suggests short-term headwinds will give way to long-term tailwinds, but the industry will have to wait until 2027 to find out.

Conductive Shock

It’s in electrical wiring, plumbing and kitchenware. It makes up 2.5% of post-1982 pennies, their copper coating enough to cast Lincoln’s profile in lustrous reddish-brown. Demand for copper, already one of the most commonly used metals in the world, has surged amid the AI computing boom and increasing use of electric cars during a global energy transition. A conventional car, for example, contains up to 50 pounds of the stuff, while a battery electric vehicle contains about 180.

Nevertheless, copper has spent this year on a price-chart rollercoaster worthy of Six Flags. President Donald Trump teased a 50% copper tariff in early July, driving per-pound prices to record highs and prompting a Herculean effort to relocate massive amounts of the metal to US shores. Not until the tariff was announced did the White House reveal it would only apply to pipes, tubes and semi-finished copper products — not the raw material. The reversal triggered a price crash of 20% in one day. All told, copper has tumbled 4.1% in the past six months, having also fallen after the administration’s Liberation Day tariffs announcement in April. Now, with China struggling to kickstart an economic recovery and US consumer sentiment souring as job creation slows, analysts at Red Cloud Securities predict copper prices will face headwinds for at least another year:

• Last week, the firm forecast a 126,000-tonne surplus of copper in 2026, and with it a 6% drop in US demand as tariffs weigh on the economy. Red Cloud already expected a 2% decline in demand this year, and the predicted surplus led the analysts to slash their 2026 copper price forecast to $3.65 per pound from $3.85.
• The future, on the other hand, still looks artificially intelligent: McKinsey predicts $7 trillion in capital outlays will be needed for data centers to handle AI processing demands by 2030. Red Cloud forecasts the related copper demand will make the metal’s surplus vanish: The firm predicts copper deficits beginning in 2027 at 19,000 tonnes and rising to 766,000 tonnes by 2030, which analysts said will help lift prices to $6 per pound.

Those are the Rules: Developers like BHP, Freeport-McMoRan, Rio Tinto, and Zijin Mining would be the top beneficiaries of the deficit, but they’re already eyeing other future roadblocks. For one, existing copper mines will produce 15% less in 2035 than they did in 2024, according to BHP. That means firms will face pressure to find and develop new mines, something that requires significant capital spending. Then there’s the fact that the US, which imports about 45% of its copper, could take a bigger swing at tariffs: The Trump administration has said it will consider 15% universal copper tariffs in 2027, and entertain doubling them a year later. That could boost prices even higher, if there’s not another flip-flop.