Chips rip, software pays — and the bottom was sold by a forced seller

BOARD The board: yesterday's inversion, inverted

The semi fund +8% with memory and equipment leading — while ServiceNow −6.2%, Adobe −6.6%, Salesforce −5.0% and SAP −3.6% sell off hard. The software index reads roughly flat only because Microsoft (+14.7%) sits inside it — strip the anchor out and the seat-software complex is having its worst session of the week. Twenty-four hours ago this board was the mirror image: software held, chips sold. One night of prints flipped it 180 degrees.

LEVEL SOXX 502 — through the broken floor, from below

SOXX trades ~502, up 8%, back through the 480.50 line it closed below last night — the reclaim test this morning's edition set as the precondition for any structural talk, passed with twenty points to spare by midday. A floor that breaks on a close and is reclaimed the next session was not a regime change; it was a liquidation. The close confirms or retracts that sentence tonight.

UP Microsoft +14.7% — the anchor, paid at index scale

MSFT ~448, up 14.7% — the largest single-name contribution to the index bid, and the market's verdict on demand-anchored capex: Azure +43%, a $678B contracted backlog, 30 million paid Copilot seats. The spending plan that stands on booked demand got the biggest one-day reward a mega-cap has collected this season. Yesterday's after-dark may have saved this market — and it did it with agent demand, not with restraint.