CEO Watchlist: Week In Review (7/26/26)

TOP NEWS AFFECTING THE STOCK MARKET THIS WEEK:

Earnings Season Week 3: Here Are The Top 5 Stocks We Are Watching This Week ... (Source)

Stocks mentioned: $GOOG, $INTC, $AMKR, $MSFT, $META, $AAPL, $AMZN

We are now heading into Week 3 of earnings season, and the tape is telling a very different story than the headline numbers would suggest. The earnings from last week delivered some of the strongest reports on the calendar, with Google (GOOG) and Intel (INTC) both stepping to the plate alongside a handful of other heavyweights. Google put up a quarter where cloud growth came in at a staggering 82%, which is massive for a business of that scale. However, investors struggled with seeing Google report their first ever quarter of negative free cash flow in the company's publicly traded history. Plus, they increased their capex guidance, which was expected, but they also signaled that more spending is to come in 2027, which always seems to put investors on edge. So that's why, despite blowing out expectations when it came to revenue and EPS, Google's stock still dropped after the report. Intel followed a similar script. The company posted a massive quarter that beat across the board, and yet the stock finished the session in the red once the print hit the wire.

The pattern that's forming across these releases is worth paying attention to. Strong earnings are no longer enough on their own to push stocks higher, and in several cases they are not even enough to hold the line. When beats get sold, it usually says more about positioning and expectations than it does about the underlying business, and that dynamic is what has us watching this week very closely. This week brings arguably the most important stretch of the entire earnings season. Four of the "Magnificent Seven" report, and they will do so against the backdrop of a Fed meeting on Wednesday. Fed Chair Warsh will host the press conference following the rate decision, and given the recent commentary out of the ECB forum in Sintra where he emphasized that inflation remains too elevated, investors have reason to be anxious about the tone of that press conference. Layer in the GDP estimates and PCE inflation print on Thursday, and the setup is as loaded as it gets.

That said, here are the Top 5 stocks we are watching for the week ahead that are reporting their earnings:

Amkor (AMKR) - Reports Monday after the close. As one of the largest outsourced semiconductor assembly and test providers in the world, Amkor sits directly downstream from the AI chip cycle, and we are watching for advanced packaging demand commentary tied to hyperscaler and HPC customers.
Microsoft (MSFT) - Reports Wednesday after the close. Azure growth is the number everyone will be locked in on, particularly the AI contribution and any color on capex guidance for the coming fiscal year.
Meta (META) - Reports Wednesday after the close. We are watching ad revenue durability, Reality Labs losses, and any updated framework around AI infrastructure spend given how aggressively the company has been signaling investment.
Apple (AAPL) - Reports Thursday after the close. iPhone unit trends, services growth, and any commentary on the AI product roadmap are the three levers that matter most for how this one trades.
Amazon (AMZN) - Reports Thursday after the close. AWS growth relative to Azure and Google Cloud is the headline metric, along with retail margins and any read on consumer health heading into the back half of the year.

Putting it all together, next week is where earnings season either confirms or breaks the pattern we have seen so far. Google and Intel showed that strong prints alone are not moving stocks the way they used to, and now four of the largest companies in the market report into a Fed meeting where the chair has already signaled that inflation remains his primary concern. Between the big tech releases, the rate decision, the Warsh press conference, and the GDP and PCE data on Thursday, there is very little room for the market to hide. We will be tracking every print and reporting any changes we are making to our stock and options portfolios to our CEO Watchlist Investment Club members in real time.

This Stock Just Partnered With Nvidia And TSM: And We Think It Could More Than Double From Here... (Source)

Stocks mentioned: $AMKR, $NVDA, $TSM

If you've been watching the semiconductor space at all this year, you've probably noticed the story keeps circling back to one word, and that word is packaging. It's the unsexy, back-end part of the chip supply chain that used to be a rounding error in the conversation, but in the AI era it's quietly become one of the biggest bottlenecks standing between Nvidia and the trillions of dollars of data center buildout the hyperscalers keep announcing. That's the backdrop we want people to hold in their heads before we get into what happened this week, because it makes the news land differently. On Thursday, Amkor (AMKR) dropped an announcement that we think a lot of the market is still sleeping on, and it plugs directly into that bottleneck story in a way that changes how we look at the name.

Amkor announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Nvidia (NVDA), and it comes with a $1.5 billion prepayment from Nvidia to help Amkor expand its advanced packaging capacity here in the US, specifically in Arizona. The two companies said they're going to align their long-term technology roadmaps around things like high-density interconnects and next-generation heterogeneous integration, which is just a fancy way of saying they want to build the guts of the next wave of AI chips together. Amkor already handles packaging work for Nvidia's data center processors and networking chipsets, so this isn't a cold intro, it's the two of them expanding their already strong partnership.

The reason this partnership makes sense for both sides is pretty clean when you lay it out. Nvidia is trying to build the most resilient supply chain possible so they never get caught short again on AI accelerators, and after the last couple years of scrambling for capacity, they want packaging locked in on US soil for geopolitical reasons and to keep pace with hyperscaler demand. Amkor has the technical chops but needs the capital and demand visibility to justify pouring billions into an Arizona campus. So Nvidia essentially wrote a check up front to guarantee capacity, and Amkor gets a marquee anchor customer to underwrite the build-out.

Here's why we think this is genuinely bullish for Amkor and why it's one of our favorite long-term names in the market right now despite all the volatility we've been dealing with. The stock has been getting hit alongside the broader semiconductor selloff, but the underlying story keeps getting stronger, not weaker. Our biggest concern on Amkor for a while was customer concentration risk and whether TSM would end up building out its own captive packaging operation in Arizona and cutting Amkor out entirely. That was the bear case. Then in June, TSM and Amkor signed a 10-year agreement for TSM to route its Arizona advanced packaging and test work through Amkor's Peoria campus, which in our view basically vaporized that risk. Now stack the Nvidia deal on top of that, and you have the two most important players in the entire AI supply chain both locking Amkor in as a core partner for the next decade. That prepayment structure from Nvidia also means Amkor isn't taking on the full financing risk of the buildout alone, which cleans up the balance sheet story that used to give us some pause.

Zooming out, we think the setup here is one of the better risk-reward profiles we're looking at right now. Amkor just went from a company with a big customer concentration question mark to a company sitting at the intersection of the two most valuable semiconductor franchises on the planet, with Nvidia funding the US buildout and TSM contractually feeding it work for a decade. The stock has been selling off on macro fear and general chip volatility, which in our view has created a disconnect between the price action and the fundamental story that just got materially stronger over the last month. Advanced packaging is the new bottleneck in AI, Amkor is one of the very few names positioned to solve it, and the two customers who matter most just told the market they're all in. That's the whole thesis, and we think it's one of the cleanest long-term stories we've come across in the semiconductor space this year, not to mention it's only a $16 billion market cap.

Stock Spotlight: ON Semiconductor (ON) (Source)

Stocks mentioned: $ON, $NVDA, $SYNA

This week we're running another one of our "Stock Spotlight" breakdowns, which is where we take a single name off our watchlist and lay out why we think it could have serious future potential. The stock we're focused on today is Onsemi (ON). This one falls squarely into what we call the "power semiconductor" bucket, and it's a theme we've been paying more and more attention to. Now, before we get into onsemi specifically, we want to set the table on what power semis even are, because the name gets thrown around a lot without much explanation.

Most people hear "semiconductor" and immediately think of Nvidia (NVDA) GPUs or the logic chips inside their iPhone. Power semis are a totally different animal. Their job isn't to think, it's to move electricity around safely. The easiest way to picture it is your house. The lights, the fridge, the TV, and your laptop charger all need different amounts of power to run properly, and none of them can just plug straight into the raw electricity coming off the street without frying themselves. Something has to sit in the middle and step that power up or down and deliver the right dose to the right device. That is exactly what power semis do, just at a much smaller and much more precise scale. If logic chips are the brain of a system, power semis are the plumbing and pressure valves that keep everything flowing at the right level without bursting a pipe.

In today's economy, that plumbing job is getting a lot more demanding, and that's really where the sector thesis starts to come together. Three big trends are pulling power semi demand higher at the same time. First, AI data centers are pulling absolutely insane amounts of electricity, and every rack of Nvidia chips needs a small army of power semis surrounding it, feeding it the exact voltage it needs without letting it overheat. Second, electric vehicles (EV) are basically giant batteries on wheels, and every EV needs power semis to manage charging, run the motor, and convert energy between the battery and the rest of the car. Third, the broader buildout around renewables, the grid, and factory automation all runs on the same underlying components. Put it all together and the bullish thesis on the sector, in one sentence, is that the amount of power semiconductor content inside each system is growing way faster than almost anyone expected a couple years ago, and the single biggest reason is that AI data centers keep needing more and more power.

Within the power semi group, onsemi is one of the names that stands out to us for a few reasons. The first is that they are one of the few names that does everything in-house. They grow their own silicon carbide crystals, design the circuits, and manufacture the finished power modules in their own factories. Silicon carbide, or SiC, is the material that matters most here. Think of regular silicon as a normal cooking pan and silicon carbide as a heavy-duty cast iron. The cast iron can handle way more heat and abuse without warping, and that's exactly what these next-gen AI racks need in their power components. Because onsemi handles every step themselves, from growing the raw crystal to shipping the finished module, they keep more of the profit on every sale instead of paying middlemen along the way. It's the difference between a restaurant that grows its own vegetables, cooks the food, and serves it versus one that just reheats deliveries.

The second reason is the content-per-rack math, which we think is one of the more compelling numbers in the whole AI infrastructure story. On their own Q1 2026 earnings call, management laid out that a 120kW rack today carries roughly $9,500 in onsemi content, while an 800V rack could carry around $115,000. In their investor slides, they frame it slightly differently: current 120kW racks at approximately $15,000 in onsemi content versus next-gen 600kW to 1MW racks projected for 2030 at approximately $115,000 per rack. Either way you slice it, that's close to a 10x increase in how much onsemi sells into a single rack, and CEO Hassane El-Khoury even called this quarter "a clear inflection point for onsemi". On top of that organic setup, they've also been aggressive on M&A, which is just when a company uses its own money or stock to buy another company and add whatever that company builds into its own lineup. In June 2026 they announced their largest deal ever, a roughly $7 billion all-stock acquisition of Synaptics (SYNA), which is expected to close in the middle of 2027 and pushes onsemi deeper into what they call "physical AI," meaning robots, self-driving cars, and smart sensors on factory floors. Management said the deal expands their total addressable market to $243 billion by 2030, while onsemi is only a roughly $30 billion market cap today.

With all of that said, we want to be honest about the other side of the coin, because the chart tells a very different story than the fundamentals. Power semi stocks have been absolutely hammered over the last couple of years with only a recent surge in popularity the past 6 months. The whole group carries a lot of volatility because it's tied to cyclical end markets like EVs and industrials, and both of those slowed down hard. When we say cyclical, we just mean industries that boom and bust with the broader economy instead of growing in a smooth line, kind of like how construction jobs surge when the economy is hot and dry up when it cools. Onsemi specifically is currently sitting around 35% off its all-time highs, and that is not a small drawdown.

The bear case is real: roughly 30% of onsemi's revenue comes from China, which carries geopolitical and tariff risk if the US-China relationship gets worse. A meaningful chunk of the business is still tied to EVs, where the slowdown lingered longer than most people expected. Some industrial sub-segments are still working through elevated inventory, meaning customers already have a bunch of chips sitting on the shelf and don't need to order new ones for a while. For these reasons, onsemi isn't an obvious buy today, but could be in the near future if we see the name pullback some more. So to sum it all up, onsemi seems to have a lot of potential being in a sector of technology that we think has a long runway of growth ahead, BUT due to their valuation and the risk-off market environment we are currently in, we think this stock is a "wait and see" story today. If this stock can drop into the $60's, we think we would dip our toes in the water and nibble at the name, but for now, we are being patient and focusing on hedges in our portfolio. If you want to research some other power semiconductor stocks outside of onsemi, then please reference the inforgraphic below that we have provided for you:

INSIDER STOCK TRADES FROM THE WEEK:

1. Crescent Biopharma (CBIO) - Fairmount Funds Management (10% Owner) bought roughly $12,300,000 of CBIO at an average price of $14.50/share on July 16, 2026, but it wasn't reported to the public until July 20, 2026. (Source)

2. Clearsign Technologies (CLIR) - John Pasquesi (Director) bought roughly $1,800,000 worth of CLIR at an average price of $3.54/share on July 22, 2026, but it wasn't reported to the public until July 24, 2026. (Source)

3. Conagra Brands (CAG) - John Brase (President & CEO) bought roughly $500,000 of CAG at an average price of $14.59/share on July 17, 2026, but it wasn't reported to the public until July 21, 2026. (Source)

Over 2,000 people have already signed up for my FREE Masterclass video on how to unlock my exact strategies for finding winning stock/options trades! I'll share everything including how to find what Politicians and CEOs are buying. Don’t miss your chance to get in for FREE before spots fill up!