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AI hardware names carry the week while the same names weigh on quality's short leg

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 · as emailed at the close · the live view is always on the dashboard

Market snapshot

S&P 5007,637.70-0.5%
VIX16.5+5%
10-year4.83%+3bp
Breadth38%above 50-day · 64% a month ago

In brief

The story

The move. The AI Infrastructure Leaders basket, 22 names, ended the week 7.6% ahead of the S&P, the 89th percentile of the trailing year. Dell rose 26% for 1.17pp of that, Corning 16% and Teradyne 14%; the three account for 31% of the move and Technology for 7.51pp. The narrower baskets ran further: Memory & Storage was up 9.9% on the week on Sandisk +15%, Micron +10% and Seagate +8%, and Optical Interconnect up 8.6% on Corning, Lumentum +14% and Coherent +12%. The basket's 60-session relative-return correlation with the High beta long book is r=+0.95, the highest of 595 pairs, down 0.01 points from 20 sessions earlier over overlapping windows.

The books. Quality's long-short spread is 3.6% behind the S&P over 20 sessions, z -2.4 and the 1st percentile of the trailing year, in the sixth session of the run. The damage is on the short side: Moderna +124% cost 1.24pp, with Sandisk +39%, Robinhood +22% and Lumentum +21% also short; Lululemon -21% is the long-leg name. Healthcare took 1.51pp and Industrials 1.20pp. The spread's 20-day realized vol, 10.9%, sits at the 97th percentile of the year. In Momentum, Casey's fell 14.2% on the day after reporting EPS of 7.37 against 6.78 expected.

The market. The S&P closed at 7,637.70, down 0.47%, with the VIX up 4.7% to 16.46. The 10-year rose 3bp to 4.83%; Barron's reported yields at new highs after a $6 billion Treasury buyback announcement. Only 38% of the index is above its 50-day average, from 64% a month ago, a 20-session change at the 13th percentile since 2020. Housing Chain is 9.2% behind the S&P over 20 sessions, led by Builders FirstSource -18% and Lennox -13%, and AI Displacement Risk lost 8.2% on the week, with Gartner -11%. Thursday brings August PPI, existing home sales and results from Oracle, Adobe and Copart.

Who did it · 31% of the move in these names

NameWeight5dContrib
DELL Dell Technologies4.5%+26%+1.17pp
GLW Corning Inc.4.5%+16%+0.71pp
TER Teradyne4.5%+14%+0.65pp

By sector: Technology added 7.5pp; Industrials added 0.1pp.

The board · factors vs S&P 500, relative return with z vs the trailing year, sorted by the week

Factor1D5D20DYTD
S&P 500 (computed) absolute-0.5% -0.7σ+0.2% -0.1σ-1.0% -0.8σ+12.0%
High beta+0.4% +0.3σ+4.5% +1.6σ+2.2% +0.2σ+17.2%
Momentum+0.5% +0.4σ+3.3% +1.5σ+2.5% +0.4σ+17.7%
Quality+0.3% +0.7σ+0.4% +0.6σ+0.1% -0.1σ+3.9%
Value+0.0% +0.0σ-0.3% -0.2σ+0.4% -0.1σ+5.7%
Low volatility-0.1% -0.0σ-1.2% -0.5σ-0.4% +0.1σ-5.7%
Dividend yield-0.7% -0.7σ-1.8% -0.9σ-0.3% -0.1σ+4.5%
Size-0.8% -0.9σ-2.5% -1.3σ-2.3% -0.7σ+0.2%

Also

Breadth, leadership, revisions, realized vol and the baskets, every day: the dashboard. Explore correlations →. Headlines are quoted from their publishers for context.

Tomorrow · Sep 10

  • Thursday: Producer Price Index MoM (Aug), consensus 0.4%.
  • Thursday: Existing Home Sales (Aug), consensus 3.98M.
  • Reporting Thursday: ORCL, ADBE, CPRT.

The narrative in this brief is drafted by an AI model from Factor Watch's computed data and checked against it, but it can still be wrong — verify anything before you act on it.

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