INSIGHT WEEKLY: February 1, 2026
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🌐 Markets Overview
📈 Gold and Silver dominate the news
Gold and silver rise dramatically and then fall sharply over the last few days.
Gold and silver prices are correlated. But silver is more leveraged and is more thinly traded than gold, and so tends to react more than gold.
January was dominated by uncertainty, including last week’s Greenland and broader geopolitical noise. Gold has a role as insurance, and once a trade gets crowded it doesn’t take much to trigger profit-taking.
Was it a coincidence that the news about the Kevin Warsh appointment hit at the same time? Maybe. A change at the top of the Fed forces the market to think about the reaction function.
The reaction function is the central bank’s pattern of behaviour. How it responds to inflation, growth shocks, and financial stress, and how quickly it is willing to change course.
There has been a pull back but Gold and Silver are up significantly in 2026.
Tech Stocks Performance
This week’s split inside mega-cap tech made more sense once earnings landed.
Meta gained after results. The market treated the large capex spend as acceptable because the core business momentum still looks strong, and management framed the AI build as something that supports the existing revenue engine.
Microsoft moved the other way. The price action says investors came away less comfortable with the near-term cloud setup and the payback timeline from AI spend.
Apple’s update was better than the headline reaction suggests. The iPhone numbers were strong, and services stayed solid, while wearables and the Mac were the softer lines.
Tesla is in “reset” mode. Musk said the Model S and Model X are being wound down, with the Fremont factory repurposed for Optimus robot production. It is a strategic pivot story, plus a capex story, and it adds another layer of volatility around expectations.
In semis, the story is clearer than it looks. The market is rewarding the parts of the supply chain that sit closest to real bottlenecks.
Micron keeps gaining because memory has re-entered the “must-have” category. Training and inference chew through bandwidth and capacity, and the memory layer can become a constraint long before GPUs.
Texas Instruments is not selling AI chips. It sells the “plumbing” - analog chips and power-management components that regulate voltage, convert power efficiently, protect equipment, and keep signals clean. Every rack, every board, every power rail needs these.
ASML is the capex proxy. When chipmakers commit to leading-edge capacity, ASML sees it in orders and backlog.
Intel is still the turnaround trade, but the market is no longer buying the label on its own. The swing factor is execution. Delivery against the manufacturing roadmap, progress on foundry ambitions, and whether the product cycle starts to feel competitive again.
AMD, Qualcomm, and Arm looked like positioning unwinders. In this kind of market, anything that is expensive, crowded, or waiting on a next catalyst is vulnerable, even if the longer-term story is intact.
Macro Watch: This Week’s Economic Developments
🇺🇸 United States
The Fed held rates at 3.50% to 3.75%.
The accompanying policy statement stated that activity “has been expanding at a solid pace” and “inflation is still “somewhat elevated,” and that the job market is stabilising. Two governors dissented in favour of a cut. The big news is that there will be a new Chair from May.
The Conference Board index (for confidence) fell to 84.5, the lowest since 2014, with consumers pointing to high prices and wider uncertainty.
Producer price inflation rose 0.5% month on month in December, led by services, and can feed through to consumer price inflation.
🇪🇺 Eurozone
The eurozone ended 2025 in better shape than most people expected. Growth came in at 1.5% for the year, up from 0.9% in 2024, and ahead of the European Commission’s 1.3% forecast. Investment picked up, households spent a bit more, and exports helped.
The fourth quarter GDP grew 0.3% quarter on quarter, matching the previous quarter. Germany, Spain, and Italy carried more of the momentum, while France remained the soft spot.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Inflation rose to 3.4% y/y in December, which keeps the Bank of England cautious even as activity looks patchy.
Housing also signalled restraint. Mortgage approvals fell to 61,013, the lowest since June 2024. Wage growth has been slowing, but it is still high enough to keep the policy debate live.
🇯🇵 Japan
The yen was volatile again as politics drove markets. The yen jumped after strong official warnings, even though no direct action was confirmed.Japan is leaning on verbal intervention, and coordinating closely with the US on FX.
Tokyo core CPI eased to 2.0% in January from 2.3% in December, helped by gasoline subsidies and softer food pressures.
🇨🇳 China
China’s data this week kept pointing to the same split. Industry is holding up better than domestic demand.
Industrial profits rose 0.6% in 2025, the first annual increase in four years, with a stronger finish to the year in December.
The constraint is fiscal. Government revenue fell 1.7% in 2025, and local government land-sale income fell 14.7%. That matters because weaker land revenues limit how aggressively local governments can support growth.
🌐 Artificial Intelligence and Tech
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Musk’s consolidation plans could have two possible shapes to control the stack - capital, compute, data, and distribution.
SpaceX and xAI ahead of a potential SpaceX IPO. SpaceX has scale, satellites, launch capacity, and a funding engine. xAI needs cheaper compute, better data, and distribution. This will give xAI access to SpaceX’s capital-raising capacity, and potentially to Starlink and satellite infrastructure.
SpaceX and Tesla as Tesla has already been repositioning itself as an AI and robotics company, with Optimus and autonomy sitting alongside the car business. But Tesla is public and SpaceX is private, so the valuation, governance, and shareholder questions get complicated fast.
SpaceX’s filing to deploy one million satellites as “orbital data centres” for AI computing. AI infrastructure is running into physical constraints on the ground. Power availability, permitting, land, and grid upgrades. SpaceX is saying that it can put compute in orbit, run it off near-continuous solar power.
OpenAi’s next funding round could involve Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft. The numbers vary by source, but the pattern is clear. Nvidia has been linked with a potential commitment in the tens of billions, Microsoft with a smaller top-up relative to what it has already put in, and Amazon with a very large prospective investment that could be tied to cloud and distribution terms.
Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave at $87.20 per share, backing a plan to build more than 5 gigawatts of AI data-centre capacity by 2030.
Microsoft kept pushing the in-house silicon path. It unveiled Maia 200, a second-generation accelerator aimed at inference efficiency inside Azure.
Anthropic’s was picked by the UK government to help pilot an AI assistant for GOV.UK, starting with employment support.
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