Not surprisingly, stocks paused on Tuesday ahead of today's PCE report as well as the pending earnings report from Micron. Some good news came in the form of a 4% decline in WTI, down to $88.90/barrel and right back to near-term chart support from the recent breakout as well as to the 50-day average. More importantly, crude is back to trendline support off the lows since early July and a break could lead to a pretty good flush. Yet Treasury rates from 5-years to 10-years held steady near recovery highs and are not in any way reacting to the lower energy prices.

ASML is the leader in lithography systems for manufacturing semiconductors with 90% market share. Lithography is the process in which a light source is used to expose circuit patterns from a photomask onto a semiconductor wafer. Lithography allows chipmakers to increase the number of transistors in the same area of silicon, with lithography historically representing a high portion of the cost of making cutting-edge chips. ASML outsources the manufacturing of most of its parts, acting like an assembler. ASML’s largest clients are TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix, and Micron.

Broadcom is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world and has also expanded into infrastructure software. Its semiconductors primarily serve computing and networking, with custom AI accelerators now accounting for the bulk of the business. It is primarily a fabless designer, but holds some manufacturing in-house, such as for its best-of-breed film bulk acoustic resonator filters that sell into the Apple iPhone. In software, it sells virtualization, infrastructure, and security software to large enterprises, financial institutions, and governments. Broadcom is the product of consolidation. Its businesses are an amalgamation of former companies like legacy Broadcom and Avago Technologies in chips, as well as VMware, Brocade, CA Technologies, and Symantec in software.

ASML is the leader in lithography systems for manufacturing semiconductors with 90% market share. Lithography is the process in which a light source is used to expose circuit patterns from a photo mask onto a semiconductor wafer. Lithography allows chipmakers to increase the number of transistors on the same area of silicon, with lithography historically representing a high portion of the cost of making cutting-edge chips. ASML outsources the manufacturing of most of its parts, acting like an assembler. ASML’s largest clients are TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix, and Micron.