This was the week the panic buyers arrived. The Nasdaq gained nearly nine percent across five sessions. The S&P 500 punched through to fresh record closes. The ASX 200 posted back-to-back all-time highs on Wednesday and Thursday. And nearly all of it was driven by the same trade: hyperscaler earnings proved the AI capex boom is generating actual revenue, and anything that wasn't nailed down got bid.

Monday set the tone. Palantir nearly doubled its revenue to $1.93 billion and CEO Alex Karp described commercial demand as "otherworldly." He's still the most difficult interview on financial television, but the numbers spoke for themselves. Caterpillar posted its first ever twenty billion dollar revenue quarter, EPS came in at $8.17 against a $6.00 estimate, and the stock jumped 5.6%. What caught our eye was the driver: data centre power equipment. Not mining trucks. Not construction. Data centres. When Caterpillar is an AI play, you know the trade has broadened.

Tuesday was record day for the S&P 500, closing at 7,735 for its first record since June. Amazon crossed three trillion in market cap. The Nasdaq surged 2.6%. But the aftermarket told a different story: AMD merely met expectations and got hammered, dropping seven percent after hours. In a season where 86% of companies are beating by wide margins, meeting the bar is a miss. SpaceX published its first public earnings report. Starlink subscribers had doubled, but it came in slightly below forecast. The real reveal was the Colossus data centres in Tennessee, which are pulling in three billion a quarter minimum from Google and Anthropic. That got people talking about neocloud names.

Wednesday brought the fireworks. Gold had its best day in six months, surging four percent. Copper hit records. Platinum was up seven percent in a single session. Eli Lilly raised its revenue guidance and gained five percent. But the session was dominated by SpaceX's lockup expiry, which released 911.5 million shares into the market. The stock initially cratered fourteen percent before stabilising. Alphabet lost four percent after reports of a mass exodus at the top of its AI division, with key staff leaving to start their own ventures. The last time this happened at a major AI lab, it became Anthropic. When talent is walking out the door of a project that's already behind schedule, the market reads that correctly.

Thursday was Australia's day. The ASX 200 hit a second consecutive record at 9,271.6, with an intraday peak of 9,296. AMP posted a 57% profit increase, announced a $150 million buyback, and jumped six percent. James Hardie reported net sales up 64% to US$1.5 billion and rose seven percent in the US aftermarket. REA Group delivered revenue growth of 11% and adjusted profit up 14%. Then the aftermarket exploded: Atlassian beat massively with EPS of $1.87 versus $1.50 expected and rallied 23%. Cloudflare surged 16%. Airbnb raised guidance. It felt like every quality name that had been waiting for permission to move finally got it.

Oil added to the chaos. Iran's Hormuz framework leaked, suggesting a proposal that would bar US ships from the strait. Fars reported strikes. Brent jumped 4.5% on Thursday alone. Treasury Secretary Bessent told CNBC there was a chance of a deal to reopen the strait "today or tomorrow," but the Iranians denied it. This cycle has been playing out for months now. Trump signals progress, Iran denies it, oil spikes, and then it all resets. The market is exhausted by it. But at $83 Brent, the price action is real.

Gold posted its best single session in six months on Wednesday, surging four percent. The move was broad-based across precious metals, with platinum up an extraordinary seven percent and silver rallying alongside it. This wasn't a panic trade. It looked more like a rotation into hard assets on the back of rising geopolitical noise and bond market discomfort. Copper hit records. Lithium bounced roughly eight percent for the week off deeply depressed levels. The critical minerals theme, which had been left for dead, showed genuine signs of life.

Oil's story this week was Iran. Again. The leaked Hormuz framework, the Fars strike reports, Bessent's comments about a deal being hours away, Iran's denial. Brent spiked 4.5% on Thursday to $83.04 and WTI climbed 3.3% to $77.73. Hedge funds boosted their WTI longs by about 25%, the most bullish positioning since mid-June. We opened the week with oil down six percent on the back of Trump saying attacks had been called off, then watched it claw all of that back by Thursday. This cycle has been running for months. We're not convinced it produces a genuine resolution anytime soon, but the floor under oil seems to be firming around the mid-seventies.

Samsung flagged a worsening memory chip crunch, which they would say given they make the chips, but the supply data backs them up. Apple's component costs are going through the roof as a result. The critical minerals trade is wider than people think: one gigawatt of data centre capacity requires 30,000 to 50,000 tonnes of copper. Dysprosium was up 25.4% in July alone. Terbium gained 21.6%. MP Materials locked in a ten-year NdPr price floor with the Pentagon and raised $400 million in equity. The REMX ETF, still down fifty percent from its highs, is where we'd look for broad exposure to this theme.

The week started with the aftermath of last week's chip volatility. SK Hynix went down ten, down seven, down nine, down eight, then up thirty in a single week. Micron was similar. Both still ended down three to five percent. The culprits were a Korean retail leverage unwind and the Situational Awareness hedge fund, run by a former OpenAI researcher who turned out to be far better at large language models than risk management. He'd been up around 800% before being forced to sell his positions to Citadel. As Mark put it on the morning call: you can probably ring the bell for the low when Citadel is the buyer.

The hyperscaler earnings changed everything. Microsoft's Azure numbers and Amazon's AWS growth showed the gap between AI capex and revenue isn't as wide as feared. Amazon was up fifteen percent on cloud growth alone. Google bounced back despite the AI talent exodus. The money that had fled into defensive names over the prior two weeks reversed course and flooded straight back into the hyperscalers. Software names rallied alongside chips, not instead of them. The IGV software ETF is now up 34% from its March lows. Palantir and CrowdStrike are back at record highs, roughly doubling from those lows.

The DaaS trade is splitting into three distinct layers, and getting them confused will cost you money. Equipment makers like Vertiv, ABB, Schneider Electric, Powell Industries, and nVent are printing cash with orders up 37% on average. These are the picks-and-shovels plays that work regardless of which AI model wins. The neocloud tenants like CoreWeave (reporting August 11), Nebius (August 12), and IREN are the earnings watch tier, where revenue needs to prove the valuation. And then there's the speculative power layer, where we'd be cautious until the infrastructure actually gets built.

SpaceX's Colossus data centres deserve attention. Three billion a quarter minimum from Google and Anthropic for those Tennessee facilities means the data-centre-as-a-service model is proven at scale. Megaport should benefit directly. Iron Mountain's DC revenue grew 39% last quarter with AFFO per share up 16%, and they report August 27. The read-through for ASX names is positive: Xero, TechnologyOne, Prometheas, and WiseTech should all benefit from the SaaS comeback theme, though WiseTech needs to sort its governance first.

While everyone watched the hyperscalers, the critical minerals space quietly woke up. Lithium bounced about eight percent for the week. Uranium gained twelve percent over five sessions. Both are coming off deeply depressed bases, and neither has remotely recovered to prior highs. But the direction has changed, and in markets, direction matters more than level.

The rare earth numbers are striking. Dysprosium rose 25.4% in July. Terbium added 21.6%. These aren't speculative commodities that move on sentiment. They're inputs for permanent magnets used in EV motors, wind turbines, and defence systems. The supply chain is dominated by China, which has been tightening export controls. MP Materials secured a ten-year price floor from the Pentagon and raised $400 million in fresh equity. United States Antimony took off overnight as one of the better performers. The REMX ETF offers broad exposure and is still down fifty percent from its highs, which tells you the theme has a very long runway if the supply constraints persist.

Robotics had its moment too. Zebra Technologies rallied 27% on earnings, driven by warehouse automation demand. Teradyne's cobot orders are accelerating. Symbotic is sitting at 52-week lows, which makes it either a value trap or a screaming opportunity depending on whether you believe the backlog converts. The pattern across all of these is the same: AI infrastructure spending creates demand for physical inputs that most investors haven't priced in yet. One gigawatt of data centre capacity requires 30,000 to 50,000 tonnes of copper. Build a hundred of those and the commodity implications are enormous.

We ran the numbers on ASX earnings reactions from the last couple of seasons, and the stats are worth paying attention to. The best upside on the day when a company beat was around thirteen percent. The worst downside on a disappointment? Thirty-four percent. The average for misses sits around the twenty percent mark. That's a risk-reward skew that punishes being wrong far more than it rewards being right.

But here's the part that most people ignore. The laggards, the stocks that dropped more than twenty percent on earnings day, ended up being seven times better than buying the winners over the following six months. AMP recovered 71%. Zip was up 55%. PMA gained 39%. Temple and Webster was the exception, rallying about twelve percent recently but still down from its highs. The point is simple: chasing momentum into earnings is a coin flip at best. Waiting for the overreaction and buying the quality turnarounds is statistically a far better trade.

The ASX earnings calendar for August is on our interactive tool at mpcinvest.co/ASXearnings. Hover over any name for the consensus expectations. Weeks three and four are where the bulk of the reporting happens. For this coming week, the big names are Westpac on Monday, CBA on Wednesday, and ANZ on Thursday. NAB follows the Monday after.