Source: Zhitong Finance "Since 1950, the S&P 500 index has risen more than 10% 21 times as of the end of May. In about 90% of these cases, the S&P 500 index rose for the rest of the year. There were only two instances of declines for the rest of the year, in 1987 (-13%) and 1986 (-0.1%)." With the rebound of the stock market, the old adage "Sell in May and Go Away" seems to have been a bad advice once again. Last month, the S&P 500 index rose 4.8%, the best May performance since 2009. The NASDAQ 100 index rose nearly 6.2%, and the NASDAQ Composite Index rose 6.9%. Goldman Sachs FICC & Equities Trading Division said: "History doesn't really support this saying. Don't sell, leave the market (go on vacation), and enjoy the good times." The rising trend is still to be continued? If history is any guide, it may indicate that the rise of the stock market is not over yet. Looking ahead to the rest of 2024, Scott Rubner, Managing Director of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Division and tactical expert, pointed out the following historical background for investors. Rubner stated that the S&P 500 index has risen 10.7% year-to-date, and since 1950, the S&P 500 index has risen more than 10% 21 times as of the end of May. In about 90% of these cases, the S&P 500 index rose for the rest of the year. There were only two instances of declines for the rest of the year, in 1987 (-13%) and 1986 (-0.1%). "Since 1950, the median return of the last 7 months of each year (June 1 to December 31) is 5.4%. In the aforementioned 21 cases, the average performance of the last 7 months increased to 8.1%." Rubner added. Rubner also pointed out that the NASDAQ index has risen for 16 consecutive Julys, with an average return of about 4.64%.

On Monday, eastern time, bank of america, known as the "big bull of technology stocks" and "long-term bullish force in chip stocks", downgraded its stock rating and target price for the usa chip giant. $Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$ This caught market participants by surprise, making AMD the "put focus" in the market during monday's trading hours. Bank of America downgraded AMD's stock rating from "buy" to "neutral", and lowered its 12-month target price for AMD from $180 to $155. By the close of trading on Monday, AMD's stock price had fallen 5.57% to $130.870.

Due to rising concerns about ai chips and personal computer chip business, bank of america downgraded its rating for AMD, which is also an important reason for AMD's stock price dropping over 5% on Monday. In its latest research report, bank of america stated that the core reason for downgrading AMD's stock rating and target price is the expectation that revenue related to ai and PC will significantly decline compared to the institution's previous expectations by 2025.

In contrast, for the other two giants in the ai chip field -$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$and$Broadcom (AVGO.US)$Bank of America still maintains a "buy" rating, with target prices ranking among the highest on Wall Street. Therefore, Bank of America unexpectedly downgraded the rating and target price of the ai chip new force advanced micro devices, which is considered one of the big winners of the ai investment boom, catching market participants off guard.

Due to nvidia's monopoly position in the ai chip sector, and broadcom, $Marvell Technology (MRVL.US)$ collaborated.$Amazon (AMZN.US)$、$Microsoft (MSFT.US)$As the self-developed AI ASIC chips from major giants make a strong impact, more and more investors have clearly lost confidence in advanced micro devices capturing a larger share of the datacenter AI chip market. Consequently, investors have begun to sell off advanced micro devices, resulting in a decline of over 11% in its stock price this year, significantly underperforming.$PHLX Semiconductor Index (.SOX.US)$with$S&P 500 Index (.SPX.US)$Its performance is even more distant compared to popular chip stocks like nvidia and broadcom.

Vivek Arya, a well-known analyst from bank of america, stated in this research report to clients that the data shows advanced micro devices has not shaken nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market at all, and the growing preference for customized AI chips launched by broadcom and marvell technology in collaboration with major usa tech giants is likely to significantly limit advanced micro devices' market share growth potential.

Arya's analysis team at bank of america has downgraded AMD's stock rating from "buy" to "neutral," which means the analysts' stance on AMD has shifted from "bullish" to "cautiously optimistic," and they have lowered AMD's earnings forecasts for 2025 and 2026 by 6% and 8% respectively. At the same time, the target price has been significantly reduced from $180 to $155.

The analyst team at bank of america has also lowered the revenue expectation related to AMD's datacenter ai chip for 2025 from 8.9 billion dollars to 8 billion dollars in this research report, whereas the general expectation from wall street analysts is in the range of 9.6 billion to 10 billion dollars. The institutions believe that the growth scale of nvidia's ai GPU and customized ai chips may be stronger than similar products launched by AMD.

"Although our forecast indicates that AMD’s year-on-year growth rate will reach about 54%, the possibility of exceeding market expectations is very limited, which could continue to put sell-off pressure on AMD's stock price," wrote the analyst team from bank of america led by Alia. "AMD's product line is still over a year behind nvidia's (and nvidia is accelerating development), while AMD lacks a competitive high-performance networking product lineup (such as ethernet switches and optical hardware) compared to nvidia."

The team led by Aliyah also emphasized in the research report that an executive from the cloud computing giant amazon AWS, whom the institution had contacted, recently commented that this cloud service provider "has not yet" seen strong demand from customers for AMD chips, but the demand for nvidia H100/H200 and even Blackwell ai GPUs continues to surge, as does the demand for amazon's self-developed ai chips.

Furthermore, the analyst team at bank of america also stated that they expect some adjustment in demand in the personal computer market in the first half of 2025, which may adversely affect AMD's PC business revenue.

"Although the growth momentum in the PC/business server CPU market is moderating rather than showing strong growth, considering the restructuring issues of the leading company intel (with a market share of up to 69%), AMD still has the opportunity to expand its share from the current approximate 23%. However, during this period, the adjustment in PC market demand will inevitably affect AMD's PC business," the team led by Aliyah added. "AMD's challenge (and opportunity) in 2025 will be to capture a larger share in the enterprise PC segment dominated by intel, while resisting the strong competitive threat from ai PC products based on ARM architecture (for example,$Qualcomm (QCOM.US)$) powerful competitive threats."

Editor / jayden