AEX price light green thanks to ASML and Besi

The AEX price starts the new stock market week with a cautious rise. That is striking, because bad news came from the Middle East. Peace talks between the United States and Iran have once again stalled. There seems to be no reason at this time to believe that peace can emerge in the short term.

Although the stock market prices today are therefore light green on the Damrak, many headwinds have arisen in the fundamental area. For example, we see bond yields rising worldwide due to rising inflation expectations.

Not only due to the rise in oil prices due to the Iran war, but also the AI investment cycle plays a role in this. The expansion of data centers and the like creates a huge demand for raw materials and manpower. That, too, drives up inflation.

The rise in bond yields means that the cost of capital increases. As a result, shares have higher hurdles to overcome. After all, the yields they generate must be higher than the bond yields in order to remain attractive.

Furthermore, this makes AI investments more expensive. It is quite possible that this means that not every investment can be profitable enough to beat the higher capital costs.

On the chip market, we are seeing varying results for the time being. For example, Disco, Advantest, Tokyo Electron and Albibaba increased by 7.7 percent, 5.8 percent, 3.8 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively.

SMI, SoftBank, Baidu, SK Hynix and Samsung, on the other hand, had to swallow price declines of 1.9 percent, 0.8 percent, 0.8 percent, 0.2 percent and 0.1 percent.

Investors are therefore not making a clear commitment to the chip market. We see clear differences between winners and losers. ASML, BESI and ASMI started today with price increases. In doing so, they continue the strong performance of the past five days of the fair. It should be clear that the AI bull market is not over yet, but that it is no longer the case that all companies are rising together.