Paid — the Test Bench, the Fibre and Korean Memory. Charged — the Control Plane and American Storage. The Names Into the Fed Week

1 · This Week's Action

Where this letter sits, in one line. Sunday's US edition reads the market at index and sector degree; this one reads it at name altitude — which companies the money went into, which it left, and what the flow behind each is doing. The backdrop, one line more: the S&P sold four sessions into a hot inflation print and bought the print, the chips beat the market a second week from under their average, the Nasdaq 100 without its technology stocks turned negative on the year, and the Fed decides on Wednesday with a hike four-fifths priced.

The selection, first — what the tracker paid and what it charged. Across the three AI indices' constituents, the twelve best lines of the tracker's week are eleven build-out names and one operator: Aehr Test +24.2%, Cohu +24.1%, FormFactor +18.8%, Bloom Energy +17.1%, Coherent +15.5%, HPE +14.1%, Corning +14.0%, Nokia +13.9%, AMD +13.1%, Marvell +13.1%, DigitalOcean +12.4%, Intel +12.3%. Test equipment, power, photonics, fibre, the CPU makers — the physical layer, and inside it the parts that are not memory. The twelve worst: Zhipu −26.2%, UiPath −24.5%, Amgen −15.0%, Kingdee −14.9%, Elastic −13.3%, PTC −12.9%, HubSpot −12.4%, Adobe −11.7%, Shopify −11.7%, Money Forward −11.5%, Delta Electronics −11.2%, SailPoint −11.1% — enterprise software in three time zones, one health-care name, one Taiwanese power-supply maker. (The tracker's week is a five-session window; across Labor Day it reaches back to Thursday 3 September, so its name-level moves are wider than the Friday-to-Friday tape the US letter reads.) The medians say the same thing in one row: capex +2.25% with 85 of 126 green; opex −0.30% with 14 of 34; applications −6.13% with 4 of 40. Section 2 has the same cut per index and per sleeve, on the week and on the year; section 6 has what the book did about it on Friday.

The tech shelf — silicon green, everything else red. Six green lines of twenty-one, five of them chips or the things chips plug into: XSD +2.87%, SMHX +1.18%, the grid fund +1.00%, the internet-of-things fund +0.56%, data centres +0.28%, SMH +0.27%. Fifteen red, led by nuclear −5.61%, fintech −4.74%, lithium −3.63%, ARK −3.06%, software −2.92%, the digital-asset fund −2.69%, cloud −2.37%. Second consecutive week of the inversion, and it narrowed: the semis did not rise much; they did not fall while the index did. The software-to-semis ratio fell 3.18% on the week to 37% above its June 22 low, from 41% — ten percent of the ratio's rise surrendered in two weeks.

The factor view — both legs down, the label held. The factor-regime gauge kept "momentum leading, risk appetite building" — indexed 159.61 against a 50-day at 155.45, 94.4th percentile — on a week in which SPMO −0.94% and SPLV −1.27% both fell. For this cohort the read is the same as a week ago and matters more into a Fed decision: when the tape sold, it sold the defensive factor harder than the momentum factor. The money that left the software names did not go to low-volatility. It went to a test-equipment maker.

Our own board — the Rotation Ledger, on Friday's closes, and the receipts. The scanner missed its Friday-night run a third week and this desk triggered it Saturday afternoon, so the tables carry Friday's closes across 647 stocks. The shares: building flow (accelerating-up plus reversing-up) 36.5% of the universe, from 38.5%; decelerating-up 36.2%, from 34.5% — now the largest bucket outright, and still the long warning; accelerating-down 9.1%, from 8.4%; flat 18.2%. Softer at the building end, heavier at the draining end, a second week. The receipts, both ways, because that is the contract: the fastest-risers table published here last Sunday — Atlassian, freee, Appier, e.l.f., Duolingo, Elastic, Veeva, Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, UiPath, Snowflake — was charged again on price: Atlassian −6.27%, ServiceNow −6.18%, Workday −5.15%, Salesforce −4.44%, Elastic −9.17%, Snowflake −2.43% after its paid window, UiPath the second-worst name in the family. And the draining table — SanDisk, Kioxia, KLA, Applied Optoelectronics — was right this week: SanDisk −6.13%, Kioxia sold in Tokyo on Thursday, KLA −2.67%, and every one of them sat out Friday's chip rally. Three weeks in: one lead, one lag, and one split — right on the draining side, wrong on the building side. The instrument reads a 252-day trend of flow; the software names it says are building have now been sold for two weeks by a market pricing a hike. The letter keeps the score it earns.

The four stock tables — this letter's own board, as of Friday 11 September.

The strongest trends, confirmed on the medium term. Dell at 211 (+16.9 on the month), Lenovo 180 (+36.2 — the fastest-building high score on the board), HPE 143 (+18.4, the week after its paid window), Nebius 135 (flat on the month), Astera Labs 129, ams-OSRAM 125, Fortinet 116, Palo Alto 112 (+21.8), Nynomic 107, Datadog 100. The confirmed board is the assemblers and the firewall pair, a third week running — and this week the assemblers were paid on price too: HPE +19.4% on the tape's week, Dell +8.2%, Lenovo the book's line in the sibling book. The exhibit of level-versus-change is unchanged and larger: Kioxia 262 and SanDisk 261 with the deepest monthly drains on the board (−66.2, −57.8), and this week the price agreed with the drain.

The same list, confirmed on the short term. Dell, Lenovo (+6.9 on five days), HPE, Fortinet, Palo Alto (+2.6), CrowdStrike 98 (+3.6, +18.6 on the month), Okta 97 (+7.0, +26.0), NetApp 94 (+3.5, +21.0 — the storage name the flow does confirm), Twilio 98. Still the incumbent software layer and the hardware assemblers; still no chip designer and no memory name on it. What the confirmed board does not contain is the week's best price list — Aehr, Cohu, FormFactor, Coherent — which sit on the draining side at 205, 89 and 84 with monthly changes of −14.8, −41.8 and −39.9. The test bench was paid from a drain, the same way storage was a fortnight ago.

Where new leadership shows up first — the fastest risers. SpaceX +32.4 on five days from a 23 score — a listing too new for a monthly column, and the book's newest line — then Atlassian +17.1 (+78.4 on the month), Appier +12.4, freee +12.0, e.l.f. +10.4, Duolingo +10.4, Veeva +10.1, Elastic +9.9, Workday +9.1, Salesforce +8.9, Snowflake +8.4 (score 67), Fujikura +7.9. Software plus consumer, a third week, one rung further along, and one rocket company. The question this table now has to answer is not whether the flow is building — it is — but whether flow that builds for three weeks while the price is sold for two is a leading indicator or a lagging one. The next scan on the far side of the Fed will say.

And the draining side. Zhipu −28.1 on five days from a 124 score (−104.2 on the month, the deepest in the universe by a distance), Applied Optoelectronics −15.4 from 177, Kioxia −14.0 from 262, SanDisk −11.9 from 261, Powell Industries −11.4, Furukawa Electric −10.8 from 179, Aixtron −10.6, Western Digital −10.0 from 159, Unimicron −9.8 from 225, GlobalFoundries −9.7. The memory-and-optics complex, five weeks running, and this week the drain was paid in full: SanDisk the worst chip on Friday, Western Digital −4.3% on the week, the Japanese optics and materials names the worst lines in the build-out. Read against the price, the table did what it is built to do: it named the names that did not participate in the bounce.