Rare earth miners fell 4.58%, the largest move in the tables, and uranium miners fell 3.03% and lithium and battery names 1.95%. The falls came even as gold rose 0.45% to $4,209.50 an ounce and copper rose 0.93%, and despite Lynas presenting its Brazil rare earth separation plant plan today (see today’s Lynas story). This morning’s mining reporting flags the divergence directly: every miner basket fell while the underlying metals rose, a broad miner weakness with no single-name driver identified.
Semiconductors fell 2.6% and Broadcom fell 1.88%, extending the Asian chip rout that led the session. South Korea’s Kospi closed down 5.46% after China’s CXMT claimed a DRAM architecture breakthrough, with Samsung Electronics down 7.7% and SK Hynix down 8.8% at the Seoul close, and Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 1.82% as SoftBank and Tokyo Electron followed the same trade lower (see today’s Kospi story).
Meta rose 3.38% against the tape. Meta’s Superintelligence Lab released Muse Wonder, its first frontier model, on Monday, priced at $4 per million input tokens through the Meta Model API (see today’s Meta story), and the shares were the clear large-cap technology gainer in a sector that otherwise fell 1.22%.
WTI crude fell 1.77% to $92.08 a barrel and Brent fell 1.67% to $104.87. Oil eased on the prospect of Russian diesel returning to export markets under the US-Russia arrangement debated in Washington, even as tanker freight rose another 1.17% and the Hormuz shipping campaign continued (see today’s Brent story).
The pattern is equity-specific rather than macro. Bond yields barely moved, with the US 10-year down 0.4 basis points to 5.24%, and the dollar index eased 0.22%. What sold was the crowded end of the AI and critical-minerals trade, chips on a Chinese memory claim and miners despite firmer metal prices, while crude drifted lower on supply politics. That mix reads as position trimming in the year’s winning baskets, not a rates shock, and it sets up Wednesday’s US CPI print as the next test of whether the trimming becomes a broader de-risking.