What a Chip Crash, a Home Run Derby & Wall Street Have in Common

Well, hello and welcome to the One of a Kind Financial Show Daily. I'm Mike Milligan, Certified Financial Planning Professional, founder of One Oak, host of the Ideas by Mike podcast. It's Tuesday, July 14th, and today we're going to talk about markets, memory chips, home runs, world football, and what happens at 7 o'clock, uh, when— what happens when the big banks open their books. Educate, coach, plan.

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Let's start with the tape. Yesterday, Monday, July 13th, all 4 major US indexes moved lower. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 52,498, down about a quarter of a percent. The S&P closed at 7,515. Down 8 tenths of a percent. NASDAQ and Russell 2000 were also lower on the day. The story behind the tape was overseas, and it was semiconductors. In Seoul, shares of SK Hynix, one of the world's largest memory chip makers, had their single largest one-day loss ever. Now, they also, uh, they also debuted as an ADR, an American Depository Receipt, on our markets. Last Friday, the KOSPI, the Korean equivalent of the S&P, closed down almost 9% yesterday. The move was so extreme it tripped Korea's 20-minute circuit breaker in the afternoon session. That fear traveled across the Pacific overnight. Micron Technology and Nvidia, 2 U.S. names in the memory and AI chip supply chain, Pulled our NASDAQ lower on Monday. Education only, not a recommendation, but here's the lesson: semiconductor names have been the muscle of this market. When the market gets tired, the whole body breaks down. Diversification is what smooths that out. This is not a hot take, this is just fundamental planning.

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It's the middle of the summer and there is— we're On the cusp today of the Midsummer Classic, Major League Baseball's All-Star Game, which over the many of the last decades have produced memorable highlights, including famously in the '70s Pete Rose running over a catcher in the All-Star Game. You had Randy Johnson coming to the mound in his prime with John Kruk from the Philadelphia Phillies at the time in his payday and Randy Johnson throwing a Nuke Lelouch Bull Durham-like pitch over Jon Krug's head. And it just creates a lot of drama. Well, if you were watching Netflix last night, you saw one of the most extraordinary finishes in the history of the All-Star Games eve biggest event, the Home Run Derby at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. 8 sluggers Battled it out over 2 rounds and then a final that will be replayed for years. Kyle Schwarber, the hometown Phillies hero, went first in the final, electrifying the crowd with 11 home runs. The crowd was buzzing. It looked over. Then Jordan Walker of the St. Louis Cardinals stepped in. He had 8 home runs on his 13 swings. He looked done. He looked tired. Then he hit a home run, which under the new swing-based format earned you a final ball. So that home run put his total to 9, and he rattled every— under those new rules, every time you hit a home run, you got another pitch and another pitch. And he rattled off 6 consecutive home runs on that final ball.

Wow.

12 to 11, Cardinals. Walker, the first Cardinal ever to win a Home Run Derby. He won $1 million, which happens to be more than his baseball salary for the full year of 2026. Here's the financial plan bridge. Excitement is not a plan. Adrenaline is not a plan. The crowd was cheering for Kyle Schwarber, the hometown The hometown Philly. Walker was silent, focused, and he trusted the process on something he had done millions of times. And with one swing at a time, he overtook Schwarber. This is what we do inside of a one-of-a-kind financial plan. When the crowd is buzzing about the latest hot stock or the latest hot annuity pitch or the latest hot piece of financial news, We're not chasing returns. We show up the next day to the One of a Kind Financial Show Daily. We take disciplined approaches to our money, and we let the compounding of good decisions do what a walk-off does— carry us home when it matters the most.

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To the world football fan, where this is Major League Baseball's All-Star Night, We are getting to almost the Super Bowl of world soccer. Today at 3 o'clock Eastern in Arlington, Texas, it's France against Spain in the first of— first 2026 FIFA World Cup semifinal. Tomorrow, Wednesday, July 15th, the second semifinal decides who joins the winner in the final. 2 matches, 4 countries with a chance. And there's only one trophy at the end. I love these semifinal windows because they're a masterclass in planning under pressure. Every team has already survived a group stage and a knockout bracket. They did not get here on excitement. They got here on preparation. That is retirement in one sentence. You don't, you don't get through a 30-year retirement on excitement. You get through it on preparation. If you're hosting a viewing party today or tomorrow and someone at your party asks what a financial plan looks like, or, I saw what happened to the stock market, tell them, tell them you look at it different. You have a clear, concise financial plan built for you. And if I— and if me saying that, if you do not have that, that's why One Oak Financial exists and the one-of-a-kind financial plan. Stay tuned for more information on that later in the show.

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Today, 3 of the 4 largest banks in the United States report second quarter earnings: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and BlackRock. Then tomorrow, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs. Then Thursday, Netflix after the bell to give us another gauge on how the consumer's doing. Why— this is why big banks' earnings matter. Even if you don't own these stocks, there's 3 lessons to this time in the earnings calendar every quarter. Number 1, banks are the biggest read we get on the American consumer and the American business borrower. Credit card delinquency trends, small business loan demand, commercial real estate exposure, mortgage volumes, This is the pulse, the heartbeat of the household. This is the rhythm of Main Street, all in one report. Number 2, net interest income tells us how banks are living within the current rate environment, how much they earn on the spread between what you give them to hold for you in your deposits versus what they charge They're borrowing customers. That's the spread. That number tells you whether we are still in a bank-friendly environment or a bank-squeezed environment. If you've listened to the show over the last couple weeks, it lets you know if we have earned the, uh, the records of the stock market or if they've just been borrowed. And then the third, the third reason big banks' earnings matter is because trading and investment banking revenues tell us whether corporate America is doing deals again. Remember, in the 2nd quarter, we had the largest IPO ever when SpaceX came out. Mergers, acquisitions, those IPOs— initial public offerings— bond issuances— when deal activity is strong, it usually shows up in those numbers first. This is educational only, guys. Not a recommendation to buy or sell any of these companies. But if you are a planner, you do not skip these earnings just because you do not own the ticker. You read them because they are the health check, the physical on how the American consumer borrower in the in America's dealmakers are doing. And a quick reminder. Earnings season is historical, historical data. It's that report card like you got in school. Your plan, though, is the future. We do not rewrite a plan because of one quarter's reports. We use the report to check whether the assumptions inside the plan still make sense.

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Bringing it home with this Tuesday. Yesterday, the markets pulled back on a chip scare out of Seoul. Last night, a Cardinals slugger reminded us that discipline finishes what excitement starts. Today, the World Cup semifinals show us what happens when a team prepares for years for the right to go to the championship match. And before you finish your first cup of coffee this morning or listening to this over your lunch break, 3 of the big banks in this country will tell us today What shape the American consumer is. If you'd like to sit down with our team and see what a one-of-a-kind financial plan looks like for your one-of-a-kind life, I invite you to call into our office, 757-909-7151. Go to Amazon and grab a copy of The One-of-a-Kind Financial Plan by me, Mike Milligan. Or catch our latest series that aired on YouTube this weekend called Reckless Abandonment: How AI Affects Your Money, the Markets, and Our Environment on the one of the one dot oak radio YouTube channel. Estoy aprendiendo. I'm still learning, folks. So are you. Educate, coach, plan, and always never miss a moment. I'll see you tomorrow. This show is for educational purposes only. It's not investment advice, not a recommendation to buy or sell any specific security. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Consult your own licensed financial professional before making any investment decisions. Mike Milligan is a certified financial planning professional, the founder of One Oak Financial, and an investment advisory representative with Advisory Alpha LLC. Ideas by Mike doing business as One Oak Financial and Advisory LLC, Advisory Alpha LLC, are unaffiliated entities. As always, never miss a moment.

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