US Stock Market Pregame Report: Kimi K3 Wows the Crowd, AI 「Rise in the East, Fall in the West」 Narrative Resurfaces, Related Stocks May Face Valuation Downgrade

BlockBeats News, July 17, a summary of pre-market news in the US stock market:

1. The Dark Side of the Moon Kimi K3 was officially released today. The model immediately stunned the audience, ranking first on the Arena frontend code list, surpassing Claude Fable 5's 1631 points and GPT-5.6 Sol's 1618 points. As a result, Western analysts and investors are once again chanting the AI "East Rises, West Sets" narrative. A representative comparison is: The K3 model will compress the profit margins of leading AI model companies. OpenAI's Sol still remains price competitive, but Anthropic's Opus is facing greater pressure.

According to BIT (bit.com) market data, possibly due to this news and the sharp decline in the Japanese stock market, US stocks of AI and semiconductor companies are generally down in pre-market trading. NVIDIA is down 2.51%, memory stocks Micron, Seagate, and Western Digital are down 2-4%. Micron is down 2.99%, AMAT, LRC are down over 4%.

2. SpaceX's 13th Starship test flight was aborted less than a second before liftoff. Due to this negative news, SPCX is down over 4% in pre-market trading.

3. Today is the US stock index futures options expiration day, with a large number of options contracts expiring or being exercised, leading to a surge in trading volume. Analysts point out that during this period, traders and market makers need to adjust their hedge positions (such as buying or selling underlying stocks or futures), which may cause abnormal trading pressure, resulting in sharp price fluctuations, unusual jumps, or deviations from the fundamental trend.

4. Netflix (NFLX) is down 11.34% in pre-market trading. Q2 performance was largely in line with expectations, but Q3 sales growth expectations have slowed (slowing growth for the second consecutive quarter), with analysts believing that the guidance for the future is weighing on the stock price.

5. Beata Manthey, Citigroup's European stock strategy director, commented on the stock market, stating that the current weakness is not a signal of a market collapse, but a "violent rotation" of the market into a broader field. Beata said, "The long-awaited broad-based rally is unfolding, which requires a fierce sector rotation. Although the current market fluctuations are severe, fundamentally, it's funds seeking new value opportunities."

6. HSBC has upgraded Apple's stock to a buy rating, stating that it is at an "operational turning point." In addition, it raised Apple's target price from $260 to $366.

7. Goldman Sachs expects a strong earnings season for the US stock market, with S&P 500 companies' second-quarter earnings set to soar by 22% year-on-year. The report also emphasizes that the current market's focus is not on the performance of the tech giants themselves—after all, the AI spending of mega-cap cloud companies is already well-known—but on whether more broadly-based companies in the supply chain can achieve profit realization through AI demand.