Short U.S. Pre-Market Update - July 7, 2026
So Tuesday opens! Let's go!
The quick read is that Korea did a lot of the selling overnight, and a little of it is leaking into our pre-market. Monday closed strong at 7,537 on the S&P 500, and this morning we give a small piece of that back. Nothing looks broken yet.
Seoul did the selling overnight
The KOSPI fell 4.91% to close at 7,656.31, down 395 points on the day. It opened near 7,919, slid straight through 7,700, and printed an intraday low of 7,389 before clawing back some of it. At one point the drop reached 8% and tripped a circuit breaker that halted the whole board for twenty minutes. Foreign investors have now sold for thirteen sessions in a row.
The odd part is the trigger. Samsung reported record quarterly earnings before the open, operating profit up roughly nineteen-fold and well ahead of estimates, and the stock still fell around 7%. SK Hynix dropped about 6%. This was a sell-the-news reaction on top of a market that has become very top-heavy in two chip names, and the leveraged single-stock products in Korea tend to make these moves worse on the way down. So the earnings were good and the tape sold anyway. That happens when expectations are already stretched.
For our purposes this reads as a correction getting underway in Korea, not a one-day event. It broke the bullish supports it had been leaning on, and once those go it usually takes time to settle. Expect it to work lower and bounce, then lower and bounce again, rather than fall in a clean line. The Nikkei was down about 1.8% alongside it.
Which is why the S&P is a touch red this morning
We flagged this yesterday. In last night’s close note we said price might well give a little back the next day and that was fine, so don’t get scared. That is more or less what is happening. Nasdaq-100 futures are off about 1.1% pre-market and the S&P is pointing to roughly 7,530, so Monday’s tech bounce is fading a bit as Asia’s chip selling washes over.
The job today is easy to describe. On Monday the S&P finally closed above the descending line we have been calling the summer bearish decay, the ceiling that rejected every rally through June. That line is now support instead of resistance, and it sits around 7,450 to 7,460. As long as we hold above it on a closing basis, the breakout stays intact and the read still points back toward the old highs. Lose it on the close and the whole thing was a fake-out. So the mission is to defend the level we just reclaimed.
The real risk to that plan is Apple. If Apple leads lower it can drag the index down with it. The offset is NVIDIA, which is sitting in a falling wedge that usually breaks upward and looks close to going. When it moves, it tends to pull everything along with it. The honest caveat is that NVIDIA likes to go quiet until about two weeks before it reports, and earnings are still weeks away, so do not expect it to rip today. Its role right now is to soften the move, not to carry it.
