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Here are 3 big things to watch in the stock market this coming week

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Here are 3 big things to watch in the stock market this coming week

FedEx is due Tuesday night with consensus EPS of $5.96 on $24.04B in revenue, but the print is complicated by the FedEx Freight spin-off and a fiscal-year change that will make guidance hard to compare. May PCE inflation on Thursday may be muted by the sharp drop in WTI crude to around $76 a barrel, versus the upper $90s and low $100s in May, potentially easing pressure on the Fed. Micron reports Wednesday with consensus EPS of $20.47 on $35.42B in revenue, and its results will be closely watched for AI-memory pricing and capex implications across major chip and data-center spenders.

Analysis

The cleanest read-through is not the headline earnings beats/misses, but the dispersion between firms that can convert volatility into pricing power and those that merely absorb it. FDX is the high-conviction self-help story: the spin-off and calendar reset obscure near-term comparability, but they also create a window where management can reset expectations lower while the underlying network optimization compounds into higher margins and buyback capacity. That makes the first print less useful than the next 2-3 quarters of freight mix, yield, and free-cash-flow conversion.

The bigger macro implication is that softer oil is a delayed tax cut for transport, consumer discretionary, and select industrials, but the market will likely underprice the lag. If crude stays near current levels for several weeks, inflation-sensitive rate expectations should drift down before the official data fully reflects it, which matters more for duration-sensitive growth and housing-linked names than for the headline PCE print itself. The key second-order effect is that lower input costs can stabilize margin guidance across retailers, restaurants, and logistics-heavy distributors, while simultaneously reducing the urgency of any hawkish policy response.

MU is the strongest read-through to the AI capex complex because memory is one of the few components where supply discipline can sustain pricing even if server demand moderates. That creates a paradox: hyperscalers may keep spending aggressively because delaying builds risks future shortages, but the economic payoff increasingly accrues to upstream suppliers rather than the capex buyers. The contrarian risk is that a sustained memory upcycle can eventually force customers to pause orders or redesign systems, which would show up with a multi-quarter lag rather than in the immediate quarter.