Pre-Market Briefing on Sept 28: Qualcomm Climbs 3.97% on Apple License Renewal, Fed Speakers in Focus

All three major indexes closed higher on Friday, September 25: the Dow +0.93%, the S&P 500 at 7,743.41 for +0.51%, the Nasdaq at 27,068.72 for +0.48%, and the Philadelphia semiconductor index +1.4%. The gains went to the names with new orders: Microsoft +3.66%, Qualcomm +3.97% and Dell +5%, against Nvidia (NVDA) at only +0.22%. The stock in focus is Qualcomm (QCOM), which closed at $201.97 and rose 3.97% as two things landed the same day: the top Snapdragon 8 Elite chip runs a 30-billion-parameter model on the handset itself, with 9 makers signed on, and Apple renewed its patent licence. ⚠ Neither the value nor the expiry of that renewal was disclosed, and the detailed terms only arrive with later filings. Today, September 28, two Fed speakers and a manufacturing index fall after the 13:30 open: these are in-session events, not pre-market ones. Data is based on the September 25 US close; all times are UTC.

 

Unit: %, single-day change on September 25 against the prior close. All eight readings are positive, so the bars are drawn from zero on one shared scale, four indexes and four stocks. Nothing on the index side reached 1%; the Dow at +0.93% was the largest. On the stock side Dell rose 5%, Qualcomm 3.97% and Microsoft 3.66%, over four times the index moves. The Philadelphia semiconductor index at +1.4% sits between them: semiconductors were firm, but not enough to account for Qualcomm's 3.97%.

 

The dividing line is not the sector label but whether new orders arrived. Microsoft's 3.66% followed a new Copilot that adds code generation and AI agents. Nvidia (NVDA) gained only 0.22%, not because it deteriorated but because nothing new landed for it. Rates are the other story: the 10-year Treasury yield closed at 5.16% and touched 5.23% intraday, the highest since 2007. A higher discount rate weighs on valuations, and AI order books held the market up anyway. Last week's US-China summit produced an eight-point agreement: tariffs cut $30B each way, farm goods for small appliances. Not one line of it is a technology good, chip export controls are untouched, and tariff relief is sentiment rather than fundamentals.

 

Unit: %, single-day change on September 25 against the prior close. Six large semiconductor names, picked by hand and grouped by their industry field; the set spans positive and negative, so a zero line is drawn and all six share one scale. Qualcomm (QCOM) at +3.97% is the highest, ahead of Lam Research (LRCX) at +2.62%, a gap of 1.35 points. Intel (INTC) at −3.45% is the lowest on profit-taking, putting 7.42 points between the ends.

 

The basis needs stating: the industry averaged −0.10% that day, so Qualcomm's excess move was 4.07 points. But −0.10% is barely negative rather than a broad sector decline: Lam Research, Applied Materials (AMAT), Arm (ARM) and Nvidia (NVDA) also closed higher, so this cannot be written up as Qualcomm rising alone. Accurately, semiconductors were close to flat while single-name news pulled the group apart: a single-stock move. Market value reached $212.1B, up $8.1B on the day. Volume ran at 1.10 times the average, which is not elevated, the opposite of the familiar case where a large multiple signals an event. The price sits at 58% of its 52-week range.

 

Unit: 0–100, against peers and its own one-year history, as of the September 25 close, 0 at the centre, 100 at the rim, all five axes on one scale. This is a one-year relative position, not the single session. Peer rank scores the full 100, the strongest of the six semiconductor names that day. Peer strength 70.3, sector valuation 67.9 and trend position 58.0 sit in the upper middle; the weakest is volatility control at 52.8, so its price swings are wider than the rest of the group.

 

Unit: %, the denominator being Qualcomm's total revenue for the June quarter. Both bars are drawn from zero on one shared scale, one of them the denominator itself. A chip company earns two ways: selling chips means units times price, collected on what it ships. Patent royalties are charged on the other company's handset price, whatever its own shipments. Licensing runs at roughly 15% of revenue, and the higher that share, the more a renewal matters.

 

Royalties carry high margins and steady cash flow, and each contract runs for several years, so every renewal is a variable outside the quarterly report: it decides whether that 15% base survives. For this Apple renewal, neither the value nor the expiry was disclosed, and the detailed terms only arrive with later filings.

 

Unit: %, the median policy rate from the September dot plot on a year-end basis. The four bars are drawn from 3.0% rather than from zero, because all four readings fall between 3.2 and 4.1. End-2026 is 4.1%, end-2027 is 4.1%, end-2028 is 3.9% and the longer-run neutral rate is 3.2%. The Fed raised rates 25 basis points to 3.75%–4.00% in September, so 4.1% at end-2026 implies one more hike inside the year, 2027 unchanged, with a step down only in 2028. ⚠ The dot plot is a forecast, not a commitment.

 

The line sizes the payback window on capital spending: high rates are a three-year story, not a single quarter. Today Governor Barr speaks at 14:05, the Dallas Fed manufacturing index lands at 14:30, and Barkin speaks at 17:30, all after the 13:30 open. Barr and Barkin are two different officials with one appearance each today, not two halves of the same speech. The discount rate is the foundation under every AI valuation: move the path and the capex maths has to be redone.

 

Unit: %, August CPI by major component, year on year, on the official series. The six bars are drawn from zero on one shared scale, and the dashed line marks headline inflation at 3.4%. Energy at 16.3% stands alone, every other component falling between apparel at 3.6% and transport services at 2.4%. Headline inflation is 3.4% and core only 2.4%, a gap of 1.0 point, almost all of it in energy. The rest are packed into a narrow band, so core is not hot.

 

The first thing to watch is how officials characterise energy inflation. Treat it as a one-off shock to look through and the room for a second hike inside the year survives, helping technology names first; judge it to be spreading and the discount rate has further to climb. The second is how the eight-point agreement gets cited: relief in sentiment, not in fundamentals.

 

Drawdown from the 52-week high (%) = (52-week high − latest close) ÷ 52-week high × 100, as of the September 25 close. The six bars are drawn from zero on one shared scale, and a larger number means further below the high. ⚠ The order is by drawdown, not a quality assessment or a recommendation ranking. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is down just 1.3%, and Oracle (ORCL) at the other end is 57.5% below its high.

 

One AI supply chain, two positions: the upstream collects cash, the downstream borrows to build. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) makes CPUs and AI accelerators, gets paid in the period it ships, rose 9.9% on Friday and passed $1.03 trillion in market value for the first time. Micron (MU) makes DRAM and HBM memory and sells another batch with every extra AI server, closing at $1,082.28, 6.8 times its 52-week low. The more a company leans on borrowing, the further it sits below its high. SoftBank's high-yield bond for its OpenAI investment priced its longest tranche at 9.75%, the going cost of building AI on borrowed money.

 

Unit: US$ billion, from the same second quarter at CoreWeave (CRWV). Both bars are drawn from zero on one shared scale, and the denominator is that quarter's revenue of $2.6B. It is not the denominator used in the previous chart, so the two cannot be read across. CoreWeave rents out GPU hours rather than selling chips: the GPUs sit in its own data centres and go out by the hour to model builders, with second-quarter revenue of $2.6B, up 112%, and a backlog of $104.2B.

 

The expansion is borrowed, though. Interest expense that same quarter was $640M, roughly $1 of every $4 of revenue, so its costs move with Treasury yields. Three steps work here: the ratio of interest expense to revenue, then the price of new debt, with SoftBank's longest tranche at 9.75% as the reference. Third, whether orders and debt line up in time, since a backlog is spread over several years while the interest falls due every quarter.

 

A: Because −0.10% is barely negative, not a broad decline. Four other names in the group also closed higher, so the spread came from individual news, not sector direction.

 

A: No, but it is worth flagging. A multiple of 1.10 means volume was not elevated: the price moved while turnover did not, the opposite of the usual case where a large multiple signals an event.

 

A: Start with licensing as a share of revenue, roughly 15% at Qualcomm in the June quarter. The higher the share, the more a renewal matters. Neither the value nor the expiry was disclosed, and the terms follow in later filings.

 

A: No. The dot plot is a forecast, not a commitment. It is a yardstick for the payback window on capex: 4.1% at end-2026 and only 3.9% by end-2028, so high rates are a three-year story.

 

A: It measures whether an expansion is funded by money earned or borrowed. CoreWeave posted second-quarter revenue of $2.6B against interest expense of $640M, about $1 of every $4.

 

Disclaimer: This article is compiled and written by the MEXC RealStocks team. The data in this article is based on the closing of the US stock market on September 25, 2026. The content is a compilation of public market information, and individual stocks are publicly discussed targets, which do not represent the recommendation or opinion of MEXC and do not constitute any investment advice. More US stock content: @MEXC | @Alpha_MEXC | @MEXC_Research