The frame
We usually show you three numbers per index — daily, weekly, year-to-date. Today we open the hood. Each of our three AI indices carries a full deck of sector sub-indices, equal-weighted and computed the same way as the headline, and the week just ended is unusually legible one level down.
The headline board first: the Agentic Ecosystem index — AI opex, the compute-renters and token-meterers — gained about +12.2% on the trailing week and closed Thursday +3.2% at 1,686.55, +70.6% for the year. Agentic Winners 40 — the application layer — added +7.6% on the week, +3.8% Thursday to 913.21, still −8.0% on the year. The Rubin Build-Out 100 — the capex layer — rose +5.5% on the week, +1.1% Thursday to 2,121.12, +113.9% year-to-date. HALO, our non-AI growth control group, was roughly flat Thursday and +2.5% on the week — the AI complex did the moving.
Inside Rubin: the physical layer paid, the design layer charged
Twenty-four sector sub-indices, and the weekly ladder sorts by proximity to the memory-and-systems buildout. At the top: AI Factory Systems +14.3%, Storage +11.3%, Advanced Materials +10.8%, HBM Memory +10.7% — with Testing & Metrology at +9.1% right behind.
At the bottom, three of twenty-four closed the week red: EDA & Chip IP −1.9%, Wafer Processing & Precision −0.7%, Fab Subsystems −0.3%. The market spent the week paying for physical capacity — the things Seoul’s memory bid and the DRAM complex touch — and charging the design-software layer that sells into everyone equally.
Storage, the weekly number four, is the year’s number one inside Rubin at +370% — the sub-index where SanDisk lives. The week was not a new story; it was the year’s story accelerating.
Inside the Agentic Ecosystem: everything green, models first
Nine sectors, and the weekly worst gained +7.3%. That is breadth, not rotation-within: Foundation Models +21.1% led, then Data & Memory +17.2%, Edge & Distribution +16.2%, Runtime & API Gateways +14.7%, Compute Operators +11.2%, Identity/Trust/Governance +10.7%, Operations & Observability +9.1%, Agentic Security +7.3%.
The opex layer had a week where its laggard would have topped most sector tables. The bellwether pair’s verdicts — CoreWeave and Nebius holding +19% and +34% prints through two days of retention — sit inside those Compute Operators and Data & Memory numbers.
Inside Agentic Winners: the sorting rule reaches the application layer
The four functional cuts tell it cleanly: Control Plane +12.5%, Application Leaders +9.9%, Endpoints +5.1% — and Megacap Gateway −0.8%, the only red, in the same week the megacap hyperscalers themselves mostly stalled (Microsoft +0.9%, Alphabet +0.8%, Amazon −0.8%, Nvidia +0.5% Thursday; Meta’s +2.8% the exception).
The segment cuts add a second axis: Enterprise +9.1% over Consumer +4.3%, United States +9.5% over Asia +3.1% and Europe +2.9%. The week paid the B2B, US-listed, non-megacap middle of the application stack.
Year-to-date the ranks invert: Megacap Gateway is still the year’s best cut at +9.3%, Endpoints the worst at −13.4%. Which is the pattern in miniature: the market pays whoever is NOT the incumbent default this week, having paid the incumbents first.
The cross-read
One rule, three appearances. In the earnings tape it reads: challengers paid, champions charged — Cisco −8.4% and Coherent −8.0% on record-quality beats while CoreWeave and Nebius kept their payments, and Applied Materials answered its eleventh straight beat about five percent lower after hours. Inside Rubin it reads: physical capacity over design software. Inside Agentic Winners it reads: control plane over megacap gateway.
And in the capital-structure tape it read loudest of all: Silver Lake reportedly in talks to take Workday private — a financial buyer stepping under the derated software floor the operators had abandoned. The market is not exiting the AI trade. It is re-deciding, layer by layer and week by week, who gets paid for it.
C · members block
Into the close
Scoring rules for the day, written before the numbers.
Lumentum’s window closes at tonight’s bell at a cumulative +7.3% off the print. The record it defends has four reactions of +16% or better, two of −9% or worse, and no middle — a settle here is the record’s first. We score whatever closes, not what we expected.
Applied Materials gets its day-one verdict at the close. After-hours said about −5% on a double beat; after-hours marks are opinions, closes are verdicts. The record row (1 paid, 3 flat, 6 charged in ten beats going in) is written tonight.
Retail sales ex-autos at 14:30 CET (consensus +0.2% after a negative prior) and Michigan sentiment at 16:00 CET (consensus 54.5 vs 55.2, with the 5-year inflation-expectations read) close the macro week. CPI and PPI were both cool; a resilient consumer completes the set the dovish branch is priced on.
IEF closes its week against 93.17. A weekly close above retires the false-break question; dollar-yen under 159.5 keeps the one dissenting tell in place.