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The First Wealth Monday Espresso is your essential five-minute investment briefing, equipping you with everything you need to know for the week ahead. Marlborough's Multi-Asset Solutions Investment Team summarise market events over the past seven days and preview the key events in the week ahead, while also sharing their expert insights.
Monday Espresso Podcast 1st June 2026
[00:00:00] Rory Dowie: Good morning. Today's Monday, the 1st of June. I'm Rory Dowie, Portfolio Manager here at Marlborough. Joining me today is Nick Warmisham, one of our Investment Analysts on the team. Nick, good to have you on the pod and good morning.
[00:00:11] Nick Warmisham: Good morning, Rory.
[00:00:12] Rory Dowie: Three topics to discussed today, the dominant story, Iran, where things moved very significantly last week with a tentative deal emerging to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:00:20] Then we'll look at Micron technology hitting a trillion dollar valuation for the first time, which tells us something interesting about where the AI story may be heading.
[00:00:29] And finally, UK economic growth data for the first three months of the year came in.
[00:00:33] First things first, Nick, how did markets get on last week and how they looking so far this year?
[00:00:39] Nick Warmisham: Yeah, well, it was a really solid week overall, Rory, the big driver of sentiment was the Iran news flow with markets moving up and down on every headline. In the US, both the S&P500 and Nasdaq, the main American stock market indices hit fresh all time highs during the week, and that's now seven positive weeks out of the last eight.
[00:00:58] Year to date we've also seen Japan as being the standout performer, globally driven by its pro-growth government, and Europe has lagged weighed down by the higher energy costs that have come with the conflict.
[00:01:10] Rory Dowie: Okay, so much of the same really, but markets last week really being driven by the hope of a resolution in the Middle East.
[00:01:17] Oil was around $73 a barrel at the start of the year, and has obviously been hovering much higher than that for a few months now up near a hundred. So any deal or kind of progress in the Middle East, that would be enormous to the cost of living and markets broadly, which brings us nicely onto Iran.
[00:01:32] What's the latest, Nick?
[00:01:34] Nick Warmisham: At the start of last week, Trump said a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway that we've spoken about over recent weeks, which roughly around 20% of the world's oil passes, was in his words, largely negotiated and would be announced shortly.
[00:01:49] Then on Thursday, US officials confirmed that the two sides had reached a tentative agreement, though it hadn't been signed yet, and still need to final sign off from both Trump and Iran's supreme leader.
[00:02:00] Rory Dowie: And what would that deal actually involve then?
[00:02:02] Nick Warmisham: The plan as it stands, would see Iran agree to reopen the Strait followed by a 60 day window of talks to work through Iran's nuclear programme. Essentially, what Iran does with the advanced nuclear material, it's been building up, think of it as a first handshake with the harder conversations to follow.
[00:02:19] But it's worth saying, even as diplomacy was progressing, military activity continued. Iran fired a missile towards Kuwait midweek, which was in intercepted, and the US confirmed its struck Iranian drone positions near the Strait.
[00:02:31] Rory Dowie: So peace talks and military strikes happening at the same time, which is why markets are being cautious until something's actually signed, but as you mentioned, clearly moving on every bit of news flow.
[00:02:42] The key thing for our listeners really is this, if oil prices come back down towards where they were at the start of the year, that's obviously good news for household bills, for businesses and the broader economy.
[00:02:51] We are not there yet, but perhaps one step closer over the past week with the positive noises that we've seen out of both sides.
[00:02:58] Moving on, Nick, something that really caught our eye this week was Micron Technology, the American chip maker, became a trillion dollar company for the first time in its history on Tuesday.
[00:03:07] Nick, why does this matter and what are the implications?
[00:03:11] Nick Warmisham: Well, yeah, it's really been a remarkable story to be honest Rory.
[00:03:14] Microns share price jumped around 19% in a single day, its best performance since 2011. A year ago, the company was worth roughly a 10th of what it is to today.
[00:03:24] The trigger for this has been a major upgrade from Swiss Bank UBS, which significantly raised their view on how valuable the company should be, pointing to the enormous demand coming from the world of artificial intelligence.
[00:03:36] Rory Dowie: And for listeners who haven't come across Micron before, what do they actually do?
[00:03:40] Nick Warmisham: In simple terms, they make the memory chips that sit inside AI data centres, the buildings full of computers that power things like Chat GPT or any other AI system you might use.
[00:03:51] So every time one of those centres is built or upgraded, it needs vast amounts of Micron chips to function.
[00:03:58] Also, they're only one of three companies in the world that can make this type of chip at scale, and they've already sold out their entire production for this year.
[00:04:07] Rory Dowie: Yeah, and on that point, Nick, all three of those memory producers are now over $1 trillion in size. We actually spoke about Korea a couple of weeks back on the pod, the other two memory names being the two stocks in Korea that make up 50% of that Korean index, which has performed so strongly this year.
[00:04:24] We've also talked a lot about Nvidia over recent months. Obviously they were kind of the initial darling company of AI making those powerful AI processes. And again, Micron really a sign that the benefits of AI are now spreading to a wider set of companies. The bottlenecks that we did see just on the compute side of AI are now moving elsewhere in the supply chain.
[00:04:42] And I guess as we move to the real world application of AI, I think autonomous vehicles, et cetera, you actually need much more localised memory. So that's why you are seeing these memory names move so aggressively or perform so well.
[00:04:54] Moving on and bringing it close to home. Nick, we had the first official estimate of how the UK economy performed in the first three months of this year.
[00:05:01] How are we getting on?
[00:05:03] Nick Warmisham: Well, better than feared actually, the Office for National Statistics, the body that measures how the UK economy's doing, confirmed that the economy grew 0.6% in the first quarter, which was a meaningful step up from the 0.2% growth we saw at the end of last year, the services sector, which covers things like retail, hospitality, and finance led the way.
[00:05:22] So overall, a solid number on the face of it.
[00:05:24] Rory Dowie: But there's an important caveat, isn't there?
[00:05:26] Nick Warmisham: There is, unfortunately. So the conflict in Iran only began on the 28th of February, so this is largely a snapshot of the economy before the full impact of higher energy prices were felt.
[00:05:37] Since then, independent forecasters have cut their expectations for UK growth this year, quite significantly, citing the squeeze on households and businesses from higher energy costs.
[00:05:48] Business confidence has fallen, the cost of running a business is rising and fewer jobs are being advertised. So Q1 was solid, but the picture moving ahead is certainly more challenging.
[00:05:57] Rory Dowie: Yeah. Okay. So clearly lots of unknowns on how this might impact the kind of numbers going forward, but prior to the conflicts, not too bad in numbers from the UK.
[00:06:07] Looking ahead, Nick, what of our listeners got to look out for this week?
[00:06:11] Nick Warmisham: Well, I suppose the Iran deal is the big one to watch. Any formal announcement would be a major moment for markets. And on the economic data side, we have job figures coming outta the US, which will give a read on the health of the American economy and in Europe we have further inflation data to keep an eye on.
[00:06:29] Rory Dowie: Great, thanks Nick.
[00:06:29] So to summarise the week Iran edging towards a deal, though nothing has been signed yet, the AI story has been broadening out. We've spoken about Micron and them having their memory moment, and then we've also had a solid start to the year for the UK economy. But as you said, there are some challenges ahead maybe with the impact of Iran coming into the next quarter's numbers.
[00:06:49] Thanks for joining me, Nick, and to our listeners, hope you found that useful. As always, do reach out if you have any questions and wishing you all a great week ahead.