Two households, both alike in dignity 🎭

Hey Superheroes,

In fair Australia where we lay our scene… this week two heavyweights of the ASX traded places.

BHP hit an all-time high and reclaimed its crown as Australia’s biggest listed company. Commonwealth Bank had its biggest single-day fall on record, crashing more than 10% in a session and wiping roughly $25 billion off its market cap. Same week. Same index. Two very different stories — and a federal budget that helped set them on a collision course.

On Tuesday night, Treasurer Jim Chalmers handed down the 2026-27 federal budget. The headline was a tightening of negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions for property investors, which hit bank valuations hard the following morning.

Overseas, Kevin Warsh was confirmed as the next Fed Chair in the most divisive vote ever for the role (54–45, almost entirely along party lines). His first meeting is June 16–17, and he’s walking into a tricky setup. US CPI for April came in at 3.8% — a three-year high, driven mostly by the energy shock. US markets have now scaled back rate cut expectations to roughly zero for the rest of 2026.

Here’s what moved this week.

BHP and CBA: A Tale of Two Stocks

On Wednesday, the great rotation finally happened in earnest. BHP up. CBA down. The crown changed hands.

⛏️ BHP’s copper bet pays off

BHP (ASX:BHP) hit a fresh all-time high on Tuesday, cracking $60 for the first time on record and pushing its market cap above $312 billion. The mining giant is now up 34% year-to-date and 56% over the past 12 months.

The catalyst is copper. The metal surged past US$13,900 a tonne on the LME — well above Goldman Sachs’ US$11,200 target for 2026. Copper now contributes more than half of BHP’s group EBITDA for the first time ever, with production up about 30% over the past four years while most global peers missed their 2025 production guidance.

CEO Mike Henry’s strategic pivot — anchored by the 2023 OZ Minerals acquisition and operational gains at Escondida — is now paying off in what is seemingly a market deficit. Morgan Stanley flagged late last year that the copper market is heading into its largest deficit in two decades, widening to 1.1 million tonnes by 2029.

🏦 CBA’s record-breaking fall

On the other side of the ledger, CBA (ASX:CBA) shares crashed 10.4% on Wednesday — its biggest one-day fall on record, wiping roughly $25 billion off its market cap.

The bank reported Q3 cash profit of about $2.7 billion, up 4% year-on-year but below analyst expectations. The headline numbers weren’t the problem. The provisioning was. CBA lifted collective provisions by $200 million and recorded a $316 million loan impairment expense, citing geopolitical and macroeconomic risks. Consumer arrears ticked up. Personal loan arrears rose 30 basis points.

Then came the budget. The proposed changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts hit mortgage-lending banks hardest. Westpac, NAB and ANZ all fell between 2% and 4% on Wednesday. CBA — trading at the highest premium of the four — took the worst of it.

👑 The crown changes hands

BHP now sits at a market cap of around $312 billion. CBA, even after some recovery, is around $261 billion. The $50 billion gap  highlights a significant shift in market sentiment. We are seeing capital flow out of the banking sector—which has faced valuation pressure following the federal budget—and into commodities linked to electrification and AI infrastructure.

CSL’s Valuation Headwinds

If BHP and CBA were the headline act, CSL was the cautionary tale playing on a different stage.

CSL (ASX:CSL) shares crashed more than 20% on Monday — the biggest one-day loss in the company’s history — after a brutal trading update from interim CEO Gordon Naylor. Shares closed at $100.75, briefly trading under $100 for the first time in nearly a decade.

💊 The downgrade

CSL now expects FY26 revenue of about US$15.2 billion and NPATA of US$3.1 billion — both below FY25 levels, meaning the biotech is forecasting earnings to go backwards year-on-year for the first time in living memory. As recently as February, management was guiding to 2–3% revenue growth and 4–7% NPATA growth.

Naylor pointed to three big drags: US immunoglobulin channel inventory normalising (–US$300m), weaker albumin pricing in China (–US$200m), and Middle East conflict impacts combined with slower HEMGENIX gene therapy growth and rising iron-product competition (–US$150m).

📉 The impairment that broke the camel’s back

The bigger story was the writedown. CSL flagged about US$5 billion in additional non-cash impairments across FY26 and FY27, on top of US$1.5 billion already recognised in the first half. That brings the total to roughly US$6.5 billion (~A$8.9 billion) — the third-largest writedown in ASX history behind Rio Tinto’s Alcan and BHP’s OneSteel debacles.

The bulk of it relates to CSL Vifor, the Swiss iron-deficiency and renal-care business CSL bought for US$11.7 billion in 2022. In other words, much of the company’s big strategic acquisition is being written off as having destroyed value.

🩸 Why it matters

CSL was, until very recently, one of the ASX’s most reliable growth stories. Shares are now down 45% in 2026 and more than 60% over the past year. The market cap is around $46.5 billion — and the third-pillar story of BHP and CBA is now joined by a quiet third character: a healthcare giant trying to convince investors it can still grow.

Naylor’s 90-day review is done. The next big test is the full-year result on 18 August.

🔦 Some other things we’re shining the Spotlight on:

MICRON AND THE AI MEMORY DEMAND: Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) surged 15% to a record $746 on Friday, finishing the week up 38%. Its entire 2026 production of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) — the chips inside Nvidia’s AI accelerators — is sold out under binding contracts. Hyperscalers are now signing 3–5 year supply deals rather than quarterly contracts, a development that some industry analysts suggest could reshape the historically cyclical memory business.

WALMART CUTS 1,000 CORPORATE ROLES: Walmart eliminated or relocated about 1,000 corporate roles this week as new CEO John Furner pushes a tech-focused restructuring. The retailer is merging three separate technology operations — Walmart US, Sam’s Club, and international — into a single global platform. The official line is “simplification” rather than AI replacement, but it’s the second round of corporate cuts in 12 months at the world’s largest retailer.

CEREBRAS POPS 68% IN BLOCKBUSTER IPO: AI chip startup Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ:CBRS) soared 68% in its Nasdaq debut on Thursday, closing at $311.07 after pricing at $185 — well above its expected range. The IPO raised $5.55 billion, the largest U.S. tech listing since Uber’s 2019 debut, and lifted the chipmaker’s market cap to roughly $95 billion. Cerebras, often positioned by the market as an Nvidia challenger, is now the largest pure-play AI IPO to debut on Wall Street., with SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic potentially next in line.

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