Weekly Check-In: TSM, BRK.B, AMZN, SPY

TSM closed at $418.95 on August 21, down about 2.7% on the week and now roughly 12% below its $477.57 closing high from June 30. Q2 revenue hit $40.2B, beating guidance, with gross margin at 67.7%; TSMC raised its 2026 revenue growth outlook to slightly above 40% on continued AI chip demand. Analyst consensus stays Strong Buy, average 12-month target $554.45, about 32% above the current price. The overhang: Taiwan is weighing stricter export controls on advanced AI chips to China, including potential criminal penalties for unauthorized shipments, and the VEU exemption that let TSM run its China fab more freely has shifted to an annual-license regime -- a real risk given how much of TSM's leading-edge production still depends on US-made EDA software and fab equipment.

AMZN closed around $259.59, market cap about $2.79T, down roughly 3% from last week's $267.28 and still well off the ~$290 record set right after the Q2 print. The quarter's headline number included a $53.4B pretax non-operating gain from Amazon's Anthropic stake being marked up, on top of the 20% sales growth and AWS's 37% re-acceleration already covered last week. Amazon's custom AI chip business crossed a $25B annualized run-rate, and its drone delivery service is expanding toward nearly 500 cities. The other side: trailing free cash flow went negative by roughly $7.6B even as operating cash flow rose 33%, long-term debt nearly doubled year-over-year to $128.9B, and an FTC antitrust trial is now set for October 2026 alongside an EU cloud-procurement review.

BRK.B closed at $495.82 on August 21, about 8% below its $539.80 all-time closing high from May 2025. The week's real news was the August 15 13F filing: Berkshire added $17B to its Alphabet stake in Q2, about 60% of it ($10B) acquired directly from Alphabet through a private placement disclosed back in June, the rest bought on the open market. Berkshire now holds roughly 106M Alphabet shares worth about $36.6B, making it the portfolio's third-largest position and continuing the shift this journal has been tracking -- CEO Greg Abel ending 14 straight quarters of net selling to become a net buyer, steering the post-Buffett portfolio further toward tech.

SPY closed the week at $765.72 on Friday, up 0.41% on the day but still down from its August 13 record close of $777.88 (the S&P 500 index itself hit 7,798.99 that same day) -- the market's first weekly decline since late July, with the Dow and Nasdaq each off more than 1% before Friday's bounce. The pullback tracked softer consumer data: July retail sales contracted 0.6% month-over-month and the University of Michigan sentiment index fell to 51.0, alongside rising energy prices and plain profit-taking after the string of records. Attention now turns to Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech next week for signals on rates and central bank independence.

The backdrop this week reads more like a pause than a reversal: TSM, AMZN, and the index itself all gave back some ground on profit-taking and softer consumer signals, while the underlying business news stayed constructive -- TSM's raised growth outlook, Amazon's AI and logistics expansion, and Berkshire's decisive move into Alphabet all point the same direction even as the market waits on the Fed's next word.