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What happened?
A number of stocks rose in the afternoon session after a weak producer price index (PPI) reassured investors and countered fears of an industry-wide budget squeeze sparked by IBM a day earlier.
Wholesale inflation fell 0.3% in June despite expectations for a flat reading, outpacing the surprisingly sharp 0.4% fall in consumer prices in the previous session. This back-to-back confirmation of cooling inflation shifted the market’s focus away from IBM’s warning that customers were “re-prioritizing capital spending” and draining their IT budgets to secure limited-supply AI servers and high-bandwidth storage instead of software.
Lower inflation data directly reduces Treasury yields by taking pressure off the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates high. This leads to a mechanical valuation increase for growth stocks, whose valuations depend heavily on future cash flows.
The stock market overreacts to news, and large drops can provide good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks.
The following stocks were affected, among others:
Zooming on Upland Software (UPLD)
Upland Software shares are extremely volatile, with 69 moves of more than 5% in the last year. In this context, today’s move suggests that the market considers this news meaningful, but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the company.
The last big move we wrote about came 16 days ago, when the stock rose 9.1% after news that the United States and Iran had agreed to halt their mutual military confrontations, easing fears of a wider Middle East conflict that had rocked markets over the weekend.
The relief dissolved the entire risk complex. The pre-existing trigger was the chip-to-software rotation sparked by a June 25 report that OpenAI might delay its IPO, alleviating “SaaSpocalypse” fears that AI labs would quickly cannibalize the incumbent SaaS.
The Iran news is significant for software through the tariff channel. Lower oil prices are easing the inflationary impulse that had led traders to price in a Fed rate hike later in the year, and declining rate hike probabilities are disproportionately helping long-term, high-multiple growth software, the very cohort that was hardest hit in 2026. So de-escalation removed a macro overhang, while at the same time the micro narrative (the limitations of OpenAI) reduced the existential fear of AI disruption.
Upland Software is up 271% year-to-date to hit a new 52-week high of $5.57 per share. Despite the year-to-date gain, investors who bought $1,000 worth of Upland Software shares five years ago would now be looking at just $147.12.
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https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/bill-marqeta-upland-software-shares-224821940.html
