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Goldman Sachs has raised the 12-month target price for Kioxia Holdings to 116,000 yen and maintained its buy rating. Goldman Sachs expects Kioxia Holdings’ operating profit for the first quarter of FY3/27, to be announced on July 31, to reach 1.417 trillion yen, exceeding the company’s guidance of 1.298 trillion yen and Bloomberg’s consensus estimate of 1.36 trillion yen. Goldman Sachs believes AI-driven supply and demand pressures will drive the peak of the NAND market cycle higher, and Kioxia Holdings has growth potential in the data center product sector.

BlockBeats News, July 1st. Today, the South Korean Financial Services Commission decided to report two cases of virtual asset market manipulation to investigative authorities. The first case involves a large "whale" investor who engaged in price manipulation for around two months through coordinated trading on domestic and foreign exchanges. The suspect invested hundreds of billions of Korean won, accounting for nearly half of the token's global circulation. They artificially inflated the price on overseas exchanges and then took advantage of arbitrage trading and price linkages between exchanges to induce a price increase on domestic exchanges and attract Korean investors to buy more. Despite recording losses in their overseas accounts, the suspect realized profits in their domestic accounts far exceeding those losses. Regulatory authorities have determined that the main victims were Korean investors. The second case involves a South Korean team that issued the "Kimchi Coin," with a significant portion of its trading volume coming from domestic exchanges. The suspect used API channels to repeatedly place market orders within one second to create a false sense of trading activity. They also placed high-price buy orders for more than ten order books to drive up the price, then gradually sold off their holdings for a profit once the FOMO funds flowed in. The Financial Services Commission cautioned investors to refrain from chasing tokens that spike without justified reasons and announced plans to enhance information disclosure related to large investors' fundraising and selling activities. They also intend to improve market surveillance systems targeting concentration of trading activities in a few accounts to prevent losses from sharp price drops due to "pump and dump" schemes.

On July 1, ahead of Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Walsh's speech at the European Central Bank forum in Portugal, gold prices fell back below $4,000 per ounce. Analysts at Saxo Bank stated, "The market has not attracted enough buying interest to establish this level as a support point." They also noted, "Gold prices dropped 14% in the second quarter, marking the worst quarterly performance since 2013, as investors continue to reflect the risk expectations that the Federal Reserve may tighten policies further due to rising inflation, despite recent declines in energy prices." In early trading in European markets, New York futures gold fell 1.6% to $3,974 per ounce. Meanwhile, the dollar index rose 0.2% to 101.37, making dollar-denominated commodities more expensive for overseas buyers.