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“The most successful people in the world aren’t usually the brightest. They are the ones who persevere.” – Ross Perot

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

Even with the US launching a new round of airstrikes overnight and Iran responding with drone attacks on US bases in the Middle East, Us equity futures are mostly higher this morning with the Nasdaq rallying more than 75 bps and the S&P 500 up a more modest 0.2%. Treasury yields are little changed, while crude oil is only fractionally higher with WTI trading at just under $74 per barrel. Worried about the Middle East, the markets are not.

Asian markets were mostly higher overnight with South Korea finishing 0.6% higher. It isn’t often lately, that the index hasn’t experienced a daily move of at least 1%, so that’s noteworthy itself. Japan rallied 1.4% while Chinese stocks led the move higher with the Shanghai Composite rising 1.7% after CPI for June showed a larger than expected decline.

In Europe, most indices are seeing fractional gains. The STOXX 600 is barely higher, but Spain is more than 1% higher after President Trump softened his tone on the country in a gaggle with reporters on Air Force One last night.

In the US today, there’s not a lot of earnings news to speak of yet, although Pepsi (PEP) is lower even though the company reported better than expected EPS on inline revenues. The only reports on the economic calendar today, and the remainder of the week for that matter, are jobless claims at 8:30 and then Existing Home Sales at 10 AM.

How you feel about the market after the first few days of Q3 says a lot about how you did in the first half. If you’re starting to feel a renewed sense of optimism, you probably had a rough first half, whereas any doubts or nervousness likely means you had a great first half.

Let’s start with sector performance. The table below, a snapshot from our Trend Analyzer, shows the performance of each sector ETF on a YTD basis and over the last five trading days (the first five trading days of Q3). Three of the four worst performing sectors so far in Q3 are among the top four performing sectors YTD. The only exception is Consumer Discretionary which is the third worst performing sector QTD and the second worst performing sector YTD. At the other end of the performance spectrum for Q3, most of the top performing sectors have been laggards on a YTD basis. The only exception here is Energy. Not only is it the best performing sector on a QTD basis, but it’s also the best performer on a YTD basis.

The scatter chart below provides a visual representation of this trend. With the x-axis showing YTD performance and the y-axis showing performance QTD, there is a clear trend from the top left to the bottom right. Again, the outlier here is Energy in the top right.

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