Chart of the Day: New Highs for Israel ETF (EIS)
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 6/16/25
See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium. CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.
“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
US equity futures are bouncing back pre-market to start the new trading week after a 1%+ drop last Friday. As shown below, the S&P has stabilized with less volatility over the last few weeks, giving it a chance to re-charge for an eventual breakout to new highs. The index needs to gain about 2.9% from its current level to make a new all-time high.
Brunch Reads – 6/13/25
Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of some of our favorite articles over the past week. The links are mostly market-related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.
King John Caves: On June 15, 1215, King John of England put his seal on the Magna Carta at Runnymede, a field west of London, after months of pressure from a group of rebellious barons. His rule had become deeply unpopular due to high taxes, failed military campaigns in France, and arbitrary justice. The barons had taken up arms and even captured London, forcing John to negotiate.
The Magna Carta was essentially a peace agreement. It laid out a set of demands from the barons that aimed to limit the king’s power, especially in taxation and legal matters. It required the king to follow certain rules, like obtaining consent for new taxes and guaranteeing that free men had a right to a fair trial.
Though the document was meant to prevent civil war, it didn’t succeed immediately. John asked the Pope to annul it just weeks later, and fighting broke out again. Still, the Magna Carta symbolized the idea that rulers are not above the law. Over time, parts of it were reissued and expanded, influencing future legal systems, including the US Constitution and the development of modern democracies.
AI & Technology
The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity (Apple)
Even though new models are getting better at showing their work, this study finds that their “reasoning” starts to fall apart once puzzles hit a certain level of difficulty. The authors built a controlled testing environment to isolate and study how these models think, not just whether they get the right answer, and what they found is that the extra thinking steps often don’t help past a point. Strikingly, models actually put in less effort on harder problems, suggesting that today’s reasoning models might still be more surface-level than they seem. It is interesting to note that this study comes from Apple, who has generally been perceived to be behind the AI race. [Link]
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The Bespoke Report – 6/13/25 – There’s Always Something
To read our weekly Bespoke Report newsletter and access everything else Bespoke’s research platform offers, start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium. In this week’s report, we cover everything happening across financial markets after another wild week.
Q2 2025 Earnings Conference Call Recaps: Adobe (ADBE)
Bespoke’s Conference Call Recaps use AI to summarize lengthy earnings calls. The commentary below is AI-generated and then edited by Bespoke for quality control. As always, none of these summaries should be construed as recommendations to buy or sell any securities, and investors should do their own research and/or consult with a financial professional before making any investment decisions.
Our latest recap available to Bespoke subscribers covers Adobe’s (ADBE) Q2 2025 earnings call.
Adobe (ADBE) is a global software leader best known for its creative and digital experience tools, including Photoshop, Acrobat, and Adobe Experience Cloud. It empowers a wide spectrum of users, from students and freelancers to enterprises, to create, manage, and optimize digital content. The company is at the forefront of AI-driven creativity through its proprietary Firefly models, which generate commercially safe content across images, video, and design. Adobe serves business professionals, consumers, marketers, and creatives, and offers a unique window into how digital content creation and personalization are evolving at scale. Adobe delivered record revenue of $5.87B (up 11% YoY), driven by strong AI adoption and innovation. Firefly content generations topped 24B, with paid Firefly subscriptions nearly doubling QoQ. Monthly active users across Acrobat and Express surpassed 700M, reflecting the convergence of productivity and creativity. Enterprise demand for GenStudio and AEP surged, with AEP subscription revenue growing over 40% YoY. Adobe’s focus on ethical, IP-safe AI continues to differentiate it, particularly amid rising scrutiny of generative content models. Despite better-than-expected results, shares of ADBE tumbled as much as almost 7% on 6/13, the company’s fourth straight decline after posting EPS and revenue beats…
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Q1 2025 Earnings Conference Call Recaps: RH (RH)
Bespoke’s Conference Call Recaps use AI to summarize lengthy earnings calls. The commentary below is AI-generated and then edited by Bespoke for quality control. As always, none of these summaries should be construed as recommendations to buy or sell any securities, and investors should do their own research and/or consult with a financial professional before making any investment decisions.
Our latest recap available to Bespoke subscribers covers RH’s (RH) Q1 2025 earnings call.
RH (RH), formerly Restoration Hardware, is a luxury lifestyle brand that designs and sells premium home furnishings, lighting, textiles, and décor, complemented by a growing global hospitality business that includes restaurants and guesthouses. It serves affluent consumers and design professionals through immersive physical galleries, sourcebooks, and a membership model that offers exclusive pricing. Despite operating in what CEO Gary Friedman called the “worst housing market in nearly 50 years,” RH grew revenue 12% but that still missed the estimate. Tariff uncertainty disrupted Q2 shipments, prompting RH to delay a major new concept launch to Spring 2026. The company permanently raised its membership discount to 30% and briefly offered 35% off outdoor to seize share during peak season. RH continues investing heavily in global expansion, with Paris, London, and Milan openings planned and international demand up 60%. On mixed results, RH shares were up as much as 20%. Not bad for Friday the 13th…
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Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 6/13/25 – So Much for a Summer Friday
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“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” – WB Yeats
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
If you were planning on a slow summer Friday, renewed tensions in the Middle East have damaged those plans this morning. Equity futures are off their overnight lows, but the S&P 500 is still indicated to open down by about 1%. The real action is obviously in the energy markets as crude oil trades sharply higher.
The US Oil Fund ETF (USO) is trading up over 7.5% in the pre-market, which would put it on pace for the sixth-largest opening gap to the upside since the ETF’s inception in 2006. It would also be just the 24th time that USO gapped up over 5%. In terms of the prior 7.5% gaps higher, USO continued higher from the open to close for a median gain of 2.1% and positive returns four out of five times. However, by the close of the following day, USO was down a median of 1.6% from the initial gap higher with declines three out of five times, and a week after that opening gap, it was down four out of five times for a median decline of 2.2%. Historically, at least, these sharp gaps higher haven’t had a lot of follow-through.
As far as the price of oil is concerned, this morning’s gap higher has helped to confirm what was already a break of the downtrend that had been in place since mid-January. It also cleared what could have been a formidable level of resistance in the $75 range.
As luck would have it, today is also Friday the 13th, and while the day has unlucky connotations, in terms of market performance, it has been anything but. Since its launch in 1993, the S&P 500 ETF’s (SPY) average daily change has been a gain of 3.9 bps, with gains 53.6% of the time. Fridays, however, haven’t been as positive as SPY’s average performance is unchanged, with gains 52.1% of the time. On the 53 prior Friday the 13ths, though, SPY’s median gain was 20 bps with gains 60% of the time, and on the four prior times that there has been a Friday the 13th in June, SPY’s median gain was 57 bps with gains three out of four times. Will investors buy the dip again and keep the positive June Friday the 13th vibes going?
The Closer – MPC, Immigration, Freight – 6/12/25
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Looking for deeper insight into markets? In tonight’s Closer sent to Bespoke Institutional clients, first up is commentary regarding the latest CBO analysis of the tax and spending bill (page 1) followed by a discussion on claims data and impacts of deportations on labor supply (page 2). We move on to discuss the latest freight data released by Cass Information Systems (page 3) and the latest performance of the Dow Transports (page 4). Over the remaining pages, we given an update on the Federal Reserves’ quarterly update of sectoral balance sheets (pages 5 and 6).
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Sentiment Around New Highs
In Tuesday’s Closer, we provided an update on monthly sentiment gauges, noting broad improvements since the April low. Of those inputs that have perked up is the weekly AAII survey. This week’s release saw the percentage of respondents reporting as bullish rise once again, to a two-week high of 36.7%.
The other side of the equation—the percentage of respondents reporting as bearish—had a more notable move this week. Only 33.6% of respondents were bears, which was the lowest reading since the week of January 23.
Put together, the bull-bear spread came in at 3.1, or alternatively, bulls outnumber bears by 3.1 percentage points. There was another positive reading in the spread a couple weeks ago, but this is the highest spread since the last week of January when it was at 7. In all, this indicates that investors have begun to shift more bullish rather than the consistent bearish tones from the past few months.
Also worth noting is that investors’ sentiment has made this improvement in tandem with a push in stock prices back near record highs. As the S&P 500 is about 1.5% below its February 19 peak, the current level of sentiment is actually lower than what might be expected. Historically, AAII sentiment (measured by the bull-bear spread) has averaged more bullish readings when the S&P is closer to a record, and readings become more bearish as it falls further from the highs (save for extreme drawdowns where sentiment actually begins to pivot to be more bullish). For the present distance from a high, the bull-bear spread has historically averaged in the high single digits compared to 3.1 today. In other words, sentiment does not appear to have gotten over its skis as the index attempts to break out.
