Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 8/26/25 – Drama at the Federal Reserve
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.
“If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven’t been born yet.” – Neil Simon
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 last week’s rally to close out the week felt like a Friday, this morning’s futures feel a bit like a Monday as futures are modestly lower in what feels like a sluggish market. The big headline this morning is probably a story from Friday where the President threatened tariffs on furniture makers who import goods from overseas. Stocks like Wayfair and RG are trading sharply lower in response,
The only economic reports on the calendar are New Home Sales at 10 AM and the Dallas Fed report at 10:30. Earnings season is mostly over, except for the elephant in the room – Nvidia (NVDA)- which reports Wednesday after the close.
Friday’s gain wasn’t the first 1%+ rally this summer, but it was the largest gain for the S&P 500 since the day after Memorial Day. Even with that gain, the S&P 500 only managed to squeak out a gain of 0.3% for the week, owing to the five-day losing streak that the market was riding heading into Friday. Last week, we showed the chart of the S&P 500’s performance during the week of the Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium, and below we have updated it to include last week’s 0.3% gain. While it was a weaker-than-normal Jackson Hole week, last week was the third straight year of positive returns and the fifth in the last six.
While most investors were checked out for the weekend, crypto markets had some major moves. Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, gave up all of Friday’s gains and fell to its lowest level since early July. The catalyst for the decline was a massive sale of 24,000 coins worth over $167 billion from a Bitcoin whale on Saturday. As shown in the chart below, for now, Bitcoin remains above support at the $109,000 level, but a break of that support within just two weeks of hitting a record high wouldn’t be a positive technical signal.
While Bitcoin investors may have been wishing that it didn’t trade on weekends after Saturday’s decline, Ethereum continues to gain attention and share in the crypto space. Around the time that Bitcoin was hitting record highs a couple of weeks ago, Ethereum was pulling back and testing support from its highs last fall. That support held, and over the weekend, Bitcoin broke out to new 52-week and record highs.
Looking at Ethereum from a 5-year time frame, its parabolic run over the last several weeks rocketed right through prior resistance in the low 4,000 range, right up to the highs from late 2021 and just under 5,000.
If Alphabet “Missed the AI Boat”, What Does That Mean for Microsoft?
Since the launch of ChatGPT, the consensus has been that Microsoft (MSFT) has been one of the AI winners while Alphabet (GOOGL) missed the boat. Some of the criticism towards GOOGL was earned as the company was late in launching a consumer AI product/tool, and then had a clumsy launch once it did. What many investors overlooked, though, was the fact that GOOGL branded itself an ‘AI first’ company way back in April 2016. Now, just because a company calls itself AI-first doesn’t mean it is. After all, anyone can say they’re an NFL-caliber quarterback, but only three dozen or so people are at any one time. In GOOGL’s case, though, missing the boat was hardly an accurate description of the situation.
Even now, nearly three years after the launch of ChatGPT, most investors view MSFT as the winner relative to GOOGL, if for no other reason than its investments in OpenAI that have given it a 49% share of the company’s future profits. Given the overall sentiment, how much do you think MSFT has outperformed GOOGL by since the launch of ChatGPT? The answer is that it hasn’t. As shown in the chart below, while MSFT has nearly doubled (+97.9%), GOOGL is now up nearly ten percentage points more with a gain of 107.6% and has just eclipsed MSFT in the back-and-forth race for outperformance.
The chart below shows the performance spread between the two stocks since ChatGPT’s launch. For the most part, GOOGL has been moderately underperforming MSFT, but it hasn’t been consistent. Overall, the average margin of underperformance has been less than 3 percentage points, so it has hardly been a runaway train in favor of MSFT. Even more, the widest the performance spread has grown between the two stocks at any point since ChatGPT’s launch was 43 percentage points in GOOGL’s favor. For MSFT, there hasn’t been a point since ChatGPT’s launch where it outperformed GOOGL by more than 31 percentage points. If GOOGL missed it, what exactly was the boat it missed?
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 8/25/25 – While You Were Out
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.
“Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t you think?” – The Wizard of Oz
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 last week’s rally to close out the week felt like a Friday, this morning’s futures feel a bit like a Monday as futures are modestly lower in what feels like a sluggish market. The big headline this morning is probably a story from Friday where the President threatened tariffs on furniture makers who import goods from overseas. Stocks like Wayfair and RG are trading sharply lower in response,
The only economic reports on the calendar are New Home Sales at 10 AM and the Dallas Fed report at 10:30. Earnings season is mostly over, except for the elephant in the room – Nvidia (NVDA)- which reports Wednesday after the close.
Friday’s gain wasn’t the first 1%+ rally this summer, but it was the largest gain for the S&P 500 since the day after Memorial Day. Even with that gain, the S&P 500 only managed to squeak out a gain of 0.3% for the week, owing to the five-day losing streak that the market was riding heading into Friday. Last week, we showed the chart of the S&P 500’s performance during the week of the Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium, and below we have updated it to include last week’s 0.3% gain. While it was a weaker-than-normal Jackson Hole week, last week was the third straight year of positive returns and the fifth in the last six.
While most investors were checked out for the weekend, crypto markets had some major moves. Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, gave up all of Friday’s gains and fell to its lowest level since early July. The catalyst for the decline was a massive sale of 24,000 coins worth over $167 billion from a Bitcoin whale on Saturday. As shown in the chart below, for now, Bitcoin remains above support at the $109,000 level, but a break of that support within just two weeks of hitting a record high wouldn’t be a positive technical signal.
While Bitcoin investors may have been wishing that it didn’t trade on weekends after Saturday’s decline, Ethereum continues to gain attention and share in the crypto space. Around the time that Bitcoin was hitting record highs a couple of weeks ago, Ethereum was pulling back and testing support from its highs last fall. That support held, and over the weekend, Bitcoin broke out to new 52-week and record highs.
Looking at Ethereum from a 5-year time frame, its parabolic run over the last several weeks rocketed right through prior resistance in the low 4,000 range, right up to the highs from late 2021 and just under 5,000.
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 8/22/25 – Same Day of the Week, Different Sentiment
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.
“There is winning and there is misery.” – Bill Parcells
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Futures are modestly higher heading into the last session of the week as the S&P 500 looks to end a five-day losing streak. There’s no economic data on the calendar, so whether we can end this streak will likely depend entirely on Powell’s 10 AM Jackson Hole speech.
In Europe, stocks are modestly higher on little in the way of news besides German GDP for Q2 being revised down more than expected to a decline of 0.3% versus forecasts for a decline of 0.1%.
In Asia, equities finished off a mixed week with a mixed session. Japan’s Nikkei finished slightly higher but down over 1% for the week. Chinese stocks were up over 1%, taking the weekly gain to more than 3%, while India traded down 0.9% on Friday but still managed to finish the week up nearly 1%. The main story out of the region was in China where Nvidia (NVDA) has reportedly stopped sales of its H20 chip to Chinese customers after that country’s government told local tech companies not to buy the chips citing security concerns. In response to the news, Chinese semiconductor names traded sharply higher.
It’s only been a week, but the general market tone heading into this Friday’s session is different than last Friday. For starters, we’re not sure where you are, but in the New York area, last Friday’s morning temperature was around 80 degrees, but this morning, we’re looking at a fall-like temperature of 58 degrees as we type this. In the equity market, last Friday, the S&P 500 was coming off its 3rd record closing high in a row and its 13th record high of the quarter. A rate cut at the next Fed meeting in September was pretty much a done deal.
Today, things look a lot less certain, the market is now pricing in just a 70% chance of a cut at the September meeting, and ahead of his Jackson Hole speech at 10 AM this morning, he probably won’t rule it out, but it doesn’t feel like Powell will make a forceful case to cut rates. With all the increased uncertainty, we’ve gone from a market closing at record highs to a 5-day losing streak that is tied for the longest since April 2024.
The last time the S&P 500 closed at a record high and then fell for five straight days was in January 2022 right at the start of the last bear market. There was also an occurrence right around the pre-Covid peak, and another near the dot-com peak in 2000. Any time you can make a connection between the current market and those three periods, it’s an ominous signal. Don’t they say that tops are a process? These all sound like pretty quick reversals!
Looking at ALL the occurrences where the S&P 500 hit a new high and then immediately went into a five-day losing streak, though, shows that there were plenty of occurrences within much longer-term bull markets.
