Aug 13, 2025
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“Ideas come from everything” – Alfred Hitchcock
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Following yesterday’s CPI, traders are looking to extend the rally this morning, as futures indicate a gain of approximately 0.25% at the open. This morning, in an interview on Bloomberg TV, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressed a view that the Fed should cut rates by 50 bps in September. Additionally, for anyone concerned that the Administration might end the monthly release of Non-Farm Payrolls, Bessent stated that he would not support such a move.
There’s no economic data on the calendar, but we will hear from multiple Fed Presidents throughout the day. Overnight, Asian stocks rallied, led by the Hang Seng, which surged 2.6% while the Nikkei added another 1.3% on top of Tuesday’s gains. The gains came even as a 5-year JGB auction was met with little demand. The gains in Asia flowed into Europe this morning as well, as the STOXX 600 is up 0.4% as inflation data in Germany and Spain was in line with expectations.
Known by most as either the ‘other crypto’ besides Bitcoin or the Bitcoin bridesmaid, Ethereum looks to be walking down the aisle on its own lately as the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency has surged from under $1,500 in April to $4,700 this morning. Over the last week, Ethereum’s price has broken out above the highs from Q4 of last year to new 52-week highs.
From a longer-term perspective, Ethereum is now not far from its all-time high of just under $4,900, and this morning, Standard Chartered raised its year-end price target to $7,500 and sees it trading as high as $25,000 by the end of 2028. That’s the beauty of dramatic price targets; they generate headlines when they’re made, but no one ever looks back to see if they actually panned out (hint: they seldom do).
This latest surge in Ethereum has been extreme to say the least, with the 50-day rate of change rising to 96%. A move of that magnitude hasn’t been seen since September 2021.
Along with the surge in price, volume in Ethereum has also surged. The chart below shows the daily volume in the iShares Ethereum ETF (ETHA) over the last year. From the start of 2025 through the end of Q2, average daily volume in ETHA was 12.3 million shares. Since the start of July, though, average daily volume has been more than 3.5 times that at just under 44 million shares per day.
So, what’s behind the surge in Ethereum prices and volume over the last 6 or 7 weeks? As shown in the chart below, the move into overdrive coincided with the announcement at the end of June that BitMine Immersion (BMNR) would become an Ethereum treasury company, sending that stock from under $5 to as high as $161. While it pulled back quickly, at yesterday’s closing price of $62.44, the stock is still up 1,364% since June 27th!
Aug 12, 2025
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“Reading the record, it is striking how many calamities that I anticipated did not in fact materialise.” – George Soros
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
After a quiet day yesterday, futures aren’t doing much this morning either as investors await the release of July CPI. European markets started the day higher but have been selling off throughout the day (sound familiar?), and Asia had a mixed session, although Japan rallied more than 2% after being closed for trading on Monday. While Japanese stocks traded higher, there was literally no trading in Japan’s 10-year JGBs. That was the first time that had happened since March 2023.
July CPI came in right in line with expectations as the headline reading increased 0.2% and core rose 0.3%. On a y/y basis, headline CPI was a tenth weaker than expected at 2.7% while the core reading was a tenth higher than expected (3.1%). The initial reaction to the move was slightly lower yields and higher stock prices.
It’s hard to read too much into market activity on a quiet day in August, but the trend of intraday weakness continued to start the week as the S&P 500, as measured by SPY, closed lower than it opened for the tenth time in the last fifteen trading days. When the bell finally rang, the S&P 500 finished down 0.25%, the Dow was down 0.45%, while the Nasdaq fell 0.30%. Besides those major large-cap indices, mid-caps slumped 0.42% while small caps held up relatively well with a decline of 0.09%. The only small ray of sunshine yesterday was in the Russell Microcap Index, which finished the day 0.17% higher. When we say small, we mean it, though. The combined market cap of the companies in the index is just $426 billion, which is smaller than Netflix (NFLX), and the average market cap of companies in the index is under $400 million, with an M!
Looking at the performance of micro-caps, as measured by the iShares Microcap ETF (IWC), after testing the Q4 highs in late July, they pulled back to the 50-day moving average, where they bounced to kick off August. It’s still early, but if the bounce holds, the index could be rounding out the right side of a cup and handle formation.
Aug 11, 2025
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“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.” – Andrew Carnegie
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Below are six-month price charts of the mega-caps. A few months ago, pretty much all of these charts were in downtrends, but now that Apple (AAPL) has recovered and broken above resistance, all six look to be trending higher.
Aug 8, 2025
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“But the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations.” – Richard Nixon
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
On this day, 51 years ago, President Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign from office. While there are plenty of others that Americans likely wish had also resigned from office since then, Nixon remains the only President to leave office before his term ended, despite saying in his resignation speech that “I have never been a quitter.” As crazy as the political, social, economic, and geopolitical climate feels today, it has nothing on the backdrop from 51 years ago. If you weren’t around then, just ask someone who was.
There’s no shortage of uncertainty or unease in the backdrop today, but equities are within percentage points of record highs, and interest rates are relatively low versus history. This morning specifically, futures are firmly in positive territory on generally positive earnings news overnight. There’s no economic data on the calendar today, and all the earnings for the week are behind us, so unless the President fires up the Truth Social app, we can expect a relatively quiet summer Friday.
In yesterday’s trading, there were many quitters. Stocks opened the day higher and gave up their gains throughout the trading day. On an average basis, stocks in the Russell 1000 declined 0.88% from the open to close. Of the index’s components, 706 closed lower than they opened, and their average decline from the open to closing bell was 1.84%. On the upside, only 306 stocks (there are more than 1,000 stocks in the index) closed higher than they opened, and their average gain was just 1.32%.
One stock that didn’t quit yesterday was Apple (AAPL). It gapped up around 2% and then added on another 1% from the open to close to finish just below its 200-day moving average (DMA), a level it hasn’t traded above since early March. While the stock didn’t quit Thursday, downward-sloping moving averages have a way of acting as resistance, so whether AAPL can close above its 200-DMA to close out the week will say a lot about how strong this latest two-day rally is. Will today be the day that Cook & Co can say to the bears that they won’t have Apple to kick around anymore?
Besides rallying over 8% in the last two days, AAPL also outperformed the S&P 500 by just under 8% since Tuesday’s close, which ranks as one of the strongest two-day rallies relative to the S&P 500 in the last five years. The only two that were stronger were an 11.8 ppt performance spread in early August 2020 after the company reported earnings, and then a 9.3 ppt margin of outperformance after the company’s WWDC conference last summer. Besides those two periods, the only other two-day period of outperformance that was close to the last two days was a 7.5 ppt performance spread following its January report.
Aug 7, 2025
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“If you absolutely can’t tolerate critics, then don’t do anything new or interesting.” – Jeff Bezos
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Stock futures have been rallying all night following the President’s announcement with Apple CEO Tim Cook that the company will invest up to $600 billion in the US over the next four years. Trump also announced 100% tariffs on all imports of semiconductors, but qualified that with the caveat that any companies investing in the US would be exempt from the tariff. We don’t know how this will be tracked or what constitutes significant enough investing, but the initial reaction of markets has been positive.
AAPL shares have also been screaming higher. Yesterday’s 5% gain was the biggest margin of outperformance relative to the S&P 500 since last year’s WWDC conference, and this morning, shares are up another 3%. One semiconductor stock not feeling the love this morning is Intel (INTC). Shares are down over 3% after the President called for the CEO’s resignation, saying in a Truth Social post that he is ‘conflicted’. We can’t remember the last time a U.S. president publicly called for the resignation of a CEO, but then again, there have been a lot of firsts under President Trump.
On the economic calendar this morning, the main reports are jobless claims at 8:30, but we’ll also get Non-Farm Productivity and Unit Labor Costs at the same time.
Yesterday was another one of those days when the S&P 500 moved one way, and breadth moved in the opposite direction. As the S&P 500 rallied more than 0.7%, there were 23 more stocks in the index that finished down on the day than up. As the S&P 500 has become increasingly top-heavy in recent years, the daily moves in the index have been increasingly less representative of the performance of the ‘average’ stock.
The chart below shows the rolling 100-day number of days when the S&P 500’s daily price change moved in the opposite direction as breadth. Beginning in the years right before Covid, this reading has been volatile, but the general trend has been higher. While the current level of 19 is well off the record high of 28 from last fall, right before the election, it is still nearly double the historical average of 10.
For most, the current elevated reading brings up memories of the dot-com boom (and subsequent bust), but it doesn’t have to end that way. Back in 2000, the largest stocks in the S&P 500 were incredibly overvalued, so when the bubble popped, they deflated quickly and pulled the index down with them. Today, the ten largest stocks in the index aren’t cheap, but their valuations are less out of step with the rest of the market than they were back in 2000. According to a report from SocGen, the top ten stocks in the S&P 500 account for 40% of the index’s market cap and a third of the profits. That’s an imbalance, but not an incredibly wide one.
While the Dow Jones Industrial Average is hardly the most widely followed benchmark of US stock market performance, we found it interesting that the index’s 3.9% YTD gain is hardly representative of the YTD performance of the index’s 30 components. As shown in the chart below, just ten stocks in the index have YTD returns that are within five percentage points of the index’s change, and more than half (16) have YTD performances that are at least ten percentage points higher or lower than the index.
Aug 6, 2025
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“If everyone isn’t beautiful, then no one is.” – Andy Warhol
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 this morning following a slew of earnings reports that have been positive, on balance. There’s no economic data on the calendar, and the only non-earnings event is a just-scheduled 4:30 PM announcement from the President in the Oval Office. The topic of the announcement is unknown, so as usual, the President will keep everyone in suspense.
Overnight in Asia, markets were mostly higher, and in Europe, equities opened the session higher, but have erased those gains intraday, with Health Care leading the way lower.
Unlike Warhol’s comment above, one could argue that when everyone looks great, no one does, and the current earnings season provides an example of that logic. The chart below shows the overall earnings and revenue beat rates of companies that reported in July versus the historical average. Whether you look at EPS or revenues, beat rates are well above their averages over the last ten years, and the frequency of Triple Plays is also above the historical average, but to a lesser degree.
Conversely, companies are also reporting weaker-than-expected results at a much slower pace. The rate of EPS misses is nearly 10 percentage points below the historical average, while the revenue miss rate is over ten percentage points less. With fewer EPS and sales misses, the pace of reverse triple plays is also just half the pace of the average from the last ten years.
