Jan 31, 2025
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.
“The most important lesson an investor can learn is to be dispassionate when confronted by unexpected and unfavorable outcomes.” – Peter Bernstein
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
The S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is currently trading up roughly 0.4% pre-market, while the Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQ) is up 0.8%. Apple (AAPL) is driving futures higher with a 4% pre-market gain after reporting mostly weaker-than-expected earnings yesterday after the close.
As shown below, all of the key US index ETFs across markets caps are currently in “neutral” territory.
Below is a look at how the biggest decliners during Monday’s sell-off have done since. There were 25 stocks in the S&P 1500 that fell more than 15% on Monday, and those names have averaged a bounce-back gain of 8.06% since Monday’s close. However, they’re still down an average of 13% on the week, so they have some work to do to recover Monday’s losses.
Jan 30, 2025
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.
“I think in terms of next year, our constraints, I think it’s likely to be just regulatory.” – Elon Musk
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
When you see a quote like the one above from Tesla’s conference call last night, it’s understandable why Elon Musk took such an active role in last year’s Presidential election. The chart below is from our annual outlook published in December and shows the annual number of pages in the Published Code of Federal Regulations since 1950. While death and taxes are the only certainties in life, the growth of government is right up there. For nearly every year since 1950, the number of pages in the published code has increased, and for the most recent year available (2023), it hit a record high of over 190,000. As we highlighted in our outlook back in December, the potential for a halt or slowdown to what has essentially been uninterrupted growth in government over the last several decades is certainly a pro.
Jan 29, 2025
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“Discrepancies – and hence opportunities – in securities originate most often when events move faster than quotations.” – Benjamin Graham
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Markets bounced back on Tuesday from Monday’s DeepSeek drop, and the S&P is entering Wednesday trading down just 58 bps on the week. Investors sold first and asked questions later on Monday, but once they did start asking questions, it seems as if cooler heads might be starting to prevail.
While AI Infrastructure stocks have fallen this week, the DeepSeek news has caused investors to contemplate an overall lower cost to compute on the AI front, which should benefit margins for companies in the AI Implementation space and also increase overall demand from consumers in the long run.
As shown below, NVDA’s drop in market cap this week has mostly been offset by gains in market cap for the other major mega-cap Tech and Tech-adjacent stocks. Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) have seen a combined increase in market cap of $299 billion so far this week, while NVDA has seen a drop of $334 billion. On a net basis, the market cap for all six of these behemoths has only fallen $34.8 billion on the week.
Below is a quick snapshot of the six mega-caps mentioned above run through our Trend Analyzer tool. While NVIDIA (NVDA) is down 8.4% over the last week and in oversold territory, Meta (META) and Apple (AAPL) are both up more than 7%.
Jan 28, 2025
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“Profitability is coming from productivity, efficiency, management, austerity, and the way to manage the business.” – Carlos Slim
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 though the S&P 500 was down 1.4% yesterday, there were 351 advancers and just 152 decliners within the index. As shown below, Technology, Utilities, and Industrials pretty much saw all of the pain, while Consumer Staples and Health Care were actually up more than 2%. All of the weakness yesterday came from declines in the companies that deal with producing and powering AI.
NVIDIA (NVDA) ended last week as the largest company in the world with a market cap of roughly $3.5 trillion. It ended Monday with a market cap of $2.9 trillion and now ranks as the third largest company behind Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT). Since last Thursday’s close, NVIDIA (NVDA) has lost $705 billion in market cap!
Jan 27, 2025
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.
“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” – Mozart
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
The S&P 500 finished last week with its second straight weekly gain, and it was the first week of back-to-back 1.5%+ advances since mid-May as the S&P 500 managed to close at an all-time high last Thursday. Since the S&P 500 ETF’s (SPY) closing low on 1/10, the large-cap benchmark is up 4.73% while the Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQ) has rallied by a similar amount (4.42%). Moving down the market cap spectrum, mid-caps (MDY) have rallied 5.64% while small caps (IWM) are up 5.47%. The leader has been micro-caps, though, as the Russell 2000 micro-cap ETF is up 5.75%.
Much of those gains from the last two weeks have been erased over the weekend as both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 are indicated to open sharply lower on concerns over DeepSeek upending the entire investment landscape for AI. News of DeepSeek first dropped around Christmas and started to pick up steam early last week as articles reported that the model has achieved comparable progress in AI to the most advanced US models for fractions of the cost. Articles published over the weekend have hit a nerve, resulting in a massive sell-off in mega cap US stocks.
If the reports of DeepSeek’s success at such low costs are true, and this is a big if as there is still a lot we don’t know in terms of how it was developed, it would pose problems for some of the biggest AI winners over the last two years. As we type this, the S&P 500 (proxied by SPY) is trading down about 2.25% which would be the largest downside gap since early August and the 60th largest downside gap in the ETF’s history dating back to 1993.
For the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ), the declines are even steeper. With the ETF poised to gap down 3.8% at the open, it would be QQQ’s largest downside gap since early August and the 20th largest downside gap since its inception in 1999. As shown in the chart below, before last August’s downside gap, the last time QQQ gapped down as much as it on pace to today was back in September 2020.
Among the mega cap stocks, this morning’s declines aren’t uniform. The chart below shows where each trillion-dollar market cap stock is trading this morning relative to Friday’s close. Leading the way to the downside, Broadcom (AVGO) and Nvidia (NVDA) are both down by double-digit percentages. These have been the biggest AI winners, so it’s no surprise that investors are selling them the fastest. Microsoft (MSFT) has also declined more than 5% given its close relationship with OpenAI. One name that has barely been impacted by the overnight sell-off is Apple (AAPL); in pre-market trading, it’s down less than 1%. Ironically, all anyone could talk about last week concerning AAPL was how it’s overvalued and missed the boat on AI. Today, that lack of investment in AI is being looked at as a plus!
Jan 24, 2025
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.
“One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth—or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world.” – Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Here in the US this morning, US futures are biased to the downside as markets digest what is expected to be the second week in a row of gains. Earnings season has continued on a bullish note with positive earnings from the banks and financials last week and then strong reports from Netflix (NFLX), 3M (MMM), Charles Schwab (SCHW), and P&G (PG) this week. Next week will be an even bigger test as the pace of reports will only increase and megacaps like Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), and Amazon.com (AMZN) will all report.
If you’re still reading this, congratulations because that means you survived the ‘December crash’. The S&P 500 declined 4.3% from its December high to early January, which was admittedly accompanied by the weakest short-term period of market breadth since at least 1990. The rally that kicked off Monday has now fully erased the declines, and the bull market has gone on to live another day (or week, month, year, etc.). For many investors, the pullback felt especially painful even if it was modest in magnitude. As shown in the chart below, since the bull market began in October 2022, there were five other periods when the S&P 500 experienced a decline that was both larger in magnitude and longer in duration.
