Bespoke’s Consumer Pulse Report — July 2025
Bespoke’s Consumer Pulse Report is an analysis of a huge consumer survey that we run each month. Our goal with this survey is to track trends across the economic and financial landscape in the US. Using the results from our proprietary monthly survey, we dissect and analyze all of the data and publish the Consumer Pulse Report, which we sell access to on a subscription basis. Sign up for a 30-day free trial to our Bespoke Consumer Pulse subscription service. With a trial, you’ll get coverage of consumer electronics, social media, streaming media, retail, autos, and much more. The report also has numerous proprietary US economic data points that are extremely timely and useful for investors.
We’ve just released our most recent monthly report to Pulse subscribers, and it’s definitely worth the read if you’re curious about the health of the consumer in the current market environment. Start a 30-day free trial for a full breakdown of all of our proprietary Pulse economic indicators.
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 7/2/25 – The Have-Nots Get Their Chance
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.
“Never do things others can do and will do, if there are things others cannot do or will not do.” – Amelia Earhart
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
To view yesterday’s CNBC interview from Closing Bell Overtime, click the image below.
US futures are little changed this morning as the S&P 500 looks to erase Tuesday’s modest losses. The major issue of the day will continue to be the Big Beautiful Bill and whether the House can pass the Senate’s version. A vote on that will be held either today or tomorrow, depending on when members can return to DC for the vote. Even when representatives return, passing the bill will be no easy task, as the slim Republican majority means Speaker Johnson can only afford a few no votes from his caucus. Betting against Johnson, however, hasn’t been a profitable strategy so far this year.
Overnight in Asia, equities were mixed with Japan falling just over 0.5% while Hong Kong rallied by a similar magnitude. The weakness in Japan stemmed from comments by President Trump, who expressed doubt that a deal with Japan would be reached by July 9th, in which case he could increase tariffs on the country to 35%.
The tone in Europe has been much more positive, with the STOXX 600 trading up about 0.5%. Unemployment in Europe ticked up to 6.3% which was higher than the 6.2% forecast, while Italy saw its jobless rate surge from 6.1% to 6.5%. That weakness should help to keep the ECB biased towards more easing.
In the US this morning, employment is also at the fore following this morning’s release of the ADP Employment report, which showed a 35K decline in payrolls in June, which was the first decline in over two years and well below the consensus forecast for growth of 95K. The ADP report has been consistently weaker than government data in recent months, and we’ll get the June Non-Farm Payrolls report tomorrow morning, but for now, this weakness lends to concerns over economic growth against a backdrop of uncertainty related to trade. With this report, you can practically hear President Trump’s fingers tapping out the next Truth Social post to Fed Chair Powell.
As we highlighted in the Chart of the Day, yesterday’s trading was all about rotation, where the best-performing areas of the market in Q2 lagged while the Q2 laggards outperformed. Another example of the rotation was in sector performance. The scatter chart below compares the performance of S&P 500 sectors during Q1 (x-axis) versus on 7/1 (y-axis). Here, you can see the rotation from the Q2 haves to the Q2 have-nots. The five worst-performing sectors of Q2 were the five best performers yesterday. Technology and Communication Services, easily the best-performing sectors of Q2, were the only two sectors to trade lower yesterday. As Andy Warhol once said, everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, and yesterday it was the Q2 laggards’ chance to grab the spotlight.
The Closer – Senate Passage, Jobs, Logistics – 7/1/25
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Looking for deeper insight into markets? In tonight’s Closer sent to Bespoke Institutional clients, we lead off with a review of the Senate passing of the spending bill and the latest news on tariffs (page 1). Next, we review the day’s PMI data (page 2) before getting into job openings readings from the JOLTS report (page 3) and Indeed.com (pages 4 and 5). We finish with the June update of the Logistics Managers’ Index (pages 6 and 7).
See today’s full post-market Closer and everything else Bespoke publishes by starting a 14-day trial to Bespoke Institutional today!
Bespoke Market Calendar — July 2025
Please click the image below to view our July 2025 market calendar. This calendar includes the S&P 500’s historical average percentage change and average intraday chart pattern for each trading day during the upcoming month. It also includes market holidays and options expiration dates plus the dates of key economic indicator releases. Click here to view Bespoke’s premium membership options.
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 7/1/25 – The Spat Resumes
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.
“Every story needs an element of suspense – or it’s lousy.” – Sydney Pollack
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
It’s a new month, a new quarter, and a new half this morning, and while investors would certainly be happy with a repeat in terms of the returns during the half, they would prefer to do without the volatility. This morning, futures are drifting moderately lower after two straight days of record closing highs. The quarter is also getting off to an active start with the June ISM Manufacturing report at 10:00 AM, along with the May reports on Construction Spending and JOLTS.
While these reports will likely impact the market upon their release, so far this morning, there aren’t many headlines driving the market in either direction. While futures are lower, the magnitude of the losses has been pretty modest so far. In Washington, the Senate is still trying to pass the GOP Reconciliation Bill. That ongoing process has led to a resurgence in the war of words between Elon Musk, who hates the bill and is threatening to primary conservatives who vote for it, and President Trump, who responded with comments that Elon owes all his success to government subsidies and said DOGE should look into them.
Besides another flare-up in the spat between President Trump and Elon Musk, Tesla (TSLA) has been in the news this week as the company marked the 15th anniversary of its IPO on Sunday. Based on its performance this year, the stock hasn’t exactly been celebrating the milestone. While well off its April lows, it’s still down over 20% on the year, and this morning, it’s on pace to open down by another 5% after the President ‘truthed’ that DOGE should look into all the subsidies that Musk’s various companies receive. If these pre-market losses hold, it will also put the stock below both its 50 and 200-day moving averages, just as it experiences a ‘golden cross’ where the 50-day moving average (DMA) crosses up through the 200-DMA as both are rising.
Even with its 20%+ decline YTD, TSLA still ranks as the third best performing stock out of the current Russell 1000 members with an eye-popping gain of 19,849% since its IPO. The only two stocks that have performed better are Nvidia (NVDA), which has tripled TSLA’s gain, and Axon Enterprise (AXON), which is up just under 22,000%. Trailing behind TSLA, Broadcom (AVGO), and Texas Pacific Land (TPL) round out the top five stocks that have all rallied more than 10,000%. That’s a 100-bagger!
While the last 15 years have been great for TSLA, the road for traditional auto OEMs hasn’t been much bumpier. While the S&P 500 has rallied nearly sevenfold over the last 15 years, Ford (F) and General Motors (GM) have essentially gone nowhere.
The Closer – First Half Close, Weak Dollar, AI Ideas – 6/30/25
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Looking for deeper insight into markets? In tonight’s Closer sent to Bespoke Institutional clients, we begin with a recap of first quarter performance (page 1) including a look at the historically bad start for the dollar (page 2) and underperformance of US equities relative to the rest of the world (page 3). Next, we check in on the performance of our AI baskets (page 4) including a look at some other under the radar AI plays (page 5). We finish with a review of the latest manufacturing data (page 6).
See today’s full post-market Closer and everything else Bespoke publishes by starting a 14-day trial to Bespoke Institutional today!
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 6/30/25 – Resume the Counting!
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.
“It would be good to be a fake somebody rather than a real nobody.” – Mike Tyson
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 market enthusiasm that took the S&P 500 to new highs last Friday has followed through to the new week as the S&P 500 looks to gap up about 0.5% at the open. Financials are leading this morning’s gains as the Fed announced last Friday that all of the banks passed the stress tests. Goldman Sachs (GS) is leading the way with gains of over 3%, but all of the other major banks and brokers are up around 1% or more.
The only economic indicators on the calendar this morning are the Chicago PMI at 9:45 and the Dallas Fed Manufacturing report at 10:30. Washington will be a focus for the market today as investors look to see if the Senate can pass a version of the GOP tax bill.
Last Friday’s close in the S&P 500 marked the first new all-time closing high for the S&P 500 in over four months and now fully puts the tariff-induced near-bear market in the rearview mirror. It also completes one of the more stunning market cycles where the S&P 500 experienced one of its sharpest sell-offs from an all-time high on record, followed by one of its swiftest rebounds.
With the new high, we can also resume the count of new all-time closing highs for the S&P 500, which for 2025 now totals four. That may sound like a meager number, but two months ago, the thought of new highs for the S&P 500 seemed like a pipe dream. With roughly 125 trading days left in the year, we’re unlikely to get anywhere near last year’s total of 57 record closing highs this year, but you have to start somewhere.
Brunch Reads – 6/29/25
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.
Apple Reinvents the Phone: On June 29, 2007, Apple released the first iPhone. Maybe you’re reading this on one right now, 18 years later. At $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB, it wasn’t cheap, but lines still wrapped around Apple and AT&T stores as people camped out overnight, eager to get their hands on what Steve Jobs had promised was “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.”
Until then, smartphones were mostly clunky devices with physical keyboards, tiny screens, and software designed more for business than pleasure. The iPhone ditched the stylus, let you tap, swipe, and pinch your way around a touchscreen, and packed it all into a minimalist design that looked more like a luxury item than a tech gadget at the time. There was no App Store yet, just preloaded apps like Safari, Mail, and iPod, but it was enough to start a tech revolution.
Critics were initially skeptical. There was no physical keyboard, no 3G, no copy-paste. But the public didn’t care. Within days, the iPhone became a cultural phenomenon, and within a few years, it would redefine communication, media, commerce, and even life itself. Everything from maps and music to photography, shopping, and banking sits in our pockets. Today, the iPhone is slimmer, faster, and smarter, featuring AI-powered capabilities and professional-grade cameras. Over 2.3 billion iPhones have been sold since launch, with Apple shipping more than 230 million annually in recent years and commanding a massive global user base of 1.38 billion people. It’s no exaggeration to say the iPhone made Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth over $3 trillion today.
AI & Technology
Cloudflare CEO says people aren’t checking AI chatbots’ source links (Engadget)
AI companies include source links, but traffic data suggests that people aren’t clicking them. Publishers are paying the price. Cloudflare’s CEO says referral rates from OpenAI and Anthropic are dismal, with one site visit for every thousand pages scraped, turning the web into a one-way extraction machine. In response, Cloudflare is rolling out tools to trap and frustrate unauthorized AI bots, calling out the industry for ignoring “no crawl” rules and draining the open internet without paying. [Link]
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International Revenues
Equities have returned to record highs, but performance during the fall from grace earlier this year and the subsequent rebound off the April lows has not exactly been even. With tariff headlines being one of the main focuses of the market this year, performance has been sensitive to how exposed a given stock is to international trade. One proxy for this international exposure is the percentage of revenues that a company generates inside versus outside of the US. As shown below, from the election last November through Liberation Day when President Trump first announced reciprocal tariff rates, the best-performing cohort of Russell 1,000 members was those that do not generate any revenues outside of US borders (about 27% of member stocks in the index). That group averaged a 1.36% gain over that span compared to an average loss of 6.24% for the stocks that generate over half of their revenues outside the US (a little less than 20% of member stocks) or a more modest 2.65% average loss for all stocks in the index. With the index trading back at fresh records, stocks have been in rally mode in the wake of Liberation Day, with the average Russell 1,000 stock now sitting on a 4.6% gain in that span. Those internationals that had formerly been hit the hardest have since shifted to the best performers, averaging a 6.28% gain.
Breaking the Russell 1,000 into deciles (equal-sized groups ranked by their share of revenues generated internationally from low to high) is another way of telling the story. As shown in the first chart below, from Election Day through Liberation Day, the only decile to average a gain was comprised of the stocks with zero international revenue exposure. Conversely, decile 10 containing the stocks with the most international revenue exposure dropped 8.16% on average, the worst of any decile. That trend of outperformance of domestics and underperformance of internationals has been turned on its head in the past couple of months as decile 10 is now the best performing group since Liberation Day.
Using data from our International Revenues Database, a little over a quarter of the Russell 1,000 generates all of their revenues domestically (or in North America). That reading has been mostly flat in the past few years and is also down versus the high 30% range in the late 2000s. By comparison, the share of stocks that rely on international sales for a majority of their revenues is a little less than 20% which is right inline with the typical reading observed for most of the past decade.
Of course, the type of business a company is involved in is a major determinant of international revenue exposure. For example, Utilities are, in a sense, natural monopolies as well as heavily regulated. Logically, that makes it hard for these companies to break into new markets, especially outside the US. As such, nearly all of that sector’s revenues are generated within US borders, whereas an area like Tech is the polar opposite. Easier trade restrictions and largely frictionless supply chains for things like software mean that the Tech sector sees almost half of its revenues come from outside the US.
The Bespoke Report – Equity Market Pros and Cons – Q3 2025
This week’s Bespoke Report is an updated version of our “Pros and Cons” edition for Q3 2025.
With this report, you’re able to get a complete picture of the bull and bear case for US stocks right now. It’s heavy on graphics and light on text, but we let the charts and tables do the talking!
On page three of the report, you’ll see a full list of the pros and cons that we lay out. Slides for each topic are then provided on page four and beyond.
To read this report and access everything else Bespoke’s research platform has to offer, sign up for Bespoke’s 50/20 special today. Our 50/20 special gets you a full year of Premium for half off, then 20% off per month after the first year. SIGN UP HERE.
Below is a look at the performance of key ETFs across asset classes so far in Q2 and year-to-date.
After a very rough March and early April, equities both domestically and globally have surged since. The S&P 500 (SPY) is currently up more than 10% in Q2 with just one full trading day left on Monday. The Tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) is up much more at 17.4%, while the Semis (SMH) are up more than 30%.
As good as it has been in the US, it has been an even better first half and second quarter for much of the rest of the world. The All World ex US ETF (CWI) is up 18.5% on the year versus a gain of 5.7% for the US (SPY), and countries like Germany (EWG), Italy (EWI), Mexico (EWW), and Spain (EWP) are sitting on 30%+ YTD gains.
As a reminder, quarterly rallies this strong aren’t the norm, so enjoy it but don’t get too cocky heading into Q3. Mr. Market loves serving humble pie to the face of investors that think they have it all figured out.
