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 greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.” – Marshal McLuhan

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

Given all the drama coming out of DC, you can’t be faulted for forgetting there’s an employment report today, but that is probably what should receive the most focus this morning from the markets. Whether it does is another story altogether. Heading into the report, US equity futures have bounced from Thursday’s close as they look to erase much of yesterday’s losses. European stocks are pretty much unchanged, while Asian equities were mixed with modest gains and losses. In the Treasury market, yields are little changed, as is the case with crude oil, even as gold, silver, and Bitcoin see modest gains.

Yesterday’s spat between Elon Musk and President Trump sucked all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to news and overshadowed every other major geo-political event that the market had been focused on heading into the day. The argument also sucked a lot of the market cap from Tesla (TSLA) stock as it fell more than 14% for its third double-digit percentage decline this year! While the declines have been painful, TSLA has also experienced two double-digit percentage rallies this year, including a 22.7% gain on 4/9, which was its largest one-day gain since May 2013. In other words, the stock has been volatile, even by the standards of TSLA.

Yesterday, on an intraday basis, TSLA plunged 11.7%, which was just the 14th time since its IPO in 2010 that the stock declined by double-digit percentages from the open to close and the second time this year. We’d also note that the 21.1% rally from the open to close on 4/9 was the stock’s second-largest open-to-close rally in its history.

While TSLA has been volatile, it hasn’t made a lot of headway. With the stock closing yesterday at $284.70, it was 3 cents–yes, CENTS–higher than where it opened after Election Day last November.  There have been some major moves within those six months, but for all the talk about how Musk’s support of Trump was just a sinister ploy to buy influence and enrich himself, the stock’s performance says otherwise. While the stock hasn’t done much since the election, over the last year, shares have rallied just under 60%, which is nearly six times the 11% gain of the S&P 500.

YTD performance within the mega-cap tech space looks like a pack of FruitStripe gum. At the top of the performance list, Meta Platforms (META), Broadcom (AVGO), and Microsoft (MSFT) have all experienced double-digit percentage gains this year, while TSLA, Apple (AAPL), and Alphabet (GOOGL) have seen double-digit percentage declines. In between, Nvidia (NVDA) and Amazon.com (AMZN) have modest gains or losses.

From a shorter-term perspective, the disparities are nearly as wide.  While AAPL and TSLA are both modestly below their 50-DMAs, AVGO headed into last night’s earnings report nearly 30% above its 50-DMA while NVDA, META, and MSFT were all at least 10% above that level. While often thought of as a monolith with the stock market, when it comes to performance, mega-cap tech has been in as much unison as political discourse at a holiday dinner.

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 difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” – John Maynard Keynes

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 been another quiet overnight session in the futures market, but that’s not for a lack of events. In Japan, JGBs managed to rally despite a weak 30-year bond auction. In the EU, the ECB just cut rates by 25 bps, and that will result in more ire from President Trump towards Fed Chair Powell.  Concerning trade, markets are eagerly waiting for ‘the call’ between President Trump and President Xi as both countries look to make progress on trade talks. Yesterday was also the deadline for countries to make their ‘best and final’ offers, so be on the lookout for any of those details to emerge. Domestically, the status of the GOP’s big, beautiful bill remains up in the air as the Senate is unlikely to pass the bill without major changes, and Elon Musk continues to rail against it.

With all the concerns over deficits and the inability of Congress to rein in spending, it’s easy to understand why precious metals like gold have performed so well. After pulling back to the 50-day moving average in early May, gold prices found support and have seen a good bounce as the yellow metal makes a run for its recent highs. The last year has seen a monster run for gold as prices are up well over 40%, and besides the last few weeks where prices have been rangebound, the only other time in the last year that prices went this long without making a new high were leading up to the election and through year end of 2024.

As gold prices have been digesting big gains from earlier in the year, other precious metals have been playing catch up and moving into the driver’s seat. Let’s start with silver. Prices have been in a much more sideways range over the last year. Both last fall and earlier in the spring, silver traded around $35 an ounce but then quickly pulled back.  This week, it made another run for $35 and broke right through to the upside this morning. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again!

Platinum prices have followed a similar path. Here, the resistance was just below $1,075- a level it approached last summer, last fall, and then again, this winter.  It finally broke out from that level in mid-March, and while it briefly pulled back later in the month, this morning’s rally of nearly 4% looks like a convincing breakout.

Within the commodities space, gold, platinum, and silver have all now seen big rallies this year with gains of around 20% or more, and all three are well above their 50-day moving averages as well. Elsewhere in the commodity space, so-called ‘soft’ commodities have lagged. The DB Agriculture ETF (DBA) is barely up YTD with a gain of just 1%, while the DB Oil ETF (DBO) is down by double-digit percentages. Not all commodities are created equal.