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“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela

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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 not looking like a good end to the week for US equity markets. S&P 500 futures are down 0.9% while the Nasdaq is down close to 2%. A new Chinese AI model from Moonshot called Kimi K3 reportedly rivals the offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of its abilities but does so using much less resources. That has the entire AI ecosystem trading sharply lower. Semiconductors are being especially hard hit as the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) is poised to open down more than 3% and in bear market territory relative to its June highs.

Outside of equities, Treasury yields are lower with the 10-year yield down 5 bps to 4.52%. Crude oil is up over 2.5% to $81 per barrel, while gold is fractionally higher after falling below $4,000 per ounce yesterday. Bitcoin is down 1.6% but still hanging on to $63K.

It was a bloodbath in Asia last night, and it would have likely been worse had it not been for a holiday in South Korea. The Nikkei fell 4%, taking its weekly decline to 6.4% while the Shanghai Composite fell 3.1% taking its decline for the week to 5.8%. Even with South Korea being closed, the KOSPI was still down 8.8% for the week. Bucking the trend, India’s Sensex increased 1.3%, putting it 0.8% into the black for the week.

In Europe this morning, stocks aren’t feeling nearly the pain of the rest of the world, as today is one of those rare days when European investors can take comfort that its economy has little exposure to cutting-edge technology like AI. The STOXX 600 is down 0.5%, putting it into the red for the week. CPI for June fell 0.1% m/m, which was right in line with expectations.

It’s a busy day for data to close out the week. Import prices came in higher than expected, bucking the trend of weaker inflation data we saw earlier this week. Housing Starts came in significantly better than expected, but it was all centered on strength in multi-family units, while Building Permits were weaker than expected. Still on the docket later today are Industrial Production, Capacity Utilization, and Michigan Confidence.

It’s Friday night, so a lot of people probably have plans tonight. They may not know where they’re going yet, but it’s Friday, so they know they’re going somewhere. Saying you’re going out is the easy part, though. Getting everyone to agree on a time and place is a whole other story.

The Nasdaq is in one of those conversations now. As shown in the chart below, over the last 50 trading days, the index is up less than 1%. At the surface, you’d think that the last 2+ months have been a snoozer, but the reality has been anything but.

Over the last 50 trading days, the Nasdaq has moved up or down at least 1% on 23 trading days. That’s hardly extreme, but it’s still well above the long-term average of 13.

What makes the frequency of 1% days over the last 50 trading days notable, though, is how narrow a range the index has traded in. The chart below compares the frequency of 1% daily moves over a 50-day period (x-axis) to the 50-day high-low range over the corresponding 50-day period (y-axis). With a 50-day range of less than 8%, the last 50 days have been one of the narrowest ranges during a period where the frequency of 1% daily moves has been so high.

The indecision on where to go for the Nasdaq has really been evident over the last week. Yesterday was the sixth consecutive session that the Nasdaq traded above and below its 50-day moving average on an intraday basis.  That’s tied with five other periods for the most consecutive days of straddling the 50-DMA on record. The Nasdaq closed nearly 1% below its 50-DMA yesterday and is on pace to gap down another 1% this morning, so barring a major turnaround intraday (perhaps a Truth Social post), the streak will likely end today. As frustrating as indecision can be, when a direction is finally chosen, it isn’t always the right one.

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