Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 5/15/26 – Rough End to the Week
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“I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.” – Walt Disney
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 may be Friday, but investors are in no mood to celebrate as equity futures are sharply lower. The Nasdaq is leading the losses, declining 1.28% while the S&P 500 is poised to open down by just under 1% (-0.90%). Treasury yields continue to march higher as they have all week, and in the commodity space, WTI crude oil is spiking 3% to just under $104 per barrel while gold is down over 2.5%. Bitcoin is also lower, falling by just 1%.
The weakness in US futures follows a lousy night in Asia. The Nikkei fell 2%, China was down over 1%, and South Korea plunged over 6%. Following these declines, all of Asia’s major indices finished the week lower. Higher yields contributed to the negative tone, and in South Korea, a potential labor strike at Samsung pressured that stock.
Weakness in Asia worked its way into Europe, and stocks are likewise lower across the board with declines of more than 1%. Here again, the primary culprit is higher yields, although CPI in Italy rose less than expected.
Getting back to the US, there’s not much in the way of earnings reports this morning, but at 8:30, we’ll get the release of the May Empire Manufacturing report, followed by Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization at 9:15.
With inflation headlining the week’s economic data, and much of it surprising to the upside, yields have been an unavoidable and uncomfortable focus for investors. Almost across the entire yield curve, we’ve seen yields move higher this week, pushing the prices of the underlying bonds lower.
The snapshot of Treasury ETFs across the yield curve shows the story. Except for the shortest duration treasuries, prices have moved lower over the last five trading days (since last Thursday’s close), and the magnitude of the declines increases the further you go out on the curve. The magnitude of the declines hasn’t been extreme, but any treasury ETF with a duration of more than a year is currently oversold and will only get more oversold at the open today. YTD, it’s also been a year to forget, with declines nearly across the board.
Of all the points on the yield curve, the 30-year is probably at the biggest crossroads. For nearly three years now, right above 5% has been a level the 30-year has flirted with multiple times, but each time it got there, the sellers didn’t have the firepower for a meaningful breakout. This week has been the third major test of that level as the yield pushes up towards 5.10% this morning. Will the third time be the charm or a strikeout?
The iShares 20+ Year Treasury ETF (TLT) is the opposite of the 30-year yield. Prices plunged during 2022 and into early 2023 as the Fed hiked rates and inflation surged. As price pressures eased, yields and treasury prices stabilized, and while there was a rally off the 2023 lows into mid-2024, momentum quickly stalled out. Ever since then, prices have been stuck in the mid-80s, and this morning, TLT is trading down over 1% and testing support right around $84. It’s been a multi-year bear market for fixed income in the post-COVID era, and if these support levels don’t hold, the sector could be in store for a new leg lower.
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The Closer – New Highs and No Breadth, Freight, Trade Prices – 5/14/26
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- The rebound in AI Doom stocks has broken over the past week while proxies for OpenAI have ripped higher.
- The past month has seen a historic consistency of new highs despite breadth hardly notching any new highs.
- Both import and export prices rose significantly more than expected in April data.
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The Triple Play Report: 5/14/26
An earnings triple play is a stock that reports earnings and manages to 1) beat analyst EPS estimates, 2) beat analyst sales estimates, and 3) raise forward guidance. You can read more about “triple plays” at Investopedia.com where they’ve given Bespoke credit for popularizing the term. We like triple plays as an indication that a company’s business is firing on all cylinders, with better-than-expected results and an improving outlook. A triple play is indicative of positive “fundamental momentum” instead of pure fundamentals, and there are always plenty of names with both high and low valuations on our quarterly list.
Bespoke’s Triple Play Report covers what each company does, what this quarter’s results say about their growth outlooks, and their histories of delivering triple plays. Bespoke’s Triple Play Report is available at the Bespoke Institutional level only. You can sign up for Bespoke Institutional now and receive a 14-day trial to read today’s Triple Play Report. To sign up, choose either the monthly or annual checkout link below:
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Chart of the Day: Healthy Confusion
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 5/14/26 – Dow 50,000
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“Chinese restaurants in America today outnumber the five largest fast food chains in the US all combined.” – Donald Trump
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
US futures are in rally mode this morning as strong earnings from Cisco (CSCO) push that stock to record highs. The S&P 500 is on pace to open higher by about 0.3% while the Nasdaq is up 0.2%. Dow futures are leading the way, gaining 0.81%, which would put the index back above 50,000. The picture for US markets is positive now, but there’s a busy schedule of economic data on the calendar, kicking off with jobless claims and Retail Sales at 8:30.
Treasury yields are pulling back a bit with the 10-year yield down 4 bps to 4.44%. Oil prices are modestly lower, but WTI remains above $100. There have been no major developments out of the Middle East. Both gold and Bitcoin are little changed.
Asian markets were mixed overnight, with Japan down 1%, while Chinese stocks fell 1.5%. South Korea, meanwhile, bucked the trend, rallying 1.8%. The meetings between Trump and Xi and their entourages are obviously the major story of the day, and investors will be looking for any headlines coming from those meetings. In Europe, equities are higher across the board with the STOXX 600 up 0.6%, led higher by a 1.5% rally in Germany.
With all the attention shifting to China over the last 24 hours, investors rotated into Chinese stocks yesterday as the KraneShares China Internet ETF (KWEB) rallied just under 5% on strong volume for its best day since late January. Despite the rally, the stock finished yesterday’s session just below the downtrend line that has been in place since last October. KWEB has clearly stabilized since early April following steady losses over the preceding six months, but for bulls to get excited, they’ll need to see that downtrend get broken.
Chinese tech and US stocks have followed interesting paths over the last decade. While the performance was a close race between the world’s two superpowers in the last half of the last decade, in the post-Covid era, the two ETFs have followed diverging paths. Five years ago, the performance of KWEB and SPY in the prior five years was nearly identical. Since then, they have moved completely in opposite directions. As a result, the trailing 10-year performance of SPY is a gain of over 250% compared to a decline of 15% for KWEB! You can debate all you want about which world leader has the upper hand on a diplomatic basis heading into this summit, but from a market perspective, Trump is holding the nuts.
The relative strength of KWEB versus SPY further illustrates the sharp contrast. Chinese tech stocks fell off a cliff (almost literally) in the second half of 2021 and haven’t recovered since. Just in the last two weeks, the relative strength of KWEB versus SPY hit a record low.
At the individual stock/ADR level, Chinese stocks have experienced mixed returns this year. The snapshot below from our Trend Analyzer shows where nine of the largest/most active Chinese ADRs are trading relative to their trading ranges. YTD, some of these ETFs have seen big gains while others are down double-digits.
On a short-term basis, practically all these ADRs are doing well, as Pinduoduo (PDD) is the only one trading below its 50-DMA, while Trip.com (TCOM) is the only other ETF on the list that is not currently at overbought levels.
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The Closer – Brazil, Hot PPI, Hawks Speak – 5/13/26
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- The Brazil ETF (EWZ) was down 4% today, breaking support at its 50-DMA.
- Other than the 2022-2022 period of very high inflation, April saw the highest PPI reading since the current iteration of the final demand series was introduced back in 2010.
- Today’s Fedspeak in the wake of the latest inflation data was decisively hawkish.
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Chart of the Day – Bubbling Up
High Costs, High Equity, Prices Flat – A Look at Housing
Based on mortgage rates, home prices, and average hourly earnings, it currently takes roughly 64 hours of work to cover a monthly mortgage payment.
Below is a look at this reading going back to the early 1970s so you can see how housing affordability has shifted over the last five decades.
Affordability was at its worst in the late 1970s/early 1980s when mortgage rates spiked into the teens, but from there it was a steady trek lower all the way until the early 2010s as rates declined.
At its nadir in 2012, it took just over 32 hours of work to cover a monthly mortgage payment, so the current number is double that.
We’ve at least seen affordability get a little better over the last few years. At its peak in October 2023, it took 76 hours of work to cover a mortgage payment, which was the highest reading since late 1990.
As you can see in the chart, while mortgage costs are indeed high relative to the last couple of decades, these types of levels were routine through the 1980s and 1990s.
While affordability is worse now than it was during the ultra-low rate environment in the years after the Financial Crisis, homeowners are sitting on a boatload of equity. As shown below, homeowner equity plunged to just over 45% at its low point after home prices crashed in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Low mortgage rates throughout the 2010s spurred a bounce-back in both home prices and loan activity, and then when prices spiked again in the early 2020s after COVID hit, homeowners were suddenly sitting on their highest amount of equity since 1960!
While home prices haven’t gone up in a few years, they also haven’t dropped, so that homeowner equity in the system remains a nice cushion.
Speaking of home prices, below is a look at the median listing price of homes from Realtor.com data over the last ten years.
After a huge move higher in listing prices in the first two years after COVID hit in early 2020, we’ve seen prices flat-line.
The two-year post-COVID surge could have just been one big multi-year pull forward in prices, however.
As shown below, if we extend out the pre-COVID trendline in listing prices all the way out to current levels, we’re currently right on trend. We just didn’t get there in a straight line.
Below is a look at the change in the median listing price versus the change in the homebuilder ETF (ITB) since 2016:
As shown below, the homebuilder space continues to get beaten up, with most stocks in the group at least 5% below their 50-DMAs in oversold territory. It’s been a rough 2026 so far, with ITB down 6.2% versus a gain of 9% for the S&P 500.
It’s likely that the builders will need to see some combination of lower rates or higher prices to get back on track.
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Hot April Core CPI Print Driven By Rents
Yesterday was a big day for inflation data as the BLS released April CPI (Consumer Price Index).
We all knew that spiking energy prices from the Iran War would impact headline CPI, but it was the core CPI reading, which strips out food and energy, that everyone was watching closely.
While economists expected core CPI to increase 0.3% month-over-month, it came in a tick higher than expected at 0.4% (4.6% annualized).
The jump in core CPI sent equity futures lower ahead of the open as interest rates rallied. Market pricing for Fed rate cuts took another hit, and the odds for rate hikes before year-end ticked higher.
When we looked underneath the surface of the core CPI print, the data wasn’t quite as scary.
The analysis below was included in our post-market macro note, The Closer, sent to Bespoke All Access subscribers yesterday. (Start a trial here to get it in your inbox going forward.)
While this was the second-largest monthly leap in core CPI since early 2023, rising 4.6% annualized, that acceleration was entirely due to the vagaries of the rent calculation.
Excluding rent, core CPI rose just 1.6% annualized and still looks similar to the pace it has trended at since 2023.
Because households are included in the rent survey on a six-month rotation, that index is still getting caught up from the government shutdown last year.
Households skipped in October were assumed to have no rent inflation for the last six months, which effectively jammed a year of rent increases for that subset into the April CPI report.
The result was a huge spike in rent in yesterday’s CPI release, which was a statistical mirage similar to the plunge observed in October. It should reverse in the coming months.
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Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 5/13/26 – Inflation Encore
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“We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good… when trade stops, war comes.” – Jack Ma
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Paul Hickey appeared on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street on Tuesday to discuss markets, semis, and inflation. To view the segment, click on the image below.
It’s hard to call yesterday’s decline (-0.16% in the S&P 500 and -0.71% in the Nasdaq) a dip, but investors have stepped in to buy it this morning as both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are poised to erase yesterday’s losses at the open. Treasury yields are little changed, crude oil is fractionally lower, gold is higher, and Bitcoin is modestly lower but still above $80K.
The positive tone in US futures follows an up night in Asia as the Nikkei rallied 0.8% and South Korea jumped 2.6%. Chinese stocks are up 0.7% as Air Force One is touching down in Beijing as we type this.
In Europe, the tone is mixed with the STOXX 600 up 0.3% as Germany leads (+0.6%) and France and Spain decline fractionally. GDP in the Eurozone increased 0.1%, which was inline with expectations, while employment increased slightly more than expected, although French unemployment unexpectedly increased from 7.9% up to 8.1%.
The only economic report on the calendar this morning was April PPI, and boy, was it a clunker. Headline PPI surged 1.4% – not y/y but m/m while the core reading surged 1.0% versus estimates for an increase of just 0.3%. The headline index was only forecast to increase 0.5%. PPI tends to be more volatile than CPI, but these numbers are hot, hot, hot. As you would expect, the immediate response in the futures market was for yields to spike higher while equities erased half of their pre-release gains.
It was bound to happen at some point. After seemingly going up every day lately, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) declined just over 3% yesterday after falling as much as 6.7% on an intraday basis. Even for semis, swings and declines of that magnitude are notable, but looking at the chart, you can barely see them. Even after that drop, the SOX is still 31% above its 50-day moving average.
We were curious to see how common it is for the SOX to fall more than 2.5% just one day after closing at an all-time high. Since 1995, it’s happened 23 other times. You know when the last occurrence was? Last Thursday! It was also the fourth occurrence this year.
The chart below shows each prior occurrence with a red dot. While there were certainly other occurrences spread sporadically over the years, the only other time they were as frequent as the last five years were during the mid-1990s, right up to the 2000 peak. That’s a parallel that has come up a lot lately, with the trillion-dollar question being where we are in that comparison – 1998 or early 2000.
We’ve discussed the lack of strong market breadth on up days several times in recent weeks, but yesterday we saw the opposite as the S&P 500 declined even as its net advance/decline line was positive. That divergence marked the third straight day and the 28th time this year that price and breadth moved in opposite directions.
The chart below shows the frequency of days by year when price and breadth diverged. Over the last ten years, we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of occurrences, and in both 2024 and 2025, the S&P 500 saw a record number of divergent days. As mentioned above, we’ve already seen 28 occurrences this year. If that pace continues, this year’s total would spike up to 77, far eclipsing the records of the prior two years.
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