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.

“A lot of people are scared to ask questions because they don’t want people to know how dumb they are. I’ve never had that problem.” – Ken Langone

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

Home Depot (HD) kicked off retailer earnings week this morning and reported weaker-than-expected EPS on slightly weaker-than-expected revenues. That’s the bad news. On a positive note, the company reaffirmed its guidance for the full year, and while most companies missing results this earnings season have been pummeled on their earnings reaction days, shares of HD are trading more than 1% higher in the pre-market. HD earnings have had little impact on futures, which are mixed on either side of the flatline. That follows what was a fractionally negative overnight session in Asia, and a fractionally positive session so far in Europe.

Here in the US this morning, besides the HD earnings report, there hasn’t been much in the way of stock-specific news. On the economic calendar, July Building Permits and Housing Starts will hit the tape at 8:30. Heading into those reports, bonds are trading slightly higher, crude oil is down 1%, gold and other precious metals are modestly high, while Bitcoin and Ether continue their recent weakness with declines of roughly 1%.

Yesterday was a tough day in the market – to stay awake. From the opening to closing bell, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) traded in a range of 0.28% which was the narrowest intraday range since March 2024. To put yesterday’s range in perspective, the intraday range of the market on April 9th at the height of the tariff drama was more than 40 times larger.

Given that we’re in August, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the market has been quiet. Since the launch of SPY back in 1993, August has seen the third-highest frequency of days when the ETF’s intraday range was narrower than 0.3%. The only two months with a higher frequency were October (17) and December (22). December makes sense given the holidays, but the fact that October has had the second-highest frequency of days with an intraday range of less than 0.3% was surprising. Digging a little deeper, we found that more than half of them (9) occurred in October 2017. That could have been the most docile month of trading in SPY’s history!

On the flip side, just for fun, we also looked at which months most frequently have seen 5% intraday ranges in SPY. Unsurprisingly, October has been the clear leader with 25, followed by March with 16. Here again, the high frequency of occurrences in March is primarily due to 2020, when there were 12, and the only four other occurrences were in 2009, around the lows of the Financial Crisis.

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.

“If you’re afraid – don’t do it, – if you’re doing it – don’t be afraid!” – Genghis Khan

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 some of the stronger inflation data, in hindsight, last week could have been worse. Looking at futures this morning and the performance of international markets overnight and this morning, it appears as though investors thought the same over the weekend. Futures are lower, but the losses are admittedly modest, so maybe it’s just the bulls taking a breather. This week will be a busy week for earnings from retailers, which should shed some light on how tariffs are impacting results, but for today, things are pretty quiet as the only report on the calendar is Homebuilder Sentiment at 10 AM, and the only earnings report of note is Palo Alto Networks (PANW) after the close.

The end of August is a popular time for vacations, and the Fed is no exception as the Kansas City Fed hangs up its ‘gone fishing’ sign and holds its annual meeting every year at the Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park. Fed officials are only human, so like the rest of us, they’ll never turn down the opportunity for a ‘work’ conference that happens to be at one of the most beautiful and scenic places in the world.  The conference is so ‘intense’ that the chair of the Federal Reserve himself (or herself) even makes the trip to give a speech every year.

With Fed officials from around the world attending the conference every year, members of the media who follow the Fed also attend the conference each year. With all these policymakers, cameras, and microphones in one place, the result is that many newsworthy events have ended up taking place. In 2010, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke laid the groundwork for quantitative easing, which became a staple of Fed policy in the ensuing years. Then in 2014, ECB chief Mario Draghi acknowledged that inflation expectations in Europe were dangerously below the central bank’s 2% target, setting the stage for more fiscal and monetary stimulus.

More recently, back in 2022, when inflation was still raging, markets were hoping that Powell would use the conference as an opportunity to take a kinder and gentler approach to markets reeling from an aggressive run of rate hikes. Shortly after he stepped up to the podium, however, he dashed any of those hopes. He started his speech with, “Today, my remarks will be shorter, my focus narrower, and my message more direct.” Then he finished with the promise that “We are taking forceful and rapid steps to moderate demand so that it comes into better alignment with supply, and to keep inflation expectations anchored. We will keep at it until we are confident the job is done.” In other words, the beatings will continue!

With Powell scheduled to speak at the end of the week, and facing intense pressure from the President to cut rates (who knows maybe President Trump will hire one of those planes you often see at the beach towing a message behind it to further criticize Powell), anticipation to Friday’s speech is already high, and investors are expecting volatility, but how volatile does the market really get around the Jackson Hole speech?

The chart below shows the S&P 500’s performance in the week of the Jackson Hole conference every year since the end of the Financial Crisis in 2009. More often than not, it’s been a positive week. Of the 16 years shown, the S&P 500 has only been down five times, with only two years where the drop was more than 1% (2019 and 2022). Overall, the S&P 500’s median performance has been a gain of 0.8%.