Trading Apologist
The Weekly Market Digest · Sunday, July 26, 2026
Hi everyone,
I hope you are all holding up well after the rough week that was. Before we prepare for the big week ahead, with the FOMC and earnings from MSFT, META, AMZN, AAPL, and many others, here is a look back at the most important information we covered over the past week.
The week in brief
It was a genuinely busy week on multiple fronts. Earnings season ran hot, with reports coming in from GOOGL, TSLA, IBM, NOW, TXN, INTC, and several others, and the results were mixed enough to remind us that this is very much a stock-picker's market right now. That theme showed up clearly in the macro picture too: the index stayed calm on the surface while the individual names inside it swung hard, yields broke out across the curve, and the flash PMI delivered a growth beat paired with a fresh inflation warning that the bond market did not ignore. We also went deep on some bigger structural questions this week, from the five layers of AI power delivery and Washington steering $200 billion toward the sector, to the debt spiral debate, M2, and who ultimately foots the bill for the buildout. If you want to pair any of that with more fundamental analysis and options data, the tools in the member area are worth a look as you think through positioning.
It was a genuinely busy week on multiple fronts. Earnings season ran hot, with reports coming in from GOOGL, TSLA, IBM, NOW, TXN, INTC, and several others, and the results were mixed enough to remind us that this is very much a stock-picker's market right now. That theme showed up clearly in the macro picture too: the index stayed calm on the surface while the individual names inside it swung hard, yields broke out across the curve, and the flash PMI delivered a growth beat paired with a fresh inflation warning that the bond market did not ignore. We also went deep on some bigger structural questions this week, from the five layers of AI power delivery and Washington steering $200 billion toward the sector, to the debt spiral debate, M2, and who ultimately foots the bill for the buildout. If you want to pair any of that with more fundamental analysis and options data, the tools in the member area are worth a look as you think through positioning.
Asset Watch
Single-name setups worth a look.
Asset Watch: HIMS & the Peptide Vote · Jul 24
An FDA advisory panel voted down emideltide and HIMS fell more than 10% in a session that had opened green. The committee met over two days to review seven peptides, and Thursday's four approvals sent HIMS up more than 10% intraday before it closed up about 3% at $32.74. Friday's rejection of emideltide reversed all of that, and I walked through exactly what the vote means for HIMS and the compounding pharmacy space.
Asset Watch: AMZN - AGI Team Trim Hits the Stock Price · Jul 22
Amazon cut jobs inside parts of its AGI organization on Wednesday, and AMZN faded from a high near $250.70 to around $243.20 on the news. The headcount itself is small, but the market is reading it as a signal about where Amazon is sharpening its AI focus and what that means for the long-range research side of the business.
Asset Watch: SPCX - Shorts Build a $25 Billion Bet Into the Unlock Wave · Jul 20
Short interest in SPCX has exploded from roughly 40 million shares three weeks ago to about 185 million shares, nearly a third of the tradable float and around $25 billion in bearish bets. The bear case is mechanical: only about 5% of SpaceX's 13 billion shares currently trade freely, and a wave of lockup expirations will expand that supply dramatically over the next year. With the stock hitting fresh lows near $120, I walked through what that crowded short setup means for both sides of the trade.
The Weekly Alpha
The week's flagship posts: the market recap, the live calls, and the watchlist review.
Weekly Trade Recap: 7/20 - 7/24 · Jul 26
It was a slower trading week, with ten trades, built around reducing risk and hedging into a heavy earnings calendar and rising yields. I entered a new IBIT position, added to QCOM and ENVX, trimmed and fully exited AMZN for a 4.91% overall gain, and put hedges on IBM, GOOGL, and the broader market with SQQQ. Every trade is listed in chronological order with the exact strikes, prices, and sizing.
Weekly Market Prep Zoom Call - 07.20.26 · Jul 20
The call opened with a major community update: Miles Fidei has officially joined the team to manage all indicator development and maintenance going forward, and he is now the point of contact for indicator support on Discord. We also worked through five macro data charts, a pre-earnings chart session, and an extended Q&A, plus a newsletter migration note for anyone who signed up with an alternate email last week.
Markets & Macro
The bigger picture across rates, commodities, and the tape.
Yields Break Out Across the Curve · Jul 22
Treasury yields broke out across the curve this week, with the 10-year at 4.67% and the 30-year at 5.15% both attempting a secondary breakout after faking out at these same levels a couple of months ago. When the short and long end rise together the bond market is repricing both Fed expectations and the cost of long-term money simultaneously, and the stocks hit hardest are the high-beta names whose value sits furthest in the future. I mapped out exactly which parts of the market are most exposed and why this is not something equities can ignore for long.
Why The Index Is Calm, While The Stocks Inside It Are Not · Jul 20
The 3-week realized volatility of the momentum factor is now running at four times the volatility of the S&P 500, a ratio that has never printed this high in data going back to 1972. The index looks calm while the stocks inside it are swinging violently, with winners getting dumped and losers getting squeezed in a rotation that is grinding down anyone positioned in the previous leaders. We covered what this level of churn historically signals and where the damage is most concentrated right now.
From the Grid to the GPU: The Five Layers of AI Power Delivery · Jul 20
The AI buildout is usually framed as a chip story, but every GPU cluster is also an electrical engineering project, and power moves through five distinct layers from the grid to the processor, each with its own set of publicly traded suppliers. I mapped the full chain, from facility intake and backup generation through transformers, cooling, and on-chip power delivery, and named the specific companies I think are best positioned at each layer. I believe the power side of the AI trade will be the most durable over the next five to ten years.
The 15-Sigma Day: What IBM's Crash Teaches About Market Math · Jul 21
IBM's 25.2% single-day drop last week was a 15-sigma event, surpassing even the 23.5% crash on Black Monday in 1987 as the worst day in the company's 115-year history. A move that size should not occur once in the history of the universe under a normal distribution, but it happened because markets have fat tails, not bell curves. We covered what that means practically for how you size positions and think about tail risk in any stock you hold.
Also this week
Sector Relative Strength
Week of July 20 · % change vs prior week's close
Energy (XLE)+3.40%
Oil & Gas E&P (XOP)+2.33%
Utilities (XLU)+2.30%
Industrials (XLI)+1.75%
Real Estate (XLRE)+1.21%
Materials (XLB)+1.05%
Semiconductors (SMH)+0.98%
Healthcare (XLV)+0.92%
Technology (XLK)+0.27%
Homebuilders (XHB)+0.18%
Financials (XLF)+0.09%
Small Caps (IWM)-0.87%
Cons Staples (XLP)-1.10%
Regional Banks (KRE)-1.29%
Biotech (XBI)-2.47%
Comm Services (XLC)-4.01%
Software (IGV)-5.19%
Cons Discretionary (XLY)-5.22%
S&P 500 (SPY)-0.65%
Equal-weight S&P (RSP)-0.10%
Market Recaps
Every market recap from the week in one place: the daily and morning notes plus the weekly recap.
Wednesday Daily Market Recap - July 22, 2026
Wednesday Daily Market Recap - July 23rd, 2025
News
The stories that moved names on our radar.
One Leg of the Memory Bear Case Just Broke · Jul 25
CXMT, China's largest memory chipmaker, is now pricing above Samsung on comparable DDR5 server modules, which removes one of the bigger overhangs on the memory trade. The company that was supposed to flood the market with discounted supply is instead hiking prices on Huawei, throwing rival engineers out of its research zone, and posting $7.5 billion in Q1 revenue, up 719% year over year. One leg of the memory bear case just broke, and I laid out what that means for the broader trade.
Negative Free Cash Flow Is Not a Broken Business · Jul 24
Alphabet posted the first negative free cash flow quarter in its history and Tesla did the same, and both stocks were sold hard despite beating revenue estimates. Neither cash engine broke: Alphabet generated $39.1 billion in operating cash flow, up 41%, but spent $44.9 billion in capex, double a year ago. We covered why negative free cash flow during a deliberate buildout is not the same as a broken business, and what the 6-to-24-month lag between spending and billing means for how you read these numbers.
SMCI Just Pre-Announced $60 Billion in Orders, and the Whole Server Space
Popped · Jul 22
Supermicro pre-announced more than $60 billion in new orders for a single quarter, a record backlog for a company whose entire market cap coming into the day was around $15 billion, and the stock ripped roughly 18% after hours while Dell gained 6% and HPE gained 5%. The more important number is the margin line: SMCI now expects gross margins of 15% to 17%, roughly double its prior guidance, which means the cheapest builder in AI hardware no longer has to discount to win deals. We covered what that signals about demand across the whole server space and why some caution is still warranted.
Also this week
Your New Competition Doesn't Sleep · Jul 22
Earnings Reports
Every earnings print I covered this week, linked to the full post.
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