Trading Apologist
The Weekly Market Digest · Sunday, August 2, 2026
Hi everyone,
I hope you had a chance to rest and recharge over the weekend. Before the next trading week gets going, I want to take a quick look back at everything we covered this past week.
The week in brief
It was one of the busiest weeks of the year, with an 82% earnings beat rate after the heaviest reporting stretch of the season, with results rolling in from META, MSFT, VISA, QCOM, ARM, and a long list of others. On the macro side, the FOMC report showed three dissents all pointing toward higher rates, Q2 GDP came in with a headline that masked some real weakness underneath, and the first US yen intervention since 2011 moved through markets in a way that connected back to the bond market moves we have been watching. We also had a significant moment in semiconductors, a notable credit repricing in Nvidia that did not spread the way you might expect, and the KOSPI posted its biggest single day ever after their emergency government meeting and proposed intervention. In terms of community tools and updates, Deviation Bands got a major upgrade and I covered How I Read Rotation Radar post for broader market analysis. We were going to launch the new website, AI Trading Desk, the Adaptive Levels indicator, and the Money Flow indicator today, but that is getting pushed back by a few days with the current wildfire situation I am dealing with. More on those updates in the coming days.
It was one of the busiest weeks of the year, with an 82% earnings beat rate after the heaviest reporting stretch of the season, with results rolling in from META, MSFT, VISA, QCOM, ARM, and a long list of others. On the macro side, the FOMC report showed three dissents all pointing toward higher rates, Q2 GDP came in with a headline that masked some real weakness underneath, and the first US yen intervention since 2011 moved through markets in a way that connected back to the bond market moves we have been watching. We also had a significant moment in semiconductors, a notable credit repricing in Nvidia that did not spread the way you might expect, and the KOSPI posted its biggest single day ever after their emergency government meeting and proposed intervention. In terms of community tools and updates, Deviation Bands got a major upgrade and I covered How I Read Rotation Radar post for broader market analysis. We were going to launch the new website, AI Trading Desk, the Adaptive Levels indicator, and the Money Flow indicator today, but that is getting pushed back by a few days with the current wildfire situation I am dealing with. More on those updates in the coming days.
Asset Watch
Single-name setups worth a look.
Asset Watch: TE (T1 Energy) - Raises $120 Million Without Breaking the Stock · Jul 30
T1 Energy raised $120 million in 4.75% convertible senior notes due 2031 and the stock jumped 15% at the open rather than selling off, which is unusual for a small-cap with negative earnings raising money in this tape. The structure explains most of it: the conversion price is set at roughly $4.46, a 20% premium to the prior close, and the deal was placed privately to a group of investors rather than dumped into the open market. Note that the actual earnings report lands August 18, not this week as some calendars showed.
The Weekly Alpha
The week's flagship posts: the market recap, the live calls, and the watchlist review.
Weekly Market Prep Zoom Call - 07.27.26 · Jul 27
Treasury yields breaking out to close last week are the central pressure point driving everything else, and they land in the week of Warsh's second FOMC where rate hike odds have jumped to 35%. Oil is a second pressure point, though we are getting a reprieve to start the week with no new Iran escalations. The encouraging part of the picture is the underlying fundamentals: earnings are delivering at a strong rate, and if that holds it builds the case for buying into the fall as one of those pressure points eventually gives way.
Markets & Macro
The bigger picture across rates, commodities, and the tape.
Why the US Telling Banks to "Stand Ready" Matters for Stocks · Jul 31
The US Treasury telling banks to stand ready for yen intervention is the most important macro development of the week, and it reaches directly into US stocks and crypto through the yen carry trade. Japan spent a record amount buying its own currency on Thursday, South Korea sold dollars the same night, and Washington moved from watching to warning on Friday. This is a key reason I have not been deploying more aggressively into this dip despite many charts being oversold.
FOMC Report: Three Dissents, All Pointing Up · Jul 29
The Fed held rates at 3.50% to 3.75% for the fifth straight meeting, but the vote shifted from 12-0 in June to 9-3, with Hammack, Kashkari, and Logan all dissenting in favor of a quarter-point hike. The statement text is word for word identical to June's apart from one cosmetic edit, so the dissents are the only new information. Market pricing had hike odds for this meeting near a third going in, with above 80% odds for September.
The Semiconductor Volume Signal We May Not Want to Trust · Jul 28
SMH traded its heaviest single-day volume in more than two years on Monday, and the instinct was to call it capitulation, but the historical record does not support that read cleanly. Across fourteen similar two-year volume highs going back to 2002, price was higher three months later in only eight of them, roughly a coin flip, and the average worst drawdown from the spike day was about 11% even in cases that eventually finished positive. What the spike marks consistently is a shift in volatility, not direction.
Also this week
VIX Options Are Not Stock Options · Jul 27
Sector Relative Strength
Week of July 27 · % change vs prior week's close
Software (IGV)+7.19%
Cons Discretionary (XLY)+6.11%
Oil & Gas E&P (XOP)+2.15%
Comm Services (XLC)+1.83%
Financials (XLF)+1.15%
Cons Staples (XLP)+1.09%
Regional Banks (KRE)+0.44%
Energy (XLE)+0.34%
Healthcare (XLV)+0.09%
Small Caps (IWM)-0.32%
Technology (XLK)-0.81%
Industrials (XLI)-1.31%
Materials (XLB)-1.62%
Real Estate (XLRE)-1.81%
Biotech (XBI)-2.05%
Semiconductors (SMH)-3.90%
Homebuilders (XHB)-4.01%
Utilities (XLU)-4.04%
S&P 500 (SPY)+0.84%
Equal-weight S&P (RSP)+0.67%
Market Recaps
Every market recap from the week in one place: the daily and morning notes plus the weekly recap.
Thursday Daily Market Recap - July 30, 2026
Community & Tool Updates
Indicator releases, new tools, events, and community happenings.
Big Update to Deviation Bands · Jul 31
Miles rebuilt the Deviation Bands signal engine from the ground up, and we tested it against a multi-year backtest across stocks, indices, and crypto before shipping. The buy side now covers four distinct situations including a new Re-entry signal for trend continuation out of a consolidation flag, the new POP signal flags rips into resistance worth selling, and add and trim markers now print suggested sizing directly on the chart.
How I Read Rotation Radar & Pre-Market Movers · Jul 27
I recorded a Loom walkthrough showing exactly how I use Rotation Radar and Pre-Market Movers together, picking up a couple of details I forgot to cover on the morning's Market Prep call.
News
The stories that moved names on our radar.
It Happened: The First US Yen Intervention Since 2011 · Aug 1
The US Treasury intervened in the yen market on Friday afternoon, with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York selling euros to buy yen through Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. If confirmed by official data, it is the first US operation to support the yen since the G7 acted together after Japan's 2011 earthquake. The euros rather than dollars detail matters: the Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund holds its foreign currency reserves in euros, estimated at roughly $14 billion, so selling euros to buy yen is simply selling what it owns.
Coldcard Warning: One Device, One Firmware Window, 594 Bitcoin Gone · Jul 31
Roughly 594 Bitcoin worth about $38 million was swept from around 500 wallets in a 25-minute window, and the exposure is specific: seeds generated on a Coldcard Mk3 running firmware 4.0.1 or later. What matters is the firmware version running at the exact moment the seed was created, not the model you own today and not what firmware it runs now, so updating the device does not fix an already-created seed. If your seed was generated on an Mk3 running version 3.2.2 or earlier, you are outside this issue.
It Wasn't Just Retail: Inside the Situational Awareness Unwind · Jul 30
Situational Awareness, the AI-focused hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, sold its entire public stock portfolio this week, with Citadel confirmed as the buyer. Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan were shopping the package to buyers ahead of Thursday's open after losses forced the prime brokers' hand. The fund had grown to somewhere between $20 billion and $45 billion at the start of July before the losses took hold.
Also this week
Also This Week
A few more posts that didn't fit neatly above.
A Correction on Strategy, and Why I Deleted the Last Post · Aug 1
I pulled the previous post on Strategy's $5 billion Bitcoin sale plan because the article it was based on recycled old news as a fresh announcement. Michael Saylor called it out directly on X, and the actual June framework, which buckets sales into a $1.25 billion reserve cap, uncapped dividend and interest payments, and buybacks, was already public. The one detail worth having is that only the first bucket carries a hard limit, which is why Strategy's full $1.25 billion of reserve capacity was still intact even after its largest-ever sale in early July.
Fire Disruption Update · Aug 2
Wildfires knocked out power and cell service at my location, so the weekly Zoom call is cancelled and the Weekly Trade and Weekly Market recap videos will not be recorded this week. I am borrowing a neighbor's Starlink Mini to post this, and I will try to get a Loom recording out with the thoughts I had planned for the call. The mods are available on Discord in the meantime.
Earnings Reports
Every earnings print I covered this week, linked to the full post.
This week 152 companies reported earnings and 76 percent of them beat expectations, which sounds solid on the surface, but the market was not particularly impressed. The average price reaction across all reporters came in at negative 0.3 percent, meaning even companies clearing the bar were mostly getting sold or ignored. That gap between the beat rate and the tape reaction is worth keeping in mind as we head into the back half of the season.
On the sector side, Energy and Healthcare stood out as the clear bright spots, with beat rates of 100 and 88 percent respectively and average reactions of positive 4.0 and positive 3.3 percent. Industrials also put up a strong beat rate at 93 percent, though the market still took those stocks down an average of 1.4 percent, which tells you expectations may have been running high going in. On the other end, Tech ex-semis was the biggest disappointment with only a 56 percent beat rate and a negative 1.8 percent average reaction, and Semis and Memory sat at 50 percent with a near-flat reaction. Communication Services only had three reporters but averaged a negative 5.8 percent move, which is a number that stands on its own.
Season to date we have 271 of 506 companies in the books, so we are just past the halfway point with 235 still to report. The cumulative beat rate sits at 82 percent, which is running meaningfully ahead of this week's 76 percent figure, and the average reaction for the season is a modest negative 0.1 percent. At the current pace we are projecting roughly 415 beats by the time the season wraps up.
Not a member? You are seeing the free weekly summary. Join the Patreon to read the full posts.