Trading Apologist
The Weekly Market Digest · Sunday, August 9, 2026
Hi everyone,
Here is a look back at what we covered this last week and where we go from here.
The week in brief
Stocks finished the week higher despite some chop into the back half, closing strong on Friday after three days of consolidation, with a live bull flag case building on the indices. Earnings season ran at full speed, with 135 companies reporting and 75 percent of them beating expectations, yet the average price reaction landed at exactly zero. The market is grading guidance and forward expectations rather than the numbers themselves, and the full earnings scorecard at the bottom of this issue shows which sectors were rewarded for delivering and which were sold anyway. Friday's jobs report moved markets in a way that months of Fed signaling had not, but in the dovish direction: September hike odds fell from roughly 57% to around 44%, taking pressure off the hawks ahead of CPI next Wednesday, August 12. The broader picture looks more optimistic, but with different names now leading. Leadership has rotated out of semiconductors into a group of names with confirmed reversals, and others sitting right at resistance ahead of potential breakouts, so the focus into next week is identifying the best setups. We also spent time this week on the structural story behind AI, including where the buildout is fragile, how China is competing on a different axis than most people are watching, and why the premium on American equities has quietly compressed. If you want to go deeper on any of the names we covered, the earnings reports, asset watches, and the Q3 watchlist update are all worth reading alongside the fundamental and options data available in the tools.
Stocks finished the week higher despite some chop into the back half, closing strong on Friday after three days of consolidation, with a live bull flag case building on the indices. Earnings season ran at full speed, with 135 companies reporting and 75 percent of them beating expectations, yet the average price reaction landed at exactly zero. The market is grading guidance and forward expectations rather than the numbers themselves, and the full earnings scorecard at the bottom of this issue shows which sectors were rewarded for delivering and which were sold anyway. Friday's jobs report moved markets in a way that months of Fed signaling had not, but in the dovish direction: September hike odds fell from roughly 57% to around 44%, taking pressure off the hawks ahead of CPI next Wednesday, August 12. The broader picture looks more optimistic, but with different names now leading. Leadership has rotated out of semiconductors into a group of names with confirmed reversals, and others sitting right at resistance ahead of potential breakouts, so the focus into next week is identifying the best setups. We also spent time this week on the structural story behind AI, including where the buildout is fragile, how China is competing on a different axis than most people are watching, and why the premium on American equities has quietly compressed. If you want to go deeper on any of the names we covered, the earnings reports, asset watches, and the Q3 watchlist update are all worth reading alongside the fundamental and options data available in the tools.
Asset Watch
Single-name setups worth a look.
Asset Watch: Gold · Aug 7
Gold broke out this week, running from near $4,070 to above $4,350, driven largely by dollar weakness tied to coordinated currency intervention. Physical demand from Chinese central bank buying is doing real work here without speculative crowds joining in, and Western positioning remains light after speculators cut long exposure hard in the spring.
Asset Watch: TE (The Numbers are Out, Call for August 12) · Aug 6
T1 Energy confirmed its Q2 earnings release for August 12, about a week earlier than the street expected, with the press release at 6 am ET and the call at 8 am ET. Shares ran to $6.32 intraday off the $3.50 low from July 30, and an overextended chart heading into the call may warrant hedging.
Asset Watch: SPCX · Aug 4
SPCX was rejected from $130 after earnings and sold off 12% from that level, making $130 the line to reclaim for more bullish price action. The center Deviation Band and VRVP point of control near $115 are holding as support, and a breakout from $130 would open a run toward $155.
Palantir's Guidance Raise Was the Largest It Has Ever Given · Aug 4
Palantir's full-year revenue guidance went to $8.15 billion, lifting implied growth from 71% to 82%, the largest full-year raise the company has ever made. The Q3 guide implies roughly 99% growth, meaning management is guiding to acceleration for a third consecutive quarter at a business now running above $8 billion annually, which is not what software companies at that scale are supposed to do.
Owning the Whole Chain · Aug 3
Goldman's metals and mining team published a piece showing that dealmaking in critical minerals has shifted from buying ore to buying the entire chain from mine to finished magnet. A single gigawatt-scale data center can require up to 50,000 metric tons of copper, and a new copper mine takes 15 years or more to bring online, which is the same bottleneck dynamic we covered with rare earth magnets back in May.
The Weekly Alpha
The week's flagship posts: the market recap, the live calls, and the watchlist review.
Weekly Trade Recap - 8/3 - 8/7 (Plus Last Week's Catch-Up) · Aug 8
Ten trades across seven names this week, plus a catch-up on the week I missed during the power outage. I closed the last of the SQQQ hedge at a 5.96% blended loss as the indices broke out, entered small speculative bounces in POET, ENVX, TE, and DECK with tight risk-free stops, and trimmed 20% of Unity into strength for a 31.10% blended gain while selling covered calls against the remainder.
Q3 Watchlist Update: Reorganized Around the Names That Are Turning Around · Aug 8
The Q3 watchlist got a full overhaul this week, reorganized around names that are actually turning around after last week's breakdown and recovery. The Open Trades and Top Swing Trades sections are where I will spend 90% of my time, and a new Crypto section captures the names compressing into symmetrical triangles as we approach the seasonal window where crypto tends to turn heading into Q4.
Weekly Market Prep Video - w/o Aug 3, 2026 · Aug 3
This week's market prep covered three overlapping pressures: TLT posting its lowest monthly close since inception in 2002, the typical early negative reaction new Fed chairs tend to produce, and coordinated currency intervention from South Korea, Japan, and the US. Near term the path could stay rough, but a weaker dollar over time is supportive of hard assets and lines up with what the administration has been pushing for.
Markets & Macro
The bigger picture across rates, commodities, and the tape.
Why the AI Buildout Breaks on Deceleration, Not Decline · Aug 4
The risk in the AI buildout is not a repeat of 2000 but something closer to 2008, where the structure breaks not when growth stops but when the pace of growth slows. The financing assumes acceleration, and the warning sits in the second derivative, whether capex growth is speeding up or beginning to decelerate, not in the headline spending figures themselves.
Capital Is Scarce Again, and Markets Are Repricing Everything · Aug 3
The core story in markets right now is that too many things need capital at the same time, and that competition is pushing borrowing costs higher across the board. The 30-year Treasury yield broke out last week to levels not seen since before 2008, and Goldman's read, which I share, is that the Fed is a passenger here rather than the driver.
23,000 Jobs Lost in July, 103,000 More Erased From May and June · Aug 7
The US economy lost 23,000 jobs in July against expectations of an 83,000 gain, and May and June were revised down by a combined 103,000, cutting average monthly job growth over the past year to 34,000. My book dropped nearly 3% in the premarket and recovered it within minutes, which tells the whole story: soft wages and a falling unemployment rate removed the case for a September hike, and futures repriced accordingly.
Also this week
Sector Relative Strength
Week of August 03 · % change vs prior week's close
Software (IGV)+8.68%
Semiconductors (SMH)+7.82%
Technology (XLK)+7.20%
Homebuilders (XHB)+6.86%
Biotech (XBI)+6.77%
Materials (XLB)+4.98%
Small Caps (IWM)+3.55%
Cons Discretionary (XLY)+3.25%
Industrials (XLI)+2.97%
Comm Services (XLC)+2.78%
Healthcare (XLV)+1.88%
Financials (XLF)+1.28%
Regional Banks (KRE)+0.14%
Cons Staples (XLP)-0.01%
Real Estate (XLRE)-0.33%
Utilities (XLU)-1.58%
Energy (XLE)-3.44%
Oil & Gas E&P (XOP)-5.97%
S&P 500 (SPY)+3.48%
Equal-weight S&P (RSP)+2.43%
Market Recaps
Every market recap from the week in one place: the daily and morning notes plus the weekly recap.
Overview Weekly Market Recap - 08/03 - 08/07
News
The stories that moved names on our radar.
Berkshire Just Broke a 14 Quarter Selling Streak · Aug 8
Berkshire ended a fourteen-quarter streak as a net seller in Q2, buying $23.5 billion of equities against $3.7 billion sold, with Greg Abel leading the pivot. About $10 billion went into Alphabet, $6.8 billion closed the Taylor Morrison acquisition, and buybacks ran $4.53 billion, nearly twenty times the prior quarter's pace.
Google Loses Its Two Most Senior AI Names in One Day · Aug 5
Alphabet fell about 5% after Google lost its two most senior AI figures in a single day. Demis Hassabis steps back from running DeepMind day-to-day, and Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years to start Discovery Loop, taking Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat with him. Google is a founding investor and cloud partner in Discovery Loop, which limits the financial hit the same way the Anthropic structure does, but it does not put those researchers back on the Gemini roadmap.
China Is Winning on Tokens, Not on Dollars · Aug 7
Chinese AI models now handle 69% of token traffic on OpenRouter, up from 17% in April 2025, and the market has barely moved on it. The catch is that volume share and revenue share are two different races: Chinese models take roughly 10% of dollars spent on general tasks because they price at a fraction of Western competitors. Goldman raised its 2026 Chinese AI revenue estimate to $13bn, which is real growth and still a rounding error against what US hyperscalers are spending on capex alone.
Also this week
Earnings Reports
Every earnings print I covered this week, linked to the full post.
This week 135 companies reported earnings and 75 percent of them beat expectations, which is a solid showing by any measure. Despite the strong beat rate, the average price reaction across all reporters landed at exactly zero, meaning the market was largely unmoved by the results and traders were not rewarding beats the way you might expect.
On the sector side, Materials stood out with a 60 percent beat rate but an average price reaction of positive 3.7 percent, and Communication Services matched that energy with a 70 percent beat rate and a positive 3.5 percent reaction, so money clearly moved toward those groups when they delivered. Industrials and Utilities had the roughest week on the price side, with average reactions of negative 2.1 percent and negative 1.8 percent respectively, and that fits a broader pattern we have seen this season where defensive and economically sensitive industrial names tend to get sold even when the numbers come in fine.
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