Trading Apologist
The Weekly Market Digest · Sunday, August 16, 2026
Hi everyone,
I hope you had a good weekend and got some time to step away from the screens. 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 a busy week on the macro front, with CPI coming in line, PPI running cool, and the retail sales miss turning out narrower than the headline suggested once you stripped out autos and online. The labor market data told a similar story of surface strength hiding softer details underneath. The bigger shift was the Fed picture coming into sharper focus: the odds of another hike drifted lower after the inflation prints, and those falling hike odds gave sentiment a real lift into the back half of the week. On the earnings side, this was a light week for the S&P, and the season is the better lens: through 436 reports so far, roughly 79 percent of companies have beaten estimates, while last week's small sample came in softer at 60 percent with the average reporter down 0.9 percent regardless of result, a sign the tape is letting sentiment and positioning do more of the driving than the prints themselves. The full scorecard, including the sector standouts, is in the Earnings Reports section at the bottom of this issue. On the community side, this week brought the launch of the AI Trade Desk alongside the new Adaptive Levels and Money Flow indicators, and on Friday's community call we demoed it and showed how to use it. The rebuilt Gann Swing indicator with three-bar signals went out as well. The goal with all of these is the same as ever: more data in your hands for better decisions, and your feedback as you put them to work will shape where they go next. Details are in Community & Tool Updates below.
It was a busy week on the macro front, with CPI coming in line, PPI running cool, and the retail sales miss turning out narrower than the headline suggested once you stripped out autos and online. The labor market data told a similar story of surface strength hiding softer details underneath. The bigger shift was the Fed picture coming into sharper focus: the odds of another hike drifted lower after the inflation prints, and those falling hike odds gave sentiment a real lift into the back half of the week. On the earnings side, this was a light week for the S&P, and the season is the better lens: through 436 reports so far, roughly 79 percent of companies have beaten estimates, while last week's small sample came in softer at 60 percent with the average reporter down 0.9 percent regardless of result, a sign the tape is letting sentiment and positioning do more of the driving than the prints themselves. The full scorecard, including the sector standouts, is in the Earnings Reports section at the bottom of this issue. On the community side, this week brought the launch of the AI Trade Desk alongside the new Adaptive Levels and Money Flow indicators, and on Friday's community call we demoed it and showed how to use it. The rebuilt Gann Swing indicator with three-bar signals went out as well. The goal with all of these is the same as ever: more data in your hands for better decisions, and your feedback as you put them to work will shape where they go next. Details are in Community & Tool Updates below.
The Weekly Alpha
The week's flagship posts: the market recap, the live calls, and the watchlist review.
Weekly Trade Recap: 08/10 - 08/14 · Aug 16
This week I ran 10 trades across 10 names, trimming ADBE at an 11.2% gain into the 200-day, exiting ACHR calls at a 14.3% gain on the earnings pop, and rotating into post-earnings entries on BW, PLUG, and ALB. I also added to beaten-down tech via BILI, Qualcomm, and IBM, and the video opens with my answer to why I am still buying calls despite weak August and September seasonality.
Weekly Market Prep Zoom Call - 08.10.26 · Aug 10
The big theme on this week's Market Prep call was leadership rotation. Financials, industrials, and healthcare hit fresh all-time highs last week while materials look poised to break out, and within semiconductors NVDA and the optical names appear set to lead while memory lags. NAND pricing peaked in March and has been rolling over while DRAM is still accelerating, which is why memory names have struggled despite strong earnings.
Markets & Macro
The bigger picture across rates, commodities, and the tape.
The AI Credit Warnings Are Real & Are Dated 2027 · Aug 16
The bearish AI credit story circulating right now is partly right, but the timeline matters. Leveraged loans from application software firms most exposed to AI displacement are trading near 87.75 cents on the dollar, down 9% this year on roughly $147 billion outstanding, and the spread over healthier software borrowers has widened from one point in January to three or four now. The scarier numbers in the bear case do not check out, and the ones that do point to a 2027 stress date, not an imminent collapse.
Analysts Expect Hyperscaler Margins to Outrun the AI Depreciation Bill · Aug 13
A BCA Research chart built on FactSet consensus data shows the gap between hyperscaler EBITDA margins and EBIT margins widening from roughly five to eight percentage points historically to an expected 18 points by 2030. That gap is the depreciation bill from roughly $700 billion in combined capex this year alone, and the entire bull case on GOOGL, MSFT, AMZN, and META rests on revenue growing fast enough to outrun it.
July CPI: In-Line Inflation, Coin Flip Fed · Aug 12
July CPI came in exactly as expected: headline inflation rose 0.1% on the month and cooled to 3.4% annually, while core held steady at 2.5%. The in-line number matters because it confirms the energy shock from the Iran conflict this spring is unwinding cleanly, with gasoline giving back ground after that brutal 21% spike in March. The Fed is now a genuine coin flip, and I walked through what the data means for the rate decision ahead.
Also this week
Oil Bounces, the Rally Stalls · Aug 13
Sector Relative Strength
Week of August 10 · % change vs prior week's close
Oil & Gas E&P (XOP)+8.47%
Energy (XLE)+7.58%
Regional Banks (KRE)+2.26%
Comm Services (XLC)+1.53%
Utilities (XLU)+1.40%
Software (IGV)+1.30%
Technology (XLK)+1.13%
Cons Staples (XLP)+1.12%
Healthcare (XLV)+1.10%
Small Caps (IWM)+1.04%
Financials (XLF)+0.97%
Semiconductors (SMH)+0.88%
Industrials (XLI)+0.72%
Real Estate (XLRE)+0.64%
Biotech (XBI)+0.04%
Materials (XLB)-0.61%
Cons Discretionary (XLY)-1.38%
Homebuilders (XHB)-1.61%
S&P 500 (SPY)+0.35%
Equal-weight S&P (RSP)+1.32%
Market Recaps
Every market recap from the week in one place: the daily and morning notes plus the weekly recap.
Overview Weekly Market Recap - 08/10 - 08/14
Wednesday Daily Market Recap - August 12th, 2026
Community & Tool Updates
Indicator releases, new tools, events, and community happenings.
The AI Trade Desk Is Live: Full Community Call Recording · Aug 15
We held a two-hour community Zoom this week walking through the new AI Trade Desk, Market Tools, and two new TradingView indicators. Miles covered the Adaptive Levels indicator, which maps support and resistance zones across four timeframes and renders them as areas rather than exact prices so priority is visible at a glance. Everything lives under Market Tools on the site and none of it requires TradingView.
The AI Premium Is 26 Points · Aug 11
A new tool called Silicon Tape just went live, tracking real AI chip demand each month using Taiwan's mandatory revenue filings from TSMC, Foxconn, Quanta, UMC, and ASE. The AI premium, which is the gap between TSMC's growth rate and UMC's, currently sits at 26 points, and July's numbers showed TSMC up 45%, Foxconn up 54%, and Quanta up 131% year over year.
Gann Swing Indicator: 3-Bar Signals Rebuilt · Aug 14
We just shipped a major update to the TA Gann Swing Indicator, rebuilding the 3-bar signal logic from the ground up so signals only fire at genuine pivot points rather than stacking up inside trends. A new RSI filter now requires conditions to be actually overbought or oversold before a signal prints, and a new Gann 3-Bar Filters section in settings lets you tune strictness further. Refresh your chart to pick up the update and no alert changes are needed.
Also this week
PSA: Don't Sign Up Via the App Store · Aug 12
News
The stories that moved names on our radar.
Jane Street's $15 Billion July Loss, Leverage, & the Semiconductor Rebound · Aug 15
Jane Street took a roughly $15 billion hit in July, confirmed when the firm disclosed the loss to lenders while refinancing its credit lines. The firm was an outside investor in Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund, which lost about 67% in a single month, and that position alone fell from roughly $10 billion to between $3 and $3.5 billion, with technology stocks and long positions in non-AI Asian equities making up the rest of the loss.
TSMC Just Confirmed the AI Trade (Again) · Aug 11
TSMC reported July sales up 45% year over year to $14.5 billion, with full-year revenue now expected to grow slightly above 40% and the company raising its 2026 capex outlook to a record $60 to $64 billion. Taiwan-listed TSMC shares are up 50% year to date, more than double NVDA's 20% gain, and the manufacturer outperforming its most famous customer is one of the cleaner signals that AI demand is real and accelerating.
Premarket Options Start Monday: Here Are the Brokers That Will Have Them First · Aug 16
Premarket options trading launches on Cboe's C1 exchange this week, with orders accepted from 7:15 a.m. ET and trading running 7:30 to 9:25 a.m., plus a short 4:00 to 4:15 p.m. afternoon session. Twenty-one names are in at launch, including NVDA, TSLA, META, and AAPL, and any ticker that averages 150,000 contracts a day, 10 million shares a day, and a $50 billion market cap over six months can be added in February or August.
Earnings Reports
Every earnings print I covered this week, linked to the full post.
This week 60% of reporters beat estimates, which is a softer showing than we have grown used to seeing this season. The market was not rewarding beats or punishing misses in any consistent way, and on average the tape handed reporters a 0.9% loss regardless of what they put up, which tells you sentiment is doing a lot of the heavy lifting right now.
On the sector side, Consumer Cyclical was the standout with a perfect beat rate across its two reporters, though the average price reaction of negative 9.1% shows the market wanted more than just a beat and came in with high expectations already baked in. Tech excluding semis was the weak link, with only one of five reporters clearing the bar, yet that group somehow averaged a positive 2.7% reaction, meaning the few that did beat got rewarded handsomely while the misses were treated with some patience. That kind of disconnect between beat rates and price reactions within sectors is worth watching as we move through the rest of the season.
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