Where the session stands: breadth, sectors, and what moved.
Read the transcript
This is the CAMS Midday Market Check for Tuesday, August fourth.
Stocks are broadly higher at midday, though the gains are uneven. The Nasdaq 100 is up about two and nine tenths percent, the Dow up roughly one and eight tenths, the Russell 2000 about one and seven tenths, and the S&P 500 about one and six tenths. The largest technology names are doing the heaviest lifting, but the strength clearly extends well past them.
Breadth backs that up. Inside the Dow, twenty three names are higher and only seven are lower, a wide advance rather than a narrow one. Caterpillar sits at the front of the average, up better than six and a half percent, with Cisco and Goldman Sachs also among the strongest. At the back, Nike, Verizon and UnitedHealth are the softest of the thirty, and none of them are down even two percent.
The sector map tells a cyclical story. Technology is far and away the leader, up more than four and a half percent, with materials and industrials next. The laggards are the defensive and income oriented corners: communications roughly flat, energy slightly lower, and utilities down about half a percent. Six sectors are higher and five lower, so money is rotating toward growth and cyclical exposure rather than lifting everything at once.
One wrinkle. The VIX is up about two percent, near sixteen, even with the tape green. Volatility expectations firming on an up day tends to say the market is looking past today.
Still on the calendar: New Zealand employment arrives this evening, ADP payrolls and ISM services come tomorrow morning, and the government jobs report lands Friday.
CAMS publishes impersonal market research — nothing here is individualized investment advice. The full written research is at curve ahead market strategies dot com.
Publisher Disclosure.
Curve Ahead Market Strategies publishes an impersonal business and financial publication of general and regular circulation.
The content is identical for all subscribers and is not tailored to any person’s portfolio, investment objectives,
risk tolerance, tax status, liquidity needs, or other circumstances. We do not provide individualized investment advice
through email, chat, customer support, social media, or any other channel. Any discussion of a security reflects the
publisher’s editorial views only and is not a request, instruction, or recommendation that any reader buy, sell,
hold, or use any specific investment strategy.
Conflicts & Compensation.
Principals, employees, or affiliates of the publisher may hold positions in securities discussed in this publication. Under the publisher’s personal-trading policy, principals do not trade a covered security from two trading days before through two trading days after the publisher posts coverage of that security, and where a principal holds a position in a security discussed, the publication states so.
Neither the publisher nor its principals, employees, or affiliates received compensation from any issuer, underwriter,
or dealer in connection with this publication. If any such compensation ever exists, the publication will clearly
disclose its source, amount, type, and timing.
Risk.
Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Markets change; nothing described here is a prediction
or guarantee of any outcome.