How the day closed: indexes, leaders, laggards, and volatility.
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This is the CAMS Closing Market Recap for Thursday, August 6.
Stocks drifted lower into the close, but nobody rushed for the exits. The S&P 500 finished down about two tenths of a percent. The Nasdaq 100 gave back a bit more, closing off roughly four tenths. The Dow was the weak spot, down eight tenths, and small caps fell about half a percent.
Underneath, the tape was tilted red without being broken. Eight of the eleven sectors closed lower. Energy was the clear standout, adding about one and a half percent and doing nearly all of the day's heavy lifting by itself. Communications and health care were the only other groups to hold green, and both only by a fraction of a percent. The soft side was cyclical and rate sensitive: materials, real estate and industrials each closed down roughly nine tenths.
Dow breadth told the same story. Twelve of the thirty components advanced and eighteen declined. The strength came from media and large cap software, while the weakest names sat in aerospace and industrial technology, off a little more than three percent.
Volatility went the other way. The VIX slipped more than four percent to just over fifteen, a reminder that a slow bleed in prices is not the same thing as fear. The character of the session in one line: a quiet, low conviction fade, with the indexes doing little and the average stock doing slightly worse.
Tomorrow brings the main event. The US employment report lands at eight thirty Eastern, with non-farm payrolls, the unemployment rate and average hourly earnings arriving together, and Canada publishes its own jobs figures at the same moment. Next week carries CPI on Wednesday and PPI on Thursday.
The desk will be watching how breadth and volatility respond once the payroll numbers are on the tape.
CAMS publishes impersonal market research — nothing here is individualized investment advice. The full written research is at curve ahead market strategies dot com.
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