Dear Trader,
Mark's got the mic this morning and he's roped Voz into joining him.
Between the two of them they’ll cover the three stories below plus whatever else lands between now and then.
There's plenty to work with.
Dell told the world it booked a record pile of AI server orders and the stock ripped after hours. The August jobs number came in soft enough to make Friday's print interesting, and Bessent spent two days in Asheville getting 19 finance ministers to nod along about China.
Then stick around, because Voz is presenting right after the show wraps.
She's walking through how she picks one trade late in the session, the kind that opens and closes inside a few minutes.
You're not holding anything overnight and you're not sitting on a position waiting for an earnings report to tell you if you were right.
She'll show you what she wants to see on the tape first and why she cares about the clock as much as the setup.
This link adds State of the Market to your calendar.
The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: Dell Technologies (DELL) booked a record $60.9 billion in AI server orders last quarter, and the stock jumped as much as 10% after hours Tuesday. Revenue hit $47 billion, up 58% year over year, and adjusted earnings rose 203% to $7.04 a share. Management raised the full-year outlook by $25 billion to $192 billion and closed the quarter with a record $95 billion backlog.
Traders knocked the shares down nearly 6% on Tuesday before any of this printed, a fair read on how twitchy holders get in a name up 230% this year. The number I want next: margin. AI servers run on expensive GPUs and memory that Dell doesn't price, so the order book can grow while the profit on it thins.
SNEAKER: Scott Bessent left the G20 meeting in Asheville saying 19 of the 20 finance ministers agreed that a never-ending stream of cheap exports from non-market economies can't last. China was the lone dissenter, and Bessent named it from the podium. He also reminded reporters he'd warned these countries in 2025 that the U.S. tariff wall would push Chinese goods their way, and that he was right.
The line worth filing came later: global debt hit a record $353 trillion, U.S. debt crossed $40 trillion in August, and Bessent says nothing here strikes him as dire. That's the only thing a Treasury secretary can say. Whether buyers at the long end agree is the part that shows up in your P&L.
SIGN: Private employers added 38,000 jobs in August, short of the 47,000 economists wanted and the slowest month since January. July got revised up to 46,000, so hiring is still positive. Education and health services carried almost the whole thing at 45,000 jobs.
Manufacturing shed 17,000 and professional and business services dropped 16,000, which are the two lines that actually track the business cycle. Job changers still pulled 4.7% base pay increases against 3% for people who stayed put. BLS reports Friday with consensus somewhere between 53,000 and 56,000 depending on whose survey you read, and ADP has a lousy record predicting that number anyway.