Good morning, {$esp_first_name|default:Trader}.
Mark goes live at 10 a.m. ET today for State of the Market, and he's not flying solo.
Licia is riding shotgun with charts pulled up, ready to show you exactly where she's seeing setups in this tape.
The agenda is stacked.
Mark will break down why the S&P is still holding that 7,000 breakout despite Iran doing its Iran thing, and then he's wading into earnings season, which goes from simmer to boil this week.
If you've been staring at your screen wondering which names to play into prints and which ones to duck, this is the session you don't skip.
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And if you missed yesterday’s show, scroll down to see what you missed.
The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: Iran flinches the tape, Nasdaq's streak goes in the ground
The Nasdaq's 13-day win streak, the longest since 1992 when Bill Clinton was running for president and grunge was a personality, finally snapped Monday. The culprit is the one nobody wants to hear about: Iran.
The S&P gave back 0.24 percent to 7,109, the Nasdaq slipped 0.26 percent, and the Dow held flat by a whopping five points. Meanwhile the Russell 2000 hit a fresh record, because small caps are apparently reading a different newspaper.
The breakout above 7,000 on the S&P is still intact, but "overheated" is doing a lot of work in the pre-ceasefire tape. Bulls need that level to hold.
SNOOZE: The quietest CEO exit in tech history, and that's the point
Tim Cook is stepping aside September 1 after nearly 15 years running the most valuable company on Earth. He's handing the keys to hardware chief John Ternus and sliding into the executive chairman's recliner.
The reaction? Tech titans dropped their takes on X like it was a eulogy. Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, and even Warren Buffett weighed in, mostly with polite claps for a guy who took Apple from $350 billion to over $4 trillion.
Shares barely twitched after hours, which tells you everything. Wall Street saw this coming, likes Ternus as the pick, and is already staring past the goodbye letter toward whether the new guy can thread the AI needle.
SNEAKER: Warsh's audition: cut rates for Trump without looking like it
Kevin Warsh sits down in front of the Senate Banking Committee at 10 a.m. ET with the unenviable task of convincing lawmakers he can cut rates for Trump without actually cutting rates for Trump.
The former Fed governor will field questions on monetary policy, banking regs, and his "complicated" personal finances, which is DC-speak for "he'd be the richest Fed chair ever." Expect fireworks from Warren on the wealth angle, a Tillis hold tied to the Powell investigation, and Warsh leaning hard on the "Fed must stay in its lane" framing.
Confirmation is still the base case before Powell's May 15 exit, but this is the tape-moving event.
What You Missed Monday
Monday's Ticker Highlight Show was a masterclass in how a market can shrug off geopolitics and still make new highs. Mark kicked things off by pointing out the absurdity of it all. The Strait of Hormuz reopened Friday, then closed again over the weekend, and the S&P, Nasdaq, and Russell 2000 still managed to print fresh all-time highs.
Only the Dow didn't get the memo. The move off the March 30th low has been a near 900-point rip in the S&P, the kind of move Mark hasn't seen since the 2020 COVID bounce. The market has officially moved on from Iran unless something blows up for real.
But here's the kicker: 60 percent of stocks are above their 250-day moving average, which means 40 percent are still below it. Translation: this is a stock picker's market, not an indexer's victory lap.
The Ticker Highlight crew gave you four to love and four to leave. On the like side: Intel (INTC) ahead of Thursday earnings, iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) for the risk-on Bitcoin trade, Netflix (NFLX) for a tradable bottom after the earnings knee-cap, and Blackstone (BX) as the best baby-out-with-the-bathwater setup in private credit.
On the hate side: Mosaic (MOS) is dead money until the Strait opens, Shopify (SHOP) has AI risk written all over it, Wells Fargo (WFC) is still cursed after 20 years, and Super Micro (SMCI) is one Mark thinks could see fraud charges and receivership.
Frank Gregory joined to break down the Iran situation and flag USA Rare Earth (USAR)'s $2.8 billion acquisition of Brazil's Serra Verde mine. The deal makes USAR the only fully vertically integrated magnet maker in America, from mine to finished product. That's a genuine China supply-chain story, not just a headline pop. Full breakdown happened behind the paywall in Ticker Highlight Show Premium.