Hey,
Mark's flying solo today, so there's nobody in the room to talk him out of anything.
He's got a loaded tape to work through: oil sold off after the weekend cease-fire, the Fed meets Wednesday with the market genuinely split on hold versus hike, and Big Tech is getting punished for spending money on the thing everybody says they should be spending money on. That's before the part you actually showed up for.
Eight candidates for the Ticker Highlight Show Play of the Week. Here's what the team turned in.
Licia likes a big-box retailer that quietly turned itself into a logistics and advertising business while everyone argued about grocery margins. She hates a discount brokerage that makes more on your idle cash than on your trades.
Mark likes an enterprise software name that IT departments can't rip out without breaking half the company. He hates a brand-new ETF stapled to one narrow corner of the chip market.
Hans likes a storage maker sitting directly under the data buildout. He hates one of the biggest names in tech, which just torched a chunk of market value for the crime of telling investors it plans to spend more.
And Andrew likes the app you scroll at midnight pretending you're moving. He hates a company whose product doesn't stay on this planet.
Mark walks through all eight live.
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The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: A weekend cease-fire did more for stocks than any earnings report this month. Brent crude fell 4 percent to trade under 86 dollars a barrel, and that alone pushed Dow and S&P 500 futures up 0.8 percent with Nasdaq-100 futures 1.4 percent higher. The US and Iran paused fighting, which reopens the door to talks.
Now comes the busiest week of the quarter: a Fed decision Wednesday, then Microsoft (MSFT), Meta Platforms (META), Apple (AAPL), and Amazon (AMZN). Cheap oil takes pressure off the Fed and props up the tape. It also means one headline out of the Middle East can hand it all back.
SIGN: Wednesday's Fed decision is a coin flip, and Chairman Kevin Warsh seems fine with that. Futures now put a hold at 62 percent and a hike at 37 percent, down from 87 and 12 on July 17. Warsh has said he wants a "good family fight" in the room, and he'll get one.
June core inflation cooled to 2.6 percent, which gives the hold camp cover. Oil's run past 100 dollars last week gives the hike camp theirs. Former Kansas City Fed president Esther George calls it 50-50 and wouldn't be shocked by a quarter-point move, though she leans September. Warsh has stopped telegraphing anything, so read the two-year yield instead of the speeches.
SNEAKER: Brian Sozzi is arguing the selloff over AI spending has it backwards, and he's putting his name on it. Alphabet (GOOGL) raised full-year capital spending to as much as 205 billion dollars and shed roughly 293 billion in market value Thursday. Tesla (TSLA) committed 25 billion for 2026, about triple its historical pace, and dropped 14.5 percent.
His case: executives get paid to make bets, the bets are on AI, and the ones placed 18 months ago are paying off now. He cites AMD's Lisa Su on compute demand and Mastercard's fraud tools as evidence the spending converts. My read is simpler. A tape that punishes capital spending this hard isn't confident about anything.