Dear Trader,
Mark Sebastian and Andrew Giovinazzi are both on the mic this morning, and they're pulling apart all three of the stories below live.
Then Andrew sticks around after State of the Market for a pop-up session.
Same room, nothing else to sign up for, so don't wander off when the show ends.
Get in early if you can.
Garrett Baldwin runs I'd Trade That at 9:20 a.m. Eastern, right before the State of the Market at 10.
This link adds State of the Market to your calendar.
The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: Kevin Warsh's Fed spent the spring arguing about whether to hike, and the July data just took the argument away. Producer prices came in flat month over month, consumer prices barely budged, and traders promptly dumped their bets on a September hike.
That's the good news. The bad news is inflation has now run above the Fed's 2 percent target for more than five years, and Cleveland's Beth Hammack doesn't think another three or four years of drifting toward it counts as a plan. She was one of three dissenters last month who wanted to hike on the spot.
Futures still price better than a 90 percent chance of a higher policy rate by December. Do-nothing isn't the same as done.
SNEAKER: The site your nephew uses to argue about headphones is about to be an S&P 500 component. Reddit (RDDT) gets added before the open on Aug. 18, and the stock popped on the news.
Strange promotion for a name that's down 22 percent this year while the index it's joining is up 13 percent. The business itself looks fine: second-quarter revenue climbed 61 percent to $805 million and earnings per share ripped 178 percent higher.
Co-founder Steve Huffman says roughly 40 percent of Reddit conversations are people asking what to buy, which makes the ad pitch write itself. Index funds have to own it Monday whether they buy that story or not.
SIGN: Futures are doing nothing this morning, which after Thursday's record close in the S&P 500 counts as a fine day's work. The S&P and the Nasdaq are both tracking for weekly gains, and Asia handed us a clean setup with Korea's KOSPI up over 1.4 percent.
The earnings calendar is empty today, so retail sales and the University of Michigan sentiment read get the tape to themselves. Next week the question becomes whether the consumer still shows up, with Target and Walmart reporting.
Then everything stops for NVIDIA (NVDA) on Aug. 26. Two quiet weeks ahead of the only print anybody actually cares about.
One flag before this ships: the Reddit piece says shares rose more than 12 percent premarket, but the quote widget on the same page had RDDT up about 3 percent. I left the number out rather than lock in a figure that's already moved. Check the tape before you publish if you want a percentage in there.