Dear Trader,
Three stories this morning all arguing about the same thing: whether money is about to get cheap again.
The Treasury decided long-term yields were too high and stepped in to fix it, which dropped rates and pushed bitcoin over $70,000 for the first time since June.
Walmart, meanwhile, is telling you the customer is still trading down.
Mark Sebastian and Olivia Voz go live today to sort out which of these actually touches your positions and which is just noise with a big headline attached.
Read these three first so you show up with real questions.
This link adds State of the Market to your calendar.
The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: Walmart raised guidance, beat on both lines, and got sold off anyway. Walmart (WMT) posted revenue growth of nearly six percent to $187.9 billion and adjusted earnings of 81 cents against the 74 cents Wall Street expected. Then everybody looked at US same-store sales, up 2.6 percent when the Street had penciled in 3.7 percent, and the stock dropped six percent premarket.
Traffic and ticket size both came in light, which matters more than the headline miss, because Walmart spent the quarter cutting prices on beef, chips and soda specifically to pull in deal hunters. E-commerce still grew 23 percent, so the shoppers haven't gone anywhere. They're just spending less per trip.
SNEAKER: The Treasury walked into the bond market this week and stocks barely reacted. Scott Bessent ramped up debt buybacks to drag long-dated yields lower, and it worked: the 10-year fell five basis points to 4.65 percent and the 30-year gave up nine to 5.19 percent. That complicates things for Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, who's been content to let higher long rates do part of the tightening for him.
Add a national debt that just crossed $40 trillion and a Wednesday night Truth Social post promising economic warfare against Iran, and you'd expect futures to do something. They didn't. Flat tape on that much news is worth more of your attention than a big red day.
SIGN: Bitcoin cleared $70,000 for the first time in more than two months. It added better than three percent to trade above $71,500, stacked on top of a seven percent run the day before that torched $2.7 billion in short positions inside 24 hours. Same driver as everything else this week: yields falling on the buyback news, with the dollar sliding to a three-month low.
Trump also met with executives from Coinbase, Payward and Blockchain.com, which put the Clarity Act back in play after it missed a Senate vote before recess. Cheap money talk plus a friendlier bill, and crypto moves first. It usually does.