Dear Trader,

The crew turned in 10 names for this week's Ticker Highlight play of the week, and Mark reveals every one of them on air.

• Mark brought a database company the AI trade sprinted right past, plus a flash memory maker he thinks is about to learn what a storage cycle turning feels like.
• Licia likes a money center bank that's been cheaper than it should be for a decade, and she's fading the broad market itself.
• Andrew's love is a streaming name near its highs that he calls the cheapest highflyer on the market. His hate is a liquor company operating in a country that keeps drinking less every year.
• Tim wants the fuel behind every datacenter buildout, sitting 45 percent off its high, and he doesn't want the gym chain that grew sales by charging its current members more because it couldn't add new ones.
• Hans is buying the monitoring software Wall Street just downgraded to Sell and selling the machinery giant that printed a record quarter and still can't get back to June.

One of those 10 becomes the play of the week.

Ticker Highlight Show Premium members get the actual option trade on it: strike, expiration, size. You can still name your own monthly rate instead of the $49 list, and that window closes at 10:30 AM ET, half an hour after Mark starts talking.

Tap here to name your rate before he does.

Click this link to jump to the State of the Market live room and let’s you catch Garrett Baldwin’s I’d Trade That show before the State of the Market.

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The Daily News Breakdown

SIREN: JPMorgan just moved its year-end S&P 500 target to 8,000, up from 7,800, the second bump in two months. Dubravko Lakos-Bujas and his team point to second-quarter earnings and evidence that all that AI spending is finally getting paid for, with cloud growth and fat backlogs at Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft doing the talking.

Here's the part that should make your eye twitch. The new number sits about 3 percent above Friday's close, and at least seven other shops are already parked at 8,000. When the target keeps moving up behind the tape instead of in front of it, you're not reading a forecast. You're reading a chase

SNEAKER: Crude climbed again Monday morning because Iran keeps dangling a Strait of Hormuz deal without ever handing one over. Brent for October added 1.04 percent to $84.42 and WTI for September ticked up to $78.83, which is the kind of move nobody puts on a chyron.

The Revolutionary Guards said Sunday the strait stays shut until Washington checks every box on their list. Tehran also wants to keep control of the waterway and charge tolls for the privilege, and roughly a fifth of the world's oil and LNG moves through it.

That's the whole trade. Everybody's staring at this week's CPI print while the biggest input to it grinds higher in the dark.

SIGN: The indexes opened Monday doing a whole lot of nothing, slipping just under flat after last week's winning run. Investors are stuck in wait-and-see mode while Iran teases that a Hormuz deal is "very close," a phrase that's been very close for weeks now.

Brent traded around $85 on all that will-they-won't-they, and this week's CPI reading is the next real catalyst. Here's the part worth circling: Fed officials are split on whether to raise rates, not cut them, as they watch the oil shock from the Middle East feed into prices.Friday's soft jobs number bought the market some breathing room.

Flat tape, split Fed, oil grinding higher. That's not calm, that's coiled.