Morning Commentary for Friday, August 8, 2025 by Peter Cook
Boring day today. Looks like the tape is more of the same Vietnam up, Crypto up and gold up.
TTD reported earnings and it's nuking -33%. That is a volatile stock, but definitely one that usually ends up going down right before the market tops. It happened in 2021 and again as Trump got elected. This is something to keep on your radar because it's very sensitive to business conditions and business conditions are not good!
Fed is on vacation, Europe is on Vacation and some of the kiddos are going back to school in the warmer parts of the country, so you know what that means for stocks and it ain't usually good. The transition from Summer to Fall makes people crabby and they like to sell stocks. They also get sick usually because the kids go back to school and that doesn't help.
I'm taking it easy today, I again have signals that day trading to the long side will be difficult today. We are in the process of trying to mount a rally on oversold breadth conditions and it's not going as well as I think it should. We'll have to see if we thaw out on the breadth side and miss the chance for the rally or not. If we skip the rally and go sideways it opens the door for a down move next week when CPI comes out.
Wage data yesterday looked bizarre - we magically have Unit Labor Costs under the Fed's 2% target after a whopper of a month last month at +6.9% (it was revised UPward and bearish too, like every single data point over the last few months). That is fishy, especially when the Wages components still suggest 4+% raises are happening. So, if I had to take a read on that to lead into CPI and PPI its that we will see CPI and PPI magically "beat" and I don't know if the market is going to really believe that. I am going to take a hard look at the data next week and I might retire CPI and PPI as inputs for my monthly models if I think they are being manipulated like the jobs data has gotten over the last decade.
Levels:
All the best;
Peter Cook
NQ Chatroom Moderator (Go2Mtg)
Hamzei Analytics, LLC
