Trading day takeaways: Nvidia record, US dollar moves, oil pops
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.
The S&P 500, the Nasdaq eked out records to kick off what is going to be a jam packed week for Wall Street. Here with the trading day takeaways. We've got Yahoo finances Jared Blikre. Jared.
Thank you, Josh. Eked out is right. The S&P 500 just barely closed in the green. It was enough for a record. Nasdaq a little bit higher and it was all thanks to the semiconductors led by the Kahuna, the biggest stock in the solar system in video. Let me get a quick market cap check, $4.31 trillion. Look at Broadcom, 1.384. That's, uh, that's nothing to sneeze at either. Um, but here we go. So the semiconductors really outperforming today, AMD up 4.32%. Let me just show you the sector action real quickly because another theme I was noticing was we don't have great breadth in the market right now. We had energy. That was on the back of crude oil. We might have time for that later. Tech and consumer discretionary. That's an Amazon and Tesla story, mainly Tesla today. Everything else and in the red. Another thing I noticed that was interesting was the S&P equal weighted index. So S&P 500 equal weighted, that was down half a percent and that's just a continuation of the low or poor breadth theme because every stock gets the same weight in there as opposed to the S&P 500, which just barely crossed into the green by the close. But thanks to those mega cap names that finished in the green. So all in all, I, without Nvidia, this would not have been a positive market today.
What was it? Was it the big mover in today's trade?
Let me get to that right here. And for that we got to go to some of those trade headlines that we saw over the weekend and that was causing the US dollar to surge. And I also want to add that the seasonals are turning bullish. And so we saw that EU and US deal kind of take shape and we got a big decline in the euro. And so conversely we saw the dollar shoot up there. When the dollar shoots up, sometimes that spills over into equities. And so it's not surprising that materials, and I you saw XLB take the biggest hit. That's where you see gold miners, and we'll get to that in a second. But first, on the dollar, I also did a segment this morning on seasonality of the dollar, which is just turning very bullish this, uh, within these few days here, according to one of my models. So I have three lines here. White is what has happened with the dollar this year so far in 2025 and it's basically been just a slow and steady line down. So you 2025 is not been friendly to the dollar. However, I have two models. Blue is going back to 1971. It's an average of all the years. It's not very volatile. It's hard to see here, but it just, it does inflect up a little bit, uh, in this time of the year. But what you really notice here is a steeper line. That's the green line. If you go back to 1971 and you only include the years where you have the same day of the week, like, uh, Monday, July 28th, you want to make sure you have that exact configuration, then we get a lot more steep action here. And that model has served me well over the last few years since I, since basically I discovered it. So on that, I am saying that there's a warning that the dollar turns up here strongly. That is a non-consensus position. We know that there's been a lot of bearish sentiment, a lot of bearish positioning in the dollar. And so this is kind of a risk factor that I think exists in the market. And let me just show you real quickly what happened today on the back of this US dollar index strength, this broad strength in the dollar. And I'll go to the futures for that. There's more green than red here, but we really saw the metals take a hit. So copper was down almost 3%. Gold took a little bit of a tumble, silver also in the red. But look at cryptocurrencies. Crypto was really the red factor today.
So metals down. What, what about other commodities, Jared?
All right. So here we got to go, we got to touch on crude oil here. And crude oil was one of the biggest gainers of the day. So I'll go back to my futures chart here and there we go. Crude oil is going to be second or third actually next to cocoa and palladium. Had a chance to sit down with Dan Dicker today of the energy word. We talked about trading futures. And, uh, this is for stocks and translation. Episode drops tomorrow. Let's take a listen.
Oil definitely does not belong in anyone's portfolio. I did it for, uh, I traded on the floor for 21 years and I still trade, uh, oil futures today. But I am a, you know, I am a trained professional. Do not try this at home. These are the kinds of markets where if you do want to have an investment in oil, and obviously I shepherd other investors who want to be engaged in the energy markets, so there is an oil part of that, you find stocks that have, you know, a relatively good, um, you know, compliance with the oil price, uh, oil companies. I tend to put people into infrastructure. It's a lot easier for them to understand and and, um, and leverage, uh, on in on the basis of an oil price. So there are ways to invest in oil prices without actually getting involved in the futures.
Yeah. And so what I like about that, don't trade the futures unless you are not the faint of heart. He likes energy stocks in general, but he also was a big proponent of clean energy and I got a heat map for that here too. Uh, more of a mixed board today, but these have really taken off over the last month. There's a lot of headwinds with regulatory issues, Trump blocking the IRA, but in general, uh, futures, futures are kind of a dangerous thing to trade. Stocks not.
Thank you, Jared. Appreciate it, my friend.
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