Investing Through a Cloud of Dubious Data

Episode 254 of the Link NewsExpress podcast with Caleb Silver (August 4, 2025)

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The recent firing of the Commissioner of the BLS and the resignation of a top Fed official have cast even more doubt on the trustworthiness of government data and the future independence of the central bank. This is an uncertain new world for investors who have so far been enjoying the march to record highs as a handful of the biggest stock in the market.

Jay Woods, Chief Global Strategist for Freedom Capital Markets, helps us find the right price levels even as the data we depend on could become more dubious. Plus, we are entering the seasonally weakest period of the year just as tariffs are set to take effect at the end of the week. The summer wind might just blow things over.

Links for Show Notes:

  • https://www.freedomcapmkts.com/newsletter
  • https://www.Link News/what-to-expect-in-markets-this-week-earnings-from-palantir-amd-mcdonald-s-and-more-11782844
  • https://www.Link News/terms/s/seasonality.asp

Full Transcript:

Caleb Silver  

On the express this week, the craziest week that was, what now, Hey, big spenders, the capex splurge is splurging why we should and shouldn't care about over concentration in the markets. We'll spend a few good minutes with Jay woods, our good buddy from Freedom capital markets and our retail investors, losing that loving feeling the Link Newsdicator and what to watch this week, rip it. Rip it. It's about to get wicked on the Link NewsExpress.

Caleb Silver  

Welcome back and welcome aboard. Here we are, live and direct from my office. Here we go, new headquarters, here for the Link NewsExpress podcast. So good to be with you on a Monday morning, live and direct this podcast, of course, streams on demand and all your favorite podcast platforms after the fact, chime in. We love to hear your comments. Talk back to you during the segment. Yeah, join that conversation. Jump in with us.

And what a week it was. We got a lot to talk about this week. Excited to have our buddy Jay Woods join us in a few good minutes to break some of this down and also talk about just the feelings around the market these days, so much going on. And last week was a week to remember. I've been in this business for a few minutes. Last week, I saw a few things I thought I would never, ever see, and I don't know if I'll ever see them again, but anything is possible. Let's just run it down real quick. Right. On Thursday, the President signed executive orders placing tariffs as high as 50% on some countries, on dozens of trading partners that we don't already have deals with. We also know last week, the Fed held interest rates steady for the fifth time in a row. No surprise there, and no surprise the president wasn't happy about that, but you got to wonder if the Fed could have seen into the future a couple of days, whether they would have made those same decisions because we had, during that Fed decision, two members dissenting. Very rare that you get fed governors dissenting on an FOMC decision so publicly. But we're in a pretty political environment right now. Maybe some people jockeying for position to be the next Fed chair. When Fed Chair Powell's term expires next year, or sooner than that, we shall see. And we also saw a Fed Governor stepping down last week, opening up a spot for the President to appoint somebody that might be a little more friendly to the administration, which brings into question this whole notion of Fed independence. Should the central bank in this country be independent? Well Fed Chair Powell spoke to that at the press conference last week following the decision, no decision. Let's hear what he had to say.

Jay Powell (Sound bite)  

Governments all over the advanced economy world have chosen to put a little bit of distance between direct political control of those decisions and the decision makers. So if you if you were, if you weren't, if you were not to have that, there would be a great temptation, of course, to to use interest rates to affect elections, for example, and that's something that that we we don't want to do. So I think that's pretty widely understood,

Caleb Silver  

Pretty widely understood, but is it pretty widely respected? We're going to find out over the next few years. I have a feeling the the boundaries of the central bank in this country will be tested, and if you look around the world, there are independent central banks, like the European Union has one, but they don't have an independent one. In China, the People's Bank of China pretty much controlled by that government. And what's happening inside that economy kind of mysterious at times. So 110 years, we've had an independent federal reserve who has made monetary policy decisions based on the data, but the data, as we know, is getting squirrely, and we learned that on Friday with the jobs report. Check this out. The live jobs report, I think you know this by now, came in lighter than expected, right? 73,000 jobs against 100,000 expected. But it wasn't that that got our attention. It was the 258,000 revisions downward for the months of June and May. That got everybody's attention. We thought the labor market was so strong. It was one of the reasons the central bank has been leaving interest rates unchanged. We almost we had looked like we had full employment. We were hiring at a pretty steady clip, about 125,000 jobs on average over the past several months. That's that's pretty strong. That's full employment. It was a pretty robust hiring basket, when you look at it, even though healthcare and social assistance have been dominating the hiring for the past, I guess, year and a half, but the fact that we only had about 19,000 and 14,000 jobs created in May and June respectively, and only 73,000 last month in July, that is way below the replacement rate. The replacement rate in this country for jobs is around 100,000 a month. We got people leaving the workforce all the time, but a lot of those jobs were being picked up by immigrant workers. And we know there's been a lot of pressure from this administration on immigrant workers. We don't have them refilling those jobs in the workforce. We have a weaker than expected hire and a little creep up in unemployment. And you wonder if the Fed would have known that would have made a different decision.   

But guess what the president did? He fires the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the person in charge of that whole department that does the surveys. And if you look at the household survey response, and I'm showing this chart for a reason, are we measuring the right thing, and are we measuring it the right way? This is the household survey response. People call it, you know, the BLS, calling or emailing or mailing a household and saying who's unemployed in your household? How many people how long you've been looking for a job? Well, the response rates have been dwindling for years and years. Fewer people are responding to that survey, so you're not getting as many responses. Then you look at the the employment survey, the private sector hiring survey, and you say, Are you hiring? How many people are you hiring? How many people did you hire? Do you have plans to hire? That's where we got the unemployment rate. Look at those survey responses, the establishment survey, we're not getting as much response to those surveys as we used to. And are we doing it the right way? Are we measuring the right things in this country when we look at it, that's finally getting people's attention, and now, with the president firing the head of the BLS, are we going to be able to trust the data going forward, this whole capital markets thing, and we're going to get into it my buddy Jay woods in a few minutes. This is based on trust. If we don't trust with the data, if we don't trust what we're hearing from companies, if we don't trust the government data that a lot of businesses rely on to make decisions, how can we have faith in the capital markets and believe that what's been going on for the past seven or eight decades of the stock market kind of churning ever higher is going to keep happening? Do we have the right guardrails in place? And we finally saw a little crack in the fir last week. The stock market selling off on Friday. Big time, first time we've seen the VIX popping over about 25 in months. It was due for a long, long summer nap. It's been asleep as this market has churned towards record highs, but it finally sold off. It's bouncing back this morning, on a Monday morning, stock market's back in place, back in the green, and the VIX is chilling about 18 right now. The VIX is that fear next. We've been talking about when people are worried about the future of the stock market, and they express that through the options market, through buying more puts more bets that the stock market is going to go down. You see a spike in the VIX. We saw that Friday for the first time in a very, very long time.

But you know what? Investors have been focused on other things, like a lot of spending. Hey, big spenders. I have a sound effect in there, but there it is. There it is. God bless Chicago. Well, investors have been focusing on all this capex spending by the biggest tech companies in the market. Look at this look at this chart. Meta told us in the last week or so they're going to spend somewhere between 114 and $118 billion on capex that's building out and scaling their artificial intelligence products, services, also their AI super intelligence research division now, which read talent jobs, high paying jobs, seven figure jobs for engineers are really no AI meta is stacking up on that. Microsoft telling us they're going to spend $80 billion on AI data centers and the expansion of Azure, that's their cloud computing product that has done pretty well. If you look at the cloud computing divisions of companies like Microsoft and Amazon. That's where the profits are. That's where the profit margins are. Those are the fastest growing parts of the companies, and they're going to spend 80 billion there alphabet telling us they're going to spend 85 billion scaling their AI infrastructure, their cloud products and their custom chips. The more you spend, it seems, the higher your stock price seems to go especially among this big tech these big tech companies, and what are they getting out of it? A lot of revenue per employee, probably the most important metric in Silicon Valley right now, revenue per employee. We talked about it a few shows ago. The more productivity, the more revenue you can squeeze out of your employees. 

Caleb Silver  

Better your margins are going to be. And no companies are better at it than these Silicon Valley companies. No better company at it than Nvidia, which does make hardware, oddly enough, but they just have such robust revenue, and they keep growing at 100% on 100% every single year that they're getting a lot of money out of their employees. This is what investors like to see. And these companies have been driving the stock market to new record highs yet again, and that's got everybody worried about that over concentration thing with the mag seven. Again, we'll get into this in a couple of minutes with Jay. But the mag seven now 25 plus percent of the S&P 500 on a market cap level, the higher these cut, these stocks go. And you know who they are, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix. You got Nvidia in there. Of course. You got alphabet. You got Amazon right. The higher these companies go, the higher the stock market goes, the heaviest. They're the biggest. You got a couple of $4 trillion companies in that mix there, and they're driving the market. And versus the S&P equal weight—again, if you just weighted everything equally—we're at near record-highs again. And I think Jay's going to talk about that bottom there, that cup and handle pattern potentially, but that's got people worried about concentration. But over concentration in the stock market, my friends, there is nothing new about that. Let me take you back to the railroads in the 1900s want to talk about over concentration? Oh yeah, there's a little steam horn right there? So the railroads in about 1860 I wasn't around back then, Neither were you, but compromised about 60 plus percent of the market cap of the entire stock market. Now is a different stock market. Back then we didn't have as many companies, railroads, a lot of the new industrial companies, standard oils of the world. Those led the pack. 63% of the stock market at that time, probably wasn't even a market cap weighted index, but it was a price weighted index, and railroads were everything. So we talked about over concentration. Yeah, it happens. It happens a lot, not just with the railroads, but we're talking about over concentration with in throughout periods of history in the stock market.

And doesn't always end that poorly when you think about it, talk about the nifty 50 in the 40s, right? You're talking about the big tech stocks in the 90s. In the late 90s, the internet bubble didn't end well then, but you've got great companies that come out of this. You talk about the telecom boom of the 1980s you talk about the oil boom. Again, 70s, we get periods of overconcentration in the stock market, and we're in one right now, again, but it's nothing like it was back in the 19th century with the railroads. And these companies are really producing profits. These are not fly by night, Pets.com, companies. These are real companies producing real profits. And the more they spend, more they generate revenue and margins out of this AI thing, the higher their stock prices seem to go and that's why you get that over concentration. And guess what? They're our favorite stocks. In terms of what we hold in our portfolios, we ask people all the time in Link News, what's in your portfolio? All these stocks looks just like the top of the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 so concentration, yeah, names of Yeah. People worry about it, but the stock market finds a way to churn higher. Let's see if that continues going forward. Well, it's time for the drop in time to bring in a little market intelligence here. Let's bring in our good friend Jay Woods, the Chief Global Strategist for Freedom Capital Markets, on the drop in you. There you are, my friend. We got to get your face on that board.

Jay Woods  

Yeah. And I wish I had better lighting. I look horrible in this shot. I don't have a nice backdrop like you, but it's always great to join you. 

Caleb Silver  

You have the benefit of being handsome, so you don't need great lighting. Jay, we bump into each other all the time around the markets. We swim in some of the same circles, but you are around professional investors and traders all the time, and you you hear this banter. You hear this conversation. You are on the financial media outlets, just like I am talking about it. Do you as an investor and a strategist and somebody that advises folks on money and such a great educator. Do you worry about over concentration like this?

Jay Woods  

No, because I think you put it, you framed it nicely. We historically. We will go through, you know, major booms and busts, and those booms are usually led by one specific sector, one specific industry, whether it was the rails during the Industrial Revolution, the telecoms back in the 80s and the early 90s, switching to the internet, stocks, and now we have the AI revolution. To me, this is something that we historically see. And you know, the leaders today. We fast forward 2030, years from now, maybe Apple will not be the apple that it once was. In fact, people are saying it's more of a utility company, a staple. So to me right now, I like this concentration. It makes sense. And these are the leaders you want to be in until something changes. And I don't see that change in this quarter proved it. The CapEx spend is there. The earnings growth continues to be there. So I can't wait to see what Nvidia does on August 27 when they report, because this is exactly what we want to see. Now, something changed, very interesting to me. When Microsoft reported they crushed it, their cloud, Azure. Okay, these were the things people were concerned about. The spend is still there, the growth is still there, and then price action kind of paused. This reminded me of August 2023 when Nvidia had one of their best quarters ever. The stock was on a tremendous run, and it peaked intraday, and it paused. 

Jay Woods

So to me, right now, we have a new ceiling that we will probably retest a few times. Whether it's 64 in the general index, in the S&P 500, or whether it's Microsoft at this I believe it was 555 level. Uh, we have bounds now that price was telling us, okay, this was the over extension. This is where buyers are going to kind of fade. And this pullback is a nut, you know, a normal retracement in a secular bull market. So price action as a technician, obviously, I'm biased towards price action, to me, was just as telling as the earnings were. And I think that this is a healthy bull market retracement with some crazy headlines. On Friday, you open the show talking about what happened on Friday, I don't recall anything like that. And then on a Friday afternoon, you just want to skate off into the sunset, go home, dip your toes in the water. And this is not what we need, is people who are studying the market. So. Very fascinating stories out of Washington with his drama, but it looks like the market is shrugging it off for now. Keywords there for now.

Caleb Silver  

Yeah. And what I love about market technicians like yourself is that, you know, you just follow what the great emcee from Marcy says, men lie, women lie, numbers don't and price never lies. Whatever comes to to the stock market. So you mentioned, you know, all these different levels, and it's a normal potential retracement, and we're all hit. We are heading into the one of the softer periods of the year. But you also know, by just looking at the charts, that we were pretty technically overbought, weren't we, especially across certain sectors. Do you feel like we were?

Jay Woods  

Without a doubt, we were overbought. The technology sector was down 20% and it was up 12% the rebounds were fast and furious. In fact, when talking about the market rebounding from that Liberation Day low, I never anticipated the speed would match that of covid. I did not think we had the strength, given all the uncertainty in the world, to break back above the 200 day moving average, to test the old highs, to break above the old highs. Now that we've done all this, I think there are, you know, distinct lines in the sand that tell us all right, this is continuation of a secular bull market. We didn't go bearish intraday. We did, and we can debate Well, 20% intraday, but only closed down 19% peak to trough. But to me, this rally was a little overdone, up 25% from low in the S&P 500. And a pullback is normal, but then when you get them, you always question, well, what is the headline driving the pullback? Remember Japan carry trade a year ago? This time I'm googling, what the hell is the Japan carry trade? We're gonna sell your narrative? Yeah, we're gonna have a narrative about Yes, I always go to Link Newswhen I'm looking up these, these terms that I am unfamiliar with. Thankfully, there aren't too, too many now over the years, but there's always something that's going to catch us off guard. We don't know what it is, but when we do get caught off guard. We need to have a nice headline narrative behind it. So we had Japan carry trade. We have uncertainty with the Fed. We have Fed President resigning. By the way, no one reports on this. Miss Coogler, who gave her resignation, which comes out this week. It was nine to two in favor and against. There was one person not at the meeting. She was not at that meeting. So there's a lot of speculation as to why she's resigning. I leave that to other people, but she wasn't at the meeting, so maybe there are some personal matters that she needed to attend to. And all these conspiracy theories are really unfounded.

But the bottom line is to answer your question, yeah, we're having a normal retracement. We haven't even retraced 5%. Three 5percent retracements a year, on average, are normal. If we retrace 5% from this high above 6400, the S&P 500. Guess what? We're just at the at the 50 day moving average, the rising 50 day moving average. To me, that's an area where we should see buyers come in. If it gets extended, there are great levels around 6000 and rising 200 day moving average that I think will hold, because I think the trends continue to be upward, the earnings growth continues to be upward, and that, to me, is what's going to drive this market into year end. Yes, we're in that wonky time, August, September, two of the most volatile months October, more bottoms are formed in October than any other month by far. So it's kind of setting up, just like a technician wants to see that playbook go. So I think these pullbacks will be bought and should be bought.

Caleb Silver

Yeah, and, you know, you mentioned it earlier, we had that kind of like baby bear and it seems that that's all we have. Are baby bear markets. You know, corrections that last just a couple of weeks, just a couple of minutes, and then the buyers come back in. Why do you think, and you're a student and an educator on the markets? Why do you think the corrections and the bear markets have been so short lately? Now we haven't, you know, during covid, obviously we had a ton of stimulus and we had the Fed flooring interest rates. But this doesn't seem like these last very long, and we don't get the typical things you read about in the stock market almanac anymore. God bless it. It's sitting right here on my desk. But there's a habit, too. Why did that happen Jay?

Jay Woods  

Yeah, the one biggest change in my career, your career, is the speed of markets. Information flows faster than ever. The dips are fast and furious. The rallies the exact same way markets just don't hesitate on these moves. There's not a group of human traders, like there were at the New York Stock Exchange, or all these guys on the phone running NASDAQ orders, like there once were. And you don't, you know, you just rush to get into it. Then you have a very hungry and informed retail base, the retail investor has been the smartest investor this year. They were the ones buying the dip as institutions lowered their price targets and ran for other countries, which have been doing well, the US has been underperforming, but what we have seen is the retail investor has been buying this dip and they're looking for that next big opportunity. My only drawback from the retail investors, they're looking for it quickly. And you know, I am somebody that likes to look at the longer picture from when you talk to investors, when you talk about making money wisely in this market and not putting your nest egg into the next YOLO trade or the next meme stock. So speed of markets is what's changed the most, and that is why we're seeing some of the volatility. 

Jay Woods 

But as you pointed out, the VIX, the VIX is really the tell, and that had been it ticked below 15. We spiked above 20. I think we got to 21 historically, that's not too high. If you remember, last year to Japan yen we spiked over 60 intraday, which was higher than 911, when you put it in perspective, it was crazy. How we overreacted. I don't think we saw an overreaction here. I think markets are coming and earnings growth continues. So to me, these little bumps, these little headlines, the tariff drama that we see, companies are smarter. They're answering questions now on the call, much better when it comes to tariff concerns. They're not, you know, fearful, and they'll say uncertain, but we're prepared to pivot.  

So I think that the company leadership is getting much smarter in the way they are addressing the concerns and then the concerns themselves. We haven't seen any inflationary data—CPI next week that will be interesting to see. And then the unemployment data, you know, to me, you got to watch that on a rolling three month average. And yes, it ticked up. If I was the president, I wouldn't have made this move. I don't think anyone has said, 'hey, yeah, fire the head of the BLS'. No.Question the data. But then use the data to say, look, he was too late, and he should have seen this coming. Like Chris Waller said that. You know, unemployment still can be combatted. Inflation is stable, some say sticky, but the tariff beer that you've been talking about, Mr. Data Dependent. Jerome Powell, you're not using the data. You're talking about the fear of what could happen on the inflation side, and then we miss the unemployment side ticking back to its highs at 4.2%.

Caleb Silver  

Yeah. And like I said, if he knew, or if they had known that it was going to be this week, maybe their decisions might have been different, but too late for that. All right, let's go out on this. You are, grant, a great educator of the markets. You're a market technician, but you're an observer of things in general, right? It's a holistic approach you take to looking at the capital markets right now. What key indicator could be? A number, could be a level, could be a pattern. Are you looking for towards the back half of the year that's going to tell you red light, green light, or, let's just yellow light, and slow this one on down.

Jay Woods

The two things I'm following for the overall health of the market is the 200 day moving average, the amount of stocks in the S&P 500 above the 200 day moving average. Moving Average, as I sit here right now, it is 56% that, to me, is healthy, that we have over 50% of the S&P 500, not just those seven stocks that we love to talk about, but to me, that level is a barometer of health, and it's trending higher. That is good, and it looks like more names are going to get above it from a momentum point of view, that percent above the 10 day moving average is now down to under 36% it spiked over 80% anything over 90, it's a little too euphoric. So things are coming down. There's not much euphoria in this market. And then the other indicator I love is I try to keep it as simple as simple as possible. I can throw lines on my charts and and make it as complex and try to put a line there to justify my thesis. I try not to do that. RSI (relative strength index), to me, that's was finally overbought for the first time in some time in the S&P 5 500, and we're pulling back under it. So that means we should have a normal retracement. That doesn't bother me. It doesn't scare me, but when you have a big headline and a more significant drop, that's when you start to question your thesis. But right now, nothing has changed. My thesis that we're in a secular bull market, the trends remain stable. We're seeing more stocks, more trends, more rotation into other sectors. And to me, the sector leadership is still strong. You still have technology leading.

Yes, utilities are doing well. They're not our grandparents' utilities anymore. It's a little different sector, those that are lagging, healthcare and staples. That's what I want to see now. I want to see consumer discretion. You pick it up. I want to see financials remain strong, and I see the financials as one of the strongest sectors overall. To me, from a slow, stable point of view technology, man, when you have three socks like Apple, Microsoft and then the king and video, that those will move a lot faster given the market cap weighting. But to me, the trends are in place. The cycles are playing to form. And I think that this craziness that we may see August, September, will set us up for a beautiful end of 2025, into 2026.

Caleb Silver

Now that's what we call good breath and high hopes for things to continue. What price the GABA ghoul is? What price is GABA ghoul these days, a viewer wants to know we have Wall Street, Wall Street stock saying that the market is 80% overvalued. Well. Yeah, it's 80% overvalued. That could be a great buying opportunity. 

And Jay Woods, get back across the street to your other Office of the New York Stock Exchange. We'll see you down there on the floor. Folks follow Jay across all social medias. He is the chief global strategist for freedom capital markets and a good friend of mine and to Link News. Thanks so much, my friend. Let's time for time to talk a little money in motion, because Jay and I were talking—retail investors have been all over it this year so far—buying the dips, getting a little promiscuous, on the on the meme stock, and we talked about that in the last couple of weeks, buying some shady stocks and stocks that are not doing that well, of companies that are not doing that well, but that's what you get in a melt up market. You get people stepping out on the edge, buying a little Krispy Kreme. Not that that's not a great company which makes delicious product, but a reason, the stock was up some 80% but we've been following this money in motion, and we'd like to look at what's been happening lately with what the retail investors like us are doing, let's hit it a little money in motion for the good folks out there,

We love to follow what retail investors like us are doing now. We talk to our readers at Link News, in our listeners and our followers, and we say, what are you buying? What are you selling? And we get that every two months in our sentiment survey. But Vanda Research does this just about every week. They're looking at what retail investors like us, the Joes and Joanna's of the world, have been buying and selling, and what we've been doing with our money outside of our retirement accounts outside of the defined contribution plans. And guess what? We may have lost that love and feeling a little bit right. We were buying hard into that sell off and buying hard out of it in April. But lately, and we had a little meme stock madness going on here, we've been dipping a little bit on our buying of us listed securities, not much, but you see this little drop off in that dark purple line there. Not crazy to see that after a big melt up like the one we saw, with the market dancing to record highs, and we had some big meme stocks soaring again, but we've been we've been dropping a little bit, and maybe that's a good sign that maybe that promiscuous buying, that on the edge, taken a little too much risk, maybe fading a little bit. But what have we been buying? Well, we like to look at what Vanda tracks as the most bought and traded stocks by retail investors. It's a lot of the same ones we've been buying and selling all over again, and leading that list, of course, at the top of that list is Nvidia, a big retail stock and also a big institutional stock, and when it's over 4 trillion and it's posting great results, you know why people keep buying it?

Tesla on that list as well. Tesla is always one of the most actively traded stocks by retail investors like us. You got the true believers that just keep buying the stock no matter what. You got the dip buyers who love to buy it after a massive tumble like it had this year so far, and those they've been rewarded so far. Palantir, of on that list, Palantir, again, we one of the best performing stocks so far this year. That's very popular among retail and institutional investors. Robin Hood, of course, having a moment. AMD, the chip maker, big competitor to Nvidia and Apple, those are the top retail stock purchases by Joe's and Joanne as the retail investors like us, but retail trading in general has been fading a little bit. All right, let's get set up for a busy a sip and whiskey has got a question. Retail re if retail investors are the real reason why they've been such quick rebounds, how much strength do you see from retail investors, and what triggers do you think will cause them to back away? I think a big dip in the market, I think sell off by institutional investors might cause us to back away, but it didn't before. So I don't know if it's going to be that. Maybe it's going to be tariff headlines. Maybe it's going to be a big fallout in one of the riskier assets. Maybe something in crypto land that trips up, trips us up a little bit. Don't forget, we had a huge rally going on until we started hearing reports of this company called Deepseek in China that was able to do AI processes many times faster than our companies could do it at a fraction of the price. And that caused retail investors to back off a little bit. Sometimes it's the headlines, sometimes it's exhaustion, sometimes we just don't have that discretionary money. Good question. Sip and whiskey. Thanks for chiming in. All right, let's get set up for a pretty busy week ahead. You thought last week was busy. We got another one heading our way.

All right, kicking off the week today. On Monday, we got factory orders for the month of June. Let's see if anybody was slowing down because of tariffs. I don't think so. They hadn't felt tariffs back then. We got a few earnings today, Palantir, big company reporting results today. I think a lot of investors will be paying attention to that tomorrow, Tuesday, the US trade deficit for June. Hey, we're starting to see numbers coming out of the customs department and from the Treasury that say that. United States is taking in a lot of money from all these tariffs that have gone into place, and the fact that there's less coming in, but about 80 billion or so in the Treasury's coffers. I don't know if we'll see that as taxpaying citizens, but this tariff thing's starting to work a little bit in terms of raising revenue. On the earnings front, we got AMD, Caterpillar, Pfizer, BPN, Amgen, among those widely held companies reporting results on Tuesday, Wednesday. We've got some fed talkers out there, including Mary Daly. She's the president of the San Francisco Fed, pretty smart person. I'm going to hope to interview her one day on this podcast. 

Earnings from McDonald's, Disney, Uber, Shopify app loving one of the most popular stocks last year, DoorDash and Airbnb, among others. Thursday circle it August 6, my friends, that's the date. I mean, August 7. I should say that's the day tariffs are supposed to go into effect after that one week delay from last week. Hey, maybe that's when we start to see prices rise. We'll see if those prices get passed on to us. We'll keep an eye on initial jobless claims and everything coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from now on, because we know what went on there. Last week, earnings from Lilly, we got a monster beverage, one of the best performing stocks in the stock market over the past 30 years. Friday, things chill a little bit. Little more fed talk from the Fed President, Musa LEM, but it's going to be another busy week of headlines and our news team here at Link Newssitting right outside here of my office. They are all over as usual. Let's get into the indicator to watch this week, and Jay and I tease a little bit. It's seasonality. It's August, right? August one of the worst performing months of the year on average for the stock market, and seasonality is just those predictable changes that occur over a one year period. When you get the seasonality, when you get close to the holiday shopping season and November and December, you got to pick up an economic activity, and it gets a cooling in the first quarter, and it may be a little bit of a rise going into the summer, but seasonality is a thing in the stock market, and as we head into August, know this, it's usually one of the worst performing stock months of the year for the stock market right around right along there with February and March. But you also get a rise in volatility, and there's plenty out there that could raise volatility and make it spike again.

Well, from one headline to the other. We got tariffs going into place this Thursday. We got the unknown coming from this administration and those black swan events that just come out of nowhere anyway. For some reason, things start to get a little heated up here in August, and then you get into the September and October periods. October is when we have traditionally had some of the worst events in the history of the stock market. So keep an eye on seasonality, and we will keep an eye on it with you as well. So much going on here. Thanks so much for joining us. Big thanks to Jay Woods. Oh yeah, Wall Street stocks, yeah, a lot of companies depend on seasonality. You're right about that, especially the consumer discretionary companies that like to sell to us during the holiday shopping season. So you better believe attempt that Apple will surprise everyone. Don't know why people doubt it. An AI series comes out, it'll blow us through the roof. Let's keep an eye on that. I'm very excited to see what Apple comes out with, because so far, feels like it's been left out of the conversation with AI. We know they're spending a lot of money on we know they're making their own chips. Figma, IPO is a meme says Wall Street stocks maybe that IPO, I think, doubled or tripled last week, and I was at the stock market for that. I hadn't seen that much excitement since Rob Gronkowski showed up there last year, but it's nice to see some activity. Some IPOs again, shows you that there's risk is on. Sure the bear season ain't coming soon. Focus world, oh one, there's they come pretty much every year, or every couple of years, we get a bear market. We haven't had a real one in a while. We had that 19% correction, but we haven't had a true bear market since the pandemic days. And hey, look, they happen. They are a feature of the stock market, not a bug.

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