A Weekly Market Intelligence Dispatch · By Anthony Spinella

Charted Territory

No GPS. No guesses. Just price.

The signal is out there. You just have to know where to look.

Section I

Current Conditions

Macro overview — what the water looks like today

August closed strong — the Dow up 2.1% month-to-date on track for its fifth straight monthly gain, the S&P and Nasdaq headed for their first up months since May (+3% and +4%), both hitting fresh highs. Monday reminded everyone how fast that can change: U.S. Central Command confirmed a strike on Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island — the first acknowledged action against Iran since late July — and Iran retaliated against bases in Jordan and the UAE. Oil spiked, and the S&P closed down 0.33% at 7,686, giving up its 20-day.

Tuesday was worse. The bond selloff went global — the 10-year hit levels not seen since January 2025, Japan's 10-year its highest since August 1996, Germany's a 2011 high — while oil climbed further on a tanker strike in the Strait of Hormuz. The S&P closed on its lows, down 0.71% to 7,631.

Wednesday flipped the script: a weak ADP print (38,000 versus 47,000 expected) pulled yields lower, and the S&P closed up 0.46% to 7,666. Thursday extended it sharply — Fed Governor Waller said he'd be "inclined to support" holding rates steady in September provided inflation cooperates, yields fell hard, and hike odds dropped from roughly 63% to 55% in a day. The S&P jumped 1.1% to close near 7,748, its best day in a month, with the Nasdaq-100, Dow, and Russell 2000 all up over 1%.

Friday reversed it again. The August jobs report blew past expectations — 162,000 added versus a 53,000 consensus, with June and July revised meaningfully higher — undercutting the "cooling labor market" narrative that had powered Thursday's rally. Hike odds jumped back, and the S&P slid 0.38% to close the week at 7,718.60.

Net for the week, the index essentially round-tripped: SPX +0.1%, Nasdaq +0.4%, Dow −0.3%. The flat headline hides a week that swung from a geopolitical shock, through a near-two-decade high in global yields, to the market's best day in a month, and back to a hawkish reversal — all in five sessions.

Coming into this week, the calm doesn't last. August PPI lands Thursday and CPI follows Friday, both just days before the September 15-16 FOMC meeting — the last real inputs the Fed sees before that decision, and likely to set the tone for the next two weeks. We start this week similarly to last, at a contentious spot in the market with the shortest term trend (20SMA) being tested and any upside pressure to yields likely to result in momentum to the downside.

Section II

The Depth Gauge

Market internals & breadth — how deep does the move really go?

This is now three straight weeks of breadth deterioration, and this week crossed a meaningful threshold: the percentage of S&P names above their 50-day fell to 47.80% from 53.60% — for the first time this series, fewer than half the index is holding a short-term uptrend, even as the index itself closed the week essentially flat. New 52-week highs hit zero. The longer-term read continued slipping too, with the 200-day reading down to 68.20% from 71.00%.

The McClellan and net advances improved slightly, moving off last week's lows, which fits the week's shape: a sharp Monday-Tuesday selloff followed by a real Wednesday-Thursday recovery. But "less negative" isn't healthy — the index's ability to hold its level increasingly rests on a narrower slice of names. This is the same story Dead Reckoning is telling from a different angle: price absorbed real shocks and closed roughly flat, but the internal engine keeps losing horsepower heading into a week with real inflation risk on the calendar.

Section III

Dead Reckoning

Technical analysis — navigating by price action alone

Last issue we laid out the exact breakdown scenario for the S&P, and it played out almost immediately. The index gave up its 20-day early Monday, gapping lower as the U.S. struck Iranian rocket launchers near the Strait of Hormuz — the first direct U.S.-Iran exchange in about a month — sending oil and yields higher. The S&P closed Monday at 7,686.14, below the 20-day.

The downside continued, but our target never got tested. Price found a natural zone to defend instead: the diamond top negation level, the same 7,620 area where the market gapped up to start August on Trump's stand-down from planned Iran strikes. Tuesday piled on pressure as the 10-year hit 4.788% — highest since January 14, 2025 — while Japan's 10-year crossed 3% for the first time since 1996. That push the S&P down to a weekly low of 7,611, stalling just 40 points shy of the rising 50-day at 7,570.

From there, the market gapped higher Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday's ADP report came in weak — 38,000 versus 47,000 expected, the softest since January — taking heat off the yield run-up. There's also a structural tailwind building: the Treasury's plan to at least double its long-bond buyback operations, first announced August 19th, is set to actually begin September 9th — meaning next week brings the first real test of whether that support does anything to cap yields. The week closed almost exactly where we framed it last issue: sitting right on the 20-day.

One correction worth flagging: it wasn't a "blowout JOLTS report" that hit Friday — job openings had released quietly Tuesday, "little changed" at 7.3 million. The real blowout was Friday's August jobs report: 162,000 versus a 53,000 consensus, with June and July both revised higher. That's the print that reignited hike odds.

Coming into this week, we're back at the same fork as last issue, but with more on the calendar to force the decision. PPI lands Thursday, CPI follows Friday, both just days ahead of the September 15-16 FOMC meeting. Given Friday's hawkish labor data, either inflation print running hot gives the Fed more room to lean hawkish. I'd expect downside momentum to resume.

Section IV

Tide Watch

Sentiment & flows — is the tide coming in or going out?

Last issue's call played out about as cleanly as it gets. We flagged AAII bears at a two-month high as the setup to lean into, not away from — and this week, sentiment snapped back hard. Bulls jumped nearly 7 points to 39.7%, bears fell almost 7 points to 37.6%, and the spread flipped from a deeply negative −11.5% to a positive +2.1% for the first time in weeks. That's exactly the round trip the contrarian framework predicts: fear peaks, then price proves it wrong. And the survey window lines up perfectly with the week itself — this poll captured sentiment through the Iran shock and the early bond selloff, meaning investors were still voting cautiously into Tuesday's carnage, then the actual price action (Wednesday's ADP-driven bounce, Thursday's best day in a month) is what likely pulled the number back toward optimism by the time it published.

CNN Fear & Greed tells the opposite story, and the divergence is worth sitting with. It fell to 42 (Fear) from 54 the week before — pulled down mechanically by the week's volatility and the Friday reversal, since that index reacts to daily price action and momentum rather than a forward-looking survey. So the self-reported outlook improved while the momentum-based gauge worsened. Given how violently the week swung — a geopolitical shock, a near-two-decade yield spike, then a sharp recovery, then another reversal — it's not surprising the two gauges disagree; they're just measuring different things over different windows.

The futures data adds a real wrinkle. Commercials cut their net short nearly in half, to −34,113 from −64,065, continuing to lean less against the tape. But large speculators kept building theirs, now at −75,941 from −67,994 — a bigger net short than the commercials themselves, and historically the more informed side of this positioning. Small specs, meanwhile, trimmed their long for the first time in a while, down to +110,054 from +132,059. Retail futures longs are cooling right as large specs lean further bearish, which tempers how much conviction to put in the AAII bounce alone.

Net it out: sentiment did what the framework says it should after an extreme reading, and price held together through a real geopolitical scare and a near-two-decade yield spike to prove the fear wrong. But Fear & Greed's drop into Fear and the large-spec short building are two dissenting data points — and with PPI and CPI both landing this week ahead of the FOMC, this is exactly the kind of setup where sentiment's next move depends entirely on how those prints land.

Section V

The Heading

Trade ideas & outlook — here's where we're pointed

Despite the deterioration highlighted in the Depth Gauge and the ever-apparent macro risks in this market, it remains resilient and will take the opportunity to move higher at any cost. Downside breakdowns are resolving quickly — though they're beginning to feel more frequent — and any good news gives the tape a reason to rally. As highlighted, there are real risks on the inflation side this week, and given the market is once again testing a 20-day that's now declining, it wouldn't be a surprise to see a true flush down to the 50-day, the same setup we looked for last week. The NDX, meanwhile, met our target cleanly: it broke the 50-day early and found clean support at its rising 100-day, exactly as laid out.

On the Radar & Game Plan

I'm continuing to build my ServiceNow position, per the thesis laid out over the last two issues. The name that caught my eye this week, and one I acted on quickly Wednesday, is alternative energy — specifically Bloom Energy (BE), and I'll keep adding this week. Speaking of acting quickly too, moving forward I will begin Rapid Take to send a note on the names, plays and trades catching my eye intraweek to premium members only.

The AI buildout has a physics problem, not a capital problem. Every hyperscaler capex number we've cited all series — Alphabet's $205B, the $600B+ borrowed across the industry — assumes the power to run it shows up on time. Increasingly, it isn't. Data center developers are hitting a wall on grid interconnection timelines stretching years, not months, and Nvidia's own roadmap is making it worse: rack-scale systems are set to demand 300-600 kW within the next 1-2 years, a 5x jump from what was standard in early 2025. You can have all the GPUs in the world; if you can't power the rack, the GPU sits idle.

That's the setup for Bloom Energy and the broader on-site power trade. Bloom's fuel cell systems generate power behind the meter, letting data centers bypass grid bottlenecks entirely — and the numbers back up how real this shift is: 61% of developers now say they're prepared to bring their own power if the grid can't deliver, and Texas's data center load alone is projected to more than double to 30% of total U.S. demand by 2028. This is already showing up in the business, not just the narrative: Q2 revenue hit $1.07 billion, up 165.5% year-over-year, with EPS of $0.78 blowing past the $0.39 consensus — driven by real commercial deals, including a 2.8 GW expansion with Oracle, a $5 billion partnership with Brookfield, and a $2.65 billion agreement with AEP.

The thesis in one line: the market has spent all year debating who wins the AI compute race — chips, software, hyperscalers. The power bottleneck says the more durable trade might be whoever keeps the lights on for all of them.

The technicals and the fundamentals lined up perfectly this week. BE rallied from 206 Monday to close Friday's regular session at 252.84, breaking above its 20-, 50-, and 100-day in the process, and the catalyst arrived right at the close: S&P Dow Jones Indices confirmed Bloom Energy will join the S&P 500 effective September 21st, sending shares up another 6% in after-hours trading. That's real, mechanical demand ahead — index funds tracking the S&P will need to buy the stock into that date. The MACD is now rising above both its signal line and the zero line, meaning near-term momentum is increasingly positive. I began building my position at an average of $230 and will keep adding this week on any weakness around the 20-day, assuming it holds.

Section VI

Off the Chart

Life beyond the screens — dispatches from the road & the water

📍  Charleston, SC - Back to the Alma Mater

Last week I said we were heading down to Boone, NC, and would see how long we stayed once we got there. We made it down, and as beautiful as it was, only stuck around for a night — it felt more like a college town, and the heat didn't help the case for staying. So we pushed further south along the Blue Ridge Parkway to Asheville, where we spent the rest of the week through Friday. We explored downtown, hit a beautiful waterfall hike, and then, sitting in the heat again, decided it was time to make a real call on the rest of the trip.

The original plan had us staying in the Southeast before heading out West toward the end of September to fly home. We scrapped that. Friday night, we drove straight from Asheville to Charleston, SC — my alma mater — to meet up with friends, couch-surf for the week, and get everything squared away before the biggest stretch of the trip: out West.

We spent the weekend soaking up sun, the beach, a concert at the Windjammer, and catching up with friends I hadn't seen in months or years. While we're here, we're planning to extend our bed platform (update on that next week), get an oil change, regroup on the AC front, and hopefully hit the road toward Colorado by next Sunday. We'll break that drive up with a stop in Nashville, a night in the Great Smoky Mountains, and then downtown Nashville before pushing on — which puts us about 16 hours out from Colorado, a stretch we'll take our time getting through over the following week.

The thinking behind the change: we're ready to get out of the muggy Southeastern heat and into a climate that fits the lifestyle a lot better. It's been an amazing run so far down the East Coast, but we're ready to go explore a part of the country neither of us knows at all.

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Charted Territory

By Anthony Spinella · Market Intelligence Dispatch

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.

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