00:00 Speaker A
best week in about five weeks for several of the majors here. So let's check that out. That was the case for the S&P 500, even though it closed in the red, narrowly missed a record closing high and the Nasdaq composite and the Nasdaq 100 by the way. So here's the Nasdaq composite over the last five days up two weeks. And uh let's check out the S&P 500, a little bit less about 1.6%. Even the small caps, Russell 2000 was down 1% today, but the Russell 2000 was able to extend its weekly streak from five to six. And now let's dig under the surface of the market because I do like to do that. You look at the sectors, most of them green for the week, led by tech, that means the AI trade is still on. And uh in second place, utilities. That's part of the AI trade too. And then XLC, that's part of the mega caps. and then you got the S&P 500, then XLY, that's another mega cap sector. What I'm noticing here is the large issues are kind of carrying the day. You got some red, Amazon and Apple, but for the most part, the large cap names, the mega cap names did very well. Here's Tesla up 13%, Broadcom up uh 7 and a half, Alphabet, Nividia up six and a half, etc. And let me do this. Let me sort by performance and you can see that we actually have more red than green there. So the smaller issues really not carrying the day. So that kind of makes the argument that maybe breadth is suffering a little bit. Nevertheless, we had a decent week for meme stocks and we'll see another pattern here. The larger meme stocks that have done somewhat well over the last few years, especially Palantir, Hood, Coin, Reddit, etcetera. Circle even a newer admission to that. Those did pretty well this week. And then here's China as well. I don't consider this a fringy asset class, more of an uncorrelated asset class uh with respect to the general markets, but China did very well. So there are pockets of strength, but it's not necessarily widespread. You do have to do some hunting here.
01:21 Speaker B
Now, what about September negative seasonality? I was warned about this by many very smart people, Jared.
01:29 Speaker A
And and here I was among, I I'm not going to put myself in the smart people group, but here's so on this September weakness. Here's a chart. I I just want to remind people, this is uh I have two different maps for seasonality and this is for the S&P 500. One goes back to 1990, that's a white line. The green line goes back to 1928, but it only has those years where we're matching the same day of the week. So I think it ends up to be 8, 10, something in that range. Nevertheless, uh you will notice that things tend to do well in the first half of the month and then they drop off. And the 1928, which is the one I'm tracing out here in green, that is my preferred one. It's the one that's done better this year. Uh so my concern is we get the Fed meeting la next week, then the rubber meets the road in some kind of way and people realize maybe the Fed's behind the eight ball, maybe the Fed is behind the curve, they should have been cutting before. That's what I'm thinking about. So that's what could cause a market to turn. Is that the case right now? No. We only price pays. So we got to pay attention to the fact that we are actually sitting in a pretty decent shape for the market at at or close to record highs. But nevertheless, the September September September seasonality map does point out the possibility that we could have some weakness in the back half.
02:40 Speaker B
And next week, of course, that that is the big event on the on the Jared radar.
02:46 Speaker A
Yeah, let's game out the Fed right now. So first, I'm going to pull up a chart of short-term interest rates and for that, I use the 13 week T bill rate. That has been crashing over the last month, maybe even two months here and we'll check that out in the second. and yeah, let's go to a two-month chart and you can see it was all the way above like 4.25% somewhere in there. That's the lower end of the Fed's current target for its short-term rate. It's supposed to be between four and a quarter and four and a half. but this has been pricing in those fed rate cuts. And so what I said before, is the Fed behind the eight ball? That's my concern here. And there's also going to be some talk about quantitative tightening, whether or not that rolls off. I think that's secondary in nature. Um the biggest concern for me is that we are heading into October, November, kind of prime time crash season. That's when you see the Vix tend to spike. And so you put everything together, markets are a bit fragile right now and things are kind of dictated by what the labor market is doing.
03:38 Speaker B
Very quickly as we end here, should we do a quick check of Bitcoin for the weekend?
03:42 Speaker A
All right. Let's do that. Let's do that. You know, it wasn't a bad week for crypto either. Let's see if I can let me just do this. I'm going to go to our heat heat map and I will pull up crypto here and we can see this is what's happened over the last five days. Bitcoin up 3.7, Ether up 8.2%.
04:02 Speaker B
There it is. Thank you, Jared. Appreciate it.
