Ringside · Post-Bell · August 6
- Blue chips shed 464.02 points to 53,885.10, snapping a five-session winning run.
- Tehran moved to write Hormuz transit rules; crude settled at $77.29, up 2.75%.
- Weekly unemployment filings came in at 199,000 against a 203,000 forecast.
Indexes
Two prices did the work today and neither of them was a stock. Crude settled 2.75% higher and the ten-year Treasury yield rose to 4.670% from 4.617% after weekly unemployment filings arrived at 199,000, under the 203,000 economists had penciled in and a third consecutive reading below 200,000. Dearer energy and dearer money land on the same part of the market, and the damage concentrated in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which gave back 464.02 points and ended a five-session winning run whose last three closes were records, the best of them Wednesday's 54,349.12. Goldman Sachs alone accounted for 171 of those points on a 2.62% decline, with Caterpillar, Boeing and Salesforce supplying another 174 between them and Microsoft's 2.54% advance handing 76 back. The S&P 500 slipped 0.18% and the Nasdaq Composite 0.06%, so this was a bad session for a handful of Dow components more than for equities at large.
| Index | Close | % Chg | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | 7,709.96 | -0.18% | Range 7,698.15-7,742.85 |
| Nasdaq Composite | 26,348.35 | -0.06% | Range 26,208.43-26,499.42 |
| Dow Jones | 53,885.10 | -0.85% | Five-session run ends |
| Russell 2000 | 3,001.55 | -0.58% | Low of 2,999.50 |
| VIX | 15.15 | -4.24% |
Sector Heat Map
| Sector | % Chg | Sector | % Chg |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy (XLE) | +1.48% | Discretionary (XLY) | -0.46% |
| Communications (XLC) | +0.28% | Utilities (XLU) | -0.64% |
| Health Care (XLV) | +0.18% | Industrials (XLI) | -0.85% |
| Staples (XLP) | -0.26% | Real Estate (XLRE) | -0.86% |
| Technology (XLK) | -0.31% | Materials (XLB) | -0.89% |
| Financials (XLF) | -0.33% |
Three sectors higher and eight lower, and the ordering refuses to sort into offense against defense: utilities and real estate finished alongside industrials and materials, which is the signature of a rate move and not of a decision about risk appetite.
In the News
Rates, FX, Commodities
Every maturity moved up together, which is what a labour reading that removes a reason to expect easier policy does when an energy shock arrives the same afternoon.
| Treasury | Yield | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2-Year | 4.21% | |
| 5-Year | 4.389% | |
| 10-Year | 4.670% | Three-session slide reverses |
| 30-Year | 5.213% |
| Commodity | Level | % Chg | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| WTI crude | $77.29 | +2.75% | September contract settle |
| Brent crude | $82.49 | +3.83% | October contract settle |
| Gold | $4,299.00 | -0.60% | 4:48 p.m. screen quote |
| Natural gas | $2.627 | -1.79% | 4:48 p.m. screen quote |
The dollar index finished at 99.968, up 0.24%, with the euro at 1.1526 and the yen at 158.44. Crude's move traces to a specific document instead of a headline about talks, which is why it held into the close where this week's earlier spikes faded.
Technicals
Broad-index charts remain comfortable. The S&P 500 closed 193.67 points over its twenty-day average at 7,516.29 and 220.47 over its fifty-day at 7,489.49, with 7,736.52 from 4 August, the best close of the trailing twelve months, sitting 26.56 points overhead.
The Invesco QQQ Trust is the live chart. It finished at $714.65 against a fifty-day average of $714.70, five cents underneath a line it reclaimed only two sessions ago. Beneath that the twenty-day sits at $700.46.
Yields spent five weeks working down toward 4.53% on the ten-year and gave back a third of that in one afternoon. A close above 4.745%, the high from 31 July, would put the summer's Treasury rally into question.
Breakouts & Breakdowns
Breakouts
Microsoft (MSFT) — a 2.54% session to $499.86 is the best close since 17 November and leaves the shares fourteen cents under $500. The twenty-day average trails at $418.09, a measure of how vertical the move off the June low has been.
Chevron (CVX) — $189.23 reclaims a twenty-day average at $188.70 on the crude move, with the fifty-day at $182.76 well below. Next overhead is $197.25, the high-water mark of the last three months.
Breakdowns
Datadog (DDOG) — $229.29 loses the twenty-day at $260.33 and the fifty-day at $248.83 in a single session, two days after a 52-week high of $288.15. Nothing structural sits underneath until the two-hundred-day at $169.51.
AppLovin (APP) — the $335.67 close is a fresh 52-week low and leaves the shares $147.26 beneath a fifty-day average of $482.93. Its two-hundred-day at $516.19 now describes a different asset.
Top Movers
Gainers
Paycom Software (PAYC) +23.55% to $215.97. The payroll software company earned $2.78 a share against a $2.38 estimate on revenue of $531 million, and the move cleared both its twenty-day average at $156.59 and its fifty-day at $143.00. Buyers rewarded a recurring-revenue business posting an upside quarter in a week when its peers have been trimming outlooks.
Unity Software (U) +15.05% to $40.81. Second-quarter results from the game-engine and advertising company beat, sending the shares to their highest level since late January. Its advertising arm draws on the same demand pool AppLovin just disappointed on, and the two finishing at opposite ends of the board says the money is discriminating between them.
SpaceX (SPCX) +6.14% to $114.92. The first lock-up expired Thursday, freeing more than 900 million shares, and the stock rose anyway from Wednesday's $108.27, its lowest close since the 12 June listing at $135.
Losers
Honeywell Aerospace (HONA) -23.16% to $156.47. The Phoenix supplier, spun out of its parent on 29 June, cut full-year organic sales growth to 4%-5% from 7%-9% and pro-forma standalone adjusted EBITDA to $4.35-$4.45 billion from $4.65-$4.75 billion in its first report as a standalone company. Management blamed a precision casting shortage routing scarce parts to Boeing and Airbus assembly lines and away from the aftermarket, where the margins live. A constraint that sends the good business to the low-margin customer is harder to fix than a demand miss, and the close was a 52-week low.
Peloton Interactive (PTON) -15.57% to $5.51. The company delivered its first full year of net profit, then guided fiscal 2027 revenue to $2.3-$2.4 billion against a $2.42 billion consensus, with connected-fitness subscriptions seen falling about 9.8%.
Western Digital (WDC) -13.03% to $451.52. The storage maker beat on both lines and still lost an eighth of its value, though the close sits well above the $436.89 the shares indicated before the open. Buyers had already paid for a straight-line year, and a forecast that merely improves at a slower quarterly pace was not what that price assumed.
Salesforce (CRM) -3.22% to $186.77. President Srini Tallapragada is stepping down after fourteen years, with Rohan Kumar taking engineering, Miguel Milano moving to operating chief and Alexa Vignone to revenue chief; four senior changes at once is the part investors reacted to.
Key Macro Data Today
| Release | Actual | Consensus | Prior |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial claims (wk. 1 Aug) | 199K | 203K | 198K |
| Four-week average | 198,750 | — | 203,250 |
| Continuing claims (wk. 25 Jul) | 1,801K | — | 1,777K |
The preceding week was revised up by a thousand, so the increase is smaller than the headline implies. Three weeks under 200,000 filings is what the bond market traded; continuing claims rising 24,000 is what it set aside, the usual sequence when employers stop shedding workers but slow down hiring them.
Notable Earnings This Session
Thursday's slate ran heavy on software and light on anything that moved an index.
Pre-Open
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) closed at $26.40, up 1.66%, and Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP) at $30.37, down 1.24%. Datadog, Paycom, Peloton and Unity had all reported the previous evening, and theirs were the reactions that set the day.
Post-Close
Airbnb (ABNB) finished the regular session at $151.64 and traded some 9% higher afterwards on its second-quarter report, the first clean beat-and-rally reaction of a week that has punished nearly all of them. Cloudflare and Lyft also reported after the bell.
Drivers
The July employment report lands at 8:30 Eastern and it is the only number tomorrow. CNBC's survey has payrolls at 83,000 with the unemployment rate holding at 4.2%; FactSet's consensus is nearer 100,000. June came in at 57,000, so the bar is low, and this week's labour data has run firmer than forecast throughout, the direction that hurts a bond market now quoting 4.670% on the ten-year.
Crude carries a legislative catalyst now. The Iranian committee text is the first version of a Hormuz transit regime set down as rules, and traders will read it for whether a partial reopening under a fee schedule is durable. At $77.29 WTI has clawed back part of what it lost to Monday and Tuesday's diplomacy.
Then there is the software standard. Datadog and HubSpot each beat and each lost roughly a fifth of their value this week; Paycom beat and gained 23.55%. The difference every time was the range guided, not the quarter delivered, and Cloudflare's numbers arrived tonight into the same test.