Ringside · Pre-Bell · August 6
- Storage guidance disappoints: Western Digital down 15.8% and SanDisk down 10.2% before the bell.
- Jobless claims land at 8:30 ET, consensus 203,000 against last week's 197,000.
- HubSpot falls 22.3% to $194.57 after trimming its full-year revenue outlook.
Indexes
Futures are pulling in opposite directions on the same set of earnings. Dow contracts sit 0.23% higher and S&P contracts 0.14%, while Nasdaq 100 futures give back 0.44%, with semiconductors accounting for nearly all of the drag. Benzinga's 5:19 ET read had the same shape at slightly different magnitudes. The split is narrow enough that a single labour reading could erase it in either direction.
| Future | Level | % Chg | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| ES (S&P 500) | 7,760.25 | +0.14% | |
| NQ (Nasdaq 100) | 29,484.25 | -0.44% | Semis heavy |
| YM (Dow) | 54,619 | +0.23% | Fifth gain Wednesday |
| RTY (Russell 2000) | 3,030.10 | +0.16% |
Asia is where the reaction concentrated. Seoul carried almost all of it.
| Asia | Close | % Chg | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kospi | 6,296.38 | -4.58% | SK Hynix -10.67% |
| Hang Seng | 25,530.28 | -1.49% | |
| Nikkei 225 | 65,683.26 | -0.91% |
Europe barely registered any of it. The FTSE 100, DAX, CAC 40 and Euro Stoxx 50 all sit higher by between 0.14% and 0.72%, a spread too narrow to argue about.
In the News
Rates, FX, Commodities
Nothing in the cash bond market has moved since Wednesday's settle, which leaves this morning quoting yesterday's levels. Of those, the two-year at 4.20% is the one the September argument turns on.
| Treasury | Yield | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2-Year | 4.20% | |
| 5-Year | 4.324% | |
| 10-Year | 4.617% | Third decline in a row |
| 30-Year | 5.174% |
Crude is firmer for a second consecutive session on the same unresolved negotiation, and bullion is extending a run that has now covered four days.
| Commodity | Level | % Chg | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold | $4,326.10 | +0.49% | Fourth gain running |
| WTI crude | $75.89 | +0.89% | |
| Brent crude | $80.32 | +1.09% | Back above $80 |
| Natural gas | $2.672 | -0.60% |
Bullion's four-session advance still leaves it roughly a fifth beneath where the metal traded in late January, which is worth keeping in view whenever the word rally appears next to it. The dollar index is up 0.10% at 99.771 and the VIX sits at 15.94.
Technicals
Broad-index charts are not where this morning's argument is. Wednesday's 7,723.55 on the S&P 500 sits 215.57 points clear of a twenty-day average at 7,507.98, 237.87 above the fifty-day at 7,485.68, and 12.97 under the record close of 7,736.52 from 4 August, a high verified against the index's full twelve-month history of daily closes.
One level is genuinely live. The Invesco QQQ Trust spent six sessions beneath its fifty-day average through 3 August, reclaimed it on 4 August, and is quoted this morning at $714.22 against that average at $715.01. Below it the next reference is the twenty-day at $700.89. The Nasdaq 100 itself closed at 29,487.79, a cushion of 100.90 points over its own fifty-day at 29,386.89.
Yields sit near the bottom of a five-week range, the ten-year 12.8 basis points under the 4.745% of 31 July with roughly 8 basis points of open chart down to 4.53%.
Breakouts & Breakdowns
Breakouts
Newmont (NEM) — $104.29 sits within two cents of a two-hundred-day average at $104.31, level with that line for the first time since the metal peaked in January. Overhead is $131.95, the best close of the past twelve months, from 28 January.
SoundHound AI (SOUN) — a premarket $8.14 clears the twenty-day average at $6.35 and the fifty-day at $6.89 in one move, from a 52-week low of $5.70 set eight sessions ago. Next overhead is the two-hundred-day at $9.31.
Breakdowns
Western Digital (WDC). A premarket $436.89 takes out a twenty-day average of $525.21 and a fifty-day of $564.59 at once. The two-hundred-day sits far below at $338.02, a gap that measures how much of this year's advance arrived in a straight line.
AppLovin (APP). At $346.52 the shares trade beneath the $366.91 that had stood as the 52-week low since 12 February, and $170.99 under a two-hundred-day average of $517.51.
HubSpot (HUBS). A $194.57 quote gives up the fifty-day average at $207.46 and leaves $24.29 between the shares and the $170.28 low of 25 June.
Top Movers
Gainers
SoundHound AI (SOUN) +26.59% to $8.14. Revenue of $61.9 million rose 45% and cleared the $53.4 million consensus, with gross profit up 67.6% to $27.9 million. The company lifted the floor of its full-year range to $230 million from $225 million, leaving the ceiling at $260 million, and ended the quarter holding $203 million of cash against an adjusted EBITDA loss of $9.6 million.
IonQ (IONQ) +6.69% to $42.57. Revenue of $80.1 million grew 287% and landed 20% above the company's own forecast, with remaining performance obligations of $485 million and full-year guidance raised to $280 million to $290 million. The headline $1.9 billion net loss is almost entirely a $1.6 billion non-cash mark on warrant valuations.
Losers
HubSpot (HUBS) -22.31% to $194.57. Revenue of $911.7 million grew 19.8% and beat, and adjusted earnings of $3.26 came in 8.1% above consensus, so the damage is entirely in the outlook: full-year revenue guided to $3.678 billion to $3.686 billion against a $3.71 billion consensus, and third-quarter revenue to $924.5 million, 1.8% light. Net customer additions of 7,000 fell short of the company's own 9,000 to 10,000 target. Management blamed a deliberate shift toward trials and outcome-based artificial-intelligence pricing, which lengthened sales cycles, and software budgets tight enough that more deals now route through the board.
AppLovin (APP) -17.06% to $346.52. Second-quarter revenue of $1.924 billion missed while adjusted earnings of $3.76 beat. Chief executive Adam Foroughi told investors the shortfall "came down to timing" on an artificial-intelligence issue he described as resolved, and guided the third quarter above where the shortfall would imply.
Western Digital (WDC) -15.85% to $436.89. Adjusted earnings of $3.56 topped the $3.29 consensus on revenue of $3.75 billion against $3.69 billion expected, and margins improved. The guidance implied a slower sequential rate of improvement in revenue, margin and earnings, which is a long way from weakness and was priced as though it were not. The shares had advanced more than 190% this year going in.
Figma (FIG) -13.97% to $24.21. Revenue of $370.08 million grew 48% and beat $351.56 million, adjusted earnings of $0.08 doubled the estimate, and third-quarter guidance of $373 million to $375 million sits above the $364.87 million modelled. The shares lost 52% over the first half of this year on the same beat-and-sell pattern, with worry about design tools built on large language models doing most of the work.
SanDisk (SNDK) -10.25% to $1,212.12. Fourth-quarter revenue and earnings both cleared estimates, and then guidance of $10.55 billion in revenue and $45.00 in earnings arrived under what the street carried. A $14 billion expansion of the buyback authorisation, taking the total to $15.5 billion, did not offset it overnight.
Micron (MU) -4.90% to $849.45. No news of its own, only the read-across from two suppliers to the same end markets.
Key Macro Data Today
| Release | Time ET | Consensus | Prior |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial jobless claims (wk. 1 Aug) | 8:30 | 203K | 197K |
| Q2 productivity, preliminary | 8:30 | — | +0.3% |
| Q2 unit labour costs, preliminary | 8:30 | — | +1.8% |
| Wholesale trade, June | 10:00 | — | — |
Claims is normally the release nobody schedules a meeting around, and this week it is the third read on employment in four days, with nothing else between it and Friday morning's payrolls figure. The unit labour cost number deserves more attention than it will get: it is the measure that connects a cooling jobs market to the inflation argument the hawks on the committee are still making.
Notable Earnings This Session
The calendar carries 577 companies, and almost none of the ones that matter report before the opening bell.
Pre-Open
Warner Bros. Discovery and Keurig Dr Pepper lead a thin morning slate.
Post-Close
Airbnb, DoorDash, Datadog and Cloudflare all report this evening. Datadog and Cloudflare are the two to sit with: both sell subscription software to corporate budgets, and both will be judged on the range they set for the fourth quarter rather than on the three months they have just finished.
Drivers
- Jobless claims at 8:30 ET arrive with an audience they have not had in months. Consensus is 203,000 against 197,000 last week, and a third consecutive soft labour reading would leave Friday's payrolls report carrying the entire case for a September increase. September pricing has already fallen to 54.9% from 67.2% on Tuesday.
- Five companies cleared their revenue or earnings estimates last night and all five trade lower this morning, four of them by double digits. They span enterprise software, design tools and memory hardware, so the pattern is not a sector problem. Buyers have stopped paying for the quarter reported and started charging for the range guided, and this evening's four reports arrive into that same standard.
- Crude is higher for a second session at $75.89 on West Texas Intermediate and $80.32 on Brent, with Reuters reporting that the Hormuz framework now turns on a transit fee rather than a map. Tehran is asking 5% to 7%; Oman has proposed 3%. That gap has been the whole negotiation since Monday, and it remains open at 6:52 ET.