Wall Street found its footing last week as technology stocks once again grabbed the headlines, proving that reports of the market’s fatigue may have been a bit premature. While investors navigated another week of geopolitical noise, our technical gauges remained unmoved—disciplined, confident, and fully invested.
Extra Time: Wall Street Advances on Penalties Before Earnings Season's Knockout Round
Somewhere between the Round of 16 and the quarterfinals, someone forgot to tell the stock market there was a ceasefire. Iran and the U.S. spent the week re-litigating a truce nobody signed in ink, oil went up like a speculative long ball into the box, and equities somehow still found the net. If this were a match, the ref would've added ten minutes of stoppage time just to sort out what actually happened — and by Friday's final whistle, the scoreboard read: Bulls 1, Chaos 0, on penalties.
The Final Score
The S&P 500 climbed 1.26% on the week, closing Friday at 7,575.39 — a stone's throw from its June 2nd record high of 7,620.90, like a striker who keeps hitting the crossbar instead of the corner. The Nasdaq Composite did what Nasdaq does in a knockout round: it went for glory, gaining 1.74% to finish at 26,281.61, powered by a Meta Platforms performance so good it drew comparisons to a golazo from midfield — the stock ripped nearly 15% for the week, its best showing since early 2024. Nvidia had its own moment of glory, breaking back above the $5 trillion market-cap mark for the first time since the spring, closing in on $5.1 trillion as the AI trade found its legs again on the back of the Meta enthusiasm and the SK Hynix debut (more on that shortly). The Dow, playing conservative, low-block soccer all week, actually lost ground, dropping 0.5% to 52,637.01 as healthcare and industrials sat on the bench nursing knocks.
Treasuries, meanwhile, played the role of the away team that just can't get a result on the road. Bond prices fell for a second straight week, sending yields to their highest levels since mid-May. The 10-year yield rose 7 basis points to 4.56%, its highest mark since May 22nd and up in eight of the last nine sessions. But the real headline was at the long end: the 30-year yield broke back above 5%, climbing to 5.06%, just shy of its 52-week high near 5.18% — a psychological line that, once breached, tends to start squeezing the rest of the market. Higher long rates raise the discount rate applied to future earnings, which is unkind to high-multiple AI darlings, push up borrowing costs for households and corporations alike, and give bonds a legitimate case as competition for stocks for the first time in months. The 2-year yield rose too, advancing to 4.21%. Translation for anyone new to the pitch: inflation worries and hawkish Fed chatter are playing out like VAR reviews — nobody's thrilled, and everybody's waiting for the replay.
Group Stage Survivors: The Catalysts That Moved the Ball
Iran, Oil, and a Ceasefire with More Stoppage Time Than a Group Match
Markets spent Tuesday and Wednesday absorbing the news that the fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire had effectively broken down, with President Trump saying he believed the truce had ended even as talks continued. Brent crude surged more than 5% at one point, touching $80 a barrel, before settling back toward $76 by week's end.
•  The pro column: Oil's retreat by Friday suggested markets are pricing this as a controlled scrimmage, not a full-blown war — and Energy stocks (+3.2% for the week) cashed in either way.
•  The con column: Every headline out of the Strait of Hormuz is a potential red card for the "soft landing" narrative, and a Fed already worried about sticky inflation doesn't need $80 oil as an assist.
SK Hynix Makes Its World Cup Debut — and It's a Golazo
Friday's marquee fixture belonged to Korea’s SK Hynix, which priced a $26.5 billion ADR IPO — the largest-ever U.S. listing by a foreign company — and then opened at $170 per share, a roughly 14% pop above its $149 offering price. For a Nvidia supplier riding the memory boom, this was less a debut than a hat trick before halftime.
A blowout memory-chip listing landing cleanly, with SK Hynix's CEO publicly betting the chip shortage runs past 2030, tells you institutional demand for the AI supply chain hasn't blinked — and it's part of what carried Nvidia back over that $5 trillion line.
The Data Calendar Took the Week Off (Mostly)
With no major economic releases scheduled for most of the week, the real economic action came from a light rotation: initial jobless claims for the week ended July 4th fell to 215,000, better than expected and the lowest since late May — a labor market that's still standing after ninety-plus minutes. Continuing claims ticked up modestly to 1.814 million. Elsewhere, June existing home sales fell 2.4%, more than expected, evidence that elevated long-term rates are still playing tough defense against housing. The May trade deficit widened sharply to $77.6 billion as exports slid and imports rose — not quite an own goal, but not a clean sheet either.
The Marquee Matchup: Earnings Season's Knockout Round Kicks Off
If last week was the group stage, this week is the Round of 16. Second-quarter earnings season officially opens with the banks — JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and BlackRock all report, alongside notable names like GE, Johnson & Johnson, BNY, UnitedHealth, and Netflix. Analysts surveyed by FactSet have quietly raised their bar, now forecasting 23.6% yoy earnings growth for the S&P 500, up from 23.3% a week ago — which is either supreme confidence or a very expensive parlay bet. Either way, it would mark a second straight quarter of growth north of 20%, something this market hasn't strung together since the height of the AI buildout.
Layered on top of earnings: next week also brings June CPI and Core CPI, the data the Fed will be studying closest as it heads toward its own knockout match. That's because the FOMC meets July 28th and 29th, with the rate decision landing that Wednesday afternoon — and with long yields already breaking above 5% and Fed officials leaning hawkish in recent commentary, this meeting shapes up as the tournament's real final. A hot CPI print now would be the equivalent of a controversial red card handed out in the group stage — it wouldn't just cost this week's match, it would set the tone heading into the knockout rounds still to come.
Meanwhile, the actual World Cup enters its knockout phase — quarterfinals wrap this weekend, semifinals are set for July 14th and 15th, and the final is on July 19th at MetLife Stadium.
Figure 1 - Yahoo Sports
Full Time: Where This Leaves Us
The S&P 500 is sitting roughly 40 points from history, the Nasdaq is up 13% year-to-date and playing as it knows it, Nvidia is back above the $5 trillion mark, and the VIX has quietly fallen to 15.0 — its lowest level in more than six months, a far cry from the 22.2 spike seen back on June 10th. That's a market that has weathered a broken ceasefire, an oil spike, a chip-sector wobble, and a record foreign IPO, and still found a way to advance.
But as any World Cup bracket will remind you: surviving the group stage on penalties doesn't guarantee anything in the knockout round. Earnings season is officially the Round of 16, a 30-year yield above 5% is a defender who's already seen one yellow card, and the Fed's July 28th decision is the match that could decide the whole tournament. The scoreboard says the bulls are through. Whether they're playing like champions or just riding a hot goalkeeper is a question the next two weeks — and CPI, and the Fed — will answer.
Substitutions warming up: banks reporting Tuesday, June CPI and Core CPI on deck, a 30-year yield flirting with 5.2%, and the FOMC's July 28–29 meeting looming as the real match.
Most participants remarked that growth in economic activity that exceeded that of potential output, owing in part to strong AI business investment, could contribute to more persistent inflationary pressures."
— Federal Open Market Committee Minutes (June 16–17 meeting)
Perspectives by Ben Ashby
Cheap Oil, Expensive Assumptions
When I last wrote, I suggested the market was fixating on the immediate inconvenience of the Strait of Hormuz while missing the larger rearrangement behind it, and that anyone assuming a swift return to Gulf normality was being, in the British manner, "somewhat optimistic." The near-term half of that has aged well. The noise has subsided, the stranded tankers are filing out of the Gulf, and Brent has completed a round trip that would embarrass a fairground ride—from a four-year high above $126 in April to the low $70s now, which is to say, roughly where it sat the day before the war began. The war premium has not so much deflated as been refunded in full.
I would now gently suggest this is the wrong conclusion drawn from the right facts. Consider what actually produced the fall, because none of it describes a healthy market.
Close to a hundred million barrels of previously stranded crude are draining onto the water as Hormuz reopens, and a backlog clearing is not the same thing as a market loosening. The forward curve, meanwhile, has spent four months pricing a reopening it kept believing was eight weeks away; Brent being a contract delivered into the future, the perpetual promise of imminent normality has sat on prices the entire time. And there has been a genuine, if brutal, rebalancing of flows: the United States has pushed crude and product exports from around five million barrels a day to nine, while China has quietly cut net imports from some thirteen million barrels a day to seven and a half, drawing down its own inventories rather than pay wartime prices.
The system found its balance not through new supply but by consuming its buffers — OECD stocks run down toward levels last seen in 2003 and, on the sell side's own arithmetic, to within touching distance of the operational floor beneath which pipelines lose pressure, terminals cannot load, and refiners cannot source their grades. The system does not seize because the oil has gone; it seizes because too little of it is left in motion to keep the machinery turning. The market has, in short, sold most of the fuel and pronounced the car lighter and therefore faster.
Into this arrives the past week's most eye-catching development, and one widely mis-described. Saudi Arabia has not cut production—quite the reverse, nominally. It has cut price.
The mechanics are the story. Aramco sells its term barrels not at an outright price but at a monthly differential to a regional benchmark, and that differential is about as honest a demand signal as the oil market produces. As recently as July, Arab Light carried a premium of nearly ten dollars; a month later it is offered at a discount, for the first time since the 2020 price war. This is not a response to abundance but to absence—the Asian buyers lost during the war have not returned, and Riyadh is discounting to win them back. That the cut lands alongside the fifth consecutive OPEC+ quota increase—volumes that remain largely notional, since Hormuz still caps how much Gulf crude can physically move—merely sharpens the point. It is a scramble for market share dressed up as a supply glut.
It is also not obviously sustainable. Riyadh needs an oil price in the mid-to-high eighties merely to balance its budget on the IMF's reckoning, and nearer ninety to close the gap in full—before one so much as mentions the giga-projects. A sovereign defending market share by discounting into a $71 market, with Aramco's cash flows now straining against a dividend it shows no appetite to trim, is a coiled spring, not a new equilibrium. Price wars are most expensive for the people who start them.
So, I find myself in the faintly absurd position of arguing that oil is too cheap while the headlines celebrate its return to normal. The flat price has round-tripped below its pre-war level; the physical system beneath it is measurably more fragile than before the war began. Qatari LNG capacity remains offline and will stay so for years—the loss equivalent to roughly three-quarters of the Russian pipeline gas Europe lost in 2022—while around a fifth of the world's LNG still threads the very strait everyone has agreed to stop worrying about. Distillate cracks sit near multi-year highs as we enter the seasonal peak, a tax on the productive economy of trucks, ships, and factories rather than merely on the motorist. And the restart, when it comes, will be neither quick nor clean: shut-in wells lose reservoir pressure and temperature, wax and asphaltenes settle out to plug the tubing, and the number of Gulf wells that struggle to come back rises with every month they sit idle—which is why the Gulf's own national oil companies now concede that full flows are unlikely before 2027. The forecasters are nonetheless already sketching a 2027 glut, assuming everything reopens on schedule and stays open. That is a great deal of assuming.
None of this argues for melodrama, and I would concede there are possible outcomes in either direction. But the distinction I drew last time holds. The market is again pricing what is visible and immediate—the tankers leaving, the premium unwinding, the Saudis discounting—and underpricing what is structural and delayed: the vessels reluctant to return, the inventories that must be rebuilt, the LNG that cannot be, the wells that will not simply switch back on, and a lead producer now selling at a loss to a customer who has wandered off.
For portfolios, the implication is much as before, only cheaper to act upon. Pause on the oddity that many energy equities have fallen through all this even as the single largest supply disruption in the market's history unfolded. Secure, low-cost producers and non-Hormuz gas infrastructure now change hands at valuations that quietly discount a long-term oil price in the low seventies: below even a conservative through-cycle estimate, and a world away from what the physical picture arguably justifies. I am inclined to take the other side of that.
In fixed income I remain wary of duration: the inflationary impulse looks rather less transitory than the calm in crude implies—distillate cracks are still stretched, and the same energy shock is feeding through Asian producers into the price of the goods the West imports—and I continue to find TIPS and selective curve steepeners useful.
The calm is real. The repair is not. We will see how this pans out.
Advisory services offered through Sowell Management, a Registered Investment Advisor. The views expressed represent the opinion of Sowell Management. The views are subject to change and are not intended as a forecast or guarantee of future results. This material is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice and is not intended as an endorsement of any specific investment. Stated information is derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources that have not been independently verified for accuracy or completeness. While Sowell Management believes the information to be accurate and reliable, we do not claim or have responsibility for its completeness, accuracy, or reliability. Statements of future expectations, estimates, projections, and other forward-looking statements are based on available information and Sowell Management’s view as of the time of these statements. Accordingly, such statements are inherently speculative as they are based on assumptions that may involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results, performance or events may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Investing in securities involves risks, including the potential loss of principal. While equities may offer the potential for greater long-term growth than most debt securities, they generally have higher volatility. International investments may involve risk of capital loss from unfavorable fluctuation in currency values, from differences in generally accepted accounting principles, or from economic or political instability in other nations. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
You should receive a confirmation email shortly. Don’t forget to reserve your room through the unique Sowell hotel reservation page. You can extend your stay at the Sowell Summit reduced room rate.
WEEK AHEAD
July 13-17, 2026
Weekly Market Commentary:
Extra Time: Wall Street Advances on Penalties Before Earnings Season's Knockout Round
The Final Score
Group Stage Survivors: The Catalysts That Moved the Ball
Iran, Oil, and a Ceasefire with More Stoppage Time Than a Group Match
SK Hynix Makes Its World Cup Debut — and It's a Golazo
The Data Calendar Took the Week Off (Mostly)
The Marquee Matchup: Earnings Season's Knockout Round Kicks Off
Full Time: Where This Leaves Us
Perspectives by Ben Ashby
Cheap Oil, Expensive Assumptions
Advisory services offered through Sowell Management, a Registered Investment Advisor. The views expressed represent the opinion of Sowell Management. The views are subject to change and are not intended as a forecast or guarantee of future results. This material is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice and is not intended as an endorsement of any specific investment. Stated information is derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources that have not been independently verified for accuracy or completeness. While Sowell Management believes the information to be accurate and reliable, we do not claim or have responsibility for its completeness, accuracy, or reliability. Statements of future expectations, estimates, projections, and other forward-looking statements are based on available information and Sowell Management’s view as of the time of these statements. Accordingly, such statements are inherently speculative as they are based on assumptions that may involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results, performance or events may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Investing in securities involves risks, including the potential loss of principal. While equities may offer the potential for greater long-term growth than most debt securities, they generally have higher volatility. International investments may involve risk of capital loss from unfavorable fluctuation in currency values, from differences in generally accepted accounting principles, or from economic or political instability in other nations. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Â