Weekend Update & Market Outlook 8/9/26

Prefer to watch? Here's this weekend's video update.

The Week in Review

The week belonged to the labor market. Stocks came in off a volatile July — SPX had closed the month at 7,489.72 with the 10-year yield touching 4.737% intraday, its highest since January 2025 — and spent the first half of the week grinding higher on hyperscaler capex commentary that eased AI-spending fears. SPX cleared 7,700 for the first time ever midweek, then paused Thursday, slipping 0.18% to 7,709.96 as traders squared up ahead of payrolls.

Friday broke it open. Nonfarm payrolls came in at negative 23,000 against consensus of +80,000, with May and June revised down a combined 103,000. The unemployment rate actually fell to 4.1% from 4.2%, but for the wrong reason — participation dropped to 61.4%, off 0.7 percentage point this year on an exodus of roughly 1.4 million people from the labor force. The market read it exactly one way: a Fed that has been openly discussing raising rates now has cover to sit still. The 10-year fell to 4.64%, the 2-year to 4.193%, and September hike odds collapsed to 42% from 58%.

Rate-sensitive and long-duration names took the handoff. The Nasdaq Composite closed at 26,690.62, up 5.2% on the week, with the SOXX semiconductor ETF up better than 7%. The Dow finished at 54,036.93, up nearly 3%. Palantir jumped 10.3% on Q2 results and SpaceX ran roughly 19% for the week on an Argus upgrade. Note the regime, because it frames everything else: with the effective funds rate at 3.63% and Chair Warsh signaling willingness to tighten, good news is bad news and bad news is good news. The market rallied 3.6% on the economy shedding jobs.

Weekly Market Scorecard — Week Ending August 7, 2026

VIX: 14.87, down about 7% on the week. 10-year yield: 4.64%. 2-year: 4.193%. 30-year: 5.192%. Effective fed funds rate: 3.63%. Russell 2000: 3,034.49 (+3.52%). Dow: 54,036.93 (+2.96%). Second straight weekly gain, and the strongest week since April.

SPX / SPY

SPX closed at 7,757.64 — a record close, and 36 points under the 7,793.68 intraday all-time high. That's the first level to watch: above it there is no prior price structure, just round numbers at 7,800 and 7,900. On the downside, first support is 7,635 (the upper Bollinger Band, now the first backstop), then 7,525 at the 20-day, then 7,494 at the 50-day. A close under 7,494 is the first real damage to this structure. The 200-day sits far below at 7,050.50. RSI(14) is 66.31 — elevated but not yet the 70-plus that usually precedes a pause — and price is trading above the upper Bollinger Band, so this is extended in the short term.

Volatility (VIX)

VIX at 14.87, down roughly 7% on the week and near the low end of its range. That is cheap protection and complacent positioning heading into a CPI print that could reprice the September Fed meeting. With RSI at 66 and VIX under 15, there is very little cushion in positioning for a hot inflation number.

QQQ

QQQ closed at 723.03, up $35.04 (+5.09%) — the standout of the three. Semis did the heavy lifting, with SOXX up better than 7% on the week. Support: 710, 700. Resistance: 730, 748 (52-week high). Tech leadership is intact and it is the group most levered to rates staying where they are.

IWM

IWM closed at 301.56, up $10.32 (+3.54%), with the Russell 2000 finishing at 3,034.49. Small caps keeping pace with large caps is the part of this rally worth noting — it means the move is not just a handful of mega-caps. Small caps are the most rate-sensitive corner of the market, so this is the same trade as the Nasdaq's, expressed differently. Support: 295, 291. Resistance: 303 (52-week high).

Next Week's Economic Calendar — August 10–14

Monday August 10 — 3-month and 6-month bill auctions. Quiet open.

Tuesday August 11 — NFIB Small Business Optimism (July, prior 97.4, consensus 97.8); Existing Home Sales (July, prior 4.09M, consensus 4.07M); Q2 Total Household Debt; 3-Year Note auction.

Wednesday August 12 — CPI (July) 🔥🔥🔥 at 8:30 AM ET: headline YoY prior 3.5%, consensus 3.4%; core YoY prior 2.6%, consensus 2.5%. Also 10-Year Note auction; Monthly Budget Statement.

Thursday August 13 — PPI (July) 🔥🔥: headline MoM prior -0.3%, consensus +0.1%; headline YoY prior 5.5%. Initial jobless claims (prior 199K). Fed speakers Hammack and Barkin. 30-Year Bond auction.

Friday August 14 — Retail Sales (July) 🔥: headline MoM prior +0.2%, consensus +0.1%. Michigan Consumer Sentiment prelim (prior 55.2, consensus 54.0).

Key watch: Wednesday's CPI, and it isn't close. The Financial Times reported Thursday that Chair Warsh is prepared to hike in September if inflation readings over the coming weeks come in hot — which converts this single print into a direct referendum on the September meeting. Friday's rally was built on hike odds falling to 42%; a hot core number reverses that arithmetic in one session, and the levered part of the tape unwinds fastest. Watch the headline-versus-core split too: headline at 3.5% against core at 2.6% says energy is doing the damage, and with Strait of Hormuz risk still live, that spread can widen without the Fed's preferred gauge moving. Thursday's PPI is the underrated one — producer prices running 5.5% year over year is a margin and pass-through problem that shows up in CPI two or three months out.

Major Earnings — August 10–14

Deep into the tail of Q2 season. FactSet has S&P 500 Q2 earnings growth at 47.4%, the strongest since Q2 2021, but the megacaps have all reported.

Tuesday — CoreWeave (CRWV) after the close: consensus 110.7% revenue growth to $2.56B. Also Super Micro (SMCI), Lumentum (LITE), Sea Limited (SE), On Holding (ONON).

Wednesday — Cisco (CSCO) after the close: fiscal Q4 consensus $1.17 EPS on $16.83B revenue (+14.7% YoY). Also Coherent (COHR), Cerebras (CBRS), Nebius (NBIS).

Thursday — Applied Materials (AMAT) after the close: fiscal Q3 consensus $3.39 EPS (+36.7% YoY) on $9.01B revenue (+23.4% YoY). Also JD.com (JD), Tapestry (TPR), Birkenstock (BIRK).

Key watch: AMAT Thursday has the broadest read-through. It sits upstream of Intel, TSMC, SK Hynix and Micron, so its order commentary is the cleanest single datapoint on whether the AI capex cycle is still accelerating — and after a week where SOXX ran 7%, semis are priced for confirmation. Cisco Wednesday is the second tell.

30-Day Market Outlook

Overall bias: Bullish, but stretched and event-dependent. The trend is unambiguous and every major moving average sits beneath price. What tempers it is that Friday's leg up was bought on a deteriorating labor market, and the entire thesis rests on the Fed staying parked — a thesis with a scheduled test on Wednesday.

Technical levels: SPX 8-day SMA 7,596.46 / 20-day 7,525.41 / 50-day 7,494.24 / 200-day 7,050.50. Price is above all of them and above the upper 25-day Bollinger Band at 7,635.41. RSI(14) 66.31, MACD +61.76. Overhead: 7,793.68 intraday ATH, then 7,800 and 7,900. Support: 7,635 / 7,525 / 7,494. VIX 14.87.

Macro narrative: A market caught between a cooling economy and a Fed leaning hawkish. Q2 GDP came in at 1.5% annualized, down from 2.1% in Q1. Payrolls are now negative with heavy back-revisions. Yet headline inflation is 3.5%, PPI is 5.5%, and Warsh has kept a September hike explicitly on the table. Equities have resolved that tension in the most optimistic direction available — pricing a Fed that holds while earnings compound at a 47% clip. As long as CPI cooperates and AI capex guidance holds, the path of least resistance is up through 7,793. Small caps joining the move is a genuine breadth improvement, not just a mega-cap melt-up.

Primary risk: A hot July core CPI on Wednesday. It flips the September meeting live, sends the 10-year back toward 4.75%, and hits the exact cohort — long-duration tech and small caps — that produced last week's gains. Secondary risk: Strait of Hormuz escalation pushing crude higher, which feeds headline inflation and hands the hawks their argument without any help from the domestic economy.