Welcome back to Hitting the Bid Weekly!

Equities started the week on firmer footing as a semiconductor rebound briefly shifted attention away from U.S.-Iran tensions. That changed Wednesday, when renewed fighting pushed oil and Treasury yields higher while investors waited for Alphabet and Tesla to report.

The decisive move came Thursday. Alphabet’s higher spending plans and Tesla’s disappointing results revived concerns that AI investment may be running ahead of near-term returns. Tesla fell more than 14%, Alphabet lost roughly 7%, and $QQQ ( ▲ 0.73% ) led the broader market lower as the Nasdaq dropped 2.2%. Chip weakness carried into Friday, although retreating oil prices helped stabilize the S&P 500 $SPY ( ▲ 0.25% ) and the Russell 2000 $IWM ( ▲ 0.57% ).

Monday brought a sharp reversal in energy but limited relief for technology. A pause in U.S.-Iran hostilities sent crude oil down 7.5% to about $82. SPY finished nearly flat and IWM gained 0.6%, while QQQ slipped 0.4%.

Across the full Tuesday-through-Monday window, SPY declined about 0.4%, QQQ fell 2.0%, and IWM gained 0.2%. That divergence looks more like a rotation away from mega-cap technology than indiscriminate risk-off selling.

This week brings the Fed decision, with no rate change expected, Q2 GDP, PCE inflation, and a huge earnings slate featuring Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple.

Key market moves this past week:

Not an exhaustive list — just a few I’m watching closely for potential market impact.

Back in June, I flagged $288 and $293 as resistance on Apple after a round of price hikes hit the stock hard. I wanted to see a lower high before considering a bearish setup. I never got one. AAPL reclaimed that zone, held it, and hasn’t looked back since. Shares hit a fresh all-time high near $343 today and overtook Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world. Wrong read, and I’m fine saying so.

What’s different now is the story underneath the move. For two years, the market rewarded the companies building AI infrastructure. Apple sat that out almost entirely, spending just $12.7 billion on CapEx in fiscal 2025 while generating $98.8 billion in free cash flow. That restraint looked like hesitation for a while. Now, with questions swirling around whether AI infrastructure spending is getting ahead of itself, the market appears to be rewarding capital discipline instead. Apple is up roughly 22% year to date. Nvidia is up about 9%.

Earnings land Thursday after the close, in the same week as Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. Wall Street expects EPS to grow 20.4% to $1.89 on revenue of $108.89 billion. At all-time highs, the setup leaves little room for a blemish.

That’s the trade. A stock priced for perfection is reporting into the most-watched earnings week of the year. The early-June highs also appeared to hold as support during the mid-July selloff. I’m watching whether AAPL holds its breakout and establishes real separation from Nvidia, or whether a flawless run finally meets a print that isn’t flawless enough.

Wrigley Field sold out three nights in a row this past weekend. Not for the Cubs, but for the Savannah Bananas, a barnstorming exhibition team playing a version of baseball where bunting gets you ejected and stepping out of the batter’s box isn’t allowed.

Plenty of the people who came don’t even like baseball. There was no pennant race, no rivalry, and the most recognizable faces were the celebrity cameos each night.

They didn’t come only for the game. They came for something else, and whatever that was, it filled a 100-year-old ballpark three times in one weekend.

The result was impressive. The source of the demand was more interesting.

The Bananas didn’t make a better case for nine innings of traditional baseball. They changed what the night was offering. The game became part competition, part performance, and part participation. People were not only buying a seat to watch a sport. They were buying an experience they could join, talk about, and share afterward.

The product was still baseball. The reason people wanted it was not.

Look only at the sellouts, and it would be easy to assume the play on the field created the demand, when the real driver is something else.

I make the same mistake in markets. A stock moves after earnings, so I attach the move to the quarter. It breaks a technical level, so I credit the chart. It rallies on a macro headline, so I decide the headline was the catalyst.

Sometimes that explanation is right. Sometimes it’s just the cleanest story available after price has already moved.

That difference matters because a trade can work even when the thesis was wrong. Maybe I bought for earnings and the real driver was positioning. Maybe I expected a bullish breakout, but a short squeeze did the work. The profit is real, but the mechanism is different. If I mistake a favorable outcome for confirmation, I may size the next trade as if I proved something I never actually tested.

A working trade is not always a validated thesis. You can be profitable and still be wrong about why.

I’ve been thinking about that with this newsletter. Subscriber growth has been flat for the past few months. My first instinct is that the answer is sharper analysis. Better market context. Cleaner explanations. More useful trade ideas.

All of that is worth doing on its own merits. But I’ve never actually confirmed that better analysis is what gets someone to hit forward. I’ve just assumed it, the same way I’ve assumed a thesis was the reason a trade worked.

Maybe people subscribe because one idea gives them language for something they’ve been feeling. Maybe they stay because the newsletter creates a weekly rhythm. Maybe they share when an idea is easy to pass along, not when I add another paragraph of analysis.

The Bananas didn’t create demand by trying to improve upon traditional baseball. They got clearer about what people wanted. What drew people in had less to do with the game itself than with the experience built around it. That can be uncomfortable to sit with because it means the thing you’re optimizing might not be the lever at all.

This extends beyond a newsletter. I still make a 90-minute round trip to get my hair cut by Vivian instead of finding someone ten minutes away. The haircut matters, but the trust and relationship we’ve built are part of what keeps me making the trip.

Over the next few months, you’ll notice me testing a few changes to the newsletter, one at a time. A one-question poll. A short prompt. A different structure. A brief survey. Then I’ll investigate what each one does to replies, forwards, referrals, and new subscriptions. I’d rather ask than guess.

The stated reason and the real reason can coexist. Trouble starts when I assume they are identical.

Before I trust a driver, I want evidence that it’s actually connected to the outcome. Not a good story. Not one successful result. A test that can separate what I built from what people value.

Fans weren’t only buying a game. They were buying a feeling. Sometimes I forget that’s true of more than baseball.

Like what you’re reading?
Forward this to a friend or share the newsletter link to help grow the HtB community.

Hitting the Bid content is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The information contained is not, nor is it intended to be, trading or investment advice or a recommendation of any security, futures contract, digital asset or alike. I may hold a position in the trading vehicles discussed. Trading and investing contains risk. All investors should evaluate their own risk tolerance, financial situation, and investment duration before entering any trade or investment.