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Equities finished higher after a volatile week shaped by the Fed, mega-cap earnings, and another sharp reversal in oil.

The Fed held rates at 3.50% to 3.75% on Wednesday, with three policymakers dissenting in favor of a hike. Chair Kevin Warsh offered few clues about what comes next, but his focus on persistent inflation reinforced the possibility that rates will stay higher for longer. SPY, QQQ, and IWM all fell more than 1.5%, while the 30-year Treasury yield moved above 5.2% for the first time since 2007.

Earnings quickly shifted the tone. Microsoft surged more than 15% on Thursday after stronger cloud guidance helped justify its AI spending, while Meta fell as free cash flow dropped sharply. Friday brought another split result. Amazon gained more than 15% on accelerating AWS growth, while Apple lost 7% after warning about supply constraints.

Monday brought the week’s final reversal. Renewed hopes for U.S.-Iran talks sent crude oil down roughly 5%, even as Iran disputed that negotiations were planned. Lower oil prices and Treasury yields helped SPY gain 1.4%, QQQ rise 1.8%, and IWM add 1.7%.

Across the full Tuesday-through-Monday window, SPY gained approximately 2.5%, QQQ rose 2.6%, and IWM added 1.1%.

This week brings JOLTs, ISM services, and Friday’s jobs report, along with earnings from AMD, SpaceX, Disney, Uber, and DoorDash.

Key market moves this past week:

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

I have no plans to trade SpaceX. It’s still too early for me to get a good read on the price action, so this is a chart worth understanding, not a setup I’m looking to enter.

SpaceX reports its first earnings as a public company on Tuesday, August 4, after the close. Two days later, on Thursday, August 6, more than 900 million pre-IPO shares become eligible for sale, a block worth at least $100 billion at the current price. That puts two of the biggest catalysts a stock can face just 48 hours apart, less than two months after the largest IPO in market history.

The round trip so far has been rough. Shares priced at $135 in June, reached an all-time high of $225.64 within four days, and have since fallen to as low as $104.83. That leaves the stock down more than 50% from its peak and sitting essentially at its floor heading into the two most consequential events since it started trading.

What makes this genuinely interesting is the disconnect. Twenty-seven of the 28 analysts covering the stock rate it a Buy, with consensus targets around $231 to $236, double the current price. Morgan Stanley sits at $300. That’s either a Street whose targets have not caught up with how far the stock has fallen, or a stock about to prove the bulls wrong twice in one week.

Revenue expectations for the quarter sit at roughly $6.75 billion, with Starlink and the recently acquired AI compute business carrying the growth story. If Tuesday’s numbers are strong enough to give the market a reason to look past Thursday’s wall of newly eligible shares, the stock could stabilize. If they’re not, a mediocre quarter combined with $100 billion of potentially sellable stock would be a rough combination.

I’ll be watching from the sidelines. Between the stock’s volatility and my own view of the CEO, this isn’t one I want a position in right now. But it’s worth knowing what’s coming because a move this size can ripple through sentiment across the broader market.

By spring, I was running outside pretty regularly, usually four times a week. It had become part of my routine and, more importantly, it’s a workout I genuinely enjoy.

Then, on June 30, I woke up with some tightness in my back that I could also feel in my hamstrings. I still attempted my normal run that morning, but not even 100 feet in, I felt pain in my abdominal area.

My first instinct was not to stop. It was to find a way to keep going.

I slowed to a jog, thinking my muscles might only need time to warm up and loosen. I made it only about half a mile before turning around and walking home.

I took a few days off before trying some short hill sprints. I felt the abdominal pain again, but I had eaten shortly before the workout. I decided it was probably a side stitch.

That explanation was plausible. It was also convenient.

It allowed me to treat the pain as unrelated to what had happened during my earlier run. More importantly, it allowed me to keep believing I could return to my normal routine.

When I eventually tried my usual route again, the original pain returned. This time, there was no recent meal or unfamiliar workout to explain it away. I finally accepted that I needed to stop running completely, and I took the next four weeks off.

Looking back, what stands out is not that I missed the signal. I noticed it every time.

The difference was the standard of proof I applied to each explanation.

The explanations that allowed me to continue required very little evidence. Maybe I only needed to warm up. Maybe I had eaten too recently. But the conclusion that I needed to stop required the pain to prove itself repeatedly before I was willing to accept it.

We do this in plenty of areas beyond running.

Imagine buying a stock because it held a level you considered important. When it breaks below that level, you decide it may only be a temporary dip. When it fails to reclaim the level, you blame weakness in the broader market. When it makes another lower low, you tell yourself the sellers may finally be exhausted.

Each explanation is plausible. But they all lead to the same preferred conclusion: keep holding.

The pattern can show up at work, too. A project misses one deadline because the original timeline was aggressive. It misses another because someone was out of the office. A third slips because another priority demanded attention.

Any one of those explanations may be reasonable. Taken together, they may be evidence that the plan itself is not working.

That doesn’t mean every broken level requires an immediate exit, every missed deadline requires abandoning a project, or every minor pain requires four weeks away from running.

The better question is whether we’re evaluating every explanation by the same standard.

Evidence that supports what we already want to do often feels persuasive immediately. Evidence that asks us to change course gets questioned, qualified, and sent back for more confirmation.

Moving forward, I’m going to start asking myself a different set of questions when a signal shows up that I’d rather not act on.

Would I find this explanation equally convincing if it required me to sell instead of hold? Would I view these delays differently if I were not invested in proving the original plan could work? Am I gathering more information, or am I just waiting for permission to keep doing what I already decided?

On Sunday, I ran again for the first time in four weeks. Easy pace, no pain, good to be back.

Sometimes clarity isn’t the problem. The problem is that inconvenient evidence has to prove itself more than once. The fix isn’t reacting faster. It’s applying the same standard either way.

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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.