Tracking the Trade | Daily Edition | Friday, July 10, 2026

Nine of the S&P's eleven sectors closed red. The index closed up 0.8%.

Two sectors did the whole thing. Tech, up 1.2%. Energy, up 1.8%. Everything else got left behind. Materials fell 2.6%. Financials fell 1.9%. Consumer discretionary fell 1.8%.

Translation: the S&P 500 is not a market. It is a handful of enormous companies wearing the market as a costume.

When cap-weighting does the work, "the market went up" and "my stocks went up" stop being the same sentence. Yesterday, they were barely related.

AMD ripped 5.67% to $546.72. Meta ran 4.70% to $631.48. Micron added 4.52% to $991.64.

Nvidia? Down 0.66%. Red. On the single best day the AI trade has had all week.

The why is not mysterious. Micron said it will put more than $250 billion into US manufacturing through 2035, up from the $200 billion it promised in June. Meta said it starts building its own custom AI chip in September, chasing 14 gigawatts of compute by 2027. ARK published a note arguing that AMD silicon is already more performant per dollar than Nvidia's on some workloads.

Translation: the AI trade used to mean "buy Nvidia." Now it means memory, custom silicon, and the company that already ate Intel's lunch once.

Here is the part worth sitting with. NVIDIA's forward P/E is now 22.2x. Lowest since 2019, back when it was a gaming-card company nobody had a thesis about. The most crowded trade on earth is quietly the cheapest thing in the room.

Everyone is looking for the next Nvidia. Nobody is looking at Nvidia.

On Wednesday, crude spiked because the Iran ceasefire fell apart. Thursday, USO gave back 2.9%.

Then the IEA said global oil demand will fall by 1 million barrels a day in 2026. First annual decline since 2020. Is the cause named? The very conflict that spiked the price in the first place.

Translation: the war raised prices and killed demand. You get to trade one of those, not both.

Existing home sales came in at 4.09 million, below the 4.20 million expected. Down 2.4% on the month.

The 30-year mortgage ticked up to 6.49% from 6.43%. Pepsi's CEO piled on, saying higher gas prices are pulling people out of convenience stores and killing impulse buys.

Meanwhile jobless claims printed 215,000, better than the 218,000 expected. So people have jobs. They just cannot afford the house, the tank, or the snack.

SK Hynix is listed in the US. The Korean memory maker raised $26.5 billion selling 177.9 million ADRs at $149 apiece. Largest share sale ever by a foreign company on a US exchange. If it breaks issue price, the entire memory complex feels it by lunch, and Micron just had a very good day on very high expectations.

11:00 AM CT: WASDE. Ags only. Safe to ignore unless you farm.

12:00 PM CT: Baker Hughes rig count. Prior 445. The IEA just called for the first demand decline in six years. Whether producers add rigs anyway tells you if anyone in the patch believes it.

2:30 PM CT: CFTC positioning. Speculators went into this net short the S&P by 37,600 contracts and net short the Nasdaq by 7,600. A squeeze has fuel. It just needs a match.

Monday: OPEC meets, and the June budget statement lands.

Iran. Washington says there have been no fresh strikes and that "technical talks" are continuing. Trump is publicly calling the attacks on commercial vessels acts of terrorism.

Oil sold off 2.9% on that hope. That hope is exactly one headline thick.

Nine sectors lost yesterday and the scoreboard still said WIN.

That is not a market. That is a group project.

Tracking the Trade is for entertainment and education. It is not investment advice, and we are not your financial advisor. If you make trades based on a newsletter that makes jokes about marlins, that is a you problem. Do your own research.