Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Thursday, July 23, 2026. Eleven straight rounds of American strikes on Iran, oil clawing higher by the day, and the S&P still can't be bothered to move more than a rounding error. Bravo.
Yesterday the index closed at 7,498.96, down a majestic 0.14 percent, the Nasdaq shed 0.57 percent, and the Dow finished six points lower, which in a 52,000 point index is not a move, it is a typo. Everyone spent the session holding their breath for the after-bell confessional from the two idols of le tout-Wall Street. Tesla ($TSLA) obliged by missing on profit, again, and Alphabet ($GOOGL) delivered the line the market has learned to dread, higher capex, more billions poured into the great AI cathedral that will surely pay for itself any decade now. Translation: we are spending your money and you will clap. And clap they did, because futures actually ticked green afterward. The wonderful world of finance, where a miss and a spending warning are received as good news provided the words artificial intelligence appear somewhere in the transcript.
Who actually won here? Not shareholders, who financed the capex. Not the earnings, which disappointed. The narrative won, as it always does.
Please step back and notice these two things quietly screaming in the corner:
The eleventh straight round of strikes on Iran, oil grinding higher toward the mid eighties like it has nowhere better to be, and the ten year yield at 4.66 percent, the firmest in two months. War premium and rising funding costs, the two skunks at the party, and le tout-Wall Street has decided they are somebody else's problem. Uncle Donald posts, the tape shrugs, oil climbs. Repeat.
Gold is loitering near 4,150 an ounce, Bitcoin around 65,900, WTI near 86, S&P futures barely green as I write, and that ten year at 4.66 percent, the only honest voice in the room and nobody wants to hear it.
What's ahead today is thin, which will not stop anyone from overreacting. Initial jobless claims, consensus around 208k, new home sales expected near 600k, apparently the slowest June in four years, and a manufacturing PMI nobody will remember by noon. After the bell Intel ($INTC) reports, fresh off a 13 percent haircut last week, so that should be relaxing, while Honeywell ($HON) and Lockheed Martin ($LMT) file in before the open, the latter presumably enjoying the current geopolitical business environment more than the rest of us.
So another day in paradise. Oil up, yields up, conviction nowhere, and a market that will tell itself whatever story lets it buy the dip before lunch. Words fail me, and yet here I am.
Have a good one, and stay sharp.