Violence
The Week Ahead 7/20/2026
The thesis that the market should hold up into Opex week proved true but sure enough, as the week came to a close we started to see escalation out of the Middle East and Semiconductor catalyst hit the news creating weakness across the index’s and key leaders.
I think over the next few weeks and months until November the difficulty level of trading this market will increase, but for those positioned to ride out a storm, it might be much less challenging. Lets dive into it.
Reviewing The 1st Half of July
I want to briefly go over the performance of the 1H July Portfolio build that was laid out in the Q3 Market Outlook. See below.
Pretty happy with that result. Now lets review the plans for the week ahead.
A Regime Shift?
One of the biggest questions of any market is what phase of the cycle are we in. Is it early cycle? Is it late cycle? Well, regardless of the cycle I wanted to share this cheat sheat with you all showing what typically works in each environment. Thank you for the support.
Technical Picture
S&P Futures - want to see if this 50D support holds to start the week. Since April it has been very solid support.
Nasdaq Futures - last time the weekly sell signal hit on the RSI was the summer of 2024, Tech bottom in early August. Not saying we get the same result this time but something to watch.
Semi’s
Was this a great callout or what? The big question is when the bounce comes, and its coming, will it be just that?
Earnings This Week
Lots of big earnings this week including Tesla, Servicenow, Google, Intel, and plenty more. I am curious to see if we have already seen peak earnings in some of the leaders or will the reports this week create a bounce opportunity?
Tesla - will be watching to see if TSLA breaks out of this setup, an upside target would be 475 gap fill, downside would be 237 level. Currently below the 200D gives me pause in trying a long here.
NOW - ServiceNow could be explosive post earnings, risk I see here is enterprise spend on AI hurting these software names. The IBM news recently strengthened that risk. But, over the longer term, I still see this as great buying opportunity for my own portfolio. We have the lower high, now we need to confirm it and push higher from here.
Seasonality
Tech weakness shouldn’t be a surprise as we are currently in the weakest window of the Mid Term Cycle. Below you can see in 2nd Term President Cycles, July is often the weakest month.
For the market overall, we need to keep in mind the bigger picture. We are squarely in the risk off zone.
2H July / August Portfolio and Trade Ideas
