1.Today's market: Closing on August 21st, rebounded in a single day but fell throughout the week
First, separate the day from the whole week, because they are talking about two different things.
Stock side (closed on 08/21)
The three major indexes rebounded across the board that day, but the whole week still fell . The reason is not the stock itself, but in the long-term US Treasury: the yield of the 30-year US Treasury bond hit about 5.34% in the middle of the day on August 18, the highest since 2007; the US Treasury then announced that it would at least double the scale of long-term Treasury bond repurchase operations - from $2 billion per time to at least $4 billion, and the yield fell by about 10 basis points that day, but quickly rose again.
Capital flows
On that day, Nasdaq technology stocks fell by an average of about 0.77%, with funds clearly shifting to finance and healthcare. NVIDIA (NVDA) fell 0.98% to $214.72; MRVL (MRVL) fell 5.57% to $237.04, with the market interpreting it as profit-taking before the financial report; Pinduoduo (PDD) fell 1.27% to $88.38, maintaining a wait-and-see attitude before the financial report.
On the other hand, bitcoin rose more than 20% in a week, once rising to about $77,000, the best weekly performance in nearly two years; spot gold stood above $4,500/ounce, rising for the third consecutive week.
Why these two lines can hold at the same time : The stock side is suppressed by the long-term interest rate because the rise in risk-free interest rates compresses the valuation multiples of all risky assets; while assets such as gold and Bitcoin that do not generate cash flow are highly dependent on the opportunity cost of holding them. Once interest rates show signs of falling, their relative attractiveness increases. The same macro variable is in opposite directions for two types of assets.
2.Star of the Day: Robinhood up 13.70%, what does Beta 2.32 mean?
The strongest performance of the day was Robinhood (HOOD), an Internet broker, closing at $108.13, a single day + 13.70% , the market value rose from about 85.40 billion to $97.20 billion, more than 11.70 billion; 50.46 million shares were traded, 1.83 times the daily average.
Why did it rise : Bitcoin rose about 7% on the same day and more than 20% in a week; the White House held a crypto summit on Wednesday, pushing the legislative process of the CLARITY Act back into the market's view. Brokers earn not money from holding coins, but money from matchmaking - When trading volume increases, income increases , so the stock price rose 2.1 times the increase of Bitcoin that day.
But before drawing conclusions, we need to first look at Beta = 2.32.
Beta is the amplification factor of a stock's volatility relative to the market: the market moves by 1%, and the average movement of Beta 1.0 stocks is also 1%. Beta 2.32 represents an average movement of 2.3%. It does not predict the direction, only describes the amplitude. When seeing the daily rise and fall, divide by Beta first, which is a very low-cost checking action.
The five-dimensional rating makes this matter clearer
Two-dimensional full marks, only fluctuation control collapsed to 27 points. The most worthwhile thing to develop here is why the relative strength of the industry is full marks : NASDAQ Capital Markets industry average + 3.37% that day, this company + 13.70%, with a difference of 10.33 percentage points in the middle. The algorithm is fixed as "50 + difference × 5", sandwiched between 0-100, and it is calculated to be 101.7, with a maximum score of 100 points.
The significance of this score lies in distinguishing between "individual stock matters" and "sector matters" The higher the score, the more the increase comes from the company itself, rather than the entire sector. Conversely, if the individual stock rises 3.5% and the sector rises 3.4%, and the score is only 50.5, then it is a market that follows the sector. On that day, Interactive Brokers (IBKR) + 4.47% and Schwab (SCHW) + 2.29% were both near the industry average - Robinhood's increase did come from the individual stocks themselves.
At the same time, there are also places that must be seen clearly : In the second quarter, the crypto business accounted for only about 13% ($100 million) of the trading revenue, and options were the main part, accounting for 44% ($342 million). The revenue contribution of tokenization and private placement products will have to wait for subsequent financial reports. In other words, what the market revalued that day was the matching traffic business , not the coins on the books.
3.Star of the Day: Why did some people rise 13.7% while others fell 8.4% in the same batch of cryptocurrency concept stocks?
On the same day and under the same driving factor, the performance of this batch of targets varies greatly.
On the same day that Bitcoin recorded its best weekly performance in nearly two years, Cipher Mining fell 8.40%, with a difference of 22 percentage points from beginning to end .
The dividing line is what exactly makes money from this business . Brokers and exchanges rely on matching commissions, and the trading volume brought by the surge in currency prices is their income; while Cipher is a computing power data center and mining company, with a large amount of Fixed Assets and debt in its cost structure - revenue in the second quarter decreased by 43% year-on-year, and interest expenses were 2.7 times revenue. The market no longer regards it as a "shadow of Bitcoin", but prices it according to the data center developer.
Transferable judgment : When you see a preset of "concept sector" rising and falling together, first regroup the companies inside according to "how to generate revenue". The same driving factor falls on different business models, which can be revenue amplification or completely unrelated.
4. US stock primary school: 52-week range position - what the index covers
Last week, the three major indexes closed in the dark for the whole week, which seemed like just a small rebound. But putting six large US stock companies into their respective one-year intervals, the result is completely different.
Company | Industry | 52-Week interval position |
Merck (MRK) | Medicine | 97.5 |
ExxonMobil (XOM) | Energy | 83.4 |
JP Morgan Chase (JPM) | Bank | 82.9 |
Microsoft (MSFT) | Software and cloud | 65.5 |
New Era Energy (NEE) | Public utilities | 48.8 |
Procter & Gamble (PG) | Daily consumption | 23.8 |
The highest stood at 97.5, the lowest was only 23.8, the same year, the same market, a difference of 73.7 percentage points .
What does this indicator measure?
The calculation is as follows: (Latest Closing Price - 52 Week Lowest Price) ÷ (52 Week Highest Price - 52 Week Lowest Price), where 0 represents the lowest and 100 represents the highest.
It has three characteristics worth remembering:
It measures the position, not the rise and fall. The same 5% drop, from 95 to 90, and from 30 to 25, are two completely different things.
Its advantage is comparability. The denominator is each company's own range, so $83 stocks and $483 stocks, a market value of 3.6 trillion and a market value of 170 billion, can be directly sorted on the same chart.
It doesn't explain why. The low position may be due to interest rates, industry headwinds, or the company's own problems. This number is responsible for pointing out the problem, not answering it.
What happened over the weekend, the index didn't tell you
The first two are two sides of the same thing: Long-term interest rates are so high that the Treasury Department has to take action The third has nothing to do with interest rates, it is a clinical data. Last week, the US stock market was pulled by these two unrelated lines at the same time And the index only reported a result that was averaged out .
5.US Stock Learning: A judgment sequence that can be repeatedly used
By combining the previous paragraphs, a universal sequence of operations can be obtained.
Step 1: Look at the distribution first, then look at the average.
The rise and fall of the index is a weighted average, which naturally smooths out the gap between constituent stocks. When the index hardly moves, it is precisely when the distribution is most worth watching - last Saturday, large stocks crossed 73.7 percentage points, while the index only moved slightly.
Step 2: Use a ruler that can be compared across companies.
The high and low stock prices and market value cannot be directly compared, but "standing in your own range" can. First, use the range position to rank a basket of stocks, and then ask the few stocks at the top of the range "why". Its value is to help you choose the object to spend time on, not to draw conclusions for you.
Step 3: Break down "same section" into "same way of making money".
On 8/21, crypto-related stocks rose in matching traffic and fell in computing power data centers. Sector tags are for retrieval, and business models are where the driving force really lands.
Step 4: Check the magnification (Beta).
Even if the direction is judged correctly, the amplitude needs to be divided by the magnification factor to make sense. The information behind the increase of 13.70% for stocks with Beta 2.32 and 13.70% for stocks with Beta 0.6 is completely different. Beta can also reverse the positioning: to bear the same volatility as the market, the target of Beta 2.3 can only hold a little more than one-third of the money.
6.What to watch tonight: Macro empty window, pre-market review of Pinduoduo's financial report
No US economic data will be released tonight. The macro focus this week is on the second half: on Wednesday at 12:30 UTC, the core PCE for July, durable goods orders for July, and Q2 GDP will be released in one go. There will also be a speech by the chairperson of the Federal Reserve at the Jackson Hole annual meeting on Friday.
Pre-market financial report: Pinduoduo (PDD), 11:30 UTC conference call, implied volatility of options is about ± 6.4%.
Pinduoduo's position in the e-commerce chain is very special: the domestic main station is an aggregator of low-priced supply, and the cross-border Temu directly connects Chinese production capacity to overseas consumers, eliminating the two layers of brand and channel in the middle. Therefore, this financial report is not only the prosperity of a platform, but also a real-time reading of China's production capacity going abroad .
It depends on transaction service revenue, not total revenue
Not looking at the total revenue is because the total revenue of 11% YoY is the result of averaging the two legs, which will smooth out the differences - in the previous quarter, the domestic online marketing services were only 2% YoY, and the transaction services were 20% YoY, with almost all growth in this area. The 63.90 billion yuan in 25Q4 was the peak of the peak season, and the decline in 26Q1 was seasonal, not a slowdown.
Two observation points tonight
Can transaction services stand at 20% YoY? This line is basically equivalent to the thermometer of cross-border business. Standing up shows that the momentum has not been bitten off by tariffs and localization costs.
The trade-off between profit and share. Last quarter's operating profit increased by 22% year-on-year, while non-GAAP net profit was − 17% year-on-year. Performance and promotion expenses are the main reasons. It depends on whether to continue to exchange profits for share or start to stop.
The biggest variable this week is NVIDIA, after the market closed on Wednesday. Interestingly, the implied volatility of options is only ± 6.3%, which, like tonight's Pinduoduo (± 6.4%), is the lowest among the two companies in this week's financial report. The truly expensive ones are several software stocks - Okta 13.4%, Veeva 12.0%, Mywell 11.5%, and Caijie 9.2%. Implied volatility Only talk about magnitude, not direction The larger the number, the deeper the divergence. It should be noted that Pinduoduo's numbers are taken from different perspectives from the others and are only for reference purposes and should not be compared bit by bit.
7. Frequently Asked Questions FAQ
Q1: The index only fell a little bit throughout the week. Why is it said to "cover up a lot of things"?
Because the index is a weighted average, and the role of the average is to smooth out differences. Last week, six large US stock companies were put into their respective 52-week intervals, with readings of 97.5, 83.4, 82.9, 65.5, 48.8, and 23.8, respectively, with a difference of 73.7 percentage points between the highest and lowest. The smaller the index movement, the more worthwhile it is to look at the distribution.
How to calculate the position of the 52-week interval and what can it be used for?
The formula is (Latest Closing Price - 52 Week Lowest) ÷ (52 Week Lowest - 52 Week Lowest), 0 to 100. Its maximum value is comparable across companies - the denominator is each company's own range, so different stock prices, market values, and industries can be sorted together. In practice, it is used to screen "who to spend time researching", rather than using it to draw buying and selling conclusions.
Q3: How to use Beta?
Beta is the amplification factor of a stock's volatility relative to the market, which only describes the magnitude and does not predict the direction. There are two practical methods: one is to divide by Beta when seeing the daily rise and fall, and judge whether this amplitude is abnormal; the other is to use it to reverse the positioning - if you want to bear the same volatility as the market, the target of Beta 2.3 can only hold a little more than one-third of the money.
Q4: Both are "crypto concept stocks", why can they differ by 22 percentage points on the same day?
Due to different ways of making money. Brokers and exchanges rely on matching commissions, and the trading volume brought by the surge in currency prices directly becomes income; mining and computing power data center companies have a large number of Fixed Assets and debts, and the relationship between currency prices and their current profits and losses is not so direct. Robinhood + 13.70% on 8/21, Cipher Mining - 8.40%, is the embodiment of this difference.
Q5: What is "peer relative strength" and what does a high score represent?
It measures how much more a stock has risen than the industry average. The algorithm is "50 + (stock increase - industry average) × 5", sandwiched between 0-100. On 8/21, the industry average is + 3.37%, Robinhood is + 13.70%, with a difference of 10.33 percentage points, resulting in 101.7, capped at 100. The higher the score, the more the increase comes from the company itself, rather than the entire sector.
Can the implied volatility of options be used to determine whether the stock price will rise or fall?
No. Implied volatility is inferred from option prices, measuring the expected amplitude of a single day after the financial report is released, only talking about amplitude, not direction. The larger the number, the deeper the market divergence. In addition, the caliber of different data sources may be different, and it is only suitable to look at the magnitude when comparing across sources.
This article is compiled and written by the MEXC US stock spot team (MEXC RealStocks) . The data in this article is based on the closing of the US stock market on August 21, 2026, and the financial report and forward-looking data are as of pre-market on August 24, 2026. The content is a compilation of market public information, and the individual stocks are publicly discussed targets, which do not represent MEXC's recommendation or opinion, and do not constitute any investment advice.