Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 6/29/26 – Rebounding After An Unusual Week

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“Real men despise battle, but will never run from it.” – George Washington

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

After an unusual week where the S&P 500 traded lower every day but market breadth remained positive, leaving the average S&P 500 stock up 0.20%, investors are heading into the short week looking to push the indices higher. The S&P 500 is priced to open 0.8% higher, while the Nasdaq is poised to gain more than 1%. Investors will be watching mega-caps and memory stocks, which both came under pressure late last week, to see if they can get back on track.

Treasury yields are little changed, while oil trades up over 1% to $70 per barrel. Regarding oil, it could be worse as the US and Iran lobbed strikes at each other over the weekend but have since agreed to pause any strikes ahead of talks tomorrow. Gold prices are down about 1% while Bitcoin rallies just over 2% and moves back above $60K.

In Asia, it was a relatively quiet start to the week relative to recent trading. The Nikkei rallied 0.2% while South Korea fell 0.2%. Chinese stocks saw a little more action, rallying more than 1%. In Europe, stocks are mostly lower, but the losses have been modest. The STOXX 600 is down only 0.1% while France and the UK lead the losses with a decline of 0.4%.

In the US today, there’s not much data, but later in the week, we’ll have several key economic reports capped off with the June employment report on Thursday. In earnings news, some of the reports to focus on will be AeroVironment (AVAV) after today’s close and Constellation Brands (STZ) and Nike (NKE) after the close tomorrow.

As bad a week as it was for the S&P 500 last week, it was even worse for both physical gold and its digital cousin (Bitcoin).  Physical gold, as measured by the Gold ETF (GLD), fell more than a percentage point more than the S&P 500, while Bitcoin, as tracked by the Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), lost nearly 5%. Bitcoin’s performance was even worse than the Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQ), which some would consider a more digital version of the S&P 500. While equities, gold, and Bitcoin were all down last week, the weakness was more of an anomaly relative to this year’s trend for equities, while it was a continuation of a trend of weakness for gold and Bitcoin, which were both already down YTD heading into last week.

The rally in futures this morning comes right on cue for what is typically a positive time of year for equities. As shown in the chart below, the S&P 500’s median performance during the July 4th week over the last 25 years has been a gain of 1.0%, with positive returns just under two-thirds of the time. In more recent years, performance has been even stronger with a median gain of 1.6% and positive returns nine out of ten times.

The strong seasonal tailwind shows up in our Seasonality Tool as well. As shown in the snapshot below, the S&P 500’s median one-week and one-month returns from the close today rank in the 93rd and 96th percentile relative to all other periods of the year with gains of 1.3% and 3.45%, respectively.

Even with the S&P 500 down over 2% last week, most sectors finished higher. Leading the charge were Real Estate (XLRE), Utilities (XLU), and Health Care (XLV), which were all up over 3%. Health Care’s massive 7%+ surge was its largest single-week gain in over a year, single-handedly rescuing the sector from a YTD loss to a 3%+ gain.

As shown in the chart below, last week’s rally took the sector ETF right up to key resistance around $160. This is a formidable ceiling: XLV failed to break it three times late last year and early this year, and it previously stalled out there back in the summer of 2024. The sector has now had about two years to convalesce, so we’ll see if this base is strong enough to finally push it into a higher trading range.

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