(These are the market notes on today’s action by Mike Santoli, CNBC’s Senior Markets Commentator. See today’s video update from Mike above.) The key indexes stayed out of danger by hiding behind their big brothers, the Nasdaq giants that embody both defense and aggression in this bull market. Apple ‘s jailbreak rally extended for a third day, the big Mag 7 laggard trying to make it up in a hurry, while carrying the Nasdaq-100 to a fresh high and offsetting another cluster of post-earnings selloffs in individual stocks (today it was Trade Desk , Microchip Tech and Block ). For the week, the NDX was up some 3.7%, almost three percentage points ahead of the equal-weight S & P 500 , enabling the standard-weight S & P 500 to hold within 1% of last week’s intraday peak. Over the course of the week, acute concern over last Friday’s poor employment report and broader apprehension toward the volatility-prone month of August was salved by increasing expectations of a September Fed rate cut, a glass-half-full take on new tariffs that emphasizes the room for exemptions and a broader sense that the brute force of the AI-buildout theme is too tough to fight. There is some sense that the mere anticipation of seasonal turbulence and concern over how far the four-month rally has travelled had investors a bit cautious entering the week, forestalling or even preventing any consequential pullback from taking hold. Much commentary about the extreme punishment handed out to stocks of companies missing forecasts or offering less-than-stellar outlooks. Shows how far prices ran relative to the fundamentals for the typical company. But the aggregate earnings growth (+11.8% vs a year ago, says FactSet), heavily influenced by the half-dozen largest tech bellwethers, keeps the chains moving for now. The S & P 500 is at levels first reached two weeks ago, in a healthy uptrend, with widely acknowledged likely support around 6150, both the old February peak and around the 50-day moving average – less than a 4% drop from here. Sometimes an overbought market can come back into balance with some sideways churn, allowing the overheated groups to cool and leaning on fewer big names to stay supported. This is the ideal scenario for bulls. Plausible, but not guaranteed.
