Stocks regain steady, snoozy state with reliance on big caps
(These are the market notes on today’s action by Mike Santoli, CNBC’s Senior Markets Commentator.) -Stocks are held snugly in place by familiar support from several of the largest stocks and undisturbed expectations that lower Treasury yields and Fed rate cuts are happening for the “right” reasons. -After Friday’s worse-than-hoped jobs report sent a brief chill through consumer and financial stocks, the tape quickly firmed up, with Wall Street refusing to extrapolate the numbers to a lasting signal that the economy is sputtering. -It’s fair to ask why the market is so calm — holding to full valuations with the Volatility Index snoozing near 15 — given glacial job creation, attacks on the Fed, tariff policy in flux. The core realities of rising earnings into 2026, generous corporate-credit conditions, faith in the AI theme and the market’s sturdy trend itself help to explain the indexes’ equanimity. As does the fact that so many people keep asking why the market is so calm: Sentiment has come off the boil, caution has creeped in. -That’s not the same as saying the risk-reward tradeoff appears particularly compelling at the moment, given the quite-benign scenario that seems embedded in market prices now. Earnings have receded as a proximate driver. When credit spreads are this tight, they can’t be expected to compress further and have plenty of room to back up. Lower yields and cheap oil are props to consumer activity until they crack into “growth scare” zone. The AI landscape appears a but less “everybody wins” than it did a few months ago, with Broadcom-Nvidia targeting the same order flow and the Darwinian fight among LLMs ensuring some infrastructure capex will result in money ill-spent. -For all the talk of a broadening market and the awakening of small-caps with rate-cut hopes inflating, the big stocks have taken the wheel and prevented the overall market from undergoing more than a 3% pullback since the stingier seasonal phase began Aug. 1. Here’s the Top 50 ETF vs. the equal-weight S & P 500. -Advancers and decliners evenly balanced on the NYSE today. Even with such a noncommittal session, we have consumer cyclicals easily ahead of staples, financials firm. An optimist would read the internal market action in recent weeks as foretelling an early-cycle reacceleration/reflation dynamic setting up. Fiscal and monetary help on the way heading into 2026? -The 6,500 level on the S & P 500 could be a bit of a friction point, given dealer exposures and valuations. Some longtime bullish technical market handicappers have been using 6,600 as an upside target for nearly a year (John Kolovos at Macro Risk Advisors and Craig Johnson of Piper Sandler among them). We’re a couple of percent from reaching what at one point seemed a longshot but might be treated as a culmination moment if it comes.
<
