The Watched Pot Never Boils

Tale of the Tape

Good evening folks.

It’s funny how sometimes the thing that everybody’s expecting imminently doesn’t come to pass. The Watched pot never boils.

Last night into this morning, everyone and their moms were all bulled up and waiting for the all-time closing high in the S&P 500. Alas…

The big level is 3,386 and at 1PM ET, we took it briefly but it was not to be and we got mild selling into the close.

Soup to nuts, the S&P only dropped .2% yet the disappointment was palpable.

Without such man-made drama, today was an absolute snoozer. None of the major averages was up or down more than 0.3% (though Energy screwed the pooch).

Some of the movers included Cisco, which gave up 11% after last night’s earnings debacle. Truist, the Frankenstein born from the BB&T/SunTrust merger, fell 4%.

On the bright side, Zoom and Tesla both gained 4%. Workday, Docusign, and Autodesk were all up 3%.

Finally, small-cap Growgeneration got high AF up 42% on earnings. This picks and shovels company for the ganja farmers reported a banger of a quarter.

Here are your closing prices for the equity indices:

S&P 500	3,373	-0.21%
Nasdaq	11,042	+0.27%
Russell 2000	1,579	-0.22%
Dow Jones	27,896	-0.29%

Jobless Claims

Jobless claims fell to its lowest level since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Now 963,000. The numbers are still insane though. Have a look:

Here’s Bloomberg with more.

Epic Games Suing Apple

Video game developer, Epic Games filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Apple after it removed Epic’s Fortnite from the app store today.

This comes after Epic Games provided a direct challenge to Apple and Google’s payment rules in their app stores. This would allow customers to purchase digital items directly from Epic rather than Apple and Google taking a 30% cut of sales inside apps.

Fortnite is one of the top games in the world with $1.2 billion in spending on the App Store to date and 2.4 million installations on the App store in the past 30 days.

Epic Games had this to say following the lawsuit filing:

Apple’s removal of Fortnite is yet another example of Apple flexing its enormous power in order to impose unreasonable restraints and unlawfully maintain its 100% monopoly over the iOS In-App Payment Processing Market.

Cisco Missed doh

Cisco reported earnings yesterday after the close and today the stock dropped 11%. The company failed to provide strong guidance and traders hit the exits. Here’s the daily chart.

Here are the numbers:

EPS: $0.80 vs $0.74 est.
Revenue: $12.15B -9.5% YoY

Here’s the official press release.

Crypto Seized.

The US Justice Department seized $2M from terrorist organizations while taking down militant groups’ cryptocurrency fundraising scheme. Attorney General William Barr said the following,

It should not surprise anyone that our enemies use modern technology, social media platforms and cryptocurrency to facilitate their evil and violent agendas. As announced today, we will seize the funds and the instrumentalities that provide a lifeline for their operations whenever possible.

Here’s Reuters with more.

Light Like Air

Saudi Arabia’s Tesla killer, Lucid Motors said its Air EV project has a projected range of 517 miles. The company did a ride along test where the car managed a real world range of 458 miles. For reference Tesla’s Model S has a range of 402 miles.

The Lucid Air EV will be officially unveiled September 9th.

Here’s a sick pic.