Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Friday, July 24, 2026. Oil is on fire, gold is running away from the fire, and the Federal Reserve is apparently thinking about pouring gasoline on both.
Yesterday was the worst session in a month, and Wall Street would like you to believe it was all about artificial intelligence. Alphabet ($GOOGL) reported, promised to spend even more billions on data centers that will surely pay for themselves any decade now, and the stock fell seven percent for the crime of honesty. Tesla ($TSLA) dropped roughly fourteen, because someone finally opened the spreadsheet. The Nasdaq shed two percent, the S&P 500 gave up 1.2 to close around 7,408, and the Dow lost about 500 points. The wonderful world of finance, where spending money is bullish until suddenly it is not.
But the AI story is the decoy. The real skunk at the party is oil. Brent punched through 100 dollars for the first time since May, WTI is north of 90 after a four percent surge, and the Middle East is doing what the Middle East does. That pushed the 10-year yield to 4.71 percent, the highest since January of last year, and now fed funds futures price something like an eighty percent chance the Fed hikes in September. A rate hike. Into a slowing economy. Because inflation, remember her?
And yet everyone is pretending not to notice the funniest part. Gold, the asset that exists precisely for days when the world catches fire, sat there at 4,028 and slid. War everywhere, and the ultimate safe haven decided to take the afternoon off. Somewhere a goldbug is refreshing his screen and questioning every life choice.
Overnight, Uncle Donald's newest tariffs officially took effect, ten to twelve and a half percent on basically everyone we trade with, and le tout-Wall Street responded with a shrug and green futures. S&P contracts are up a rounding error, the market betting sixty-six percent on a higher open, because tariffs are only scary until they are Tuesday. Bitcoin, for what it is worth, is loitering around 65,000, though I would treat that number as approximate given the hour.
What is ahead? June new home sales this morning, which will confirm what your mortgage broker already told you, that nobody is buying anything at these rates. A scattering of earnings nobody will read past the headline. And the small matter of a Fed meeting next week that just became interesting for all the wrong reasons.
The setup is almost too perfect: energy up, yields up, a central bank cornered into tightening while stocks pretend it is fine. Which means someone is going to be wrong, and it is usually the person feeling calm right now.
Have a good one, and keep one eye on the crude tape.