Published August 1, 2025
As summer hits full steam (and heat!), we will dive into our archives and post a few briefs from our Knowledge Base. The Knowledge Base section of our website contains historical notes about investing and how to best use our TimingCube system and website. Enjoy!
Our simple Buy-Sell-Cash signals attempt to make investing decisions mechanical, taking the emotion out of the decision. Still, we worry about our investment accounts and losing money. An interesting study confirmed what we already have observed. People who watch the market are typically more nervous than people who don’t. The study found that investors who looked at their account annually were far more comfortable investing in stocks.
That’s because stocks don’t often show a major loss over a year’s timeframe. There are very painful exceptions, of course, and more than most are comfortable with over the past decade. Still, investors watching the daily gyrations of stocks can easily get frozen in a volatile market and walk away from investing completely. Letting our signals light your way works.
If that’s not comfortable enough, letting our friends at MarketTrend Advisors implement the signals for you is another option. Watching the market can cause heartburn and worse. We all know and have experienced that. The less we watch, for most people, the happier we are.
Market Update
Despite a slew of companies beating earnings estimates and raising their outlooks for next quarter, stocks struggled this week – tormented by Fed interest rate angst and tariff terrors. Stocks were flat Monday despite several stellar earnings reports which propelled shares higher in AMD +4.3%, SMCI +10.2%, Diamondback Energy +4.1%, and Nike +3.9%. Tuesday brought widely anticipated earnings from Procter and Gamble who indicated they took a $1B hit to earnings as a result of tariffs and will increase prices on about 25% of all their products starting this month. The FOMC policy statement and presser on Wednesday yielded no change to interest rates (as expected) and the Fed left the door open to possible rates hikes if tariffs spur inflation. The immediate reaction by investors was muted with the S&P500 and the DJIA down only slightly, -0.1% and -0.4% respectively, with the NASDAQ 100 closing up 0.1%. Wednesday afternoon saw earnings reports from Meta and Microsoft who both had blowout earnings sending their shares dramatically higher on Thursday. Thursday Apple and Amazon both beat expectations but their shares fell on Friday caught up in the broader market selling. Amazon investors expressed concern about declining market in the AWS business. Overnight on Thursday Trump, seemingly without warning, jacked up tariffs on several countries, including Canada which went from 25% to 35%, and stock futures had a strong pullback over 1% in overnight trading — loses carried into the regular session with the NASDAQ 100 closing down nearly 2% while the S&P500 closed down 1.6%. Adding fuel to the fire, the Friday jobs report showed the economy added a paltry 73,000 jobs in July, well below the ~200,000 necessary to maintain level employment and the prior two months had large negative revisions showing that the US barely added any new jobs in May and June. As a result Trump fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a move that will likely not sit well with investors moving forward. In Friday earnings, crypto darling Coinbase came up short and shares fell 16.7%.
Warm wishes and until next week.