Another Glorious Summer Week!

Equities start the day higher on another glorious summer week! I love June, the weather isn’t too hot, the drinks can’t be too cold, and kids are finally starting their summer breaks. Allow me to relay a quick story from the weekend hence. My daughter is a precocious 10 years old and as a budding young tween she does her best to drive me absolutely insane. Her bedroom always looks like the clothes return counter at any major department store: socks here, shirts there, shorts hanging off a dresser. I stood at the top of the stairs and yelled at her to “come up and clean or else you get no iPad for a week” (this is like the nuclear option for a tween). Of course she ignored me because why wouldn’t she but as I stood there contemplating how to throw all her stuff out the window I realized I found my market metaphor. Last week the media screamed and yelled about Italian Elections, Trade Wars, and Tariffs yet the market ignored it. I actually submit to you that the selloff surrounding Italian debt / politics was the dumbest thing since the Ebola mania of 2014. Italian politics has been messy since the Renaissance so if that was your big catalyst you need to read more books. Look, I’ve been on record saying that all this sideways grinding would resolve itself higher and I still maintain that view. We had a solid jobs report last week and all the other economic indicators like ISM Manuf, Chicago PMI, Housing Starts, etc all point to the same story we’ve been reading for years:  slow steady growth where the stock market works. Remember, investing isn’t about you vs the stock market it’s about you vs YOURSELF. Don’t let random noise knock you off your path and if your daughter doesn’t clean up her room in a timely manner just change the wifi password. Boom!!

After the open we saw plenty of new all-time highs from such fan favorites as AAPL, AMZN, NFLX, MSFT, V, and MA. Large cap tech continues to lead the way and anyone doubting that has had their PnL summarily executed. How about V and MA though, those two stocks blow my mind. They, along with companies like AMZN, are in my “you use this every single day, why don’t you own it” portfolio (better known as my “K.I.S.S fund”. I mean look at these charts, secular growth at its finest! “Hey hon, we buy everything from museli to pencils on AMZN all while using our MasterCard debit card, maybe we should buy the stock?”   “Nah, let’s just speculate on some biotech trying to cure gout in pigs, that’s our ticket to riches!”.   Sigh.  There wasn’t much news, other than Trump saying he can pardon himself, so the tape coasted on momentum gained last week. Winners were SO MANY RETAIL STOCKS.  Let’s hear it for Komp and Altschwager!!! UAA, TGT, ULTA, KSS, M, LB, hit up my guys to talk about it.  Losers were NKTR, BHGE, NFX, WYNN, and a whole slew of energy names as Crude fell back under $65. Two biggest pain trades of the past month: Short UST and Long Oil  (TBT And USO as a proxy for those). Sucked everyone in at the top and SMACKED them in the face. By lunch I was bummed about the future of tech as one of $AAPL’s big announcements at their WWDC conference was “MeMojis” Yep, smartest people in the world working in one of the most vibrant communities on the planet in a company worth nearly $1T and Me-freaking-mojis pop out. Great, now all the people I wanna block will send me talking pictures of their face (they did announce group Facetime video calls so that might be cool).

The rest of the day brought nothing fresh and exciting but we did see fresh all time closes in both the Ru2k and the Nasdaq composite. That’s two of the 3 major indices (no one is watching the Dow, stop it) that have now put the misery of February and March behind them. Will the S&P follow suit?   It’s hard to imagine a world where both of those make new highs and $SPX doesn’t but crazier things have happened. If you managed to keep your cool among all the things that have happened in the past few months then I tip my cap to you.  Behavior is the #1 thing you can work on to be a better investor and as people worried about VIX ETFs and Italian 2 years I hope you were taking long walks listening to Yacht Rock on Sirius XM. Who doesn’t love 70s and 80s soft rock!!! There’s a warm wind blowing the stars around….and I’d really love to see you tonight….(yea I went there) 

Final Score:  Dow +72bps, S&P500 +45bps, Nasdaq +69bps, Rus2k +34bps

Volume was perfectly average. News Highlights:

Tonight we’ll end with a child’s slide in Japan. I’d love to see this thing during recess!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=WV0fbR840FQ

Have a good night