Morning Watchlist: Saturday Edition
A quick note from Behind the Markets
It's Saturday morning — the long one. The market is closed today, closed tomorrow, and closed Monday for Labor Day. Three quiet days. The right weekend to pour a second cup and do what most newsletters never do: go back and check our own work.
And what a week to check it. The 10-year Treasury touched its highest yield since 2023. Oil traded above $95 with missiles over the Gulf. Broadcom forecast $230 billion in AI revenue and got marked down for it. And our own ledger took a loss — on purpose.
Four stops on the tour. Let's get into it.
1) The Bond Market Ran the Week — Then Blinked
Through Wednesday, this was the bond market's show. On Tuesday the Dow fell more than 400 points as oil topped $95. By Wednesday the 10-year Treasury touched 4.814% — its highest since November 2023 — with the 30-year near 5.27%, a level last seen in 2007. Then Thursday, Fed Governor Waller offered the first soothing words of the Warsh era: "Give disinflation a chance. We can wait one meeting." Futures odds of a September hike, 66% when the week began, slid toward a coin flip. Yields eased. Stocks exhaled.
Now, the rate-sensitive shelf of our ledger, graded.
M/I Homes — we flipped our August 20th Buy to Sell in Thursday's edition near $146, taking the roughly 5% loss. By Thursday midday, after Waller's balm, the stock had ticked up to about $148. That's fine. We didn't sell a tick; we sold a broken catalyst — the falling-rate thesis inverted, and we said so out loud. The reasoning was the trade. Sold, and we sleep fine.
Federated Hermes, honesty first: Monday's Buy near $65 traded around $61 Thursday, down about 6%. Here's why we're not flinching. The parking-garage thesis never needed rate hikes — it needs trillions parked at today's short rates, and Waller argued for holding, not cutting. The kill switch we named was a fast Fed pivot. One governor asking for patience isn't a pivot. Still Buy.
The winners on the same shelf: Jackson Financial closed Wednesday at $137, about 4% above our flag, and touched $140 Thursday morning. Still Buy. CME Group reached $278 Wednesday — up 6% from our flag — after reporting its second-busiest August ever: 29.7 million contracts a day. Bitcoin slipped below $78,000 and CME rose anyway, because volatility in either direction is the product. Still Buy. Invitation Homes drifted to about $28.80, down 4%; the same weather soaking the builders still waters the landlord. Still Buy.
And gold. The metal cooled from $4,646 to about $4,470 by Thursday morning, and Eldorado round-tripped from $48 back to $42.86 by Wednesday's close. Last Saturday we refused to add after a 14% week — chasing our own winner is still chasing — and the market just refunded the entire pop. From our $42 flag, the call stands. Still Buy.
2) Broadcom Forecast a Doubling. Twice. The Market Sent a Bill Anyway.
Wednesday night, Broadcom delivered: revenue up 86%, AI chip revenue of $16.7 billion up 221%, a roadmap toward $230 billion. Thursday morning the stock fell about 6% — total guidance of $34.8 billion missed Wall Street's $35.03 billion by a rounding error. Bernstein's Stacy Rasgon called it plainly: "The quarter was actually very, very good" — and pointed at elevated memory prices pinching the margin outlook.
Read that twice. The biggest custom-chip company on Earth just blamed the flour. That's our Onto Innovation thesis wearing someone else's quarter — the memory bill is real, and the inspector gets paid on every new mill. ONTO wobbled with the complex to around $250 Thursday. Still Buy. And let's finish Friday's honesty item: Dell, down 7% when we wrote about it, reversed to close Wednesday up nearly 16% near $492 — then hit an all-time high Thursday. We rode the bill, not the bounce. The bounce won the week; the bill is still on the table.
The rest of the aisle, quickly. Sanmina, Friday's fresh Buy, held near $188 — an engine still isn't a car. Buy stands. Amkor sat flat near $47 while Bank of America initiated it at Buy with a $70 target, calling it "an underappreciated beneficiary of rising semiconductor packaging complexity." Still Buy. Modine rose about 2.6% Thursday to $184. Still Buy. Cirrus Logic crept up 3% to $113 ahead of Apple's event next week. Still Buy.
Two Watches earned updates. Nutanix was our Broadcom trigger: the software division did $8.8 billion, up 29% — the landlord is still raising the rent, which is Nutanix's whole marketing department. Meanwhile the stock digested from our $72 flag to $66.85 — a 7% markdown on an improving thesis. That's the direction we ordered. Still Watch — and getting interesting. GitLab: the models caught up in a day. Morgan Stanley went from $30 to $57, Canaccord to $70, and the consensus target now sits near $54.74 — above the roughly $50 stock. That erases half our caution; the other half — 58 times earnings — still stands, and so does the entrance: a pullback toward $45, or a repeat quarter. Still Watch.
3) The Racks Kept Falling. Our Wallet Stayed Shut.
Burlington, which we flagged at $338 and refused at $308 last Saturday, closed Wednesday at $257 — down 24% from the flag, no new headline required. A share-loss dip just keeps dipping. Two weeks of sitting on our hands has been worth a quarter of the ticket price. Entrance unchanged: comps reaccelerating toward Ross and TJX. Still Watch.
Dick's Sporting Goods is the mirror: flagged at $124, closed Wednesday at $137 — up 11% while we deliberately did nothing. The new wrinkle: four Dick's directors bought about $3.7 million of stock in the open market in late August. Insiders eating the cooking is a real clue. But our tell was the promo wave breaking, and Williams Trading's Foot Locker note — target slashed to $130 — describes "an overabundance of basic core lifestyle shoes" across the aisle. A clue is not a bell. Tell remains Nike's next report. Still Watch.
Ollie's, our August 20th Buy, finally got its report card Wednesday: sales up 9.1%, adjusted earnings of $1.42 against $1.12 expected — up 43% — gross margin up 360 basis points, full-year profit guidance raised. The asterisk: comparable sales fell 1.8% and the sales guide came down. The trade-down migration is real, but the migrants keep stopping at Ross first. At about $74, right at our flag: profit machine confirmed, traffic pending. Still Buy.
Quick hits: The Trade Desk rose about 6% to $14.55 Wednesday as the FTC suit's details circulated — including Amazon's own internal description of its ad fees as "a clever non-transparent way to charge first price." Wonderful color. Not yet revenue. Proof, not promise. Still Watch. PayPal recovered to $55.64 by Thursday — and Axios reported the dead bid was $60.50 a share, so the stock still sells about 8% below the offer its own board refused. Still Buy. Restaurant Brands held near $79. Still Buy. H&R Block drifted 4% lower to $51 on no news; boring at single-digit multiples is still fine. Still Buy.
4) Three Days of Headlines, No Trading — Your Tuesday Checklist
When the bell rings Tuesday, here's the homework, in order.
First, the jobs report. Consensus expected roughly 58,000 jobs after July's loss of 23,000, and the warm-up acts leaned soft — ADP counted just 38,000 private hires Wednesday, the slowest since January. The number referees Robert Half, our Sunday Sell near $39.50 that has so far cost us nothing but patience: the stock climbed to almost $43 by Wednesday. Selling into strength means watching the strength continue for a while. It also grades the M/I Homes exit, and swings Federated Hermes, Jackson Financial, CME, and gold.
Second, Lululemon. It reported Thursday night. Going in: Wall Street wanted about $1.80 a share, UBS expected the full-year guide cut by more than a dollar, and Goldman trimmed its target to $111. Heidi O'Neill's first day is Tuesday. Check whether comps stabilized — and whether any guide-down read like the cycle or the brand. Still Watch; O'Neill's kitchen-sink reset may yet be the better entrance.
Third, the Cybercab. Tesla's no-steering-wheel show was Thursday night in Austin. Our angle is onsemi, the eyes-seller, which closed Wednesday at $72.34 — Wells Fargo trimmed its target to $95 Thursday but kept its Overweight. A post-event fade is our entrance. Still Watch.
Fourth, the tariff wall goes live Tuesday. Canada's 15–50% counter-tariffs take effect September 8, and Prime Minister Carney said talks resume only "when the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade... and start being serious." No last-minute handshake, then. Commercial Metals closed Wednesday at $69.15 with its umbrella about to open. Still Buy. Eagle Materials sits 5% below our flag at $195 — the umbrella is real, and so is the rate headwind we named. Still Buy. AGCO's long-flagged headwind arrives the same day.
Fifth, the Gulf doesn't take weekends. Thursday, Brent traded above $96 after Iran fired missiles at Kuwait, and ship transits through Hormuz ran at roughly half their normal pace midweek. Excelerate Energy closed Wednesday at $40.22, up 4% from our flag, while Asian LNG prices hit five-month highs and QatarEnergy extended its force majeure into November — the spare-port thesis is being written directly into the world's gas bill. Still Buy. International Seaways, at $101, never gave us the pullback — Deutsche Bank just raised its target to $107. Still Watch. Alaska Air held near $41 with oil in the $90s; the trigger stays dead, the resilience is noted. Still Watch. L3Harris closed Wednesday at $261.31 — to the penny where Friday's edition flagged it — and Range Resources sat at $42.48 with natural gas at an eight-week high. Both Buys stand.
Before You Go
The scoreboard. Nineteen calls this week — twelve Buys, five Watches, two Sells. CME up 6%, Trade Desk up 6%, Excelerate and Jackson Financial up 4%, PayPal positive and climbing Thursday. Paying tuition: Federated Hermes down 6%, Eagle Materials down 5%, Invitation Homes and H&R Block down 4%, Textron down 3%. The Sells: M/I Homes executed at a 5% loss on purpose; Robert Half is 9% above our flag with Friday's referee unheard.
And the discipline column, which never shows on a brokerage statement: refusing Burlington saved 24%; refusing Dick's cost 11%. That trade-off — skip the falling knives, miss some bounces — is the whole system, and we'll take it every week. Add Eldorado's round-tripped pop we declined to chase, and three Watches (Nutanix, GitLab, onsemi) drifting toward entrances we refused to force.
Have a wonderful weekend.
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Written by Behind the Markets