Morning Watchlist: Saturday Edition
A quick note from Behind the Markets
It's Saturday morning, and the week handed investors a riddle. On Wednesday, the Fed's preferred inflation gauge finally cooled — 3.4% against the 3.7% expected, with core at 3.0% — and the odds of an October rate hike fell to about 37%. The bond market's answer? The 10-year yield rose, closing the worst quarter for bonds in decades and touching 5.34% on Thursday, its highest level since 2002.
Cooler inflation, pricier money. The long end of the bond market has stopped arguing about the Fed and started arguing about supply — and every call we made this week got marked against that tape.
Saturday is when we grade them all, misses first.
Four stops on the tour. Let's get into it.
1) The Report Card With a Contract Stapled to It
The week's main event performed on schedule. Micron — our September 15th Buy near $925 — reported Wednesday night: revenue of $54.2 billion against the $50.75 billion expected, earnings of $33.42 a share, guidance far above consensus, and roughly $150 billion of multi-year business at defined prices. By Thursday midday the stock sat at $1,046.66 — down 1.7% on the day as profit-takers collected, still about 13% above our flag. A cycle with a contract stapled to it. Still Buy.
Friday's edition followed the capex: Micron named $25 billion of spending and four new factory sites, and we flagged Lam Research — the oven maker for those bakeries — as a Watch at $328.51. Thursday it traded at $333.58, up 1.5%. The entrance is unchanged: the October 28th report converting Micron's checks into a raised guide, or a pullback toward $300. Still Watch.
Ciena, Monday's Buy at $359, is the only Buy on this week's card that's green — $372.77 by Thursday midday, up nearly 6% in Thursday's session alone as Wall Street rediscovered the optical aisle (Bernstein started coverage on Coherent, which jumped 10%; Lumentum rose 9% beside it). The couriers between the AI industry's buildings are getting noticed. Up about 3.8% from the flag. Still Buy.
The rest of the build-out shelf took the week's bill. Sterling Infrastructure, Thursday's Buy flagged at about $505, traded at $495.97 — down 1.8%, with Cantor Fitzgerald setting an Overweight rating and a $742 target on Wednesday. The $4.3 billion backlog didn't shrink. Still Buy.
Regal Rexnord, Wednesday's robot-muscle Buy at $156.48, was nearly unmoved at $155.73 even as Goldman trimmed its target to $216 — still 38% above the price. Still Buy.
Albemarle took the worst grade on the card: $103.71 Thursday, down about 6.6% from Monday's $111 flag, on no company news we could find — it spent September on the S&P's worst-performers list while Bank of America called it a bargain. The kill switch is Chinese supply switching back on; nobody reported that. The hops farm is cheaper, not different. Still Buy.
And SailPoint, Tuesday's Watch at $20.64, drifted to $20.39. Neither entrance printed. Still Watch.
2) The Scorekeeper Started a Price War
Thursday's edition took the TransUnion entrance we'd named three weeks earlier — the washout toward $63 — flipping our September 8th Watch to a Buy at about $64.40 after regulators gave the bureaus' co-owned VantageScore pricing parity with FICO.
Then the story accelerated. TransUnion announced it will hold VantageScore 4.0 at 99 cents per standalone mortgage score through December 2028 — against FICO's $10-plus — or free when bundled. More than 1,100 mortgage lenders have adopted it, including nine of the fifteen largest originators. FICO slid again Wednesday to $600.83, another fresh low. And TransUnion closed Wednesday at $61.94 — about 4% below our two-day-old flag.
Read that honestly. We wrote on September 8th that score-shopping could "turn scoring into a price war," and the price war is here — except TransUnion is the one holding the torch. The pantry is selling the recipe at cost to sell more groceries: a 99-cent score is a land grab for the scoring layer the bureaus own together, paid for out of FICO's margin, not TransUnion's core reports business. The real risk is the one that kept us outside the ring all month — the regulator's floated cut from three credit reports per mortgage to two — and it remains unresolved. We bought with the risk priced, and two days of tape doesn't change the arithmetic. Still Buy.
3) Five Point Three Percent, and Everyone It Bills
The long bond spent the week sorting our financial shelf into businesses it bills and businesses it pays.
Goldman Sachs — Friday's Buy flagged at $916.24 — saw its named risk arrive almost immediately: reports this week said the board has discussed a plan to make President John Waldron the next CEO, with David Solomon potentially stepping down as early as next year. The stock traded at $891.15 Thursday, down about 2.7%. Succession noise isn't the thesis; the fee cycle is — Jefferies' record advisory quarter stands, the Anthropic debut is still expected this month, and Goldman even emerged as lead bidder for the $37 billion asset manager Palmer Square. The October 13th report is the first exam. Still Buy.
Evercore, Wednesday's Buy at $261.62, scraped a fresh 52-week low of $251.13 during the week before settling at $256.69 Thursday — down about 2%. Record earnings, 14 times earnings, priced like wedding season got canceled. The thesis didn't move; the tape did. Still Buy.
Houlihan Lokey, the September 16th ice-storm Buy at $137.82, sits at $126.99 — down 8%, the deepest mark on the Wall Street shelf. Its restructuring desk feeds on exactly the 5% world doing the marking. Still Buy.
Western Alliance, Monday's tripwire Buy at $76, eased 3% to $73.75; the Fed's threshold proposal remains "sources say," which was always the honest caveat, and the credit numbers stayed calm. Still Buy.
Now the shelf the long bond pays. Lincoln National, Friday's Buy flagged at the last verified close of $41.69, traded at $39.25 Thursday — down about 6%. Here's the honest tension: a 5.3% ten-year marks down the bond portfolio Lincoln already owns today while raising the wage on every premium dollar it reinvests tomorrow. The market bills first and pays later; at under 5 times its operating-earnings pace, we're being paid to sit through the billing. Still Buy.
ONEOK, Tuesday's toll bridge at $88.63, slipped 2.7% to $86.28 — a borrowing business in a 5% world, which is precisely the risk we named, while the fees roll on. Still Buy.
And Nexstar, Tuesday's snowplow at $162.10, idled at $159.32. The blizzard is still scheduled: midterms in five weeks, a billion dollars of October ad money already reserved. Still Buy.
4) The Gloomy Consumer Kept the Vacation and Skipped the Car Lot
The week's defining split-screen came Tuesday: consumer confidence at a 12-year low, the same morning Carnival reported the best quarter in its history and jumped 12%. Carnival held near $24.62 through Thursday — a receipt that keeps paying our vacation shelf. OneSpaWorld and Travel + Leisure both ride it. Still Buy, both.
Norwegian, Thursday's clearance-rack Watch at $14.80, closed Wednesday at $14.65 — a newborn behaving. The entrance is still the kitchen, not the street: bookings back to optimal and yields flattening. Still Watch.
The car aisle got the opposite treatment. CarMax aced its physical Tuesday — earnings up 81% — and the market shrugged at the whole aisle anyway. Lithia traded at $294.74 Thursday, about 6% below our flag, and Ally slipped 3.2% to $36.98 while the analysts argued it out loud: Wells Fargo at Equal Weight citing "double risk," Raymond James starting coverage at Strong Buy. The kill switch on both calls is consumer credit cracking — and this week's evidence leaned the other way: jobless claims fell to 197,000, a fourth straight decline. Cheaper, not broken. Still Buy, both. September's actual sales pace lands after our press time; it's on the checklist.
Brown-Forman, Sunday's Buy at $26.05, barely moved at $25.85 as the Canada import ban went live Tuesday — the small raise we promised, not a windfall. Still Buy.
And Nike went into Thursday night's exam at $35.81, pennies above our September 22nd Watch flag, with the Street expecting about 44 cents a share. We said we wouldn't enroll early, and we didn't. Still Watch — graded Monday, alongside the Dick's promo-wave tell it referees.
Your Monday checklist, in order. First, Nike's Thursday-night numbers — inventories, gross margin, Greater China: cycle-broken earns an entrance, brand-broken doesn't. Second, Friday's jobs report — consensus looked for roughly 90,000 jobs with hike odds near 37% going in; it referees every 5%-world markdown above. Third, Friday's bond close: did the 10-year hold above 5.3%? Fourth, Tesla's third-quarter deliveries (consensus near 462,000) and September's auto-sales pace, the fresh reads on Lithia and Ally. Fifth, circle the calendar: Anthropic's Nasdaq debut is expected this month (Goldman, Evercore, and Nasdaq all sit in that blast radius), Goldman reports October 13th, and Lam Research rings our named entrance bell October 28th.
Before You Go
The scoreboard. Seventeen calls this week — fourteen Buys, three Watches, no Sells. Through Thursday midday, Ciena's +3.8% was the only green Buy on a card the long bond graded hard; tuition ran from Regal Rexnord's half a percent to Albemarle's 6.6%. The watch column stayed cheap: Lam's +1.5% is all that discipline has cost so far, and SailPoint and Norwegian cost nothing to watch.
The older shelf kept honest score in both directions — Micron up 13% through the exam it aced, Carnival writing receipts for the vacation shelf, Houlihan Lokey down 8% in the freeze it was bought to survive, and TransUnion already below a two-day-old flag with a price war to show for it. Same system as every week: buy the story at the fair price, name what kills it, and let the exciting version go to somebody else.
Found this helpful? Share it with others.
Written by Behind the Markets