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August 4, 2026
Dow: 53,178
S&P: 7,600
Nasdaq: 25,913
10-YR T-Note: 4.66%
Bitcoin: 63,763
VIX: 15.64
Gold: $4,118
Crude Oil: 78
Don Selkin, the creator and innovator of the "Fair Value" numbers, as its Chief Market Strategist on the Newbridge platform has given CNBC and its Predecessor, these numbers every day for the over 40 years - never missing a single day, as well as given the fair value for the Nasdaq 100 futures since their introduction in 1996 and the Dow Jones stock index futures since 1997. Mr. Selkin has also been quoted in several publications including but not limited to Bloomberg News, New York Post, Reuters, and The New York Times. Mr. Selkin's Fair Value numbers are included in the U.S.
Futures Report broadcast on CNBC every day before the market
opens attributing "Newbridge Securities" as the source. In addition, NSC provides to its professionals, their clients and the public access to Don Selkin's more in depth financial market views.
Last week the S&P and Nasdaq went higher for the first week in the past three attempts as initially things went lower on the first day of the new Fed chair Kevin Warsh’s meeting, mainly because interest rates rose from the time of the meeting until the close.
The President is pushing for lower rates, as do all incumbents prior to him, but the market would have none of this idea during the first day of the meeting. Tere is still some consensus that rates are going to be raised at the next meeting in September, but that may or may not be a function of how the data appears within the nearer period. And the first such event will take place this Friday with the release of the July non-farm payroll report which is expected to show a gain of 53,000 as compared to the prior one of 57,000 the month before. The unemployment rate is expected to remain at 4.2%.
In the meantime, markets are being supported by stocks that have so far shown at 90% beating rate on estimates and three-quarters better on revenues. This is the reason that things did very well on Tuesday with the Dow breaking a new all-time high after last week’s gain of 1% while the S&P also rose by that amount while the Nasdaq advanced by 1.6% and the Russell 2000 Index was around unchanged.
This week we will see the largest number of companies reporting their second-quarter results with the following lineup: PLTR which did better on Monday; Tuesday – AMD, Dow component CAT and MRK in addition to SPCX, which also has a bunch of release dates for existing shareholders coming up in various periods right after this report.
And for those who keep track of such things, Elon Musk has now for the time being lost his status as the world’s first trillionaire as the recent large decline in TSLA and the collapse of SPCX from as high as 210 to its current level of 114 has “deteriorated” his numbers to around 700 million from the highest level as mentioned above.
The results continue on Wednesday with CVS, LLY, the always volatile SNDK and WDC in addition to Dow component DIS; Thursday sees ABNB and Conoco Phillips.
Tech giants keep setting records for how much they are spending on AI, but this time there are some concerns rising.
Last week, AMZN said that its capital expenditures rose to $53 billion in the second quarter, up 69 percent from a year earlier. And META said that its costs rose 55 percent from las year while MSFT gained 68 percent and GOOG said that its costs rose by a large amount and said its costs would keep rising as well.
The total costs of this are expected to gain $1.5 trillion building data centers with advanced chips.
This can be a problem as GOOG said that it would have “negative free cash flow” which means it has been spending more on daily operations than it was taking in from its businesses.
Multibillion data centers which the industry calls “AI factories” rose by $170 billion, up 72 percent from last year. In April, MSFT said that higher component prices do not have the computing power to meet demand. In effect, they are leaving money on the table.
As an example, the parent company of GOOG rose its spending forecast by $15 billion to as much as $205 billion.
The pent-up demand has resulted in a backlog of $1.7 trillion, more than doubling from a year ago. Much of the growing backlog comes from partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic, the leading AI start-ups.
The tech companies have borrowed more than ever to fund the AI building boom but they also rely on their lucrative ongoing businesses, like digital advertising, which brings in a ton of cash.
AMZN said that it had $200 billion in sales in the second quarter, ahead by 20 percent from last year. Profits more than tripled to $63 billion, mostly due to its investments in Anthropic. The company said that its cloud services are going to show a trillion dollar annual revenue over time.
MSFT’s share price said that Azure, the cloud computing platform at the center of its AI services, rose by more than $100 billion while quarterly sales grew at its fastest in four years, when Azure was a much smaller business. They said that it had opened 31 data centers across five continents and mentioned that the company is set to double their overall capacity in just two years.
