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This is nobody’s idea of a struggling stock market. Today closed not at new record-setting highs, but we don’t have that every day (even though for a while there it seemed like it.) The Dow was down -243 points today, -0.52%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq were down -18 points each: -0.28% and -0.08%, respectively. The small-cap Russell 2000 slipped -13 points, -0.53%.

What more is there to say about the AI infrastructure trade? Not that it isn’t a viable enterprise — and not that it won’t one day change major parameters in all our lives — but only so much can be done a day at a time. For a while there, it seemed as if OpenAI's Sam Altman was tying together all the business partnerships for the entire enterprise, but even that had to slow down sometime.

And, of course, without any federal economic reports coming out — today would have been Weekly Jobless Claims and August Wholesale Inventories — we get even less for market participants to act upon, to say nothing of the Fed. And even considering all this, Q3 earnings season is a slow trickle at this time and the next Fed meeting isn’t for weeks yet.

The shutdown continues, but even gold has pulled back from all-time highs yesterday north of $4000 for the first time ever. Gold is still considered a main hedge against a potentially wobbly equities market going forward — should we ever get one. Bitcoin pulled back another -2% today. 

And what can be expected to pull market trading interest back up to earlier levels? Tough to see. We’ll get preliminary Consumer Sentiment for August (this morning we saw the NRF Retail Monitor swing to a negative on both the headline and core reads), which is expected to come down to 53.5 from 60.4 a month ago. But no Monthly U.S. Federal Budget data will be forthcoming, as had been planned.

Just about every catalyst for the market going higher has already come to pass this week. Unless there is some significant progress in ending the shutdown — and even that’s no gimme: markets usually like it when Congress can’t get anything done — we don’t see a lot to pull markets much higher into the end of the week. Barring another big blockbuster merger deal, which I suppose we can never completely rule out.

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