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It’s a great start to the trading week. After months of trailing its major-index brethren, the Dow Jones reaches today’s closing bell at a new record high: 40,211. It finishes +210 points, or +0.53%, but this was well off the +342-point high right around high noon today. The S&P 500 notched yet another all-time high this morning, +15 points, +0.28%, to 5631. The Nasdaq grew +74 points, +0.40%, while the small-cap Russell 2000 beat the field today, +1.80%.

Q2 earnings are coming in well so far. “Starting” late last week (although Fortune 500 companies have been reporting Q2 results for a couple weeks now) we saw earnings beats for JPMorgan (JPM - Free Report), Citigroup (C - Free Report), and others. This morning was an impressive beat from Goldman Sachs (GS - Free Report). Tomorrow we’ll hear from Bank of America (BAC - Free Report) and Morgan Stanley (MS - Free Report), which are expected post-earnings -10% and +33.8%, year over year, respectively.

The rest of the week branches out from Wall Street finance. We’ll also see earnings results for Johnson & Johnson (JNJ - Free Report) and United Airlines (UAL - Free Report) on Wednesday, Abbott Labs (ABT - Free Report), and Netflix (NFLX - Free Report) on Thursday. There will be a total of 45 members of the S&P 500 reporting earnings this week alone, and earnings season only picks up steam in the weeks to come. We’re looking for the highest pace of earnings growth since the first quarter of 2022.

There will also be some key economic reports out this week. Among them are tomorrow’s Retail Sales figures for June, which are expected to drop to -0.4% from -0.1% the previous month. Ex-autos, this headline swings to a positive +0.1%, following -0.1% for May. Year over year Retail Sales have been coming down steadily the past few months, and were +2.3% last time around. We’ll also see Import/Export numbers and Business Inventories, also for June.

As of now, a Fed rate cut at the end of this month is off the table. However, should we see a bigger-than-expected drop in Retail Sales or Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) report, which is due at the end of next week, it’s possible we could see the Fed change its mind and cut on July 31st. That said, the Fed, especially under Chair Jerome Powell, is a very methodical organization, and it’s more likely it will use the July meeting to telegraph its first cut in more than four years for September.

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