Inconclusive behavior as the market behaves defensively ahead of several potentially influences later in the week, is disappointing, but not surprising. 

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In fact the day began with S&P (the firm, not the Index) downgrading more than a couple Banks, and that weighed on sentiment rebuffing an early upside effort.

While we looked for some sort of reprieve to begin this week, the idea was as well as remains, that the market will take more of a breather as we migrate in the late Summer and even into the early Fall. Lots depends on whether or not we get 'credit delinquencies' and/or 'default', which could rock things more.

The market hasn't proven anything significant at the moment and likely won't. I believe the unending discussions of bull-bear cases are almost irrelevant for the moment, and various opinions about the Fed's policies and rate trends...besides what 'really' influences inflation, remain pending. In fact, the Chairman might not even clarify that on Friday, but we'll see.

For Nvidia (NVDA) the expectations are way-overly expanded in terms of importance, but they don't 'own' this market, though they dominate speculation about it as Semiconductors are tending to go with the flow of sentiment about Nvidia. So it reports Thursday, and then the Jackson Hole commentary from Powell, in a best-case scenario, could indeed adhere to his pre-announced topic, which is 'structural impacts or influences on the economy'.

That doesn't mean Powell will tip-off everyone about the next rate decision, although we still believe they need to stop. Really just stop before they wreck more than what they've already done, which is contributing to inflation, not so much easing pressures on average Americans, though they pretend it does.

There's a slowdown in the labor market (slightly), there are families struggling to cope with the higher cost just to 'house' their kids at colleges or universities for this Fall (I hear that from more than one personal acquaintance), so given a propensity to control spending, we should see some consumer retrenching.

By the way I'll not delve into Retail or what happened to crashing Macy's, but the combination of lower consumer 'want' spending (versus need), combined a bit with the increasing loss situation (it's real, but more of an excuse for just sales slowdown), do impact discretionary spending, though some deny that.

In-sum: 

This was an on-hold day with defensive responses to the Banks, to comparable retail sales, to anxiety ahead of Nvidia and then Jackson Hole (especially Chairman Powell's speech), and chatter about China. Little talk about the 'war' or Iranian threats, which should merit more attention.

This remains an on-hold market, and sobered by the Banking downgrades.

After the Close, it was announced that the Teamster's Union has ratified a deal with United Parcel Service (UPS), so presumably that's inflationary itself. Why? 86% of Teamster members voted in-favor of the Agreement, so you know they got most raises and/or benefits they had bargained for. Right now probably they'll appreciate a decision UPS already made: all future 'vans' will be Air Conditioned.

It's a massive deal apparently and might offset things like Amazon (AMZN) thought by some analysts as underappreciated or under-priced (not). They argue that Amazon moved from their historical use of shippers to in-house trucks/drivers, so that's actually competing with UPS. 'But', those drivers will want more too.

I will say that it does give some efficiencies to Amazon for drivers who interact with customers more than (for instance) UPS or FedEx (FDX) drivers would, but that isn't all that significant. In some cities the increase in retail theft helps Amazon as increasingly (again) people are ordering online rather than physical stores.

Bottom-line:

A defensive indecision pattern persists, rebounds were and are ephemeral at best, and now it should be more about monetary policy ahead, than merely the day-to-day changes in yield. Ten-year at 4.25 gets attention, but there are other factors capable of contributing to market angst, or relief.

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