(Note: Below is a summary of the Market Update Video for 08/09/2026, click here to watch the video update)
Market Update Preview
August opened with a massive rally, taking us to nearly 7,800. Coming off a last week of July where the headlines looked genuinely dicey and every feed was piling into the bearish narrative, this is about as clean a vindication of the flows process as you get. The macro headlines said one thing; the flow data said another; the flow data won.
So the question shifts. It's no longer "does this hold" — it's "when does this get dangerous." My read: too soon to be overly cautious. There's still wind in the sails, flows stay strong through August into mid-September, and there's nothing stopping another leg from here. But the pieces for a more substantial reset are quietly assembling, and I walk through exactly which signals I'm watching and roughly when I expect them to align.
I also dig into a divergence that's been building for a couple of years now between credit creation and tax receipts — one of the two has to be lying, and which one it is matters a great deal for how the eventual downturn plays out. Plus: why the VIX getting too calm is its own kind of warning, where the Fed is boxed in ahead of Wednesday's inflation print, and the specific setup that would be a recipe for a 10%+ sell-off. Full breakdown below.
