 Hi everyone, this is Mike Kramer of Mock Capital with a weekly check-in. Today is Monday, July 17th, and it's around 6.30 New York time. So tomorrow we'll be getting retail sales. Estimates are for retail sales to rise by 0.5 percent month over month. That would be higher than last month's reading a 0.3. X sales, X auto up 0.3 percent versus last month 0.1. X auto and gas up 0.3, down from 0.4. Retail sales control group up 0.3 versus last month 0.2. So overall looking for a slightly hotter retail sales in the month of June. When we look at some other data this week, you're going to be getting things like housing starts, continuing claims, which have been a really big number along with initial jobless claims. These numbers have tended to come in below expectations now for some time. So again, a lot of people are watching these numbers closely to get a sense if the labor market is showing any signs of weakening, and then of course we're going to get some of the leading index also on later this week. So plenty of economic data to go around. Also this week we're going to get earnings. Most notably we're going to start with really Wednesday morning Goldman Sachs's reporting results and then later that afternoon you're going to get results out of Tesla and Netflix and then Thursday you're going to see things like Johnson and Johnson and Taiwan Semi, which is I think an important one given that the this is one of the fabricators for NVIDIA. And so you're going to want to see what Taiwan Semi says because that could have a spillover effect into the semiconductor space overall and this recent AI frenzy that's been going on in the market. So you'll want to pay attention to things like that. Also, it's important we just start off with we'll start off with Goldman Sachs because again, Goldman Sachs is on Wednesday but also because Goldman Sachs is one of the largest components in the Dow. So Goldman's results could have some big significance in terms of how the Dow performs. You can see Goldman overall hasn't really performed very well, hasn't really kept pace with the recent equity market rally. So a move higher in Goldman could certainly help the Dow, which has been just basically stagnant here, unable to get through this 34,600 region. It's tested it a number of times going all the way back to November of last year. Now, today, Monday, we got up to that level again, 34,585. We got, you know, briefly above 34,665 today, but just couldn't seem to maintain it. So Goldman could be one of those stocks that really helps to push the Dow over that final hurdle. It's interesting because while you've seen the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 really push to newer highs, the Dow has basically done nothing now for some time. And again, as we've talked about, the Dow has been largely associated with or largely traded with this Australia 200 index, which has been also highly correlated to it. And you can see that both indexes are really not performing very well, just kind of status quo, and you can also overlay the DAX over that as well. And while the DAX has performed better than the Dow overall, both indexes have basically, you know, stalled out, I would say, for the lack of a better word since really around March. So this is sort of an important point for Goldman and for the Dow, because also, you know, you already had UNH report results, and UNH was up 7% on Friday, and it was up another 1% today. And UNH is the biggest weighting in the Dow. And again, so far, haven't been able to break through. You can see also that we're getting very close to this upper bound of resistance on the RSI. So if the Dow is going to break out, it certainly seems like that time needs to be now, because again, you have already have one of the largest components or the largest component report. All of that positivity is already reflected in the price. So you're going to need really Goldman to potentially be the catalyst that gets the Dow over that hump that maybe allows it to climb back up to around 35,400 or 35,500, about 1,000 points higher than where we are right now, which would really put it more in line with the S&P 500, because you can see the S&P 500 right now is knocking on the door of 4,530. And that's been the level that's also been goes back and is the equivalent to where the Dow would be if it were to move higher. The S&P today had a rather strange move higher today. And I say it was strange because we rallied pretty sharply almost all day long. And then in the final basically 30 minutes of the day, we gave all of that, we gave back a big portion of those gains and then managed to also close below the highs that we saw on Friday, which came early Friday morning. And so this could be a number of two things, right? I mean, obviously if the S&P 500 gaps above these highs tomorrow morning, all this negativity that we've seen at least in the last half hour today goes away. And the market could potentially continue on its upward path. And it looks like again with option exploration this Friday, the big gamma level for this OPEX appears to be around this 4,500 level. The next level is at 4,550. So if you take out, if you can take out early tomorrow this 45 and this 45 call it 45, 35 region, there's not much to say that the S&P 500 doesn't rally to 45,50 or maybe even 45,75 in the next couple of days. There could even be some people taking a shot and hoping that they can get this thing up to 4,600. But suddenly if tomorrow's opens down here and we open lower, there's a case that could be said that you start looking for some of these lower gap fills. So I think tomorrow's opening is going to play a critical point in terms of where this index goes and whether or not it tries to push a little bit higher going into options exploration. When you look at the NDX, it also moved higher today. It closed right at the highs though of Friday. So not quite as a negative a close as the S&P, but again like the S&P you really want to see these highs taken out pretty quickly because then after that again as we spoke about last week, there's really no real resistance until about 16,000 on the NASDAQ 100. Also we've been watching the dollar weaken pretty dramatically and this is also helping to add to a little bit of the equity market move higher because when the dollar weakens it helps to ease financial conditions and easing financial conditions can help to push equity prices higher. So the dollar broke through some really key levels here around this 100 to 101 level. You can see today we're trading around 99.10 or so broke some key uptrends in the RSI that was kind of pointing towards a stronger dollar for some time and that reached oversold levels with the index going below 30 and you can even see that the dollar went below the lower Bollinger Bands suggesting that maybe the dollar is a little bit oversold here at these levels maybe we're in for a little bit of a period of a little consolidation so to speak now obviously you get stronger retail sales you could see the dollar lift and maybe retest the breakdown at 101.5 but otherwise I mean for further downside here in the dollar you're looking at 99.15 or so again and if you look at the Euro remember last week we were talking about or maybe two weeks ago we were talking about a potential reversal pattern in the Euro and we were talking about if we got over this 110 region it would invalidate it and that's pretty much what happened right and so when when head and shoulder patterns don't break down and they continue to they can form continuation patterns and you can see that the Euro rose right to resistance here at we'll call it 112 or so in terms of the Euro where it goes from here again like the dollar looks a little bit overbought you can also see that it it also got above its upper Bollinger Band so it seems when you look at the Euro you look at the dollar they're both telling you the DXY they're both sort of suggesting that we might be in a little bit of a period here where we see a little bit of a retracement in both the Euro and a retracement in the dollar index and perhaps the Euro comes back down and tests the 110, 111 region before it makes the next move up towards this 114, 115 area now what's important about the Euro also is if we go back and take a look at it from a longer term perspective and we start drawing in you know trend lines in terms of how the Euro has performed historically you know you can make an argument that the Euro has room really to rise all the way back to 116, 117 before it really hits a long-term downtrend that may pose a threat to it right and and so that suggests that you know again this next level here could be telling because if we get through 112 again it looks like you could be testing a longer term downtrend at around 116 or so so there's a lot of things happening this week I think there's a lot of points in time where you could be seeing some really important moments in the market because again we have option expiration on Friday you also have VIX OPEX on on Wednesday and just really quickly to throw in the VIX OPEX what this is looking like at least is that you have you know a lot of open interest in the calls all up here and these are all due to expire worthless unless we see some sort of move higher in the VIX over the next couple of days that may be a bit of a challenge given that you also have lots of puts which are likely to keep it you know suppressed but you know you can't discount and rule out the fact that there might be a push higher in the VIX in the next couple of days to try to get some of these calls into the money and maybe take some of these puts out of the money and that would certainly that certainly would be a pain trade and that would be a counter to what I think many people might be thinking about but again that's something to think about the VIX did rise today it has been you know up you know three of the last four days the VVIX was also up today and that's been up three days in a row so certainly signs have implied volatility starting to pick up it looks like for now at least the VIX has made a low at this point maybe it makes a lower low but given the OPEX on Wednesday and then on Friday it looks like maybe that may start to reverse course as we go through the rest of the week anyway that's all I have for you today hope you have a great week bye