HAPPY TUESDAY TO THE STREET
Earnings season kicked off today with a Wall Street victory lap. All five big banks that reported posted double-digit profit gains, powered by an AI-fueled deal boom and frantic trading desks.
But JPMorgan (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon brought an odd party favor: buckets of cold water. The banker warned the market is "getting close to as good as it gets." In other words, congratulations on the record quarter… now try to top it.
🟩 | US stocks rose today on a cooler-than-expected inflation print and the aforementioned strong start to the earnings season.
📈 | One Notable Gainer: Goldman Sachs (GS) jumped after Q2 earnings and revenue blew past estimates.
📉 | One Notable Decliner: IBM (IBM) saw its worst single-day decline on record after sounding the alarm on its Q2 profit, as clients shifted spending from software to AI hardware and memory.
— Brooks & The Street Sheet Team
MARKET SNAPSHOT
S&P 500 Heatmap. Credit: Unusual Whales
HOW HIGH WILL CPI GET THIS YEAR?
June CPI came in cooler than anyone expected, with annual inflation easing to 3.5% on the biggest monthly drop since April 2020. Traders are betting the relief holds, pricing long odds on inflation topping 4.2% this year. Of course, that assumes oil behaves. On that front, “uncertainty” may be too soft a term…
Market Movers
HCA, BANK OF AMERICA, LM ERICSSON
📉 | HCA Healthcare (HCA) fell after cutting full-year earnings guidance.
📈 | Bank of America (BAC) rose after beating on both earnings and revenue in Q2.
📉 | LM Ericsson (ERIC) dropped after missing revenue estimates.
📈 | CleanSpark (CLSK) surged after locking in a 20-year Georgia data center lease worth $6.6B in contracted revenue.
📉 | O-I Glass (OI) slumped after a double downgrade to Underperform at BofA on soft glass demand.
Tomorrow's Trade Idea, Today
RXO SPEEDWAGON
Stock Spotlight
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Tight Squeeze
The truckload market is running out of slack, and BMO Capital Markets thinks one broker is built to cash in.
The firm initiated coverage of RXO at Outperform, with analyst Fadi Chamoun arguing the company offers clean operating leverage to a supply-driven tightening in truckload capacity.
Load-Bearing
Chamoun points to RXO’s brokerage volumes, up roughly 80% this year, and productivity, which has improved about 40% on a two-year stack.
BMO models roughly $600M in peak adjusted EBITDA by the end of 2028, more than double the $292M consensus.
A strong free cash flow outlook could fund accretive M&A on top of that, Chamoun argues.
Against the Traffic
The rest of the Street is riding the brakes. Of the 18 analysts covering RXO, 11 rate it a Hold and two sit at Underperform, even after shares more than doubled in 2026.
The majority of analysts may be asking, “Are we there yet?” But BMO reckons that the drive is barely halfway over.
Do you own any shares of RXO Inc (RXO)?
OVERHEARD ON THE STREET
🏛️ Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh told Congress he is pursuing a "regime change" in monetary policy to scrap what he called inflation's tax on Americans.
🛢️ Oil gave up its gains after President Trump abandoned his demand for a 20% fee on cargo transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
🔌 New York became the first state to ban new AI data centers, halting construction of facilities drawing 50 megawatts or more for up to a year.
📱 Apple (AAPL) is in early talks with Caltech spinout PrismML, which says it shrank a 54GB AI model to under 4GB and ran it on an iPhone.
✈️ Frontier (ULCC) and four other budget carriers will debut Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi in early 2027.
MONDAY'S POLL RESULTS
Do you own any shares of Biogen (BIIB)?
▇▇▇▇▇▇ 🐂 Yup, I’m holding
▇▇▇▇▇▇ 🐻 Nope, not interested
▇▇▇▇▇▇ 👀 No, but I’m interested
And, in response, you said:
🐻 Nope, not interested — “The tau protein theory makes sense but hadn’t shown long term results. Perhaps this class of medications will work if given early enough, but such studies are years off.”
