Technical analysis: AI debt hits Broadcom stock, thirty fresh buy signals and the Nasdaq ETF opens a new trade
The 14 August session closed a week in which the market stopped buying artificial intelligence as a single block and began to discriminate. Softer-than-expected US producer prices pushed equity volatility to its lowest reading of the year and carried Wall Street to a third straight weekly gain, yet inside the chip space the day produced a clear winner and a clear loser for balance-sheet reasons rather than demand.
The cards below carry the technical analysis of the names that moved the session — Broadcom stock, AMD, Micron, Oracle, PayPal and Walmart stocks on Wall Street, Ferrari and Fincantieri on the Milan market — and for each one the position of our model, long or short, with the date its signal fired. Friday's close opened thirty fresh buy signals, and the first card is about them. The closing card compares SPY and QQQ, the two US ETFs, which today sit at opposite ends of the same cycle.
- The thirty fresh buy signals of the week
- Semiconductor stocks: AI debt hits Broadcom
- Software and M&A: Oracle, Salesforce and PayPal
- US energy and a nervous consumer
- Alibaba stock and Baidu stocks
- Milan market: Ferrari and Fincantieri hold the list
- European indices: four signals, one poor result
- The ETFs that moved the session
- Earnings this week
- SPY and QQQ technical analysis
The thirty fresh buy signals of the week
The weekly analysis that closed on Friday opened thirty fresh buy signals, and ten of them sit below. Their make-up says more than any single name: quantum computing, space, uranium, rare earths and compute infrastructure, plus a cluster of technology ETFs that all turned in the same week. This is the most mobile group we cover, and it switched sides together.
Semiconductor stocks: AI debt hits Broadcom stock while AMD runs
The session offered a textbook case of a market learning to discriminate inside a single theme. Broadcom stocks were the story of the session: Broadcom fell 5.94% after Bank of America shone a light on roughly 370 billion dollars of debt tied to the sector's spending on artificial intelligence, a reminder that the infrastructure race is partly financed with leverage. On the other side of the same coin Advanced Micro Devices gained 6.50% on Baird's 1,250-dollar target, and Micron Technology closed 2.30% higher. NVIDIA sat still at minus 0.06% on heavy volume, confirming its role as the neutral pivot of the group.
The message is that financial sustainability is being repriced while end demand is not in question. It is the same fault line that on Thursday hit the margins of the companies assembling the hardware.
Software gives back its rally while M&A takes over: Oracle, Salesforce and PayPal stock
Software had a poor session. Salesforce gave up 2.56%, handing back most of the rally sparked the day before by J.P. Morgan's coverage launch with a 250-dollar target, while UBS flagged downside risk into the 26 August print; Oracle lost 3.65%, weighed down by a gas supply line for its data centres slipping to 2027.
The livelier story sits in corporate action. On PayPal the Stripe and Advent offer at 60.50 dollars a share is advancing, and if it completes it would mark a landmark consolidation in digital payments. Alongside merger talk around AstraZeneca, speculation about SAP and the progress of Iridium's acquisition by Rocket Lab, a cluster of special situations is taking shape that deserves to be watched apart from the rest of the tape.
US energy stocks lead while the consumer turns nervous ahead of earnings
Crude on the rise, with Brent heading toward 88.5 dollars, supported energy: Exxon Mobil added 0.94% while Chevron declared a 1.78-dollar dividend going ex on 19 August. The US energy sector was the best of the day at plus 1.39%, and it is also the only one where the daily picture fully confirms the weekly one.
On the consumer side the mood is the opposite. Walmart lost ground after July retail sales fell a surprise 0.6% on the month, a nervous appetiser ahead of the 20 August print; Home Depot opens the run on the 18th. The week ahead lines up the Federal Reserve minutes on the 19th and the US retail reporting season.
Alibaba stock and Baidu stocks: technical analysis into the earnings window
Among the large Chinese companies listed in New York the story of the day belongs to Alibaba, reportedly picked by Apple to train the artificial intelligence model destined for the Chinese market, an important step in localising Cupertino's offering. Alibaba stocks added 1.35% and head into the 20 August print. Baidu, reporting on the 18th, has options pricing a 5.8% move, which points to high expectations.
Milan market: Ferrari and Fincantieri stocks hold a listless pre-holiday session
The Milan market closed soft on thin pre-holiday volume, with the FTSE MIB around minus 0.15%. Fincantieri and Ferrari stood out on the upside, both around a percentage point, with Nexi up 2% and Avio up 1.2%. At the bottom sat STMicroelectronics, the worst of the index at minus 1.94%, dragged down with the European chip complex.
Elsewhere on the continent the DAX set fresh highs, with SAP up 3% on speculation about a US acquisition and defence names running, while E.ON dropped 4.4% on an unfavourable draft ruling in gas. In London a copper rally lifted Rio Tinto and Glencore, with weakness in Shell holding the index back after the sale of its renewables arm.
European indices: four signals open since spring, one returning a tenth of the others
The four European baskets we follow all carry a weekly buy signal open since spring: DAX from 13 April, CAC 40, FTSE MIB and FTSE 100 from 7 April. Eighteen weeks in the trade, and on that they agree.
Where they part company is the result. The Italian basket returns 15.48% from the signal, the French one 6.73%, the German one 6.70%; the British one stops at 1.17%, a thirteenth of the Italian over the same span. It is also, alongside the French basket, the only one whose daily signal has turned to sell, and it has already taken out the first declared stop.
The ETFs that moved the session: the energy ETF, gold ETFs and the semiconductor ETF
Among the US sectors the day belonged to energy, with US energy ETF up 1.39% on the session and 7.67% on the week, followed by utilities with US utilities ETF at plus 0.61%. Europe sat at the other end: European health care ETF gave up 1.47% and European utilities ETF 1.04%, and they are the two baskets whose weekly picture clashes most with the day.
Three baskets deserve a line even without having moved the session. Gold ETFs, which we track through gold ETF, carry a buy signal while the metal remains 8.9% ahead over four weeks: the technical analysis of gold says the structure is holding, which is why the signal is still open. The semiconductor ETF, semiconductor ETF, is where Friday's session reads better than on the single names, because Broadcom and AMD cancelled each other out. The Nasdaq ETF, Invesco QQQ Trust, is the case of the week and it has the closing card.
Earnings this week: the US consumer and Chinese demand on the same day
The week ahead is short on names but heavy on content, because it lines up the US consumer and Chinese demand forty-eight hours apart.
Tuesday 18 August — Home DepotLong
Tuesday 18 August — BaiduShort
Thursday 20 August — WalmartShort
Thursday 20 August — AlibabaLong
Straight after, just outside the seven-day window, comes the block that matters most for the theme of these weeks: Intuit and Zoom on 25 August, Salesforce on the 26th, and Nvidia at month end.
SPY and QQQ technical analysis: one closes a cycle, the other opens one
S&P 500 (SPY), the ETF on the S&P 500, slipped 0.20% and finished the week 0.40% higher, four tenths of a point away from its all-time high. Its buy signal has been open since 6 April, returns 14.26% and has already reached all three profit-taking windows: coverage of the trade is complete and only the trailing stop is left in charge.
Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ), the ETF on the Nasdaq 100, gained 1.11% on the week and Friday's close validated a fresh buy signal, after three weeks of selling that began on 20 July. It is in its first week, has all three windows ahead of it and its own record still sits 2.40% above the price.
The market stopped buying the theme and started reading balance sheets
The wider picture is the calmest since mid-July, and the numbers say so plainly: stress gauges are falling together, equity volatility is down almost a quarter over four weeks, and market participation has been climbing for three weeks with a gain of 8.7%% in the last one alone. A rally with broadening participation stands on many legs.
What changed sits inside the theme that has driven the market for months. In two sessions the market punished the margins of the companies assembling the hardware and the debt of those financing the race, rewarding at the same time the ones selling licences and the ones with solid balance sheets. End demand was never in doubt; the way it is being valued has changed. Two small gauges confirm it from the risk side, the BTP-Bund spread and the tail-risk measure, both up around 3%% on the day while equity volatility touched its low of the year. When protection is cheap and starts to be asked for, the week opens with more attention than usual.
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The full analyses behind the cards on this page.