Technical analysis: oil shock lifts energy stocks while Edison International stock loses 23% in a single session
The 31 August session had two engines, both of them outside the charts. Over the weekend US forces struck Iranian rocket launchers on the island of Larak, described as ready to mine the Strait of Hormuz, and crude reopened with a gap: oil added 2.8% from Friday's close. Meanwhile California lawmakers introduced a wildfire bill that leaves civil liability with the publicly traded utilities: Edison International stock fell 23.07% and PG&E stock 20.06%, on volumes seven and nine times their normal levels. Wall Street absorbed the blow — the S&P 500 ETF shed 0.30%, the Nasdaq 100 ETF closed flat — and August still ended in the green.
Energy was the only US sector to finish higher, up 2.04%, with Schlumberger stock up 4.83%, Exxon Mobil stock up 2.71% and Chevron stock up 2.12%. On the Milan market the same move lifted Eni stock by 2.26%, Tenaris stock by 2.97% and Saipem stock by 2.29%, while banking consolidation kept Banca MPS stocks up 1.51%; Leonardo was the worst of the index, down 2.18%. In the cards below you will find the technical analysis of the names that moved the day — from Edison International, PG&E, Exxon, Chevron, PayPal and Tesla on Wall Street to Eni, Tenaris, Saipem, MPS and Leonardo in Milan — the seven weekly signals that turned on the bar still forming, the map of European indices and ETFs, and for each one our model's position, long or short, with the date the signal fired.
- The week's signals: what changed
- Edison International and PG&E: a bill wipes out a fifth
- Oil and the companies that sell it
- Milan market: Eni, Tenaris and consolidation
- Tesla, PayPal and GameStop: the news decides
- US technology: ten names, a flat sector
- Seven signals turned Monday: provisional
- European indices: Paris is the divergence
- The ETFs that moved the session
- This week's earnings
- Technical analysis of SPY and QQQ
The week's buy signals: what changed in the first full session
The cohort was born with Friday 28 August's close — 9 signals, six of them tradable — and stays the same until next Friday. Here we publish only what changed in the first full trading session: who moved above or below their entry level, and whose picture shifted. The entry level is Friday's close itself, so the moves below are the trade's real return from the signal.
Technical analysis of Edison International and PG&E stock: a bill wipes out a fifth of the value
Over the weekend California lawmakers introduced the new wildfire bill. It updates the state's wildfire response but does not shift civil liability away from the publicly traded utilities, which is what the market had been counting on: at least three research houses cut their view on the sector that same morning. Edison International stock lost 23.07%, its worst day since 2001, on seven times its normal volume; PG&E stock lost 20.06%, on nine times normal volume.
The surprise sits right beside those numbers: the US utilities ETF shed only 1.17%. Two companies lost a fifth of their value and the basket holding them barely moved a point, meaning the market priced this as a Californian event rather than a sector event. That is an implicit bet, and it is worth knowing about.
Technical analysis of the oil complex: Hormuz puts supply risk back into the price
The US strike on Iranian rocket launchers at Larak, described as ready to mine the Strait of Hormuz — the corridor carrying roughly a fifth of the world's oil — was the first direct exchange of fire between Washington and Tehran in about a month. Crude reopened with a gap and added 2.8% from Friday's close, taking it to 9.7% over the month.
The sector moved as a block: Schlumberger stock up 4.83%, Petrobras stock up 4.43%, Exxon Mobil stock up 2.71%, Chevron stocks up 2.12%, Valero up 1.86%, Halliburton up 1.85%, Occidental up 1.83% and ConocoPhillips up 1.64%. The US energy ETF closed up 2.04%, the only one of eleven US sectors in the green.
Technical analysis of the Milan market: Eni and Tenaris stocks rise with crude, consolidation holds the banks
The Milan index closed all but unchanged, down 0.04%, yet two stories ran underneath. The first is oil: Eni stock gained 2.26% — with Venezuelan investment agreements reported to be close to signature — Tenaris stock 2.97% and Saipem stock 2.29%. The second is banking consolidation heading into a busy September: Banca MPS up 1.51%, Mediobanca stocks up 1.26%, Generali up 1.00%, Intesa Sanpaolo stock up 0.13% and UniCredit stock down 0.67%.
On the other side of the index the industrials gave way together: Leonardo down 2.18%, Avio down 2.90% and Prysmian stock down 1.52%. Stellantis stock instead added 1.60%, following European autos.
Technical analysis of Tesla, PayPal and GameStop stock: when the news sets the price
In a session thin on macro catalysts, single company events set the price. Tesla stock gained 5.51% ahead of Thursday's Cybercab event in Austin, with the market hunting for detail on the robotaxi after the limited clearance obtained in Nevada. GameStop stock rose 2.85% after preliminary second quarter results came in above expectations, with net income estimated between 290 and 310 million dollars against 168.6 a year earlier, helped by the gain on its eBay stake.
On the other side Take-Two stock lost 6.67%. On PayPal it pays to be precise: the 12.71% collapse that followed the Advent-Stripe consortium walking away belongs to Friday the 28th. On Monday the stock fell 1.85%, and our data leaves no room for interpretation.
Technical analysis of US technology: ten names higher, semiconductor stocks split, the sector flat
The US technology ETF closed up 0.44%, and underneath that number sits a distribution worth looking at. Circle stock gained 9.65%, Roblox 7.16%, CrowdStrike 5.77%, Sandisk 5.50%, IREN 4.70%, Strategy 4.42%, Qualcomm stock 3.83%, Fortinet 2.97%, Palo Alto Networks 2.84% and Micron stocks 2.77%, the last of these supported by a research house restating its bullish view on memory.
Anyone following ai trading as a single theme has a day in front of them that splits it in two. With the sector flat at 0.44%, ten names rising between 2.7% and 9.7% mean one thing: below them there is a vacuum. And indeed Alphabet stock fell 2.09% and Amazon stocks 2.50%, so two of the basket's heavyweights went the other way.
Seven weekly signals turned on Monday: provisional until Friday
The weekly bar that opened on Monday 31 August will close on Friday 4 September. On seven instruments in our universe the weekly signal has already changed sides on that bar, and for our model a flip printed on a bar still forming is provisional: it can retire if the week closes differently. We publish them because they are the freshest information we hold, saying exactly what they are.
Moving from buy to sell: PG&E, Avio, Take-Two, Broadcom and the Russell 2000 ETF. Moving from sell to buy: Saipem stock and Bayerische Motoren Werke stock.
Technical analysis of European indices: Paris is the only one of the four on sell
Frankfurt's basket, the DAX, shed 1.22%; the CAC 40 lost 0.79%, the FTSE MIB 0.04% and the FTSE 100 closed up 0.25% — though the British figure is Friday's, because the exchange was shut on Monday for a bank holiday.
Distance from their own record separates the four more than the session does: Frankfurt sits 1.30% below its all-time high, Milan 2.69%, Paris 4.96% and London 8.24%.
The ETFs that moved the session: energy, utilities, gold and semiconductors
Two baskets made the day on the upside. XLE — the State Street Energy Select Sector SPDR, the most heavily traded US energy ETF — closed up 2.04%, and VDE, the Vanguard Energy ETF, matched it. On the other side XLU, the State Street Utilities Select Sector SPDR, the US utilities ETF, lost 1.17%: it is the basket that holds the two Californian power companies that collapsed on Monday, and it is also last of the eleven sectors over the month, down 4.78%.
Among the baskets the public follows most closely, GLD — SPDR Gold Shares, the most heavily traded gold ETF in the world — closed effectively flat, down 0.11%, held back by rising yields despite the geopolitical tension. SOXX, the iShares Semiconductor ETF — the semiconductor ETF of reference — added 0.48%. In Europe EXH1, the iShares STOXX Europe 600 Oil & Gas, the European oil and gas ETF, stopped at 0.33%.
This week's earnings: Broadcom is the real test
Five companies in our universe report over the next seven days. The date that counts is Wednesday 2 September, with Broadcom: after guiding for AI-related revenue growth above 200% year on year, it is the test of sentiment across the whole semiconductor chain. And it arrives just as its weekly signal has changed sides on the bar still forming.
Monday 1 September
Credo Technology Long
NIO Short
Wednesday 2 September
Broadcom Long
Thursday 3 September
Zscaler Long
Tuesday 8 September
FuelCell Energy Short
Technical analysis of SPY and QQQ: the day diversification cost money
SPY, the S&P 500 ETF, lost 0.30%; QQQ, the Nasdaq 100 ETF, closed up 0.05%. For once the ratio flipped, and the reason is not a technology one.
The block the concentrated basket barely owns — financials down 0.67%, industrials down 1.13%, utilities down 1.17%, real estate down 0.83%, materials down 0.92% — carries more than 28% of the S&P 500 and gave way together on Monday. On the Nasdaq 100 those same sectors are worth a little over 6% combined: utilities 1.54%, financials 0.24%, real estate 0.10%.
The backdrop: risk moves out of equities and into rates and commodities
No central bank meeting marked the day, but the backdrop is still one of waiting: the market is positioning for a more hawkish Federal Reserve at the September meeting, just as energy-driven inflation comes back into the equation. The US ten-year sits at multi-month highs and the euro held above 1.16 against a dollar that softened during the session.
The stress dashboard describes a precise shift. Equity volatility is flat, up just 3.4% on the week and unchanged over the month; bond volatility is up 5% over the month, the Italy-Germany spread 8% and rising for four consecutive weeks, tail risk 12%. Three measures of tension climbing while the most watched indicator of all stands still: risk has not gone away, it has changed market. Oil points the same way, up 10% over four weeks, as do shipping rates, up 17% on the month with a 12.1% jump in the past week alone.
The figure we keep watching is market participation, meaning how many stocks are genuinely holding the index up: down 5% over the month and falling for three weeks. That is the third consecutive week in which prices hold with fewer and fewer names taking part, and an index like that turns fragile without looking fragile.
What you find here. If you are trying to understand how to manage risk in trading — stops, break-even stops, trailing, and the declaration of stops that have been taken out — or how to read chart patterns (double bottoms, Bollinger bands, the Ichimoku cloud, price action trading), this is the desk's trading journal: published every morning before the US premarket, with our model's position on every instrument mentioned.
The full analyses behind the cards on this page.
* Our system — The rows of names at the foot of each card carry our model's position, long or short. Position from the latest published weekly analysis. Levels, targets and the trading plan sit in each instrument's own page. The two letters in brackets lead to the instrument page (G) and the full analysis (P).