Situation Awareness: Cautious, tilting defensive. Futures are pointing sharply lower — S&P futures sit 73 points below fair value and Nasdaq futures a heavy 404 below — as the entire Magnificent Seven trades red in the premarket following Alphabet and Tesla earnings, all against a backdrop of WTI crude vaulting above $90/bbl and Treasury yields grinding to fresh 2026 highs. SPY, QQQ, and IWM technical levels are (data unavailable) in today’s feed, so we anchor to breadth and futures rather than specific index prints. Trade mode: selective and defensive — let the gap settle before committing. The dominant force is a collision of rising oil, sticky-inflation bond selling, and mega-cap earnings digestion. Regime context — 60.5% of stocks trade above their 40-day SMA, but the 4% Bull/Bear gauge has flipped hard bearish at 118 bulls vs. 219 bears, and only 24% of names hold above their 20-day SMA. The 5-day trend is choppy and deteriorating at the short end: the 20-day breadth reading barely ticked up (+1pp to 24%) while the 4% gauge collapsed from 405 bulls the prior session to just 118, confirming a fast momentum unwind.
SIP: SMCI TEL ADTN
- What’s working: Continuation/2LYNCH scan produced 5 clean signals (CBOE, DE, LH, STT, CW); Reversal scan added 4 (CHTR, SNOW, BABA, CELH). Delayed 9M is empty — no episodic-pivot fuel today.
- Leading sectors: live sector and theme performance is unavailable with the market closed and ATR feed empty; from the after-hours tape, energy (+1.2%), utilities (+2.3%), and materials (+1.5%) were the standouts, while communication services (-1.3%) and consumer discretionary (-0.8%) lagged.
- Key event: initial jobless claims came in red-hot at 187,000 vs. 214,000 consensus — a labor-market beat that adds fuel to the higher-for-longer rate narrative pressuring futures.
- Market read: yesterday’s tape drifted near unchanged on light volume as investors waited on GOOG/TSLA; the after-close reaction has now tipped the balance decisively risk-off for the open.
- DEP watchlist: no Delayed 9M signals today — stand down on that book.
- SIPS: DE, CW, STT — the cleanest continuation swing candidates outside the tech blast radius.