Daily Market Update — July 25, 2026

Saturday note. US equities are closed. Crude, crypto and the Middle East story all kept moving this week, so this covers the week that just ended and what it sets up.

Where the week ended Equities: Friday July 24 finished split — S&P 500 7,411.98, up 0.05%; Dow 51,947.25, up 235.60 points or 0.46%; Nasdaq 24,975.82, down 0.64%; Russell 2000 2,930.00, down 0.35%. A 3.5% gain in Apple did most of the work for the Dow. On the week: S&P 500 -0.6%, Nasdaq -2.1%, Dow -0.4%, Russell 2000 -1.1%. That is a second straight weekly loss for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, and a third straight for the Dow. What drove it: chips and mega-cap spending plans, not the broad market. Intel fell about 8% Friday even after second-quarter results beat estimates; Micron dropped 7%, AMD 3.3%, Broadcom 2.7%, and the VanEck Semiconductor ETF gave up 3%. Earlier in the week the damage came from earnings reactions in the largest names: Tesla fell 14.5% on Thursday, its worst earnings-reaction day on record, and Alphabet fell 7.1% after raising its capital spending plan to as much as 205 billion dollars. Communication Services and Consumer Discretionary were the week's weakest sectors, both down roughly 6%. Energy and geopolitics: this was the week oil ran. Brent topped 100 dollars for the first time since late May, then eased to settle at 96.78 on Friday, down nearly 4% on the day. WTI settled 89.31, off about 3% Friday but still up roughly 8% on the week. Friday's pullback followed a Reuters report, citing three Pakistani sources, that Pakistan is considering a path toward new US-Iran peace negotiations in a push initiated by China. Cutting the other way: President Trump told Axios he is considering a "massive attack" on Iran, and the New York Times reported Friday that he was meeting advisers and senior cabinet members to decide whether to escalate. US forces completed a 13th consecutive night of strikes, the conflict has extended into the Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed. Rates and metals: the 10-year Treasury yield ended near 4.68%, up roughly 14 basis points on the week. Yields rose while equities fell, which is the oil story arriving in the bond market. Gold settled near 4,067.60, up about 1.4% on the week. The dollar index finished near 101.47 and the VIX at 18.58. Earnings, for scale: with 27% of the S&P 500 reported, 86% have beaten earnings estimates and blended growth is running near 37.9% year over year, the fastest since the third quarter of 2021, according to FactSet. Strong results are not what moved this tape. Crypto (live through the weekend): Bitcoin marked near 64,312 dollars Saturday against 64,098 at Friday's close; Ethereum near 1,873 against 1,860. Crypto stayed quiet while equities and crude did the moving.

What this means for your system The story of this week is not a falling market. It is a market where the index averages were dragged down by a handful of very large names — over their own spending plans — while the strongest earnings growth since 2021 was being reported underneath, and crude ran 8%. Two portfolios could have had completely different weeks depending only on concentration, and most people cannot say which week they had without looking.

Three things worth doing this weekend Open your Financial Tracker and write down what share of your equity exposure sits in mega-cap tech and semiconductors, directly or inside an index fund. That one number explains most of this week for you. Note where crude sits and what a move of this size does to your own costs, before a headline decides that for you. Write down, in one line, what would separate a normal drawdown from something you would act on. Deciding that on a closed Saturday is easier than deciding it mid-session.

Bottom line A second week of index declines driven by semiconductors and mega-cap capital spending, an 8% move in crude, and an unresolved Middle East conflict that is now reaching rates. Nothing on this page is a reason to act today. It is a reason to know what you hold before the Fed decision on Wednesday. The Sunday setup note follows with the week ahead.

Question for you: when a week splits like this one did, do you look at your own numbers first or the headlines first?

Sources (publicly available data): Yahoo Finance chart data for index, commodity, rate and crypto marks through July 24-25, 2026; CNBC market coverage for the July 24 close, sector moves and single-stock reactions; Reuters reporting on the Pakistan-led diplomatic push; FactSet earnings data as cited by CNBC. Equity figures are Friday's close; crypto and oil move continuously.