The Market Brief
Hey team, U.S. equity futures edged lower during early trading as a week dominated by headlines on trade tariffs, a slew of earnings, and more evidence of stubborn inflation comes to an end.
Let’s re-cap Thursday’s session and see what’s next for the markets!
Impact Snapshot
🟥 Retail Sales - 8:30am
Macro Viewpoint
U.S. stock index futures traded mixed on Friday as investors awaited further details on President Donald Trump's proposed reciprocal tariffs. This pause followed strong gains in previous sessions, with all three major stock indexes on track for substantial weekly increases.
The S&P 500 remained just 0.2% below its record high reached three weeks ago, underscoring the market’s recent strength.
On Thursday, Trump instructed his economic team to develop plans for reciprocal tariffs on nations that impose taxes on U.S. imports. However, the directive did not immediately introduce new tariffs.
Investor sentiment also received a boost from economic data showing a rise in U.S. producer prices for January.
Meanwhile, key components of the core Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index—a metric closely monitored by the Federal Reserve—remained stable or declined.
Prior Session Deep Dive
The chart below includes all the references and context we shared at 7:00 AM with our paid Substack users, detailing what we would be looking for in the session ahead on Thursday.
We would have an extremely hard time sitting here one day after the fact and writing a better market outlook and context than what you see on the chart below.
Being able to “read” the markets and build actual scenarios to prepare for the session ahead requires a set of skills and screen time. There is no magic ball or easy answer to it, which is something most people don’t want to hear.
SURVIVORSHIP BIAS – You look at successful traders and assume their methods are effective, overlooking the many who failed using the same strategies and methodology.
The above quote is arguably the most important you’ll ever hear regarding the path to success in trading. Most of your favorite influencers don’t even know what bid/ask is or how orders are matched. Their “easy” strategy may have worked for them, but what about the thousands who tried their so-called “direct” path to success?
What this Substack offers is the ability to hone your intuition and market-reading skills to build a solid framework the right way—understanding how markets actually work behind the scenes—so you can spot things well before the fact.
This means that you might have to unlearn some of the things that you’ve seen on someones youtube channel that post things like: “How i got my lambo in one day”.
Develop better context and create a robust entry model by understanding all the market nuances we share on a daily basis. This will help you build the market understanding that most traders lack.