Monday Takeaways: Will Apple Overthrow Nvidia’s Reign?

Shah Gilani|September 9, 2024

You’ve likely heard that September tends to be a rough month for the markets. Well, it certainly started off with a bang as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq ended last week down.

But there are plenty of market-moving events this week to keep an eye on…

Will Apple (AAPL) overthrow Nvidia’s (NVDA) reign as the coolest stock in the market?

Will PPI and CPI influence the upcoming rate cut that’s been promised?

And what will the markets make of the first presidential debate tomorrow?

A lot of questions will be answered this week. Get the full scoop of what I’m watching… and what to do about it… in today’s video.

Click on the thumbnail below to watch.

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Shah Gilani here with your weekly, starting on Monday, takeaways.

The first takeaway comes from last week.

Wow. Ugly week. S&P down 4.2%. Nasdaq composite down more than 6%.

An ugly week ending with an ugly Friday. And the reason that Friday was ugly and the takeaway from it is ugliness may persist is the not so great but not so bad jobs numbers. In other words, payrolls increased but not by as much as expected, but didn’t disappoint, I should say, as much as could have been.

And so the market’s going like, well, wait a second. What does that mean? Does that mean, oh, it means things aren’t so bad, and the economy’s still moving along? The labor market’s still okay. Wages were actually up slightly month over month, 0.1%.

But still, that doesn’t mean that things are sinking, and that the Fed’s going to cut by 50 basis points. So the narrative switched once again from 50 basis points coming up hopefully at the September 17 and 18 Fed meeting to maybe that size of a cut is off the table now.

So markets dumped, but they dumped all week.

Another takeaway from the selling is it’s September, people. Everyone is afraid of September. Who’s afraid of September? Well, not me, but pretty much everybody who looks back and says, historically, it’s one of the worst months ever. And, historically, it is.

Not as bad as October, technically. By the way, November is always pretty good, so keep that in mind. But September worries a lot of folks. Obviously, coming into the election year, things are getting heated up.

They’re going to get more heated tomorrow, Tuesday, because we have the debate. What the takeaway will be from that remains to be seen.

But looking at last week, we turned the page into September and market sold off having a pretty darn good August, and all of a sudden, bang, now we’re in the dumps, and will September continue in that fashion?

The thinking is the Fed has to cut rates, and they will definitely cut. Everybody thinks it’s a foregone conclusion that they’ll cut by 25 basis.

If they cut 50, the question then becomes, will the markets rally or is it baked in? The bond markets, boy, it’s a push me/pull you there because half the analysts are saying it’s baked in. The other half are saying that we could see a continued bond market rally if we get a 50 basis points cut.

So we got a lot of stuff coming up this week. Today is Monday. We’ve got the big Apple event today. Could that move markets?

The futures are up already this morning. Is there a positive in there because maybe Apple could turn things around with its new smartphones and new AI incorporated in them? Could this be the shining moment for Apple to become again the coolest stock on the planet? And not Nvidia?

Well, maybe. That remains to be seen.

It remains to be seen how investors and traders perceive what happens today with Apple’s “big top” show. I’m going to be watching. Everyone’s going to be watching, but you don’t have to watch it directly. You could just watch Apple’s stock to see where it’s going and what the perception is of the new smartphones.

It’s going to be a very busy week. The takeaway from that is it’s going to be a lot. We’ve got a lot stuff. We’re kind of looking for direction here, and the direction is all of a sudden down, though it’s been kind of up and now all of a sudden it’s down.

What does that mean?

It means we’re data dependent again. We’re data dependent on a couple things.

We got the CPI on Wednesday. That’s going to be a market mover. Maybe.

If it’s really a good number, meaning CPI is lower much lower than expected, then we’ll probably get a 50 basis point cut. The markets will probably rally on that expectation, and that’ll be a positive.

If CPI is really a negative, in other words, comes in a lot higher than expected, and core is going to be different because oil prices have been coming down. Energy is going to be affecting core, and that’s going to look better. But if for some reason core and headline are worse than expected, then there’s the chance of a 50 basis point cut. It’s going to just get erased, and the market will probably shake a little bit on that.

So that’s going to be very interesting to watch. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t have an expectation one way or the other. I’m just going to be glued to seeing how the futures react in the morning and where we’re going to go.

Thursday, we have PPI. We’ve got a bunch of data this week that’s all meaningful, and that’s where we’re at. We’re back to watching data points. And we all know one data point isn’t the sole defining point that determines what the trend is of inflation or Apple or PPI or CPI or whatever it is.

It’s a data point. But we are at a place now where everyone is trying to figure out what the narrative what the what the blossoming narrative is going to be on the heels of the collective data points. And this week is going to be very interesting.

I think first and foremost is going to be Apple’s event.

Takeaway with that is if you own Apple stock, you better have a stop in in case you want to take some profits if the thing dumps. If you don’t own Apple, and it goes higher, you want to probably want to buy some. But it’s going to be an interesting day for Apple.

No. 2, you got the debates tomorrow, Tuesday. That’s going to be interesting. We’ll see how the futures react Wednesday morning, what goes on there.

Of course, Wednesday, we have CPI, Thursday, PPI. It’s going to be a data driven week. We got other data points in between. We got a lot of stuff going on this week.

A lot of Fed speakers are out there, muddying the waters in my opinion. So it’s going to be a juggling act as September tends to be. The takeaway from all that is be careful out there.

Catch you guys next week. Cheers.