The Empty Week Got Thin.

Sunday’s Macro Brief asked one question about this week: two full sessions had no United States data scheduled on them, so would an empty calendar get bought, or would it just get thin? It got thin, and the selling did not start with the calendar. Attacks on shipping escalated at two separate chokepoints, the Strait of Hormuz and the approach to the Red Sea, in an exchange that has run in both directions for weeks, and crude repriced hard. West Texas Intermediate, the United States oil benchmark, settled Thursday at $102.01, up 11.5 percent from the prior Friday and its first settlement above $100 a barrel since May. The bond market read that as inflation. The 10-year Treasury yield closed at 4.944 percent, its highest close since October 2023, and the Volatility Index, which is the options market’s estimate of how far the S&P 500 will travel over the next month, went from 14.53 to 17.84.

The three indexes fell together and their lines did not. The Dow lost its invalidation level, the price that turns an up call into a wrong one, on Wednesday at 52,380.66 against a line at 52,691.31, and by Thursday it sat 627.21 points underneath. It had held that line by 94.76 points on Tuesday, under two tenths of one percent, so it was never comfortable. The S&P 500 held for two sessions and then closed Thursday at 7,591.70, which is 19.50 points below its 7,611.20 line. The Nasdaq 100 never got there. Its lowest close of the week finished 150.25 points above 28,953.26, and that is the only one of the three lines still standing. The Dow and the S&P 500 both closed Thursday at their lowest since late July. The Nasdaq 100 gave back only as far as where it closed on September 1.

The direction was wrong on all three. The order the lines failed in was not. Every index starts the week with a measurable amount of space between the open and its invalidation line, and this week the Nasdaq 100 had 2.33 percent of it, the S&P 500 had 1.38 percent and the Dow had 0.79 percent. The lines then failed from the bottom of that list upward. Last week the same measurement pointed the other way against the ranking: the Dow was ranked first, it carried the shallowest room in the set at 0.375 percent, and it broke. This week the index ranked first also carried the most room, so the ranking and the room agreed, and a week where they agree cannot tell which of the two did the work. One week where they disagreed is not a finding. It is a reason to keep printing the room number on Sunday, so the next disagreement has something to be measured against. What neither number does is fix a direction. All three biases were up, and all three finished between 1.63 and 1.97 percent below Tuesday’s open, which is where the scored week starts. The figures at the top of this page run from the prior Friday close instead, which is why the Dow reads worse up there.

Thursday was the first session of the week with United States data on it, and it did not help. The European Central Bank raised its main refinancing rate a quarter point to 2.65 percent at 8:15 in the morning, Eastern, with the press conference at 8:45. Producer prices landed at 8:30 and showed the oil problem already inside the data: prices charged by producers rose 0.4 percent in August and 5.4 percent over twelve months, up from 4.8 percent in the year through July, with energy up 4.2 percent on the month and diesel fuel alone up 24.1 percent. All three indexes closed at their weekly lows anyway. Friday sits outside the scored window and carries the week’s last consequential release. August consumer price inflation lands at 8:30, with the headline figure forecast at 0.4 percent on the month against 0.1 percent in July, and 3.4 percent over the year. It measures August, so it cannot contain a single day of this week’s crude move, which means a soft number does not settle what actually repriced the tape, and the Federal Reserve meets September 15 and 16 with both prints in hand. Oracle reported after Thursday’s bell and beat on revenue and earnings, with cloud infrastructure revenue up 121 percent. The one level in play is the Nasdaq 100’s 28,953.26, the last line standing, 150.25 points under Thursday’s close.