Oil Wrote the Week.

Renewed strikes between the United States and Iran put the Strait of Hormuz back in the conversation, and crude repriced fast. West Texas Intermediate, the United States oil benchmark, went from $83.40 at the prior Friday close to $91.48 by this one, a little under ten percent in five sessions. Energy costs feed inflation expectations, so the bond market moved with it. The 10-year Treasury yield closed at 4.796 percent on both Tuesday and Wednesday, its highest close since January 2025. Then Thursday morning Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said he is leaning toward holding rates steady in September if the next two weeks of inflation data cooperate, and the yield came back down to 4.762 percent.

The three indexes did not take it the same way. The Dow closed below Sunday’s invalidation line, the price level that turns an up call into a wrong one, in three straight sessions, starting Monday at 53,185.90 against a line at 53,261.95 and bottoming Tuesday at 52,766.88. The Nasdaq 100 closed no nearer than 201 points to its own line all week, held up by an artificial intelligence earnings run that sent Snowflake up more than sixteen percent Thursday after a quarter that beat on both revenue and earnings. The S&P 500 sat between them and closed Tuesday at 7,631.47, which is 6.70 points under its 7,638.17 line. That is less than a tenth of one percent, and it still counts, because the rule is a close beyond the level and not a close comfortably beyond it.

The uncomfortable part is that Sunday’s card already said which line was easiest to reach. Each index carries an expected range for the week built from option pricing, and the card publishes how far the invalidation line sits inside that range. The Dow’s line sat 34 percent of an expected week away. The S&P 500’s sat 58 percent away. The Nasdaq 100’s sat 79 percent away. Ranked first, the Dow carried the shallowest line in the set: about 200 points of room from Monday’s open, or 0.375 percent, against 528 points and 1.797 percent for the Nasdaq 100, close to five times the cushion in percentage terms. Rank measures which index looks cleanest going in. It does not measure how much room the line has. Those two came apart this week, and the number that separated them was printed on Sunday.

One note on the scored window, because Friday sits outside it. August payrolls landed Friday at 162,000 against a consensus near 55,000, roughly three times what was expected and well above the 31,000 average monthly gain of the prior year. The unemployment rate held at 4.1 percent and average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent to $37.75. Hiring came from restaurants and local government education while the information industry shed jobs. The 10-year touched 4.812 percent, the highest yield print of the week, and the same split held into the close: the Dow gave back 271.86 and the S&P 500 gave back 29.11 while the Nasdaq 100 added 61.83 to finish the week at its high. None of that moves a verdict. The rank scores Monday through Thursday.