Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 6/17/26 – Sales-Slump

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“Reality is wrong. Dreams are for the real.” – Tupac Shakur

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

After the Nasdaq lagged yesterday, it leads the charge in the pre-market this morning, with a gain of 0.5% while the S&P 500 looks to gain just 0.05% and the Dow is slightly lower. Treasury yields are slightly higher, while crude oil bounces 1% after a four-day decline of more than 15%. Gold and other precious metals are modestly lower while Bitcoin trades down over 1%.

Asian stocks finished mostly higher after erasing earlier losses. The only decliner in the region was Hong Kong, where the Hang Seng declined 0.8%. South Korea, however, finished 1.6% higher, while Japan traded 0.7% higher. For both countries, the closing levels were record highs. In Japan, imports rose slightly less than expected while exports came in higher, rising by 17% y/y to a three-year high.

In Europe, the STOXX 600 is up 0.4% in midday trading, with Spain leading the charge, gaining 0.5%. Germany has been a laggard after BMW lowered guidance for the year on weaker expected margins. May CPI data for the Eurozone increased 0.1% m/m, which was right in line with expectations.

Besides today’s Fed meeting, we just got Retail Sales at 8:30, which came in higher than expected (0.9% vs 0.6%). Between now and the Fed announcement, we’ll get Business Inventories and Pending Home Sales at 10 AM. The real focus, though, will be on today’s Fed meeting and the press conference at 2:30. Given that Warsh is a Trump appointee, there’s already a consensus among many that he will bend to the President’s will. If anyone involved in the markets has learned anything in their experience, though, what the consensus thinks often doesn’t play out, so let’s at least give the new Fed Chair one meeting before drawing conclusions.

Sector performance has been broadly positive over the last week, but there has been some dispersion in where each one is trading relative to its trading range. Financials (XLF) and Industrials (XLI) both finished yesterday’s session in ‘extreme’ overbought territory, while another five sectors finished in overbought territory. Trailing those sectors, Consumer Discretionary (XLY) and Utilities (XLU) finished the day in neutral territory while Communication Services (XLC) and Energy (XLE) lagged in oversold territory.

With a gain of 3.14% over the last week, the Technology sector (XLK) is one of the five sectors in overbought territory, but just barely. That strength comes despite some major weakness in the software sector. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) has declined more than 1.5% over the last week, and some of the ETF’s largest components have seen big losses.

The snapshot below shows the performance of the top ten holdings in the IGV ETF. While Palo Alto (PANW) and CrowdStrike (CRWD) are both up over 5% in the last week, four other stocks are down over 5%, including Adobe (ADBE), Oracle (ORCL), and salesforce (CRM), which have all dropped more than 7.5%.

The weakness in CRM has been especially pronounced. While the stock experienced a big bounce in the late days of May into the first day of June, it’s been all downhill from there, as the stock has returned to 52-week lows.

The weakness in CRM has been relentless, and the stock heads into today’s session with an 11-day losing streak. Since Marc Benioff took the company public in 2004, this is easily the longest losing streak in the company’s history.

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