Clear chart· Clear head· Better decisions

Friday’s jobs report did what the Fed had been worrying about it wouldn’t. Employers added just 29,000 jobs in September, far below the roughly 84,000 to 90,000 economists had expected, and unemployment ticked up to 4.2%. That cooled the bets on another rise in interest rates, and NASD rallied hard into the close, touching a new all-time intraday high before settling just short of its record close. Dow and DAX both finished the week lower, though, and bond yields were still high enough to keep the mood cautious. ...

It was a choppier week than the closing numbers suggest. Bond yields surged again in the middle of the week, unsettling all three indices for a day or two, before oil prices eased and an AI-driven rally in chip and tech names pulled everything back up by Friday. NASD did more than recover: Meta, AMD, and Intel led it to a fresh all-time high close mid-week, and it finished Friday just a fraction of a percent below that record. Dow, meanwhile, snapped a three-week losing streak. ...

The Fed did what the market had been pricing in for weeks: on Wednesday it raised its main interest rate by a quarter point, to a range of 3.75-4.00%, the first time it’s raised rates since 2023. What happened next is the more interesting part. Government bond yields pushed above 5% for the first time in almost two decades, which weighed hard on Dow and DAX, while NASD brushed the whole thing off and finished the week higher. That split, not the rate rise itself, is the story going into this week. ...

Everything else this week is just waiting for Wednesday afternoon. That’s when the Fed announces its rate decision, a few hours after August’s retail sales figures come out the same morning, and because policymakers stop giving speeches or interviews in the fortnight before every meeting, there’s nothing else on the calendar that comes close to mattering as much. Last week’s inflation figures came in higher than expected, and that alone was enough to tip the balance: traders now think the Fed is more likely than not to raise rates, where a week ago it was closer to an even bet. Wednesday is where we find out whether that shift was the right call. ...

US markets are shut today for Labor Day, so nothing moves until Tuesday. Once trading resumes, the week comes down to two releases: Thursday’s PPI and Friday’s CPI, both landing just days before the Fed’s 16 September rate decision. Friday’s stronger-than-expected jobs report already pushed the odds of a hike higher, and with Fed officials now in their pre-meeting blackout period, this week’s inflation data is the last real input anyone gets before that decision. ...

The Learn section is finished. Every topic across all seven sections is written, published, and free to read, no email required, no paywall halfway through. It took from the middle of July to the end of August to get here, and it’s the single largest thing on this site. What’s in it Sixty-one lessons, organised into seven sections that build on each other in order. Foundations covers where markets came from and how they work, the basic vocabulary every trader needs before anything else makes sense: leverage, spreads, sessions, the difference between a broker and a platform. Reading Charts moves on to candlesticks, chart types, support and resistance, trendlines, and what indicators are doing under the hood. Market Structure goes deeper: trends, ranges, supply and demand, fair value gaps, order blocks, Elliott Waves, and reading more than one timeframe at once. ...

Last week ended the way this Fed cycle keeps ending: with markets moving more on what a policymaker said than on anything a data release showed. New Fed chair Kevin Warsh used his first Jackson Hole keynote on Friday, marking his hundredth day in the job, to say he isn’t convinced inflation’s underlying trend has improved even after a run of better-than-expected summer prints, and traders responded by pushing the odds of a September rate hike up to 55.7%, about twenty percentage points higher than the day before. All three indices closed the week higher regardless, DAX out in front on an automaker-led Friday rally that pushed it to a fresh all-time high, while Dow and Nasdaq both remain a little below their own record levels. The real test of whether Warsh’s tone holds up lands Friday, when August’s jobs report either backs up his inflation concerns or repeats July’s shock 23,000 miss and undoes the very odds his speech just built. ...

Ask most traders why they’re not profitable yet and you’ll hear about strategy: the wrong indicator, a system that needs more backtesting, a market that’s stopped behaving the way it used to. Look at the actual research on who wins and who loses, though, and strategy barely gets a mention. The regulators and academics who’ve measured this properly, across different decades, different countries, and completely different market structures, keep landing on the same answer, and it isn’t a strategy problem. ...

Last week never really settled down, and it closed with all three indices lower for a second week running even after a strong Friday. This week starts quietly by comparison, nothing major is due out of the US today, but that quiet is only the calm before Friday, when new Fed chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first keynote address at Jackson Hole. Wednesday’s GDP and PCE double-header is the last real data point standing between here and there, and how markets read it will shape how much room Warsh has to move the needle on Friday. ...