Good morning contrarians! Welcome to the Daily Contrarian, our morning look at events likely to move markets. It is Monday, July 21, 2025. Your host returns after a long illness-induced absence. Apologies for any inconveniences caused by this outage.

State of Play

Stocks find themselves at record highs after moving higher last week. As we eye or board of indicators for signs of direction at 0915 ET:

* Stock index futures are unchanged with the exception of small caps, which are pointing higher. The Russell 2000 is up 0.5%;

* Cryptos are not really doing much after rising to records last week. Bitcoin is unchanged, trading around $118,000;

* Bonds are seeing some bids, interestingly enough. The 10-year yield is down 6 basis points to 4.37% (yields move inversely to prices);

* All is quiet in commoditiesland. WTI crude oil is unchanged trading around $66/barrel. Copper is up 0.5%. Silver is on the move a bit, up 1%. Gold +0.5%.

Known Events

It’s a massive week for earnings with the heavy hitters checking in at midweek. Tesla (TSLA ) and Google (GOOG /GOOGL ) are probably the biggest names we’ll hear from this week, both after Wednesday’s close.

So far today Domino’s Pizza (DPZ ), Verizon Communications (VZ ) and Ryanair (RYAAY ) all posted positive results.

After the close the highlight is chipmaker NXP Semiconductors (NXPI )

The Bottom Line

Good news from earnings so far, then. But again, the big names don’t report until midweek. We’ve still got tariffs hanging around, with the Aug. 1 deadline looming. Can expect to hear a lot more about that as the deadline approaches.

Even ahead of that there are some rumblings that tariffs could be less benign than initially anticipated. Automaker Stellantis (STLA ), the subject of a contrarian take this March, is warning of tariff-induced losses. There was also a recent Wells Fargo report, that noted a decline in discretionary spending on services and the ‘false narrative’ that tariffs were having a benign impact. We’ve also got student loan bills increasing for some borrowers, though a lot of those reports are fear-mongering clickbait.

Still: with stocks at record highs, this is not the environment for a Contrarian to allocate risk. Sure, there could be happy AI news from Google and chipmakers this week and Tesla could pull another rabbit out of its hat. But valuations are stretched and the rumblings under the surface are not a great sign.

Housekeeping

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