Record highs return, yields, ethereum: Market takeaways

Yahoo

18-07-2025

Yahoo Finance Markets and Data Editor Jared Blikre joins Asking for a Trend with Josh Lipton to go over the biggest takeaways from Thursday's trading session: the return to record highs, the relationship between yields (^FVX, ^TNX, ^TYX) and commodities, and movements from ethereum (ETH-USD).
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.
The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ notching a fresh record close. Investors digesting a wave of corporate earnings reports along with better-than-expected economic data. And Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre joins us now with the trading day takeaways. Jared.
Thank you, Josh. We got to talk about those record highs here that you were just talking about. And I'm going to chart them for you. I'm going to start out with the S&P 500. This is a two-month chart. And yes, each one of these candles is one day, and we just closed at a record high. Essentially, though, we are still still at the top end of a two-week range. So we haven't quite broken out of that yet. But if you look at the NASDAQ composite, we are definitely trending up, as we have been since the lower edge of that chart two months ago began. And then you take a look at the Russell 2000. I like this too. Hasn't broken out, but we've seen some leadership over the last two days from the Russell moving 1 percentage point, I believe, both days. Now, I did have some concerns about 30-year. We'll get that into that in a minute. But let me just show you the VIX, too. This is sitting near multi-month lows. We had a brief spike up yesterday that had to do with all that kerfuffle regarding Trump potentially firing Powell, but that was walked back. So things seem like they're getting back on track here with respect to the equities rally. I would like to see breadth improve here, but even meme stocks were up today for the most part. So I consider that kind of a win for the stock market.
Kerfuffle. Great word.
Oh, thank you.
Underused word. The 30-year yield, which you mentioned and I know you've been focused on, what do you see?
Yields have been juicing commodities. Now I'm going to dive into this on Monday morning in the AM hour, but basically my thesis is we have record fiscal deficits right now, and we also have the Federal Reserve on track to ease this year. The point is they're not going to be raising rates. So you have the Federal Reserve keeping rates low, you have all these deficits, and there has to be a relief valve. And usually that comes in the form of currencies or yields, in other words, the bond market. And so the currency market right now, the dollar is down on the year. However, it is being propped up a bit by tariffs. And so the release valve has been in commodities. So, oh, and I do want to tackle those yields here. The 30-year yield, you have seen that shoot higher, basically, but there are some moves by Basant over in the Treasury that could keep that capped. So the release is commodities, and we've seen some super cycles in the past. You remember the 1970s, or maybe you read about it in the history books, um and also the early 2000s. And let me just show you what commodities have been doing recently. This is what happened today. You can see platinum up up another three and a half percent. But if I go to the last month alone, check this out. Palladium up 24%, orange juice, of all things, up 18%, platinum 18%, copper. You got cattle in there. You got all kinds of things like sugar. So we're seeing a lot of pressure on commodities, and that is where all this fiscal these deficits is being expressed. So I'm going to tackle that Monday morning, give you some more details there, but that's the short and long of it.
Switching gears, we talked to a congressman on the show today about the crypto bills on Capitol Hill. So let's do a quick check on crypto perhaps.
Ethereum has been mooning recently, and there's been a lot of excitement about this. I'm going to chart some I'm going to chart a bunch of these guys. Let's get my crypto heat map up there. And you can see this is over the last month. And let's just stick with this for one hot second. You can see a lot of outsize performance here. XLM, Automatic up 85%. There's Algo up 76%, Ripple up 55%. Here's Ethereum, 36%. And this is the intraday chart of Ethereum. Let me go to a let's do year to date right there. And you can see it has just shot up, and most of it is just due to recent price action. We've seen huge inflows into ETFs that cover the Ethereum market, and so that has been beneficial for this. All in all, I see a lot of potential with the crypto in the crypto space here, especially with this institutionalization of it. These things have to go to the Senate, and so there's more work to be done there. Anything can happen, but things are moving in the right direction for crypto, especially with all this breadth, which I've been telling you I really like.
Quickly, on deck tomorrow. What's on your radar?
Options expiration. Always a fan favorite, right?
Thank you, Jared. Appreciate it, my friend.