CPI at 8:30 With the AI Trade Split Down the Middle
July CPI lands at 8:30 a.m. ET after a defensive Tuesday: Oracle and Datadog fell while MongoDB and AMD rose. Global-e reports before the open.
July consumer prices are released at 8:30 a.m. ET, and they land on a market that spent Tuesday rotating into defensives and out of AI infrastructure — but not uniformly, which is the part worth noticing.
Defensive Tuesday sets up the CPI print
July CPI is out at 8:30 a.m. ET, with PPI Thursday and retail sales Friday at the same hour. Tuesday’s session was mildly negative rather than a rout: 45 of 100 large caps advanced against 55 declining, the Dow ended more than 180 points lower, and gold settled at a two-month high as hopes for a U.S.–Iran deal faded. The leadership was income and rate-sensitive — AT&T +1.87%, Duke +1.65%, NextEra +1.23%, BlackRock +1.54%, Home Depot +1.05% — with energy the strongest sector, XLE +1.25% on 22.3 million shares. Duke and NextEra rising is an awkward fit with the widely circulated line that power stocks are losing steam.
The AI complex sold off, but not as a bloc
Oracle fell 3.69% to $145.48, and the story is the balance sheet rather than the results: capital spending ran about $16.5 billion in the quarter with expectations of roughly $70 billion by fiscal 2027, and the debt-funded data-center build has drawn credit-rating downgrade warnings. Alphabet dropped 3.84% to $343.80, Adobe 3.39%, Datadog 5.37% to $246.78, and Amazon 2.09%. Yet MongoDB rose 5.4% to $439.16 — sitting essentially on its 52-week high of $440.60 from January — and AMD added 1.01%. Two consumption-priced data platforms moving hard in opposite directions on the same day does not support a single “software de-rating” explanation.
Beating estimates has stopped being enough
Rapid7 reported a clear beat — adjusted EPS $0.44 against $0.35 expected, adjusted EBITDA $35.85 million versus $31.93 million consensus on revenue of $210.9 million — and raised full-year profit guidance. The stock was up 26.9% in the morning session and finished at $13.36, up 14.88%, giving back roughly half the move, with slowing top-line growth and a corporate restructuring sitting alongside the profit beat. Datadog did something similar on August 6: revenue up 36% to $1.12 billion and EPS of $0.65 versus $0.58, followed by its largest single-day decline on record on soft Q3 guidance. The pattern is cheap to observe and worth carrying into this earnings tail.
Reporting today, plus a screening trap
Global-e confirmed it reports second-quarter results before the open this morning; the stock is at $40.91, up 14.37%. Elsewhere in the movers, Alamar Biosciences printed $36.49, up 30.79% — a recent IPO that priced 11.25 million shares at $17.00 and jumped 33% on debut, so treat percentage moves on a thin float accordingly. One caveat for anyone screening Honeywell, which fell 5.27% to $230.12: the aerospace business separated on June 29 and fell more than 20% on its own first standalone report, after cutting 2026 organic growth guidance to 4–5% from 7–9%. Post-spin Honeywell is not comparable with its own pre-spin history on a year-over-year basis.
What to watch today
- July CPI at 8:30 a.m. ET
- Global-e second-quarter results before the open
- Alphabet’s Pixel event, 6:00 p.m. ET
- PPI Thursday 8:30 a.m. ET, retail sales Friday 8:30 a.m. ET
Not financial advice. iTrading Buddy summarizes publicly available market data and news; every figure above is sourced from the reporting available before the US open on the date shown. Verify anything you act on.