Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, Axon Enterprise Inc. develops, manufactures, and markets electrical weapons for personal defense. It operates through its TASER segment and Software & Sensors segment. The TASER segment sells electrical weapons, accessories, and other related products and services. The Software & Sensors segment consists of devices, wearables, applications, cloud, and mobile products. The company was founded by Patrick W. Smith.

The major benchmarks are all higher by more than 1%, after this morning's unemployment claims eased fears of weakness in the labor market. Jobless claims for the week ended August 3 came in at a solid 233,000, under the 240,000 consensus. Economists have been concerned after last week's jump in the Unemployment Rate and big decline in Nonfarm Payrolls. Stocks have been hyper-sensitive to labor market weakness and fears that the Federal Reserve is behind the curve in lowering interest rates.

Following a panic low, which occurred Monday at the open, we saw a strong bounce to the upside that was followed with decent gains on Tuesday and into Wednesday. Unfortunately, the move higher on Wednesday led to a heavy dose of selling as the major indices gave back all their gains, and then some. That's certainly not the type of response that gives us any confidence that the low is in after a massive volatility (VIX) spike, plenty of daily oversold readings, and a major pop in fear. Volatility is probably not going to disappear quickly, so it's likely a good idea to have some Tums within reach. The S&P 500 (SPX) was up over 1% in the first 30 minutes of trading Wednesday, but finished with a 0.8% decline. The Nasdaq and the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) were also up just over 1% and ended with 1.1% and 1.2% losses, respectively. So why did the indices turn tail? The SPX filled the price gap created on Monday (always a potential stopping point) and also ran out of steam at its nine-day exponential average (which is heavily used by traders and algorithms). The SPX also ran right to a 38.2% retracement of the decline (almost to the point). The Nasdaq and the QQQ also ran out of gas after filling Monday's gap and never reached a minimal 38.2% retracement. Just to be clear, we did not know ahead of time where the indices would peak, and are simply pointing out resistance after the fact. So far, the SPX has traced out a three-wave, ABC decline where "A = C x 1.618" almost perfectly. We could also be in a five-wave decline, with the first four waves completed and one lower low to come. Either way, that's not too bad. (Mark Arbeter, CMT)

On Monday, we attempted to label this phase of the rally and our conclusion was that two or three trade days do not make a trend. But we might have to look at this from another angle and label it a "Trump Trade." To that end, we reviewed the sectors and individual stocks that did the best in the six months after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. The S&P 500 sectors that performed the best were Financial (XLF), Industrial (XLI), Materials (XLB), Consumer Discretionary (XLY), Energy (XLE), and select stocks in Information Technology (XLK). Some of the individual large-cap stocks that did the best were DE, CAT, X, GS, BAC, JPM, XOM, LMT, AAPL, RTX, GD, JNJ, GM, MRK, BMY, PFE, BA, F, GOOGL, MSFT, META, INTC, ABBV, AMZN, and TSLA. Interestingly, XLE, XLF, and XLI were the three best-performing sectors on Monday. While the major indices all rose on Monday, the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) saw a pretty good selloff after peaking late in the morning. All three were up about 1% in the morning, gave it all back late in the day, and then popped over the last 10 minutes. Meanwhile, the Russell 2000 small caps held on to most of their 2% gain. The S&P 400 Mid-Caps finished with a 0.6% gain, and just barely closed at an all-time high, eclipsing the previous close from March 28. For some perspective, IWM has gone nowhere since February 2021 and MDY hasn't made much progress since November 2021. Needless to say, these are huge bases -- and a strong breakout by the Mid-Caps could be very bullish with price at all-time highs. (Mark Arbeter, CMT)