Friday's Final Takeaways: Jobs Miss, Solar Stocks Rally

close. I'm Marley Kayden here in Chicago alongside Sam Vargas at the New York Stock Exchange. We will close out the week with some final thoughts on the session. Of course, we've been talking about it all show and all day long the U.S. labor market delivered a major downside surprise in July, with employers cutting 23,000 jobs versus the expectation that was looking for an increase of more than 80,000. The weakness was compounded by sharp downward revisions to prior months, with May and June payrolls revised down by a combined 103,000 jobs, while the unemployment rate dipped to 4.1% as labor force participation fell to 61.4%. Wage growth also cooled to 3.2% year over year, adding to signs that the labor market conditions are losing momentum and prompting investors to sharply scale back expectations for a September fed rate hike. The fed funds futures now put the odds of a September hike at about 44%. That's down from 57% before the report came out, putting a renewed focus on whether the fed can justify further tightening as employment looks like it's weakening and the U.S. housing market is increasingly splitting into two very different directions, with luxury home sales up 6.2% year over year, while starter home sales fell 5.4%. That's according to new Zillow data. The divide comes as higher income households continue to benefit from stock market wealth and home equity, while first time buyers face elevated prices, elevated mortgage rates, and limited affordable inventory. First time buyers now account for just 21% of the market. That's a record low, while baby boomers make up 42% of home purchases, highlighting just how difficult it has become for younger Americans to break into the market. The result is a k-shaped housing market. We've got strong demand at the high end, but a sharp affordability squeeze at the entry level. Those were just two of the things that stuck out to me, very data focused today. Sam, how about you? What caught your eye during the session? Well, well, I'm just wondering who some of those baby boomers are actually buying the houses for because Ed Yardeni is always banging the drum about how they've been helping out the younger generation. So you just don't know, do you? But yeah, really interesting data. I looked at solar stocks today, which had a really good day after President Trump slapped a 15% tariff on products made from polysilicon and set minimum price floors on solar cells. It's all part of the president's aim to protect domestic manufacturing. First solar rallied off the back of the news. It also got a price target bump from Wells Fargo, which took the stock to $313 while keeping an overweight rating on the shares. Another takeaway from today was how China is managing to narrow the gap with the US in AI. It seems ByteDance is reportedly training an AI model that could near the size of mythos. According to the Financial Times, the model could be three times bigger than moonshots. Kimmy K three, which is the biggest Chinese release to date, and Alibaba is also reportedly planning to ask for revenue sharing arrangements for its next version of Quinn. That's according to Reuters, which says Barber is planning to implement a similar measure to Kimmy K three, which requires working out a commercial agreement with moonshot. Reuters says Barber plans to introduce this next week. Heading into next week, though. Molly, what are you going to be looking out for? We're getting another look at inflation. We'll have CPI on Wednesday. Headline inflation expected to rise about 3.4% year over year, core CPI increasing about 2.5% annually. That's the expectation that monthly projections hovering right near adding about a 10th of a percent for headline, 2/10 for core CPI. But that's not our only data. We'll get the producer price index to follow on Thursday. Those results could help clarify whether factory level costs are continuing to moderate, or if these recent energy price surges are feeding back into wholesale channels. We'll also get retail sales and will get existing home sales during the week as well. I didn't realize it until just now, but I had an entire data focus today. Sam, what will you be watching? Well, a bunch of tech earnings out next week. We've got core. We've Cerebrus, Lumentum, super micro computer. That's all coming on Tuesday. We'll have Cisco Coherent and Tencent reporting on Wednesday. Then we have Lenovo, jd.com and Applied Materials on Thursday. As we know, the market is laser focused on AI momentum right now, CapEx and ROI. We've started to see some of that monetization proof coming through, by the way, of the hyperscalers. That's why we've obviously seen some of that rotation. But it's interesting. Next week we only have 11 of the S&P 500 due to report, obviously Amat and coherent Lumentum s MCI among those, but a lot of Chinese ADR and other tech in focus. So that's going to be really interesting as we pass over all those. Given some of the reactions we've seen this week, Molly. And we've got some space names too, following SpaceX, Rocket Labs and AST Space Mobile, they're reporting first thing on Monday after the close, and Hims and hers should be interesting. I always find them to be fascinating. We had Raul Shaw on the podcast on market matters, talking about hims hers, so I'll be curious to see what their results are, but that is going to do it for us. On market on close today for Sam Vardys I'm Marley Kayden. Be sure to download our Schwab Network app available in the Apple App Store, and you can tune in 24 over seven on Schwab network.com. Th