The Dow Beat Tech This Summer?! 2026 Market Scoreboard & 5 Stories You Missed

Welcome to the One of a Kind Financial Show Daily special Labor Day edition coming to you from San Juan, Puerto Rico. I'll be by the pool today, probably have a little mid-morning workout that I don't get to do while the market's open and just relax. But today on the show, we're going to recap what happened over the summer, Memorial Day Tuesday through Labor Day. 14 weeks of tape, the scoreboard on where the S&P 500, Dow, NASDAQ, Russell 2000 started, and give you an idea of what they looked like from their finish. We're also going to go into social media world and the largest search engine out there, and we're going to see the 5 biggest financial stories according to what those said, what we covered along the way. We're also going to talk about what we lost. And what we learned. Educate, coach, plan's my mission. Never miss a moment. Grab your coffee, uh, and then let's get this done so we can get to the grill, the pool, the beach, and a relaxing day.

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Let's set the scoreboard on Tuesday, May 26th, the trading session right after Memorial Day. Here's where we open. I'm going to talk about this in the term of ETFs. SPYD opened at $750. DIA, which is the Dow Jones ETF, opened at $507.54. QQQ, which follows the NASDAQ, opened at $725.98. The NASDAQ Composite, by the way, opened at 26,590. Russell 2000, the index itself, opened up at 2,899. Bitcoin was $76,572. Gold was at $415. Oil was at $136 on USO. Now the finish line, to give you an update. The SPY, the SPY, was up about 3%. DIA up about 5.8%. The NASDAQ was essentially flat all summer. The NASDAQ gave back nearly everything it earned, and then— Came back. QQQ was down 1.14%. Russell was up 2.39%. Bitcoin up 5.75%. Gold down 1.2%. And oil up 4.22%. The story right there. Let me tell you the story this scoreboard shows. We're getting ready to really talk scoreboard because if you haven't heard, the NFL opens this Wednesday. The Dow led the summer on the summer scoreboard for the markets. Small caps caught up in the last 4 weeks. Bitcoin quietly worked. It actually came back at the end of the summer. Oil worked on geopolitics. Tech, the story of the first 4 months of the year, stopped working around the middle of July and never fully recovered. Gold pulled back from its spring break. This was not a story about the Nasdaq. This was a story about breadth. More stocks participated. The concentrated bets in mega-cap tech gave back some gains. If you were in a diversified plan, you had a great summer. If you were chasing 7 stocks, maybe not the best. See, we don't chase returns here on the One of a Kind Financial Show Daily. We're here to help you build a one-of-a-kind financial plan, the written document on how you handle taxes, retirement income, investments, long-term care, and legacy. Guys, it's really a philosophy document that when you answer the question why money is important to you, it allows you to show up big on the scoreboard. The Summer Scoreboard proves it.

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Here are the 5 stories that dominated Google search, Reddit, finance boards, and every major financial publication from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Story number 1, the AI chip sell-off on July 17th. Per the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Reuters, Friday, July 17th was the day the AI trade cracked. The NASDAQ fell 2.2%, the S&P down 1.3%. Chip stocks got hit the hardest. Japan's index was down 6% overnight. Taiwan the same. The catalyst, per the Wall Street Journal, was concerns about the sustainability of huge AI capital expenditures. Deepened by news out of China's Moonshot AI, plus a weak Netflix forecast that broke the momentum. For the week, the S&P fell 1.5%. The NASDAQ lost 2.8%. That is what caused the NASDAQ summer to end flat and QQQ to end negative. We covered this the following Monday. How concentrated your plan is in the Mag 7 is a question your certified financial planner should be asking you at every review. Concentration risk is a real thing. The scoreboard says be diversified. Story number 2, the Iran war and the oil premium. The war escalated early in July. Per Reuters and Bloomberg, the US military struck more than 80 sites in Iran alone on July 7th and revoked the waiver that allowed Iran to sell oil after 3 commercial tankers were hit in the Strait of Hormuz. Per Al Jazeera, Brent crude climbed 22% on August 30th. Per Reuters, oil settled at 2.5% higher. A theme emerged. Oil, as we track it by the ticker USO, ended the summer up 4.22%, but with wild rides. The financial planning lesson we covered all summer is the geopolitical premium in your gas tank. is the same premium in your portfolio. Diversify across energy exposure. Don't concentrate. Story number 3, Nvidia earnings and the AI bubble debate. Per Forbes and ABC News, Nvidia reported its Q2 fiscal 2027 earnings on August 27th, and the results were massive, huge. Revenue soared 106% year over year to $96.2 billion, largely driven by data center growth. CEO Jensen Huang forecasted 70% data growth ahead. Despite that, the market responded, was muted, and eventually rolled over into the AI concentration sell-off. We covered this in real time. One takeaway then and now, an S&P 500 that is 40% concentrated in tech companies with AI-driven CapEx is a concentration risk that can show up in your plan too. The one-page plan reveals how much of your net worth is riding A single narrative. Story number 4, Michael Saylor, Bitcoin, and MSTR. We closed the summer with the loudest single-name story of the season. Per The Motley Fool, Michael Saylor's Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, ended a 10-week pause on Bitcoin by acquiring 4,603 Bitcoin, or $369.7 million, last week. And MSTR ripped 17.56% on Thursday to close at $144.82. Bitcoin ended the summer after a wild ride, up 5.75%. We covered Saylor in the 10 Guru Profile Arc back in August. If you haven't listened to that arc on those 10 people, you're going to be hearing some more of those names coming up this fall. Uh, we don't day trade. We are a disciplined financial plan building shop. Michael Saylor communicated the pause when they did it. He communicated the resumption. He has done it every year since 2020. This is what a written investment policy statement looks like out in the wild. You should have one. It should be part of your one-of-a-kind financial plan. Whether you like Bitcoin or want a laddered CD or treasury portfolio, The discipline is what you copy, not the ticker or the news. And then story number 5, this is a story somewhat pushed out toward the winter, yet it's still a story. Per Reuters, The Guardian, NBC News, Congress in early September passed a continuing resolution funding the government through December 11th, 2026. Do you think we're going to be watching this around the election time? Heck yes. That those midterms on November 3rd bought some time that the lame duck session will have to solve. This story played out all summer. The Senate passed a bipartisan version in early August. The House passed 370 to 48 on September 1st. And the result is a Christmastime debt cliff that resets the entire budget fight after the midterms. This shows up in your plan as reinvestment risk on short Treasuries maturing in December and as a policy uncertainty premium on 2026 tax planning. We covered this in real time on the Daily Show and connected it back to the Roth conversion window. Clients are running conversions right now because they do not know what the tax law will look like after This election and after this debt, this continuing resolution expires. Honorable mention for the top 5 stories this summer, the $40 trillion national debt milestone hit in early August. We covered it in the August 31st Milestone Recap. That will be a story in Q4. If you want to follow along, go to usdebtclock.org, U-S-D-E-B-T-C-L-O-C-K.org. Continuing on what we covered on the One of a Kind Financial Show Daily, we discussed the 10 Guru Arc, condensed lessons from Duffett— I mean Buffett, Warren Buffett, Dalio, Munger, Bogle, Lynch, Rogers, Templeton, Marks, Fisher, Dimon. More of those coming soon. Some of those names I mentioned are going to be names that we're going to cover in profiles Because there's something coming up from them soon. If you missed it, the one-line takeaway from each was this. These 10 people, whether it's a Wall Street legend, an economics professor, Dolly Parton, or even YouTube, they had a written defined communication plan that mattered more than the specific asset it was in. We also talked this summer about the volume thesis of the pre-Labor Day week. Maybe you learned something in that. That happens a couple times a year where volume gets really light. The next major time it will show up again, around Thanksgiving and the week between Christmas and New Year's. Just watch for it. Sometimes there's also something we'll discuss in the winter, the beginning of winter is the Santa Claus rally. These things happen when you're educated, You see them coming. We talked about over the summer, the concentration risk conversation, the September 500. I mean, the S&P 500 exposure through a market cap weighted index is not diversified when the top 10 companies are 35 to 40% of the index. And coming up soon, Rothtober, the fall Roth conversion campaign. Every summer week we referenced it. In some way, the window is now open. Let's get ready to go through it. What we lost, guys, was a quiet summer. We lived through the Iran war escalation, the AI bubble scare, the biggest chip sell-off of the year, a national debt milestone that maybe some people missed, a shutdown fight that got postponed to Christmas time. The one thing this summer did not deliver was calm. Not at all. The other thing we lost was the mega-cap tech-only narrative. For the first time in 3 years, tech was not the story of the summer. The Dow beat the NASDAQ. Small caps outperformed big-cap tech. This has not happened in a while. Gold led us this summer. Gold peaked in the spring and gave back some across the summer. It's now in consolidation. And then along the way, a few close friends and mentors in the financial planning world We do not name them on air out of respect for their families, but this summer took some good ones from my profession. If you're a listener who lost someone this summer, a family member, a mentor, a client, a friend, this show sends love to you. A summer you'll never get back again. A summer you'll— a future summer you'll never get to spend with someone you love. Just know you as our listeners, we love you.

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To close out today's show, just a quick fall preview. Uh, here's what, uh, here's what's, uh, the show's up to coming up. Uh, next week, uh, volume normalizes, the real signals from the tape, and we're gonna get the first real fall market week. We're going to start talking about Roth more and more as Rothtober kicks off. It's client education. We're going to talk about one-page conversion analysis and case studies. If you're a listener with a taxable year, a taxable or a pre-tax IRA, and you're considering Roth conversions, text the word ideas to 600-700. One book launched this summer, Retirement Déjà Vu launched. It's available on Amazon. This fall, Retirement Chi and The Retirement Handshake are going to launch. 2 books in progress. Watch for chapter previews later in the fall. I'm going to start talking about them on this show in a couple weeks. The Handshake That Costs You Everything, that's The Retirement Handshake. That's going to drop in October. I'm excited to bring that to you. I'm just a few days away from my 50th birthday. Go ahead and circle December 11th. The shutdown reset happens the week before Christmas. That's it though, guys, on this special edition of the One of a Kind Financial Show Daily. Just remember, a written plan beats a hot take every summer. Everything that we talked about as a recap today on the show cost money to the people who reacted. Every one of them rewarded people who had a written plan, And a schedule. The Dow led the summer. The NASDAQ gave back. Bitcoin worked because Michael Saylor stuck to a plan he wrote 6 years ago. Oil worked because the world is dangerous, not because you predicted it. Small caps caught up because the market got wider, not because you called it. The One of a Kind Financial Plan is a philosophy document that lets you sleep through a summer like this one, not because it predicted any of the stories, Because it defined how you would respond to whatever story showed up. We're not chasing returns. We are building the one-of-a-kind financial plan. Estoy aprendiendo. I am learning Spanish. You are learning finances, business, and money by being a faithful subscriber to the One of a Kind Financial Show Daily. So on this Labor Day, Relax and rest. I'll see you tomorrow when the market is back at full strength, when people are back from their vacations, and we're going to see what the big stories are for the fall 2026. This has been the One of a Kind Financial Show Daily Special Edition. The show is for educational purposes only and does not constitute personalized investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Historical results cited from May 26th through September, um, September 4th reflect a single 14-week window and are not representative of long-term expectations. References to any person, company, index, or security, including but not limited to SPY, DIA, QQQ, IWM, NASDAQ Composite, Russell 2000, MSTR Strategy Inc., Bitcoin, GLD USO, Nvidia, Netflix, Moonshot AI, or any named individual are for illustration and education only and not recommendations to buy, sell, or hold any security or digital asset. Cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, are highly volatile and involve substantial risk of loss. References to corporate treasury strategy of publicly traded companies, including Strategy Inc., are educational only and are not appropriate templates for individual retail investors. Historical characterizations of the Iran conflict, the September 26, 2022 26th continuing resolution, Nvidia earnings, and the July 17th chip sell-off are drawn from public reporting and presented as educational context, not political or investment advocacy. Data and quotes attributed to The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Reuters, Barron's, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, The Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance, Forbes, ABC News, NBC News, and any other publications where those sources reported and not those of Mike Milligan, One Oak Financial, the affiliated companies of One Oak Financial, or the unaffiliated companies where Mike is a partner. Please consult your own certified financial planning professional, CPA, and licensed tax professional. Any tribute to persons lost this summer is offered personally by me, Mike Milligan, and does not constitute an endorsement by any company of any related product, service, or business. This has been Mike Milligan. Happy Labor Day. I'll see you on the other side.

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