Markets look past strong jobs report... And tech’s next earnings test 9/4/26

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Frank Holland (1:00)

Live from the Mazdaq Market site in the heart of New York City's Times Square, this is Fast Money and here is what's on tap tonight. Stocks dropping in this week as a stronger than expected jobs report, puts a rate hike back on the table. So how should you position yourself now going into this long holiday weekend? In software's next big test, Oracle and Adobe set to report their earnings next week. What can we expect to learn from these numbers? And what could it all mean for the AI trade? Plus, NVIDIA bucking the downtrend in the Mag 7 space, Apple pulls back out of next week's big iPhone reveal, and Lululemon hits more than eight year lows. Can this one time pandemic, darling, do anything to get its groove back? We will debate that. I am Frank Holland from Melissa Lee coming to you live from Studio B at the NASDAQ. On the desk tonight we have Steve Grosso, Courtney Garcia, Tim Seymour and Bonoen Eisen.

We start with the latest example of good news being, well, not so great news. Stocks lower across the board today with the Dow falling back in a negative territory for this week. The S&P, the NASDAQ and the NASDAQ 100 all just managing to stay in the green since Monday. Today's moves come after the August jobs report shows payrolls. They rose by more than three times the estimates. July's unexpected contraction was also then revised to a gain. That labor market strength pushed up chances of a September rate hike by the Fed substantially. Odds now stand at nearly 60% compared to about 50-50 before the report. But President Trump this afternoon doubling down on his calls for a rate cut, Mr. Trump threatening to cut trade with partners if the Fed doesn't act as he wants them to. Our Megan Casella joins us now with the very latest.

Megan Casella (2:35)

Megan.

Frank, that's right. This was the president going after both the Federal Reserve and all countries with which the US has a trade deficit. That is most of the U.S.'s major trading partners. It was a stark threat on True Social. Without the US agreeing to allow these countries their big surpluses, and we could stop that immediately, they would no longer be considered financially elite. Lower the rate or I'll stop trading with countries with which we have a deficit. And the president then went on to elaborate on these threats, really double down on them. This afternoon in the Oval Office, take a listen to some of what he said.

SPEAKER_5 (3:08)

If we don't trade with them, they don't have any money to pay the bills.

And if we're not going to be treated properly, we're going to do that. And all we have to do to cut our trade deficit with the country is not trade with them.

Megan Casella (3:24)

Frank, I'll add here that most economists do not believe running a trade deficit is a bad thing. That was not something the president was acknowledging here. But he was doubling down on this. He was not acknowledging either that doing this would likely drive up inflation, make goods more expensive, really shake the economy and lead the Fed more likely to hike rates. What he was doing here is saying that this might not be something that he's going to do imminently, but more likely a direction or a new way that he's threatening the Federal Reserve, another way, something that we haven't heard before, another way of threatening them to cut those rates. Frank.

Frank Holland (3:56)

All right. Megan Casella with the very latest. Megan, thank you very much. Have a great weekend. Tim, want to come over to you. What do you make of what the president has to say? And also that much stronger than expected jobs report.