Navigating the Market at Record Highs: Your Next Trade 8/13/26

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**Jenny Harrington** (0:30)
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**Scott Wapner** (0:46)
I'm Scott Wapner and you're listening to CNBC's Halftime Report, the podcast, the most profitable hour of the trading day. We record this live weekdays at 12 Eastern. Listen in.
Carl, thanks. Welcome to the Halftime Report of Scott Wapner, front and center this hour, record highs for stocks. After the latest inflation read comes in, light yields falling. We're trading the markets with the Investment Committee. Joining me for the hour today, Josh Brown, Stephanie Link, Jenny Harrington, Malcolm Etheridge, PPI was cooler, yields are lower, oil was down. We were 50-50 on a rate hike for September. Probably a hold seems more likely today after these most recent inflation prints. Decent mix of sector performance today.
8,100 remains in the line of sight, that according to Citi, and they lift their earnings estimates as well. Plays right to the theme we've been talking about. 8,000 seems to be the floor on the street. They keep bumping up their numbers.

**Josh Brown** (1:44)
Why?

**Scott Wapner** (1:44)
Because earnings remain so robust. Fact set today, the S&P's highest revenue growth since the fourth quarter of 2021, the highest net profit margin since fact set began tracking that metric all the way back to 2009
That's the story.

**Josh Brown** (2:03)
That is the story. You're absolutely right. Look, there are people in this business who choose to direct their energies focused on Fed gossip and what two words might be missing from the statement this week, or they will look at one data point that agrees with their priors, like a retail sales miss or something to do with ISM, which I don't even know what that stands for. I'm only around for 30 years. I'll figure it out at some point. There are people that choose to spend their time on that. And then there are people, I think, like the people on our panel that look at earnings, listen to what companies are actually saying to their shareholders when they report, focus on price and trend, and mostly get things right. This has not been a difficult year.
We had a couple of thrills and spills.
We had a January, February sell-off. We had another one in March. We had some geopolitical stuff, what else is new? But overall, the earnings story has been so obvious, like a smack in the face. Every time we go through an earnings quarter, it's the same story. Beat, raise, above everyone's expectations, companies spending more on capex than even we would have thought the prior quarter, and every sector is now participating. It's 10 of 11 sectors with earnings growth. It's all different companies, all different walks of life. It is not a tech-specific rally, although tech looks unbelievable right now, coming back from the lows of July.
And if you get those big picture things right, you don't have to do Fed gossip.
Spend your time doing something else. Read a book to a child, literally anything other.

**Kate Rooney** (3:41)
Have your child read a book.

**Josh Brown** (3:43)
Trend is higher, stocks are acting great. The advanced decline line hit an all-time high last week.
Earnings are outperforming in every sector. You need another data point, or can you just go with what's happening right now? I don't need another data point, I'm good.

**Scott Wapner** (3:58)
Knock in on 7,800 on the S&P, right?

**Stephanie Link** (4:02)
Yeah, so the Atlanta Fed tracker is at 5.8% GDP growth for this quarter. Now, it's going to come down probably over time, but we're still well above trend, and that's a massive acceleration from the second quarter. So even if we wind up at 3%, that's double of what the second quarter came in at. So to me, it is about the economy because that flows into earnings. Now, the inflation reports are still high, they're still elevated, but at least they're not accelerating from here. And we talked about the unit labor cost, Scott, last week, which I pay more attention to than the CPI PPI, and also the productivity numbers. 1.7% productivity. We averaged 2% to 2.5% over the last 10 years. In the 50s and 60s, the industrial revolution, it got to as high as 5%.