What is a trend? There are countless ways to answer that question, but I’ve always been partial to perhaps the simplest definition: an uptrend is when an asset moves from the lower left to the upper right corner of the chart, and a downtrend is when it moves from the upper left to the lower right corner.

With price pressures still running at a subdued level throughout the developed world, hotter-than-expected inflation readings have been hard to come by of late. Perhaps today’s Canadian inflation data marks a turning point for that trend.

It’s been less than nine months since traders flipped their calendars to 2018, but crypto asset bulls have aged years (if not decades!) since the holiday season’s euphoria. After peaking at a total market cap above $800B on January 7th, the crypto market has contracted precipitously, briefly falling below $200B earlier this week. Take a look at the chart below.

The price action so far today is emblematic of a textbook “risk off” day: stocks are falling across the globe, oil is trading off by nearly 3%, bond yields are generally retreating, and the yen is the strongest performing major currency (though we would note that gold bugs still can’t seem to catch a break!).

Technically speaking, the dollar index formed a clear “ascending triangle” pattern through May, June and July. The bullish breakout from that pattern, in-line with the recent uptrend, suggests that rates may have further to rally in the days and weeks to come.

Sparkling. Spectacular. Stellar. Sterling. Stupendous. Super… and those are just the adjectives starting with “sp” through “su” that describe the Q2 earnings season for the S&P 500. Through Friday, 91% of the companies in the S&P 500 had reported earnings, and according to the earnings mavens at FactSet, this earnings season has broken all sorts of records.

The economic situation in Turkey has been a powder keg for months, and it’s finally found a spark. While investors have never truly trusted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he’s shredded his last vestiges of credibility in recent months by appointing his son-in-law as the country’s finance minister and espousing his belief that lower interest rates were needed to fight inflation, the exact opposite of economic orthodoxy (and your humble author would argue, all the empirical evidence of centuries of central banking); indeed, Erdogan recently stated, “interest rates are the mother and father of all evil."

Falling in the awkward post-US, pre-Asian session, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand will deliver its quarterly monetary policy statement in just a few hours (21:00 GMT). While the release is functionally equivalent to the Fed’s “live” quarterly meetings when it delivers updated assessments on the economy, the primary difference is that the RBNZ is nowhere near making any meaningful changes to policy; instead, traders will try to “read between the lines” for more insight on how the central bank is leaning for the future.