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Durable Goods Orders Remain Unchanged

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Preliminary Durable Goods Orders for July was weaker than expected on headline — 0.0% (unched) month over month, down from the +1.0% expected — but bring some reassurances upon deeper examination. This follows an upwardly revised +2.2% for June. However, stripping out volatile Transportation costs, this figure blossoms to +0.3%, 10 basis points (bps) higher than the +0.2% expected.

Core Capital Equipment Orders — non-Defense, ex-aircraft: a proxy for “normal” business investment — reached +0.4%, another strong month-over-month number. This follows another upward revision for June: +0.9% from +0.7% originally reported. Shipments came in +0.7%, down 10 bps from the upwardly revised +0.8% the previous month.

While there’s nothing sexy about a 0.0% economic read, it’s actually fairly Goldilocks: the Fed is looking for signs the economy is cooling without crashing too hard, and a zero-balance fits that suit quite well. And coming down from higher revisions to June’s tallies demonstrates stronger pullbacks than expected. That said, these are preliminary figures, subject to change on the final.

After today’s market opens, Pending Home Sales from July are expected to register a negative headline again, but -3% — not nearly the disastrous -8.6% we saw in June. However, let’s be mindful that New Home Sales, reported last week, came in well lower than expectations, -12.6% month over month. Higher mortgage rates and a spike in cancellations, which we saw in Toll Brothers’ (TOL - Free Report) earnings report yesterday, are taking a big bite out of the overall housing market.

Brinker International (EAT - Free Report) , the parent company of Chili’s and Maggiano’s Little Italy, posted fiscal Q4 earnings results which came in slightly mixed: earnings of $1.15 per share missed the Zacks consensus by a penny, whereas revenues of $1.02 billion beat expectations by +0.42%. But the shares are tumbling -7.7% in today’s pre-market on lowered guidance.

We also have a big afternoon of earnings results after the closing bell today, including semiconductor powerhouse NVIDIA (NVDA - Free Report) , cloud software majors salesforce.com (CRM - Free Report) and Snowflake (SNOW - Free Report) , and upscale specialty retailer Williams-Sonoma (WSM - Free Report) , among others. Now in the final leg of Q2 earnings season, overall results to this point have been slightly better than expected.

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