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All right, markets closing slightly higher today with the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq each finishing off their best weeks of the year collectively. It's the best week for market since November. Joining us now is Ed Kleisal, Ned Davis Research, Chief US strategist. And Ed, I want to just sort of start with where you feel like markets are at. Our Jared Blicker just sort of breaking this down. I mean, we're back above where we were before all of the sell-off that we had, right? Tech led us higher, tech's been ripping, that big tech name Nvidia's been leading the market again. We're back to pricing in 25 basis point cut for September. It feels like we're almost back to the same place we were two weeks ago, but I can't tell if as investors we should be feeling differently about being back in this position.

Well, I think if you look at the big picture macro fundamentals, nothing's really changed over the last few weeks. Uh, look, the economy is still looking like it's moving towards a soft landing with some of the data this week suggested is some of those bigger fears of recession are probably unfounded at this time. Uh, and that leads the Fed to that slow pace of Fed rate cuts. Uh, inflation continues to trend down, which is going to again allow the Fed to move and earnings growth is solid. So, with that underpinning, you know, then you get this air pocket like we had a couple weeks ago, which kind of washed off some of the excessive optimism that was in the market. You know, it's not a bad setup. And as you alluded to, you know, the market action over the past several days is kind of confirming that that, uh, you know, this was a hiccup within an ongoing bull market.

And so, you know, as as we have talked about, it wasn't just actual optimism, it was also sort of the underlying sort of technical things going on in the market, the carry trade, the short volatility trade that seemed to be quite popular as well. To your point now that those have washed out, does that limit the risk, but also does it limit the upside to any extent? Is there less sort of speculation going on in the market here?

Yeah. So, there are a couple things to digest there. One is that when you're going through a bottoming process, you're like when you have a decline like we like we went through, there's usually four steps to it. You get first over sold clearly, we did that. You get a rally, a retest, and then you move higher with really strong technical action. And the reason you can get these retests is that the really speculative parts of the market don't come back right away. You know, think about if you're if you're a trader to hedge fund, you're probably not going to be able to put in the size of trades that you had done before. It's going to take a while for the the people who control risk to uh to allow you to do that. And so that does mean that maybe some of the froth doesn't come back right away. And that's not a bad thing. It means the market can climb a wall of worry. So, I wouldn't be surprised over the next several weeks to couple of months, you know, for for this and a variety of other reasons with seasonality and the election and so forth, that the market doesn't do a little bit more backing and filling, but you know, the market had a chance to crack, and so far it just hasn't done that.