The Earnings Bar Meets Its First Prints

One signal to define the week and shape the month. Three minutes, six questions. Every Sunday at 21:00 CET — scored the next.

12 July 2026 · closes through Jul 10.

1 · The signal

Earnings season opens Tuesday against the highest expectations bar of the cycle — and the market just spent a week pricing in the good outcome before seeing a single print.

The signal has two layers. The narrow one: the numbers themselves — the first AI-compute bellwethers, ASML on Wednesday and TSMC on Thursday, print before any US heavyweight opens its books. The broad one, and the more important one: the market's reaction function. How does the tape treat this year's leaders when they print above consensus — and when they merely match or fall short, with guidance the focus either way? And the mirror image: how does it treat the laggards, software above all, on their numbers? The prints answer one week. The reaction read answers the month: whether the leaders still have room to run, and whether the laggards have absorbed all their bad news — or not.

This chart is the tape-side referee: SOXX at 581, sandwiched between the 554 floor it reclaimed and the 590 shelf it hasn't.