Good morning, investors. Sandisk, one of the best-performing stocks of the last two years, reported stronger-than-expected earnings after the bell Wednesday and shares tumbled double-digits anyway.

That continues the recent stretch of strong earnings not driving stock prices higher.

More on that later. Today we’re turning our attention to the (fast-running) dogs of the Dow.

The market keeps trying to remind investors that average and boring stocks keep going up.  

The Dow just hit another all-time high for its fifth winning day in a row, and it’s now outpacing the S&P 500 this year and looks one solid trading session away from beating the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite. 

The Dow tracks 30 large and uninteresting “blue-chip” names that typically exhibit slower top-line growth than the high-flying technology names in the Nasdaq.

And unlike the S&P 500, it also uses a price-weighting model, which limits how much sway mega-cap stocks hold over the index.

Those characteristics have given the Dow weaker annual returns on average, as well as lower volatility.  

This year, though, not only has it kept up with the Nasdaq but it’s done so with far shallower drawdowns.

Tech stocks fell nearly 11% at the end of March, for instance, while the Dow fell a comparatively mellow 6%.  

Just as the equal-weight S&P 500 has beat out its market-cap weighted counterpart in 2026, the Dow provides further indication that the bull run has expanded beyond the trillion-dollar behemoths at the top of the market.

The equal-weight index grants the smallest company in the S&P 500 the same influence as Nvidia, yet it’s up about 14% year-to-date, beating the regular S&P 500 by 1%.

The outperformance of the Dow and equal-weight marks a reversal of the last three years, when a handful of AI giants propelled most of the market’s gains. 

This is what investors mean when they talk about a “healthy” bull market.

A broadening rally tends to be sturdier — and so last longer — when it’s supported by everything from banks and healthcare and consumer staples, rather than merely hypescalers. 

To be sure, none of this means the AI trade is over. 

It just means that the bulls have more to celebrate than a year ago.

📈Toy Story 5 and record streaming profits helped Disney crush earnings. Adjusted EPS came in at $2.06 against $1.86 estimates on $25.25 billion in revenue, with a $100 million tariff refund and a 21% jump in operating income to $5.6 billion lifting shares 3.5%. (CNBC)

🤖 Meta released a coding agent to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic. It will reportedly cost less than popular competitor tools, and it’s called Muse Code. The stock fell 10% last week following its earnings. (WSJ)

🚀 Shopify stock jumped nearly 20% after blowout earnings. Revenue climbed 34% year over year to $3.58 billion and free cash flow reached $654 million against a $3.45 billion revenue estimate. (Yahoo Finance)

🗓 August 6, 1997: Steve Jobs took the Macworld Expo stage and announced Microsoft had invested $150 million in Apple, ending a years-long patent lawsuit and rescuing the company from bankruptcy.

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