Good morning, investors. The first half of 2026 is behind us.

The next six months will decide whether this is a year investors brag about or one they spend the holidays trying to forget.

The data tell the story.

The S&P 500 just notched a stellar first half of 2026 and yet it was only its third-best in the last four years. 

The drivers behind the latest leg of the bull market are more telling than the total return. The index climbed without help from its largest constituents, it survived a war-induced near-correction, and the forgotten corners of the market did the heavy lifting.

The market’s 9.4% return in six months makes it easy to forget the sell-off from the Iran conflict and the subsequent double-digit rally that followed. 

And as Opening Bell Daily has documented, the Magnificent 7 as a group are still negative year-to-date, which means the index has been able to accelerate despite the lack of leadership at the top.

The Dow, meanwhile, secured its best first-half since 2021 and small-cap stocks had their strongest run since 1991. 

This is the opposite of how the last stage of the bull market unfolded and, to me, the foundation seems sturdier. Any rally that doesn’t rely solely on a handful of mega-cap technology names is a better long-term bet.

According to a ProCap Insights analysis, the S&P 500 has an 88% hit rate of finishing the year higher once it reaches the midpoint up more than 5%.

The index has cleared that bar seventeen times since 1990 and ended higher in fifteen, with a median second-half gain near 10%.

The risk now is that the rotation that defined the first half of the year reverts to old habits and mega-caps reclaim their place at the top of the food chain. 

Rate hikes from the Fed or another unexpected geopolitical shock could trigger a reversal in small-cap stocks or other rate-sensitive sectors that have run up in recent months.

That said, market breadth this wide rarely unwinds quickly. 

And, as optimistic investors recognize, rarely does broad strength like this mark the end of a bull market.

SpaceX is public, trading on Nasdaq under SPCX.

Now there is a fund built for the daily move.

Meet SPCU, the Defiance Daily Target 2X Long SpaceX ETF (Cboe: SPCU). It seeks 200% of the daily performance of SpaceX stock.

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The wait is over.

🤖 The Magnificent 7 lost more than $2 trillion in June. Roughly $2.3 trillion has been erased from Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Tesla and Amazon since the start of last month with investors growing uneasy about hyperscaler AI capex. (Yahoo Finance)

🛢 Oil just secured its worst monthly drop of the year. Brent crude saw a roughly 20% sell off in June to about $73 a barrel. The US and Iran trade continue to flash conflicting signals on peace talks. (CNBC)

📉 The Japanese yen just hit a 40-year low against the dollar. The currency slid to 162.52 per dollar and officials said Tokyo would "take appropriate action at any time as necessary" to counter excessive moves. (ProCap Insights)

I sat down with Josh Schafer, a top investment writer at Barron’s, to unpack the most important charts driving the market, and the four stocks his team is most high-conviction on for the rest of the year.

Tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

🗓 July 1, 1944: Delegates from 44 allied nations convened in New Hampshire to launch the Bretton Woods Conference, which set the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and created the IMF and World Bank.

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