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It was a refreshing break in July as the stock market was moved by ‘traditional drivers’ such as corporate earnings, as opposed to U.S. politics, Brexit or the ongoing myopic focus on the actions of global central bankers. While the news on corporate earnings was not particularly good, with year-over-year earnings down for the 5th straight quarter, most of the results have come in ahead of the very low expectations. The weakest results came from the energy companies, which were dealing with much lower oil prices than a year earlier. Banks also saw year-over-year earnings declines as they had to deal with slower loan growth and record low interest rates, which does not help their profitability. The upside surprises came mostly from the technology stocks where the global economic slowdown did not seem to have any noticeably adverse effects on the time people spend online or corporations invest to upgrade their systems and migrate business to ‘cloud-based’ services. (more…)