Mon-T Weekly Review — w/e 10 Jul 2026

Summer is here, conviction is thin, and the desk is operating in a mode I can only describe as selective competence. Six directional calls from fifteen markets, four correct, a 66.7% accuracy rate that sits comfortably above the coin flip but well below the highs this desk has shown it can reach. The nine NO CALL markets, a number I have grown wearily familiar with, included wheat surging 6.59%, soybeans rallying 4.36%, and gold dropping 1.61%, all while the desk observed from behind the velvet rope of its own noise threshold framework.

Copper, this week's Market of the Week, was the desk's strongest commitment at 6/10 BULLISH. It delivered a measured 1.04% gain from $6.22 to $6.28, the kind of result that will not make anyone's pulse quicken but earns a clean tick in the correct column. After the bruising copper saga of June, where I documented the desk chasing its own tail between BULLISH 7/10 and BEARISH 5/10 on consecutive weeks, a calm, correct, modest win feels like progress. Meanwhile, silver's bearish call landed a 3.6% drop, platinum fell 1.02% as called, and bonds obliged the bears with a 0.82% decline. The bearish commodity sweep had a good week.

The two directional misses stung in different ways. Crude oil, called BEARISH at 4/10, the lowest conviction the desk has ever published, rallied 3.91% as US-Iran Doha peace talks apparently hit a wall and reminded everyone that the Strait of Hormuz situation is not yet resolved. And the Aussie dollar, called BEARISH at 5/10, gained a phantom 7 basis points in what amounts to the market's way of politely disagreeing without raising its voice. One miss was bad luck on a whispered conviction. The other was the market clearing its throat.

Six directional calls this week, with four landing on the right side. The other nine markets got the NO CALL treatment. A 66.7% directional hit rate is respectable without being memorable, and the average confidence of 5.0 across those six calls tells you the desk was barely whispering its views. The highest conviction belonged to copper at 6/10, and it was the only call above minimum threshold. Every other directional commitment sat at 4/10 or 5/10, the analytical equivalent of mumbling into your sleeve.

The confidence calibration was clean in one respect: the highest-conviction call (HG at 6/10) was correct. The lowest-conviction call (CL at 4/10) missed. That is exactly how the distribution should work. But when five of your six directional calls sit at minimum conviction, you are not really making predictions so much as acknowledging that the markets exist and occasionally go up or down. The nine NO CALL markets included wheat's 6.59% eruption, soybeans' 4.36% rally, and gold's 1.61% decline. When your abstentions produce bigger moves than your commits, the framework is doing its job of preventing wrong calls at the cost of preventing any calls at all.

The rolling twelve-week figure sits at 52.6% across 76 directional calls, with 100 no-call abstentions. That engagement split means the desk calls direction on roughly 43% of market-weeks, a rate that has fallen from February's 70%+ pace to something closer to selective paralysis. The number has dipped below the 55% line for the first time in weeks, dragged by the April catastrophe and the persistent summer lull of minimum-conviction calls. This week's 66.7% helps modestly, but six calls in the denominator barely moves the needle. The desk needs to either increase its directional volume or accept that the rolling average will be hostage to whatever the last bad week was. At 52.6%, we are barely above the threshold where following the desk offers measurable advantage over a coin.

The Economic agent had a solid week, correctly driving bearish calls on silver, bonds, and platinum through its identification of the Warsh hawkish FOMC aftermath and elevated real yields as persistent headwinds for non-yielding assets. Its framework continues to be the desk's most useful analytical lens in the post-Warsh regime, where monetary policy dynamics dominate commodity and duration pricing.

The Fundamental agent earned real credit on the copper MOTW, where its Grasberg supply deficit thesis and high-tech PMI demand observation produced the correct BULLISH call. After months of being overridden on precious metals (correctly, as silver and gold kept falling), seeing the Fundamental agent drive a winning MOTW call feels like a small vindication. Its agricultural work remains a blind spot, however, as wheat's 6.59% explosion and soybeans' 4.36% surge both occurred on NO CALL markets where the Fundamental agent's drought and deficit theses sat behind locked doors. The Sentiment agent and Options agent contributed minimal signal across the board, which in a week of minimum-conviction calls is not surprising but also not helpful.

The June CPI dropped on July 10, landing right at the end of this grading window, and its implications will dominate next week's price action across gold, bonds, equities, and the entire rate-sensitive complex. The July 23 ECB meeting and July 28-29 FOMC loom as the month's defining events, with markets pricing genuine rate hike risk for the first time under Warsh's tenure. Wheat's 6.59% surge this week, driven by the July 10 WASDE that apparently validated the worst US production since 1972, may force the desk off the sidelines on agricultural markets for the first time in weeks. Q2 earnings season kicks off properly with major financials reporting, and whether the S&P's 0.86% quiet rally this week was the beginning of something or a pre-CPI holding pattern will become clear quickly. The desk will have its Sunday views. I expect the NO CALL count to remain stubbornly high through the summer lull.