This Week in Markets: Tuesday 25 August 2026

Threadgold Advisory Desk | Covering: Friday 21 & Monday 24 August 2026 (Marcus Weekend 22 August, no trading)

Sentiment Bar

US MARKETS: Choppy Friday's Treasury-fuelled rally fully unwound by Monday's chip-led slide.

ASX: Rotating Miners surged, banks extended a losing run, the headline barely moved.

COMMODITIES: Bid Gold at a three-month high and bitcoin near $80k, oil eased on the new Iran sanctions.

Dear Investor,

Washington opened two new economic fronts in the space of 72 hours, and the index numbers barely blinked. On Friday, 50% US tariffs on US$20bn of Canadian goods took effect after talks in Washington collapsed; Prime Minister Mark Carney called it economic warfare and confirmed dollar-for-dollar retaliation from 8 September. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled "Operation Economic Outcast," a sweeping sanctions campaign designed to cut off Iran's oil, shipping, tech and digital-asset revenue, and to punish any country that keeps trading with Tehran. Iran responded by threatening to disrupt Strait of Hormuz shipping again. Two separate fronts, two separate headline events, and the S&P 500 closed Monday within 3 points of where it sat three sessions earlier.

That flat headline is doing a lot of hiding. Chip stocks did the damage Monday, Micron down 5.8%, AMD and Broadcom both off more than 2-3%, as AI-capex scepticism deepened (the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is now more than 20% off its highs, a technical bear market) and bond yields ticked back up. On the ASX, miners rallied hard while the banks extended a run that's now down in 10 of the last 12 sessions. Gold pushed to a three-month high near US$4,630 and bitcoin surged toward US$80,000 in the same week, two very different hedges both getting bid at once. That's not a market waiting to see what happens next. That's a market already positioning for it.

In a sentence: Washington opened tariff and sanctions fronts against Canada and Iran within three days of each other, chip stocks fell into a technical bear market, and gold and bitcoin both surged as investors positioned rather than waited.

01: US Markets & Macro

Friday closed out the market's second straight losing week with a strong session anyway: the S&P 500 rose 33.21 points (+0.4%) to 7,674.37, the Nasdaq added 113.29 points (+0.4%) to 26,180.45, and the Dow jumped 517.80 points (+1.0%) to 53,277.01. The relief rally followed the Treasury's mid-week move to more than double its long-dated bond buybacks, a liquidity intervention that also sent bitcoin surging roughly 25% to a two-month high above US$77,000 (intraday US$79,500), a 22% weekly gain and an estimated US$3.5bn short squeeze across crypto derivatives. None of it changed the week's overall verdict: two straight weekly losses for the major indexes, bond-market volatility still the dominant story.

Monday handed the gains straight back on a different theme entirely. The S&P 500 fell 21.51 points (-0.3%) to 7,652.86 and the Nasdaq dropped 200.26 points (-0.8%) to 25,980.19, while the Dow eked out a small gain, +140.15 points (+0.3%) to 53,417.16, on the strength of its lighter chip-stock weighting. Micron fell 5.8%, AMD and Broadcom both dropped more than 2-3%, as AI-capex scepticism deepened further, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is now down more than 20% from its highs, a technical bear market, and bond yields ticked back up just as the market was digesting fresh tariff and sanctions headlines. Net effect across the three sessions: the S&P 500 finished almost exactly where it started, while the composition underneath swung from a Treasury-driven relief rally to a chip-led risk-off session inside 72 hours.

Look ahead to Friday 28 August: new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first Jackson Hole keynote as Chair, at 10am ET, on the theme of "Financial Innovation." The July Fed decision carried a rare three-way hawkish dissent (Cleveland's Hammack, Minneapolis' Kashkari, Dallas' Logan all voted for a hike), so his tone matters more than usual. The 19-day gap to the September FOMC meeting gives markets plenty of runway to overreact to whatever he says.

02: Australian Market Performance

Friday closed the books on August reporting season with the ASX 200 down 24.8 points (-0.27%) to 9,059.0, extending the index's weekly loss. Energy stocks were the one bright spot, up for a fifth straight session as oil ticked higher into the weekend. The late reporters from Thursday kept selling regardless of what they'd actually delivered: Zip, Telix and Megaport all fell further, and Telix copped a downgrade to Hold from Bell Potter (price target $19.00) despite what the broker itself called a solid result. Charter Hall (CHC) posted FY26 operating earnings in line with consensus on record equity inflows, but FY27 guidance, struck with no performance fees assumed, landed short of where the market was sitting.

Monday flipped the script entirely: the ASX 200 rose 44 points (+0.49%) to 9,103.0, and this time the miners did the heavy lifting. BHP jumped 3.6%, Rio Tinto added 1.5% and Fortescue rose 1.8% as the big three iron ore names led the index higher. Banks went the other way: CBA, NAB, Westpac and ANZ were all lower, and financials as a sector are now down in 10 of the last 12 sessions, a losing run that's starting to look structural rather than a blip. Data#3 was the standout mover on well-received results; health insurer NIB Holdings was the biggest laggard after its own. Net across the three sessions, the index moved from 9,083.8 (Thursday's reference close) to 9,103.0, up 19.2 points (+0.21%), another flat headline sitting on top of a sharp sector rotation, miners against banks this time rather than healthcare against banks the week before.

03: Commodities & Currency

Gold kept climbing through the whole window: above US$4,500/oz on Friday, its third straight weekly gain, then on to roughly US$4,630/oz by Monday, its highest level since mid-May. Safe-haven demand is doing exactly what you'd expect with two fresh economic-policy fronts opening in the same week. Brent crude moved the other way: US$95.29 on Friday, a fifth straight higher session, before falling more than 2% to US$93.16 on Monday as traders waited for the detail on the new Iran sanctions package rather than pricing in worst-case supply disruption immediately. AUD/USD touched a 10-week high near 0.7178 on Friday before easing slightly, last printing around 0.7171, a softer US dollar doing more of the work than any domestic driver. Bitcoin's run toward US$80,000 belongs in this section as much as the equities one, a genuine hedge-asset bid, not a speculative side-show, running alongside gold rather than instead of it.

04: Reporting Season & Stock Highlights

August reporting season is now closed, and Friday's session was a reminder that the market keeps punishing missed guidance long after the headline result is out. Charter Hall's FY27 guidance gap and Telix's broker downgrade both landed on names that had already reported solid or better numbers, the market grading the outlook, not the scoreboard. Monday's session belonged to the miners instead: BHP's 3.6% gain, on the back of a FY26 result that already showed record iron ore volumes and a 27% jump in underlying EBITDA, is the clearest sign yet that the market is looking through the mining majors' backward-looking numbers and buying the commodity call, gold and iron ore both bid, rather than the earnings print. Data#3's standout Monday move is a smaller-cap echo of the same pattern, the market rewarding execution wherever it finds it, reporting season or not.

05: Geopolitics & Trade

Friday brought the US-Canada trade relationship to a genuine breaking point. 50% US tariffs on US$20bn of Canadian goods, dairy, alcohol, electronics, building materials, apparel and agricultural products, took effect after three days of talks in Washington failed to produce a deal. Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada is now effectively "at war" with the US economically and confirmed dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs from 8 September, targeting steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. This is a G7 ally, not an adversary, and a 50% tariff puts it in the same bracket as some of this year's harshest actions against genuinely contested trading partners.

Monday brought the second front. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled "Operation Economic Outcast," a sweeping sanctions campaign explicitly designed to sever every economic lifeline sustaining the Iranian regime, oil, shipping, technology and digital-asset revenue all targeted, with secondary sanctions threatened against any country that keeps trading with Tehran. Iran's Supreme National Security Council responded by threatening further disruption to Strait of Hormuz shipping and promising a "seismic" reply. This builds directly on the ceasefire memorandum that lapsed on 17 August and the broader Iran war that has now been running since February. We said in the last two editions that oil and gold moving together was a market pricing an inflation problem as much as a conflict. Monday's price action, oil down as gold and bitcoin both rose, suggests the market is treating Iran risk as more contained for now than the tariff and sanctions machinery still being assembled around it.

06: What We're Watching

• Kevin Warsh's first Jackson Hole keynote as Fed Chair, Friday 28 August, 10am ET. Watch how he handles the Fed's rare three-way hawkish dissent from July; his tone sets the runway into the September FOMC meeting.
• Canada's 8 September retaliatory tariffs. Whether they land as announced, or a fresh deal materialises before then, is now a genuine market-moving date on the calendar.
• Operation Economic Outcast's first real test: which of Iran's trading partners comply with the new secondary-sanctions threat, and whether Iran follows through on its Hormuz warning.
• The chip sector's technical bear market. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is down more than 20% from its highs. Whether that stabilises or deepens further shapes the next leg for the Nasdaq specifically.
• ASX financials, down in 10 of the last 12 sessions. That's no longer noise, it's a trend worth tracking into the banks' next trading updates.

Positioning takeaway: two new economic-policy fronts opened in three days, and the flat headline index numbers are hiding real rotation underneath, chips out of favour, miners back in, banks under sustained pressure, gold and bitcoin both bid as genuine hedges rather than speculative bets. We're not chasing the chip weakness or the bank underperformance off a single week's data, both moves need to prove they're trend rather than noise. What we are doing is treating the gold and iron ore strength as a signal worth respecting: when two very different assets get bid at the same time for the same reason, policy uncertainty stacking up faster than markets can price it, that's usually not the moment to be underweight the hedge.

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Warm regards, Joel Threadgold Threadgold Advisory Private Wealth Adviser | M: 0483 958 272 | AR: 001297336

Disclaimer

This communication is general information only and does not constitute personal financial advice. It is intended for wholesale clients as defined by the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth). Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. Any yield figures referenced are indicative and not guaranteed.

Joel Threadgold (AR 001297336) is an Authorised Representative of RiverX Financial Services Pty Ltd (AFSL 556458), trading as Threadgold Advisory.