By Sabrina Escobar | Monday, July 21

Go Time. Investors are revving up for a big earnings week. 

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite marked record highs (again), rising 0.1% and 0.4%, respectively, on the day, even though stocks pulled back from intraday highs toward the end of the trading session. It's the 10th record close this year for the S&P 500 and the 12th for the tech-heavy Nasdaq.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 19 points, or less than 0.1%. 

There wasn't any specific catalyst moving markets on Monday. Call it the calm before the storm of earnings report that are slated to be released over the remainder of the week. Whether the rally continues might very well depend on what corporate America has to say about a very chaotic quarter -- and what it expects in the coming months. 

Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, writes that Wall Street has decided to "give corporate America a mulligan of sorts," with S&P 500 earning projections targeting growth of just 2.6% year over year -- the lowest bar since the fourth quarter of 2023. The bar is "impressively low," she adds, especially considering S&P 500 companies have handily beaten analyst expectations over the past couple of quarters. 

In a way, a lower bar is bullish, as low expectations and an acceptable reality are a decent setup for steady gains. Maybe analysts just gave the stock market a little blessing in disguise.

However, calling this a low-expectation season doesn’t do it justice. You can’t just blow this quarter off. We’ll get fresh commentary on how management is navigating century-high tariffs, plus potentially some color on Aug. 1 tariff threats. 

We'll be covering the earnings reports here.

DJIA: -0.04% to 44,323.07
S&P 500: +0.14% to 6,305.60
Nasdaq: +0.38% to 20,974.17

The Hot Stock: Verizon Communications +4.0%
The Biggest Loser: EQT Corporation -9.6%

Best Sector: Communications Services +1.3%
Worst Sector: Energy -1%

A Bin-ful of Bargains

As Barrons' resident retail reporter, one of my favorite things is to poke around (and shop at) some of the industry's funkiest niches. My latest find is the bin store, a type of discount retailer that has grown at a rapid clip nationwide since the pandemic. 

Bin stores buy pallets of returned merchandise and overstock from retailers like Amazon and Walmart and sort them into large bins by category. Prices typically decrease daily after a weekly restock, starting at between $7 and $15 an item on a restock day and falling to $1 or less by the end of the week.

Liquidation stores aren't new, but bin-store popularity surged after the pandemic. The increase in online shopping flooded retailers with returned items they then needed to get rid of, often selling them on the secondary market (where bin store operators could snap them up). Simultaneously, higher inflation prompted many consumers -- particularly lower- and middle-income shoppers -- to prioritize bargain hunting.

Enter bin stores, which offer a dizzying array of discretionary goods that would otherwise be too pricey for people to buy. I visited a store, called Crazy Mad Dealz, in Hempstead, New York, and found dozens of people browsing the aisles for everything from an electronic keyboard, a foot-spa massager, quilts, rugs, and coffee-brewing machines. One man I interviewed at the store said he once found the exact car part he had been looking for in the bins -- and paid just $3 for it instead of the retail price of about $150. 

Savvy operators can make a good profit out of a bin store -- they have lower overhead costs than most other retailers, although they still have to pay rent, labor, and inventory costs. Some have already managed to scale up: Black Friday Dealz, for instance, has about 40 stores across the country and plans to add about 10 more between now and 2026. 

But every business model comes with growing pains, and bin stores are no exception. As more bin stores open, competition for customers and pallets full of retailers' unwanted merchandise is increasing. Tariffs could also throw a wrench in expansion plans. 

Read the full story here.