Stocks Jump Into the Close as Tech, Small Caps Lead; Gold Surges, Oil Advances

The Bank Rally No One’s Talking About

U.S. stocks rallied Monday, with gains accelerating into the closing bell ahead of bank earnings and amid easing trade jitters. The Dow industrials rose 588.05 points, or 1.29%, to 46,067.6. The S&P 500 added 102.16, or 1.56%, to 6,654.67, while the Nasdaq Composite climbed 490.18, or 2.21%, to 22,694.6. Small caps outpaced: the Russell 2000 gained 2.78% to 244.40.

Commodities underscored the risk-on tone. Gold futures jumped 3.02% to $4,121.40, while U.S. crude settled up 1.31% at $59.67.

Investors are positioning for a busy bank docket Tuesday. For Citigroup consensus calls for $1.90 in Q3 EPS on ~$21.1 billion of revenue, with management earlier signaling mid-single-digit year-over-year gains in investment-banking fees and Markets revenue, “good fee momentum,” and no abnormal card delinquency signals; the CFO also indicated Citi expects to repurchase at least $4 billion this quarter.

At JPMorgan the debate centers on net interest income (NII) staying power after the first rate cut of the cycle. Management’s last update pointed to about $95.5 billion of total NII, while Doug Petno, co-CEO of the Corporate & Investment Bank, flagged “high-teens” Q3 Markets growth and low-double-digit Banking growth—helped by a firmer IPO calendar and better M&A dialogue. Jamie Dimon has kept a cautious macro stance even as activity improves, recently noting there is “a lot of merger talk” and ample market “firepower”; he has said JPM spends roughly $2 billion a year on AI and is already saving a similar amount, calling that just the “tip of the iceberg.”

Tech sentiment brightened as tensions around U.S.–China trade and rare-earths cooled at the margin. Wedbush argued “the bark will be way worse than bite,” while CFRA’s Angelo Zino cautioned, “We believe greater sanctions on rare earth compounds by China have negative implications to the U.S. chip industry, with the potential to create supply chain disruptions/manufacturing delays,” even as he expects “all-important Trump-Xi negotiations to progress in the coming months.” A Goldman Sachs’s analysis estimates U.S. consumers bear 55% of tariff costs and that existing levies have lifted core PCE by 0.44 percentage point this year. Meanwhile, an Aug. 11 executive order extended a suspension of some China-specific duties to Nov. 10, 2025, keeping policy uncertainty on the calendar.

In AI hardware, OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled a multi-year plan to deploy 10 gigawatts of custom accelerators, with racks starting in H2 2026 and completing by 2029—a nod to Ethernet-based scale-out networks. CFRA’s Zino wrote: “We continue to believe that AVGO’s visibility/pipeline is extraordinary and the company is well-positioned to benefit from the massive AI infrastructure build…”

The day’s advance left the S&P 500 comfortably higher into the earnings week, with cyclical leadership broadening to small caps and energy. Whether the move sticks may hinge on the banks confirming fee momentum and keeping credit “boring,” and on whether tariff rhetoric continues to recede toward negotiation rather than escalation.

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