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Welcome to the weekend, friends and fellow traders. Well, you probably don't need me to tell you the jobs report for July was merely mediocre, and yet, the consensus was that it was still good enough to let the Federal Reserve go ahead and raise interest rates as early as September.

I honestly don't understand that mentality, for a couple of reasons.

One of them is the fact that, though an unemployment rate of 5.3% is historically low-ish, we all know the effective unemployment rate (people who aren't collecting unemployment, but would like a job and don't have one) is higher than average. Plus, a mere 215,000 new jobs just isn't enough to shove the economy into high gear.

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Well, there's another day of languishing market action. For a brief moment it looked like the S&P 500 was going to go ahead and make a run for the resistance levels around 2135 we've talked about a few times in recent editions. After having a few hours to digest disappointing job-growth numbers from ADP though, traders ended up letting the market slip back towards Tuesday's closing levels... and right back to several key moving average lines.

I think today's action is another hint that we're ultimately going to have to head a little lower before we go any higher. I'll show you why in a moment. In the meantime, with not a lot else to do right now other than wait for a meaningful move from the market, let's go ahead and knock another one of our sector earnings-trend analysis out of the way. Today's guinea pig is the consumer staples sector, for a very specific reason.

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Good Tuesday afternoon, everybody (or good Wednesday morning, depending on when you check your e-mail). As we suspected would be the case, the bulls finally pushed back on Tuesday after five straight days of sizeable losses. It's not clear yet, however, if this was just a dead-cat bounce or the beginning of a bigger rebound effort. We suspect it's just the former, though only time will really tell.

It's not just a hunch leading me to a pessimistic conclusion though. There's actually a fairly new piece of evidence the entire stock market is in the midst of a transition that may well serve as the underpinnings for a major marketwide shift.

In fact, I think I want to start there today, since this discussion will provide some of the context we need to poke and prod the broad market's true direction.

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Welcome back from the weekend, everyone, although I wish we could have started the new trading week out on better terms. While I'm not so sure U.S. stocks were poised to begin the new week on a bullish foot anyway, in the shadow of an 8.5% tumble from Chinese stocks, domestic stocks didn't stand a chance on Monday.

As for where we're headed to from here - now that new damage was inflicted today - the bearish trend cleared some key hurdles. In other ways though, the market has hit some key floors that could serve as the basis for a quick bounce. The question is, how long will that bounce realistically last?

We'll dissect it all below. The first thing I want to talk about today is the 800 pound gorilla in the room... China.

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Do any of you Elite Opportunity members own Amazon.com (AMZN)? You know.... the stock that went nuts today after a surprisingly strong earnings report? John Monroe's been pounding the table on AMZN for the better part of the year, and though shares have been climbing for as long as I can remember him talking about it, today's 10% jump pretty much puts the icing on the cake.

I'll confess I've been one of the few Amazon critics, pointing out its perpetual inability or unwillingness to turn an actual profit. John took the other side of the debate, pointing out how sheer euphoria was far more important for the stock's future price than earnings performance was.