August 2026 · Interim Note
The Half of Datadog’s Drop That Came Back
Monday looked quiet at the index level — the S&P 500 closed down 0.03%, the Nasdaq-100 down 0.30% — and was anything but underneath. Fourteen of my 32 positions closed higher and eighteen closed lower, split almost perfectly along one line: chips down, software up.
Datadog, Palo Alto, and the rotation
Datadog rose 11.48% to $260.78, the book’s largest single move today. That's a partial reversal of the 19.03% drop I wrote about on August 6 — a decline I noted at the time had no dated news attached to it despite Datadog reporting Q2 earnings that same week. As of tonight, I still can’t point to a specific headline for either the drop or today’s bounce; the stock remains about 8% below where it traded before the August 6 move. Palo Alto Networks rose 5.82% and CrowdStrike rose 5.01%, both part of what The Motley Fool flagged two days ago as money rotating out of semiconductors and into software. Read the full writeup on the News page.
On the other side of that rotation, Arm fell 5.21%, Intel fell 4.06%, and AMD fell 2.86% — all names I hold, none with a dated headline I can point to today. American Airlines fell 5.9%, the book’s worst single name, on a day crude oil (USO) jumped 6.73% for reasons I also can’t source yet. I go further into what a day like this should and shouldn’t change about how I’m positioned in today’s Opinion piece.
No trades today
A single-day rotation, explained or not, isn’t a reason to touch anything under the Blackout Rule and Holding Period. Datadog getting some of an unexplained drop back doesn’t change the thesis any more than the drop itself did.