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Welcome to the Fletcher Friday Report, where we'll look at Fletcher compared to the S P 500. Fletcher is an investment algorithm I created with simple monthly signals of buy, hold, and sell. Today is Friday, July 24th, 2026. We've had a busy week, so let's get started. As I said, for this week, I'm going to use the word busy. What made it busy? There's been a lot of news and activity. Oil prices and the conflict in Iran. There seems to be some movement there, maybe not as much as earlier this year. There's the jobless claims report, which was positive, so that seems to be factored in at some level. Tariffs are in the news again. Sentiment seems negative, but the reaction almost seems muted so far. Maybe it's fatigue from all the news in the past about tariffs. Earnings, positive. Google as an example. There's been quite a bit of spending, and that leads into what AI spending has been doing to the market. It seems to be negative. The CapEx has spooked the market, and I think we're seeing that across the AI theme. For Fletcher this week, it's been positive signs, no huge movements. There's been some push and pull with the positions. We have about one more week until we get the next set of signals. So we're in a bit of a sit and watch mode. Speaking of watching, I'm struck by the words I see in the financial headlines. How are you processing these words straight from the headlines this week? Plummet, slaughter, tumbles, surged, opportunity, puzzled, erased, surprised, slashed. That's what we're seeing in the headlines these days. Do any of these reflect your personal outlook or experience with the market this week? Like, does a 5% drop really warrant a plummet? Did you experience any slashing or erasing? For me, the market's just being itself. Sometimes the unpredictable nature is predictable. Let's move on and look at the numbers. As I mentioned, Fletcher is up this week, not by a whole lot, almost 4%. Of course, that's coming off of last week, which was quite negative. For the week, SP is basically flat, just down about a half a point. For the month to date, since July 1st, Fletcher is down about 19%. And the SP is in the negative 1% range. And year to date, Fletcher is gaining some ground again after coming off of its high in June. But right now we're at 147%, and the SP is sitting at about 8%. I've said this before. A fun aspect of sharing Fletcher are all the conversations that come up. I got a message this week that seemed to cast some doubt on, quote, systems. It was somewhat of a sideways comment, and it got me thinking, I hadn't really thought of or described Fletcher as a system per se, but it is a system with steps to help manage investing, right? But do systems have a bad reputation in general? I don't know. Maybe I'm oblivious to that sentiment. Here's what got me thinking about it more. We all use systems in some form or fashion, and systems need to be judged. So that's fair. And since we all operate under a system, even though we might not be paying for a system, we might not even have our system defined. But there is an action that we take that seems to fall into somewhat of a system. And I had a system before I created Fletcher. Granted, it was a loose, somewhat emotional, and I was consistently evolving the system with no measures or accountability. I tracked my portfolio, but even the tracking was sporadic. That's what I call a personal system. Then there's financial advisors and the systems that they provide. You know, they're tailoring the approach based on questions they might ask. And, you know, it might be about risk, age, that sort of thing, what your goals are. So they have their system. My opinion is pretty cynical on this side of things, but I'll refrain from going down that path today. Back to judging our system. So do you judge your financial advisor's prescribed system for you? And what about your personal efforts? Are you measuring that? Are you judging that? Or do you have other systems that you subscribe to? And what are we judging Fletcher on? I'm sorry I'm raising a lot of questions today and not providing many answers, but I think we should judge all systems. Can we agree on that? But what do we judge it on? We all know the phrase past performance does not guarantee future results, but doesn't past performance inform at some level? So how do you resolve that? Is there a percentage of accuracy you might assign? Is there going to be a way to judge a system? Even our personal experience is past performance. Yes, there are no guarantees, but that does provide enough for judging, or does it? Maybe these questions will help spur more conversations. I look forward to that. That'll do it for this week. To learn more about the Fletcher signals, go to Fletcherinvestor.com. Thank you for listening today. I hope your coming week doesn't tumble or plummet, but I hope it does surprise and surge instead for you. Have a great week, and let's conduct again next Friday.