Fletcher Friday Report: July 10, 2026

Welcome back! Today is Friday, July 10th, 2026. Fletcher is an investment algorithm I built around simple monthly signals — buy, hold, and sell. This week we're checking in on performance versus the S&P 500, plus a few random thoughts on the market and some questions I've been getting. Let's dig in.

Staying the Course Through the Chop

Fletcher was up this week despite a pretty turbulent stretch in the market — and I'll be honest, that kind of volatility is exactly when I start watching too much news and second-guessing myself. It's also exactly why I built Fletcher in the first place. I'm fickle. I'm emotional. Fletcher is not. That's the whole point.

Over the past few weeks there's been a notable sell-off, and I got curious enough to look at where Fletcher's current positions stand relative to their 52-week highs. Right now Fletcher holds four stocks (six is the maximum), and a couple of those four are sitting about 20% off their highs — all of that in roughly the last three weeks. Not great to look at in isolation. But when I zoom out to year-to-date, that's where the comfort lives, and the bigger picture helps me breathe a little easier.

How Did the Week Actually Look?

Surprisingly not terrible, all things considered. The Dow was down less than 1%, the NASDAQ was up almost 2%, and the S&P came in around 1%. Fletcher landed in that same 1% range. Call it flat, but I'll take flat over dramatic any day — "down 5%" is not a headline I enjoy waking up to.

One quick housekeeping note: I need to correct last week's numbers. I understated Fletcher's performance — it was actually better than what I reported. Easy correction to make.

First Half of the Year in Review

While we're talking about context, it's worth taking a quick look at how the first six months shaped up. The worst month of the first half was a -4% month. The best? January, which came in at nearly 44% on its own. That's the kind of range Fletcher operates in — concentrated positions mean bigger swings in both directions.

The Numbers

• This week: Fletcher ~+1%, S&P ~+0.5%
• Month to date (July): Fletcher +6%, S&P just over +1%
• Year to date: Fletcher +185%, S&P +11%

July has been a -6% month so far, which has brought the YTD number down from its recent high. But 185% for the year is still a number I feel genuinely good about — especially next to the S&P's 11%, which is itself a strong year by historical standards.

What the Headlines Are Saying (and What I'm Doing About It)

Two themes dominated the financial news this week: AI spending and Iran/oil. On the AI front, the conversation is all about infrastructure — computing power, chips, energy, and the sheer amount of capital flowing into that space. On the geopolitical side, the Iran situation seems to nudge the market up or down almost daily.

Here's the thing though: none of that changes what I do. Fletcher doesn't factor in news or sentiment directly, and neither do I on a week-to-week basis. I watch it out of curiosity, but I try hard not to let it become emotional fuel. Let the algorithm do its job.

Speaking of curiosity — I've been known to ask AI a random question just to satisfy my own wandering brain. (Reminder: Fletcher itself does not use AI. That's me personally, just poking around for fun.) This week I asked Gemini what the historically strongest months for the U.S. stock market have been over the last decade. The answer was July — positive 80% of the time, with the S&P averaging somewhere between 2.5% and 3.3% during those periods. Gemini also flagged August and September as the trickier months. Interesting enough that I might dig into that in a future report.

Reader Questions

"Does Fletcher use AI?" No — and that comes up a lot, so worth being clear. Fletcher is a set of theories I developed and validated through backtesting. Backtesting can be gamed, and I was deliberate about avoiding that: I plugged in the data, ran the theories, and let the results speak for themselves without trying to engineer a specific outcome. That's how Fletcher was born.

"How does Signals Day actually work?" Signals go out on the first trading day of each month — once a month, that's it. Each signal tells you what to sell, what to hold, and what to buy. Since Fletcher never holds more than six positions at a time (currently four), there usually isn't a ton of rebalancing involved. The signal comes with a target allocation — something like: position A rebalance to 25%, position B sell 100%, position C rebalance to 10%. You get a clear target and you execute it yourself in your own brokerage account.

That brings up something I want to emphasize: Fletcher is fully self-directed. You're not handing money to a fund or a manager. The signals are information — what you do with them is your call, and your account stays entirely in your control.

As for portfolio size, it genuinely doesn't matter. I started with about a third of my overall portfolio. One of my sons is using Fletcher with roughly $10,000 committed. And I have a subscriber currently working with around $600,000 in their Fletcher allocation. The signals scale to whatever you bring to them.

That's a wrap for this week. Thanks for reading, and I hope July's been treating you well so far. To learn more about the Fletcher algorithm, visit FletcherInvestor.com.

Have a great week — see you next Friday.