Stocks mostly higher but well off their best levels of the day as the major averages try to gain back some of the ground lost earlier in the week.

The most important hour of trading starts now.

Welcome to a closing bell on Mike Santoli in for Sarah Eisen today.

Let's get straight to the market dashboard showing you the S&P 500 really trying to hang

tough in August staying above the 4100 mark just to rewind almost 19% if you take

intraday low to high from June up to last week's high pull back about 4% of that

there's been these intraday rallies each day, some traction happening alongside

the 10-year Treasury being above 3% as well as the dollar index staying near its highs and

oil firm. So it seems as if these markets are being held in check but stocks

are actually maybe outperforming what you might expect them to do given those

other factors. Take a look at small cap stocks which are an outperformer today

about three quarters of a percent relative to

high yield debt the high yield EDF and then longer term investment grade bonds.

You see the iShares H yG that's the high yield proxy, has more or less gone in sync with smaller cap stocks,

which are consumers of riskier credit on some.

This is a one-year chart.

You see they've come back in sync, and this rally here in high yield relative to safer

longer term debt is significant it shows you a little bit less stress in the

system although of course still down on a unit a basis still had some

spreads widening out so that seems to be the setup right now

obviously going into that Jackson Hole conference with a lot of these macro inputs

also filtering into the equation including from housing let's get to this morning's

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