Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch. Our afternoon update on today's market action news and analysis.

Good afternoon. Today is Monday, August 19th,'m your host Kim Khan. Our top story so far.

General Motors is letting go of more than 1,000 salaried employees with the majority coming from its Michigan

tech campus. The layoffs come just two months after the

automaker promoted former Apple executives David Richardson and Barriss Sedenock

to head up the company's Software and Services Division. The automaker said in a statement, as we build GM's future, we must simplify for speed and

excellence, make bold choices, and prioritize the investments that will have the greatest impact.

As a result, we're reducing certain teams within the software and services organization.

Looking at the latest macro data ahead of Jackson Hole later this week,

the Conference Board's measure of July leading indicators,

drop 0.6% month on month to 100.4

steeper than the 0.3% fall expected. Justina Zabinsky-Lamonica,

senior manager for business cycle indicators, says the LAI continues to fall

on a month-over-month basis, but the six-month annual growth rate no longer signals recession

ahead. Stocks are having trouble finding direction, while treasure yields are also little change today.

Greg Marcus, managing director at EBS Private Wealth Management,

says, while the market is mostly fully recovered from the overblown recession fears earlier this month, we expect volatility to remain high for the rest of the year.

The Vix is slightly higher today and looking to snap its streak of nine straight down sessions since the August 5th surge. While we want to be cautious

about allocations becoming top-heavy and biased towards large-cap tech, there is

opportunity in some names whose valuations, despite having come back a bit, are still well off their highs and currently

offer a better entry point, Marcus said. Small allocations to active management in international

equity provide great diversification. Among active stocks, advanced micro devices is acquiring AI infrastructure providers ZT systems

...