Goodbye, August, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. The S&P 500 index could be in for a whopping 0.3% gain this month, which means the beach bums didn’t miss much.

Bring on September and some big losses as well? Michael Brush, writing for MarketWatch, rattles off seven reasons why stocks are primed for a 5% to 10% drop. Some of those sound familiar — interest rate worries, politics, investors and the media (whaaaaaat?) are too bullish — but he also offers up some ideas on how to prepare.

Cracked Market’s Jani Ziedins agrees a big stock move is coming, but says it’ll be a few weeks before the direction is clear. Even though Friday’s jobs data is fairly important for markets and interest rate chatter, big money managers won’t really be on deck until after Monday’s Labor Day holiday, he notes.

“With just a few months left in the year, they will start positioning their portfolios for year-end. That either means chasing these record highs even higher, or cashing in and taking profits,” says Ziedins.

But don’t expect to get a clear picture on whether the big money is going to chase profits or take them until mid-September — hence the slow choppy grind is on the menu for a while longer.

If the new highs that have marked this summer market are making you sweat a little, then Steve Sjuggerud’s post on the Daily Wealth blog might cool things off. He crunched the numbers back to 1927, and found stocks hit new highs 10% of the time in general, and that new highs tend to lead to more new highs.

“If you had simply bought stocks each time they hit a new all-time high, and then held for 12 months, you would have outperformed the typical (‘buy and hold’) one-year gain,” he says.

Front and center for Wednesday, oil will grab the headlines as supply data looms and investors get into pre-fret mode. That’s discussed in our call of the day from Barclays, which says investors are having a forest/trees problem when it comes to crude.

Our chart of the day takes yet another poke at the U.S.-stocks-are-expensive view.

Key market gauges

S&P US:ESU6 and Dow US:YMU6 futures dipped after that ADP data came out. Crude oil CLV26, has been tapping more lows ahead of U.S. supply data. The dollar USDJPY, -0.02% has been creeping higher.

Read:Friday could be an important turning point for the dollar

Gold US:GCU6 fell to two-month lows post-ADP. Here’s a nice gold bulls then-and-now chart:

In Asia ADOW, -0.51% , the Nikkei NIK, +0.17% rose nearly 1%, but other markets were lower. Europe SXXP, +0.35% is mostly higher, but not by much.

The call

“With market sentiment shifting with every new bullish or bearish headline, casual observers may tend to miss the forest for the trees, even if these ‘trees’ drive prices in the short term.”

That’s what a team of Barclays commodities analysts, led by Michael Cohen, told clients in a note Wednesday.

They say investors should beware the “cherry picked bullish or bearish headline that fits the flavor of the day and concentrate on the risks that the oil balance faces on its path toward alignment.”

Investors should understand that the oil market balance is imprecise, with global supply and demand data prone to error. “With the 2014 revisions in, it is clear that a more than [1 million barrel a day] discrepancy between estimates and the reality contributed to the price decline in 2014,” Cohen and his team pointed out.

Keep headlines in line with the broader context, they advise. That means realizing weekly U.S. supply data may overstate consumption. Or trying not to hyper focus on outlooks from the big 20 oil companies, while ignoring views from the rest of the industry.

Barclays has nudged up its third and fourth-quarter forecasts by $2, to $47 and $52 a barrel, respectively. “With the market balance moving toward deficit next quarter, the risk of price weakness based on oil market fundamentals looks low, compared with the upside risk associated with market observers missing the forest for the trees,” say the analysts.

Don’t miss:Think older investors are much less likely to take risks? Think again

The chart

IG market analyst Angus Nicholson has been pondering the never-ending question about whether U.S. stocks are overvalued. He stacks them up against the rest of the world in two charts.

The first looks at forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio for big global indexes, which shows that China is cheap and the Russell 2000 RUT, -3.35% is expensive.

IG

But then Nicholson converts the current forward P/E of the indexes into a z-score, which reflects how many standard deviations the current value is away from the 10-year average forward P/E of its respective index. The S&P 500 is trading at 2.1 deviations above its historical average, while the Russell 2000 is at the bottom, just 0.6 standard deviations above. China is still one of the cheapest markets.

IG

The buzz

Google GOOG, -1.97% GOOGL, -1.44% is looking to offer its own ride-sharing service in the fiercely competitive market of San Francisco, right on Uber’s turf.

Amazon AMZN, +0.18% is offering free restaurant delivery to Houston’s Prime members.

Twitter TWTR, -0.62% will get a helping hand from an industry pro to help stream its $10 million worth of NFL gams this season.

Palo Alto Networks PANW, +0.41% fell late Tuesday after reporting higher revenue and expenses.

H&R Block HRB, +2.01% took nearly a 6% late hit after posting weaker-than-expected results.

From the Moneyball blog, an interesting chart that predicts U.S. companies will start swinging the ax in the next two earnings seasons, and carry out hiring freezes come October or January. While many CEOs have been upbeat, business is soft and not getting better. Read more here.

The economy

The ADP employment report was solid, with a private-sector jobs gain of 177,000 in August. The Chicago purchasing managers index is coming at 9:45 a.m. Eastern, and pending-home sales follows at 10 a.m. Eastern.

Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren and Chicago Fed President Charles Evans spoke in China earlier. Evans, for his part, said the Fed could still hike rates gradually, while his colleague warned of the dangers of keeping interest rates too low.

In case you missed it, Allianz’s chief economic adviser Mohamed El-Erian told CNBC on Tuesday that a strong jobs report could raise odds for a September rate hike to 80%.

The stat

$28,496 — That’s the cost of annual U.S. college tuition fees, making it the most expensive place in the world to study, followed by Canada and the U.K., according to research from HSBC on global costs of education.

The quote

“I believe in dialogue to promote the interests of Mexico in the world, and to protect Mexicans wherever they are.” — A tweet from Mexico’s president Enrique Peña Nieto, who will briefly meet U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday. Trump has repeatedly vowed to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and make that country pay for it.

Naturally, Twitter has been losing its collective mind.

Meanwhile, Mother Jones interviewed former models who claim they worked illegally for Trump’s agency.

Random reads

Singer Chris Brown was arrested after a bizarre standoff with police

In Lima, sexual harassers have been ment meets mom:

Could 49ers’s Colin Kaepernick take a financial hit for his sit-in? In any case, military vets were jumping to his defense Wednesday.

The world’s largest indoor theme park -- the size of 28 football fields — opened in Dubai Wednesday.

Deadpool fans. Ryan Reynolds ponied up the cash to keep his writers on set.

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