Top 10 Stocks to Watch — Monday, July 20
Earnings week opens with Brent above $90 and catalysts stacked at both ends of the session: steel and regional-bank prints tonight, a biotech two events from a binary readout, and the mega-cap reports that decide the AI trade. Ten names, ranked by catalyst.
Futures open the week modestly green — S&P 500 futures up about 0.3%, Nasdaq 100 futures up roughly half a percent — but the tape under the surface is anything but calm. Brent crude is trading above $90 a barrel for the first time since mid-June after the US-Iran ceasefire collapse escalated through a ninth consecutive night of strikes, and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is thinning again. Energy is once more the dominant macro input, pressuring bonds and reviving the inflation conversation just as the busiest earnings week of the summer begins.
And it is a genuinely heavy week: Steel Dynamics and Zions kick things off after today's close, Alphabet, Tesla, IBM, and ServiceNow all report Wednesday, and RTX lands Thursday morning. Roughly 450 companies print results over the next five days, and the semiconductor complex comes into it wounded — Friday's selloff in EDA and chip-design names after Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 chip-design demo is still being litigated. The only notable macro release today is the June Leading Index at 10:00 a.m. ET.
Here are the ten names on our watchlist today — ranked by how hard and how dated the catalyst is. Prices are Friday's close unless marked pre-market; watch levels are scenarios for a watchlist, not trade calls.
1. Steel Dynamics ($STLD) — the cleanest catalyst of the day
$235.51 prior close; ~flat pre-market ($236.00). Steel Dynamics reports Q2 after today's close, and this is the rare earnings event where management already showed its hand: the company guided to $3.51–$3.55 in EPS back in June — up from $2.01 a year ago — while street consensus sits near $3.68 on roughly $5.5 billion in revenue. That gap between guidance and consensus is the story: analysts are betting metal spreads expanded even faster than management signaled, on strong demand and tariff-supported domestic pricing. The stock has already re-rated hard, so the print has to deliver. The call is tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. ET, which leaves tonight's release to trade on the headline numbers alone.
Watch for: an EPS print at or above the top of the guided range plus firm flat-rolled pricing commentary — and whether the stock can hold a gap above the $236 area, or fades a merely in-line quarter.
2. SELLAS Life Sciences ($SLS) — binary catalyst, imminent
$13.19 prior close, +12.3% Friday; $13.43 pre-market. The Phase 3 REGAL readout in second-remission acute myeloid leukemia is the entire thesis here, and the market is treating it as imminent — the trial needed 80 events for top-line analysis and the last company update disclosed 78. Alliance Global raised its target from $10 to $25 on Friday, arguing the delay in reaching the event count is itself a signal that patients are living longer. The stock has run from the mid-$8s in late June to over $13, with a WallStreetBets-driven retail crowd on board, which cuts both ways: this is now priced for good news it hasn't received yet. A $2.6 billion market cap into a binary readout is a watchlist item precisely because the move — either direction — will be violent.
Watch for: the top-line REGAL press release itself, any 8-K on data timing, and whether the stock holds the $12–13 zone in the meantime. Position sizing discipline matters more than direction here.
3. Domino's Pizza ($DPZ) — the morning's earnings pop, on trial at the open
$322.18 prior close; $344.00 pre-market, +6.8%. Domino's reported Q2 this morning and the reaction is the interesting part. The headline numbers were unspectacular: EPS of $4.07 against a ~$4.10 consensus, revenue of $1.19 billion (+4.3%, a slight beat), US same-store sales up just 0.1%, international comps slightly negative. What the market is rewarding is the composition — order-count growth across both delivery and carryout in a quarter where US fast food broadly saw traffic decline, plus 209 net new stores globally. In a QSR tape full of demand warnings, share-taking is the scarce asset. A nearly 7% gap on a headline EPS miss is a market that came in positioned for worse.
Watch for: whether the gap holds through the 10:00 a.m. analyst call — pops built on relief rather than raised guidance have a habit of being sold by lunch. The bull case needs the order-growth narrative to survive Q&A.
So that's the free tier: a steel print tonight with the bar above guidance, a $2.6 billion biotech sitting two events from a binary readout, and a QSR gap-up running on relief. The next seven names are where this week's real positioning questions live — including the regional-bank tell reporting in five hours, the China trade gapping up 4% this morning, and the AI casualty from Friday that may have been mispriced.
The rest of this briefing is for paid members: the regional-bank credit tell reporting tonight and the number that moves the whole group, the two mega-cap prints that decide the AI trade this week, the tanker name repricing Hormuz risk in real time, the record quarter nobody expected from a left-for-dead meme stock, and the oversold EDA leader where Friday's panic may have overshot the actual threat.
AlphaBriefing Paid gets you every investment thesis, scenario framework, and catalyst brief we publish — the analysis private intel clients pay four figures for, at a fraction of that.