Booking Holdings offers a variety of online booking services, including airline tickets, car rentals, cruises, hotel rooms, and vacations. Booking Holdings operates in Europe, North America, South America, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, and Africa. The company's brands, Booking.com, Agoda, KYAK, OpenTable and Priceline, enable customers to reserve hotel rooms anywhere in the world. More than 80% of bookings are international (primarily in Europe). In July 2014, Booking Holdings acquired OpenTable, which provides restaurant reservations online in the U.S. and internationally. In May 2013, it acquired KAYAK Software Corp. KAYAK searches travel sites to obtain the lowest hotel room and airline ticket prices. In 2012, the company bought TravelJigsaw, now called Rentalcars.com, a provider of rental car services in Europe. In 2007, it acquired Agoda, an online travel company offering hotel bookings in Asia. We think management's efforts to expand its services and diversify geographically have enabled the company to gain market share over the past five years. Although some of its competitors entered Europe before Booking Holdings, savvy acquisitions have, in our opinion, enabled the company to become a leader in the European market.

Will he give any hints? Fed Chairman Powell is back on Capitol Hill again today, this time testifying on the U.S. economy to the House side. Powell always sticks to message - the Fed wants to be extra, super, highly confident that inflation will be sustainable at the 2% level before it considers lowering interest rates. Still, Wall Street and economists around the world listen for clues on when that day might come. Tomorrow at 8:30am, we get fresh inflation data in June CPI which will also be highly analyzed. The last print was 3.3% so we're not quite there yet at the level that Powell is looking for. The Jobs numbers out last week helped make the case for a rate cut. Now analysts are looking for further evidence. Meanwhile, markets are in a mid-summer mood today - flat.

This pick list highlights constituents of the Morningstar US Large Cap Index that we believe offer investors the best risk-adjusted return prospects. Stocks of large-cap companies where neither growth nor value characteristics predominate. Stocks in the top 70% of the capitalization of the U.S. equity market are defined as large cap.

After massive advances, it's looking more and more like the uptrend in metals is finally failing. We thought the rally might be over back in mid-April after a parabolic move and then a massive price reversal on huge volume. Gold (GLD), silver (SLV), and copper (CPER) all pulled back into early May but then made one advance to all-time highs for GLD and CPER and new recovery highs for SLV. Those new price peaks for GLD were minor and followed a big move higher, similar to what we recently saw in the stock market. These patterns of one last minor high after big rallies are bearish more often than not. In addition, the new highs were not confirmed by daily momentum and created nasty bearish divergences.