July 2026: What Changed After June
July was supposed to be the month I recovered from June’s 11.36% loss. It didn’t really work out that way — most of the portfolio didn’t actually recover. One part of it did, and that part alone was enough to turn the whole month positive.
My portfolio was up 1.49% in July, leaving me down 0.89% for the year. On the surface, that looks like a decent bounce back from a very bad June. But when I split the portfolio between China and non-China, the picture changed completely.
| Month | China contribution | Non-China contribution |
|---|---|---|
| June | -5.9% | -5.5% |
| July | +9.9% | -8.4% |
In June, both sides of the portfolio hurt me by roughly the same amount.
In July, that flipped — China carried the whole month, while everything outside it got worse. So the portfolio didn’t really recover. China did.
Where the July return came from
At the sector level, the same pattern shows up.
| Sector | Allocation % of Portfolio | Value Change in July |
|---|---|---|
| Industrials | 30.6% | -2.5% |
| Healthcare | 29.4% | +7.6% |
| Consumer Discretionary | 21.4% | +2.7% |
| Technology | 9.3% | -1.3% |
| Materials | 6.2% | +2.5% |
| Financials | 1.8% | +0.4% |
| Energy | 1.1% | -1.6% |
Healthcare was my biggest positive mover. Industrials was my biggest drag.
Interestingly, they end July at almost the same size — but they got there in completely different ways. Healthcare grew. Industrials shrank.
The Healthcare number is also where my own decisions started to matter. In my mid-year review, I’d already concluded healthcare was under-allocated relative to how much I actually believed in it. July was when I started acting on that — trimming some holdings and moving the money into DexCom and Tempus, and rebuilding a position in WuXi AppTec after fully exiting it back in June.
It looked like it worked immediately. Healthcare became my biggest positive mover for the month.
But I’m not calling that validation yet.
I was buying while the sector was going up, so I have to be careful about calling that a win. Some of the +7.6% is simply because I owned more of it. DexCom is the cleanest exception — it beat earnings by a wide margin in the same month I added to it, so at least part of the move was earned. WuXi Biologics, which I didn’t touch at all, was quietly positive too.
That’s probably the more useful way for me to look at July: I made a portfolio decision, and the market immediately rewarded it. One month isn’t enough to tell me whether the decision was right.
Three stocks, three reactions to good news
Alibaba and WeRide gave me two very different reactions to good news in July. Then Doximity gave me a third version of the same pattern, just as I was finishing this in August.
Alibaba: good news that changed the numbers
Alibaba was up over 25%. I didn’t touch the position.
The news was the kind that can actually change a forecast: cloud revenue growing fast, AI workloads becoming a real chunk of the business, instant-commerce losses narrowing, a legal cloud clearing, Qwen picking up real distribution in China. Alibaba gave the market something it could put into a model. That’s roughly 2.2% of my July return, and I’m comfortable calling it real — the market repricing the company, not me buying more of it.
The next test is the earnings release expected on 20 August. July’s rally raised expectations. I want to see whether the actual numbers catch up to them.
WeRide: good news that didn’t change the price
WeRide had, if anything, a busier month.
Recognition for its UAE deployment. A new autonomous-driving AI platform. A partnership expanding into Denmark. The untouched position moved exactly nowhere.
That initially bothered me. If the company is executing, shouldn’t the stock go up?
Looking at Alibaba and WeRide side by side, I’m less bothered by it now. WeRide gave the market more evidence that the technology is working. Alibaba gave the market evidence that could change the company’s earnings trajectory. Those aren’t the same thing.
WeRide reported Q2 2026 while I was writing this. Revenue up 82%. More than doubled from the prior quarter. Margins expanding, overseas now pushing 40% of the business. Real numbers this time, not just another partnership announcement.
The stock fell more than 9% anyway.
The clearest reason, from the coverage, wasn’t about timing — it was about profitability. Investors don’t seem satisfied with strong revenue growth on its own. They want to see the losses actually closing.
And, I agree. Growth without a real path to profitability isn’t the same as a company getting better — it’s just a bigger number attached to the same problem.
Management still isn’t pointing to full profitability until 2029.
I’m choosing to look past the 2029 target for now, not because the market’s wrong to care about losses, but because global reach is the part of the thesis I actually believe in.
Doximity: good news that moved the price too much
Doximity is technically an August story, but it happened while I was writing this and it was too interesting to leave out.
On 6 August it beat revenue expectations and raised guidance, though earnings were a cent below estimates. It closed at $20.66 that day, then reacted violently overnight — over 130% at the meaningful premarket peak, briefly over 200% on an illiquid print — enough to trigger a volatility halt right at the open.
I didn’t sell.
Watching that spike happen, based on the earnings and guidance I expected somewhere around $38-40 to be where it would eventually settle — a reset floor once the initial euphoria cooled, still reflecting genuinely good results. I was wrong. It kept fading for days after that, well past my own floor, until it was sitting barely above where it started before any of this happened.
I missed my chance.
The lesson isn’t “sell when a stock spikes.” It’s simpler: even my own corrected guess can be wrong, not just the market’s first one. I’m still holding, because my view on the business has improved from the management guidance. The earnings gave me more confidence in the underlying business — the price action just reminded me not to confuse that with what the stock should actually be worth in the short term.
What I’m taking into August
For context, here’s how the portfolio compared with the S&P 500 and Hang Seng:
| Benchmark | June | July | Year-to-date |
|---|---|---|---|
| My Portfolio | -11.36% | +1.49% | -0.89% |
| S&P 500 | ~-1.0% | ~-0.1% | +9.4% |
| Hang Seng Index | ~-9.1% | +13.1% | +1.0% |
Three things I’m actually watching as the month plays out:
China vs. non-China: July was a sharp reversal — China carrying the whole portfolio while non-China got worse. Does that keep going into August, or was it a one-month swing rather than a new pattern?
Healthcare: did increasing the allocation improve the portfolio because the underlying businesses justify it, or because July happened to be a good month?
Alibaba: does the 20 August earnings report justify the July re-rating, or was it built on sentiment that doesn’t hold?
And then August happened
I started writing this thinking July was the story.
Then August happened.
| Monthly Movement | June | July | 1–11 August |
|---|---|---|---|
| My Portfolio | -11.36% | +1.49% | ~+11% |
Down 11.36% in June. Up 1.49% in July. Up roughly another 11 percentage points in the first eleven days of August.
That’s starting to look like the V-shaped recovery I was turning over in my head after June. The strange part is I still don’t know what to make of it. I don’t have August’s attribution yet, so I’m not going to pretend I know what’s driving it.
I don’t know yet whether this is the start of a real recovery or just another swing in a portfolio that’s become a lot more volatile than I’d like. That’s probably a better question to leave until August is over.
Disclaimer: This is a review of my personal portfolio and performance for learning purposes. It is not investment advice.