These are the sessions — hot summer sessions when everybody who’s anybody is on vacation and everyone else is asleep at their desks — when you have to scrape the proverbial barrel.

There isn’t a lot of color on offer during peak summer, so you take what you can get, where and when you can get it.

On the bright side, being compelled to refocus on the tedious for lack of livelier commentary isn’t the worst thing. We live in a world in thrall to sensationalism and it’s poisoning our minds.

So, here’s some tedium: The smartest guys on the Street say a 10% decline in the dollar means +2-3% on the bottom line for the S&P ceteris paribus because the index is heavily skewed to big tech companies which derive nearly half their revenues from abroad.

The chart on the left, below, shows you international revenue exposure by benchmark. If it feels like you’ve seen that chart before, that’s because you have, but I promise I’m not recycling it merely for the sake of recycling. Goldman’s David Kostin included it in his Q2 earnings coverage ahead of the reporting bonanza that unfolds this week and next.

If you’re a company which derives a lot of sales abroad, the tailwind from a weaker dollar’s helpful, but in this case the reason for dollar weakness (i.e., a trade war) arguably makes it not worth the trouble. As Kostin put it, “further trade conflict escalation would create the largest risk for companies with elevated international sales exposure.”

The figure on the right (Exhibit 10, above) you probably haven’t seen before. It shows the rolling one-year return for the trade-weighted dollar against relative performance for two custom Goldman stock baskets, one representing companies with the highest international sales exposure, the other companies with the highest domestic sales exposure. As you can see, there’s a pretty tight relationship.

The implication is that the weaker dollar (and for whatever it’s worth, Goldman’s FX team expects additional dollar weakness going forward) should spell outperformance for stocks with higher international sales exposure versus domestic-facing firms, something to consider before you dive into trades which assume a broadening out of the US equity rally.

Again, there’s a push-pull here. On one hand, the trade war’s supposed to benefit domestic-focused companies on a number of vectors — this is “America first” economic nationalism, after all. But the accompanying dollar weakness is a boon for giant multinationals, not small- and mid-cap firms which generate three quarters or more of their sales domestically.

Those giant multinationals also face a good news / bad news dichotomy in the trade war. When the dollar’s weak, revenue earned abroad “earns a premium” when swapped back into dollars, as Morgan Stanley put it a few weeks ago, but a protracted tariff battle jeopardizes American business interests around the world in a number of ways, not least of which is that Trump’s acrimonious approach sets them up to be targets for retaliation.

Kostin didn’t endeavor to adjudicate, opting instead for a noncommittal assessment. “Our economists expect continued USD weakness” which, if past is precedent, should favor “relative outperformance of international-facing stocks,” he said, before quickly adding that the bank “also expects US economic growth to outpace most other major economies in both 2025 and 2026, which should provide a relative tailwind to domestic-facing firms.”