Reading the stock market tea leaves is an occupation better left to Wall Street types, but it doesn’t take a Goldman Sachs soothsayer to interpret August’s charts as forgettable – at least on the surface.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average willed itself into the black for the month, gaining 0.3 percent to close at 21,948.10 on Aug. 31; the S&P 500 languished, closing up less than 0.1 percent at 1,471.65 for the period; and Nasdaq managed to claim something resembling victory in August, jumping 1.3 percent to close at 6,428.66.

But those numbers don’t tell the full story. Market volatility was up – the Dow Jones saw it largest single-day drop in three months and Nasdaq had its third-worst day of the year.

Maybe the most troubling market indicator for Los Angeles came in the form of the Russell 2000 Index’s four-week swoon, which began in late July. The Russell tracks small- and midmarket companies, the core of our region’s cohort when it comes to publicly traded companies.

That was the longest run of weekly declines since October 2014.

There’s no dancing around the cause of the market’s recent jitters: President Donald Trump.

Figuring out where to begin a critique of the first eight months of his presidency is a game of whack-a-mole. Trump’s cavalier Twitter diplomacy in response to North Korea’s nuclear missile testing ranks high on the list. His failure to unequivocally denounce white supremacists after a protester was killed at a rally in Charlottesville, Va., might top it.

Markets have mostly ignored these stumbles – and a host of others by Trump – on the belief pro-business economic legislation and deregulation would be his administration’s priority.

Maybe they shouldn’t, seeing that tax reform remains untouched, and there’s been no concrete progress on trade policy or any substantive regulatory overhauls.

Tax cuts in particular would help smaller outfits here thrive, according to a study by Nuveen Asset Management, which found small-cap companies’ effective tax rate is 6 percent higher than large-cap corporations.

There’s still no tax cut in sight, though, and that leaves us to wonder if August’s market wheezings are a harbinger of a real slide to come. Or are the ups and downs just another blip in the long upward march U.S. stock indexes began in March 2009?

We’ll concede that some on Wall Street or in Washington might have the benefit of inside views of the action, but it seems from our perspective that cracks are beginning to show.