Last Week: The market rallied towards record highs as the corporate earnings, trade, and Fed headlines were all somewhat sanguine. Corporate earnings continued to modestly exceed the low bar that was set for the third quarter, as the blended (combines actual results for companies that have reported and estimated results for companies that have yet to report) earnings decline for the quarter shrank to -3.7% from an earnings decline of -4.8% [...]
Last Week: The Good: Third quarter corporate earnings are off to a handsome start, with more than 14% of S&P 500 companies having reported through Friday, FactSet data shows that 81% posted earnings that beat analyst expectations. To be sure, the companies are being rated on a very low bar this earnings season as the consensus expectations call for third-quarter earnings to fall by 4.6%. The Bad: Retail sales data for [...]
Last Week: In the summer of 1983, while I was preparing to enter the training program at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the hilarious comedy “Trading Places” was released. The climax of the movie is the year-end release of the USDA report on the orange crop forecast, as all the traders wait for that report to either buy or sell orange juice futures. It’s a binary process, good crop equals sell while bad [...]
Last Week: If you crawled under a rock on Sunday night and emerged on Friday afternoon and checked in on the markets, you would come to the conclusion that not much had happened. The S&P 500 finished down 0.33%, while the Dollar, Gold , and VIX (Volatility Index) were all at similar levels to the previous week. The bond market, however, would provide you a clue that there had been significant [...]