Last Week: The stock market party was disrupted as the Coronavirus upset the apple cart. Corporate earnings reports were strong and interest rates moved lower, but the S&P 500 declined 1.03% and the Russell 2000 fell 2.2%. It was the biggest one-week drop in the market since August, with most of the damage coming on Friday. Positive earnings surprises recorded by companies in the Information Technology sector were mainly responsible for [...]
Last Week:President Donald Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He finally signed a phase-one trade deal on Wednesday. The eight-part deal includes protections for trade secrets and intellectual property, mechanisms for enforceability, and commitments by Beijing to increase purchases of U.S. goods and services by $200 billion over the next two years and broadens U.S. companies’ access to China’s markets. The bad news is that tariffs on $370 billion of Chinese imports [...]
Last Week: P=MV P=Momentum M=Mass V=Velocity The S&P 500 set another record on Thursday, as the upward momentum powered stocks through the destabilizing news flow from the Middle East. A minor sell-off on Friday following a tepid jobs report left the S&P 500 slightly below that record, but still +0.9% for the week. The yield on the Ten-Year Treasury inched up 3 basis points to 1.82%. For those of you who [...]
Last Week: The economic trends remained in place as 2019 wrapped up as the number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits at the end of 2019 fell slightly, showing the pace of layoffs in the U.S. remains near a half-century low. Initial jobless claims slipped by 2,000 to 222,000 in the seven days ended Dec. 28. Meanwhile a slump of American manufacturers deepened in December as a survey of senior [...]