Markets: The high for the week was set on the opening Monday morning, but those modest gains quickly evaporated by lunch time as the S&P went negative -0.5%, and basically stayed around that level the rest of the week. Small and Mid-Cap stocks fared slightly better, and advancing issues outpaced decliners 8-7. The tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 1.06% ending a four-week winning streak. Bank stocks were the biggest winners advancing 6.4% as [...]
The S&P 500 Total Return Index finished up 8.93% for the quarter and is up 5.57% for the year. The Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index gained 0.62%% for the quarter and is up 6.72% for the year. This has been a historically volatile year for the stock market. Investors are clearly focused on the spread of the COVID‐19 pandemic and the effect on the global economy. In addition, the U.S. election [...]
For the next few weeks, we are going to format the Blog to cover the topics that seem to be of most interest, those being the markets, stimulus, economic reports, earnings reports, and COVID-19. We would appreciate any relevant feedback on this new layout. The Markets: The S&P 500 jumped nearly 2% Monday morning on iPhone 12 enthusiasm, but then slowly faded over the week to finish up a modest 0.2% [...]
Last Week: From Dictionary.com: Stimulus (stim-yuh-luhs), noun. In economics, a stimulus is a government injection of money into an economy and intended to spur (stimulate) economic growth. If William Shakespeare were around in 2020 he might have penned “to stimulate, or not to stimulate, that is the question”. Indeed that has been the question for the last few months, and it certain dominated the narrative last week. On Tuesday Federal Reserve Chair Jerome [...]
Last Week: Here is how we wrapped up our previous commentary: “Politics will become an even more dominant verse, with the first presidential debate being held on Tuesday in Cleveland. The most important economic release will come on Friday when The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the jobs report for September, with the consensus calling for the headline unemployment rate dropping down to 8.2% from 8.4%. Additionally, the Consumer Confidence [...]