Last Week: It was a pretty quiet news week, as the Wall Street Bears remained in hibernation, while the Chicago Bears emerged (a win is a win). As we moved into the ninth inning of earnings season, the blended (combines actual results for companies that have reported and estimated results for companies that have yet to report) earnings decline for the third quarter improved modestly to -2.4%, from -2.8% last week. [...]
Last Week: Despite a mixed bag of news, investors were treated to a Halloween rally that saw the S&P 500 gain 1.47% to set a new record high. The yield on the Ten-Year Treasury trickled down 7 basis points to 1.73% and the U.S. Dollar held steady. Apparently the same old spooky stories can’t scare the bulls anymore. Corporate earnings continued to modestly exceed the low bar that had been set [...]
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 [...]
Last Week: The S&P 500 declined 1.01% and the Russell 2000 sank 2.52% as trade, IPO, impeachment, and economic concerns dictated the mood on Wall Street. The yield on the Ten-Year Treasury slipped 9 basis points to 1.68% and the Dollar gained 0.5% to test its recent highs. The U.S.-China trade “dialogue” (I think it’s a mistake to call it a “war”) seemingly took a turn for the worse as a [...]
Last Week: There were numerous potentially troubling storylines starting with the attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure on Monday and finishing with reports that the China had canceled a visit to Montana farms on Friday. In the middle, a shortage of cash in the banking system led to a spike in the overnight repurchase rates to over 10%, and a FOMC decision to cut rates but with growing dissent on future [...]
Last Week: Treasury yields rose sharply during the week after signs that U.S. consumer spending remained strong and on receding trade tensions between the U.S. and China. Additionally, both the CPI and PPI showed some signs of inflation. The “Crowd” got caught all-in on the recession trade, long bonds and stocks that were categorized as recession-resistant, and a dramatic rotation into cyclical and value stocks was unleashed. The Russell 2000 Value [...]
Last Week: The economic releases were consistent with a slowing economy in August, with the manufacturing ISM cracking below the 50 level (contraction) and the BLS jobs report coming in at 130,000 versus an estimate of 158,000. Neither of those reports should be cause for alarm, in a fact with a longer-term perspective the jobs data remains very positive: Whereas a sub-50 in the ISM report suggests contraction, it is also [...]