October 2, 2019 @ 7:55 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Yesterday’s disappointing Purchasing Managers Index news on U.S. manufacturing has put two interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve back on Wall Street’s expectations.(Economists had expected that the PMI number for September would show the...
October 1, 2019 @ 6:22 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
All the major U.S. stock indexes fell today as the Institute for Supply Management’s Purchasing Managers Index for Manufacturing disappointed by sinking further into contraction territory. At 47.8 for September, the index hit a 10-year low. Economists surveyed by...
September 25, 2019 @ 7:50 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
The manufacturing sector–thanks to the U.S.-China trade war–continues to slow China’s economy. But the real problem may be an underperformance in the services sector that makes it impossible for that sector to pick up the slack. The end result is that the...
September 20, 2019 @ 7:38 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Today, Friday, September 20, the Federal Reserve will buy another $75 billion in the overnight repo market. That brings the total this week to $203 billion in the Fed’s effort to stabilize the short-term markets that Wall Street uses to finance its purchases of...
September 9, 2019 @ 7:10 pm | Breaking News, GOLD, Jubak Picks Portfolio, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
It’s by no means a guarantee of gains, but owing shares of a company that is riding the wave of positive macro and micro trends does indeed usually result in solid profits. On the macro side, Barrick Gold has global trends pointing toward toward higher gold...
September 3, 2019 @ 7:54 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
The Institute for Supply Management’s Purchasing Managers Index fell to 49.1 in August, according to data released this morning. That was below all the forecasts of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. In this survey anything below 50 indicates that a sector is...
August 28, 2019 @ 7:51 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Recessions have a huge “sentiment” component in their causation. Consumers and CEOs look around at the economy, assess their feelings about the future economy, and decide that the prudent course is to cut back on spending to prepare for the coming economic...
August 27, 2019 @ 7:12 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
With the proviso that no one is inside the head of Chinese President Xi Jinping (except Xi himself) and that this is all speculative analysis which carries it’s own bias, I think it’s worth taking seriously reports that Xi may have a Trump problem that...
August 22, 2019 @ 10:50 pm | Breaking News, Update, XOM, You May Have Missed |
On Monday, August 19, I posted a deep dive into the financials at Concho Resources (CXO) to illustrate some of the pressures weighing on the stocks of oil shale producers. Now Exxon Mobil (XOM) is a very different kind of oil company. It’s diversified globally....
August 21, 2019 @ 7:47 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
The financial market didn’t get what it had hoped for out of today’s release of the minutes from the Federal Reserve’s July 31 meeting. The market was hoping for something in the minutes that pointed toward a shift in Fed policy toward an extended...
August 20, 2019 @ 7:13 pm | Breaking News, You May Have Missed |
After-hours on July 31, Concho Resources (CXO), the biggest producer in the low-cost, high-yield Permian Basin, reported earnings of 69 cents a share for the second quarter of 2019. That missed the Wall Street consensus by 3 cents a share. Revenue climbed 19.3% year...
August 19, 2019 @ 7:55 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Gotta love that financial market enthusiasm for central banks. Last week the markets rallied on signals from the European Central Bank that it would cut its key interest rate–now at a negative 0.40%–to a negative -0.50%, lower the rates that banks pay to...
August 14, 2019 @ 7:18 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 800.49 points today, or 3.05%; the Standard & Poor’s 500 finished 2.93% lower; and the NASDAQ Composite lost 3.02%. One reason for the plunge was an intraday inversion in the Treasury yield curve with the yield...
August 12, 2019 @ 7:42 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
The United States has called China a “thuggish regime” after the country labelled a U.S. diplomat who met with Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, a “black hand.” Along with charges that the meeting showed the United States was...
August 9, 2019 @ 7:40 pm | Breaking News, You May Have Missed |
This morning President Donald Trump said that talks with China planned for next month could be called off. “We’ll see whether or not we keep our meeting in September,” Trump said as he left the White House for a fundraiser in the Hamptons. “If we do, that’s fine. If...
August 6, 2019 @ 7:22 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Stocks rallied today on signs that the People’s Bank intends to deliver an orderly drop in China’s currency. This morning the yuan traded slightly above the critical 7 yuan to the dollar currency band. And the bank said it will sell $4.2 billion in yuan...
August 5, 2019 @ 7:38 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
For the last few weeks I’ve been working to shift gears in my online portfolios in anticipation of a tougher market after the Federal Reserve meeting (and a likely additional interest rate cut) on September 18. I’ve added Treasury ETFs–the Vanguard...
August 5, 2019 @ 7:13 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
It would be unwise to assume that today’s retaliation by China is the last tit for tat in the U.S.-China war. What “reasonable” fears are making rounds today? That the Chinese decision to let the yuan break the 7-yuan-to-the-dollar barrier...
August 5, 2019 @ 7:07 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
We suspend our usual programming to cover the developing financial market and likely economic reaction to China’s decision to let the yuan tumble in retaliation to President Donald Trump’s decision last week to place a 10% tariff on an additional $300...
August 1, 2019 @ 7:28 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
So much for any hopes that the resumption of U.S-China trade talks would put an end to the tariff war in anything like the near term. The new round of talks only began on Wednesday, was adjourned after a day, and was scheduled to resume in Washington in September....
August 1, 2019 @ 7:21 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Can you connect the dots? No one in Washington seems to be willing to make the effort. On a day when the Federal Reserve said it would cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points and end its efforts to sell some of the bonds in its own portfolio two months...
July 31, 2019 @ 7:51 pm | Breaking News, Dividend Income Portfolio, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Today the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee cut the Fed’s benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points. That’s pretty much what the financial markets had been expecting–although a sizable minority of investors and traders had been hoping...
July 26, 2019 @ 7:44 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
The U.S. economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 2.1% in the second quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported this morning. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had projected that year over year growth in GDP would fall to 1.8%. So today’s...
July 22, 2019 @ 6:47 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
The White House and congressional Democrats are nearing a deal to raise the debt ceiling for two years and fund the government, CNBC, the Wall St Street Journal and other sources are reporting today. The deal would suspend the debt ceiling limit for two years and put...
July 19, 2019 @ 7:56 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
It’s not just the huge miss on subscriber growth that has sent shares of Netflix (NFLX) plunging in the two days since it reported second quarter earnings. The stock fell 10.27%, or $37.23 a share, on July 18 and it was down another 1.87% today as of 2 p.m. New...
July 17, 2019 @ 7:27 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
According to Dow Theory the transportation index leads the Dow Jones Industrial Average higher and lower. A divergence between a climbing Dow Industrial Average and a falling Down Jones Transportation Average (DJTA) is an indicator of trouble to come. And that...
July 15, 2019 @ 7:48 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Of course, we can’t trust China’s official GDP statistics. Government economists cook the books so that China’s growth stays within the goals set by the country’s leaders every year. But investors should pay attention to the trend. And this...
July 15, 2019 @ 7:43 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Okay, we all know that the current rally that has pushed U.S. equities to one record after another is built on cheap money. That is on a Federal Reserve that has promised to cut interest rates one, two, or maybe even three times in 2019. And on a hope on Wall Street...
July 12, 2019 @ 7:20 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Looking at what I called “the shortish short term” in a post yesterday, I said that in that time frame the market is likely to behave as if nothing much matters besides the Federal Reserve and interest rate cuts. The logic, I argued, works like this:...
July 11, 2019 @ 7:38 pm | Breaking News, You May Have Missed |
In the second day of his semi-annual testimony to Congress–this time in front of the Senate–Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell sounded even more likely to support an interest rate cut at the central bank’s July meeting. The Fed has room to cut...