Category Archive: 5.) Alhambra Investments

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Weekly Market Pulse: An Energetic Market

2025-09-18

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2025-09-18

Quite the turnaround from February–March. Back then, tariff chaos sank the dollar 10% in March, volatility spiked, correlations went quickly toward +1, markets cracked, and only currency havens like the euro, yen, and gold found love.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Big Rate Cuts? Not Right Now

2025-08-18

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2025-08-18

“I think we could go into a series of rate cuts here, starting with a 50 basis-point rate cut in September”. “If you look at any model” it suggests that “we should probably be 150, 175 basis points lower.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a Bloomberg interview, 8/13/25 President Trump and others in his administration have been pushing for lower interest rates for months – one wonders what they’re worried about – and are doing and saying...

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Weekly Market Pulse: The Turkey Leg

2025-06-23

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2025-06-23

Note: I wrote most of this commentary prior to the US strike on Iran and I decided to go ahead with it anyway. I don’t know any more than you do about what is going on in the Middle East and trying to predict what will happen in the coming days and weeks is a fool’s errand. We have a strategic allocation to commodities in our portfolios exactly because we can’t predict things like this.

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Weekly Market Pulse: No Free Lunches

2025-05-19

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2025-05-19

Moody’s Ratings downgrades United States ratings to Aa1 from Aaa; changes outlook to stable New York, May 16, 2025 — Moody’s Ratings (Moody’s) has downgraded the Government of United States of America’s (US) long-term issuer and senior unsecured ratings to Aa1 from Aaa and changed the outlook to stable from negative.

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Weekly Market Pulse: On The Road Again

2025-05-12

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2025-05-12

“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Peak America?

2025-04-21

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2025-04-21

The US economy has been the envy of the world for a long time, especially after the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID pandemic. Our economy has grown faster than just about any other in the developed world thanks in large part to the extraordinary performance of our technology sector. Our markets for debt and equity are the largest and most liquid on the planet. The US economy represents roughly 25% of global GDP but our stocks make up over 50%...

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Weekly Market Pulse: Tune Out The Noise

2025-02-24

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2025-02-24

Okay, I confess. It was my fault. I decided to take a couple of days off. I took my eye off the ball and the stock market fell a quick 2% while I was relaxing, eating too much, and seeing some great art in the Holy City, Charleston, SC. I promise it won’t happen again, at least until my wife tells me where we’re going next. It is a running joke within Alhambra that every time I go away for a few days the market takes a hit. Of course, that isn’t...

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Weekly Market Pulse: Is The Honeymoon Over Already?

2025-01-27

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2025-01-27

President Trump’s first week on the job was a good one for markets. The S&P 500 was up 1.75%, with tech stocks taking the lead as the President welcomed a group of leading technology CEOs to D.C. to announce big investments in AI.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Questions

2024-10-14

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2024-10-14

As we enter the final quarter of 2024, there are a lot of questions facing investors. There are, of course, always a lot of questions because investors are always dealing with the future, but today’s environment does seems to have more than usual.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Did The Fed Just Make A Mistake?

2024-09-23

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2024-09-23

Well, they did it. The Fed cut the Fed Funds rate by 50 basis points last week and indicated that there is likely more to come. Stock investors liked it, bidding up small cap stocks (S&P 600) by 2.25%, large caps (S&P 500) by 1.4% and the NASDAQ by 1.5%.

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Weekly Market Pulse: It’s An Uncertain World

2024-09-03

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2024-09-03

You’re going to hear a lot of talk about the yield curve soon and what it means for “the” yield curve to uninvert (which isn’t a real word but will get used a lot). The difference between the 10-year Treasury note yield and the 2-year Treasury note yield is about to turn positive, the 2-year note yield recently falling a bit more rapidly than the 10-year.

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Market Morsel: SLOOSing

2024-08-06

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2024-08-06

The Senior Loan Officer Survey came out yesterday and I’m sure you’ve been waiting on pins and needles, as I have, to see the results. Okay, maybe you had better things to do. I sure hope so because it isn’t exactly riveting.

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Q3 Cyclical Outlook

2024-06-25

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2024-06-25

Growth peaked on a quarter over quarter seasonally adjusted annual rate in Q3 last year at 4.9%. The preferred reading is on an annual basis where growth peaked in Q4 of last year at 3.13%. Growth in Q1 was 2.88% and growth in Q2 has risen some and is trending at right about 3%. 

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Weekly Market Pulse: The Sober Spending Of Drunken Sailors

2024-06-24

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2024-06-24

Any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long. True of Habsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the U.S. beginning this very year.

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Market Morsel: How “The Market” Is Really Doing

2024-06-12

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2024-06-12

When people talk about “the market” they are usually referring the big indexes – the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ. For more casual observers, “the market” is the Dow which is a lousy index for a lot of reasons but has the advantage of history. But are any those really representative of how “the market” is doing? Not really.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Are Higher Interest Rates Good For The Economy?

2024-04-15

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2024-04-15

Interest rates surged last week on the back of a hotter-than-expected inflation report that wasn’t actually that bad (see below). Not that my – or your – opinion about these things matters all that much to the market.

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Market Morsels: ISM and Recession

2024-02-07

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2024-02-07

The ISM manufacturing survey has been below 50 for 15 months in a row and sits today at 49.1. This survey, along with a lot of other manufacturing data and anecdotes, has been cited repeatedly by the economic bears as evidence we are heading for recession. That, of course, hasn’t happened and that is consistent with this indicator.

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Macro: GDP Q3 — Inflationary BOOM!

2023-12-22

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2023-12-22

Outside of the pandemic defined as 2020 and 2021, this past quarter was the 5th best quarter for nominal GDP in the last 25 years.

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Macro: Philly Fed Mfg Survey — Umm

2023-12-22

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2023-12-22

Tis was a poor number. The headline dropped from -5.9 to -10.5. The more eye popping number was the Index for New Orders which dropped from 1.3 to -25.6.

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Macro: Banking: Senior Loan Officer’s Survey and Lending

2023-11-08

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2023-11-08

Banks continue to tighten lending standards across all sectors. This has eased a bit from the July survey. Banks continue to widen spreads across all sectors. The percentage of banks widening spreads has also eased a tad.

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