Tag Archive: S&P 500

Great News! Consumer Sentiment Is Awful!

2023-01-04

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2023-01-04

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen blog posts or articles or Tweets about negative consumer sentiment over the last year. These articles rightly point out that the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey is sitting near (or at a few months ago) 50 year lows. This fact is taken as a negative for the economy and therefore stocks.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Peak Pessimism?

2022-10-03

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2022-10-03

Goodbye and good riddance to the third quarter of 2022. That was one of the wildest 3 months I’ve experienced in my 40 years of trading and investing. The quarter started off great with the S&P 500 rising 14% from July 1 to August 16 but ended with a 17% swan dive into the end of the quarter. And we closed on the low of the year.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Same As It Ever Was

2022-08-22

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2022-08-22

History never repeats itself. Man always does. Mark Twain is credited with a similar saying, that history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. Of course, there is scant evidence that Clemens said anything of the sort just as Voltaire may or may not have penned the quote above. But both men were much wittier than I – than most – so I’ll take them both as being representative if not genuine.

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Gold traders on trial: Only buy physical

2022-07-15

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2022-07-15

Followers of the gold and silver price will have long been aware of the cases brought against large banks for manipulating the precious metals markets. This week has brought the issue to the fore as three former JP Morgan employees stand trial for “racketeering conspiracy as well as conspiring to commit price manipulation, wire fraud, commodities fraud and spoofing from 2008 to 2016”.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Expand Your Horizons

2022-06-29

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2022-06-29

Late last year I wrote a weekly update that focused on the speculative nature of the markets. In that article, I focused on the S&P 500 because I wanted to make a point, namely that owning the S&P 500 did not absolve investment advisers of their fiduciary duty.

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Market Pulse: Mid-Year Update

2022-06-24

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2022-06-24

Note: This update is longer than usual but I felt a comprehensive review was necessary. The Federal Reserve panicked last week and spooked investors into the worst week for stocks since the onset of COVID in March 2020. The S&P 500 is now firmly in bear market territory but that is a fraction of the pain in stocks and other risky assets.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Is The Bear Market Over?

2022-05-31

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2022-05-31

Stocks had a rip snorter of a rally last week and a lot of people are pondering the question in the title over this long weekend. The S&P 500 was down 20.9% from intraday high (4818.62, January 4th) to intraday low (3810.32, May 20th). From that intraday low the market has risen 9.1% in just six trading days.

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Why The Next Powell Pivot Will Destroy Stocks And Drive Metals And Miners Higher

2022-05-26

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2022-05-26

“The Federal Reserve will take it to the point of maximum pain and then they’ll reverse, this is when we’ll see the Powell Pivot.” These are the words of warning from Craig Hemke, this week’s guest on GoldCore TV, interviewed by Dave Russell.

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Is Gold Starting to Behave Itself?

2022-05-14

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2022-05-14

Gold is doing what it is supposed to do!  Equity markets are tumbling, “NASDAQ 100 Rout Erases $1.5 Trillion in Market Value in 3 Days” reads one Bloomberg headline.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Is This A Bear Market?

2022-03-16

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2022-03-16

I don’t know the answer to the question posed in the title. No one does because the future is not predictable. I don’t know what will happen in Ukraine. I don’t know how much what has already happened there – and what might – matters to the US and global economy. I don’t know if the Fed is making a mistake by (likely) hiking interest rates by an entire 1/4 of 1% this week.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Fear Makes A Comeback

2022-01-24

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2022-01-24

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Discounting The Future

2021-12-07

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2021-12-07

The economic news recently has been better than expected and in most cases just pretty darn good. That isn’t true on a global basis as Europe continues to experience a pretty sluggish recovery from COVID. And China is busy shooting itself in the foot as Xi pursues the re-Maoing of Chinese society, damn the economic costs.

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What’s Going On, And Why Late August?

2020-10-29

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2020-10-29

ICE: US$ Index Futures, DX1
This isn’t about COVID. It’s been building since the end of August, a shift in mood, perception, and reality that began turning things several months before even then. With markets fickle yet again, a lot today, what’s going on here?

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Why The FOMC Just Embraced The Stock Bubble (and anything else remotely sounding inflationary)

2020-06-14

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2020-06-14

Mainstream Models World Bank
The job, as Jay Powell currently sees it, means building up the S&P 500 as sky high as it can go. The FOMC used to pay lip service to valuations, but now everything is different. He’ll signal to all those fund managers by QE raising bank reserves, leading them on in what they all want to believe is “money printing” (that isn’t).

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A Day For Rate Cuts

2020-03-04

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2020-03-04

Total Credit Market, 1980-2015
Well, that wasn’t he had in mind. The whole point of a rate cut, any rate cut let alone an emergency fifty, is to signal especially the stock market that the Fed is in the business of…something. The public has been led, by and large, to assume that something good happens when the Fed Chair shows up on TV.

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The Transitory Story, I Repeat, The Transitory Story

2019-05-24

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2019-05-24

Money Markets Equivalents, 2017-2019
Understand what the word “transitory” truly means in this context. It is no different than Ben Bernanke saying, essentially, subprime is contained. To the Fed Chairman in early 2007, this one little corner of the mortgage market in an otherwise booming economy was a transitory blip that booming economy would easily withstand. Just eight days before Bernanke would testify confidently before Congress, the FOMC had met to discuss their lying eyes....

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A Few Questions From Today’s BOND ROUT!!!!

2018-10-05

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2018-10-05

Benchmark 10-year UST 2017-2018
On April 2, the benchmark 10-year US Treasury yield traded below 2.75%. It had been as high as 2.94% in later February at the tail end of last year’s inflation hysteria. But after the shock of global liquidations in late January and early February, liquidity concerns would override again at least for a short while. After April 2, the BOND ROUT!!!! was re-energized and away went interest rates.

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Global Asset Allocation Update

2018-08-02

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2018-08-02

Moderate Allocation 50-50 risk budget
The risk budget is unchanged again this month. For the moderate risk investor, the allocation between bonds and risk assets is evenly split. The only change to the portfolio is the one I wrote about last week, an exchange of TIP for SHY.

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Mid-Year Global Markets Update

2018-07-19

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2018-07-19

S&P 500
Volatility returned to markets with a vengeance in the first half of this year. 2018 started off as an extension of last year when volatility was almost wholly absent. Stocks roared out of the starting gate, up almost every day until January 26th. And then – whoosh. What took nearly a month to gain took just 6 trading days to give back and then some.

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Buybacks Get All The Macro Hate, But What About Dividends?

2018-07-13

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2018-07-13

S&P500 Stock Repurchases 2000-2018
When it comes to the stock market and the corporate cash flow condition, our attention is usually drawn to stock repurchases. With good reason. These controversial uses of scarce internal funds are traditionally argued along the lines of management teams identifying and correcting undervalued shares. History shows, conclusively, that hasn’t really been true.

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