Tag Archive: stocks

What’s Going On, And Why Late August?

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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Monthly Macro Monitor – September (VIDEO)

Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun and Alhambra's Bob Williams look at data from the past month and discuss what it means for the economy.

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Monthly Macro Monitor – September 2020

The economic data over the last month continued to improve but the breadth of improvement has narrowed. Additionally, while most of the economic data series are still improving, the rate of change, as Jeff pointed out recently, has slowed. I guess that isn’t that surprising as the initial phase of the recovery comes to an end.

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Uh Oh, The Dollar Has Caught A Bid

Anyone who follows Alhambra knows that we keep an eye on the dollar. It is a very important part of our process of identifying the economic environment. A rising dollar, when combined with a falling rate of growth, can be a lethal combination. That was the situation in March and of course during the financial crisis of 2008.

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Monthly Market Monitor – August 2020

Many of the weak dollar trends I noted in June’s update have moderated – even as the dollar has weakened further. US stocks surged over the last month, with growth indices leaving their value counterparts in the dust…again.

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Eurodollar University’s Making Sense; Episode 24, Part 2: Peering Behind The (Unemployment Rate) Curtain

———WHERE——— AlhambraTube: https://bit.ly/2Xp3roy Apple: https://apple.co/3czMcWN iHeart: https://ihr.fm/31jq7cI Castro: https://bit.ly/30DMYza TuneIn: http://tun.in/pjT2Z Google: https://bit.ly/3e2Z48M Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3arP8mY Castbox: https://bit.ly/3fJR5xQ Breaker: https://bit.ly/2CpHAFO Podbean: https://bit.ly/2QpaDgh Stitcher: https://bit.ly/2C1M1GB Overcast: https://bit.ly/2YyDsLa SoundCloud: https://bit.ly/3l0yFfK...

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Monthly Macro Monitor – August 2020 (VIDEO)

Monthly macro monitor review of August 2020 with Bob Williams and Joe Calhoun.

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Monthly Macro Monitor – August 2020

One of the advantages we enjoy here at Alhambra is the opportunity to interact with a lot of investors. We talk to hundreds of individual investors on a monthly basis, giving us a front-row seat to everyone’s fear and greed. Economic data tells us about the past, which isn’t particularly useful for investors focused on the future.

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Part 2 of June TIC: The Dollar Why

Before getting into the why of the dollar’s stubbornly high exchange value in the face of so much “money printing”, we need to first go back and undertake a decent enough review of the guts maybe even the central focus of the global (euro)dollar system.

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Fama 2: No Inflation For Old Central Banks

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the core CPI in July 2020 jumped by the most (+0.62%) in almost thirty years. After having dropped month-over-month for three months in a row for the first time in its history, it has posted back to back gains the latest of which pushing the index back above its February level.

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Eugene Fama’s Efficient View of Stimulus Porn

The key word in the whole thing is “bias.” For a very long time, people working in and around the finance industry have sought to gain tremendous advantages. No explanation for the motive is required. Charts, waves, technical (sounding) analysis and so on.

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Monthly Market Monitor – July 2020

Most Long-Term Trends Have Not Changed. A lot has changed over the last 4 months since the COVID virus started to impact the global economy. Asia was infected first with China at ground zero. Their economy succumbed first with a large part of the country shut down to a degree that can only be accomplished in an authoritarian regime.

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Monthly Macro Monitor – June 2020

The stock market has recovered most of its losses from the March COVID-19 induced sell-off and the enthusiasm with which stocks are being bought – and sold but mostly bought – could lead one to believe that the crisis is over, that the economy has completely or nearly completely recovered. Unfortunately, other markets do not support that notion nor does the available economic data.

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

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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We Have Reached The Silly Phase of the Bull Market

Have we entered a new bull market? Was the 35% pullback in the S&P 500 in March the fastest bear market in history? Or is this just a continuation of the bull market that started in 2009, interrupted by a rather large correction? Bull markets and bear markets are about behavior, about the human emotions of fear and greed. While we got a brief bout of fear in March, greed has since overwhelmed all sense, common and otherwise.

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COT Black: No Love For Super-Secret Models

As I’ve said, it is a threefold failure of statistical models. The first being those which showed the economy was in good to great shape at the start of this thing. Widely used and even more widely cited, thanks to Jay Powell and his 2019 rate cuts plus “repo” operations the calculations suggested the system was robust.

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Three Short Run Factors Don’t Make A Long Run Difference

There are three things the markets have going for them right now, and none of them have anything to do with the Federal Reserve. More and more conditions resemble the early thirties in that respect, meaning no respect for monetary powers. This isn’t to say we are repeating the Great Depression, only that the paths available to the system to use in order to climb out of this mess have similarly narrowed.

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Regime Change

Stocks took another beating last week as the scope of the coronavirus shutdown started to sink in. The S&P 500 was down 15% last week with most of that coming on Monday after the Fed’s emergency rate cuts. Our accounts performed much better than that, but were still down on the week as corporate and municipal bonds continued to get marked down.

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Is GFC2 Over?

Is it over? That’s the question everyone is asking about both major crises, the answer is more obvious for only the one. As it pertains to the pandemic, no, it is not. Still the early stages. The other crisis, the global dollar run? Not looking like it, either.

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Is Now a Good Time to Buy Gold? Market Report 16 March

We got hate mail after publishing Silver Backwardation Returns. It seems that someone thought backwardation means silver is a backward idea, or a bad bet. “You are a *&%#! idiot,” cursed he. “Silver is the most underpriced asset on the planet,” he offered as his sole supporting evidence. He doesn’t know that backwardation means scarcity, not that a commodity’s price is too high.

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