Earnings Are a Problem For Bears
You really have to give the bear camp credit these days. Despite being just plain wrong about the economy, earnings, and the state of the stock market, our furry friends are sticking to their guns. Yes, uber-bear Mike Wilson kinda/sorta did a mea culpa a couple months back. But like the rest of our furry […]
Stocks In Sync With Historical Cycles
Good morning and Happy Friday. After enjoying a strong run higher from mid-March through the end of July, stocks then took a much deserved and highly anticipated breather. And in following the seasonal script, the major indices proceeded to pull back in August. Although it wasn’t fun, the decline was definitely to be expected. It […]
Macro Leans Bullish
With the Fed meeting on tap next week (the rate announcement is slated for 2:00 pm Wednesday with the Powell presser to follow) and the crowd split on whether or not the country’s merry band of central bankers will hike rates again or take a pass to get more data, it is fairly easy to […]
The AI Gold Rush
I was asked recently to sum up the action in the stock market as succinctly as possible. As long-time readers are likely aware, brevity is not exactly my strong suit. But after giving it some thought, I did manage to come up with a three-word summary, which also doubles as the title of this week’s […]
While We Wait on the Fed
Make no mistake about it; this week’s Fed meeting is the primary focal point for market participants. And from my seat, the outcome and/or the “tone” of Jay Powell’s press conference is likely to become the driver of the next near-term trend in both the stock and bond markets. While I could spend my pixels […]
Indicators Suggest New Bull May Be Underway
The stock market appears to have spent the vast majority of the last week or so doing, well, a lot of nothing. In short, after the S&P 500 moved to the high end of the recent trading range, which, as our heroes in horns tell us, is certainly an encouraging sign, traders decided to hit […]
Rally Gathers Steam Despite Banking Turmoil
The first quarter of 2023 saw a continuation of the stock market rally off the October 2022 lows, recording an encouraging pattern of higher lows and higher highs along the way. However, that progress was not made without a good measure of drama mid-March, when a series of bank failures made global headlines. The fact […]
The Debate is On
On various calls with institutional clients over the past couple of weeks, I have summarized the current state of the market as an ongoing debate between the bulls and bears – playing out daily. I opined that the macro situation boils down to a series of questions. For example: Will the economy experience a hard […]
What’s It Gonna Be?
With the macro backdrop remaining fairly fluid these days, it appears that market players are in search of the appropriate levels – for stocks, bonds, fed funds futures, gold, and just about anything else that might be impacted by a burgeoning crisis. A week ago, traders were positioning for just that – a crisis in […]
The Big Question
The question of the day is simple. Are investors dealing with another banking crisis, which poses what is called “systemic” risk (I.E. Risk that threatens the entire banking system) or what my colleague Jeff Pietsch, CFA terms “idiosyncratic” risk – meaning risks that are specific to each entity involved. To be sure, there are some […]