ANGLES.

The final full trading week of 2023 was basically more of the same. With many market participants already in holiday mode, volumes were low but even a rare victory for the bears on Wednesday was swiftly reversed by the bulls. Wall Street seems determined to keep this party going as long as it can. Last weekend, Fed officials began trying to pour whatever the opposite is of gasoline onto the fire o...

Stocks had another terrific week , boosted by the interest rate cut-friendly tone of the Federal Reserve and its Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday. The S&P 500 moved higher for the seventh consecutive week, something it hasn’t done since 2017. The NASDAQ-100 ended the week at a new all-time record high, something that would have seemed unthinkable just a year ago at the end of a catastrophic 2022....

For the first three days of last week, the market’s price action felt a bit like a head-thumping hangover the morning after the month-long bender that was November. Then on Friday we got a very Goldilocks Jobs Report which sent prices spiraling upwards again and the S&P 500 had managed to squeak out a new 2023 high by Friday’s close. A majority of S&P 500 stocks moved higher on Monday , but the in...

Stocks closed out a truly spectacular November last week with the S&P 500 index finishing about 9% higher than it was at the beginning of the month. Tech stocks were the best performers by sector, but real estate came a close second - despite the cratering post-pandemic commercial space. Energy was the worst performer, falling 2% in line with very weak oil prices and was the only sector with a neg...

Stocks moved higher last week for the fourth week in a row with the major indexes ending the holiday-shortened week up by about 1%. The sense grew that the typical year-end Santa Claus rally may possibly have begun even before Thanksgiving. But trading volumes were so low that drawing any real conclusions from last week’s activity would be a fool’s errand. No news was good news on a slow, drama-fr...

Good news for stocks erupted all over the place last week. We saw slowdowns in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) measure of retail inflation and the Producer Price Index (PPI) measure of wholesale inflation faced by manufacturers, we saw the (temporary) avoidance of a government shutdown, we saw continued mostly impressive earnings, particularly from Target (TGT) which soared 18% in a day and plummet...

A rather uneventful week was saved by a solid final day, although arguably the biggest event came after the close on Friday when a U.S. credit rating outlook downgrade was announced. Stocks and bonds spent Monday aimlessly meandering around, looking for fresh direction following the previous week’s fiesta. Both Blackrock and Morgan Stanley were quick to come out with warnings that the end of Octob...

It was a sensational week for stocks, the best of the year, with prices rising each and every day. In the end, the S&P 500 Large Caps and Russell 2000 Small Caps both rose about 6% for the week and the NASDAQ soared 6.6%. What started life as something of a short term over-sold bounce following a largely gruesome three-month slide gained traction as the week went on, on the back of the fact that t...

It was another pretty brutal week for stocks. Last week, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ indexes both dropped by more than 2% and officially joined the Russell 2000 Small Cap Index by falling below their long term moving averages and into correction territory (defined as down 10% or more from a recent high) and a third straight calendar month of stock price declines is on the cards. The solid 4200-4500...

It started out so well. There was green all over the board for a while with earnings mostly looking very perky. But in the end, sentiment was overwhelmed by the noise of higher interest rates, Middle East fears, bedlam in Congress, a government shutdown once again looming on the horizon, fears that consumer spending - and thereby inflation - is refusing to die and some rather nasty projections abo...

The stock market was open on Monday although the bond market wasn’t and it had its first chance to react to the latest flare up of the conflict in Israel and Palestine that broke out over the weekend. Wall Street tries to frame everything in dollars and cents, because, well, that’s its job - but it can often appear a little dazed and confused when it comes to having to suddenly price in geopolitic...

Stocks eventually ended a little higher for the week but it was a tough slog getting there with interest rates continuing to push ever higher (see AVERAGE 30-YEAR FIXED RATE MORTGAGE below) and a bizarre Jobs Report on Friday. Monday started out quietly. There was some relief at no government shutdown but an awareness that the can is now lying just a little further down the road and nothing had re...

The month of September duly lived up to its stock-killing reputation and there was a strong sense of good riddance from investors as markets closed on Friday. On the bright side, Octobers following losing Septembers have a history of being rather good for stock prices and November to December is historically a strong season. Last week began with a predictable but mild snap-back rally on Monday aft...

Last week was always going to be about Wednesday’s Federal Reserve meeting and its fallout . We are undergoing a major shift from the question being “ How high will interest rates go?” (the market’s obsession over the last eighteen months) to “ How long will interest rates stay high?” going forward. It is now the answer to this second question that will determine if the Fed’s stance is deemed to b...

Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal all published articles last weekend essentially saying that the Fed is done with interest rate hikes and while that’s hardly new news, it helps counter some of the somewhat negative narratives that are emerging as investors step back to assess the state of the economy and the business cycle looking towards the end of the year. It’s leading to an incre...

U.S. markets found themselves heavily impacted last week by a number of decisions made from beyond its shores. The United States and China continue to trade jabs, particularly at each other’s tech giants and it’s having an effect on the stock market . Apple stock (AAPL) is probably the largest holding in most investors’ total market and large cap fund portfolios and it fell hard, swiftly shedding...

A reasonably solid last few days of the month wasn’t enough to rescue August from being the first losing month for stocks since February , with the Large Cap S&P 500, the tech-heavy NASDAQ-100 and the Small Cap Russell 2000 losing 1.8%, 2.2% and 4.5% respectively. We're now heading into what is often the rockiest part of the year . September is the only month to have historically seen more stock m...

There’s a very accurate saying that that you can win just about any financial argument you like by simply adjusting the start and end dates of a scenario . There’s a perfect example of this on show right now with the most important question of all to investors. Is what we have seen over the last few weeks a temporary pullback within what is still a bull (rising) market that dates back to March of...

As I’ll show in a moment, earnings and economic data last week generally propped up the case for a soft landing for the US economy and should have been celebrated, but the stock market seemed jumpy and afraid of its own shadow - seizing on anything negative it could find . There’s a downside to the current high level of economic strength. In something of a return to the old “good news is bad news”...

The stock market playbook is being followed exactly as we would expect and in the way that I have been banging on about in my recent weekly reports. The plain fact is that, around 4500, the S&P 500 index is priced for near-term perfection with zero room for any kind of disappointments , meaning that even the most modest of negatives (an uptick in market interest rates, some lackluster earnings, a...

Bank of America became the latest to hop aboard the now-rather crowded Happy Train early last week, eagerly joining Team No Recession. The abrupt change of stance comes just a week after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told reporters that the central bank’s own economists are no longer forecasting a recession. As BofA economists put it in a note to clients on Wednesday; “Recent incoming data h...

To the surprise of precisely nobody, the Federal Reserve resumed its campaign of interest rate increases on Wednesday , pushing its target Fed Funds rate up another quarter of a percentage point to a range of 5.25%-5.50%, the highest level since J-Lo joined forces with Ja Rule to point out to us that she was real back in 2001. It marked the eleventh increase since March 2022, at which time the rat...

Less than twenty months after it began, the bear market that engulfed the S&P 500 in early 2022 is now just 260 points away from being completely erased . 2023 has barely passed its midpoint and the market has already blown through even the most optimistic estimates for where Wall Street thought the S&P 500 might be by year end. In the process, it has constantly defied all the early-year gloom acc...

Short and shallow seems to be the growing expectation surrounding any 2023 recession, if it ever even arrives at all. The US economy is stronger than most people expected and inflation is clearly stabilizing. This is the “immaculate disinflation” that many optimists talked about a year ago, with an economy simply showing signs of normalizing after a pandemic. Under this theory, the Federal Reserve...

Fears of an imminent destructive recession and hopes of any interest rate cuts in 2023 are evaporating in equal measure , with each narrative pulling markets in opposite directions. We learned last week that the Fed was apparently a lot less united at its recent interest rate-setting June meeting than the announced unanimous decision suggested. According to the minutes of that gathering released o...