ANGLES.

Wall Street’s eyes last week were firmly on important labor market data coming out on Tuesday and especially on Friday, with the release of the latest Jobs Report which would start to clean up the mess of last month’s data which was severely disrupted by hurricanes and labor disputes, effectively giving us two months worth of data at one time. More tariff rumblings from Trump over the weekend with...

Everything is relative. Wall Street breathed a huge sigh of relief at the beginning of a holiday-shortened week that, despite all the glaring shortcomings of Trump’s pick Scott Bessent, financial markets have at least not been saddled with a clownish Dr. Oz-type figure as Treasury Secretary. A degree of calm returned to bond markets on Monday as interest rates eased and stocks moved higher at the...

Stocks began the week on Monday in a more upbeat mood, with buyers re-emerging to scoop up some of the discounted Tech/AI names following the previous week’s gloom, although the early momentum slowly dissipated as the session wore on and the day ended with only minimal gains. Energy stocks jumped as Trump decided that a fracking company CEO was a good idea to become the next head of the Department...

The bond market was closed on Monday for Veterans’ Day, but the stock market was up and running and squeaked out a tiny further extension of its winning streak on light trading volume with Small Caps leading and Tech/AI lagging. The slight gain was enough, however, to achieve a first-ever S&P 500 close above the 6000 level (just 263 days after first breaking through 5000) and the first-ever Dow Jo...

Wow . Where to even begin unpacking last week? OK, let’s give it a try .. As an immense week began, Wall Street was acutely aware that following the 2020 election, stock prices swung around in both directions in an 11% range in the 24 hours following the closing of the polls and this time around the election looked even closer than it did then. If we go back to 2000, stocks fell 12% between electi...

U.S. markets shook off the weekend’s news of Israel’s bombing of Iran and looming political gridlock in Japan and embarked on an incredibly busy earnings and economic data-packed last full week before both the election and the next Fed interest rate decision on a positive note at the open on Monday . Oil prices suffered their biggest one-day fall in over two years on the back of an apparent lack o...

Wall Street appeared rather disinterested on Monday ahead of a busy week of earnings reports and stocks weakened on the back of some unsurprising, but still low-volume, profit-taking on the back of six straight weeks of gains. Although the tech-heavy NASDAQ made something of a comeback later in the day boosted by a good session for some select tech names including Nvidia, the S&P 500 index still f...

The market’s positive momentum from the end of the previous week followed through into Monday after a generally quiet weekend on the newswires and with the stock market open but bond markets closed for Columbus Day, trading volume was weak. Prices across the board were bolstered by Fed-speak from a number of committee members and senior officials that was generally pro-steady interest rate cuts. W...

Stocks began the week nervously on Monday with tit-for-tat attacks further raising the geopolitical temperature in the Middle East and the resulting continued move higher in oil prices to above $80. Things just grew more dismal as the session wore on with analysts issuing rare downgraded outlooks for both Apple and Amazon. Yet another massive destructive storm began to take aim at Florida, which c...

Q3 came to an end last week with the S&P 500 pulling off its best first three quarters in any year since 1997. It also completed its fourth straight quarterly gain , the longest such stretch since 2021. It marked the beginning of a crucial and potentially volatile five week period in the lead-up to a knife-edge election and the next Fed meeting right afterwards during which time we will get to see...

The final full week of September is historically on average the worst-performing week of the year for U.S. stocks. This time round, a very limited amount of consequential economic data ahead of the latest inflation reading on Friday and only a handful of earnings reports left the market feeling untethered and drifting , at the mercy of some notoriously unpredictable moving targets such as trader s...

The main focus of markets was on the week’s interest rate announcements from the heavyweight central banks in London, Tokyo and, of course, a highly consequential one in Washington DC on Wednesday afternoon, which finally resolved the passionate, frenzied “Will be it be 25 or 50?” debate of the last few weeks. More data over the weekend confirming the accelerating deterioration of the Chinese econ...

Last week’s big data points were mostly inflation-related with the release of CPI and PPI, but all of a sudden inflation is no longer the big issue it used to be. The trajectory is very much set and meaningful unexpected bombshells are considered rather unlikely, which was borne out in the data on Wednesday and Thursday. There was also the small matter of the presidential debate, with both candida...

Septembers can often be tricky as professional stock traders begin to liquidate some of their positions ahead of the year-end with tax considerations, regulatory filings and the process of locking in profits in mind. This becomes even more of a potential issue with the S&P 500 starting the month so close to its all-time highs and an economic soft landing entirely assumed without any questions aske...

Last week was all about Wednesday’s after-hours Nvidia (NVDA) earnings report. Since the stock accounts for more than 6% of the S&P 500's total market capitalization in terms of its index weight and its unique position as a proxy for the entire market-impacting narrative of AI, it has the capability to be a meaningful influence on the direction, trend and momentum of the entire stock market. Which...

Things got off to a somewhat muted low-volume start on Monday with many A-list institutional traders at the beach this week. Their B squads seemed to be under orders to basically tread water, waiting to see if anything of interest emerged from either the annual Federal Reserve jamboree in Jackson Hole or the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As the session wore on, however, the level of i...

It’s less than two weeks since financial markets seemed to be teetering on a precipice . Japan had raised interest rates, a complex currency trade had broken down and a disheartening Jobs Report had come out in the U.S., sparking a chain reaction that triggered record-setting volatility levels and the worst stock market crash in decades in Asia which then cascaded around the world, cratering marke...

It’s not often you get the kind of violent, concentrated two-way turbulence that we experienced last week. In the course of three days, the S&P 500 had both its worst day since 2020 and its best day since 2022 and still ended the week unchanged. The ferocious global market rout from the end of the prior week intensified on Monday as more storm clouds rapidly gathered over financial markets around...

There are three main factors that have propelled the S&P 500 higher in 2024 .. i) solid economic data, ii) impending Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, and iii) AI enthusiasm. Last week provided challenges for all three of those narratives. With key earnings reports, central bank interest rate decisions taking place in Washington DC, London and Tokyo and a pivotal Jobs Report, it always looked li...

With Biden finally realizing last Sunday that he needed to walk the plank, the Democrats swiftly clearing the runway for Harris and the resulting shift in the election narrative, Wall Street’s prior assumption of a comfortable Trump victory in November was thrown into some doubt. It always had the potential to be a volatile week anyhow with a flood of Q2 earnings reports, including from some high...

Despite the politically consequential events in Pennsylvania the weekend before, the assassination attempt appeared not to have been that much of a game-changer on Wall Street since a Trump victory in November had been pretty much assumed already and was then simply priced in more strongly than ever over the course of the week. But there were plenty of other factors in play during what ended up be...

The surprising outcome of the French parliamentary elections the previous day, where the left, centre and right all essentially cancelled each other out to create a legislative power vacuum and potential political deadlock in France for years to come, caused nervousness and volatility in European markets on Monday , which continued for much of the week. With such a big slate of upcoming potential...

Following the car crash of a presidential debate and an apparent outbreak of civil war in the Democratic party, Wall Street strategists and traders have already begun gaming out how an increasingly-likely Trump victory in November will look , especially as it was further enhanced by Monday’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity. As one analyst put it; “It’s still too soon to fully price...

Last week saw the end of the month, Q2 and H1. As I will summarize next week in my Q2 Quarterly Report, stock indexes broadly did ok over these periods, but last week confirmed that some two-way volatility is creeping into the Mega Tech names that have carried this eight month rally. The highlights of the week were always going to be the presidential debate and some big inflation data on Friday, b...

Stocks moved cautiously higher in a bifurcated week, with the S&P 500 achieving its eighth weekly advance from the last nine and ending up just south of all-time record levels, but tech stocks started slumping later in the week, particularly AI-related ones. With a jam-packed week coming up in terms of important economic data releases, there are some concerns that any disappointments could trigger...