ANGLES.

Investor attention was focused on the Capitol in Washington DC on Monday rather than on the New York Stock Exchange which was closed for Martin Luther King Day. Once sworn in, Trump doubled down on much of his campaign rhetoric in his inaugural address, including some of the more “out-there” proposals, notably promising an expansion of U.S. territorial claims not only on earth but also in space (t...

Over the weekend, oil prices rallied to their highest levels in five months, as a fresh wave of US sanctions against Russia’s energy industry threatened to slash supplies from one of the world’s top producers and only added to what is a growing list of financial market worries. Stock indexes came out of the gate on Monday morning by adding to the losses that have plagued investors so far in 2025,...

The week began with growing concerns on Wall Street about the potentially chaotic nature of the upcoming administration and its propensity to balloon the federal deficit by trillions of dollars and to reignite higher inflation based partly on increasingly bizarre online musings from Trump and Musk. These worries are being reflected by steadily rising interest rates, including that of the important...

The death of former President Carter on Monday means that, in keeping with tradition, US stock markets will be closed this coming Thursday, January 9th for the funeral. Monday was the penultimate trading day of 2024 and the session kicked off with more end-of-year institutional position adjustments and momentum-unwinding across the board. This put stocks very much on the back foot again, crystalli...

With the risk of a government shutdown pushed out to March, traders breathed a small sigh of relief over the weekend. But the chaotic intervention by Trump/Musk won’t be quickly forgotten by Wall Street, which is likely to view the whole political debacle as something of a preview of what can easily and frequently happen in 2025 and beyond. A holiday-riddled week that traditionally sees Santa bear...

As we entered 2024’s final full week of trading, political turmoil raged around the world. A vote of no-confidence brought down the German government, French national debt was downgraded by credit agencies after the selection of a new Prime Minister, Canada’s finance minister resigned in reaction to what she saw as Trudeau’s wimpy response to Trump’s tariff threats, presidential impeachment procee...

After the rapidly spiraling events in Syria over the weekend, attention was temporarily refocused on geopolitics and the potential tinderbox that is the Middle East region, where the chess pieces were being moved around following the abrupt disintegration of the Assad regime as everyone tried to work out who are the “goodies” and who are the “baddies” in this story. Both the U.S. and Israel immedi...

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...