Just Shrugged It Off!
April 20, 2022 Good morning, The headline news item this morning is Netflix earnings – they missed. It’s not every day that you see a $300 billion market-cap company lose over half its value in less than 6 months. It’s also interesting to see one of the FAANG growth favorites appears to have stopped growing, […]
Trendlessness?
April 18, 2022 Good morning, Let’s look at the 1yr chart of the S&P 500 Index and talk perspective today. The 14% decline in the first 2½ months is stark. But so is the 11% rally that closed out the quarter and left the Index off ~4 percent for the year at the start of […]
Patience Fraying
April 11, 2022 Good morning, Markets are on the move this morning, well before the U.S. exchanges get going. Most of the action is again in bond-land, the rise in yields has been relentless. The US 10yr, yielding under 2% only a month ago, jumped 8 more basis points overnight and put in a high […]
Up on the Western Front – Quiet in the East
April 8, 2022 Good morning, European equities rallied +1.8% in the early part of their last trading session of the week. They have drifted just off their daily peaks as the sun rises on our shores. Bonds are quiet for a change this morning. It looks to be a quiet Friday here, at least when […]
March 2022 Monthly Letter
While this is a cover letter to a monthly report, the month did end the first quarter and it was a quarter that bears mention. It was one for the record books. War. Inflation. The First U.S. Fed funds rate increase. The likely (typing with fingers crossed now) final act to U.S. Covid. Inverting yield […]
“Bite”
April 6, 2022 Good morning, Beginning yesterday morning and continuing right through the overnight trading session, bonds have been getting hammered (lower prices, rising yields) and consequently equities are looking a lot less resilient than they have over the past three weeks. The alarming 2’s-to-10’s inverted spread mentioned Monday has worked itself out of inversion […]
Breakfast: Inversion on Egg Shells
April 4, 2022 Good morning, After a bit of a “push” last week for the major equity market indexes – the S&P 500, NASDAQ and Russell 2000 were up +.08%, +.66% and +.68% respectively for the week – our investment posture remains the same. We’re giving the recent 3wk old rally the benefit of the […]
A One Day Pass
April 1, 2022 Good morning, Yesterday’s crummy market action had all the hallmarks of end-of-month/quarter portfolio rebalancing. We’ll give our fragile rally a pass for now. Today’s March employment number fooled no one – economists nailed it. It was a strong report, and it will keep the upward pressure on inflation expectations…as well as the […]
Midterm Election Year
March 30, 2022 Good morning, Equity markets overnight were soft as yesterday’s optimism around Russian/Ukraine “Talks” have evidently faded. Military operations continue in Ukraine and show no signs of letup. At the overnight lows, Futures were off half a percent. Now, an hour before the U.S. cash market open, they are off only half that […]
Quite a Worry Wall
March 28, 2022 Good morning, Following a unusually strong move up in equity indexes two weeks ago and delivering two reasonably reliable short term breadth thrust buy signals in the process, equities followed through last week – for the most part. The S&P 500, NASDAQ and Russell 2000 were +1.81%, +1.99% and -0.38% respectively for […]
According to Plan
March 25, 2022 Good morning, Futures are up about a third of one percent this morning ahead of the U.S. cash market open. They spent most of the overnight session under water and mildly in the red. The chatter making morning rounds on trading desks this morning (Bloomberg), is a call for four consecutive 50bps […]
A Year of Single Digit Returns
March 23, 2022 Good morning, World bond markets collapsed Monday with 2yr treasury yields, for example, rising from 1.93% to 2.11% in a matter of hours. Equities were flat on the day. The selloff in world bond markets deepened yesterday, putting short-dated Treasuries (2yr) on track for their worst quarter performance in almost four decades. […]