Friends As mentioned this morning, we will do a zoom conference call tomorrow morning to discuss all that has transpired in the last week in the financial markets. But first I will try to just touch on a couple of items. The government stepped up to back bank...
Friends Where do I start? The non-farm payroll number came in hotter than expected this morning with 311,000 jobs created in February vs. the 205,000 expected. But the unemployment rate rose from 3.4% to 3.6%, and the average hourly earnings month over...
Friends As the Fed has been bludgeoning the economy with interest rate hikes and quantitative tightening, market participants have been looking for signs that things are cracking. Today, a huge flair was fired into the air as banks that lend to venture capital firms...
Friends Stocks tried to push lower after yesterday’s selloff in response to the Fed Chair’s testimony before Congress, but the sellers seemed to run out of gas as the trading session wore on. Regardless, Friday’s job number and next week’s inflation data will set...
Friends “they stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.” Eagles sang that line during the song Hotel California back in the day. It can be applied to the Fed and the economy today. Fed Chair Powell and his colleagues have been raising...
Friends It’s going to be a very busy next couple of weeks in the markets and ahead of it all stocks were pretty quiet today. Tomorrow the Fed Chair will be testifying before the Senate Banking Committee. Later in the week we get a very important non-farm payroll...
Friends On my way home, and I see that the bulls were able to lessen the damage from last week and deliver a couple of good days for stock prices to close out this week. Sentiment is still dreadful, and the Fed still looms as a problem for the bulls, so as we...
Friends, Of course, last week was the worst of the year for stocks. Thanks Jim. Stocks did try to stage a comeback today with the Dow up more than 370 points in early trading. But all those gains basically evaporated as the trading session wore on. I’m still on the...
Friends More mixed action in the stock market as while the Dow reversed early losses, the S&P and the Nasdaq remained in negative territory during the trading session. The biggest stumbling block for the bulls this week was stronger than expected economic and...
Friends An army of Fed officials were speaking today, and they took the opportunity to try to take some of the enthusiasm out of the stock market. The bond market has finally sold off a little recently, but the rising stock market of late was not helpful to a Federal...
Friends Today’s Consumer Price Index data came in a little hotter than expected. Yes, year over year we are still seeing a decline in inflation, but the pace of that decline is glacial. We have seen inflation go from a pace of 9.1% last June to 6.4% today....
Friends The bulls are feeling pretty good these days, even emboldened enough to rally into a CPI print. Last year market participants were often quite cautious in the lead up to key economic/inflation data, but buyers were out in force today, seemingly unafraid that...
Friends Yesterday we saw stocks start the day higher only to reverse course and move decisively lower by the close of trading. Today we started the trading session with stocks firmly in negative territory only to reverse course and see stocks decisively higher...
Friends After a nice move higher at the open fueled by earnings reports from the likes of Disney and Pepsi, stocks lost all of their gains and fell decisively into negative territory. Is this move that we have seen higher since the beginning of the year losing...
Friends The bulls were not able to follow through on yesterday’s gains as stocks spent most of the trading session in negative territory. With no real catalyst, there just didn’t seem that market participants had much interest in today’s proceedings. Maybe a little...
