ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
Housing Market Intro and Summary What happened in the housing market in December, 2024? Suddenly, the housing market is mired in a broken narrative after a brief drop in bond yields created a (fake) boost in November. The weakness showed up in stubbornly high mortgage rates and the dour commentary from earnings reports. The data … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Investopedia defines the Santa Rally very precisely: “A Santa Claus rally refers to the sustained increases found in the stock market during the last five trading days of December through the first two trading days of January.” Based on this definition, Santa is failing…and just as the stock market risks a January … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The dust is settling ever so slightly on the stock market’s post-Fed plunge. The stock market shifted from euphoria to oversold on a day that woke up everyone to a potentially new market reality. I say “potentially” because all year the market has been hit with bearish catalysts and quickly bounced back … Read more
Stock Market Commentary If you followed December’s deterioration in market breadth and/or paid attention to the inflation numbers and the smoke signals from the Federal Reserve, today’s market sell-off does not surprise you. What surprises me at the time of writing is the complete collapse in market breadth. The stock market essentially plunged from euphoria … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Inflation was the big story last week. I covered the details in “Bonds Try to Weigh on A Market Trying Harder to Look Past Stabilizing Inflation“. The stock market had a curiously mixed reaction that highlighted an on-going bearish divergence for the month of December. A market breadth breakdown contradicted impressive strength … Read more
TSLA Revs Higher Incredibly, Tesla Inc (TSLA) has nearly doubled since a loud thud greeted the company’s robotaxi rollout. That bearish breakdown below support at the 50-day moving average (DMA) (the red line in the chart below) now looks quite quaint. Since then, a 21.9% post-earnings gain and an initial 14.8% post-earnings pop have ignited … Read more
Stock Market Commentary It probably seems odd using “turnaround” as a descriptor for December’s trading. After all, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ continued their respective melt-up trading action. Yet, small caps diverged and trickled downward all week. So I am intrigued by a collection of stocks that are making and often completing turnarounds from … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Holiday trading last week was deceptively lazy. The indices did a lot of churning, yet the S&P 500 and the ETF of small caps each made all-time highs at some point. A good number of individual stocks developed and followed through on bullish setups. For example, all week long, new highs greatly … Read more
Housing Market Intro and Summary What happened in the housing market in November, 2024? October’s reckoning transformed into a rebound with a boost from a sharp drop in long-term interest rates. The partial recovery came just in time for the seasonal strength in the stocks of home builders. The housing data for October showed mixed … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Imagine that. Key support holds firm across the major indices. A telling post-election reversal turned into proof positive that unrelenting bulls remain all-in for the stock market. Not even a further escalation in World War 3 brought pause to the rebounds off support (Russia fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile into Ukraine and … Read more