ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
Stock Market Commentary The S&P 500 is down 4.1% month-to-date. This loss makes this month a below average September for a maximum drawdown and fulfills September’s reputation as one of the index’s three most dangerous months of the year. As I noted last week, August’s extreme drawdown significantly increased the risk of September being worse … Read more
Stock Market Commentary This year’s Jackson Hole confab hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve delivered for financial markets. In his prepared speech, Fed Chair Jerome Powell issued an historic and classic sound bite for all of the history of monetary policy (emphasis mine): “The time has come for policy to adjust. The direction of … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Welcome to the start of the stock market’s three most dangerous months of the year. A weak jobs report for July helped to send market sentiment into a sharp reversal. The bad economic news suddenly turned the prospect of rate cuts into something to fear. These rate cut fears spun the market … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Bears still look ready to bow out, but they still have their paws firmly planted on high-tech stocks, especially semiconductors. The market rotations out of tech are nudging enough stocks higher, especially small caps, to rechallenge the threshold defining overbought conditions for market breadth. The stark divergence in stocks greatly reduces the … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Last week ended with an historic tech outage that took down operations around the globe. This event was a poetic punctuation to a week that featured a sharp and toppy end to overbought conditions. The stock market’s tech outage features blow-off tops, double-tops, and some key breakdowns in individual stocks. Still, while … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Last week further emphasized the continuation of notable divergence from Q2 to Q3. This time, soft inflation data caused a surge in rate cut anticipation that in turn drove a significant rotation away from big cap growth and tech stocks and toward small caps and a whole host of other rate sensitive … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The stock market put an exclamation point on the end of the previous week’s statement performance. Market breadth made an important breakout to a 2-month high and almost looks ready to return to overbought conditions. Such a milestone would finally align my favorite technical indicator with the relentless strength in the stock … Read more
Stock Market Commentary There is a deepening irony in my on-going bearishness on the stock market. The sector most visibly responsible for the anti-bearish animal spirits leaning against poor market breadth is the same sector I remain unapologetically bullish about: Artificial Intelligence (AI). The ironic contrast was in full display last week as the bullish … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Right after the stock market tempted me to flip from bearish to neutral, January’s CPI (consumer price index) turned brought the bears rushing back to the scene. Inflation’s fizzle turned to sizzle, and the technical picture of the stock market almost flipped on its head. The charts say it all – the … Read more
Stock Market Commentary After the stock market rally suffered strike one and strike two, Wednesday’s sudden pullback had all the signatures of a third strike to start the end of the extended overbought rally. Sellers surged in the final 90 minutes of trading that day. However, they failed to sustain the stampede for the exits. … Read more