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: On cue, the stock market groaned at fresh signs of economic strength, this time from another strong jobs report. The recession Wall Street wants is on hold yet again. The bullish intent that charged out of the wake of the Federal Reserve’s last statement on monetary policy made a sharp u-turn. The … Read more
With the power change in the U.S. House of Representatives, 2023 will be another year of drama over the U.S.’s debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently brought the looming debt drama to the forefront of economic headlines by delivering the obligatory warning about the risk of default if Congress does not increase the debt … Read more
Housing Market Intro and Summary A continued respite from rising rates gave some breathing room for new home sales to stabilize in November while existing home sales continued to plunge with a dearth of inventory helping to suck air out of the room. Housing starts continued to plunge in parallel with home builder sentiment. However, … Read more
Stock Market Commentary: Social unrest from fresh COVID lockdowns in China are already a distant memory for the U.S. stock market. Just as quickly as the stock market bearishly failed once again to hold overbought trading conditions, market breadth flipped the script to surge and rush back to overbought. Buyers and bulls celebrated a speech … Read more
The United States Oil Fund, LP (USO) has declined six straight Mondays and seven of the last eight. Prior to this streak, USO only declined 39% of Mondays in 2022 (where the market was trading on the prior Friday). Overall, the split is essentially 50/50 with 19 Monday blues versus 20 Monday gains. In other … Read more
Stock Market Commentary: The latest cryptocurrency scandal and implosion distracted the market (and me) from the upside potential of the October CPI (Consumer Price Index) report. Likely contagion, real and psychological, from crashing crypto prices helped drive distraught trading that created technical breakdowns across the major indices. U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday also apparently failed … Read more
The landscape of inflation and monetary policy continues to change fast. The June inflation numbers disappointed expectations once again for peak inflation. A surprise 1% point rate hike by the Bank of Canada combined with this hot inflation accelerated the timeline for peak interest rates from the Federal Reserve. Instead of a 75 basis point … Read more
That sigh of disappointment was Wall Street looking for signs of a weakening labor market in the June jobs report. Instead, that report showed job creation remains robust in the economy. Not only did the unemployment rate remain steady at a low 3.6% with the economy adding 372,000 jobs (far more than “consensus” expectations), the … Read more
Stock Market Commentary: Fears of a recession are running high as the Federal Reserve scrambles to normalize monetary policy. The Fed is racing against an economic clock. It needs to get rates as close to the “neutral rate” as possible before a weakening economy finally forces them to reverse course. The higher the rates when … Read more
Stock Market Commentary: A little over a month ago, the prospects of a bottom for this bear market got me a little more interested in individual stocks. Unfortunately, the bear market rubble expanded shortly after that. Amid the rubble are crushed gems and false hopes. These stock charts follow up on my initial reads and … Read more