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 stock market has a natural law of “physics.” Overly enthusiastic trading, whether up or down, eventually meets an opposite and sometimes equal force. This natural instability of extremes forms a basis of my market breadth trading rules. The enthusiastic post-election surge exhausted buyers enough to create a post-election reversal. Moreover, my … Read more
Housing Market Intro and Summary What happened in the housing market in October, 2024? A reckoning that I anticipated finally came in the form of sharply lower prices for the shares of home builders. After resisting rising mortgage rates for a month, the stock market lost its appetite. Earnings have brought a dose of reality … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The latest overbought period lasted two days, a typical duration. However, the start of the period was atypical given the fuel from historic heroics from small cap stocks. The end of the overbought period was remarkable by delivering some of the clearest topping signals of the year. Key indices that soared into … Read more
Stock Market Commentary A plunge in market breadth on Wednesday made me expect a more bearish take on the markets for my next blog post. A sharp rebound led by strong earnings from various retail companies, quickly changed the narrative from a continued NVDA hangover to a bullish divergence and then a bullish setup. Friday’s … Read more
Stock Market Commentary I looked to last week’s earnings from NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) with great anticipation. The indices gathered momentum with all-time highs and seemed to point to a big moment for NVDA. NVDA did indeed have a big moment, but it helped precious few. In fact, NVDA’s gain looked like a net loss. Buyer’s … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The simple and quiet breakout for the stock market found follow-through last week. Both the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ hit fresh all-time highs during the week. The April CPI (consumer price index) report paved the way on Wednesday’s all-time highs. A softer than “expected” number revived hopes for a rate cut … Read more
Stock Market Commentary In the prior week a post-earnings pricequake from Meta Platforms (META) dominated the stock market headlines. Last week, an Apple buyquake dominated the headlines and week-ending trading after the company announced a record $110B buyback. The subsequent gain in AAPL turned my simple test dividing bearish and bullish trading action into a … Read more
When Jim Cramer gets exorcised about something, I sit up and pay attention. As a student of market extremes, Cramer’s extremes offer their own special trading signals. At the onset of the pandemic, I wrote about “Cramer in turmoil” as a demonstration of how quickly financial narratives can change in response to market extremes, revealing … Read more
Stock Market Commentary A curious break in the trading action unfolded as financial markets wrestled with two “disappointing” inflation reports. Both the CPI (consumer price index) and wholesale inflation (the producer price index or PPI) came in slightly higher than “expected” (headline and core). The data just tell me expectations are unrealistic or at best … Read more
Sometimes it pays to be stubborn. In December, I asked whether Beyond Meat (BYND) would be the speculative trade of the new year. I presented a simple thesis that managed to work out. However, the path from A to B was totally unexpected, and I broke rules along the way. In response to earnings, BYND … Read more