ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
I still can hardly believe my eyes, but it seems that a V-shaped recovery is truly underway in the housing market. In my last Housing Market Review, I wrote about housing-related stocks printing V-shaped recoveries ahead of data suggesting that such a recovery was underway. Last week’s sales activity report from home builder TRI Pointe … Read more
Purists in the financial markets often decry the “voodoo” of technical analysis. The U.S. jobs report for May, 2020 is an extreme version of how the fundamentals can also fail to provide sufficient guidance for trading and investing in financial markets. Economists and other sooth-sayers in consensus expected the U.S. economy to lose 8.3 million … Read more
“Other scenarios for the recovery phase can readily be envisaged. Given the relatively rapid decline in the number of new COVID-19 cases in Australia, it is possible to contemplate an upside scenario where most domestic restrictions on activity are relaxed a little sooner and the economy recovers somewhat faster than in the baseline scenario. The greater … Read more
Housing Market Intro and Summary Could the housing downturn already be coming to a swift end? The stocks of home builders are delivering this message. They have enjoyed a very healthy rally and recovery from the depths of the March stock market crash. The challenges ahead are large: worsening economic conditions, unemployment at historically high … Read more
U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the first quarter of 2020 (advanced estimate) plunged by 4.8% as the coronavirus pandemic put the economy on lockdown. The following categories made positive contributions to GDP in ascending order of their contribution to the percentage change: Housing and utilities: .08% Change in farm inventories: 0.10% Government consumption expenditures … Read more
Housing Market Intro and Summary Something surprising is happening in the middle of the current downturn in the housing market: buyers keep coming and home builders are staying resilient and resolute. A series of earnings reports from publicly traded home builders do not reflect the historic plunge in builder sentiment from April (see below). The … Read more
“We are a very young country. What we’ve accomplished is miraculous… We have made progress. And we are a better society… You would think that with the level of prosperity that we have, we would do better taking care of people…We’ve been going in the right direction in the country, but it’s been awfully slow.” … Read more
The Canadian Dollar After the Canadian dollar (USD/CAD) sold off in the wake of the Bank of Canada’s latest Monetary Policy Report (MPR), I doubled down on my bullish bet on the currency (short USD/CAD). That bet paid off as general weakness in the U.S. dollar took USD/CAD back down to its 50-day moving average … Read more
In a press release titled “‘No Lump Sum Required at the End of Forbearance’ says FHFA’s Calabria” the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) sought to reassure home owners that they will not risk defaulting on their homes coming out of a mortgage forbearance program. The forbearance program gives home owners relief from paying their mortgage … Read more
AT40 = 30.6% of stocks are trading above their respective 40-day moving averages (DMAs) AT200 = 11.7% of stocks are trading above their respective 200DMAsVIX = 43.8Short-term Trading Call: cautiously bullish Stock Market Commentary The culture of collapse that has accompanied the coronavirus pandemic reached new lows. The on-going collapse in oil prices reached new … Read more