ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on April 5, 2016. Click here to read the entire piece.) Canada’s GDP report for January, 2016 confirmed renewed strength in the Canadian economy. {snip} Source: Statistics Canada Now that the Canadian economy has apparently stabilized, the weakening in the Canadian dollar … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on March 28, 2016. Click here to read the entire piece.) Last December, I wrote about the shaky prospects for the seasonal trade on home builders. Sure enough, iShares US Home Construction (ITB) has not performed this badly on an absolute or … Read more
A recent article in Business Insider by Jesse Felder from TheFelderReport.com raised a loud alarm bell over rising margin debt levels in the U.S. stock market (see “A closely followed indicator says a 20% drop in stocks could be coming soon“). The article used the following chart as part of an analysis concluding that a … Read more
(T2108 measures the percentage of stocks trading above their respective 40-day moving averages [DMAs]. It helps to identify extremes in market sentiment that are likely to reverse. To learn more about it, see my T2108 Resource Page. You can follow real-time T2108 commentary on twitter using the #T2108 hashtag. T2108-related trades and other trades are … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on March 13, 2016. Click here to read the entire piece.) When I last wrote about the British pound (FXB), the currency was reaching the bottom of its latest downdraft. I did not know the bottom was near, but I did claim … Read more
The last Housing Market Review covered data released in January, 2016. At the time, I warily looked at a nervous market and insisted that the steep decline in the iShares US Home Construction ETF (ITB) and individual home builder stocks presented a great buying opportunity. I was conservative in my expectations including looking out to … Read more
On Friday, February 26th, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reported revised GDP results for Q4 2015. The number went from a first estimate of 0.7% to 1.0% annualized. The Bureau of Economic Analysis declared “with this second estimate for the fourth quarter, the general picture of economic growth remains the same; … Read more
What a difference 19 months make. It was June, 2014 when Bank of England (BoE) Governor Mark Carney confidently warned financial markets that rate hikes could come earlier than implied at that time by the market. Less than a month later, the British pound (FXB) (or sterling) peaked against the U.S. dollar (DXY0). Peaks against … Read more
The February 4, 2016 edition of Nightly Business Report included a segment assessing the ability of the stock market to predict recessions. This is of course a timely piece given the stock market’s current plunge and growing recession fears arising from analyst commentary and softening economic data. Steve Liesman, chief economist for CNBC, took a … Read more
“…emerging markets experienced a more recent run-up in indebtedness, which started around the time of the crisis, and is still continuing. In other words, their deleveraging has not even begun. This has the potential to create persistent spending disappointments, if monetary policy is unable to stimulate other spending sufficiently.” – “Debt, Demographics and the Distribution … Read more