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 Federal Reserve took the stage right after the U.S. presidential election. The Federal Reserve and Fed Chair Jerome Powell delivered as expected. The unrelenting bulls had no reason to stop the momentum from the post-election rally. Powell stuck to the Fed’s script and unrelenting bulls kept charging. The uneventful meeting had … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Fades were on display, especially on Thursday, as the stock market showed signs of exhaustion. Bad news in and for the semiconductor industry seemed to motivate sellers. For example, earnings for Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta Platforms (META) seemed to release some steam on hyped expectations for the AI chips both companies will … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Another week, another tease for bears. A fade from resistance joined market breadth in flagging bearish signals for the stock market. Yet, bears are hard-pressed to find a good risk/reward entry, especially considering the on-going uptrends for 2024. The latest confounder for bears has been the market’s general ability to ignore rising … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Bearish engulfing patterns flag potential tops at the end of uptrends. They represent the potential exhaustion of buying power as price first opens above the previous day’s high and then closes below the previous day’s close. Thus, the latest round of bearish engulfing patterns in major indices and major stocks should be … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Yet another bearish engulfing day. Will THIS one matter to the stock market? In the following video, I review the converging bearish signals just days after all-time highs from the S&P 500 defied October’s warnings. (A summarized transcript follows the video – cleaning and editing help from ChatGPT) Summarized Transcript Introduction Hello … Read more
Stock Market Commentary October is the third of the stock market’s three most dangerous months. October, 2024 started with a convergence of bad news tailor-made to fulfill October’s seasonal destiny: intensifying war and geo-political tensions, two intense hurricanes, the looming contentiousness of the U.S. presidential election, another failure from the overbought threshold (bearish according to … Read more
Housing Market Intro and Summary What happened in the housing market in September, 2024? Existing home sales fell into a deeper downturn while new home sales maintained an uptrend from recent troughs. Rate cuts are helping to bottom out sentiment for builders. However, great anticipation of a rate cut from the Federal Reserve gave way … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The stock market poetically swung from the depths of despair with a seasonal September drawdown to a sharp rebound in giddy anticipation of rate cuts from the Federal Reserve on Wednesday. The highly anticipated meeting has the potential to set the market’s tone for the remainder of the year. If Chair Jerome … Read more
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 At the beginning of August, you might have looked uninformed predicting that the S&P 500 would end up printing its 4th straight monthly gain. At its lows, the index wiped out gains from the previous two months and almost reversed May as well. Now, the index hovers just below its all-time high … Read more