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 After a month of churning, market breadth is wavering again. This slip is just about the only sign that the market cares at all about looming risks from a potential government shutdown. Even the volatility index (VIX) dropped 8.6% on Friday and remains just below where it closed right before the tariff … Read more
Stock Market Commentary After a holiday-shortened week, a market breadth breakout signals sentiment near peak bullishness. The market also seemed to interpret an unexpectedly strong jobs report as a positive, even as odds for rate cuts plunged (at the time of writing, 5% for later this month and 69.4% for September, down from 91% a … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The new year of 2025 got off to a rocky start with the weight of the last Federal Reserve decision on monetary policy pushing fresh losses across the indices. I assumed this price action signaled the market’s readiness to cash in on the capital gains that it did not want to register … Read more
Stock Market Commentary In announcing the official end of monetary tightening, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell mentioned some form of the word “recalibration” nine times from his introductory statement to the Q&A portion of the press conference. Specifically, “….it’s a process of recalibrating our policy stance away from where we had it a year ago, … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The stock market’s V-shaped recovery finished reversing most of the losses from the August calamity. Small caps are once again the laggards. During this recovery the market swung from recessions fears to recession relief. The prospects for interest rate cuts no longer seemed to matter on either side of the V-shape. The … Read more