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 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
Stock Market Commentary A strong September jobs report woke up the stock market from lethargic trading. The numbers handily beat expectations and reset expectations for future rate cuts and economic growth. Surprisingly, the good news was not bad news; the market has typically been antsy about getting lower interest rates. Instead of fearing a longer … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The U.S. stock market hardly reflected last week’s action-packed news. China scrambled to address a weakening economy with a massive stimulus program with news rolling nearly all week. In Japan, voters elected a Prime Minister who favors a stronger currency in the Japanese yen (FXY). Capping the anti-climactic feeling in U.S. stocks, … 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
In this “special edition” post, I recorded my thoughts on the stock market in an 8-miunte video. The main headline is that an abrupt improvement in the technicals from a major upside reversal forced me to run from my short-term bearish trading call and settle into neutral. As has been the case all year, the … Read more
Housing Market Intro and Summary What happened in the housing market in August, 2024? Financial markets quickly threw out a major downgrade from Citigroup for the housing sector. Hopes for rate cuts from the Federal Reserve continued to impact both the data and stock prices. While the on-going decline in mortgage rates has failed to … 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
The simple answer is yes! The data show that a worse than average August for the S&P 500 (SPY) increases the likelihood of a worse than average September. I use average to mean the average maximum drawdown as calculated and analyzed in “How to Trade During the Stock Market’s Most Dangerous Months“. In this case, … Read more
Stock Market Commentary This year’s Jackson Hole confab hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve delivered for financial markets. In his prepared speech, Fed Chair Jerome Powell issued an historic and classic sound bite for all of the history of monetary policy (emphasis mine): “The time has come for policy to adjust. The direction of … Read more