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 stock market continued its inflation celebration last week with a surge on Monday. The buying momentum abated from there as the holiday-shortened week rolled into Thanksgiving and then Black Friday. Even though NVIDIA (NVDA) stole the earnings spotlight for the week, the U.S.’s most storied day of shopping set the stage … Read more
Stock Market Commentary Downtrends are over. Bullish breakouts abound. Sellers got one chance last week to try to keep the cork in the bottle of the oversold bounce, but they failed. The stock market insisted on pushing right through. With little time to rest, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ ended the week with major … Read more
Stock Market Commentary An October jobs report with some weakening numbers and more downward revisions of prior numbers appeared to reinforce the market’s celebratory conclusion that the Fed is done hiking interest rates. The resulting drop in long-term interest rates helped to support a major reset for the stock market. October’s bearishness has given way … Read more
The bear market intrusion to the oversold period gave way to an explosion of bullish trading action this week. The maximum drawdown of October for the S&P 500 (SPY) was 4.0% well above the average for the month. This extreme move provided the perfect setup for the sharpness of the current oversold bounce. The rubber … Read more
Stock Market Commentary A bear market intrusion upset the dynamics of this oversold period. The NASDAQ is back in bear market territory. Both the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 broke down below their respective 200-day moving averages (DMAs) (the blue line in the charts below) and entered “correction” territory which is 10% below the 52-week … Read more
Stock Market Commentary At the end of September, I asked skeptically whether an oversold bounce could prevent an October swoon. As I suspected at the time, the answer turned out to be no. The market-moving headlines for October have included weighty, tragic, and alarming news making for a demotivating trading environment. An oversold bounce earlier … Read more
Stock Market Commentary “This may be the most dangerous time the world has seen in decades.” This statement from Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase (JPM), concluded his commentary on the bank’s Q3 earnings report. These words on Friday morning fittingly concluded a sobering week that started with tragedy and war raging in Gaza and … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The economist “consensus” expectations for September job growth missed the mark by a mile, 336,000 actual versus 170,000 projected. These big misses represent the on-going struggles of conventional economics to understand the dynamics of today’s post-pandemic economy. Initially, the good jobs news frightened financial markets which think of good news as bad … Read more
Stock Market Commentary It was an unfavorable day in the stock market, as I anticipated in “Small Cap Stocks Uncork Oversold Conditions.” The following post is a summarized transcript of a “show and tell” video I posted to talk through the accumulating extremes in this oversold market. I used ChatGPT to help with the clean-up. … Read more
Stock Market Commentary The last quarter of the year and the third of the stock market’s most dangerous months started off with a swirl of signals. Each of the three major indices exhibited its own behavior. Small cap stocks plunged and uncorked oversold trading conditions. The S&P 500 clung to flatline. The NASDAQ happily shot … Read more