The following are futures positions of non-commercials as of March 22, 2016. Change is week-over-week. 10-year note: This could not get any funnier. A week after the FOMC statement, and later Janet Yellen, Fed chair, shifted message from hawkish to … Continued
Last year, with the bull market in its seventh year, a June 19th post sought to find out where several valuation metrics stood. The conclusion was that they were in uncharted territory. With three more quarters of data since, a … Continued
U.S. households are flush with cash – if we look at their bank deposits. The question is, does this represent dry powder for stocks? Households’ currency and deposits including money market fund shares totaled $10.7 trillion in 4Q15, having increased … Continued
Last Friday, spot West Texas Intermediate crude ($41.62) produced what looked like a shooting star near its 200-day moving average ($42.77). Right above lied another layer of resistance at $43.50 going back to January 2015 (Chart 1). A shooting star … Continued
In the latest week, non-commercials cut net longs in gold futures by three percent period-over-period to 169,512 contracts. This was the first weekly reduction in eight weeks (Chart 1). The prior week’s holdings were the highest since February 3rd last … Continued
The following are futures positions of non-commercials as of March 15, 2016. Change is week-over-week. 10-year note: Major central banks are in a race as to who can ‘shock and awe’ the markets the most. On January 29th, Haruhiko Kuroda, … Continued
Three months. That is all it took for the Fed to do a 360. In the middle of last December, the fed funds rate was raised for the first time in nine years – to still-zero-bound 37 basis points. The … Continued
Back in the middle of December, when the Fed hiked rates for the first time in nine years, the FOMC’s dot plot optimistically forecasted four quarter-point hikes this year. On December 16th – the day the FOMC statement came out … Continued
On February 11th, spot gold closed up 4.1 percent to $1,263.9/ounce, surging intra-day as much as 5.6 percent (blue arrow in Chart 1). It was a high-volume session. A healthy $535 million moved into GLD, the SPDR gold ETF, in … Continued
U.S. corporate earnings have been in serious deceleration. This is no news. They have been decelerating for a while now. Operating earnings of S&P 500 companies peaked at $29.60 in 3Q14, and have declined for five straight quarters annually. Chart … Continued