Two thousand and seventeen has gotten off to a good start. U.S. stocks quickly shook off the nervous energy of the last week of December. On December 27, the S&P 500 large cap index had a go at the December … Continued
In 2016, the so-called January barometer – the hypothesis that the first month sets the tone for the year – failed to deliver. The S&P 500 large cap index lost 5.1 percent last January, and was down 10.1 percent by … Continued
Quite a year 2016 turned out to be! Stocks did not quite get off the starting blocks in an ideal fashion. The S&P 500 large cap index opened 2016 down 1.5 percent on January 4 (was down as much as … Continued
Following futures positions of non-commercials are as of December 27, 2016. 10-year note: TLT, the iShares 20+ year Treasury bond ETF, has had a nasty drop since it reached a historic high of $141.91 on July 8 this year. Two … Continued
November NYSE margin debt increased 3.4 percent month-over-month to $500.4 billion. This is the fourth time in the series’ history it has crossed $500 billion. The first one occurred in April 2015 when debt rose to $507.2 billion – a … Continued
Following futures positions of non-commercials are as of December 20, 2016. 10-year note: Ten-year Treasury yields peaked at 15.8 percent in September 1981, then dropping to 1.39 percent by July 2012. In July this year, those lows were slightly undercut; the … Continued
Notice the plateauing to slightly rising red line in Chart 1? In the middle of January this year, 2017 operating earnings estimates of S&P 500 companies were started out at $141.11. At the time, 2016 estimates were just north of … Continued
Following futures positions of non-commercials are as of December 13, 2016. 10-year note: With the Fed this week having raised by 25 basis points the fed funds target rate to a range of 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent, its conventional … Continued
In late 2014/early 2015, U.S. economic data began to either stall or decelerate. Take capacity utilization, for instance. It peaked at 78.9 percent in November 2014, peaking before tagging 80 percent (Chart 1). The Fed funds rate was still near … Continued
Following futures positions of non-commercials are as of December 6, 2016. 10-year note: Regardless how Mr. Mario Draghi, ECB president, describes the €20-billion/month reduction in asset purchases beginning next March until December, it looks like tapering, walks like tapering, and … Continued