Earnings Revisions Look Weak
Bleeding Edge Of Data I used to use FactSet’s numbers in these articles to review S&P 500 earnings, but I recently switched to using data from The Earnings Scout because The Earnings Scout does a better job of showing the rate of change in future estimates. Investors are always on the bleeding edge of data.…
Stocks Ignore Potential Trade War With China
Stocks Fall Slightly On Friday The stock market was down decently early in the day on trade war fears, but the S&P 500 only closed down 0.1% as it rallied in the afternoon. Trump stated he would impose a 25% tariff on up to $50 billion of Chinese goods. Specifically, America will put a 25%…
Dollar Hits An 11 Month High
Finishing The Checklist Before I get into the market action from Thursday, let’s finish off the bear market checklist. It says the rising U.S. estimates/EPS growth rate will turn into a peak in U.S. estimates/EPS growth rate. That’s true, but it seems like that is very obvious. I doubt any trader doesn’t already know that…
ECB Announced It Will End Asset Purchases In December
ECB Balance Sheet Decision Made I’ve reviewed all the parts of the bear market checklist above which are currently occurring. Now let’s review the parts of the checklist which will occur in the rest of 2018. The first one is growing central bank balance sheets will transition to shrinking balance sheets. This is probably true…
Curve Flattens After Rate Hike: Signaling 2020 Recession
Market Reaction To Fed Hikes This was probably the biggest week of the year for the market in terms of news events as we had the Trump-Kim summit, the Fed meeting, and the ECB meeting which will be on Thursday. With 2 of the 3 major events having occurred, plus the CPI report on Tuesday, the stock…
A Hawkish Hike Pushes The Stock Market Lower
Fed Raises Rates Like Expected The Fed raised rates 20 basis points like the market expected. However, the unexpected part was the change to guidance. This is a situation where a small change made a big difference. The Fed went from 6 officials thinking there should be 3 hikes this year and 6 Fed members…
North Korean Drama Over- CPI Meets Estimates
North Korean Summit Ends The stock market didn’t have much of a reaction to the North Korean summit on Tuesday in Singapore, but that could be considered a good thing as the missile launches that occurred last year won’t return and hurt stocks in the intermediate term. I was wrong to imply everything would be…
Stocks Rally As They Await The Fed Decision
Stocks Rally Slightly & Curve Flattens With the North Korean news in the rear-view mirror and the Fed meeting ahead, the stock market rallied slightly on Tuesday. The Russell 2000 was up 0.46% and the Nasdaq was up 0.57%. The S&P 500 was up 0.17% which brought it to 2,786.85. That is less than 1 point…
Stocks Wait For The Big News Events To Occur This Week
Slightly Positive Monday Monday’s trading action was what you’d expect from a market anxiously waiting for big new events to unfold later in the week. The S&P 500 was up 0.11% which 4.57 points off the March high. The S&P 500 almost crossed above that point, but there was a minor selloff at the end of…
Investors Are Becoming Optimistic (Not Good)
Optimism Is Here I’m strongly in the camp which expects the S&P 500 to break its all-time high opposed to forming a double top. I’m not big on technical analysis, but that would be a scary chart pattern if it occurred. However, even though I’m still bullish on the stock market in the near term,…